Witchcraft In Africa Research Articles

Coronavirus and the Rise of Child Witchcraft Accusations

This paper examines the impact of witchcraft accusations with a focus on Africa and children. After presenting an overview of anthropological understandings of witchcraft in Africa, it focuses on increasing allegations of witchcraft among children. It discusses how this phenomenon may occur in the UK and its implications for social workers and police. Faith based child abuse is becoming more common in the UK and the COVID pandemic is a major risk factor for this.

Witchcraft and Its Implications for Women Reconsidered

AbstractIn Africa, witchcraft as both a practice and concept is characterized by diversity. A number of places such as Nigeria hold a general suspicion that women are more likely to be witches. This gendered social practice has been studied in anthropology. However, African women’s reactions and interests regarding practices associated with witchcraft (identification, deliverance, healing etc.) have not been studied sufficiently. And in particular, women’s multi-religious backgrounds have often been ignored. This article argues that research on witchcraft in Africa carries a burden of epistemic violence. It has often left the ascription of witchcraft to women unquestioned and at the same time, overlooked women’s own diverse religious perspectives and the interplay of this with witchcraft belief. Based on fieldwork among the Yoruba in Nigeria, the article analyses how witchcraft is ascribed as female, how women are impacted by this and how they position themselves within this social practice. It discusses these gender dynamics as related to the effects of epistemic violence and agency. Results show that women participate in the production of witchcraft as an imagined exclusive female practice, yet their dealings with witchcraft also implicate agency and the possibility of socio-religious change.

Witchcraft and Its Implications for Women Reconsidered

AbstractIn Africa, witchcraft as both a practice and concept is characterized by diversity. A number of places such as Nigeria hold a general suspicion that women are more likely to be witches. This gendered social practice has been studied in anthropology. However, African women’s reactions and interests regarding practices associated with witchcraft (identification, deliverance, healing etc.) have not been studied sufficiently. And in particular, women’s multi-religious backgrounds have often been ignored. This article argues that research on witchcraft in Africa carries a burden of epistemic violence. It has often left the ascription of witchcraft to women unquestioned and at the same time, overlooked women’s own diverse religious perspectives and the interplay of this with witchcraft belief. Based on fieldwork among the Yoruba in Nigeria, the article analyses how witchcraft is ascribed as female, how women are impacted by this and how they position themselves within this social practice. It discusses these gender dynamics as related to the effects of epistemic violence and agency. Results show that women participate in the production of witchcraft as an imagined exclusive female practice, yet their dealings with witchcraft also implicate agency and the possibility of socio-religious change.

Attitude Towards Witchcraft in Africa: The Role of the Church

Attitude Towards Witchcraft in Africa: The Role of the Church

Witchcraft after modernity

What are the current trends in the study of witchcraft in Africa? Twenty years ago, the “modernity of witchcraft” approach was very influential. Although key texts from that framework are still often cited, its heyday seems to have passed. This overview of scholarly debates about witchcraft in Africa after 2010 shows three trends: the attempt to explain witchcraft, which stands in a long anthropological history; the focus on human rights, mainly by authors from fields beyond anthropology; and, influenced by the ontological turn, efforts to take witchcraft seriously. The article gives a critical overview of these current trends in the study of witchcraft in Africa, placing them in the context of theoretical perspectives that have preceded them, as well as looking to the future.

20. What is the Disease? Engaging the Problem of Witchcraft in Africa

20. What is the Disease? Engaging the Problem of Witchcraft in Africa

Material deceptions and the qualities of time

Material deceptions and the qualities of time

Language and Witchcraft as a Trade: Insights from, Machakos County, Kenya

Witchcraft is defined as the use of magical powers for healing, seeing into the future, causing harm or for religion. The belief in the powers of witchcraft is widespread in Africa. Due to these perceived magical powers people from different walks of life seek for various forms of treatments from witchdoctors. As such, witchcraft in Africa is a trade complete with a marked use of language that sustains in in modern society. This article reports on an analysis of language used by witchdoctors in Machakos County in Kenya, and respondents’ views about witchcraft. The objectives of the study were twofold. One was to identify and describe the language strategies that mark witchcraft as trade. The second objective was to explore the socio-psychological factors governing the use of the language by witchdoctors. Two witchdoctors were purposively sampled: one male and one female. The primary data were collected through recorded interviews of the witchdoctors. It was found that the witchdoctors use various language strategies to attract and retain clientele and that these strategies are a factor of the socio-psychological environment in which the witchdoctors operate. Moreover, the study established that witchdoctor still find relevance in the modern Kenyan society because of prevalent beliefs about social and medical problems. This paper thus argues that language is an important tool in the witchcraft trade that serves to purposely obscure meaning in order to shroud the trade in secrecy, enhance social exclusion and consequently sustain the belief in the magical powers of the witchdoctors.

Overcoming fear? A search for an empowering theological response to the fear of witchcraft among urban Zimbabwean Christians

How can we make theological sense of the resilience of the fear of witchcraft among indigenous Zimbabwean Christians? From the perspective of the transcendence and immanence of God, this article analyses the resilience of the fear of witchcraft among African Christians in Zimbabwe. The article uses results of a case study conducted in Zimbabwe in a congregation belonging to the Churches of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) in the city of Bulawayo. Using focus group discussions and in-depth interviews, the study affirms that many African Christians struggle to overcome the fear of witchcraft in their lives. Witchcraft is feared because it is primarily viewed as an evil power that destroys life. The article analyses the awareness of witchcraft, the experiences of witchcraft and the responses to witchcraft among Zimbabwean Christians. The article proposes that African Christians be grounded on the transcendence and immanence of God as a way of overcoming the enduring fear of witchcraft.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: A meaningful response to the fear of witchcraft in Africa requires a multidisciplinary approach including phenomenology of religion, Christian doctrines and practical theology and pastoral care. The immanence and transcendency of God in a context of fear of witchcraft must be unpacked in the light of insights from phenomenology of religion, African traditional religions, discipleship and pastoral care.

Rethinking Witchcraft Confessions in Africa : Imagination on Occult Forces, Morality and Violence among the Ejagham, the Cross River Region

Throughout Africa, societies are found in which the practice of witchcraft confessions is observed. This paper provides ethnographic descriptions of witchcraft confessions among the Ejagham and other Cross River societies of the Cameroon-Nigeria border, which offer a key to reconsidering the interrelationship among witchcraft, morality and attitude of people toward witchcraft in Africa, and investigates the process that leads people to such confessions. The comparative typological classification of African witchcraft and societies proposed by Mary DOUGLAS will be revisited. This paper also reconsiders the issue of witchcraft and social equalization, thereby pointing out in more general terms certain risks and violence that are derived from strict beliefs about 'justice' related to 'morality'. Through these descriptions and analyses, I would like to suggest one approach which enables us to translate and interpret African witchcraft as something common to all human societies in present-day world, while reevaluating certain advantages of social functionalistic interpretations which have been routinely criticized by some recent anthropological discourses.

Witchcraft and space: a theoretical analysis of unseen political spaces in Ghana and Cameroon

This article addresses the application of the concept of space to witchcraft in Africa. Throughout colonial history, and still today, efforts to mediate and control witchcraft and witchcraft-related violence have focused on the manipulation of physical spaces, such as villages, shrines and witch camps. While critical theories of space and power are increasingly relevant in a number of fields, the exploration of these concepts may be somewhat limited in their application to witchcraft-related violence and witchcraft as a lived reality in Africa. In this article, the theoretical ability of Western concepts of space to analyze the phenomenon of witchcraft will be considered, looking at the relations of space and power in colonial and postcolonial Africa. This analysis brings into question the modernist foundations of these concepts and explores the role of witchcraft in the governance of Ghanaian and Cameroonian spaces and imaginations.

Relationship between Social and Economic Status and Witchcraft in Africa

Relationship between Social and Economic Status and Witchcraft in Africa

Cultural Foundations for Fear of Witchcraft in Africa

Cultural Foundations for Fear of Witchcraft in Africa

Morality, justice and the challenge of execution of witches in Africa

The question whether justice can be completely detached from morality seems to be relevant to the discussion of the issues that surround the execution of witches in Africa. In spite the widespread belief in witchcraft in African societies, it is apparent that part of the West as well as the Judeo-Christian traditions also support this view. However, this does not remove the fact that, there are thousands of individuals who are still sceptical about such belief. This paper agrees with the view of those who believe the existence of witchcraft. Thus, despite the fact that many scholars have written on the existence of witchcraft in Africa, little or no attention has been paid to the question of moral implications of executing witches in Africa. An attempt to fill this gap facilitates an investigation into the nexus between morality and social justice. The fundamental problem now is, is it morally right to kill? Should witches be killed? If witches should be executed, are there moral and legal bases for such killing? How should we account for the question of sanctity of human life? In this paper, effort shall be made to answer these fundamental questions. The methods employed in this research are critical analysis, philosophical argumentation and conceptual clarification.Keywords: witchcraft, morality, law, society, justice, religion

Children enacting idioms of witchcraft and spirit possession as a response to trauma: Therapeutically beneficial, and for whom?

This article examines children's enactment of spirit possession idioms and witchcraft in Africa including the meanings such idioms provide and the local healing resources they mobilize. Idioms of haunting spirits in Northern Uganda and witch-children elsewhere in Africa can be interpreted as manifestations of social crises and mass traumatic stress. On the other hand, such idioms also allow children to articulate, reflect upon, and communicate the complex feelings resulting from their precarious positions within families and communities under duress. With the help of Dow's transactional model of symbolic healing, this article explores obstacles to the effectivity of the rich variety of symbolic healing available for haunting spirits in Uganda and points to the generational gap between children and their families and communities. Elsewhere, witchcraft idioms may act as a healing resource at the group level, but at the expense of the accused child. The idioms of evil spirits and witchcraft speak of these children's navigation of the moral universe of their postconflict communities. Given that children's appraisal of their experiences through these notions may also exacerbate their anxiety, interdisciplinary research examining the microprocesses that lead to children being haunted or accused, including emotional and physiological levels effects, is urgently needed.

Stifling the Imagination: A Critique of Anthropological and Religious Normalization of Witchcraft in Africa

Abstract Recent anthropological and religious, especially Christian, discourses on African witchcraft normalize the witchcraft imagination on the continent by failing to show how damaging the imagination has been to Africa’s move toward modernization. While anthropologists normalize it by studying the phenomenon ahistorically and by rationalizing and reinterpreting it, scholars and preachers of African Christianity see it as the context necessary for the growth of Christianity on the continent. However, this normalization of the witchcraft imagination stifles the African imagination because it does not encourage Africans to think in scientific ways that may be more helpful in the transformation of the continent in our modern world. This article is an attempt to liberate the African imagination by critiquing the witchcraft imagination from a rational and theological perspective. It also proposes policies that need to be taken in order to overcome this ruinous imagination and facilitate Africa’s dignified participation in the modern world.

Modernity through the Eyes of Witchcraft: A Radical Critique of Categorisation

The Enlightenment has come to dominate global discourse. In so many ways it has disseminated, often through imperial/colonial actions, a knowledge system which has prioritised objectivity and rationality and excluded as superfluous or vacuous entire cultures of knowing and perceiving. That most important of Enlightenment concepts, progress, is, itself, built on replacing indigenous knowledge systems with sound scientific thinking – of transforming from traditional to modern. However, this progress has stuttered. Modernity has not replaced all tradition, and traditional ways of knowing and perceiving and the place of humans in it continue to be the basis of human experience. Many core Enlightenment tenets have faced stern opposition both, within Western society, by a plethora of anti-foundationalist philosophers, and, beyond Western society, by, for example, the East Asian contributors to the Asian values debate. The universality of rights, the objectivity of science and the merits of modern technology have all faced intense academic and popular scrutiny. However, there are examples of cultural opposition to such tenets which have been often overlooked and which, if given suitable attention, would enable us to explain and understand the distinctive ways in which Enlightenment has the potential to injure human beings. In this essay, I shall seek to illustrate the rich way in which a particular cultural tradition can articulate key deficits in the Enlightenment project. The tradition to which I refer is witchcraft in Africa. While my focus in this essay lies in the African incarnation, belief in witchcraft, as a power which operates within an occult or spiritual dimension on reality, is not limited to the continent. It exists, or has existed, in most parts of the world (Moore and Sanders 2001: 11). In its African form, it has developed a series of important responses to modernity which, as I shall argue, highlight some core internal contradictions within Enlightenment. I come to dissect and explain the ways in which witchcraft highlights these contradictions in the following manner. First, I discuss some of the most explicit issues with modernity in (without wishing to appear tautological) the contemporary period. I then introduce the response of witchcraft to these issues. Finally, I employ the civilisational categorisations of Cox (2000) to explain the foundations of the critical response of witchcraft traditions to modernity. I argue that divergent notions of time and space, the tension between the individual and community, and contradictory understandings of matter and spirit in spirituality and cosmology, enable people operating within the paradigm of witchcraft in Africa to produce a distinctive critique of modernity. I begin by discussing some explicit issues with modernity and the strident and uncritical way in which these are reproduced in the African context. Socially, modernity is about hope and guilt; psychologically, it is about identity (Bauman 1998: 23). In an extremely unequal world, modernity is

Review of "Witches, Westerners, and HIV: AIDS and Cultures of Blame in Africa" by Alexander Rodlach

This easy-to-read, scrupulously researched, and fascinating book addresses two critical, but stubborn problems which threaten to reduce the effectiveness of many externally-funded HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs in Africa. First is the reluctance by biomedical and public health practitioners to recognize the essential value of qualitative and ethnographic data for the success of AIDS intervention programs in Africa. Second is the challenge of explaining the culturally coherent logic behind the seemingly irrational and contradictory views of Africans who blame sorcery and witchcraft for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While this book will not completely solve both of these entrenched problems, it is a powerful statement about the value of systematically studying local explanatory models of the AIDS epidemic and offers a convincing and fine-grained analysis of the African quest to explain and account for personal misfortune in a time of significant social and economic uncertainty. Rodlach's description of AIDS-related sorcery accusations and conspiracy theories is rooted in over a decade of work and research in rural and urban Zimbabwe. Although the book focuses specifically on Zimbabwe, there are many similarities to accounts of the AIDS epidemic elsewhere throughout southern and central Africa. His methodology draws on the usual skill-set of a qualitative researcher (key-informant interviews, observation, focus-groups, printed media and archival research, etc) and his theoretical framework rarely veers far from the standard anthropological literature on witchcraft in Africa (Douglas, Herdt and Stoller, Comaroff and Comaroff, Geschiere, Ashforth); but his extended residence in Zimbabwe as a practicing priest in the local Catholic Church clearly distinguishes him from other social scientific researchers. Fluent in Ndebele, Rodlach gained the confidence of his informants as he ministered to their suffering; this trust made possible his frank discussions about deeply-held and often hidden explanations of AIDS misfortune. The chapters on conspiracy theories will be of most interest to clinicians, medical researchers, and other healthcare providers as these professionals feature prominently in local explanations of the origin of HIV and the spread of AIDS. In fact, these are Rodlach's strongest chapters because they are based on a broad and diverse range of evidence and, unlike accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, conspiracy theories are publicly discussed thus revealing a shared consensus and logic. The origin of HIV is sometimes attributed to clever (meaning selfish) western researchers and their Zimbabwean colleagues whose experiments on HIV in primates went awry and infected the human population. Rodlach suggests that this local disgust of biomedical research originates in strong taboos against transgressions of primate-human boundaries, the researchers' failure to adhere to other local knowledge and traditions, and the suspect intentions of anyone who is personally enriched by biomedical research. Clearly, this is fertile ground for the emergence of a conspiracy theory that holds biomedical research responsible for the spread of HIV. Rodlach then situates these seemingly irrational beliefs in the context of colonial medical practices during the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, rampant iatrogenic morbidity and mortality, and the poisoning of maize flour by white Rhodesian farmers. This serves to demonstrate that that which is seemingly irrational is, in fact, a logical interpretation of the origin of HIV/AIDS against these historical circumstances. Also of interest to healthcare practitioners is an explanation of why even literate and educated Zimbabweans can simultaneously hold both biomedical and conspiracy explanations for the origin and transmission of HIV. Elite and healthy civil sector professionals who initially discredit sorcery charges may later invoke these same explanations to account for why they are diagnosed with AIDS when others are not. To explain this, Rodlach argues that causality is ambiguous. Because a variety of biomedical and social factors can lead to the symptoms of AIDS, and these causal factors can be variously categorized as remote, intermediate, proximate, or ultimate, it is therefore possible for people to hold multiple and even contradictory explanations of HIV. Clearly, the most effective AIDS education programs engage with, rather than deny, these multiple explanations. However, the link between beliefs and behaviors was not substantially addressed in the book, and the cursory discussion of the A-B-C controversy needed more critical attention. Despite these small shortcomings, Witches, Westerners, and HIV is an engaging discussion of a difficult and complex topic, and as a result, this book is an important contribution to the literature on explanatory models of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in Africa

Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in Africa

The Vernon Anderson Papers

The papers in this collection were generated by Rev. Vernon Anderson, a Presbyterian missionary who served in the Belgian Congo. Born in Illinois in 1896, Anderson was raised in Alabama where he attended the Alabama Presbyterian College. After graduation he continued his studies at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, from which he received his B.D. degree in 1920. Anderson joined the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and assumed a post with that mission in the Kasai Province in 1921. The earliest Presbyterian missionaries to work in the Congo had established a station at Luebo in 1891. Their missionary efforts were concentrated among the Bena Lulua of the Lulua river valley. Anderson, however, was sent to the station of Bibanga situated near the Lubilashi river in the area southeast of Luebo. Bibanga lay within the broad area between Lake Tanganyika and the Kasai river in which the Luba live. The Baluba have been separted into two groups--the Baluba-kasai and the Baluba-katanga--by one present-day scholar. The Baluba-lubilashi are a subgroup of the Baluba-kasai.Anderson was one of the first missionaries to work among the Baluba-lubilashi, from 1921 to 1946. In addition to his duties as a missionary he spent a considerable amount of time studying Luba society, in part through the collection of primary data from informants. From this material he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation entitled Witchcraft in Africa: A Missionary Problem and received his degree in 1942 from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Another project to engage his scholarly interest in the Luba was the revision of an early Tshiluba-English dictionary.