ABSTRACT
I shall, now and then, have occasion to make use of confessions of witchcraft made by persons either in court or during the course of investigations into the commission of criminal offences. Of cases containing records of such confessions three are so important that it is necessary to give a full account of them. They are cases in which a certain amount of repetition of evidence is unavoidable since the nature and extent of the corroboration of one witness’s account by another is of the very greatest importance. It must not be assumed that such cases come often before the courts; they do not, but they are of value not only for the study of witchcraft beliefs in Rhodesia but also for the understanding of the records of those cases in Europe during the Middle Ages and elsewhere where similar confessions of witchcraft have been made. In the cases of R v Dawu, R v Mazwita and Others and R v Rosi, which are of this type, there is no need to reproduce the purely formal evidence, that of the investigating officer that he arrested the accused, saw the body and drew a plan; the evidence of the Government Medical Officer that he conducted a post-mortem, etc; but otherwise I have endeavoured to give a fairly full account of the evidence.
