Fetish Priests Rewrite History

When 29 people were found dead in a Togo lagoon six years ago, the local fetish priests carried the bodies to foreign embassies and cast spells against the Eyadema army. Now they have had a dramatic change of heart in a public confession. Are they now telling the truth, asks Prince Ebow Godwin.

In April 1991 when Togo was gripped with the fever of agitation for democratic reform, 29 bodies were fished out of a local lagoon in Be. Those were days of violence and mayhem and open agitation against the Eyadema dictatorship. Ethnic killings were frequent, but the scale of this massacre shocked the world.

The killings were put down to northern, Kabye soldiers loyal to President Gnassingbe Eyadema who were accused of settling local scores with the local Ewe.

The discovery of the 29 corpses in the lagoon made screaming headlines and led to a serious ethnic backlash against the Kabyes who were chased out of their Lome homes, setting off a round of further killings. An estimated 5,000 Kabyes were killed.

But recently, six years after the tragic event, a group of traditional fetish priests called together the whole Togolese diplomatic corps, to publicly confess that they had been wrong about the deaths. At the time some of the priests had carried the drowned bodies to some foreign embassies to show the diplomats what Eyadema's soldiers had done. Eye witnesses remember with horror how the priests had carried the dead bodies to the American chancellery in Lome, where they had laid out the bodies on the ground before casting spells on President Eyadema, blaming him for the massacre.

But now the priests said they were wrong. They said they had been driven by the anger of the gods of the Forest of Be to make their confessions. But now they were saying that they had discovered that the 29 had not died by drowning. They had been killed on dry land and had been later thrown into the water, already dead. So they had carried out the wrong rituals in an attempt to cleanse the spirits.

The priests chief concern was to be exonerated by the gods, but in the course of their "confession" they added that it was opposition leaders, not the Eyadema troops, who had killed the men in the lagoon.

The priests told the astounded diplomats in Lome that it was all an opposition plot to discredit Eyadema and incite the local population against him.

The chief priest of the shrine, Togbe Adoglin Nidodzi said that they had been misled by opposition leaders into performing the wrong rituals and casting spells against Eyadema. Since then the country had enjoyed no peace as the gods visited their anger on the people, sending famine, epidemics, drought and mysterious deaths to punish the nation. That was why his priests were making their confession.

Though the chief priest did not name those responsible for the killings, Togolese government ministers intervened at the end of the press conference saying that action would be taken against the politicians who had been responsible for the conspiracy and the deaths which followed.

After the conference, the opposition denied any involvement in the killings and immediately claimed that the fetish priests' confessions had been deliberately stage managed by the government in order to clear President Eyadema of any wrong doing.

Opposition lawyer Yaovi Agboyibor said the whole episode just showed how keen Eyadema was to clear his name. He said Eyadema had tempted the fetish priests with money and that the confessions had been a "rehearsed, political, cinema screen play".

The Lome public has been caught in a vicious cycle of claim and counter claim by both government and opposition groups. They are still divided over who was responsible for the killings. And the priests of the sacred forest of Be are caught in a political wrangle. They still cannot find peace or sleep.

New African Magazine. Copyright © IC Publications Limited 1998.