“You are giving away our secrets to put a few cents in your pockets.”

The BBC has a short video segment on witchcraft in Liberia.  It’s not bad.  The narrator seems to have gotten access to a Poro society ceremony.  (This is not explicitly said, but the only people shown are teenage boys.)  Someone is quoted saying that the masked devil dancing should not be confused with Satan.  Cut to an interview with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.  She explains that the idea of the devil was used to moderate people during a time without rule of law.  (Yes, she uses the past tense.)  Cut to an interview with an American missionary who describes a pull many Liberians feel between their secret society and more traditional lives, and modernity.  (I don’t think this is an accurate dichotomy.  I think it would be fascinating to read an anthropological account of how secret societies have changed over the years.)

I was thinking about how the BBC managed to get access to the Poro society ceremony, and record it, and immediately thought of something I read in Sizwe’s Test by Jonny Steinberg.  In the (absolutely amazing) book Steinberg follows “Sizwe,” a young South African man who refuses to be tested for HIV despite the availability of free treatment.  Steinberg describes a discussion he had with Sizwe about why Sizwe did not want his real name used in the book.  None of the views Sizwe expressed to Steinberg would come as a surprise to those who knew him.  In fact the views were fairly typical. Yet still, he wanted anonymity.   Sizwe said:

“I would be accused of giving away black people’s secrets,” he said. “‘It is like what you are accused of when you act as a guide.  When Graeme and the bird-watchers were there at their cottage, and I was showing them around the forest, my cousin and I organized a cultural tour for them.  We took them to see a sangoma, an inyanga, to see traditional dance, to see the floors of the hut being cleared with cow dung.  They watched the ritual when a goat is being slaughtered.

“After they left, some people in Ithanga were very angry with us.  They said, ‘You go around showing the white people our culture, but they show us none of theirs.   You are giving away our secrets to put a few cents in your own pockets.  But it is our secrets you are making money off, our culture.’

“I am afraid that I would be accused of the same thing.”…”They will say I have sold something that is not for sale.”