virt_7

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

7. The virtual village: Two recent discourses on witchcraft and healing

7.1. Introduction

For my third case study, I contrast two excellent recent papers by my long-standing colleagues and friends Peter Geschiere and Matthew Schoffeleers.42 Geschiere's paper offers a convincing example of virtuality in the context of globalisation, with special application to present-day African religion. Matthew Schoffeleers' paper provides the perspective from which I can focus on Geschiere's.
Geschiere's paper is only the introductory chapter of a beautiful and thoughtful book,43 which has been widely acclaimed in its French version and whose forthcoming English version will no doubt play a major role in the current revival of the study of occult forces in a context of globalisation. I have read the book in the form of a personal copy donated to me as, in the author's own words, 'le grand sorcier de l'anthropologie hollandaise';44 so even if Geschiere wittily states that 'On ne se remercie pas dans le monde de la sorcellerie',45 and even if there are indications that he is right, there are obvious limitations to the kind of comment I can present here. At the same time, the most appropriate way to show appreciation for a scholar's work is to critically review his work in detail. But let me stress from the outset that my focus here is not so much on Geschiere's book as such but on the way it illustrates problems of virtuality.

7.2. A recent healing movement in Malawi

Schoffeleers, on his part, deals with a recent and short-lived healing cult in Malawi, around the healer Billy Goodson Chisupe.46 During a few months in 1995 - grabbing a rare opportunity which fell away with the aged protagonist's death - tens of thousands of people flocked to his village home in order to obtain the cure for AIDS which had been shown to him - an ordinary villager until then - in a dream only a few months earlier.
In terms of the story of the prophet's calling, and the massive pilgrimage to his rural dwelling, the cult replays a scenario that is familiar to students of popular religion in South Central Africa in the twentieth century CE, from the prophet Mupumani who appeared in the midst of drought and effective colonial penetration in the 1910s, to the prophetess Lenshina in the 1950s and '60s.47 In the most admirable and convincing way, Schoffeleers situates the brief contemporaneous history of the cult both within the time-honoured cosmology of the Malawi countryside of which he has become the principal living ethnographer;48 and within the national political and social developments in Malawi during the 1980s and early '90s. Much like other religious movements in South Central Africa, Chisupe's cult is interpreted, beyond its therapeutic ineffectiveness against AIDS, as an attempt to revitalise the country.
Of course Schoffeleers realises that the central concept of mchape which - contrary to the healer's own choice of words - has been imposed, by the Malawian public and the media, to denote the herbal solution dispensed by the healer, while retaining its basic meaning of 'ablution', in the colonial history of Malawi and other parts of South Central Africa has acquired a more specific reference: to the young men, often returning migrants, who would come to the villages forcing people to surrender their witchcraft materials and to be cleansed.49 However, in the context of Chisupe's cult, references to witchcraft have been so minimal that Schoffeleers sees no reason to refer to them.

7.3. The status of 'witchcraft' as an analytical term

Before I proceed, a few words are in order about the term 'witchcraft'. I dislike the term and prefer to use 'sorcery' instead, but like Geschiere I do not think that we should waste time over terminological issues before we have considered the actual language usages of the people we write about. In his recent work, as well as in his earlier book on the Maka of Cameroon, Geschiere proposes to use a term which he suggests to be more neutral, 'occult forces'.50
Employing standard anthropological instruments such as cultural relativism and the distinction between emic (actors') and etic (analytical) models, we may be tempted to distinguish at least four different contexts where terms designating such 'occult forces' are coined:

• the village and the local language prevailing there,
• the popular culture of the town with its oscillation between local African languages, and an international language,
• the national elite and its preferred international language, or
• the domain of international scholarship.

Geschiere's argument now claims - and that is an important aspect of its unique quality - that these four contexts are intimately interrelated and even overlapping in the case of contemporary Cameroonian beliefs and practices relating to witchcraft. At this point in my argument this may justify us to employ the term 'witchcraft', if only as a blanket descriptive term.
In Geschiere's argument witchcraft is the central issue, and he clearly and convincingly sees no option but to confirm the image well-known from the literature written by missionaries and colonial administrators of a much earlier vintage:51 an Africa which is truly the abode of witchcraft. But, contrary to the expectation of these early European observers and actors on the African scene, he proceeds to demonstrate that witchcraft has not disappeared under the onslaught of modernity, but has installed itself within the very heart of modernity: it is the dominant discourse concerning power in the post-colonial state, and concerning the acquisition and use of modern consumer goods.

7.4. The absence of witchcraft in Chisupe's movement

In Schoffeleers' argument, by contrast, the witchcraft element is absent, 52 and I am inclined to think that this is a valid rendering of the actual situation. Not so much because Schoffeleers is the Malawi specialist (his data in this case are not of standard quality, deriving from newspaper clippings, personal correspondence and unedited video recordings taken by an anthropological colleague, - he has not even been on the spot), not even because of corroborating evidence from Probst, van Dijk and other local ethnographers, but because the extensive research on religious transformations in South Central Africa in the course of the last few centuries - the massive research output over the past three decades, which has owed so much to Terence Ranger - certainly has revealed the existence of a limited number of options besides witchcraft.

Witchcraft was the main issue in some religious expressions which, having become fashionable, swept as cults across the region - but not in all. Ironically, witchcraft eradication movements do not constitute the crucial limiting case their name would suggest, for the active confrontation of the witchcraft in others presupposes, not a interpretative alternative, but a firm belief in witchcraft as the central explanatory factor in evil. The prophetic idiom represented by Mupumani addressed an ecological or productive concern, for rain and vegetation. Cults of affliction, which have formed the major religious expression in western central Zambia during much of the twentieth century, represented the African actors' radical departure from the theory of witchcraft as an explanation of evil: not human malice, but capricious non-human alien spirits, were cited as the cause of illness and distress, and these spirits were reputed to emulate the spatial displacement, to travel the very roads, of regional population movements, long-distance trade, labour migration, colonial penetration and mass consumption of foreign-produced manufactured goods. Christian churches, to cite another major alternative to witchcraft as a religious idiom, has operated a theory of evil which not so much accepts witchcraft as a mode of explanation, but offers an alternative explanation in terms of sin and salvation, and by doing so provides a shelter for many of those fearing the witchcraft of others as well as the witchcraft inside themselves. All this does not mean that the people practising cults of affliction or Christianity entirely ceased believing in witchcraft or engaging in witchcraft practices - but at least they had access to a religious variant where witchcraft was not the all-overriding mode of explanation.53

7.5. The construction of a discursive context for analysis: (a) the village as the dominant locus of cosmological reference

A crucial difference between the arguments of Geschiere and Schoffeleers lies in the way in which each constructs a discursive context for his analysis.
For Schoffeleers this is a regionally embedded context: without saying so explicitly, the argument moves back and forth between, on the one hand, post-colonial Malawi, whose socio-cultural and political outlines we need to know in order to understand the story - and on the other hand some generalised Malawian village environment, which constitutes the setting for cosmological notions around trees and their healing power, and for the typical biography (including temporary death, a visit to the underworld or heaven, and rebirth on earth) of the prophet and the healer,54 - in other words, the village is the very place where ancestors dressed in bark-cloth may yet appear in dreams. Meaning is implied at the level of the actors, and interpretation is rendered possible at the level of the academic writer and reader, by Schoffeleers' dextrous juggling between these two regionally nested sets of references. Much of the argument is by imputation: the two spheres are suggested, in some implicit way whose implications for method and interpretation remains un-argued, to be distinct yet continuous and interconnected, so that meanings and conditions applying to one sphere can be carried over to the other. Is not the crux of the healers' oneiric message that there is a cure for every ailment? Schoffeleers data may not be in the classic anthropological tradition of participant observation, but his argument, as well as his empirical method, is certainly in the line of inspired socio-religious history for which Terence Ranger set the examples. In fact, no piece by Schoffeleers has reminded me more strongly of the best work by Ranger - for instance the latter's masterly short study of the witch-finder Tomo Nyirenda, also known as Mwana Lesa, a piece which, when I read it in draft in 1972, made a more profound impression on me than almost any contemporary scholarly text, provided me with a splendid model to emulate, and committed me overnight to the study of Central African religious history.55

7.6. The construction of a discursive context for analysis: (b) leaving the village and its cosmology behind, and opting for a globalising perspective

Geschiere as an author can be seen to struggle with the same problem as Schoffeleers does: where can we find a locus of meaning and reference, for the African actors, as well as for the academic discourse about their witchcraft beliefs and practices?
Both our authors derive their inspiration and their analytical confidence, rightly, from their years of participant observation at the village level. But for Geschiere the village and its cosmology is no longer a dominant reference.
Which village, and which region, anyway? Geographically, some of the data which he presents as having triggered his analytical curiosity may derive from a Cameroonian village, but on closer inspection his corpus highlights the discourse and practices among African elites and middle-classes, and between anthropologists and selected individual Africans who, as employed anthropological assistants, may be characterised - with some stretch of the imagination - as practical or temporary members of the middle class. I deliberately used the word corpus, whose textual and finite nature, with its sense of procedural appropriation rather than humble and defenceless immersion, differs so very much from the standard anthropological material based on participant observation over a prolonged period. The last thing I want to do here is criticising Geschiere for methodological procedures which, far from being defective, constitute deliberate and strategic choices on his part. Having done his bit on occult forces at the village level, in his Maka book and a number of shorter pieces, he emphatically and justifiably seeks to move away from the village setting - which anthropologists may be tempted to construct as being unique - among the Maka. He wishes to explore how witchcraft operates in a context of 'modernity': the state, the district capital, the city, modern consumption, elite behaviour.
These choices are strategic and commendable, not only in view of the time pressures an anthropological field-worker experiences if, like Geschiere, he is at the same time a successful leading academic in his distant home country - but also in view of the already vast literature on witchcraft in a great number of African village settings.
All the same these choices direct the research, however timely it may be, to contexts both geographically dispersed and endowed with such social power that they can effectively impede participant observation by an anthropologist. This would be so for any topic, but all the more so for the topic of witchcraft, where sinister threats and counter threats, and occasional confrontations with the very real powers of witchcraft specialists to harm and kill people, create a field-work setting well comparable to that of a front-line position in guerrilla warfare.

The latter is no facile rhetoric. Having from 1972 frequented a village environment in Kaoma district, western central Zambia, where witchcraft was and has been the dominant discourse for discussing interpersonal relations, both within the family and at the local royal court, I became interested, in the early 1990s, in studying the activities of the witch-finder Tetangimbo. He was reputed to be active around Mangango, a thriving rural centre at the other end of the district, at some 120 km distance. The case has interesting parallels with that of Mwana Lesa referred to above.56 Surrounded by a considerable number of locally recruited assistants, drawing his clientele from all over Kaoma district, and relying not on the traditional alkaloid bark poison (mwathe, mwave) but on absolutely lethal agricultural poison which left the accused no chance whatsoever of escaping with his life, the witch-finder is alleged to have killed a considerable number of people in the latter days of the Kaunda administration and right up to 1992. A criminal investigation was subsequently initiated, but the accused fled to Namibia, the case was never brought to trial, the police records are nowhere to be traced, and some key witnesses are reputed to have been killed. Noticing that my own scholarly interest in the case was interpreted by some of the administrators and by the population at the district capital as an attempt to establish myself as Tetangimbo's successor (!), in a context where local actors had difficulty distinguishing between my Botswana-derived spirit mediumship and the more sinister forms of occult practice as common in western central Zambia, I realised (and was explicitly warned) that further insistence would be inviting violence of either an occult or a physical nature; and I have effectively given up the project. One of the lessons I have learned in the process is this: to appreciate the amazing difference between

• the relatively open discourse on witchcraft and on specialist occult powers in the village environment, where even the most terrible suspicions cannot take away - in fact, presuppose - the fact that everyone is personally acquainted and engages in public sociability, as against
• the anonymous, fragmented, veiled and basically secret discourse on witchcraft in even a small urban centre like a Zambian district capital.57

It is not only the choice for a national or even international level of variety and comparison, impossible to cover by any one investigator's participant observation, that gives the specific flavour of displacement, of operating in an uncharted no man's land, to Geschiere's discourse on witchcraft in modern Africa. Having studied the village and written his monograph, he is now operating at a level where the meaning which actors' attribute to their witchcraft practices is no longer informed by the cosmology of some original village environment.
Or is it? When we compare Geschiere's approach to that of Schoffeleers, the difference may be tentatively expressed thus:

• Schoffeleers has access to the village cosmology and appeals to it to partially explain the meaning of contemporary events at the national level, even if he does not argue in detail the interrelations between town and country and the interpenetration of rival cosmologies in Malawi today;
• Geschiere on the other hand ignores the village cosmology and therefore, despite the close attention - throughout his published work - for the interpenetration between the village and the wider national political and economic scene particularly in contemporary Cameroon, is at a loss to identify (or rather, is no longer interested in identifying) the locus where witchcraft beliefs and practices take shape and meaning; his approach to witchcraft is essentially de-contextualised.

From a classic anthropological point of view, such a characterisation of Geschiere's work would amount to severe criticism. Yet it is this particular orientation of his work on witchcraft which allows him to capture an important aspect of contemporary African life: the extent to which the village is no longer the norm, no longer a coherent and consistent point of reference and meaning. In other words, Geschiere's approach may be de-contextualised, only to the extent to which also the actors' conceptualisation is de-contextualised.
But before I elaborate this point, let us explore what could have been gained, in the Cameroonian case, from a closer attention for the rural cosmology of witchcraft.

7.7. The possible lessons from a rural-orientated cosmological perspective on witchcraft

Might not some greater explicit attention for rural-based cosmology, and for the relevant literature in so far as it illuminates the cosmological position of witchcraft, have helped solve a number of dilemmas which now remain in Geschiere's argument? The answer is a qualified yes, yet we shall see that the great value of Geschiere's argument lies in the fact that yet he dared steer away from the village.
Much of that literature is cited by Geschiere;58 but, like we all do as authors, he interprets it in a personal way. Thus, I find it hard to understand Geschiere's claim that this older anthropological discourse on witchcraft is so very moralistic in the sense that it can only present witchcraft as something bad, and does not realise that in the African experience it is ambivalent, also capable of inspiring excitement, admiration, a positive sense of power; in fact, the realisation that his African companions could be positively fascinated by witchcraft is presented as a serendipity.
In my opinion Geschiere falls victim here to his tendency to overlook the place of witchcraft in African rural cosmologies. Whatever the difference between acephalous societies and those with centralised political leadership, and whatever the variations across the continent, African cosmologies tend to converge on this point, that they have important moral implications, defining witchcraft as transgressing the moral boundaries defined in those cosmologies. As a statement about the land, which in many parts of Africa is the ultimate economic as well as ontological and moral reality, these cosmologies tend to stipulate a morality which makes the absence of murder, incest and witchcraft a precondition for the fertility of the land.59

This does not mean that these moral boundaries can never be transgressed; such transgression is in fact a precondition for the construction and legitimation of forms of identity which go beyond the scope of the ordinary human being inhabiting the standard village: the identities of ruler, diviner-priest, monopolistic trader, blacksmith, bard. The morality implied in witchcraft beliefs therefore particularly informs, and is informed by, the dynamics of face-to-face interaction within commoner villages as standard contexts of production and reproduction, and tends to be suspended or challenged in the context of other modes of production including royal courts.60
Geschiere's central point about the moral ambiguity implied in African witchcraft is very well taken, and I could not agree more when he claims that it is this ambiguity which allows witchcraft to insert itself in the heart of African modernity. Such ambiguity however, contrary to what he claims, does not at all explode the moral overtones which the concept carries, in the view of many Africans and of many well-informed anthropologists. Nor can it entirely be relegated to some universal, innate quality of the sacred to be both benevolent and destructive, as stressed by Durkheim and Otto.61 That ambiguity largely reflects the material contradictions between the various modes of production involved in African rural social formations, and the ideological and symbolic expressions of those contradictions. Nor is this a feature particular to Africa, as an analysis, along similar theoretical lines, of witchcraft and other forms of magic in the Ancient Near East may show.62 Because these modes of production ultimately revolve on the appropriation of nature, we can understand why the fundamental distinction, in so many African cosmologies, between the ordered human space ('village') and the forces of the wild ('forest', 'bush'), particularly empowers roles situated at the boundary between these domains: the hunter, the musician, the healer.
Meanwhile, the amazing point is not so much variation across the African continent, but convergence. The 'new' idiom of witchcraft which Geschiere describes for Cameroon, in terms of victims being in some occult way captured and made to work as zombies, I also encountered during field-work in both Zambia and Guinea-Bissau (but so far not in urban Botswana). The South-east Cameroonian jambe as a personalised occult force demanding sacrifices of close kin (the 'old' witchcraft idiom) would appear to be closely equivalent - in belief, practice and even etymology - to the Zambian concept of the chilombe or mulombe, a snake with a human head which is secretly bred near the river, first on a diet of eggs and chicks, later demanding that his male counterpart nominates close kin for sacrifice in exchange for unrivalled powers and success.63 What however seems to be absent from the Cameroonian scene is the concept as enshrined in the widespread Bantu root -rozi, -lothi, -loi, with connotations of moral transgression, malice, murder, incest, not exclusively through the use of familiar spirits but also, or especially, relying on materia magica: herbs, roots, parts of human or animal bodies. Extremely widespread64 is the belief (fully understandable on the basis of the cosmological principle cited) that for any type of excessive, transgressive success - attaining and maintaining the status of ruler, diviner-priest or monopolist trader - a close kinsman has to be sacrificed or to be nominated as victim of the occult forces.

7.8. The felicitous addressing of virtuality

These are the sort of insights one can pick up at the village level - as Geschiere himself has done in his earlier work. Perhaps he should have tried harder to bring these insights to bear on his supra-local, non-rural argument. But his insistence to explore Cameroonian social and political life beyond the village enables Geschiere in the end to do something truly unique and impressive. He refuses to make his discourse on witchcraft ultimately dependent upon some local village scene. Rather, he describes witchcraft as part of today's national culture of Cameroon, much in the way as one might describe, for instance, qualified sexual permissiveness as part of the national culture of The Netherlands today. He realises that the village context may once have engendered or incubated the witchcraft beliefs and practices which today have such an impact on middle-class and elite life in Cameroon and throughout Africa, but he seems convinced that today such a rural reference is no longer a determining factor for the actors. We are left with a situation which may not at all satisfy the theoretical assumptions of the anthropologist who only feels truly at home in the African village context, but which for those who know African urban life today is utterly convincing: witchcraft beliefs which are suspended in the air, which are not endowed with meaning by their reference to some actual, concrete practice of production and reproduction within the horizon of social experience of the actors carrying such beliefs, but whose conceptual and social basis is fragmented and eroded, a loose bricolage of broken myths and ill-understood rumours about power and transgression, fed on one side by the faint echoes of a rural discourse and practice, but on the other by the selective recycling of detached, de-contextualised images of African life, including witchcraft, as produced by Europeans (anthropologist, missionaries, colonial civil servants) as well as by African elite and middle-class actors, and subsequently recycled even wider in present-day African national societies.
In this way, Geschiere beautifully captures the virtuality which is such an essential aspect of the modern African condition. The beliefs and practices clearly have the formal characteristics that one would associate with the counterpart, in African cultural production, of the virtual reality of electronic media and games. They lack precision and detail, and neither reveal nor claim profound cultural competence. Despite an element of regional variation (which Geschiere lists, beside the kinship link and the ambiguity, among the three major features on witchcraft beliefs in Cameroon today, and of which he shows the potential for ethnic articulation) these beliefs and practices tend to blend into broad blanket concepts, situating themselves in some sort of national or international lingua franca of concepts, ideas and rumours which (also because of the effect of the recycling of North Atlantic reformulations) can hardly be traced back to any specific regional or ethnic rural source of conceptualisation and meaning. Most significantly, Geschiere tells us that actors (for reasons which he does not go into, but which revolve on the virtuality which I have pinpointed) often prefer to discuss witchcraft matters not in any of the Cameroonian languages but in French or English!
Recent media research65 has stressed the fact that contemporary forms of art and the consumption of images derive their impact particularly from a transformation of the temporal basic structure of human perception. In the creation of virtuality, time plays a key role, as I began to realise as soon as I stumbled into the massive field of the social science and the philosophy of time.66 Witchcraft beliefs and practices in contemporary Africa provide an example of this time dimension of virtuality. Geschiere's discussion carries the strong suggestion that these beliefs are situated in some sort of detached no-man's-land, and do no longer directly refer to the village - they are no longer rooted in the productive and reproductive processes there, and the attending cosmology. Part of that cosmology, fragmented, disintegrated, ill-understood, and exposed to vaguely similar globalising influences from elsewhere, has been exported to function, more or less, outside the village. Middle classes and elite use English or French to discuss its blurred and collapsed notions. But if that transformed, virtualised cosmology still retains its social and symbolic potency (and that it does so is very clear from Geschiere's argument) this is, among other factors, because it does contain an oblique reference to the village and its intact moral cosmology, in which the witch has for centuries, probably millennia, occupied a central place. So in a way the village is still part of witchcraft beliefs and practices in Africa, even if these are situated among the elite and at state courts of law, usually at considerable spatial and social distance from villages. Yet the fundamental manipulation here is not in terms of space, but of time: as if the primordial time of the village (of the self-evident competence of the way of life it represented, of its cosmology which could defeat the witches or at least keep them at bay) had somehow - as in a daydream momentarily flashing by - been restored. It is the same play at temporal virtuality which empowers the South African Zulu-based Inkatha violence through dreams of a an acutely reviving past, in which obsolete principles of a heroic regimental order flash back to life.
Geschiere's argument also shows signs of such a play with virtual time. For if the 'new' forms of witchcraft in the 1980s-90s use the idiom of the slave trade which has been extinct for almost a century, than this is an anachronism - even if the slave trade belongs to a more recent history than e.g. the establishment of ancestral cults. In other words, the reference to earlier forms of globalisation (slave trade) is now used in order to express and contest, in a witchcraft idiom, newer forms of globalisation, such as the differential access to consumer goods and post-colonial state power. This is comparable to the processes of selective borrowing between time frames which I tried to capture in my analysis of South Central African cults of affliction, which I also interpreted as referring to a period of long-distance trade, i.e. the nineteenth century.67
I must leave it for some other occasion to discuss the details of the interconnections and variations which Geschiere discovered on this intermediate, virtual plane, which for us village-trained anthropologists is so difficult to conceptualise and which is yet the scene at which much of the symbolic life of African today take place. My aim here has not been to do full justice to his book, but to show how it is an excellent example of virtuality and its analytical potential.

7.9. Conclusion: The rural-orientated perspective on witchcraft and healing as an anthropological trap?

Finally, we should not miss the opportunity of going full circle and assess what these achievements on Geschiere's part mean in terms of a possible re-assessment of Schoffeleers' picture of the Chisupe movement.
Schoffeleers helped us to pinpoint what could have been learned from a rural-inspired reading of the distant, Cameroonian data, while taking for granted that this perspective was eminently applicable to the Malawian healing movement's discourse. But were the Malawian actors involved really prepared for such a reading, and did they have the symbolic baggage to make such a reading at all relevant to their situation? Does Schoffeleers' reliance on such rural insight as prolonged participant observation at the village level accords one, yield insight in present-day Malawian actors' conscious interpretations of the problem of evil as expressed in Chisupe's mass movement, or does it merely reveal the historical antecedents of such interpretations - a background which has gone lost to the actors themselves? Does the analytical return to the village - and I myself have made my own instinctive enthusiasm for such a reading abundantly clear in the preceding pages - amount to valid and standard anthropological hermeneutics, or is it merely a form of spurious anthropologising which denies present-day Malawians the right to the same detachment from historic, particularistic, rural roots which many North Atlantic Africanists very much take for granted in their own personal lives? It is this very detachment, this lack of connectivity - a break in the chain of semantic and symbolic concatenation -, which the concept of virtuality seeks to capture.
On this point the recent work of Rijk van Dijk68 is relevant, and revealing. In the Ph.D. thesis which he wrote under supervision of Matthew Schoffeleers and Bonno Thoden van Velzen, the assertive puritanism of young preachers in urban Malawi is set against the background of the preceding century of religious change in South Central Africa and of the interpretations of these processes as advanced in the 1970s and 1980s. Here the urban discourse on witchcraft already appears as 'virtual' (although that word is not yet used), in the sense that the urbanites' use of the concept is seen as detached from direct references to the rural cosmology and conceptualisations of interpersonal power. Similarly, the events around Chisupe may be interpreted not as an application or partial revival of time-honoured rural cosmological notions, but as an aspect of what Van Dijk describes as the emphatic moral re-orientation in which Malawi, under the instigation of the new president Mr Muluzi, was involved at the eve of the 1994 elections, and in the face of the AIDS epidemic.69