Unruly magic: Global resource extraction, witchcraft and resistance in Yaba Badoe's The Witches of Gambaga (2011) and Wolf Light (2019)

Abstract

Following Giovanna Di Chiro's argument for a ‘coalitional’ approach to social reproduction as environmental issue, this article examines representations of magic and witchcraft in Yaba Badoe's young adult novel Wolf Light as registering the impact of neoliberal ‘extractivist heteropatriarchal capitalism’. Accusations of witchcraft were, and still are, associated with grabs for resources, wealth and class positions occupied by women. To this we could add the notion of the environment as a further realm under threat by increasingly toxic strategies of extraction and disposal. This article extends these conceptual frameworks to consider how Yaba Badoe's speculative text, set in Ghana, Cornwall and Mongolia, depicts feminised magic and transformative supernatural powers as ways of combatting global extractivism. Significantly, ecological destruction has yet to be adequately theorised in relation to social reproduction theory. So too its cultural registration in fictions from peripheral areas long associated with extraction. Through focusing on Wolf Light, this article will theorise how the book's formal mode, alongside its figuration of witches as eco-utopian earth defenders and transformative shape-shifters, offers forms of cultural resistance. Critically, the novel builds consciously on global histories of women's oppression – including the resurgence of witchcraft accusations in Ghana, as discussed in Badoe's research for her film The Witches of Gambaga, and early modern British witch hunts. These narratives are reinvested with a focus on local struggle and resistance as imagined through the text's three main protagonists, whose shape-shifting abilities and trans-border magical connections provide a way of protesting neoliberalism's compound crises of reproduction.