African Studies Review

http://journals.cambridge.org/ASR
Additional services for African

Studies Review:

Email alerts: Click here

Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

The Magic of Africa: Reections on a Western

Commonplace
Peter Pels
African Studies Review / Volume 41 / Issue 03 / December 1998, pp 193 - 209
DOI: 10.2307/525359, Published online: 23 May 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0002020600034077

How to cite this article:
Peter Pels (1998). The Magic of Africa: Reections on a Western Commonplace .
African Studies Review, 41, pp 193-209 doi:10.2307/525359
Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ASR, IP address: 139.82.115.33 on 28 Apr 2015

The Magic of Africa: Reflections on a

Western Commonplace
Peter Pels

Abstract: This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African

magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one
that pictures Africa as the dark heardand of magic and witchcraft while at die same
time saying diat diis occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analysis of a number of different texts in which diis commonplace emerges suggests diat
diis recurrent fear of an African occult core is part of die Western engagement widi
the occult in Africa through its translation as "witchcraft." The translation of
African magic as "witchcraft" direatens European understandings of self and other
just as much as diis translation is an attempt to contain die African occult widiin
imperial, colonial, or neocolonial discourses. These different attempts to write
about the occult in Africa suggest diat this direat of translation cannot be contained; a recent text even suggests diat it extends itself to unsetding our sensory
perception of die world around us. The magic of Africa requires a still more radical engagement dian Africanist andiropology has produced thus far.
Resume: Nous suggerons, dans les pages qui suivent, qu'une genealogie des conceptions europeennes de la magie africaine reste encore a ecrire. Nous nous concentrons sur un lieu commun europeen qui represente rAfrique comme le sombre
creuset de la magie et de la sorcellerie tout en disant qu'il est difficile ou dangereux
d'ecrire sur ce noyau occulte. L'analyse d'un certain nombre de textes differents
dans lesquels on rencontre ce lieu commun suggere que cette peur repetee d'un
occulte africain est un element de la perception europeenne de l'occulte africain
qu'elle voit comme de la "sorcellerie". Une telle interpretation de l'occulte africain
menace la saisie europeenne de soi et de l'autre, de meme qu'elle est un effort
pour contenir l'occulte africain dans les limites du discours imperial, colonial et
African Studies Review, Volume 41, Number 3 (December 1998), pp. 193-209
Peter Pels lectures on missionization, magic, and modernity at die Research Centre Religion and Society of die University of Amsterdam and does research into
African politics at die Department of Andiropology of die University of Leiden,
both in die Nedierlands. His most recent publication is A Politics ofPresence. Contacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999).

193

194 African Studies Review

neo-colonial. Quand on examine ces differents efforts d'ecrire sur le sujet de l'occulte en Afrique, il apparait que cette menace ne saurait s'eviter; en effet un texte
recent suggere qu'une telle interpretation va jusqu'a deranger notre perception du
monde qui nous entoure. La magie africaine requiert une interpretation encore
plus radicale que n'a pu jusqu'ici offrir l'anthropologie africaniste.

Western images of Africa as a dark and occult continent functioned, as

most scholars agree, as a way to contain African phenomena within the
parameters of imperial, colonial, and neocolonial power and ideology
(Brantlinger 1988; Hammond &Jablow 1970; McClintock 1995; Mudimbe
1988). Without denying the value of such insights, I would like to try and
crack the seemingly monolithic edifice of power they put up by employing
a subversive methodological principle, which Peter Hulme defined as the
need to " [bracket] particular questions of historical accuracy and reliability in order to see the text whole, to gauge the structure of its narrative,
and chart the interplay of its linguistic registers and rhetorical modalities"
(Hulme 1992: 18). Of course, such necessary decontextualization hurts
the feelings of the lovers of that strange abstraction, "context," and this
partly explains why this principle of literary analysis has not been very
widely practised by anthropologists and historians, or African studies specialists in general. Their fears of the textual incontinence it might produce are justified to some extent: this paper in particular, apart from
being an amateur and impressionistic application of the principle, clearly
needs more historical context if its argument is to be developed further. 1
Yet the principle's value lies in the fact that some of its operations change
the contexts of the tropes and commonplaces it brings together so promiscuously. It thus may enable a different contextualization, or even suggest
that in our dealings with magic in Africa, text may contextualize context
as well as vice versa (Dirks 1996). I do not claim to have surveyed the Western commonplaces on the magic of Africa extensively enough; nor do I
claim that my background as an anthropologist allows me to employ this
methodological principle as rigorously as literary experts can. However, I
believe we are sorely in need of a genealogy of Western perceptions of the
magic of Africa. In addition, I believe such a genealogy will show that even
in its description by Western outsiders, African "witchcraft" turns out to be
difficult to contain (cf. Taussig 1987; 1993).

The Magic of Africa 195

-1There are many things that happen in the very heart of Africa that no man
can explain; that is why those who know Africa best hesitate to write stories about it.
-Edgar Wallace

This brief paper aims to set out some fragmentary and restless thoughts
about a commonplace that permeates Western writing about Africa. It
depicts Africa as the heardand of witchcraft and magic. Because of this
occult core, Africa is thought to be difficult to write about, a continent of
secrets and hidden forces that nevertheless tend to run wild and threaten
civility and reason. Although comparable ethnographic traditions have preceded itthink of the nineteenth-century return of the fetish, to eat at the
heart of European capitalism and psychologyI believe the emergence of
the commonplace in its present form (signposted by the notion of "witchcraft") can best be dated at around the 1880s, with the appearance of popular novels like H. Rider Haggard's She (1887a), which tells the tale of the
discovery of a powerful witch in the heart of Africa who threatens to come
to Europe and turn it into her empire.
However, I am not merely interested in the way in which an "imperial
gothic" (Brantlinger 1988: 227 ff.) voiced late Victorian anxieties about the
security of empire and civilization. African witchcraft and magic cast their
shadow forward into the twentieth century. I feel that the ambivalences present in the work of "imperial gothic" writers on Africa like H. Rider Haggard and John Buchanwho, as I will argue, were also ethnographers of
sortsresonate with what we tend to regard as the more serious and professional work of Africanist anthropology. I hope to pause and reflect on
this commonplace by examining some of the colonial anxieties that EvansPritchard tried to still with Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande,
some of the philosophical anxieties that gave his book a new lease of life in
the discussions about rationality of the 1970s; and the anxieties about
anthropological writing that characterize the debate around Paul Stoller's
more recent apprenticeship to a Songhay sorcerer.
In stringing together these disparate magics of Africa, I am guided by
the insight of Mr. Commissioner Sanders, as voiced by Edgar Wallace
above: what are these "things" that "happen" that make the experts on
Africa hesitant about the way to write about the continent? Is it the hidden
core of Heart ofDarkness, which Marlow covered up by replacing Kurtz's last
words"the horror! the horror!"with the name of Kurtz's white beloved
(Conrad 1902: 111, 121)? But, if so, why can't that horror be described?
Could it be that the act of describing and translating what Westerners perceive as the heart of African darkness is itself too much like the weaving of
a spell, a trick that barely conceals the magic of Western representation?

196 African Studies Review

-2"How thinkest thou that I rule this people?... It is by terror. My empire is

of the imagination."
-H. Rider Haggard

H. Rider Haggard's She (1887a) truly inaugurated an empire of the imagination: like his first bestseller, King Solomon's Mines (1885), it broke all
records of previous book sales, including that of its predecessor, and solidly emphasized the arrival of the mass publishing industry of the mystery
and adventure story. Before one relegates Haggard's work to the imagination only, however, it is interesting to detail some biography and put it in
context. Haggard started his career as a colonial administrator, being seconded to the new lieutenant-governor of Natal as private assistant and
learning the trade of colonial ethnography from Chief Interpreter Fynney
(who showed him several Zulu "witch-hunts"), and Theophile Shepstone,
die Secretary of Native Affairs of Natal, when accompanying him to the
Transvaal (Haggard 1926/1: 56, 68). In this, his career shows a parallel with
diat other "imperial gothic" writer, John Buchan, who some time later
became a member of Milner's "Kindergarten" of young administrators in
die same South Africa. Haggard fell for the martial aura of Zulu and
Tswana, and his novels teem with upright and honest warriors, climaxing in
the heroic death of the axe-wielding Umslopogaas of Allen Quatermain
(1887b). 2 Haggard included "a true account" of the Zulu "witch-hunt" he
witnessed in several of his romances, and although this is conjecture, it
would be interesting to research whether its depiction in King Solomons
Mines is not one of the first stereotypes of African "witchcraft" to reach such
a broad British audience. For anthropologists and folklorists, in any case,
"witchcraft" and "Africa" had not yet been put together, and they continued to discuss the magic of Africa in terms of the "fetish" until the twentieth century. 3
Haggard's ethnographic interestsculminating in his first book after
his return to England, Cetywayo and his White Neighbours (1882)permeate
his later fiction, to the extent that he insisted on traveling to a place about
which he planned to write a novel in order to get the "local colour" (a
dogma of the school of imperial romance writers of his time, which included other ethnographically- or folklore-inclined writers like Andrew Lang,
Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson). But Haggard's penchant
for including lurid details of "witchhunting" and magical performance
again, reaching its peak in Shecannot be understood without also recognizing the strong occult currents present in British society at the time.
Andiropologists, folklorists, and writers like Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor,
and Andrew Lang were busy with contemporary occult phenomena such as
spiritualism (Pels 1995), and Haggard, too, was initiated into die business

The Magic of Africa 197

of spirit mediumship and table-rapping at an early age by some of the London society ladies who took up many of the positions of authority in the
elite sections of the spiritualist movement. In his reminiscences, Haggard
described these early experiences as "mischievous," "harmful," and
"unwholesome," but his description of levitating chairs and die desire to
kiss one of two beautiful female spirits makes one wonder what the heavyhanded moralism was for (Haggard 1926/1: 37-41). Interestingly, just as he
was horrified by the Zulu "witch-hunt" but believed in some of die powers
of the "witch-doctors," so he believed in die reality of spiritual phenomena,
telepathy, and reincarnation while condemning die experimental practice
of it (Haggard 1926/1: 41, 57). This may have had somediing to do with the
presence, at diese seances as elsewhere in British occultism, of women widi
authority (andwho knows?with sexual desires that overwhelmed an
adolescent country boy). In any case, it seems no coincidence diat Haggard's witches and sorcerers are the beautiful She or the repulsive
Gagoolthat is, they are female, a translation to European assumptions
about the occult diat contrasts widi his experience of both male and female
"witch-doctors" among die Zulu.
Thus it seems that Haggard's personal biography suggests he did,
indeed, link die empire of die magical imagination widi (female) terror.
Moreover, his ethnographic interests reappear in She in die form of die
antiquarian and folkloristic expertise of die novel's storyteller, Horace
Hollyto the extent diat Holly feels he should excuse himself widi die
reader for including so many scientific details. 4 The details of Roman,
Egyptian, and African edinography triggered by die finding of an antique
potsherd lead Holly and his ward, Leo Vincey, to go and search out die
African stronghold of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and time after time Haggard emphasizes Holly's scientific skepticism toward the possible marvelous
outcome of the enterprise. Holly's science (he is an Oxford don) serves as
a way to exorcise die direat, suggested by die story of die potsherd, of an
invasion of the civilized world by antique sorcery. Folklore study, antiquarianism, and edinography are employed as a charm to lay before the ghost
of She's magicuntil it turns out that its terror is all too real and only barely contained by die love of She for Leo Vincey.
Of course, this is fiction. But does diat mean diat edinography and
folklore study only work tiieir charms in fiction? At more or less the same
time, James Frazer was compiling his massive storehouse of quaint customs,
shifting die attention of die Victorian reading public (and, to a lesser
extent, of andiropologists and folklorists) to magic radier dian to religion
(which had been die major interest of his intellectual predecessor, Edward
Tylor). The stereotype history of andiropology has it diat Frazer was an evolutionist who relegated magic to a stage of development preceding religion, which again preceded die age of science. But any diorough reading
of The Golden Bough's central dieoretical sections can show diat Frazer tended to picture magic as somediing more akin to science dian religion could

198 African Studies Review

ever be, something that is hard to reconcile with his distinction of evolutionary "stages"; that, moreover, Frazer feared civilization was only "a thin
crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below" (1911: 236). 5 How far is this evolutionist anxiety from Allen
Quatermain's lament, in Haggard's novel named after him, that "[c]ivilisation is only savagery silver-gilt" (Haggard 1887b: 10), and that, after we
have correctly measured the one-twentieth part of ourselves that contributes to civilization, "we must look to the nineteen savage portions of our
nature, if we would really understand ourselves
" (1887b: 12). Such a
veneer is thin indeed. Whether in evolutionist fad or imperial fiction, the
horror of savagery tends to break through the charms of ethnography.

-3"And now I will tell you my story," said Captain Arcoll. "It is a long story,
and I must begin far back. It has taken me years to decipher it, and
remember, I've been all my life at this native business."
-John Buchan
Captain Arcoll is the intelligence officer in John Buchan's Prester John
(1910), who, together with the novel's young hero, David Crawfurd, succeeds in stopping the "native" rising which a black South African "Ethiopian" minister, John Laputa, wants to start by using an old fetish said to have
belonged to Prester John, the legendary African Christian king. 6 Like that
other famous fictional spy, Colonel Creighton in Kipling's Kim, Arcoll is an
archetypal spy-cum-ethnographera figure as fictional as he is real. For
apart from Arcoll and Creighton, we can also think of famous nineteenthcentury anthropologists like Sir Richard Burton and Christiaan Snouck
Hurgronje, the security functions of British government anthropology in
Nigeria or Tanganyika, and the intelligence work by North American
anthropologists during the two World Wars and the Vietnam war. It was, to
a considerable extent, the work of more or less professional ethnographers
to decipher secrets (of Africa or elsewhere) and make them available to a
certain audience, whether this audience was "confidential" or public. Such
was also the work of Edward Evans-Pritchard during the Second World War
as well as for the Sudan administration (Geertz 1988: 49ff.; Johnson 1982).
One may wonder to what kind of audience the revelations of EvansPritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic (1937; 1976) were originally
addressed: a large reading public, or the confidential files of the Sudan
administration. Of course, his book clearly is a public "deciphering" of the
riddle of Zande magicperhaps conveyed best by E-P's remarkable powerplay in relation to Zande "witch-doctors," a long story which I shall have to
cut short here. Evans-Pritchard, afraid that his stature in Zande society

The Magic of Africa 199

would be lowered by becoming apprenticed to a "witch-doctor" (Zande

noblemen were not supposed to be "witch-doctors," and E-P wanted to associate himself with Zande noblemen) decides to send a proxy. By having two
"witch-doctors"who both knew their pupil would tell everything he
learned to the anthropologistcompete for the tuition of his assistant, he
creates a rivalry that guarantees that few secrets will be withheld (EvansPritchard 1976: 69). Moreover, by forcing one of the "witch doctors" to
effect a cure of someone in his house, E-P manages to detect fraud in the
"extraction" of "witch"-substance from the patient and leads the healer to
confess it in private (1976: 102-4). Thus, the secrets of Africa are, as in the
case of Captain Arcoll, uncovered by a persistent presence of the ethnographer, assuring the reading public that their inner essence (i.e., fraud) is
revealed. There remains an ambiguity, however: now that the horror of
there being any truth in "witchcraft" is unmasked by discovering the fraud
of the witch-doctors, we are still left with the horror of the fraud itself. What
is the terror of magic, anyway: the possibility of "witchcraft's" being true, or
the possibility of the fraud's being believed in by so many in African society? Evans-Pritchard tries to lay both those ghosts to rest, first by unmasking the "witch-doctor," and second by demonstrating the rationality of
Zande beliefs.
However, one can also find indications that Evans-Pritchard's work on
Zande witchcraft functioned as colonial intelligence, and that in that
sphere, the containment of witchcraft was a much more immediate problem. In a paper published two years before Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic,
Evans-Pritchard introduced the subject of "witchcraft" to his audiencethe
anthropologists, missionaries, and colonial administrators who were supposed to read Africa: "Witchcraft is an imaginary offence because it is
impossible. A witch cannot do what he is supposed to do and has in fact no
real existence" (Evans-Pritchard 1935: 418). This charm betrays the specific audience for which it was woven by the term "offence": a legal term indicating that here, "witchcraft" was not a problem for a general European
reading public, but a specific conundrum that faced British colonial legislation. Just as Evans-Pritchard's work among Nuer was meant to resolve certain questions about politics bothering the Sudan administration (Johnson
1982), just so Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic arose from the desire of colonial
administrators to be able to deal with "witchcraft" as a political and legal
problem. I still have to find out where the definition of the problem as
"witchcraft" comes from, and why this term replaced "fetishism" in the
ethnography of Eastern and Central Africa around 1900.7 It seems clear,
however, that by the early 1920s, British African administrators translated
the "problem" for themselves by associating African occult practices with
the European history of witchcraft (Melland 1923). This background in a
set of problems defined by colonial legal practice is, as far as I can tell, the
best explanation of the sudden shift from studies of "magic" (the term
championed by Frazer and Malinowski [Malinowski 1925; 1935]) to studies

200 African Studies Review

of "witchcraft" in British anthropology in the 1930s, exemplified by EvansPritchard (1929; 1935) and Richards (1935).
Here lies a crucial moment for die problematic of die containment of
"witchcraft," for colonial administrators dealing widi it could not escape die
cultural transgressions that "indirect" colonial rule brought along. British
administrators who had to apply a Witchcraft Ordinance that said diat
witchcraft was, indeed, an "imaginary offence," and who had to punish
diose who engaged in witchcraft accusations, found diat tiiey easily lost dieir
credibility as moral authorities when punishing diose who were regarded as
criminals by die people concerned. Indirect rule's conservative sidedie
requirement to build rule on indigenous routinesactively produced a subversion of die Witchcraft Ordinance, allowing "witchcraft" evidence to fulfill certain functions in colonial legal practice (Fields 1982). This is die
conundrum diat is still worrying many African governments today (Fisiy and
Geschiere 1996: 193). Thus die horror of African "witchcraft"die unresolvable dilemma of reckoning with its reality, either as a belief of Africans
or as objective trudicould not but intrude on die colonial practice of
Europeans. (It did not even need diose administrators and missionaries
who, like Rider Haggard, actually believed in die "witch-doctors'" powers of
cure and divination.) African "witchcraft" eidier direatened Europeans witii
a surrender to die objective trudi of the witches' existence, or it frightened
diem by die extent of die "witch-doctors'" fraud or die believers' credulity.

-4According to [Ayesha's] translation [the inscription] ran thus: "Is there

no man diat will draw my veil and look upon my face, for it is very fair?"...
And a voice cried: "Though all those who seek after diee desire mee,
behold! Virgin art mou, and Virgin shalt mou go till Time be done. No
man is there born of woman who may draw thy veil and live, nor shall be.
By Death only can diy veil be drawn, oh Truth!" And Truth stretched out
her arms and wept, because diose who sought her might not find her, nor
look upon her face to face.
-H. Ryder Haggard

I have tried to put "witchcraft" and "witch-doctors" between inverted commas whenever they are used to describe African practices, but not in an
attempt to avoid offending politically correct minds. I mean to emphasize
the work of translation, and the translation by Ayesha (the actual name of
"She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed") itself shows up the politics of such efforts by
picturing Truth as a virgin, and her unveiling as an offence or violation that
is punishableor rewarded?by death. The simile conveys the problem of
translation in an interesting way, for if one compares the language to be

^
The Magic of Africa 201

translated to a virgin, then "drawing her veil" results in death, indeedor

in any case, in a mutual loss of innocence, of both the language to be translated and the language into which one translates. The difference is, of
course, that in Ayesha's story, Truth remains inviolate, causing the death of
any man who might try to draw her veil. In real life, power rather lies with
the deflowerer, that is, with the cultural imposition of the language into
which the other language is translated.
We can put the issue of the translation of African "witchcraft" in this
light. Of course, this translation is a skewed effort, if only for its point of
departure; for why should the English notion of "witchcraft" be applicable
to Africa?8 Its effects of power are evident, since the English "witchcraft"
associates African practice with a European past (thus distancing it), while
burdening it with connotations of femininity (disempowering it) and irrationality (disallowing it). Of course, the term witchcraft is applied to African
occult practices that are neither necessarily feminine nor necessarily irrational nor evolutionary survivals. But the really interesting aspect of
Ayesha's simile is that it pictures the unveilingand, I add, the translationas something threatening the unveiler, or the translator. Does the
work of translationthe attempt to contain a set of meanings in another
languageproduce problems with the containment of meaning? Put differently: does the translation of African occult practices by "witchcraft" create a fear of deatha terror of oblivionin the translator?
On one level, it doesn't, for we have just acknowledged that the translation of African practices by "witchcraft" is a powerful act, signifiying a situation in which words and meanings of one language can come to dominate those of another. But translation is never mere aggression, for it implies
mastery of the other language and therefore also an implicit agreement to
live in, and be colonized by, parts of the new cultural repertoire that is inseparable from the other language. As the history of magic and "witchcraft" in
Africa shows, such mixing of cultural repertoires contantly happened: first,
missionaries and administrators used or opposed what they classified as
"witchcraft" practices; soon, Africans started to use the term witchcraft (or
sorcery, or sorcellerie) themselves; soon after that, independent Africans started to use die legal apparatuses that colonial Europeans used to combat
African "witchcraft"; then, European scholars started to protest against the
ethnocentric uses of "witchcraft" in Africa; and so on. Deflowering the virgin always implies the possibility of cross-fertilization.
However, the method of translating can carry its own form of containment, its own prophylactic. 9 Evans-Pritchard, for instance, creates his
image of effordess and continent cultural translation partly by seeming to
put the other language first: "Azande believe..." (1976: 1)what Clifford
Geertz called the "first-strike assertiveness" of rhetorically declaring the
other's otherness as a way of subjecting it to an operation of "disestrangement" (Geertz 1988: 63, 69). While the emphasis seems to lie on die Zande
term mangu, which Evans-Pritchard acknowledges can only be problemati-

202 African Studies Review

cally translated by witchcraft, the term has already been classified as strange
and other. Tucked away in a kind of appendix to the introduction of the
1937 edition (and removed to an even more obscure location in the 1976
abridged edition) is a clarification of terminology that conveniently classifies mangu as "mystical" and opposed to "common sense," which, being
empirical, leads to a scientific attitude (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 8ff.; 1976:
226-29). The misrepresentation of science (as an activity only concerned
with "common sense" and its "empirical" results) helps in slanting the
translation. That this translation of mangu as mystical force (rather than as
reasonable explanation of the universea line of reasoning E-P also
employed) did violence to the subject, becomes apparent when one realizes that for thirty years, the epistemological argument of Witchcraft, Oracles
and Magic went largely unheeded by anthropologists, who instead concentrated on "witchcraft's" moral effects (Douglas 1970). To me, the problems
of translation of African magic were brought home when I realized that the
Swahili uchawi was regularly employed to refer to "non-mystical" activities
such as slitting someone's throat or poisoning (cf. Lienhardt 1968). When
a Tanzanian friend came to see me in the Netherlands, and I explained to
him the hazards of making a living in Europe without having a legal visa,
he simply told me: "uchawi is everywhere." He was saying that one finds
"malevolence" or "misfortune" everywherebut Swahili-English dictionaries translate uchawi as "witchcraft" and "sorcery."10 Of course, uchawican be
understood as both malevolence, misfortune, sorcery, and witchcraftor
neither (see Pels 1999: ch. 6).
One does not need a Geertzian analysis of a whole rhetoric to see the
prophylactics of Evans-Pritchard's method of translation. The phrase
"Azande believe..." carries a whole cultural realm with it. As Igor Kopytoff
and Rodney Needham have set out in detail, to relegate a whole worldview
to the status of "belief introduces assumptions about a knowable inner
state and a knowledge defined by its objectivity into the worldview translated in those termsassumptions that belong to the cultural repertoire of
the Western scientific world (Kopytoff 1981; Needham 1972). While Needham stresses that definitions of other worldviews in terms of "belief" introduces to these worldviews assumptions about inner states of being that
nothing but the evidence of the other language itself can substantiate (for
we do not have access to the "other" inner states of being), Kopytoff shows
by an analysis of Suku concepts that these other languages need not carry
the notion that "belief is anything on which a worldview can rest. Interestingly, Needham confesses to a kind of "vertigo" that assails the thinker
who ventures into such efforts at translation, efforts that have left the safety of Western prophylactics behind. How far is Needham's vertigo removed
from the fear of death, the terror, of any attempt to surrender to a totally
different conception of how the world is put together?
I submit that Needham's vertigo is caused by the effort of taking a historically or culturally relativizing risk with one's own language and culture

^
The Magic of Africa 203

put differendy, of "taking a chance" or "trusting one's luck"on the basis of

the understanding that luck is an English term that, as Evans-Pritchard
argued as well, comes very close to understanding much of what Azande
tried to say with mangu. A comparable dizziness was caused by EvansPritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among many Western thinkers, with
its argument that Azande were usually rational in setting out or shoring up
their system of "belief," even when Evans-Pritchard did not take the risk of
relativizing all the way. One is tempted to conclude that, mediated by EvansPritchard, Azande put this risk before the participants in what is now called
the rationality debate, seeing that a majority of the contributions to the
debate tried to contain such relativizing risks. In an attempt to exorcise the
terror of radical translation, Wilson, Lukes, and Hollis, impressively backed
by Gellner, Horton, Jarvie, Maclntyre, and Taylor, set up the work of Winch
(in Wilson 1970), and that of Barnes, Bloor, and Hacking (in Hollis and
Lukes 1982) as spells that relativistically enchant virginal Western rationality and that therefore need to be exorcised. The anxiety that this operation,
however successful, still produces, comes out clearly in Charles Taylor's
argument: Although "irrationality" is not something one can legitimately
attribute to other cultures (Taylor therefore replaces rationality with the
capacity for theoretical argument), still one can say that "theoretical cultures score successes which command the attention of atheoretical ones," if
only because of their "immense technological successes." Here, terror
returns to philosophical consciousness, for if Taylor says there are "good
intellectual reasons" for this technological superiority, he remains ambivalent about whether it does not prove itself more in the way of the colonial
ditty, "Whatever happens/We have got/The Gatling gun/And they have
not" (Taylor 1982: 104). Azande, Evans-Pritchard showed, shored up their
rationality in a slightly less terrifying way.

-5Terrified by the force of [the sorceress's] disapproval, I turned and ran. To

have walked further down that unknown path would have prevented me
from telling my story.
- Paul Stoller
The anxieties of the majority of participants to the rationality debate may
have been caused partly by a historical change in their culture and society:
the rise of what many perceive as the irrationalisms of "New Age" thinking.
From Carlos Castaneda onward, anthropology has contributed to this
revival of occult thinking, just as it always has helped to produce or increase
anxieties about core legitimations of Western knowledge and power. Conversion to the "native point of view" was, of course, a possibility of all

204 African Studies Review

anthropological work, and in that context, objectivity itself has sometimes

been treated like a "veil" that has to be ripped away to undo die spells it
casts over the true perception of human concerns (Jules-Rosette 1978).
The veil of objectivity of Paul Stoller was ripped away when he found himself paralyzed one night in the Niger town of Wanzerbe and panicked at
the thought diat a nearby sorceress was testing him. By reciting a charm of
defence against bewitchment, one he learned during his apprenticeship to
several Songhay sorcerers, the paralysis disappeared. "Before my paralysis,
I knew there were scientific explanations of Songhay sorcery. After
Wanzerbe, my unwavering faith in science vanished" (Stoller and Olkes
1987: 153), and with it, his unwavering faith in anthropological objectivity.
We need to turn to Stoller's storytelling here, and not only because, in
the epigraph to this section, he gives an interesting modification of Mr.
Commissioner Sanders's stance. Stoller says he had to "turn and run" in
order to tell his story, but he never gives a reason. After all, the path of sorcery which he refrained from following was, in his own words, "unknown"
to himwhich at least leaves open the possibility of writing about it. One
could take a nasty view of this, and interpret it as the style of an author who,
in a desire to recreate some of the popular appeal of authors like Haggard
and Frazer (and of Carlos Castaneda in die New Age market), wants to give
a high profile to the risks he ran while actually saying very litde exciting
about diem. This is close to the argument of Olivier de Sardan, who
accused Stoller and others of taking a fashionable European, secretive
occultism as their model of African sorcery, rather dian die humdrum magics of everyday "knock-on-wood" or Christian sacrifice (Olivier de Sardan
1992: 14). Indeed, die early twentiedi-century "Haggard option" of titillation by magical terror has, in late twentiedi-century Western practices,
been internalized as occultism, and "witchcraft" is now widely practiced in
its Tolkien or Marion Zimmer Bradley guises (and even dispensed globally
by occult mail order catalogues diat help reinvent African "witchcraft" and
"sorcery" today). This shows diat die risks of radical translation are historical risks, and that the commonplace I discuss here, although it still commands the power of popular appeal, has lost some of its terror and has
expanded into New Age entertainment instead.
Yet, in addition, Stoller's work suggests an option that seems to lift die
problem of uniting about die terrors of African magic to a different plane.
At a certain point, he records how he and one of his teachers, the sorko
Djibo, go and search for a sick man's "double." As Djibo releases the double from a pile of husks, he asks Stoller whedier he heard, felt, or saw die
"double," but Stoller is dumbfounded. Djibo upbraids Stoller:
'You look but you do not see. You touch, but you do not feel. You listen,
but you do not hear. Widiout sight or touch... one can learn a great deal.
But you must learn how to hear or you will learn litde about our ways."
(Stoller 1989: 115, emphasis in original)

The Magic of Africa 205

Stoller takes this dialogue as an argument for the recognition of the

cultural importance of sound in Songhay culture, but he fails to note that,
apart from inverting the hierarchy of the senses common to the West
(where vision comes first), Djibo begins his statement with an attack on
Stoller's entire routine of perception. Elsewhere, we have argued that
Stoller does not takes his insights far enough, failing to question the (Western) classification of five senses, and omitting to mention whether his experiences with Songhay sorcery have actually changed his way of life in the
USA (Van Dijk and Pels 1996). But it is important to realize that his experiences did at least bring Stoller to question the use of sense metaphors in
anthropology (Stoller 1989).
This indicates a way in which, even when times have changed and the
titillations of magic have become a New Age cash success, it is possible to
think of a different practice of translation, one that produces a vertigo even
among people for whom the issue of the defense of a Western or scientific
rationality or objectivity is of litde concern. It was suggested to me by the
ways in which anthropologists who became African "sorcerer's apprentices"
were "converted," so to speak, by the sensation of an inner change, a visceral perception for which Western empiricism has litde patiencenot the
"inner vision" of an alternative, Romantic Western epistemology, but something more like die everyday way human beings perceive pain or indigestion. Whether it is a perception of an illness (Van Binsbergen 1991), of
"waves, vibrations and shaking" (Gibbal 1994: 81), of "the body's internal
messages" (Fidaali, cited by Gibbal 1994: 158), or of a paralysis like
Stoller's, the point of a successful attack, by African occult practices, on the
anthropologist's sensory regime (that presupposes five senses and puts
vision first) is mosdy a perception, if not anterior, at least interior to it.
Thus, it can hardly become "objective": "objectivity" implies something exterior to the perceiving subject. Therefore, in telling the story about this
"other" perception, the subject cannot but put the categories of Western
"objectivity" at risk and risk the horror that his or her account will be
ridiculed and exorcised from die ethnographic archive (as has happened
to Castaneda, and as I suppose happens, at least now and then, to Stoller
and others).
Thus, the translationand here is where I, at least, start to feel slightly dizzyinvolves not merely the correct rendering of words in the other
language, even to the extent that these strange words, as Needham and
Kopytoff have shown, tear down one's confidence in what one can say in
one's own language. Followed through to Djibo's demand, translation may
turn out to start with a physical operation, a transformation of what one
regards as the bedrock of one's material beingseeing and feeling what is
around one. This goes beyond the desire for fashionable occultism and for
Western magical authority with its profound complicity with both Western
ethnographic and Songhay magical authorityan authority that Stoller
claims on the basis of knowledge of "the Songhay world" that "few Songhay

206 African Studies Review

know directly" (Stoller and Olkes 1987: 227-28). It shows that present-day
attempts at radical translation of African "witchcraft" must not only negotiate novel Western categories of the occult, but might also take one into a
phenomenology of perception that suspends our everyday classifications of
factuality, what we regard as the bedrock of sensory perception. But that
suspension, of course, is terrifying: it may be a signpost on the road to psychotherapy, conversion, or madness.

-6So, how should we write about the magic of Africa, that heart of darkness
that the successive empires of the Western imagination have tried to contain? The reflections in this paper suggest that we need to attend, in more
detail than before, to the texts that provide our contexts, the historical constitution of several rhetorics and translations that prefigure not only our
scholarly understanding of occult practice in Africa, but also have in part
come to constitute the understanding of those we study. Both forms of
understanding the magic of Africa can reproduce the imperial stereotype
of a dark core posing a threat to the public and civilized world, something
against which one needs to protect oneself to safeguard civility and reason.
Yet, we can also discern a consistent refusal to write about those things, an
implicit argument that writing about them may let loose in public its (perhaps largely imagined) threats. From Rider Haggard's refusal to describe a
Zulu "witch dance" in a letter home because it was too "weird" (Haggard
1926/1: 57) to Paul Stoller's retreat from the path of Songhay sorcery, it has
been rhetorically suggested that there are dangers to African "witchcraft"
that one can only reveal at one's perilor that of others. This may, however, be a "language of secrecy" that produces an occult core in order to better ground its own authority (cf. Bellman 1984), a gesture of power that
hides a more profound problem. Before relating, and subsequently covering up, Kurtz's "horror," Marlow had rescued him from the heart of darkness and put him on the boat anchored in the river. There a black woman
came to the shore, raising her arms in despair toward the boat where Kurtz
was keptdespair of being separated from her contact with her lover, with
the white god, or the object of her charms (Conrad 1902: 100-101)? To
find out, of course, Marlow would have had to plunge in the river between.
Just so, we might still have to fathom further the depths of translation and
perception.
References
Andreski, Stanislav. 1972. Social Science as Sorcery. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Bellman, Beryl L. 1984. The Language of Secrecy. Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

The Magic of Africa 207

Brandinger, Patrick. 1988. "Imperial Gothic: Atavism and die Occult in die British
Adventure Novel, 1880-1914." In P. Brandinger, Rule ofDarkness. British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
226-53.
Buchan, John. [1910] 1994. Presterjohn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burton, Richard. 1860. The Lake Regions of Central Africa. A Picture ofExploration. New
York: Horizon Press.
Conrad, Joseph. 1902. Heart of Darkness. Harmondswordi: Penguin Classics.
Daniell, David. 1994. Introduction to Presterjohn by John Buchan. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 1996. "Reading Culture: Andiropology and die Textualization of
India." In Culture/Contexture. Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, ed.
E.V. Daniel andJ.M. Peck. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Douglas, Mary, ed. 1970. Witchcraft: Confessions and Accusations. ASA Monographs
no. 9. London: Tavistock.
Etherington, Norman. 1978. "Rider Haggard, Imperialism, and the Layered Personality." Victorian Studies 22: 71-87.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1929. "The Morphology and Function of Magic. A
Comparative Study of Trobriand and Zande Ritual and Spells." American
Anthropologists!: 619-41.
.1935. "Witchcraft." Africa 8: 417-22.
.1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
.1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (abridged edition).
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fields, Karen. 1982. "Political Contingencies of Witchcraft in Colonial Central
Africa: Culture and State in Marxist Theory." Canadian Journal of African Studies 16: 567-93.
Fisiy, Cyprian, and Peter Geschiere. 1996. "Witchcraft, Violence and Identity: Different Trajectories in Postcolonial Cameroon." In Postcolonial Identities in Africa,
ed. R. P. Werbner and T. O. Ranger. London: Zed Books.
Frazer, James. 1911. The Golden Bough. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan.
Geertz, Clifford. 1988. "Slide Show: Evans-Pritchard's African Transparencies." In
C. Geertz, Work and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford Univeristy Press.
Gibbal, Jean-Marie. [1994] 1988. Genii of the River Niger. 1st French edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haggard, H. Rider. 1882. Cetywayo and his White Neighbours, or Remarks on Recent
Events in Zululand, Natal and Transvaal. London: Trubner.
.1885. King Solomon's Mines. London: Cassell.
.1887a. She. Longmans, Green.
.[1887b] 1995. Allen Quatermain. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
.1926. The Days of My Life: An Autobiography. 2 vols. Edited by C.J. Longman.
London: Longmans, Green.
Hammond, Dorodiy, and Alta Jablow. [1970] 1992. The Africa That Never Was. Four
Centuries of British Writing About Africa. Prospect Heights, 111.: Waveland Press.
Hollis, Martin, and Steven Lukes, ed. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hulme, Peter. 1992. Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797.
London: Roudedge.

7
208 African Studies Review
Johnson, Douglas. 1982. "Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, and the Sudan Political Service." African Affairs 81: 23146.
Jules-Rosette, Benetta. 1978. "The Veil of Objectivity: Prophecy, Divination and
Social Inquiry." American Anthropologist 80: 549-70.
Kingsley, Mary. 1897. Travels in West Africa. Congo francais, Corisco and Cameroons.
London: Macmillan.
Kopytoff, Igor. 1981. "Knowledge and Belief in Suku Thought." Africa 51: 709-23
Lienhardt, Peter. 1968. Introduction to Hasani bin Ismaeli, Swifa ya Nguvumali.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. [1925] 1954. "Magic, Science and Religion." In Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays. New York: Doubleday.
.[1935] 1965. "An Ethnographic Theory of the Magical Word." In Coral
Gardens and their Magic. Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context. London: Roudedge.
Melland, Frank. [1923] 1967. Witch-Bound Africa. An Account of the Primitive Kaonde
Tribe and Their Beliefs. London: Frank Cass.
.1935. "Ethical and Political Aspects of African Witchcraft." Africa 8:
495-503
Mudimbe, Valentin. 1988. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington/London: Indiana
University Press/Currey
Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell
Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. 1992. "Occultism and the Ethnographic 'I.' The
exoticizing of magic from Durkheim to 'postmodern' anthropology." Critique
of Anthropology 12: 5-25.
Pels, Peter. 1995. "Spiritual Facts and Super-Visions: The 'Conversion' of Alfred
Russel Wallace." Etnofoor8/2: 69-91.
.1999a. A Politics ofPresence. Contacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late
Colonial Tanganyika. Chur/Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers.
.1999b. "Occult Truths: Race, Conjecture and Theosophy in Victorian
Anthropology." In Excluded Ancestors. History ofAnthropology, ed. R. Handler and
G. W. Stockingjr. Vol. 9. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press (in press).
Pietz, William. 1985. "The problem of the fetish I." Res 9: 5-17.
Richards, Audrey. 1935. "A Modern Movement of Witch-Finders." Africa 8: 448-61.
Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things. The Senses in Anthropology.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes. 1987. In Sorcery's Shadow. A Memoir of Apprenticeship
among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
.1993. Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses. New York/London: Roudedge.
Taylor, Charles. 1982. "Rationality." In Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis & S.
Lukes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tylor, Edward B. [1873] 1924. Primitive Culture. 2d ed. New York: Brentano's.
Van Binsbergen, Wim. 1991. "Becoming a Sangoma: Religious Anthropological
Fieldwork in Francistown, Botswana." Journal of Religion in Africa 29: 309-44.
Van Dijk, Rijk, and Peter Pels. 1996. "Contested Audiorities and die Politics of Perception: Deconstructing the Study of Religion in Africa." In Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. R. P. Werbner and T. O. Ranger. London: Zed Books.

The Magic of Africa 209

Wallace, Edgar. [1911] 1935. Sanders of the River. London: Ward, Lock & Co.
Wilson, Bryan R., ed. 1970. Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.

Notes
1.

I hope to do so in a projected volume on the history of andiropology and the

occult, the first installments of which are Pels (1995; 1999b) and Van Dijk and
Pels (1996).
2. As Etherington argues, Haggard's natives are "the best and cleverest" since
Fenimore Cooper's Mohicans (1978: 74); Umslopogaas, "or more correcdy
M'hlopekazi," was a Swazi attendant to Shepstone (Haggard 1926, vol.1: 74).
3. Tylor, for example, discusses "witchcraft" in relation to Europe, and "fetishism"
in relation to Africa, while his theory subsumed witchcraft to die more encompassing category of "fetishism" as primitive religion (1873, vol.1: 141, 424).
Likewise, Burton subsumed East African witchcraft under "fetishism" (1860:
ch. 19). The most famous treatment of African fetishism in the nineteenth century is, of course, Mary Kingsley's (1897).
4. As the work of Edward Tylor and James Frazer shows, antiquarian and folklore
studies were part and parcel of andiropology in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
5. Compare diis to Tylor urging us to "hope" that if witchcraft beliefs "once more
come into prominence in die civilized world, diey may appear in a milder
shape tiian heretofore"; here he refers, among other things, to the spiritualism
practised by, among odiers, Haggard (1873, vol. 1: 141).
6. The story of Prester John, once imagined to be resident in Asia, and subsequendy moved to Africa as the heir to Solomon's kingdom, is of course more
complicated dian this (Daniell 1994: xi-xii).
7. In 1860, Richard Burton still subordinated "witchcraft" to "fetishism" in what
is arguably one of the first Western edinographies of East and Central Africa;
he preferred the translation of die Swahili word uchaxoi as "black magic" radier
than "witchcraft" (1860: ch. 19).
8. In contrast to witchcraft, die word fetish was at least a genuine, if hybrid, product of die West African coast (Pietz 1985).
9. See Stanislav Andreski's unforgettable: "Mediod is prophylactic in its essence"
(1972:115).
10. The situation is slighdy different when one consults Swahili-Swahili dictionariesbut diat is too complicated to go into here.