The Politics of Witchcraft and the Politics of Blood: Reading Sovereignty and Sociality in the Livingstone Museum

Alírio Karina (bio)

Abstract

Thoroughly entangled in the legacies of colonial anthropology, witchcraft is often presented as evidence of primitiveness or superstition, or as a metaphor for reality. This paper examines a set of witchcraft objects held at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, reading them against anthropological and political-theoretical efforts to treat witchcraft as a metaphor—for the African nation-state, capitalism, and ethnic violence, or for African ingenuity, modernity, and liberation. It argues instead that the materiality of witchcraft invites a reconceptualization of ideas of postcolonial agency and points to the limitations of liberatory politics organized around the pursuit of sovereignty.

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.—Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

In her 1975 review of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, Hildred Geertz identifies a problem with Thomas’s sweeping history of ideas: he fails to define “magic” outside of the terms his other ideological protagonists use to criticize it. The borders of the magical come to be delineated by that which should be, but is not, there—reason, practicality, religion.

According to Geertz, Thomas reduces all systems of magical belief to wholly psychological phenomena, which cease to be important in the 17^th century as Thomas identifies a reduction in need for supernatural aid and an increase in practical self-reliance. But, for any such psychological effect to exist, magic must be reasonable, and must too be something exceeding negative definition—so under what terms does it make itself such? What, actually, is magic? I am not interested in fleshing out Thomas’s psychological account of magic, though I will explore a related psychological-rationalist reductionism in contemporary and classical anthropological accounts. Instead, I contest Geertz’s challenge. What if there was a form of “magic” that was not framed as existing on the outside of normative knowing and being, but that sought to be the frame of that outside, to become that outside? To exist willfully outside of juridical and ecclesiastical law and logic, of scientific rationality—to exist, perhaps, against it, as a sovereign without obligations?

Such a form of magic would present a radical threat to the knowable and governable and livable world. It is such a form that we find in the news reports and rumors of witchcraft that seem to orbit the African and Afro-diasporic world. This witchcraft kills, maims, and terrorizes innocent and marginal Africans.¹ It remains a threat even after more than a century of colonization brought about its criminalization, after the refusal of the traditional and a new Christian antagonism to (non-ecclesiastical) magic, and after post-colonial African governments sought to unite despite the traditionalisms of tribe. In the process, it became overwhelmed by racial and ethnographic phantasm, a sign of the most shamefully savage, of the threat of an at-once racial and ethnographic Blackness, of the utmost impossibility of desiring the non-colonial, and thus it became a site of crisis for a reimagined African Studies. While in some ways specific to African Studies, this problematic has broader ramifications, as it is the result of the naturalization of ethnographic habits in the discipline that cast African witchcraft as a peculiarly and perniciously Black and indigenous practice. This paper does not seek to “apply” Black Studies or Indigenous Studies to consider this question. Instead, it thinks through the figure of witchcraft—at once burdened by the representational weight of both fields, by the weight of aspiration—in order to explore how both contribute to its understanding as a sign of sovereignty rather than as merely a nativist symbol of the return to a pure past or a liberal symbol of an always-already modernity.

Fig. 1.
Witchcraft display in the ethnographic gallery of the Livingstone Museum. All photographs were taken by the author and are used by permission.

The contours of this story are drawn out in the galleries and collections of the Livingstone Museum, in Livingstone, Zambia (see fig. 1).² In the ethnographic gallery,³ at the very beginning of a series of displays that travel from TRADITIONAL MEDICINE, through WITCHCRAFT, to DEATH (and BEYOND…), a small label informs the viewer that there are three kinds of traditional medicine items: herbs, which are prepared ointments and oral medicines of predominantly plant origin meant to cure various ailments; stimulants and depressants, which amplify or diminish a person’s (sexual, reproductive, psychological) capacities; and charms and talismans, which confer power to the wearer. Following in the footsteps of foundational English anthropologist E. Evans-Pritchard’s work on magic, the museum builds a careful distinction between objects that belong to the realm of the “magical” and those that pertain to “witchcraft.” This distinction marks not only a difference in what these objects are capable of, but—perhaps more importantly—a difference in how these objects should be related to.

In this paper, I examine these objects as material things critically embedded in modes of ethnographic interpretation that are signaled by both the museum’s taxonomy and the writing of anthropological monographs that seek to understand “belief” and its associated material culture. These objects are caught up in an ethnographically entangled process of missionary evangelism on the African continent and in other legal and political moments of the colonial encounter. Reading these moments together with the sociopolitical threat posed by witchcraft and its associated material, I argue that the museum’s framing of these materials works (symbolically) to mediate their sovereignty, while nevertheless ceding to their power. When read against theories of postcolonial politics that rely upon an analogy to witchcraftness, these violently heretical objects demonstrate the necessity of thinking witchcraft not merely via circulated objects of belief or superstition, but as a practice that poses real challenges to the authority of postcolonial African states. This paper develops ideas about the sovereignty of witchcraft in relation to Achille Mbembe’s “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony” and considers the questions witchcraft poses for scholars concerned with valorizing African practices that exceed the command of the colonial.

The witchcraft objects held by the Livingstone Museum were accessioned between the 1940s and 1960s, primarily following witch-trials, and were studied by Barrie Reynolds, then the Keeper of Ethnology at the Livingstone Museum.⁴ The objects fall into a few categories. Many are power sources in the form of containers; others are kaliloze guns used both by witches to kill their enemies and for witch-hunting (see fig. 2); a few are large ceremonial brushes; several are ilomba, snake familiars whose form the witch would adopt on night missions; others are various kinds of familiars, divining baskets, and associated objects. Among the objects is a magical telephone for communing with the otherworld and at least one magical aeroplane for traveling large distances and conducting night missions. Many are made from common materials that signal they were likely made by the same person. But many of them share other material traits. Several objects use seeds of the Lucky Bean Creeper (poisonous shiny red seeds that are black when dried), which are embedded in the object using dark resinous wax (another feature of many of the objects, across makers), while others featuring strings of small beads embedded in the same way. Many are shrouded in layers of fabric (at times signaling that the object was a snake, at times to hold a precarious object together, at times both) that have clearly been darkened on the surface by burial. Many combine parts of animal bodies—hooves, hides, tails, turtle shells, feathers—with wooden and other natural and crafted materials. Several too—especially the kaliloze guns, but also a skull-shaped object and a necklace of teeth—involve human remains, either teeth or large pieces of bone.

Fig. 2.
A kaliloze gun, made to look like a rifle. Its barrel is one end of a hollowed human femur, partially filled with soil. This is attached to a wooden stock and wrapped with leaves. Aimed through a hole in a wall, or at the sun, it can kill its target at any distance. Acc. 6580.

These objects are composites, crafted from a variety of different (primarily natural) materials that do not seem to fit, usually held together with dark resin that appears equally unsuited to the object’s components. A significant subset of the objects seem to employ impossible taxidermy. The most striking is crafted to look like a zebra’s leg filled with a zebra’s tail, made from a zebra hide, a hoof (likely equine), a combination of multiple animal tails for the tail, and wood and thread. Even non-taxidermic objects combine these forms in similar ways. While most of the kaliloze guns are made simply of wood, a sawed-off human bone, fabrics wrapped around them, and beads attached with wax (already an extraordinary and unsettling combination), some are more extravagant. One has a purple glass or semi-precious stone attached, with an inverted pound coin beneath it; the handle of another is formed from a warthog tusk and a claw. The magical telephone is a small animal horn with thick, soft fur stitched all around it and a jar lid with sticks, wax, and lucky beans that forms the “earpiece.” The “receiver” is a painted plastic cylinder filled with things that rattle (see fig. 3). In many of these cases, the objects come to look magical through the internal consistency of a mode that relates disparate forms, objects, and components, whose combination undermines any norm by which the viewer might expect to relate to it.

Fig. 3.
A witch’s telephone. The earpiece comprises animal horn, hide, metal, wood, seeds, and a shell. The receiver is metallic (possibly a jar lid) and coated in dark wax; Lucky Seeds dot the perimeter, with a cowrie shell on the top. The mouthpiece is a plastic canister filled with black powder, covered in fabric, resin, and strings of beads. Acc. 064 A/B.

Even objects with aesthetic value—well-crafted, referential of the familiar, or intricate in their form and decoration—are jarring. The intricate ilomba—whose carved faces recall the more mundane carvings found in the tourist market a few minutes from the museum—are deliberately frightening to look at. Their wooden heads, carved in the likeness of the witch whose snake form they would become, have exaggerated facial features that bulge out and are often decorated with materials that augment both their power and their visual menace. One such object has both seeds of the Lucky Bean Creeper affixed to the center of each eye and human hair (likely from the head of the witch himself). The heads form the tops of otherwise uncarved slabs of wood. The “bodies” are wrapped with a tremendous amount of murky-colored fabric, often with other objects (like scissors and animal claws) slipped inside and around these layers. This wrapping recalls a straitjacket and a snake at once, while the tone of the fabric indicates the ilomba’s hiding by burial. Another object is a necklace made entirely of human maxillary incisors, attached by coils of wire to a copper choker. This necklace, containing at least ten sets of front teeth, seems to come alive when moved (see fig. 4). The teeth, loosely connected to the copper core, shift very slightly. All of these objects are crafted with a great deal of attention to their form and aesthetics, echoing the familiar while using materials that render this reference to the beautiful quite frightening.

Fig. 4.
An item of witch regalia, worn around the neck. It comprises 43 adult maxillary incisors affixed to a loop of copper wire. The teeth move slightly when the piece is held. Acc. 10699.

The necklace, the kaliloze guns, and the ilomba are especially unsettling because of the way they inhabit death. Objects involving human body parts and remains become inescapably entangled with questions of how they were obtained (the morbid hope that they were stolen from graves) and, in the case of the guns, an awareness that the death that was necessary to build the object is a death that comes to generate death. Each of the objects with Lucky Bean seeds signals a relationship to the world of the dead—as well as the dangers of crossing the witch who has that relationship and the dangers of an object decorated with poison, a death-bringer. The shrouding and burial of the guns and the ilomba are reminders of precisely what these objects have the power and intention to do.⁵

Despite the ways in which these objects invoke and inhabit death, the ordinariness of Zambian belief in and fear of witchcraft is often treated as puzzling. Zambia—seen as modern, urban, educated, distant from “tradition”—would not then make sense as a home for indefensible superstitions from a forgotten past, while its predominant Christianity allows visitors to assume magic belief would have been replaced, as in Europe, by religious faith (Thomas). But that is not what witchcraft is. Witchcraft is a thoroughly modern practice and it has adapted in turn to the conditions of colonial and postcolonial Africa and assisted African subjects in adapting to these changes themselves.⁶ Zambian witchcraft is also invariably colored by colonial influence. Distinctly European magical fears—of black cats or walking under ladders—came to form the language for talking about a local “witchcraft” (which itself earned its name through the colonial encounter) and became the basis of a reckoning with this form as equivalent to what was historically present in Europe. This connection may have been tenuous in the early encounter—indeed, it was still complicated in 1930s Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where Evans-Pritchard used the terms “witchcraft,” “magic,” and “oracles,” which he recognized as inadequate to the task of describing the capacious modes of the social theory he was capturing. However, the question of “mistranslation” becomes murkier when we return to postcolonial Livingstone, a place where European missions and their postcolonial American counterparts have been entrenched for centuries. Zambian witchcraft was changed by its framing with European logics. Some of this involved the appropriation of European symbolism, as both Barrie Reynolds and Friday Mufuzi argue. The kaliloze guns again provide an immediate reference here, both in their form (referencing guns, with some quite distinct references to revolvers and rifles) and in the materials that decorate them.

But this shift is perhaps most clear when we consider the medicinal objects in the Livingstone Museum collections. Unlike the objects considered witchcraft objects, which traffic in and produce death, the objects that the Livingstone Museum frames as medicinal were built around magically or medically refusing the death that the witchcraft objects created, refusing the decay of the body and healing it instead. The herbal materials are catalogued as botanical clippings, occasionally with notes indicating the appropriate methods for usage and the illnesses these materials would aim to heal. This pharmacological collection strategy grants these materials a scientificity that allows them to be read as a valued form of “indigenous knowledge.” But what brings these herbal materials and charms together is the peculiar way in which the museum comes to define the category they do not form a part of: witchcraft. Where the magic of protective charms is a magic that heals or does no harm—and a magic that, perhaps as a result, needs little justification for even a very Christian Zambian to recognize—witchcraft is the magic that is about doing violence. In the case of the needle charms that protect against kaliloze gun attacks, witchcraft is also about surviving the reflection of violence you have attempted. This distinction seems solid enough until one remembers that the most common supernatural-related violence that the region sees takes the form of the killing of marginal subjects for body parts, which can then, medicinally, assist in the production and sustenance of power. These medicinal killings and maimings continue to be a problem in the region, with the market for body parts thriving especially in electoral periods. By delimiting violence of this kind to the world of witchcraft, the museum creates a neater division between different modes of vernacular practice than seems to really exist; this move may reflect a deliberate attempt to cleanse the “medicinal” of its more horrific components, such that “medicine” as a whole—not only in its pharmacological form—can remain an indigenous form immune to moral critique.

Due to the museum’s taxonomy and the way it is reproduced by Christian responses to witchcraft and medicine materials, these objects come to be inscribed by a very European binary: they are either white or black magic. This idea is now hard to unravel from these materials. The white magic, which is beneficial and socially acceptable, becomes “medicine” or “divination”; the black magic, which is anti-social and violent, is “witchcraft” (Mufuzi, “Practice of Witchcraft”). This distinction between social benefit and anti-social violence mirrors the origin mythology that animates tourist life in Livingstone. Livingstone the town is named after Livingstone the man, who is memorialized as the uniquely goodhearted missionary who brought both salvation and abolition to the region. The ultimate anti-social black magic would then be the violence of slavery, and its abolition is understood to be of material and moral concern—a concern both with the end of raids that brought upheaval to the north of what is now Zambia (and the danger of being abducted into slavery through these raids) and with the wrongness of the enslavement of African kin. Its counterpart is the healing force of Christianity spread by Livingstone. Indeed, contemporary Christianity in Zambia—even after excluding the more willfully syncretic African Independent Churches—is a thoroughly magical phenomenon. Ordinary and spiritual life is expected to be structured in profoundly supernatural ways, from the transubstantiation in Catholicism and consubstantiation in Anglicanism to the more recently imported Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, where locals find themselves possessed, speaking in tongues, gaining special powers, and being healed by the word of God and the hands of their preachers. More, these supernatural modes are amenable to those governing local ideas of magic, and the commensurability of religion and witchcraft in Zambia produces local witchcraft practices not as impossibilities but as evil presences in the world. It follows that the fear of witchcraft and of its objects comes to be central to conversion in the region.

To Western audiences, these witchcraft objects appear to manifest their power and intention through supernatural means,⁷ a fact that presents a scholarly problem. In the most notable early attempt to resolve this problem, Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) works to find a way to rationalize witchcraft’s excess from the natural. In the text, Evans-Pritchard argues that Zande cosmology seeks to explain and respond to that which is left out of Western analyses of cause and effect—instead of the how questions, the why questions: why then, why there, why them. These beliefs in turn produce practices that help the Zande social structure retain stability in light of potentially destabilizing accidents and deaths.⁸ Evans-Pritchard produces a psychological account of witchcraft, describing it as a way of dealing with the inexplicable misfortunes of everyday life. In its effort to be sympathetic to magic, this mode imagines magic as the exceedingly rationalist counterpart to Western naturalist modes of inquiry (Mills). This witchcraft is not truly agential; not only does it not actually harm anyone, but it doesnt’ actually act. Instead, for Evans-Pritchard, witchcraft is a discourse applied after the fact and it produces the sense that the world it describes can be correctly understood through Western science.

In postcolonial scholarship on witchcraft, this problematic is often addressed by studying experiences of witchcraft or witchcraft accusations through a set of concrete harms that witchcraft is understood to provide psychic or critical commentary upon. Many scholars extend Evans-Pritchard’s “misfortune” to its structural conclusion that witchcraft is the manifestation of the lived social violence of capitalism. This mode of thinking witchcraft as part of an “occult economy” hopes to take seriously the modernity of practices that are otherwise situated in the traditional past in an uncomplicated way. In Modernity and its Malcontents, Jean and John Comaroff attempt to rethink all ritual on the African continent as forming the “efforts of people to empower themselves, [and] thus to assert a measure of control over worlds often perceived to be rapidly changing” (xiv) and assert the importance of thinking ritual as symbolic action. Thus, they replicate Evans-Pritchard’s psychological dismissal of the occult. However, where for Evans-Pritchard magical practices have a stabilizing function, for the Comaroffs, they figure “in a moral economy capable of addressing the raw realities of misfortune and inequity” (xvii). The occult here is transmuted into a form of ritualized social criticism, which may come to have tangible effects. This speaks to an idealized occult world, in which the eminent adaptability of witchcraft (Geschiere) uniquely positions it as a resistant force to those geopolitical changes that affect everyday life in harmful ways (Moore and Sanders 11). But the practice of witchcraft that the Comaroffs identify routinely becomes subordinate to the moral critique that witchcraft is seen to enable. They write:

African witches have a long legacy. Their signifying potential, moreover, has proven to be unusually dynamic and versatile. They travel across broad horizons, take up residence in towns, become mistresses of money, markets, and motorized transport, wear makeup and modish attire. They also become the personification of capricious commodities, the sirens of selfish desire. Thus Schmoll shows that Hausa “soul-eaters” in rural Niger consume the life essence of their fellows out of insatiable, uncontrolled craving. Theirs is an antisocial lust that finds its “meat” in the bodies of children, and hence subverts the process of social reproduction itself—this, Austen reminds us, being a very general motif in African witchcraft. (xxv)

This brief historic analysis of the doings of witches is subsumed into an account of the soul-eater as a commodity that comes to threaten Hausa heritage, revealing the shifting moral margins of society. The Hausa witchcraft accusation is a quasi-Marxist critique from which we might better come to understand the economic violence of African modernity. It should come as little surprise that the discussions of magic in Modernity and Its Malcontents are animated by the idea of the fetish. This is a layered reference. The feitiço gives “fetish” its name—the enchantment, the magical object, the product of sorcery, the supernaturally animate—just as the Marxian commodity fetish describes the magic whereby circulation hides the social, becoming a veil that masks what is real. This is not just a rhetorical parallel; for the Comaroffs, much of what witchcraft appears to veil is capitalism. Despite their stated concern with taking non-Western forms seriously in their own right instead of as reflections of the West, Comaroff and Comaroff present an unveiling of the occult that is “truly” a criticism of newly entrenched forms of accumulation (xiii). Witchcraft becomes simply a metaphor for capitalism.

For Sean Redding, witchcraft is the sign of colonial power in Union-era South Africa. Redding quotes a passage from Monica Hunter (Wilson)’s 1936 Reaction to Conquest, in which she presents an argument about the witchcraft done to the Pondo by Europeans:

Quoting an unnamed informant, [Hunter] elaborated: “All ubuthi [material for sorcery] comes from Europeans. They are the real amagqwira (witches or sorcerers).” . . . Informants, when asked, replied that store-keepers and individual Europeans in Pondoland did not kill Pondo by witchcraft or sorcery, but “It is that European, the Government, who ukuthakatha [does harm by witchcraft or sorcery].”(10)

For Hunter’s Pondo informant, the Union of South Africa is a witch, and colonial rule takes place by means of witchcraft. As Redding elaborates, the most frequent target of this mode of witchcraft accusation was the colonial tax, which demanded a fundamental and immediate restructuring of local forms of life, and whose authority (however illegitimate) could not be ignored. For Redding, this reading of white power as witchly is entangled with early evangelism. Christian missions and their associated civilizing projects—training grounds for appropriately proletarian, though at least initially elite, African subjectivities—were aligned with the colonial administration and colored local understandings of what the supernatural could do and for whom. The social disruption and violence of the sorcerer—the colonial administration, broadly construed—operated through the fetish of British currency, entrenching and facilitating the colonial government’s power at the cost of indigenous lives and life. Redding is concerned less with witchcraft, however, than with the witchcraft accusation. As a result, witchcraft is a metaphor and witchcraft accusations are indices of social anxiety, and thus critiques of the decidedly not supernatural operations of the colonial and postcolonial market and state.

Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders offer a rejoinder:

Is witchcraft, or the occult more generally, offering a critique of globalization and modernity? Must it do so? Is witchcraft really about symbolic politics? Could it be that anthropologists are telling a popular liberal tale through “others” and, in the process, inadvertently reinscribing the very “us”-“them” dichotomies we seek to dismantle? It seems most unlikely that, in all cases and places, people are resisting or critiquing the technologies and conveniences of modernization, and they are certainly not shy of the capitalist relations needed to acquire them. (13)

Why should allegations about occult harm so neatly mirror a left-centrist critique of capital and the modern world? Why should witchcraft be fundamentally about any such critique—why should it be reduced to discourse? By failing to think witchcraft as a practice with a social life, this scholarship cannot account for the way that the language of witchcraft in particular works to track changes in processes of “consumption, production and political control” (Moore and Sanders 9) on the African continent. This trajectory of witchcraft scholarship is well-meaning, reflecting the desire to dismiss concoctions of racist imagination, to valorize African social practices, and to retain a sense of (radical, or even revolutionary) political optimism about a continent that is often refused it. But witchcraft is not only a discourse; it is a living practice. To understand it, one must first be willing to take witchcraft as real. On one level, this might mean taking a more “rounded picture of reality, one that provides for both the visible and invisible dimensions of our world” (Nyamnjoh 47). But even if one is unwilling to countenance the agency of an invisible world, witchcraft is nonetheless agential and real. The ilomba of the Reynolds collection are especially suggestive here. These objects are crafted in ways that emphasize their identification with ethnographic Blackness, using racialized caricature to heighten the work of fear, and they are understood to be fundamentally entangled with the life of the witch. The ilomba must eat just as the witch must eat, and blood must flow through the ilomba just as blood must flow through the witch, or the ilomba and the witch will both die. This materiality does not so obviously reflect a structure of anti-social violence. But such a violence characterizes the evidently material practices that come to be excluded from the realm of the medicinal—the medicine murders and maimings of children, the elderly, and people with albinism. By failing to reckon with these, and with the convenience mapping of witchcraft accusations onto critiques of capitalist modernity, witchcraft is wholly excised from the material and social world.

Francis Nyamnjoh’s analysis of magic in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon offers a direction for resolution. Here, sorcerers are at once estranged from social life and possessed of an “undomesticated agency” (Nyamnjoh 44). This “undomesticated agency” is not only the malevolent power of sorcery, it corresponds too to the greed and pride of the economic and political climber, as part of a world in which everything—all resources, including life itself—is understood to be finite and in need of balancing. In both cases, close and distant kin are sacrificed—their lives traded at the market of a shadow world, Msa—to attain position and power. While this certainly appears to be a vernacular criticism of capitalist accumulation, it also seems to make a broader claim: witchcraft has a wild power and this power is absolute, free of the influence of any but the witch, and if left undomesticated—or at least unchallenged—it will continue to consume its kin until there are no spirits left.

What does it mean to consume one’s kin? This is an expression of the most antisocial of violences—not only the cannibal consumption of other persons, but the literal eating of the family that grounds one’s presence in the social world. This consumption corresponds to the use of body parts in medicines that aid inattaining power and wealth. But it speaks more broadly to witchcraft as a socially disassembling force. The materials in the Reynolds collection—their aesthetics, materiality, social importance, and magical power—unmoor us and their contemporaries alike from the bounds of the social world as we have been brought to understand it. The witch’s otherworldly knowledge, signaled by the material and aesthetic mismatches in the construction of these composite objects, violently unmakes the boundaries of our worldly knowledge. In other words, witchcraft is abject. This is not as the overdetermined signifier of the horrors of the African primitivity, although an awareness of this may well be incorporated into witchcraft practice. Instead, witchcraft is the deliberate crafting and embodiment of abjection, occupying a position that is both marginal and threatening. This abjection can be seen even in the materiality of the Reynolds objects, with their malevolent superimposition of human remains with craft materials, natural dangers, and animal parts. Instead of merely surviving from a shameful traditional past, witchcraft continues to disassemble the boundaries of social meaning in ways capacious enough to incorporate the iconography and logic of colonialism.

Whether we are concerned with the witchcraft of the medicine murder or with the way that killing itself operates through more occult means, we find in witchcraft a problem of relation. We cannot want witchcraft—even as we might want its heresy—and yet it remains, producing spectacular violence and spectacular objects that unsettle the social. And yet, there is something seductive about witchcraft, about the power it possesses and can transmit. This power is not just a discursive referent to things that have actual power. In this sense, witchcraft is not merely a critique of capitalism or of the particular workings of any given African nation state, but of sovereign power and those who wield it.

Indeed, witchcraft is a form that challenges the sovereignty of African states. This challenge is regularly expressed in ordinary life. In one version, witchcraft is an evil obstacle to the salvation of the continent, to be overcome through novel ecclesiastical practices (Asamoah-Gyadu). This point is especially salient in Zambia, whose official Christianity has resulted in explicitly non-secular forms of governance following the 1991 presidential election of Frederick Chiluba, a Pentecostal Christian. This general Christian consensus on witchcraft in Zambia results in the idea that witchcraft is heretical, but not as discourse or representation. Instead, witches are actual combatants in a cosmological war,⁹ one that Christianity must win (Asamoah-Gyadu). In a somewhat parallel story, witchcraft is a superstitious practice that burdens governance and its potential to provide liberated futures (Okeja). This line of criticism reduces magical beliefs and practices to a backwards misreading of the real that produces frustrating noncompliance with the paternal authority of the state. Here the Zambian state’s position offers a useful conclusion. In the Lusaka National Museum—a fairly empty museum colored by state politics and situated next to a government office building that houses several ministries—the International Museums Day exhibit for 2017 (“Museums and Contested Histories: Saying the Unspeakable in Zambia”) featured panels on witchcraft and albinism, among other topics. The witchcraft panel, while in principle standing alone, provided the context through which to understand the other. Witchcraft and magic—including their medicinal and defensive forms, and especially the forms that enable the accumulation of wealth—are the necessary conditions for the maiming and murdering of albino Zambian adults and children. Tremendous and pervasive violence is incorporated into an illicit economy of supernatural power; superstition, if not evil itself, produces evil. And this violence is of urgent concern not only because it is horrific, but because it persists, spiting national attempts to manage it.¹⁰ Its occurrence compels international observers to call for intervention, thus reminding African governments of the subordinate position of their own “sovereignty.”

In contrast, the heretical violence of and for witchcraft is not trapped by any obligations to appease others—any such death or maiming serves only the witch and perhaps a series of hired hands who willfully do violence to others in order to bring about or maintain the wealth or power of the witch in question. There is no decorum to maintain—no acts of violence that might (need to) be justified—nor anyone to be accountable to. There is opposition from the colonial and postcolonial state, as well as from Christian churches, and the entanglement of their challenge to witchcraft—or rather, of witchcraft’s challenge to both—signals that witchcraft’s heretical position may also be a sovereign one, as Fasolt argues in “Sovereignty and Heresy.” The attempts to criminalize witchcraft and the evangelical framing of witchcraft as an enemy force signal that witchcraft presents a critical disruption of the sovereignty of the Zambian state that, in the transit of the neocolony (cf. Byrd), must somehow be restructured from crisis into a difference that is either internal or external to the workings of the state¹¹.

Such an attempt was hinted at upon the election of Frederick Chiluba. On the first of November 1991, the results of the Zambian presidential election were announced. Following a staggering defeat, Kenneth Kaunda telephoned Chiluba to concede defeat and congratulate the new president. The Washington Post reported that shortly after this concession in a press conference,

Chiluba called on Kaunda to remain in the country and help rebuild it. “I want the fears to vanish, to disappear from his mind,” he said. “There will be no witch hunting. Kenneth Kaunda is the father of this country, so we must show him respect.”¹²

Chiluba’s declaration that “There will be no witch hunting” is a loaded play on words. More than just referencing the fact that Kaunda was the subject of myriad accusations of witchcraft, it nods to the legitimacy of the accusations against Kaunda. The pronouncement recognizes the growing popular frustration with Kaunda’s singular power, which, together with international pressure, produced the multiparty election in which he was unseated and through which his late autocratic rule became tantamount to witchcraft. Beyond that, Chiluba is declaring his own authority and capacity to control the world of witchcraft and dissuade it from action, perhaps by virtue of this democratic election. These two figures—Kaunda the witch, Chiluba the vanquisher—together tell a story of the success of Zambian sovereignty. The witch’s undomesticated agency is domesticated (subordinated) to the newly Christian state by means of a democratic election. But there is more than one threat of witchcraft in this account; also present are the multitudes desiring occult retribution, the witch-hunters-in-waiting (the rioters who had unsettled Kaunda’s Zambia and led to the election). And where Kaunda’s witchcraft-of-sovereignty is overcome by Chiluba’s electoral victory, this latter witchcraft—which threatened to compete with Chiluba’s role of authorizing violence for the state—is instead comfortably incorporated into Zambian statecraft, becoming part of what confirms Chiluba’s own legitimacy. The witch is dead! Long live the witches!—or so Chiluba, victorious, will tell us.

Perhaps this signals the incorporation of witchcraft proper into Zambian nation-building. The use of witchcraft by politicians to establish their power certainly suggests as much. Perhaps witchcraft then takes the form of a commodity whose circulation is attuned to the whims of the state or its capitalist corollaries. Or perhaps instead of witchcraft being incorporated into the workings of the Zambian nation, it remains independent of and coextensive with Zambian sovereignty, a font of illicit power engaged by those who desire its legitimate corollary. The idea that witchcraft could be incorporated into governance belies both the utter social disruption it produces and the fact that, even as politicians attempt to access power by means of witchcraft, they can never acknowledge (to locals) that they are witches or (to international observers of multiple kinds) that they are primitive, superstitious, and willing to corrupt social life to attain power. Instead, it seems that witchcraft holds its own. It has become the immediate point of reference when discussing ascension to the kinds of wealth and position whose power is progressively less constrained. This does not seem to signal that witchcraft is equivalent to the tropic, populist witchcraft accusations that follow those who have attained some form of power (not least because they also follow those who have not). Instead, it seems to indicate that witchcraft, as a distinct, independent, unsubordinated sovereign form, is the sign through which power is understood.

Thinking with Achille Mbembe, we might then be tempted to understand witchcraft as a necropolitical form, characterized by the production of lawless and excessive “death-worlds” (Mbembe, “Necropolitics” 40). In this reading, and in light of the challenges witchcraft poses to the postcolonial state (which it shadows with myth, rumor, and spectacular violence), witchcraft appears to correspond to an expression of sovereign power peculiar to the colony and its postcolonial successor. This is the logic that animates Mbembe’s “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony” (1992), which employs an extended metaphor of the fetish in its reading of postcolonial commandement. In this text, the fetish is the ideal form through which illegitimate authoritarian colonial power operates, as well as the power of its postcolonial successor.

This fetish appears primarily to be the fetish-as-veil, although Mbembe makes use of the more occult origin of the term. But the fetish is also what structures our relations to the obscene, vulgar, sexual, phallic. Thus this contemporary-politics-as-fetish is not only a veil but a carnival masquerade (and, crucially, one known as such). This reading forces us to reckon with the permeation of political discourse with reactive and chaotic performances that undermine the recognition of political relations. Mbembe offers an account of how the grotesque, excessive, and obscene come to be incorporated into the workings of political power. What initially exceeds the capacities and domains of postcolonial governance comes to form part of what ratifies and enables the workings of the state. These changes can be read as the workings of a state aspiring to the modernity that seems to be otherwise unique to witchcraft, which is possessed of an infinite adaptability and responsiveness to change and external interpretation. As a result, Mbembe’s power-as-fetish—or perhaps, power-as-witchcraft—is capable of internalizing any obscenity or excess that should disrupt it.

Mbembe writes this power-as-fetish as at once establishing and legitimating the authority of the state. But neither mechanism seems convincing, even within his own reading. Postcolonial potentates do not institute themselves by radical incorporation or any other means—in On the Postcolony (2001), they are instituted by a mere handover of power from a colonial commandement established by routine violence.¹³ Even considering only the contemporary African nations for which this claim might be held as true, the terms of this transition violently constrain African government policy. What remains relatively unconstrained is a discursive terrain through which power might be legitimated. However, Mbembe goes on to argue forcefully for an African postcolonial drama in which all parties have been radically disempowered, and both the state and the subjects of its regime are locked in a violent powerlessness due to their intimate, unwilling “conviviality” (“Provisional Notes” 10).¹⁴ In light of this, it seems odd that a mechanism for legitimation should even be necessary in the postcolony. Regardless of how political discourse might be performed here—with or without the fetish—we are left without a material account of the kind of sovereign power actually possessed by African states and the terms through which that sovereignty might be challenged or dissembled, and are instead offered something very close to an account of total domination. Mbembe reads power-as-witchcraft as a peculiarly African form characterized by excessively and arbitrarily violent state power. This peculiarity seems to be grounded in the seamlessness that Mbembe ascribes to the transfer of power from colonial administration to African government at independence, which appears as the key feature of the continent’s politics after colonialism, and through which theorization post-independence African states are assigned the full power of the colonial administrations that preceded them.

Reading “Provisional Notes” with his essay, “Afropolitanism” (2007), a further problem emerges with the thesis of a postcolonial citizenry radically disempowered of democratic possibility. In “Afropolitanism,” Mbembe rhapsodizes about the value of an African political-aesthetic practice untethered to Africanism or Blackness (as racial, cultural, or kin-making forms). These latter forms reflect a nativism that Mbembe reads to be the problem at the heart of power-as-witchcraft.

Partly through the indigenizing character of the African occult, Mbembe reads political claims to lineage and kinship—which he elsewhere equates to a “politics of blood,” both the blood of kin and of bloodshed (“If We Don’t”)—as commensurable with witchcraft-as-power. But, just as African states do not operate through witchcraft-as-power, violence in excess of that required to produce a nation-state can never gain hegemony across the Postcolony due to the quasi-condition of African sovereignty. Moreover, this commensuration misreads witchcraft, imagining it as a politics of kinship instead of a practice that arbitrarily and systemically brings the possibility of kinship into question. Further, and perhaps most troublingly for Mbembe’s project of reclaiming African subjectivity after colonialism, this gesture also forecloses the the affiliative models of political practice that might figure a new politics of solidarity and a new African political horizon.

Mbembe’s criticism of the politics of custom operates within an academic conversation that commonly disparages resurgent African indigenous-coded political claims as nativist. Claims to land and lineage are seen as mired in an attachment to a past that is beyond reasonable access, and thus that is produced in the shape of existing desires, in which the customary comes to exist primarily as a legitimating force. Taking this to reflect truth, the question that follows is then, for what? The seeming answer is that claims to lineage threaten to produce ethnic division, hierarchy, and violence. This threat is in many ways evidenced by aspects of ethnic politics on the continent. But this sense of threat also reflects how the customary exists as a site of anxiety in advance of any actual violence, in ways that elide the banality of its everyday life—and indeed, the banality of the suggestion that an ethnicized context should deal with ethnicity instead of seeking to sweep it away. After all, fictive and affiliative claims to culture, kinship, and the past do not reflect politically convenient artifice, nor—much like witchcraft—are they a holdover from the precolonial. Instead, they articulate experiences with and attachments to non-Western practices, and reflect the vitality and urgency of such practices for the present day.

The problem of wrestling with the agency and power of kinship—both in its banal and its pernicious forms—is one that the Livingstone Museum takes seriously. Its witchcraft objects are possessed of a deathly power, which is resolved by their deactivation by a witchdoctor prior to their placement on open shelves, and the restriction of access to any active objects accessioned after the last deactivation event. In the process, the museum both builds an archive of materials that can no longer threaten¹⁵ and recognizes their threat as real. The structure of its galleries offers another set of remarks; the ethnographic gallery is set up so as to critique colonialism and its effects on Zambian lives. Its entrance is marked by a curved reed fence, with sand on the ground; on the other side of this fence, a sign reads “Our Village.” The next room has several thatch-roofed buildings, sandy floors, and many traditional items meant to communicate how Zambians would have been living in the villages. Many objects, like jerricans and bicycles, signal that this is life under colonial rule. Three-dimensional sculptures of people are living their lives in this environment with these objects. The paintings on the walls continue the scene into the distance. In the next room, labelled “Their Town,” the floor ceases to be sandy, and is instead structured like a street, with pavement along the sides where the visitor walks in the road. Right in front of the entrance is a huge building with a sign labeled “Mirage House” and other signs that identify it as a government office and people’s bank. The story of this transition is clear; the urban promises of colonialism and postcolonial modernity proved mere mirages, and life in the cities and towns of Zambia is no easier than “traditional” life in the villages. Next to the building, there is a pay phone and a street light. Along the wall, extending to the right side of the entrance, a scene shows an industrial project helmed by a complaining European man, people struggling for work, and people debating whether the work—and, by extension, the colonial project—is worth it. Unlike in the scene of “Our Village,” all of the figures are two-dimensional wood cut-outs (or part of the murals). On the right side, we see a church, children walking to school, and a small shop set up in a tin shack complete with dry goods. Walking around the building, a car with wooden cut-out figures inside is being stopped by police and another person is sitting on the corner, begging.

Fig. 5.
Entrance to the conventional ethnographic exhibition hall following “Their Town.”

A sign on the arched wall reading “Museum” marks the end of the installation space and the beginning of the conventional ethnographic exhibits, while also chronologically and critically situating museological knowledge in and after the destabilizing colonial encounter (see fig. 5). Thus, the structure of the ethnographic gallery suggests that the indigenous cosmologies reflected by the witchcraft objects (as opposed to by the museum, or the anthropologists that read the museum, or the colonial administrators who seek to reorganize social meaning for political and economic gain) are an inheritance Zambians cannot abandon. In making this move, the Livingstone Museum both invests in the scientificity of the research museum and challenges the singularity of its authority. The museum, we should understand, does have some (curated, colonial) relationship to truth, and as such is a resource in coming to comprehend anew the Village in the midst of (and after) the Town. Between the affirmations of and attempts to manage the threat of witchcraft and the exalting of forms of life that resist the logics of Zambian modernity without excluding its trappings, the Livingstone Museum does not make any optimistic claims about the potentiality of the future. Instead, it reckons with the problem that these witchcraft objects pose, as potently agential materials fundamentally entangled in indigenous ways of knowing. These objects also become overdetermined signs of primitive savagery and come to take newly harmful forms after colonialism and into the present.

In its refusal of easy optimism—and even as it asserts the urgency and reality of indigenous knowledges and cosmologies—the museum also refuses a nativist appeal to origin or to a neatly defined sense of the precolonial. But it does so in ways that reflect the absence of anxiety around the power of custom, ethnicity, and the past, in sharp contrast to the scholarly discourses that concern and surround materials of the kind held in the Livingstone Museum’s collections. In the process, the museum is able to treat even the most violently overdetermined signs of cultural life as things possessing a life of their own, even the ones that have been out of circulation for half a century. It presents the idea that regardless of the impulse to authenticate indigenous practices, anthropologized African forms are not paths to the precolonial, nor do they reflect correct modes of timeless relation to the contemporary world. Instead, the Livingstone Museum’s treatment of these witchcraft objects underscores the necessity of simultaneously asking what politics are desired and what forms must be enlivened or reformed in order to ensure the possibility of these politics.

Asking these questions means emphasizing the kinds of constraints to the quasi-sovereignty of post-independence African states posed by the economically, epistemically, and politically intrusive actions of imperial powers, and acknowledging too that life is made and remade in the midst of this. By taking witchcraft seriously—as practice and rumour and myth, as repulsion and seduction, as an antisocial violence and being-without obligation—we might gain grounds from which to understand the aspiration to sovereignty in African political life. And we might understand its fatal absence even where it is present and, more urgently, its inadequacy as a site of political aspiration whose violence—of jurisdiction, or of recognition—is not society-making but society-breaking. Crucially, witchcraft suggests too a productive inverse: sociality. Perhaps, following Mudimbe, one might instead trace the ordinary—the cultural products, the habits of life, the discourses that needn’t be spoken—and through it find a politics of kin-making that need not also be a politics of blood.

Alírio Karina is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Their research examines how the idea of Africa is the product of the legacies of anthropology, and what it might mean to do African studies—and to think Africa—in ways autonomous of anthropology.

Footnotes

1. Following the Livingstone Museum’s nomenclature, I use the term witchcraft here. The term is itself coherent with a lineage of writing from Barrie Reynolds to Evans-Pritchard, and with the popular terms that typically describe these practices in Zambia and beyond. Accordingly, I refer to the practitioners of witchcraft as witches, whereas practitioners of other kinds of magic might be diviners or witch-doctors. In some scholarship, my use of witchcraft is congruent with sorcery; in other scholarship and social contexts, witchcraft and sorcery are used interchangeably. In doing so, I also am responding to a set of arguments about nomenclature that would avoid the use of witchcraft or sorcery altogether, in favor of terms that speak to indigenous meaning rather than colonial assumption, and that avoid the pernicious connotations that come with witchcraft, sorcery, or witch-doctor. However, this logic falls flat in contemporary Zambia, where witchcraft is called witchcraft and bears the traces of the colonial encounter. Moreover, the attempt to avoid the negative connotations of these terms ultimately reflects a misunderstanding of (or unwillingness to understand) the extent to which these practices produce social violence. Further, in the Zambian case, the term witch, and thus the term witchcraft, is gendered in complex ways. While it is assumed that men and women are equally capable of being witches, male witches are understood to be more powerful (Mufuzi) and witch-hunts predominantly target women (and the elderly).

2. This museum was founded as the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, after both David Livingstone and Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate who conquered what is now Zambia as part of his personal colony of Rhodesia. It was affiliated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) and would occasionally accession items collected by anthropologists working under the latter’s auspices. The RLI has since been renamed the Institute for Economic and Social Research (INESOR).

3. Specifically, this display is in the part of the ethnographic gallery labelled MUSEUM and arranged with conventional museum displays, and not in the preceding part of the ethnographic gallery, a two-room installation work (“Our Village”; “Their Town”) that depicts the subtler violences of colonialism.

4. The objects are deeply associated with Reynolds, and this collection is generally referred to within the museum as the “Reynolds Collection,” despite the fact that Reynolds is not listed as the collector for any of these materials. I will use this nomenclature in this paper.

5. As a counterpoint to this now faded (deactivated) power, we see the present material condition of the objects. As many are made of natural materials (especially hide, hair, or dense patches of fiber), almost all of the objects are decaying, with small insect infestations resulting in dramatic shedding.

6. See Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft; Moore and Sanders, “Magical Interpretations”; Comaroff and Comaroff, Modernity and Its Malcontents; and Mufuzi, “Practice of Witchcraft.”

7. In Zambia, the operation of witchcraft objects does not exceed the natural, nor do broader witchcraft and traditional medicinal practices.

8. Evans-Pritchard already recognizes that this does not take the form of the “traditional,” as Anglo-Egyptian intervention had already forced the relocation of the community he studied and would do so again shortly thereafter. In some ways, these moves disabled “traditional” ways of living.

9. This tale of the war of Christianity versus Witchcraft further complicates the idea of the “occult economy,” which serves as a mode of criticizing capitalist value structures. This is due to the Christian evangelical churches, whose leaders are conspicuous in their consumption and almost as rich in moral authority, and whose members tithe heavily, whose work entangles the capitalist and the moral and supernatural, whose adverts litter notice boards and the walls of buildings, and whose churches can be found on every block.

10. The most obvious of these are the attempts to criminalize witchcraft, primarily under British rule, efforts that actually served to criminalize witchcraft accusations (see Redding, Sorcery and Sovereignty). But other anti-witchcraft (and anti-magic) sentiments animate African government, most clearly where public health and internal security seem to be at risk. These sentiments share a mixed lineage from both European attempts to produce modern colonies and modes of anticolonial anti-tribalism that were the result of wariness of the threats posed by attachments to ethnicity and to the making of new nationalisms, but that also took the form of a wariness with practices under sign of the traditional past instead of the modern (and in the case of Zambia, socialist) future.

11. Together with Jodi Byrd, Sylvia Federici’s work is instructive on this point. Though the “witches” in question are altogether different, the “witch” appears as abject, against which—and in whose idealized answer—the maintenance of the Rhodesian and Zambian state as (neo)colonial forms is made possible. Indeed, even as the sovereignty of Zambian witchcraft is grounded in material violences, and responded to with equal materiality, its power is also grounded in its role as political and cultural counter-symbol to the state.

12. This statement is complicated, as it becomes clear prior to the 1996 presidential election—for which new laws were passed barring non-Zambian born people from candidacy—that Kaunda was not welcome except as a subordinate figure to Chiluba and his political party, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). In the following year, Kaunda was stripped of his Zambian citizenship altogether..

13. This argument is central to the first two chapters of On the Postcolony.

14. In “Provisional Notes,” Mbembe offers this as an analytic on the grounds of its superior complexity to the binarism of “resistance v. passivity, autonomy v. subjection, state v. civil society, hegemony v. counter-hegemony, totalisation v. detotalisation” (1).

15. The absence of threat is limited to when these objects remain deactivated; the object that ceases to be an archival or curatorial object is one that might be reactivated by another witch and used again to cause harm. For this reason, witchcraft objects on open display are sometimes stolen.

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