Sentenced to Witch Camp
A journalist explores the plight of forgotten Ghanaian women labeled as witches
29 October 2010
Some women at the witch camp tend to lose track of time, having been there for decades.
The Halloween season abounds with witches and goblins and ghosts. While many children and adults put on costumes and pretend to be witches, a new book reminds readers that there are still people living in a world haunted by witchcraft.
In "Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps," Karen Palmer explores the destiny of women accused of committing supernatural crimes. She also examines the paradox of why people there rely on witchcraft, even as they fear it.
Karen PalmerGambaga, in northern Ghana, is a small, remote village where one of the country's six witch camps is located.
Witch camps
More than 3,000 accused witches, mostly women, live in Ghana's six witch camps in unenviable conditions. They are not prisoners, exactly, but they can't leave. Palmer, a journalist, first learned about these witches in exile from a 2004 human rights report. Three years ago, curiosity prompted her to investigate one of the camps in northern Ghana.
"We went up to this witch camp, which is an 18, 20-hour drive from the capital Accra," she said. "I was really quite surprised. I had all these visions in my head of Macbeth kind of witches, the Disney kind of witches. And in fact, what we found was a very small and remote village, made mostly of mud huts and a collection of about 200 women who were left to live there on their own."
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