Blaming the father: witchcraft, de-industrialisation and generation in South Africa

Social researchers associate paradoxical developments in post-apartheid South Africa — such as increased hardship at a time of heightened expectations — with a proliferation in witchcraft accusations. This article examines this postulate in greater depth, drawing upon multi-temporal ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a village of Bushbuckridge since 1990. The evidence I gathered does not confirm any dramatic increase in accusations of witchcraft but does show significant changes in the pattern of who is being accused. More specifically, villagers now increasingly suspect male cognates of practicing witchcraft, and sons regularly accuse their fathers. I relate these changes to processes of de-industrialisation and to the AIDS epidemic that have both dashed young men’s expectations of progress in the period after political liberation. The ambiguous position of elderly men as marginal yet historically powerful persons resonates with the status of witches. Villagers imagine that by having used witchcraft to attain status, health and prosperity in the past, fathers unwittingly sacrificed the futures of their sons.