Content area
Full text
This article focuses on witchcraft in order to examine youth in Botswana. Two witchcraft realms preoccupy youth: boloi, in which an individual manipulates materials for personal gain or to harm someone, and dipheko, or ritual murder. Boloi poses a threat to youth by inducing headaches, pain, and dizziness. This suffering prevents youths' socially upward movement and economic improvement by resulting in school failure, with ramifications for the family as well as the individual. Dipheko, while less common, is also dangerous to youth. Stories of witchcraft and school failure are related to conflicted social relations, competition for scarce resources, and youth action. Ritual murder accentuates these issues, magnifying and telescoping tensions onto youths' bodies whose mutilation symbolizes a reversal of expected behavior and an interruption of social reproduction. Both kinds of witchcraft explain school failure and youth vulnerability, but each involves knowledge and youth action differently. In boloi youth supposedly know and do nothing-only adult actions yield results. Dipheko, however, reveals youth vulnerability yet also provides opportunity to address it. [youth, Botswana, witchcraft, ritual murder, schooling.]
In late 1994 a teenage girl named Segametsi Mogomotsi was killed in Mochudi, Botswana, the suspected victim of ritual murder. By early 1995 students were rioting in response to this crime, and the university was closed for two weeks in midsemester. This article focuses on witchcraft and youth, and will explore the connection between a murder and a riot to demonstrate the circumstances in which youth act and the role of knowledge within this field of action. Ritual murders are not new in Botswana; however, the reasons for a strong youth reaction to this particular event need to be considered for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of the murder in Mochudi and the situation of youth. Below, I recount several examples of ritual murder discourse both to show that dipheko (ritual murder) is not new and to reveal some of its alleged workings. Next I briefly discuss witchcraft in general in Botswana, of which dipheko can be considered part. A description of schooling, beliefs in the value of education, and the linkages between schooling and witchcraft culminates in an analysis of the Segametsi ritual murder case in terms of the knowledge, power, and embodied potential of youth.
The...