I've seen this many times and in the big cities of every single African country that I've visited: You sit in a shared cab, you walk down a busy street or you are strolling over a crowded market and out of a sudden a butt naked man appears, screaming, dancing, beating with his flat palms onto the tops of cars, onto the ground, blood shot eyes and acting like a total lunatic. When this happened for the first few times, I was stunned by how nobody around me would show any surprise or even concern, there was no reaction, nobody even seemed to be bothered by this naked maniac, nobody would even make any kind of remark or otherwise aknowledge the presence of buttnaked crazy dude . When I asked a Guinean friend about this, he explained that these all were people who got cursed by a powerful witch doctor and that he himself even knew somebody who this also had happened to. My friend said that most witch doctors are "fake" but that there would be "real" ones that could do this to people and that all you need is a photograph of the person you want to have cursed -a strand of hair, a piece of clothing etc will also do -but most commonly a photograph is being used. If the ceremony is successful, the victim goes stark raving mad from one second to the other, leave his house or village and never come back. I had conversations about this with many Africans from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, some of which had a "Western" education who will just smile at your disbelieve when they tell you that of course, these things are real and you can even find people with medical degrees who had gone to European universities who would never denounce the possibility that these things do exist.
