Like Cutting a Cow 
Adam Kuper
- Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis by Colin Murray and Peter Sanders Buy this book
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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Adam Kuper, whose most recent book is The Reinvention of Primitive Society, is a professor of anthropology at Brunel University.
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