"Witchcraft and Sorcery"

"Witchcraft and Sorcery"

Terms like "witchcraft," "sorcery," and sorcellerie are now generally used throughout Africa to indicate occult forms of aggression. The adoption of these Western terms has specific consequences. Especially important is the strong pejorative tenor of these terms, while the local terms which they are supposed to translate are often much more ambivalent: the latter refer to forces that in many situations are viewed as evil but that also may be used constructively. The general use of Western terms like "sorcery" and "witchcraft" therefore risks reducing a rich cosmology, in which the whole of the human environment is animated, to a negative, ugly core. Often a more neutral translation, such as "occult forces," would be preferable. However, terms like "sorcery" and "witchcraft" are now so generally used--by "Radio Trottoir" (i.e., gossip) and in newspaper accounts and discussions of development and politics as much as in local affairs--that it is difficult for social scientists to avoid them.

Another disadvantage of these Western terms is that they gloss over all sorts of local variations. There are important differences between local discourses, for instance, on the description of witches and their abilities and on how "witchcraft" is transmitted. Sometimes it is believed to be inherited; sometimes it is thought to be acquired later in life. Yet, there is a common core to these representations. A basic theme is that misfortune--and often also spectacular success--are attributed to hidden human agency. Witches and sorcerers are believed to use secret forces to hurt other people or to enforce their own success.

Witchcraft and sorcery are therefore closely related to jealousy, inequality, and the illicit search for power. Such ideas are, of course, not special to African societies; rather, they seem to reflect a basic fear that may be universal. Indeed, the strong popular reactions triggered by rumors of sexual child abuse in the West, or the recourse to esoteric expertise--be it of astrologers or public-relations experts--in the politics of modern democracies, show intriguing parallels with the responses to and reliance upon witchcraft in present-day Africa. The same applies to the flowering of all sorts of spiritualist cults, for instance, in the newly industrialized countries of East Asia. However, some traits seem to be particular to witchcraft in Africa. One is the heavy stress on the link between witchcraft and kinship in many African societies; another is the equation of witchcraft with eating. A basic image that haunts people in many parts of Africa is that of witches--both men and women--leaving their bodies at night and flying off to meet with others of their kind. At such meetings they deliver their kin, whose vital parts are often supposed to be consumed during cannibalistic banquets. In many African societies, the basic urge of witches is thought to be the eating of kin.

Since these discourses emphasize the use of hidden forces, there is always a close connection between witchcraft, sorcery, and divination. If one fears becoming the victim of a hidden attack, one has to look for the help of a specialist who is able to "see" what the witches have done and can force them to lift their spell. The diviner who "sees" and the counter-sorcerer who attacks the witches may be one and the same person or can be two different people. The conceptual triangle of bewitching/divination/countersorcery highlights the circular character of most witchcraft discourses. Only specialists can offer help, since they alone know their way in the world of the occult. The diviners must be able to "see" the witches, which means that they are themselves implicated. In many Bantu societies, acquiring "a second pair of eyes" is seen as the first step in one's initiation into the world of the witches.

Similarly, the power of the witch doctor to vanquish witches and force them to lift their spells is believed to derive from his or her own exceptionally developed witchcraft. Witch doctors are often described by the population as "superwitches." This makes them highly ambivalent figures. In the case of southern Cameroon, for instance, authors like Lluis Mallart and Elizabeth Copet-Rougier refer to a vague but widespread belief that one can become a nganga (healer, witch doctor) only by sacrificing a parent. Nganga themselves always emphasize that their "professor" has made them swear to use their power only in order to heal, never to kill. But the population is never sure of this: there is always the danger that the basic urge of the witch to kill his or her kin will break through. It is especially this circular reasoning characteristic of witchcraft discourses--the main protection against the witches is to be found in the world of witchcraft--that makes it so difficult to break out of these conceptions. This can also explain why these ideas seem to retain their relevance despite modern changes.

The inherent circularity of witchcraft discourses can also explain why the scientific distinctions that anthropologists and other social scientists have sought to apply in this field remain highly precarious. A good example is E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic distinction between witchcraft, which he defined as an innate quality often unconsciously activated, and sorcery, which he understood to be the conscious use of an acquired technique. He deduced this distinction from his study among the Azande of the southern Sudan. Some later anthropologists have sought to generalize it, whereas others have insisted that this distinction simply does not fit their ethnographic data. One can doubt especially whether it is of much use to understand the modern transitions of these representations. It is, rather, the circularity of these discourses and the ease with which all sorts of possible conceptual distinctions are glossed over that make them so all-pervasive in present-day African society.

The Modernity of Witchcraft

One of the most striking aspects of social interactions in contemporary Africa is the omnipresence of witchcraft and sorcery discourses in modern settings. Rumors about the use of these hidden forces abound in politics as much as in sport or in the churches; at school as well as in relation to modern forms of entrepreneurship; in urban contexts as much as (or even more than) in the village. An often implicit assumption of many Western observers was, and still is, that witchcraft would necessarily disappear under the impact of modernization. In the 1970s European priests in Cameroon stated that "there is no sorcellerie where there is electricity." Since then, Cameroon has witnessed an intensive campaign of electrification, but nobody would repeat this statement now. On the contrary, one is struck--in Cameroon as in other African countries--by the dynamic and innovative character of the discourses on witchcraft. Rumors integrate, apparently without much difficulty, all sorts of borrowings: notions from other ethnic groups as easily as Christian or Islamic elements; "magical objects" sold by mail-order firms in Europe as well as medical knowledge or notions from books on Oriental wisdom. Witchcraft conspiracies are now supposed to be reproduced on a truly global scale: the witches are thought to have their professors in Europe, or to be linked to the Mafia. This gives notions of the occult a fairly unsystematic character--inconsistencies seem to abound--but it is precisely this elasticity that makes them retain their relevance in the face of new developments. A growing fear of the proliferation of witchcraft--of witchcraft "running wild"--is expressed especially in new social settings, where people are confronted with new and baffling inequalities.

This is especially clear in the rumors about novel forms of witchcraft that are explicitly related to new forms of wealth. In many parts of Africa, the newly rich are presumed to accumulate wealth by exploiting the labor of their witchcraft victims. An explicit opposition is often made between old forms of witchcraft, in which the victims are eaten, and new forms, by which victims are transformed into zombies who are put to work on "invisible plantations." In western Africa, whites are still believed to play a mediating role in this. Other elements of these beliefs suggest that they reflect the traumas of the slave trade and forced labor during colonial times. But they are now closely linked with the emergence of new entrepreneurs among the African population. Eric de Rosny suggests that these beliefs have such a hold over people's minds because they offer at least some explanation of the mysteries of the market: the spectacular successes of the few and the poverty and unemployment of the many. What is striking is that in some areas these beliefs seem to inspire determined attacks on the new rich, while elsewhere they seem to affirm or even legitimize their distance from the poor.

The role of these conceptions in politics and in relations to the state is equally filled with ambiguities. On the one hand, the representatives of the state seem determined to intervene against the proliferation of witchcraft. Postcolonial civil servants regularly admonish villagers to stop trying to sabotage government projects with their witchcraft. Indeed, in the official propaganda of many African regimes, witchcraft is branded as a particularly dangerous form of subversion. It is also seen as one of the major obstacles to realizing "development." At the end of the 1970s, such ideas inspired the Marxist-Leninist regime of Mathieu Kérékou in Bénin to instigate a true witch-hunt through radio broadcasts. The results of such propaganda were, and are, often contradictory. It evokes an image, as Jean-François Bayart emphasized in his earlier publications, of witchcraft as some sort of "popular mode of political action" against the authoritarian state and its hegemonic pretensions. Yet, in practice, it is often not clear that people try to use these beliefs in such a sense. It is, rather, the government's insistence on witchcraft as an omnipresent form of subversion that serves to politicize it.

The civil servants' denouncement of witchcraft seems to reflect their private fears of leveling attacks to undermine their new and highly enviable position. In several parts of Africa, members of the national elite say they are afraid of being "eaten" by their former fellow villagers; in such expressions there is a clear reference to the threat of witchcraft. This is hardly surprising. Ever since the 1950s, anthropologists have emphasized that in many African societies, witchcraft conceptions have a strong leveling effect on relations within the local community. The new elites' accumulation of wealth and power dearly surpasses traditional boundaries: it is no wonder that they fear leveling attacks coming from inside their own community. Yet here again, witchcraft appears to wear two faces. There are many examples of members of the new elite using the same witchcraft conceptions to protect and affirm the new inequalities. This is facilitated by the commodification of witchcraft and sorcery practices. In many settings, "medicaments," jujus, and other "charged objects" are literally for sale. Witch doctors offer their services to the highest bidder, who is generally a member of the new elite. Thus, witchcraft discourses, instead of having a leveling impact, can serve to affirm the new inequalities and make them seem self-evident. The continuing involvement of the elites with the occult makes the state offensive against witchcraft highly ambiguous in its effects.

A striking aspect of witchcraft rumors in new settings is the relative absence of women. In the older version of witchcraft, both women and men are thought to participate in hidden conspiracies. Indeed, many myths about the origin of witchcraft have women leading the way (although it is often added that the men soon followed). However, in speculations about the links between witchcraft and the new forms of wealth or the new power struggles, women are mostly absent. This may reflect the predominance of men in the new political and economic arenas. It may also relate to a tendency in many discourses on witchcraft to relegate women's activity primarily to the domestic sphere.

The Search for New Protection: Anti-Witchcraft Movements, the Church, and the State

The general fear of witchcraft running wild and the rumors about novel forms of occult aggression have encouraged an unremitting search for new forms of protection. The first reports on new, experimental anti-witchcraft movements date from before the colonial period. But the colonial period in particular saw a proliferation of such movements. They invoked a rich variety of forces and procedures in their struggle against witchcraft: poison ordeals, "traditional" jujus, Christian symbols. In the extensive literature on this topic, such anti-witchcraft "medicine" is often set apart from the occult forces of witchcraft itself. The supporters of such movements, of course, strongly emphasize this separation. However, if looked at over a period of time, such distinctions prove, again, to be quite unreliable. In a fascinating study on the northwestern Congo, Georges Dupré shows how an anti-witchcraft movement, initially directed against the witchcraft of the elders, has been appropriated by the latter, who use its shrine to extort heavy fines from young men and wage laborers in the village.

In postcolonial times, the struggle against witchcraft has notably been waged by Christian movements: Independent Churches, Jehovah's Witnesses, more recently by Pentecostal movements, and also by the mainstream churches. Especially within the Roman Catholic Church, a lively discussion is going on about how far its priests can go in this. Several black priests and even bishops have run into difficulties with the Catholic Church because they went beyond orthodox exorcism rites and tried to follow too clearly in the footsteps of the nganga, as in the case of the Zambian archbishop Emmanuel Milingo.

Of special importance is the growing pressure on the state to intervene. Ever since the establishment of the colonial state, people have reproached the state for protecting the witches because it forbade the use of poison ordeals and the execution of witches by chiefs or witch doctors. The postcolonial state elites seem to be more inclined to intervene against the witches--or at least have more difficulty in withstanding popular pressure in this respect. Kérékou's witch-hunt in Bénin was certainly not an isolated example. Isak A. Niehaus shows, for instance, that the African National Congress (ANC) has considerable difficulty keeping its younger members from becoming involved in witch-hunts in Lebowa as in other former "Bantustans."

An example of the state becoming directly involved comes from Cameroon. At the end of the 1970s, the state courts, especially in the Earl Province, suddenly started to convict witches, mainly on the basis of the expertise of witch doctors. This official recognition of the witch doctor constitutes a spectacular reversal of earlier jurisprudence. In colonial times and in the first decades after independence, witch doctors were always in danger of being prosecuted by the state courts (for defamation and breach of the peace). Now, they appear as witnesses for the prosecution. This reversal is clearly related to the state's campaigns against witchcraft. But there also seems to be strong popular pressure in this region--where local societies have long been highly segmentary in character--for the state to intervene. In this respect, it is noteworthy that such processes seldom occur in other parts of the country, such as in the west, where the chiefs' authority still has strong roots in local societies, or in the Islamized parts of northern Cameroon.

Direct interventions by the state seem to go together with the emergence of a new, more modern type of nganga. The witch doctors who work with the state are often intent on seeking publicity. They make ostentatious use of all sorts of modern symbols: sunglasses, books on Oriental wisdom, Christian elements, and medical knowledge. And they boast of their membership in new organizations, such as the more or less official national associations of "traditional healers," as well as elite societies like the Rosicrucians. Most important, they have a highly aggressive style in recruiting clients and unmasking witches. Often they approach people on their own initiative, warning them about dangers in their close surroundings and insisting that they should have their courtyard "purified." Thus, they play an important role in reinforcing the popular fear of a proliferation of witchcraft, all the more so because by so doing they may gain official recognition.

Analytic Approaches: Witchcraft and Morality

Even though witchcraft and sorcery have always been central themes in anthropological discourse, anthropologists have had surprisingly little to say--at least until very recently--about the modern transformations of these phenomena on the African continent. One reason for the long delay in confronting the modern dynamics of this old anthropological theme may have been the problems of the discipline's dominant paradigms.

In 1970 Mary Douglas noted some surprising shifts in the anthropological study of witchcraft and sorcery. Of course, she takes as her point of departure the undisputed classic in this field, Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937), which studied the witchcraft beliefs of this southern Sudanese people in relation to questions of cognition and the social restraints upon perception. This work had a profound influence on later anthropologists but, as Douglas notes, in "directions not foreseen or even blessed by its author." For instance, in the series of monographs on central Africa by British anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s, which profoundly influenced the study of sorcery and witchcraft (especially those by Victor Turner, James C. Mitchell, and Max G. Marwick, and the collection edited by John Middleton and E. H. Winter), Evans-Pritchard's problematic was refocused in a special sense. These authors concentrated not on issues of cognition but rather--in accordance with then-current functionalist theories--on the relation between witchcraft and the preservation of social order, and on micropolitics. They focused on witchcraft accusations, which were to be studied as a kind of "social strain gauge" (the term is Marwick's)--that is, as indicators of social tensions, especially in relations within the local kin groups where aggression could not be expressed in more direct ways.

Thus, witchcraft came to be seen as a "homeostatic control system": accusations of witchcraft were thought to be crucial to the reproduction of social order because they permitted hidden tensions to be expressed and dealt with, so that the local community could be reconstituted. This view of witchcraft, which dominated anthropological studies until the 1980s, had remarkable consequences. In her 1970 piece (an introduction to a set of conference papers by anthropologists and historians studying European societies), Mary Douglas notes with some irony a striking difference:

The anthropologists of the 1950s developed insights into the functioning of witch beliefs which seemed about as relevant to the European experience as if they came from another planet. Dangerous in Europe, the same beliefs in Melanesia and Africa appeared to be tame, even domesticated; they served useful functions and were not expected to run amuck. (p. xiii)

This anthropological view of witchcraft, as something "domesticated," seems to be of limited relevance for dealing with the increasing popular fears about its proliferation. In many parts of Africa, people today are convinced that witchcraft does indeed "run amuck."

Another problem with this "micropolitical" perspective is that the contents of the witchcraft accusations are neglected; the accusations are analyzed only as expressions of something else: hidden sociopolitical tensions. In his 1993 analysis of witch-hunts in Lebowa, South Africa, Isak Niehaus emphasizes instead the need "to take the perceptions informants themselves have of witches seriously." His "Comrades"--young rebels vaguely related to the United Democratic Front or even the ANC--made a clear distinction in their witch-hunts between witches and political opponents: the latter might be attacked but were not accused of witchcraft. In his view, the accusations had a specific aim: by denouncing witchcraft, the young men sought to affirm the legitimacy of their role in "the politics of public morality."

But the strong moralist tenor of the functionalist view on witchcraft also creates problems if one wants to understand the resilience of these notions in modern contexts. In the functionalist view, it was necessary to make a rigorous separation between the positive and negative expressions of occult forces. Often, this forced the anthropologist to impose a Manichaean distinction on more open local concepts. (A good example is Middleton's 1963 study of Lugbara witchcraft.) Only by isolating "witchcraft" as an unequivocally evil force could these beliefs be thought to function as a "homeostatic control system"--a kind of safety valve that permitted the expression of social tension without endangering the social order as such. But it is precisely the fundamental ambiguity of notions about the occult that allows them to remain relevant in modern contexts. Although "witchcraft" as such is certainly seen as evil, people often believe that the same forces can be used constructively, in order to accumulate wealth and power. It is the possibility of many interpretations that makes notions of witchcraft and sorcery such seductive tools for trying to understand the vicissitudes of life in the modern sectors. It is also why the use of a pejorative term like "witchcraft" poses serious difficulties.

Instead of starting from seemingly fixed conceptual distinctions, it might be more clarifying to study the different ways and means by which societies try to impose conceptual demarcations on what are basically highly diffuse and volatile notions. The ongoing struggle for reproducing conceptual distinctions in this treacherous field might be a key to a better understanding of the remarkable dynamics of notions of witchcraft in present-day Africa. This is a common theme emerging from the recent and quite sudden wave of witchcraft studies on modern Africa, such as Modernity and Its Malcontents (1993), edited by Jean and John Comaroff; Isak Niehaus's 1993 article in Africa; and the 1988 article by Michael Rowlands and Jean- Pierre Warnier in Man.

An important point of departure for understanding the pervasiveness of notions of witchcraft in modern contexts is the close conceptual link between witchcraft and kinship. Even in highly urbanized contexts, witchcraft remains the dark side of kinship: when treating a patient, witch doctors always try to bring the family together; the sources of aggression are sought primarily within the sphere of kinship and intimacy. This link can help one to understand both the continuing strength of the witchcraft discourse and the uncertainty it evokes. In many parts of Africa, kinship and the family still seem to provide the basis for social security, even for the urban elites. However, it is clear that kinship relations are under a growing strain: they have to bridge ever-wider inequalities between rich and poor, between city and village; often they seem to be stretched to the breaking point. This configuration may explain both the omnipresence of witchcraft rumors, despite the modern changes, and the desperate search for new forms of protection from witches in many parts of Africa.

-- Peter Geschiere

Source Citation:
"Witchcraft and Sorcery." Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara. 4 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/History

Document Number: BT2344200853