On Thursday 2nd September, the Islamic Enlightenment Society, also known as Iskaat, which was established in June 2017 purposely to propagate the true teachings of Islam, embarked on destroying jujus on baobab trees in different regions within the kombos. They started this initiative after attending a burial ceremony of one of their colleagues in fajikunda cemetery and saw some jujus on the ground.

Imam Abdallah Fatty, an erudite Islamic scholar was present at the scene and seized the opportunity and commented on the danger of amulets/jujus and the video went viral.

The president of the organization Kabiro Fafa Dampha,  said some marabouts came out debunking claims that they make such destructive jujus: “So we decided to go back to the scene the following day, and ripped them open and showed it to the people. Afterwards, many people suggested to us that there are many baobab trees in which these jujus are buried, so we went to the baobab tree at the Tallinding riverside to remove jujus buried in it.”

Mr Dampha said, “they were motivated to initiate the juju destruction because they’ve all passed through the majlis, according to him, he had spent over 10 years in the Majlis and was taught about the marabouts stuff.

He affirmed that they were also indirectly involved in the act, “we were also involved in burying these jujus back in the days when we were learning there, because they used to send us to do so. We did not know what it was all about. It is said that if you’re into things you didn’t  know were sinful, then later realise that it is, you should quit immediately, turn a new page and ensure to spread the message of its danger to the people.

“Removing these jujus is very helpful to the society, because we have received information from people even though we do not have any concrete evidence to ascertain this, that they knew some individuals who were mad and had gotten well after we started these activities of removing jujus from trees, and in fact, we could by chance remove the jujus of certain individuals who are still alive and have been inflicted with black magic. Black magic is completely forbidden in Islam, and the ruling on the person involved in practising magic, is that he is beheaded if it’s in a Shari’ah state.”

Kawsu Marong, the aged man in charge of the school near the baobab tree said, he has been working at the place for almost 2 years,  but the condition in which he found the place was really horrible.

“WhenI observed how frequent people were coming here to do things like black magic by means of nailing and tying their jujus, and burying some, and this place was a complete thick bush, because of that, I cleared it all, and stood firmly to stop anyone who wants to install such evil things. People come here frequently, like how busy a marketplace is. They don’t actually have any specific time of coming to this place, because it’s very lonely here and people barely see them while burying their bad stuff. Alhamdulillah that people are not coming here anymore after I have succeeded in stopping them. And in my opinion, if they were doing something good, they shouldn’t have been hiding themselves from the people while doing such acts.” Kawsu added.

They have been to six places so far to remove and destroy these jujus. Kabiro Fafa Dampha went on to deny the fact that they have been involved in digging graves to remove jujus. He further stated that they in fact would not know where exactly the jujus could be, unlike the “Batutas” who work with the devils to give them information about such things or they could even bury the jujus there for them, so that they will come later to exhume them. “But if we have any reliable information that there are jujus buried in a particular grave, we would go there to destroy them. But we haven’t yet gone to any graves to remove jujus.”

“We do not have any support from the state, but we definitely would need the state to intervene and empower us in order to be able to go anywhere we want and also provide us with some facilities to enable us to carry out our activities effectively.”

“We do not face any challenges from settlers of various towns and villages we have visited so far, but we know there would of course be oppositions from some settlers where these acts are highly predominant. They may want to stop us from carrying out our activities, that we do not have any rights to touch their trees, but we have not faced any such opposition so far.”

Claims that we are involved in martial arts because we are terrorists, is completely false, but rather, we only do martial arts for self defense purposes and it’s a sport that is practised globally. In fact, we are very peaceful people and rarely involve fighting. It’s hard to find any one of us involved in fighting. And we are not extremists and has never encouraged that at all.” Kabiro concluded.

Ebrahim Senghore, Lamin Jammeh and Muhammed Jammeh all emphasized the viciousness and danger of evil black magic.

By  Fatimah Sonko