DELWENDE CENTER: A PLACE OF REFUGE FOR AFRICAN OLD WITCHES AND SORCERESSES

By Mariam KANLA

In Burkina Faso thousand of women are forced to domestic asylum due to familial and social exclusion. Their exclusion is nurtured by traditional beliefs that women especially elderly ones, widows, sterile women, very poor women are responsible for the death of their husbands, family members, or neighborhood children.

In old days such women were banned from villages, beaten and chased away. They lived in isolation, in abandoned huts out of villages, or wander in bushes till they die of exhaustion if the didn’t find exile in some other villages.

Nowadays we are experiencing new categories of cursed women: The widows of wealthy men who refused to remarry their late husbands’ relative in order to permit conservation of inherited wealth in family.

The inherited widows whose new marriage they don’t want to consume because they are found HIV positive.

These are cases of women who seek refuge in places like DELWENDE CENTER for women in Ouagadougou.

Created in 1960 by Roman Catholic nuns, DELWENDE was the first site to host excluded women, because accused of witchcraft in Burkina Faso. Today the center hosts 410 women of sixty year of age average. They live on support of ministry of social affairs, charity organizations and people donations.

Another center call PASPANGA Center receives women victims of the same phenomena. Due to this social factor, thousand of devoted housewives, end in nervous breakdown, and mental depression because one day some witchdoctors, in low relatives, fellow folks demonstrated their responsibilities for a person death.