Like Cutting a Cow

Adam Kuper

  • Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis by Colin Murray and Peter Sanders
    Edinburgh, 493 pp, £50.00, May 2006, ISBN 0 7486 2284 5

In the chaotic last years of apartheid – the regime crumbling, local authorities in turmoil, violence a constant threat – there were outbreaks of witch-hunting and medicine murder in what was then the northern Transvaal. Hundreds of suspected witches were burnt to death. In 1988, a medicine murder scandal precipitated the fall of the government of the Venda Bantustan. There were 15 suspicious killings within a month of the mysterious death of the state president, himself a notorious medicine murderer, and gangs of youths were roaming the streets shouting: ‘Death to the ritual murderers!’

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