Sanguma

In 1985, the American anthropologist Bruce Knauft published the results of his fieldwork among the Gebusi people of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. He had traced family histories across 42 years. His finding: almost one in three adult deaths among the Gebusi were homicides. Of those homicides, 86% were related to sorcery accusations. The Gebusi had one of the highest rates of internal killing documented anywhere in the ethnographic record, and they did not consider it murder. They considered it justice.

“For most Gebusi,” Knauft wrote, “it wasn’t murder to execute sorcerers. Rather, it was a proper way to dispense with persons who were believed to have used killing to compromise community good.”

The Word

Sanguma comes from the Monumbo language, spoken inland near Bogia in Madang Province. The original word was tsangumo, meaning “violence by means of magic.” As it entered Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, it broadened into something that functions as noun, verb, and identity at once. A person can be a sanguma. A person can do sanguma. A person can have sanguma inside them. The word covers the sorcery, the sorcerer, and the spirit-creature that inhabits the sorcerer’s body. This triple meaning is not imprecision. It reflects how the belief system works: the creature, the practice, and the practitioner cannot be separated.

The Creature Inside

In Simbu Province and the Eastern Highlands, where the belief is most deeply rooted, the specific form of sanguma is called kumo or ghumo. A kumo koimbo is a person possessed by the spirit-creature.

The kumo takes the form of a rat, bat, frog, snake, or flying fox. It lives inside the host’s body. At night, while the host sleeps, the kumo leaves and enters a victim’s body to consume internal organs. It favors hearts, but any organ will do. It can suck blood, leaving the victim pale and weak. The victim may walk and talk for days after the attack, appearing normal, before collapsing and dying. The community interprets any unexplained decline as evidence of kumo activity.

The kumo is hereditary. It passes from parent to child or grandparent to grandchild. It can also transfer to anyone who touches a kumo-person’s head or hands. This means entire families fall under suspicion across generations.

The detail that makes the belief system so dangerous: the host may not know they carry the creature. The kumo “compels and controls the kumo koimbo to do things he would not otherwise do if he were not possessed.” A person can be a sanguma without awareness, without intention, without choice. This means anyone can be accused. The accused cannot prove innocence because the accusation describes something operating below consciousness.

The Accusation

An unexplained illness or death triggers the process. The death of a prominent or wealthy person generates the most intense response.

A glassman is summoned. The glassman is a diviner who claims the ability to see or detect sanguma practitioners, sometimes by interpreting the smoke of burning bamboo, sometimes through trance. The glassman identifies the alleged perpetrator. The system operates under what scholars describe as a presumption of guilt rather than innocence. Once the glassman names someone, the community acts.

The accused are not random. They follow a pattern documented by anthropologist Philip Gibbs across police records in Simbu Province from 2000 to 2007: elderly women, widows without powerful male relatives, outsiders who married into the clan, people who display unusual behavior, and women who have prospered in ways that generate jealousy. In Gibbs’s data, accusations were split nearly equally between men and women, but hospital admission records showed 67% of injured survivors were female. Women face more severe violence when accused.

Confessions emerge under torture. Philip Gibbs documented a case where a 45-year-old church leader was tortured with heated iron rods. She died without confessing. In other cases, people confess hoping their torturers will kill them quickly and end the pain.

The Violence

This section names real people. They were killed because their communities believed in sanguma.

On February 6, 2013, in Mount Hagen, Western Highlands Province, a 20-year-old mother named Kepari Leniata was accused of causing the death of a six-year-old boy who had died the previous day. She was stripped, tortured with a hot iron rod, bound, doused in gasoline, and set on fire on a pile of rubbish. She burned for approximately thirty minutes in front of hundreds of witnesses. Both PNG national newspapers ran front-page photographs. The US embassy condemned it as “brutal murder.” Amnesty International called for prosecution. As of 2022, no one had been brought to justice.

On May 7, 2021, in Hela Province, a woman named Mary Kopari was accused of sorcery following a boy’s death. She was tied up and burned alive. The attack was recorded on video. Police knew the identities of the attackers. No arrests were made.

On July 21, 2022, in Enga Province, a trucking magnate named Jacob Luke died, likely from a heart attack, while walking in the bush. Nine women were accused of kaikai lewa (“eating the heart”). Five of the nine died from their injuries. Four survived.

An estimated 700 people are tortured or killed annually in Papua New Guinea over sorcery accusations. Between 2000 and 2020, approximately 3,000 people were killed. Only 91 out of an estimated 15,000 perpetrators have been imprisoned. Dickson Tanda, the Catholic Church’s coordinator for sorcery accusation-related violence, has rescued over 600 women and children since 2015.

The Law

Papua New Guinea’s 1971 Sorcery Act, enacted just before independence, attempted to manage the problem by criminalizing “evil sorcery” while acknowledging the belief. Its most consequential provision: it allowed a witchcraft allegation as a legitimate defense in murder trials. A person who killed an accused sorcerer could argue the killing was justified, reducing their sentence. The Act gave legal cover to the killers.

The Kepari Leniata case forced a reckoning. In May 2013, the PNG government repealed the Sorcery Act. Simultaneously, a new provision was added to the Criminal Code: any person who kills another person on account of a sorcery accusation is guilty of willful murder, carrying the death penalty.

The repeal has not stopped the killing. The Sorcery National Action Plan, developed in 2014-2015 from conferences involving government, churches, civil society, and academia, was approved by the National Executive Council on July 21, 2015. According to reporting by Al Jazeera in 2022, it was “announced but never funded.”

The Spread

The belief is not declining. It is spreading into regions where it did not previously exist.

Enga Province had no recorded sorcery accusation attacks before 2010. The concept of kaikai lewa (“eating the heart”) arrived through intermarriage and frequent travel between Enga and the neighboring Simbu and Jiwaka provinces. Police described its spread as “like wildfire.” A common language, Tok Pisin, allows concepts that were once confined to single language groups among PNG’s 800-plus languages to travel nationally.

Facebook accelerates the process. Research from the United States Institute of Peace (2024) found that roughly two-thirds of comments on sanguma-related posts advocate for violence. Images and videos of torture are shared virally. As rural PNG connects to digital infrastructure, populations with limited media literacy encounter sensationalized accusations alongside detailed calls for torture and murder.

Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which have grown rapidly across PNG, play a documented role. Their emphasis on spiritual warfare, deliverance from evil spirits, and the reality of demonic possession aligns with and reinforces existing sanguma beliefs rather than displacing them. Richard Eves of the Australian National University has documented this dynamic in Simbu Province. In a country that is 96% Christian, the oldest fear and the newest faith have found common ground.

The Pattern

The organ-theft belief connects sanguma to figures documented thousands of kilometers away. The Albasty of the Turkic world steals the lungs or liver of new mothers and flees toward water. Lamashtu of Mesopotamia caused miscarriages and kidnapped nursing infants. In Cameroon, Bangwa witches are born with an extra organ that compels them to drain blood. Among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania, each witch inherits a python in their stomach that drives them to consume human flesh. The kumo of the PNG highlands functions almost identically to these African parallels: an internal creature, hereditary, operating below conscious control.

The social dynamics mirror the European witch trials with uncomfortable precision. Unexplained death triggers accusation. Marginalized individuals are targeted. Confession is extracted through torture. Execution is framed as community protection. Legal systems either enable the violence or fail to prevent it. Michele Stephen, editing Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia in 1987, sought to free PNG scholarship from African-derived theoretical frameworks while acknowledging that the parallels are real and structural.

Reo Fortune, who lived with the Dobuans of the D’Entrecasteaux Archipelago in 1927-28 and was initiated into their magical practices, described a society where “darkness, the possession of property, and food from another’s hand are pregnant with danger.” He published Sorcerers of Dobu in 1932. Ninety years later, the danger has not diminished. It has found new platforms, new churches, and new provinces to enter. The kumo has not been killed. It has spread.