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:…

In the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, believers in witchcraft claim to observe empirical evidence that confirms the “reality” of witchcraft. One such evidence is mysterious lights—referred to as “witch lights.” “Witch Light” During the 2001 witch hunt in Aru (see my previous piece, “The Sparking Story”), some people were accused of being witches because villagers…

  “Lord, you know the hopes of the helpless. Surely you will hear their cries and comfort them. You will bring justice to the orphans and the oppressed, so mere people can no longer terrify them.” Psalm 10:17–18   Stop Child Witch Accusations (SCWA) was formed in 2012 and is a coalition of predominantly Christian,…

The Lugbara people live in the Northeast end of the D.R.Congo and in the Northwestern West Nile region of Uganda. They belong to the Central Sudanic ethnolinguistic group. 500,000 Lugbara live in D.R.Congo; almost the same number lives in Uganda. Beliefs in witchcraft among this ethnic group are widespread. It is not surprising that most…

In Africa’s new charismatic Christianity (what I previously referred to as contemporary Pentecostalism) prosperity in both its spiritual and material senses remains a major theme. This Christianity shares the supernatural worldview associated with traditional religion in which evil powers are held responsible for the problems that people face in life, including the failure to prosper materially. This much…

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…

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…

Yesterday I received an urgent email from a good friend, the President of an indigenous evangelical denomination among the Aguaruna of Peru, with whom I worked closely many years ago. I would like to translate his letter here into English, using pseudonyms, and provide commentary on the way witchcraft issues continue to play out among…

In my last post, “Identities of Accused Witches,” I listed the most common identities of those who are said to be witches. The question for this post is, “how do we know and identify a witch?” Basically, the question is that of epistemology and it is an important one in dealing with the whole question of…

One of the critical features of the way that people talk about “witchcraft” in African contexts is the idea that witches do not usually identify themselves publicly. After all, they are engaged in antisocial behavior, and so it is to be expected that they would want to remain hidden from view.[1] The challenge for ordinary…

In Togo, West Africa, traditional explanations for illness and healing are often very different from those offered by scientific bio-medicine. This is not to say that Togolese don’t accept modern biomedical explanations for illness, but rather that bio-medicine doesn’t provide the only explanation. I conducted research at a mission hospital in Togo in an attempt to…

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…