Witchcraft In South Africa Summary

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa In the book Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, the author Adam Ashforth argues that "no one can understand life in Africa without understanding witchcraft and the related aspects of insecurity". (Ashworth, 2005) In the book, Ashforth elucidates how the New South Africa faces the problem of how witchcraft affects them politically, socially, religiously and economically. Before I discuss Ashforth’s work, let me start by providing a brief historical background of Apartheid in South Africa. In 1948, the Apartheid government was voted into power. During Apartheid the white minority government that was merely 20% of the population, governed the rest of the 80% black majority, wherein the white minority fully controlled the rights,

Apartheid was institutionalized racial segregation between whites and blacks. The main cause for Apartheid was to maintain the pureness of the white race because they felt that they did not want their race to be tainted by other ethnic groups. The white minorities were ethnocentric towards the black population in a sense that they criticized the blacks’ religious and cultural beliefs and considered them to be irrational and traditional in comparison to their own culture.

Structural violence became well defined when the Bantu Education Act passed in 1953. The Bantu Education Act established particular standards for black education that was proposed by the prime minister that kept the blacks grounded. Wherein they were only taught simple arithmetic, conformity of the fundamental laws and to be sufficient and functionally literate given a limited education. This form of structural violence greatly crippled the black majority by preventing them from meeting their basic needs to be progressive. The consequences of the structural violence that they experienced lingered even after the apartheid era. Even in the eve of the