Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici

Author:Silvia Federici
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2018-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Witch-Hunting and Globalization in Africa from the 1980s to the Present

Although the fear of witchcraft is often described as a deep-seated feature of Africa’s belief systems,4 assaults on ‘witches’ intensified across Africa in the 1990s in ways unprecedented in the precolonial period. Figures are difficult to come by, since attacks and killings have often gone unpunished and unrecorded, but what is available shows the magnitude of the problem.

Approximately three thousand women are now exiled in ‘witch camps’ in the north of Ghana, forced to flee their communities under the threat of death.5 As we have seen, scores of people, mostly women, have been killed in the Gusii (Kisii) district of southwestern Kenya, the attackers being well-organized groups of young men, usually unmarried, acting as mercenaries under the directives of relatives of the victims or other interested parties.6 Intense persecutions have occurred in South Africa’s Northern Province since the end of apartheid, with such a heavy toll in human lives that the African National Congress saw fit to appoint a commission of inquiry on the matter as one of its first acts in government.7 Routine assaults on ‘witches,’ often with deadly consequences, have also been recorded in the Republic of Benin, Cameroon, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. According to one account, between 1991 and 2001, at least twenty-three thousand ‘witches’ were killed in Africa, the figure being considered a conservative one.8 ‘Cleansing’ campaigns have also been launched, with witch finders going from village to village, submitting everyone to humiliating and frightening interrogations and exorcisms. This has been the case in Zambia, where, in one of the districts of Central Province 176 witch finders were active in the summer of 1997, and, since then, witch hunts “have proceeded unabated,” with the accused driven out of their villages, having their possessions expropriated, and often being tortured and killed.9

In most instances, witch hunters have operated with impunity, even in daylight. Police forces often either side with them or refuse to arrest them to avoid be accused of protecting witches or because they cannot find people willing to testify against them. Governments too have watched from the sidelines. Except for the government of South Africa, none has seriously investigated the circumstance of these killings. More surprising, feminists have not spoken out against them. They fear, perhaps, that denouncing these witch hunts may promote colonial stereotypes of Africans as a population mired in backwardness and irrationality. Such fears are not unfounded, but they are misguided. Witch hunts are not just an African problem but a global one. They are part of a worldwide pattern of increasing violence against women that we need to combat. Thus, we need to understand the forces and social dynamics responsible for witch hunts.

It is important to stress in this context that anti-witchcraft movements only began in Africa in the colonial period, in conjunction with the introduction of cash economies that profoundly changed social relations, creating new forms of inequality.10 Prior to colonization, ‘witches’ were at times punished

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