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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Postcolonial authorities see the belief in witchcraft and other occult forces as creating a basic impediment to development initiatives in Africa. Consequently, the state in Cameroon has sought to use all sorts of instruments—including legal instruments—to contain, if not eradicate, witchcraft. However, the institutionalization of the crimes of witchcraft, magic, and divination has been fraught with evidential problems of proof. The vigorous pursuit of witches by the postcolonial courts has led to rather perverse outcomes whereby the witch-doctors, witches par excellence, have emerged as expert witnesses in the courts. By relying on these expert witnesses, the courts are caught in the witchcraft logic, blurring the line between the accused and the accuser. The standard of proof in the courts has become that of the “L'intime conviction du judge,” at best a subjective standard.

In this essay I offer an interpretation of Wimbum tfu by analyzing Wimbum terms to distinguish it from the English term “witchcraft.” I argue that Wimbum terms bfui, brii, and tfu have multiple meanings, are dynamic, and are often employed to discuss and critique lived experience. I argue that postmodern perspectives help us interpret tfu as power, economic, and religious discourse thus making it possible for us to attempt an ethical critique of the negative aspects of Wimbum tfu.

This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one that pictures Africa as the dark heardand of magic and witchcraft while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analysis of a number of different texts in which this commonplace emerges suggests that this recurrent fear of an African occult core is part of the Western engagement with the occult in Africa through its translation as “witchcraft.” The translation of African magic as “witchcraft” threatens European understandings of self and other just as much as this translation is an attempt to contain the African occult within imperial, colonial, or neocolonial discourses. These different attempts to write about the occult in Africa suggest that this threat of translation cannot be contained; a recent text even suggests that it extends itself to unsetding our sensory perception of the world around us. The magic of Africa requires a still more radical engagement than Africanist anthropology has produced thus far.