French footballers recount negative and positive experiences with marabouts, pastors and witch doctors

 “It was like a spiral,” said Gilles Yapi Yapo, a former Cote d’Ivoire international football star who said he was cheated out of 200,000 euros ($213,000) by a witch doctor.

“You are like a slave and it can be really damaging,” the 41-year-old said of the two years he spent under the spell of a traditional healer, or marabout.

The midfielder, who now manages a team in the Swiss second division, was “going through a difficult period” playing for the French Ligue 1 side Nantes when his uncle recommended he see a healer in Paris.

“I wasn’t really attracted by the occult,” Yapi Yapo told AFP, “but growing up in Cote d’Ivoire going to a marabout was normal, and it isn’t seen as bad as long as you are not looking to harm anyone.”

The healer said his family had been “cursed”, which was stopping him from “succeeding and being happy” and prescribed making “sacrifices to counteract the curses”.

 

Sacrificing a cock, goat or ram started at 500 euros and began to climb to “colossal sums”, he said.

Then one day it became darker, “something like black magic”, Yapi Yapo said.

“The marabout made me believe that the spirits he worked for liked me and wanted to make me rich.

“That was the bait,” he said.

– ‘Sacrifice his son’ –

The sacrifices needed to attain these riches cost “40,000, 50,000, then 60,000 euros”.

When the footballer got financially stretched, the witch doctor said “‘If he has no more money he’ll have to sacrifice his son’. I had the strength to say ‘stop’ and I never went back to him,” Yapi Yapo said.

In two years, he said he was conned into paying 200,000 euros and got “nothing positive back”.

“He knew how to put me into a spiral and I lost the ability to think clearly…”

 

The footballer said his Christian faith helped give him the strength to put an end to the hold the marabout had on him.

Some witch doctors “threaten vengeance”, he said, “so there is a fear of breaking away from them.”

The pastors

Joel Thibault, an evangelical pastor to several top athletes in France, has had to deal with the “disastrous consequences” of footballers and basketball players caught in similar circumstances.

“I know there are clubs that allow players to go to Senegal after they get injured because doctors can’t treat them. They come back and play with amulets and protection belts.”

Those who go to healers in France have told him “that when things are going less well they are told to make more sacrifices, to pay more for them, and then it spirals,” Thibault added.

 

“I see the damage… players who are depressed and who have had suicidal thoughts.”

– ‘He became like a god’ –

Another Cote d’Ivoire-born footballer, Cisse Baratte told AFP how he went through the same hell.

When he began playing for a top club in Abidjan at 16, he was told that healers could make him perform better and protect him “from jealousy”.

“I fell into the trap,” he admitted. Baratte, now 55, started by taking “showers with potions” prescribed by a witch doctor, having sacrifices made, and wearing a leather protection belt that had verses of the Koran sewn into it.

“As soon as I got injured or things weren’t going well, I would go to him. He became like a god to me… You become dependent and he took advantage of that.”

He turned to witch doctors again when he began playing in Europe in the 1990s.

“I was always injured,” he said. “The marabout said that it was because I wasn’t taking the showers with the potions at the right time or because it was cold…”

In the dressing rooms, he noticed teammates from Senegal or Cameroon also had “protection” — “perfumes” or belts under their jerseys.

– Pogba case –

Thibault said it has taken the Paul Pogba extortion case, where the French star was held against his will last year, to throw a spotlight on how serious the problem has become “with more and more money” in football.

The French World Cup winner was accused by his brother and a childhood friend of paying a witch doctor to cast a spell on his teammate Kylian Mbappe — an allegation that Pogba and the marabout denied to police.

“Players tell me that when some have anti-doping tests, doctors can’t get a needle into them until they have called their marabout… So people know about this,” Thibault insisted.

 

Several healers say they feel “stigmatised” by the headlines the Pogba case has sparked.

“The controversy has damaged our profession,” Monsieur Fakoly, a Guinean-born healer who works outside Paris told AFP. “It’s really the dark side.” People should distinguish between witch doctors “who cast spells” and healers “who help”, he said.

But as long as there are players looking for “shortcuts to success”, witch doctors’ influence on the game is “not going to stop, unfortunately”, said Yapi Yapo.

“There’s a lot of jealousy in football,” said Sheikh Issa, holding up a piece of bark and a bottle of a yellowish potion.

This is why many professional players beat a path to the African faith healer in the Paris suburbs looking for ways to ward off the “evil eye” and other afflictions.

“This is what I use to treat a player who keeps getting injured in big games,” said Sheikh Issa, whose name we have changed at his request.

He was really low and “I had to clean his star”, said the Cote d’ Ivore -born “traditional practitioner”, who claims to be able to “see both the past and the future”.

With so much money at stake, and careers that can end on a single tackle, elite sports people “regularly turn to witch doctors and to the paranormal”, said Joel Thibault, an evangelical pastor who is a spiritual advisor to French striker Olivier Giroud and other top athletes.

All this had been discreetly going out of the public eye until Pogba — whose parents come from Guinea — fell victim to an alleged extortion attempt by some of his entourage last year.

His brother later claimed Pogba paid a witch doctor to hex Mbappe, but both the former Manchester United star and the healer told police they did nothing of the kind.

The marabout said the substantial payments Pogba made to him were for “good works in Africa”.

With three out of 10 people in France prone to believe in some sort of sorcery, according to a 2020 survey, AFP has been investigating this closed world for the past year.

We discovered how faith healers are “half feared and half despised” — as one anthropologist put it — and why they hold such sway in some communities.

– ‘A gift’ –

Sheikh Issa wears jeans in the street, but when he welcomes his clients into his surgery he sports a long African boubou robe. “I don’t believe in gris-gris or amulets, I believe in the Koran and in plants,” said the 45-year-old, who also runs a cleaning business.

The tools of his trade are arranged around him in a couple of dozen bottles and plastic bags — tree bark that protects you from the “evil eye”, ground seeds that “keep you lucky”, and potions to “add sheen” and charisma to “politicians, lawyers and business people” who Sheikh Issa said come to him looking to “be loved and admired”.

Sheikh Issa got “the gift” from his mother “who read shells” and his father, who is an imam. He trained with faith healers in West Africa — where people often consult marabouts — after studying at a Koranic school.

He said his reputation took off when he “helped” a politician become a government minister. His three phones buzz constantly with messages.

“People don’t talk when they come for the first time,” he said. “I have to guess” what is wrong. Some are having trouble at home or at work, have health problems, or are looking for “the love of their life”, he said.

Claude Le Roy's experience

The legendary French football manager Claude Le Roy, who managed six African national teams, knows the problem well.

He was even threatened and branded the “white sorcerer” for driving marabouts away from his staff and players.

“Some players have a need to talk with their marabouts, it can comfort them, and it is also a link with their homeland,” he added.

 Even though he insists that “he doesn’t believe in the slightest” in their powers, Le Roy is still troubled by one incident.

In 1997, after a catastrophic away leg in the Champions League against Steaua Bucarest which they lost 3-0, Paris Saint-Germain had to win by four goals to go through.

Desperate for anything that might help, the club paid “a grand Malian marabout” 500 euros.

“He asked us for photos of the players and their numbers, and just before the home leg told us that number 18 would score the fourth goal in the 37th minute.”

PSG won 5-0, with its number 18 scoring the fourth goal in the 41st minute