Save our Skins

In the spring of 1999, in the southern reaches of Tanzania, police arrested two people for the murder of an 11-year-old schoolboy. Under ordinary circumstances such murders, though rare, would scarcely attract national – let alone international – attention. But these were no ordinary circumstances. For the boy’s body was found skinned; the alleged murderers were attempting to sell the skin to a Malawian man. Within weeks, also in Mbeya Region, a second skin-less body was reportedly discovered. And in June, so said local papers, a third. By mid-July a total of six youths had purportedly been killed and skinned, ‘the skins…allegedly offered for sale in Malawi, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo for use in witchcraft activities’, reported the London-based broadsheet, The Guardian. ¹ For many Tanzanians, the rationale for such witchcraft killings was all too obvious: private economic and political gain. As one paper put it, ‘The human skins and other body parts, including vaginas and penises, are said to be in demand by sorcerers who use them to make powerful concoctions, which are potent enough to make the rich richer, and the mighty mightier’. ²