To browse Academia. A series of murders of albinos in Tanzania's northwest mining frontier has been shrouded in a discourse of primitivism by the international and national press, sidestepping the significance of the contextual circumstances of an artisanal mining boom firmly embedded in a global commodity chain and local profit maximization. Through the concept of fetish creation, this article interrogates the agency of those involved in the murders: the miners who purchase the albino charms, the waganga healers renowned for their healing, divination and sorcery skills who prescribe and sell the charms, and the albino murder victims.
The Sukuma have been long known in Tanzania for their skills as healers. Sukuma knowledge of uganga is admired and often remarked upon as the cause of the economic success of artisanal miners' who seek their services Sanders b 7. For decades, their acclaimed knowledge of medicinal plants and healing practices has attracted patients from other parts of Tanzania seeking consultation and treatment.
Famous waganga establish clinics, which usually consist of a collection of small thatched round huts, situated along up-country roads remote from towns and other habitation. Set back from the road, they are often demarcated by an ostrich egg perched on the largest hut's domed thatch. In addition to adopting the role of medium between the two realms, the Sukuma mganga is understood to be a force for good within a community, maintaining the two worlds in a state of equilibrium.
Concepts of good and evil vary but evil in many African cultures tend to be unassigned to a specific agency. In other words, evil is seen as an imperfection or absence of good without attributing causation to individual agency Bewaji In this light, witch killings and other physically harming practices inflicted by waganga on individuals that are identified as repositories of errant, evil spirits are justifiable if not praised as ridding the society of evil.
Traditionally, the waganga were expected to bring about a normalisation and harmonisation of relations between people and between realms. However, this role is changing.
