Witchcraft in Modern African Societies E-Book

Stephan Schuster

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject History - Africa, grade: 1, University of Hannover, language: English, abstract: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Problem der Hexerei in modernen Afrikanischen Gesellschaften, auch in Bezug auf die Immunschwäche AIDS.

Leseprobe

Table of Content

Witchcraft Definition

Witchcraft Violence

The State Reacts

The Problem of AIDS

Works Cited

Page 1

Universität Hannover

Historisches Seminar Sommersemester 2004

Hauptseminar:Witchcraft in Africa and Beyond

Witchcraft in Modern African Societies

Page 3

Witchcraft in modern African societies

Introduction

Witchcraft has been a subject in historic and social anthropologic works notably since Evans-Pritchard released his anthropologic classic “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande” in 1937. For several decades, historians dealing with witchcraft had put a focus on European witchcraft discourse of the early modern age, while anthropologists developed insights into the functioning of also African witch beliefs.1This gap narrowed notably in the decades to follow, but the tenor of the works still let show a strong one-sided approach towards the African societies whom the authors talked about, as the following passage about the differences between early modern English and 20thcentury African witchcraft shows:

A further difference between England and Africa is that Tudor Englishmen did not find it necessary to explain all misfortunes in terms of some supernatural belief, whether witchcraft or anything else. There seem to be many primitive societies where virtually all deaths are attributed to witchcraft or to ancestral spirits or to some similar phenomenon.2

Modern authors are less prepossessed and treat African belief systems and people with more respect. This is, of course, partly because especially the more advanced and modern African societies such as the democratic South Africa have their own writers and researchers who teach the world about their own history. More recent works then focus less on the otherness of witchcraft beliefs, but have a closer look at the victims of witchcraft violence, as well as on social and political dimensions of witchcraft discourse.3The aim of this paper is therefore not a comparison between European and African witchcraft, but to look in which ways witchcraft violence has evolved throughout the years to the present and search for indicators that mark an increase or decrease of witchcraft related problems, such as poverty or political changes. Especially the development in modern South Africa shall

1Douglas, p. xiii.

2Thomas, p. 56.

3Compare Bond / Ciekawy, p. 16.

Page 4

be in focus, especially the question, what a young modern democracy can do about an old and still increasing problem such as witchcraft.

An important question is how to deal with a topic like witchcraft, i.e. what position one takes concerning the question whether witchcraft is real or not. The position I will take up in this paper is that the question about the reality of witchcraft is irrelevant, since I will not try to prove the one position or the other. It is not important if witches really exist or not. What is relevant for this paper is the fact that witches do exist as a social phenomenon. The mere fact that people believe in them is enough to make them kill each other and to live in deep distrust, as we will see. I will therefore begin with a short overview about the types of witchcraft which are relevant for this analysis, as well as some aspects of the ancestral belief system, which may be of some help as well. Then I will focus on witchcraft violence and its legal aspects. Finally I will have a look at the state’s options to cope with the situation. In this case it will be especially interesting to have a short look at the problem of AIDS which is also of some importance in this respect.