ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the factors involved in the spread of anti-witchcraft movements into modern Asante and to touch upon the relationship of these cults to wider aspects of social change. The theories have been put forward to explain the form, chronology and function of a number of movements reported from modern Asante which offered principally to protect their adherents from witchcraft and bad medicine and which specialised in catching witches. The first anti-witchcraft movement for which there is irrefutably clear evidence was Abirewa which sprang to sudden prominence in Asante in 1906 and was suppressed by the Colonial Government a short time later. In the Asante case the unsocialised bush was clearly believed to be the place from which many new medicines and abosom originated, and the temples and priests of the latter were both, in their way, in some sense marginal to society.
