Adam Ashforth - The Trials of Mrs. K.: Seeking Justice in a World with Witches

Adam Ashforth

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-32222-3 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-32236-0 (paper)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-32253-7 (e-book)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226322537.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ashforth, Adam, author.

Title: The trials of Mrs. K.: seeking justice in a world with witches / Adam Ashforth.

Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017051214 | ISBN 9780226322223 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226322360 (pbk: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226322537 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH : Trials (Witchcraft)Malawi. | WitchcraftSocial aspectsMalawi.

Classification: LCC BF 1584. M 3 A 84 2018 | DDC 133.4/3096897dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051214

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

As the two women sat chatting in the shade of the veranda outside the maternity ward, a nurse passing by greeted Alice.

How are you, madam? inquired the nurse, whom we shall come to know as Mrs. K. Short in stature, dark in complexion, Mrs. K. was in her early fifties at the time and living in a small two-bedroom brick house in the nurses compound behind the hospital.

I am fine, replied Alice, rising to her feet, respecting the formalities. And you?

Fine, said Mrs. K. A nurse for thirty years, Mrs. K. was a senior figure in the hospital. She coordinated the districts HIV/AIDS programs, including the hospitals antiretroviral clinic. She knew Alice from a training course for HIV counselors she had led some months earlier. Are you ill? she inquired.

No. I have come to see my relative here who is ill.

Good, said Mrs. K. Okay, I am going for lunch. See you.

Their greetings concluded, Mrs. K. passed on her way down the dusty path to a gap in the wall where a shortcut had been made from the hospital compound to the nurses quarters in the neighboring village, oblivious of the river of whispers, gossip, and rumor that was swirling in her wake.

The brief exchange between Alice and Mrs. K. had not gone unnoticed. Before Alice had a chance to return to her friend, another nurse, who had been lingering in the shadows, approached her from the door to the maternity ward. Dispensing with the usual formalities of greeting, the nurse asked abruptly: Is she your relative or friend?

No, replied Alice, taken aback by the brusque inquiry. She was one of the facilitators at the training course I attended for HIV counselors.

Okay, said the nurse, her face relaxing, I thought she was your friend. And then, sensing approval to exchange gossip, the nurse explained the reason for her concern.

She is a cruel woman. You can see so in her face. We are lucky that she is not working at the maternity ward. She would have been shouting at the patients and she would have been leaving patients to bear children in her absence and even killing them.

The nurse, continuing her explanation, confided in Alice that when she had first met Mrs. K., she had felt uncomfortable in her presence, sensing that she had been born a cruel woman. But in time she had learned something even more alarming. Mrs. K., she said, was a witch woman who, moreover, was teaching children witchcraft and forcing them to kill their mothers and sisters.

A couple of days after her conversation at the hospital, Alice encountered more stories about the witch-nurse of the District Hospital. According to a neighbor, who had heard the story from a friend, Mrs. K. had recently been flying in her magical witchcraft airplane on her nefarious business at night, intent on attacking the residents of a certain house. Unfortunately for her, the house had been protected by powerful medicines from traditional healers causing the magical airplane to crash. Mrs. K., having lost her power and her invisibility, had been found injured on the ground outside the house, struggling to stand. Passersby rushed to her aid. People asking questions, at once solicitous and suspicious, quickly surrounded her. They had heard the stories; now came a chance to corroborate. Someone offered to transport her by bicycle for medical help, but Mrs. K. rebuffed him and started to hobble away on her own, thereby confirming popular suspicions: the woman must be a witch.

According to Alices neighbor, Mrs. K. was followed from the accident site by the people who found her, escorting her in a swelling mob to her home, taunting her with an improvised song to the effect of: The nurse is a witch! She has fallen down. God would like to punish you. They ended with the words: You shall see this world now. You have seen now. Fearless, in a swirl of righteous malice, they defied the witch by turning back on her a version of the most deadly threat a witch can pronounce: You will see!

Mrs. K. survived. What followed, however, was an ordeal that would leave her life in shambles. Though she was never formally charged, she faced many trialslegal, social, and psychologicalin her struggle to clear her name of that dreadful stain: Witch. Through it all she maintained her innocence. But she was facing a community racked with dread, yearning for security, and angry about what seemed an epidemic of children being taught witchcraft....

This book stems from a chance encounter in the small town of Balaka, Malawi. In June 2009, I happened to be in Balaka, working on the Malawi Journals Projecta long-running project involving young Malawians writing journals describing everyday life in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. I was enjoying a beer one evening at a local tavern with my friend McDaphton Bellos when we met a group of staff members from the nearby District Hospital. They told us about the witch trial soon to take place concerning a nurse at the hospital. The nurse, whom Im calling Mrs. K., had been accused by colleagues of teaching children witchcraft and, I later learned, was suing her accusers for defamation. The gossip in town, as we heard repeated many times in the following weeks, had it that Mrs. K. was herself on trial as a witch. And the gossipers were adamant about what the verdict should be. The core of the book centers on Mrs. K.s efforts to clear her name, unraveling the ways that claims to truth and demands for justice are intertwined in the stories people tell in their quests for security. In the process, we shall seek to better understand how law actually works in places like rural Africa.