The Magic of Africa: Reflections on a Western Commonplace

Abstract

This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one that pictures Africa as the dark heartland of magic and while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analy- sis of a number of different texts in which this commonplace emerges suggests that this recurrent fear of an African occult core is part of the Western engagement with the occult in Africa through its translation as witchcraft. The translation of African magic as witchcraft threatens European understandings of self and other just as much as this translation is an attempt to contain the African occult within imperial, colonial, or neocolonial discourses. These different attempts to write about the occult in Africa suggest that this threat of translation cannot be con- tained; a recent text even suggests that it extends itself to unsettling our sensory perception of the world around us. The magic of Africa requires a still more radi- cal engagement than Africanist anthropology has produced thus far.