Sorcery and the Silencing of Chiefs: "Words on the Wind" in Postindependence Ambae

Abstract

In this paper I discuss what I learned from being the "son" of a Pacific island chief who was accused of committing murder by magical means. My research on Ambae in Vanuatu lends cross-cultural support to the idea in current African ethnography that sorcery often serves as an idiom for discourse about local power and privilege in "weak" postcolonial states. On Ambae, as in the Cameroons, sorcery accusations are a leveling discourse, a protest on the part of women, the young, and the powerless against the persistence of old forms of inequality in a new era of postcolonial politics. I also show how ambiguities in sorcery beliefs on Ambae blur questions of innocence and guilt. Ultimately, my "father" was forced to accept his political fate in the bitter knowledge that his enemies may have been right, that the "words on the wind" might have whispered the truth.