February 12, 2025 • 51 mins
Witchcraft and sorcery accusations continue to plague our world in the 21st century. Join us as we explore the complex issue of sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) in Papua New Guinea through the lens of Anton Lutz, a human rights defender working directly with affected communities. Drawing from his extensive experience living in PNG and developing educational initiatives, Lutz provides insight into how these accusations unfold within a nation of over 800 distinct cultural groups. The discussion examines the recent intensification of violence, its impact on communities, and the cultural and religious factors that contribute to these situations. Lutz shares his perspective on current intervention strategies and the ongoing work to protect vulnerable individuals while respecting PNG's rich cultural heritage.
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(00:00):
When they get together and talk,they all talk about like we all
believe in sanguma. But if you can see below the
surface, you realize that what they're talking about is often
quite different. And are they talking about the
thing that lives inside a person?
Or are they talking about the the techniques that have been
learned? Are they talking about objects
that are held? Welcome to Witch Hunt, the
(00:23):
podcast bringing you news from the front lines in the effort to
eliminate sorcery accusation related violence.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
Today we'll be talking about accusations of witchcraft that
can have deadly consequences. We'll be exploring the cultural
and religious dynamics that contribute to this violence and
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the devastating impact it has onindividuals and communities.
We'll also discuss the challenges of addressing sorcery
accusation related violence and efforts being made to challenge
it. We're honored to have Anton Lutz
join us today to shed light on this important issue.
Anton is a human rights defenderwho is dedicated his life to
(01:03):
working with victims of sorcery,accusation related violence or
starve and advocated for change.Let's get started and learn more
about Papua New Guinea Welcome to Witch Hunt Anton Wets.
We're looking forward to learning from your unique blend
of lived experience in Papua NewGuinea and the development of
(01:24):
your curriculum project. Can you give us a brief
background about yourself and work?
Hi, my name is Anton Lutz. I'm a human rights defender and
activist in the Sorcery Violencespace in Papua New Guinea.
I've been doing this work there for around 8 years and there's
always something new that I'm learning and things that I'm
(01:47):
trying to communicate. My background in Papua New
Guinea is that I was raised there, My father and my mother
were medical missionaries in from the US that we're based
there. And so I grew up there and
returned to work there 20 years ago in rural development.
I'd built an airstrip and did various things and then found
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that people in the community where I had been raised, we're
very keen on burning people theycalled witches.
And that was something I wanted to take a stand against.
And yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that as the episode
progresses. Thank you.
What should we know about Papua New Guinea before we talk about
(02:32):
the sorcery accusations? Everything Papua New Guinea is
one of the most interesting and diverse places in the world it's
famous for being linguistically diverse the eastern half of the
island is the nation of Papua New Guinea.
The western half is the Indonesian province of Papua and
West Papua, and together they have over 1000 languages that
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are spoken there, which is more than 15% of the world's
languages living languages. The popular Guinean side has
around 800 languages, which means over 800 cultures, which
means 800 different kinds of beliefs about magic and about
the supernatural world and abouthow to live well with others.
(03:16):
And there have been people therefrom the earliest migrations out
of Africa into this part of the world where people came in at
the time, the larger landmass ofSouthwell, which is Australia
and New Guinea and Tasmania combined into one landmass with
lower sea levels. And they crossed here 65,000
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years ago, give or take. And after sea level rose, they
were then isolated for 40,000 years.
And finally the Austronesian people came from Taiwan through
the Philippines into the New Guinea area, and then from there
on into the wider Pacific, becoming the cultures that we
now recognize as Pacific cultures, getting as far as
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Hawaii and Easter Island. And then finally from there
moving to New Zealand and discovering New Zealand and
populating that hundreds of years before the Europeans
decided to go and try to find out what's on the other side of
the planet. In many parts of the Highlands,
the first contact with anyone who is not the next door tribe
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was in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and in some places the
1960s. And so there are people that are
alive today who I know who were teenagers, were young adults
were were married actually probably as teenage marriage,
but still they were married whenthe first white person hiked
into the valley and they discovered that they were on an
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island that surrounded by an ocean on a planet that has other
people living on it. And they had not known that.
So it's an incredible story of change that these people have
lived through and are living through.
And of course since independencein 197549 years ago that there
is these growing pains that thatwe have there.
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And this the situation with regard to the sorcery accusation
related violence is different across the 22 provinces of Papua
New Guinea. But there are some similarities.
We can talk about. Gosh, what else?
And people are generous and amazing.
And the landscape is so diverse from sort of what you would
(05:28):
picture as the Australian Outback flatlands down in the
South in Western Province, and then up into Alpine up to 15,000
feet elevation, mountains up there.
Would they get snow and have glaciated valleys up on them and
then back down to the Sepic River with all of its.
Yeah. Just so much diversity and so
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much beauty. And yeah, it's amazed that I can
call that place home. Yeah.
That's amazing. What do we need to understand
about what's happening there with violence?
I think violence has a long history there.
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There's evidence that in many communities there were people
being violent to their enemies, certainly, but also sometimes to
their loved ones, to their own children, to their wives.
Going all the way back. There is.
I don't think that's anything new in particular.
The degree of the violence, the kind of violence though, the
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cruelty that we're now seeing, and especially when it comes to
tribal warfare and sorcery violence and even some gender
based violence or intimate partner violence, we're seeing
just really sadistic, cruel, sexualized treatments of others,
torture, and I think that is newas well.
(06:55):
Violence in general, I think it's hard to summarize.
If you look up Papua New Guinea and violence, you'll see many
horrific stories that are on theInternet.
They're published in the newspapers in PNG and by
journalists around the world andthat is all there.
And I think the thing to note about all of that is that for
many people, it is accepted and expected.
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And people think that this is a normal way to be and that it's
normal for a a boyfriend or a husband to, to beat his wife.
It's normal for a community to torture someone they think is a
witch. And they just, it's normal for
in a tribal fight, if you've killed your enemy warrior to
desecrate his body and mutilate it.
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And they just think that that's normal.
And I'm not sure what the history books and the
psychologist will say about whathas happened to a society when
violence becomes that normal. What what made that happen?
I'm not sure we can detail all of it yet, but it's happened.
And the violence is pervasive and very commonplace.
(08:04):
And yeah, it's hard to see that happening to people who want to
live in peace. How did you first become aware
of sorcery accusation related violence and what drew you to
work in that area? I think I've told the story in
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several different ways differenttimes.
I'm asked, and the way that is now sitting with me is that this
is something that my my interestin sorcery, violence goes back
to people I was working with in a quite a remote part of the
country that had had first contact in the 60s and 70s.
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There were some anthropological papers written in the 70s by a
guy named Lyle Steadman. So this is the Haywell part of
Papua New Guinea up in the Central Highlands.
What's now Hella Province was then, so that Highlands province
in the Lagai River Valley. And yeah, these are people that
had long held beliefs that thereis no death in our community
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apart from that which is caused by witches.
And by witches we now translate in English is a version of the
word sanguma, which is a versionof their own word, which is
peace I. And they believe that these
peace I people had a being that lived inside of them that was
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contagious. So two women sleeping in a house
by the river could pass this being from 1:00 to the other.
If one of these people who had this being gave you a piece of
sweet potato and you took it, itmight actually be a piece of
meat which was disguised as sweet potato, spiritually
disguised. Which interestingly, like
Christians have beliefs about things that you eat that aren't
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actually what you think they arewhen you eat them and so forth.
But they had this belief as wellthat the sweet potato could
actually be a piece of meat and that by eating this piece of
meat, you could then infect, getinfected with this piece.
I spirit or invisible being. I guess spirit is also a English
word that we probably shouldn't be using.
But this invisible being that lives inside of you that can
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then go forth and eat people's hearts and their life force and
cause them to get sick and die. And that if you coerce this
human who is the host of this creature and demands, you know,
I tell her to stop or tell her to give you compensation in the
form of pigs or shell money or threaten her, then she would be
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able to control this spirit beating enough that it would no
longer go and kill others. So I'd heard these stories and I
had tried to raise my eyebrows as much as I could and say, are
you, you know, this sounds like things that of course I'd heard
of the Salem witch trials and I heard of the burning people at
the stake in Europe and so forth.
And I was like, that's things that we used to do and we grew
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out of a long time ago. But you guys still think this is
on like, this is crazy. You can't be doing this.
And so I, I had these interactions in my 20s and
didn't really think much of it and then found that this
aversion of this violence was then happening further to the
east, where I was doing most of my life and work among the anger
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people, which had no such beliefs in their history.
And so their history had to do with, you know, there's
ancestral ghosts that must be appeased.
And so you're talking to beings in the sky that are not
associated with humans. You, there's no one to torture,
there's no one to coerce, there's no one to convince.
You're just talking to ghosts. And if you can successfully talk
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to ghosts, then good on you. You might get healthy again.
And if you can't, then you'll probably die.
It's a very different belief systems.
Of course. They're different languages,
they're different cultures. They have different histories
when they had different belief systems.
And yeah. And then this belief about the
being that lives inside of you has migrated, has followed
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people, has moved word of mouth,and now the hanging people
believe this. And they have resorted to not
just demanding pigs and money and wealth from people who they
think are causing these problemsin their communities, but
they're torturing and murdering them.
And we are. We began seeing this as early as
2010 and onwards. I didn't really become aware of
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it. It was quite sporadic until
20/14/2015. And then I had people showing up
on my doorstep saying so and so is being tortured, can we go
help her? And I jumped in the truck and
drove off, tried to get the police to go and so on.
So my in person involvement in that really began in 2015.
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I was involved with tortured people and with rescuing people
and taking them to hospital and finding safe houses for them and
buying mattresses and clothing for them because they'd lost
everything, had their houses burned and so on and so forth.
Yeah. So my that's sort of how I got
launched into it. What are the cultural, religious
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and social dynamics that are perpetuating the sorcery
accusation related violence? Like I mentioned before, I think
there's so, so much that is not documented, not fully understood
about the traditional. And by traditional I mean pre
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contact belief systems. And when we say that, we can
also note that these belief systems have changed very
rapidly and are no longer what they were.
So what the anthropologists in the 70s and 80s went and
documented and wrote down for the first time ever that this is
what these people say they believe is no longer necessarily
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the case. That might be what their
grandparents believed. But the new generation has gone
to school, they are watching movies, they are reading books,
they are traveling overseas, andthey have a different world
view. They they are mixing their
Christianity with their true, what their grand grandparents
believed in an in a whole new way.
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And what of that is being documented and well understood,
I think is minimal. There's very little that's
actually formally being studied about how all of this is coming
together. And yeah, what we're seeing is
this evolving of worldview. And because it is so disparate
to begin with, we're not, we can't say there is a Papua New
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Guinean culture. There are Papua New Guinean
cultures, but there is not one that is pervasive everywhere.
And I think we can still see thediversity and the nuance from
within people's, their origins. And, and there's also now a lot
of mixed parentage as they call it there where your mother is
from one culture and your father's from a different
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culture, a different province, adifferent part of the island.
And so then you're growing up with very different, your
mother's family believes one thing, your father's family
believes something quite different.
And so then what do you believe?It's both, it's neither.
It's something new that you are creating in your own head.
And so it's highly complex. I think there are many cultures
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in PNG that many, many tribes, many languages, many areas that
traditionally had belief in a person who was able to do
magical kinds of things, what wein English would call magical.
So they were able to maybe have influence over the weather or
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sickness or birth or tell the future or give good fortune in
warfare, these kinds of things and protective magic of various
kinds. So that was sort of your shaman,
your witch doctor, your sorcererkind of figure, often well
respected, but usually male. And many, so many people are
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like, I'm descended from a line of sorcerers.
My grandfather was a powerful sorcerer and then he became a
Christian. So now he's not anymore.
But if you mess with me, I'll tell him and he'll whip out the
old gear and he'll get even withyou.
And so you hear that kind of that kind of talk, whether they
actually believe that their grandfather could actually cause
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you to fall dead at 50 paces with no physical implements, I
don't know. But they talk like they do.
There's then this subset of traditions that talk about this
evil thing that lives inside of people, maybe old people, maybe
women in a few places, it's men and that they're the ones
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responsible for death in the village.
And they should control the spirit thing better.
They should have a better reign on it.
They shouldn't just let it out so often.
And so, and we can still see theconfusion in the language.
So this word I mentioned earlier, sanguma is a word that
is very confused across Papua New Guinea.
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And you can see it in the the grammar of how it's used.
You can say she did sanguma or she is sanguma.
So is this an ontological characteristic?
Is this like a choice she has made?
Is this a practice she is doing?Like these are all different
concepts, but the way it just rolls off your tongue and she is
sanguma or she's doing sanguma. Like these are very different
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things in the way that in English we would have confusion
over someone is a witch or someone is being a witch or
they're doing witchcraft. And these are actually quite
different ideas about how the bad thing is happening and why.
I think a further level of confusion and potentially
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foundation for violence is the Christian beliefs that have been
introduced and especially the ideas that there is a mega
powerful evil being named Satan who has very powerful demons
that can walk the earth and inhabit people.
And that they are totally real because the Bible said they are.
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And so therefore we have to preach about them.
And I think that has really resonated with a lot of people
there. And they have thought that,
well, this backs up what I was told by my grandfather in the
village, which some missionarieswould have said, well, what your
grandfather believed, those wereheathen ideas or those were
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Pagan ideas or those were animistic ideas.
And you shouldn't believe them. You should just believe the
Christian faith that we're now teaching.
But I think some missionaries were much more syncretic in
their approach, and they just mix things together.
And they said, well, the spirit that you believe in, he's
actually a demon, so don't believe in him.
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And they just, like, mix these, yeah, Middle Eastern ideas that
had morphed into European ideas.And then they brought them from
Europe to the Pacific and then labeled Pacific beliefs with
European words. And so now we have, for
instance, this Pisai character, this creature that lives inside
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of women in the Haywa. We call that witchcraft is
actually has nothing to do with witchcraft, right?
It's like it's completely different.
It's their own beliefs. It's their own tradition.
Has nothing to do with what Europeans knew as witchcraft and
what we defined it as. And what how would that word
developed over the centuries in Europe?
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Yeah. So it's very interesting.
And in its sort of academic curiosity, in my mind, sometimes
I get distracted from the fact that whatever this back story
is, this the etymology of these ideas, when it comes to
practice, there is someone who is being stripped naked,
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tortured horribly and murdered. Like all of it boils down to
people being killed in horrific ways.
And yeah, and that's really tragic and that's.
Something that is a a challenge,I guess, to try to figure out
how do we unpack enough to help people see through the veil that
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is in front of them without confusing them too much with the
semantics, the etymology, the the history of all of it, If
that makes sense. I have so many questions about
what you've just said, but I think the one I'll go with is,
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are you seeing patterns as far as what types of people get
targeted or what types of peopleare doing the violence?
In terms of who is targeted, there's nothing conclusive in
the research that has been done so far on this.
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And I think to me that simply goes back to the idea that there
are 800 plus traditional cultures with modern variants.
So we're talking times 2 * 10 times.
Who knows how many new subsets of these cultures we could say.
And so it's hard to make any generalizations about anything
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in PNG. One of the things that I think
the research would bear out is that people believe that the
evil is contagious in some way, like from mother to daughter or
from friend to girlfriend or someone you shook hands with or
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like it's there's, there's always a physical genetic
proximity that is involved. And so it's rare that just a
total stranger would get accused.
They'd be like, well, we killed one last week.
And her friend, her next door neighbor, is acting suspicious
now. So let's kill her or we killed
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her mother. So it's probably the daughter.
And there's, there's some kind of a connection that can be made
in many parts of the country. It is women who are mostly
targeted. Whether, yeah, you can't, we
can't even really say. It's usually single women or
widowed women or elderly women. It's it's a combination of young
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women, married women, single women, widows, people who are
beautiful, people who are not, people who are mentally
disabled, people who are not. I think we would find that it's
rare that it's the most popular people in our community and it's
rare that it's the people who are best connected in a
community. Although we have a case where
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someone who is not considered beautiful by the by her, their
community who is a bit off in the head was accused.
And then she said, well, this other lady was doing it with me
under torture. And so they rounded up the more
physically attractive, the more well connected wife of the
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leader and tortured the two of them together.
And so when they finally the family of the more well
connected one showed up and said, hey, like, why are we
torturing these ladies? Cut it out and they rescued both
of them. And then that led to years of
court cases from the woman who was better connected, trying to
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get compensation from the one who was less attractive and
saying, you're the one who got me tortured, so thanks a lot.
And now you owe me. And you shouldn't have shouldn't
have named me and so forth. So she was sort of accidentally
tortured. And then the one who should have
been tortured was the one who was, you know, socially
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acceptably tortured. So there's those kinds of
interactions that we see. I've seen cases where people
were accusing each other over 5 kina.
So that's a little over AUS dollar worth of peanuts.
And there was an argument about a peanut garden and who
harvested, who planted the peanuts and how much they were
worth. And then they grew.
And so when we harvested them, they were now worth this much.
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And then the wrong person sold them.
And it's. Yeah.
And then there was some jealousyover it was now 20 bucks instead
of five. And so and so now you're a
witch. You shouldn't have done that.
You're a witch. And it's like, these are just
poor people. Like this is poverty.
There's an element where this ispoverty.
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These are poor people who are desperate, who are fighting for
a place at the margins of their community that are turning on
each other so they don't get left out themselves.
And yeah, so we see that. And it's often, there's often an
element of outsiders who are attacked.
So in in many parts of PNG, women leave their clan or tribe
(25:08):
of origin and they go and live with their husbands clan when
they get married. And so they're there without
their cousins, without their uncles, without their fathers,
without their grandfathers, without their brothers.
And they're very much alone. And if that tribe of men who are
all brothers, cousins, uncles, the men all stay put and they
(25:28):
bring women in and they send their sisters out to go get
married outside. These women who come in are each
alone in in some very fundamental way.
And they can try to form a bond of sisterhood within their tribe
where they've married in, but they're still, if they get
accused, the other women are like, what's the English word by
(25:50):
a Felicia? We don't, we don't know you.
We don't want anything to do with you.
We're going to let you be tortured on your own and hope
we're not next. Whereas if if that was happening
in their own tribe, her father would show up and be like, no
way, you're torturing my daughter.
So, yeah, in terms of perpetrators, it's almost always
young men. And in some places they say that
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the young men are enabled or egged on by the elder men in the
community. So that if you sit down
afterwards and talk with the, the men who did the torture,
they say, well, we wouldn't havedone it, but the leaders told us
to do it or the leaders urged usto go and do it.
And I think there's a, an element of truth to that, that
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there is a complicity at a minimum, if not authority that
is given to these or an authorization, I should say,
that's given to these, these times of torture.
And it's, it's a whole mob effect.
It's not two or three people, It's dozens of people, hundreds
of people sometimes that are observing, participating,
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cheering it on, videoing it, photographing it, uploading it.
So this is what we're seeing. It's interesting that many times
the perpetrators, after some time has passed, they can turn
around and say, I realized that what I did is wrong and I
(27:14):
repented this. And I don't want to go face the
police, but I am willing to go stand up in public and speak
about why we shouldn't be behaving the way I behaved.
I was wrong. And so it's, yeah, makes makes
me think that the level of theirconviction was not as deep as
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some people think. That they were not fully
convinced that this is a good thing to do, but simply got
caught up in a hysteric kind of moment where they were
influenced by the group by the the fever of the the moment and
decided to do this and did this.Yeah.
So many just fascinating dynamics that all of which I
(27:58):
think are not necessarily research based, but it's very
hard to do research into this for the reasons I've mentioned.
And so I think maybe what we're left with is, are these
anecdotes and these observationsfrom one off cases.
But it's hard to extrapolate from this to say this is true of
everything we see. Yeah.
But those are big trends that wesee.
(28:19):
Should also be noted, of course,that in the island of
Bougainville, it's predominantlymen and boys that are accused
and tortured. So they have a different set of
beliefs about the supernatural there, and that they believe
that it's more plausible that men are responsible than women.
And yeah, so we see a lot more boys and men merged there than
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women. This concept of Saint Guma.
Is this pretty widespread acrossdifferent cultures, or is it
particular to certain provinces?Yeah, the belief about what a so
I think almost everyone would say that they believe in
(29:04):
Sangama. What they mean by that will be
diverse and regionally specific,I think.
But then of noting of course that people move a lot for work,
for education, for just going shopping to to go from where I
grew up in Wappunamunda across to Hagen, the main city in the
(29:26):
Highlands, for shopping. You have to cross three language
groups through into, through three different cultures to get
there. And that's an hour and a half
drive. And you've now crossed 1
provincial boundary. You drive another 30 minutes,
you're in in another province. So these are very small tribes,
very small cultures, very small languages, very small provinces.
(29:48):
So to say there's anything consistent or regionally
specific doesn't necessarily always hold true.
That being said, the word sanguma has different meanings
through time and across different parts of the country.
In its place of origin, on the North Coast of the island, it
(30:13):
had to do with people who claim to be using magic to go and do
assault on their enemies. So when I read about this in the
first documentation of it from the 1920s and 30s, it's
essentially a form of assault, like ninja terrorism or
(30:35):
something. So these guys go to school, they
learn how to do their special skill, and then they go and
attack the guys from the neighboring tribe, get one of
them alone in the coconut plantation, and each one of them
does something horrible to him, like pounding spikes from a
certain palm tree into the his ear, or putting sand in under
(30:56):
his eyelids or making him drink terrible things or whatever it
is. And then the role of the last
person is to perk him up enough to make him stumble back to his
village and cry out. The sanguma have killed me and
then lie around rolling in pain for a couple days and then die.
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And if you just kill him in the field, that's just a murder.
That's not a sanguma attack. A true sanguma attack is
designed to cause terror in the next village that you, you want
him to be screaming in pain for days at a time while he dies
from his injuries and, and telling.
And these are secret injuries. They're not like obvious
(31:40):
injuries. They're secret injuries.
So that you then tell people, well, we didn't kill him.
It was the the spirits that killed him or it was magic that
killed him. It was our powerful sorcery that
killed him. So don't mess with us or our
grandfathers. And, and so they, it was this
sort of intimidate the neighbor kind of and you and you tell big
stories about what you're doing.We move so silently.
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We were invisible and we became so small like ants.
And that's how we snuck into your village and we escaped like
flying foxes, what what they call bats.
We flew away like bats afterwards because we can fly
and we tell all these big stories to add that much more
terror and fear to your enemies.So that's where that's what a
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Sangamma was. It was one of these trained
sorcerer ish ninja ish assassin boys, young men who did this
thing. The word then moved up as the
rest of the island began learning this Tupeeson language,
the Moanesian pigeon language. The rest of the island began
learning what this word was. But they didn't have a culture
(32:45):
that there were trained people running around doing this kind
of thing to their enemies. They had cultures that believe
that there was a being that lived inside of women that came
out from them and killed suck people's energy like a flying
invisible vampire thing. And there was other cultures
that believe that what you coulddo protective magic.
And so this word sanguma became an umbrella term that
(33:09):
incorporated all of these diverse meanings.
And so today you have people that say, well, we know what
sanguma is. And what they're thinking is
it's the shaman in Maya village.He's my respected uncle who no
one messes with. But when you want good grades,
so you go and you give him a chicken and he does something
with some leaves and some spits a few things in the right
(33:31):
direction. And then I get better grades on
my next report card and he's my sanguma and I trust him and I
believe him. And why would I kill him?
He's my uncle, he's great. Whereas in other cultures,
couple 100 miles away, you have people who are like, well, that
one over there, she's a sanguma.Her mother was a sanguma.
We murdered her. We'll probably going to murder
this one if she messes up. And then you go a couple 100
(33:53):
miles away and they believe something different about
Sanguma. But when they get together and
talk, they all talk about like we all believe in Sangu gwa.
But if you can see below the surface, you realize that what
they're talking about is often quite different.
And are they talking about the thing that lives inside a
person? Or are they talking about the
the techniques that have been learned?
(34:14):
Are they talking about objects that are held?
These are all quite diverse and different specifics and nuances
that are there. So I don't know if that helps
clarify any of this for you. But yeah, this is kind of the
complexity that's there. And then you add in words like
sorcery and witchcraft, and thatmakes it all the more complex.
(34:35):
And especially because we have words, the word sorcery and
witchcraft are not only in English Bibles, but the word
sanguma is in the Tarpisen Bible, which to me is highly
irregular. Because there is no way that
people 3 to 4000 years ago in the Middle East believe that
there was this creature that lived inside of women in the
(34:56):
Chimbu Province of Papua New Guinea and could go forth and
eat the life energy of others and come back into them.
That is not what people in Mesopotamia or the Canaanite
areas were, were believing. They, they had their own
beliefs, equally interesting, equally complex, but they were
not those beliefs. And so we should not be taking
(35:17):
words like sanguma and putting them into the Bible and saying
sanguma is real because it's in the Bible.
Like that's irresponsible. Yeah, really reinforces any
existing belief. And Sanguma, definitely to see
it printed. And all these people with modern
technology are showing up at your doorstep with this
(35:39):
wonderful book. And it's right there.
Sanguma. Yeah, exactly.
I'm really curious about urbanization.
Is that having an impact on accusations because of people
coming into contact with other cultures?
The urbanization that we're seeing in PNG now is sort of two
(36:02):
tiered the you have the employedgroup that are moving for work
and then you have the I wish I was employed group that are
moving to be with those who are employed or be with their
friends who are looking for work.
And so you have the ones who are, they are employed, they
(36:23):
have a house, they might have a car, they're putting their kids
in school and they're moving around the country for work.
And then you have the settlements and you have the
slums basically, where you have them living in ethnic groups and
they'll all live together. And then they have a certain
cohesion, even though they're often not from one single place
(36:47):
of origin, but they're from a region of origin or a group of
tribes of origin. And so we have, for instance, in
the capital city, we have the Angas.
They just say it's all the Angas, even though when we're in
Anga, we're all very diverse andwe know which tribe we reach
from and who's at war with who and who can't go through that
tribal land because they might get killed and killed by
(37:09):
violence, not by sorcery and so forth.
But when you come down to the city, it's all by a sort of
provincial block or by regional block.
And then they will have their conflict between block to block
kind of thing. So you see, as these settlers or
these migrants are coming to thecity, they're bringing with them
(37:30):
their beliefs. And so then those beliefs are
now able to, what's the, what word am I looking for?
They're able to operationalize, they're able to activate in a
setting that is removed from anytraditional constraints.
Any like in the village, back inthe provinces, the elders would
(37:52):
say, no, no, no boys. That's not how we do it.
We have a tradition. This is what we do.
Here's how we solve our problems.
But when they move to the city, it's just the boys.
And then they're like, but our buddy from the next street over,
he says he knows what to do. He says, this is how you torture
someone. And then the one from the other
street says he watched it happen.
(38:12):
Let's all get together. And then all of a sudden you've
got this gang of boys that boys,young men that have no elders,
that have No Fear of the law, that have no groundedness in
their land. They don't, they don't look at
the land and say, this is my land.
This is where my ancestors lived.
I have respect for the land. I won't pollute this waterway.
(38:33):
I, you know, they're just aliens, they're just rootless.
And in that context, they then attack people.
And so you see instances of torture and murder going on in
the cities, in the settlements of the cities, not necessarily
like in downtown, but in in the settlement areas by these groups
(38:58):
that are formed from diverse places, from diverse backgrounds
that are now all ingesting the same stories.
And it's very much a, a rumor mill where the story just goes
around in a circle and circle and circle.
And I guess you could probably say that that's a, they're
forming their own new culture there.
(39:19):
And this new culture is that there are people that we can
identify who need to be torturedand murdered in public.
And that's what they now think is right and real.
In a lot of the conversations that I've heard and been a part
of, the significance of reachingchildren with curriculum to help
them understand the problems with witchcraft violence is
(39:43):
significant and you yourself have experienced developing
that, helping bring that into a community.
When you look at that experiencethat you've had and then you see
that this new culture in this young generation, but not the
newest generation, what is goingto be an effective way to
(40:05):
continue to reach those littles,but also, is there a way to get
a hold of what's happening in this young adult generation?
Yeah, good question. I feel like we're way behind
where we should be in PNG at least.
(40:27):
I think there's like the parent generation that is moved.
Some have moved for work, but others are moving for.
I hope there's work for education.
You have the same thing. You have those who are in school
and then you have the ones who Iwish I was in school or in some
cases maybe I'm glad I'm not in school.
(40:47):
But you have the 22 tiers now ofyoung people, of children.
And I think for the ones who arein school, we do not yet have a
an attitude toward developing curriculum.
That is enough. Yet it's far too many teachers
(41:09):
are confused about what the lawsare, what beliefs lead to
violence, why that's bad, what they can say to their kids to
help undermine and challenge these beliefs, dislodge these
pro violence tendencies. Like this is not, in my
experience, a significant part of teacher training.
(41:31):
And many of the teachers are themselves prone to thinking,
well, but it might be an evil spirit, it might be a witch, it
might be a sorcerer. And violence might be a
justified response to that. So reaching those kids with a
curriculum through their teachers, I think is a
(41:53):
significant step in the right direction has yet to happen.
Reaching other kids, I think will have to be done by the
people they look up to. It will have to be done by
sports figures. It will have to be done by the
local teenage boys in their own community who those little kids
(42:15):
see and see as leaders, as the big boys, as the mentors.
If and when they start proactively taking a stand
against this, this kind of violence, then the little kids
will be like, oh, OK, we can, wecan do that too.
But while the big kids are pushing in the wrong direction,
(42:38):
the little kids will just all inline and continue in the wake.
I think because of the complexity of all of these
beliefs and the way that for most people, they, they believe
a subset of these beliefs. They they believe something
about sanguma that, that there are, there are curses or there
are demons or there is sorcery or there are witches or these,
(43:04):
these are beliefs that most people hold.
Some of them, if not many of them, certainly not all in the
in the same configuration. But if we think of it as as all
the colors of the rainbow, they're all seeing in color.
No one is seeing this in like black and white, I think, the
way I sometimes do. And so for them to say, but none
(43:27):
of it is real. That's a step that almost no one
can take. And so then they're left doing
epistemology without any background in doing formal
epistemology. And they're trying to figure out
which of these things is right and which is wrong and which of
these things has enough justification for me to believe
and which does not, and which isa rumor and which is not and
(43:50):
which is truth. And for them to actually ask
those questions can be very challenging.
Well, for any of us, it can be very challenging for any of us
to begin asking those questions about things that we hold deeply
that form parts of our identity.Yeah.
And And so that that journey is I, I think in many ways not yet
beginning. We do have many, we, we do have
(44:14):
some people who are able to say this is nonsense, this is
illegal. We cannot do this.
But the number of people who arewilling to stand up in public
and say that is still few and far between.
And hats off to the people who are doing it.
But it's still few and far between.
(44:34):
Thank you so much, learned a lot.
I know that it's a big topic andI feel like we could talk for
hours about it, but we're at theend of the hour.
So I just wanted to ask you if there's anything else you wanted
to say today that we haven't covered yet?
My goodness, the art has truly flung.
(44:55):
I think one of the the things that I wish we could have talked
to talk more about maybe we can in a future episode, but is to
talk about the people who are taking a stand against the
violence, who are doing the rescues and who are helping
these the people who have been accused and tortured recover and
(45:16):
regain a place in their communities and help them
finding, you know, ways to express their rage and their
grief and their trauma. And the the amazing women and
some men that I know that have survived this and are still
looking for a place in the worldthat where where they're safe
(45:39):
and where they can feel like they're part of a community
again. And the instances where, you
know, the children of these people, the life that they live
and the struggles they go through.
This past year, we've had two children of accused witches,
tortured witches whose mothers survived.
(46:00):
But now the children have been murdered because they are
rendered that much more vulnerable because of the
accusation that was against their mother.
So it's this very complex web. I think today maybe we talked a
bit more about the beliefs behind it, the stories of the
humans who are going through it and what it does to them and how
(46:20):
they struggle with that. And the helpers, look for the
helpers, right? The people who are making a
difference like to talk about them too sometime.
So anyway, like you say, there'smuch, much to talk about here.
And thank you for the opportunity to share this little
bit. Yeah, thank you so much for
coming. And I'll definitely need to do a
few more episodes, I feel, to cover this broad subject so next
(46:46):
time we can focus on the people of.
Yeah, So thank you. And now Sarah, Jack and Mary
Bingham have a special update from Papua New Guinea.
Outlined by CDW and Doc News Jonathan Sophie Unroe thanks for
(47:08):
turn of Kathy Nye. A triumph for community unity
and care. La Propolis, Wabog District,
Inga Province, February 6th, 2025.
In a heartwarming event that underscores the power of
community support and humanitarian efforts, Kathy Nye,
(47:29):
a victim of alleged sorcery, wassafely returned to her home
village in La Prapas Wabog District after two months of
treatment and care at the Yambu Health Center.
The Cretus Anga team worked tirelessly to ensure her safe
passage back to her community, with their efforts bolstered by
the support of local authoritiesand church.
(47:50):
Leaders Hanthi, who had been admitted to the Yomi Health
Center following an incident related to sorcery accusations,
a sadly common issue in many parts of Papua New Guinea,
received comprehensive medical and psychological care for time
at the Health Center emphasized the need for community
(48:12):
understanding and acceptance, challenging the prevailing
stigma surrounding victims of such.
Accusations The return journey, which took place today on the
6th of February 2025, was markedby a collaborative effort
involving several key figures. Auxiliary Bishop Justin Ain
Soonji from the Catholic Dioceseof Wabog played a significant
(48:34):
role in advocating for Kathy's right to health and safety,
emphasizing the moral obligationto protect vulnerable
individuals in the community. Alongside him were Richard
Cokie, the Rural Police Commander, Health Secretary
Emmanuel Lehrer from the Catholic Diocese of Wabog, and
various members of the Law and Order officials who ensured that
the return was in line with a preventative court order
(48:56):
safeguarding Kathy from any potential threats upon her
return and beyond. This is a momentous occasion,
not only for Kathy and I and herfamily, but for all of us in the
community as it emphasizes our commitment to justice and
compassion, stated Auxiliary Bishop Soonji during a press
conference before the return. We must continue to advocate for
(49:21):
a society where such victims aretreated with care and dignity
rather than fear and suspicion. Community members lined the
route to welcome Kathy back, rejoicing in her safe return.
The event served not only to celebrate her recovery, but also
to raise awareness about the dangers of sorcery accusations
and the need for comprehensive support systems for victims.
(49:44):
Tara Kasanga, the organization dedicated to social justice and
humanitarian aid, expressed gratitude for the collaborative
efforts that made the successfulreturn possible.
Our mission is to empower and protect the marginalized in our
society, said a spokesperson from the organization.
We hope Kathy Safe Return can serve as a turning point in
(50:09):
changing mindsets about Swiss Rerelated accusations as Kathy.
Reunites with her family and community, advocates hope this
incident will spark broader discussions on the importance of
mental health care, legal protection, and the eradication
of harmful traditions that perpetuate violence against
women and vulnerable. Populations In a statement
(50:30):
issued by the rural police commander, he affirmed the need
for ongoing education on human rights to prevent future
incidents, stating it is our duty to ensure that no one else
suffers the same fate as Kathy and I Together, we can foster a
safer and more understanding community.
This event is not just a celebration of her return, but
(50:53):
also a call to action for continuous societal change,
reinforcing the vital need for compassion, care, and a
commitment to justice for anger,province and beyond.
Thank you, Sarah and Mary, you're welcome and thank you for
joining us on Witch Hunt. Spend time with us again next
(51:13):
week. Have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow.
When they get together and talk,they all talk about like we all
believe in sanguma. But if you can see below the
surface, you realize that what they're talking about is often
quite different. And are they talking about the
thing that lives inside a person?
Or are they talking about the the techniques that have been
learned? Are they talking about objects
that are held? Welcome to Witch Hunt, the
(00:23):
podcast bringing you news from the front lines in the effort to
eliminate sorcery accusation related violence.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack.
Today we'll be talking about accusations of witchcraft that
can have deadly consequences. We'll be exploring the cultural
and religious dynamics that contribute to this violence and
(00:43):
the devastating impact it has onindividuals and communities.
We'll also discuss the challenges of addressing sorcery
accusation related violence and efforts being made to challenge
it. We're honored to have Anton Lutz
join us today to shed light on this important issue.
Anton is a human rights defenderwho is dedicated his life to
(01:03):
working with victims of sorcery,accusation related violence or
starve and advocated for change.Let's get started and learn more
about Papua New Guinea Welcome to Witch Hunt Anton Wets.
We're looking forward to learning from your unique blend
of lived experience in Papua NewGuinea and the development of
(01:24):
your curriculum project. Can you give us a brief
background about yourself and work?
Hi, my name is Anton Lutz. I'm a human rights defender and
activist in the Sorcery Violencespace in Papua New Guinea.
I've been doing this work there for around 8 years and there's
always something new that I'm learning and things that I'm
(01:47):
trying to communicate. My background in Papua New
Guinea is that I was raised there, My father and my mother
were medical missionaries in from the US that we're based
there. And so I grew up there and
returned to work there 20 years ago in rural development.
I'd built an airstrip and did various things and then found
(02:10):
that people in the community where I had been raised, we're
very keen on burning people theycalled witches.
And that was something I wanted to take a stand against.
And yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that as the episode
progresses. Thank you.
What should we know about Papua New Guinea before we talk about
(02:32):
the sorcery accusations? Everything Papua New Guinea is
one of the most interesting and diverse places in the world it's
famous for being linguistically diverse the eastern half of the
island is the nation of Papua New Guinea.
The western half is the Indonesian province of Papua and
West Papua, and together they have over 1000 languages that
(02:56):
are spoken there, which is more than 15% of the world's
languages living languages. The popular Guinean side has
around 800 languages, which means over 800 cultures, which
means 800 different kinds of beliefs about magic and about
the supernatural world and abouthow to live well with others.
(03:16):
And there have been people therefrom the earliest migrations out
of Africa into this part of the world where people came in at
the time, the larger landmass ofSouthwell, which is Australia
and New Guinea and Tasmania combined into one landmass with
lower sea levels. And they crossed here 65,000
(03:39):
years ago, give or take. And after sea level rose, they
were then isolated for 40,000 years.
And finally the Austronesian people came from Taiwan through
the Philippines into the New Guinea area, and then from there
on into the wider Pacific, becoming the cultures that we
now recognize as Pacific cultures, getting as far as
(03:59):
Hawaii and Easter Island. And then finally from there
moving to New Zealand and discovering New Zealand and
populating that hundreds of years before the Europeans
decided to go and try to find out what's on the other side of
the planet. In many parts of the Highlands,
the first contact with anyone who is not the next door tribe
(04:20):
was in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and in some places the
1960s. And so there are people that are
alive today who I know who were teenagers, were young adults
were were married actually probably as teenage marriage,
but still they were married whenthe first white person hiked
into the valley and they discovered that they were on an
(04:43):
island that surrounded by an ocean on a planet that has other
people living on it. And they had not known that.
So it's an incredible story of change that these people have
lived through and are living through.
And of course since independencein 197549 years ago that there
is these growing pains that thatwe have there.
(05:04):
And this the situation with regard to the sorcery accusation
related violence is different across the 22 provinces of Papua
New Guinea. But there are some similarities.
We can talk about. Gosh, what else?
And people are generous and amazing.
And the landscape is so diverse from sort of what you would
(05:28):
picture as the Australian Outback flatlands down in the
South in Western Province, and then up into Alpine up to 15,000
feet elevation, mountains up there.
Would they get snow and have glaciated valleys up on them and
then back down to the Sepic River with all of its.
Yeah. Just so much diversity and so
(05:49):
much beauty. And yeah, it's amazed that I can
call that place home. Yeah.
That's amazing. What do we need to understand
about what's happening there with violence?
I think violence has a long history there.
(06:11):
There's evidence that in many communities there were people
being violent to their enemies, certainly, but also sometimes to
their loved ones, to their own children, to their wives.
Going all the way back. There is.
I don't think that's anything new in particular.
The degree of the violence, the kind of violence though, the
(06:33):
cruelty that we're now seeing, and especially when it comes to
tribal warfare and sorcery violence and even some gender
based violence or intimate partner violence, we're seeing
just really sadistic, cruel, sexualized treatments of others,
torture, and I think that is newas well.
(06:55):
Violence in general, I think it's hard to summarize.
If you look up Papua New Guinea and violence, you'll see many
horrific stories that are on theInternet.
They're published in the newspapers in PNG and by
journalists around the world andthat is all there.
And I think the thing to note about all of that is that for
many people, it is accepted and expected.
(07:20):
And people think that this is a normal way to be and that it's
normal for a a boyfriend or a husband to, to beat his wife.
It's normal for a community to torture someone they think is a
witch. And they just, it's normal for
in a tribal fight, if you've killed your enemy warrior to
desecrate his body and mutilate it.
(07:41):
And they just think that that's normal.
And I'm not sure what the history books and the
psychologist will say about whathas happened to a society when
violence becomes that normal. What what made that happen?
I'm not sure we can detail all of it yet, but it's happened.
And the violence is pervasive and very commonplace.
(08:04):
And yeah, it's hard to see that happening to people who want to
live in peace. How did you first become aware
of sorcery accusation related violence and what drew you to
work in that area? I think I've told the story in
(08:25):
several different ways differenttimes.
I'm asked, and the way that is now sitting with me is that this
is something that my my interestin sorcery, violence goes back
to people I was working with in a quite a remote part of the
country that had had first contact in the 60s and 70s.
(08:46):
There were some anthropological papers written in the 70s by a
guy named Lyle Steadman. So this is the Haywell part of
Papua New Guinea up in the Central Highlands.
What's now Hella Province was then, so that Highlands province
in the Lagai River Valley. And yeah, these are people that
had long held beliefs that thereis no death in our community
(09:09):
apart from that which is caused by witches.
And by witches we now translate in English is a version of the
word sanguma, which is a versionof their own word, which is
peace I. And they believe that these
peace I people had a being that lived inside of them that was
(09:31):
contagious. So two women sleeping in a house
by the river could pass this being from 1:00 to the other.
If one of these people who had this being gave you a piece of
sweet potato and you took it, itmight actually be a piece of
meat which was disguised as sweet potato, spiritually
disguised. Which interestingly, like
Christians have beliefs about things that you eat that aren't
(09:53):
actually what you think they arewhen you eat them and so forth.
But they had this belief as wellthat the sweet potato could
actually be a piece of meat and that by eating this piece of
meat, you could then infect, getinfected with this piece.
I spirit or invisible being. I guess spirit is also a English
word that we probably shouldn't be using.
But this invisible being that lives inside of you that can
(10:14):
then go forth and eat people's hearts and their life force and
cause them to get sick and die. And that if you coerce this
human who is the host of this creature and demands, you know,
I tell her to stop or tell her to give you compensation in the
form of pigs or shell money or threaten her, then she would be
(10:37):
able to control this spirit beating enough that it would no
longer go and kill others. So I'd heard these stories and I
had tried to raise my eyebrows as much as I could and say, are
you, you know, this sounds like things that of course I'd heard
of the Salem witch trials and I heard of the burning people at
the stake in Europe and so forth.
And I was like, that's things that we used to do and we grew
(10:59):
out of a long time ago. But you guys still think this is
on like, this is crazy. You can't be doing this.
And so I, I had these interactions in my 20s and
didn't really think much of it and then found that this
aversion of this violence was then happening further to the
east, where I was doing most of my life and work among the anger
(11:21):
people, which had no such beliefs in their history.
And so their history had to do with, you know, there's
ancestral ghosts that must be appeased.
And so you're talking to beings in the sky that are not
associated with humans. You, there's no one to torture,
there's no one to coerce, there's no one to convince.
You're just talking to ghosts. And if you can successfully talk
(11:42):
to ghosts, then good on you. You might get healthy again.
And if you can't, then you'll probably die.
It's a very different belief systems.
Of course. They're different languages,
they're different cultures. They have different histories
when they had different belief systems.
And yeah. And then this belief about the
being that lives inside of you has migrated, has followed
(12:03):
people, has moved word of mouth,and now the hanging people
believe this. And they have resorted to not
just demanding pigs and money and wealth from people who they
think are causing these problemsin their communities, but
they're torturing and murdering them.
And we are. We began seeing this as early as
2010 and onwards. I didn't really become aware of
(12:26):
it. It was quite sporadic until
20/14/2015. And then I had people showing up
on my doorstep saying so and so is being tortured, can we go
help her? And I jumped in the truck and
drove off, tried to get the police to go and so on.
So my in person involvement in that really began in 2015.
(12:47):
I was involved with tortured people and with rescuing people
and taking them to hospital and finding safe houses for them and
buying mattresses and clothing for them because they'd lost
everything, had their houses burned and so on and so forth.
Yeah. So my that's sort of how I got
launched into it. What are the cultural, religious
(13:10):
and social dynamics that are perpetuating the sorcery
accusation related violence? Like I mentioned before, I think
there's so, so much that is not documented, not fully understood
about the traditional. And by traditional I mean pre
(13:31):
contact belief systems. And when we say that, we can
also note that these belief systems have changed very
rapidly and are no longer what they were.
So what the anthropologists in the 70s and 80s went and
documented and wrote down for the first time ever that this is
what these people say they believe is no longer necessarily
(13:53):
the case. That might be what their
grandparents believed. But the new generation has gone
to school, they are watching movies, they are reading books,
they are traveling overseas, andthey have a different world
view. They they are mixing their
Christianity with their true, what their grand grandparents
believed in an in a whole new way.
(14:13):
And what of that is being documented and well understood,
I think is minimal. There's very little that's
actually formally being studied about how all of this is coming
together. And yeah, what we're seeing is
this evolving of worldview. And because it is so disparate
to begin with, we're not, we can't say there is a Papua New
(14:34):
Guinean culture. There are Papua New Guinean
cultures, but there is not one that is pervasive everywhere.
And I think we can still see thediversity and the nuance from
within people's, their origins. And, and there's also now a lot
of mixed parentage as they call it there where your mother is
from one culture and your father's from a different
(14:55):
culture, a different province, adifferent part of the island.
And so then you're growing up with very different, your
mother's family believes one thing, your father's family
believes something quite different.
And so then what do you believe?It's both, it's neither.
It's something new that you are creating in your own head.
And so it's highly complex. I think there are many cultures
(15:19):
in PNG that many, many tribes, many languages, many areas that
traditionally had belief in a person who was able to do
magical kinds of things, what wein English would call magical.
So they were able to maybe have influence over the weather or
(15:40):
sickness or birth or tell the future or give good fortune in
warfare, these kinds of things and protective magic of various
kinds. So that was sort of your shaman,
your witch doctor, your sorcererkind of figure, often well
respected, but usually male. And many, so many people are
(16:00):
like, I'm descended from a line of sorcerers.
My grandfather was a powerful sorcerer and then he became a
Christian. So now he's not anymore.
But if you mess with me, I'll tell him and he'll whip out the
old gear and he'll get even withyou.
And so you hear that kind of that kind of talk, whether they
actually believe that their grandfather could actually cause
(16:21):
you to fall dead at 50 paces with no physical implements, I
don't know. But they talk like they do.
There's then this subset of traditions that talk about this
evil thing that lives inside of people, maybe old people, maybe
women in a few places, it's men and that they're the ones
(16:44):
responsible for death in the village.
And they should control the spirit thing better.
They should have a better reign on it.
They shouldn't just let it out so often.
And so, and we can still see theconfusion in the language.
So this word I mentioned earlier, sanguma is a word that
is very confused across Papua New Guinea.
(17:05):
And you can see it in the the grammar of how it's used.
You can say she did sanguma or she is sanguma.
So is this an ontological characteristic?
Is this like a choice she has made?
Is this a practice she is doing?Like these are all different
concepts, but the way it just rolls off your tongue and she is
sanguma or she's doing sanguma. Like these are very different
(17:27):
things in the way that in English we would have confusion
over someone is a witch or someone is being a witch or
they're doing witchcraft. And these are actually quite
different ideas about how the bad thing is happening and why.
I think a further level of confusion and potentially
(17:54):
foundation for violence is the Christian beliefs that have been
introduced and especially the ideas that there is a mega
powerful evil being named Satan who has very powerful demons
that can walk the earth and inhabit people.
And that they are totally real because the Bible said they are.
(18:15):
And so therefore we have to preach about them.
And I think that has really resonated with a lot of people
there. And they have thought that,
well, this backs up what I was told by my grandfather in the
village, which some missionarieswould have said, well, what your
grandfather believed, those wereheathen ideas or those were
(18:38):
Pagan ideas or those were animistic ideas.
And you shouldn't believe them. You should just believe the
Christian faith that we're now teaching.
But I think some missionaries were much more syncretic in
their approach, and they just mix things together.
And they said, well, the spirit that you believe in, he's
actually a demon, so don't believe in him.
(18:59):
And they just, like, mix these, yeah, Middle Eastern ideas that
had morphed into European ideas.And then they brought them from
Europe to the Pacific and then labeled Pacific beliefs with
European words. And so now we have, for
instance, this Pisai character, this creature that lives inside
(19:20):
of women in the Haywa. We call that witchcraft is
actually has nothing to do with witchcraft, right?
It's like it's completely different.
It's their own beliefs. It's their own tradition.
Has nothing to do with what Europeans knew as witchcraft and
what we defined it as. And what how would that word
developed over the centuries in Europe?
(19:42):
Yeah. So it's very interesting.
And in its sort of academic curiosity, in my mind, sometimes
I get distracted from the fact that whatever this back story
is, this the etymology of these ideas, when it comes to
practice, there is someone who is being stripped naked,
(20:03):
tortured horribly and murdered. Like all of it boils down to
people being killed in horrific ways.
And yeah, and that's really tragic and that's.
Something that is a a challenge,I guess, to try to figure out
how do we unpack enough to help people see through the veil that
(20:27):
is in front of them without confusing them too much with the
semantics, the etymology, the the history of all of it, If
that makes sense. I have so many questions about
what you've just said, but I think the one I'll go with is,
(20:48):
are you seeing patterns as far as what types of people get
targeted or what types of peopleare doing the violence?
In terms of who is targeted, there's nothing conclusive in
the research that has been done so far on this.
(21:11):
And I think to me that simply goes back to the idea that there
are 800 plus traditional cultures with modern variants.
So we're talking times 2 * 10 times.
Who knows how many new subsets of these cultures we could say.
And so it's hard to make any generalizations about anything
(21:32):
in PNG. One of the things that I think
the research would bear out is that people believe that the
evil is contagious in some way, like from mother to daughter or
from friend to girlfriend or someone you shook hands with or
(21:53):
like it's there's, there's always a physical genetic
proximity that is involved. And so it's rare that just a
total stranger would get accused.
They'd be like, well, we killed one last week.
And her friend, her next door neighbor, is acting suspicious
now. So let's kill her or we killed
(22:14):
her mother. So it's probably the daughter.
And there's, there's some kind of a connection that can be made
in many parts of the country. It is women who are mostly
targeted. Whether, yeah, you can't, we
can't even really say. It's usually single women or
widowed women or elderly women. It's it's a combination of young
(22:35):
women, married women, single women, widows, people who are
beautiful, people who are not, people who are mentally
disabled, people who are not. I think we would find that it's
rare that it's the most popular people in our community and it's
rare that it's the people who are best connected in a
community. Although we have a case where
(22:58):
someone who is not considered beautiful by the by her, their
community who is a bit off in the head was accused.
And then she said, well, this other lady was doing it with me
under torture. And so they rounded up the more
physically attractive, the more well connected wife of the
(23:19):
leader and tortured the two of them together.
And so when they finally the family of the more well
connected one showed up and said, hey, like, why are we
torturing these ladies? Cut it out and they rescued both
of them. And then that led to years of
court cases from the woman who was better connected, trying to
(23:40):
get compensation from the one who was less attractive and
saying, you're the one who got me tortured, so thanks a lot.
And now you owe me. And you shouldn't have shouldn't
have named me and so forth. So she was sort of accidentally
tortured. And then the one who should have
been tortured was the one who was, you know, socially
(24:01):
acceptably tortured. So there's those kinds of
interactions that we see. I've seen cases where people
were accusing each other over 5 kina.
So that's a little over AUS dollar worth of peanuts.
And there was an argument about a peanut garden and who
harvested, who planted the peanuts and how much they were
worth. And then they grew.
And so when we harvested them, they were now worth this much.
(24:23):
And then the wrong person sold them.
And it's. Yeah.
And then there was some jealousyover it was now 20 bucks instead
of five. And so and so now you're a
witch. You shouldn't have done that.
You're a witch. And it's like, these are just
poor people. Like this is poverty.
There's an element where this ispoverty.
(24:44):
These are poor people who are desperate, who are fighting for
a place at the margins of their community that are turning on
each other so they don't get left out themselves.
And yeah, so we see that. And it's often, there's often an
element of outsiders who are attacked.
So in in many parts of PNG, women leave their clan or tribe
(25:08):
of origin and they go and live with their husbands clan when
they get married. And so they're there without
their cousins, without their uncles, without their fathers,
without their grandfathers, without their brothers.
And they're very much alone. And if that tribe of men who are
all brothers, cousins, uncles, the men all stay put and they
(25:28):
bring women in and they send their sisters out to go get
married outside. These women who come in are each
alone in in some very fundamental way.
And they can try to form a bond of sisterhood within their tribe
where they've married in, but they're still, if they get
accused, the other women are like, what's the English word by
(25:50):
a Felicia? We don't, we don't know you.
We don't want anything to do with you.
We're going to let you be tortured on your own and hope
we're not next. Whereas if if that was happening
in their own tribe, her father would show up and be like, no
way, you're torturing my daughter.
So, yeah, in terms of perpetrators, it's almost always
young men. And in some places they say that
(26:12):
the young men are enabled or egged on by the elder men in the
community. So that if you sit down
afterwards and talk with the, the men who did the torture,
they say, well, we wouldn't havedone it, but the leaders told us
to do it or the leaders urged usto go and do it.
And I think there's a, an element of truth to that, that
(26:33):
there is a complicity at a minimum, if not authority that
is given to these or an authorization, I should say,
that's given to these, these times of torture.
And it's, it's a whole mob effect.
It's not two or three people, It's dozens of people, hundreds
of people sometimes that are observing, participating,
(26:54):
cheering it on, videoing it, photographing it, uploading it.
So this is what we're seeing. It's interesting that many times
the perpetrators, after some time has passed, they can turn
around and say, I realized that what I did is wrong and I
(27:14):
repented this. And I don't want to go face the
police, but I am willing to go stand up in public and speak
about why we shouldn't be behaving the way I behaved.
I was wrong. And so it's, yeah, makes makes
me think that the level of theirconviction was not as deep as
(27:35):
some people think. That they were not fully
convinced that this is a good thing to do, but simply got
caught up in a hysteric kind of moment where they were
influenced by the group by the the fever of the the moment and
decided to do this and did this.Yeah.
So many just fascinating dynamics that all of which I
(27:58):
think are not necessarily research based, but it's very
hard to do research into this for the reasons I've mentioned.
And so I think maybe what we're left with is, are these
anecdotes and these observationsfrom one off cases.
But it's hard to extrapolate from this to say this is true of
everything we see. Yeah.
But those are big trends that wesee.
(28:19):
Should also be noted, of course,that in the island of
Bougainville, it's predominantlymen and boys that are accused
and tortured. So they have a different set of
beliefs about the supernatural there, and that they believe
that it's more plausible that men are responsible than women.
And yeah, so we see a lot more boys and men merged there than
(28:41):
women. This concept of Saint Guma.
Is this pretty widespread acrossdifferent cultures, or is it
particular to certain provinces?Yeah, the belief about what a so
I think almost everyone would say that they believe in
(29:04):
Sangama. What they mean by that will be
diverse and regionally specific,I think.
But then of noting of course that people move a lot for work,
for education, for just going shopping to to go from where I
grew up in Wappunamunda across to Hagen, the main city in the
(29:26):
Highlands, for shopping. You have to cross three language
groups through into, through three different cultures to get
there. And that's an hour and a half
drive. And you've now crossed 1
provincial boundary. You drive another 30 minutes,
you're in in another province. So these are very small tribes,
very small cultures, very small languages, very small provinces.
(29:48):
So to say there's anything consistent or regionally
specific doesn't necessarily always hold true.
That being said, the word sanguma has different meanings
through time and across different parts of the country.
In its place of origin, on the North Coast of the island, it
(30:13):
had to do with people who claim to be using magic to go and do
assault on their enemies. So when I read about this in the
first documentation of it from the 1920s and 30s, it's
essentially a form of assault, like ninja terrorism or
(30:35):
something. So these guys go to school, they
learn how to do their special skill, and then they go and
attack the guys from the neighboring tribe, get one of
them alone in the coconut plantation, and each one of them
does something horrible to him, like pounding spikes from a
certain palm tree into the his ear, or putting sand in under
(30:56):
his eyelids or making him drink terrible things or whatever it
is. And then the role of the last
person is to perk him up enough to make him stumble back to his
village and cry out. The sanguma have killed me and
then lie around rolling in pain for a couple days and then die.
(31:19):
And if you just kill him in the field, that's just a murder.
That's not a sanguma attack. A true sanguma attack is
designed to cause terror in the next village that you, you want
him to be screaming in pain for days at a time while he dies
from his injuries and, and telling.
And these are secret injuries. They're not like obvious
(31:40):
injuries. They're secret injuries.
So that you then tell people, well, we didn't kill him.
It was the the spirits that killed him or it was magic that
killed him. It was our powerful sorcery that
killed him. So don't mess with us or our
grandfathers. And, and so they, it was this
sort of intimidate the neighbor kind of and you and you tell big
stories about what you're doing.We move so silently.
(32:01):
We were invisible and we became so small like ants.
And that's how we snuck into your village and we escaped like
flying foxes, what what they call bats.
We flew away like bats afterwards because we can fly
and we tell all these big stories to add that much more
terror and fear to your enemies.So that's where that's what a
(32:23):
Sangamma was. It was one of these trained
sorcerer ish ninja ish assassin boys, young men who did this
thing. The word then moved up as the
rest of the island began learning this Tupeeson language,
the Moanesian pigeon language. The rest of the island began
learning what this word was. But they didn't have a culture
(32:45):
that there were trained people running around doing this kind
of thing to their enemies. They had cultures that believe
that there was a being that lived inside of women that came
out from them and killed suck people's energy like a flying
invisible vampire thing. And there was other cultures
that believe that what you coulddo protective magic.
And so this word sanguma became an umbrella term that
(33:09):
incorporated all of these diverse meanings.
And so today you have people that say, well, we know what
sanguma is. And what they're thinking is
it's the shaman in Maya village.He's my respected uncle who no
one messes with. But when you want good grades,
so you go and you give him a chicken and he does something
with some leaves and some spits a few things in the right
(33:31):
direction. And then I get better grades on
my next report card and he's my sanguma and I trust him and I
believe him. And why would I kill him?
He's my uncle, he's great. Whereas in other cultures,
couple 100 miles away, you have people who are like, well, that
one over there, she's a sanguma.Her mother was a sanguma.
We murdered her. We'll probably going to murder
this one if she messes up. And then you go a couple 100
(33:53):
miles away and they believe something different about
Sanguma. But when they get together and
talk, they all talk about like we all believe in Sangu gwa.
But if you can see below the surface, you realize that what
they're talking about is often quite different.
And are they talking about the thing that lives inside a
person? Or are they talking about the
the techniques that have been learned?
(34:14):
Are they talking about objects that are held?
These are all quite diverse and different specifics and nuances
that are there. So I don't know if that helps
clarify any of this for you. But yeah, this is kind of the
complexity that's there. And then you add in words like
sorcery and witchcraft, and thatmakes it all the more complex.
(34:35):
And especially because we have words, the word sorcery and
witchcraft are not only in English Bibles, but the word
sanguma is in the Tarpisen Bible, which to me is highly
irregular. Because there is no way that
people 3 to 4000 years ago in the Middle East believe that
there was this creature that lived inside of women in the
(34:56):
Chimbu Province of Papua New Guinea and could go forth and
eat the life energy of others and come back into them.
That is not what people in Mesopotamia or the Canaanite
areas were, were believing. They, they had their own
beliefs, equally interesting, equally complex, but they were
not those beliefs. And so we should not be taking
(35:17):
words like sanguma and putting them into the Bible and saying
sanguma is real because it's in the Bible.
Like that's irresponsible. Yeah, really reinforces any
existing belief. And Sanguma, definitely to see
it printed. And all these people with modern
technology are showing up at your doorstep with this
(35:39):
wonderful book. And it's right there.
Sanguma. Yeah, exactly.
I'm really curious about urbanization.
Is that having an impact on accusations because of people
coming into contact with other cultures?
The urbanization that we're seeing in PNG now is sort of two
(36:02):
tiered the you have the employedgroup that are moving for work
and then you have the I wish I was employed group that are
moving to be with those who are employed or be with their
friends who are looking for work.
And so you have the ones who are, they are employed, they
(36:23):
have a house, they might have a car, they're putting their kids
in school and they're moving around the country for work.
And then you have the settlements and you have the
slums basically, where you have them living in ethnic groups and
they'll all live together. And then they have a certain
cohesion, even though they're often not from one single place
(36:47):
of origin, but they're from a region of origin or a group of
tribes of origin. And so we have, for instance, in
the capital city, we have the Angas.
They just say it's all the Angas, even though when we're in
Anga, we're all very diverse andwe know which tribe we reach
from and who's at war with who and who can't go through that
tribal land because they might get killed and killed by
(37:09):
violence, not by sorcery and so forth.
But when you come down to the city, it's all by a sort of
provincial block or by regional block.
And then they will have their conflict between block to block
kind of thing. So you see, as these settlers or
these migrants are coming to thecity, they're bringing with them
(37:30):
their beliefs. And so then those beliefs are
now able to, what's the, what word am I looking for?
They're able to operationalize, they're able to activate in a
setting that is removed from anytraditional constraints.
Any like in the village, back inthe provinces, the elders would
(37:52):
say, no, no, no boys. That's not how we do it.
We have a tradition. This is what we do.
Here's how we solve our problems.
But when they move to the city, it's just the boys.
And then they're like, but our buddy from the next street over,
he says he knows what to do. He says, this is how you torture
someone. And then the one from the other
street says he watched it happen.
(38:12):
Let's all get together. And then all of a sudden you've
got this gang of boys that boys,young men that have no elders,
that have No Fear of the law, that have no groundedness in
their land. They don't, they don't look at
the land and say, this is my land.
This is where my ancestors lived.
I have respect for the land. I won't pollute this waterway.
(38:33):
I, you know, they're just aliens, they're just rootless.
And in that context, they then attack people.
And so you see instances of torture and murder going on in
the cities, in the settlements of the cities, not necessarily
like in downtown, but in in the settlement areas by these groups
(38:58):
that are formed from diverse places, from diverse backgrounds
that are now all ingesting the same stories.
And it's very much a, a rumor mill where the story just goes
around in a circle and circle and circle.
And I guess you could probably say that that's a, they're
forming their own new culture there.
(39:19):
And this new culture is that there are people that we can
identify who need to be torturedand murdered in public.
And that's what they now think is right and real.
In a lot of the conversations that I've heard and been a part
of, the significance of reachingchildren with curriculum to help
them understand the problems with witchcraft violence is
(39:43):
significant and you yourself have experienced developing
that, helping bring that into a community.
When you look at that experiencethat you've had and then you see
that this new culture in this young generation, but not the
newest generation, what is goingto be an effective way to
(40:05):
continue to reach those littles,but also, is there a way to get
a hold of what's happening in this young adult generation?
Yeah, good question. I feel like we're way behind
where we should be in PNG at least.
(40:27):
I think there's like the parent generation that is moved.
Some have moved for work, but others are moving for.
I hope there's work for education.
You have the same thing. You have those who are in school
and then you have the ones who Iwish I was in school or in some
cases maybe I'm glad I'm not in school.
(40:47):
But you have the 22 tiers now ofyoung people, of children.
And I think for the ones who arein school, we do not yet have a
an attitude toward developing curriculum.
That is enough. Yet it's far too many teachers
(41:09):
are confused about what the lawsare, what beliefs lead to
violence, why that's bad, what they can say to their kids to
help undermine and challenge these beliefs, dislodge these
pro violence tendencies. Like this is not, in my
experience, a significant part of teacher training.
(41:31):
And many of the teachers are themselves prone to thinking,
well, but it might be an evil spirit, it might be a witch, it
might be a sorcerer. And violence might be a
justified response to that. So reaching those kids with a
curriculum through their teachers, I think is a
(41:53):
significant step in the right direction has yet to happen.
Reaching other kids, I think will have to be done by the
people they look up to. It will have to be done by
sports figures. It will have to be done by the
local teenage boys in their own community who those little kids
(42:15):
see and see as leaders, as the big boys, as the mentors.
If and when they start proactively taking a stand
against this, this kind of violence, then the little kids
will be like, oh, OK, we can, wecan do that too.
But while the big kids are pushing in the wrong direction,
(42:38):
the little kids will just all inline and continue in the wake.
I think because of the complexity of all of these
beliefs and the way that for most people, they, they believe
a subset of these beliefs. They they believe something
about sanguma that, that there are, there are curses or there
are demons or there is sorcery or there are witches or these,
(43:04):
these are beliefs that most people hold.
Some of them, if not many of them, certainly not all in the
in the same configuration. But if we think of it as as all
the colors of the rainbow, they're all seeing in color.
No one is seeing this in like black and white, I think, the
way I sometimes do. And so for them to say, but none
(43:27):
of it is real. That's a step that almost no one
can take. And so then they're left doing
epistemology without any background in doing formal
epistemology. And they're trying to figure out
which of these things is right and which is wrong and which of
these things has enough justification for me to believe
and which does not, and which isa rumor and which is not and
(43:50):
which is truth. And for them to actually ask
those questions can be very challenging.
Well, for any of us, it can be very challenging for any of us
to begin asking those questions about things that we hold deeply
that form parts of our identity.Yeah.
And And so that that journey is I, I think in many ways not yet
beginning. We do have many, we, we do have
(44:14):
some people who are able to say this is nonsense, this is
illegal. We cannot do this.
But the number of people who arewilling to stand up in public
and say that is still few and far between.
And hats off to the people who are doing it.
But it's still few and far between.
(44:34):
Thank you so much, learned a lot.
I know that it's a big topic andI feel like we could talk for
hours about it, but we're at theend of the hour.
So I just wanted to ask you if there's anything else you wanted
to say today that we haven't covered yet?
My goodness, the art has truly flung.
(44:55):
I think one of the the things that I wish we could have talked
to talk more about maybe we can in a future episode, but is to
talk about the people who are taking a stand against the
violence, who are doing the rescues and who are helping
these the people who have been accused and tortured recover and
(45:16):
regain a place in their communities and help them
finding, you know, ways to express their rage and their
grief and their trauma. And the the amazing women and
some men that I know that have survived this and are still
looking for a place in the worldthat where where they're safe
(45:39):
and where they can feel like they're part of a community
again. And the instances where, you
know, the children of these people, the life that they live
and the struggles they go through.
This past year, we've had two children of accused witches,
tortured witches whose mothers survived.
(46:00):
But now the children have been murdered because they are
rendered that much more vulnerable because of the
accusation that was against their mother.
So it's this very complex web. I think today maybe we talked a
bit more about the beliefs behind it, the stories of the
humans who are going through it and what it does to them and how
(46:20):
they struggle with that. And the helpers, look for the
helpers, right? The people who are making a
difference like to talk about them too sometime.
So anyway, like you say, there'smuch, much to talk about here.
And thank you for the opportunity to share this little
bit. Yeah, thank you so much for
coming. And I'll definitely need to do a
few more episodes, I feel, to cover this broad subject so next
(46:46):
time we can focus on the people of.
Yeah, So thank you. And now Sarah, Jack and Mary
Bingham have a special update from Papua New Guinea.
Outlined by CDW and Doc News Jonathan Sophie Unroe thanks for
(47:08):
turn of Kathy Nye. A triumph for community unity
and care. La Propolis, Wabog District,
Inga Province, February 6th, 2025.
In a heartwarming event that underscores the power of
community support and humanitarian efforts, Kathy Nye,
(47:29):
a victim of alleged sorcery, wassafely returned to her home
village in La Prapas Wabog District after two months of
treatment and care at the Yambu Health Center.
The Cretus Anga team worked tirelessly to ensure her safe
passage back to her community, with their efforts bolstered by
the support of local authoritiesand church.
(47:50):
Leaders Hanthi, who had been admitted to the Yomi Health
Center following an incident related to sorcery accusations,
a sadly common issue in many parts of Papua New Guinea,
received comprehensive medical and psychological care for time
at the Health Center emphasized the need for community
(48:12):
understanding and acceptance, challenging the prevailing
stigma surrounding victims of such.
Accusations The return journey, which took place today on the
6th of February 2025, was markedby a collaborative effort
involving several key figures. Auxiliary Bishop Justin Ain
Soonji from the Catholic Dioceseof Wabog played a significant
(48:34):
role in advocating for Kathy's right to health and safety,
emphasizing the moral obligationto protect vulnerable
individuals in the community. Alongside him were Richard
Cokie, the Rural Police Commander, Health Secretary
Emmanuel Lehrer from the Catholic Diocese of Wabog, and
various members of the Law and Order officials who ensured that
the return was in line with a preventative court order
(48:56):
safeguarding Kathy from any potential threats upon her
return and beyond. This is a momentous occasion,
not only for Kathy and I and herfamily, but for all of us in the
community as it emphasizes our commitment to justice and
compassion, stated Auxiliary Bishop Soonji during a press
conference before the return. We must continue to advocate for
(49:21):
a society where such victims aretreated with care and dignity
rather than fear and suspicion. Community members lined the
route to welcome Kathy back, rejoicing in her safe return.
The event served not only to celebrate her recovery, but also
to raise awareness about the dangers of sorcery accusations
and the need for comprehensive support systems for victims.
(49:44):
Tara Kasanga, the organization dedicated to social justice and
humanitarian aid, expressed gratitude for the collaborative
efforts that made the successfulreturn possible.
Our mission is to empower and protect the marginalized in our
society, said a spokesperson from the organization.
We hope Kathy Safe Return can serve as a turning point in
(50:09):
changing mindsets about Swiss Rerelated accusations as Kathy.
Reunites with her family and community, advocates hope this
incident will spark broader discussions on the importance of
mental health care, legal protection, and the eradication
of harmful traditions that perpetuate violence against
women and vulnerable. Populations In a statement
(50:30):
issued by the rural police commander, he affirmed the need
for ongoing education on human rights to prevent future
incidents, stating it is our duty to ensure that no one else
suffers the same fate as Kathy and I Together, we can foster a
safer and more understanding community.
This event is not just a celebration of her return, but
(50:53):
also a call to action for continuous societal change,
reinforcing the vital need for compassion, care, and a
commitment to justice for anger,province and beyond.
Thank you, Sarah and Mary, you're welcome and thank you for
joining us on Witch Hunt. Spend time with us again next
(51:13):
week. Have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow.
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