These stories always drip out of the ‘darkness’, and each time they repulse me to core of my being. And yet we continue to explain the backwardness and barbarism of these people as a function of ‘colonialism’ (the international version of ‘institutionalized racism’, that favorite phantom, catch-all notion). Note: Though it takes place in New Guinea, and not Africa, I nonetheless have put this post in the ‘Africa’ category… because it’s borne of the same Darkness.
Diversity from Papau, New Guinea (hat tip: AmRen):
“The two women were rounded up and taken to Lopele village after they were suspected of practising sorcery and blamed for the death of the former teacher, who was from Lopele village,” he said.
They were tortured for three days, suffering knife and axe wounds, before being beheaded in front of the police who had been sent to the village to mediate, the report said.
The killings come just days after another report that six women accused of sorcery were tortured with hot irons in an Easter “sacrifice” in the Southern Highlands.
Last month, a woman accused of sorcery was stripped naked and burned to death by a mob, with Amnesty International stepping up calls for an end to sorcery-related violence in Papua New Guinea.
Amnesty has urged the government to stamp out the practice in the Pacific nation where there is a widespread belief in sorcery and where many people do not accept natural causes as an explanation for misfortune and death.
There have been several other cases of witchcraft and cannibalism in PNG in recent years, with a man reportedly found eating his screaming, newborn son during a sorcery initiation ceremony in 2011.
I know what would surely solve this backwardness: immigration to the U.S.!