A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (review)

The central thesis of this book is that many black South Africans believed that the state was guilty of evil defined in African terms—using witchcraft to gain illegitimate power. Going beyond familiar explanations for witchcraft accusations—the resilience of precolonial culture or economic tensions concerning ill-gained wealth, envy, and selfishness—Crais holds that many black South Africans translated their experience of the modern state into African understandings of occult power. Resisting the state involved ridding their world of the scourge. Following the reciprocal effects of state formation, popular culture, and resistance, the book presents an innovative and noteworthy analysis of subaltern conceptions of evil under colonialism. It also provides an original inquiry into reciprocal influences in colonial political culture.

Crais builds his case with selected examples from the history of Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape Province. More interested in colonial than precolonial societies, he does not mention the millenarian destruction of crops and cattle in 1856/57. Rather, he uses the murder of a magistrate in 1880 to demonstrate an engagement between the new colonial state and African beliefs about the relationship between governance, social health, and drought. Crais acknowledges a problem of evidence; colonial records do not preserve the interpretations that he seeks. Hence, with the goal of seeing like subaltern, he infers their vision from conditions, behaviors, and documented beliefs. His use of evidence is judicious and transparent.

What was so evil about the state was bureaucracy. The conquest state set out to make the new territory legible with maps, censuses, tribal laws, and genealogies. The early state was weak, but modern bureaucracy and authoritarian rule emerged in the twentieth century. Through coercion, the bounded tribal societies became real, and bureaucracy became draconian.

Crais does not claim that his analysis of state actions is particularly new. The innovation is that he wants to write an "ethnography" rather than a "biography" of the state. Thus, he moves to popular interpretation of, and action against, evil. The actors are rural subalterns and migrant laborers. In this respect, his project of probing crosscurrents and appropriations under colonialism is original. Peaceful millenarian prophetic movements of the 1920s explicitly addressed the evil of the state and predicted the supernatural deliverance of the black nation. Significantly, Crais suggests that the appropriation of Christian notions of good and evil in independent churches led to a "subaltern Manichaeism." Reprisals against witches became more violent and execution by burning became common.

Repressive intervention by the apartheid state in the 1950s led to vigilantism, outright revolts against the state and its African agents, and attacks on whites. Crais' new interpretation is that these were an attempt to eradicate evil power. It is, however, difficult to demonstrate that people believed themselves to be fighting witchcraft. The complete absence of recorded statements that the struggle was against the occult power of the state is a problem. Therefore, much of the argument hinges on the use of fire and on the fact that rebels engaged in protective rituals and received counsel from independent evangelists. The connections between his evidence and conclusions became tenuous. Yet, Crais' argument is worth serious consideration and further testing. Witchcraft is a real issue in Africa, even if absent from the archival record and too sensitive a subject for mass interviewing. The inferences bring new insight into political history.

The title and introduction do not announce that this book is about violence, but malignant witchcraft and the horrific reprisals against those who were believed to practice it eventually upstage nonviolent aspects of magic and supernatural power. As the book focuses on violence, it becomes more about how young men in a particularly volatile region dealt with evil and less about other conceptions of supernatural power or other less drastic measures to counteract it. If Crais' argument is to hold for South...