Mamprusi witchcraft, subversion and changing gender relations

Abstract

In the pre-colonial Mamprusi kingdom female witches were either executed after sentencing in the king's court, or segregated in a special section of a major market town where they received medicine to neutralise their witchcraft. This treatment of witches is a manifestation of the centralising process at work in the kingdom, and also exemplifies the division of ritual labour characteristic of the polity. Recent changes in the constitution of the witches' village have been accompanied by new Mamprusi conceptions of witchcraft, drawing on a long-standing belief in the power of women to subvert the social order. Radical changes in national political and economic conditions, and local changes in the division of labour, are threatening the idealised norms of Mamprusi gender relations. Mamprusi witch-hunting emerges as an attempt to control women, who are perceived as a source of these wider disorders.