RedHanded - ShortHand: Papua New Guinea's Black Magic Murders

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Black magic, or ‘Sanguma’, is often used to explain everything from minor illnesses to sudden deaths in Papua New Guinea. Horrifyingly, it’s also behind the recent rise of brutal witch hunts sweeping the nation. An epidemic of violence in which, predominantly, women and girls are being publicly tortured and murdered.Why? Find out on this week’s ShortHand.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello, hello, and welcome to another short hand. You're welcome. In the village of Tukasanda, Papua New Guinea, in November 2017, a seven-year-old girl named Lily, and Lily's not her real name, I changed her name so that we don't say it, was abducted from her home by an angry mob. They carried Lily to a nearby hut where they tied her up and tortured the young girl for hours. They beat her. They flayed her skin with hot machetes. and screamed accusations at seven-year-old Lily that she had stolen her cousin's heart and devoured it. All the while Lily's cousin lay in the hut, groaning in pain.

Whenever Lily was being hurt by the mob, the cousin would fall quiet. But when Lily was left alone, her cousin would start shrieking as though she was being attacked. This all but confirmed it. Lily was a witch and a practitioner of Sangamah, Black Magic. It was decided that Lily must have used her dark powers to steal the other girl's heart, making her gravely ill. Because after all, as the saying goes in Papua New Guinea,

no one dies a natural death. And it's because of this belief and the ideas of black magic that go with it that horrifically, Lily's story is not a unique one. In fact, what's officially termed sorcery-related violence, so quite literally witch hunts, have been on the wrong. rise since 2013 in Papua New Guinea, and they're now at epidemic levels. How's that happened? You're going to find out because here is the shorthand. So Papua New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific is truly, and this is no exaggeration,

a jaw-droppingly beautiful country of immense cultural and biological diversity. If you listen to last week's red-handed episode on the Bain Family Murders Part 1, you'll know that it is truly unique, anthropologically speaking, with genetic testing showing that its inhabitants have involved separately from the rest of the world's population for at least 50,000 years, making its traditions, cultures and languages totally distinct. But Papua New Guinea is also one of the poorest countries on earth. Corruption and inequality are through the roof,

alongside shocking levels of violence, particularly against women and children. In many cases, this violence is thanks to accusations of witchcraft. And while to many of us literal witch hunts may sound like a thing of the past, a grisly historic relic of times gone by, sadly that's just not the case in Papua New Guinea. And over the past 20 years, on average, 72 incidents of torture and 30 deaths have been reported every year. And it's not a huge population.

And I also don't think that's the real number. Yes, we suspect that the real number is much higher. And we suspect that because when you consider that NGOs in Papua New Guinea state that they rescue and evacuate on average 10 people a week who are at risk of torture and murder because they have been accused of being witches and certain districts have said that some months up to 30 women are attacked. It does seem that that number is probably quite a lot higher. Yes, I just think it's very, very hidden. It's very hidden.

So yes, the real numbers are completely impossible to know. Who would risk reporting a witch-related or sorcery-related murder for fear that they would be next on the mob's hit list? And even if someone wanted to make a report like this, who would they report it to? Because 85% of PNG's population live rurally. And honestly, when I was writing this, I was like, Rurally feels like a massive fucking understatement.

Because the topography of the country, which is what makes it so beautiful, also makes it incredibly hard to traverse. So many of the communities live in what's better described as isolation. With over half of the population of PNG living in these sort of like very, very isolated, very like jungle surroundings, they have no access to electricity, no running water, basic healthcare or education. And this is particularly true in the country's vast highlands. There's also no official police presence.

So you have here what you have in so many other countries that are similar to this. You have village elders who have total power. So they make the laws, they run the tribal courts, and they are the ones to dish out judgments and punishments. And often these accusations of wrongdoing lead to exponential bloodshed. For example, when a person is accused and killed, their first born will become the next target, the fear being that the child has inherited the evil.

And that is exactly what happened to Lily. Her nightmare didn't start with her abduction into Cassander. It started back on the 6th of February 2013, with the incident that kick-started the rise in witch hunts across Papua New Guinea. At this time, Lily lived with her mother in the second biggest city in the nation, Mount Hagen. That day, there was a knock at the door. It was a group of men, and they were there for Lily's 20-year-old mother, Kapari Leniatta. They were accusing her of being a Sangama woman,

who had caused the death of a local six-year-old boy, who had died after weeks of some sort of like diarrheal condition. And if any of this story, Mount Hagen, Capari, any of this is sounding familiar, it's probably because you listened to last week's episode on the Bain case. And if you did, that means you'll know what's about to happen next. because despite Kipari's crying and pleading that she was innocent and she knew nothing about the boy's death. They took her, loaded her into their truck and drove her to a rubbish heap in the city.

There they tortured Kepari with a hot iron rod, in front of a crowd of hundreds of onlookers. Then they dumped her body onto the rubbish pile and set her alight. It took her 30 minutes to die. Many people there that day filmed her ordeal on their phones, but no one tried to help. So yeah, that is the story that we obviously told you guys in part one of Bain, but I think what's just so, so, so harrowing is as if that story isn't bad enough,

is that the same thing happens. Well, luckily Lily doesn't die, but the same thing tries to happen to her own seven-year-old daughter years later. And the reason that Capari's case often comes up as like the story that everybody talks about, it is in by no means unique. This kind of thing is happening all the time. It's that that was the story, that was the case in 2013, that actually kick-started the rise that we see.

Like, that's the thing that's so mind-blowing about it, is these witch hunts, these Sangamara-related violence killings that are happening in Papua New Guinea, haven't been dwindling. Since 2013, they have been steadily on the increase. It is unbelievable. So after her mother's murder, Lily was moved to live with her uncle

about 100 miles away from Mount Hagen. But the stories of her mother's evil, like we said, often the firstborn is tarred with the same brush, followed Little Lily. And when her cousin got ill, the family suddenly turned on her, with her own uncle letting the mob take Lily saying, If you kill her, so be it. She was seven years old. Thankfully, like I gave away, Lily didn't die.

She was rescued by the Papua New Guinea Tribal Foundation, an NGO based in Port Moresby. And she's since been adopted by the organisation's director of operations, a woman named Ruth Kissam, who is my hero. I read the entire article that Ruth wrote about this, and Ruth's rescued a lot of people. She's worked with this NGO for a very long time. She studied law in the US,

and then she ended up having to drop out to take care of her mother who wasn't very well. And after that, she was kind of like, I don't want to go back to law school. I want to go do something practical that I can help people. So she moves to Papua New Guinea and joins this NGO. She saved loads of people, but she said when I saw Lily, there was something that made me feel like, I have to take care of this child. And she adopted her.

And what happened to Lily? Happened in 2017. Despite the fact that after her mother Kepare's brutal murder, the government of Papua New Guinea actually repealed the country's controversial 1971 Sorcery Act. And I love and hate the fact that Papua New Guinea had a 1971 Sorcery Act enshrined in. law. It was only repealed in 2017. Which allowed murderers to use the allegation of witchcraft as a legitimate defence. So basically, people could claim that their belief in Sangamur was a mitigating factor in any murders or tortures that they committed in the name of their belief. And it was only repealed in 2013. Yeah, that is mind-blowing. So basically, what was happening before is, like you said, people would kill people, torture people, and then they wouldn't get any convictions or any

time in prison because they'd say, well, I have a belief that that person is a witch and that's why I killed them. And the law was just like, okay, what? But this is the thing that even after they repealed this law, Lily was still attacked four years later. And that's because this reform was pretty toothless and hard to enforce. And to this day, in P&G, prosecutions and conviction of such crimes are incredibly rare. And while it used to be that this sort of violence was predominantly based in the kind of isolated highlands of PNG, not that, you know, that wouldn't have been bad enough since 85% of the population seems to live in those kind of communities, but that's just now no longer the case. Sorcery-related violence is

spreading everywhere in P&G, from the bigger cities like Port Moresby and Mount Hagen and all around the coasts. And like we said in the introduction, the occurrence rate of these killings is also going up. And it has been since 2013. And I think it's probably because after Kapari's murder, women's groups demanded the action be taken. And I think that really set off a lot of people into kicking back against these women demanding that other women stop being murdered. But let's talk more about why specifically this rise is happening. Despite the fact that the government say that they're taking this issue seriously

and they say that they have repealed the Sorcery Act and set aside four million for a Sangamah Task Force and public awareness campaign. Activists say that this money has been squandered away through corruption. Surprise, surprise. But the main reason for the rise in Sangamara-related violence in Papua New Guinea, as far as we can see, is unequal development, inequality and the progress of women. Three things that can be directly mapped onto the country's spike in which lynchings. Let's look at why. PNG is seeing a lot of development from foreign investment, particularly China. But this sort of sudden influx of money into a developing nation

leads to heavily uneven development across that country. So increasingly you have a situation where more and more people are leaving their villages in order to look for work in cities. These people tend to have grown up in these sort of far-flung villages with a more intense belief in things like Sangama. Now they are relocated to a city with no village elders to sort of keep them more prone to violence or more psychopathic among them in check.

So these individuals left to their own devices, and thanks to the inherent issues with extreme poverty, as is rife in PNG, it doesn't seem to take much for them to whip up a mob from the growing pools of economic migrants that they'll find in the cities that they live in, ready to hunt for witches in their midst. It is horrifying.

And if you look at the majority of incidents of such killings, they do tend to involve a sudden death. Most people who live in Papua New Guinea lack access to a proper education and adequate health care so when a sudden death or illness strikes angry mobs often go looking for a scapegoat and typically it's a woman because there's no doubt that the demands

by women in Papua New Guinea for more freedom and equality is leading to a cultural kickback but let's stick with the sudden deaths and how they act as a catalyst for violence like we said at the beginning there is a saying in Papua New Guinea no one dies a natural death. And sadly, it's this dangerous idea

that underpins a lot of these killings. People, especially children, die of sudden and treatable illnesses when you have poor access to healthcare. And in Papua New Guinea, like it would anywhere, when you don't understand what's actually happened, it sparks fear and confusion. And now, with the growing issue of imported junk food

and drugs that you're seeing infiltrate the country, It's giving rise to more and more previously unknown conditions, things like diabetes. It's also important to say that not all of these witch hunts are grassroots in nature, just like springing up organically, because there are astroturfers out there too. According to the NGOs in Papua New Guinea, there are people who will go to different communities and say things like if you pay me a thousand kina, which is the equivalent of about $300, I'll tell you who the sorcerer is and who's causing the sorcerer is. sudden deaths in this community, which is, of course, a recipe for disaster and brutality.

So what can be done? Rescue and evacuation, like the NGOs and charities in the area have been doing, isn't really a solution to the problem. Yeah, it doesn't sort of fix the problem at the source. No, it's treating the symptoms. It's not the course. Precisely. And it's also like, they're just the people that find some way to get in touch with an NGO. It's completely not a solution. And to be honest, the government do seem to be a bit stumped. A senior public health official in Papua New Guinea has proposed an interesting idea, though. Public autopsies. Dr. Betty Koka is the head of Enga's provincial health department, and she reasons that the

issue of Sangamara-related violence is a huge public health risk, but posters and ad campaigns just aren't going to fix it. She says that most of the attacks are down to someone getting sick or dying unexpectedly. So, what if we gave people proof that the death had nothing to do with sorcery? Dr. Koka says the following. If they say this person's heart has been ripped out and that's why they died, okay, let's open up the person, let's open up the body and see if the heart is missing, or is it intact?

And it might seem like a really, really out there idea for the rest of us. But I get it. I get it because the things that are being believed, like Sangha, like people stealing hearts and devouring them out of living people, is also out there. So you need to tackle it with something that's just as it. extreme. You can't sort of reason with people who are, A, scared because they don't know what's going on, and B, have these deep-rooted beliefs with just sort of like telling them that there's no problem.

And Dr. Koka genuinely believes that by educating people and dispelling the myths around sorcery, it could really genuinely prevent further sorcery accusations and result in fewer attacks. Now, I don't know if the PNG Sangha Task Force will go for it. they seem very much more focused on posters. But I do think she might be on to something. I think so. I think so too. And yeah, so basically really what you need to take away from this is the reason for the rise is unequal development.

And the unequal development is coming from sudden influxes of money from China. And the problem is with money coming in from China as foreign investment is that typically when other countries invest in developing countries with money, they will make certain other social progress criteria a demand of that money coming in. So, for example, they'll say, we will invest £10 million in this nation to help with X, Y, Z, but we demand that you improve treatment of women and girls. We demand that you improve rights for LGBT people. So it will come with certain demands like that. China doesn't do that because they don't care about the human rights of an

country. They will say that they don't believe that you should impose your beliefs on another country, that other countries can do whatever they want. Some people may agree with that, but they often tend to invest within no strings attached policy. So that means that if Papua New Guinea has a decision to make between China money or somebody else's money, they'll go with China money. And that leads to an increase in unequal development across the country, which drives issues like more and more economic migrants moving within the country, still feeling very disenfranchised, and poverty will lead to more and more of this. And at the same time, there is no clear reason or benefit

for the government to attack this in any more of an aggressive way than they've been doing. Right. Because the money's not going to go away because they're not dealing with it. So yeah, bad stuff all round. And also absolutely, after Kapari's death, a lot of women's groups in PNG really mobilized and tried to get this issue sorted.

And the counterculture kickback was, of course, we're going to hunt you harder. because there was nothing else sort of supporting these women from a governmental level. Yeah. So bad times, really bad times. But that is the shorthand on Sangha. There you go. Whether you like it or not.

Yeah, exactly. And I don't. But that is it, guys. And we will see you next time for some other things. Hooray. Goodbye. Thank you.