Six years ago, Akua Denteh, a 90-year-old woman from the town of Kafaba, was killed after being accused of witchcraft. A crowd beat her to death on July 23, 2020, after she was accused of using witchcraft to prevent rain from falling in the area. Footage of the attack spread across the country within hours. The killing drew public condemnation and renewed calls for Parliament to act.

Pattern of Accusations

The accusation that led to Denteh’s death did not materialize on its own. A priestess blamed her for a run of misfortune in Kafaba, including a poor rainy season. Researchers describe a consistent pattern: droughts, crop failures and unexplained illness create pressure to assign blame. That blame tends to fall hardest on vulnerable women who are older, poor, widowed, living with a disability or otherwise without someone to defend their claim to land and property. Once people make an accusation, it compounds that existing vulnerability, stripping a woman of her home and income on top of what she has already lost.

Exile as an Alternative

For the women who survive, exile is often the alternative to death. Across northern Ghana, hundreds of people accused of witchcraft live in settlements commonly known as witch camps, after being banished from their communities or fleeing because they feared further violence. More than 97% of residents of such camps report an extremely low quality of life.

Political Spotlight

Denteh’s death pushed an old, deeply rooted practice into the political spotlight, and Parliament responded. Three years later, in July 2023, members of Parliament passed the Criminal Offences (Amendment) Bill, commonly known as the Anti-Witchcraft Accusations Bill, which would make it a criminal offense to accuse, name or label another person as a witch. It would also outlaw witch-finding, the rituals through which priests, priestesses and other self-styled witch-finders identify supposed witches, and it proposed a route toward protection, justice and compensation for victims.

Presidential Assent

However, Parliament’s passage did not make it law. President Nana Akufo-Addo did not give the bill his assent. According to reports, his objection centered on a constitutional and procedural question: the bill had originated as a private member’s bill, and his administration argued that the government should have introduced legislation carrying financial implications for the state rather than individual MPs.

Continued Efforts

For the women in the camps, the distinction between Parliament passing a bill and Ghana having a law was not abstract. Without presidential assent, the proposed criminalization of witchcraft accusations did not take effect, while women already displaced by accusations remained in exile. The fight has now returned to Parliament. In July 2026, five MPs from the same group that sponsored the original bill reintroduced it, again as a private member’s bill. Government ministers have separately signaled interest in taking up the legislation, and Amnesty International Ghana has appealed to President John Mahama to certify it as urgent. Whether that support translates into the government formally sponsoring the bill, or into presidential assent this time, is still an open question. The procedural issue raised over the 2023 bill — its status as a private member’s bill with financial implications — has not yet been definitively resolved.

Building Pressure

Outside Parliament, pressure has been building too. Amnesty International Ghana, ActionAid Ghana, Songtaba, Oxfam and the Sanneh Institute have formed part of a coalition pushing for the bill’s passage. Campaigners have traveled to the camps, gathered testimony from women living there and taken their demands back to Accra. Their petition has attracted almost 19,000 signatures.

Future Challenges

This is no longer simply a story about whether MPs agree that witchcraft accusations are wrong; they have already voted on that once. It is a story about what it will take to convert that agreement into an assented law, and about what happens next if that finally happens. The first bill did not fail because Parliament rejected the women it was meant to protect; it stalled over a procedural dispute about how the bill was introduced. Whether that obstacle has genuinely been cleared this time, or will resurface, remains to be seen.

Even if Parliament passes the bill again and it receives assent, a harder question will still be waiting: what happens to the women already living in the camps? A law can make a new accusation a crime. Reintegrating women who have already been displaced, rebuilding a lost home, restoring lost land, repairing a relationship with a family that still believes an accusation, persuading a village that a woman it once feared is safe to welcome home is a separate, longer undertaking that legislation alone does not resolve. That is the implementation gap between passing a law and closing the camps.

And it is where Akua Denteh’s story, six years after her death, leads next: not back to the village square where she was killed, but into the corridors of Parliament, where Ghana’s lawmakers have another chance to decide what happens after her death.

– Alana Breslin

Alana is based in London, England and focuses on Global Health and Politics for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr