The Discourse of "Ritual Murder": Popular Reaction to Political Leaders in Botswana

Abstract

Geschiere, for one, claims that ‘nearly everywhere on the con-tinent the state and politics seem to be true breeding grounds for modern trans-formations of witchcraft and sorcery’ (1999: 6). And Jean and John Comaroff(1999) speak of escalations of what they label ‘occult economies’ in post-apartheid South Africa, escalations they also trace in other parts of the world,including the West and the post-communist East. Although the intensity and public character of what seems to be going on invarious parts of Africa apparently resemble the witch-hunting that took placeduring the colonial era, it has been argued that ‘witchcraft’ in post-colonialtimes is situated in a new kind of context that transforms it into something else.The Comaroffs, for example, maintain that ‘[i]n its late twentieth-century guise… witchcraft is a finely calibrated gauge of the impact of global culture and eco-nomic forces in local relations’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxviii–xxix). AndGeschiere (1999: 214) enquires ‘why there is such a strong tendency in manyparts of post-colonial Africa to interpret modern processes of change in terms of“witchcraft”’. He argues that ‘the paradoxical combination between, on the onehand, “globalization” with its connotations of open-endedness and unbound-edness, and, on the other, “identity” seems to require definition and clarificationthat can help us to understand why “witchcraft” or related moral concerns playsuch a prominent part in people’s perception of modernity’ (ibid.: 216).These statements are thought-provoking when addressing such a case as thepresent one: the heightening concern amongst people in Botswana about whatis conceived as ‘ritual murder’. Generalising notions of ‘globalisation’ and‘modernity’ raise, however, a number of theoretical difficulties, amongst othersbecause of their lack of analytical distinction. Case studies help to overcomesome of these difficulties, as they speak more specifically about these notions