meant that some people, probably equipped with the mysterious
organevur,would profit from the accident or death. Who the witches
were, and how they operated, was of course clouded in mystery.
Witchcraft seems to provide an "explanation" for all sorts of events:
many cases of illness or other misfortune are spontaneously inter-
preted as evidence for the witches' actions. Fang people say that
witchcraft has become so general and so diffuse, transportation and
communication have made their work so much easier, that you could
be attacked from anywhere. A whole variety of rituals, amulets, secret
societies and spells can provide a measure of protection against
[192] witches. But this is only cold comfort when you see evidence of the
witches' powers at every turn. In Cameroon, there may be little witch-
craft activity but discourse about it is constant and frames the way
people think of misfortune.
Anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada documented the converse
case, where witchcraft activities are all too real but no one will talk
about it. When she started working in the bocagein western France,
Favret-Saada observed that most people denied the very existence of
witchcraft. Whenever she broached the topic people would either
feign ignorance or concede that there "used to be" witchcraft, or that
it still happened in other regions, but all would plead ignorance. One
major reason is that otherstalk far too much about it. Journalists, psy-
chiatrists, social scientists, schoolteachers and government officials are
all too eager to supply the anthropologist and other visitors from the
city with lurid accounts of the peasants' supposedly backward beliefs.
As Favret-Saada points out, these officials do not in fact have much
knowledge of what goes on in their district and are in fact quite keen
on ignoring as much as possible, substituting folkloristic stereotypes
of bats, black cats and muttered incantations for genuine information.
There is witchcraft; but it is not a matter of old legends and narrative
frisson, for the fights between witches and their victims may be quite
literally deadly.
The first sign of a witchcraft attack is that a household is struck by
repeated misfortune. Single events—a cow aborts, a member of the
family gets ill, someone is in a car crash—are things people can take in
stride; but the repetition is what alarms them. At some point, someone
has to open their eyes to the fact that they are being attacked, that the
enemy will not desist until they are thoroughly ruined or dead. This
"announcer" also discloses the identity of the putative witch, very gen-
erally a neighbor or close relation. Now the announcer is no mere
RELIGION EXPLAINED