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Sorcellerie et Modernité. Les enjeux des nouveaux procès de sorcellerie au cameroun approches anthropologiques et historiques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Peter Geschiere
Peter Geschiere*
Affiliation:
Université de Leyde
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Extract

Vers 1980, les tribunaux de la Province de l'Est du Cameroun commencèrent assez brutalement à condamner des « sorciers ». C'était un renversement dramatique de la jurisprudence antérieure. Jusqu'alors des gens accusés de sorcellerie ne pouvaient être condamnés — conformément à la jurisprudence coloniale — que s'il y avait des « preuves tangibles » d'agression physique. Mais à partir de 1980, les tribunaux de cette province se mirent à condamner de prétendus sorciers à de lourdes peines (jusqu'à dix ans d'emprisonnement et à des amendes relativement élevées) sur la base de « preuves » qu'on ne peut guère considérer comme « tangibles ». Souvent la preuve principale semble être la déclaration d'un nganga (guérisseur « traditionnel ») qui aurait « vu » l'accusé commettre des actes de sorcellerie. Apparemment — et c'est une autre déviation frappante de la jurisprudence coloniale — les juges sont maintenant prêts à accepter ces nganga comme des témoins-experts.

Summary

Summary

Since 1980, State courts in the East Province of Cameroon began to convict “witches ”, mostly on the basis of the testimonies of “witch-doctors ”, whose “expertise” thus receives official recognition. Such direct interventions by the State in witchcraft affairs are not exceptional in post-colonial Africa; they reflect a general obsession with a supposed proliferation of “witchcraft”. Striking is that “witchcraft” becomes an overriding issue precisely in the more modem sectors of society. A comparison with historical studies of witchcraft trials in early Modem Europe is of interest because in these studies as well the relation between “witchcraft” and “modernity” is a central, albeit highly differently interpreted, issue. Of special relevance is Michel de Certeau's insistence that the witches, as much as the magistrates who convict them, are part and parcel of the modem changes. In Africa as well, witchcraft is not to be studied as a relict of a tradition that will disappear with “modernization”. It is rather modernity itself its dreams and practices, that seems to reproduce the witchcraft imaginary on an unprecedented scale. Witchcraft trials offer a concrete setting to locate the intermediaries that play a key role in this. The African examples, like the Italian “micro-historians”, emphasize the role of seemingly subaltern actors in the crystallization of the modem changes: the nganga (witch-doctors) — more than the State and its representatives —figure as key actors in this modem reproduction of witchcraft discourses.

Type
Violence et Sorcellerie Anthropologie et Histoire
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , Volume 53 , Issue 6 , December 1998 , pp. 1251 - 1279
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 1998

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