African Studies, 61, 1, 2002
An Epidemic of Witchcraft?
The Implications of AIDS for the
Post-Apartheid State
Adam Ashforth
Institute for Advanced Study
AIDS or Isidliso?
In a scene replayed tens of thousands of times in recent years in South Africa,
a relative appeared at the Khanyile family’s door in the informal settlement of
Snake Park on the outskirts of Soweto to inform them of a funeral. A cousin in
a town not far off had passed away. A young man in his late twenties or early
thirties, the deceased had been sick for some time. In their message announcing
the funeral, the dead cousin’s parents speciŽ ed nothing about the illness, other
than to say he had died after a long illness. The relative visiting the Khanyiles,
however, whispered the cause: Isidliso.
Khanyile and his family took note. They know about this isidliso, otherwise
called “Black poison”, an evil work of the people they call witches. Along with
whatever treatments the deceased relative would have secured from medical
practitioners in his town, they knew without being told that he had been taken
to traditional healers to combat the witchcraft manifest in the form of isidliso.
All the Khanyile family members concurred with this diagnosis except one. A
daughter, Moleboheng, twenty-seven and skeptical, thought the cousin’s story
was “nonsense”.1
“He died of AIDS, obviously,” Moleboheng told her mother after the cousin left.
She was far too polite and sensible to say this in front of the relative, for then
the relative would report to others that her family were starting vicious rumours.
Mrs Khanyile conceded the possibility of AIDS, although that did not necessarily rule out isidliso. Her view was that the AIDS, if indeed it was AIDS, must
have been sent by someone. Someone had wanted to see the young man dead
and had used witchcraft to send this AIDS or isidliso to kill him. Moleboheng
still insisted that this was nonsense, as she does whenever her mother talks about
witchcraft. In this, as in most things pertaining to witchcraft, the daughter and
her family agree to disagree. She knows that within African society at large her
way of looking at things is in a distinct minority.
ISSN 0002-0184 print/ISSN 1469-2872 online/02/010121-23
Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand
DOI: 10.1080/00020180220140109
122 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
As the pandemic of HIV/AIDS sweeps through this part of Africa, suspicions of
witchcraft arise amongst many in the pandemic’s path. To the extent that this
occurs, the pandemic becomes an epidemic of witchcraft. But the implications
of a witchcraft epidemic are quite different from those of a public health crisis,
at least as such things are conventionally conceived in established discourses of
social and political management. In this paper I will examine some of the
implications of interpreting AIDS infection as witchcraft, ask what problems
they might pose for democracy and what they might mean for the legitimacy of
public power in post-apartheid South Africa. For when suspicions of witchcraft
are in play in a community, problems of illness and death can transform matters
of public health into questions of public power, questions relating to the
identiŽ cation and punishment of those persons deemed responsible for bringing
misfortune to the community.
In post-apartheid South Africa, the primary problem of public power can be
summarised as the task of creating, through the transformation of a racist and
oppressive state, a system of institutions and procedures that is not only
represented as the embodiment of “democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights” in the Preamble to the Constitution, but which resonates
with a popular sense of trust in law and government as effective instruments of
service to the public and to justice. Despite the “small miracle” of democratic
transformation to date, the South African state still has a long way to go before
the legitimacy of governance can be taken for granted as a cultural foundation
of political power. With the AIDS pandemic following so closely on the heels
of democracy, the government’s response to the crisis will surely have an impact
on the long-term health of the political system. If it is the case that even a
signiŽ cant minority of people af icted with the disease interpret their suffering
in terms of witchcraft, the political implications will be such as are rarely found
in textbooks of political science or public administration. Indeed, it is possible
that as a problem of public health, the AIDS pandemic may affect the long-term
legitimacy of democratic governance in this region as much through the manner
in which the problem of witchcraft is managed as with the protection of citizens
from the ravages of the virus. This paper seeks to begin a discussion of the
implications of a witchcraft reading of the AIDS epidemic and suggests that it
is important, both for the anti-AIDS struggle and the endeavour of building and
preserving democracy, to consider its possible political implication.
To date, these implications have not been extensively studied. The literature on
AIDS in Africa has focused primarily on questions of epidemiology, demography, and policy issues relating to AIDS-awareness programmes. And while some
observers have noted the propensity of Africans to draw upon witchcraft
discourses in the interpretation of diseases, there has been little written about the
implications of this for AIDS, other than to note that it complicates education
programmes. The main exception to this is the work of John and Pat Caldwell
and their collaborators (Caldwell et al. 1989; Caldwell et al. 1992; Caldwell
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 123
1993, 2000), although their work has focused more on the epidemic itself than
on the social and political consequences of it. In South Africa the question of
witchcraft is more difŽ cult to broach. In their excellent survey of the scale of the
problem facing South Africa in the time of AIDS, for example, Alan Whiteside
and Clem Sunter, while offering many insightful analyses of the public policy
challenges facing the country, nowhere mention the problem of witchcraft and
the particular challenges that might arise from the fact that people af icted with
AIDS often see themselves suffering at the hands of witches (Whiteside and
Sunter 2000).
In this paper I shall begin by outlining some of the political dimensions of the
crisis understood in the conventional discourses of public health policy. Then I
shall inquire as to how these dimensions might be complicated by the question
of witchcraft. My method here will be somewhat abstract and hypothetical.
Rather than an ethnographic description of AIDS and witchcraft in concrete
circumstances, I shall outline a general framework of presumptions and hypotheses within which discussion of matters relating to occult powers typically take
place (see Ashforth 2000). Given certain elementary propositions concerning the
nature and action of invisible power that I shall call the “witchcraft paradigm”
(which, I shall stress, is by no means irrationality or superstition), I shall suggest
that it is entirely plausible for people suffering from diseases related to AIDS to
interpret their af ictions as a form of witchcraft. I shall examine some of the
ways in which HIV/AIDS can in fact be interpreted as witchcraft and shall
present preliminary evidence to suggest that many people actually do interpret
their illness this way. Following this we shall be in a position to begin
investigating possible social and political implications of such modes of interpretation.
The AIDS Epidemic as a Public Health Crisis
Since 1990 the South African Department of Health has conducted annual
anonymous surveys of blood tests of pregnant women in antenatal clinics around
the country. The survey suggests a terrifying rate of increase in infections in the
late 1990s. At the end of 1996 the overall prevalence of HIV amongst women
of childbearing age (Ž fteen to forty-nine) was estimated at 14.7 per cent. At the
end of 1997 it was 16.01 per cent. At the end of 2000 the seroprevalence rate
for HIV amongst pregnant women was 24.5 per cent (South Africa 2001). In
KwaZulu-Natal, where the prevalence is highest, the rate of infection in 1999
was estimated at 36.2 per cent (ibid.). Estimates drawn from this survey data
suggest that more than 4.7 million South Africans are currently infected with
HIV. That Ž gure is likely to double by 2010 (Abt Associates 2000; 7).
If it is true that HIV causes AIDS, and AIDS causes death, there is going to be
a huge increase in mortality in the years ahead. UNAIDS estimated that 250,000
people died of AIDS in South Africa during 1999. City ofŽ cials in Durban and
124 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
Johannesburg announced in May that the number of deaths in 1999 was more
than twice that of Ž ve years earlier (Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 28 May 2000).
Statistics South Africa, the ofŽ cial statistics ofŽ ce, predicts that the death rate
will continue to rise at 20 per cent per year (ibid. 28 January 2001). The Medical
Research Council estimates that six million people will die of AIDS by the year
2010. The Joint United Nations World Health Organization Programme on
HIV/AIDS estimates that life expectancy in Southern Africa will drop to 45 in
the years between 2005 and 2010, after having risen from 44 to 59 since the
1950s. Fewer than 50 per cent of South Africans alive today, they estimate, will
live to their sixties (United Nations 1999). Moreover, 65 per cent of those who
have AIDS and who are dying in the greatest numbers are in the age group
twenty to thirty-nine, the age in which people are normally most economically
productive (United Nations 1998).
By any measure, this tidal wave of death approaching South Africa is a social
and economic disaster. It is also a potential political disaster for the new
democratic regime. So far, the record of the ANC government in South Africa
regarding AIDS has not been impressive. The history of its anti-AIDS efforts
since 1994 is a story of one distraction after another. Indeed, the failure of South
African governments to stem the spread of AIDS in the second half of the 1990s
is a cruel political irony. Although the danger of AIDS was well recognised in
the country by the end of the 1980s, even with the best of intentions the white
government of the National Party, lacking the trust of the people, would have
been incapable of stemming the tide of the disease. The Ž rst response of the
National Party government to AIDS was that it was a disease of foreigners and
homosexual men and thus not deserving of serious attention. By 1988, however,
the potential for a widespread epidemic amongst the black heterosexual population was recognised by government ofŽ cials and basic AIDS-awareness and
prevention programmes were initiated. In 1990, for example, there were already
policies in place to issue free condoms in clinics and AIDS-awareness campaigns were being launched in black townships (see Grundlingh 2001). Doubting
that the apartheid regime would ever act in the true interests of black people,
many residents of Soweto insisted that the free condoms were really intended to
reduce the black birth rate in order to secure white domination. Having never
buried anyone from a disease named AIDS, they doubted the reality of the
condition, jokingly referring to AIDS as standing for “American Invention to
Discourage Sex”.
In the aftermath of apartheid, there were few public institutions in South Africa
capable of speaking convincingly to black people. The main exceptions here
were churches, but churches have proved notoriously inadequate in preaching
safer sex messages as their primary doctrines specify abstinence. The message
of AIDS-awareness could only be preached by a government responsive to the
people and trusted by them, that is, by a democratic government. When such a
government arrived in 1994, however, the opportunity to tackle the disease was
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 125
missed because to quote the rather lame excuse Department of Health’s Strategic
Plan, “both human and Ž nancial resources at all levels were limited” (South
Africa 2000; 10). As the death toll mounts in the coming years, the government
will be judged on its performance in handling the AIDS epidemic. Policies
relating to protecting the integrity of the blood supply, educating people about
the dangers of exchanging bodily  uids, sponsoring research, subsidising treatments, and caring for the dying and their children will all be scrutinised for signs
of failure of political will and action. The tone of such scrutiny was foreshadowed in September 2000 by the Anglican Archbishop of South Africa, Njongonkulu Ndungane, when he issued a statement saying that history would judge
the government’s inaction on AIDS “as serious a crime against humanity as
apartheid”. (Anglican Communion News Service, 2000). And the trope of
governmental responses to AIDS vs apartheid as rivals for the status of crimes
against humanity has become a staple of political discourse. For example, in
commemorations of the Sharpeville Massacre in Langa, Cape Town, on March
21, 2001, opposition Pan Africanist Congress speaker Costa Gazi lambasted the
ANC government’s handling of the epidemic and claimed that it had cost far
more lives than apartheid ever did. (See, “Aids ‘far deadlier than apartheid’,”
Daily Mail and Guardian, Thursday. 22 March, 2001, on the web at: http://
www.mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/2001mar/22maram-news.html). This political
stance could ultimately result in a fundamental loss of trust in government.
In addition to failing to take adequate measures to prevent the spread of infection
in the late 1990s, the ANC government has failed to provide leadership for
reducing the stigma associated with the disease. Despite volumes of pious
sentiment, no signiŽ cant ANC leaders have emerged as living with AIDS, and
the party has resisted any effort to publicise the HIV status of its leaders. The
Ž rst South African politician in ofŽ ce to publicly comment on the HIV status of
himself and his family was the Inkatha leader and former “warlord” of the
informal settlement Lindelani, Thomas Shabalala, who announced to the
KwaZulu-Natal legislature in January 2001 that his daughter had died of AIDS.
In an interview in March, Shabalala explained his decision to make the family’s
tragedy public: “You know how it is — if you don’t tell people the truth, they
become suspicious. They try to come up with explanations, which raises
unnecessary suspicions such as someone had put muthi on the children — which
is not good.” (Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 30 March–5 April 2001). To
“put muthi on” someone is to bewitch them. In May 2001 an ANC MP, Ruth
Bhengu, became the second politician to describe the personal impact of the
disease when she made a statement to the National Assembly about her daughter
being HIV-positive. Judge Edwin Cameron has long been the only HIV-positive
person in a prominent position to be open about being seropositive.
The question I want to address now is: How might the implications of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic be complicated by an interpretation of the disease as
witchcraft?
126 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
AIDS as Witchcraft
Cases of premature death or untimely illness in Africa are almost always
attributed to the action of invisible forces, frequently those described as
witchcraft. Many Africans object to the terms “witch,” “witchcraft,” and
“witchdoctor,” arguing that they are both derogatory and misleading. This is
undoubtedly so, but the words are impossible to avoid. Not only are the English
words common in African usage, but the indigenous terms such as the isiZulu
ubuthakathi have long been in ected with notions deriving from Europe as much
as Africa. Nor is it possible to insist on deŽ nitional clarity and precision without
obscuring how the words are actually used in everyday practice. I prefer to use
the terms loosely while seeking to tease out from an investigation of the context
what they might mean. It should also be stressed that the personal manipulation
of evil powers spoken of as “witchcraft” is only part of a more general condition
of spiritual insecurity involving a great many occult and supernatural forces
(Ashforth 1998). The literature on witchcraft both in Africa and elsewhere is
immense and little purpose would be served in trying to survey it comprehensively here. Evans-Pritchard is the grandfather of witchcraft studies in Africa —
his book on witchcraft among the Azande (1937) is a pioneering study — and
virtually everything else relates to his work in some way or other (Douglas
1977). His much celebrated distinction between witchcraft and sorcery consists
of a subsidiary proposition about the practices of witches and the nature of their
powers. While the distinction is useful, it is not watertight in contemporary
practice and I shall use the term “witchcraft” here to incorporate “sorcery”. The
doyen of recent studies in this Ž eld is Peter Geschiere (1977), and for a recent
sample of work on the issue in Africa, see the essays in African Studies Review
41(3), 1998, and the book by Moore and Sanders (2001).
Witchcraft in the South African context typically means the manipulation by
malicious individuals of powers inherent in persons, spiritual entities and
substances to cause harm to others. The people af icted are typically thought of
as being in more or less intimate relationships with the perpetrators — lovers,
relatives, neighbours, schoolmates and workmates top the list of usual suspects
— and the motive of witchcraft is typically said to be jealousy (which in
ordinary usage here encompasses envy). It is a mistake to presume systematicity
in ideas about witchcraft. In a context such as contemporary South Africa,
particularly in urban areas, a great variety of ethnic, religious and medical
traditions from Africa and beyond have interacted over many generations in
ways that preclude any authoritative account of a singular “system of belief.” It
is not helpful to state merely that “people believe in witchcraft” for the structure
of relationships engaging aspects of the occult is far too complex to be reduced
to the language of “belief” and “non-belief”. For one thing, many people believe
in witches but struggle against such beliefs, and the character of this struggle can
take on religious, secular modernist, traditional and psychological hues all at
once (see Ashforth 2001). Indeed, when people engage seriously with these
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 127
matters in their lives, a great deal of effort is expended simply in establishing a
plausible framework within which meaningful action can be taken to manage the
threat of occult forces. This is evident particularly in the psychic, spiritual,
Ž nancial, and social investments required by submission to the ministrations
both of traditional healers and Zion/Apostolic healer-prophets. (Oosthuizen
1992; Anderson 2000; Ashforth 2000). Discussions about matters such as
witchcraft, then, can encompass ideas from widely dispersed sources. Notions
such as Satanic powers, evil ancestors, magical herbs, inherent evil personal
powers, minor demons, and African science can all be brought to bear with
eminent plausibility in speculating on the question of evil and suffering in this
world.
Yet, while there is no single system of belief of which talk about witchcraft is
an indicative factor, it does not seem too outlandish to refer to the elementary
structure of such talk as a “witchcraft paradigm” and to anatomise talk of
witches and their craft into a series of interrelated conjectures, suppositions and
hypotheses clustering around a central question: Why are we suffering? As
Evans-Pritchard characterised it in his famous discussion of collapsing granaries
in Zandeland, witchcraft provides a framework of moral agency that can make
sense of seemingly random coincidences in space and time (1937; 69). Regarding undeserved misfortune — suffering that cannot be satisfactorily construed as
justiŽ ed punishment or self-in icted wound — the invocation of witchcraft
provides ways of answering the questions: Why me (or he, or she)? Why now?
And the key feature of this mode of interpretation is that the conjectures,
suppositions, and hypotheses that frame meaningful action in relation to such
misfortune posit the malice of another person as the source of suffering.
Discourses of witchcraft can thus be represented as modes of posing and
answering questions about evil; about the beings, powers, forces and modes of
action responsible for causing suffering in the world; about the nature and
meaning of their effects. And while the forms of witchcraft discourse and
witch-Ž nding procedures vary across space and time, there are certain elemental
aspects that can be broadly delineated whenever witchcraft is invoked in relation
to the fundamental questions of suffering.
Apart from the vexed question of translatability of terms and evidence for these
hypotheses, the fact that cognate terms for “witchcraft” have been found around
the world, and in every language of the Southern African region, suggests that
the search for some common elements of a witchcraft paradigm is in not vain.
This is not the same, however, as suggesting there is only a single system, or
variants thereof, in relation to witchcraft beliefs. It is a mistake to think of
witchcraft as primarily a system of explanation analogous to science or, as many
have argued, a sign of irrationality. The various elements of the witchcraft
paradigm should be thought of as informing relationships and interaction —
which must, in turn, be broadly conceived to include human, super-human, and
non-human entities — and within these relations, explanation (in the sense of a
128 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
theory of causation) is only one aspect. Moreover, against the much celebrated
“rationality debate” (Hollis and Lukes 1982) explanation, while often central, is
not always the most important aspect of these relations as they are lived.
A disease or complex of symptoms better suited to interpretation within the
witchcraft paradigm than AIDS would be hard to imagine. Most people infected
with the HIV virus will contract diseases associated with AIDS such as
tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, wasting syndrome
(involuntary weight loss), candidiasis and HIV dementia (memory impairment).
Persons with AIDS-related disease will also commonly suffer a range of
respiratory problems and other opportunistic infections which their impaired
immune systems have difŽ culty resisting although they might appear to recover
in the short term. In Africa the predominant diseases associated with AIDS are
tuberculosis, wasting, and diarrhoea (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases 2000). And although new treatments can prolong the lives of people
infected with HIV, there is no cure for AIDS and virtually everyone so infected
will ultimately die.2 Once infected by HIV a person can remain without
symptoms for ten years or more, making it difŽ cult to pinpoint the source of
infection. Moreover, the time between infection with HIV and the onset of AIDS
symptoms varies widely as does the length of time a patient might survive with
the disease. Although there is now widespread consensus that HIV causes AIDS
(ibid. 1994), the precise mechanism by which this occurs is not well understood.
Nor is it fully understood why some people exposed to the HIV virus do not
become infected (Centers for Disease Control 1996). How might one make sense
of this situation if one considered some of the basic hypotheses of the witchcraft
paradigm?
The central questions that the witchcraft paradigm provides answers for in
relation to the meaning of suffering — Why me? Why now? — are acutely
posed in relation to illnesses associated with AIDS, particularly as the “Who is
to blame?” question arises no matter how the disease is interpreted. The most
extensive discussion of AIDS and sorcery to date has been in the work of the
medical anthropologist Paul Farmer based in Haiti (1992, 1999). Farmer’s work
is important, though he tends to reduce sorcery to a symptom of poverty and
inequality, and focuses more on the politics of economic inequality than on the
dynamics of spiritual insecurity that I am trying to elucidate here. While
AIDS-awareness campaigns in South Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, are
spreading the message of a dangerous epidemic of sexually transmitted infections at large, and knowledge of the impact and dangers of the disease is
becoming widespread, comparatively few people have actually contracted symptoms of the disease to date. Even fewer know for certain that they are infected.
And it is extremely important to remember that the symptoms associated with
AIDS do not present themselves as akin to any known form of sexually
transmitted infection (STI). Thus it is pointless to inquire into such things as
traditional understandings and treatments of STIs except to interpret the impact
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 129
of AIDS-awareness discourse. The actual symptoms — coughing, diarrhoea,
wasting, and so on — resonate within an entirely different realm of experience
from sex.
The AIDS pandemic is fundamentally different from a plague or famine that
af icts all equally. Such large-scale af ictions hardly seem plausible as the work
of individual witches, although they might make sense as a collective punishment for a whole people. But a disease such as AIDS that singles out particular
victims within intimate social networks can readily lend plausibility to the
suspicion that malicious individuals are pursuing secret evil work. Moreover, as
the people af icted are not always the least virtuous members of a community,
or those deemed most worthy of punishment, it is easy to conclude that they are
victims of malice rather than justice. In publicity surrounding the epidemic to
date in South Africa, the most prominent victims of the disease have been the
most innocent. If witchcraft discourses serves to provide an account of undeserved suffering, it would be hard to Ž nd a more blameless victim than the AIDS
orphan Nkosi Johnson, the young boy who was featured at the International
AIDS Conference in Durban in July 2000.
If suffering must have meaning, as many people deeply feel, it is hard to ignore
the fact that the AIDS pandemic is devastating the poorest and most vulnerable
communities in a way that can only seem fundamentally unjust. This again is
grist for the witchcraft mill. For, as we have seen, the witchcraft hypothesis
transforms a sense of injustice into a certitude of malice by positing for
undeserved suffering a presumption of malicious agency. And the suffering
caused by witches can only be alleviated by repelling the forces of the witchcraft
and protecting against further attack, either by mystic means of healing or by
acting against the person responsible in such a way as to neutralise their threat
(by killing them, for example). The struggle against witchcraft seems remarkably
analogous to the struggle against the constantly mutating retrovirus. Like
witchcraft, the disease of AIDS, in the story promulgated as AIDS-awareness,
can never be Ž nally and irrevocably defeated but must rather be constantly
protected against and fought.
The form of witchcraft most frequently invoked in Soweto as the cause of death
where the symptoms suggested AIDS (whether or not the AIDS diagnosis has
been made by a medical practitioner) is isidliso or idliso (poison/poisoning in
isiZulu; sejeso is the Sesotho equivalent). In a letter to the editor of City Press
in August 2001, a reader, Tshwaranang Tshule, wrote, “It is extremely disturbing
that many young people are dying and in black communities almost all cases are
blamed on muti or some incomprehensible bad spell (sejeso topping the lists).”
Idliso, sometimes translated as “Black” or “African” poisoning to distinguish it
from other toxic substances, is a term used to cover a great many symptoms,
most commonly anything that affects the lungs, stomach, or digestive tract or
that leads to a slow wasting illness. This may not always have been the case.
Historical accounts of witchcraft and healing practices from this part of the
130 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
world all mention the technique of poisoning through medicines placed in food
and drink but most simply report it as one of many techniques of the witch, see,
for example, Hunter 1961; Junod 1962; 512. These days, idliso is one of the
most common af ictions of the witch’s craft. The poison is said to take the
form of a small creature lodged in the gullet. Sometimes it resembles the shape
of a crab, at other times a frog or small animal, a lizard, say. It can even take
a man’s form and devour a person from the inside out. (Ashforth, 2000; 166ff).
Oosthuizen reports, after surveying healer prophets of the African Independent
Churches in Soweto and Durban, that regarding idliso “the consensus is that the
victim becomes thin, loses appetite, coughs continuously as if he/she has
tuberculosis, vomits (blood in some cases), and becomes dark in complexion.
The af iction disturbs the heartbeat” (1992; 100).
Sent by the witch through muthi (mixtures of herbs and other magical substances
such as animal fats) adulterating food or drink (ukudlisa in isiZulu is “to eat”),
the isidliso slowly consumes its victim, creating all manner of hardship and pain
along the way, such as friendships breaking, lovers leaving or jobs disappearing.
Although spoken of as “poison”, in relation to isidliso this notion is not
understood in the limited terms of modern toxicology. For this same poison,
while typically thought of as being placed in food — hence the name — is
directed towards particular victims not by chemistry, but by intention. Another
person can eat the food laced with poison intended for me but suffer no ill
effects; me it will kill. Isidliso can even enter the victim while he or she sleeps:
the witch places the muthi in food consumed in a dream; the muthi is placed in
the food and the food sent into the dream through witchcraft (Ashforth
2000; 186). No surprise then that idliso is greatly feared. Once inside its victim,
the isidliso is in a battle to the death and the victim must engage a powerful
healer to repel it before it completes its destruction. The more powerful the
witch, the stronger the isidliso and the more protracted the struggle for cure. If
the victim is weak, however, the battle itself can kill. There are some people who
have self-medicated themselves for idliso by purging themselves, but generally
when such af iction is suspected, treatment by a professional healer is required.
An indication of the signiŽ cance of idliso in the era of AIDS can be gauged from
studies of attitudes to tuberculosis, another rampant epidemic in Southern Africa.
In a 1998 pilot study of traditional healers in Natal regarding their treatment of
HIV and tuberculosis,3 twenty-four healers were asked for their diagnosis “if a
patient reports chronic cough, chest pains, and blood in sputum”. Eighteen of the
healers responded “isidliso”; six diagnosed tuberculosis. Those who reported TB
suggested that “the difference between isidliso and tuberculosis is that isidliso is
curable by traditional medicine and a patient coughs sputum without bloodstains,
while on the other hand tuberculosis is not curable by traditional medicine, and
a patient coughs sputum with bloodstains.” This would appear to be a distinction
emerging more from the exposure of the inyangas to TB awareness programmes
and a desire to answer questions correctly rather than traditional healing practice.
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 131
The healers apparently all agreed that isidliso cannot be passed from one person
to another but is rather “man-made TB caused by a person mixing a poison with
somebody’s food” (Gcabashe 2000; see also Wilkinson et al. 1999).
It is important to distinguish between modes of interpreting symptoms such as
the coughing up of phlegm — which might be a sign of witchcraft in action —
and modes of interpreting diseases such as those named by the doctors AIDS or
TB. Traditional healers, like ordinary people, generally have a great deal of
respect for the powers of Western medicine. They tend to distinguish, however,
between diseases which doctors can heal and those which require traditional or
African methods. Nobody would seriously consider taking a victim of a car
accident to an inyanga, for example. They might, however, consider it necessary
to take such a patient to a traditional healer or prophet after the physical injuries
have healed in order to deal with the ultimate source of the misfortune.
Similarly, healers will tend not to claim greater power than the doctors in curing
TB or AIDS, at least once they have been made aware of the clinical nature of
the disease. They are, however, going to insist that isidliso can only be cured by
traditional or spiritual methods. When the patient dies, as most do, the healer’s
failure is seen as less a function of his or her incapacity as a sign of the awesome
power of the witch or of the patient’s failure to follow the prescriptions of the
healer. While Western medicine pronounces that AIDS cannot be cured, thereby
eliminating a potential “natural” counter-explanation to the witchcraft hypothesis
of man-made illness, the course of the disease has its ups and downs, such that
intervention by traditional healers can very often seem, at least for a time,
efŽ cacious.
Some healers do indeed make blatant claims to cure AIDS, but they generally
tend to be circumspect rather than confront Western medical science head on.
For example, in a news item headlined “AIDS Cure Ploughed up as a Weed”,
the famous South African healer and former proprietor of a Soweto theme park,
Credo Mutwa, praised the healing powers of an indigenous herb known as
Sutherlandia: “ ‘I don’t claim this is the cure [for AIDS], but what it does to
people is amazing. Men and women who have been sent home to die are alive
now because of an ancient African herb,” said Mutwa. Asked whether he
thought there would ever be a cure for AIDS, the well-known visionary said:
“It’s right there in the violated plains of my fatherland. It is being ploughed up
as a weed’.” (Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 15 March 2001).
Within the witchcraft paradigm of suffering and misfortune, there is no such
thing as an incurable disease. For if illness and death are caused by the action
of others, healing is a matter of a struggle between the curative and restorative
powers of the healer on the one hand and those of the evil forces on the other.
As in any power struggle, success cannot be guaranteed, but neither can failure.
The powers to which healers are believed to have access in varying degrees in
Southern Africa include powers inherent in substances, powers bestowed by the
132 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
healer’s ancestral spirits, as well as those possessed by the personal ancestors of
the af icted and, ultimately, the power represented by the Triune God, particularly in the form of the Holy Spirit. To say that a particular disease such as AIDS
is undefeatable in the face of such an awesome array is, from the perspective of
the believer, absurd.
Most people in Soweto now know about the disease and would not say that
AIDS itself is witchcraft. If pressed to Ž nd some supernatural dimension to the
epidemic, people are more likely to offer gloomy disquisitions on the eternal
sufferings of Africa or suspect the work of God as punishment for immorality.4
Confronted with the symptoms of respiratory disease and wasting, however,
virtually everyone suspects idliso, but interpreting the symptoms associated with
AIDS in terms of the witchcraft paradigm by no means precludes the notion of
a sexually transmitted infection. For example, while it may be accepted that the
disease is transmitted through sex with an infected partner, it does not necessarily follow that the origin of the misfortune lies in that particular person. That
is to say, while the virus might be contracted from a man’s illegitimate love
affairs, the witchcraft responsible for his infection could have been sent to him
by his wife, his mother-in-law, or a jealous neighbour or a person in any one of
a number of different relationships who might have been motivated by jealousy
and hatred to malicious action. Moreover, AIDS-awareness campaigns —
highlighting the dangers of exchanging bodily  uids — present a story immediately recognisable to anyone conscious of witchcraft and sorcery using blood,
hair, nail clippings, or other bodily excretions for its purposes (see Hunter
1961; 290. This message resonates powerfully with various notions and practices
concerning pollution, dirt, and “heat” (Verryn 1981), although taboos associated
with such matters are not strong amongst Sowetan youth. If AIDS becomes
interpreted as sexually transmitted witchcraft, curing the disease (which usually
means expelling the witchcraft) can also be interpreted as requiring a sexual
emission of the witchcraft agent.
Berglund has a long and fascinating discussion of the ways certain Zulus
interpret the dangers of bewitched semen. He quotes an informant as saying,
“When a man fears that he has been treated secretly with medicines which work
on his water (semen) he does not sleep with his wife. The water can cause
sickness in her. So he does not put it into her. He goes to another woman. He
tells her of his desire for her and her beauty. She agrees. He puts the water into
her. Perhaps the water does not affect her because it was directed towards his
wife. So he expels it in this other woman. Then he goes away. He comes to his
home, being light (i.e. empty of evil). He cohabits with his wife and there is
nothing that is seen (i.e. she does not get sick). The darkness of those medicines
was thrown somewhere else” (1976; 332). Such an attitude to semen relates to
the widely reported belief that sex with a virgin cures AIDS. Although I have
seen no studies of this, the police Ž gures indicate an explosion in the incidence
of child rape corresponding with the years of increased awareness of AIDS.
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 133
A curious homology also exists between the manner in which the action of HIV
is represented in popular discourses of AIDS-awareness as an invisible agent
working in mysterious ways such that, for example, a person can seem healthy
but still be sick. The language of viruses attacking the immune system parallels
the common talk of witchcraft as an attack, as does the fact that the victim
of the virus, as the victim of the witch, is said to be in a constant struggle against
the invisible forces depleting his or her life. Moreover, witches are particularly
keen on attacking the generative capacities of families and lineages, so an
af iction that specialises in fertile victims and is passed through sexual contact
is tailor-made for their craft. Even an awareness of the length of time that
elapses between infection and the onset of symptoms is conducive to witchcraft
hypotheses, for everyone knows that the witch’s hatreds are deep and their
memories long in communities such as are found throughout urban and rural
South Africa where neighbours have lived together for generations. Hence, with
jealousy the primary motive for the witch’s evil, the sexual character of the
disease is a fertile Ž eld for presumptions of witchcraft. Thus, as the number of
cases increases, so must the number and power of the witches. As the number
and power of the witches increases, so grows the need for protection. And in the
face of evil wrought by malicious individuals, the desire for justice grows.
Witchcraft and the Social Impact of AIDS
According to the all the epidemiological data, those most likely to be infected
with HIV are young adults with women typically ten years younger than men at
the onset of the disease (United Nations 2000). Most black households in South
Africa have no health insurance and little in the way of savings to bear the extra
strain of illness. Under such circumstances, if an illness or death arouses
suspicions of witchcraft it is likely to exacerbate existing tensions within a
household as well as between members of that household and other relatives.
The survivors will be faced with the question: Who is responsible? Even in
families where witchcraft is not a general preoccupation, people Ž nd it difŽ cult
to resist the supposition that “evil forces” might be at work when serious illness
strikes: the general ethic is that when someone is ill, it is irresponsible not to
explore all possible avenues of cure.
In these situations, suspicions of witchcraft — which will come to a head at the
time of death and burial — cause recent quarrels within families and neighbourhoods to assume new signiŽ cance, while old grudges and grievances will be
resurrected and minutely re-examined. Actions or gestures that once seemed
innocent, like the loan of an article of clothing or the gift of food, for example,
can suddenly turn into ominous portents that were foolishly overlooked at the
time. Community relations generally are likely to be stressed by the presence of
people dying from diseases associated with witchcraft, for neighbours will also
be wondering who amongst them might have been responsible for the misfortune
134 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
in the victim’s house. Moreover, with certain families suffering misfortune,
neighbours will worry that those af icted will be inclined to be jealous of those
not so af icted and more likely to wage wars of witchcraft against the unscathed.
Perhaps the most distressing feature of the witchcraft interpretation of AIDS is
that, as the younger and more productive members of a household succumb to
the disease, their children become the wards of grandmothers. Grandmothers, by
virtue of the fact that older women in a community are presumed to be the most
inclined to jealousy while at the same time having the least capacity to resort to
violence, have a long history of attracting suspicions of witchcraft (Ashforth
2000; 82). The dynamics of relations between older women and their daughtersin-law are already complicated by mutual fears of witchcraft, and the fact that
many households are dependent upon the grandmother’s pension while the
young people are dying is a sociological time bomb.
Families suspecting witchcraft as the cause of illness will be under increased
Ž nancial pressure as they will feel the need to consult traditional healers and
make feasts for their ancestors. In contemporary South Africa traditional medicine is typically far more expensive for ordinary families than Western medical
treatment. In order to line up the full panoply of spiritual forces to ward off an
attack of disease such as manifested in AIDS, it would be necessary for a family
to pay for an extended course of treatment with a traditional healer — typically
the equivalent of one month’s wages for an industrial worker. Adherents of the
AIC churches, however, are in a more favorable position as the healer-prophets
in these churches do not usually charge, or charge as steeply, for their services
as traditional healers, though participation in the AICs involves a major commitment of time and lifestyle (see Oosthuizen 1992). In addition to the healer’s or
healer-prophet’s fee, success could not be guaranteed without the hosting of an
ancestral feast, the cost of which can be very much higher. Few have this sort
of money readily available without imposing on relatives and friends. Despite
strong norms of sharing and mutual responsibility in African families, such
burdens breed resentment. When the initial treatments are found to fail, as they
will, pressure mounts to try other healers and modes of remedy until all avenues
are exhausted. Not many families have the resources to support these treatments
through to the last resort and, when the relatives are coming to terms with an
untimely death, a sense lingers that if only the right healer had been found and
if the money to pay for treatments had been available, death could have been
averted.
As the suffering associated with the witchcraft/AIDS worsens in a family, and
as traditional herbal, spiritual, and ritual remedies fail, the pressure on a victim’s
kin and friends to Ž nd and neutralise the social source of illness grows. Knowing
that someone is responsible for all the misery increases the desire for justice. For
if the witch could be identiŽ ed and neutralised, his or her evil work would cease
and a cure ensue. But justice is not easily attained. In the absence of justice the
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 135
desire for revenge arises. But vengeance on the part of people who are already
victims is a desire that must be delayed, repressed, controlled. It is a desire that
can only be acted upon with stealth and secrecy (see Scheler 1961). For people
Ž lled with such vengeful desires, witchcraft is an obvious solution and an
appealing prospect. Their neighbours, relatives and other associates will know
that such people, victims of witchcraft, will be yearning for revenge and thus
more inclined to perform witchcraft themselves. Such people should therefore be
treated with caution if not shunned completely.
To talk of a stigma attached to AIDS in contemporary South Africa without
understanding the witchcraft dimensions is, in my view, to risk misunderstanding
both the nature of community power relations and the impact of the epidemic.
For even as they lie dying, most people do not know that they or their loved ones
have the disease. Nor would they want to know5, or be wise in so desiring. This
wilful ignorance arises not simply from fear of the name “Acquired ImmunodeŽ ciency Syndrome”, nor from shame over the sexual licentiousness that
presumably gave rise to the infection in the Ž rst place. After all, there is hardly
a family in the country that does not have unmarried daughters giving birth to
children, sons being sought to support their offspring, or fathers Ž nding long lost
progeny they secretly sired many years back. Sexual misdemeanours are shameful but commonplace. And while the disease was Ž rst registered in South Africa
amongst white homosexuals, nobody identiŽ es it now as a “gay disease” or
stigmatises its victims for their sexual orientation. The silences and stigma
associated with the symptoms of the diseases ravaging villages and townships in
the wake of AIDS, however, make much more sense if their witchcraft
dimensions are taken into account.
With cases of witchcraft, silence and discretion are the norm. No-one wants to
publicise the fact that they have been cursed. Such publicity would not only be
embarrassing, but dangerous, because it would enable the witch to gain intelligence of the efforts being made to counteract his or her occult assault. Such
knowledge allows the witch to redouble his or her efforts or seek out other
avenues of attack; for this reason, traditional healers typically enjoin their clients
to silence, and when the cure fails, the client’s breach of silence is one of the
Ž rst excuses proffered for failure. The essence of curing witchcraft is to engage
in a struggle with the witch by employing all the spiritual and medicinal powers
of the healer in league with the ancestors of the victim. Any compromise of this
struggle could be fatal. And as someone once said in respect of another war:
“Loose talk costs lives.”
Witchcraft, Justice and Democracy in the Age of AIDS.
Although a great deal more ethnographic work would need to be done to
delineate the precise contours of meaning associated with AIDS in different
communities throughout South Africa, for the purposes of discussion let us
136 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
assume that the AIDS pandemic in black townships and villages is likely to
stimulate suspicions of sorcery, fear of witchcraft, and a general sense of
spiritual insecurity as more and more people die at an early age of painful,
debilitating and incurable infections that resonate with indigenous categories of
interpretation broadly subsumed under the rubric “witchcraft”. The question I
want to address now is: What might this mean for democratic governance, the
rule of law, and human rights?
For people who live in worlds where witchcraft is experienced as a real and
present source of danger, managing the problem of witchcraft typically involves
two distinct though interrelated strategies: counteracting the unseen forces of
supernatural evil on their own terrain through ritual action, and neutralizing the
social source of that evil — the witch. The Ž rst strategy typically involves
healing rituals, prayers, and consultations with diviners, prophets, priests or other
experts in spiritual succour. While such rituals and healing practices can have
public implications, they are usually conducted in a private manner or in what
might be termed “semi-private” family or communal settings such as religious
congregations (Oosthuizen 1992).
From the point of view of public policy, as it is ordinarily conceived, the issues
raised in relation to anti-witchcraft action as a form of healing have mostly to
do with the registration and regulation of healers, the recognition of alternative
healing practices and therapies, environmental protection relating to the harvesting of medicinal plants and animals, and the protection and exploitation of
indigenous biological knowledge and substances. In post-apartheid South Africa
the ANC government has committed itself to “integrat[ing] the activities of the
public and private health sectors, including NGOs and traditional healers, in a
way which maximises the effectiveness and efŽ ciency of all available health care
resources” (South Africa 1997). In order to do this, the parliament has proposed
establishing a national register of traditional healers, recognizing their rights to
issues medical certiŽ cates and receive reimbursement from health insurance
companies (South Africa 1998).
The second line of anti-witchcraft strategy, however, the attribution of responsibility for evil to particular individuals, is inherently public and political as it
always involves the making and contestation of accusations within a public
domain, even if one of limited scope. Indeed, the effort to mobilise resistance to
those deemed witches, the struggle for justice and the punishment of enemies of
the community, are activities fundamentally constitutive of the political sphere
as people debate such basic issues of community life as who belongs and who
does not and who are the rightful and effective leaders of public action (Willis
1970; Auslander 1993). If the AIDS pandemic becomes widely interpreted in
terms of witchcraft, it will result in questions about justice, legitimacy and
community power in villages and townships across the country that will surely
have political implications for the state as a whole.
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 137
To date, most people living with a fear of witches have not begun to insist that
government address matters of witchcraft. I would submit that this quiescence is
more a sign of the lack of a sense that democratic government is supposed to
respond to the needs of the people, and doubt regarding its ability to do so, than
a sign of the non-signiŽ cance of the issue of witchcraft. The former Mayor of
Soweto, when the connection between witchcraft and democracy was pointed
out, acknowledged that witchcraft was the “biggest problem” and that the City
Council ought to be looking into it (Ashforth 1998b; 524ff). If cases of
witchcraft are not dealt with in the formal legal system, however, people subject
to the fear of witchcraft are likely to take independent action, which can pose
signiŽ cant problems for the legitimacy of the legal system as the state seeks to
police those who would police witchcraft (see Chavunduka 1980; Harnischfeger
2000; Mavhungu 2000). In post-apartheid South Africa, the risk for the state
generally is less that of losing legitimacy than of failing to develop a sense of
trust in the legitimacy of institutions purportedly representing the rule of law.
When efforts to manage the social dimensions of witchcraft result in informal
judicial procedures that result in the punishment of witches, the modern state is
placed in the position of having to prosecute the perpetrators of community
justice. In the past decade or so, hundreds of people in South Africa have been
killed as witches, and the problem of witchcraft violence has become part of the
national political agenda (Delius 1996; Minaar, et al. 1998) (Niehaus 2001a; b;
Commission on Gender Equality 1998). Modern jurisprudence tends to take a
rather simplistic view of the problem of witchcraft violence: arrest the people
responsible, charge them with whatever crimes are relevant — kidnapping,
assault, and murder are the most common — and then accept as a plea in
mitigation of sentence a sincere belief in witchcraft (Nel et al. 1992). Beyond the
courtroom, procedures can be established to protect those who are accused of
practising witchcraft. Community mediation can be encouraged to help overcome the social tensions that might underpin the con icts expressed in terms of
witchcraft, and public relations efforts can be mounted to defuse the urge to
publicly point out witches. In July 2000, the Commission on Gender Equality
claimed that its Witchcraft Roadshows have had just such an effect in the
formerly violence-plagued Northern Province of South Africa (Commission on
Gender Equality 2000).
In the absence of a dramatic improvement in physical and Ž nancial security,
however, such procedures will do little to satisfy those who see witches as
destroying the health and prosperity of their communities (Ashforth 2000; 97ff).
With witchcraft, as with all radical evil, there is no middle ground: you are either
for the witches or against them; there can be no compromise. In a context where
state provision of services is inadequate while inequalities thrive, the failure to
act against witchcraft is potentially serious for the legitimacy of political and
juridical institutions. Morever, where there is scant trust of ofŽ cialdom, suppression of witch-Ž nding and punishment can very easily lead to a situation
138 African Studies, 61: 1, 2002
where people see the authorities’ protection of accused witches — generally
already convicted in the court of public opinion — as evidence that the people
occupying powerful positions within the state are using witchcraft for their own
nefarious purposes to “eat” the birthright of the people (Geschiere Peter
1997; 97ff ).6
In South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, suspicions that authorities were
protecting witches became a staple of politics in regions governed by the former
Bantustan authorities. As the Ralushai Commission reports of Venda, “To
politicise rural communities, the revolutionary forces chose witchcraft and ritual
killing to destabilise these communities. One Ž nding is that the reason why this
route was chosen was due to the fact that the revolutionary forces were fully
aware that the local communities were dissatisŽ ed with the manner in which
such cases were being handled by the authorities, for example, as witches could
not be tried, the government was seen as a protector of witches” (South Africa
1996; 270; see also para. 273 for Lebowa). There is no guarantee that the present
regime will remain immune to this taint.
The challenges to democratic governance posed by life within the witchcraft
paradigm, challenges which can only be exacerbated by a pandemic of AIDS,
take three broad forms. First, there is the demand from people living within the
witchcraft paradigm for governmental response to the harm caused by witches.
Related to this is the correlative suspicion that the government is in league with
the witches against the interests of the people. This is a different kind of
legitimation problem from those commonly found in liberal democracies.
Second, in communities where a witchcraft paradigm informs understandings
about other people’s motives and capacities, life must be lived in terms of a
presumption of malice. In other words, it is dangerous to ignore the possibility
that anyone, even your most intimate relations, can, despite all appearances, be
poised to commit the most abominable crimes against you and your family.
Given the possibilities of occult harm, peaceful community life requires constant
vigilance against, and protection from, witchcraft attack as well as efforts to
minimise the impact of social jealousy and procedures to defuse the desire for
vengeance. I would argue that, particularly in urban multicultural communities,
this presumption of malice makes it difŽ cult to build networks of trust, and that
this has practical implications for civil society and the building of social capital,
especially when a high prevalence of misfortune, such as is the case with the
present epidemic, makes suspicions of witchcraft all the more plausible.
Third, I would suggest that practices of interpreting the nature of power within
the witchcraft paradigm put a premium upon the penetration of presumed
secrecy in order to reveal the hidden source of evil manifested in particular
misfortune. In political life, the tendency to see evil forces manipulating visible
appearances and conspiring to pervert the institutions of public power is both
extraordinarily difŽ cult to disprove and extremely destructive of trust in the
An Epidemic of Witchcraft? 139
legitimacy of those institutions. Within the witchcraft paradigm, the tendency is
to presume that the secret source of power lying behind appearances is inherently evil. If misfortune is widespread, as in the AIDS pandemic, the plausibility
of witchcraft interpretations is enhanced and the legitimacy of public power in
turn diminished. Under apartheid, this evil was apparent and obvious. It was
responsible for the suffering of all black people. In the post-apartheid era, the
meaning of misfortune is not so easy to construe. Yet misfortune is as much in
evidence as it ever was, and with the increasing death toll from AIDS it can only
become more widespread.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Information from Moleboheng Sello (see Ashforth 2000).
Information from the CDC website [http:www.cdc.org] and the National AIDS Treatment
Information Project [http:www.natip.org].
Tuberculosis in South Africa is endemic. The infection rate is more than double that of other
developing countries, and about sixty times the level found in countries like the United States
and Western Europe with a high prevalence of multi-drug resistant strains (Fourie 2001). A
study in the Hlabisa district of KwaZulu-Natal in 1995 found that 44 per cent of TB cases
were attributable to HIV (Wilkinson and Davies 1997).
A study conducted in Malawi in 1995 found a widespread attribution of divine retribution to
the AIDS epidemic. See (Forster 1998).
In a random biomedical and social survey of 2,500 inhabitants of the West Rand mining town
of Caroltonville, people were offered a free and anonymous HIV test, but not a single person
accepted (Mkaya-Mwanburi et al. 2001).
For discussion of the general signiŽ cance of “eating” in African politics, see (Bayart 1993).
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