Malawi faces “ticking time bomb” as witchcraft killings and impunity rise

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the targeting of elderly people on accusations of witchcraft constitutes one of the continent’s most persistent and poorly monitored human rights crises.

Tanzania, Zambia and Ghana have each confronted it in different ways, with limited success. In Malawi, the crisis is intensifying.

In the first four months of 2026, 11 elderly people were killed over witchcraft accusations, according to data compiled by the Malawi Network of Older Persons Organisations (Manepo).

That figure is on track to exceed the 22 deaths recorded across the entirety of 2025. More than 300 elderly Malawians have been killed on witchcraft charges since 2015, Manepo executive director Andrew Kavala said this month.

His words were specific: “This is alarming.” What makes this a governance story, not merely a cultural one, is the gap between Malawi’s formal commitments and its institutional performance. 

The country passed a landmark Older Persons Act in May 2024. Its social protection grants remain unbudgeted. Its oversight body has not been constituted. 

And the colonial-era Witchcraft Act of 1911, which has never been meaningfully enforced, is being considered for reform in a direction that human rights organisations warn could make conditions for the elderly significantly worse.

Manepo’s annual data reveal a pattern that is not cyclical but structural. Thirteen elderly people were killed in 2021, 15 in 2022 and 25 in 2023. In January 2024 alone, six elderly people were killed. 

Manepo documented a 68% rise in reported attacks and abuse of older people between 2020 and 2021. By September 2024, it reported that 18 elderly people had been killed and 123 had faced various forms of human rights abuse during the year.

The pattern is documented but largely unpunished. In March 2023, Manepo stated that none of the 72 witchcraft-related killings recorded over the two preceding years had been tried and concluded in court.

Kavala described the underlying institutional failure in direct terms: “Uncoordinated responses at various levels of [the] justice administrative system and absence of structured community support systems continue to make Malawi one of the worst countries for one to grow old.”

One case illustrates the mechanics. In late December 2023, Eliza Supuni, a 78-year-old woman, was bludgeoned to death near the town of Mulanje in Malawi’s southern region.

The perpetrators were her three grandsons, aged between 19 and 23, who attacked her with metal bars and stones. Police confirmed she died from internal bleeding caused by fractured ribs on the right side of her body.

The accusations of witchcraft had been circulating after one of her sisters died from complications during a caesarean section. Health authorities described that death as natural. The three grandsons were arrested and face a murder charge, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Malawi’s primary instrument for managing witchcraft-related violence is the Witchcraft Act of 1911, a colonial statute that takes a rationalist approach. The law does not recognise the existence of witchcraft and instead criminalises the act of accusing another person of practising it, punishable by a fine and up to five years in prison.

In principle, this should provide protection for the elderly. In practice, it has rarely been enforced. The enforcement deficit is structural. Rights organisations have documented that law enforcement officials themselves frequently hold witchcraft beliefs, creating a culture in which accusations are treated as legitimate grievances rather than criminal acts.

The Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation (CHRR), one of Malawi’s most established human rights bodies, reiterated its call for urgent review of the 1911 Act.

CHRR executive director Michael Kaiyatsa and the Centre for the Development of People director Gift Trapence stated that their organisations had documented more than 60 witchcraft-related killings in just two years.

The cultural substrate reinforcing this enforcement failure is significant. An April 2022 Afrobarometer survey found that three in four Malawians, or 74%, believe “in the existence of witchcraft”. More than six in 10 said that in their communities, elderly people are most often associated with witchcraft.

Counterintuitively, educated citizens were more likely to hold these beliefs than those with no formal education: 82% compared to 71%. This distributes the problem far beyond the rural poor, complicating assumptions about the root causes of violence.

On 5 April 2024, Malawi’s national assembly passed the Older Persons Act. Former president Lazarus Chakwera passed the law on 19 May 2024 and it was published in the Government Gazette on 31 May 2024.

The law establishes age-based anti-discrimination protections, measures against elder abuse and violence, community care frameworks and monthly financial grants for people aged 70 and above.

The law’s operational record since 16 September 2024, when it formally came into force, has been one of near-total non-implementation. The 2025/26 national budget made no allocation for the elderly persons grant. The national steering committee on older persons mandated by the Act had not been established as of April 2025.

The Ministry of Gender’s spokesperson confirmed that disbursement of grants was “awaiting resource allocation from the Ministry of Finance” without providing a timeline.

Manepo, which championed the law, noted that it was “actively engaging donors to secure the necessary resources for implementation”. Law lecturer Andrea Manda of the University of Malawi, speaking at a seminar on access to justice for older persons, described the situation with measured precision.

“We, as a country, have the 2024 Older Persons Act, which seeks to promote the rights of the elderly. However, it is clear that there is a lot that needs to be done to ensure that they are actually enjoying these rights,” Manda said.

The absence of a functioning social protection framework is not incidental to the witchcraft crisis. Elderly poverty is structurally significant: fewer than 5% of elderly Malawians receive any pension benefits, according to a HelpAge International report.

More than 70% of the total population live on less than $2.15 a day, according to World Bank data compiled prior to the bank’s June 2025 revision of the international poverty line.

Following that revision, the World Bank’s October 2025 poverty and equity brief placed

Malawi’s poverty rate at 75.4% of the population living below the updated $3-a-day threshold.

Economic precariousness intensifies community anxieties around misfortune and misfortune in Malawi’s cultural context is frequently attributed to witchcraft.

Against this backdrop, the Malawi Law Commission has advanced a set of proposed amendments to the 1911 Witchcraft Act that are generating serious concern among rights groups. 

The Special Law Commission finalised its review and recommended that Malawi recognise witchcraft’s existence in law and criminalise its practice. The proposed penalty structure includes a maximum of 10 years for practising witchcraft and a death penalty for those convicted of killing through it. 

Commission chairperson Justice Robert Chinangwa argued that the current law’s failure to acknowledge witchcraft has contributed to mob justice. Critics dispute this logic. 

In a joint statement, CHRR and CEDEP argued that criminalising witchcraft would be “highly problematic” because it would extend legal legitimacy to beliefs that are already used to justify violence against the elderly.

The Catholic Church’s Episcopal Conference of Malawi has separately warned that witchcraft recognition in law risks victimising innocent people, noting that poverty and economic envy, rather than supernatural behaviour, are the proximate drivers of accusations.

Father Alfred Chaima, secretary general of the Episcopal Conference, observed: “There seems to be a strong link between poverty and witchcraft beliefs as you can see that most cases come from rural areas where most people struggle economically.”

The Ministry of Justice was seeking further consultations before drafting a new bill as of 2023. No timetable for parliamentary introduction has been publicly confirmed.

The witchcraft accusation problem is not unique to Malawi, but the combination of acceleration, impunity and regulatory vacuum distinguishes its current trajectory.

In Tanzania, elderly women in the Sumbawanga area have faced witchcraft-related killings documented across decades. In Zambia, similar patterns of mob violence have been recorded, with traditional healers and accusation networks embedded in community structures.

Malawi’s situation nonetheless presents specific governance dimensions. The country has ratified regional and international human rights instruments that create obligations to protect older persons from violence.

Humanists International delivered a statement to the UN Human Rights Council’s 52nd session in 2023 specifically identifying Malawi’s legislative trajectory on witchcraft as a risk factor, noting that extending legal recognition to witchcraft would increase stigmatisation and normalise impunity.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had published a report on witchcraft- related violations that same year.

Andrew Kavala’s assessment, delivered as the 2026 figures were compiled, frames the structural problem without ambiguity. The country, he said, is “sitting on a ticking time bomb”.

This article was made possible by a partnership with the Centre for Investigative Journalism Malawi