Western and African Concepts of Witches & Witchcraft

And y'all this has been bugging me for a while. In the largely Judeo-Christian, Eurocentric western world a witch is any occultist, particularly a female one, whose work includes activities beyond prayer, bibliomancy, and and the reliance on the guidance of the most senior male clergyman in her congregation. With the advent of Wicca and the subsequent reclamation or reinvention of indigenous European practices(collectively called Paganism) the term witch, having lost none of it's power, shed much of its negative connotation and has even taken on a rather popular, beneficent light as an archetype of feminine autonomy and authority over her environment. Since then, female leaders of marginalized communities have adopted the archetype and moniker even going so far as to translate it into their native languages or in the case of groups cut off from their ancestral origins, like African Americans, adopted languages that resonate with them and it is here that we start to run into problems.

I was already years into my priesthood when I first came across a post on social media where a woman was describing her occult sorority as a coven of aze. I understand why she did it and half a decade earlier I may have celebrated her reclaiming both her feminine power and ethnic pride. But I'm a hounnan, Amengansie and most importantly I am a Nana. I am charged to see for and guide the people in the ways of the vodou, Tɔgbeawo, and ŋɔliwo, but most importantly I am to lead. The very sentiment communicated to me by my Godmother, Mamishie Zogbeshie Densushie, when I told her of this. It's not a job I want because people inclined to need my leadership are also recalcitrant iconoclasts and rebels. They(we) tend to reject instruction and authority because authority has led us all astray. Nonetheless, I put on my big boy pants and told the sisters that they've just taken on an identity that no sane person in any era would publicly declare. And they scoffed that it was just patriarchal oppression that made it so but that they were going to take that power back.

I was the problem. Me. And my fragile masculinity. We just gonna gloss over my subordination to a sisterhood. Just completely ignore that my whole training was from a woman very much in touch with her power. Nope that doesn't matter. I've got a penis, a title, and I was telling her she was doing something wrong, I must be an agent of the White Man. If you didn't glean it from the bitterness in those last couple of sentences, my admonishment wasn't well received. Maybe I needed to work on my delivery.

See, the Gbe word that we usually translate into English as witch is the word aze and witchcraft is the translation of the word azetɔ. This was the work of the Franciscan monks whose efforts in West Africa included translating Biblical concepts into Gbe languages, so when it was time to convey the Christian definition of the witch, the missionaries attempted to equate them to the traditional clergypersons, the vodounshie. They failed at this as these were largely positive influences in the communities. The missionaries would have to include themselves in that definition as they were also considered vodounshie of some Far West Asian spirits that left it's homeland to offer preference to the Northerners. But when they explained the Jewish idea of the "Poisoner" the concept communicated instantly. The translation of aze into English has been witch ever since.

Now there is this problem. Because women pursuing wisdom and ancestral power are identifying with people who are rejected by the ancestors and because women who sought to heal their communities in Europe and the Americas have been unjustly equated to Middle Eastern mystic assassins who employed toxins and diseases to topple governments, cultivate fortunes, dissolve societies. That is what an aze is. Not a wise woman or a cunning man. Not a mystic or spiritualist. They are not even an example of feminine or female power. They are corruptive. They are evil. Even their cures advance plagues.

Now some people are married to being wrong. I told those young women what right looked like and it's on them to act accordingly. I just hope they don't go to Africa with that nonsense. But for myself, I can't continue to equate azewo to witches knowing that the two's only commonality is to be reviled equally by the Christian church, especially knowing that witches and Wiccans have more in common with vodounshie than aze. So from now on both I and my Ƒome will no longer translate the word aze into witch but into maleficus, meaning worker of evil, instead. There, confusion solved.