Witchcraft, Power and Politics: exploring the occult in the South African lowveld (review)

Isak Niehaus presents a powerful ethnographic study of witch hunting and accusation in Green Valley, situated in the South African lowveld (previously the Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga Province) during the 1980s. This book sets a high benchmark for future studies on this topic in Southern Africa, mainly through the remarkable richness and polyphony of Niehaus’s ethnographic work, but also through his confrontation of what can be called the politicization of witchcraft. Although witchcraft has been a staple topic in anthropology, researchers have remained largely silent about the relevance of witchcraft in contemporary South Africa. Witchcraft certainly does present some fundamental challenges to researchers and politicians: can witchcraft practices be regarded as signatories of ‘authentic’ culture, as series of logical, genuine and bona fide events? Or does one simply relegate witchcraft to an illogical world of superstition, as a topic unworthy of theoretical investigation?

Niehaus chooses to locate his analysis outside these debates. He rightly points out that any total (legal) acceptance or outright rejection of witchcraft by the South African state might foster an increase in violence associated with witchcraft. This is particularly true in Green Valley, mainly because witchcraft accusations have been a fundamental component of political struggles for recognition between genders, generations, races and income groups. In addressing these challenges, Niehaus draws upon the ideas of Evans-Pritchard and Knauft, who point out that witchcraft practices are intrinsically dualistic and paradoxical, and cannot be related to a functional or causal explanation of events. Instead, Niehaus uses witchcraft as a tool to explain how people use and manipulate beliefs, viewing social action in the context of a larger comparative and explanatory framework.

Niehaus shows how two main features of rural apartheid gained expression in Green Valley: the imposition of Bantu Authorities – which lessened the power and authority of local chiefs to act as controllers of witchcraft accusations – and Betterment, which effectively destroyed the remnants of subsistence agriculture, and radically changed kinship relations between people through forced removal and villagization. Both of these events created new forms of economic inequality, leading to a rapid increase in witchcraft accusations against and by those who were perceived to have inordinate amounts of power or material wealth. As land holdings shrank, people streamed onto government Trust land, where residents became more competitive over resources. In these conditions, any sign of affluence would trigger an accusation of witchcraft against the rich, or against the poor, who perhaps had tried to bewitch the rich, or vice versa.

The gradual development of Christianity, particularly through Zionist and other such churches during the 1960s and 1970s, came to serve as the marker of a more dualistic cosmology, in which witchcraft was seen as inherently evil (unlike earlier ambivalent views). These events created an opening for violent interventions against witches, and a proliferation of witchcraft-related events and accusations. In the 1980s and 1990s, violent episodes erupted in Green Valley, where perceived witches were either killed or expelled from local villages by ‘comrades’ (ANC youth) who presented themselves as guardians of community morality – effectively replacing the vacuum left by the subversion of chiefly authority through Betterment and Bantu Authorities.

The only shortcoming of Niehaus’s insightful and mature work is the noticeable absence of comparative material, especially concerning witchcraft in neighbouring Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Niehaus does hint at the heterogeneity of the phenomenon in Green Valley, and that there are many ‘different types’ of witchcraft and sprit possession (p. 24), but does not fully investigate the crossover between elements of witchcraft and spirit possession derived from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, as partially expounded in a 2002 paper in African Affairs. He also states that ‘new lines of contestation are likely to emerge as witchcraft becomes embroiled in the politics of African nationalism’ (p. 184), but fails to investigate the wider significance of witchcraft beyond...