Twenty girls fell into a trance while standing before the flag, while the principal was present. The students who were not possessed claimed that the principal was eating souls of the other students.

“Our principal is a witch” was a primary story that Sasha Alexandra Newell, faculty member of University Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropology told a crowd of forty students.

The school at the Ivory Coast was in financial and academic trouble. So, the principal demanded nearly $8 before the students could go to class. When the school district heard about this, it began an investigation, which shut down the school.

Society has moved beyond witchcraft and superstitions for the most part; however in Abidjan, Cote d’lvoire witchcraft is a part of daily conversation. Witches are constantly in the newspaper articles with titles like “In complicity with her daughter in law, a mother bewitches her son.”

The newspaper was able to get the woman and her coven in a picture. Most witches confess to be witches and do not deny, but instead tell the identity of others. The caption read (translated into English): “The entire witch’s coven within which operated the mother wind who was behind her son’s suffering.”

Newell lectured about modern witchcraft and culture of terror and gave several graphic examples of violations of the human body. Witches only want to have evil succeed and good destroyed, according to Newell. Witches will eliminate any one of good standing.

In order to tell when a person is a witch or in the presence of a witch, a woman perhaps at a relative’s funeral would go into trance where she descends into a state of mind where she can see those who are witches. Also the dead relative enters the woman’s body tries to tell who the witch is, but cannot say because the witch is blocking the woman by making the woman flail.

“Deaths are never a death,” Newell said. “Ultimately behind it was a witch.”

The days of Salem, when witches were secret about being a witch, are a cliche of Halloween.

“Europeans used the presence of witchcraft beliefs as one (among many) indicator of a culture’s uncivilized status,” Newell said.

Newell talked of how one becomes a witch through an orgy, meetings at night and cannabis. However, unlike the European witchcraft, an African witch only has the power to harm his or her own family. People will possess others or threaten others to do their sinister bidden of harming loved ones in the family.

“Only family can kill family,” Newell said.

In today’s society witchcraft is used a form of terror and a way culture deals with the fear of the unexplained. The Ivory Coast starts the terror from the common folk whereas the U.S. government spreads the terror from above, Newell said.