Witchcraft and African Culture

Modern Africa is the setting for evidence that witchcraft is embedded in the belief systems and the social and political practices of the many indigenous peoples of the continent. That is significant because this same Africa is also the locus of tension between emergent, technology-driven, and largely Western-controlled globalization and modernization on one hand, and the legacy of reliance on supernatural explanations and analyses of experience on the other. That the title of a recent collection of ethnographic essays dealing with witchcraft in Africa is Magical Interpretations is instructive in that regard (Moore & Sanders, 2001). Similarly, Parish (1999, p. 427) observes that despite the formal declarations of the postcolonial African states against witchcraft, "it is precisely in that apparently modern arena . . . that witchcraft discourses have come to be lodged, incorporating new images and objects and providing one way of defining modernity through the 'local' consumption

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002, p. 90) Okuwan argued that the master should either have sold her or "found a way to contain and exploit those powers for themselves. Sorcery/witchcraft here becomes the sign of incomplete commodification, a node of individual transcendence over social objectification" (Bastian, 2002, p. 90). The matter was complicated by the fact that Christian missionaries from Sierra Leone had been authorized to run a CMS mission in the trading town of Onitsha, Nigeria, but were having great difficulty making Christian converts. It was further complicated by rumors of immoral lifestyle (sexual activity with women, alcohol abuse) on the part of the missionaries, which fueled rumors of witchcraft on the part of some of the converts. Okuwan was one of these. Socially marginalized as she was and lacking a patron, she and 25 others were subject to being stoned or poisoned; their fate was to be expelled from Onitsha, and the fate of the CMS mission was that it was taken out of the hands of indigenous pastors and restored to control of white churchmen. There is no further historical record of the expelled women's experience. Even today, however, there is a witches' society in Nigeria, with practitioners evidently less likely to be stigmatized and
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Westerfelhaus Ciekawy, Ghana Akan, South Africa, Protestantism Bastian, Similarly Parish, Okuwan Socially, Mijikenda Kenya, , Modern Africa, Onitsha Nigeria, der geest, westerfelhaus ciekawy, van der geest, van der, bastian 2002, et al 2001, al 2001, modern africa, witchcraft africa, witchcraft accusations, et al, niehaus et al, niehaus et, westerfelhaus ciekawy 1998, der geest 2002,
Approximate Word count = 2522
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)