Scarred … Janet Kemo was attacked by a gang of men for supposedly dabbling in sorcery. Credit:Brendan Esposito To prevent this, Kapi and his helpers camp nearby with their bush knives and home-made guns. "If any animal comes near the grave, we shoot it," he says. They only guard the graves for the first week after burial. "After that the body stinks too bad, so the sangumas don't like it." Kapi shows me his gun, pieced together using hessian strips, metal pipes and a steel spring. It can shoot only one bullet at a time, meaning that if you miss, the sanguma invariably get away. "But it doesn't matter," Kapi tells me. "Sometimes we shoot the sanguma in the eye or the leg or neck, then if the next day we see a man missing an eye or with cut from a bush knife, then we know he is the sanguma." "But how do you know for sure?" I ask.

Ordeal … Janet Kemo at the scene of her horrendous torture. Credit:Brendan Esposito "We know," Kapi replies. "So what do you do?" Wearing the pain … Dini Korul shows one of the lasting signs of her shocking ordeal. Credit:Brendan Esposito "We kill him."

"Have you done this yourself?" On a mission … NZ-born PNG resident Father Philip Gibbs. Credit:Brendan Esposito "Yes, plenty," Kapi says, nodding. "We tie him up and burn him up, in public. We burn him alive." Witch-hunts went out of style in Europe some time in the 1700s. But in PNG, where 80 per cent of the population still lives in the bush and even city folk believe in black magic, such violence is increasingly common. According to PNG's Constitutional and Law Reform Commission, the Highlands province of Simbu alone experiences 150 attacks a year. In one of the most recent deaths, in February, a 20-year-old Mount Hagen woman named Kepari Leniata was bound and gagged before being set alight on a pile of car tyres. Leniata, who had been accused of eating the liver of a six-year-old boy, was killed in broad daylight, before hundreds of witnesses. (Two people have been charged over the murder.) Reports of her death made headlines worldwide, grisly dispatches from a country that appeared to be sliding backwards in time, towards a past most people assumed long gone. Give peace a chance … founding member of Kup Women for Peace, Mary Kini (at left), with Monica Paulus. Credit:Brendan Esposito

"Sanguma - also sometimes referred to as sorcery or witchcraft - is all over PNG, but it varies from place to place," New Zealand-born Catholic missionary Father Philip Gibbs, who has lived in PNG since 1973, tells me at his home in Mount Hagen. "In some areas, like Port Moresby, the sorcerer can be a respected individual, a bit like a local policeman. In other areas, people simply sacrifice a pig to appease bad spirits." But it's amid the jungled slopes and chilly mists of the Highlands that the most virulent superstitions have persisted. Steep and remote, both spooky and forbiddingly beautiful, the Highlands represent the archetypal PNG, a "lost world" of hidden valleys and blue-green peaks, of gorges and waterfalls and prehistoric flowers. Highlanders are famously volatile and invariably well armed: virtually every male over the age of two carries a bush knife or long-handled axe. They also possess what Gibbs describes as a "pre-Enlightenment, or Biblical, world view ... They don't believe in coincidence or accidents. When something bad happens, they don't ask what did it but who did it." All of which explains - or partly explains - what happened to Janet Kemo. Kemo lives in a mud hut on the outskirts of Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province. A gnomish woman with wrists like twigs, she never went to school and cannot read or write. She does not know her own age, though suspects she might have been born after independence, in 1975. In 2011 she was the second wife of a man called Kemo Fogodi, who became ill with what turned out to be tuberculosis. When Fogodi began coughing up blood - a sure sign of sorcery - Kemo was accused by her husband's family of using witchcraft to kill him. Early one morning, while her husband lay helplessly ill nearby, she was hauled out of bed by a group of 15 men, one of whom tied a chain around her neck. She was then dragged 800 metres up a muddy track, through a forest, and tied to a mango tree, where she was tortured for 12 hours. "The men used a hammer to smash my teeth and break the bones in my hands," Kemo says. "They chopped my face and head and burned me with iron bars that they had heated in a fire." They also cut the tendons in her wrists and carved a cross in her chest with their bush knives. Kemo was blindfolded but recognised the voice of her husband's nephew, Junior Taweta. "Junior asked me, 'Janet, you drank the blood from your husband, when are you going to give it back, so that our uncle can have his life again?' By this stage I was only barely conscious, but I said, 'Junior, I'm not a witch! I'm a child of God!' "

In the end, Kemo was cut down and left for dead. A woman from the village helped her to the main road, where she was picked up by a passing bus and taken to hospital. After four days in care, six of her assailants came charging through the ward and attempted to forcibly remove her. "They wanted to put me in a sack and throw me in the river," she says. "But the senior doctor threatened to call the police and they ran away." After two months, Kemo was released. She returned to her home, but there was nothing left. The house had been burned, her gardens razed. Her prize pigs, "Bigboy" and "Abade", were gone, as was her beloved guard dog. She later found out that her attackers had eaten it. Convincing police to pursue cases like Kemo's is notoriously difficult (Taweta was arrested and spent seven months in jail before being bailed out by relatives for 500 kina - $222. He has not been back to court.) This is not only because PNG's constabulary are scandalously understaffed and hopelessly corrupt, but because more often than not they also believe in witches. Indeed, sorcery is formally recognised by PNG law, in the 1971 Sorcery Act, which provides for people committing acts of witchcraft to be charged and put in prison. The act has been criticised by human rights groups for providing the perfect cover for score settling, an excuse, essentially, for people to attack women. (Last month, PNG's Law Reform Commission recommended repealing the act.) Most of the victims of such attacks are women, frequently widows who had previously married into a clan from a different region - a common practice in PNG - and lack local support networks or grown sons to stand up for them. In a country where the status of women is somewhere between food dispenser and farm implement, the threshold for accusations can be laughably low. Women are targeted on the basis of rivalries, grudges and jealousies, on the basis of dreams and half-remembered stories, or on what people say when they are sick or delirious. They are targeted if they are old, ugly or deformed, if they are sick or greedy or "too successful", or if they grieve too much (or too little) at a funeral. In one case, observed by Philip Gibbs, relatives of a boy who had died accused an elderly widow of witchcraft after remembering that she had been looking for lice in the boy's hair shortly before he fell ill.

Not surprisingly, Highlands funerals, or haus krais, are highly charged affairs. It's not unusual to find women prostrate on the road, clawing at the dirt in agonised displays of grief. If the deceased died suddenly, talk invariably turns to sorcery, with a glasman or mambu man brought in, usually from outside the area, to identify the guilty party. Glasmen, who can be paid handsomely for their services, are, in essence, black-magic consultants; they use bowls or glasses of water into which they gaze until the faces of the witches magically appear. (Mambu men perform the same service, only with a piece of bamboo, or mambu.) They are powerful figures, all care and no responsibility. "The glasman looked into the water and made clear to us who did the witchcraft," a man who claims to have taken part in an attack on a witch near the town of Goroka tells me. "But then he said, 'It's up to you what you do next.' " In the past, suspected witches tended to be killed quickly, in secret, and often at night. "They might have been chased off cliffs or thrown into caves," Gibbs says. Now, they are often tortured, in public and during the day, by groups of men who inflict a peculiarly sexualised violence upon them, thrusting red-hot iron bars into their vaginas and abdomens, causing irreparable damage. This was the fate of Dini Korul, who was tortured by five men in a pigsty after her 23-year-old son, Bobby, died of a stomach ulcer in 2010. ("I remember saying to them, 'Why would I kill my own son? I raised him!' " Korul tells me.) Korul somehow survived, after spending 10 months in the hospital in Kundiawa, the capital of Simbu Province. Today she is a physical and psychological wreck; her genitals and stomach remain disfigured, her body braided with scars and welts. "Every time I see the scars it reminds me of what happened," she says. The sexualisation of the attacks perplexes people such as Gibbs, who suspects it has to do partly with an influx of violent pornography and partly with the "sex antagonism", or inbuilt misogyny, that has long characterised life in the Highlands. He also points out that the sanguma's kumo - its evil power - is commonly said to reside, in the form of a small creature, in the womb or vagina. For this reason, sorcerers are seldom raped - a small mercy if ever there was one.

Few societies have collided with modernity quite so hard and fast as the Highlands of PNG, where the first white explorers, many of them Australian, only began appearing in the early 1930s. The transition that followed, "from stone to steel in one generation", would have been traumatic for any people, but for a nation as fractious as PNG, which has more than 800 separate languages, the result has been a cultural car wreck. Town life, television, the predations of "civilisation" and consumer culture, all have proved wildly destabilising, a situation that has, in combination with a lack of education and opportunity, actually heightened the allure of magic. Magic is not only an explanation in today's PNG, it's an excuse, a weapon, and a strategy. Men appeal to marila (love magic), to explain their adultery; others use it "to get an advantage, in business or getting elected or raising pigs", Nick Schwarz, a researcher at the Melanesian Institute in Goroka, says. "It's not really seen as cheating, but as a legitimate performance-enhancing agent." Some also use it to rub out their rivals. "There is a person called the posin man [from the pidgin word for poison], which is basically like voodoo," Schwarz explains. "You take something that resembles another person, an essence of that person, a bit of their clothes, say, or a bit of their shit, and you put it in the fire. The most potent bodily substances that you can use are blood and semen, because they contain the life force." Sanguma lore has similarly flourished, spinning off into ever wilder and more arcane territory. Sangumas are said to have their own "parliament of witches" at Mount Elimbari, a sheer, pyramid-shaped limestone peak between Goroka and Kundiawa. They are thought to operate in regional hierarchies, with kumo kings and queens who plan mob-like "hits" and approve, when necessary, the restoration of stolen body parts. They are also tech-savvy, increasingly using special "kumo guns", "kumo helicopters" and "kumo jets", plus powerful hand-held lights that allow them to see at night. What strikes the first-time visitor to PNG is the complete absence of scepticism with which locals talk about all this: sanguma is believed, unquestioningly, by virtually everyone you meet. Sitting on a bus from Goroka to Kundiawa, I get talking to a polite and well-spoken man named David, who teaches English and history in a nearby province. David is visiting his mother in Kundiawa. When he discovers my interest in sanguma, he decides to give me a crash course. He explains how, in order to obtain their evil power, sangumas must first kill one of their own family, invariably their own son or daughter, and how their power is then passed down through families, from generation to generation, almost like a vocation or a hobby.

"My granddaddy's third meri [wife] was a sanguma," David tells me, smiling. "But he realised and he said to her, 'Don't pass on that sanguma to my family or I will chop your neck off.' So it was all right in the end." He also explains how it is regrettably necessary to torture them, "you know, cut them, burn them, otherwise they will never admit to be being witches". The village of Kup is about two hours' drive from Kundiawa. The journey there, which I take with a local human rights worker, Mary Kini, and her colleague, Monica Paulus, is like a Third World version of a Wild Mouse ride - sheer ravines, rickety bridges, raging rivers. Everywhere you look are mysterious vapours, low cloud and exotic plants, like the pandanus tree, with its giant, red, phallus-like fruit. There's also lots of coffee, the area's main cash crop, and home-grown tobacco, great sheaves of it, like elephants' ears, drying in the sun. Kup is Kini's home town. Her group, called Kup Women For Peace, is largely focused on addressing the sanguma issue, and rescuing women who have been attacked. Neither Kini nor Paulus get paid for their work, which, in the absence of any formal, state-based response, is pretty much all that vulnerable women in this area have to rely on. Kini has invited us to Kup to talk to a local woman called Nakandip Tom, a glasmeri (a female glasman) who has recently gone rogue, accusing every second woman in the village of being a sanguma. Given the potentially deadly consequences of such an allegation, Tom is regarded with a mix of fear, apprehension and outright loathing. What Kini wants to do is talk to her, to get her to put a lid on it and stop stirring up trouble.

When we get to Kup, however, Tom is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a village court has been convened on the main road. Scores of people stand about in the sun, munching on raw peanuts and sticks of sugar cane. Old women huddle in the shade of umbrellas. The court has been called to adjudicate an adultery case; apparently the wife of a man named Kai has been sleeping around. Kai isn't happy about this, and is making his displeasure loudly known. As it happens, Kai's wife has also been accused of sanguma by the crazy glasmeri. Not only that, but - as we later learn - Kai has a long-running monetary dispute with Kini, who he claims underpaid him for work he had done on a local agricultural project. When Kai vandalised the project in retribution, Kini reported him to police, who forced him to pay compensation. When Kini shows up, Kai loses it. He begins screaming and yelling, stalking off then rushing back to thrust his face at Kini and scream and yell some more. No one seems to know what to do. Suddenly, without warning, he picks up a "kopi stik", the trunk of a coffee tree sharpened at one end, like a spear. He goes to spear Kini with it, only pulling back at the last moment. Kini remains calm and almost bizarrely nonchalant, as if to show him that she isn't to be intimidated; that she regards his histrionics as primarily for public consumption. Then, just as the situation seems resolved, Kai walks behind Kini, winds up like a baseball batter and lets rip, belting her with the stick from side on. The bulk of the blow falls on Kini's forearm (breaking it, as we later discover at hospital). To my surprise, she doesn't cry out or scream. She just winces, then wilts, melting onto the road like a stick of butter on a hotplate. We quickly help her back into the car. There is more screaming. Some men are waving bush knives. A fat guy with a sweaty face comes up to the window and apologises for Kai. We leave. Suffice to say, we never meet the glasmeri - events have taken over. And yet, in a way, this seems appropriate. After all, the problems surrounding sanguma are not simply about sanguma. They are about precisely the kind of fury and fear we have just witnessed in Kup; about confusion and anger and culture and history, about lots of other things that aren't about to go away any time soon.

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Lead-in photograph by Brendan Esposito: James Kapi (opposite at left) with fellow witch-hunters. Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events – www.facebook.com/GoodWeekendMagazine