On Modernity as Powerlessness: Fetishism and Political Crisis in Equatorial Africa (and Beyong)

Since the 1990s, modern witchcraft has become the dominant paradigm in the studies of African religious beliefs, against the older notion of fetishism that had declined in scholarly language since the 1920s. Yet the stubborn use of the repertoire of the fetish in postcolonial popular parlance shows how little is known of the history of its colonial transfer and reappropriation in Africa. Ignoring such processes, I argue, has led scholars of the religious to carry on significant conceptual blockage, which I call the imaginary of infra-politics. This article retraces some of the historical steps in the emergence and endurance of this imaginary, first in the colony where colonizers created two distinct categories, the religious and the political, to define and disempower African cosmologies and practical initiatives, and to predict that Africans could never adequately separate the two in order to achieve progress towards a secularized form of modernity, and second, among contemporary studies of modern witchcraft and African Christianities. To go beyond this conceptual dead-end, it also suggests a return to studies of African theories and practices of power.