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The Magic of Africa: Reections on a WesternCommonplace

Peter Pels

African Studies Review / Volume 41 / Issue 03 / December 1998, pp 193 - 209DOI: 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

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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 con-centrons 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 Cen­

tre 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 of Presence. Con­tacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika (Harwood Aca­demic Publishers, 1999).

193

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neo-colonial. Quand on examine ces differents efforts d'ecrire sur le sujet de l'oc-culte 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

- 1 -

There 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 it—think of the nineteenth-century return of the fetish, to eat at the heart of European capitalism and psychology—I 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 Buchan—who, as I will argue, were also ethnographers of sorts—resonate 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 Evans-Pritchard 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 of Darkness, 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?

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- 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 interests—culminating 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 She—cannot 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

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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 heavy-handed 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 (and—who 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 Gagool—that 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 Holly—to 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, antiquar-ianism, and edinography are employed as a charm to lay before the ghost of She's magic—until 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

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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]ivilisa-tion 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-ethnographer—a figure as fictional as he is real. For apart from Arcoll and Creighton, we can also think of famous nineteenth-century 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 Evans-Pritchard'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 magic—perhaps conveyed best by E-P's remarkable power-play 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 anthropologist—compete for the tuition of his assistant, he creates a rivalry that guarantees that few secrets will be withheld (Evans-Pritchard 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 audience—the 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

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of "witchcraft" in British anthropology in the 1930s, exemplified by Evans-Pritchard (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 side—die requirement to build rule on indigenous routines—actively 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 unre-solvable dilemma of reckoning with its reality, either as a belief of Africans or as objective trudi—could 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.

- 4 -

According 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 punishable—or 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, indeed—or 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 unveiling—and, I add, the transla­tion—as something threatening the unveiler, or the translator. Does the work of translation—the attempt to contain a set of meanings in another language—produce problems with the containment of meaning? Put dif­ferently: does the translation of African occult practices by "witchcraft" cre­ate a fear of death—a terror of oblivion—in 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 "disestrange-ment" (Geertz 1988: 63, 69). While the emphasis seems to lie on die Zande term mangu, which Evans-Pritchard acknowledges can only be problemati-

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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 universe—a 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" everywhere—but Swahili-English dictionar­ies translate uchawi as "witchcraft" and "sorcery."10 Of course, uchawican be understood as both malevolence, misfortune, sorcery, and witchcraft—or 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 terms—assumptions that belong to the cultural repertoire of the Western scientific world (Kopytoff 1981; Needham 1972). While Need-ham 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—

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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 Evans-Pritchard'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 Evans-Pritchard, 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.

- 5 -

Terrified 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

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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 him—which 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 titilla-tion 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 patience—not 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 translation—and here is where I, at least, start to feel slight­ly dizzy—involves 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 being—seeing 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 authority—an authority that Stoller claims on the basis of knowledge of "the Songhay world" that "few Songhay

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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.

- 6 -

So, 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 peril—or 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 kept—despair 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.

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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 subse-quendy 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 dictionar­ies—but diat is too complicated to go into here.