Crime: Battling Juju-Marabou Mediums
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

In the West African region, the Ghana Police Service has made a lot of strides, despite still struggling with logistic and manpower challenges. An offshoot of the long-running British colonial regime, the Ghana Police Service is some sort of a star in innovative policing in West Africa, able to think from within Ghana’s traditional values up to the global level, working to enhance its ex-colonial heritage, which is rooted in neo-liberal, legal-rational sensibilities, by incorporating Ghana’s traditional values into its operations.

Actually, because of the way the Ghana Police Service was created the impression is that traditional Ghana had no iota of its values in its paradigms. In fact, the idea of community policing is as African as it is global. Pre-colonial Ghana or Gold Coast, as seen in the institutions and values of 56 ethnic groups that form Ghana, had some sort of traditional policing services though not in the structural sense of the Western world. In Maxwell Owusu’s Rebellion, Revolution, and Tradition: Reinterpreting Coups in Ghana, traditional institutions such as the militant Asafo organizations that used to overthrow traditional rulers who have violated traditional governance norms such as “not been accountable to the people,” were kind of police service.

Owusu’s reinterpretation of Ghana’s 21 years of military rule from the perspectives of Ghana’s “traditional beliefs and practices, indigenous political ideology, attitudes and outlooks” also indicates that traditional policing were part of pre-colonial Ghana’s societies, a view that balances the overriding analytical viewpoints that had for long explained that Africans had no pre-colonial policing services from Marxist and non-Marxist positions that grounded images and views of change that originated from Western historical experiences.

Today, the Ghana Police Service is not only increasingly re-connecting with its traditional roots in order to serve Ghanaians better but moving deeper to tackle certain traditional values that have for long been untouchable despite aiding crime. The arrest of a 40-year-old spiritualist by the police for allegedly helping, spiritually, in the robbing of the Church of Pentecost at Ashaiman, a suburb of Accra, the capital, of about US$ 2,000 is case in point. According to the Accra-based The Ghanaian Times, Ali Baba, the spiritualist, purportedly helped Philip Kwaku Ahwoa, 23, a labourer of the church and another to rob the church.

Ali Baba’s arrest reminds me of long conversation I had recently with a police-woman at Nima, a suburb of Accra, the capital. Analytically, most crimes reported are remotely influenced by juju-marabout mediums and other spiritualists. From pick-pockets to fraudsters to armed robbers to roadside magician tricksters to money doublers to most of the crimes reported at the police station, juju-marabout mediums and other spiritualists are partly to be blamed, playing heavily on the negative superstitious parts of the culture to the detriment of peace.

At this juncture, it is important to know that when the Ghana Police Service arrested leading armed robber, Atta Ayi, at Adabraka, a suburb of Accra, huge amulets and other spiritual paraphernalia, prepared for him by various juju-marabout mediums and spiritualists, were stripped around his body.

That makes the Ghana Police Service not only bravely confronting the dreaded juju-marabout mediums and other spiritualists who are highly feared in the Ghanaian society for obvious deeply held superstitious reasons because of their dark spiritual crafts and the perceived superstitious believe that they can wage spiritual reprisals from their dark-rooms. By arresting Ali Baba, the Ghana Police Service aren’t only putting such deep-seated superstitious fears at bay but also rationalizing parts of the traditional values that are deemed irrational and that have for long been aiding crime and other state pathologies but have not been looked at in its crime prevention paradigms.

That makes the Ghana Police Service openly understanding the Ghanaian society as holistically and deeply as practicable. In years gone by, the policing services have not been seen from within traditional Ghana that for the past years has seen spiritualists of all sorts - from juju-marabou mediums, prophets, shamans, and fortune tellers - in one way or the other, working for criminals. The spiritualists have wrongly being thinking they are outside any moral responsibility for aiding criminals.

For some time, juju-marabout mediums and other spiritualists have not been considered in the larger criminology thought. In the face of the criminality of some traditional spiritualists, including even aiding military coup detats, the traditional spiritualists have not been held criminally responsible for long time – most times out of the radar of social accountability.

Until now, traditional spiritualists have been operating as if they are not part of the Ghanaian society, above law-and-order, and can aid any scheme - good or bad - without any social sanctions. Just look at Ghana or other West African states, and you will see that the traditional juju-marabou mediums and other spiritualists are some how above the law. At certain point in West Africa’s history, juju-marabou mediums were virtually ruling the region from Mali to Nigeria. Just interview Mali’s top marabout medium M. Cisse and you will be shocked at the damages some juju-marabout mediums have caused Ghana and West Africa.

As no figures are available for the number of juju-marabout mediums and other spiritualists arrested for aiding criminals, the best way to measure it is to look at media reports and by word of mouth. Juju-marabout mediums mostly work for the elites, criminal individuals and gangs. Most ordinary Ghanaians do not access them for money reasons. By playing the powers-that-be, the juju-marabou mediums escape responsibilities for causing social dysfunction that send places like Ghana’s northern regions in perennial conflicts and maldevelopment – just ask Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, the former BBC correspondent, of his coverage of the on-again, off-again Bawku conflicts and you will be shocked to hear how the conflict is virtually driven by juju-marabout mediums and other spiritualists.

By openly showcasing the battling of juju-marabout and other spiritualists in its fight against crime, the Ghana Police Service, part of the objective society, is helping refine some of the ancient inhibitions within the Ghanaian culture that have been stifling progress. By this act, too, the Ghana Police Service is seen as transforming its administration of justice to include some traditional values that have been stifling peace and progress, and this should be part of the new approach to police training.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, Canada, June 5, 2008