Crocodile Men

Some years ago in Bangui, I met a man from Obo. He had been working for an ill-fated American anti-poaching militia and was involved in untold drama: he'd accused his colleague, a South African mercenary, of embezzlement (diamonds, LandCruisers), who then accused him of murder, and he spent half a year in prison. Near the end of our conversation, he pulled out some photos of a corpse in the shallows on the banks of a river. The body was bloated, pummeled, and dismembered. “You Europeans don't believe it, but it is a very real problem for us – crocodile men. They are men who transform themselves into crocodiles and kill people in the water.”

I didn't have time to ask more then, but the image of the corpse and my interlocutor's grave mien – even graver than when he described his rivalry with the South African – as he talked of the crocodile men stayed with me.

Evans-Pritchard, meanwhile, in his extensive work on Azande notions of witchcraft and magic, makes no mention of the “pili” (crocodile men). So I was curious to find out more while out in Obo. The problem of crocodile men dates to the early 1980s, when many Yakoma functionaries were assigned to posts here. The president at the time, Andre Kolingba, was a Yakoma, an ethnic group concentrated in riverine areas near the capital, and his loading of the civil service with his kin marked the beginning of the ethnicization of CAR politics.

Many Yakoma are fishermen, and pili developed as a strategy to increase catches. A man who takes the pili medicine, imbibed under guidance of a magician, gains the strength to stay underwater all day and finds all the biggest fish. Only, it can be used for ill as well; pili can also employ these superhuman skills to slay a foe, provided the foe is in the water. As Yakoma moved into Obo, they mingled with the Azande living there and the pili skills passed between friends. Very often, crocodile murders involve rivalries over women.

The pili problem reached its height in 87 – 96. It felt like an epidemic to residents, who sought out and sanctioned any suspected pili in their midst. The usual practice was burning accused crocodile men at the stake. As the flames began to lick at their bodies, they would denounce others. For a while, the Catholic mission stopped giving communion out of exasperation with its members' excitement for the crocodile-men-burning.

Few Yakoma remain in Obo, as indeed few functionaries at all remain. The crocodile men problem has abated too. (Now, ill will is enacted upon others through inflicting sickness, a sickness that resembles AIDS but is not AIDS because it kills people so much more quickly than the doctors say AIDS usually kills, explained one interlocutor. Incidentally, there is no functioning hospital in Obo, so any opportunistic infections would go pretty much untreated.)

But there was one big crocodile man case last year. A boy from the nearby village of Gugbere came to Obo for a soccer tournament. In the afternoon, he and his friends headed home, but found themselves blocked by the ferry, which was at the far side of the river. Undeterred, the young man jumped in and began swimming to pull back the barge that would bring them home. Halfway across, he began yelling, “They've gotten me! The crocodile men have me! You will never see me again!” His head and torso emerged from the water, as if propelled, once, twice, three times, and then he disappeared.

People searched for his body for four days before they found it. The internal organs and the penis had been cut out. People understood them to have been eaten. Investigations ensued, and three men were accused of the killing: the boy's cousin, a man from Sudan, and a boy from the neighborhood. They confessed to being pili and killing the boy. The man from Sudan was the ringleader, in a way. He had been paid by a patron in Sudan. The patron had lived in Obo until the UN decided to repatriate Sudanese refugees a few years ago. He had his eye on a girl in Obo, but the girl thought him too old and preferred the soccer playing boy. So the patron dispatched his associate to deal with the rival. The associate paid the boy's cousin and another young man to help him.

The three accused sat in detention at the gendarmerie. But an angry mob yelling passages from the Bible (an eye for an eye) led by the murdered boy's mother broke down the door and killed all three. Their bodies now repose in a cemetery established by a Colonel who ruled as prefet of Obo a few years ago. This colonel is remembered as a particularly effective leader, because he could see through people to tell who was bad and who was good, a skill enhanced by his drinking, according to local lore, and he quickly dispatched the bad to his cemetery.

While in Obo, I read a novella by Mark Twain called The Mysterious Stranger. The story takes place in modern-day Austria sometime around the 1600s, a period marked by witch scares. The narrator, a young boy, enjoys a privileged view of the world thanks to repeated visits from the titular stranger, who describes himself as Satan. Satan enables his young friend to see the future and shows him how little humans understand about good and bad – early death might in fact obviate years of suffering; madness may bring greater happiness than sanity. What emerges clearly, through the witch burnings and unexpected changes in people's lives, is the ridiculousness of human efforts to make order out of the evil forces they see in the world. By the end of the story, Satan reveals to the boy that none of it exists. Not the boy, not himself; all is but a ripple, a sigh, a joke of the universe. A kind postmodern tale, a product of its brilliantly irreverent author. And yet, immersed in my own tales of crocodile men scares (not to mention LRA depravities), which have a social truth as well as a physical truth and yet are founded in what are, to a logical-rational mind, untruths, somehow it struck me as hopeful.

Witchcraft again

Last night as I dozed off reading Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul by headlamp, I came across a passage that struck me as remarkably resonant with descriptions of witchcraft here.

In the book, one of the characters has just described a bomb plot gone awry. The bomb had been placed in a church and set to explode at midnight, but it failed to go off. The police colonel states that the fuse was badly set, but his interlocutor replies,

' “And why was the fuse badly set? One has to go back to the source, colonel. A miracle is very much like a crime. You say the fuse was badly set, but how can we be sure that it was not Our Lady who guided the hand which set the fuse?” '

These are the kinds of questions that animate accusations of witchcraft here in Central Africa. In Christianity, believers tend to cordon such powers off as the provenance only of delineated religious authorities (the baker is not credited with channeling Mother Theresa into the sticky bun that has just come out of his oven – a higher power is). With witchcraft, anyone – including the pushy woman at the water pump – might be capable of wreaking havoc. Makes the world a dangerous and tricky place.

This insecurity is one reason why discipline is so lacking in the armed forces here. An officer will not dare to sanction a subordinate who has known poisoning powers at his disposal. The head of the ECOFAC anti-poaching unit that I stayed with last week described how he had to shift around various members of his force because their wives were recognized as witches and accused of causing all sorts of problems. Clearly, there are many other reasons for the impunity enjoyed by soldiers. For instance, a humanitarian worker was shot by a soldier here in Ndele a few weeks ago, and the general (a government official no longer in the military), the person who should lead the investigation, spent the whole of the next 36 hours too drunk/hung over to deal with the problem and then promptly decamped for Bangui, where he has remained. But the discourse of witchcraft suggests that the reasons might include some beyond simple-to-uproot structural delinquency.

Post-Halloween edition: Witches and sorcerers

When I walk from my room to the main mission building, I often pass one or two elderly women sitting on the ground, legs outstretched, a tired and droopy expression on their faces. This frustrates the Sister to no end. The women's children drop them here and then depart, explaining that they are witches and so the Church should take care of them. The Sister knows these families, though, and complains that many of the kids are themselves drunkards and ne'er-do-wells who simply want to be quit the burden of parents who can no longer work to feed themselves.

As my friends know, I find witchcraft fascinating. I count E.E. Evans-Pritchard's seminal study Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937) – many of whom live in southeastern CAR – among my favorite books. Evans-Pritchard wrote that for the Azande witchcraft is primarily a philosophy, a way of understanding causality that also defines the contours of social values: “the notion of witchcraft explains unfortunate events.” For instance, in warm weather Azande often sit beneath the open-walled roof of their homestead’s granary. Termites sometimes eat through the supports, and the building collapses. In the event that people have seated themselves underneath the granary, and the granary collapses on top of them, Western reasoning would state that it collapsed because termites ate through the supports. The fact that the collapsed roof injured people would be explained as coincidental, if unfortunate. In contrast,

"The Zande knows that the supports were undermined by termites and that people were sitting beneath the granary in order to escape the heat and glare of the sun. But he knows besides why these two events occurred at a precisely similar moment in time and space. It was due to the action of witchcraft. If there had been no witchcraft people would not have been sheltering under it at the time. Witchcraft explains the coincidence of these two happenings."

Evans-Pritchard writes that witchcraft co-exists with empirical knowledge of cause and effect, but it adds blame where a rational explanation would insist on coincidence. For Evans-Pritchard, witchcraft was a coherent system of philosophy, but one that the Azande would come to realize was incorrect.

Yet, all the modernizers' expectations to the contrary, witchcraft has not gone away. Instead, it has surged alongside the surge in economic and social instability that much of the African continent has experienced in recent decades. Contemporary anthropological accounts of sorcery and witchcraft have tried to dig deeper, then, and understand witchcraft not simply as a belief (because when we label something a belief, we tend to imply that on some level it is false, or that people could/should come to realize the error of their thought) but as a taken-for-granted fact of life and a tangible actor in the world.

I find some a lot of this work fascinating, because it stretches the limits of my whole way of making sense of the world: what would it be like to see witches all around me, to understand actions and problems in this way? This, to me, is what is exciting about anthropology.

But seriously, the women at the mission are not witches. They are destitute, desperate old women who have been abandoned as dead weight by their families. Today, my own mother's birthday, I have even less patience for scapegoating like this.

Nevertheless, witchcraft came to dominate my discussion this morning. I stopped by the tribunal to speak with the only official currently there (the president and the prosecutor are both in Bangui pending decisions on various disciplinary matters allegedly to do with their involvement in the illegal bush meat trade), the greffier en chef. He's a personable guy who was eager to discuss the vagaries of Central African law with me. (I'm afraid my blog posts have taken a slightly negative tone, and I feel the need to acknowledge here how generous people have been in talking with me, for which I am very grateful.) He showed me his reports and explained that the most common crime they see is “PCS” - Pratique de Charlatanisme ou Sorcellerie. (Ah, the francophone love of acronyms!)

I went through two PCS dossiers in detail to get a sense of how these cases play out. In one, the accused was deemed guilty, in the other, innocent. I'll start with the latter:

A child with no penis (he has had several operations to put him in order, but the doctor said that he should be treated with gentleness) was at the quartier's bathing area to wash. A slightly older neighbor boy came and shoved him out of the way so as to claim the space for his own. When the penis-less boy's father found out, he beat the pushing-boy harshly. The family of the beaten boy objected. Some days pass. One night, the father of the penis-less boy is bitten by a snake. He notices that the beaten-boy's father is outside, coming toward him. The beaten-boy's father is drunk, barefoot, and going to the edge of his compound (the edge abutting that of the snakebitten man) to piss. They exchange harsh words. Later, the snakebitten man notices that a snake is sitting in his usual chair. With neighbors' help, he manages to get the snake out. At this point, he accuses his neighbor of witchcraft: he transformed himself into the snakes, or sent the snakes. However, upon hearing a succession of witnesses, it was determined that the accused had no reputation for being a witch; no oracular proceeding had determined that he was a witch; and there was insufficient witness testimony to condemn him. He was set free.

The other case involved two women. They were at their quartier's water pump, jostling and arguing about who should be able to pump first. The accused screamed at the victim: “You're going to leave this water pump, and you're going to give birth through your mouth!” The target of her acrimony was in fact six months pregnant and had a miscarriage several days later. Following complications, she died. It was at this point that “En tant que africains mon mari et moi [parents of the deceased] avions décidé de proceder à des recherches traditionnelles pour déterminer les causes de la mort de ma fille” (Being Africans, my husband and I decided to use traditional means of research to determine the cause of my daughter's death.) The traditional healer they found did the egg test 8 times (not quite sure what this consists of) and each time the egg broke when they said the name of the woman they later accused. Furthermore, everyone in the neighborhood knew that she was a witch. (Being a witch is not illegal; only committing public offense through witchcraft is punishable.) And, when first accused, she didn't so much as open her mouth to deny the charges. Verdict: guilty of PCS in the case of the dead pregnant woman.

The lesson in all this: don't get into fights at water sources.