Madumo, a Man Bewitched

I was so happy I could get it in such a hurry! This saved my grade, I had a quiz due at 11:59 and ordered it at 2am and delivered by 6pm!! Book is new and beautiful.

I lived the story. My favorite. but alas it was stolen.

Was an interesting read.

This was a required text for a cultural diversity class. It served the purpose of exposure to other cultural beliefs. However, it would not have been a choice of mine to read this for enjoyment.

A great book!

Although he is now a professor in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Adam Ashforth has spent much of the past ten years in Soweto, living there full time until the elections of 1994, and then going back for three months each year. He has friends there, so he goes to South Africa for his vacations. _Madumo: A Man Bewitched_ (University of Chicago Press) tells the story of one such friend, and the extraordinary lengths toward which friendship goes. It is a warm, generally happy book blending memoir, reportage, and sociology. It is steeped in witchcraft. Madumo, a friend from Ashforth's first stay in Soweto, has been thrown out of his house because a prophet of the Zion Christian Church told Madumo's younger brother that Madumo had used witchcraft to murder their mother, and Madumo had been thrown out of the family home. Much of the book has to do with the counter-witchcraft Ashforth helps Madumo hire, through a medicine man named Mr. Zondi. Madumo has to be washed with herbs and earth from Madumo's mother's grave. There is a ritual cutting of Madumo's hands and legs, with mercury rubbed into the cuts. A white hen is slaughtered in a pre-feast to assure the ancestors of goodwill and more to come. Other herbs induce vomiting, the sort of purgative that has been favored in folk medicine for centuries, but which makes Madumo seriously ill. Ashforth tells a surgeon friend about what Madumo is going through, and the surgeon explains the danger. The vomiting can cause dehydration, kidney failure, and bleeding from the esophagus. Ashforth seriously worries if he had been too simple-minded in endorsing the Zondi cure. The treatments bring improvement for Madumo. The improvement can't promise him a new place in his family, or within the South African economy, however; the strange daily life and business ways of the Sowetan community are a constant theme in this unique memoir. The main theme is, of course, the pervasive belief in witchcraft, and Ashforth explains how as a form of belief in the supernatural it takes its place with other religious ideas as a way of trying to make sense of the world. Ashforth is often asked if he believes in witchcraft, and he resoundingly doesn't. But he also knows that there are no arguments persuasive enough to make believers think that Madumo's treatment is placebo any more than those who pray can be convinced that prayer is not a real interaction with the divine. Trying to argue Madumo out of his beliefs would have availed Ashforth nothing, while paying for the treatment did give his friend a new life. Thus the materialist harnessed counter-witchcraft to help a bewitched friend, and brought results.

Writing on every page was not the expectation. Expected better from Thrift Books than that.

I really liked that Ashforth wrote it in a narrative way. I had to read this book for my Anthropology class and our professor gave us a list of books to choose one. I was looking at two different books and then I picked up this book. It makes it much more interesting when Anthropologists make the story interesting to read. It is also quite an eye-opener in terms of witchcraft in South Africa. I found it interesting to read why there is so much witchcraft in Africa and why it has increased. I won't tell you why...you have to read it :)