Magical Interpretations, Material Realities

Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa

Henrietta L. Moore, Todd Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134575572
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Magical Interpretations, Material Realities brings together many of today's best scholars of contemporary Africa. The theme of "witchcraft" has long been associated with exoticizing portraits of a "traditional" Africa, but this volume takes the question of occult as a point of entry into the moral politics of some very modern African realities.' - James Ferguson, University of California, USA

'These essays bear eloquent testimony to the ongoing presence and power of the occult imaginary, and of the intimate connection between global capitalism and local cosmology, in postcolonial Africa. A major contribution to scholarship that aims to rework the divide between modernity and tradition.' - Charles Piot, Duke University, USA

This volume sets out recent thinking on witchcraft in Africa, paying particular attention to variations in meanings and practices. It examines the way different people in different contexts are making sense of what 'witchcraft' is and what it might mean.
Using recent ethnographic materials from across the continent, the volume explores how witchcraft articulates with particular modern settings for example: the State in Cameroon; Pentecostalism in Malawi; the university system in Nigeria and the IMF in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The editors provide a timely overview and reconsideration of long-standing anthropological debates about 'African witchcraft', while simultaneously raising broader concerns about the theories of the western social sciences.

Chapter 1

Magical Interpretations and
Material Realities

An Introduction¹

Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders

In April 1944, a middle-aged Scotswoman called Helen Duncan was convicted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act and sentenced to ten months in Holloway Prison, London (Gaskill 2001). Winston Churchill was reported as indignant that so much time and money had been spent on ‘all this obsolete tomfoolery’. Helen Duncan was a well-known psychic and such conjurers of ectoplasm and conversers with the dead were more normally prosecuted under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, providing a concrete link between the practices of spiritualism and the poverty and distress that provided its fertile ground. Spiritualism flourished in the context of other occult beliefs. The First World War of 1914–1918 had dealt death arbitrarily and on a massive scale. It had disrupted the flow of generations and the form of family life, and was speedily followed by further economic disaster. The popular followers of Helen Duncan were facing hardship and social transformation in equal and large measure, and somehow the limits of this world were all too apparent. Yet perhaps surprisingly, spiritualism was not a manifestation of ‘tradition’ or a hangover from the past, but a new quest for meaning in the context of rapid industrialization, large-scale war and the major advances of Victorian and early twentieth-century science. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a group of eminent Victorians. Seances, then popular, were occasions when sleights of hands, trickery and fraud were all in play, but the audience, for all their credulity, were always asked to see and hear for themselves; not only to experience strange events, but to witness their proof. Ghost hunters and other sceptics set about proving the opposite, but science and spiritualism – far from being simple opposites – were conjoined investigators.

Spiritualism in its Victorian and early twentieth-century form died out as something of mass popular interest from the 1950s onwards: a period of notable economic growth and social confidence in the United Kingdom. Today, however, at the dawn of a new millennium, newspapers advertise weekend ‘Psychic Fayres’ where gullible audiences listen to tarot card readings and the voices of the dead. In the intervening years, popular belief in flying saucers, New Age Spiritualism, millennial cults, Gaia, crop circles and aliens has waxed and waned, but never died out. Nor have compulsory education and an increase in the popular understanding of science done much to dent the popularity of science fiction or indeed to prevent perfectly sane individuals from claiming that we are all descended from lizards. Science and the occult have never been entirely separate. Not then. Not now. It is enough to recall – evolutionary theory is one such case – that serious sciences have often started off as forms of imaginative ‘metaphysics’.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, anthropologists and other westerners frequently (mis)took ‘witchcraft’ in Africa and elsewhere for evidence of ‘primitive’ or ‘pre-logical’ thinking (Lévy-Bruhl 1926); for something Europeans themselves had, in times past, endured, but had now outgrown. African witchcraft thus served as an unmistakable marker of ‘the primitive other’. This idea, popular in its day, meshed neatly with European social evolutionary thinking – underpinned as it was by those grand, Enlightenment-inspired notions of progress, development and modernization (Frazer 1959 [1890]; Tylor 1913 [1871]). Social evolutionary theory, like all theories, made a number of assumptions. Principle among them was that all societies have an inbuilt telos, allowing or even causing them to ‘evolve’ along a linear path from ‘primitive’ to ‘modern’. This movement logically implied an eventual convergence of societies everywhere, and that this was a ‘natural’ process.

As societies ‘evolved’, a number of things allegedly happened: scientific understandings grew; instrumental rationality increased; a secular world view triumphed; ‘superstitions’ like witchcraft vanished; and people made an ever-clearer distinction between facts and fictions, objective Truth and subjective falsehoods. Social evolutionary theory suggested that Europeans had somehow ‘evolved’ quite a bit further than had Africans or other ‘primitives’.

Such evolutionary notions of course sprang directly from eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thinking, and also underpin the works of later, foundational social theorists: Marx’s inevitable move from precapitalist social formations through to communism; Durkeim’s transition from mechanical to differentiated, organic forms of social cohesion; Weber’s modern capitalism in which ‘religious and ethical reflections upon the world were increasingly rationalized … [and] primitive and magical notions were eliminated’ (Gerth and Mills 1958: 275).

Yet it should not surprise us that education and science, the two most potent symbols and purveyors of progress and modernity, should not eradicate belief in the unseen, in the magical, in powers that transcend ordinary human control and comprehension. Since the 1980s, there has been an upsurge of popular and academic interest in ‘witchcraft’ in Africa – as it has been generally termed – in occult powers, ritual murders, the commoditization of body parts, and the role of God and the Devil as opposing forces in the world. This volume sets out recent work on such phenomena, and pays particular attention to variations in meanings and practices, and to the way different people in different contexts are making sense of what ‘witchcraft’ is and what it might mean. Key questions include whether ‘witchcraft’ is appropriate as a catch-all, general term, why incidences of witchcraft accusation, witch-finding, and occult practices might be on the increase, and how these discourses and experiences can be explained in relation to socio-economic transformation, growing inequalities and the perception of modernity and globalization by local actors.

One thing that is very clear is that the African experience may have caught the imagination of anthropologists, politicians and journalists, as well as local administrators, business people, civil servants and ordinary citizens in Africa and elsewhere, but it is not unique. Africans have no monopoly on witchcraft, occult forces and discourses (cf. Brown 1997; Comaroff 1994; Greenwood 2000; Melley 2000; Morris 2000; Stewart and Harding 1999; Scheper-Hughes 2000). Moreover, contemporary witchcraft, occult practices, magics and enchantments are neither a return to ‘traditional’ practices nor a sign of backwardness or lack of progress; they are instead thoroughly modern manifestations of uncertainties, moral disquiet and unequal rewards and aspirations in the contemporary moment (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). The very familiarity of such practices begs questions that are difficult to answer, principle among them: ‘What do we mean by the terms we use’?

What is Witchcraft?

What is clear from contemporary work on Africa is that the term ‘witchcraft’ has been generally used to cover a variety of activities, often of the nefarious sort, and that in much of the literature it is used almost interchangeably with terms like the occult, magic and enchantment. Anthropologists have justified this more capacious and shapeless use of the term with reference to the widespread local use of the term in Africa and, in particular, in print and electronic media on the continent and elsewhere. Geschiere (1997: 13–15) makes this very valid point, and argues that as social scientists we cannot afford to distance ourselves from complex, on-the-ground realities. While this is undoubtedly true, difficulties remain.

For one thing, there is the question of what exactly witchcraft is. Earlier anthropological work dedicated a certain amount of ink to trying to distinguish between witchcraft and sorcery: where the former was a mystical and innate power, and the latter was an evil magic consciously practised against others, sometimes deploying objects, ‘medicines’ or ‘tools’ (Middleton and Winter 1963; Harwood 1970). Problems of translation immediately raise questions, since the usual French translation of the English term ‘witchcraft’ in anthropological texts is sorcellerie. Such distinctions have on the whole in anthropology been disregarded in favour of a more contextualized approach. In many earlier texts, then, witchcraft refers to local beliefs about good, evil, causation, divination and healing that provided ‘a coherent ideology for daily living’ (Fortes 1953: 18; Evans-Pritchard 1937; Gluckman 1944). This is in itself a very broad definition, and clearly accounts for the easy extension of the term ‘witchcraft’ to cover such things as zombies, ritual murder, sale and manipulation of body parts, general occult powers and magic. It also draws attention to Crick’s point that the term ‘witchcraft’ is an historical one: its meanings, deriving from a particular period and culture, cannot be meaningfully transferred to another (Crick 1970: 343). Crick’s view is that witchcraft beliefs are inextricably tied up with moral systems, ‘evaluatory ideas’ and ‘systems of belief’ and have to be understood in context (ibid.: 347).

While all the authors in this volume contextualize ‘witchcraft’ in this way, situating it soundly within particular ethnographic and historical settings, several also make the point that witchcraft is perhaps best understood as a matter of social diagnostics rather than belief. This is because, for many people in Africa, witchcraft is not so much a ‘belief’ about the world as it is a patent feature of it, a force that is both self-evident and solemnly real – a point Francis Nyamnjoh (Chapter 2) makes clear in his discussion of the popular epistemological order of Cameroon and beyond: ‘an order that marries the so-called natural and supernatural, rational and irrational, objective and subjective, scientific and superstitious, visible and invisible, real and unreal’ (see p. 29). In the contexts of Nigeria, Malawi and South Africa, the respective chapters of Misty Bastian, Rijk van Dijk and Adam Ashforth (Chapters 4, 5 and 10) all make a similar point by showing how witchcraft pervades and saturates a number of separate yet interrelated social and cultural domains. Across the continent, people see witchcraft less as extraordinary than as everyday and ordinary (Ashforth 1996), forming as it does an integral part of their daily lives.

Recent commentators have observed that local terms associated with witchcraft, magic and power have very specific meanings, not all of them associated with harmful activities. Thus, rather than translating local terms as ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’, which often conjure only negative images and associations in the western mind, it may be sensible to use ‘a more neutral term like “occult forces”; this leaves open the question of whether the force is used for evil or for good’ (Geschiere 1997: 14). Bongmba (1998: 168), for instance, discusses how the Wimbum people of Northwest Cameroon employ three different terms for the phenomenon glossed as witchcraft to refer to ‘an overarching conception of local knowledge, power and interpretation of misfortune’, and there are both positive and negative uses of such knowledge and power. Particularly attuned to the problem of translation, Susan Rasmussen (Chapter 7) similarly shows that the Tuareg of Niger have four distinct notions of occult forces – both negative and positive – which defy simple English glosses and understandings (also Rasmussen 1998). One of the points being made here is that seeing contemporary witchcraft and occult practices in Africa through the prism of a particular European historical experience runs the risk of serious misapprehension (Crick 1979), and overemphasizes negative power and malevolent forces at the expense of local understandings based on ambiguity, where understandings change contextually: ‘the same techniques may be moral and approved in one context but immoral and outlawed in another’ (Krige 1947: 12; see also Nyamnjoh, Chapter 2; Sanders, Chapter 8; Ashforth, Chapter 10; Fisiy and Geschiere, Chapter 11).² Indeed, many scholars have noted that local African terms are not direct translations of the English term ‘witchcraft’; and that local terms frequently run the gamut from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ mystical forces. Godfrey Wilson noted in 1936 for the Nyakyusa that they had one word, ovolosi, meaning aggressive witchcraft that was bad, and another, amanga, meaning defensive witchcraft that was good, as well as a phrase ‘the breath of men’ which meant the power of witchcraft used in accordance with general public opinion (Wilson 1936: 85). Oyler noted for the Shilluk that they believed in the management of occult powers by both good and evil medicine men (Oyler 1920). The major argument here is that power and its operation in and across everyday and occult realms is ambivalent, and people’s views of its workings and consequences are ambiguous (Arens and Karp 1989; Geschiere 1997; Rowlands and Warnier 1988: 121; Sanders 1999; West 1997; 2001).

As Africanist anthropologists have increasingly problematized the relationship between ‘mystical’ and ‘mundane’ forms of powers, exposing in particular ethnographic settings the subtle and ambivalent operation of occult forces and discourses (Ellis 1993; Ellis and ter Haar 1998; Feierman 1990; Murphy 1998; Packard 1981; Sanders 1998; Strandsbjerg 2000), they have simultaneously drawn attention to how witchcraft is sometimes seen as something more than just good or bad forces. For example, Rijk van Dijk (Chapter 5) shows how Pentacostalists in Malawi often understand witchcraft as being about humour or irony, which thus carries connotations of scepticism. Such views offer a compelling critique of Horton’s (1970) notion that witchcraft is a ‘closed’ system, incapable of engaging meaningfully with people’s social worlds. Above all else, the point of interest is that speaking of ‘witchcraft’ in general terms, and conflating it with European historical experience, reconfigures it as something ‘backward’, anti-scientific and/or ‘traditional’, and imposes a specific view of the relationship between modernity and witchcraft that obscures the nature of such practices and beliefs in the contemporary moment (Pels 1998; Olivier de Sardan 1992).

The question of translation is however much more complex. Since Africans themselves use both the English and French terms for ‘witchcraft’, ‘sorcery’ and sorcellerie and have done since colonial times – that is, for the last one hundred years or more – the meanings of these terms have evolved; they have not stayed static. In addition, processes of urbanization and migration have meant that local people have adopted indigenous terms from neighbouring groups or from those whose languages have become the lingua franca or national language of different countries. There is therefore no easy discussion about the simple translation of indigenous terms into English or French. A further...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1. Magical interpretations and material realities: an introduction
• 2. Delusions of development and the enrichment of witchcraft discourses in Cameroon
• 3. Cannibal transformations: colonialism and commodification in the Sierra Leone hinterland
• 4. Vulture men, campus cultists and teenaged witches: modern magics in Nigerian popular media
• 5. Witchcraft and scepticism by proxy: Pentecostalism and laughter in urban Malawi
• 6. Black market, free market: anti-witchcraft shrines and fetishes among the Akan
• 7. Betrayal or affirmation? Transformations in witchcraft technologies of power, danger and agency among the Tuareg of Niger
• 8. Save our skins: structural adjustment, morality and the occult in Tanzania
• 9. Witchcraft in the new South Africa: from colonial superstition to postcolonial reality?
• 10. On living in a world with witches: everyday epistemology and spiritual insecurity in a modern African city (Soweto)
• 11. Witchcraft, development and paranoia in Cameroon: interactions between popular, academic and state discourse
• Index