Bufflehead Cabin

retropolitics:

By Johann Hari

The first witch I ever met was 14 years old and shivering. Clarice was brought before me—tiny, frozen, and swaddled in a wide white cardigan—in a church in the wreckage and rubble of the Congo war, as irrefutable proof of the cause of the catastrophe unfolding all around us. Her priest, Papa Enoch Boonga, explained before a gravely nodding congregation that the girl had been possessed by Satan, who would drag everyone around her into the abyss until he and his Armies of Evil were starved, burned, and whipped out of her.

In a dull, blank rote, Clarice told me how she had let the demons enter her at the age of 12. One night, her late grandmother had appeared before her, at the end of her bed, and offered her a biscuit to eat. She promised Clarice that if she only swallowed it, she would become more powerful. But it was a trick. As soon as she ate it, she was betrothed to Satan and forced to do his work on earth. He forced her to jinx her father, making it impossible for him to get a job. Satan forced her to kill her little sister by giving her a deadly fever.

Clarice had at first denied her intimacy with the devil, Papa Enoch told me disapprovingly. She protested it wasn’t true. But he finally made her “admit” it, through a process of starvation and torture. I asked Clarice softly whether she really believed she had done all these things. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

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