Dan Lawton : Journalist

This is the last of six posts I have written about the witch camps of Northern Ghana. You can find additional posts below.

“When will you file your story?” Cephus asks.
“Soon, it will happen soon.”
“It is about witches, right?”
“Yes, witches and wizards.”
“Where did you see wizards?”
“In Yendi.”

Cephus is the managing editor of The Mail, the newspaper I work for and he is calling me about the witch article, which has yet to be started.   Not only have I yet to start it, but none of the notes have been transcribed.  They are all scribbled in my tattered yellow notebook, which sits in the rucksack below my bed.  The only thing I have looked at so far are the pictures.

It has been two weeks since I left Gambaga and I have spent most of the time on my balcony.  It’s a private balcony,  attached to my massive ocean-side room, all of which costs me about six dollars a night.  My guesthouse is managed by a woman named Perpetual, but she is currently on vacation, so most of my interaction is with her sister Sawah.

Today Sawah is doing my laundry and I am watching intently from my balcony.  The pools of flesh around her elbow flap as she scrubs my jeans.  She wrings the soap from my underwear with the force of her palms.   She hangs my light-blue dress shirts from the line with care and they bounce, ever so gently, as the wind whips past the beach, the palm trees and the stone gazebo in the yard.

Today, Sawah does my laundry.  But most days, she spends her time sitting with a look of abject hopelessness on the stairs.  The stairs face a wall.  She could easily face the ocean, which bursts in torrents of white against the huge black rocks on the beach, but instead she faces the wall.

I try to write in the late afternoon, as the sun hemorrhages over the water in hues of purple and orange, but I can’t produce a word.  I want to get a drink with Sawah and stare at the wall, but Sawah never drinks in public–she stumbles and slurs in public, but she only imbibes alone–so I go to the bar by myself, and then walk along the beach through the piles of litter that dot the sand.  My thoughts begin to blur and pool.  They run in jagged, uneven lines, like a glass of spilt water on a dirt floor.  Mostly, I am awash in images– Polaroid pictures flipping through my brain.

I see Simon at dinner, eating voraciously, confiding his “secret” belief in the specious nature of the supernatural, licking the frothy head of a Guinness; the Gambaranna, cloaked in his flowing white tunic, staring ahead with his soft brown eyes, as I slip money under his rug; the Juju man, stonewalling me with his obstinate guru bullshit, mocking my questions in his tiny shack full of antiquated weaponry and voodoo charms; the guys at the bar laughing at the idea that witches may not exist; the youthful organizer, Ernest Cudjoe, telling me in his perfectly polished English, “It’s not up to me to decide who is a witch or not;” Magaji –the guilty witch–confessing spiritual murder listlessly with her dead gray eyes.

I see a copy of The Crucible in my hand in high school, a fantastical play about something that happened in America four hundred years ago and something that is happening in Africa right now. “Did you hear about the witch that flew into Nungua the other day on a broomstick without clothes on?” I recall a friend asking me.  “RITUAL MURDER TAKES ANOTHER VICTIM,” a newspaper headline proclaims. “BOYS TURNED INTO SNAKES FOR BLOOD MONEY,” another shouts.  I fixate on the dent in the forehead of the wizard in Yendi; the nail hole looms large in mind.

I want to write an op-ed, like I do in America whenever something offends me.  In America, I can call people out, I can  castigate them if I think they’re false or hypocritical, but in Africa my voice is so small.  I want to say that Northern Ghana is in the Stone Age and that these beliefs retard development, democracy and human rights, but my pulpit is so flimsy here. And who would ever feel sympathy for a witch?  And even those who might–like Simon–still don’t believe that maybe these men and women aren’t witches at all.

A deluge of pity hits me, followed by a breathless moment in which all I can hear is the mortar-like pounding of the waves.  Pop, pop, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! The rocks take their beating peacefully.  The tide crests, the sun fades, and a violent bout of loneliness descends upon me in its wake.   It hurts more than usual this time.

Visit the Gambaga archive for all the posts in this series or check out the photo gallery for more images from the witch camps of North Ghana.