Evil in Africa: Encounters with the Everyday

405 Pages·2015·2.83 MB·English

by  William C. Olsen

EVIL IN

AFRICA
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EVIL IN
AF R ICA
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EVERDAY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM C. OLSEN
& WALTER E. A. VAN BEEK
FOREWORD BY
DAVID PARKIN
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evil in Africa : encounters with the everyday / edited by William C.
Olsen and Walter E. A. van Beek ; foreword by David Parkin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01743-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01747-5
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01750-5 (ebook) 1. Good and
evil. 2. Good and evil—Social aspects—Africa. I. Olsen, William C.
II. Beek, W. E. A. van.
BJ1406.E96 2015
170.96—dc23
2015017065
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
CONTENTS
Foreword · David Parkin vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice ·
Walter E. A. van Beek and William C. Olsen 1
PART I. EVIL AND THE STATE/WAR
1 Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of
the Bewitched · Sónia Silva 29
2 Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda · Susan Reynolds Whyte,
Lotte Meinert, Julaina Obika 43
3 The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity
in Africa’s Newest State · Jok Madut Jok 61
4 Genocide, Evil, and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan
Explanations of the 1994 Genocide · Jennie E. Burnet 75
5 Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and
Dagbon Compared · Wyatt MacGaffey 91
PART II. EVIL AND RELIGION
6 Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative among
the Yaka · René Devisch 105
7 Aze and the Incommensurable · Léocadie Ekoué
with Judy Rosenthal 128
8 Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains ·
Walter E. A. van Beek 140
9 Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda
Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini · Diane Ciekawy 157
vi | Contents
10 Haunted by Absent Others: Movements of Evil in a
Nigerian City · Ulrika Trovalla 175
11 Attributions of Evil among Haalpulaaren, Senegal · Roy Dilley 195
12 Reflections regarding Good and Evil: The Complexity
of Words in Zanzibar · Kjersti Larsen 210
13 Constructing Moral Personhood: The Moral Test in Tuareg Sociability
as a Commentary on Honor and Dishonor · Susan J. Rasmussen 229
14 The Gender of Evil: Maasai Experiences and
Expressions · Dorothy L. Hodgson 251
PART III. EVIL AND MODERNITY
15 Neocannibalism, Military Biopolitics, and the Problem of
Human Evil · Nancy Scheper-Hughes 267
16 Theft and Evil in Asante · William C. Olsen 302
17 Sorcery after Socialism: Liberalization and Antiwitchcraft Practices
in Southern Tanzania · Maia Green 324
18 Transatlantic Pentecostal Demons in Maputo · Linda van de Kamp 344
19 The Meaning of “Apartheid” and the Epistemology
of Evil · Adam Ashforth 364
List of Contributors and Affiliations 381
Index 383
FOREWORD
DaviD Parkin
The comparative study of moral systems is fundamental to anthropological
thinking. This collection of nineteen chapters and the editors’ introduction
present rich ethnographic cases from sub-Saharan Africa on a topic bearing
on the definition of morality that has been at the forefront of anthropological
findings drawn from research in the continent. Yet, as the editors point out,
anthropologists have been hesitant to use a concept of “evil” to refer to acts and
beliefs indigenously regarded as moral inversions or perversions of humanity.
The term, evil, is indeed an ethnographic imposition drawn from the English
and cognate languages and therefore part of so-called Western thinking and
moral theology. Yet, notwithstanding this lexical ethnocentricity, people ev-
erywhere do treat with horror, utter contempt, or fury those acts, statements,
and occurrences (whether human, derived from “nature” or even of “spiritual”
provenance) that they see as extreme violations of standard expectations of
what it is to be human. The particular cultural expressions of such violations
vary considerably: regarded as evil in one society or group but sometimes nec-
essary and even beneficial in another. Not that such cultural relativity is un-
bounded. The flourishing of human life and perpetuity is surely everywhere
respected and cultivated, even at the cost of sacrificing individuals and parts
of life itself in defense of that principle against violation. It is this possibility of
common human understanding of and response to the violations we may call
evil, however they are specifically identified and dealt with, that marks it out as
a domain of general and critical enquiry. The book admirably balances a con-
sideration of both general and ethnographically specific questions.
The introduction suggests that, despite its enormous sociocultural diver-
sity and historically inextricable global involvement, perhaps even more so in
late modernity, sub-Saharan Africa appears to have broadly distinctive ways
of conceptualizing evil. The editors point to what they call the practicality of
African religion that defines moral contours and is different from the “other
worldliness” of the major Asian religions. Aside from but also intertwined
with Islam and Christianity, it is religion less of subservience to a High God
vii
viii | Foreword
but more of negotiation with spirit, ancestor, and perverted human agency, in
which moral precepts are accordingly inherently relativized. Islam and Chris-
tianity invoke a High God and seek to impose moral absolutes and dissolve the
moral ambiguities and ambivalences that arise from the negotiation with evil
and its agents. But the world religions have not dissolved the fear of and anger
toward, for example, alleged witches, nor the rationality of witchcraft as the
most logically acceptable explanation of the otherwise inexplicable suffering
that many innocent people endure, sometimes preceded by the blaming of spir-
its, ancestral and otherwise. As Evans-Pritchard argued long ago (Witchcraft,
Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), it makes
sense and fills the gap that neither modern science nor other epistemologies
have plugged: why me/us and how can I/we reverse the harm and confront its
agents? Indeed, if we can point to a strong negotiating tendency in much of
Africa, often couched in ritual, as underlying the solution to problems deemed
as arising from evil, is this not in fact preferable to absolutist pronouncements
of right and wrong and of the inevitable resort to force to settle argument? That
said, absolutist moral conflict occurs in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, as
nonnegotiable ideologies, beliefs, and prejudices crowd out the possibility of
settlement and result in violence. There is the example of antiwitchcraft move-
ments and the killing of witches to eliminate perceived evil, sometimes in the
name of a world religion that otherwise condemns such violence. This pro-
cess of vengeful retribution is, in some form or other, a global phenomenon,
whether or not we call it the elimination of witchcraft. But the deprivations
and extortionate exploitations of Africa surely make it especially vulnerable
to poverty, thwarted aspirations, internecine conflicts, and immense suffer-
ing. Reversing such “evils” inevitably often occurs as retaliation against alleged
agents who are commonly themselves victims as much as anyone else. There is
also the wider context. Perpetrators of violence in the Hutu-Tutsi conflicts face
international tribunals, but not so those powerful world leaders who carry out
wars and killings in defiance of international condemnation. Is this not a wider,
encompassing evil?
As much of the material in this timely volume shows, the problem of evil
in sub-Saharan Africa is, ultimately, an expression of powerlessness and of at-
tempts to remedy deprivation through means which themselves may become
excessive and regarded as another level of evil. This retaliatory cycle is not ex-
clusive to Africa, which, however, for a long time has had, and has additionally
been given, a distinctive vocabulary and set of concepts to identify it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for a continent-wide book on evil in Africa was born in the aftermath
of the volume Religion in Africa. Experience and Expression (1994), which van
Beek coedited. During the 2006 African Studies Association meeting, the two
editors of the present collection decided to pursue the topic of evil in Africa
as a sequel to the earlier volume. We appreciate the direction, point-of-view,
and guidance offered by David Parkin in this endeavor. Van Beek gratefully
acknowledges the preparatory grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO
2004), The naturalness of evil: towards an evolutionary approach of notions of
evil, which helped sharpen the focus on constructions of evil as an integral part
of human existence. His field studies among the Kapsiki/Higi in Cameroon/
Nigeria and the Dogon in Mali have been financed from many sources, includ-
ing three grants from WOTRO (Scientific Study of the Tropics, now Science for
Global Development). Two SANPAD (South African–Netherlands Program for
Alternative Developments) research projects, plus the experiences in SANPAD
RCI were important in shaping thought about the varieties of witchcraft and
accusations. Van Beek is grateful for the broad support of his home institutions,
first the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, now the
African Studies Centre, Leiden, and Tilburg University. Olsen expresses appre-
ciation to his wife, Vivian, for many years of exchange on culture and African
life, and for the conversations and the listening. He also wishes to thank Gyasi
Obeng and Kaakyire Gyemfi for overseeing work in Penteng and Mampong and
for clarifying details about Asante. Olsen deeply appreciates research funding
in Asante (Ghana) for the years 2002–2005 from the David M. Kennedy Cen-
ter for International Affairs and from Georgetown University’s Berkley Center
for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Appreciation is expressed to Wim van
Binsbergen and to Michael Lambek for their critical reading and input on the
project and on several chapters. Editorial review was given by Natalie Prado
and by Indiana University Press. Both editors express their deep thanks to Kar-
in Berkhout for her work in correcting the manuscript and for drawing up the
index, and Ruadhan Hayes for his language editing.
ix