Family Curses: What is Essential to Know!

Questions on Family Curses Answered
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
Is there anything like a family/generational curse? Some people say that in family x, all members are drunkards etc
Before we delve deeper into this question, we have to understand what is meant by a curse. A curse simply put is defined as the opposite of a blessing. But such a definition is so simple and would easily make some to easily label anything bad a curse. The English word “curse” has obscure origins, but the etymological dictionary suggests that it derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “wrath”. It is commonly defined as harming others through demonic intervention. Curses invoke evil, and the origin of all evil is demonic. There are four different but not independent forms of curses:
(i) Black magic or witchcraft or satanic which rites have a common characteristic to obtain a curse against a specific person through magic formulas or rituals by invoking the demon, but without the use of particular objects. Whoever devotes himself to these practises becomes a servant of Satan through his own fault. The word of God forbids these practises: “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, weaver of spells, consulter of ghosts or mediums, or necromancer. For anyone who does these things are detestable to Yahweh your God; it is because of these detestable practices that Yahweh your God is driving out these nations before you”.
(ii) Curses: when curses are spoken with true treachery especially if there is a blood relationship between the one who casts them and the accursed, the outcome can be terrible. The most common instances mainly involve parents or grandparents or uncles who call down evil upon children or grandchildren. The most serious consequences occur when the evil wish is against someone’s life or when it is pronounced on a special occasion such as birth or wedding. This is so because the authority and the bonds that tie parents to their children are stronger than any other person’s. A parent has a very strong bond of kin with his/her children. Here, we have to consider the instances in which parents do curse their children with the effect that children do carry that parental curse with them all through their lives. This may be damaging to their lives since all that characterise their lives may be failure and misfortune. This type of curse may become generational because parents may pass on such a curse to their children and their children’s children for generations to come. Here, we have also to think of instances where parents consecrate their children to the family spirits or to the devil for protection. In such instances, a child is already given up to the devil and to the demonic powers and they will always have to reclaim him/her as their own. This means that such a consecrated person has to be available in service to the powers to which he has been consecrated and any failure to recognise them may turn out to be fatal to the life of that person. Such a person may experience devastating experiences in life as a reminder that he belongs to the realm of the devil. Parents have to be careful when performing certain rites on children as this could turn out to be a curse for generations to come in the life of that individual. This is the origin of the generational or family curses. But curses are so broad that a curse may assume different characteristics, according to the end that is desired. For instance, it may be called “divisive” if it intended to separate spouses, engaged couples or friends. Another type of curse may be “infatuation” which is used to lead someone to “fall in love”. Other curses are called “illness” because the target will always be sick. The so called death curse is named destruction.
(iii) Evil eye: This consists in a spell cast by looking at someone. The evil eye is a true spell, in other words, it presupposes the will to harm a predetermined person with the intervention of demons. In this instance, the wicked deed is achieved through the sense of sight. Many times the perpetrators of the spell are not known nor how it began.
(iv) The Spell (also known as malefice or hex): This is the most commonly used means to achieve evil. The name in Latin means to do evil, that is, to make or manufacture some object with the most diverse and strange materials. This object has an almost symbolic value, it is a tangible sign of the will to harm, and it is offered to Satan to be imprinted with his evil powers. There are two distinct ways the spell is applied to the designated target. The direct way consists of mixing the object that is used for the spell into the victim’s food or drink. As mentioned earlier on, this is manufactured with the most diverse materials; it can be menstrual blood, bones of dead people; various burned powders, mostly black; animal parts – the heart seems to be the favourite; peculiar herbs and so on. But the evil effectiveness is not so much in the material used as in the will to harm through demonic intervention. This will is manifested in the black magic formulas that are chanted while mixing this material. The Indirect way consists in putting a spell to objects that belong to the target – photographs, clothes or other belongings- or figures that represent the accursed: dolls, puppets, animals, even real people of the same age and sex. This is called ‘transfer material’ and it is struck with the same ills that are intended for the victim. A doll is very common example: during the satanic rite, pins are stuck all around a doll’s head. As a result, the victim suffers from intense headaches as if pins are in ones head.


In Greek mythical tradition, the family curse is presented as a punishment inflicted by an angry god on the descendants of an individual who has offended that deity. The curse, although a legacy from the past, is also a destiny, and involves prophecies of what is to come. It has the power to overrule any potential individual development, rendering the person a mere vehicle for the unfolding of the curse.
The first known example of the word occurs in the 11th century: Goddes curs, the wrath of God. A curse is thus something inflicted by a wrathful deity in response to human wrong-doing. Its roots lie in the past, but it predetermines the future. Most people do not think in terms of their families being cursed, whatever difficulties they experience like repeating generations of broken marriages, alcoholism, sexual and drug addiction, suicide, financial ruin, and functional diseases, however much these patterns are deeply disturbing in their consistency and precision.
When we read the scriptures we realise that the whole of creation is under a curse or bondage from God for having fallen through the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Again the letter to the Romans states that, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God,” (Rom. 8:20-21). Hence, we would define a curse in the context of original sin as that which God brought on all creation. But outside the context of the Original Sin we would end up labelling every bad thing in our lives a curse. For instance, persecution, trials of faith, every sickness, every failure, every accident, every type of poverty, carrying the spiritual cross, and so on would all be labelled curses. Outside the context of Original Sin a curse, from a biblical perspective, is any undesirable matter that emerges from an utterance, statement, pronouncement, and invocation, oral or written vocabulary that expresses ill will or misfortune to an individual, animal or objects. What distinguishes a curse from other unpleasant matters is in its expressive. It needs to be uttered whether verbally or in writing. It’s not just a bad thought, feelings of anger or hatred towards someone. Curses are not telepathic or psychical. Neither can curses be received through a dream, vision, apparition, or any spiritual phenomena. They can only be expressed in the physical or earthly realm, not spiritual realm. We could agree that until such mental or any spiritual phenomena are physically uttered whether verbally or in writing they cannot result in a curse. The expressed words, whether spoken or written, do not constitute curses on their own. They’re cursing words but they are not curses in the real sense. In general language we say someone spoke cursing words to another. However, in reality the words themselves are not curses. It’s what emerges or results from the words that constitute curses.

The nature and characteristics of curses
The nature and effects of a curse can be any type of unpleasant matter. This does not mean any type of unpleasant matter is a curse. It only implies that a curse can come in any form or characteristic that is undesirable.
It can be characterized by any one or more of the following: affliction, nuisance, hardship, pain, grief, despair, misfortune, punishment, condemnation, sentence, scourge, torment, torture, terror, toil, bondage, deformity, abnormality, payback, hindrance, difficulty, stumbling block, interference, holdup, predicament, confusion, chaos, and so on – anything unpleasant. But as said earlier, not all unpleasant or undesirable matters are a result of a curse. A curse is only a subset of various categories of unpleasant and undesirable matters.
There are five conditions for an ill-will or misfortune to operate as a curse on a person
1. Curse words need to be outside the Original Sin or the fallen nature.
Curse words from God are outside the Original Sin or the fallen nature of which the individual innocently inherited from Adam. The book of Deuteronomy has a snapshot of God’s curse words for people walking in disobedience. Here is an example of God’s words of misfortune on the disobedient: “You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off,” (Deuteronomy 28:38-40).
2. Curse words need to be specifically addressed to an individual. Curses are always specifically addressed to an individual. In this case a curse needs to have a source who is the originator of the curse, and who expresses the curse to an individual. There are only three sources that qualify to curse: God, people and the individual himself or herself. Being specifically addressed to an individual means curses on people are not random. They do not just happen by chance, or by bad luck, or accidentally occur on a person. Like mail curses have an address where they are sent to. It is to the person, people or entity they’re addressed to that curses will affect. We have seen that the curses God pronounced in the book of Deuteronomy did not just randomly apply to anyone. They were pronounced on those who fell in the category of the disobedient. Thus anyone walking in obedience was automatically spared from the curses. A person walking in obedience was actually entitled to God’s blessings.
3. Curse words need expression through two avenues: speech or in writing. Curse words or statements of ill will or misfortune, need to be uttered whether verbally or in writing by the source directed to an individual. A mere mental wish of ill will or misfortune cannot result into a curse.
4. Curse words need a person deserving or having grounds to receive it. For every curse word to have any effect on an individual it needs to find a person having one or both of the following factors: (a) A person in a position of deserving it. Deserving it implies a person did something wrong intentionally or ignorantly and the curser (source assigning the curse) is justly proclaiming punishment and holding the person accountable for the wrong. (b) A person having grounds or a legal doorway to receiving it. Having a legal doorway to receiving a curse implies a person is not directly responsible or accountable for a wrong but has a liability for it. He/she has an avenue of access for a curse to bear fruit. This liability poses as a risk factor. Liabilities include having not received the gift of salvation and walking in sin. Walking in sin also opens grounds or legal doorways to receiving curses in some areas. The major source of curses from walking in sin is God (curses from God). Self-imposed curses can also have an effect on a person since walking in sin creates grounds or legal doorways for various negative matters. St. Paul cautions us thus: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps whatever he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit will reap eternal life,” (Galatians 6:7-8).
5. Curse words need to go through God, the ultimate Gatekeeper of words. The word of God is clear on this: “To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue,” (Proverbs 16:1) and “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails,” (Proverbs 19:21). God cannot be forced into action by proper wording or ritual. Thus a curse could not be used capriciously as a weapon against one's personal enemies.
From all the above, we can deduce that there’s a family or generational curse in a certain family if members of that family do conform to the above conditions that merit to term their situation as being cursed. But we cannot precisely state that such and such a family or members of such and such a family are cursed. We may not have the proper instruments for measuring such curses. That’s why we need to approach an officially appointed exorcist to help us determine our fate. In the Catholic Archdiocese of Kampala, UGANDA, we have Rev. Fr. Dr. Dominic Mwebe Bakipapankulawa currently Parish priest of Nansana Catholic Parish on Hoima Road, who is the officially appointed Archdiocesan Exorcist. His contacts could be provided on request!

Ugandans Humiliated by Poverty and stripped of Dignity

Poverty Humiliates Ugandans and are stripped of Dignity

Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto

In this treatise on poverty, I want to argue why I say so! A fundamental dimension of poverty is the inability to adequately feed oneself and one’s family and to meet other basic requirements such as clothing, housing and healthcare. There is broad agreement that poverty occurs when someone experiences a fundamental deprivation – a lack of some basic thing or things essential for human well-being. Intuitively, most people think they can recognise poverty – hunger, malnutrition, worn clothing, unwashed bodies, run-down housing or no home at all, begging, lack of access to clean water, primary schooling or basic health services, and so on. But this apparent consensus is considered deceptive because there is no objective way of defining poverty. The way that poverty is conceptualised is inherently about value preferences that vary between individuals, organisations and societies. Until the 1990’s, poverty was considered mainly in ‘material’ terms – as low income or low levels of material wealth. But other factors like vulnerability and multidimensional deprivation especially of basic capabilities such as health and education have been emphasised as key aspects of poverty. Indeed poverty is rarely the result of a single factor. Instead, combinations of, and interactions between, material poverty, extreme capability deprivation and vulnerability often characterise the chronically poor. On the other hand, poverty is not a static condition. This implies that the dynamics of people’s poverty changes, or does not change, over time. Nevertheless common to the poverty situation, is that poor people commonly experience several forms of disadvantage and discrimination at the same time.
The above consideration of poverty provides us with a background to initiate our investigation into its relationship with human dignity in the Ugandan context. In a situation of poverty an individual is reduced to a peculiar scenario since one is unable to supply oneself with all the basic material necessities of survival. The most distressing representation of poverty is that of the long term poor who are not economically active because of health, age, physical and mental disability. With this group, there is no obvious remedy for the causes of their poverty. Then, there are those who are economically active but unable to escape poverty because of the terms of their employment, their lack of access to productive assets or social barriers that mean they are discriminated against. Poverty renders its victims to the fringes of society and makes it thorny for them to participate equally in the opportunities, which are prevailing. So poverty is a form of injustice and “the poor are victims of injustice.” If this is the case, then there is a deliberate disregard for their humanity and an abuse to their dignity. In the Uganda’s development discourse, the poor are framed as part of the problem, lacking the level of economic activity to drive through the transformations required to move Uganda out of being a ‘backwards’ -agricultural economy. In a speech attributed to the President of Uganda, which aimed at articulating the government’s underlying project of development, Museveni argued that most of the 85 percent Ugandans engaged in the agricultural economy “are stepping on top of each other and not doing anything useful.” This is practically the same as saying that the poor are not worth existing, they are just good for nothing beings and a burden to the nation of which they are the principle components and hence a burden to themselves.
In addition to the above, one of the fundamental questions, which is distressing, is about the causes of poverty. According to the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-5, a group of disabled Ugandan women stated that, “Obwavu obumu buba buzaale. Abaana babuyonka ku bazadde baabwe, ate nabo nebabugabira ku baana” meaning that – some poverty passes from one generation to another as if the offspring sucks it from the mother’s breast. But this is a common belief among Ugandans and we can attribute this to the fatalistic mentality, which is a common anthropological ingredient in our society. Paulo Freire would characterise this as “semi-intransitive consciousness, that is, a mode of consciousness which cannot objectify the facts and problematical situations of daily life.” He assumes that men whose consciousness exists at this level of quasi-immersion lack what we call ‘structural perception’, which shapes and reshapes itself from the concrete reality in the apprehension of facts and problematical situations. For Freire, lacking structural perception, men attribute the sources of such facts and situations in their lives either to some super-reality or to something within themselves; in either case to something outside objective reality. If the explanation for those situations lies in a superior power, or in men’s own natural incapacity, it is obvious that their action will not be orientated towards transforming reality, but towards those superior beings responsible for the problematical situation, or towards that presumed incapacity. Therefore, it is not hard to trace here the origin of the fatalistic attitudes men adopt in certain situations.
Nevertheless if we consider the men and women’s perceptions of the causes of poverty in Uganda, we recognize a number of reasons, which are at the same varied. I have preferred the women’s explanation, which I suppose, is more representative of the reality on the ground. Women have ranked the key causes of poverty as the following. One, Ignorance, defined as a lack of knowledge; doing things, which are not helpful, and an inability to communicate the necessary information, for instance to husband or to wife. As a result people do not use their assets well. Two, laziness, defined as people who do not want to work. They are able, they have the knowledge, they aren’t stupid, but they don’t want to work. An example would be someone who has land, but instead of cultivating it, rents it to obtain money for alcohol or despite having their own land they do casual work to get quick money for alcohol. Three, drinking, that some people just get up to drink. Four, education, that is, most of the youth do not have skills so they spend their time drinking and then gang up to break into homes. The women link the lack of education to polygamy as the husbands concentrate on one wife and her children and the others are neglected and not educated. The girls are sentenced to marriage. Other reasons given are, theft of animals and crops; lack of cooperation within families, polygamy, poor soil fertility, variable climate, sale of household assets by husbands and decline in farm-gate prices. Men on the other hand discussed mostly the meso-level causes of poverty.
This state of affairs carry complicated repercussions for the individual human person and the wider social setting. According to a survey carried out in the health institutions it is claimed that patients are left to die in Mulago hospital. The report details the plight of the six-year-old Sadat Mangeni lying in agony and pain at the Cancer Institute in Mulago Hospital suffering from a heavily swollen cheek and deformed jaw. His father with seven more children had to sell all his cows to save the life of his child and as a consequence his other children had to drop out of school because of the expenses incurred on Sadat’s treatment. This is because the full dose needed to save the boy’s life reportedly costs between Shs3 million and Shs5 million (that is between 1500 and 2500 Euro) and the family cannot raise it. The report gives other appalling instances, for example, Lukiya Nakiwala, 17, was admitted to the hospital suffering from kidney cancer. Her parents failed to raise Shs3 million (about 1500 Euro), to buy the requisite drugs and going by the doctor’s advice, she went for the only free available alternative – radiotherapy with its adverse effects that she went into comma and re-admitted to the hospital. Other cases involve patients like Solome Banura, 16, suffering from leukaemia and her condition demand a dose of cancer drugs worth Shs300, 000 after every two weeks, but her parents cannot afford it. Some patients need drugs that range from Shs70, 000 to Shs100, 000 just for a start. And other patients recount their dreadful experiences in health institutions that even after one has spent Shs3 million to buy drugs from Nairobi, he could not get a doctor to administer the drugs on him. The high mortality and morbidity rate in Uganda can be attributed partly to poverty because many people are unable to get the necessary medical attention, given that they have no financial means to access the same. The only feasible alternative is to resign to God’s mercy. And again it has been reported that “Patients who cannot afford their own drugs from outside pharmacies are either neglected or pushed out of the hospital.” This is a precarious situation for the poor and the United Nations believes that “overcoming human poverty will require a quantum leap in scale and ambition: more nationally own strategies and policies, stronger institutions, wider participatory processes, focussed investments in economic and social infrastructure, and more resources, domestic and external.