A Cesspool of Sorcery: How Zionists Visualize and Respond to the City

Abstract

Residing in the recently established township of KwaMashu to the north of Durban where they were employed, Zulu Zionists formed small religious groups which addressed themselves to the alleviation of poverty and ill health. Zionist healing services upheld sorcery as the most common explanation of affliction while being designed to safeguard sufferers against it. Zionists would not dabble in sorcery but acknowledged it as an external reality by continually grappling with it. Internal conflicts were not expressed in an accusation of sorcery, mainly because the group was too fragile to contain it, and accusations were directed towards non-Zionists. Yet sorcerers are not identified as individuals, even vaguely. Instead, there is a tendency to socially expand the origin of sorcery to coincide with the major categories of outside association, i.e., neighbor and fellow-worker. Lacking the means either of socially denigrating or mystically damaging an identified assailant, Zionists gain nothing by unmasking an individual sorcerer. The adoption of a defensive attitude at once renders sorcery anonymous and endemic to the outside, to the city as a whole, and ensures internal cohesion as a prerequisite for responding to it. In its attitude to sorcery, Zionism opts for imprisoning its members within a set of relationships rather than excluding some by direct accusation. For the Zionists among whom I conducted research,1 the city means Durban. But in a more specific and immediate sense it means the segregated black township of KwaMashu, which sprawls across the hills some twenty kilometers to the north of Durban. Most Zionists are in full-

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