A case for setting up ‘witchcraft desks’ in our newsrooms

Sometime in the Year of Our Lord 2008, a team of journalists was dispatched from a newsroom to Mbeere, Embu County.

Mission? To track down a ‘renowned witchdoctor’ rumoured to have bewitched a local magistrate.

The witchdoctor was so ‘powerful’ he ‘bewitched’ the magistrate to get stuck on the magisterial chair until evening.

And so it was that a reporter, a cameraman and a driver in a fully fuelled car left for Mbeere hills, nearly 200km away from Nairobi to cover this ‘big’ story.

We will not go into details of the mission here. But suffice it to say that the team, on returning to the news desk swore that it had an exclusive interview with a witch.

We will also tell you that the witch seemed to know his rights very well – he threatened to bewitch the entire team sent to hunt him down if they dared take his photos.

This particular ‘witch’ seemed to know a bit of journalistic ethics – that if the subject in a story wants to remain anonymous, so should he or she remain.

Moreover, his ‘witchcraft’ seemed to work – both the story and the photos that went with it almost died. The story ran as a quarter page, romantically headlined – “Hills of magic.”

Two years later, the same media house dispatched a journalist to cover another ‘witch’ story somewhere in Nairobi’s outskirts. The reporter was instructed to go undercover and seek the services of the witchdoctor, pretending that he needed help with his finances and love life.

For a small consultation fee, this second witchdoctor instructed the ‘client’ to travel upcountry at night and bath naked under a full moon.

Well, the news desk must have gotten over its fear of witchcraft in this second case. The story ran the next day. The only problem was that the said witchdoctor pitched camp outside the media house’s headquarters to protest that he was not a ‘witch’ and demanded an apology.

We could go on and on about how our media has put witchcraft on the same level with matters life and death such as food security, health and crime.

We can cite hundreds of stories here, including “DCI praise witchdoctor for aiding arrest of suspected animal thieves”, reported by Twin Towers in May, Year of Our Lord 2022.

In fact, a simple search on witchcraft stories in Kenya’s media yielded 34,800,000 results in 0.35 seconds.

Now, the jury is still out on whether witchcraft exists.

And yes, a 2010 survey by Pew Research Center indicated that one in every 10 Kenyans believes in witchcraft; and that most of them would rather take some mentally ill kin to a witchdoctor than to a hospital.

Yes, witchcraft does exist in Kenya’s laws – it has been in existence since its enactment nearly 100 years ago, and sadly, has not been repealed to date.

Still, it is our job as journalists to tell the truth about this blind faith in black magic. Sadly, most of the stories on witchcraft out there only serve to strengthen Kenyan’s faith in black magic. Very few have the core message that there is no research to prove that witchcraft exists.

As such, we have stories of ‘suspected witchcraft’ running on the same pages with suspected thievery, murder and rape.  We have lead stories on poor men and women lynched because they were suspected of witchcraft.

We have stories about angry neighbours raiding a poor woman’s house in the middle of the night claiming that “…the woman possessed a male reproductive organ, which she allegedly brandishes in the morning to keep the rains away.”

Perhaps, we ought to have ‘witchcraft desks’ in our news rooms, alongside gossip and propaganda desks.

Perhaps, the very fact that witchcraft stories still run in our media as big news is prove enough that witchcraft is real, and that we could be witches ourselves. Perhaps, for every ‘witch’ crucified on our pages, we ought to have a reporter and an editor crucified on either side.