This essay is intended for teachers. It is not seen as simply setting out the history of the genocide in Rwanda; that has been done elsewhere. Instead, this article addresses four conceptual fields associated with the genocide, and asks two questions of them: how do these issues become important in understanding the genocide, and how does understanding the genocide illuminate these themes? The themes explored include ethnicity, outside influences, gender issues, and ecological issues. None of these issues are unique to Rwanda; therefore, there is a danger in “distancing” genocide to some remote, “exotic” locale: it has occurred in North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as Africa. Because it results from the conjunction of influences and actions widely present in the world today, genocide needs to be addressed direcdy, and understood, not neglected. This article is intended as a step in this process.

This study examines ways that political leaders influence the development of the unofficial economy in Congo. Using aggregate data as well as data from observation and two surveys conducted in 1991–1992, it demonstrates that the unofficial economy develops not only as a reaction against an over-regulated state, but also because of a market segmentation along gender lines, state policy in defining property rights, and networks of relationships that partly shape the behavior of bureaucrats who act to satisfy their own preferences. Although the unofficial economy creates institutions that can challenge state hegemony, it neither allocates resources equally among the participants nor provides an equal access to high-profit activities to all. The findings suggest that women are more likely to be involved in low-value profit sectors of the unofficial economy than men. Because the unofficial economy reinforces mutual trust and reciprocity, it tends to create a new idea of social order and interactions.

Postcolonial authorities see the belief in witchcraft and other occult forces as creating a basic impediment to development initiatives in Africa. Consequently, the state in Cameroon has sought to use all sorts of instruments—including legal instruments—to contain, if not eradicate, witchcraft. However, the institutionalization of the crimes of witchcraft, magic, and divination has been fraught with evidential problems of proof. The vigorous pursuit of witches by the postcolonial courts has led to rather perverse outcomes whereby the witch-doctors, witches par excellence, have emerged as expert witnesses in the courts. By relying on these expert witnesses, the courts are caught in the witchcraft logic, blurring the line between the accused and the accuser. The standard of proof in the courts has become that of the “L'intime conviction du judge,” at best a subjective standard.

In this essay I offer an interpretation of Wimbum tfu by analyzing Wimbum terms to distinguish it from the English term “witchcraft.” I argue that Wimbum terms bfui, brii, and tfu have multiple meanings, are dynamic, and are often employed to discuss and critique lived experience. I argue that postmodern perspectives help us interpret tfu as power, economic, and religious discourse thus making it possible for us to attempt an ethical critique of the negative aspects of Wimbum tfu.

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 heardand of magic and witchcraft while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analysis 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 contained; a recent text even suggests that it extends itself to unsetding our sensory perception of the world around us. The magic of Africa requires a still more radical engagement than Africanist anthropology has produced thus far.