Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial Conundrum
Abstract
Religion, magic and witchcraft are conceptual, socially constructed
categories, the boundaries of which have been contested under diverse
religious, cultural and intellectual conditions in the west. This paper focuses
firstly on the polemical relationship between religion and magic in the
context of colonial South Africa, namely, the historical factors that privileged
the category religion and the multiple effects of the social and legal
imposition of western epistemologies on colonised communities whose
practices constituted ‘magic’, and, therefore, were synonymous with
‘witchcraft’. Secondly, examples of strategies to reinforce the religion/magic
dichotomy, to collapse their subjective boundaries, and the complexity
witchcraft discourses bring to both positions are provided in the context of
the religious and cultural hybridity of postcolonial South Africa. A parallel
discussion is on the influence Christian and Enlightenment thought had on
category construction in the study of religion and questions the extent to
which Religion Studies today engages in decolonising the categories religion,
magic and witchcraft in ways that do not contradict religious realities in our
society.