Evil in Africa Encounters with the Everyday [Paperback]

William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.

This volume will be widely welcomed as dovetailing with a range of recent treatments, notably by Peter Geschiere and Richard Werbner, of how practical wisdom may consist of identifying apparently familiar others as uncanny threats, or alternately of recognizing distortions of the familiar within oneself.

Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice
Walter E.A. van Beek and William C. Olsen
Part I. Evil and the State/War
1. Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched
S?nia Silva
2. Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda
Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, Julaina Obika
3. The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity in Africas Newest State
Jok Madut Jok
4. Genocide, Evil and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan Explanations of the 1994 Genocide
Jennie E. Burnet
5. Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and Dagbon Compared
Wyatt MacGaffey
Part II. Evil and Religion
6. Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative Among the Yaka
Ren? Devisch
7. Az? and the Incommensurable
L?ocadie Ekou? with Judy Rosenthal
8. Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains
Walter E.A. van Beek
9. Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini
Diane Ciekawy
10. Haunted by Al“$