Review: I Am Not a Witch

“We’re soldiers for the government and we’re used to it. We’re used to it and we don’t get tired.” In writer-director Ryongo Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch, this chant comes not from a platoon of conscripts, but from a group of women being held in one of Zambia’s witch camps. The film satirizes the real-life camps in the southern African nation, where the state confines women who supposedly possess malevolent powers. Nyoni brings to this intrinsically upsetting material a biting sense of humor—exemplified by the witches’ acquiescent chant—that emphasizes the absurdity of a situation in which an administrative state exercises control by exploiting traditional beliefs.

In the film, the witches are overseen by an official named Mr. Banda (Henry B.J. Phiri), a man who wields his government credentials as if they themselves were magic, expecting the mere mention of his position to grant him unlimited power. Referring to the women under his watch as “civil witches,” he has them perform duties for the state, including everything from harvesting crops to serving as a tourist attraction. The action of the film commences when a new witch is sent to his camp, a taciturn nine-year-old girl the witches name Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), whom locals suspect of being a witch primarily because she was standing mutely nearby when a woman tripped.

In Nyoni’s satirically embellished vision of very real conditions that play out in Zambia, the alleged witches are each attached by a long ribbon to an oversized thread spool—this because, as camp officials explain, they’re literal flight risks (as one camp worker explains to visiting English tourists: “They could fly all the way to the U.K!”). This is a rather Orwellian explanation for the ribbons, as they clearly aren’t keeping the women from flying away, but tethering them to the state. Banda takes a liking to Shula and begins taking her around Zambia to conjure rain, settle disputes, and even appear on television—with ribbon-spool in tow, of course. She’s even invited into Banda’s house, where she meets his wife, Charity (Nancy Murilo), a former inmate of the camp. Charity advises her that the way to survive is to give in. Marrying a government official, it turns out, is one way to lose the ribbon.

Shula isn’t happy with this arrangement, and she doesn’t even respond to Charity’s well-intentioned advice. Although she never articulates the film’s title sentence, Shula grows truculent, silently refusing to play along with Mr. Banda’s attempts to turn her into a national attraction. Mulubwa carries the film as the sullen young witch, making Shula an empathetic figure even while uttering relatively few lines. Her performance is aided by Nyoni’s deft melding of tones. I Am Not a Witch alternates between the distanced perspective necessary for irony to be effective and the intimacy needed to underline the tragedy of Shula’s situation, but the film never feels uneven. It finds that rare nexus of the comic and the tragic, underlining the absurdity of a terrible situation without demeaning those who have been harmed by it.

Intriguingly, I Am Not a Witch arguably leaves open the question of whether Shula is actually a witch. (The young girl correctly pegs the identity of a petty thief without the aid of evidence, and she seems to be able to at least guess when rain is coming.) The focus of the film is, then, less on the legitimacy of the belief in magic and more on the way that belief is exploited to control women’s lives. In its depiction of English tourists oblivious to the fact that they’re visiting a prison camp where a nine-year-old girl is being held against her will, I Am Not a Witch also offers an implicit critique of the all-or-nothing cultural relativism of the Western tourist. One can cry out against sexism, Nyoni’s film proves, without being a cultural chauvinist.