Witch Camp (Ghana) – I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be

TRACK LIST

  1. I Must Build A New Home
  2. Hatred Drove Me From My Home
  3. Wizard Drum
  4. Protection
  5. Witch Song
  6. I Am A Beggar For A Home
  7. Only God Can Judge Me
  8. I Was Accused
  9. Everywhere I Turn, There Is Pain
  10. Hunted
  11. We Are No Different Than You
  12. Love
  13. I Have Lost All That I Love
  14. When I Was Ill, You Didn’t Come Visit Me
  15. Love, Please 
  16. Abandoned (Forced Into A Life Of Prostitution) 
  17. If The River Runs Dry, The Canoe Cannot Rise
  18. I Trusted My Family, They Betrayed Me
  19. There Are No Promises In This World
  20. Left To Live Like An Animal 

ABOUT THIS RELEASE

Release Date: March 12, 2021

Witch Camp Review From The Observer UK (****):
I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be review – magical sound of the marginalised 
 
By Dorian Lynskey
 
Now that it is fashionable for aggrieved political factions to dismiss criticism as a “witch hunt”, it’s worth remembering what makes actual witch hunts so pernicious. It’s not that the women thus accused are in fact innocent – it’s that they couldn’t possibly be guilty. In northern Ghana, witch hunts are more than a political metaphor. Even now, vulnerable women are accused of the dark arts because they have a mental illness, a physical disability or simply because their families want them out of the way. They are blamed for infertility, crop failure, bad weather, accidental deaths and much more besides. Lynchings and burnings still occur from time to time. That’s what a witch hunt means.
 
While belief in witchcraft is not unique to Ghana, witch camps are. These small settlements, which still exist despite government efforts to shut them down, offer accused women safe haven, albeit within the same framework of belief that drove them from their homes: the chiefs claim to ask the local gods to neutralise their powers and render them harmless. Protection assumes guilt. “If we are here, then we must be witches,” one told a journalist a few years ago.
 
The women of the witch camps are suitable subjects for Ian Brennan, a Grammy-winning producer and combative author, and the Italian-Rwandan film-maker Marilena Delli Umuhoza. Brennan has been compared to the pioneering song collectors of the 1930s, John and Alan Lomax, although he has a 21st-century sensitivity to the ethics of field recording, avoiding the bad practice and paternalistic assumptions that complicated the work of his predecessors.

ABOUT WITCH CAMP (GHANA)

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