Witch-Burning Has Cast A Spell On South Africa -- An Old Practice Is Back In Fashion To Settle Scores

------------------------------------------------------------------ DESPITE ITS post-apartheid advances, South Africa still grapples with a dichotomy between traditional beliefs and modern ways - as evidenced by continued witch-burnings. ------------------------------------------------------------------

WITCHES HILL, South Africa - By all accounts, the mobs were deliberate, determined and deadly.

In Leeuwfontein, they dragged an 82-year-old grandmother from her home, put a gasoline-soaked tire around her neck and burned her alive. In Inverane, they marched two women to a river bank, stoned them to death and torched their battered bodies. And in Moraphalala, an elderly woman was painfully poisoned to death and then heaved into her blazing hut.

The four grisly deaths early last week in different parts of rural South Africa had several things in common: The women were all accused of being witches. The killers were almost certainly their own friends and neighbors. And the slayings were not unusual.

In this year of liberation, when democracy dawned and the evil of apartheid ended in South Africa, an ancient crime has made an ugly comeback. At least 100 accused witches have been incinerated or stoned to death in 1994, sometimes by their husbands and children.

But the toll may be even higher. More than one-third of the deaths occurred in the impoverished Seshego district, near Pietersburg. And local police Col. Mohlabi Tlomatsana concedes that "only a tiny proportion has been reported. The real problem is decidedly worse."

Not all of those accused of casting evil spells, raising the dead or using supernatural powers were killed. Many were forced to flee their villages, saw their homes burned and children chased from school - or took refuge with police.

Scores of accused witches and their families now live in Witches Hill, a kind of refugee camp for the damned, in a police-sponsored witches-protection program.

It is an eerie place. Slithering lizards, gnarled cactus and razor-sharp thorn bushes line the sun-seared slope. Dust devils twirl in a bone-dry wind.

"They said I bewitched two women," explained one resident, Lina Ngoepe, a 60-year-old woman with an engaging smile and piercing eyes. "It was just pure jealousy. But they accused me of being a witch."

Neighbors banished the Ngoepe family from the town of Early Dawn and torched their spacious six-room home. They moved to a one-room, mud-walled shanty here in September after living five months in a tent at a police station. A heap of charred window frames and a broken sewing machine are the only remnants of their former life.

Police have arrested hundreds of people for witch-related murder, assault and arson but have won few convictions. Villagers rarely agree to cooperate or testify in court. Some fear reprisals. But most simply applaud the vigilantes.

"They feel the people who have murdered the witch have done the community a favor," said Koos Van Der Heever, a Pietersburg lawyer who specializes in witchcraft cases. "If you don't participate in the killing, it's an offense according to traditional law. So the whole village shares the guilt."

This grim side of the new South Africa is centered in Pietersburg in the vast northern Transvaal region north of Pretoria, especially in the dirt-poor, largely illiterate former black "homeland" of Lebowa. "Eighty percent of all murder cases in our region involve witchcraft," said Van Der Heever.

Villagers blame witches for misfortune, like a road accident, or for events they cannot explain, like cancer or epilepsy.

But some secretly settle family feuds, target business competitors or simply express envy for a neighbor's prosperity by accusing them of witchcraft.

In most cases the village elders convene a tribal court if witchcraft is suspected. Every family must contribute to hire a special witch hunter called a "nyanga," usually from outside the tribal area, to "sniff" out the demon. He gives the instigators a hallucinogenic potion to drink, then tells them to shout out the witch's name.

Sometimes the suspected sorcerer is simply banished. More often, an angry mob of youths uses the agony of fire to exorcise the evil spirit forever. Women are usually the victims, but a man is sometimes targeted as a wizard.

Witch hunts aren't new in South Africa. But the tense transition from apartheid to democracy sparked a witch-burning epidemic.

"The assumption was the new South Africa should be free, even free from superstition and traditional beliefs," said sociologist Anthony Minnaar, a witchcraft expert at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria.

"So gangs of militant, politicized youths went around saying now is the time to get rid of witches once and for all," he said. "They held tribal courts where anyone could accuse anyone else of being a witch. There was mass hysteria."

Government officials have repeatedly condemned the attacks. Since many local police are also terrified of witches, a multi-agency police task force was created to investigate and prosecute what a spokesman called "this barbaric scourge."

But the deaths have been an unsettling reminder that one of South Africa's deepest divisions is between traditional beliefs and modern ways. The national government hopes to bridge the gap by incorporating traditional healers and herbalists into the formal health-care system.The Medical Association of South Africa estimated that 80 percent of the black population regularly consults the country's 200,000 traditional healers.

Robert Thornton, head of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, compares witch hunts to lawsuits in America. "People (in the United States) sue because of problems of childbirth, or an operation going wrong, or accidentally falling into a hole," he said. "It's a search for blame. It's the same with witches. It's a denial of the fact that misfortune does happen, and it happens on a random basis."