Mens Daemonica: Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa.

In Thohoyandou, South Africa, a series of rapes and murders in 2014 sparked panic, with local stories attributing the violence to demonic forces—a claim the accused himself confirmed, saying he was possessed. Based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article describes how state criminal justice sites in South Africa grapple with the occult in ambivalent ways. Spirit possession is difficult to reconcile with legal methods of determining criminal liability in courtrooms, yet when imprisoned people are paroled, the state entertains bewitchment in public reconciliation ceremonies. The article proposes the concept of mens daemonica ("demonic mind") to describe a hijacked selfhood, contrasting it with mens rea ("criminal mind") in law.

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Abstract

In winter 2014, the town of Thohoyandou, South Africa was gripped with panic after a series of rapes and murders. In this area, notorious for its occult specialists and witchcraft, stories began to circulate attributing the violence to demonic forces. These stories were given credence by the young man who was charged with these crimes. In his testimony, he confirmed that he was possessed by evil forces. Taking this story as a point of departure, this article provides an empirical account of the ambivalent ways state sites of criminal justice grapple with the occult in South Africa. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how spirit possession is not easily reconciled with legal methods of parsing criminal liability in courtrooms. And yet, when imprisoned people are paroled, the state entertains the possibility of bewitchment in public ceremonies of reconciliation. Abstracting from local stories about the occult, this article proposes mens daemonica ("demonic mind") to describe this state of hijacked selfhood and as an alternative to the mens rea ("criminal mind") observed in criminal law. While the latter seeks the cause of wrongdoing in the authentic will of the autonomous, self-governing subject, mens daemonica describes a putatively extra-legal idea of captured volition that implicates a vast and ultimately unknowable range of others and objects in what only appears to be a singular act of wrongdoing. This way of reckoning culpability has the potential to inspire new approaches to justice.