The idea of evil, for all its conceptual vagueness, has provided fertile ground for comparative analysis. Is evil intrinsic to personhood, or is its source located in a superhuman realm? What overlaps exist between abhorrence and admiration of those said to act in evil ways? What institutional arrangements make it possible to act upon attributions of evil intent? In the view of the editors of the present volume, the specificity of evil ‘in Africa’ derives from the emphasis in African religions on addressing everyday conflicts. Within these religious practices, they contend, evil tends to be construed as a form of excess that disrupts proper relationships. Incorporating 19 essays by eminent scholars, this collection brings cosmological perspectives on evil into dialogue with approaches showing how understandings of evil motivate political violence and reconciliation.

Opening Part One, entitled ‘Evil and the State/War’, Sónia Silva's chapter cautions against identifying evil in Africa solely with the ambivalent aspects of power, since the destructive acts of the powerful are apt to be all too clear. As a case in point, Jok Madut Jok relates the impunity with which soldiers in South Sudan have abused citizens, contributing to ethnic tensions and civil war. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, and Julaina Obika discuss a postwar forgiveness project in Acholiland whose participants aim not to forgive armies or military leaders, but to re-establish relations of civility with those with whom they had prior relationships. Jennie Burnet describes competing ways of conceptualizing evil in popular accounts of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, showing how narratives depicting killers as possessed by Satan might make it easier for survivors to live with perpetrators. Wyatt MacGaffey speculates that rituals arising from conditions of political instability may promote conceptions of a single occult force that can be deployed to heal or to harm. Further chapters dealing with the ambiguous moralities of corruption and human rights would have been welcome in this section.

In Part Two, ‘Evil and Religion’, René Devisch adopts a Lacanian perspective on how desire inhabits intercorporeality, thereby enhancing or deflating the life of the kin group. In dialogue with Judy Rosenthal, clinical psychologist and anthropologist Léocadie Ekoué explains that Afa divination makes a person aware of her personal powers, thereby helping her refrain from unconscious hurtful acts. Walter van Beek describes how the capacity of revenge magic in Kapsiki to cause total social death requires that it be used in moderation, so that justice rather than vindictiveness may be served. Diane Ciekawy explains how Mijikenda affirmed their reliance on rituals of cleansing the land following a terrible road accident, thereby sustaining moral claims to autochthony and collective identity. Ulrika Trovalla describes how sectarian conflicts in Jos have sparked fears of the absent other, so that malevolent entities seem to have enhanced their reach and mobility even as Christians and Muslims have become segregated. Roy Dilley explores how absolutist conceptions of evil are taking precedence over more flexible interpretations of what is permitted and forbidden under Islam in Senegal. Kjersti Larsen focuses on the potency of words deemed excessive in Zanzibar, showing how unveiling others’ secrets epitomizes malevolent action. Susan Rasmussen argues that among Tuareg, evil derives not so much from excess emotion as from deprivations and dangers that threaten honor and dignity. Dorothy Hodgson shows how Maasai women cast men's increased political and economic control as an affront to the divinity Eng'ai, and affirm women's power through collective protests and Christian worship.

Part Three, ‘Evil and Modernity’, opens with a chapter by Nancy Scheper-Hughes on the international organ trade, which she argues is an instance in which ‘the devil entered history’. William Olsen accounts for mob killings of thieves in Asante by explaining how thefts of material goods are seen as illicit appropriations of people's life force, upon which communal prosperity depends. Maia Green contends that cosmological approaches cannot fully explain how and whether attributions of evil are acted upon. Describing postsocialist transformations of witchfinding in southern Tanzania, Green shows that actions against witches have become dissociated from public institutions and thus require greater informal support. Linda van de Kamp describes the efforts of Brazilian Pentecostal pastors working in Maputo to liberate believers from spiritual bondage. Even as Brazilian pastors must display familiarity with the tricks of the devil, their ignorance of the particularities of Mozambican spirits is deemed a strength associated with foreignness. Finally, Adam Ashforth points out that the politics of blame in South Africa revolve around claims concerning ‘the evil of apartheid’.

This volume will be widely welcomed as dovetailing with a range of recent treatments, notably by Peter Geschiere and Richard Werbner, of how practical wisdom may consist of identifying apparently familiar others as uncanny threats, or alternately of recognizing distortions of the familiar within oneself.