Crimes of the Dream World: French Trials of Diola Witches in Colonial Senegal

Abstract

As European powers completed the colonization of the African continent, they faced the difficult task of creating an administrative and judicial structure to control the diverse population of their domains. Questions about the role of indigenous authorities and customary law in colonial system confronted Europeans at the very moment when they were gaining their first extended glimpses into the working of African political systems. In West Africa, the French employed indigenous people as local officials of highly centralized colonial administration while dividing precolonial polities into cercles and cantons. They often chose local officials more for their loyalty and their knowledge of the French language than for any claims to legitimate authority within formerly independent communities. Subject to the indigenat, the legal code that was applied only to Africans, local officials had little protection against arbitrary dismissal or other forms of discipline.' Central to the establishment of such system was the colonial authorities' claim to have a monopoly to dispense justice, not only to their own people, but also to those they have conquered.2 French officials administered local courts with the advice of African dignitaries from an approved list. African systems of law were allowed continued jurisdiction only in those areas outside immediate French concern. Thus the vast majority of French West Africans were subjected to judicial process organized according to French procedures; with French definitions of criminality, evidence, and, as it will be shown, of reality itself. As the European powers extended their authority, many Africans turned to their religious systems for an explanation of the colonial conquest. Prophets who claimed to understand the spiritual causes of the loss of political autonomy advanced new religious doctrines and rituals as way of self-purification and means to regain independence. When such prophetic messages led to armed revolts or evoked the specter of social unrest in the minds of colonial officials, these movements were suppressed and their leaders imprisoned or executed.3 More puzzling to colonial officials was another religious response: the dramatic increase in witchcraft accusations in the wake of the colonial conquest. From Senegal to South Africa, many African leaders blamed their defeat at the hands of the Europeans on the spiritual pollution generated by the practice of witchcraft. This was major part of the teachings of Nongqawuse, the Xhosa woman whose visions led to the Xhosa Cattle Killings of the 185Os.4 It continued after the colonial conquest in such diverse places as Nyasaland, Rhodesia, and Senegal. European observers filled their writings with descriptions of the thousands of people who lost their lives through poison ordeals or other forms of witchcraft accusations as African communities sought to rid themselves of those who used supernatural means to harm other people in their midst.5 Since the vast majority of colonial administrators did not believe in witchcraft, their response was to outlaw witchcraft accusations and to punish those who made such accusations. African concepts of witchcraft were not seen as response to the crisis of conquest, but as justification for the colonial presence and its mission civilisatrice.6 From the very beginnings of their presence on the African coast in the fifteenth century, Europeans had heard rumors that Africans engaged in cannibalism. This belief was strengthened by African claims that neighboring peoples-but never their own societies-practiced cannibalism. Despite investigations by such early ethnographers as Thomas Winterbottom, who concluded that aside from occasional ritual cannibalism, there was not single authentic account by reliable witness, European faith in such stories remained unshaken.7 William Cohen described French colonial novels of the 1920s as preoccupied with images of black cannibalism. …