Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust

Africa in Comparison

Peter Geschiere

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226047751
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Dante's Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere masterfully sketches it as a central ember at the core of human relationships, one brutally revealed in the practice of witchcraft. Examining witchcraft in its variety of forms throughout the globe, he shows how this often misunderstood practice is deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords. In doing so, he offers not only a comprehensive look at contemporary witchcraft but also a fresh—if troubling—new way to think about intimacy itself. Geschiere begins in the forests of southeast Cameroon with the Maka, who fear "witchcraft of the house" above all else. Drawing a variety of local conceptions of intimacy into a global arc, he tracks notions of the home and family—and witchcraft's transgression of them—throughout Africa, Europe, Brazil, and Oceania, showing that witchcraft provides powerful ways of addressing issues that are crucial to social relationships. Indeed, by uncovering the link between intimacy and witchcraft in so many parts of the world, he paints a provocative picture of human sociality that scrutinizes some of the most prevalent views held by contemporary social science.One of the few books to situate witchcraft in a global context, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust is at once a theoretical tour de force and an empirically rich and lucid take on a difficult-to-understand spiritual practice and the private spaces throughout the world it so greatly affects.

1

THE DANGERS OF HOME

Ethnographical and Conceptual Explorations

THE PROLOGUE SKETCHED A DILEMMA. Witchcraft—like intimacy—is an extremely slippery term. Indeed, its strength—the secret of its resilience in so many different contexts—may precisely be its diffuseness, making it a panacea that seems to apply to almost anything, an empty signifier that because of its very emptiness seems to be omnipresent. This makes it a dangerous term—including when it is used by academics. Yet precisely because of its remarkable resilience and capacity to graft itself upon modern changes, the solution can hardly be to ignore it. A somewhat unsettling question—unsettling at least to me—raised after a presentation I recently gave at a conference in Yaoundé showed most graphically how far the term witchcraft’s generalizing tendency goes and why academics might be careful in taking the notion on board.

The conference took place in 2009 at the Université catholique de l’Afrique centrale in honor of Eric de Rosny, a Jesuit who wrote beautiful books about his initiation as a healer in Douala (de Rosny 1981 and 1992). The topic was medical pluralism. I presented a paper on witchcraft and healing. In order to save time, the audience—mostly students from the Catholic University—was asked to put questions on little pieces of paper. After my talk I was pleased to get a pile of these. Yet the first one I opened came as a shock; it was brief but pointed: “When will you Europeans stop exporting your forms of sorcellerie to Africa: Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and homosexuality?”¹

Of course I should not have been surprised. I knew that witches are believed to indulge in same-sex bacchanals during their nocturnal meetings. I knew also of the crucial role Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism play among the Cameroonian political elite (their rituals are supposed to determine political in-fighting among the president and his cronies); and I had become all too familiar with people’s association of Freemasons with homosexual practices and thus with witchcraft.² Moreover, it was clear that the questioner had linked sorcellerie not by accident to highly controversial topics in present-day Cameroonian society: since 2005, “witch hunts” have been unleashed by both the government and the population against supposed homosexuals, and for a longer time there have been furious popular protests (with support of notably the Catholic Church) against the elite’s involvement in Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. Still, the little note surprised me since it showed so graphically how all-encompassing the notion of sorcellerie had become. And the increasing attacks on homosexuals show how such generalizing can help to victimize people.

In Cameroon, as elsewhere, this generalizing tendency acquired new scope over recent decades. In the 1970s witchcraft was hardly a topic for public debate. These were the hopeful days when “modernization” still seemed to be a clear and quick route—when the “young states of Africa” still hoped to modernize rapidly, unencumbered by a heavy traditional load. In those days, talking openly about witchcraft was frowned upon by many—not only by the government but also by more educated people in society—as an attempt to “traditionalize” Africa and deny its progress. However, all this changed in the 1980s when there was growing disappointment in “development.” At the same time it became increasingly clear that the view of witchcraft as a traditional relic automatically disappearing with modernization was untenable. In 1971 my Maka assistant would still say, “Where there is electric light, witchcraft will disappear.” Now there is electric light, even in some Maka villages, yet nobody would dare to say that this led to the disappearance or even the decrease of witchcraft. On the contrary, witchcraft rumors have come to abound precisely in the more modern sectors of society. Witchcraft as a topic came out increasingly into the open, and newspapers, TV, and other media started to pay ever more attention to it. Its increased presence in public debate seemed to go together with the generalizing trend noted already, and this made it seem, indeed, all-pervasive: witchcraft “running wild” and lurking everywhere in society.³

No wonder that also in academic language the notion made a spectacular return. After independence—for most African countries around 1960—many scholars tended to avoid topics like witchcraft for fear of “primitivizing” Africa and ignoring modern developments. Yet the dynamics of these notions precisely in more modern sectors of society became too powerful to be ignored in the long run. Since the early 1990s a wave of studies on “witchcraft” has emerged, especially by anthropologists and historians, focusing on all sorts of aspects and settings.⁴ There is, as said, a real danger that this new tendency to adopt highly fuzzy notions from everyday language will confirm popular concerns that witchcraft has in fact become an omnipresent danger.

This confronts academics with the basic dilemma sketched above. Ignoring the presence of what people call witchcraft in everyday life is hardly possible, but the very term threatens to suck academic studies into all the inconsistencies and shifts that seem to be characteristic of this field. The solution might not be to try to impose an analytical delimitation of notions that have acquired such presence in everyday life—this might lead to a quixotic struggle to control a notion that is so powerful because of its slipperiness. An ethnographical approach might be more useful. Below I shall first sketch how I was confronted by these notions—both witchcraft and intimacy—during my forty years of fieldwork in Cameroon. Then I shall try to relate their changing contours in the field to more general, theoretical discussions. The aim is to show how the link between witchcraft and intimacy emerged from the interaction between ethnography and theory as a possible beacon to bring some clarity in this marshy field.⁵

Witchcraft: The Pitfalls of a Notion

When I set out in 1971 to do fieldwork in Southeast Cameroon for my PhD project, I did not intend at all to study “witchcraft.” On the contrary. I wanted to be a “modern” anthropologist focusing on new developments in Africa. As I’ve said, these were the days of great but simplistic optimism about the ability of the “young states” of Africa to rapidly “modernize,” since they were supposed to be less encumbered by the load of tradition than, for instance, older civilizations in Asia. My intention was to study local effects of state formation (local-level politics) and to avoid hobbyhorses of classical anthropology like kinship and witchcraft. The first problem I was confronted with was that openly discussing politics—that is, anything related to national or regional politics—turned out to be quite dangerous under the authoritarian one-party state of Cameroun’s first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo. A second problem emerged once I was settled in a village. I soon found that whenever I wanted to talk about local politics with the villagers—this at least was more or less permitted—my spokespersons invariably began to refer to the powers of the djambe. Clearly to them, any form of power—whether of the village chief and the old notables in the village council, or the authority of family elders (women included) within their own household—was related to the djambe. They translated this term as sorcellerie in French (or even used the word sorcellerie while speaking Maka, the local language). The djambe evoked a fascinating shadow world behind any event in the everyday world; it proved to be also an extremely polyvalent notion.

Elsewhere I have extensively described the Maka imaginary around djambe (Geschiere 1997), so a short sketch must suffice here. People describe the djambe as a nasty creature living in someone’s belly which gives its owner (djindjamb—a person who took the trouble to develop his or her djambe) special powers. The main power is the capacity to transform oneself into an animal or a spirit. Especially at night when the owl calls, the djindjamb will leave his or her body and fly off into the night—“along the cobwebs of the djambe”—to the shumbu, the nightly meeting of witches. There terrible cannibalistic banquets are staged. Stories of the debaucheries of these nightly meetings—marked by shocking transgressions, violent encounters, and devious victories—are many.⁶ But one element recurs in them all: each djindjamb has to offer a relative to be devoured by the other witches; in daily life the victim of this nightly treason will fall ill and die unless people call in the nganga (healer)⁷ to “see” the guilty witches and force them to lift their spell. Basic to Maka discourse on the djambe is that it is about the betrayal of one’s kin to outsiders. In many respects djambe is positioned at the interface of the private and the public: between the intimate world of kinship or the house, on the one hand, and the outer world and its fascinating opportunities for self-enhancement, on the other. Witches are supposed to have a special hold over their relatives, but they use this in order to hand over their victims to outsiders.

However, this is only the dark core of the djambe notion. Apparently it can be used in many other ways as well. It is noteworthy, for instance, that nganga (healers) are also supposed to have a djambe. They are even supposed to have developed an exceptionally strong djambe—this is why they can “see” the witches, “fall upon them,” and force them to deliver their victims. To my surprise, I myself turned out to have a djambe that permitted me to drive my modest Citroen 2CV without causing an accident. Djambe can be channeled for constructive purposes: to heal, to accumulate wealth and power. However, there is always the danger that the basic instinct—that of betraying and cannibalizing one’s relatives—will break through. For this reason the nganga remains a dangerous and potentially suspect person. Nganga will always insist that their “professor” has bound them with heavy interdictions to use their djambe powers only to heal and not to kill; but people are not altogether sure about this—as said, there is always the risk that the basic instinct of the djambe will manifest itself.

Another surprise for me was how deeply the djambe notion turned out to be affected by all sorts of modern technologies. Rumors about the nightly escapades of the mindjindjamb (witches) referred to their use of planes and airstrips, and the miedou (medicines) that were most sought after were those bought from mail-order firms in Europe. Moreover, djambe was not at all limited to the village. On the contrary, it was constantly referred to in more modern settings—in the city, in education, health care, and sport, and most of all in national politics and new forms of entrepreneurship. Djambe in fact offered a seductive discourse to address the riddles of modern development: the rapid emergence of shocking new inequalities, the enigmatic enrichment of a happy few, and the ongoing poverty of the many. This capacity of the discourse to graft itself onto new developments might be the secret of its surprising resilience despite deep changes, in Africa as elsewhere.⁸

Yet all this innovation notwithstanding, the djambe remains closely linked to the familiar realities of village and family. This capacity of a local discourse to graft itself onto modern changes is certainly not special to the Maka area. On the contrary, everywhere in Africa local notions that people now generally translate with terms like witchcraft or sorcellerie seem to provide tempting discourses to interprete modern developments that are baffling to many. It is this ambiguity that I tried to catch in the perhaps too adventurous title of my 1997 book The Modernity of Witchcraft.

The choice of the term witchcraft was the fruit of long discussions with a Cameroonian colleague, Cyprian Fisiy. I met Fisiy in 1987 in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where he worked at the Institute of Human Sciences, then the country’s central institute for social science research. As a student of law he had become interested in issues of witchcraft—notably in how state courts should deal with the popular pressure to intervene against the supposed proliferation of new forms of witchcraft. Moreover, he had been officially assigned to participate in a larger research project initiated by the Ministry of Scientific Research, called Sorcellerie et Développement (Witchcraft and Development). We decided to work together on the impact of these local notions. Together we published on changes in jurisprudence in regard to witchcraft affairs, particularly the growing inclination of some courts to condemn “witches” on the basis of the testimony of nganga healers who had “seen” that the accused had gone out; we published also on the impact of witchcraft ideas on development projects and forms of accumulation (see further Fisiy and Geschiere 1990, 1991, 1996, and 2001).⁹

One of the first decisions we had to make concerned the terminology. For me as an anthropologist, an obvious option was to stick to local terms like djambe. However, for Fisiy as a lawyer, this was hardly attractive; Cameroon has over two hundred languages, and he argued that our work had to be of a more general applicability.¹⁰ I agreed; after all, I had learned quickly that the representations concerned do not respect language demarcations or ethnic borders. On the contrary, it was striking how ideas on occult aggression traveled and intermingled. Even in the relatively inaccessible Maka area there were constant rumors about new forces introduced from somewhere else, and people mixed all sorts of languages when discussing these issues. In general, there is no search for purity or respect for authenticity in this field. Even people like the nganga have to constantly reinvent themselves in order to show that they are in touch with the changes.

One possibility was to adopt a more neutral notion—for instance, “occult forces.” But this would mean that we were isolating ourselves from intense discussions going on in society that were couched in terms like witchcraft or sorcellerie (cf. Fisiy’s role in the ministry’s program Sorcellerie et Développement).¹¹ The modern dynamics of these local notions—the ease with which they are grafted onto new forms of technology and inequality—have given rise to an expanding regional discourse, one that overflows the limits of local terminologies and in which terms like sorcellerie and witchcraft are central. It was especially this hybrid and fluid interregional conglomerate that we wanted to address, since it seemed to have such an increasing hold on people’s minds. The considerations above led us to choose to retain the term witchcraft—but with misgivings. The problem remains that the term gives only a very partial translation of local notions.¹² Yet, as said, it has acquired a presence of its own in many parts of Africa, and therefore it seems to merit being called by its name. Avoiding the term risks isolating social scientists from the very processes they want to study.¹³

Fisiy and I had these discussions at the end of the 1990s. Since then there seems to be only increasing reason to focus on a term that is so central in wider societal discussions. Returning to a term in the local language becomes ever less of an option. Many youngsters hardly speak this language anymore. The crystallization of an interregional culture (one could use the term civil society here) of the occult, mixing elements from all over—from different local cultures but also Christian and Asian borrowings, thus truly global in outlook—defies any preference of researchers for looking for an authentic core. In such a context they have little choice but to follow the terms people themselves use, diffuse and constantly changing as they are. Nevertheless, the increasing currency and generalization of a term like witchcraft reinforce its allure as an omnipresent and all-pervasive threat in popular perception. There is a dilemma here that may defy any ultimate solution.

Academic Discourse and the Dangers of a Panacea Notion

How should academics deal with such a conundrum: notions like witchcraft can hardly be avoided, yet using them might reinforce their self-evidence? There is good reason for such a question especially for anthropologists, now that they again write so much about the topic. The suddenness of the “return” of witchcraft in academic stu...