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African Science Witchcraft Vodun and Healing in
Southern Benin Douglas J Falen Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Douglas J Falen
ISBN(s): 9780299318901, 0299318907
Edition: Hardcover
File Details: PDF, 2.46 MB
Year: 2018
Language: english
African Science
 African Science

Witchcraft, Vodun, and
Healing in Southern Benin

Douglas J. Falen

T h e U n iv e r sit y of W is c on sin Pre ss

 The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom
eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright © 2018
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles
and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the internet or a website
without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries
should be directed to [email protected].

Printed in the United States of America

This book may be available in a digital edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Falen, Douglas J., author.
Title: African science : witchcraft, Vodun, and healing in southern Benin /
Douglas J. Falen.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011398 | ISBN 9780299318901 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Witchcraft—Benin. | Vodou—Benin. | Benin—Religion.
Classification: LCC BL2470.D3 F35 2018 | DDC 299.6/96683—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011398
 
To all my Beninese friends
and the others who shared their lives and stories.

I hope this book does justice to your vision of your world.

 Contents

ix
xi
xiii

3
26
two Black and White: Witchcraft, Science, and Identity 51
three Whose Reality? 80
four Religion and the Occult: Opposition and Connection 119
five Healing and the Globalization of Witchcraft 152
Conclusion 181

Glossary of Fon Terms 193

Notes 197
References 211
Index 227
 Illustrations

Figure 1. A man feeds cow’s blood to a protective bǒ in his home / 33

Figure 2. A healer’s protective bǒ, which he called a kpè / 36
Figure 3. One of the few female healers, in Bohicon / 44
Figure 4. Ká gohǔ (bumpy calabash) used to make an àzě-ka / 61
Figure 5. A healer shows off his shrine / 72
Figure 6. The Catholic church Saint Jean-Baptiste, Cotonou / 125
Figure 7. Offerings of fruit, honey, and sugar in a Celestial Church of Christ,
Cotonou / 128
Figure 8. Chams in the canoe crossing the lagoon to Tohounou / 136
Figure 9. Mǐnɔnã̀
̃ shrine outside of Abomey / 145
Figure 10. Trɔ̀ ̃ priests prepare ritual objects during an installation
ceremony / 149
Figure 11. Ritual items deposited on a road outside Abomey, likely a request
for witchcraft protection / 155
Figure 12. A healer shows me the object he removed from the victim / 157
Figure 13. A xunɔ̀ ̃ (Trɔ̀ ̃ priest) who is also a healer seated by his shrine, near
Abomey / 159
Figure 14. A recently constructed Trɔ̀ ̃ shrine without the usual building to
house it, near Abomey / 161
Figure 15. Adegbenon places a snake on a patient’s arm / 166

ix
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful first and foremost to all my Beninese friends and informants

who opened the door to their lives and let me in. I thank them for their hos-
pitality, shared meals, and willingness to look beyond our differences to find
friendship and a common humanity in us all. Their ideas and words were the
inspiration for this book, and I have tried to tell their stories in a way that they
would appreciate. Although I can never adequately repay them all for what
they have given me, I pledge to donate my royalties from the sale of this book
to friends, informants, and members of their families who are struggling to
eat, to stay healthy, and to send their children to school.
I express special thanks to my longtime friend and brother, Chams Link-
pon, for his encouragement, candor, introductions, and translation help over
the years. Now that he lives in the United States, I experience a great void in
my visits to Benin. I am deeply indebted to Hippolyte Behanzin, a confidant
and fellow researcher who freely shared his insights and passions with me.
Special thanks go to my close friends Romain Togni and Germain Gblan-
goun, who were always available to offer their insights, introduce me to peo-
ple, and house me. Other people who made important contributions to my
research include Gabin Djimasse, Hounon Fulbert Dahwenou, Chimène
Ahouanmagnagahou, Dah Agossouza, Toussaint Mekpo, and Romeo Atingli.
I also express gratitude to Maureen Klein, who joined me for a field season as
a research assistant and helped collect some of the data used in this book. I
am grateful to Timothy Landry, Marcy O’Neil, and anonymous reviewers for
feedback that contributed to important improvements in this work. All photo-
graphs that appear throughout the text were taken by me.
The research on which this book is based was funded through support
from Agnes Scott College, and I am fortunate to work at an institution that
maintains a commitment to faculty research.

xi
 Note on Fon Transcription
and Pronunciation

The Fon language, known as Fɔ̀ g̃ bè by its speakers, is the most widely spoken
language in southern Benin. It is related to other nearby languages in the Gbe
family, spoken in Benin, Togo, and Ghana (Ethnologue n.d.). The colonial
language of French is still the official language of government and education,
so few Fon speakers actually read and write in their native language. My tran-
scription style uses R. P. B. Segurola’s (1963) orthography, with the exception
of certain words that have an established academic spelling or are proper
names, such as Vodun and Fon. In some cases, I have transcribed words that
are not found in the dictionary; therefore, these spellings may not adhere to a
standardized spelling. Below is a guide of the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) characters used to transcribe the Fon language. All letters not indicated
here follow standard American English pronunciation. Nouns are pluralized
by adding the postposition morpheme lɛ, as in vǐ lɛ (child plural). For readabil-
ity, plural Fon words are written in singular form within the text. All transla-
tions are mine unless otherwise indicated.

Consonants
c as in church
gb as in rugby, also at the beginning of a word
h rounded, voiced h
kp as in backpain, also at the beginning of a word
x fricative, voiceless h, as in Bach
ɖ (Đ) retroflex d, with the tongue back and toward the middle of the palate
ñ as in canyon
Vowels
a as in father
e as in fail

xiii
 Note on Fon Transcription and Pronunciation

ɛ as in pet
i as in sleep
ɔ as in caught
u as in food
Nasal vowels show a tilde (˜) above the letter, as in ã, ɛ,̃ ɔ,̃ or ĩ. Tones are
marked as follows on all vowels:
é high tone
e middle tone
è low tone
ě rising tone
ê falling tone (rare)
African Science
 Introduction

T he American media’s stereotypic depiction of Africa as the land of safari

wildlife, dismal poverty, and rampant corruption has always been prob-
lematic, as has its negative portrayal of African religions. But the media’s
treatment of witchcraft is more than a simplistic stereotype. True, the charac-
terization of Africa as the unquestioned home of witchcraft unfortunately can
foster distorted, exotic, and unflattering images of Africans, but such labels do
more than objectify and reify dynamic peoples and their cultures. These labels
also suggest a profound intellectual and spiritual chasm by evoking ideas of
an “irrational,” “primitive” people inhabiting the “dark continent.” The media
reports of supernatural fears, child witches, and evangelical exorcisms encour-
age Westerners to think of Africans as fundamentally different from them-
selves, as incapable of rational thought, and as guided by a terror provoked by
imaginary evil powers. At the same time, these stories capture something
meaningful about contemporary Africa—the fact that witchcraft is one of the
most troubling, challenging, and powerful phenomena on the continent and
a defining and perplexing feature for both Africans and foreigners. This book
explores the supernatural ideas and practices commonly known as “witch-
craft” (àzě in the Fon language) in the southern region of the Republic of
Benin and their links to notions of science, magic, healing, and the indige-
nous Vodun religion. While the popular media and much academic writing
posit an incompatibility between Western and African worldviews, Beninese
people see similarities across categories and cultures. For my Beninese friends
and informants, witchcraft is a universal phenomenon that encompasses sci-
ence, religion, and moral philosophy. In reporting on these connections,
along with accounts of my own experiences, I hope to offer outsiders a view
from within the Beninese occult world, thereby reducing the divisive foreign-
ness with which Westerners treat African occult practices and beliefs.

3
 Introduction

Finding the Occult in Benin

One sweltering afternoon in July 2008, I was finishing an interview in the
town of Bohicon when I received a call from my friend Odette, who worked
at a radio station in Abomey. She said frantically, “Douglas, come down to the
station quickly! They’ve caught some witches, and they’re going to put them
on the air!” I was ten kilometers away, but I quickly jumped on a zemijã
(mototaxi) and headed for Abomey. When I arrived at the radio station, there
was already a crowd of twenty to thirty people, many of them staff of the
station, but several others wandered in off the street. A small dejected woman
of about sixty years old sat on a chair in the hot sun, along with two quiet
girls around seven and ten years old. As usual during tense and emotional
moments, several people were speaking at once, and I had trouble making
sense of the situation. I found Odette, and she and one of the journalists filled
me in on what was happening. They told me that the woman and girls were
witches and that one of the men talking to the crowd was the son of the dele-
gate (a municipal official) from a nearby village. The delegate’s son and several
other people were responsible for bringing the three accused witches to the
radio station. Apparently, the previous day the woman was passing through
the village on her way from Bohicon to another village when night fell, and
she needed a place to stay. She inquired at the house of the delegate, whose
role obliges him to provide hospitality to strangers in need. He offered to lodge
the woman for the night, but while she was arranging her things in prepara-
tion to sleep, a small calabash fell out of her clothing. The delegate saw the
calabash, immediately recognizing it as the àzě-ká (witchcraft calabash) car-
ried by witches, and he called others to join him in taking the woman into
custody. They questioned her about her activities, and she admitted to being
an àzètɔ́ (witch). Furthermore, she also admitted to initiating two young girls
who were distant relatives of hers into the witch society. In the morning, the
delegate’s son and some others located the two girls and escorted all three
of them to the radio station in Abomey. Odette informed me that they had all
confessed to being àzètɔ́ and that they were prepared to go on the radio to
discuss their crimes.
Most of the people gathering at the station showed considerable excite-
ment and disgust, recounting pieces of the morning’s events while sucking
their teeth and commenting on how sad and cruel àzě can be. After about
twenty minutes, several reporters invited the three accused witches and the
people who accompanied them behind the building, where they could con-
duct the interview away from the noise and distraction of the crowd. Since I
 Introduction 5

knew people at the station, and Odette put in a word for me, the reporters
allowed me to attend the interview, though I also obtained permission from
the three accused àzètɔ́ to attend the meeting and to record my own copy of
the interview that the reporters conducted. When the interview began, the
reporter questioned the woman first. She confessed to killing a number of
people in her life and to having inducted the two girls into the group. She was
timid, frail, and soft-spoken, and the way her eyes scanned, searching left and
right, made me think she was anxious and scared. When the girls were inter-
viewed, the older one spoke more, since the younger girl seemed intimidated
or confused by the commotion around her. But what the girls confirmed is
that they were visited in their dreams by the older woman and that she had
led them to the nocturnal feasts where they consumed people’s souls. The
children confessed to having killed three of their classmates. Everyone in
attendance was awed by the confessions and even more stunned by the young
age of these supposed witches. When the interview was over one of the
reporters called the old woman over to him and grabbed her hand. Though
she did not appear completely willing, she complied with the request. The
man took a stick and repeatedly hit her hands sharply. The woman flinched
and cried out slightly but did not struggle to get free. I was disturbed and
turned to another reporter beside me to ask why the man was hitting her. He
answered that this was a usual form of punishment and that the accused
woman expected this.
Though I saw the three presumed àzètɔ́ with my own eyes and heard the
testimony and confessions with my own ears, I found the experience confus-
ing and unsettling. From the expressions of excitement and alarm among the
crowd, I gathered that everyone present viewed this as an especially distress-
ing example of the dangerous and baffling powers of witchcraft. This type of
confession and direct confrontation is far from a daily occurrence in Benin,
but the event is emblematic of Beninese people’s fear of and preoccupations
with invisible and incomprehensible evil forces, which they often say are dis-
proportionately wielded by women. The event raises difficult questions about
reality and the anthropologist’s relationship with the “Other.” Encounters like
these, with foreign gods and occult practices, constitute some of the most
challenging cross-cultural experiences with which anthropologists must con-
tend, because these experiences force us to engage with the lived worlds of
people who may appear drastically different from ourselves. Nevertheless,
my aim in this work is to explore the Beninese people’s concepts of witchcraft
and sorcery in their own terms in an attempt to find common ground across
cultural difference.
 Introduction

In the formative years of my research among the Fon people in Abomey

(1998–2000) I tended to overlook religious and supernatural issues. My lack
of interest in religion may appear surprising, given that Benin is known
worldwide as the cradle of Voodoo (called Vodun in Benin). How could I go
to Benin and avoid investigating secret societies, spirit possession, magical
formulae, and mystical powers? At the time, my avoidance of these topics was
largely due to my focus on studying gender and marriage relations. Further-
more, in my life in the United States, I practiced no religion and had no real
exposure to belief in gods or spiritual entities. In short, spiritual concerns
seemed peripheral to my task. In my writing that came out of that research, I
did take account of spiritual practices, but it was an admittedly brief overview
of the religious and supernatural domains of Fon culture.
When I finally began studying occult dimensions of Beninese life, my study
was the product of a confluence of factors. In 2006, though I was still con-
cerned with gender and marriage, I began a new direction in my fieldwork,
looking specifically at the interaction between Christianity and polygynous
marriage in Benin (Falen 2008). I immediately discovered that one cannot
understand African Christianity without acknowledging the role of witch-
craft, since the fear of witches is the principal force driving people toward
the varied and proliferating churches in Benin. At the same time, I encoun-
tered unsolicited testimonials from my Beninese friends about their children
being killed by witches. I also heard countless stories of a novel development
whereby children were themselves becoming witches, rather than merely the
victims they had been some years earlier. Although witchcraft had always
been a topic of discussion, when comparing my experiences with those from
before, I found that talk about witchcraft had grown to startling proportions.
It became clear that Beninese people were experiencing what Adam Ashforth
(2005) calls “spiritual insecurity.” Though these influences attracted my inter-
est in the occult, I had not yet committed to pursuing it as a topic of research.
As it often happens during fieldwork, it was an unexpected experience
and the urging of a Beninese friend that ultimately led me to undertake this
study of the occult in southern Benin. In May 2006 I arrived in the Fon ethnic
group’s cultural capital of Abomey and learned that an elderly friend of mine
had recently died and that his family was preparing to hold elaborate funeral
ceremonies. He had been an important man in a royal Fon family, bearing the
title of Daǎ (an honorific term for a household head). It was through the old
man that I became friends with two of his sons. I had previously lived with his
son David in a nearby village for about six months in 1999.1 When I visited in
 Introduction 7

2006 it was my first time returning to Benin in four years, and I was saddened
by the news that met me. Although I had not known the old man intimately,
I used to visit him regularly, often dropping by as I passed by his home, offer-
ing him a small gift in deference to his age and for the paternal role he played
in helping me find a place to live during my research.
After I learned about the funeral, Gaston, the elder of the two sons and
a middle-school geography teacher in his forties, immediately invited me to
participate in the two-week ceremony, asking me to assume the role of one of
the Daǎ’s twenty children. He saw this as an opportunity to honor the con-
nection I had enjoyed with the Daǎ’s family and to offer me a rare glimpse
into Fon royal religious and social life. Although my research activities did not
permit me to attend the entirety of the lengthy rituals, over the course of the
next ten days, I visited the family almost daily, participating in various events
with my adoptive siblings. Gaston loaned me a length of the cloth whose pat-
tern he and his siblings had chosen as the uniform for the funeral ceremonies.
Bare-chested and with the cloth wrapped around my waist, I joined the Daǎ’s
other children dancing to drum rhythms into the early morning hours in
front of the assembled family and guests. I listened to griots singing about
the departed household leader, and I joined the crowd in viewing his body,
adorned with a collection of cloths to accompany him into the afterlife.2 I fol-
lowed the others who kneeled before the body, and I participated with the
delegations of related families in offering coins during the family prayers.
Over the course of these rites, I was also given access to a few private
aspects of religious life. For example, I attended the burial and observed the
hidden tomb dug out like a tunnel to the side of the burial pit, since a Daǎ’s
resting place must never be apparent from the surface. I also heard discussion
about the location of a second, private interment of the Daǎ’s true power
and soul in the form of his nails and hair, which must be buried separately
from his body in a location known only to close family members. The impor-
tance of secrets, hidden knowledge, and mysterious powers so prevalent
in southern Benin became clearer to me during the funeral as I sat talking
with Gaston, his siblings, and other friends at moments between the rites. In
addition to discussing some less public aspects of funerary traditions, conver-
sations often turned to the occult. Gaston and his brother David, also a
schoolteacher, told me about the power to make corpses speak, but only if
the person had died from a lightning strike. In fact, they told me that when
their father’s body was in the morgue awaiting the start of the ceremonies,
some thieves came to collect parts of the corpse to use in magical rituals, but
 Introduction

lightning struck and killed the thieves. Their bodies were ritually awakened,
and they confessed to their attempted crime. David told me he had personally
witnessed a corpse made to speak in this manner.
Another magical matter arose at one point during the ceremonies when a
rain shower began suddenly, interrupting the scheduled events and generat-
ing discussion about what precautions had been taken to prevent this dis-
turbance by the weather. Gaston informed me that he had entrusted the task
to one of his brothers, who had hired a specialist to protect the funeral from
rain, an especially important responsibility during the rainy season’s heavy
downpours in the months of May and June. But there were questions about
the specialist’s skill, and a frustrated Gaston claimed he would have to find
somebody else to do the job right. He said he knew an old man from the out-
lying town of Djidja who mastered the power of leaves and magical spells,
the power known as bǒ in the Fon language. He eventually introduced me
to the man and asked him to provide us with the formula for stopping the
rains (see chapter 1). The man showed us several leaves and demonstrated
the procedure for invoking their powers and hiding them in a nearby tree. He
promised us that rain would never fall until he removed the bǒ. The next day,
the man’s promise was tested, as ominous storm clouds gathered during one
of the rituals. A strong wind howled and bent the trees as a few large drops
of rain started falling. But within minutes the dark clouds passed, the wind
subsided, and no more than a few raindrops ever fell. Gaston said matter-
of-factly that what we had just witnessed was impressive but not unusual in
Africa. He repeated a common refrain that I have heard many times, that
Africans have special knowledge of plants, nature, and mystical forces that
allows them to do extraordinary things. But he added that, as an anthropolo-
gist, my mission should be to investigate these African secrets and introduce
them to America. He claimed that what we had seen were scientifically verifi-
able properties found in nature and that by recording the formulae in academic
publications we could put such knowledge in the hands of humanity. He
added that the old man from Djidja was a perfect example of someone pos-
sessing this scientific knowledge but that in order to truly control these forces
the man is also likely to be a sorcier (French for “witch/magician/sorcerer”).
Though I had had many discussions about the occult in previous years,
Gaston’s insistence that I should study it, along with my observations of
witchcraft’s growing prominence, tipped the balance.3 Once I had accepted
the task, I quickly came to understand that witchcraft, or whatever name we
choose to call it, is undeniably the most significant social force in Benin and
one that I could no longer ignore. Following this realization, I devoted some
 Introduction 9

time during my 2006 field season to asking people about their beliefs and
experiences with the occult. I followed this with more directed interviews
during three subsequent month-long field visits in 2008, 2009, and 2012. I
concentrated on the two geographic areas where I had the most contacts and
experience: the metropole of Cotonou and the rural and semiurban region in
and around the towns of Abomey and Bohicon. However, I also visited people
in Ouidah and Porto-Novo. During my 2008 visit I interviewed people from
a wide range of occupations, ages, and religious backgrounds in order to under-
stand their views of witchcraft, who witches are, and what they do. In my
2009 field season I concentrated my investigation on traditional healers and
their efforts to combat and exorcise witchcraft, since the business of healing
is integrally related to the growing prevalence of witchcraft fears and accu-
sations. In 2012 I collected information about the relationship of Vodun and
witchcraft and about foreign esoteric societies that are often classified as
witchcraft. This book is the compilation of findings and perspectives gar-
nered in part through fieldwork and relationships that began in 1996, though
most of the specific information was obtained in the more recent field sea-
sons, which produced a total of 141 interviews (as well as numerous informal
discussions) with pastors, teachers, business owners, mothers, fathers, farm-
ers, healers, and many others. Although I conducted interviews with rural
inhabitants, many informants were educated urbanites whose unambiguous
acceptance of witchcraft’s existence should call into question Western stereo-
types that belief in occult powers is confined to poor, marginalized, unsophis-
ticated, rural individuals. I agree with Peter Geschiere (1997) that, rather than
being solely a “traditional” belief confined to rural villages, African witchcraft
is also very much a part of the modern urban world.

Secrecy, Occult Fears, and the Discourse of Witchcraft

As elsewhere in Africa, witchcraft and sorcery in the Republic of Benin are un-
avoidable phenomena and hot topics of conversation (Henry 2008b). But the
presence of a foreigner prompts questions about the relationship between re-
searcher and informant and about the ability to penetrate a world of guarded
esoteric knowledge. While I believe I was successful at achieving familiarity
with local notions of magic and the supernatural, given the dramatic and dev-
astating results of occult activities, it should be unsurprising that people some-
times expressed reticence in discussing these sensitive topics. In particular,
women showed greater disinclination to talk about witchcraft. Granted, part
of my research focused on healers (most of whom are men), so I spoke with
more male than female informants, but I also felt that women either showed
 Introduction

less knowledge or were less forthcoming about the details of occult matters.
Perhaps their reserve was well founded, since women are more frequently
accused of witchcraft, whereas male healers who possess occult knowledge
are typically regarded as benevolent (see chapter 1).
Though Westerners might hold a curiosity about exotic magical or occult
phenomena, Beninese witchcraft and sorcery are more than quaint folklore.
The occult is part of people’s everyday lives, but it is extraordinarily serious
business that can inspire great fear. Informants were often afraid that by talk-
ing about occult powers or by revealing secret knowledge, they might put
themselves or me in danger. For example, when I told an auto mechanic in
Cotonou about my research, he vehemently declined to participate, saying he
knew nothing and had no interest in talking about witchcraft. He explained
that he might talk to me later in a different place, but not in public. A Cotonou
artist expressed similar reservations, declining even to give me his name for
fear that the witches in his family would overhear him and take vengeance.
This response was based on the widespread claim that witches have the ability
to listen in on distant conversations through use of a supernatural “antenna”
that allows them to monitor their enemies’ activities. However, not everyone
was so tight-lipped. Despite a few misgivings, many other informants were
longtime friends offering candid views of the occult, like Gaston, who adopted
my research as his own pet project. In general, I found that many people dis-
cussed the occult frequently and openly, perhaps reassured by my outsider
status that I would not use the knowledge against them.
For those friends who expressed fear, many directed their concerns toward
me, suggesting that I should be careful about probing too deeply lest a dis-
gruntled witch feel threatened by my research and take supernatural mea-
sures to silence me (see Stoller and Olkes 1987). People cautioned me against
asking questions too bluntly and too openly, and even those who recognize
Westerners’ disbelief in witchcraft suggested that they should still be careful
in Africa, especially in Benin. My adoptive Beninese mother, Mouni, stated
that associating with healers and ritual specialists put me at risk of contract-
ing witchcraft (as I later learned, several people suspected that I had become
a witch). But Gaston responded to Mouni, saying that I was relatively well
integrated into Beninese society and that people trusted me enough to allow
me to ask questions without launching any magical injunctions against me.
Even if his statement were accurate and not mere flattery, I did take pains
to avoid arousing animosity, in part for my own protection. But I also trod
gingerly on the path of the occult out of respect for people’s anxiety and for
the sanctity of their supernatural secrets. For example, I have been offered
 Introduction 11

initiation in various religious groups, including the witchcraft society, but I

have declined all such invitations in order to preserve my status as an outsider
who is less of a threat. Gaston told me that patience is an asset because it helps
gain the trust of religious leaders. And Gaston’s friend Serge, a Vodun priest,
praised me for maintaining a calm detachment, as opposed to intruding in
secret societies or seeking to acquire sacred knowledge. Following an inter-
view with a group of religious specialists, Serge approvingly recalled me
declaring to them, “Acɛ̀ bá n ɖe ǎ” (I’m not seeking power). I never asked for
demonstrations of witchcraft powers or for magical formulae (though infor-
mants occasionally offered these of their own volition); instead, I collected
ordinary expressions of discourse about occult ideas and behaviors. Although
I did interview healers and some other ritual leaders, the information I gath-
ered does not constitute a practitioner’s knowledge; instead, it is probably
similar to that accessible to an ordinary Beninese person who takes an inter-
est in the occult.
While the information I report is not necessarily secret, this book is a wide-
ranging and systematic assemblage of my observations and people’s state-
ments and views about the supernatural. Of course, because people could
have been wary about disclosing sacred knowledge to me, they might have
intentionally distorted their testimony. Even without intentional subterfuge,
discourse is inherently messy and contradictory, challenging our attempts to
generalize or establish consensus. Nevertheless, to the extent possible, I con-
sider this an accurate representation of the range of southern Beninese ideas
and practices related to witchcraft, magic, and healing. Rather than portray
the occult with broad, crude brushstrokes that gloss over gaps between data
points, I have attempted to reproduce some of the disordered details. This, I
hope, offers a richer portrayal of informants’ disagreements and contradic-
tions, but, like a pointillist painting, it also allows the reader to step back and
see the larger picture of the occult in Benin.

Terminological Concerns
Beninese people refer to supernatural abilities or mystical forces as magic,
science, religion, witchcraft, or sorcery, and they are at the core of life in the
Republic of Benin. What I refer to as the occult dimension of these forces
occurs in two basic forms, called bǒ and àzě in the Fon language used through-
out the southern part of the country. Bǒ are essentially magical charms and
formulae, while àzě consists of a psychic ability to perform superhuman acts
and to consume people’s souls. In African studies, the “occult” has been used
to refer to evil and negative acts, such as the destructive witchcraft found in
 Introduction

Benin, but also to human sacrifice, zombification, and the trade in body parts.
While I might classify these latter practices within the occult, they are not
a major part of the discourse in Benin; therefore, my use of “occult” in this
work refers mainly to bǒ and àzě. Furthermore, in recognizing the possibility
that occult studies will contribute to the exoticism or negative image of Africa,
I wish to stress that the morality of bǒ and àzě is viewed with considerable
ambivalence; therefore, I do not equate the “occult” with purely malevolent
forces (see Ranger 2007; ter Haar and Ellis 2009). It may be problematic to use
an all-encompassing term like “religion” to refer to a broad range of magico-
religious customs, including both the occult and the worship of deities, but I
will show how some of those differences melt away in certain contexts (Meyer
2009; ter Haar and Ellis 2009).
People who wield the power of bǒ are called botɔ́ in Fon, while those pos-
sessing àzě are àzètɔ́. Both of these terms can be translated as “witch” or “sor-
cerer,” though àzě is usually more powerful and more consistent with what
I will call witchcraft, and this work will focus especially on àzě. Àzě is said
to be responsible primarily for killing family members, ruining businesses,
and causing illness. The mystical forces of bǒ and àzě invade families and
overlap with politics, business, and religion. For many people, occult power is
the source of misery, fear, financial ruin, and death. But for others, it is also
the source of creativity, pride, religious faith, and spiritual commerce; such
people say witchcraft can heal illness or bring luck and success. The occult
also bears a key social and cosmological message as a reminder of the pres-
ence of both good and evil in the world.
Whenever anthropologists write about their fieldwork using a language
different from the one spoken by their informants, they run the risk of distort-
ing people’s understandings of their world. In my case, this risk is especially
pronounced for the following three reasons. First, during many of my inter-
views, my informants and I used a combination of French and Fon languages,
and I occasionally relied on Beninese friends to translate parts of our dis-
cussions in Fon. Therefore, in addition to the usual problems posed by writ-
ing a book in a language other than the research language, distortion might
arise from the alternation between languages and from the additional filter of
translation between Fon and French. Second, as noted above, occult secrets
are jealously guarded, which means total consensus is unlikely. Despite some
common patterns, there is significant heterogeneity in people’s notions of
these phenomena, rendering ethnographic accounts potentially reductionist.
Third, the topic of the supernatural has a particularly confusing history in the
anthropology of Africa, and with good reason. The terminologies and related
 Introduction 13

conceptualizations of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” in Western academic litera-

ture are not always consistent; nor are they necessarily true to African sensi-
bilities (Pels 1998; J. Rush 1974). We cannot be confident that the words we use
to describe African occult practices accurately convey indigenous people’s
views. Furthermore, it would be wrong to suggest that members of a society
all agree on the meanings of words they use among themselves. Witchcraft
and sorcery terminology can be confusing within the Fon language, as well as
between Fon, French, and English.
One problem is how to deal with the fact that English has two words, witch-
craft and sorcery, whereas Beninese frequently use the French word la sorcel-
lerie to translate both witchcraft and sorcery (see Moore and Sanders 2001).
E. E. Evans-Pritchard ([1937] 1976) famously distinguished between witchcraft
and sorcery among the Azande, who have two separate concepts for magical
acts. The first, which Evans-Pritchard labeled witchcraft, was a psychic, invol-
untary, invisible force that brought harm to people. The second, which he
called sorcery, consisted of intentional, tangible, and learned procedures for
manipulating supernatural forces. While this distinction has long served as
a starting point for anthropological discussions of witchcraft and sorcery in
Africa, in truth the distinction rarely holds up to cross-cultural comparison,
and anthropologists do not always use the terms consistently (Turner 1964).
With respect to Benin, we might ask a number of questions: Is there always
a clearly defined distinction between witchcraft and sorcery in the way that
Evans-Pritchard ([1937] 1976) defined them? How do we discriminate termi-
nologically between benevolent and malevolent magical acts? What is the dif-
ference between a witch, a healer, a sorcerer, and a wizard (see Middleton and
Winter 1963a, 3)? And perhaps most importantly, given the African context,
it is worth asking what differences exist between witchcraft and the domains
we label religion, magic, and science. Although I make no claim of having
solved the terminological dilemma or of being able to portray African witch-
craft in an “authentic” fashion, I do argue that much academic writing has
failed to represent African supernatural worlds in a way that bridges cultural
gaps or in a way that problematizes simplistic characterizations of “witch-
craft.” I believe some of these distortions arise from the fact that Western
academic and folk notions tend to distinguish the occult too facilely from re-
ligion and science, such that the occult is irrevocably relegated to the domain
of the imaginary (see Pocock 1972).
For one thing, Western views take religion for granted and, in Durkheim-
ian fashion, as something that serves a purpose. Although a similar function-
alist approach characterized witchcraft studies of the mid-twentieth century,
 Introduction

a fundamental difference between the treatment of witchcraft and religion

is that witchcraft is often singled out as imaginary—an unreal, irrational (and
implicitly “primitive”) response to life’s problems. Contemporary scholars
often portray African witchcraft as a sign of tension, disharmony, and social
decay, which is in stark contrast to the academic treatment of official religion.
Why is “religious” belief portrayed as distinct from “witchcraft” and immune
to skepticism? What difference exists between witchcraft and religion, other
than the fact that religions typically have institutional and even governmen-
tal legitimacy? My aim here is not to question the legitimacy of religion but
rather to highlight the fact that distinguishing religion from the occult may
contribute to judgmental attitudes about the difference between Africa and
the West.
In the West, the idea of magic carries a performative connotation, which
suggests illusion, deception, and sleight of hand. A trick, by definition, is some-
thing that is unreal and appears to do something recognized as impossible
or false. For my Beninese informants, Western magic performances present a
conundrum to muddy the waters around witchcraft. There is a divergence of
opinion among my informants, with some suggesting that Western magic is
equivalent to witchcraft, while others argue that such shows amount to noth-
ing more than commercialized illusions. Despite the usual secrecy enshroud-
ing acts of witchcraft, some informants pointed out that African witches can
perform similar demonstrations to prove to me that witchcraft exists. They
also noted the magical qualities of the theatrical performances by the Beni-
nese secret society of Zã̀ gbétɔ́, guardians of the night who transform ducks
into turtles beneath a dancing straw tent. Some said the Zã̀ gbétɔ́ are a money-
making theater group that uses illusion, although others contended that the
Zã̀ gbétɔ́ really do have mystical, perhaps witchlike, powers that they cannot
fully reveal in public. Although Westerners may perceive the claims about
African witches as distinct from magic routines, there is much more ambiva-
lence among Beninese respondents.
Science is another domain that, in comparison to witchcraft, generally
goes unquestioned by Westerners. Among academics, science is often viewed
as inherently rational, while witchcraft is implicitly portrayed as irrational.
Though the existence of witchcraft is continually subjected to scrutiny among
scholars, most of them are unlikely to question the reality of science. To the
average Western onlooker, witchcraft is based on faith, fear, and imagina-
tion, and science is founded on observable, reproducible experimentation.
Although Evans-Pritchard (1935, [1937] 1976) made great strides in recogniz-
ing the logical and rational basis of Azande occult beliefs, his bias in favor of
 Introduction 15

observable phenomena led him to conclude that sorcery exists, while witch-
craft does not. Thus emerged a pattern of depicting witchcraft belief as real
but witchcraft itself as imaginary (ter Haar 2007). While many academic
works explicitly or implicitly declare witchcraft’s nonexistence, I have never
met a Beninese of any religion, occupation, or educational level who denies
its existence. Furthermore, when I asked my Beninese friends and informants
a broad question like “what is witchcraft?” a common refrain was that witch-
craft is a “science,” often likened to Western technological inventions such
as cell phones, airplanes, and computers. Some acknowledged a difference
between the two systems of knowledge, claiming that white people possess
science, whereas Africans possess witchcraft. But in the next breath, most
people labeled the former “white people’s witchcraft” and the latter “African
science” (see Ashforth 2005). According to the Western model, science and
witchcraft are incompatible, despite the fact that both rely on specialized
training and experimentation, resulting in fantastic acts. It is the ambivalence
characterizing both the distinction and the convergence between the notions
of the occult and technology that shape the arguments of this book.
In order to unsettle the presumed distinctions between Western domains
of belief, when I refer to witchcraft throughout this work, I intentionally in-
tersperse indigenous words (àzě and bǒ) with English terms (witchcraft and
sorcery) while also drawing on meanings implied by words like technology,
supernatural, occult, mysticism, spirituality, nature, philosophy, magic, med-
icine, religion, and yes, even science. I believe that none of these terms alone
is sufficient to capture how Beninese people view these forces. To reduce the
entire constellation of conceptions to witchcraft runs the risk of essentializing
all acts as negative and imaginary. Yet to label everything as science or tech-
nology has the opposite effect of suggesting that everything is plain, visible,
and true, which would ignore the fact that Beninese people themselves are
constantly questioning what is real or unreal, what is natural or supernatural.
Occasionally, Beninese claim to know how a particular effect is produced,
whereas at other times they do not. By using a variety of English and Fon
words and occasionally their French equivalents, I hope to disrupt the com-
mon understandings of these terms in English, allowing us to see Beninese
concepts, as well as our own, in a new light. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
argues, “A good translation is one that allows the alien concepts to deform
and subvert the translator’s conceptual toolbox so that the intentio of the orig-
inal language can be expressed within the new one” (2004, 5). In casting àzě
as science, religion, medicine, and magic, I endeavor to convey its multiplic-
ity of meanings, as well as the deeply contested sense of these forces in Benin.
 Introduction

African Science
Blurring the lines between religion, science, and magic could make some
fervent rationalists and theologians uncomfortable. Indeed, the majority aca-
demic opinion holds that witchcraft is imaginary; therefore, the belief in such
supernatural forces is irrational. As philosophers Barry Hallen and J. Olubi
Sodipo (1997) point out, Western scholars express embarrassment about the
history of witches in the West; witches are a mark of shame on an otherwise
rational culture. Hallen and Sodipo note that clinical psychologists and other
scholars interpret witchcraft confession as a psychological product of frustra-
tion among subordinate groups or, worse, of mental illness. Current anthropo-
logical scholarship often depicts witchcraft as a metaphor for social turmoil,
finding a language that makes sense to our scientific sensibilities but that does
not automatically demonstrate an acceptance of native belief as true. In an
earlier anthropology, and still in Western folk ideology, magic was portrayed as
a crutch for an inferior mind, or at least as an impoverished explanation in the
absence of a “true” scientific understanding (Malinowski 1948; Thomas 1971).
In a word, witchcraft and magic became “superstition.” By contrast, Christi-
anity and other religions of the developed world receive little of this critical
attention. But as my informants’ testimony shows, the boundary between
magic and religion is exceedingly porous, a position advanced by other writ-
ers. Randall Styers (2004), for example, notes that, despite repeated attempts,
the literature on religion and magic betrays a long history of failed efforts to
define these terms and their separate domains. The conundrum is so vexing
that Claude Lévi-Strauss concluded, “There is no religion without magic any
more than there is magic without at least a trace of religion” (1966, 221). Stan-
ley Jeyaraja Tambiah (1990, 19) tracks the origins of the distinction between
magic and religion in Christian theological debates. He notes that when Prot-
estants were distancing themselves from what they saw as the magical rituals
of Catholicism, they introduced a distinction between prayer and spell, the
former characterizing religion, and the latter being a feature of magic. Tam-
biah notes that these concepts were later adopted by Edward Burnett Tylor
(1871) and James George Frazer (1890) and incorporated into the anthropo-
logical canon.
To the question of why academics continue to use the term “magic,” Ran-
dall Styers argues, “One of the primary functions of magic in this scholarly
literature has been to serve as a foil for religion. . . . Magic is ‘the bastard sister
of religion’” (2004, 6). Styers states that modernity itself has been defined by
the creation of discursive boundaries between “primitive” magic on one side
 Introduction 17

and “modern” science and religion on the other. Magical thought is usually
attributed to colonized peoples, the former “primitives” and “savages” of an
earlier anthropology. The presumed illegitimacy of magic is marshaled in the
effort to define the West as “modern” and therefore superior to “traditional”
societies.4 And anthropologists themselves are not immune to these othering
tendencies. Byron Good (1994), citing Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s (1977) lin-
guistic history of the word “belief,” holds that anthropology’s language of
“belief ” implies doubt or falsehood, often in contrast to Western “knowledge”
or “truth.” This is ironic, given anthropologists’ usual mission of withholding
judgment of other cultures. But it is also emblematic of our instinct to defend
our ontological turf, giving us the satisfaction of presenting our own position
as the correct one.
As for magic and science, there is a similar tendency to take the distinc-
tion for granted. Academics brought up in a Western scientific paradigm are
socialized to regard science as the ultimate source of truth, in contrast to the
superstition of magical systems of thought. But philosophers have criticized
this tendency. Though controversial, Robin Horton’s (1967a) position is that
traditional African religious thought holds many similarities to scientific
thinking (see also Capra 1975). Addressing African spiritual beliefs, Horton
writes:

How could primitives believe that a visible, tangible object was at once its
solid self and the manifestation of an immaterial being? How could a man
literally see a spirit in a stone? These puzzles, raised so vividly by Lévy-Bruhl,
have never been satisfactorily solved by anthropologists. “Mystical thinking”
has remained uncomfortably, indigestibly sui generis. And yet these questions
of Lévy-Bruhl’s have a very familiar ring in the context of European philoso-
phy. Indeed, if we substitute atoms and molecules for gods and spirits, these
turn out to be the very questions . . . posed by modern scientific theory in the
minds of Berkeley, Locke, Quine, and a whole host of European philosophers
from Newton’s time onwards. (1967a, 52)

Horton (1967a, 54) goes on to suggest that both scientists and African divin-
ers display similar thought processes and the use of theory in order to explain
events. Indeed, my own data tend to confirm Horton’s assessment of the
resemblance between scientific and magical thought, in that Beninese people
are not merely slaves to tradition; instead, they constantly doubt what they see
and hear, and they test different ingredients, procedures, and ritual specialists
and then evaluate the results. Horton’s philosophical approach to science and
 Introduction

spirituality is entirely consistent with Beninese people’s own theory as evi-

denced in the supercategory àzě, which combines science, magic, and religion.
Following this model, in the way that Karin Barber (1981) contends that Afri-
can gods are invented by humans in search of concrete results, people are free
to abandon any diviner or healer who is unable to satisfy their needs. Thus,
even in the supernatural realms, African thought demonstrates a practical,
materialistic, and critical approach to life (Mbiti 1969).
Despite these lessons on the similarities between different knowledge sys-
tems, Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992) contends that
science exhibits greater emphasis on systematic experimentation, informa-
tion dissemination, repeatability, and the development of alternative theories.
While he acknowledges that scientists are far from totally neutral, he sug-
gests that religious thought is more concerned with meaning and values than
is science. He identifies some of the possible factors for these differences in
industrial societies’ development of social mobility, individualism, and liter-
acy, all of which promote debates over contrasting ideas. Horton (1967b) him-
self draws a distinction between the “open” scientific outlook and the “closed”
outlook of traditional African thought. Although part 1 of Horton’s article
argues for the similarities between scientific and spiritual thought, part 2
hedged on these claims by declaring that African thought does not allow for
self-critique or the abandonment of a failed theory in the way that science
does. But like Andrew Apter (1992), I argue that African ritual and spiritual
thought do allow for self-reflection, critique, and even the abandonment of
theory. Within African systems of thought lies the potential for dramatic
change and transformation, and this transformative potential is at the heart
of àzě. Àzě is constantly reworking the political and religious landscape while
also being reworked itself through the articulation with Vodun and other
religions and through invention and the borrowing of foreign traditions.
What remain more fixed are larger paradigms—and this is true for both Afri-
can and scientific systems of thought (Appiah 1992). Accordingly, we can rec-
ognize that in Africa, whatever experiences people have are unlikely to cause
them to forsake their resolve that spiritual and supernatural forces exist.
Scientists are likewise resistant to the abandonment of science and ratio-
nality in the face of failed experiments. Thomas Kuhn (1962) was one of the
first to introduce the idea that scientists are themselves embedded in a social
and psychological mindset that makes them resistant to new paradigms that
are inconsistent with their standpoint. Although Kuhn’s theories allow for
scientific shifts, they remind us that science, like religion, is supported by a
degree of faith. Regarding contemporary Western faith in science, Tambiah
 Introduction 19

writes: “A commitment to the notion of nature as the ground of causality can

function as a belief system without its guaranteeing a verified ‘objective truth’
as modern science may define it” (1990, 10). Too little attention is paid to the
magical thinking and faith associated with Western science (see Verrips 2003).
Many researchers talk about the “occult imaginary,” but few interrogate the
“scientific imaginary.” However, following Kuhn, some scholars in the field
of science studies (e.g., Bruno Latour) have questioned science’s privileged
claim to a single reality. These debates, popularly dubbed the “science wars,”
reflected the tension between science’s positing of an independent natural
world and the postmodern argument that science is itself rooted in culture
and therefore a social construction (Latour 1988, 1993). There is much about
the world and the human body of which doctors and scientists are ignorant.
We know little about how drugs operate, how the brain works, or the creation
of the universe. And even what we think we know from science is constructed
via particular instruments, language, and cultural learning. So while I agree
with Horton and Appiah that science and magic may not be identical, there
may be more resemblance than people are comfortable with or accustomed
to admitting. Those who subscribe to Horton’s general message make the
case that the boundaries between religion, magic, and science are a product
of mythmaking, and the myth is founded on particular social and political
agendas related to an enduring discomfort among Westerners with seeing the
Self and Other as one.
Horton makes another important point, claiming that academics often
overlook examples of overtly magico-spiritual thinking in their own societies.
While professional scientists may scoff at magical thinking, they ignore just
how much folk culture embraces and celebrates it. Indeed, magical thought was
never vanquished in the West, and scholars have observed that societies the
world over are experiencing a reenchantment (Geschiere 1997, 2000; Meyer
and Pels 2003; Taylor 2008; van Binsbergen 2001). New Age religion and
Wicca are some recent examples of the ways that Westerners have embraced
the possibility of mystical powers, demonstrating the difficulty in separating
magic from religion. Furthermore, popular culture is filled with a fascination
with mystical and fantastic powers, from Harry Potter, to Voodoo dolls, to
films and television shows about vampires, superheroes, psychics, and time-
travelers. Science fiction has always skirted the fringe between magical fiction
and scientific reality. For example, the 1960s TV series Star Trek anticipated
many innovations like cell phones, teleconferencing, voice-activated comput-
ers, and noninvasive medical devices. One could argue that inventions that
seem purely imaginary today may actually be possible in the future. In fact,
 Introduction

Frances Yates (1964, cited in Tambiah 1990, 29) proposes that magical thought
was actually the inspiration and catalyst for the development of the scientific
movement during the Enlightenment. Thus, alchemy and other practices that
we now consider pseudoscience were very much part of the rich and produc-
tive intellectual climate of the Enlightenment. Today, Star Wars and other
films depict Jedi knights and superheroes with godlike powers, and these
characters come closest to Beninese conceptions of àzètɔ́ (witches). Although
the figure of the “witch” is a much regretted chapter in the history of Western
civilization, one way we might view the witchcraft phenomenon is through
reference to images that are pervasive in our society. Just as Darth Vader was
seduced by the dark side in Star Wars, Beninese worry that religious leaders
and others believed to possess àzě will turn to evil. The moral messages con-
veyed by our superhero stories, about the battle between good and evil and the
corrupting influence of ultimate power, are the same as those found in accounts
of àzètɔ́. But although such characters are generally relegated to a fictional
existence in the West, I must stress that my Beninese friends see them as ter-
ribly real. Thus, comparison to Western fictional characters may provide an
opening to understanding other belief systems, but they cannot take us all the
way. This is why I maintain that to understand witchcraft among Beninese,
we must also take seriously their claims that science and witchcraft occupy
similar domains and that they represent similar modes of knowledge.

Goals of the Book

When one understands the simultaneous juxtaposition and merging of sci-
ence and witchcraft in Africa, it becomes evident that anthropological studies
have missed something in their characterization of occult forces. I believe a
key objective of anthropological study is the rapprochement of peoples and
cultures, but the divide between Africa and the West remains vast when it
comes to witchcraft. In addition to the widespread disbelief in witchcraft
expressed in academic discourse, Western news headlines sensationalize the
stories of child witches in Africa (Houreld 2009; Karimi 2009; Oppenheimer
2010), and human rights groups argue against the mistreatment of accused
witches. Yet in a number of African nations, the acceptance of witchcraft’s
reality is so pervasive that courts regularly hear witchcraft cases and sentence
accused witches (Geschiere and Fisiy 1994). To the average European or Amer-
ican, such events are unimaginable, or perhaps it is more accurate to say they
are only imaginable, because witchcraft appears so far from reality.
My intent is not to try to convince readers of the existence of witchcraft,
nor is my position a claim of authority to define reality. Instead, I hope the
 Introduction 21

contribution of this book is to destabilize common perceptions of witchcraft

and shed light on how Beninese people see and experience occult forces.
Doing this might help remove some of the stigma and the exotic perception
of African people’s mystical worlds. Readers might understandably want to
know whether I actually “believe” in witchcraft (see Viveiros de Castro 2013).
In fact, some Beninese informants interpreted my research as a quest for
proof of witchcraft, as if I were a messenger who could show Americans that
witchcraft is real. In some ways, this was Gaston’s desire, which will have to
remain unfulfilled for now, since I did not witness many demonstrations (and
I never sought them). Moreover, those informants trying to protect esoteric
knowledge might have seen my inquiries as a quest to appropriate their
knowledge and power, leading them to distrust me. In any event, I usually
explained that I was neither trying to prove witchcraft’s reality nor trying to
make off with their secrets. In fact, many of my Beninese friends and infor-
mants have never seen explicit proof; instead, they have interpreted misfor-
tune, sudden death, incredible coincidence, and confession as sufficient proof
of the existence of invisible forces. As for me, after listening to their accounts
and testimonials, I am more receptive to these ideas than before. Over a
twenty-year span of working in Benin, with the longest stay of two years, I
have come to see many Beninese as close friends and even family. And when
these rational, trustworthy friends and family declare the existence of some-
thing, I am naturally more inclined to take it seriously than if it came from
strangers. As to what I believe, I confess that this remains a struggle for me.
In my life in the United States, witches are not real; but, as I describe in chap-
ter 3, while in Benin I found myself occasionally fearful of witchcraft as I was
drawn into the perspective of my friends. This has made me sympathetic to
the notion of alternate realities (Kapferer 2002), but realities that nevertheless
can be bridged through human connection, such as that created through eth-
nographic fieldwork. After a number of years of close contact with a people
and their culture, I have not only begun to appreciate the social conditions that
permit people to believe something but have also become sensitive to how
they believe it on a personal, emotional, and embodied level. Yet, like many of
my informants, I cannot blindly accept all claims of supernatural power, so I
continue to ask questions and wonder what elements of witchcraft, religion,
and science are real, false, hidden, or overt. Because ethnography is inherently
about storytelling, I attempt to convey these epistemological and ontological
struggles through my own and my informants’ accounts of our experiences.
I acknowledge that reading ethnography is a far cry from doing ethnography,
and so I cannot expect my audience to feel the same transformative effects
 Introduction

that I have felt over the course of long-term fieldwork. At the same time, I
contend that even receiving a glimpse of Beninese life provided in this book
might be enough to provoke thought and raise questions that can unsettle
some of what readers take for granted.
However, ethnography is also a social science, so my stories are not meant
to inspire exotic or voyeuristic reactions; instead, I hope that a reader can view
these phenomena through various theoretical lenses and consider the rami-
fications of the different perspectives for foreigners’ ability to respect and
empathize with African people. This book employs a variety of theoretical
and methodological approaches coming out of the sociological and anthro-
pological traditions. As a social scientist, I cannot deny some of the social
functions (or rather the social effects) of occult behaviors and beliefs. For
example, the occult may serve as a leveling mechanism when the fears of
envy-inspired witchcraft cause more fortunate individuals to downplay their
successes (Rosenthal 1998) or to share their wealth with less fortunate family
members (Fisiy 1998). Witchcraft may also serve to promote social confor-
mity and to reduce the expression of hostility (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976).
It is clear that jealousy, envy, and inequality are key components of the fears
and suspicions of witchcraft in Africa, and this observation is made readily by
ordinary Beninese people. Following the modernity school in witchcraft stud-
ies, I acknowledge the idea that witchcraft and occult fears accompany (or
symbolize) the spread of capitalism and the resulting inequality and social
upheaval (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Taussig 1980).5 Furthermore, given
witchcraft’s gender imagery and the fact that accusations are unequally directed
at women, feminist perspectives suggest that witchcraft may reflect both male
fears of a threatened status quo and the patriarchal power to scapegoat women
as witches. I also explore the possibility that the occult expresses Africans’
frustration with Western-inspired “development” and a postcolonial desire to
offer an African alternative to Western ways of knowing (Falen 2007; Smith
2008; West 2005). Despite the value in these theoretical interpretations, we
must use our scientific perspectives cautiously. Bruce Kapferer argues that
occult beliefs are too often “boxed away into familiar sociological and rational
categories: witchcraft as resistance, witchcraft as the folk explanation of mis-
fortune, or witchcraft and sorcery as types of ‘social diagnosis’ (Moore and
Sanders 2001). The practices are domesticated to the analysts’ own sensibilities.
There is a tendency towards a too easy glossing of the phenomena in ques-
tion, a brushing aside of dynamics that are not immediately and externally
self-evident” (2002, 20). Therefore, although I acknowledge the utility of our
theoretical tools for understanding some aspects of witchcraft, this book also
 Introduction 23

takes inspiration from the phenomenological method pioneered by Jeanne

Favret-Saada (1980) and Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes (1987) and partially
adopted by Harry West (2007) and Adam Ashforth (2005). In anthropology
the phenomenological approach typically involves privileging experience and
the lived worlds of others, as opposed to abstract theorizing in the anthropol-
ogist’s intellectual tradition (Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Jackson 2013; Katz
and Csordas 2003). Phenomenological anthropology often includes a narra-
tive ethnographic writing style that employs engaging first-person accounts
to emphasize bodily or emotional experiences within the fieldwork process
(Ram and Houston 2015). While this book is not strictly a phenomenological
ethnography, I follow these authors in employing some narrative techniques
to demonstrate my perceptions and experiences living in a world inhabited by
witches. In other words, I take seriously my Beninese friends’ expressions of
fear or pride and their testimonies about mystical powers because I believe in
the necessity of anchoring my analysis in the beliefs of my Beninese friends
and informants and in “taking [my] intellectual cues from their concerns”
(Jackson 2013, 254). Apter writes: “Whatever the methodological concern—
functionalism with authority, Marxism with contradiction and change, struc-
turalism with binary contrast and equivalence, phenomenology with the con-
struction of experience—the interpretation of cultural forms must begin with
the people, not the ethnographer” (1991, 223). Therefore, I have determined
that, whatever methodological techniques or theoretical interpretations I
employ, I should also write this book in a manner such that my Beninese
friends would recognize their views and beliefs in my words. As a result,
much of my analysis is inspired by Beninese people’s claims that witchcraft
is a science with important links to religion, philosophy, and global spiritual
movements.
In addition to investigating philosophical questions about science and the
occult, this book is about the articulation between the occult and organized
religions in Benin, including Christianity and the indigenous polytheistic reli-
gion of Vodun, found among the Fon- and Ewe-speaking peoples and related
ethnic groups of southern Togo and Benin. In some ways, by highlighting
the connections between witchcraft and Vodun, I am in danger of feeding
exoticism and popular stereotypes about Vodun and its New World cousin,
Voodoo. American popular culture in the form of film, TV, music, and video
games depicts these African-based religious traditions as equivalent to black
magic and witchcraft. A great deal of scholarship has gone into dispelling this
unfortunate conflation, particularly with respect to Haitian Vodou (Brown
2001; Desmangles 1992; Herskovits [1937] 1971). Caribbeanist authors have
 Introduction

endeavored to distinguish between serving the legitimate spirits, on the

one hand, and seeking to manipulate illegitimate supernatural forces, on the
other. I must state early on and emphatically that this same distinction exists
in Benin, so it would be a fallacy to claim that practicing the Vodun religion
is tantamount to casting evil spells. Ordinary adherents of Vodun (known as
Voduisants) do not equate their religion with magic, and even less with nefar-
ious actions. Nevertheless, scholars of Afro-Caribbean religion have acknowl-
edged the blurred lines between the Haitian “good” priest (hungan) and “evil”
priest (bocor) (Brown 2001; Herskovits [1937] 1971), and there are also impor-
tant links between the legitimate and illegitimate spiritual domains in Benin.
This book outlines both distinctions and connections between Vodun and the
occult, bringing to light the similarities shared by the Vodun religious tradi-
tion and New World Vodou. Perhaps because indigenous religions are in re-
treat in many African countries, other recent works on African occult forces
do not delve deeply into the role of indigenous religions in the occult or into
the connections between witchcraft and the organized worship of divinities.
Vodun is alive and flourishing in southern Benin, opposing and interacting
with other religions and supernatural forces.
One thing this book does not offer is a historical examination of witchcraft
and the processes through which Benin developed its own unique character-
istics (see Ranger 2007). While that would be a worthy task for a historian,
my interest lies more in the ethnographic endeavor and the ways witchcraft
ideas are currently marshaled in the quest to respond to life’s challenges and
opportunities. When possible, I refer to older ethnographic accounts of Benin,
but their treatment of witchcraft and the occult is often superficial or nonex-
istent. Although there appear to be recent and dramatic changes in Beninese
understandings of witchcraft, I do not mean to imply that witchcraft is some-
thing new. Linguistic cognates of àzě exist in neighboring languages (adze
in Ewe and aje in Yoruba), demonstrating that the term and the category
have old roots in the region.6 Based on reports from elsewhere in Africa, it is
clear that Benin is part of a broader pattern whereby witchcraft articulates
with morality, kinship, health, development, and the state. While these fea-
tures allow witchcraft to transcend the local and engage with globalizing
trends and spiritual influences, this is an ethnography of a particular place
that should not be considered identical to other parts of Africa.
In many ways, the study of witchcraft is really the study of the whole of a
culture, since it touches on many other social fields in southern Benin, includ-
ing notions of science and causality, family, religion, sexuality, wealth, jealousy,
envy, political power, morality, health, and identity. Though I cannot hope to
 Introduction 25

cover each of these issues with equal or comprehensive attention, this book
will provide a sense of the important, even seminal, role of witchcraft and
the occult in contemporary southern Beninese society. My goal is to weave
together a number of threads, namely: (1) witchcraft is perceived as a science,
a typically “African” science that inspires pride among residents of this post-
colonial nation; (2) like technology, the occult can be applied to both destruc-
tive and productive ends, informing Beninese racial comparisons between
Africans and foreign others; (3) discourses of witchcraft’s good and evil sides
reflect an abiding philosophical outlook about duality and cosmic balance;
(4) Beninese people’s belief in the convergence of science, witchcraft, and reli-
gion calls into question Western disciplinary distinctions and creates fertile
ground for thinking about alternate realities; and (5) Beninese occult beliefs
involve a universal notion of power in the world that includes science, technol-
ogy, religion, and healing, opening the door for the appropriation of foreign
religions and esoteric traditions.
 chapter one

 Àzě and Bǒ
Witchcraft and Sorcery in Benin

P eople in Benin speak frequently of malevolent individuals and the powers

they harness to attack others. In the Fon language of southern Benin, there
are two terms for these occult forces, àzě and bǒ, both of which are rendered
in French as la sorcellerie (“witchcraft” or “sorcery” in English). Benin was a
French colony until 1960, and French remains the official language, so most
educated people use French terms interchangeably with indigenous ones.1 As
the single French term suggests, both Fon words generally denote mystical,
malevolent abilities, but Beninese typically point out that the two phenomena
are different. In fact, in some ways àzě and bǒ correspond to E. E. Evans-
Pritchard’s ([1937] 1976) account of the Azande distinction between witchcraft
and sorcery. In this chapter, I relate Fon terms to Evans-Pritchard’s conceptual
dyad for defining the two varieties of magic and describe how people acquire
and use these powers to kill, protect, and manipulate the world to their ad-
vantage. I discuss the recent rise in child witchcraft and the association of
femininity with witchcraft to lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding
of the social tensions and ambiguities surrounding the occult in Benin. This
chapter also focuses on the negative functions of the occult, since stories of
death and misfortune are the most usual topics of discussion. Although I take
pains to convey how many informants differentiate between àzě and bǒ, I
should stress that this distinction exists only on one level of discourse—the
most public—and this was how I understood these two occult forces in my
earlier fieldwork. A casual observer would perceive two separate but primar-
ily malevolent practices, but as I explain in chapter 2, the occult cannot be
reduced to its negative side, and many of the differences between àzě and
bǒ unraveled following deeper questioning of healers, priests, and others who
take an interest in these supernatural matters. In other words, we might think
of the discourse regarding àzě and bǒ as existing in two different styles of

26
 Àzě and Bǒ 27

speech, or registers. In the present chapter, I outline the ordinary, public reg-
ister used to describe occult forces. People using this register are employing
a default classification of àzě and bǒ, one that is common to ordinary people
and others making standard comments about witchcraft and sorcery. Chap-
ter 2 draws on another register that admits to ambiguity between àzě and
bǒ and to the possibilities of benevolent witchcraft. We must be cautious
about regarding one register as “correct.” As I will show throughout this book,
in all matters related to witchcraft, there are multiple and contradictory views
among people, so we cannot declare a definitive or consensus understanding
of witchcraft and its manifestations.

Àzě
Evans-Pritchard’s ([1937] 1976) original distinction between witchcraft and
sorcery among the Azande is a useful starting point for understanding the
supernatural practices of àzě and bǒ in southern Benin. Like the Azande,
many Beninese people say that there is a difference between involuntary psy-
chic powers, on the one hand, and intentional magical actions, on the other.
The basic Beninese conception of àzě as an internal, invisible, and involun-
tary power suggests that it is similar to Evans-Pritchard’s definition of Azande
witchcraft. And like Azande sorcery, bǒ are tangible magical formulae and
objects. If we were required to find English equivalents for these two terms,
àzě could be translated as “witchcraft,” and bǒ could be translated as “sorcery,”
“magic,” or “charm.” But unlike Evans-Pritchard’s witchcraft, àzě is not neces-
sarily inherited, because it can be transmitted from an àzètɔ́ (witch) to another
individual (discussed below). As Victor Turner (1964) correctly established,
Evans-Pritchard’s distinction between witchcraft and sorcery does not apply
precisely nor everywhere in Africa, but in the public register we do find some
striking similarities between Beninese and Azande beliefs.
When first asked to define àzě, people generally described a mystical psy-
chic ability, an invisible evil force. Others described àzě as “knowledge of
the night,” les choses obscures (hidden/obscure things), a “typically African”
supernatural power, a limitless force, a science of the invisible, the ability to
leave one’s body, or an ultimate strength held in the stomach. The variety of
characterizations is typical of the multifaceted and indeterminate nature of
àzě, but most would agree that àzě is a divine power that inheres in people or
other supernatural entities. As with Azande witchcraft, the dominant notion
of àzě is negative, since it produces evil, death, and betrayal. People fear and
despise àzètɔ́ and frequently blame them for the deaths of loved ones or for
bad luck and illness. Àzètɔ́ can cause impotence in men and infertility in
 Àzě and Bǒ

women, and they make people go insane or lose all their money. They can
take the form of someone else and commit nefarious acts for which the other
person is blamed. An àzètɔ́ can turn into a bull in the middle of the road and
cause the driver to have an accident. Many said that àzě involuntarily compels
someone to harm, kill, or consume other people. Usually, àzètɔ́ are said to
attack family members, and an àzètɔ́’s own children are some of the most
frequent targets. One man in Bohicon offered the following expression as a
metaphor for àzě targeting family members: “Xɔnɔ ́ ̀ ̃ wɛ̀ nɔ̃ ze zẽ bo e nɔ̃ hu
ajakà” (It is the owner of the house who lifts the jar to kill the mouse; i.e.,
family members “own” each other and therefore control each other’s life and
death). Other expressions further illustrate this sentiment: “Mɛ e sɛ kpɔ mɛ,
ye wɛ̀ nɔ̃ wa nu xa mɛ” (Those who are close to you are the ones who do you
harm); “Àzě nɔ̃ hu aliwáyitɔ ǎ” (Àzě does not kill strangers).
Most people affirm that a key motive for witches to kill is envy, like that
directed at a brother who is more successful or at a cowife whose children
are favored by their father. People said that ill will and rancor usually occur
between individuals who know each other well; even if they are not family,
they are likely to be friends or coworkers. Although inequality exists between
strangers, it is the inequality between intimates that generates social tension
(Geschiere 2013). This tension takes the form of envy and jealousy, which
people assert lie at the heart of witchcraft fears and motives. Envy, the desire
for what someone else possesses, reportedly drives poor people to employ
witchcraft in an effort to bring down a wealthy sibling or friend. Jealousy is
the fear that someone will take away what one already has, and this is the
rationale for prosperous people to take supernatural precautions to protect
against attack. While the rich are looking over their shoulder, their less fortu-
nate friends suspect that the wealthy are likely to have used witchcraft to
become rich in the first place. Although envy and jealousy can be differenti-
ated in this way, Fon speakers tend to use a single term, ùhwã́ , which conveys
the general tension between those who possess something and those who do
not. Therefore, the envy/jealousy dynamic associated with inequality is inti-
mately connected to witchcraft motives, fears, and suspicions. Some suggested
a slightly different understanding of inequality that does not manifest as
either jealousy or envy. In this version, a witch could launch an attack against
someone who stops helping her financially. An official in Abomey’s court sys-
tem provided just such an example. He told me about a man who moved
to the United States and became wealthy and successful. On visits home, he
would regularly give gifts of money to his aunt. During one such trip, the
aunt’s door was closed, so he passed by without making his usual gift. In front
 29

of the entire family, his aunt accused him of neglect and threatened him with
a supernatural attack. Although her relatives tried to calm her, and she claimed
that all was forgiven, from that moment on the man became confused and
deranged. He eventually abandoned his life in America and returned to Benin
before dying prematurely. This case demonstrates that curtailing one’s gener-
osity can engender as much resentment as outright hostility. This contributes
to the notion that àzètɔ́ can be fickle and unpredictable, often harming those
who help other people and show them sympathy, in particular, members of
one’s own family. Indeed, the kinship-based conception of witchcraft was so
strong that in my early fieldwork I was often reassured that my status as a
foreigner meant that I had nothing to fear from witchcraft in Benin. For a
number of years, people continued to accept my claims that, since I had no
witches in my family, I must be invulnerable to witchcraft.
Despite the fact that the default conception of àzě locates the threat within
families, some people acknowledged that àzě now extends beyond the fam-
ily. Given that each family is presumed to contain at least one àzètɔ́ and that
àzètɔ́ work in collaboration with each other, most people admit that anyone
is a potential victim. Informants explained that an àzètɔ́ with a grudge against
a nonfamily member can contact another àzètɔ́ in the victim’s family, and
this connection allows the aggressor to carry out his or her wishes. Much as
Charles Piot (2010) has observed of witchcraft in neighboring Togo, there are
widespread reports that àzě is changing, such that àzètɔ́ can now attack un-
related people. Likewise, Peter Geschiere (2013) observes this trend occurring
elsewhere on the continent, inspiring fear that witchcraft can now target any-
one, not only kin.2 Nevertheless, a healer in a village south of Abomey said,
“A ma ko wa nu ɖe àzètɔ́ wa ɔ, e na ɖu we ǎ” (If you don’t do anything to an
àzètɔ́, s/he won’t eat you), and most people acknowledge that àzètɔ́ do not
attack indiscriminately but rather target those who have wronged them or
those of whom they are envious. An Abomey man offered an expression to
illustrate this point: “E zu àzètɔ́ sĩ nɔ̃ yo me, e ko kpe bo e ɖa we ɖu” (It’s
enough for you to insult an àzètɔ́’s mother for her to cook and eat you). This
reinforces the notion that àzě operates primarily within a community.
Despite claims that àzě is motivated by anger, jealousy, and envy, people
also maintain that it compels people to kill, even against their will. Because
àzètɔ́ operate in groups, each member of the coven is required to take a turn
in providing a victim (usually a relative) to be shared (“eaten”) by the group.
This is the most common explanation for why children would be the targets
of àzètɔ́. Among family and friends, food sharing is a demonstration of con-
nection, trust, friendship, and solidarity, and the communalism among àzètɔ́
 Àzě and Bǒ

mimics this ethic of sharing. It is ironic that àzètɔ́ live by these same social
conventions, even when àzě represents the opposite values of animosity,
deceit, and betrayal. At the same time, this fits with the notion of àzètɔ́ inhab-
iting a parallel, opposite world governed by similar social rules, but with a
perverse morality. Several informants noted that àzètɔ́ are like thieves because
they operate at night, they flout ordinary social conventions, and they main-
tain secrecy and solidarity within the group. People also spoke of the àzě soci-
ety being an ordered hierarchy with different ranks, including a government
with leaders, judges, and lawyers, just like the daytime world of ordinary soci-
ety. The witches also have rules resembling the social obligations of the popu-
lar financial collectives (tontine in French, gbɛ̌ in Fon), where each member
must contribute his or her share at regular intervals or risk being punished
(see Falen 2011). But in the case of the àzètɔ́ society, a person must offer a
human victim rather than money. There were conflicting reports of whether
àzètɔ́ are supposed to actually or metaphorically eat people. Some informants
contended that àzètɔ́ are cannibals who eat human flesh, but most said that
àzètɔ́ do not eat a person’s body; instead, they mystically consume a person’s
life force or his or her soul, known as sɛ́ in Fon.3 They do this by magically
transforming the victim’s sɛ́ into an animal that can be cooked and eaten.
People said the victim takes the form of a fish, an agouti (a large bush rodent),
a goat, a pig, a chicken, or some other comestible animal. The image of con-
sumption is central to àzètɔ́ activity. When describing attacks, people used
the Fon word ɖu (to eat), as in “é nɔ̃ ɖu mɛ” (s/he eats someone; i.e., s/he
attacks someone using àzě, s/he is an àzètɔ́). Eating is the ultimate metaphor
for using or controlling people and resources. In Benin, as elsewhere in Africa,
it is through the idiom of food and eating that people describe sex, gifts, and
corruption (Bayart 1993). Àzě is also said to exist in the stomach; once you eat
it, it resides permanently in your belly. Still others claimed ignorance of the
nature of attacks, simply stating that witches kill by some invisible and mysteri-
ous power. Àzètɔ́ are said to convene nocturnal meetings, during which they
collectively feast on a victim. These meetings take place in the forest, often
beneath or within large trees like the baobab and iroko.4 While victims sleep
in their beds, the witches’ souls, whose bodies are also asleep, travel in the
dreamworld to mystically capture their victims and take them to their meet-
ings, where the victims’ souls are transformed into animals, cooked, and eaten.
Consuming a person’s soul induces sickness or death in the victim, which can
last for weeks or months, suggesting that consumption is a lengthy process.
At its essence, àzě is about transformation—of àzètɔ́ themselves, of their
victims, of the power of good and evil. Àzètɔ́ can transform into other people,
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 What was the real truth may be doubtful, but I was clear the
“ballanse of account” was not groceries, and struck it out; yet, had
the mother succeeded, she would have pursued her son-in-law to
prison in an endeavour to collect the money.
For my part I think it is bad business for the community that
homes should be broken up in order that a creditor may collect a
trumpery debt that should never have been incurred, and it is
because I believe it is the interest of the State to keep together the
home of the working-man, and to deliver him from temptation, that
I hope to see imprisonment for debt diminished, if not abolished
altogether. An intelligent landlord wishing to preserve game kills off
birds of prey and puts down poachers. An intelligent State, if it
wishes to preserve the home of the working-man and his wife and
children, should make it illegal for him to mortgage his future
earnings, and to place his liberty in jeopardy in order to possess for
the moment some shoddy piece of jewellery or drapery for which he
has no real use.
 THE FOLK-LORE OF THE COUNTY
COURT.

“To those athirst the whole world seems

A spring of water in their dreams.”

From the Arabic.

Being snowed up in a library, well stocked with modern scientific

folk-lore, I began a serious study of the subject. I started with
enthusiasm. I saw myself propounding a new theory for every
variant text, and pictured myself triumphantly riding through the
otherworld on the Ossianic cycle. After a few days of it, however, I
found that, wonderful as the science was, it was not made for me. I
ran into a thick German fog, I got mixed up with sagzug and
märchen, I failed to appreciate the true differences between those
holy men, Zimmer and Rohde, and I wandered aimlessly among
parallels and analogues of varying age and provenance. When I
emerged from the German fog I found myself staggering about a
bleak Irish moor in company with a fellow named Cormac—or was it
Finn? We were studying the Dinnshenchas, or playing with an
Agallamh or looking for a Leprechaun. It was worse than political
economy, or logic, or the lost tribes. The fiscal problem is merriment
compared to folk-lore. I finished my holiday with Trollope and have
put folk-lore on my index expurgatorius.
One thing, however, haunts me still. I seem to have escaped from
the learned confusions of this dismal science with a belief that the
world is certainly not progressing. They took a lot of trouble at
school to persuade me that the world kept going round. Since I have
dipped into folk-lore I find this to be only part of the truth. The fact
seems to be that the world does nothing else but go round and
round and round, reiterating its old ideas in a very tiresome way
indeed. The things we do and gossip and preach about to-day are
much the same as the things they worried over in the ages of caves
and mammoths and flint implements. I feel sorry that I cannot
explore folk-lore further, for there are evidently great possibilities in
it. But folk-lore is like collecting stamps, or keeping gold-fish or
guinea-pigs. It is a “fancy,” and if you don’t fancy it you cannot be of
the “fancy.” The slang of the science is too difficult for most of us,
and if you cannot master the technical terms of a game, how can
you hope to play it? Even football would be dull if you had no
elementary conception of “off-side,” and it is easier to get “off-side”
at folk-lore than it is at football. Then these scientists are so solemn.
Euclid has his pictures and occasionally admits that things are
absurd; but the smiles of folk-lore are in the otherworld, and even
their ghosts do not appear to the latter-day student.
I should never have troubled further about folk-lore had not I met
one of its greatest professors. To him I unburdened myself and told
my trouble. “Folk-lore books,” he explained, “are not made to read.
They are written to amuse the writer. You write about folk-lore—then
you will begin to enjoy it.” I remembered that Lord Foppington held
similar views when he said: “To mind the inside of a book is to
entertain one’s self with the forced product of another man’s brain.
Now, I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused
with the natural sprouts of his own.” An idea held in common by a
peer and a professor must be precious indeed.
I modestly murmured that I knew nothing about folk-lore. To
which the Professor encouragingly remarked that I should “approach
the subject with an open mind.” “There is one royal road to success,”
he said, as we parted, “have a theory of your own, and whatever
happens, stick to it.”
Now curiously enough, I had a theory about folk-lore. It was the
simple common idea that comes to many children even in their
earliest school-days. The schoolmasters were all wrong. The
professors of folk-lore were teaching it upside down. Instead of
beginning with ancient legends and working back towards to-day,
they should begin with to-day and march forward into the past. I
wired to the Professor about it—reply prepaid. His answer was
encouraging. “Theory probably Celtic origin; stick.”
As my business is to preside over a County Court, I went down to
my work full of my theory and determined at all costs to stick to it. I
know that to the pathologist a County Court is merely a gathering-
place for microbes, and a centre point of infection; that the reformer
sees in it only a cumbrous institution for deciding unnecessary
disputes, whilst the facile reporter comes there to wash from its
social dirt a few ounces of golden humour for his latest headline.
These are but surface views. I went there like the poet, “whose
seed-field is Time,” to find folk-lore, and I was overwhelmed.
No sooner did I enter the Court, as I had done many and many a
hundred times, than the High Bailiff, rising in his place, called out, as
he, too, had done many a hundred times, “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes!
All persons having business in the Manchester County Court draw
near and give attention.” At once I knew that the place I was in
belonged to the old days of fairies and knights, and ladies and
giants, and heroes and dragons. The “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” struck my
certain ear and told me I was in the presence of folk-lore. The
creeping voice of the old world came stealing across the ages,
calling upon me “Oyez!” “Hear!” and if you can “Understand!” It
seemed to bring its message with a sly chuckle as if to say, “There
you are, my modern, up-to-date, twentieth century judicial person,
beginning your day’s work with the same old cry that has called men
together to listen to official wisdom for centuries of time.”
My friend the High Bailiff has not, I am sure, the least notion that
he is, from a folk-lore point of view, a man of parallels and
analogues, or that the “fancy” would undoubtedly classify him along
with that most beautiful of human fritillaries, the Herald. For indeed,
in everything but glory of costume, he is one of those delightful
figures of the middle ages who carried challenges and messages of
peace and war, and set out the lists in jousts and tournaments, and
witnessed combats and wagers of battle—which my friend sits and
watches to-day—and recorded the names of those who did valiantly,
and remembered the dead when the fight was over—which to-day
he leaves to the reporters. Here in this dingy court in a Manchester
back street students of folk lore may see a real Herald calling out
“Oyez! Oyez!” announcing that the lists are open, and that anyone
may come prancing into Court and throw down his glove—with the
post-heroic gloss of a treasury hearing fee upon it—and that if the
challenge be taken up, the fight may proceed according to the
custom of County Courts.
I would inaugurate a movement to apparel the High Bailiff in
scarlet and gold lace, and I would have him ride into Court on a
white palfrey, sounding a trumpet, but that I fear it would lead to
jealousy among Registrars. Besides, some envious German Professor
will, I know, point out that as a crier my High Bailiff is more akin to
the Praeco of a Roman auction, and that the village town crier is his
poor relation. The answer to this is that his auctioneering tendencies
really belong to his bailiff cycle, as the “fancy” would say. And as a
bailiff we could, did time permit, trace him in dry-as-dust glossaries
and abridgments, through a line of sheriffs of counties, and stewards
of manors, and in various forms of governors and superintendents,
until we lose sight of him as a kind of tutor to the sons of emperors
in the twilight of the gods.
Let the High Bailiff call on the first case, and say with Richard
Plantagenet, Duke of York:

This is the day appointed for the combat,

And ready are the appellant and defendant,
The armourer and his man to enter the lists;
So please your Highness to behold the fight.

It seems a real pity that we no longer follow the rubric of the

Second Part of Henry VI., and that we cannot see Horner enter with
his neighbours “bearing his staff with a sand-bag fastened to it,” on
the other side, “Peter with a drum and a sand-bag.” Horner and
Peter to-day would make a much better fight of it, thumping each
other with sand-bags, than they do “barging” at each other with
tongues, and they would be better friends afterwards. With a small
charge for admission, too, and two houses a night, the County
Courts might be self-supporting.
But we have not got very far away from the wager of battle after
all. The hired champion is still with us from the house of the old
Knights Templars, but he breaks his wit against his adversary instead
of a lance. In another hundred years or so our methods of settling
disputes may seem as laughable and melodramatic to our more
reasonable great grandchildren as our grandfathers’ romantic
methods seem to us. They may think that fees paid to eminent
counsel, dressed in antique shapes, to exhibit their powers before
packed galleries, according to the ancient and musty rules of a game
that is wholly out of date, is an absurd way of endeavouring to
reconcile human differences. The whole thing must before long, one
would think, tumble into the dustbin of history and become folk-lore.
But the legendary charm of the absurdity will always remain. Sir
Edward Clarke or Mr. Rufus Isaacs, appearing for an injured ballet-
girl in a breach of promise case against a faithless and wicked peer,
is only a new setting of the story of Perseus and Andromeda, with
the golden addition of a special fee. Perhaps there is even a parallel
for the special fee in the old myth, for may it not be said that in a
sense Perseus was moved to leave his usual circuit, and appear
against the dragon by the tempting special fee of Andromeda
herself? Could such a glorious figure be marked on the brief of to-
day, what eloquence we should listen to.
The longer one stays in a County Court, the more does the
atmosphere seem charged with folk-lore. Sagas seem to float in the
air with the soot of our smoky chimneys, and wraiths of old customs
swim in the draughty currents of cold that whistle under our doors.
No sooner does a witness step into the box than one perceives that
he too is an eternal type, and our methods of dealing with him as
everlasting as the forms of the waves. The Greeks with all their
noble ideals were a practical people, and the exactitude of their
terminology is beyond praise; with a true instinct they described
their witness as μάρτυς, a martyr. For, in the Golden Age, and
equally I take it, in the Bronze, Stone, and Flint Chip period, the only
way to stimulate your witness to truth was by blood or fire. These
rough, kind-hearted, jovial, out-of-door fellows had not considered
the superior and more subtle torture of cross-examination. The rack
and the stake were good enough for them. Yet I feel sorry for the
Greeks. How an Athenian mob would have enjoyed the intellectual
entertainment of Mr. Hawkins, Q.C., administering one of those
searching cross-examinations so lovingly described in Lord
Brampton’s “Book of Martyrs.” Many others I have heard greatly
skilled in this truly gentle art, but no one who played the game with
such sporting strictness or approached his task with such loving joy.
To see a witness in his hands made one feel almost jealous of the
victim. To say this is only to say that to be a great advocate you
must also be a great sportsman. How many moderns could handle a
witness after the manner of Master Izaak Walton dealing with his
frog? “I say, put your hook, I mean the arming-wire, through his
mouth and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and silk sew
the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of
your hook; or tie the frog’s leg above the upper joint to the armed
wire; and, in so doing, use him as though you loved him, that is,
harm him as little as you may possibly that he may live the longer.”
Alas! Lord Brampton’s arming-wire is laid on the shelf, and the pike
in his pool mourns for Master Izaak—but what sportsmen they were.
Really, when I think of the sorrows of the human frog in the witness-
box, I begin to think the hour is coming to start a Witness
Preservation Society with a paid secretary and a London office. It
would be a charity—and there is a lot of money in charity nowadays.
Some day I will write a book the size of a Wensleydale cheese on
the folk-lore of evidence. It should be written in German, but
unfortunately I am such a bigoted Imperialist that I have patriotically
avoided the study of the tongue. It should perhaps be published in
several cheeses, and the biggest cheese should be all about the
Oath. It was the flood of folk-lore on this subject that overwhelmed
me when I first began to consider the matter.
In our County Court we administered two oaths.[1] The Scotch
oath, with uplifted hand, and the English oath, with its undesirable
ceremony of kissing the Book. The Scotch form is incomparably the
older, and though some maintain that the hand of the witness is
lifted to show he has no weapon about him, there seems no doubt
that the sounder view is that both Judge and witness are really each
lifting his hand in appeal to the Deity. In this way did the Greeks lift
their hands at the altars of their gods when they made sacrifice. In
similar fashion was the oath to Wodin administered in the Orkneys
by two persons joining their hands through the hole in the ring-
stone of Stennis. So also Aaron “lifted up his hand toward the
people.” And it is no stretch of imagination to suppose the lifting of
the hands to the sun to have been one of the most natural and
solemn attitudes of early man. In the Scotch form of oath we seem
to have a ceremony that has been with us from the earliest dawn of
humanity. I have seen this oath administered in a Scotch Court, and
it certainly still retains many of the solemn incidents of a religious
ceremony, and compares very favourably from a serious dramatic
point of view with the English oath as administered here. The fact
that the Judge administers the oath himself, standing with hand
uplifted, is impressive, at all events to those to whom it is not made
stale by custom. To me it seems a very appropriate ceremony in an
old-world system of law such as prevails in Scotland, where there
are numerous judges and not too much work to do. In a busy
English urban County Court, it would render the life of a Judge
uninsurable.
Our English oath is a much younger branch of the family. I have
made my own theory of its incidents, and remembering my
professor’s advice, I propose to stick to it. It is a quite modern idea
that the oath should be taken on the New Testament. Sir Geoffrey
Boleyn, writing to John Paston in 1460, says that the late Sir John
Falstafe in his place at Suffolk, “by his othe made on his primer then
granted and promitted me to have his manner of Gunton.” Even as
late as 1681, Coke’s “Institutes” print a form of oath with the Roman
Catholic adjuration, “So help you God and all Saints.” An Irish
woman in Salford County Court quite recently objected to kiss the
Book, and desired to kiss a crucifix. But the “kissing” idea is very
modern. In 1681 it seems clear that kissing the Book was not a
necessary official act. All that was necessary was to place the hand
upon the Bible. “It is called a corporall oath,” writes Coke, “because
he toucheth with his hand some part of the Holy Scripture.”
The efficacy of the “touch” runs through all the old legends, and
we have an amusing survival of it to-day when a punctilious Crier
insists upon a nervous lady struggling out of her glove before he will
hand her the Book, and again, in the peremptory order constantly
given by a clerk when handing the Book to a witness, “Right hand, if
you please.” For these demands there is as far as I know no legal
sanction, and I take them to be echoes of the social system of these
islands that prevailed some time prior to the building of Stonehenge.
Touching a sacred object seems a world-wide method of oath-
taking. The Somali—who are not yesterday’s children—have a special
sacred stone, and observe a very beautiful ceremony. One party
says, “God is before us, and this stone is from Amr Bur,” naming a
fabulous and sacred mountain. The other party receiving the stone
says, “I shall not lie in this agreement, and therefore take this stone
from you.” Let us hope that what follows is more satisfactory than
are my everyday experiences.
The exact origin of kissing the Book in English Courts, though
modern, is obscure. It is not, I should say, a matter of legal
obligation, but seems to be merely a custom dating from the middle
or end of the eighteenth century. If a witness claims to follow the
law according to Coke, and to take his “corporall oath” by touching
the Book, who shall refuse him his right? The “kissing” act seems
akin indeed to what the “fancy” call, somewhat unpleasantly, a saliva
custom, which in modern western life exists in very few forms,
though many of the lower classes still “spit” on a coin for luck. The
subject is a very large one, but the fundamental idea of all customs
relating to saliva seems to have been a desire for union with divinity,
and if the Book were always kissed in our Courts with that
aspiration, the custom might well be retained.
Unfortunately, the practical value of an oath depends in almost
exact ratio upon the depth of superstition of the person to whom it
is administered. The moral man will speak truth for practical moral
reasons. The immoral man will lie for practical immoral reasons. The
latter in the old days was hindered by the oath from lying, because
he firmly believed in the practical evil effects of breaking the oath.
The perjurer of old was certainly “looking for trouble.” This is not a
phrase of the “fancy,” but it exactly describes the oath-breaker’s
position. Some of the few minor sequelæ of perjury were such
domestic troubles as a curse which ran on to the seventh
generation, or the perjurer’s death from lingering disease in twelve
months, or that he would be turned into stone, or that the earth
might swallow him up and that after death he would wander round
as a vampire. These simple beliefs, which were no doubt part of the
cave-dwellers’ early religious education, must have done a great deal
to render the evidence of early man more trustworthy and accurate
than that of his degenerate younger brother.
Though in an occasional burst of atavism an uneducated man may
kiss his thumb instead of the Book, the bulk of humanity take any
oath that is offered without any deep feeling of religious sanction,
nor any particular fear of supernatural results. It is not altogether a
matter of regret that this should be so. Our ceremony of oath-taking
is really a Pagan one. Our very verb “to swear” takes us back to the
pre-Christian days when man’s strength and his sword were the
masters, and peace and goodwill had come to conquer the earth. To
swear was a vow to Heaven upon a sword. When we offer the Book
to a witness to swear upon, we really tender him, not a Christian
thought, but the old Pagan oath which, splendid as it was, is no
longer of force. It was a fine thing in its day when a knight vowed
upon his sword “to serve the King right well by day and night, on
field, on wave, at ting, at board—in peace, in war, in life or death; so
help him Thor and Odin, likewise his own good sword.” It is no use
replacing the sword by the Book if you retain the spirit of the sword
in the old Pagan ceremony. The word “to swear” is very closely
related to the word “sword,” and the very essence of swearing, deep
down in the root form of the thing and the word itself, is to take
one’s sword in one’s right hand, and fight for one’s own side with an
energy that will make the Pagan gods shout with joy in the Valhalla.
Medical witnesses and land surveyors are real Vikings in this respect,
especially as it seems to me those of Celtic origin.
But of a truth it is not only the oath and the witnesses that want
amendment. For when I suggest that it would be well in Court if we
obeyed the command, “Swear not at all,” and that the outward use
of the Book in the County Court is undesirable, it is because I feel
that some such thing as a Court on the lines of the teaching of the
Book ought not to be wholly impossible after 1,900 years of
endeavour. You must drive out of the Court all the folk-lore with its
Pagan notions of fighting and hired champions and oaths, and
witnesses and heralds, and above all you must get rid of the
anachronism of a Judge, and appoint in his place a peace-maker or
official reconciler. The idea is not wholly Quixotic. Lord Brougham, a
very practical reformer, had hopes of constructing Courts of
Reconciliation in this country seventy years ago. We shall not close
the courts of litigation and replace them by courts of reconciliation in
a day. But I am optimist enough to hope that I may go down to my
work one morning to find that we have been taken over by a new
department called the Office of Peace, and that under the Royal
Arms is our new official motto, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”
 CONCERNING DAUGHTERS.

“As is the mother so is the daughter.”

Ezekiel xvi., 44.

I am far from thinking Ezekiel knew much about it. True he was a
married man and a householder, but I remember no evidence of his
being the father of daughters. At all events if he thought that the
education and bringing up of daughters was an inferior thing
because of the authority of mothers, I think he was gravely
mistaken. When the daughters of the middle ages were part of the
household plant their mothers turned them out with certain practical
qualities that made them a valuable asset to the comfort of
mankind.
It was when unthinking fathers began to meddle in the affair and
to consider the subject of the education of their daughters that the
trouble began. The fathers—particularly the middle class Early
Victorian father—discovered that it was a desirable thing to be a
gentleman. Remembering and misapplying one of the catch words of
his own education that things which are equal to the same thing are
equal to one another, he thought it was equally important to the
success of his family that as his sons were to be gentlemen his
daughters should be gentlewomen.
And this is where he missed it. The word “gentlewoman” is
obscure, but it is certainly not the grammatical feminine of
gentleman. True it has a narrow technical dictionary meaning, but it
is used popularly to signify the result of a well-to-do middle class
father’s education of his daughters, as in the phrase “Gentlewoman’s
Employment Association” the name of an excellent society for
helping daughters of the well-to-do father when he is deceased or
has ceased to be well-to-do.
Concerning daughters then, and to help their fathers to bring
them up as gentlewomen I take upon myself as one who has given
grave personal consideration to the subject, to offer a few
suggestions of a practical nature; for I have found the gentleman
father in the matter of the education of girls—like his namesake the
gentleman farmer in matters of agriculture—to be an enthusiastic
and amiable, but eccentric amateur.
And remember my dear sir, that there are two main objects to be
kept in view in the education of a daughter. The first is to fit her for
the ultimate ownership of a well-to-do husband, the second is to
guard her from acquiring any knowledge or capacity that might take
her out of the ranks of the unemployable.
And first of marriage. Charlotte Lucas when she has made up her
mind to the inevitable Mr. Collins, “was,” writes Jane Austen,
“tolerably composed. She had gained her point and had time to
consider it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to
be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable: his society was irksome
and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be
her husband. Without thinking highly of either man or of matrimony,
marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable
provision for well educated young women of small fortune, and
however uncertain of giving happiness must be their pleasantest
preservative from want.”
How refreshing in these neurotic days is Charlotte’s old-fashioned
commonsense. And once recognising that marriage is the
“pleasantest preservative from want” a father may be wise to leave
the affair to mothers and daughters and chance. Holding, as I do,
the extreme doctrine that anything that a mother does is of
necessity absolutely right, I do not propose to enlarge upon this
branch of the subject. There is a belief, however, among social
naturalists that the solvent son-in-law is fast becoming extinct. This
may be from the fact that he has been hunted with too great rigour
in the past. The handsome but non-solvent variety though
ornamental in the house is vastly expensive. Then there is the larger
question of grandchildren. Here, too, sentiment finds itself again
opposed by considerations of economy.
The problem of training one’s daughters to become in Charlotte
Lucas’s phrase “well educated” or as Miss Austen and Miss
Edgeworth so constantly word it “gentlewomen” is a far easier
matter, and may therefore be the more safely left in the hands of a
father. Still in this, as in the more serious amusements of life, there
are principles to be followed.
The main object of such education to-day should be to give girls
what their brothers describe as “a good all round time.” Avoid
anything that hints of serious work, eschew “grind,” choose a
multitude of accomplishments rather than any one serious study,
encourage the collection of useless objects and the manufacture of
much fancy-work, and by this means there will be little fear of your
girls attaining any real knowledge of affairs. So may your daughter
be as one of the polished corners of the Temple, in the world and of
the world, and in her you will see reflected the delightful patterns of
the society by which she is surrounded.
But to descend to particulars. In early life commence with home-
training. Beware of kindergartens. They are too often taught by
women trained from early life in habits of work. They are apt to instil
ways of industry, and to cultivate a socialistic tendency towards
unselfishness, and might even at an early age suggest to the girl
baby that the mission of women is to work as well as to weep. The
poet must not however be taken too literally about this. Men must
work and women must weep, but intervals ought clearly to be
allowed for joint amusement, and the length of these is for one’s
own decision. In her young days then let the girl be taught that she
alone exists in the world, and that other human beings are mere
dream persons. The difference, never to be bridged over, between
herself and the household servants, ought to be constantly insisted
upon. A nursery governess is a suitable companion. Some of these
neither know nor desire to know how to scrub a nursery, and
teaching is not their mission. Obtain one if possible, who is a nursery
governess only in name, she will be cheap, and what is more
important to you—ladylike. In a few years a school becomes a
necessity; partly from the irksomeness of constant association with a
spoiled child, but more immediately in the real interests of the girl
herself. Choose by all means a school that you cannot well afford.
Here your daughter will meet with companionship that must fill her
young mind with ideals of life and society that cannot possibly be
attained by her in after life. Be careful, too, not to thwart her
expenditure in dress or amusement. Shun the modern craze—sprung
up now I fear even among the wealthiest—for instruction in such
subjects as cookery, dressmaking, and the like. A camera is a
necessity. It enables inaccurate representations to be produced
without skill or labour, and checks that desire for detailed
information, which might easily develop into scientific study. The
presence of a camera has saved many a young person from serious
attention to art. It is an excellent plaything. By all means let your
daughter learn French, for it is the language of the menu, and there
is no great harm in a little Latin, but let it be ladylike. Whenever you
are in difficulties, Mrs. Malaprop—who is always with us—will be only
too glad to tell you in further detail what kind of education becomes
a young woman, and the school where it can be found.
If you are “carriage people”—and by all means be “carriage
people” if your wealthier neighbours are—then of course your
daughter will not learn to cycle, but will rather learn to regard the
cyclist as the curse of the highway, which was obviously built for her
pleasure. The omnibus or tramcar will, I hope, always be regarded
as impossible. Remember that people who nowadays possess motor-
cars are not necessarily “carriage people.” It is becoming daily more
difficult to diagnose “carriage people” by the symptoms of their
outward circumstances.
When your daughter leaves school, if your income is less than £x,
and you are spending more, you should certainly have your daughter
presented at Court. She will naturally desire it, and it may for the
moment go far towards appeasing your creditors who, I take it, will
by this time be pressing you after the vulgar fashion of such people.
Bring out your daughter at a ball, similar in cost and style—but
especially the former—to that given by Mrs. Goldberg Dives, when
your daughter’s dear school friend, Aurora “came out,” as the saying
is. You remember that on that occasion young Dives brought home
Lord Bareacre’s youngest son from Oxford, and the marriage that
ensued, was followed by that entertaining case so recently decided
in the third division of the Probate and Admiralty Court. Who knows
what good fortune your daughter may have if you follow these high
examples.
But if during the prolonged pursuit of pleasure—which after her
careful education your daughter ought now to be able to plan and
carry out for herself—no son-in-law solvent or insolvent appears,
then when you have departed to another sphere leaving behind
assets insufficient to meet your worldly liabilities, or—as we may
hope will be your case, dear reader,—when you have called together
the callous creditors into an upper chamber of some persuasive
accountant who can explain to them cheerily the true inwardness of
your estate, and tender, with fitting apology, the pence that now
represent the pound that was,—think not with the austere moralist
that this costly education of your daughter has been a rash and
hazardous speculation. Let us be thankful that the world is not at
one with the Inspector-General of Bankruptcy with his sallow views
of the possibilities of life. True your daughter will know nothing, and
be fit for nothing, true it will take her years of misery to make
herself capable of the meanest employment. She has eaten dinners
she cannot cook, she has worn dresses she cannot make, she has
lived in rooms she cannot sweep, and she has grumbled at the
service of others she could not herself perform, but at least you can
say that she has been brought up as other gentlewomen are, and
that shall be your boast.
 THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTY
COURT.

“Had I God’s leave, how I would alter things!”

—Robert Browning.

The County Court like the poor in whose interests it was invented
is always with you if you have one of those perverted minds that
wastes its moments on dreams of legal reform. Seventeen years ago
I studied the question with earnest enthusiasm under the strange
hallucination that it was a real business question ripe for a business
solution. It seemed to me nearer to the lives of people than the
Veto, or Tariff Reform or the Ornaments Rubric. That is the result of
leading a narrow self-centred life. In a word, without knowing it, I
must have been a Whig, for, as Sir Walter Scott remarks, “Whigs will
live and die in the heresy that the world is ruled by little pamphlets
and speeches, and that if you can sufficiently demonstrate that a line
of conduct is most consistent with men’s interest you have therefore
and thereby demonstrated that they will at length after a few
speeches adopt it of course.” Thus for many years I have pegged
away with papers and speeches and like a true Whig find myself still
hopefully at it, playing the same game perhaps but with slightly
increased handicap. To-day I have learned by experience that the
future of the County Court is not to come in my time and to doubt if
I shall ever climb into some sufficiently high place to see the
promised land that I shall certainly never enter.
I have come to regard the question with the same child-like
affection and belief in its possibility, but also in a sense
archæologically, as becomes one whose first childhood is but a
dream and who feels himself pausing on the threshold of a second.
Had I any political foresight seventeen years ago I should have
recognised that the reform of the County Court system is not a party
matter, it is eminently a matter of greater interest to the poor than
to the rich, to the business man than to the man of leisure. Now,
more and more, Parliament has become a machine for registering
the decrees of the prevailing party and one cannot find that the poor
are in any way directly represented in Parliament and business men
only in a small degree, whilst the interests of the rich and of men of
leisure have an overwhelming representation. Moreover Legal
Reform has to fight for its hand against that band of brothers, the
lawyers in Parliament, who from generation to generation we find
stalwart and faithful in their clear-sighted optimism that all is well
with the law—and lawyers.
The story of the evolution of the County Court is not without
entertainment for those who are interested in the practical affairs of
the community. In its struggle for existence we find a warfare being
carried on between the business man and the lawyer in which, foot
by foot, the business man gains and places his pet tribunal in a more
secure position whilst he takes breath for a new encounter. Still,
although the building up of the County Court to its present story of
usefulness has been the work in the main of business men, yet few
realise that the County Court of to-day with its £100 jurisdiction is
only a belated attainment of the ideals of Lord Brougham in 1830. It
was in that year that Brougham brought in a Bill in the Commons—
he was then member for Yorkshire—to establish “Local District
Courts,” with a jurisdiction limited to £100 in contract, £50 in injury
to person or property, and an unlimited jurisdiction by consent. It
has taken us seventy-five years to arrive at the position that was
thought practicable by a great reforming Chancellor in 1830. And yet
there are many Englishmen in daily terror lest we should reform
anything too hurriedly. Lord Brougham’s ruling idea was free law. He
was in a sense a legal socialist. Law to him was one of those things
that every member of an ideal community should have without
paying for it individually, like fresh air and sunshine, and the Church
of England and the British Museum, and gaslight (in urban streets),
and roads, and the police, and the education of your children—all
which things an English citizen is entitled to have to-day without the
payment of any fees. He admitted the over-ruling necessity of fees
in his day, owing to the poverty of the Exchequer, but he said, “he
must enter his protest against the principle, and insist that any tax
no matter what, for the purpose of drawing the payment from the
public rather than from the suitor would be better than fixing it on
legal proceedings.” Free law is, of course, a grand ideal, and may
again attract legal reformers; but, without attaining that ideal, it
might be possible to abandon in a great measure the fees collected
from poor suitors. Law, like medicine and surgery, might be free to
the poor—not merely to paupers, but to all who are unable to pay
fees and costs without running into debt. It will take a Savonarola to
convert the Treasury to this view, but it is an enticing subject for a
youthful legal missionary full of ardent zeal and possessed of what
the insurance world calls “a good life.”
The dramatic duel between Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst
over the former’s Bill in 1833 is full of historical interest, but Lord
Brougham was unsuccessful, and it remained for Lord Cottenham in
1847 to establish County Courts with a jurisdiction of £20. These are
the Courts that we use to-day, with an enlarged jurisdiction up to
£100 in common law, £500 in equity matters, and the added
jurisdictions given by the Workmen’s Compensation Acts and many
other statutes which have chosen for their tribunal the County Court.
Throughout the country we are face to face with two statistical
facts which, if our reforms were moved by scientific considerations,
would lead the legal reformer to turn his serious consideration to the
County Court. We find in the great centres of population in the north
and the midlands, firstly, that there is a slight shrinkage or perhaps
only stagnation in the world of the High Court, and secondly, that
there is a continuous increase of business keeping pace with the
growth of population in the County Courts. I am far from saying that
all the expansion of County Court work is progress—much of it is the
reverse and in order to understand how far it is good and how far it
is bad, it is worth while trying to understand what the County Courts
do.
These Courts lead as it were a double life. They have extended
their energies along two different branches of business. Each Court
has become a huge debt-collecting machine for minor tradesmen
and at the same time has developed into an important and trusted
tribunal for deciding disputes between citizens. Both these functions
are important ones, but the two branches have nothing to do with
each other. In the debt-collecting branch the cases are, for the most
part, undefended; in the other branch the cases are nearly all fought
out. In the first branch the judicial work is unimportant, the machine
works automatically; in the second branch the vitality of the Court
depends almost entirely on the quality of the judicial work.
In considering the future of the debt-collecting branch of the Court
it will be necessary to consider the whole question of imprisonment
for debt, which is the ultimate sanction of the business. The point to
be considered is, I think, How far is it right for the State to provide a
machine to collect the class of debts that are, in fact, collected by
the County Courts? The point is a practical one, for if imprisonment
for debt were abolished or mitigated, a great deal of the work of the
County Courts would undoubtedly fall away, leaving reasonable time
at the disposal of the Courts to try cases under the present extended
jurisdiction, and possibly making room for a further extension, if that
were thought desirable.
Let me try and describe the present system in a few words. A
grocer, draper, or jeweller hands over to a debt-collector a large
number of debts to collect; the customers are, from a business point
of view, the “undesirables.” The debt-collector makes some effort to
collect the debts outside the Court, and then issues a batch of
summonses against all who are or pretend to be impecunious. It is
no uncommon thing for one collector to issue a few hundred
summonses in one day. On the day of trial the cases are either
undefended, or the wife appears and consents to judgment, and an
order is made of so many shillings a month. The defended cases are,
I should say, less than five per cent. of the total summonses issued,
and those successfully defended are a negligible quantity. In
Manchester and Salford, where we used to divide this class of work
from real litigation, the lists were seldom less than 400 cases a day.
When the judgments are obtained, the duty of the defendant is to
pay the monthly instalment into Court, and a ledger account is
opened, the Court becoming a sort of banker for the purpose of
collecting and paying out the money. Whenever the debtor fails to
pay an instalment, the collector is entitled to take out a judgment
summons, calling on the debtor to show cause why he should not be
committed to prison for non-payment. On proof that the debtor has
means to pay, or has had means since the judgment, the judge’s
duty is to commit him to prison.
Two things are clear about this system. It is not a system of
deciding disputes, but a system of collecting debts, and in the cases
of workpeople without property it could never be carried out without
imprisonment for debt. When the legal reformer looks at the figures
relating to imprisonment for debt, he will see at a glance that if he
could get rid of a large quantity of the debt-collecting, there would
be more time for the real litigation. Many people still seem to think
that imprisonment for debt is abolished. In France and the United
States and in most civilised countries I believe it is, but in England it
is not only not abolished, but is greatly increased. The actual
number of debtors imprisoned has recently decreased, owing no
doubt to the fact that Judges are more and more inclined to temper
the wind of the statute to the shorn lamb. But the number of
summonses issued and heard increases, and there is no doubt the
credit habit grows upon the working classes, and is encouraged by
the system of imprisonment for debt. In 1909, the last year of
statistics before me, no less than 375,254 summonses were issued.
It is the commercial and domestic waste which lies hid in these
figures that distresses me. They reduce me to the despair of those
two immortals, the Walrus and the Carpenter, who
 “Wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand.
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand.’”

But ought it to be cleared away? In the main I think it should. One

might lay down the principle that where the debt was not necessarily
incurred the State should not assist the creditor to collect it by
imprisoning the debtor. For the system is used, in the majority of
cases, by a very undesirable class of creditor. I analysed a list of 460
summonses heard by me in one day. There were 284 drapers and
general dealers. These include all the instalment and hire system
creditors. There were sixty jewellers, thirty-five grocers, twenty-four
money-lenders, and ten doctors. Now, with the exception of the
doctors, and possibly in a few instances the grocers, it was not in
the least desirable, from the point of view of the State, that these
debts should be collected at all. Why should taxes be imposed and
work done at the public expense to enable a jeweller to persuade a
man to buy a watch he does not want? Why should the State collect
the jeweller’s money for him by imprisonment for debt? If there had
been no imprisonment for debt the jeweller’s business wouldn’t pay,
and the workman would have one chance less of mortgaging his
wages for the immediate delight of possessing a third-rate piece of
jewellery. This would be better for the State and the workman, and
for everybody but the jeweller. But why should his interests prevail
over those of the rest of the community, and why should we spend
money in promoting a business of which most of us disapprove?
Everyone must have noticed of late years the enormous growth of
firms whose main business seems to be to tempt people of small
means to purchase things they do not want, or, at all events, cannot
afford. Take up any newspaper or magazine circulating among the
lower middle classes, or among working men, and you will find it
crowded with advertisements of musical instruments, cycles,
furniture on the hire system, packets of cutlery, all of which can be
obtained by a small payment down and smaller instalments to
follow. Remember, too, that over and above these there exists a
huge army of “tally men” and travelling touts, who are pushing on
commission, clothing, sewing machines, Family Bibles in expensive
series, jewellery, and a host of unnecessaries. What chance has the
working-man to keep out of debt? Not one of these transactions has
any commercial sanction. Credit is given merely because there is
imprisonment for debt. And there is a further aspect of this question
which I am surprised has never attracted the attention of
temperance reformers. As long as a man can get credit for groceries
and clothes there is not the same urgent reason to spend his cash
upon these things. But cash is necessary in the public-house,
because, by the Tippling Acts, no action can be brought for the price
of drink consumed at a public-house. So the obvious result too often
follows: the wages are spent at the public-house, and the credit for
the week’s groceries and the children’s boots is obtained under the
sanction of imprisonment for debt.
Much more might be said in objection to the system of
imprisonment for debt, but we have enough before us, I think, to
show a strong case for reform. The next question will be: Should
that reform be abolition? Although I am personally in favour of the
abolition of imprisonment for debt, I am in doubt whether it is
desirable at the moment; and I am so eager to see some reform that
I would welcome any measure, however meagre, that did something
to mitigate the misfortunes of the insolvent poor. I have suggested
as a practical measure that no summons should be issued or
committal made for a less sum than forty shillings. One must
remember that there are a huge number of traders giving
reasonable credit to their fellow-traders, who find, when they seek
to recover the debt, that the goods in the house or shop are in the
wife’s name. This is really a quasi-fraudulent obtaining of credit, and
there are many similar cases not within the criminal law where
imprisonment for debt seems a natural remedy. Moreover, if one
studies the evidence given before the Commissioners on the subject,
and if one discusses it, as I have, with men in business, one finds
that abolition would meet with great opposition from powerful trade
interests, whereas the “forty shilling” proposal is generally regarded
as a fair experiment, which would injure no one but traders who
deliberately give credit to the poorer working class under the
sanction of imprisonment for debt. In my own experience, I have
found hardly any cases of judgments summonses taken out for more
than two pounds where there was not ample evidence of means,
and where the non-payment was not more or less of the nature of a
contempt of Court. In the smaller cases the means, though proved
to have existed since the judgment, have disappeared, and the
debtor is only saved from imprisonment by the leniency of the Court.
Total abolition of imprisonment for debt would probably never be
carried by consent. It would mean more commissions, inquiries,
reports, and the waste of time that these things necessitate.
Abolition of imprisonment for debt for sums under forty shillings—a
great practical reform for the very poor—would, I believe, be carried
by consent. That is why I put it forward. It is utterly illogical but
intensely practical; and when one has been face to face with the
misery of others for many years, one cares more for business than
logic.
Assuming, therefore, that the future of the County Court as a
debt-collecting machine is to be a future of decrease, that the
legislature are going to save the taxpayer’s money and encourage
thrift by refusing to collect undesirable debts, what will be its future
as a litigating machine?
I may commend to anyone desirous of studying in further detail
the arguments for and against the extension of County Courts, the
proceedings of the Norwood Commission on County Courts in 1878.
There is no doubt that if the business man had had his way the
County Court in urban centres would have long ago been a district
Court for all but cases of some peculiar public or legal importance.
The great enemy to such an extension has always been the lawyer,
and the London lawyer in particular. A very eminent solicitor, giving
evidence before the Commission in 1878, had no confidence
whatever in County Courts. His evidence was very typical, and shows
how carefully one should criticise the evidence of a professional man
who is also a very superior person. His view was that “When
occasionally a client of mine of position who has been summoned to
the County Court comes to me, I am unable to leave him in the
lurch, but I never go into the County Court myself.” Asked whether
he thought it “undignified,” he replied enigmatically: “It is not a
matter of dignity, but a man of position cannot go into the County
Court.” It turned out later that it was a physical difficulty, for it was
“quite inconsistent with the position of a professional man to stand
in the County Court with women bringing cases about washing-tubs,
and servants summoning their masters for wages.”

He called them untaught knaves unmannerly

To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse,
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

Dozens of times, he told the Commission, barristers had declined to

go into the County Court, and his clerk had gone to half-a-dozen
barristers before he could find one who would demean himself by
taking a case in the County Court. County Courts were, in his view,
“inherently incapable of conducting important litigation.” The County
Court Judges had not, in his opinion, the confidence of the country,
because they are not taken from the successful members of the Bar,
it is known that their salary is an extremely small one, there is no
Bar attending before them, there is no report of their proceedings,
and there are difficulties of appeal. One thing I find very delightful in
the eminent solicitor’s evidence.

Question.—Some of the County Court Judges are very

competent men, are they not?
Answer.—Extremely.
Question.—You think that there are some who are not equal to
the others?
Answer.—Yes.
Question.—Is not the same thing true in regard to the Superior
Courts?
 Answer.—You will not expect me to answer that question, I
think.

Even in the dark ages of 1878 one would have thought he might
have risked an affirmative.
One does not quote the eminent solicitor’s opinion merely for the
humour that attaches to old-fashioned ideas and prophecies that are
brought to light in a new age and found to be absurd. No doubt he
was fighting for a substantial thing, in a word—costs, and he was
fighting the wreckers that wanted to break up the machinery that
made costs, for he naturally disliked to see the smooth, well-oiled
machine that worked so well for him replaced by some cheap
machinery of one-horse “costs” power. In one thing I confess to his
statesmanlike insight. If you want to improve the County Courts, he
said, the “only improvement would be to double the salary of the
judges at least,” and let the judge reside in his district, “but then you
would be establishing superior Courts all over the country.” And the
idea of the “country” having similar facilities to London for the trial
of actions was too preposterous. It had only to be stated, it was self-
condemned, and the matter dropped.
One must not suppose that there were no champions of saner
methods in 1878. On the contrary, I think the reformers were the
better team of the two, and pressed their opponents hard, although
they did not score greatly in the end. What could be more
interesting or important than the opinion of Lord Bramwell, who was
concerned in several of the Judicature Commissions prior to 1878?
His view was that the County Courts should be made constituent
branches of the High Court of Justice, and that as a consequence of
that, the existing jurisdiction in common law should be unlimited.
That is to say every action would commence in the County Court and
be tried there unless the defendant chose to remove it to the High
Court. It was pointed out that this would practically mean giving to
every district, local Courts with full powers, and among other things
that it would lead to the “deterioration of the Bar.” Lord Bramwell
objected to the phrase, and answered his opponents by saying that
the then Attorney-General (Sir John Holker) and Mr. Gully and Mr.
Pope and Mr. Higgins, one of her Majesty’s counsel, have belonged
to the local Bar, “and I think I may say of my knowledge, that the
local Bar of Liverpool is as good as the London Bar.” This is
important testimony, inasmuch as any evolution towards district
Courts that will injure the assize system is sure to be opposed by
those barristers—and there are many in Parliament—who are
interested in the assize system, and one argument will be that the
client will be deprived of the advantage of London “silk” if his case is
tried in the County Court. Lord Bramwell disposes of that argument
very shortly. “If there is any disparagement or injury to the Bar for
the benefit of the public, the Bar must undergo it; that is all.”
In other words, the Courts of the future must be made convenient
to the public as well as convenient to the profession; and where
interests clash the public interest must be considered before the
professional interest. This looks when written down an obvious
platitude, but the history of the efforts to obtain and improve County
Courts since 1830 will convince the legal reformer that it is worth re-
stating.
Some years ago I made some elaborate calculations from the Blue
Books, the results of which were rather surprising even to myself. I
investigated the figures of ten typical urban Circuits in the centres of
industry and of ten typical rural Circuits in agricultural districts. I
found that in the former Circuits in ten years there had been a large
increase in business. Nearly £40,000 a year more was paid to the
Treasury in fees, and more than £150,000 was the increase in
monies collected for suitors. In the same ten years similar figures for
the rural districts showed a marked decrease. When one compared
the turnover of the ten urban Circuits as against the turnover of the
ten rural Circuits, it was as ten to one. I wondered what a Harrod or
a Lipton or a Whiteley would have done with these Courts if he had
found in auditing their accounts over many years that ten of them
were non-increasing in a business sense, and that the other ten
were increasing; if he found that he drew £150,000 as an income
from one set and £40,000 from the other set. Would he not consider
whether there was not a class of business being done by the urban
circuits worthy of special consideration and encouragement?
For what did these figures show? They showed on the one hand a
stagnant and non-increasing business, and on the other a business
increasing by leaps and bounds. What business man would hesitate
to extend ten branch concerns capable of so great an improvement
in turnover in the course of a few years? I am frankly an enemy to
making the suitor pay for his law. I believe, as Lord Brougham did,
in free law; but if the system is to continue, why should a suitor in
Birmingham pay more for his law than is necessary in order that a
suitor in Ambleside may pay less for his law than it costs?
The Courts are, no doubt, not paying concerns, but how far some
Circuits are run at a profit it is impossible for anyone outside the
Treasury to ascertain. There is no doubt, however, that the loss in
small Courts is very great, and whether they are of any great value
to a district in these days of postal facilities and cheap railway transit
I have grave doubts. I have always thought that the Post Office
might work a great deal of the pure debt-collecting business in
connection with the County Court, if it were thought desirable. It
would, to my mind, be a natural co-ordination of two public offices,
and might adapt itself very well to the needs of rural districts. If a
country debtor could pay his debt to the nearest post office, and get
an official receipt there, many small Courts and offices would
become wholly unnecessary, and with a post office cash on delivery
system one excuse for giving credit would be removed.
Why one little town has a Court and another has none it is as
impossible to say, as why one little pig went to market and the other
little pig stayed at home. These ancient myths are part of our
history, and any effort to dislodge them is rightly made difficult. But
whilst the Courts of London and the Midlands and the North are
overcrowded, there are actually ten Courts issuing less than 100
plaints each—their average is 57!—and thirty-two Courts with less
than 200. Alston, in Cumberland, is the holder of the record. This
Court issued twenty-seven plaints and four actions were heard. It
heard two judgment summonses, and made a commitment order in
one. And the Court collected sixteen pounds in fees. To cope with
this annual business the Judge sat once and the Registrar three
times. It will take a long time to persuade these small communities
that it is necessary they should give up conditions such as these to
which they have become accustomed. I think it would be more
readily done if the districts that had no real use for a County Court
or an Assize Court were only allowed to retain them on payment of
what they cost to the community.
The endeavour to bring justice to the poor man’s door is more
praiseworthy than practical. I remember explaining to a collier’s wife
that her husband must attend with her, and adjourned the case to a
Monday for that purpose. Monday is often kept by colliers as a
saint’s day. “Eh!” she replied. “It will be very onconvanient. My
maister winna like coming on a Monday. Besides, it’s my weshing-
day.”
I expressed my regret, but said it must be.
“Well, it’s very onconvanient our coming here. Couldn’t yo call?”
The idea of calling personally on the litigants—especially in these
days of motor-cars, when every registrar is probably an expert
chauffeur—is a very attractive one, and not much more absurd that
the present system of sending Judges to Courts that have no real
use for them.
But from my point of view, the difficulties of dealing with the
smaller Courts, if they exist, should not hinder the development of
the larger Circuits. It is clear that the problems of providing
adequate Civil Courts for Central Wales and Norfolk is not the same
as the problem of providing similar tribunals for Manchester,
Birmingham, and Leeds. I have shown that there are a large number
of districts where the Courts are increasing yearly in usefulness and
in public favour, and there is, I think, a strong case that from a
business point of view Circuits that are dealing with large amounts of
work should be specially considered.
 I do not think there will be any great difficulty in dealing with the
great urban centres when the legislature makes up its mind to make
the County Courts district Courts working directly in touch with the
High Courts. No doubt it will mean the providing of money for
further and better equipment, but it has certainly to come about,
and there are signs that it is being faced. The problem of the rural
Courts is more difficult, but I think the grouping of several Courts
under one resident permanent registrar with extended powers and
allowing him to gather together in one place a day’s work for the
Judge who is to travel his Circuit with a business regard for the
actual wants of litigants from time to time is a statement of the
general lines upon which reforms can be carried out. The rural
Courts will always be costly to the community, out of all proportion
to the services rendered, but they are necessary and the expense
must be borne; the urban Courts, on the other hand, might be made
to pay their way, and might be of far greater service to the business
communities around them than they already are.
It is difficult, of course, to write upon such a subject without
personal bias, and it has been my lot to take an official position for
the sake of its comparative leisure, and to find that leisure taken
away by successive Acts of Parliament without compensation for
disturbance. Still, experience of legal reform leads me to believe that
I cannot be writing this with any personal motive, for I cannot hope
to be presiding in any County Court in the latter part of the
twentieth century, when, according to recorded precedent, such
reforms as I propose will be about due.
Why, then, do I commend the future of the County Court to the
attention of the legal reformer? Because I see in the County Court,
and in that Court only, a growing and popular tribunal favoured by
the business men of the country. Because in that Court there is a
crying abuse calling aloud for reform, namely, imprisonment for
debt, which abuse, when abolished or mitigated, will release Judges
from odious duties, and give them time for more honourable
services. Because in great urban centres there has long been a
demand for continued sittings, which the High Court has been