Essay by Eric Worrall
In Africa, if someone claims to have magical abilities and takes your money, then the magic doesn’t work, things can get serious.
Africa’s rainmakers still in demand but face challenges from climate change
By AP
UGANDAAfrican rainmakers have long been revered as spiritual leaders who perform rituals to bring rain, with the role often passed down through generations. But climate change is raising expectations they cannot meet, leaving rainmakers increasingly blamed for drought — and in extreme cases, killed by mobs.
…
For generations, communities across Africa have revered spiritual leaders known as “rainmakers,” who perform rituals to call for rain.
The role is often passed down through generations, with the rainmaking spirit believed to enter members of particular clans.
But with increasingly erratic weather, the rainmakers are becoming victims of their own reputation.
Across parts of sub-Saharan Africa, farmers who depend on rainfall for their livelihoods are placing enormous expectations on those believed to have the power to summon it.
And when the rain fails to come, some rainmakers are paying the ultimate price.
In South Sudan, which borders Uganda to the north, at least two rainmakers have been killed in the past few years.
In 2024, Solomon Oture was buried alive in the remote village of Lohobohobo during a dry spell. In June, in a southeastern area facing a prolonged dry spell, men abducted a rainmaker named Albino Lobillia and buried him alive.
…
Read more: https://www.africanews.com/2026/09/15/africas-rainmakers-still-in-demand-but-face-challenges-from-climate-change/
I’m sorry people are getting hurt, but frankly if you tell desperate people you can save them and take their money, and your claims turn out to be false, you can understand the victims of your fraud becoming a little upset.
Imagine if that money had been spent digging wells or drilling water bores instead.
Troughers ending up in the trough . Karma .
Wake up, climate cultists !
Once a climate cultist always a climate cultist- like most other fundamentalist religions.
Exactly.
I spent years debating with friend I grew up with. They were raised Catholic, then turned to southern baptist. Hard core, Earth is young, no evolution, etc. One, who really did study his new faith- told me that only 35K people will make it to heaven. I suggested that means God is a failure, right? He said, no because the rest deserve to burn in hell for eternity. God is just, he said.
I’ve never heard that one JZ, especially from any Baptist denomination. Sounds like a fringe sect.
Closest I’ve seen is Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe that 144,000 people will get into heaven.
They gave me books written by the Creation Institute in Texas- which gave the idiotic story of the Earth being young, no evolution, etc. I almost fell for it. So, just to check, being a born skeptic, I went to my alma mater book store and bought every textbook used by the geology department. Then I realize how that Institute created that fable, using technical terms too. They had a guest speaker one day at that church. A handsome guy – looked like a Harvard professor- who said the layers in the grand canyon formed all at once after the flood, as the sediment settled down. He was very convincing, and the flock all nodded their heads in agreement- not having a clue.
Young-earth creationism is much more prevalent than limited entry into Heaven. The best “explanation” I’ve heard is that God created adult animals and humans, so why not a mature “old” earth?
At least that explanation doesn’t dismiss things like sedimentation.
But in my experience, even young-earth creationism is fairly rare.
Somewhere, Charles Hatfield is laughing.
Which doctors..?
Perhaps you meant witch doctor?
He wrote it in crayon, he doesn’t know what he means.
Let’s see. The basic concept is to get the human population down to 100 million, or so our “experts” claim is the necessary goal.
So, 2 down, 7.899998 to go.
With apologies. Bad form, bad taste to make humor of someone’s death.
Too bad Trans-Reality Activists are not viewed with the same gender-identity as those revered spiritual leaders. Yes, we have our version known as Net Zero Activists.
With apologies. Bad form, bad taste to make suggestions that could lead to people dying.
Let us hope Greta is safe from the mobs.
Population Matters / The Optimum Trust:
Optimum Trust Spreadsheet
Never mind that the sub-Saharan is greening due to increased CO2. The propagandists love the easily duped who lack the critical thinking skills to see through obvious false narratives.
“Greening puts ShaManns out of business.
AGW kills jobs of Africas most prolific climate experts.”
NYT
gyan1
I do not support that narrative for the Sahel, attractive though it obviously is. A better reason for the recovery rests in a restoration of traditional dryland farming practises and in forestry regulation changes:
CO2 and the rainfall rebound after the 1980s droughts are real. They don’t explain the map. “Sub-Saharan greening” is mostly the Sahel; humid West/Central Africa is still losing forest.
A lot of the extra trees on cropland are Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration: living stumps keep sprouting; farmers keep 1–5 stems, prune the rest to a leader, and farm around them. No nursery saplings are used. Coppice from old roots beats planted seedlings in that climate.
The switch was tenure. Under colonial-style forest codes the state owned the tree on your field, so every shoot was a weed. Once farmers could keep the wood (Niger’s 1993 Rural Code; 2020 decree), protection paid.
Niger: ~5–7 million ha of densified parkland, on the order of 200 million trees regenerated, not planted. Gains cluster near villages, not as a uniform CO2 blanket. Extra grain often cited ~+100 kg/ha. Rain and CO2 help, but these natural inputs didn’t rewrite the forest code or prune the stems.
Only about 10% of the Sahel is farmland. The measured greening has been attributed to CO2 which makes plants more drought resistant.
Ten percent (or ~15% in the 200–600 mm belt) is not a rebuttal. Nobody said FMNR is the whole Sahel NDVI signal. Most of the belt is rangeland; rain recovery after the 1970s–80s droughts is still the main regional driver. Hickler et al. already had CO2 as a minor term for 1982–98. Later work still gives rainfall the interannual swing and lets CO2 add some water-use efficiency and a woody edge over grass.
That is a different claim from “the measured greening has been attributed to CO2.” Attribution papers split the signal. Woody leaf mass has risen faster than grass. On cropland, tree-cover gains since 1999 cluster next to villages and in Maradi/Zinder FMNR districts — 9.2 million ha of cropland with a significant gain; about 12% of all Sahelian trees sit on farms. CO2 does not stop at the village fence.
Drought resistance from higher CO2 is real. So is a farmer who owns the stem and stops slashing it. Both can be true. The second one shows up as a patch, not a blanket.
It is good to see both sides of the issue discussed, maturely.
In my experience on the ground, the Sahelian tree recovery was driven by a large and sustained (30 years) tree planting campaign. Every single tree in the cities (and there are a lot) was fenced with a little circle of chain link. A large number of the trees planted in Niger, for example, are Melia Azadirach which is not native to the region. They grow well, are extremely drought resistant, grow to huge dimensions and are a relief to sit under. The seeds are the source of Azadirachtin which is used in modern pesticides. They are more useful in many ways than the weedy, slow growing Acacias.
The evidence of greening is everywhere, however no one mentioned the 65 year drought cycle. The peak drought was in 1983, and there were all sorts of sob stories about how the desert was expanding (because of us, naturally) and goats were blamed (as usual). Following that peak, the desert limit has moved north about 500 km (which is a long way) and things now return to “normal”. This will inevitably be followed by a receding line in the sand which will peak sometime around 2050. This will (of course) be blamed on us (again) and whatever population of goats lives in those days (of course).
What we know from history suggests that if the world really is warming at least a little, the Sahel will move further and further north as the Hadley cells warm, and more rain will fall in the Sahara Desert. At +3 degrees the Sahara will revert entirely to grassland as it was ~6000 years ago. This could happen before we sink into the next ice age, but its not looking good at the moment.
Well, here in the U.S. at least one state, Florida, has outlawed weather modification!
“Senate Bill 56 repeals the state’s ability to issue permits for geoengineering and weather modification.”
Source:
https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-celebrates-action-protect-floridians-chemical-and
So I’m pretty sure no one will be “buried alive” for a failed attempt in the Sunshine State.
That is all for now.
Oh dear.
We are doomed.
If one cannot be permitted to modify the weather, one cannot arrest climate change. /s
Now for a completely serious post.
“For generations, communities across Africa have revered spiritual leaders known as “rainmakers,” who perform rituals to call for rain.”
Often such individuals hold high status within a tribal community, often with benefits.
The article does not clarify if that is the case. It seems likely, but it is unknown. Some rainmakers reportedly charge a fee.
The article does not address if the tribal community held a tribunal or if the chief rendered the verdict. Nor do we know the tribal laws that may have been relevant to these 2 instances. Perhaps it was seen as fraud. Perhaps theft. Perhaps both. Perhaps it was viewed as the individuals were possessed by evil spirits.
The manner in which this was presented makes it seem it was the equivalent of a lynch mob taking care of a snake oil salesman. Maybe it was. We do not know.
It is possible it does fall within tribal customs to some extent.
But we do know that Climate Change (oh the horror) can do anything.
Those 2 died from Covid(the vaccine actually) .
Nobody has died from the vaccine.
Mice are people too.
Only if they self-identify as such
VAREs data disagrees .
VAERS
COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with a range of adverse events (AEs) (Rosenblum et al., 2021; Yasmin et al., 2023). These AEs include serious conditions that may lead to hospitalization, life-threatening illness, or death (Diaz et al., 2021; Woo et al., 2021; Patone et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2024). Numerous studies have examined vaccine safety using diverse data sources (Newbern et al., 2025), and many types of AEs have been reported during the global COVID-19 vaccine campaign. For example, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) was significantly associated with the Janssen vaccine (Marcucci and Marietta, 2021), a finding that contributed to its discontinuation. Meanwhile, other vaccines were also reported to cause other concerning AEs, such as myocarditis linked to the mRNA-based Pfizer-BioNTech Comirnaty (i.e., BNT162b2) and Moderna Spikevax (i.e., mRNA-1273) (Patrignani et al., 2021; Ahmed, 2022; Goddard et al., 2022; Naveed et al., 2022; Wong et al., 2022). Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) has also been identified as a severe side effect of COVID-19 vaccines (Sadowski et al., 2025). Indeed, these three AEs (myocarditis, thrombosis, and GBS) have been consistently recognized as key concerns in post-vaccine safety monitoring (Guo et al., 2022) and warned about by the CDC and FDA (MacNeil et al., 2021; Oliver et al., 2022; CDC, 2025; Pan et al., 2025). Meanwhile, many other severe AEs such as acute kidney injury, seizure, and death have been frequently reported and studied (Pan et al., 2024; CDC, 2025; Pan et al., 2025).
Using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) (Dayan et al., 2005),
Of course.
The “vaccine” that was rushed out within 9 month
is also the 1st vaccine nobody died from.
Considering that the Pfizer vaccine had an about 12500% higher adverse effect rate than a swine flu vaccine that never got an approval – because of a too high rate of adverse effects.
How likely do you think it is that your claim is true??
Especially when we have several different companies with, therefore different vaccines.(yet all of them went the MRNA way// all of them had this remarkable breakthrough at the same time to cut vaccine development time by more than 90% – how were longterm studies even possible?// All of them knew somehow that MRNA therapy will be rebranded vaccine the way the Ice Age became global Warming// all of them had never-seen-before giant capacities to produce on a global scale ).- miracle after miracle after miracle? or you took too many vaccines?
Have you heard about the new kind of white blood clots that didn’t exist prior to the vaccine?
In football/soccer there is usually only a handful of active professionals on the planet who have scored 400+goals.
How likely is it that 2 of them(Kun Aguerro,Aubameyang) get cardiac problems at the same time?
Haven’t you observed an increase of cardiac and cancer related issues amogst your relatives and friends?
Funny as even in the small trials from, for example, but not only Phyzer, there were deaths. Or is the data from Phyzer incorrect, and are all those studies from countries like England also all false?
Who is “Phyzer”?
Substitute “fi” for “hy” and acknowledge the possibility of a typo.
(Note: “Phyzer” is also the title of an electronic/ambient song released by the artist Eroir on his 2021 album Incisor.)
I know what he meant. I don’t acknowledge a typo, I acknowledge laziness.
https://worldmetrics.org/covid-vaccine-death-statistics/
Oh really?
https://worldmetrics.org/covid-vaccine-death-statistics/
They died from being buried alive.
Horrible way to go.
I wonder if these two fellows were itinerate, staying one step ahead of the clients, so to speak. Until they didn’t.
A possibility, of course, except the referenced article states that Rainmakers were children of Rainmakers were children of…. Sort of a hereditary thang.
I can think of a few lines of work that can be passed down in the family, without them being tied to one place.
Those possibilities are endless, of course.
In a tribal society, it is often hereditary.
I have no way to validate that hypothesis one way or another other that the article lends credence to the hereditary aspect.
Africa needs a lot less magic and a lot more education just like all the world. The climate cult is into magic as well, the skammers leading the pack need to be eliminated just like the ones in Africa.
This sort of superstition is one reason most African countries are still third world.
Third world has achieved an undeserved derogatory meaning.
Originally:
First World US and the WWII Allies (mostly western Europe, Australia, and Canada).
Second World: Soviet Union and Communist affiliates (China, etc.).
Third World: Everyone else.
I have a sneaky suspicion that this falls in the category ‘climate justice’. But hey, the rainmakers of the Americas are savvy enough only to dance if there are clouds.
Well, you have Wilhelm Reich with his cloudbusting machines.
You don’t need no dancing rainmakers anymore.
These types existed in Texas during the 1950s drought, best I recall shooting cannons which attracts sharks, but not on land except on TV. Serious drought did eventually stop from a huge 1957 spring flood, requires clouds.
We were taught a “rain dance” in elementary school.
I went home and danced for my Mom.
It rained.
Only time it ever worked. LOL
Don’t these witch doctors qualify for climate science professorships at Penn?
Not without M.Mann approval.
‘Monsoon‘ or Rainy Season, the term never appears herein.
Killing a rain sorcerer because you paid him for rain and he didn’t deliver, even without the global warming aspect, is a real dumb and dumber contest.
The alarmists must be right that CO2 is an evil molecule.
How else do you explain that the Rainmakers’ magic worked at 280 ppm, but that magic no longer works at 428 ppm?
Well, they could always hire a water witcher. Same efficacy as the climate models. <sar>
A water witcher has a random statistical chance of success.
But a 100% chance of taking your money.
Idiots still believe scammers but now turn violent when the scammers fail.
True throughout history.
Snake Oil Salesmen for example.
I wonder how the multiculturalists would feel about adopting the superstitions of the Sudanese to venerate rainmakers and, ahem, “fire” them when they don’t succeed. Come to think of it, I don’t see any practical or philosophical difference between faith in Sudanese charlatans who think they can modify the weather and gullible belief in Western ones who think they can predict and prevent global climate change. At least the Sudanese are practical enough to rid themselves of their false prophets.
But they don’t get rid of the premise. They just get new false prophets.
Anybody have any recent reports about the Native American rainmakers? Since Obama gifted a huge fraction of the landmass to the “indigenous owners”, how are their crops doing in comparison with agribusiness?
Any irate executions there?
I wish I could say I was concerned for the welfare of the high priests of climate warriors, but the likes of Gore, Mann, etc., have taken the public’s money, caused untold damage to young lives, and the world economy, so I really don’t give a toss what happens to them when this house of cards comes falling down.
I have a climbing partner that when we go up into the mountains, it rains. I accuse him of being a minor rain god. He says, “No, you are the rain god”. Too bad, neither of us can exploit our GAIA talent, and per Douglas Adams, live a new unimaginably better lifestyle.
I am not sure I trust these rainmaker claimants. Everyone in Eswatini knows that when the Dlaminis invaded the area and eventually reached Mbabane and Mbuluzi Falls, the Mdluli Clan rain maker had the only amulet that enabled anyone to create rain, which he did almost continuously in the Falls area. When he realized the Dlaminis were after it, he swallowed it. The Dlamini warriors killed him and extracted the amulet from his stomach. This is well known history. It has since been in the possession of the Ngwenyama of the AmaSwati people (in English he’s called the King.) I am not sure anyone in Sudan has such an amulet. If so, historically, it seems they don’t know how to use it.
That said, American mathematician David Garcia-Andrade witnessed a group of about 5000 dancing and chanting traditionally dressed warriors causing it to rain for a few seconds in the middle of dry season in the early 70’s. The occasion was the Kings Birthday, 22 July.
He asked what they were doing and they said when the Ngwenyama comes, it must rain because he is the nation’s rainmaker. David replied that it was mid-July and the blue sky was cloudless. They replied they realized that, so they were going to have to pray to make it rain. Hours later, around 1 PM the entourage arrived and as the Ngwenyama stepped out of his limo, a tiny cloud that had moved over the parade ground rained on him with a brief shower about 100 ft in diameter. Very shortly after it started, it stopped and the event continue in bright sunshine.
They told him what they were going to do, and they did it. He said that in the bus on his way back to Hlatikhulu he “…had to re-think his entire world view.”
Cool story bro. Is a rain shower that small even possible?