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A combination of poverty, ignorance and personal jealousies leaves fearful and frustrated peasants quick to blame any adverse act of fate - a dead child, a failed crop, an inheritance settlement where a sibling receives all the land - on witchcraft. Throw into the pot malicious gossip and an often fatal bout of finger-pointing at old women, and the result is vigilante groups of professional killers moving from village to village, accepting payments to remove the "problem" by hacking, beating or burning. Four cows or $100 is said to be the going rate.

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A combination of poverty, ignorance and personal jealousies leaves fearful and frustrated peasants quick to blame any adverse act of fate - a dead child, a failed crop, an inheritance settlement where a sibling receives all the land - on witchcraft

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I like how they tie it in to economic conditions rather than just playing the "backward people with backward beliefs" card.

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But this is a really screwed-up situation where gangs of thugs are making coin off of people's beliefs. Given the heroism shown by these honourable and noble gangs of thugs, I'm sure they're more than happy that the usual targets of these specific witchcraft accusations *are* women, and better yet, old women, not young, hale men who own their own machete, and who have cadres of friends and supportive families that might seek to revenge their deaths. After all, it wouldn't do to have the noble witch-killers get chopped out because some greedy witch-smeller fingered the wrong guy, right?

Seriously, though, this kind of system doesn't usually discriminate all that much. In fact, given the patriarchical bent of many small-scale societies, men could arguably be *more* the focus of these sorts of accusations than women, since they're the ones more expected to gain reknown/earn lotsa money/big themselves up. But this CURRENT situation is NOT NORMAL.

[ 29 November 2005: Message edited by: aRoused ]