In Defense of Witchcraft in Africa

The study of witchcraft in Africa is rooted in discourses of African difference. The post-modern stress on difference has heightened this endeavor as witchcraft has come to be interpreted as serving a useful function in Africa. Witchcraft has recently been interpreted as not only serving political and social functions but as an interpretive grid that displays an element of the malcontents of modernity. For this paper, however, witchcraft serves an emotional function and Africans would be deprived of this emotional support if the phenomenon is eradicated without any substitute. While in the West belief in witchcraft is largely seen by scholars as delusional, in Africa the same phenomenon becomes legitimate, an African way of thinking that helps people deal with the elusiveness of modernity. Rene Descartes was wrong, the West is wrong to stress rationality, witchcraft should still have been a dominant element of the imagination in New England and Europe. Thank God that Africans still believe in witchcraft. It fits them so well because they are different. They don't need science; well, if they need science, they can get it from the West. But the West and Western educated African scholars must tell Africans that witchcraft is good for Africa. It is not good for Europe or America. Hooray for people who need witchcraft for emotional support! Hooray for people who have shown that science is wrong! Hooray to Africa's different rationality. Hooray to Africa's different modernity. Hooray to Africa's traditional paradise.