French star player Paul Pogba visited a medicine man for a curse on Kylian Mbappé, the even bigger star of the French national team with whom he became world champion in 2018. (Back then they were both worth 90 million euros, today Mbappé does three times more than Pogba with 160 million.) Ever since Pogba’s brother Mathias made the accusation on Tiktok, the whole of France has been captivated by the football and family drama that Shakespeare is doing. Can Suck: Envy between three soccer-playing brothers, a single supermom, a wizard and a criminal gang. Even the serious one Le Monde makes a nice report. Mathias Pogba, former Sparta player and lesser god in top football, is now incarcerated on suspicion of extortion. He cheated his little brother of 13 million.
Paul Pogba didn’t say his brother sees them flying. That sorcery is nonsense. No, Pogba confirmed he gave money to a marabout, just not to throw Mbappé into misfortune. It was for an aid organization in Africa, says one French newspaper. No, Pogba is looking for a cure for his injured knee, says another. Basically like the marabout was always the 12th man on the field in a team with West African players.
Central Africa is also teeming with the witch doctors. Where people live in insecurity, just about everyone is engaged in witchcraft. Congo’s most famous exorcist treated hundreds of poverty-stricken women every morning who had sometimes walked for days. Six-year-old girls who had been rejected as witches by their families roamed the city of Bukavu. And in Kampala, quite a few toddlers disappeared in the years I lived there, kidnapped for a sacrificial ritual. That brought fortune. When building a large building, it was preferable to have a child’s head built into the foundation, so that the building would never collapse. The World Bank canceled a new office at the last minute, after rumors of bricked-in children’s parts.
What I saw in the Devil Banner’s treatment room was indescribable. Had I found the language, I would have kept silent about witchcraft. I could draw the slights: too submerged. Going local. Lost your critical eye. No, as a young female journalist I had to build my reputation from (male) stories of struggle, distress and danger.
Then I chose not to write down what happened before my eyes. Today the fiction that is believed to be true flourishes. The Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinsky knew Africa inside out, but in the mid-1990s he noticed ‘the growth of the irrational factor in the lives of individuals and society’ in his own Europe. He wrote in his notebook: ‘The utopias are over, but the world remains in the power of the myths. In the modern world we observe a clear escalation of currents, movements, which politically, socially and religiously have no intellectual basis, no theoretical background. The members of those movements are guided by emotions, instincts, phobias, prejudices.’
Evil fables are rampant in the public domain. Denying the Enlightenment, they deliberately act on emotions, instincts, fears and prejudices. They affect the healthy fabric of society. The moderate middle is beginning to shift about nitrogen and vaccines. As in Africa, this modern witchcraft is driven by greed, this time for political power. The promoted demagogue, who cannot possibly believe himself what he sells in poisonous gossip, has not yet been kicked out for spoiling the game.