socially isolated or physically threatened on that account. That was the case during the heyday of European missionary activity in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it persists to some degree today.
Bastian (2002) cites a somewhat complicated 1890 case in Nigeria, in which young women gave confessions of witchcraft. Bastian explains that late-nineteenth-century western Africa as a whole was "ambivalent" about witchcraft, especially in communities that were being targeted by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of London. The practice was associated with women, or more exactly "female-centred religious and social practice at a moment when women's religious work in the region was increasingly devalued" by missional Protestantism (Bastian, 2002, p. 85). The dominant belief, including, apparently, on the part of the witches themselves, was that witches had special powers to commune with the spirit world and that there was
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