William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.
William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.
Evil in Africa: Encounters with the Everyday
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Overview
William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253017505 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 405 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
William C. Olsen lectures in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University.
Walter E. A. van Beek is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at Tilburg University.
Read an Excerpt
Evil In Africa
Encounters With the Everday
By William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. Van Beek
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01750-5
CHAPTER 1
Political Evil
Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched
Sónia Silva
"Evil is not any thing," David Parkin asserts in his introduction to Anthropology of Evil(1985b). Evil is an odd-job word, a word with a lot of baggage, but evil is also a word whose analytical value in anthropology is to push researchers beyond conventional categories. Instead of asking what evil is, let us explore where evil takes us.
Depending on route, the concept of evil can take us in two different directions: morality or ontology. In the first direction, evil is part of morality, being oftentimes interchangeable with bad. In Martin Southwold's words (1985, 131), this is evil in the weak sense. In the second direction, ontology, evil is perceived as a form of extreme wrongdoing. Southwold speaks here of radical evil or evil in the strong sense, this being a realm where the moral discourse of wrongness, wickedness, and immorality seems lacking and displaced. Although Southwold does not deny the continuum between weak and strong forms of evil, he believes that it is important "to keep 'evil' in the strong sense, the better to point to the problems that arise" (1985, 132). I concur.
One "problem" that arises when we define evil in the strong sense is that the concepts of good, bad, and evil are no longer equidistant. Neither is the continuum that they define uniform. It is certainly the case that the continuum good-bad-evil is predicated on the setting of boundaries or limits and, therefore, on the possibility of transgression (Clough and Mitchell 2001, 1). To think of good is always to think of bad, which lies on the other side. Evil is no exception. The Old Teutonic form from which the English term evil derives, ubiloz, means 'to exceed due measure' or 'overstep proper limits' (Pocock 1985, 42). Yet radical evil differs from immoral acts such as stealing, adultery, and crimes of passion. In his reflections on evil, Aristotle captures this difference by relating the idea of excess with ápeiron, the inexplicable (Hobart 1985, 166). As inexplicable excess, the concept of evil leads one to reflect not only on the boundaries between morality and immorality but also on the "internal constitution and external boundaries" of humanity (Parkin 1985b, 6).
Further developing this train of thought, both Pocock and Hobart note that the term evil has an ontic weight. In contemporary usage, Pocock affirms, the term evil has "a distinctive ontological weight" (1985, 46) — "hence also the terms favored by the popular press which do echo those that people [in Eng- land] actually use: 'beast,' 'wild animal,' 'savage'" (1985, 52). Agreeing with Po- cock, Hobart states, "[Pocock's interviewed] majority are more Aristotelian — although it might surprise them! — in seeing evil as inexplicable excess, to the point that it is no more a moral judgment but an ontological assertion: there are truly evil acts which show the perpetrators to be inhuman. If evil is so extreme, then the dubious doings of ordinary humans pale in comparison with such monsters" (1985, 167).
Building on the work of both Pocock and Hobart, specifically their idea of evil as excess with an ontological weight, I argue that the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of morality feels lacking and out of place. This is an ontological realm where humans metamorphose into wild animals, beasts, even monsters, which are "worse than animals." In addition, now carrying the idea of evil as excess with an ontic weigh in a different direction, I posit that the shift from the moral to the ontic becomes expressed in the form of highly systematic, often ritualized processes of interpersonal predation that lead, if not curbed, to suffering and death.
Atrocities, however, can be committed and endured not only in the visible realm (genocide, serial killings, witch hunts) but also, as I will show momentarily, in the invisible realm (zombification, bewitching). Some scholars may favor visibility over invisibility, reality over belief. But from the standpoint of those who inhabit cultural and cosmological worlds in which interpersonal encounters are likely to occur in both visible and invisible planes of existence, such dualisms as reality versus belief stand in the way of understanding.
Similarly, interpersonal violence can take place not only in what anthropologists and other thinkers, following Max Weber (1948), often designate as the public domain of politics but also in the more intimate domain of one's home or village. Anthropologists have shown that power in Africa is oftentimes embedded in religion, a point persuasively argued by Arens and Karp in Creativity of Power(1989, xvii). But power in Africa, and elsewhere, also undercuts the conceptual differentiation between politics and society. We are as likely to find "brotherliness" (Weber 1948, 155) in politics as to experience enmity at home. The social is political through and through. Consequently, and returning now to that ghastly region of absolute violence where the concept of evil has taken us, I reserve the concept of political evil for those interpersonal processes in which one or more individuals mercilessly prey upon others, dehumanizing and depleting them of their vitality, if not their life. Humans are as capable of empathy, identification, love, and solidarity as they are of indifference, condemnation, hate, and discord. In this field of intersubjectivity (Jackson 1998, 1–36), the concept of political evil signals the point in which the interpersonal process of intrusion and predation, unfettered by moral concerns, advances coldly and systematically toward annihilation.
There is something sacred in political evil. Although bad and evil are equally political in the sense of corresponding to interpersonal acts of encroaching and coercion, as suggested, bad morphs when it becomes political evil. In the movement from bad to evil, the process of systematic, ritualized objectification of one by another is unleashed, reducing humans to the conditions of predators and prey (Silva 2013). The movement from morality to ontology is also a movement from morality to absolute violence.
From Witchcraft to Bewitching
I now turn to the world of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, witchcraft being often described, to borrow from Parkin, as the "prototype of all evil" in Africa (1985b, 15). It hardly matters, as mentioned, whether you and I see witchcraft as reality or belief, for witchcraft in Africa is experientially real, being widely considered a major cause of lethargy, illness, and death. For many Africans, witchcraft is a "matter-of-life-and-death reality," writes Gerrie ter Haar (2007, 19). Similarly, it hardly matters that most of us have never, to the best of our knowledge, experienced the dangerous world of witchcraft firsthand. In two years of fieldwork in the Chavuma district of northwest Zambia, I never apprenticed myself to a male or female witch (the term in the Luvale language spoken in Chavuma is mukandumba, or person-with-lions), attempted to join a coven, or selected a mukandumba as an informant. In fact, except for those witchcraft healers and basket diviners who openly claim to be witches as a way to bolster and broadcast their powers of healing and clairvoyance (Silva 2011), I never knew of anyone, man or woman, who publicly admitted to practicing witchcraft or engaging in acts of bewitchment. My sources of information were therefore of two kinds: those peculiar, self-proclaimed male witches of sorts who nevertheless, being highly respected public figures, do not engage, or admit to engage, in acts of bewitching, and those laymen and women with whom I struck up conversations that led to the sensitive topic of witchcraft. Notoriously, these laymen and women did not describe themselves as witches; instead, they saw themselves as the potential or actual victims of bewitching.
In what follows, paraphrasing the words of these men and women, I attempt to convey their experience of witchcraft as a form of political evil. Four experiential themes recur in their discourse: dehumanization, intrusion, depletion, and consumption. All my interlocutors dwelled to some degree on the same experiential themes even though the content and tenor of our conversations on the topic of witchcraft changed according to focus. Because their discourse — all discourse — simultaneously reflects and culturally molds the experiences narrated (van Beek 2007, 298), it offers a privileged glimpse into the world of witchcraft and bewitching in northwest Zambia from an experiential perspective.
I start with "witchcraft in general," a type of account in which the evildoers are typically female. These accounts describe the methods employed for recruiting new members into the society of witches, the social dynamics of the coven, and the witches' dealings and doings — their witch craft. I was told that recruiting starts with the giving or receiving of food, often salt. A witch will walk through the villages asking for salt, Nguhaneko mungwa! Nguhaneko mungwa! Suspicious of the intention behind such a request, particularly if voiced by an elderly woman, the potential giver may opt to excuse herself, saying that she is very poor and has no salt to offer. By refusing to reciprocate she hopes to escape the cycle of indebtedness among witches. But the witch will persevere. Under the cover of darkness, the witch will invade that poor woman in her sleep, "causing her to dream" (kulotesa), and then proceed to accuse her of being selfish and greedy: "How dared you refuse a bit of salt to a fellow woman in need?" As punishment for her heartless and ungenerous behavior, the victim will be told to join the society of witches, or else die and be eaten.
Witches may also adopt the opposite strategy to multiply their numbers and fill their bellies with human meat. Instead of asking for salt, they will donate salt to women in need. Later, the witches will invade the receivers in their sleep, causing them to dream, and asking for the salt back. Every receiver of salt will likely respond, apologetically, that she has already used the salt in her stew (ifwo). But the witch will riposte in a cold, threatening tone: "That salt that you used in your stew belonged to my fellow witches. Now, you must join the coven and pay back your debt in the form of one of your relatives." The most malicious among the witches will demand an infant.
These gifts of human meat that create and sustain the society of witches through ties of mutual indebtedness are known as jifuka. To seal her promise of murder, the new witch will be asked to tie a knot in a rope while saying these words: "I will tie up so-and-so." There will be no return now. The new witch will attack at night, invading her victim in his or her sleep and causing him or her to dream. The witch will force the victim to work for her every night, tilling the fields, fetching water, collecting firewood, and going on errands. I was once told that some witches force their prey to carry them on their shoulders from Chavuma to Zambezi, a distance of eighty-four kilometers on the gravel road. Having worked like a slave all night, the bewitched will wake up in the morning feeling pains in the legs, arms, and shoulders. Over time, he or she will feel exhausted and depleted. In particularly malicious cases of bewitchment, the victim will see witchcraft familiars such as hyenas and lions during sleep. The witch may also force sexual intercourse or the ingestion of raw meat, clear signs that death is imminent. The victim is said to die twice: to his or her relatives, who will bury the corpse at the cemetery; and to the gluttonous witches, who will butcher and devour their prey at the cemetery.
The process of bewitching is not random and chaotic. Bewitching is a highly systematic and ritualized process in which the four experiential themes of political evil recur each time: dehumanization of the victim as prey, intrusion into his or her sleep as well as body in the form of forced sexual intercourse and ingestion of raw meat, depletion of the victim's vitality through nocturnal forced labor, and finally, the cannibalistic consumption of the victim's body at the cemetery.
Listening to these stories at night around a bonfire or maybe a small mbaula fire — minuscule circles of light surrounded by a thick wall of darkness — can be an uncanny experience. Significantly more perturbing though is listening to accounts that involve relatives, friends, and neighbors who have been bewitched. I refer to these accounts as "witchcraft in particular." As Koen Stroeken (2010, 125) also noticed during her research among the Sukuma of northwest Tanzania, these accounts, being more personal, offer a glimpse into the world of witchcraft from the perspective of the bewitched. From this perspective, bewitching acquires an experiential weight in the form of pain, weariness, illness, and fear. I begin with two cases of witchcraft in particular that I vividly remember.
Konde
In April 1996, the village headman who had welcomed me to his village suddenly died. He had been an important regional cadre of UNIP (The United National Independence Party of Zambia), a faithful supporter of President Kenneth Kaunda, and a wise Luvale elder, respected and loved by all. Over seven hundred people attended his funeral. Some of the attendees drove all the way from the cities of the Copperbelt and the capital of Zambia, Lusaka, and others flew in from Zimbabwe and Ireland. Konde's funeral was a beautiful and peaceful ceremony. Christians sang church hymns and read passages from the Bible. Respected elders offered memorable eulogies that described in great detail Konde's contributions to UNIP during the liberation struggle and after independence.
During the three nights of vigil that preceded the burial at the cemetery, however, the atmosphere was very different. For the smaller group of relatives and friends who attended the vigil held at Konde's village, the confirmation that Konde had been bewitched, as many suspected, arrived on the first night. Many were napping on woven mats around two large bonfires. Suddenly, one of Konde's daughters, Musami, a well-spoken young woman who attended the regional high school, stood up from her mat and readied herself to report what she had heard and seen on the night prior to her father's death.
Musami started by informing her audience that Konde had felt an excruciating pain on his right hip in the morning prior to his death (vakandumba are sometimes said to manipulate substances and injure from afar, much like sorcerers, or vakakupanda, typically do). Konde had fallen to the ground, crying and screaming, "I'm dying! I'm dying!" Then, he had returned to bed, leaving his relatives suspended in a state of apprehension and deep concern. But the situation became clearer that night, Musami added. She had woken up in the middle of the night feeling a heavy weight on her legs below the knees. She had heard "the spirits" (her words) urging, "go, go outside and look," so she had jumped to her feet and run outside as fast she could. "I will never forget what I saw that night," she told her audience at the vigil: three vakandumba standing in the village plaza and holding large chunks of raw, blood-dripping meat; her father's body on top of the large anthill; and a hyena. She had screamed, waking her relatives. Having identified the witches as their neighbors, she had started off in the direction where they lived. Had her mother and half-sister failed to stop her, she would have hit them.
By dawn, Konde lay moribund in bed. He told his relatives that one of his three predators, a man, was troubling him too much (in accounts of witchcraft in particular, vakandumba are not always women). Musami asked her relatives to summon Kazuzu, a renowned expert in witchcraft-related conditions, but Kazuzu was away. Around 9 am, Konde said to Musami: "They are really troubling me now. I'm leaving, my daughter. Be a good girl." He lifted his hand in her direction. Then he folded his arms over his chest, letting out the sound of a hyena from his mouth.
I have no words to describe the growing tension on the vigil grounds as Musami told her story. Had a group of devout Christians not started to fervently sing church hymns, effectively muffling Musami's hateful words, Musami and others would have likely chased the alleged predators who had chosen not to join the wake. However, not even the Christian hymns erased the grisly images of witches holding chunks of raw meat and Konde lying on his bed, his arms crossed on his chest and his mouth open to let out the sound of the hyena.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice
Walter E.A. van Beek and William C. Olsen
Part I. Evil and the State/War
1. Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched
Sónia Silva
2. Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda
Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, Julaina Obika
3. The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity in Africa's Newest State
Jok Madut Jok
4. Genocide, Evil and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan Explanations of the 1994 Genocide
Jennie E. Burnet
5. Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and Dagbon Compared
Wyatt MacGaffey
Part II. Evil and Religion
6. Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative Among the Yaka
René Devisch
7. Azé and the Incommensurable
Léocadie Ekoué with Judy Rosenthal
8. Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains
Walter E.A. van Beek
9. Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini
Diane Ciekawy
10. Haunted by Absent Others: Movements of Evil in a Nigerian City
Ulrika Trovalla
11. Attributions of Evil among Haalpulaaren, Senegal
Roy Dilley
12. Reflections regarding Good and Evil: The Complexity of Words in Zanzibar
Kjersti Larsen
13. Constructing Moral Personhood: The Moral Test in Tuareg Sociability as a Commentary on Honor and Dishonor
Susan J. Rasmussen
14. The Gender of Evil: Maasai Experiences and Expressions
Dorothy L. Hodgson
Part III. Evil and Modernity
15. Neo-Cannibalism, Military Bio-Politics, and the Problem of Human Evil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
16. Theft and Evil in Asante
William C. Olsen
17. Sorcery after Socialism: Liberalization and Anti Witchcraft Practices in Southern Tanzania
Maia Green
18. Transatlantic Pentecostal Demons in Maputo
Linda van de Kamp
19. The Meaning of "Apartheid" and the Epistemology of Evil
Adam Ashforth
List of Contributors and Affiliations
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Particularly valuable for the manner in which religious or mystical notions of evil are linked to more secular ones, notably violence and warfare, fetishes, gender constructs, psychoanalytic processes, personhood, theft, transnational connections, and apartheid."
Particularly valuable for the manner in which religious or mystical notions of evil are linked to more secular ones, notably violence and warfare, fetishes, gender constructs, psychoanalytic processes, personhood, theft, transnational connections, and apartheid.
Particularly valuable for the manner in which religious or mystical notions of evil are linked to more secular ones, notably violence and warfare, fetishes, gender constructs, psychoanalytic processes, personhood, theft, transnational connections, and apartheid.