Just a brief reminder that our first research seminar is taking place on Thursday 3 October in Uni Place_3.204 from 4.15-5.30.

Prof Diana Jeater (University of Liverpool) ‘A European obsession with vengeance: reclaiming ngozi spirits from the ethnographic record’.

In the ethnographic literature, Zimbabwe’s ngozi spirits are presented as ‘vengeance spirits’. They are conceptualised as a form of the Greek Erinyes (‘Furies’), who were closely associated with curses and thought to carry out acts of vengeance against those who did harm to others. The ngozi spirits, it is said, similarly torment and terrify the perpetrators of evil. As I have argued elsewhere, the ubiquity of Biblical and Classical references in European modes of thought frequently distorted white perceptions of African societies. Yhis paper suggests that the distortion was exacerbated because Europeans conceptualised justice as retributive rather than as reparative. But the ethnographic literature is misleading: the role of ngozi was not to persecute and punish perpetrators, but rather to harry them into seeking out victims’ families and make restitution. Whites misread these reconciliation impulses as vengeance impulses and so inscribed ngozi as ‘vengeance spirits’ in the ethnographic record.
Detailed examination of cases in the judicial archives from the first half of the twentieth century reveals a different story. There are traces of ngozi cases that were not recognised or recorded as such by the white judicial system, but which can be identified as such by small telling details. Because they have not been recorded as ethnographic evidence of ngozi beliefs, they provide an alternative perspective from that recorded in the ethnographic literature. This archival work has been supplemented by a handful of oral histories of ngozi stories from the past forty years.
This critique of the ethnographic record is important primarily because it has consequences for the work of grassroots healing and reconciliation in the present. Ngozi cases were outlawed and driven underground by the white state. Consequently, memories of how ngozi contributed to reconciliation became submerged and distorted, creating a belief that there are no indigenous systems of community reconciliation and that models need to be imported from outside. However, within some grassroots reconciliation programmes, there is a growing recognition of the need to reclaim these systems and acknowledge the spiritual dimensions of reconciliation. For this, people need accurate ethnographies. This work is a contribution to that change.

Prof Diana Jeater (University of Liverpool) is a leading expert on Zimbabwean history, who has published extensively on sex and sexuality, religion & belief, language and translation, law and jurisprudence, health and healing, citizenship and rights, witchcraft and politics. She is also currently working on a project on ‘Decolonising the Academy’.

Dr. Laure Humbert
Lecturer in Modern History

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