Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (review)

Interest in witchcraft among researchers in African Studies has grown notably since the 1990s. This has been due in part to the field’s turn toward cultural studies and abandonment of modernization paradigms, wherein witchcraft beliefs served mainly as a measure of tradition’s tight grip. This shift has freed academics to address and explain witchcraft’s ubiquity in much of contemporary African life, from high politics to village households to seemingly everywhere in between. In the torrent of subsequent research, the significance of contemporary witchcraft beliefs has been interpreted alternately as a mode of engagement with modernity, a critique of colonial and postcolonial exploitation, and a means of negotiating status and obligation within extended families and among neighbors. It is within this richly developing field that Adam Ashforth offers Witchcraft, Violence, and Modernity in South Africa, a first-rate study of contemporary urban witchcraft that was co-awarded the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Award for best scholarly book on Africa in the English language in 2006. This project stands as a wider-ranging sequel to his earlier book Madumo, a Man Bewitched (2000), a case study of one ordinary South African’s quest to cure his own bewitchment by consulting local healers and diviners. Ashforth states at the outset that this new effort is “an attempt by an outsider to think about the connection between living in a world without justice and living in a world with witches and how these two features of life might affect the cause of democracy” (p. xiv). While the end result remains largely speculative on the question of democracy, Ashforth demonstrates that the meaning and uses of witchcraft in contemporary Africa can be best understood by posing the question of what justice means in a spiritually insecure world.

The spiritually insecure world in question is that of Soweto, an acronym for South Western Township, a segregated African urban neighborhood of Johannesburg initially settled by industrial workers and made famous for its antiapartheid riots in the 1970s. Densely populated, multiethnic, and poor, Soweto holds a central place in the imagination of South Africans and outsiders alike as a prototypically harsh urban environment that forged many key grassroots activists in the struggle against apartheid. Here as throughout the book, Ashforth is at once sensitive to popular perceptions yet also willing to confront awkward facts and received wisdoms. Soweto is indeed poor, but not nearly as poor as several other African urban areas in South Africa, let alone rural ones. It is also a place that has witnessed community breakdown since the end of apartheid, where increasing social differentiation has led better-off households to construct high walls around their homes for protection from the ubiquitous crime and violence that go unchecked by police. People rely on family and neighborhood reciprocity to survive in this marginal urban economy afflicted with massive unemployment, but such relations often create dependencies and resentment that fuel witchcraft fears. In this insecure environment, inyanga and sangoma (traditional healers and diviners) do a big business by diagnosing and treating those manmade afflictions that are immune to Western medical treatment. Sowetan customers combine a healthy skepticism about the abilities of particular inyanga and sangoma with a deep faith in their general necessity to mediate between the visible and invisible worlds. This multiethnic urban setting also offers an important shift in perspective from the villages more typical of earlier witchcraft studies, for Ashforth has recourse to neither ethnic generalizations (e.g., witchcraft practices among the Azande) nor tidy political structures on which to ground the spiritual world he describes. The Soweto of eroded ancestral influence and Pentecostal entrepreneurship reflects well the emerging urban milieu of contemporary Africa.

Ashforth posits the existence of witchcraft not as a belief particular to a group’s identity, but as a reaction to spiritual insecurity, a sort of insecurity that he—a self-confessed secular humanist and witchcraft nonbeliever—has never had to confront. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are few if...