By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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I sometimes wonder why our regional rulers are never heard talking about the softer, spiritual maladies afflicting our people, which may be more responsible for our perennial backwardness than all the common markets, non-tariff barriers, free movements of people and goods and all the high-sounding formulations that seem to preoccupy our policy wonks and their number-crunching assistants in our regional capitals, and at Arusha.

There is no doubt that laying down the basic rules by which the East African Community will be governed is an important undertaking, one that will of necessity determine how much each of our countries will contribute and what each should expect to receive in return.

Still, I believe some time must be found to deal with the more spiritual side of our region and those attributes that will enable us to become useful citizens of our integrated region, or which, if not handled properly, will give us a community of mentally retarded constituents, harmful to ourselves and to the world around us.

Recently, I was watching a Kenyan news channel doing a report on multiple killings of elderly people in the Kilifi area on the coast, and I was struck by the similarity between what was being narrated and what happens in my own country. The killings were of elderly people, and they were killed apparently because it was believed that they were sorcerers or witches.

Although I do not have enough information about these other countries, I suspect it is the same with Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. It would be safe to include the whole of Africa, but for now I will limit myself to our own neck of the woods.

We East Africans are a dangerously superstitious lot, without exception, but we pretend not to see this problem as important enough for us to dwell on.

A few years ago, a rural charlatan, aided by certain shysters among the local clergy, sold us a rainbow about a panacea he had discovered and which “cured” pretty much whatever your ailment was if you drank a cup of his concoction. East Africans from all over the region came in droves to rural Arusha, and some died after abandoning their drugs because of the misplaced belief that they had been cured.

Now, one would have thought that now it has become clear that the man was a fraud, people and institutions would have dissected his claims and reinstated the sanity of science. But no, we kept quiet and continued with our lives as if nothing of moment had happened. Which tells me that there will soon emerge another junk miracle-worker, and East Africans will once again join the trek of ignorance and early death.

Attitude

I believe we need to do something to disabuse our people, many of them simpleminded to the point where it pains, of such credulous attitudes.

In the Kilifi reportage, the reporter asked one “erudite” villager if it was possible to tell a sorcerer simply by looking at his physical features. The sage answered in the affirmative: “If you look into his eyes, you will see that they contain the devil; even his hands will give you clear indications that the man is evil, he has evil in the blood.” On such a basis, the man was hacked to death.

But, as in almost all stories out of Kenya, there is a more practical reason. Those who kill these old people whom they say they suspect of practising witchcraft often have identified a piece of fertile land or other properties owned by the victim that they covet.

So the motive for the murder is often economic, which, though regrettable, is more comprehensible than the mere suspicion of someone having mystical powers to cause harm.

In certain cases the perpetrators have found a way to go regional, such as when traffickers in albino body parts from Tanzania began to sell their macabre wares in other countries of East Africa after the authorities became tough on them in their home country.

It is a lesson in integration taught to us by these criminals. Now, can we not reverse their practices by co-ordinating our security operations at regional level to thwart cross-border trading in witchcraft artefacts, and by adopting region-wide educational programmes in our schools, colleges and media to encourage scientific thinking and discourage superstition?

Just thinking.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]