Obayifo

Obayifo is the Ashanti Twi word for a person, typically a woman, said to practise witchcraft. R. S. Rattray's Ashanti (1923) describes such witches as hated and feared beings that prey on the human body.

In Ashanti Twi, according to Wikipedia, witchcraft is called bayi, and people who practised it, typically women, became obayifo. Where the word bayi comes from is uncertain. One reading splits it into oba, child, and yi, to remove, which would tie witchcraft to infant death and fertility; another links it to blood or family line.

R. S. Rattray's Ashanti (1923) mentions the witches he calls abayifo as hated and feared beings that feed on the human body and eat away at men's inner organs and hearts. He wrote that even they are remembered by the drummer, for fear that in anger they would grab his wrists and make him slip. In his earlier Ashanti Proverbs (1916), Rattray suggested the obayifo may be the servant of a power used only for evil and witchcraft, since the two terms are at times used for each other.

Cameron Duodu, writing in The Guardian in 2010 on why supposed witches are still burned alive in Ghana, reported that six people were facing a magistrate in Tema, near Accra, accused of burning a woman of 72 to death because they took her for a witch. He also described an earlier story the media had mocked: villagers said they had arrested an old woman who dropped from the sky under a tree when her witches' gas ran out while flying with her coven. Duodu writes about witchcraft accusation in Ghana generally.