Is Tanzania the headquarters of witchcrafts in Africa?
Otherwise how come about 500 alleged witches are lynched to death in Tanzania every year?
According to statistics by a Tanzanian rights group, the Legal and Human Rights Centre the annual-lynch is based on reports that counted some 3 000 people killed between 2005 and 2011.
Many of those killed were elderly women, the centre said.
In the latest of such killings this month, two Tanzanian women were killed by men who accused them of casting spells that made them “sexually impotent”, the police said.
A week before the murder of the women, seven people, who were also accused of witchcraft, were killed in a separate attack in western Tanzania. They were burned alive in their huts.
In the latest killings, the women, one aged in her 80s and her 45-year old daughter were killed in the village of Ihugi in Tanzania’s northern Shinyanga province late last Tuesday.
“Three men slit their throats and then chopped their bodies up”, local police chief Justus Kamugisha said, adding: “their neighbour was suspected of carrying out the attack after he believed they had made him unable to have sex”.
A 40-year-old man, who also accused the women of poisoning his mother last year, has been arrested.
“The victims were attacked as they were about to take their evening meal,” Kamugisha said.
Belief in witches and black magic remains strong in many parts of Tanzania.
The LHRC said some are targeted because they have red eyes – seen as a feared sign of witchcraft – even though this is often the result of the use of dung as cooking fuel in impoverished communities.
The centre said: “many local people believe that witchcraft is behind every misfortune – from infertility and poverty to failure in business.”