Many years ago when I was a newspaper editor in Kampala, we had a strict policy about reporting witchcraft. Africa is Africa, so we couldn’t run away from stories about witchcraft, juju, or whatever they are called.

Court cases were full of them; in most murders, witchcraft was alleged; and election (and football) seasons were a bonanza for witchdoctors as politicians trooped to their shrines to pay for luck at the ballot box.

However, when a person was alleged to have “supernatural” powers, we always threw quotes around it to show there were no such things.

If not, we ran the claims with a scientific disclaimer immediately after it in brackets, saying witchcraft does not work or is a fraud.

We took a rigidly scientific line, and so inevitably we had to be sceptical of religion, especially its claim to miracles. We were clear that miracle healers were con men and women, and that when someone fell sick and you wanted them to be cured, you took them to see a doctor; prayer alone couldn’t heal them.

Tragically, that now seems like a century ago. Magistrates and judges are allowing cases in which juju claims and counter-claims are given as evidence, to drag on for days in court!

Stories of miracle healers and the claimed effects of evil spells are being reported as fact. It happens in the Uganda media, in Kenya, in Tanzania, and the worst offenders in Africa are the South African tabloids followed closely by the Nigerians.

International media too love these stories, these days, and also happily purvey claims about juju forces at work in some part of Africa without debunking them.

For now, only the predominantly Muslim countries of North Africa, where the rise of a more puritanical Islam frowns, and even punishes severely, associations with the occult, is spared.

This, strangely, is happening partly for good reasons. Nigerian’s Nollywoood movies, hugely popular on the continent, are among the leading purveyors of this glorification and routinisation of the dark arts.

They supposedly give the films “African authenticity,” and are good business because this narrative is popular with the masses.

Films from other African countries in which the young man is poor, and the young woman can’t have a child because they have been bewitched by an evil stepmother or a vengeful aunt, are standard fare.

In all, they have combined to imperil the coverage of science in the popular media in most of Africa. They needed one more thing to bring science to the grave — Hollywood fantasy films. Some of them respect scientific principles. Many of them don’t.

The mix of superstition and hyper sci-fi fantasy, happening in environments where there is no science being taught, has set us on a dangerous road.

The first job that was cut in most African newsrooms was science editor. But not all is lost. There is still a lot of science on pay-TV channels like DSTv, and the Internet. But you see where this is leading; the children of the elite, already advantaged, are moving even farther ahead, because they are the ones getting all the good scientific stuff, and being less exposed to voodoo film.

One day soon, we will all pay the price for this.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter: @cobbo3