I have argued that the monopoly on witchcraft suppression practices associated with Kalembwana and her successors and for a time at least, with a particular place was due to a combination of factors, including the policies of local administrations and the cultural acceptability of ‘shaving’ as an effective anti-witchcraft strategy. This was not a new position. The south central part of Tanzania had an established history of witchcraft suppressors who were associated with virtual monopolies and booms in popularity, and the credibility that Ihowanja practitioners attained owed much to popular understandings of this history. Similarly, the post-missionary Catholic Church of the 1980s and 1990s owed much of its position and influence to the specific history of the district, in particular to the vacuum of power created in the aftermath of German colonial repression and the massive depopulation following the first world war and tsetse concentration. The Church's retention of the institutional structure established by the missionaries ensured that the expectations of hierarchy and patronage which characterised relations between mission and community were to persist long after the official end of the missionary era, at the same time as these were subverted through increased demands by the Church for local communities to provide material support. One consequence of this was the popular articulation of the ambivalence with which the Church was regarded through its enforced implication in the witchcraft suppression practices which it opposed, and through the forced involvement of people closely associated with it in anti-witchcraft activities.