How to Piss People Off at Polite Parties
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 10/May/2011 09:48, 34 days ago
Down in Accra last week, I met up with a number of other volunteers at one of their frequent house parties. It was a polite occasion with drinks, nibbles and inoffensive background music. I enjoyed myself. I don’t see the Accra volunteers very often and they have an entirely different perspective on Ghana compared with us in the far north. Laura had left just two days before and I was still in that odd period of readjustment - knowing that everything I care about is on another continent.I was in a group talking about belief in juju and magic. It’s a common topic of conversation. It is difficult for westerners to understand the depth of belief - how people will kill and die on account of their faith.There was a horrendous story recently in a small town outside of Accra. A girl was fetching water from a well. The well was away from any houses, surrounded by bushes and poorly lit. As the girl was about to start pumping the water, a man leapt out of the bushes, lopped off her head with a machete and ran off. Moments later, a second man jumped out from the same bush, picked up the unfortunate girl’s head and lifted it up to drink deeply from the blood that was still pouring out from her severed neck. This was all witnessed by the girl’s younger brother who had accompanied his sister to the well to help her carry the water. After drinking the blood, the head was cast aside and the secondman ran off. The police have no idea who these two individuals are. They have almost no hope of catching them. It was undoubtedly part of juju magic. Perhaps the man was dying and was desperate for a cure. Perhaps his wife or mother or daughter was terminally ill. Perhaps he wanted to be rich or wasattempting to be elected into some high office. The little brother who watched his sister being beheaded is likely never to know.After exhausting our examples of terrifyingly disgusting tales of juju magic, we talked about the less sinister beliefs that most people have in dwarves with their feet on backwards, spirits, demons, witches, wizards and ghosts. We talked about medicine men and soothsayers - how they smear rabbit dung and mud onto broken limbs and sacrifice chickens to try and get someone pregnant.“It’s a lack of education,” someone called Lydia intervened. “Or it’s a cultural problem. Too many Ghanaians have these irrational beliefs and it stops the country developing.”I don’t like such lazy dismissals of another culture’s set of beliefs - however irrational. We in Britain, after all, have plenty of people who believe in things that are just as irrational as medicine men and soothsayers. Many of these people are highly successful, highly intelligent and highly educated. Indeed, many western educated, intelligent and successful Ghanaians will pay huge sums of money for a consultation with a juju doctor. I wanted to confront Lydia with such an irrational belief and so I picked one at random.“Well,” I responded, “Look at homeopathy. That is something that lots of people in Britain believe in.”Lydia’s face looked wounded.“You don’t actually believe in homeopathy, do you?” I asked, tentatively.Lydia went on to describe her friend who is a homeopathist. It is, she explained, all to do with the periodic table of elements. The human body contains all these elements and if someone is ill, it is an imbalance of these elements that can be remedied through the correct administration of a homeopathic remedy.All nonsense, of course.Wikipedia describes homeopathy as:“a form of alternative medicine in which practitioners treat patients using highly diluted preparations that are believed to cause healthy people to exhibit symptoms that are similar to those exhibited by the patient. The collective weight of scientific evidence has found homeopathy to be no moreeffective than a placebo.”The last sentence is key. Countless studies have been conducted and have shown homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo. I am certain that if similar studies were conducted on the juju medicine practiced by Ghanaian local‘doctors’, this would equally be shown to be no more effective than a placebo. Therefore, belief in homeopathy is as irrational as believing in juju medicine - possibly more so because at least British people tend to have the education to be able to critically evaluate the evidence.I tried to explain this point to Lydia but she was having none of it. Perhaps, she said, there is something about homeopathy that science cannot yet explain.Perhaps, in fact, there is something about juju medicine that science cannot explain but the beauty of the scientific method is that it is able to separate the genuine effect from the placebo effect. Science has found many traditional herbal juju medicines that actually do work. Science can not necessarily explain how the medicine works (and if it helps cure cancer or depression, who cares!) but, by conducting a double blind trail, can demonstrate that the medicine does at least contain something that helps.The most famous example of science accepting juju medicine is the case of quinine. Used by native Peruvian witch doctors, the bark of the‘holy’ cinchona tree was one of the most valuable commodities sent from South America to Europe for two hundred years. Science didn’t know how it worked - it simply accepted that it worked better than a placebo. Eventually, the scientific method isolated the critical ingredient and allowed mass production from 1850 onwards. This mass production enabled Europeans to finally colonise Africa - a place so afflicted with malaria that it was known as the ‘white-man’s graveyard’.Extracts from the South African flower, Sutherlandia frutescens, have, in the past ten years, been shown to inhibit the growth of certain cancers. A juju remedy, it has been used traditionally for“dispelling darkness”. A well known cure-all, people claim it can cure everything from syphilis and flu to cancer and depression. Maybe, with further research, it will be shown to be true. Currently, science has no idea how Sutherlandia frutescens inhibits in vitro cancer growth - it can simplytell that it is more effective than a placebo or control.Homeopathy is not like that. It does not work any better than a placebo and studies consistently show this to be true. Belief in homeopathy is a faith in the irrational and, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence, its adherents will defend their doctrine as passionately as any Ghanaian believer in witches, juju and dwarves.Again, Lydia was having none of it. She went on to cite anecdotal evidence, describing people who have made miraculous recoveries after taking homeopathic medicine. Of course, we can all argue anecdotes until we’re blue in the face. Ask anyone from Bolga for an anecdote about dwarves, pixies and goblins and they will bombard you with endless ‘evidence’ of miraculous cures of terrible afflictions. These stories, heart-warming though they are, do not prove that something is more effective than a placebo and this is the only important question when discussing medicine.Anyway, I was getting distracted. I wasn’t aiming to lampoon homeopathy and upset a fellow volunteer. I just wanted to show how we cannot indulge in lazy cultural superiority. We cannot arrogantly dismiss people with dearly held beliefs in juju (the state religion of Togo, by the way) as ‘undeveloped’ whilst simultaneously respecting people who have equally irrational beliefs in homeopathy, an omnipresent but undetectable Christian God and Ganesh, the Hindu god of wealth with an elephant’s head, a fat belly and lots of arms. Europeans have a long history of cultural arrogance in Africa and we must respect what people believe, even as we argue against them. In fact, the most disrespectful critics of traditional African beliefs are Africans themselves - the evangelical pastors who desperately try to emulate their white missionary forefathers. They are the ones who will dismiss juju as ‘black magic’ or ‘devil worshipping’ even as they speak in tongues and lay their healing hands on the sick and crippled.I tried to move the argument onto safer ground. I wanted Lydia to see how some people within our own British culture will cling onto ridiculous ideas long after they’ve been de-bunked - how this is part of human nature and not just an African affliction.“What about Astronomy?” I asked. “Some people in Britain still believe in astronomy.”Again, Lydia looked hurt.“Actually,” she replied, “I have a friend who is an astronomer and...”