Abstract
Does African traditional religion have a history? And can we explore this history without reified notions of a fixed, unchanging pre-colonial culture? Judith Bachmann's first book offers a resounding yes to both questions and pioneers a carefully researched history of witchcraft, or àjẹ́, among the Yorùbá speakers of southwest Nigeria and the US diaspora. Focusing on the importance of missionary, colonial, academic, and political discourses for changing understandings of witchcraft/ àjẹ́ from the second half of the 19th century to the present, Bachmann reveals discourses about witchcraft/ àjẹ́ as both historically contingent and gendered.
The book's history of witchcraft/ àjẹ́ begins in the 1880s, when Western and Christian debates about the suffering caused by witchcraft accusations began to play an important role in legitimising conquest and colonial rule (144–159). Both missionary churches and colonial administrators also raised concerns over witchcraft accusations in African-initiated Aláàdúrà or "prayer" churches to limit their expansion in the 1930s–1950s (165–170). The fact that many prayer churches circumvented this disadvantage by establishing close links to international Christian organisations illustrates the importance of global networks also for locally rooted or "indigenous" expressions of Christianity. Throughout the colonial period, the representation of pre-colonial traditional culture and religion, and later of African-led churches, was infused with the inequalities and ambitions that attached to global Christian networks.
Bachmann notes that the 1950–1951 Alatinga movement, which attracted followers in Ghana and Nigeria as these countries prepared for independence, eventually challenged the colonial-cum-missionary perspective on witchcraft as non-existent. As the movement encouraged large numbers of witchcraft confessions mainly by, though not limited to, women, it embedded àjẹ́ as a deeply gendered practice (178–185). The end of colonialism in 1960 inspired research into pre-colonial Yorùbá culture and the establishment of African Traditional Religion as a category of religion. Dominated by Christian, and occasionally missionary, perspectives, this research confirmed witchcraft as a negative and highly gendered practice (95–104). By the 1970s, studies of Yorùbá culture, religion and philosophy elaborated that witchcraft/ àjẹ́ relied on specific, typically anti-social, forms of female organisation (211–221).
In line with growing global concern about witchcraft wince the 1980s, Yorùbá Muslims and Christians have drawn on different intellectual traditions and global exchanges to conceptualise and engage with witchcraft. Nonetheless, their imaginations of witchcraft as a form of female possession and incorporation resemble each other (227–239, 291–354). Equally, witchcraft/ àjẹ́ features prominently in women's discourses about female health and reproductive struggles, and women's ill-treatment by other women (407–428). Yet the association of witchcraft/ àjẹ́ with women's experiences also inspired a positive re-interpretation of the concept in the 1990s. In an expanding community of traditional practitioners outside of Nigeria, and especially in the USA, intellectuals sympathetic to traditional religion have increasingly associated àjẹ́ with female powers of healing and wellbeing (253–257). While àjẹ́ continues to be associated with a deep unease about women's acknowledged agency and powers in the Yorùbá social context, it has come to inspire African, feminist and anti-racist self-assertion in North America and other parts of the world.
The book's first major contribution is a critical tour de force through the scholarship on Yorùbá culture and religion, which will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the thrust of global relations of power in the production of knowledge about African societies. For example, Bachmann rightly notes that African missionaries did not represent local practices as non-Christian Yorùbá-speakers would. Many texts produced by 19th-century Yorùbá-speaking missionaries were written for European supervisors or audiences, and we cannot consider their perspectives as "indigenous" (56). Yet this does not answer the question of how to read these texts instead. One of the earliest descriptions of Yorùbá witchcraft fears, produced in 1846 by CMS agent William Marsh, highlights the association of witchcraft/ àjẹ́ with palm oil, then typically produced by women and enslaved people. Like most missionary references to witchcraft in that period, Marsh's observation came from the palm oil-producing southwest of the Yorùbá region. I think this suggests that the association of àjẹ́ with gender is more enduring than Bachmann implies. But more generally, it raises the question how we engage with sources we cannot take at face value, and whether we think that they can still offer insights into African agency and conceptual worlds.
The book's second significant achievement is Bachmann's argument that Yorùbá notions of witchcraft/ àjẹ́, and by extension of "African Traditional Religion," are historically contingent and shaped by broader social, political and intellectual relations of power. This argument is further illuminated by her insightful ethnography of contemporary practices and beliefs about witchcraft/ àjẹ́ in Ibadan. Through research and interviews in a comprehensive range of settings, Bachmann explores the contradictory nature of witchcraft mobilisation as a source of gendered identity. She argues that witchcraft/ àjẹ́ reflects gendered, religious and racial positionalities and life chances that both enable and limits women's self-realisation (400, 439–444).
Building on both interventions, the book argues that insofar as witchcraft/ àjẹ́ is reproduced in constant exchange with global religious communities, it stands for aspects of gendered life that are suppressed by both Yorùbá Muslims and Christians. Equally, by being incorporated into global Muslim and Christian discourses, traditional religion – whether associated with Yorùbá or African practice – has become an integral aspect of both religions (138–140, 449–455). This is undoubtedly an important contribution to the study of religion, including Christianity, Islam, and Muslim–Christian relations, in many African contexts and beyond.
Overall, then, this is an important book for scholars and activists in the fields of religion, gender relations, and Yorùbá history, and all those interested in the representation of Africa in academic knowledge production. Yet the fact that Bachmann's book is only available in German at present limits its potential audience. Notwithstanding the importance of publishing cutting-edge research in languages other than English, an English-language translation, and especially a translation available in Nigeria would undoubtedly convene a large audience of readers.