The obayifo — witch — looks like anyone. She is your neighbour, or your aunt, or your co-wife.
Anywhere. That is the fear.
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Obayifo
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Obayifo
The obayifo — witch — looks like anyone. She is your neighbour, or your aunt, or your co-wife. By day she is ordinary; the signs, if you know them, are small: eyes that shine oddly, restlessness, an unusual appetite.
At night the spirit leaves the sleeping body and travels as a light — a moving glow above the fields and the roofs, which people have watched from their compounds and pointed out to each other. What it goes to do is consume: the blood or the vitality of children, the yield of a farm, the luck of a business, the fertility of a marriage. The victim wastes without any visible cause.
Witchcraft in this tradition is not usually about power over strangers. It runs along the lines of kinship and envy — it works within families and within villages, and its subject is what your relatives think of your success.
The shrine, the ordeal and the confession show how the community tried to give an invisible fear a public form. In the story, the danger is not only the witch. It is what suspicion can do to a family.
The obayifo — witch — looks like anyone. She is your neighbour, or your aunt, or your co-wife. By day she is ordinary; the signs, if you know them, are small: eyes that shine oddly, restlessness, an unusual appetite.
At night the spirit leaves the sleeping body and travels as a light — a moving glow above the fields and the roofs, which people have watched from their compounds and pointed out to each other. What it goes to do is consume: the blood or the vitality of children, the yield of a farm, the luck of a business, the fertility of a marriage. The victim wastes without any visible cause.
Witchcraft in this tradition is not usually about power over strangers. It runs along the lines of kinship and envy — it works within families and within villages, and its subject is what your relatives think of your success.
The shrine, the ordeal and the confession show how the community tried to give an invisible fear a public form. In the story, the danger is not only the witch. It is what suspicion can do to a family.