Witchcraft, Intimacy & Trust: Africa in comparison by Peter Geschiere (review)

The latest book by Geschiere, an authority on witchcraft studies since his 1997 classic The Modernity of Witchcraft, is commendable as a unique work of comparison. He manages to encompass three continents under one theme: the changing relationship between witchcraft, intimacy and trust. In six engaging chapters, relying mostly on historical evidence, the author contrasts the gruesome suspicions of present-day witchcraft in the intimacy of the household in Cameroon and Nigeria with, on the one hand, the carnal, liberating possession cults of Candomblé in Brazil and, on the other, the state-oriented, sexually disciplining witch-hunts of medieval Europe. The chapters are interlaced with further cross-cultural comparisons such as an interlude on Siegel’s account of witch-hunts in Indonesia.

One of the book’s main tenets posits that colonization and subsequent decolonization have made witchcraft-related practices in Africa illicit and have de-territorialized these uncanny forces, which are now bewitching the African diaspora in Europe, while the opposite course has been observed in Latin America. There, the once forbidden fetish cults have grown into respected, territorially established or ‘emplaced’ religions such as Candomblé, which claims authenticity through purity of belief and (African) origin. Key to this process, Geschiere suggests, is that the cults provide a basis for trust after the loss of family during the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. The book holds the promise of a sequel, in which the author describes how both sides of the Atlantic have been equally affected by the current Pentecostal wave that centres on monopolizing people’s trust by undermining their allegiance to traditional spiritual practices, equating these with the work of the devil.

A brief review such as this can never do justice to the wide span of insights and statements in this book. But all-encompassing as the study is – as well as polemically phrased in its discussion of relevant, ‘competing’ literature – it invites thorough scrutiny. For one thing, this reader was left pondering what Geschiere’s cross-cultural comparison would have looked like had it considered medico-anthropological accounts of how healers and their patients talk about witchcraft, and how, in the intimacy of the home, these accounts give rise to the figure of the witch and to the development of protective medicine to counter black magic. If ethnography on healing cults in Africa has revealed anything, it is that there exist intricate relationships between witchcraft suspicions, oracles, spirit possessions, state formation and collective witch-hunts, reproducing within any one community the aforementioned contrast between carnally liberating and sexually disciplining experiences.

As the subtitle indicates, this book intends to be comparative. Yet, it does not specify the grounds on which a locally rooted occult practice could be likened to one in some other community. The author’s constant emphasis on the fluidity of ideas only begs the question of how comparisons can be made. On what basis can he characterize ‘the’ healer in Africa (pp. 73, 88)? Why should he locate Candomblé's origins in Africa’s fetishes and occult practices, rather than in Africa’s spirit cults, which it always resembled (pp. 144–63)? The author rejects the common Africanist distinction between healer and witch since the healer uses black magic too and is in some cases known to sacrifice kin in return for magical power (passim). But can the two be compared? True, a user of white magic and a user of black magic are comparable. They can be interchangeable, as in the author’s discussion of Favret-Saada’s study in France (pp. 124–30). But African informants talking about their witches seem to experience a different (third) figure, one that inhabits their imaginary before identification processes such as divination transform this figure into yet another user of (black or white) magic. In fact, Favret-Saada’s informants also experienced ‘the witch’ quite differently at first (as Geschiere himself remarks), before local healers made...