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Title: | The Politician and the Diviner: Divination and the Consumption of Power in Sierra Leone |
Author: | Shaw, Rosalind |
Year: | 1996 |
Periodical: | Journal of Religion in Africa |
Volume: | 26 |
Issue: | 1 |
Period: | February |
Pages: | 30-55 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Sierra Leone |
Subjects: | divination politicians Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Religion and Witchcraft Politics and Government |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1581893 |
Abstract: | This paper demonstrates that recent accounts of nefarious relationships between diviners and politicians in Sierra Leone, such as those after the 1992 regime change, draw upon earlier processes and tropes - but not necessarily those of the historical links between diviners and chiefs. In representations of the supernatural underpinnings of political corruption in Sierra Leone, eighteenth and nineteenth-century ideas of auspicious relationships between diviners and local rulers in the presence of powerful foreign elites are replaced by nineteenth-century understandings of the horrifying ritual origins of rapid enrichment and of new forms of leadership - understandings which draw upon much older indigenous critiques of the slave trade as malign, 'cannibalistic' consumption. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |