Speaking of Satan in Zambia is a comprehensive overview of the research into Satanism in the southern African nation of Zambia, as well as an examination of its theological and cultural connections to western views. Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps accomplishes this, she readily admits, by virtue of the fact that “[n]arratives about Satanism have a relatively short history in Zambia” (32), beginning only in the 1990s. As her own narrative progresses, she cites parallel research from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana and Lesotho. The volume also contains many testimonials from the primary research the author conducted for her dissertation. Consequently, what this book offers are first-hand ethnographic accounts of how belief in Satan, evil forces and the evil “other,” and the ways to combat them, are culturally expressed in African modernity and in the context of global Christian discourses on evil.
After examining the various theologies of Satanism, anti-Satanism, witchcraft,...
University of California Press