Swaziland has launched a crackdown on high-flying witches after banning them from hovering above 150 metres. According to the Star newspaper, air traffic control will be monitoring the skies regularly for high-flying witches, it is not clear what will be used to bring them down if they are spotted.

Specifically the new law appears to be targeting witches. quidditch players will not be affected because they do not have to fly so high. To be fair it might also have something to do with a recent case of a a private investigator who was caught flying a helicopter equipped with a video camera to gather surveillance information. He did not use a broom but was arrested using the same laws targeting witches. 

The country’s civil aviation authorities said this week that anyone caught flying their broomstick above the height limit faces arrest and a hefty R500,000 fine.

Witchcraft is taken seriously in Swaziland where witches are not identified with the New Age cult formed in the 1940’s by a British civil servant Gerald Brosseau Gardner. The Gardner cult involves generously proportioned middle class women being worshipped as a goddess by emasculated men who like to be whipped. Swaziland seems to have a problem that people believe in witches in the same way that the Europeans did in the middle ages. They are certain that they are there and people have been killed for practicing it, but there are few actual cases where they appear to be real.

Last year a leading Swazi MP called for a hike in tax paid by witch doctors to help ease the cash-strapped country’s financial woes.