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Not only in Liberia Ritual Killing Lesotho (2 cases reported here)
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Book on 'medicine
murder' Colin Murray and Peter Sanders, Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis (London, 2005) "This book has appeared at just the right moment. We badly need an anthropological guide to the matter of medicine murder. This book's main subject is a series of medicine murders, their detection and punishment in late colonial Basutoland, rather than any post-colonial phenomena. (...) They (i.e. the authors) offer a careful exploration of historical evidence which suggests that medicine murders had taken place intermittently for a hundred years at least. They offer detailed case studies of late colonial murders based on exhaustive research in the archives. Their book ends with a 122-page appendix which summarizes every case of suspected medicine murder between 1895 and 1966. (...) They (i.e. the authors) are concerned, of course, to explain why this was so. They reject any idea of a general African, or even southern African, ideology of human sacrifice. In every place where medicine murders took place, or became notorious--and they examine the crisis in Swaziland in the 1970s, in Venda in the late 1980s, in Ghana, in Nigeria--motives for murder could be understood 'only within local systems of belief that were difficult for outside observers to penetrate'. (...) In Basutoland the key parties to a medicine murder were the most powerful men in society, but they were not denounced by the impoverished young who took part in the murders. (...)" Book review by Terence Ranger
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