The Complexity of African Witchcraft

The expression “It’s just witchcraft” is misleading. Witchcraft moves from one imaginary representation to the other, between Western imagery and African realities. Religion shows the power of magis, fairies, and enchanters.

However, it is also a gateway to the shadowy occult world and forces of evil, of which the sulphurous sorcerer is the intermediary, an archaic figure of charlatanism. The colonial and the scientific spirit confused the reading of this phenomenon which becomes more fleeting the more that one tries to define it.

In Hergé’s unforgettable Tintin in the Congo, Tintin’s poodle Milou strikes down the enormous lion that had terrorized an African village, further proof of colonial power. The Babaoro’m people’s sorcerer, depicted wearing a pot on his head, understands the danger of this imbalanced competition. The reflections of the all-powerful sorcerer, in French in the text :

“This little white, he take too much power. Soon, the Blacks no listen to me, their sorcerer, anymore. Have to get rid of this White.” The duel ends in the sorcerer’s defeat. Thanks to his skills and – and aspirin that destroys evil spirits – Tintin takes control of the situation, and ends a tribal war (the Babaoro’m against the m’Hatouvou), provoking the adoration of the m’Hatouvou : “You big witch ! You be king of m’Hatouvou !”

Colonial language invoked a pejorative lexicon to speak of the complexity of ritual African practices. A world where spiritual concerns, instrumentalized magic and religious tradition were all grouped together. According to a series of degrading equations, religion = superstition, cultural objects = magical amulets or objects, and officiator = sorcerer.

In the New World, before the cultural reappropriation of the 1930s, the sorcerer (who also made the dreadful journey in the holds of slave ships) appeared as an evil being. He was seen as shadowy servant of occult forces, a virtuoso of poisons and spells, the familiar of bloody sacrifices. Even worse, he was also the catalyst of revolts and fires that brought terrible consequences. In this case, good-bye sugar, tobacco, cotton, beautiful homes and easy fortune.

 Makandal, “the Mandingo sorcerer”, devised a plan to poison the colonists of Saint Domingue (1757-1758). Then, Boukman, another voodoo practitioner, started the 1791 insurrection, whose revolutionary alchemy would transform Saint Domingue into Haiti. However, the fear of witches has much older origins.

An age-old story

The phobia of witches took hold in two powerful currents of thought : the big three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and the cult of scientific thought. Moses’ commandments forbid consulting seers on pain of being considered unclean ; the New Testament condemns frequenting magicians ; and, Islam rejects all forms of idolatry. 

The geopolitical expansion of Christianity and the expansion of Islam considerably reduced – and sometimes liquidated- polytheistic religions. The latter favoured a multiplicity of divinities, provoking an animist proliferation of the sacred, and the growth of rites and sacrifices.

In France, Chateaubriand congratulated himself that The Genius of Christianity swept away all confusion regarding wandering gods of Greco-Roman antiquity and the undesirable blurring of man/animal by centaurs, sirens and other. The guardians of polytheistic cults ended up with two different “North/South” rankings : on one hand, the Greek priestesses, Roman vestals, and Druids ; on the other side, African sorcerers and their supplies of gris-gris, leopard skins, amulets, straw skirts and mysterious masks.

The supernatural which was vanquished in the West lived on in nostalgic and commercial marvels : the wizard Merlin, the witches of Charmed, and Harry Potter. In Christian Europe, the Inquisition resulted in terrible, fiery witch hunts. Colonial expansion went on to bring powerless African “witchcraft” into contact with militarized capitalism which relyied on both the “civilizing power” of Christianity and triumphant science.

What use were a sorcerer’s gris-gris and fetishes against guns and canons ? 

It required an enormous amount of work on the part of anthropologists to normalize, in scientific terms, the world of sorcery. Applied to the African context, the term witch remains pejorative and unclear.

African witchcraft : appellation non-contrôlée

The uncontrolled usage of the term African witchcraft feeds into a sort of religious segregation which leads to a spiritual ghetto. This ghettoization does not enable comprehension of the phenomenon’s complexity in Africa. Most of the time, the guardians of African religions favour either : divinity cults, divination, or traditional plant-based medicines. Those that engage in dark practices are looked down upon, sometimes even hunted or killed in times of societal crisis.

In Bantu society, the healer (mganga) is dissociated from the spell-casting sorcerer (ndoki). The Yoruba distinguish between the babalorisha (agent of the divinities), the babalawo (soothsayer), the babalosain (healer), and the babaegun (appointee to mortuary cults). In the southern regions of three countries in the Gulf of Benin region (Togo, Benin, and Nigeria), the Fa or Ifa techniques of divination present great sophistication.

In Madagascar, the officiator and traditional healer, the ombiasy is distinct form the sorcerer that practices black magic, the mpamosavy. However, great importance is placed on the divination of the mpanandro, mpisikidy, or mpamintna. These different fields are not definitively separated. More and more, the prevailing trend is towards concentration. The majority of time, the sorcerer chooses to limit himself to beneficent works “travailler des deux mains” by acceding to both positive and negative requests by clients who are considered responsible for the consequences of their demands.

Thus, sorcery as a supernatural force can be offered in a positive form (aswewe) or negative (azevè). The outside perception of the phenomenon is confused by the fact that, under the category of sorcery, the religious dimension (explanation of the workings of the world, ethical cosmogony, sacred acts) as well as magical practices targeting the capture of spiritual energy to obtain material rewards, are considered the same.

The Dark Side

In the 1989 film Yaaba (grandmother, in More), Burkinabe filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo tells the story of a solitary old woman who provokes a village’s hostility and ends up lynched because she is considered a witch. Cases like this are not rare in contemporary Africa. With Rural exodus and civil wars, elderly women and child soldiers, considered useless mouths to feed, are often left to fend for themselves, revealing the limits of solidarity in weakened societies. 

These are not real witches but the scapegoats of collective anxiety.

These victims, sacrificed in times of crisis, recall the case of the pharmakon in ancient Greece, people of marginal status (prisoners of war, handicapped people, foreigners, slaves) who were sacrificed in times of calamity, epidemics, or famine. In the excellent book Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard explains the therapeutic function of these ritualized collective killings.

In Africa the idea that occult forces can be used for evil ends often incite dangerous suspicion in cases of unexpected natural death, repeated sickness or spectacular success. Faced with the dark and incomprehensible aspects of punitive sorcery, many African states attempt to regulate the uncontrollable violence of occult proceedings by implementing legal repression of such acts. Chad and Cameroon’s legal codes condemn delinquent witchcraft practices.

Due to its implantation in traditional culture, the complexity rests undiminished because the sorcerer is able to impose his presence, even if detested, in the relational fabric and it can be used either as an executioner of punishments or as an indispensable intermediary in police enquiries as in Sorcellerie à bout portant by the Congolese author Achille Ngoye.

Unforeseeable metamorphoses

The word sorcerer conveys many meanings. The uncertain nature, by the harnessing of psychic uncertainty, enables its use as a method of explanation, interpretation and influence on opinion. The negative perspective on witchcraft serves as explanation for one of modern Africa’s biggest calamities, AIDS, especially in the DRC and southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland). Desocialized children coming from civil wars are sometimes accused of transmitting it.

The nganga healers, accepted as such in Bantu Africa, can plan an information relaying role while those considered bewitched messengers are looked down upon and sometimes mistreated. The international press showed a particular case at the fork between power and manipulative sorcery regarding the Gambian president, Yayah Jammeh (continually re-elected since 1996). With the help of incantations, Koran and plant-inspired prayers, the President created a “miracle cure”.

Just as in days gone by, relations between political power and religion were very widespread before the separation of powers ; the links between power and witchcraft have in no way disappeared. Marabouts and feticheurs are hardly absent from the electoral context. Even invoked during football matches, sorcery is too rooted in the collective unconscious and the supernatural to disappear from the mental landscape.