14 - The Danger Within

Summary

FEAR OF DIVINE PUNISHMENT AND LOVE OF GOOD FOR ITS OWN sake may be powerful conductors of behaviour. But fallible mankind has never found them enough. Africans, like others, have required less mystical deterrents to sin. Public opinion has been one of these, youthful training another.

In Chewaland, for example, notions of ideal character and behaviour have supposed that ‘the good man is the meek one who pleases all, gives offence to none, and is wise, generous and sociable’. This is what public opinion has required of Chewa who want to enjoy a pleasant reputation. And although it is obvious that public opinion will often have failed to induce wisdom, generosity or sociability, its force was considerable in these small-scale societies where it was always difficult for a trangressor to ‘move away to where the neighbours do not know’.

There was also training by initiation schooling and other rites de passage designed to instil the ideal by ‘setting up values and behaviour patterns both for emulation and detestation’. Cautionary tales and fables did the same. They consistently opposed the companionable human order of the village to the outcast wilderness of the bush, equating the one with hope and the other with despair, and employing a rich symbolism to drive home the contrast.

Yet Chewa have found public opinion and youthful schooling, even when backed by mystical sanctions, nothing like enough to keep them on the path of righteousness. Individuals have continued to invite the attentions of the Devil by coveting their neighbour's wife or husband, pushing their own careers, fornicating with forbidden relatives, breaking out in acts of violence, and generally doing what they know they should not do. As well as a moral order, they have required a legal one; and there is plenty to suggest that they have been deterred from transgression as much by their jural institutions as by anything else. Yet it is precisely here, in considering the limits of jural sanction, that one finds another clue to the place of witchcraft belief, and to its often concealed connexions with the social order.

It happens that the Chewa social order is matrilineal. They trace descent, and therefore succession to property and office, through mother's brothers and not through natural fathers. So litigation among the Chewa ‘is generally between one person supported by his [mother's kin] and another supported by his’.