The Sex Thieves: the Anthropology of a Rumor

THE SEX THIEVES Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com THE SEX THIEVES T HE ANTHROPOLOGY OF A RUMOR Julien Bonhomme Translated by Dominic Horsfall Foreword by Philippe Descola Hau Books Chicago English Translation © 2016 Hau Books and Julien Bonhomme Original French Edition, Les Voleurs de sexe. Anthropologie d’une rumeur africaine, © Editions du Seuil, 2009, Collection La Librairie du XXie siècle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender Cover Image: “Rumor” by Catalin Badarau. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9861325-8-2 LCCN: 2016953267 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. “You say it’s just rumors—radio grapevine. But you don’t know that what radio grapevine says is true enough. Toads don’t croak unless it’s raining, dé.” – Henry Lopès, The laughing cry (1987: 22) Table of Contents Editorial Note ix Acknowledgments xi Foreword: “Sexually Bewitched” by Philippe Descola xiii introduction Beware the Sex Thieves! 1 chapter one Sex, Crisis, and Witchcraft 21 chapter two Strangers in Town 35 chapter three Shivers and Lynchings 47 chapter four Witchcraft, New Style 59 chapter five Danger: No Greeting 73 viii THE SEX THIEVES chapter six The Foreigner 83 chapter seven Front-Page News 95 chapter eight “Everything is in Place” 107 chapter nine To Believe or Not To Believe 117 conclusion 125 Appendix 129 References 135 Index 165 Editorial Note This book is a revised and expanded edition of Les Voleurs de sexe. Anthropologie d’une rumeur africaine, originally published by Editions du Seuil in 2009. Quotations taken from original French-language sources, from press clip- pings in particular, where no official English versions are available, have been reproduced by the translator. Acknowledgments For their inspired comments on the various oral and written versions of this work, I would like to express my gratitude in particular to Olivier Allard, Lau- rent Barry, Laurent Berger, David Berliner, François Berthomé, Luc Boltan- ski, Julien Bondaz, Matthew Carey, Andrea Ceriana Mayneri, Filip De Boeck, Emmanuel de Vienne, Grégory Delaplace, Pierre Déléage, Philippe Descola, Jean-Baptiste Eczet, Arnaud Esquerré, Sandra Fancello, Carlos Fausto, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Laurent Gabail, Peter Geschiere, Olivier Godechot, Arnaud Halloy, Bill Hanks, Michael Houseman, Katerina Kerestetzi, Pierre-Joseph Laurent, Bruno Martinelli, André Mary, Todd Meyers, Olivier Morin, Patrick Mouguiama-Daouda, Ramon Sarró, Carlo Severi, Anne-Christine Taylor, Jo- seph Tonda, and Jean-Pierre Warnier. I am very grateful to Giovanni da Col for offering me the wonderful oppor- tunity to publish an English translation of this book. I also express my sincere gratitude to Sean Dowdy, Justin Dyer, and Hau’s staff for their enthusiasm and professionalism. I warmly thank Dominic Horsfall for his outstanding translation. Finally, I feel very honored that Philippe Descola accepted to write a foreword to this English translation. I wish to thank him wholeheartedly. The publication of this book was made possible by funding from the Na- tional Research Agency of France (Agence nationale de la recherche), as part of the research program “The State and the Institutions facing Witchcraft in Contemporary Africa: Violence, Justice and Human Rights” (2012–16). Julien Bonhomme foreword Sexually Bewitched This foreword is intended for the doubtful reader who might think that The sex thieves sounds too much like the title of a semipornographic zombie movie of the type formerly known as grade Z. The others, whether because they are already familiar with the work of Julien Bonhomme, or because they have perused the book, do not need to read the following lines for they already know, or at least suspect, that it is a little gem. Bonhomme is a very serious anthropologist indeed. A noted specialist of Central African religions and rituals, he devoted his first book, Le Miroir et le crâne (Bonhomme 2006a), to the initiation cycle of the Bwete Misoko, a Gabonese cult where the initiates absorb large quantities of the psychedelic iboga plant to induce visions. Oops, now it’s sex and drugs! But no, it was not the LSD-like effect of iboga which interested Bonhomme, and he hardly dwells on its usage. The central theme of this first book is how the Bwete Misoko initiation cycle manages to alleviate the plight of someone thought to be bewitched, not so much because the ritual operates directly as a therapy, rather because it reconfigures the experience of the suffering subject by allowing him or her to escape from the face-to-face confrontation with the suspected sorcerer. The ritual does so by granting a new identity to the initiate, a complex identity which is at the same time purely relational—it establishes a new social position vis-à-vis the participants to the ritual and the members of the cult—and entirely reflexive—a specular relation to oneself, aptly mediated by a mirror. xiv THE SEX THIEVES Such a process is very different from Amazonian shamanism and the drug- induced communication with the spirit world with which I am more familiar: there, visionary experience introduces order and a temporary certainty to the normally unsettled identity of the beings with whom I interact because it allows enriched perceptual relations with them. In the Central African context, by contrast, the dense tissue of obligations stemming from segmentary affiliations and initiation cults other than the Bwete wraps up the individual in a mesh of ontological and social determinations which leaves little room for ambiguous identities. This is why misfortune when it strikes takes a more dramatic dimen- sion here than elsewhere: it signals the irruption of chance and arbitrariness in a world where everything is organized to eliminate them. Now, instead of reduc- ing this uncertainty, the genius of the Bwete is to institute a constructed ambi- guity in response to a contingent indeterminacy, the result of a very structured ritual process, which is thus far more than a simple device for resocialization, as it is often interpreted. After this initial analytical tour de force, why would Bonhomme devote time to the invasion of penis snatchers in African cities? For the very simple reason that what is at stake in the rumor of sex theft that has spread in a large part of sub-Saharan Africa since the 1970s is also witchcraft, but witchcraft under another guise. This is not the traditional rural witchcraft originating from within the family (beware of your maternal uncle!) to which so many monographs have been devoted; it is an urban and transnational witchcraft, all the more unset- tling as it strikes not at night, in the silence of the village, but in the city, in the midst of bustling markets and on crowded public transport, and in contact with complete strangers, many of them obviously foreigners. Let’s go back to the facts. They seem deceptively and tragically simple, hardly deserving a learned essay: someone, usually a man, claims that a passer-by, usually another man, has robbed him of his genitalia through a slight physical contact; an angry mob assembles, ready to take revenge on the offender, and it may end in the lynching of the accused party, or even, if the latter is able to plead convincingly his innocence, of his accuser. The behavior of everyone is in a way expected because this is a rumor which has spread by word of mouth or through the media in a dozen countries, from Sudan to Senegal and from Mauritania to the Democratic Republic of Congo, such that the script for the event is now known by most urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa. But why does it work? This is the obvious question that comes to mind. Why does such a preposter- ous accusation, which can be easily disproved, take hold of so many people? FOREWORD xv Common explanations can be easily dismissed, such as: that this kind of silly story works because the African masses are gullible, illiterate, and superstitious (to the contrary, many of those involved are sophisticated and well-educated city dwellers); that it is a political conspiracy intended to spread unrest (how could it work on such a huge scale?); or that it is a typical symptom of the anxiety of, take your pick, (a) lower middle-class urban professionals impoverished by the reckless neoliberal policies of the IMF, (b) recently arrived migrants from rural villages who are maladapted to large cities, or (c) illegal workers from neighboring countries looking for a better life. There is no doubt that all these people form a good chunk of the population of African cities and that they live in disquieting conditions, but why would their anxiety adopt the specific form of penis snatching? The explanation which Bonhomme proposes is at the same time simpler and more subtle. Intent on applying to a concrete case the premises of the epi- demiology of representations developed rather abstractly by Dan Sperber, and convinced that the saliency of an idea is provided by its contrastive opposition to other ideas, Bonhomme examines both the conditions that appear to favor the spreading of the epidemics—the pragmatics of

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