WITCHCRAFT IN MODERN AFRICA
AS VIRTUALISED BOUNDARY CONDITIONS OF THE
KINSHIP ORDER
Wim van Binsbergen
Version 2000-12-08 text only
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1. INTRODUCTION1
For many decades, anthropologists have
dominated the academic study of African societies and cultures,
and for a similar period most anthropologists have scarcely
bothered to investigate the epistemological premises of their
discipline. The common assumption was that prolonged fieldwork
would take care of whatever nasty questions epistemologists could
ask. In the first half of the twentieth century, anthropologists
were busily engaged in a professionalisation process which made
them surround their juvenile discipline with high walls of
institutional and paradigmatic isolationism - through which
general developments on the intellectual scene only selectively
and reluctantly penetrated. Moreover, the mainstream of Western
philosophy had been remarkably Eurocentric, philosophers had
their hands full with one language and one culture, and were not
particularly equipped to illuminate the interlingual and
intercultural quest for knowledge of which anthropology and
African Studies form part. From the early 1970s onwards, the
epistemological complacency of anthropology has been increasingly
assaulted by a series of debates on the imperialist background of
anthropology, on decolonisation, on orientalism, on alterity or
otherness, on male-centredness, on ethnographic authority, on
Afrocentrism, and so on. The title of the panel of the
international African Studies Association Annual Meeting where
the present chapter was presented for the first time:
'Epistemological and ideological approaches to witchcraft
analysis within African Studies: A critical assessment' indicates
a new phase of reflection on the problems and possibilities of
academic knowledge production in the modern world. Since Marx,
Mannheim, and Michel Foucault we have been deeply aware that
power relations largely determine - often inconspicuously - any
production of knowledge. In the context of African studies this
observation is of crucial importance. For here a massive volume
of knowledge is being produced by outsiders who cannot by any
standards identify as Africa. Moreover, this knowledge addresses
a part of the world which was subjected to outside domination for
long periods, and whose dependence and marginalisation in the
contemporary period of globalisation is only increasing. As
Africanists we must constantly consider the foundations of our
knowledge production, and we must be prepared to thresh out the
contradictions in this production in genuine debate with those of
our colleagues who (as Africans, as African Americans, as members
of Asian, South American, and Oceanian societies) occupy
strategically different positions in a world which is at the same
time globalising and under North Atlantic hegemony.
The study of witchcraft occupies an important place in this
endeavour, since for a long time Africa has been singled out as
the proverbial abode of witchcraft. This started in Late
Antiquity, when Egypt was already singled out in similar terms in
the Graeco-Roman perception.2 More recently, throughout the
colonial period, witchcraft featured in racialist and imperialist
constructions of alterity and inferiority as projected onto
members of African societies. A number of phases may be discerned
in the academic study of witchcraft as a major topic in African
studies:
the
insistence on witchcraft as a manifestation of Africans' alleged
fundamentally different modes of thought as compared to
inhabitants of the North Atlantic (Lévy-Bruhl, Evans-Pritchard,
1920-40s)
the
vindication of the African subject's rationality by insistence on
the logic of social relations behind witchcraft, against the
background - considered to be more or less table and timeless -
of the stable institutions of African village society (Gluckman,
Marwick, the Manchester School in general, 1950-70s)
witchcraft
as one of the symbolic expressions of the African subject's
active confrontation of problems of evil, meaning and competition
in a context of rapid social and political change (e.g. the study
of African religious change centring on Ranger, 1960-1980s; also
my own work situates itself here)
and, after a slack period during the
1970s and '80s,3
the
massive insistence on witchcraft in modern Africa interpreted as
an African path to modernity in the context of globalisation
(Geschiere; the Comaroffs c.s.).
Witchcraft has meanwhile featured in
specifically philosophical arguments. These initially reiterated
Lévy-Bruhl's position or Frazer's contention that witchcraft
(and magic in general) was misguided proto-science - an
alternative theory of the natural world and its inner workings. A
major breakthrough occurred in this field when the philosopher
Winch,4 a follower of the later Wittgenstein, cogently argued the
fallacy of the Frazerian approach. Far from expounding a theory
of the natural world which is demonstrably false - which would
call in question Africans' capability of empirical observation
and logical reasoning, therefore would be in conflict with the
anthropological tenet of the unity of mankind and with the
epistemological principle of charity;5 and would be
academic-political dynamite under contemporary conditions - Winch
argued that African witchcraft, like any other religious beliefs
the world over, comes in where knowledge (the knowledge of
members of an African society, but also the knowledge of
cosmopolitan natural sciences) runs out. African witchcraft is no
more a theory of the natural world than that the Christian and
Islamic dogma of Divine Providence is - what these three belief
systems have in common is that they seek to articulate what is
beyond empirical knowledge; but all may be pushed to a point
where they imply the possibility of miracles, i.e. incidental
departures from physical laws. African witchcraft is a way of
speaking about the unspeakable, and as such perhaps
understandable to believers, poets, philosophers and
anthropologists, but outside the realm of natural science
testing. If we accept this position, epistemology takes away our
political embarrassment since clearly our study of African
witchcraft no longer implies that Africans' intellectual
capabilities are in any way different or deficient as compared to
those of the rest of mankind. But for the great majority of
Africanists like myself, who did not need Winch to arrive at this
insight in the first place, this does not exhaust the potential
of African witchcraft as a topic of research.6
Meanwhile the study of witchcraft in Africa poses the same
epistemological problems as any other attempt to study religious
beliefs and practices with the concepts and theories which the
social sciences have developed in the course of the twentieth
century. Personally I have recently made the transition from a
chair in anthropology to one in philosophy because I am convinced
that without such epistemological reflection anthropology is not
going to fulfil its promise, at a time when - with globalisation
and the rise of multicultural societies in the North Atlantic -
the intercultural knowledge production which anthropology
promised to deliver is more needed than ever. However, at this
stage I feel I have more to offer as a long-standing
anthropological and historical student of witchcraft, than as a
novice philosopher.
The steps in my argument are inspired by two excellent recent
texts written by my long-standing colleagues and friends7 Peter
Geschiere and Matthew Schoffeleers,8 both in the forefront of the
Dutch contribution to African religious studies. Geschiere's
argument is contained in a beautiful and thoughtful book,9 which
has been widely acclaimed in its French version and whose English
version is now playing a major role in the current revival of the
study of witchcraft in a context of globalisation - signaling, in
Geschiere's words, the 're-enchantment of Africa'. Matthew
Schoffeleers' paper serves to suggest the perspective from which
I can focus on Geschiere's.
The present argument operates at a high level of aggregation and
generality. I try to contribute to the construction of an
analytical context for the description and analysis of witchcraft
beliefs and practices. But admittedly I scarcely enter into a
discussion of specific descriptive details; this is to be
reserved for a later study.
Throughout the argument I shall deploy the concept of virtuality,
which in my recent work I have found helpful towards the
definition of relationships of broken reference and meaning gone
astray, such as characterise social and cultural phenomena in
Africa today. Therefore, let me begin by defining the concept of
virtuality and provisionally indicating its use for the study of
contemporary Africa.
2. VIRTUALITY AND THE VIRTUAL VILLAGE
2.1. Virtuality defined10
The terms virtual and virtuality have a
well-defined and instructive trajectory in the history of ideas.
In its broad sweep of space and time, its multi-lingual aspect
and its repeated changes of meaning and context, this trajectory
reminds us of the context we seek to illuminate by the use of
these terms: that of globalisation.
Non-existent in classical Latin (although obviously inspired by
the word virtus there), virtual and virtuality are late-medieval
neologisms. Their invention became necessary when, partly via
Arabic versions of Aristotle's works, his concept of dúnamis
('potentiality, power, quadrate') had to be translated into
Latin. While the Scholastic/ Aristotelian philosophy, with its
emphasis on general potential to be realised in the concrete and
the specific, gradually retreated from most domains of North
Atlantic intellectual life, the terms found refuge in the
expanding field of physics, especially mechanics, where virtual
velocity, virtual moment, virtual work became established
concepts around 1800. This was a century after optics - another
branch of physics - had formulated the theory of the virtual
image: the objects showing up in a mirror image do not really
exist in the place where we see them, but they are merely
illusory representations, which we believe to observe at the end
of the refracted light beams connecting the object, the surface
of the mirror, and our eye.
In our age of information technology the term virtual has gained
a new lease of life. While in the context of contemporary
automatics virtual largely takes its cue from the meaning given
to the term in optics ('illusion'), it has also incorporated the
mechanics sense of 'potentiality capable of actual realisation'.
In the globalisation perspective we frequently refer to products
of the electronic industry; the furtive, intangible projection of
texts and images on electronic screens is an obvious example of
virtuality. Virtual reality has now become a cliché of the
post-modern experience: computer games and simulations which -
with extreme suggestions of reality - conjure up, for the
consumer, experiences which are as real as they are vicarious.
Guattari has introduced a related but significantly different use
of the term virtuality: for him the term refers to new,
unprecedented worlds, which are conjured up by creativity -
contrasting science as knowledge of the real with philosophy as
knowledge of the virtual. The evocation of these forms of
virtuality in the context of art and philosophy is the most
inspiring and hopeful aspect of Guattari's work, who however
tends to ignore the structures of domination prevailing also in
the production of art and philosophy.11
We need a further abstraction in order to make the concept of
virtuality amenable to the analysis of modern Africa. Let
virtuality stand for a specific relation of reference as existing
between elements of culture (A1, A2, ..., An). This relation may
be defined as follows:
Once, in some original context C1,
Avirtual referred to (i.e. derived its meaning from) Areal; this
relationship of reference is still implied to hold, but in actual
fact Avirtual has come to function in a context C2 which is so
totally dissimilar to C1, that Avirtual stands on its own; and
although still detectable on formal grounds to derive from Areal,
Avirtual has become effectively meaningless in the new context
C2, unless for some new meaning which Avirtual may acquire in C2
in ways totally unrelated to C1.
Virtuality then is about disconnectivity,
broken reference, de-contextualisation, through which yet formal
continuity shimmers through.
Such an approach to virtuality allows us to study the process of
the appropriation of globally available objects, images and ideas
in a local context, which constitutes itself in the very process
of such appropriation. Under conditions of globalisation, this
process occurs everywhere in the world today. However it takes on
a particularly marked form in Africa, where new technologies,
like the computer, television and video, appear to be
particularly discontinuous vis-à-vis pre-existing social and
technological practices, and where the economic situation
moreover imposes exceptional constraints on the introduction and
spread of these new technologies. Far better than the classic
research tradition which imagined bounded and integrated local
'cultures' to be drawn into contact with the wider world, the
concept of virtuality offers a context for the analysis of
contemporary African actors' production and sustaining of meaning
in a context of globalisation. Virtuality equips us for the
situation, which the global spread of consumerism and electronic
technology has rendered increasingly common also in Africa, that
meaning is encountered and manipulated in a context far removed,
in time and space, from the concrete social context of production
and reproduction where that meaning was originally worked out;
where meaning is no longer local and systemic, but fragmented,
ragged, absurd, maybe even absent.
But let us not forget that virtualising appropriation need not be
limited to new forms coming in globally from very distant places.
When today in South Central African towns there is a revival of
girl's puberty rites whose imagery celebrates a rural cosmology
no longer operative any more even in the rural areas, this is an
instance of urbanites appropriating a virtualised rural model. It
is my contention in the present chapter that a similar process is
at work in modern African witchcraft beliefs and practices as
found among African elites and middle classes.
2.2. The virtual village
We are all familiar with the obsolete
classic anthropological image of a multiplicity of African
'cultures', where 'each' culture was taken to be holistic,
self-contained, bounded, integrated, locally anchored,
effectively to be subsumed under an ethnic name. This image was
deliberately constructed by ethnographers from the 1930s onwards
so as to constitute, for the people supposed to adhere to one
such culture, a local universe of meaning - the opposite of
virtuality. Such a culture was thought to form an integrated
unity, so all its parts were supposed to refer to that same
coherence, which in its entirety gave the satisfactory illusion
of localised meaningfulness. Marxist anthropology of the
1970s and 1980s represented only a partial, not a radical
departure from this holistic classic position.12 Both the Marxist
and the classic position would tend to agree that African
historic societies have offered to their members (and largely in
order to accommodate those very contradictions) a fairly coherent
universe, in which the human body-self, interpersonal relations,
the landscape, and the supernatural all featured in one
composite, comprehensive world-view, whose symbolism and ritual
elaboration where to reconcile and conceal, rather than
articulate, such internal contradictions as constitute the whole
and render it dynamic. The agreement between the classical and
the Marxist anthropological position should not be taken as a
sign of validity, or as a sign of agreement on my part, given the
theoretical position I hold today. African historic societies in
the present millennium have invariably displayed cleavages in
terms of gender, age, class, and political power, revealing
comprehensive historical and structural factors which cannot be
meaningfully approached within a narrow spatial and temporal
horizon. Classic anthropological theory as well as Marxist
modes-of-production analysis is not incapable of casting light on
these factors, but when doing so fail to justify the classic
obsession for the local and presentist horizon, while even
Marxist anthropology in the African context has tended to
concentrate on specific social formations whose confinement to
narrow spatial and temporal horizons was taken for granted.
However, what is involved here is socio-cultural forms of
production and reproduction which are very widespread in space
(over much of the African continent, if not beyond) and time
(several millennia) , not only because of their typological
similarity, but also and particularly because they form part of
one comprehensive historical transformation process from the
Beolithic onwards. Moreover, historic African societies and their
cultures have always contained elements whose local integration
was only partial: beyond the local society, they derived from,
and partially still continued to refer to, other cultural
complexes which were often remote in space and time. Both the
classic and the Marxist approaches have been incapable of coping
with these continuities through time and space. 13
In this context, the meaning of an element of the local society
and culture may be said to consist in the network of referential
relations at the centre of which that element is perceived and
conceptualised by the participants;14 through this relational
network the element is taken, by the actors, explicitly or
implicitly, as belonging to that general socio-cultural order,
cognitively and emotively linked to many other aspects of that
order - a condition which produces a sense of proper placement,
connectivity and coherence, recognition, identity as a person and
as a group, aesthetics, bodily comfort and even healing.
In Africa, village society still forms the context in which many
present-day urbanites were born, and where some will retire and
die. Until recently, the dichotomy between town and village
dominated Africanist anthropology. Today we admit that,
considering the constant movement of ideas, goods and people
between town and village, and the increasing economic,
institutional, political and ideological continuity between the
two, the dichotomy has lost much of its explanatory value. Town
and village have become complementary, even converging options
within the social experience of Africans today; their difference
has become gradual, and is no longer absolute. However, while of
diminishing value in the hands of us analysts, the dichotomy
between town and village remains relevant in so far as it informs
African actors' conceptualisations of their life-world and social
experience. Here the idealised image of the village stands for an
imaginary context (no longer to be found in the real villages of
today) where production and reproduction are viable and
meaningful, pursued by people who - organised along the lines of
age and gender divisions, and historic ('traditional') leadership
- are turned into an effective community through an un-eroded
kinship system, symbolism, ritual and cosmology. Vital in this
set-up is that - largely through non-verbal means - ritual
manages to construct the bodies of the members of the residential
group as charged or inscribed with a shared meaning, a shared
identity, and while the body moves across time and space this
indelible mark yet remains, to be carried over into new contexts.
Even in the village context the effective construction of
community cannot be taken for granted. Central African villages,
for instance, have been described15 as the scene of an uneasy
truce between strangers, only temporarily constructed into
community - mainly through kinship rituals which take up an
enormous part of available resources and even so barely conceal
or negotiate underlying contradictions among the village
population. Such rituals of kinship (some articulating
reconciliation after conflict, and more others articulating over
such life crises as pregnancy, birth, adolescence, marriage, and
death) transform biological human individuals into competent
social persons with a marked identity founded in the local
community (or in the case of death transform such social persons
into ancestral spirits or transfer them onto living heirs in the
face of physical decomposition). Kinship rituals construct,
within the overall community, specific constituent identities,
e.g. those of gender and age. They refer to, and to a
considerable extent reproduce and perpetuate, the productive and
social organisation of the village society. Perhaps the central
characteristic of the nineteenth-century village order was that
the construction of community was still so effective that in the
villagers' consciousness their actual residential group, despite
periodic conflict, self-evidently appeared as the realisation of
the community ideal.
It is crucial to realise that in the twentieth century, even with
reference to rural settings, we are not so much dealing with
'real' communities, but with rural folks' increasingly
problematic model of the village community. Perhaps we could say
that throughout the twentieth century, the village in South
Central and Southern African discourse has been in the process of
becoming a virtual village. During the heyday of studies of
African religious history, rural ideological change in Africa
during the twentieth century16 came to be regarded as a process
of people actively confronting the erosion of that model, its
becoming irrelevant and impotent in the face of political and
economic realities. Employing numerous forms of organisational,
ideological and productive innovation combining local practices
with outside borrowings, rural populations in Africa struggled to
reconstruct a new sense of community in an attempt to revitalise,
complement or replace the collapsing village community in what
was remembered as its viable nineteenth - century form. The
ideological history of twentieth century Africa could be largely
written from this perspective. Peasants have been constantly
engaged in the construction of new, alternative forms of
community on the basis of rather new principles such as derived
from political, cultic, productive and consumerist ideas
introduced from the wider world. Many of these movements have
sought to re-formulate the notion of the viable, intact village
community in new terms and with new outside inspiration and
outside pressure. Healing cults, prophetic cults, anti-sorcery
movements, varieties of imported world religions and local
transformations thereof e.g. in the form of Independent churches,
struggles for political independence, involvement in modern
national politics including the recent wave of democratisation,
ethnicity, involvement in a peripheral-capitalist cash economy
with new symbols of status and distinction, - these have been
some of the strategies by which villagers have sought (often
against many odds) to create and bring to life the image of a new
world, and a continued sense of meaning and community, when the
old village order was felt, or said, to fall apart. And that old
village order, and the ethnic cultures under which it was usually
subsumed, may in itself have been largely illusory, strategically
underpinned by the ideological claims of elders, chiefs,
first-generation local intellectuals, colonial administrators and
missionaries, open to the cultural bricolage of invented
tradition on the part of these comparatively actors.17
If the construction of community in the rural context has been
problematic, the village yet represents one of the very few
models of viable community among Africans today, including
urbanites. It is the only model which is part of a collective
idiom pervading all sections of contemporary society. As such it
features massively as a nostalgic reference in ethnic identity
construction. Whatever alternative models of community are
available, are shallowly rooted and reserved to specific sections
of the society: Christians or Muslims (the local religious
congregation as a community; and by extension the abstract
world-wide collective of co-religionists), cult members (the
cultic group as a community), members of a specific ethnic group
(where the - usually newly invented - ethnic group is constructed
into a community, often with emphatic reference to the village
model as a focal point of origin and meaning), the elite (for
whom patterns of consumerism replace the notion of
community-through-interaction, with the notion of virtual or
vicarious global community through media transmission and the
display of appropriate manufactured symbols - status symbols in
clothing, transport, housing etc.).
Having identified the village featuring in contemporary African
expressions of self-identity and meaning, as a virtual village,
let us proceed to examine two recent Dutch approaches to African
witchcraft and healing, one by Peter Geschiere, the other one by
Matthew Schoffeleers.
3. TWO RECENT DUTCH DISCOURSES ON
WITCHCRAFT AND HEALING IN AFRICA
3.1. A Malawian healing movement
Schoffeleers deals with a recent and
short-lived healing cult in Malawi, around the healer Billy
Goodson Chisupe.18 During a few months in 1995 - grabbing an
opportunity which fell away with the aged protagonist's death -
tens of thousands of people flocked to Chisupe's village home in
order to obtain the cure for AIDS which had been shown to him -
an ordinary villager until then - in a dream only a few months
earlier.
In terms of the story of the prophet's calling, and the massive
pilgrimage to his rural dwelling, the cult replays a scenario
that is familiar to students of popular religion in South Central
Africa in the twentieth century, from the Ila prophet Mupumani
who appeared in the midst of drought and effective colonial
penetration in the 1910s, to the Bemba prophetess Lenshina in the
1950s and '60s; both attracted a following of many thousands of
people in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and even adjacent
territories.19 In the most admirable and convincing way,
Schoffeleers situates the brief contemporaneous history of the
Chisupe's both within the time-honoured cosmology of the Malawi
countryside of which he has become the principal living
ethnographer;20 and within the national political and social
developments in Malawi during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Predictably, considering the accumulated literature on religious
movements in South Central Africa, Schoffeleers interprets
Chisupe's cult, beyond its claimed therapeutic effectiveness
against AIDS, as an attempt to revitalise the country: i.e. the
nation-state.
Chisupe dispensed a reddish herbal solution. The Malawian public
and the media - contrary to the healer's own choice of words -
insisted on calling this medicine mchape. Of course Schoffeleers
would be the first to realise that mchape is the central concept
which, while retaining its basic meaning of 'ablution', in the
colonial history of Malawi and adjacent parts of South Central
Africa has acquired a more specific meaning: that of 'witchcraft
- cleansing medicine'; by extension it has come to denote the
young men, often returning migrants, who would come to the
villages forcing people to surrender their witchcraft materials
and to be cleansed.21 However, in the context of Chisupe's cult,
references to witchcraft have been so minimal that Schoffeleers
sees no reason to refer to them.
Let us now turn to Geschiere's analysis of witchcraft in Cameroon
today.
3.2. Witchcraft in Cameroon today
We are all aware of the unsatisfactory
nature of 'witchcraft' as an analytical ('etic') term; yet the
term is acceptable since, far from being an alien imposition, it
is the (inevitably defective) translation of a 'emic' concept
found in many African languages and consciously informing actors'
practices. Geschiere rightly argues that we should not waste time
over terminological issues before we have considered the actual
language usages of the people we write about. In his recent work,
as well as in his earlier book on the Maka of Cameroon, he
proposes to use a term which he suggests to be more neutral,
'occult forces'.22 However, the intra-disciplinary dynamics of
anthropological labelling have persuaded him to largely retain
the term witchcraft, and that is what I shall do.
We may distinguish at least four different contexts where various
sets of actors make pronouncements concerning witchcraft:
the
village and the local language prevailing there;
the
popular culture of the town with its oscillation between local
African languages, one or more urban linguae francae of African
origin, and an intercontinental language such as French and
English;
the
national elite and its preferred intercontinental language; and
the domain
of intercontinental scholarship, expressing itself again in
intercontinental languages.
Geschiere now implies - and this lends to
his argument its unique quality - that these four contexts are
intimately interrelated and even overlapping in the case of
contemporary Cameroonian beliefs and practices relating to
witchcraft.
Witchcraft is the central issue in Geschiere's argument, and at
first glance he appears to confirm the image well-known from the
literature written by missionaries and colonial administrators
from the late nineteenth century till the middle of the twentieth
century:23 an Africa which is the abode of witchcraft. But,
contrary to the expectation of these earlier European observers
and actors on the African scene, Geschiere proceeds to
demonstrate at length: that witchcraft has not disappeared under
the onslaught of modernity, but has installed itself at the very
heart of modernity. Geschiere argues that the African actors'
discourse concerning power in the post-colonial state, and
concerning the acquisition and use of modern consumer goods,
hinges on their conception of witchcraft. Whereas witchcraft
cases in the colonial era, especially in former British Central
Africa, were based on the official dogma that witchcraft is an
illusion (so that people invoking witchcraft would be punished as
either impostors or slanderers), in contemporary legal practice
in Africa witchcraft appears as a reality and as an actionable
offence in its own right. In Geschiere's view, the inroads of
modernity and postmodernity in Africa have not rendered
witchcraft obsolete. For Geschiere, however, witchcraft is, no
longer a concept tied to a rural cosmological order - for that
order no longer exists. Instead, new regional and national
settings have emerged in which witchcraft has managed to insert
itself as a central aspect of the discourse and the experience of
modernity - having severed all connections with the village and
its once viable kinship order.
3.3. Problems raised by a view which
stresses the prominence of witchcraft in contemporary Africa
A number of problems present themselves
at this point.
Not so much at the descriptive empirical level. Those of us who,
as Africans and/or as Africanists, have participated profoundly
and extensively in contemporary African life, will tend to agree
with Geschiere's observation as to the conspicuous prominence of
witchcraft in the discourse of the middle classes and the elites,
whenever these seek to describe power relations that have to do
with the access to and control of modern consumer goods and the
state; but also when they seek to define their position
vis-à-vis their rural area of origin, which then often emerges
as an avoided abode of witches - as an Africa within Africa.
Not all researchers working in this field however may agree with
Geschiere that such witchcraft discourse in contemporary Africa
is a manifestation of the existence of a variety of paths towards
modernity. If we loosely define modernity as the routinisation of
the heritage of the Enlightenment, does then contemporary African
witchcraft discourse constitute a path to modernity at all? Or
does it simply manifest the fact that, to the extent to which
there are witchcraft practices and witchcraft beliefs, no path to
modernity is taken or can be taken?
As a characteristically late echo from developments in such
provinces of intellectual life as philosophy, literary criticism,
art criticism in general, cultural anthropology in the 1990s has
been obsessed with defining modernity, its pluralities and
contradictions, its limitations, its defeats by postmodernity.
Here anthropology occupies an intrinsically problematic position
in that it in itself straddles the line between modernity and
postmodernity: modernist in its method and scope, postmodernist
in its emphasis on identity, locality, plurality, relativism and
stress on situationality. It is therefore unlikely that the
dilemmas of African witchcraft research as identified here can be
resolved from anthropology alone.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that North Atlantic
modernity and postmodernity have had their own share of occult
images - ranging from zombies and vampires to astrology and other
forms of divination, shamanism, UFO-ism, gaiasophy, the teachings
of South Asian gurus processed for North Atlantic consumption,
and whatever the constantly innovating spiritual fashion industry
of New Age will bring. Are these beliefs in the proper sense of
the word, comparable to nineteenth-century Dutch villagers'
beliefs in the invisible world claimed by their version of
Christianity, or nineteenth-century African villagers' beliefs in
the powers of their ancestors to effectively interfere in the
visible world? Or are these North Atlantic postmodern beliefs
rather 'make-beliefs', with a characteristic high level of
virtuality and performance, true and compelling on the video
screen but not necessarily so in everyday life? Might not the
same apply to contemporary African witchcraft beliefs as
circulating at the regional and national level? What if these can
be shown to be 'virtual' as well? And what about the relation
between such a 'virtual' national and regional discourse on
witchcraft, and witchcraft as an aspect of the time-honoured
kinship order at the village?
Another problem concerns, not anthropological interpretation, but
the political and ethical implication of such interpretation. As
my friend and colleague Peter van der Veer, the South Asianist,
never tires of observing, one or two decades after the debates on
the imperialist nature of anthropology and on orientalism,24 it
is rather amazing that the mainstream of Africanist writing
continues to reinforce the image of Africa as the abode of
witchcraft - as the continent where even under conditions of
modern technology (including advanced equipment in the domains of
armament, information and communication), modern science, modern
organisation (the modern state; the formal organisation as the
dominant expression of civil society), and the effective inroads
of Islam and Christianity as major world religions, witchcraft
remains (or has become?) a dominant discourse among, of all
people, those Africans participating more than others in
modernity and postmodernity. Is this a true rendering of the
descriptive reality of contemporary Africa? Or is it in the first
place, as van der Veer suggests, a 'localising strategy' (Richard
Fardon)25 on the part of Africanists: an intra-disciplinary
consensus according to which it is fashionable and appropriate to
write on Africa in terms of witchcraft, in the same way as South
Asianists are in the habit of writing on South Asia in terms of
sharply conflicting communal identities (between Muslims and
Hindus - reified categories which the orientalism debate has
urged us to deconstruct)26, and on the Middle East in terms of a
constant pendulum-swing between formal and popular Islam?27
At this point in my argument we can only raise these questions.
Let us continue our juxtaposition of Schoffeleers' and
Geschiere's argument, in the hope that this will help us clarify
the theoretical issues raised in this section.
3.4. The absence of witchcraft in
Chisupe's movement
In Schoffeleers' argument, by contrast to
Geschiere's, the witchcraft element is absent. I am inclined to
think that this is a valid rendering of the actual situation.
Schoffeleers is the Malawi specialist, there is corroborating
evidence from Probst, van Dijk and other recent ethnographers,
and most importantly: the extensive research on religious
transformations in South Central Africa - the massive research
output over the past three decades - certainly has revealed the
existence of a limited number of interpretative options open to
African actors besides witchcraft.
Yet in his oral presentation of the text on which I base my
argument here,28 Schoffeleers admitted, of course, that in Malawi
the term mchape carries general connotations of witchcraft; and
regardless of the issue whether witchcraft might have been a more
prominent aspect of the Chisupe movement than his argument
suggests (apparently it was not), he also pointed out that given
the primary audience he had in mind for his paper (notably,
producers and consumers of African Theology) he could not afford
to enter into a discussion of witchcraft if he did not want to
lose that audience.29
Let me elaborate.Witchcraft was the main issue in some religious
expressions which, having become fashionable, swept as cults
across the region - but not in all. Ironically, witchcraft -
eradication movements do not constitute the crucial limiting case
their name would suggest, for the active confrontation of the
witchcraft in others presupposes, not an interpretative
alternative, but a firm belief in witchcraft as the central
explanatory factor in evil. The prophetic idiom represented by
the prophet Mupumani addressed an ecological i.e. productive
concern with rain and vegetation; none of our sources suggest
that his cult addressed witchcraft at all. Cults of affliction,
which have formed the major religious expression in western
central Zambia during much of the twentieth century, represented
the African actors' radical departure from the theory of
witchcraft as an explanation of evil: not human malice, but
capricious non-human alien spirits, were cited as the cause of
illness and distress; these spirits were reputed to emulate the
spatial displacement, to travel the very roads, of regional
population movements, long-distance trade, labour migration,
colonial penetration and mass consumption of foreign-produced
manufactured goods. Christian churches, to cite another major
alternative to witchcraft as an interpretative religious idiom,
have operated a theory of evil which not so much accepts
witchcraft as a mode of explanation, but offers an alternative
explanation in terms of sin and salvation, and by doing so
provides a shelter for many of those fearing the witchcraft of
others as well as the witchcraft inside themselves. All this does
not mean that the people practising cults of affliction or
Christianity ceased believing in witchcraft or engaging in
witchcraft practices - but at least they had access to a
religious variant where witchcraft was not the all-overriding
mode of explanation of evil.30 But whereas in my earlier work -
following Horton31 rather than Winch - I have stressed this
aspect of witchcraft beliefs as a theory of evil, I now feel that
this approach was too intellectualist, smacked too much of the
European theological and philosophical discussion of the problem
of evil in terms of the theodicee, Job's predicament, etc.
African witchcraft beliefs, although potentially leading on to a
theory of causation, would now seem to have been primarily a
labelling device: naming, not explaining, evil from the
perspective of the kinship order and its narrow, nearby horizon.
3.5. The construction of a discursive
context for analysis: (a) the village as the dominant locus of
cosmological reference
A crucial difference between the
arguments of Geschiere and Schoffeleers lies in the way in which
each constructs a discursive context for his analysis.
For Schoffeleers this is a regionally embedded context: the
argument moves back and forth between, on the one hand,
post-colonial Malawi, whose socio-cultural and political outlines
we need to know in order to understand the story - and on the
other hand some generalised Malawian village environment, which
constitutes the setting for cosmological notions around trees and
their healing power, and for the typical biography (including
temporary death, a visit to the underworld or heaven, and rebirth
on earth) of the prophet and the healer.32 The village is the
very place where ancestors may yet appear in dreams dressed in
bark-cloth (the standard pre-textile clothing in East Africa and
South Asia). Emic meaning is implied at the level of the actors,
and etic interpretation is rendered possible at the level of the
academic writer and reader, by Schoffeleers' dextrous juggling
between these two regionally nested sets of references - the
nation-state and the village. Much of Schoffeleers' argument is
by imputation: the two spheres are suggested to be distinct yet
continuous and interconnected, so that meanings and conditions
applying to one sphere can be carried over to the other. Is not
the crux of the Chisupe's dream-derived message that there is a
cure for every ailment, including AIDS, including perhaps the
ailment of the post-colonial state?33
3.6. The construction of a discursive
context for analysis: (b) leaving the village and its cosmology
behind, and opting for a globalising perspective
Geschiere as an author can be seen to
struggle with the same problem as Schoffeleers does: where can we
find a locus of meaning and reference, for the African actors, as
well as for the academic discourse about their witchcraft beliefs
and practices?
Both our authors derive their inspiration and their analytical
confidence, rightly, from their years of participant observation
at the village level. But for Geschiere the village and its
cosmology is no longer a dominant reference.
Which village, in which region, anyway? Geographically, some of
the data which Geschiere presents as having triggered his
analytical curiosity may derive from a Cameroonian village, but
on closer inspection his corpus highlights the discourse and
practices among African elites and middle-classes, and between
anthropologists and selected Africans who, employed as
anthropological assistants, may be considered middle class. I
deliberately used the word corpus, whose textual and finite
nature, with its sense of procedural appropriation and processing
rather than contingent and dependent immersion, differs
considerably from the standard anthropological material based on
prolonged participant observation. After all, Geschiere
frequently boasts that his first professional identity was that
of historian, not anthropologist. These methodological procedures
constitute deliberate and strategic choices on Geschiere's part.
Having previously written on occult forces at the village level,
in his monograph on the Maka and in a number of shorter pieces,
in his recent book he emphatically seeks to move away from the
village setting. He wishes to explore how witchcraft operates in
a context of 'modernity': the state, the district capital, the
city, modern consumption, elite behaviour. It is here that he has
a chance of making an original contribution to the already vast
literature on African witchcraft, where village contexts
predominate. These choices inevitably have an effect on the
nature and the quality of the data at the anthropologist's
disposal: they direct the research to contexts which are
geographically dispersed and structurally far more complex than
most African villages; contexts moreover which feature social
actors endowed with such social and political power that they can
effectively impede participant observation; and finally, contexts
which are often downright intimidating, involving threats of
inflicting occult injury.
It is not only the choice of a national or even international
level of variety and comparison, impossible to cover by any one
investigator's participant observation, that gives the specific
flavour of displacement, of operating in an uncharted no man's
land, to Geschiere's discourse on witchcraft in modern Africa.
Having studied the village, and with his first monograph many
years behind him, he is now operating at a level where the
meaning which actors' attribute to their witchcraft practices is
no longer informed by the cosmology of some original village
environment.
Or is it, after all? When we compare Geschiere's approach to that
of Schoffeleers, the difference may be tentatively expressed
thus:
Schoffeleers
has access to the village cosmology and appeals to it in order to
partially explain the meaning of contemporary events at the
national level, even if he does not argue in detail the
interrelations between town and country and the interpenetration
of rival cosmologies in Malawi today;
Geschiere
on the other hand plays down the village cosmology and therefore,
despite the close attention - throughout his published work - for
the interpenetration between the village and the wider national
political and economic scene particularly in contemporary
Cameroon, is no longer interested in identifying (or may we say:
is at a loss to identify) the original locus (the village) where
witchcraft beliefs and practices once took shape and meaning.
It is this particular orientation of
Geschiere's work on witchcraft which allows him to capture a
crucial aspect of contemporary African life: the extent to which
the village is no longer the norm, - no longer a coherent,
consistent and explicit point of reference and meaning in the
African actors' discourse. In contexts of modernity, ( in cities,
in the formal organisations of the state, churches and economic
life), the African actors express themselves in an idiom of
witchcraft which has become virtualised -- although Geschiere
does not use that term. While operating in a social context which
is very different from the village, and which is informed by very
different structural principles than the village, these actors
have appropriated into their situation of modernity the concept
of witchcraft from the village, have transformed it, have given
it a new meaning, and constitute themselves in the very process
of such appropriation.
However, it is my contention that such new meaning as the modern
African discourse on witchcraft may entail, however transformed,
is likely to be illuminated by a proper understanding of
witchcraft in its more original rural context.
3.7. Possible lessons from a
rural-orientated cosmological perspective on witchcraft
Much of the well-known anthropological
and historical Africanist literature on witchcraft is cited by
Geschiere;34 but his insistence on the African middle-class and
elite subjects' fragmented modernist social discourse outside the
village may render him less perceptive of the extreme antiquity,
and the fundamental significance, of the witchcraft discourse in
the village context.
This is especially manifest in Geschiere's claim that the older
ethnographic discourse on witchcraft is so very moralistic in the
sense that it can only present witchcraft as something evil.
Geschiere chides the older authors on African witchcraft for
failing to realise that in the African experience witchcraft is
ambivalent, also capable of inspiring excitement, admiration, a
positive sense of power; brainwashed as it were by this older
ethnography, as he feels he has been, Geschiere regrets that he
had to discover personally, as a serendipity, that his African
companions could be positively fascinated by witchcraft. No doubt
there is an element of truth in Geschiere's critique: there is in
the older ethnography of African witchcraft a tendency of
constructing the African subject - along familiar missionary and
colonial lines - as depraved, given to immorality, with limited
powers of abstract thought , with a system of thought moreover
not conducive to the idea of transcendence; represented in this
manner so that 'the African' would appear to be incapable of
rising above the limitations of the human condition, hence to be
inclined to attribute misfortune to human malice and not to such
a supernatural principle as a High God actively intervening in
the visible world. Yet Geschiere's attempt to relegate the moral
dimension in African witchcraft at the village level to a North
Atlantic ethnographic imposition and nothing more, suggests that
he has only a partial understanding of the place of witchcraft in
the village-based kinship order. Moral ambiguity does not imply
amorality but is its very opposite.
Whatever the difference between acephalous societies and those
with centralised political leadership, and whatever the
variations across time and space, South Central and Southern
African historical cosmologies tend to converge on this point,
that they have important moral implications, defining witchcraft
as primarily the transgression of the code of social obligations
defined by the kinship order. The entire cosmology is an
evocation of a kinship-based social universe, whose normal and
beneficial flow of life force and fertility depends on a
precarious balance between opposites: heaven and earth, life and
death, the living and the dead, men and women, nature/forest and
culture/the village, etc. It is the three mortal sins against the
kinship order which are capable of destroying this balance and of
blocking the flow of life force: incest, murder and witchcraft
within the local (or by extension regional) community.35 By
observing the taboos on incest, murder and witchcraft, the
community is effectively constructed as based on: a recognition
of extensive kinship (hence the incest taboo); on intra-community
peace (hence the taboo on intra-community violence, i.e. murder);
and on sociability and reciprocity (hence the taboo on witchcraft
as a celebration of individual desires and powers at the expense
of one's kin). Witchcraft has been the boundary condition of the
construction of the African village community in the very many
centuries that this community was the basic context of production
and reproduction. I suggest that it is the individual challenge
of the non-violent, sociable, reciprocal kinship order that is
really at the heart of the original notion of witchcraft in the
village societies of South Central and Southern Africa.
The ambivalence of village witchcraft which Geschiere rightly
notes is not a modernist innovation but is inherent in witchcraft
as a boundary condition of the kinship order. Before modernity,
the kinship order was not virtual in the sense of defined above:
it was not a transformative appropriation into a totally
different setting; but even then the kinship order was certainly
problematic. It needed to be continuously constructed and
reconstructed. New-born individuals, in-marrying spouses,
captives and migrants needed to be drawn into it and kept within
it through socialisation and social control. Even so, in South
Central and Southern Africa, villages as localised, spatial
contexts of production and reproduction tended to have a
life-span of only a few decades. They declined demographically
and in terms of internal social contradictions, and new villages
were constantly formed. All this required a leadership which
oscillates between sociable arbitration and gentle coaxing, and
occasional outbursts of assertiveness and initiative. Individuals
were constantly on the move from one village to another and from
one patron (a senior kinsmen) to another, fleeing the disrupted
social relations in a previous place of residence and being
attracted by the promises of sociability, care and protection in
the next place of residence. Both in an individual's life, and in
the life of a village community, there was a continuous movement
back and forth between the moral ideal of community (through
sociability, non-violence, and the absence of witchcraft) and the
embarrassing reality of individual assertion (through anti-social
egoistic behaviour, leadership initiatives, challenges, physical
violence - which all implied, and usually were cast in the secret
ritualistic and symbolic trappings of, witchcraft). This
contradiction, and the contingent dynamics it takes on over time,
is the heart-beat of village society in South Central and
Southern Africa. The moral premium on non-violence and
sociability, and against individual assertiveness, is only one
side of the medal; its counterpart (conceptualised in the village
discourse as witchcraft, locally expressed by such vernacular
concepts as wulozi, buloi, etc.; see below) is as necessary and
as common as it is normatively sanctioned. The fact that
witchcraft often implies a violence which is hidden, still
reflects the strong taboo on violence within the kinship order,
as characteristic of many African societies.
Not only is the kinship order internally divided and juxtaposed
against individual assertion (whose symbolic conceptualisation
and ritualistic procedures are those of witchcraft). In addition,
the kinship order, and the villages which it calls into being as
contexts of production and reproduction, is set off against other
structural modalities in South Central and Southern Africa, which
while parasitic upon the village-based kinship order, do not
derive from that order, cannot be reduced to that order, and in
fact in their socio-economic structure and their symbolic
elaboration challenge the kinship order by a recourse to a
different socio-cultural 'logic' (in the sense of coherent
world-view) altogether. Whatever the cosmological and mythical
elaboration of the kingship, the kingship order is never
coterminous with the kinship order, hence royals' often extreme
reliance on violence, social separation, emphatic denial of the
very kinship ties to which they owe their lives and social
position, on royal incest, and on close association with
witchcraft. The single most important defining feature of the
precolonial African state is not its monopoly of violence (as
Weber would have it for the European state), but its radical
rejection of the kinship order which informs the local
communities over which the state holds sway. In lesser degrees
and with different symbolic repertoires, the same departure of
the kinship order characterises other specialist positions in
South Central and Southern African societies prior to the
colonial conquest: the trader, the blacksmith, the
diviner-priest, the rain-maker, the bard, the musician. They
exist by definition outside the kinship order, and therefore
inevitably share with royals connotations of witchcraft,
anti-sociability, and violence. Their reproduction as
professional subgroups or ethnicities, meanwhile, implies forms
of intra-group non-violence and sociability, which contradict
their outsidership vis-à-vis the overall kinship order, and make
for all sorts of symbolic and ritual elaborations.36 It is from
these symbolic elaborations, these phantasms, that part of the
later imagery of modern witchcraft can be expected to derive.
Witchcraft, one might say, is everything which
falls
outside the kinship order,
is not
regulated by that order,
challenges,
rejects, destroys that order.
As such, witchcraft is opposed to
kinship, group solidarity, rules of kinship, incest prohibitions,
avoidance rules concerning close kin, kinship obligations
concerning redistribution of resources, the repression of
intra-kin violence, and the acknowledgement of ancestral
sanctions. Outside of the kinship order is the realm of
witchcraft; and it is here that we must situate kingship, trade,
and the specialities of the bard, the diviner, the magician and
the rain-maker.
Probably it is incorrect to assume that witchcraft beliefs and
practices sprang directly and exclusively, as transformations,
reversals and denials, from the kinship order. The specific forms
of witchcraft have a history, so has the kinship order (although
its history is difficult to study in contexts where written texts
are relatively scarce, like in precolonial Africa), and so has
the relation between witchcraft and the kinship order. Ironically
(in view of witchcraft's reputation of being hidden, dark,
obscure), it is somewhat easier to reconstruct the history of
witchcraft. For if witchcraft is everything which challenges the
kinship order (such as kinship, trade, specialities), then
witchcraft has much to do with social complexes that leave more
lasting traces than the ordinary face-to-face kinship domain -
social complexes that have much to do with the way in which the
wider world is connected with the local societies of sub-Saharan
Africa. At present we have a fair general knowledge of the
history of the magical tradition of the Ancient Near East
(especially Egypt and Mesopotamia) from c. 3000 BCE. The same
applies to the history of kingship. Now, especially in the fields
of kingship and the magical tradition there are such specific,
numerous and widely distributed parallels between sub-Saharan
Africa and the Ancient Near East, that it is now becoming
possible to read the history of African magic (and that of
African kingship, but that is another story) in part as the
diffusion, and subsequent localisation and transformation, of
these social complexes from the Ancient Near East. This idea was
first launched by Frobenius,37 and in the course of the twentieth
century was increasingly discredited in professional Africanist
circles along with Frobenius himself. Meanwhile, we should add,
that there is also increasing evidence that the civilisations of
the Ancient Near East, in their turn, in their emergence and
early history, owed a very great debt to Saharan and sub-Saharan
Africa
I could not agree more with Geschiere than when he claims that it
is the fundamental ambiguity of African witchcraft which allows
it to insert itself into the heart of modernity. Such ambiguity
however, contrary to what he claims, does not at all explode but
implies, as the complementary concept, the morality of the
kinship order. Nor can such ambiguity entirely be relegated to
some universal, innate quality of the sacred as being both
benevolent and destructive, as stressed by Durkheim and Otto.38
The ambiguity is not even adequately captured by a statement,
superficially correct, to the effect that 'witchcraft is an idiom
of power'. Witchcraft in the time-honoured village context does
not describe power in general, but power in a specific context:
the individualising self-assertion which while challenging the
kinship order, constitutes that order at the same time.
In addition to the requirements of leadership and of the
enculturation of new individuals, the ambiguity of witchcraft
also seems to reflect the material contradictions between the
various modes of production involved in African rural social
formations, and the ideological and symbolic expressions of those
contradictions. The prominence, in the domain of witchcraft, of
references to kingship, trade and specialities which each may be
recognised as specific, distinct modes of production, suggests
that despite having gone out of fashion, the theory of the
articulation of modes of production may yet considerably
illuminate African sorcery beliefs and practices39 - as it has
been argued to illuminate African ethnicity.40 Nor need this
suggestion as to the applicability of modes-of-production
analysis to witchcraft beliefs be restricted to Africa, as an
analysis, along similar theoretical lines, of witchcraft and
other forms of magic in the Ancient Near East may show.41 Because
modes of production ultimately revolve on the appropriation of
nature, we can understand why the fundamental distinction, in so
many African cosmologies, between the ordered human space
('village') and the forces of the wild ('forest', 'bush'),
particularly empowers roles situated at the boundary between
these domains: the hunter, the musician, the healer. This brings
us near to an understanding of which specific imagery, with which
specific origin in real life, is likely to be employed in the
domain of witchcraft beliefs.
Meanwhile, the amazing point is not so much variation across the
African continent, but convergence.
Extremely widespread in Africa42 is the belief that for any type
of excessive, transgressive success - such as attaining and
maintaining the status of ruler, diviner-priest or monopolist
trader - a close kinsman needs to be sacrificed or to be
nominated as victim of occult, anti-social forces. I have
extensive reasons to take such beliefs as indicative of actual
practices (whose empirical assessment however poses immense
difficulties, both of method, of criminal law, and of the
politics of knowledge)43. In view of the above discussion of the
kinship order and of witchcraft as its boundary condition, these
beliefs are understandable as ritual evocations of how specialist
statuses challenge the kinship order through their individual
assertiveness, violence, and denial of reciprocity and community.
The South-east Cameroonian jambe as a personalised occult force
demanding sacrifices of close kinsmen (in what Geschiere calls
the 'old' witchcraft idiom) would appear to be closely equivalent
- in belief, practice and perhaps even etymology - to the Zambian
concept of the chilombe or mulombe, a snake with a human head
which is secretly bred near the river, first on a diet of eggs
and chicks, later demanding that his human associate nominates
close kin for sacrifice in exchange for unrivalled powers and
success.44
What however seems to be absent from the Cameroonian scene is the
concept as enshrined in the otherwise widespread Bantu root
-rozi, -lothi, -loi, with connotations of moral transgression,
malice, murder, incest, not exclusively through the use of
familiar spirits but also relying on materia magica: herbs,
roots, parts of human or animal bodies. The fact that this
lexical root is so widespread allows us to adopt a historical
perspective: we are led to conclude that over 2000 years ago the
early farmers and herders who spoke proto-Bantu already had a
concept of
'[abstract noun prefix]+ [ root ]
l/ro[th]i
whose semantic field must have largely
coincided with that of its twentieth-century CE descendent
linguistic forms. It is quite possible that the Bantu lexical
root [ root ] l/ro[th]i signifies this domain external to, and
challenging, the kinship order - that its original sense is
alienness rather than moral evil. This hypothesis would then cast
light on the puzzling of apparently the same lexical root in the
names of the Zimbabwean Barozvi and the Zambian Barotse/Balozi:
'outsiders', 'strangers', 'aliens' with royal connotations,
certainly, but not an entire people of 'witches'. The Bantu root
vl/ro[th]i would then perhaps be similar to the root vwal
underlying such names as Wales, Wallon, Walen, Wallis, Wallachia,
in Central and Western Europe - which although often interpreted
as 'Celtic' (even Celtic of a particular ethnic group) ultimately
means 'alien'. By a very far shot one might even surmise that the
two roots [ root ] l/ro[th]i and vwal are etymological cognates.
Rather more difficult to explain are the extensive geographical
continuities attending the new idioms of witchcraft which
appeared under conditions of approaching modernity, especially
the advent of early-modern consumer goods with the growth of
long-distance trade from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
CE onward. What Geschiere describes for Cameroon, in terms of
victims being in some occult way captured and made to work as
zombies, I also encountered during field-work in both Zambia and
Guinea-Bissau (but so far not in Botswana). And the comparative
Africanist bibliography on these topics must be voluminous.
If the 'new' forms of witchcraft in the 1980s-90s use (in the
zombie imagery) the idiom of the slave trade which has been
extinct for almost a century, than this is an anachronism - even
if the slave trade belongs to a more recent history than e.g. the
establishment of ancestral cults. If instead (and John and Jean
Comaroff have argued recently)45 it is not downright slavery but
indentured exploited wage labour which the zombie metaphor is
referring too, then that too would be anachronistic to the extent
to which such labour conditions no longer obtain in Southern
Africa today. In other words, the reference to earlier forms of
globalisation (slave trade, indentured labour) is now used in
order to express and contest, in a witchcraft idiom, newer forms
of globalisation, such as the differential access to consumer
goods and post-colonial state power. This is comparable to the
processes of selective borrowing between time frames which I
tried to capture in my analysis of South Central African cults of
affliction; also these I interpreted as referring, in the late
nineteenth and the twentieth century CE, to the complex of
long-distance trade which by then had already become obsolete.46
3.8. Modern African witchcraft as an
instance of virtuality
My insistence on the kinship order as the
long-standing and widespread historical basis of village-centred
witchcraft beliefs and practices in South Central and Southern
Africa enables us to identify the virtualised and transformed
nature of the modern regional and national witchcraft beliefs and
practices as studied by Geschiere. This is the case even although
Geschiere does not employ the concept of virtuality nor stops to
explicate the remarkable features as captured by this concept.
Although he does recognise the kinship nexus of witchcraft, he
refuses to make his discourse on witchcraft ultimately dependent
upon some local village scene in the past or the present. Rather,
he describes witchcraft as part of today's national culture of
Cameroon, much in the way as one might describe, for instance,
sexual permissiveness, xenophilia, and democracy based on
institutionalised sub-national negotiation as parts of the
national culture of The Netherlands today. Geschiere does not
deny that the village context may once have engendered or
incubated the witchcraft beliefs and practices which today have
such an impact on middle-class and elite life in Cameroon and
throughout Africa, but he stresses that today such a rural
reference, far from being a determining factor for the actors,
has lost all conscious significance for them.
Being virtualised, the urban, national and elite witchcraft
beliefs in Cameroon are suspended in the air. They are not
endowed with meaning by any direct reference to actual, concrete
practices of production and reproduction within the horizon of
social experience of the actors carrying such beliefs. Instead,
the conceptual and social basis of these beliefs is fragmented
and eroded: a loose bricolage of broken myths and ill-understood
rumours about power and transgression, fed by two main sources:
on one
side by the faint and disconnected echoes of a rural discourse
and practice;
on the
other by the selective recycling of detached, de-contextualised
images of African life, including witchcraft, as produced by
Europeans (anthropologists, missionaries, colonial civil
servants) as well as by African elite and middle-class actors,
and subsequently recycled even wider in present-day African
national societies.
Admittedly, whatever their rural origin,
'modern witchcraft beliefs' in Africa may share hardly more than
their lexical designation with the time-honoured concept
witchcraft as a boundary condition of the kinship order. That
kinship order and its implications no longer seem to form part of
modern witchcraft beliefs. What has instead been co-opted,
appropriated, of ancient witchcraft beliefs into the modernist
collective representations at the national and regional level,
among elites and middle classes operating in the formal
organisations of the state, industry and civil society, are
notions in which individual power is celebrated, and is adorned
by imagery of extravagance, violence and transgression. In a
modern social world where whatever is alien to the rural kinship
order, has gained ever greater dominance, witchcraft is no longer
a boundary condition, but has become the central norm. Modern
life is the kinship order virtualised: turned inside out, invaded
by, subjugated by, the outside world against it was once an
effective refuge. Modern life, in short, is witchcraft.
The subjective experience, reported from many parts of nineteenth
and twentieth century Africa, according to which people signalled
a dramatic increase of witchcraft in recent times, then - far
from necessarily corresponding with an actual increase of
witchcraft practices - should be interpreted as scarcely more
than a tautological expression for the fact that social
experiences would be less and less governed by the kinship order,
yet at the same time would for the time being continue to be
judged from the perspective of that order.
Geschiere seeks to interpret modern witchcraft by playing down
the village nexus and its perspective of the longue durée. Thus
he is offering us a new version of Max Gluckman's influential but
one-sided adage: 'the African townsman is a townsman', whose
social and cultural existence should primarily be interpreted by
reference to modern urban conditions which by implication are
supposed to render all rural and historical referents obsolete.
If we yet try to bring in the rural and historical dimension, we
appreciate that modern witchcraft is an instance of virtuality as
an essential aspect of the modern African condition.The beliefs
and practices of modern witchcraft clearly have the formal
characteristics that one would associate with the counterpart, in
African cultural production, of the virtual reality of electronic
media and games. Modern witchcraft lacks precision and detail,
and neither reveals nor claims profound cultural competence.
Despite an element of regional variation (which Geschiere lists,
beside the kinship link and the ambiguity, among the three major
features on witchcraft beliefs in Cameroon today, and of which he
shows the potential for ethnic articulation), these beliefs and
practices tend to blend into broad blanket concepts, situating
themselves in some sort of national or international lingua
franca of concepts, ideas and rumours which (also because of the
effect of the recycling of North Atlantic reformulations) can
hardly be traced back to any specific regional or ethnic rural
source of conceptualisation and meaning. Most significantly,
Geschiere tells us that actors (for reasons which he does not go
into, but which revolve on the virtuality I have pinpointed)
often prefer to discuss witchcraft matters not in any of the
original Cameroonian languages but in French or English! What a
relief for an anthropologist who does not know any Cameroonian
language except these to intercontinental ones.
Recent media research47 has stressed the fact that contemporary
forms of art and the consumption of images derive their impact
particularly from a transformation of the temporal basic
structure of human perception. In the creation of virtuality,
time plays a key role. Witchcraft beliefs and practices in
contemporary Africa provide an example of this time dimension of
virtuality. Geschiere's discussion carries the strong suggestion
that these beliefs are situated in some sort of detached
no-man's-land, and do no longer directly refer to the village -
they are no longer rooted in the productive and reproductive
processes there, nor in their attending cosmology. Part of that
cosmology, fragmented, disintegrated, ill-understood, and exposed
to vaguely similar globalising influences from elsewhere, has
been exported to function, more or less, outside the village.
Middle classes and elite use English or French to discuss its
blurred and collapsed notions. The reference to the village is
absent, perfunctory, or meaningless. Modern Africa, inventing its
own witchcraft idioms tailored to the tune of the town and the
formal organisation, can do without the actual village, and in
its conceptualisation of power does not even necessarily take
recourse to the image of the virtual village any more.
3.9. The continued relevance of the old
kinship order
Still we are left with a sense of
dissatisfaction. Does not an interpretation of modern witchcraft
in terms of virtuality simply restate the old opposition between
town and country in a new idiom? If in the live of African middle
classes and elites the village has been left behind for good,
this is a sign that the mechanisms of social control by which the
village environment seeks to enforce the kinship order as a basis
for viable community, no longer effectively extend into the life
of the village's successful descendants in town and abroad. In
the course of the twentieth century Africanist research has
monitored the succession of strategies through which the village
has tried to retain a hold over its emigrants: tribal elders in
town, marital ties, monetarisation of bridewealth, initiation
cycles, rural-based regional cults, cults of affliction and other
forms of therapy which could only be extended to urban migrants
at the village, parental curses, the lure of prestigious
traditional office (as headman, court assessor, chief) after
retirement from a modern career, the lure of rural land as an
urban migrant's ultimate security the norm of building a house in
one's village of origin,, and the widespread norm of being buried
in the rural home. All these strategies have consisted of power
games between generations and genders, and inevitably they have
constituted a fertile context for older and newer forms of
witchcraft.
Let us grant that an increasing number of middle class and elite
Africans have sought to escape from village-based strategies and
no longer actively participate in village life - although often
at the cost of cultivating a fear of the village as a an imagined
place of intense witchcraft, which one tries to avoid at all
costs and visits to which - if absolutely inevitable - have to be
cut short to the extreme. These fears already betray a measure of
acknowledgement of the historic kinship order and the obligations
it imposes, especially on the more successful and affluent
members of the family,- such as urban migrants. Besides, one may
cut one's ties with the distant village, but that does not mean
that one can entirely place oneself outside the reach of kinship
- that one can totally ignore one's parents, siblings, and
children, not to speak of somewhat more remote ties. This
residual kinship may partially be patterned or re-patterned
according to North Atlantic and global models, but in the case of
African middle class and elites is also likely to reflect their
childhood socialisation into recent versions of the historic
kinship order whose boundary condition has been witchcraft.
We could
go full circle and assess what the insights attained by on
Geschiere's part mean in terms of a possible re-assessment of
Schoffeleers' picture of the Chisupe movement.
Schoffeleers helped us to pinpoint what could have been learned
from a rural-inspired reading of the distant, Cameroonian data,
while taking for granted that this perspective was eminently
applicable to the Malawian healing movement's discourse. But what
about the Malawian actors involved? Were they really prepared for
such a reading, and did they have the symbolic baggage to make
such a reading at all relevant to their situation? Does
Schoffeleers' reliance on such rural insights as prolonged
participant observation at the village level accords one, yield
insight in present-day Malawian actors' conscious interpretations
of the problem of evil as expressed in Chisupe's mass movement.
Or does Schoffeleers merely reveal the historical antecedents of
such interpretations - a background which has perhaps largely
gone lost to the actors themselves? Does the analytical return to
the village amount to valid and standard anthropological
hermeneutics, or is it merely a form of spurious anthropologising
which denies present-day Malawians the right to the same
detachment from historic, particularistic, rural roots as many
North Atlantic Africanists very much take for granted in their
own personal lives? It is this very detachment, this lack of
connectivity - a break in the chain of semantic and symbolic
concatenation -, which the concept of virtuality seeks to
capture.
On this point the work of Rijk van Dijk is relevant, and
revealing. In the Ph.D. thesis which he wrote under supervision
of Matthew Schoffeleers and Bonno Thoden van Velzen,48 the
assertive puritanism of young preachers in urban Malawi, c. 1990,
is set against the background of the preceding century of
religious change in South Central Africa and of the
interpretations of these processes as advanced in the 1970s and
1980s. Here the urban discourse on witchcraft already appears as
'virtual' (although that word is not yet used by van Dijk), in
the sense that the urbanites' use of the concept of witchcraft is
seen as detached from direct references to the rural cosmology
and to conceptualisations of interpersonal power within the
kinship order. Similarly, the events around Chisupe may be
interpreted not as an application or partial revival of
time-honoured rural cosmological notions, but as an aspect of
what Van Dijk describes as the emphatic moral re-orientation in
which Malawi, under the instigation of State President Banda's
successor Mr Muluzi, was involved at the eve of the 1994
elections, and in the face of the AIDS epidemic49 - in other
words, as very much the same kind of national-level,
neo-traditional, phenomenon which Geschiere persuades us to see
in the contemporary discourse on witchcraft in Cameroon.
As a general principle, I claim that the
old kinship order is never far away from the personal lives of
even the most modern and urbanised Africans, whatever their class
position; the free variation of virtualised witchcraft beliefs,
fertilised by whatever global images circulate in the way of
vampirism, satanism etc., is not totally virtualised but
continues to be fed, to some extent, by the historic cosmology on
which the village and its kinship order were based.
This is also what I have found, in scores of cases many of which
I came to understand in detail as they evolved over the years,
among my Zambian associates since 1972, and among my Botswana
associates since 1988. Among the middle classes and elites, the
adoption of new lifestyles and of new emphases in kinship (a
tendency to retreat into the nuclear family, to discourage
parasitism from distant kin, to recruit one's political and
economic followers not among kinsmen but among client non-kin)
often goes hand in hand with family dramas in which the old
kinship order turns out to be not so easily discarded, and to
strike back with a vengeance. At the same time, witchcraft
beliefs and practices are obviously no longer confined to the
kinship domain, but have penetrated many aspects of modern life,
many instances of competition over scarce resources, and many
instances of the exercise of power. This is only what we would
expect, in African societies more and more taken over by outside
forces, images, people and organisations, if our initial
viewpoint is correct that witchcraft of old has formed the
boundary condition of the kinship order, has constituted the
evocation of all that is foreign and alien. Largely severed from
the old cosmological context, the imagery of this new witchcraft
follows the symbolic repertoire of the old cosmology only to a
limited and diminishing extent, and is open to all sorts of free
variation, in which the global supply of images of horror,
alterity and violence (often electronically transmitted) is
eagerly absorbed.
4. CONCLUSION
Thus witchcraft in contemporary Africa
emerges, not as a timeless, atavistic continuation of an
essentially unaltered, historic cosmology right into modernity
(Schoffeleers); nor as a predominantly new phenomenon marking
Africa's road to modernity (Geschiere); but as the resolution,
through a process of virtualising appropriation (amazingly
similar converging in many parts of the continent), of the
tensions between
witchcraft
as the boundary conditions - in the four of various claims of
individual assertiveness - of the kinship order at the village
level, and
witchcraft
as the idiom of power struggles in modern situations: the context
of urban life, formal organisations, the state
The two poles represent (, in structural
implications for production and reproduction, in procedures, and
in imagery), largely independent symbolic complexes, yet they are
inseparable, in that the 'modern' pole has been constructed on
the basis of a specific transformation, towards modern life, of
witchcraft as it was - and to a considerable extent continues to
be - available in the conception of the kinship order.
In the same way as Winch's re-analysis has exculpated the study
of African witchcraft from allegations of slighting Africans'
mental capabilities, my argument exculpates the study of African
witchcraft from allegations of North Atlantic, alien imposition
à la Peter van der Veer. If today Africa appears to be the
continent of witchcraft, this is not because a number of
prominent North Atlantic Africanists have colluded to decide that
this - despite its suggestion of exotism and imposed alterity -
is how African societies are going to be represented, as part of
a 'localising strategy'. It is because, on the basis of the
historic underlying pattern of kinship-based village communities
of agriculturalists and herdsmen going back to the Neolithic,
witchcraft (under whatever local emic term) played an important
role in defining the moral and productive order in many parts of
the African continent. Witchcraft was therefore available for
appropriation and virtualisation by African middle classes and
elites in their struggle to create meaning in modernity and
postmodernity. Without acknowlegment of this shared heritage of
African village society, the modernity of witchcraft cannot be
understood unless as an alien analytical imposition _which it is
certainly not. Acknowledging this common pool of historic
inspiration allows us to admit both the continuity and the
transformation in modernity. Witchcraft has offered modern
Africans an idiom to articulate what otherwise could not be
articulated: contradictions between power and meaning, between
morality and primitive accumulation, between community and death,
between community and the state. If this insistence on an African
witchcraft idiom does not render the African experience of
modernity and postmodernity any more transparent, it at least -
in the face of the avalanche of alien, imported ingredients of
modern life - casts this experience in a mode of expression whose
extremely long history on African soil cannot be denied.
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NOTES
1 An earlier
version of this paper was read at the panel on 'Epistemological
and ideological approaches to witchcraft analysis within African
Studies: A critical assessment', African Studies Association
Annual Meeting, Chicago, 27th October - 1st November 1998. I am
indebted to George Bond and Diane Ciekawy for inviting me to take
part in this inspiring session, to all participants for
illuminating ideas and criticisms, and to the African Studies
Centre, Leiden, for financing my participation.
2 Barb 1971.
3 Which however
brought us the seminal: Hallen & Sodipo 1986.
4 Winch 1970. For
a complex historical theory of magic combining natural,
psychological, social and political factors, cf. van Binsbergen
& Wiggermann 1999.
5 Lepore 1993;
Davidson 1984; Malpas 1988. Cf. the kindred 'principle of
humanity': Grandy 1973.
6 However,
see Horton's criticism of Winch in: Horton 1993.
7 Van Binsbergen
& Geschiere 1985; Van Binsbergen & Schoffeleers 1985.
8 Geschiere
1995;. Schoffeleers 1996.
9 Geschiere
1995; also cf. Geschiere 1996.
10
On virtuality, cf. Jules-Rosette 1990; Jules-Rosette 1996; Korff
1995; Rheingold 1993; Van Binsbergen 1997, 1998; Rheingold 1991;
Woolley 1992.
11
Cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1991; Guattari 1992. Cf. Van
Binsbergen 1999 and 2000.
12
Van Binsbergen 1998.
13 Cf. Van Binsbergen 1997,
1998.
14
This comes close to the current holistic definition of meaning,
which Peacocke cites as the basic stance of global holism:
'The meaning of an expression depends
constitutively on its relations to all other expressions in the
language, where these relations may need to take account of such
facts about the use of these other expressions as [ reveals? -
WvB ] their relations to the non-linguistic world,. to action and
to perception.' (Peacocke 1999: 227)
15
Turner 1968; Van Velsen van 1971 ; van Binsbergen 1992.
16
Ranger & Kimambo 1972; Ranger 1972; Ranger 1975; Fields 1985;
Bond 1976, 1979; Schoffeleers 1979; Van Binsbergen 1981.
17
Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983; Vail 1989.
18
Probst 1996.
19
Van Binsbergen 1981
20
Schoffeleers 1992.
21
Redmayne 1970; van Dijk 1992.
22
Geschiere 1982.
23
A few examples out of many: Melland 1967; Mackenzie 1925.
24 And, as I would
personally add, at a time when Afrocentrism is becoming more and
more an established intellectual stance; cf. Howe 1999;
Berlinerblau 1999; Fauvelle-Aymar c.s. 1999. I contributed to the
latter collection, and wrote reviews of the former two books in
Politique Africaine (93, October 2000), and the Journal of
African History (in press).
25
Fardon 1990.
26
Gellner 1989, 1963, 1969.
27
Breckenridge & Van der Veer 1993; van der Veer 1995, 1996.
28
Department of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of Development,
Free University, Amsterdam, 12 April 1996.
29
For a characterisation of African theology as a field of
counter-hegemonic knowledge production (and thus by implication
as a form of localisation in the academic globalisation process -
much comparable to and overlapping with, African Philosophy writ
large), see: Schoffeleers 1988.
30
These interpretations have been argued at length in: Van
Binsbergen 1981.
31
Horton 1967; Horton 1993.
32
Van Binsbergen 1981: 195, 239.
33
No piece by Schoffeleers has reminded me more strongly, in method
and theoretical framework, of the best work by Terence Ranger -
for instance the latter's masterly short study of the
witch-finder Tomo Nyirenda, also known as Mwana Lesa, a piece
which, when I read it in draft in 1972, made a more profound
impression on me than almost any contemporary scholarly text,
provided me with a splendid model to emulate, and committed me
overnight to the study of Central African religious history. Cf.
Ranger 1975.
34
Geschiere 1995.
35
On this point, cf. Schoffeleers 1978; Van Binsbergen 1992
36
Cf. Van Binsbergen 1992; Van Binsbergen 1993; For a more general
formulation of this theory of the state, with specific African
applications, cf. Van Binsbergen, forthcoming.
37
Frobenius 1931.
38
Durkheim 1912; Otto 1917.
39
Cf. van Binsbergen 1981.
40
Cf. van Binsbergen 1985.
41
Cf. van Binsbergen & Wiggermann 1999.
42
It may pervade the discourse and practice of independent
churches, e.g. the Botswana case of the Guta ra Mwari church: Van
Binsbergen 1993.
43
Cf Toulabor's article on human sacrifice and contemporary African
political leaders (Toulabor 2000).
44
Cf. Melland 1967..
45
Comaroff & Comaroff 1999.
46
Van Binsbergen 1992: 262f; 1981: 155f, 162f.
47
Sandbothe & Zimmerli 1994.
48
Cf. Van Dijk 1992
49
Van Dijk, in press.