Comparison: South African post-colonialism

While I was reading the “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction” article, I thought that the events that took place in South Africa in the late 1990s would b1990slar to the Salem Witch trials in the 1690s. When I finished the article, I discovered that this wasn’t the case at all. In Salem, the majority of people accused of witchcraft were teenage girls, some were as young as five. In South Africa, most of the people accused and murdered for witchcraft were older women. The ages of the people killed and accused were not the only differences, for one, the reason behind the accusations in South Africa came from the fact that they were living in a post-colonial world. Another key difference was the fact that the accusations of witchcraft in Salem were very Christian in their origins, while in South Africa, accusations occurred because of the renewed appeal of enchantment, the occult, and the role of apartheid in their post-colonial society. The final key difference that I found when trying to compare these two instances of witchcraft accusations was the political and economic realities of both societies. While these accusations were occurring, South Africa was fresh out of apartheid and it still to this day functions as a post-colonial, capitalist country. Salem, on the other hand, was not a capitalist economy yet and functioned under a completely different set of economic rules. Overall, while both communities had “witchcraft” accusations and deaths, the context for these events is important to understand why they occurred.