Do not panic between witches and judges

Abstract

The community has among its functions that of making norms and customs internalized in each of its members. This kind of nutrition is sometimes a kind of second nature. An instance of this would come from the conflicts related to witchcraft and its perception in the Guineo-Ecuadorian collective imagination. This comes to question us about the resolution of such conflicts and the consequences of the eventual denial of judicial pronouncement, based on the non-existence of witchcraft facts or lack of incriminating legal basis for prosecution. This denial of justice thus follows from the premise that the crime of witchcraft should be inferred exclusively from material evidence, and in no way from the intention to determine and guide the behavior of individuals in a given society, so as to make them scared to death or induce them to act in a certain way. However, witchcraft is not, in Equatorial Guinea, an innocuous or absurd social fact, nor are its expressions naive behaviors that can be classified as superstition. The fact that this form of knowledge and behavior has survived the colonial persecution and postcolonial legislation, points to an inherent feature in the way of thinking, feeling and acting of the Guinean, a second nature if we can repeat it like this. The lynchings of alleged witches on the island of Bioko (Caravaca (Roka), Riopo (Killing Billy), Capote, Siadeke), or the frustrated homicide on the person of Sialito in the town of Rebola, falsely accused of having bewitched his wife, among many others, are there to immortalize, day after day, that malaise that corrodes people. Whereas the colonial regime acknowledged the fact, but fought it in the name of the Catholic religion, morality and civilization; the postcolony rejected it in the name of positivism and uncompromising Cartesianism, when it was not entangled in considerations that only deepened its skepticism and the bewilderment of the administrated-defendant.