European and African Witchcraft: Healers, Heretics, and the Fear That Still Haunts Us

The figure of the witch has haunted human imagination for centuries. She flickers in and out of history, shifting shapes depending on where you stand. Sometimes she is an old woman bent over herbs, muttering charms. Sometimes she is a neighbour accused of consorting with the devil. Sometimes she is a healer revered by her community, and sometimes she is the dark figure blamed for every misfortune.

Every culture has its own witches, but they don’t mean the same thing everywhere. In 17th-century Europe, witches were often scapegoats, condemned more for suspicion than for action. In Southern Africa, particularly in Nguni traditions (Xhosa and Zulu), the witch — umthakathi — is not simply accused, but believed to be a figure who actively harms through ukuthakatha (sorcery).

This blog explores the duality of the witch: one shaped by accusation and hysteria, the other by intent and malice. Along the way, we’ll also meet their counterparts — the cunning women, white witches, inyangas, and sangomas — figures who remind us that the same knowledge can heal or harm, depending on who wields it.

And at the centre of it all is The Girl Who Knew The Medicine, my novel that grew from this collision of folklore, fear, and memory. It asks: Who truly holds power — the one who works in shadows, or the one we name a witch out of fear?

The European Witch

To understand the European witch, we have to step into the shadows of the 16th and 17th centuries — a time of famine, war, plague, and religious upheaval. Fear was everywhere, and fear always looks for a face.

The witch trials of Pendle (1612), Bamberg and Würzburg (1620s), and Salem (1692) are etched into history as some of the most terrifying examples of paranoia. Neighbours accused neighbours; family members accused each other. A birthmark, a quarrel over land, or a sudden illness could be enough to turn suspicion into execution.

Witchcraft here was not defined by proven action but by accusation. Whispers spread like plague, and the mere suggestion of the “devil’s mark” could seal a woman’s fate. Most of the accused were women — often poor, widowed, or otherwise powerless. The witch became a scapegoat for all of society’s anxieties: failed harvests, infant mortality, economic hardship.

Yet, even as hysteria raged, not all magic was seen as dangerous. Across Europe, there were cunning folk and white witches — healers, charmers, and wise women who provided herbal remedies, protective charms, and spiritual guidance. Communities relied on them, even as church courts condemned their practices. The paradox is sharp: one day you were the village healer, the next you could be the village heretic.

The European witch reveals a society obsessed with purity, control, and scapegoating. Her danger lay not in her power, but in the fears projected onto her.

The Nguni Witch

If Europe’s witch was often accused without evidence, the Nguni witch — the umthakathi — was feared for deliberate harm. In Xhosa and Zulu traditions, witchcraft is not merely a rumour whispered over a fence; it is the shadow of sorcery believed to be intentionally cast.

The umthakathi uses ukuthakatha (sorcery) to harm, often through poisoned muti, spiritual manipulation, or calling upon agents like the tokoloshe — a mischievous, sometimes malevolent spirit said to attack in the night. Tales of abathakathi (plural) weave through community memory, turning unexplained illness, misfortune, or death into evidence of sorcery.

But alongside the feared witch stand the revered healers: the inyanga and the sangoma. The inyanga works with herbs and remedies, a traditional pharmacist who understands the medicine of the earth. The sangoma divines the will of the ancestors, guiding communities through ritual and spiritual counsel. They are protectors, guardians, and mediators between the living and the unseen.

This duality — healer versus witch — is central to Nguni worldviews. Where the umthakathi acts with malice, the inyanga and sangoma act with reverence and healing. Yet the same knowledge of plants, rituals, and spirits underpins both roles. The difference lies in intent.

This distinction shows a society that does not see witchcraft as a blanket accusation but as a spectrum of spiritual practice: some destructive, some protective, all deeply embedded in survival and belief.

Healers and Heretics: The Line Between

When we compare Europe and Nguni traditions, a striking similarity emerges: both cultures recognised figures of healing alongside figures of fear.

In Europe, cunning women and white witches used charms, potions, and prayers to heal the sick or ward off evil. But the same remedies that brought comfort could also arouse suspicion. A healer was useful until the crops failed; then she became dangerous.

In Nguni societies, the inyanga and sangoma were deeply respected, but the line between healer and witch was equally fragile. If someone healed in one place while others grew ill elsewhere, accusations could rise. The power to heal always carried the shadow of the power to harm.

This fragile boundary reminds us that witchcraft is not only about spells or spirits, but about society’s anxieties. A woman, or a healer, becomes dangerous not just for what they do, but for what others believe they might do.

European and African Witchcraft Compared

European and African witchcraft reveals two very different traditions. In Europe, witchcraft was defined through accusation: witches were often victims of fear, scapegoats for problems no one could solve. In Nguni societies, witchcraft was defined through intent: witches were feared as active agents of harm, wielding power in secret to inflict suffering.

Both perspectives reflect deep survival fears — famine, illness, unexplained misfortune. Both also show how communities turn to stories to explain the unexplainable. And in both, the same practices — herbs, rituals, charms — could tip a person’s reputation from healer to heretic.

The core question lingers: within European and African witchcraft, are witches victims of hysteria, or villains hidden in plain sight?

The Witch Today: Echoes in Modern Life

Though witch hunts may feel like a thing of the past, witches are far from gone. They live on in literature, horror films, and even social media, where #WitchTok has given new visibility to modern magic. But beyond pop culture, darker echoes remain.

In South Africa, witchcraft still carries weight in communities. Vigilante attacks on suspected witches occur, rooted in fear of deliberate harm. And in the late 1990s and 2000s, occult gangs emerged in places like the Free State, blending symbols of Satanism with traditional witchcraft. Tattoos of “666,” inverted crosses, and reports of muti murders turned fear into lived reality.

It was an article about these gangs in the Daily Maverick that first jolted me into writing The Girl Who Knew The Medicine. The blend of occult fear, traditional belief, and modern violence struck a chord. Witchcraft was no longer just folklore — it was a chilling part of contemporary life.

The Girl Who Knew The Medicine

The Girl Who Knew The Medicine was born from that collision: folklore, news, and memory. What if the hysteria of the 1600s was dropped into a conservative South African high school? What if whispers of sorcery, once confined to rural myths, seeped into classrooms and corridors?

The novelette grew from questions: Who gets named the witch? What happens when belief collides with fear? How do young people navigate a world where accusation can ruin you, and power — whether real or rumoured — can isolate you?

Every scene is stitched with that unease: the clash between healer and heretic, scapegoat and sorcerer, truth and paranoia. Inspired by both European witch trials and Nguni beliefs, the story reflects how fragile our definitions are. Sometimes witches are real. Sometimes they are imagined. But either way, the fear they stir has consequences.

Which Witch Do You Fear?

The witch has never been a single figure. She has been the scapegoat, the sorcerer, the healer, the heretic. She has been condemned by whispers and feared for her intent. Across cultures, she reflects society’s deepest anxieties: about survival, illness, control, and the unknown.

The question isn’t whether witches exist. The question is: why do we need them to? Why do communities, time and again, conjure her into being — sometimes to protect themselves, sometimes to punish outsiders, sometimes simply to give fear a face?

Which definition chills you more — the neighbour scapegoated for a storm, or the sorcerer who poisons a remedy in secret?

In the end, the witch is a mirror. And in her reflection, we see not just superstition, but the truths a society fears to admit.