In African countries like Ghana where people take delight in inscribing cryptic religious statements on their properties visitors find this signwriting culture very revealing. These writing are part of the popular religious culture. A lot of them insinuate the fact that enemies may either be working against people or plotting their downfall. Thus inscriptions like:…

Nollywood, the Nigerian version of Hollywood of the US and the Bollywood of India, is the largest  movie industry in Africa. In 2009 Nollywood produced 872 films while the United States Hollywood produced 485 major films. Though they are usually cheap and of poor quality, these movie videos are one of the most powerful promoters…

In my next two posts I’d like to explore the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs and accusations on the one hand and economic prosperity and social wellbeing on the other. In other words, in African societies where people experience socio-economic uplift, they tend to fear that envious…

I’ve noted that despite an almost universal conviction that witches exist and are able to do terrible things, there are significant numbers of believers who are not personally afraid of witchcraft. This is what I’ve been writing on thus far and what my research conducted among evangelical mission church leaders in northeastern Congo (DRC) has found. These…

“When you used to research witchcraft, we thought it was just something normal,” an old friend told me during a recent trip to Northwestern, Tanzania, we we lived for over a decade during our time in East Africa. “We didn’t think it was really important to research. But now all of the killing of albinos…

In Ghana, witchcraft is popularly referred to as “African electronics,” and its reality is simply taken for granted. Like electronic gadgets, the workings are not visible, but they are no less real. Developing upon a few observations made by my colleague Opoku Onyinah in his two recent posts, I’d like to consider some of these…

Is there such a thing as “good witchcraft”? Witchcraft discourse now plays an important role in the understanding of modernity and the progress that some have made in a technologically sophisticated world (Cf. Opoku Onyinah, Pentecostal Exorcism, p. 4). In an early 1970s highlife hit a popular Ghanaian musician sang that “white witchcraft” is good…

In the understanding of Lugbara people, children can become witches if they are initiated by adults. The same could be true in other cultures because in the cosmopolitan town of Bunia (Eastern DRC), many children have been accused of witchcraft in recent years. Those ones I want to talk about in these following lines live…

When considering witchcraft and witchcraft accusations in the news over the last month, one should note its widespread geographic distribution (highlighted in the map above). For example, one finds news of older women lynched and burned (or hacked) to death as witches in the last few days in Nigeria, Guatemala, India, and New Guinea (see…

Witchcraft has negative connotations in every society throughout history. There is no society without “witchcraft” even though a wide range of meanings is associated with its connotations from culture to culture. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, . . . The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft: from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced “witchah” and “witchuh,” respectively, denoting someone who…

The Dhongo form an ethno-linguistic group who live in the Territoire (County) of Faradje in the Haut-Uélé District in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are neighbors of my Lugbara people and share some “experiences” of witchcraft with this Lugbara people that I previously mentioned, in my “Aula: A Baby Disease Caused by a Witch.”…

A few nights ago a visiting pastor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (let’s call him Rev. Basua) came to my room in Bangui, CAR where I’ve been visiting, to tell me a story about witchcraft and to show me his accompanying home-made video. The story concerned his brother-in-law (let’s call him Nzuzi), a…