Europe's inner demons

Muhlava’s confession was largely corroborated by that of her friend Chirunga Tsatsawani. To appreciate both at their full value it is necessary to add Crawford’s comment:

Any suggestion that the alleged witches were forced to confess is, I think, belied by the very nature of the confessions themselves. Forced confessions are generally grudgingly made and retracted as soon as the threat is removed. The confessions in [this case] were not of this nature and were first made in front of a definitely sceptical European policeman and then repeated or admitted in front of a European magistrate and later a European judge. As far as one can tell there is no reason to suppose that the police brought any pressure to bear on these people. There would, in any event, be no reason to bring pressure to bear on such talkative persons. Again, there seem to be no reasons one can suggest why the community in which these people were living should demand confessions of the sort which were made, for — even if a confession were demanded — a mere confession of witchcraft lacking in circumstantial detail would suffice.

While, no doubt, no normal, well-adjusted person would give the evidence these alleged witches gave, there is no reason to suppose that any of them was insane. Certainly they were considered sane enough to give evidence or to stand trial and, in any event, it is hardly possible that a group of women in one village should be similarly attacked by identical forms of the same mental disorder.⁽⁴⁴⁾

This, surely, is the heart of the matter: these confessions correspond precisely with the ideas about night-witches which are general amongst the Shona. The deeds were all purely imaginary — the cannibalism as much as the hyena-ride: Chidava’s body was exhumed by the police and subjected to a post-mortem, and no trace of any interference was found. On the other hand, there is nothing to suggest that the imaginings were produced by drugs. The collective fantasy has simply taken possession of the minds of certain women, to the extent that they believe themselves to be night-witches: “I cannot explain the reason for this, it only comes to us in a dream… I cannot tell the reason because it only comes to us as if we were dreaming.”

Set against this background the discoveries of the Italian scholar Dr Carlo Ginzburg, which he has described in his fascinating book I Benandanti, take on a fresh significance.⁽⁴⁵⁾

By archival research Ginzburg unearthed the existence, in the late sixteenth century, of a curious group of anti-witches at Friuli, near Udine in north-eastern Italy. These peasants saw themselves as entrusted with the task of going out, during the Ember days, to fight witches who were trying to destroy the fertility of the crops and also to kill children. Their steeds could be goats or cats as well as horses, their weapons consisted of sticks of fennel; the outcome of the battle decided whether the coming year would be one of plenty or of famine. Because of this, Ginzburg decided that he had stumbled upon a survival of an age-old fertility cult; and other writers have adopted and developed the idea.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Yet there is nothing whatsoever in Ginzburg’s material to justify such a conclusion.