State and the Institutions facing Witchcraft in Contemporary Africa. Violence, Justice and Human Rights. – EINSA

In several areas of Africa, witchcraft and the successive chains of violence starting from suspicion or rumour, leading to public accusation and ending in killing or lynching are becoming quite alarming today. From village to town, from private space to public space, the media exploitation and the political use of these violent accusing flare-ups give them a quasi epidemiological dimension. The expansion of the phenomenon is increased by the fact that we no longer deal with regulated and socially circumscribed accusations based on well known social conflicts (men/women, old/young, parents/in laws, rich/poor). The normative deregulation partly related to the State withdrawal has settled insecurity and uncertainty at the heart of social life. It has deeply affected kin and neighbouring relationships, intergenerational and gender interplays and more generally the moral economy of business and the legitimacy of institutions. In front of violent « popular justice » way often choose by village or urban youngsters, the institutions with their police associated to legal departments and health administrations resort to legal treatment and religious therapy : from the criminalization of sorcerers to the victimisation of the suffering bewitched. But, whatever the definition of the « facts », the identity of the accusers or the reversibility of the position (accuser/accused), ambiguities are always the same. The astonishing recurrence of sorcery affairs goes nevertheless together with emerging new actors and new types of sorcery. The tradi-practitioners (nganga) stand as a new type of mediator close to educated and power elites and are not very far from the new healing ministers who pretend to purify society. The options between customary justice against legal justice, between family conspiracy and forgiving approaches, between legal sanction and faith healing, are more or less blurred. The very fact that accusations draw now on the most vulnerable (women, youngsters unemployed, AIDS victims, « witch children » and migrants) shows the process of change (through « déparentalisation » and « dévillagisation ») at work in witchcraft affairs. which explains the ways the actions are relayed by the media ignoring the resort to social mediation. In some countries the anti-sorcerer action is institutionalized through the security administrations of the State and the political discourses. Theses affairs of witchcraft violence draw the attention of researchers as they call for a regional comparative approach of customary systems of social regulation and of legal proceedings of the courts of justice in several Central African countries ; and also a « glocal » approach which puts what is at state in these affairs in the local and national political games (judges, political leaders, reporters) as well as in the transnational dream worlds of migration ; and a multidisciplinary approach of the hybridding cognitive process affecting medical, legal or religious categories.