nization) in which it is implicated as regards human and natural resources appear not to have significantly altered the seriousness with which indigenous African cultures regard witchcraft. In an account of time spent in the Soweto district of Johannesburg, South Africa, in the early 1990s, Ashworth explains that he was unprepared for the scale of "spiritual insecurity I found in Soweto. I could never have imagined the degree of fear which people endure . . . regarding the risk of witchcraft and sorcery, the constant threat of evil forces being unleashed by jealous neighbors, relatives, and acquaintances to cause them harm" (1996, pp. 1183-4). Ashworth's remark is all the more striking inasmuch as--whatever the character of the gross poverty in which they live--the residents of Soweto are in a physical location in which the attributes of industrial society are abundantly manifest.
Witchcraft manifests in a variety of forms in Africa. It is an aspect of a shared communitarian worldview, as instrument of social power to be wielded by the powerful, and as accusation against socially or politically vulnerable (or powerful!) constituencies whose sorcery is figured as an attack. Evidence that witchcraft is experienced partly as Weltanschauung may be found in the perception that sorcery is a kind of cosmic mediator, playing something of the same role for African societies as religion, relevant to the bureaucratic civil society and tenets of belief that play a role in shaping societies. Niehaus, et al. (2001), cite the abundance of symbolic, mystical, and cosmological interpretations of witchcraft that are commonly found among African peoples, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, there is also evidence that witchcraft in Africa has been stigmatized, possibly in part because of the variable influence of Christian missionaries, and that those accused of witchery have used various strategies to attempt to extricate themselves from being...