This is an ethnographic study of witchcraft and witch-hunting in 1980s South Africa - a period of rapid social change. The book demonstrates the extent to which witchcraft must be seen, not as a residue of "traditional" culture, but as part of contemporary political and economic processes.

He explores the increasingly conservative role of the chiefs and the Christian church. In the process, he reveals the fraught nature of intergenerational and gender relations. The result is a truly insightful and theoretically engaged account of a much-studied but frequently misunderstood practice.