Witchcraft, gender, power and intimate relations in Mura compounds in Déla, northern Cameroon

Abstract

African witchcraft is a personal act of one individual using supernatural powers to harm another. This action is not random but is a strategy used within particular sets of social relations and contexts of interaction. Presented here is an ethnoarchaeological study of witchcraft in husband‐wife relationships amongst the Mura of Déla in northern Cameroon. In Mura society a set of social practices, including witchcraft, presents women as mobile and antisocial, justifying their exclusion from controlling major resources especially land and houses. Wives use men's fear that they will act as witches to curb husbands from abusing their authority. Men use differential site formation processes in men's and women's areas of domestic compounds to represent women as disruptive and impermanent members of households and unworthy of holding major resources. At the same time men must protect themselves from wives who might use witchcraft against them and do so by burying powerful amulets in the floors and through other material practices. It is argued that such practices are widespread and may have broader implications in the emergence of social differentiation.