Democracy in South Africa

Adam Ashforth arrived in Soweto more or less by accident in 1990. A historian preparing to do research on the transition to democracy in South Africa, he hired a room in the vast African township outside Johannesburg. He was adopted into his host family, and he has returned every year but one since 1990, making him perhaps the first professional researcher to write about Soweto on the basis of having lived there. His white skin, he tells us, never posed much of a problem. A much greater obstacle to understanding life in Soweto was Ashforth’s lack of spiritual knowledge. He became particularly interested in what South Africans call witchcraft, a word that Ashforth does not define extensively but that, he writes, refers to “malicious human action” (p. 80) carried out by mystical means, or to a force, generated by intense hatred, that people experience as acting on them independently of their own will (p. 87). For many Sowetans, witchcraft is the explanation for a wide range of misfortune, including infection with HIV/AIDS. Part 1 of the book is an ethnographic description of what Sowetans perceive as witchcraft and of the role it plays in their lives. Part 2 is an exploration of people’s ideas about spirits and about pollution generally; the material and invisible worlds in Soweto are joined seamlessly, as they are in the rest of Africa. Finally, Part 3 of the book describes how the state fails to deal with witchcraft and alleged witches. This book, written in an unpretentious and pleasing style, differs from much of the recent anthropological literature on witchcraft in Africa in at least three significant respects. First, Ashforth does not analyze witchcraft primarily in symbolic terms, as anthropologists habitually do (see, e.g., pp. 111–121 and 163). Despite being a self-described secular humanist, he takes his informants’ opinions about the invisible world at face value for analytical purposes. This is a methodological approach that has long been standard in the scientific study of religion. Second, he situates people’s ideas about witchcraft in the context of some of their other ideas about the invisible world, such as concerning the spirits of ancestors, the Holy Spirit of Christian belief,