Originally Posted by
Tom Odom
One belief that continually pops up in central Africa is invulnerability through ritualistic initiation. The first time I ran into this was in looking at the 1964 Congo Crisis and the Simba Rebellion. The Simbas believed that their witch doctors could make them invulnerable to bullets, a belief encouraged by the Congolese army's penchant for shooting in the air and discouraged by Western military advisors and mercenaries penchant for hitting their targets. The West's use of contract anti-Castro Cuban aircrew in T6s, T28s, and A26s against the Simbas also did much to disabuse the Simbas (at least those who survived the initial pass) of this notion bullets could not hurt them.
It resurfaced in the post-Rwandan genocide war in central Africa. I have read accounts of the same thinking with the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and some suggestions the same thing happened in southern Sudan.
Tom
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