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I am writing a book, Witches and Bureaucrats, which draws upon immigration decisions from the UK, Australia, and Canada. I would be extremely grateful if any of the members of the Refugee Law group would be willing to share redacted cases or inform me of published cases involving witchcraft.  

Contact: Dr. Katherine Luongo, Northeastern University (Boston), [log in to unmask]

For you who have time, here is a summary of my published work:

Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Focusing on colonial Kenya, this book shows how conflicts between state authorities and Africans over witchcraft-related crimes provided an important space in which the meanings of justice, law and order in the empire were debated. Katherine Luongo discusses the emergence of imperial networks of knowledge about witchcraft. She then demonstrates how colonial concerns about witchcraft produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence about capital crimes. The book analyzes the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the birth of an anthro-administrative complex surrounding witchcraft in the 1920s, the hotly contested Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the explosive growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the unprecedented state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s. A work of anthropological history, this book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft or uoi.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/african-history/witchcraft-and-colonial-rule-kenya-19001955

Please find a summary of my current book project:

Witches and Bureaucrats: Witchcraft-Driven Violence in Africa and its Relationship to Global Asylum-Seeking
Witchcraft beliefs persist as a significant, measurable engine of violence in the modern world. My interdisciplinary book project, Witches and Bureaucrats, develops an historical ethnography of the widespread violence motivated by witchcraft beliefs that consistently claims numerous lives across the African continent because individuals and groups continue to engage in lethal, extrajudicial punishment of poor, vulnerable men, women, and children accused of being witches. Witches and Bureaucrats investigates how such violence is not merely an urgent problem for Africans on the continent, but has lately emerged as a global human rights matter as increasing numbers of African asylum-seekers assert that being accused of practicing witchcraft puts them at high risk of being killed in their countries of origin. Showing how earlier attempts to eradicate, or at least curb, witchcraft-driven violence have failed and how the global immigration sector is ill-equipped to engage with witchcraft, my book intervenes at the nexus of anthropological, historical, legal, developmental, and human rights scholarship to offer fresh insights into and approaches to extrajudicial violence and global migration. Drawing on multiple national archives, grey literature, legislation and legal reports generated at the state and global levels, media materials, and ephemera as well as ethnographic sources, my book provides an innovative model for analyzing the global reach of local violence. I anticipate that it will be useful to immigration authorities, legal and development practitioners, and academics concerned with witchcraft, extrajudicial violence, and global migration.


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