Witchcraft logics and the biometric citizen

I hope to explore the confrontation between on the one hand efforts of the postcolonial state to create a biometric citizen and, on the other the implications of local visions of the person as double, incomplete etc.; these local views can be summarized as ‘witchcraft’, but this is quite a distortion; maybe ‘animism’ is a better term (which also its problems).

Why this idea of the person as double? Over the last years I have been working with Rogers Orock (a former Wits colleague) on a book with the ambitious title Conspiracy Narratives from Postcolonial Africa – Freemasonry, Homosexuality and Illicit Enrichment (forthcoming - in September with Chicago University Press – see synopsis attached). My basic question is why Cameroon is so homophobic? In many respects this country was a forerunner in the homophobic tide all over the continent. Moreover, homophobia takes a special form here: an attack on the national elite as depraved and corrupt; people believe that elite is deeply involved in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and other global associations, and everybody ‘knows’ that Freemasons impose anal penetration on young initiandi (association of Freemasonry with homosexuality has a long history in francophone contexts). Seminal contribution to Cameroonian debate on homosexuality “(since 2005 a major public issue) by Severin Cecile Abega ((young anthropologist at University of Yaounde I who unfortunately died in 2006) who emphasized that homophobia in Cameroon could only be understood from the local idea that each person has a double; sometimes the double is of the opposite gender and this explains homosexuality. He relates this to sorcellerie (witchcraft) as a ‘world of doubles’. This relates to a wider debate on African personhood as incomplete, and double (Francis Nyamnjoh, Achille Mbembe, both quoting Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard 1952).

My question is how this relates to the biometric state? It is quite clear that this basic view of the person as double and capable pervaded in all sorts of ways the identification of a person as ‘individual’ by the documentary state (Georges Macaire Eyenga’s paper on the Kumbatois provides fascinating examples of this for Cameroon). But undermining the forms of control imposed by the biometric state might be a different challenge. For India’s Aadhaar project (until now the world’s most ambitious biometric project), Kriti Kapila predicts that the state will try use it for excluding all cash exchanges, making all transactions pass by the Aadhaar card. What will remain in such a context of the view of the person as pluriform and transformative? The notion of ‘the modernity of witchcraft’ suggests that such a question should not be addressed in an either-or perspective, but rather in terms of possible articulations. Issues of social security might be of central concern in such articulations.

Synopsis | Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere – Conspiracy Narratives from Postcolonial Africa (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Homophobia assumes many forms. In Cameroon and Gabon, many people believe that the national elite is deeply involved in esoteric organizations of Western origin, such as Freemasonry, which makes them impose anal penetration on young men, eager to get a job or business opportunities, thus corrupting the nation. Here, homophobia is therefore primarily a direct attack on the elite, denouncing its depravity. Orock and Geschiere analyze this imaginary as a  special conspiracy narrative, another example of the visceral power conspiracy thinking can acquire with the global onset of social media. This example from Central Africa may seem quite far-fetched, but recent reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic show that everywhere in the world  unexpected associations mobilize deep emotions (think of QAnon or Obama ordering cheese sandwiches, read as a code for child abuse). What is the role of academic research against such a proliferation of ‘alternative facts’?  A recent switch in conspiracy studies suggests that refuting is futile since it will not change people’s minds; rather academics should first listen to, and then try to take even the wildest rumors seriously. In this book we try to show how historicizing the rumors and conspiracy narratives on elites, Freemasonry, and homosexuality in Central Africa can relativize their apparent self-evidence for the believers. This demands -  in this case but possibly also in others – patiently disentangling various histories: special aspects of the (post-)colonial role of Freemasonry in Francophone Africa, as important in the continent as it is understudied; also the much longer history of the association of same-sex  intercourse with illicit enrichment throughout the continent; also the ambiguous tenor of witchcraft with which this particular conspiracy narrative is closely intertwined; and, lastly, for Cameroon, moreover, the fierce violence of the decolonization trajectory. Striking is especially the suddenness with which such a conspiracy narrative can acquire self-evidence that makes refuting so difficult. In Cameroon and Gabon, the link between Freemasonry and homosexuality became only uncontested for many people after 2000 in a particular historical setting, but subsequently it has dominated political debates in these countries for the last two decades. Is it such a sudden ‘click’ between seemingly disparate phenomena that makes conspiracy theories in general so unassailable?

Apart from its contributions to the analysis of conspiracy thinking and the history of Freemasonry (and similar global secret societies) in Africa, the book relates to debates about queering Africa (or rather Africanizing queer studies) through attention to special aspects of the debates on homosexuality in African contexts, notably the association of homosexuality with occult imaginaries about witchcraft and riches, as well as the refusal of an ‘identity-trap.’