Voices from the Past. Rethinking Persecutory Interpretations of Sickness and Misfortune in Africa

The idea that ‘delusional’ experience and the persecutory interpretation of disease and misfortune are common in African societies and among African migrants has a long and controversial history, both in psychiatric and an-thropological literature. More recently, ethnography emphasized the ties be-tween a past of dispossession, the “modernity’s malcontents”, and witch-craft beliefs. The paper tries to explore the politics of Self (a Self imbued with distrust, increasing competition and intolerable inequalities) as well as the local and the historical roots of these beliefs and attitudes in contemporary West Africa (Cameroon). Its aim is to contribute to go beyond the mere cul-tural register and to anchor feelings, beliefs, and what it can be defined as a form of “social postcolonial suffering” to an ongoing experience of power-lessness and dispossession.