The Eséka train disaster as a witchcraft collective action: a socio-historical perspective on anger

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AbstractThe October 2016 train accident on Cameroon’s main railway line remains shrouded in mystery. The announcement of the derailment before it happened, followed by a denial by the Minister of Transport a few hours later, at the very moment of the accident, has given rise to much speculation. According to testimonies collected in Eséka through fieldwork and the media, this tragic event was interpreted as the result of a witchcraft conspiracy. The inhabitants of the Bassa region, who consider the railway crossing their territory as a cultural heritage, had expressed their discontent with attempts to rationalize the line for some time. These accounts reveal that the disaster was triggered by collective action which unfolded through three distinct phases: labelling, whereby words acquire particular power; harbingers of misfortune; and finally, the bewitchment of the train to ‘zombify’ it, leading to its derailment. In response to these witchcraft imaginaries, the president himself addressed the Bassa’s grievances and requested an adjustment of the train stops, thus demonstrating the performativity of witchcraft and its capacity to put grievances on the agenda and to shape public policies. This article puts forward the idea that witchcraft represents a repertoire from which a community draws to express dissent. Bewitching and zombifying the train to make it derail are, for some actors, a way of signalling to the modern African state that it is not always ‘master in its own house’, that it does not have total control over reality and that it must constantly negotiate its authority.