The Witches of Gambaga (review)

This film, which won a second prize in the documentary category at FESPACO 2011, explores the tribulations and, quite literally, the trials of women who, scapegoated and stigmatized as witches, even by family members, are exiled to a camp in Gambaga, Northern Ghana. According to lore, the camp was established in the nineteenth century as a sanctuary for a suspected witch rescued from imminent execution by a kindly imam. The film opens with the ordeals of Amina Wumbala, a widow, whose brother died in his sleep following an altercation. Declared a witch by the community, she was severely beaten, forced across a river, left for dead at its banks, and eventually found her way to Gambaga. Other residents have lived in the camp for varying periods of time and as a result of various circumstances, including Magazia Hawa, a once famous praise-singer, for more than twenty-five years; Alima and Zenabo, twenty years; and Agruba, ten years. Salmata, condemned with her daughter, had contemplated suicide, whereas Zenabo’s mother, also accused of witchcraft, had followed her daughter to the camp to help rear her grandchildren. On the basis of someone’s dream, Azara Azindow, a once-prosperous businesswoman, had been convicted of causing a meningitis outbreak. Salmata was exiled after the death of the daughter of her “rival,” a co-wife in a polygamous marriage.

Under the guardianship of the local chief, the Gambarrana, who adjudicates issues of guilt and innocence, residency and repatriation, obligations and liberties, these women are lodged in a liminal zone between sanctuary and incarceration, humanity and abjection. They are obliged to work on the chief’s farm and are subjected to “trials,” redolent of inquisitorial proceedings, in which a chicken’s throat is slit and the vagaries of its death throes exculpate or condemn the accused. If the chicken dies with its wings upturned, the accused is exonerated and drinks a potion with a promise to refrain from evil. Coerced confessions, like Asana’s, who was turned in by a brother, are common and reminiscent of a national scandal in 2010, when a seventy-two-year-old grandmother, Ama Hemmah, was tortured into a confession and burnt to death by a gang that included three women and an evangelical pastor.

In the film, the aphorisms “Fear women,” which appears on a tro-tro (public transport), and “Stronggest man” (sic), a hypermasculinist fantasy that is written on another, convey the degree to which popular culture is permeated with gender politics. In response, Gladys Lariba and Simon Ngota, members of the local Presbyterian Church, whose Go-Home project (Gambaga Outcast Home) is geared toward public education, repatriation, and rehabilitation of the accused, are joined by academics and activists like Rose Entsua-Mensah, Dodzi Tsikata, Takyiwaah Manu, and Yao Graham, who are determined to undermine the pernicious beliefs, attitudes, and values undergirding this practice. In the end, some of the women, including Azara Azindow, to whose memory the film is dedicated, are returned to their home communities, making the film a narrative of resistance and restoration.

Eschewing both the “observational documentary” style of exoticizing spectacle and the restrictive ethnographic gaze, Badoe interweaves the women’s biographies with ruminations on the “origins,” purposes, significance, scope, and epistemic transformations of the practice of witchcraft within Ghanaian social history, a history that involves “associations” of witches with enormous wealth and, in one notorious case, the elimination of political opponents. Each woman tells her story in her own voice, and each one highlights this fraught confluence of culture, religion, history, age, class, and gender. Whereas suspected witches are universally associated with folk tales, malevolence, and the occult, hysteria and paranoia have been common responses to their ostensibly supernatural powers, along with egregious acts of violence, often committed as “containment” strategies to assuage communal anxieties. Showing the women as recognizably human—for instance, through their very ordinary yearnings for simple well-being—the film undercuts the insidious myths around them steeped in timeless belief systems that...