Containing Witchcraft: Conflicting Scenarios in Postcolonial Africa

Abstract

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.

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