On February 26th, 2021, the Center for African Studies hosted its weekly Baraza entitled: “Border-Crossing Beliefs: African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking”. The presentation was given by Dr. Katherine Luongo, a professor of History at Northeastern University.
Dr. Luongo is a specialist in the anthropological history of Kenya. Her work focuses on legal systems in colonial and contemporary Africa, global legal regimes, and human rights. Her research interests are at the intersections of the supernatural, law, and politics in Africa and in the interactions of African witchcraft and forced migration. She is the author of Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She is the author of Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories of Politics and Belonging (Ohio University Press, 2016), the first scholarly work to examine the history of Kenya through the experiences of the Obama family.
Dr. Luongo’s current project, Border-Crossing Beliefs: African Witchcraft in the Arena of Asylum, investigates the persistence of witchcraft-driven violence across Africa from the related standpoints of legal anthropology and legal history and migration and human rights studies.
Dr. Luongo presented chapters from this work at the Baraza. In her book, she analyzes how witchcraft allegations made by African asylum-seekers have interacted with the protocols of asylum-seeking on the local, national, and global levels over the last two decades and how humanitarian organizations such as the United Nations have engaged with witchcraft-driven violence. This research has been published in African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, edited by Iris Berger et al. (Ohio University Press, 2015). A second work-in-progress, A History of Human Rights in Kenya, examines the legal history of human rights in Kenya from the 1960s through the 1990s, focusing on illegal detentions, human rights activism, political trials, and lawfare.
Dr. Luongo began her talk by framing the research process and development process of the book. The journey took her from the archives in the United States to Switzerland. She defined key aspects of what is asylum-seeking, to who counts as a refugee. Then detailed the transnational and legal frameworks surrounding this topic, as well as the anthropological and policy history of asylum-seeking. Dr. Luongo transitioned into examining the relationship between Witchcraft and Asylum Seeking. But she made sure to frame the history of why refugee status and asylum have been sought historically.
As she continued, Dr. Luongo touched upon the differentiation between Colonial narratives of witchcraft violence and the law, and contemporary narratives of today. She then shared stories and cases of refugee seekers impacted by allegations. Her talk elaborated further on storytelling about specific cases and the stories of individuals seeking asylum due to witchcraft allegations. Dr. Luongo highlighted the nuanced aspects of these stories of asylum-seeking in relation to threats to personal safety and allegations of witchcraft in home countries of asylum seekers. One key example was the experience of a Nigerian woman whose abusive husband had labeled her a witch. Dr. Luongo shared her analysis about the time and exhaustive capacity Asylum seekers go through to convince the legal process that they have been or will be persecuted because of the label of witchcraft, that this fear exists, and that this is a lived experience to legal bodies in Canada, the UK, and Australia. Dr. Luongo stated “How do you express something that this Is not real?” to a Eurocentric legal audience when you are talking about witchcraft and seeking asylum. Dr. Luongo shared her definition of witchcraft, a definition of an embodied practice. She offered insight into the bodily psychological or financial harm that people accused of this act of deploying supernatural power face, as well as the episodic violence that they experience, and how globalization has made these questions urgent, particularly on the African continent.
Dr. Luongo noted that there are many stories of dislocation in the asylum-seeking experience. Reviewing archives can offer an array of information about asylum seekers—specific information regarding individuals, NGO or media responses, different governmental approaches to cultural persecutions, and variation in what counts as an acceptable cause for seeking refugee status. Dr. Luongo ended her presentation by revisiting the stories of the key Asylum seekers, sharing that one was able to gain asylum after a long process.
Written by: Karen Awura-Adjoa Ronke Coker