ABSTRACT
To both of us it was, somewhat surprisingly, ‘development’ that forced us to study ‘witchcraft’. 1 In the early 1980s, when Cyprian Fisiy was just recruited as a researcher for the new Institute of Human Sciences in Yaoundé, this institute was officially charged by the Ministry of Internal Affairs with starting a large- scale research project on Sorcellerie et Développement (Witchcraft and Development). The main goal of the research programme was to gather empirical evidence on witchcraft phenomena and its impacts on development – more precisely, to come up with policy prescriptions on how best to fight such phenomena. At the outset, a critical assumption, based on anecdotal evidence, was that witchcraft was a major barrier to development in the country. For reasons that are quite interesting in themselves, as we shall see in the second half of this chapter, the project never really took off. Yet it triggered a long series of articles by Fisiy on ‘witchcraft’, especially on the judicial aspects of the government’s efforts to deal with it.
