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:…

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…

Robert Priest’s presentation on the meaning of the terms “witch”, “witchcraft” and “sorcery” is very important. One of the main reasons is that currently the terms are used differently at various places with diverse meanings. Tim Stabell thought we did not need to be precise but could refer to such terms as “the alleged innate…