Reckless witchcraft accusation amounts to defamation: Courts in Africa concur

The belief in witchcraft is unarguably one of the most widespread beliefs in African communities and a major cause of violence against vulnerable groups, such as elderly people.

However, there are rare instances where people accused of being witches sue their accusers for defamation.

A recent study, “Witchcraft Accusations and the Tort of Defamation in Anglophone Africa," published in the International Journal of Legal Information by Cambridge University Press, has explored the courts’ attitudes towards witchcraft-related defamation claims in five Anglophone African countries (Botswana, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, and Tanzania) and reported interesting findings.

The paper demonstrates that in most Anglophone African countries, there are statutory laws that criminalize witchcraft imputations. However, these laws and criminal justice systems have been ineffective in protecting people from witchcraft accusations and concomitant crimes. This has compelled some victims of witchcraft imputations to seek justice through civil proceedings.

The study shows that courts in various African countries apply various principles when resolving witchcraft-related defamation claims. However, they generally concur that recklessly imputing witchcraft to a person necessarily impairs that person’s dignity and is actionable per se.

In Botswana and the Republic of South Africa, the three main types of laws—customary law, statutory law, and common law—protect personal dignity, which tends to be impaired by reckless witchcraft accusations. For this reason, witchcraft-related defamation claims may be dealt with under any of the three categories of laws.

In contrast, the courts in Namibia and Tanzania acknowledge that witchcraft accusations are actionable under customary law, but they largely apply common law principles when resolving these types of claims.

The courts in Ghana have persistently claimed that the applicable principles for resolving slander claims bordering on witchcraft imputations, where the parties are from the same group, are those of customary law. Yet, some of the courts’ own pronouncements and postures suggest that they readily seek the intervention of the received common law, even where the parties belong to the same ethnic group.

The study suggests that most witchcraft-related defamation claims (over 90%) succeed. Unfortunately, however, the overwhelming majority of people recklessly accused of being witches (mostly elderly women) are unable to bring defamation lawsuits against their accusers due to the exorbitantly high costs of accessing the courts and seeking justice.

Thus, the people who usually initiate witchcraft-related defamation claims are those of high socio-economic status (but this group forms a fraction of victims of witchcraft accusations). It recounts that the professions and occupations of 15 out of 18 plaintiffs in the 17 cases examined were known.

Of the plaintiffs whose professions or socio-economic status were known, at least 11 (approximately 73%) had high socio-economic backgrounds or reasonable incomes.