A striking turn in African studies since the late 1980s has been the renewed attention to “witchcraft,” conceptualized explicitly in relation to modern changes. Perhaps the prior neglect of this relationship by social scientists is even more striking, for throughout the postcolonial period the influence of witchcraft discourse has become increasingly manifest, precisely in modern sectors of society including politics, sports, new forms of entrepreneurship, and institutions of formal education. The neglect of what could be called the “modernity” of witchcraft has been especially striking among anthropologists, in view of the long-standing preoccupation in their discipline with the theme of “sorcery and witchcraft.” Up until the end of the 1980s, and despite their supposed expertise in this field, anthropologists seemed reluctant to confront the flourishing of the occult in modern sectors of society, abandoning this challenging theme to journalists and theologians. A wide array of reasons can account for this reluctance, such as the tenacious influence of the structural-functionalist paradigm with its obsession with order and internal integration, or the tendency to study “witchcraft” or ”sorcery” in local contexts. Another reason is the preference of anthropologists for clear-cut classifications such as “good” versus “bad” magic—while it is precisely the diffuseness and ambiguity of discourses on the occult that are so important for understanding their relevance for interpellating modern changes (see Geschiere 1997, especially the afterword). This reticence on the part of anthropologists has abruptly broken down and, especially since 1993, there has been a torrent of studies on witchcraft and the occult. The theme of witchcraft and modernity is decidedly popular now.

No issue has riveted international attention on and to the African continent over the past five years than the genocides in Burundi, Congo (Kinshasa), and Rwanda. As we struggled first as college teachers and then as the new editors of the ASR to come to terms with and then to explain these horrific events, we determined to inaugurate our tenure as editors with a series of essays that provide an in-depth analysis of the warfare and genocides in the Great Lakes region. To that end, we commissioned five essays, each providing a different optic for comprehending what has occurred there.

The editorial work for this collection was largely complete by November 1997, and the subsequent delay in getting the text to the printer and on to subscribers may fairly be attributed both to the move of the African Studies Association from Emory University in Atlanta to Rutgers University in New Brunswick as well as to substantial changes in the way the journal is edited and produced. In the interim, several other essays have appeared in sister journals on this same topic, and rather than being disheartened at being scooped, we welcome this broad participation by scholars, activists, and editors.

The Nigerian military state has used gender politics for its own ends, exploiting opportunities afforded by international concern with women. The highly publicized program for rural women enabled the regime of Babangida to gain international credibility. The Abacha regime did not seek or win international support, but sought to upstage the gender politics of their predecessors locally by mounting more broadly populist programs which promised benefits to “the family” and further reinscribed women within highly limited reproductive roles. Because Nigerian civil society has been so reluctant to engage with gender, the military have been able to appropriate the terrain they refer to as “women development” for their own ends. Through a series of high profile programs, they have neutralized the potentially subversive and inherently antimilitarist notion of women's liberation, and propagated a gender politics which normalizes military rule.

There can be no reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi without justice, and no justice without truth. This proposition holds true for all three states of former Belgian Africa. In Rwanda and Burundi, in particular, getting at the truth will remain problematic as long as the perpetrators of genocide readily cast themselves in the role of victims, and the victims, in turn, are seen as perpetrators by their enemies. Basic disagreements between Hutu and Tutsi about who committed genocide and why are traceable in part to the uncritical use of the term genocide to describe just about any type of ethnic violence, in part to the selective sifting of the evidence with a view to exonerating one group and condemning the other. Although Hutu and Tutsi are both guilty of genocide, the tendency to substitute collective guilt for individual culpability in the planning and execution of the killings can only result in distortion of the facts. There will be no peace in the Great Lakes region unless one takes seriously the task of shedding light on the circumstances, the scale and the consequences of the genocide of Hutu by Tutsi in Burundi (1972), of Tutsi and Hutu by Hutu in Rwanda (1994), and of Hutu by Tutsi in Congo (1996–1997).

In the wake of the last democratic elections in Ghana, which took place in December 1996, the electoral commission published and distributed a poster that depicted a voter who was approached by both the Devil and an angel. While the former told the man to sell his vote for money, the latter made it clear that his vote was his voice, thereby insinuating that selling his vote would boil down to selling himself to the “powers of darkness.” The paper seeks to explain how Christianity, especially the pentecostal variant highly popular in southern Ghana, came to cast political discourse in religious terms. On the basis of the examination of a popular Ghanaian movie about a chief who indulges in ritual murder in order to generate wealth and power, it is shown that in Ghana a public debate is going on about the (im) morality of power. In this debate, rumors about the occult sources of power and wealth form the flip side of politicians' claims of being linked with the divine. In distinction to established mission churches, pentecostalism takes such rumors about the threat of sorcery as seriously as the aim to turn Ghana into a Christian country. Presenting themselves as the sole members of society able to contain sorcery, pentecostalists claim to have the power to reveal the occult sources of those in power and subsequently to purify politics and politicians from occult traces and draw them closer to God.

During the 1996–1997 academic year, students at the University of Ouagadougou went on strike for three months. This strike was the worst in Burkina Faso's history (or in the history of the former “Upper Volta”). The author, who was a visiting American professor at the time of the strike, details what happened at the university and in related incidents in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso. The author suggests that the strike may have resulted from the erosion of democratic rights within Burkinabè society, following the assassination of former President Thomas Sankara and the rise to power of current President Blaise Compaoré. Our attention is drawn to contributing factors behind the strike, including long-standing structural problems at the University of Ouagadougou and the politically motivated killing of popular professors and the former student body president Dabo Boukary, all of whom had spoken out against the Compaoré regime.

With the onset of the twenty-first century, power distribution has become a key factor in African security. In western and southern Africa, power has become more concentrated and hierarchical, especially with the growing assertiveness of three regional powers, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and organizations (ECOWAS and SADC) which have the authority, salience and capability to mount and lead security operations. In contrast, in central and eastern Africa, anarchy remains prevalent and helps to explain the failure to enforce peace in both Rwanda and Somalia. The indigenization of peace enforcement in western and southern Africa has been accompanied by high levels of salience, as regional forces have struggled to prevent spillover of conflicts into their home countries. African forces have been more willing than the United Nations and other outsiders to accept the costs of “crossing the line,” taking sides, and enforcing peace. The record of peace enforcement and interventionism for humanitarian purposes has been mixed. For example, ECOMOG peace enforcement in Liberia and Sierra Leone prevented seizures of power and retribution and allowed peace-making to begin in which agreements were reached and implemented and in which elected governments came to power. On the other hand, ECOMOG committed its share of abuses and prolonged conflicts and humanitarian crises that could have been ended fairly quickly by force.

This paper explores both the plight of the vanquished Hutu refugees who have returned to Rwanda under a cloud of suspicion, or outright condemnation (for their presumed roles in carrying out the 1994 genocide against Tutsis) and the legal mechanisms that could foster the reconstruction of a more inclusive political community. The author uses the term “social memory,” rather than “culture” or “tradition,” to elucidate the idea that social hatreds and inclusions arise and fall historically in conditions where political power is consolidated and deployed. Thus the re-integration of the Hutu into Rwanda civil society rests more on political will rather than foundering on implacable mystical or primal antagonisms. The author outlines several legal steps that might be followed to implement that political will.

Opening with an account of an incident in July 1998 when warnings were circulated in a shack settlement outside Soweto that a giant snake known as Inkosi ya Manzi [King of the Waters] was angry and threatening to destroy the settlement, this paper seeks to examine questions of spiritual insecurity in a context of widespread poverty, hardship, and violence. It seeks to examine those aspects of insecurity that are not reducible simply to objective conditions of danger by examining questions of epistemology relating to modes of understanding the action of invisible forces and beings upon the fortunes and misfortunes of everyday life. Five sources of epistemic anxiety are identified, along with three distinct frames of interpretive authority. The paper suggests that the relative intensity of spiritual insecurity in contemporary Soweto derives in large part from the fact that no one framework of interpretation enjoys dominance.

Since the military coup d'état of October 21, 1993 Burundi is experiencing a genocide, albeit at a slow pace, while the leaders engage in a series of ‘dialogue of the deaf.’ Meanwhile, half-truths are being told about the causes of the crisis and inappropriate solutions are being proposed for an incorrectly diagnosed structural social malaise. This paper examines the causes of ethnic violence by emphasizing the impact of institutional failure. The ‘privatization’ of key institutions such as the military, the judiciary, and the education system by ethnic and regional entities, has resulted in a divorce between state institutions and the population. Violence is created and maintained in a vicious cycle of frustration–claims and counterclaims–and repression as the rulers try to hold on to power while the oppressed categories of the population claim for their fair share in national resources. Restoration of peace and stability will require an extensive reform of key institutions to ensure equity and protection of rights and property for all citizens.

Analysts of African business in the 1960s and 1970s stressed the weakness of the local private sector and its subordination to foreign capital and the government. Have economic liberalization and the shrinking of the state changed matters? This paper takes up this question in an analysis of Senegal. Here, relations between the state, foreign capital, and indigenous business interests have changed considerably since 1980, signaling what may be some of the most significant shifts in Senegal's political economy since Abdou Diouf's coming to power in 1981. There has been a shift of commercial control away from the state and foreign interests and toward the Senegalese “informal sector,” and clear moves away from the old pattern of clientelist-style relations between Senegalese business and the regime.

In this paper, we argue that in spite of changes, the political clout and economic ambitions of Senegalese business interests are still limited by their weak hold on productive sectors of the economy. This is clear in the economic policy fights of the 1990s. Much of the contest is a struggle for commercial-sector advantage that pits old-style politician-businessmen against the “informal sector” commercial interests that have been gathering force in Senegal since the 1970s. These changes seem to have less to do with the emergence of “indigenous capitalism” than with diminution of the regime's ability to constrain and canalize the development of indigenous commercial interests.

This paper traces these developments, grounding the analysis of the 1990s in a detailed empirical study of UNACOIS, a sometimes-militant business association that emerged in Dakar in 1990 to represent the Senegalese “informal sector.”

In many parts of Africa, political liberalization seems to have given new impetus to the “politics of belonging,” leading to an obsession with “autochthony.” Thus the continuing relations of urban migrants with their home area tend to be reaffirmed. However, these relations, marked by an explosive mixture of intimacy and inequality, continue also to be a hotbed for witchcraft rumors. In this article we compare two different cases, from different parts of Cameroon, of witchcraft threats and efforts to contain them in the context of rural-urban relations. In both cases, the accusations are the same—they refer to a novel form of zombie witchcraft attributed to the nouveaux riches—but they are dealt with in a strikingly different manner. A Grassfields chief from the Northwest challenges the authority of the state by arresting three witchcraft suspects among his subjects in the faraway Southwest. In the segmentary societies of the southern forest area, urban elites appeal to the state for protection against vicious witchcraft accusations.

The increased importance of “belonging” and “autochthony” in national politics makes witchcraft more and more a public issue, triggering new efforts to contain it in which the new associations of urban elites play a central role. However, the effectiveness of such efforts remains doubtful: the increased importance of the relations between urban elites and the home area tends to reproduce witchcraft, which is, indeed, thriving on such an explosive mixture of intimacy and blatant inequality.

This essay investigates the symbolic politics of three witch-hunts in a chiefdom of the South African lowveld during the 1990s. In the last years of apartheid young men, known as Comrades, assumed the forefront of political struggles. Comrades embarked upon witch-hunting campaigns to banish evil and misfortune, and thereby to attain legitimacy as a political movement. Since the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, a situation of pluralistic political structures emerged. Branches of the ANC and ANC Women's League were launched, Civic Associations were established, and chiefship was gradually reconstituted. As adults assumed positions of political leadership, the influence of the Comrades diminished. Witch-hunts of the 1990s are multifaceted social dramas, which involve different modes of participation and bear a variety of different meanings for political audiences. As such they reveal changing relations of alliance and opposition between the different political structures. I argue that through time, growing schisms have developed between the ANC and the Comrades, who have continued to be the most vociferous participants in witch-hunting. Local ANC leaders have been unsuccessful in resolving the conflicting demands of villagers (who demand their assistance in the eradication of witchcraft) and those of their political superiors (who require that they oppose witch-hunting).

Christian churches play sharply contradictory roles in African societies, both helping the ruling classes maintain their domination of the masses and helping the masses resist domination. An analysis of Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo reveals that various social groups vie to use the churches to support their political programs. In Rwanda, for example, both supporters and targets of the genocide received assistance from the churches. Churches have no predetermined relationship to structures of power, but represent important sites of political contestation, a fact that challenges the view that civil society, in which churches are a vital segment, necessarily serves the interests of the society as a whole.

Sierra Leone's transfer election of 1996 was instigated by a resurgent civil society that came alive after thirty years of dictatorship. This electoral democratic renewal did not, however, alter the spoils logic that has defined the organization and exercise of political power in Sierra Leone since the late 1960s. Because performance by a popularly elected government is critical to the consolidation of public support for democracy, the SLPP's inability to distance itself from its discredited precursors endangered the country's fragile democracy.

This work focuses on the production of discourse on witchcraft in relation to colonial and postcolonial statecraft in coastal Kenya. It distinguishes between two sets of terms for magical harm, the Mijikenda term utsai and the term witchcraft, and uses this analytical distinction to draw attention to the different worlds from which utsai and witchcraft emerge, and to frame each discourse on magical harm in terms of the political conditions of its production and use. It presents “witchcraft” as a disciplinary technology with five component practices identified as “witchcraft technologies of power.” These technologies have wide general applicability to other colonial and postcolonial situations in Africa and can be used to illuminate both processes of state formation and the emergence of new forms of magic and the occult.

This essay presents a current survey of the Africana research holdings and collections that are available at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) located at Chicago, Ill. The collection is composed of many formats of material, including foreign dissertations, monographs, newspapers, periodicals, official publications, pamphlets, political ephemera, manuscripts and archives, and miscellaneous materials. Each of these formats is described in the essay, including examples, collection development guidelines, and information on access. The primary institutional focus for the collection of these materials has been the Cooperative Africana Microform Program (CAMP). Over the past thirty-five years, representatives from the various CAMP member institutions have selected materials to be purchased or filmed. These decisions have reflected the changing research priorities and needs of the various individuals and the institutions they represent in these collection development efforts. Access to the Center's Africana holdings is also discussed. For researchers located at institutions that hold membership in CAMP or CRL, access and user policies are liberal. It is possible for a user at such an institution to acquire an extensive amount of material in a single interlibrary loan transaction and to have access to the material indefinitely or until needed by another researcher. Bibliographic access is provided by CRLCATALOG, the online catalog of the center, as well as through a variety of printed bibliographies, reference folders, collection inventories, and the center's web site. The forty-two institutions that currently hold membership in CAMP and their institutional representatives are listed on the Web at http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/campmem.htm.