Preface
[chapter]
2020
Colonial Transactions
Preface One day in Brazzaville (Congo), witchcraft filled my heart with anger. I was very young and very inexperienced, and this was my first stay in Equatorial Africa. At a dinner with friends, Guy, a young Congolese man, told us that, as a boy, his parents had sent him away to the care of relatives in the big city. He had been a sickly child, and a local diviner had diagnosed his ailment as a result of mystical attacks by a jealous uncle. Guy worked at a local school for students with special
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... needs, managed by Catholic nuns. He was a devout Christian, and a very good friend of ours. That night, my young mind became irritated by these apparent contradictions. I asked Guy, rather brutally, why he and his parents still believed in witchcraft since they were Catholic? I do not remember his response, but I still sense the embarrassment that I later felt about my brash, idiotic reaction. I later came to grasp that, beyond a personal failing, the impulse was also shaped by the colonial past. Historically, I was the descendant of men and women who had invaded Africa and had also, in their time, been baffled and angered by local ways. This study of Gabon is thus written by an outsider coming from the colonizing world, aware of, but not freed from, weighty politics of repre sen ta tion. To a large extent, this book is an effort to stitch together Guy's life story and my multilayered anger-not to smooth over my awkwardness but to use the story to get into the murky space where African and Eu ro pean imaginaries about power, agency, and misfortune clashed, overlapped and combined. Scholars tend to reflect on the historicity of modern witchcraft by reaching out to precolonial patterns and beliefs and comparing them with contemporary ones. By jumping over the colonial moment, they obscure how colonialism restructured the field of practical and mystical agency. This book offers a thick description of these reconfigurations over the last hundred years. But its main argument is to revisit how domination worked, showing
doi:10.1515/9781478002666-001
fatcat:5w6cqigi3faudgtdll6u7j35mq