What to See This Holiday: “I Am Not a Witch”

I Am Not a Witch is the debut feature film of the filmmaker Rungano Nyoni. Nyoni was born in Zambia and moved to the UK with her family when she was nine years old. Her short films made after she graduated from the University of London earned her a formidable reputation, and this new feature has launched a promising international career in feature filmmaking, having played at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival (in the Directors’ Fortnight), winning Nyoni a BAFTA, and garnering a number of prizes at the British Independent Film Awards. I give this background merely because I’m so pleased to report the successes of an African emigrant in the art-house filmmaking world, and because I derive great pleasure from anticipating the work to come from young artists whose early works are already so strong.

I Am Not a Witch, which is mostly in Nyanja, with English subtitles, follows an eight-year-old girl (Maggie Mulubwa) who first goes without a name and is later named Shula (“uprooted” in Nyanja), and who is accused by some of the angry villagers around her of witchcraft. Shula is totally alone, afraid, and wholly uncertain of herself, and does not deny the villagers’ accusations, opening her to exploitation by local leaders who claim to protect witches. Shula is taken by the government official Mr Banda (Henry Phiri) to a camp for witches, where other accused women are kept practically as slave labourers and tourist attractions. A witch-doctor judges whether or not they really are witches (note that when a man can show capabilities of witchcraft, he enjoys a position of power) and, if they are, they’re fitted with harnesses to which ribbons are tied, keeping them within a tight radius around the camp’s truck that transports them from their beds to wherever the government requires them to be. Shula is singled out for witch-related work by the government: She divines guilty culprits from a line-up of criminal suspects and brings rain to the fields of farmers who pay her handlers, and is rewarded with favours such as biscuits and gin. With the help of Mr Banda’s wife, she grows in self-assurance, but also gains awareness of the grim situation she’s in and the abusive systems of power that brought her there.


Nyoni’s film comes basically from an elemental anger at patriarchal oppression of women, particularly women in rural African societies. It’s made against the backdrop of African people’s struggles amid poverty and scarcity, in hard conservative and superstitious cultures. Harsh judgmental attitudes come from harsh living conditions, and Nyoni seems to suggest that the anger that is taken out on the women in her film arises in part from people’s dissatisfaction with their poor quality of life. She even implicates us, the viewers, in the very first scene, when foreign tourists come to the witches’ camp to photograph the women and listen earnestly to their tour guide’s drivel on the witches’ powers and evil intent. The tourists accept the images of rural African life that they’re given without question, self-satisfied and comfortable merely in their mild interest and supposed enlightenment.

Nyoni did research in a real-life witches’ camp in Ghana; I don’t know whether she invented or happened upon the detail of witches being tied up with ribbons, but either way it’s a provocative metaphor for women’s constraints — some of the witches express gratitude that their binds are not as tight as they had been in the past, but this doesn’t comfort Shula, who realises that her ribbon, however long, still means captivity. Mrs Banda, who had also been previously been accused of witchcraft as well, presents a weak possibility of conditional, transient freedom: Do whatever you’re told with unquestioning obedience, and you will gain the chance for superficial respectability. I Am Not a Witch is satirical, but it’s not an uproarious comedy; Nyoni shows clearly the absurdity of the witches’ story, and also conjures the horror of what they’re put through. Much of what she addresses is not specific to Zambia but is pertinent to African life in many areas on the continent, giving a lucid view of the continual and multiple conflicts between traditional cultures and customs and the formal legal affairs of governmental administration. Her images bring forth the complexity of the converging social and political forces at work, as well as the varying emotional and moral consequences. Particularly striking is the steadfast quality exhibited throughout both by the film and the characters, a unique quality of quiet dignity that, as the world is beginning to learn, can be offered by African cultures and African personalities, and that have been absent for as long as African influence has been excluded or ignored from western forms such as art-house cinema.