It is in response to this discrimination that over the last decade, as L. Muthoni Wanyeki (2003) has documented, a women’s movement has grown in Africa to demand a land reform and land rights for women. But this movement will not succeed in a context where the women making land claims or insisting on holding on to the land they have acquired, are treated as witches. Worse yet, this movement can be used to justify the kind of land reform that the World Bank is promoting, which replaces land redistribution with land titling and legalization. For some feminists may believe that titling gives women more security or can prevent the land disputes that have so often been the source of witch-hunting and other forms of warfare in rural Africa.
This belief, however, is an illusion, since the land law reform which the World Bank and other developers (e.g. USAID, the British Government) have promoted can only benefit foreign investors, while leading to more rural debt, more land alienation and more conflicts among the dispossessed. (Manji 2006). What is needed, instead, are new forms of communalism guaranteeing an egalitarian access to land and other natural resources, one in which women are not penalized if they do not have children, if the children they have are not male, if they are old and can no longer procreate, or they are widowed and without male children coming to their defense. In other words, feminist movements, in and out of Africa, should not let the demise and/failure of a patriarchal form of communalism to be used to legitimize the privatization of communal resources. They should, instead, engage in the construction of fully egalitarian commons, learning from the example of the organizations that have taken this path, like Via Campesina, the Landless Movement in Brazil, the Zapatistas, all of which have been committed to the building of women’s power and solidarity as a fundamental condition of success.
Indeed, viewed from the viewpoint of the African village and the women who have been the victims of witch-hunting, we can say that the feminist movement too is at a crossroad and must decide “which side is it on.” Feminists have devoted much effort during the last two decades to carving a space for women in the institutions, from national governments to the United Nations. They have not, however, made an equal effort to “empower” the women who, on the ground, have borne the brunt of economic globalization, especially in rural areas. Thus, while many feminist organizations have celebrated the United Nations’ decade for women, they have not heard the cries of the women who, in the same years, were burnt as witches in Africa, nor have asked if ‘women’s power’ is not an empty word when old women can be tortured, humiliated, ridiculed and killed by the youth of their communities with total impunity.

Silvia FEDERICI, Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today p. 14-15

One view is that witch beliefs are being manipulated to justify expropriating people from their land. In some areas of post-war Mozambique, for instance, women, who after their husbands died, insisted on holding on to the couple’s land, have been accused of being witches by the relatives of the deceased (Bonate 2003: 11, 74, 115). Others were accused when refusing to give up the land that they had rented during the war. (Gengenback 1998) (4) Land disputes are also at the origins of many accusations in Kenya. In both countries, land scarcity adds to the intensity of the conflicts.
More broadly, witchcraft accusations are often a means of enclosure of communal land. As international agencies, with the support of the African governments, press for the privatization and alienation of communal lands, witchcraft accusations become a powerful means to break the resistance of those to be expropriated. As historian Hugo Hinfelaar points out, with reference to Zambia:

« In the current era of uncontrolled ‘market forces’ as preached by the present government and other supporters of neo-liberalism, confiscating land and other forms of property has taken on a more sinister dimension. It has been noted that witchcraft accusations
and cleansing rituals are particularly rife in areas earmarked for game management and game ranching, for tourism, and for occupation by potential big landowners…Some chiefs and headmen profit from selling considerable portions of their domain to international investors, and fomenting social disruption in the village facilitates the transaction. A divided village will not have the power to unite and oppose attempts to having the land they cultivate being taken over by someone else. As a matter of fact, the villagers are at times, so engaged in accusing each other of practicing witchcraft that they hardly notice that they are being dispossessed and they have turned into squatters on their own ancestral lands.” (Hinfelaar 2007: 238)

Silvia FEDERICI, Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today p. 5-6

It is important to stress, in this context, that anti-witchcraft movements only began in Africa in the colonial period, in conjunction with the introduction of cash economies that profoundly changed social relations. creating new forms of inequality. (3) Prior to colonization, “witches” were at times punished but rarely killed; in fact, it is even questionable whether we can speak of ‘witchcraft,’ when referring to pre-colonial times, since the term was not used until the coming of the Europeans.
It was in the 1980s and 1990s that —together with the debt crisis, structural adjustment, currency devaluation— the fear of ‘witches’ became a dominant concern in many African communities, so much so that “even ethnic groups…who had no knowledge of witchcraft before colonial time today believe to have witches in their midst.” (Danfulani 2007: 181)
[…]
these witch-hunts are not a legacy of the past, but are a response to the social crisis that globalization and neo-liberal restructuring of Africa’s political economies have produced.

Silvia FEDERICI, Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today p. 4

My argument is that these witch-hunts must be understood in the context of the deep crisis in the process of social reproduction that the liberalization and globalization of African economies have produced, as they have undermined local economies, devalued women’s social position, and generated intense conflicts between young and old, women and men, over the use of crucial economic resources starting with land. In this sense, I see the present witch-hunts on a continuum with such phenomena as the dowry murders and the return of sati in India, and the killings of hundreds of women in the Mexican towns at the border with the U.S., victims of rapists or snuff/porno producers. For, in different ways, they too are an expression of the effects of “integration” into the global economy, and men’s readiness to vent on women their economic frustrations and even sacrifice their lives to keep abreast of advancing capitalist relations. These witch-hunts are also on a continuum with the worldwide return of “the supernatural” in political discourse and popular practice (e.g. “satanic cults” in Europe and the U.S.), a phenomenon that can be attributed to the proliferation of fundamentalist religious sects but, significantly, has emerged in conjunction with the globalization of economic life.

Silvia FEDERICI, Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today p.2

 

 

the persecution of the withes…

the persecution of the witches was the climax of the state intervention against the proletarian body in the modern era.

Silvia FEDERICI, The Great Caliban : The Struggle Against the Rebel Body p. 12

It is in this context that we must also read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages. At the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in “sympathetic” relation with the rest. In this perspective where nature was viewed as a universe of signs and signatures, marking invisible affinities that had to be deciphered (Foucault 1973: 26–27), every element — herbs, plants, metals, and most of all the human body — hid virtues and powers peculiar to it. Thus, a variety of practices were designed to appropriate the secrets of nature and bend its powers to the human will. From palmistry to divination, from the use of charms to healing by sympathy, magic opened a vast number of possibilities. There was magic designed to win card games, to play unknown instruments, to become invisible, to win somebody’s love, to gain immunity in war, to make children sleep (Thomas 1971).
To eradicate these practices was a necessary condition of the capitalist rationalization of work, since magic appeared as an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, as refusal of work in action. “Magic kills industry,” lamented Francis Bacon, admitting that nothing repelled him so much as the assumption that one could obtain results with a few idle expedients, rather than with the sweat of one’s brow (Bacon Works III: 381).

Silvia FEDERICI, The Great Caliban : The Struggle Against the Rebel Body p. 10

La mondialisation a déclenché une série de nouvelles privatisations de terres. Ces spoliations ont non seulement miné le principal mode de subsistance de quantité des populations rurales, mais elles ont également ébranlé le système de terres communales. Jusque dans les années 1980, dans une grande partie de l’Afrique, les relations fondées sur la propriété des terres s’organisaient toujours autour du principe de la terre communale. Ce principe est cependant menacé à cause des ajustements structurels, qui ont pavé la voie à une sorte de processus de recolonisation, en vertu duquel les entreprises étrangères ont désormais des droits, tels que ceux d’acquérir des actifs et de rapatrier des profits. […]
En fait, dès que vous commencez à analyser les chasses aux sorcières contemporaines, vous rencontre souvent des visages connus : ceux de la Banque mondiale, du FMI, des compagnies minières, des entreprises spécialisées dans les agrocarburants… Tous sont attirés par l’immense richesse du continent africain et tous jugent rentable de créer des situations dans lesquelles des villages sont déchirés par des conflits internes. Il existe beaucoup de preuves démontrant que, dans bon nombre de cas, les accusations de sorcellerie sont employées pour d’approprier des richesses que les accusés possèdent, ou bien pour mettre la main sur des terres partagées. Faisant référence aux chasses aux sorcières qui ont eu lieu en Zambie, l’historien Hugo Infelaar écrit que les accusations de sorcellerie sont particulièrement fréquentes dans les zones désignées pour des projets commerciaux (ranch, tourisme, etc.). Il a constaté que certains chefs de village tirent profit de la vente de terres communales à des investisseurs étrangers. Occuper et embrouiller les villageois avec des accusations de sorcellerie facilite les transactions.

« Accumulation primitive et chasses aux sorcières : histoire et actualité », interview de Silvia Federici par Anna Colin, in Sorcières : Pourchassées assumées puissantes queer, p. 47-48