Evil in Africa: encounters with the everyday

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

Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice -- PART I. EVIL AND THE STATE/WAR -- 1 Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched -- 2 Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda -- 3 The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity in Africa's Newest State -- 4 Genocide, Evil, and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan Explanations of the 1994 Genocide -- 5 Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and Dagbon Compared -- PART II. EVIL AND RELIGION -- 6 Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative among the Yaka -- 7 Aze and the Incommensurable -- 8 Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains -- 9 Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini -- 10 Haunted by Absent Others: Movements of Evil in a Nigerian City -- 11 Attributions of Evil among Haalpulaaren, Senegal -- 12 Reflections regarding Good and Evil: The Complexity of Words in Zanzibar -- 13 Constructing Moral Personhood: The Moral Test in Tuareg Sociability as a Commentary on Honor and Dishonor -- 14 The Gender of Evil: Maasai Experiences and Expressions -- PART III. EVIL AND MODERNITY -- 15 Neocannibalism, Military Biopolitics, and the Problem of Human Evil -- 16 Theft and Evil in Asante -- 17 Sorcery after Socialism: Liberalization and Antiwitchcraft Practices in Southern Tanzania -- 18 Transatlantic Pentecostal Demons in Maputo -- 19 The Meaning of "Apartheid" and the Epistemology of Evil -- List of Contributors and Affiliations -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.