Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law:

Magic, Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu.

Knut Rio
University of Bergen

ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention
of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery
practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument
revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people’s
contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a new
imaginary space of national belonging.
Key words: Vanuata, sorcery, law, kastom, courts.

INTRODUCTION1
In this paper I draw attention to a domain of cultural heritage in Vanuatu that people often do
not want to preserve or protect, but that they often cannot get rid of – namely sorcery or what
is known as posen or nakaimas in Vanuatu Pidgin. Like much other cultural heritage, its power
resides in its intangible form. Sorcery involves the transferral of secret knowledge and is
articulated through relations marked by fear, anger or jealousy. Like other cultural heritage
practices, sorcery is also being articulated and transformed through its participation in
historical processes of social change.
Occult forces have always played an unwanted and upsetting part in social history. When
the colonists imported African slaves to America, they later discovered that they had also
unknowingly imported voodoo and zombies. Likewise, in Europe, when the big cities like
London began to emerge in the 18th century and, as people were thinking that they had
emancipated themselves from the fetters of old beliefs and the evil forces that governed the
life of farmers in the rural areas, such as the diseases of humans or livestock, they had sadly
to realize that the old magic was still with them. It was now money and investment that
suddenly became prey to magic, and homicidal sorcery due to jealousy was rampant in the
new urban circumstances (see Davies 1997). Likewise, today, there are reports of widespread
witchcraft beliefs and accusations in Africa bound up with situations of great change in
relations of production and ideology. In South Africa (Ashforth 2005, Comaroff and Comaroff
1993, Niehaus 2001), Cameroon (Geshiere 1997) and Ghana (Meyer 1999), witchcraft has
been shown to articulate itself at the level of the state, entangled in politics, law, government
contracts and bureaucratic power. In such contexts, government officials are often suspected
to be witches - their demonic magical power closely tied to their economic and political power.
Likewise, in contemporary Melanesia, witchcraft and sorcery are perceived as important factors
shaping people’s living conditions. In Vanuatu nakaimas is something that affects people’s life
on a daily basis, forming an invisible background to social life and giving new impetus to the
energetic activities of churches, healing rituals, relations of gift-giving and sharing, and
people’s patterns of socialization on the whole.
A number of anthropologists have argued that during the colonial era, with the coming of
money and the market place, sorcery was ‘democratized.’ It was perceived as having become

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available to anyone and anybody - especially in the streets of towns, around plantations and
administrative centres, and in markets where it could be transacted freely without being related
to chiefly authority or kinship ties (see Lipuma 1994; Rio 2002; Tonkinson 1981). These new
social settings were the new spaces of control, power and exchange. Andrew Lattas (1993)
reports from New Britain that new, more powerful forms of sorcery involve supposed sites of
civilisation and pacification, such as government stations, schools and churches. Here
magistrates, patrol officers and priests are both suffering from sorcery as well as being its new,
suspected source. Lattas argues that the state can be experienced as a vehicle of sorcery because
of its selective incorporation of certain ethnic groups into its administrative structures. New
Britain villagers in the Kaliait and Kove area suspect that the travels of police have provided
them with access to new forms of sorcery. The ability of police and magistrates to travel from
area to area to extract fines is related to fears of their sorcery. Jean Mitchell has also noted the
sorcerer-like status of Vanuatu’s national police (see Mitchell 2002).
In these cases sorcery is a form of cultural heritage that belongs to Significant Others –
with its power being a new de-territorialised form of national cultural heritage. Indeed, for
some, sorcery can serve as a leading example for all kinds of cultural heritage. The very concept
of kastom in Vanuatu is now very often used synonymously with the feared black powers of
cultural heritage. The power of cultural heritage itself needs to be controlled; otherwise it can
potentially become alive as nakaimas. Jean Mitchell in her study goes as far as to define sorcery
in the Vanuatu urban context thus ‘I frame poison as violence which links the present and the
past’ (2000:199). Similarly, I will use a quite broad definition in order to cover the social forces
that everyone in Vanuatu, in one way or another, fears are hidden in their social environment,
and for which they constantly keep searching. Prototypically posen or nakaimas, as these terms
are used interchangeably, refer to conscious acts of poisoning or casting of malevolent magic.
Instruments of such sorcery can simply be poisonous herbs or substances, but also more potent
magical mixtures that use human bones and magic stones or what is called su in Bislama.2
Such instruments of sorcery are now supposed to be drifting freely around in Vanuatu social
networks, more or less dependent on various island kastom, but also more dangerous for having
been freed from customary forms of regulation concerning the transmission of sorcery and the
punishment of transgressors
These new suspicions open up a whole field of evidence that scrutinises extraordinary
events and patterns of sociality for signs and motivations. Every illness, death, and other
misfortunes, such as bad weather, and business failure will be treated as signs of potential
malevolent magic on someone’s part. Such suspicions press themselves forward as an
underlying force in all kinds of social contexts, and every time they appear they make
customary conceptions or relations turn up under new social conditions. The specific evidence
of nakaimas always comes as a surprise, and it therefore always evokes enormous interest and
speculation.
I want to focus on a specific aspect of this process by studying recent attempts to control
sorcery within a system of law. This is occurring within a process of state constitution in
Melanesia, wherein efforts are made to encompass traditional culture and customary authority
within the overarching structure of the nation-state. This involves efforts to find a place for
cultural heritage in state legislation. For example, recent laws on intellectual property rights
have sought to develop a ‘Pacific Model Law’ for ‘the Protection of Traditional Knowledge
and Expressions of Culture’.3 There have also been attempts to incorporate chiefly authority
into national state institutions like The National Council of Chiefs, which is a body of authority
under the Vanuatu Constitution that has its own legislation in the National Council of Chiefs
Act.4 Perhaps in opposition to these attempts, a central element of culture such as malevolent
magic keeps upsetting these processes by revealing the yawning gap between the civilising
ideals of modernity in their embracement of traditional governance on the one hand versus the
problematic cultural practices of the past which are also developing and modernising
themselves on the other.

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THE STATE AND ‘TRIANGULAR CONSPIRACY’

To understand contemporary forms of sorcery, it is necessary to break free from stereotypes
of ‘the irrational’ or ‘traditional society’ and instead see it as a phenomenon rooted in a social
sphere with its own type of social ontology that posits an alternative kind of social space. This
is a space where normal ideas about behaviour or other conventions no longer hold. People
can be in several places at the same time, they can fly, and they can take on the appearance of
other people or animals. They can treat other people in devastating ways; taking their organs,
eating their flesh and handling human waste. These transgressors are greedy for human
substance. This is a social field wherein human relations become severed or destroyed and
where new relations are forged and bound together tightly through ritual, curses and oaths –
through what Kapferer terms the ‘phantasmagoric space’ (see Kapferer 1997). This alternative
space of power and relatedness can only be accessed through magical means, either through
the dark powers themselves, or through being revealed by diviners in their dreams or in an
extraordinary sense of ‘seeing’ by people called ‘clevers’ in Vanuatu. In the everyday world,
these dark magical practices leave behind signs or clues for people to pick up (see also Rio
n.d.). The character of this alternative hidden space differs throughout the world – but we can
maybe say that the fantasizing effort of trying to describe or understand, or even to enter into,
this fantastic space is always incredibly imaginative. The efforts of relatives, of diviners, and
also recently of news-papers and courts, to try to explore the terrors of sorcery or witchcraft
practice always expand it as a field of unbelievable and inhuman atrocities, and always in great
detail. Terence Ranger recently described a very interesting case from 2005 in London, where
newspapers, police and even Scotland Yard became party to the murder story of an African
boy whose corpse was found in the river Thames. Fantastic speculations were flourishing about
ritual sacrifice, voodoo poisoning, trafficking in human flesh, and clearly feeding on popular
visions of Africa as the continent of darkness (Ranger 2007). In this regard, it might be useful
to return to former frames of understanding: in traditional historical explanations about
witchcraft in medieval Europe, a ‘triangular conspiracy’ was used to explain the creation of
that fantastic space. It emerged from a mix of popular belief or ‘superstition’, church authority
and state power. Accusations against medieval witches are analysed as the result of people’s
deepest, unnameable fears of loss or death, but combined and acted upon inside the strategic
interests of control and discipline of church and state towards certain layers of the population.
We do not need to adopt wholesale the historians’ ‘triangular conspiracy’ theory to
understand contemporary Melanesia– but we can note the similar agencies and relationships
involved. People’s fear for their life and wellbeing - concerning the devil, witches or sorcery
- is still an important part of Melanesia today, and there is almost a medieval aspect to some
contemporary journalism and, as we shall see, to contemporary state legal proceedings. Indeed,
both church and state power always play a part in the potent space of relationships created
under the circumstances of mysterious deaths, posen or nakaimas. Church and state become
powerful parties to the construction of the space of sorcery when they invest themselves in it.
This brings me to consider the role of police, courts and the Christian discourse in
contemporary Melanesia.

SORCERY AND MELANESIAN LAW

Even though we get news reports of horrific incidents in Melanesia where people accused of
sorcery are burned, raped and killed, we have seen little in the anthropological literature about
the way this is handled by police, in courts or in the public sphere. The Papua New Guinea
Sorcery Act states its purpose as ‘an act to prevent and punish evil practices of sorcery and
other similar evil practices’.5 Under the Vanuatu Penal Code, chapter 135/section 151, it is
written that ‘No person shall practice witchcraft or sorcery with intent to cause harm or
detriment to any other person’. Here we see witchcraft and sorcery beliefs transferred from
custom and recodified within the state’s judicial-penal system. From colonial times, sorcery

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has played an awkward part in Melanesian history, as colonial legislators sought to create
legislation and punishment for offences which they did not believe existed. In this respect
Goddard notes the paradox of colonial administration around 1925:

as far as Murray was concerned “We know of course that sorcery is all rubbish” –
and his cryptic comment on a gaol sentence, that sorcerers could not be put to death
for an imaginary offence, reflected the ontological dilemma sorcery beliefs presented
for the Administration…yet the prosecution of alleged sorcerers suggested to Papuans
that the Administration shared the belief. (2009:36).

The original response of the state and courts was to outlaw intimidation through sorcery
and reprisals against alleged sorcery attacks. But this has become more blurred with
independence and a national elite that believes in sorcery as much as the population that it
administers.New state and also church ways of managing sorcery emerge, which are grounded
in a social ontology of how sorcery works. This ontology underpins the competing accounts
and different forms of knowledge about sorcery. These new accounts often function not to
present sorcery as more under control but as less subject to control and thus all the more
frightening. In the court case that I shall refer to below it becomes clear that both the police
and the judges operate with full recognition of the specificity of the social ontology of the
space of sorcery. Yet the judicial-legal process also serves to remove the case from its local
context, thus recodifying and reframing the ontology of sorcery.
This institutional transfer of sorcery removes sorcery from being located in local
relationships of kinship and reciprocity and submits it to the totalizing state agency. Indeed,
the pursuit of witches is upgraded to the level of having the potential to be a project of military-
police pursuit and eradication. The witch hunt is thus expanded, but so also is the state’s
regulation and surveillance of the population. In Melanesia today, the realm of state violence
and policing increasingly overlaps with the realm of sorcery activities and beliefs (see Mitchell
2000). It is not without consequence that the police in Vanuatu are now expanding their
activities, and are getting more and more resources to watch over the threat posed to the social
body by posen and nakaimas. This increasing involvement of the state is also, I believe,
producing a transformation of the concepts of guilt and blame invoked in sorcery accusations
and is leading to more widespread aggression and violence against those accused.
Another related question is how the interconnection between local village courts, area
magistrate courts and the supreme court works. A tendency has been that in these relatively
small countries in Melanesia, the supreme court does not escape being influenced by village
courts since the distance in kinship and relationship is never long between central
administration and local relationships and chiefs. On the other hand, as pointed out by Michael
Goddard for the case of Papua New Guinea, village courts have adopted the legalism and
procedures of the formal courtrooms even though they were supposed to be informal and
democratic organs of the village communities under the colonial regime (Goddard 1996; 2009;
see also Demian 2003). Also noted by Goddard is a tendency to see courts as being in moral
opposition to kastom, since courts are ultimately perceived as the tool of regulation for
colonialism and the nation-state, whereas kastom continues to operate with its own form of
justice and regulation (also LiPuma 1994; Ottley and Zorn 1983; Rousseau 2008). From a
juridical angle, Miranda Forsyth comments on the Melanesian legal systems:

Despite the fact that all the state legal systems profess a desire in their constitutions
to create an indigenous legal system, adapted for their particular circumstances and
culture, rather than continuing with a system that is essentially foreign, this desire
has remained largely unsatisfied. (Forsyth 2006: 2)

Forsyth claims that attempts have been made to merge the two systems, and she especially

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discusses cases where a norm from customary law, notably ‘the prohibition against sorcery’,
has been taken into the court room. She notes how customary bodies have become national
legal bodies such as the National Council of Chiefs in Vanuatu, which offer not just customary
legislation but penal suggestions that carry weight in the communities in Vanuatu. In a
paragraph in the Malvatumauri Kastom Law, it is stated that ‘If the court finds proof that he
killed through sorcery, he must compensate that person’s life according to the judgment of the
court’ (Forsyth 2006: 11). It is compensation instead of punishment which is being
recommended, or perhaps, in these hybrid domains of law, punishment and compensation are
merging to create new disciplinary forms.
I believe it is problematic for state law to encompass customary law in such a way as to
assume that sorcery can be treated as a unitary phenomenon codified in the abstract
decontextualised principles of law. Alternatively, perhaps custom and sorcery are being
transformed through this process, creating forms of inter-legality and punishment regimes.
Under kastom, sorcery was never altogether ‘prohibited’ or even illegitimate. In many ways
kastom and sorcery have become synonymously immoral inside new forms of churchly
discourse and in particular inside new forms of Pentecostal religiosity. There is nothing to
indicate that sorcery could ever be simply translated as ‘crime’ in the vocabulary of customary
law. That translation would efface different cultural understandings of morality, agency and
motivation. In terms of morality, the sorcerer’s desire and force to invade another person’s
body is hard to pinpoint. I believe it can be seen as an extension of a morality of sharing. The
events of sorcery always force subjects to realize the relationship of sharing as of primary
value. In contemporary situations where individual ownership and cash labour are becoming
more current, the sorcery event opens people’s eyes to their fundamental embeddedness in a
social system of relatedness. Like ethnographic reports for other parts of the world, those on
contemporary Melanesia show that jealousy often accompanies charges against the sorcerer
(see Eves 2000). Likewise, in Vanuatu many can predict a potential nakaimas threat in a
relationship where there is reason for envy. Given the ideal that people should not be selfish
and keep to themselves, jealousy carries a certain moral legitimacy against those who have
success in business or other activities which privatise income and profit. In Vanuatu, in most
village court sorcery trials there is therefore often a double moral edge; the accused sorcerer
should not have been angry or jealous, but the victim should not have been stingy or selfish
either (see Rio 2002). This double, ambiguous nature of sorcery has been raised by Naomi
McPherson in a paper on New Britain. In her evaluation of these situations, she fails to decide
whether sorcery represents social deviance or the control of social deviance (McPherson 1991).
Similarly, Rodman and Rodman (1991) discuss the degree to which a magician or sorcerer in
Ambae of Vanuatu can be charged with an offence. The village court case against a rain-maker
that they report ends up with no charges being pressed. The direct charges would themselves
have caused more anger and that would represent danger to the community as a whole. In
another case, William Rodman discusses sorcery accusations as a levelling discourse: ‘a way
of silencing chiefs who cling to power in the face of political change’ (Rodman 1993:218). In
this example members of the community were allowed to express their doubts about the chief
as they accused him of sorcery. This open court hearing pressed for the need to have concrete
evidence about intent and ability. For this reason, the court could not establish any guilt on the
part of the accused, and the result was, as is also my experience in most village courts, that the
accused had to engage in exchange with the victim’s side and, also, that the victim should
compensate the accused for the allegations and anger demonstrated during the court
proceedings. What Rodman’s description shows is that the morality or the truth of the sorcery
often remains hidden from the court hearing. In the Ambae case, the power of the chief was
cast into uncertainty in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, it represented his downfall because
he had to stand trial. The event was levelling to the extent that the sorcery court managed to
take away his power and bring his name into disrespect, but it also forced him to acknowledge
the new basis of leadership in a modern formally egalitarian society. To add to the uncertainty

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about guilt, truth and morality, Rodman reports that the chief acknowledged after the court
hearing that he might have been the cause of the sorcery attack, which resulted in illness and
death, but without intent (see also Demian 2003:105).
Ethnographic descriptions of sorcery reveal it as an ambiguous field of paradoxes and
contradictions, and so efforts to incorporate it within a system of law, sentence and punishment
must be highly problematic. My view is that sorcery always comes with unknown motives. In
and of itself, it has no morality. When a death or illness occurs, people will start asking the
type of questions that makes it a moral issue for the relationships involved, and this will blend
in with other moral issues within these relationships. As described by Demian: ‘The history of
a death moves “backwards” through the person of the sorcerer and into his relationship with
the family of his victim, their allies and enemies’ (2003:105-106). I believe this is becoming
more and more powerful in Melanesia today, as sorcery accusations are becoming more and
more an issue of individual accusations. Relationships are scrutinized, especially close
relationships within family or marriage, but also relationships of dependence and reliance
within the workplace or with regard to authorities, and the tendency now is to draw out
individual blame from these relationships, with the primary intention of punishment. We have
seen arguments going in several directions. In some cases charges of sorcery are directed at
the supposedly weak; such as powerless women (see Strathern 1972:159-184), in other cases
they are directed at authorities such as chiefs or businessmen (Eves 2000; Rodman and Rodman
1991). Both instances have in common the effect of opening up a whole social field to doubts
about the viability of these relations, as absolutely crucial relations (women as mothers or
sisters, chiefs or other big men as important middlemen and mediators), and in the end this
doubt must be repaired by some compensation to the loss of a reciprocally constituted totality.
Relations must be mended and this becomes the motor for accusations and violence against
the alleged sorcerer. All this activity leads to the closing down of the phantasmagoric space of
invisible violence and murder through a re-engagement in reciprocity – that includes the
taking of life or the giving away of kin - for only this can lead back to normal affairs. As noted
by many writers, the potent space of sorcery fears and accusations does not fade away with
modernity, but rather intensifies because of strengthening and painful new sorts of inequality
and reasons for rupture in post-colonial situations, and even more so because of the role that
police and systems of courts play in the processes of state-building.

APPROACHING THE PHANTASMAGORIC SPACE

I believe it is dangerous for the state apparatus to take on the role of the witch hunt. This
contemporary state involvement has upgraded sorcery into a national project that draws not
just on custom but also on new forms of evil formulated within a Christian discourse, which
can potentially fuel the witch hunt into a generalized form of violence that seeks not
compensation and reconciliation but to purge and cleanse the nation and the world.
When law comes to stand in opposition to kastom, the side effect is that policing and
sorcery can become alternative modes of discipline and violence. In order to provide more
background for this I shall describe the process of a court case against a group of men who
were charged with the murder of a young girl in Malekula Island in Vanuatu in December
1995. I focus on the reactions of co-villagers, police, journalists and court officials in the
Magistrate and Supreme Courts Official agencies who also participated in creating the
phantasmagoric space of the incident. The effect of taking the sorcery accusations into the
bureaucracy, the system of police and law, also demonstrates that a belief in sorcery is not a
product of a lack of education, the irrational or the logic of traditional society. Today, the
modern state has become part of sorcery processes and is considered by the ‘grassroots’ to be
on the very same level where one might place the sorcerer and the diviner. The state intervenes
in the form of the police and the system of courts as a new kind of diviner of hidden causes.
Like the old diviners who used dreams or visions, it seeks empirical evidence about the

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supernatural, seeking to make the invisible visible, but it does so using police interrogations,
cross examination and modern forensic evidence. All of this empirical material is assembled
and evaluated. It is also reobjectified and given a new reality by being written down on paper
so as to appear as legal transcript and to appear for mass consumption in newspapers. There
is a modernisation of processes of divination; they are being rationalised at the same time as
state power acquires the quality of a supernatural struggle with the occult (see Lattas 2010).
In northern Malekula, in December of 1995, a girl appeared to having died suddenly on
the dance floor of a disco club. The circumstances of the death were suspicious. People found
it strange that the corpse appeared to be cold straight after she fell over. They observed that
whilst she was lying on the dance-floor her clothes looked untidy and her hair was in a mess.
Like witchcraft in Africa and sorcery in parts of Papua New Guinea, homicidal sorcery in
Vanuatu often presents the sorcerer as hungry for the victim’s inner organs. Eating the heart or
liver is typically part of people’s shocking accounts of posen attacks. A common theme is when
and where the victim was first attacked, on the way to the gardens, between villages or just
going to the toilet behind the hamlet. Sometimes sorcerers are described as putting something
over the victims’ head so as to bespell them and cause them to follow the sorcerers voluntarily.
Alternatively, sorcerers might kill the victim right away and transport him or her into a secret
location where they will open the stomach, take out the intestines and start to eat them along
with other inner organs. These will be replaced with herbs and the body will be stitched up
and the victim will be woken up. He or she will not remember anything and will walk around
as normal for some days, until the victim suddenly falls over dead. By then the sorcerers are
far away and beyond suspicion. I use sorcerers in plural because normally suspicion falls on
groups of men who have teamed up to kill the victim. Many also believe that it requires the
unanimous agreement of kin before sorcery can be used. In Vanuatu, mysterious sorcery deaths
and accusations are unequally distributed. Some islands have nothing of the sort, whereas
others, such as Ambrym, Maewo and the towns of Port Vila and Luganville are rife with sorcery
(see Forsyth 2006; Rio 2002). In this case in Malekula, the sorcery had allegedly been imported
from the neighbouring island of Ambrym by one of the accused men who had relatives there.
It is significant that the police officer at Lakatoro station who took their statements was from
Ambrym and so was the judge of the Supreme Court in Santo. The death of the girl was
informed by this caricature of Ambrym as a place of dark powers, and by rumours that the
killing was ordered by a secret men’s lodge in North Malekula with links to Ambrym. In these
flows of posen from one island to another a regional space is being remapped, and these
interconnections are experienced as making control over life difficult.

EVENTS ON VILLAGE LEVEL

As a result of these events, the nightclub of a certain village in North Malekula came to the
centre of attention. Though the owner of the nightclub lives in the hamlet, his nightclub is
situated some distance from the settlement itself, inside an old coconut plantation. The
nightclub’s owner was a Member of Parliament and a powerful man. The dead girl and her
family lived at the entrance to the mission ground, close to the seashore. Behind the mission
station is the hamlet of the family of the suspected sorcerers, they live with their mother who
is from Ambrym Island. There is a history of tension among these settlements close to the
mission. Indeed, in 1995, at the time of the death, those tensions were pivoting around the
local MP and his followers. The family of those accused were living ‘behind’ the main village,
in a hamlet that was characterised by the more progressive supporters of the MP as
‘backwards’, non-cooperative and uninterested in development. Because the elderly mother
of those accused was from Ambrym, she and her husband were believed to be in control of
black powers. They were said to have a little ‘secret house’ in their hamlet, where they kept
imported magical items and performed practices from the old woman’s relatives in the Olal
area of North Ambrym. Many villagers suspected that the old woman had served as a metehal

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(lit. ‘leading the road’, in North Ambrym language the word for ‘sister’), i.e. in this case as a
road for malevolent magic (see Rio 2007:89).
Immediately after the girl fell over at the dance floor people suspected something was
wrong. She had been dancing too furiously, like nothing they had ever seen before. When they
tried to blow air into her mouth, it was as if her insides had been destroyed, for the air did not
come back out as it normally does. According to witnesses who accompanied the dead body
to the hospital, an expatriate doctor inspected the corpse and stated that he estimated that death
had occurred three days earlier. The girl had been very healthy and fit, and there was reportedly
no history of serious illnesses in her family. All of this made people suspect nakaimas to be
the cause of death.6 People began looking for signs of what had happened and tried to go over
the immediate events leading to her death. Suspicion quickly fell on the ‘backwards’ family
in the village and its Ambrym connection. Over the next few weeks, signs were collected and
evidence assembled to create a full picture of what had taken place.
After the girl was buried, there was a round the clock wake over the girl’s grave. This was
done to prevent sorcerers coming to the grave and removing a part of the corpse in order to
produce more magic. Body parts could be used to create the sort of magic that would make
everyone forget that this was at all a suspicious death. The group who watched over the grave
saw many mysterious things. One thing was that the members of the suspected family did not
cry at the grave as other family members did. The suspected sorcerers were classificatory
brothers of the deceased girl and so crying was an important mortuary obligation for them.
People remarked how the suspected brothers secretly held hands while standing over the grave,
as if to confirm the accomplishment of killing her. People saw other signs; like a huge,
unknown dog that came past the grave during the night, which, they were convinced, was the
shape-shift version of one of the suspected brothers. Another event that raised a lot of attention
and was brought up as evidence in the first village court was that, during the wake over the
dead girl, the accused family came with a flying fox as a gift that they said could be used for
baking in a pudding for the mortuary meal. The flying fox was so large that no one had seen
anything like it before. The family of the girl feared that something was wrong, so instead of
cooking the flying fox they burnt it. Later, a dog in the household took hold of a piece of it
and ate it, and immediately had a change in its state of mind. The dog ran straight uphill and
into the house of the suspected sorcerers. It had never done such a thing before, and it was
clear to everyone that the sorcerers had added something to the flying fox so that the household
of the girl would forget about the murder. The next day a brother of the dead girl went up and
shot the dog with his rifle.
More evidence that the girl had not died of natural causes came in the ensuing weeks
when her spirit kept haunting the disco. During the night noise was heard from the building;
music was playing and it was as if someone was banging the corrugated iron roof. This was
taken as evidence that she was killed by nakaimas, and that because of this, her spirit could
not return peacefully to its grave. Such rumours led the MP, who owned the disco, to kill a pig
inside the disco so as to compensate the girl’s family for her death taking place on his property.
In the later court trial there were reports that blood had then become visible on the walls of
the disco. Other traces of blood also became visible in different places in the plantation,
between the village and the disco.
Around this time, another extraordinary thing happened. As the grave was being watched
over, a boy back in the hamlet started talking about what had occurred to the girl, what he had
seen with his own eyes and even taken part in. This boy is described as a little bit ‘different’,
not exactly out of his mind, but a bit retarded. He was a classificatory brother of the MP, but
his parents were living elsewhere, in Malekula. At first when he started speaking, people
hushed him and told him to shut up, but a chief in the village began listening to him. The boy
claimed that he had been in the coconut plantation on the night of the killing – and that he had
been forced to take part in the rape and murder of the girl.
This news sparked anger and rage, and led to the immediate attack on the uphill hamlet

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of the accused sorcerers. The attack was encouraged by the MP. The ultimate target of the first
raid was to destroy the ‘secret house’ of this family. This was described as a small house, with
a tree growing through its middle and through the thatched roof. As they rushed into the house,
the first thing they saw was the body of a dead cat. The cat had been skinned and only its head
and fur were hanging on a wall over the fireplace. Later, it would be presented as evidence
that the cat had been used magically to shape-shift one of the men so that he appeared as the
deceased girl. The first man who rushed into the house and saw this immediately fainted. This
was taken as evidence of the strong magical powers of the house as an Ambrym secret house.
It was burnt down along with two other houses. Three dogs were also killed, fruit trees were
cut down and the family was attacked with pieces of wood. It was later reported that when
they were beaten with strong pieces of wood, the attackers were made to think that they had
broken the sorcerers’ skulls, arms and legs. Yet, when coming to the hospital, the sorcerers
had miraculously recovered and had walked out of the hospital with only minor bruises. Even
though strong sticks of hardwood had broken over their limbs, magic had protected them from
any harm.

THE VILLAGE COURT

After two weeks, all this evidence was summed up in the first village trial, which was
supervised by three local village chiefs. The complete events of the case were outlined in
witness reports. It was claimed that the sorcerers had committed the murder some days in
advance. In the court, a friend of the girl witnessed how the girl had been called into the accused
sorcerers’ house some days before the disco. The witness had remained outside waiting, and
she heard many voices coming from inside, as if a whole group was assembled there. It took
a long time for the girl to come out. This was the suspected time of the killing, and it was
claimed that one of the men took on the girl’s appearance and walked around as her for the
next days.
A very detailed map of signs and evidence was traced out that included signs of blood
due to the transportation of the corpse through the plantation and to the disco. A witness
described how he had been walking down the road that goes past the plantation on the night
of the nightclub event, and he heard the voices of a group of men inside the coconut groves,
voices that he thought belonged to the suspected men. The grass outside the disco and through
the plantation showed also the movements and footprint of many men, which was seen to
indicate the dragging of the corpse itself. Crucial traces of blood were also reportedly found
on a wine bottle that one of the accused had been seen drinking earlier that night, and in several
other places in the plantation. An abundance of empirical details like this emerged to map
every move of the accused sorcerers. Special attention was given to the way the accused had
placed themselves by the different entrances to the disco, ready to replace the fake appearance
of the girl with her dead corpse. A major advocate of these accusations was the owner of the
disco, the local MP, who in this court interrogated the accused and even performed a customary
test on them by holding a branch of wild kava in front of them. We can maybe perceive this
involvement of the local MP as a first indication of a merging of different regimes of truth,
those of a modern state system and its offices with the customary powers of divination. The
state as a domain of justice is capturing and incorporating other domains of truth so as to create
more rationalised forms of the occult - so as to create sorcery into a national enemy of modern
ni-Vanuatu people.
To the accusers’ bafflement and surprise, at the end of the first court session, the president
of the Council of Chiefs announced that there was not enough evidence against these men.
Some of them had not even been on Malekula at the time of the murder. At this point the young
man who claimed to have taken part in these sorcery events still had not come forward with
his evidence himself, and so there were not really enough witness reports for the chiefs’ liking.
It was also taken into account that the family of the accused had already suffered through the

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beatings and property damage caused by angry villagers. The headman in the hamlet of the
accused nevertheless agreed to pay a fine of one pig and 10,000 vatu (100 USD), in order to
‘clean his face’ in relation to the two families. During the court hearing there had been talk
back and forth and accusations in many directions, one version being that the MP had killed
the girl himself, but that matter was left in complete uncertainty. As is typical for a village
court, the chiefs presented their decision as taking into account the total situation for their
future community and not only the singular question of individual guilt.

STATE INTERVENTION
At this point there emerged heated arguments in the village, and tensions between the families
and hamlets became even more strained. Normally this case should have been closed and
settled by the decision of the village court, but in April 1996 a brother of the deceased girl
went and filed a complaint to the police. He claimed ‘black magic’ had killed his sister and he
named the seven men that he believed to be guilty. His accusation was based on the evidence
of witnesses who had seen her body change after she collapsed at the disco and the doctor at
the hospital who said that she had seemed to have been dead for some time. Later that same
day the police arrested one of the named men, namely the young boy who claimed to have
been part of the events and who was later in the court process deemed ‘a possibly mentally
unbalanced adolescent’ (Forsyth 2006:13). He was a 23 year old cousin of the dead girl and,
during police interrogation, testified to something very unusual – to having been forced to take
part in the killing of his classificatory sister inside a secret men’s lodge. He detailed a series
of events where he had been tricked into taking part in this occult ritual murder. He reported
how the girl had been bespelled, raped and then killed. He had been the one who had allowed
these sorcerers to take her life, in exchange for him entering their secret cult. They had first
approached the retarded boy by inviting him to come along with them to seduce some girls. It
was too late when he discovered that they had actually tricked him into something else. When
he had agreed to come along, he had thereby agreed to come inside their secret kastom group,
As his fee of entrance, he needed to give up a close relative to the group or die himself. In
particular, the sorcerers were targeting the MP, and they were convinced that the boy would
deliver him to them. However, by accident and at the last moment, the young boy came up
with an unexpected name: the name of the MP’s wife. The sorcerers had to go for the person
chosen by the boy. But this name was also the name of the girl who actually died. She was
taken by mistake since she had been just outside of the hamlet of the accused sorcerers at the
time.
His vivid accounts of the sorcery rituals seemed to confirm his claims. He told of how
each sorcerer had raped her one by one. Then she had been killed by a stroke to the head.
Accompanied by magic spells a pandanus leaf had been pushed up her anus to pull out her
intestines, and the men had cooked and eaten her liver and heart. This was all part of a kastom
ritual that would give magical powers to the men taking part. The leading man was then able
to take on her appearance from the head down to the hip. In order to avoid suspicion, he had
walked around as her for three days until she fell dead on the dance floor. He described how
the leader of the group had performed the ritual and spells by singing in the Ambrym language.
This included performing magic on the half dead cat, and dancing around the fire chanting the
girl’s name.
The returning topic of the cat here is interesting. Though supposedly customary, these
sorcery accounts also seem to incorporate Western forms of magic and the occult, as the cat
repeatedly appears in accounts of modern occult rituals. The cat is a creature of domestication
and of the night, it figures in Western folktales about magic, and its incorporation is indicative
of how Western images of the occult begin to transform sorcery into people’s understanding
of a demonic occult conspiracy. There is a modernisation of sorcery taking place, for the cat
is also a creature of a Western domesticated order; it is an imported nocturnal creature that

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wanders freely and invisibly at night. This is partly customary sorcery being modernised, but
it is also modern forms of the occult being localised.
It was not until August 2000 that the case reached the Supreme Court of Luganville. The
complaint was written out as follows under the offence of breaking the law on sorcery:

Particulars of offence
(Names of the accused) sometime on 22. December, in the … area, you all from….
Malekula were grouping together in taboo fire (ed. Ritual hierarchy) and poison
(nakaimas) and you danced and chanted the name of R.B. (victim). You were
performing kastom poison in order to make R.B. (victim) lose her mind and you were
calling her by kastom chants to come along with you into the bush, and there you
fucked (fakem) her without her being conscious about it, and after you had fucked
you pulled out her intestines through her anus, and then you ate her liver in the way
that you people do this, and then ….changed his face to look like R.B. (victim) and
he walked home to her house.
Public Prosecutor, 8th August of 2000.
(CR 246/2000, My translation from Bislama)

It was in April 1996 that the local police officer at Lakatoro in Malekula opened this case for
sorcery and initiated the arrests of the seven family members. When the appeal case opened
in 2002, it was commented that it was hard to find information on how long the arrested men
had been in custody. By the time of the court hearings in 2000, the charges were backed by
signed confessions from all the accused. These were recorded in the handwriting of the leading
police officer and described in detail events that supported the case against the accused. For
example, the leader of the group described how his group had met for their rituals wearing
only customary penis sheaths. He had pulled out the girl’s intestines using a customary leaf,
and he had afterwards stuffed her with banana leaves and finally a snake bean. Throughout all
these events he had been chanting in the Ambrym language, also when transforming his friend
into the bodily shape of the victim.
However, under cross examination in court and later in the appeal case, he denied all these
events. The defence put a lot of weight on the fact that he was a regular church-goer. He
testified that he believed in God and acknowledged that only God could take away life, and
added that he thought he would go to heaven when he died. He said that he was a participant
in the youth group and that he used to work for the mission on a regular basis. At the time of
the murder, he had been away in Port Vila working for a construction company, and he had
not arrived back in Malekula until December 23rd, i.e. after the girl had allegedly been killed,
but in time to be at the disco the night she fell over dead. He claimed he had not been in contact
with any of the other accused men for a long time, and that he only met them that night on the
disco when the girl died. He also said he had never known the young boy who had testified
and brought the allegations against them, as this boy was not even from this part of Malekula.
He claimed it would be inconceivable for him to have sex with the deceased girl, since she
was his classificatory mother.
In some of the court materials that were not mentioned in the court, the accused filed
complaints over their arrest by the Vanuatu Mobile Force whom they claimed had tortured
them during their interrogation. They had been forced to eat their own shit and urine and were
continuously beaten up. They were confronted with these written statements which had been
read out to them and they were forced to sign. The confession of the supposed leader of the
group stated: ‘It was I who planned the murder of R. The poison or black magic that I am in
control of was given by my uncles in Olal in North Ambrym. It was my uncles who taught me
how to become a poison man on the side of custom.’ Later, it was claimed that this was all a
fabrication on the part of the police, especially the police officer from Ambrym. Others
implicated in fabricating the story allegedly included the local MP.

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Fig. 1. Frontpage from the leading Vanuatu newspaper.

During the appeal trial it was remarked that the previous judge had simply ignored the
fact that many of the accused men actually had alibis and had not been around in Malekula at
the time of the murder. Despite this, in November 2000, they were found guilty of sorcery,
rape, and intentional homicide (Criminal Case no 246, 2000). The Supreme Court sentenced
them to two years prison. The Prosecutor’s statement had read:

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This case is about magic, it is not white man’s magic but black magic having its deep
roots on Ambrym and spreading slowly out of Ambrym. It is a sacred cult, a satanic
practice that people who practice cannot expose, but this case is different. It is
different because one of the persons drawn into the group was tricked into believing
what the group’s activities were.

And in the statement by the Learned Judge Justice later:

We are here dealing with the spiritual powers of darkness. The mastermind behind
these activities is Satan who the bible refers to as the father of lies. More than 2000
years ago Jesus Christ rebuked some Jews who claimed to be children of Abraham
but were not. And Jesus called them children of the devil.

In going through the documents from the court case it emerges how the bureaucratization of
the event through the police and law also involved the increasing Christianisation of sorcery
as a demonic pact with the devil. It was also these new Christian understandings of the Satanic
customary past that set off the first raids in the village and that led to blaming this group of
men for raping and killing the girl using methods of black magic from the island of Ambrym.
In December 2001 the horrific details of the murder took a new form when they reached the
front page of the national newspaper. What began as an incident of sorcery, acquired a new
phantasmagoric aspect within the state legal system, which saw the problem as the nation’s
struggle with a Satanic custormary past.

SORCERY IN THE CHRISTIAN NATION

When the story reached the front page of Vanuatu’s largest national newspaper (see fig 1), it
was under the headline ‘Seven Black Magic Killers found guilty’. The atrocities had become
part of a national imagery of ever present black powers lurking underneath the civilised surface
of Christianity and progress. Note how the story is placed next to a picture of Santa Claus and
his reindeer, alongside wines, spirits and TeleCards. This new reality of modern consumption
and Christian morality is also the national context. The story was interesting because it involved
a well-known MP, a disco as a highly problematic modern form of pleasure seeking, and
growing inequalities and conflicts at the village level. People’s perceptions of material and
moral progress occur alongside perceptions of new growing forms of evil, where cats merge
with local sorcery spells and taboo houses with disco nightclubs. Here we see how modernity’s
appropriations of the past are being commented upon as people explore the monstrous
combinatorial potential of modernity.
The whole case is indicative of the new collective phantasmagoric space that is
redefining sorcery. The police and the judge participated in the creation of this space –
following but also reconstituting the original accusations in the local community in
Malekula. They used knowledge based on custom but also their Christian faith as a collective
fight against evil. These sentiments towards the evil of kastom are as strong as ever in
Vanuatu and they are being renewed and reformulated with the rapid growth of Pentecostal
churches which focus on the occult side of kastom (Eriksen 2009). These transformations
in religion and the moral value of kastom go hand in hand with other economic and political
development in Vanuatu. The Judge of the Supreme Court is himself the founder of his own
indigenous charismatic church, and is known to be on a crusade against the evil forces of
traditional culture. In March 2007, there was an outbreak of sorcery accusations in Port Vila,
when a girl from Tanna was allegedly killed by Ambrym sorcerers. An enraged mob killed
three accused sorcerers and a state of emergency had to be declared. The same Supreme
Court judge announced in a newspaper that the sorcery could be blamed on the Vanuatu
National Museum and its promotion of kastom in its many arts festivals. The director of the

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Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta, Marcellin Abong, replied that the museum had never promoted
sorcery. He pointed out that it was on the contrary the churches that insisted on talking about
sorcery and the evil of kastom every Sunday in their gospel services (Daily Post 8th March
2007).
In the ethnography of the Vanuatu nation we here see an emerging conflict between kastom
and state. In many accounts of the traditional sorcery in Melanesia – from Malinowski (1922)
and Fortune (1932) and up to Nancy Munn (1986) – we learn that sorcery and witchcraft are
the negative aspects of society and person. In the Trobriands, the suspected witch was often
someone from within one’s own community. In Munn’s account, witchcraft was typically
performed by a female, but hiding behind her was always a man’s kareiwaga – ‘the locus of
decision making power’ (1986:68) – hence the locus of agency was always coming from
somewhere else. This complicated the customary legal aspects of witchcraft since agency never
came down to an individual guilty person. Munn argues that there was never a focus on
exposing the witch’s identity, nor a focus on witchcraft as immoral or setting up the witch as
bad, rather ‘the community at large remains the diffuse locus of witchery’ (1986:218). I would
argue that this is in contrast to the contemporary Melanesia situation which involves a shift of
attitude so as to locate morality and evil on a more personal individual level. Whereas others
have focused on religion, I have drawn attention to the role of the police and state apparatus
in this process of moral individualization. My focus is the institutional production of a new
collective imaginary space that produces sorcery in certain new ways so as to understand the
nation and its possibilities in new ways.
The case from Malekula is unique – the only sorcery case in Vanuatu that has taken place
in the Supreme Court - and it cannot be taken as representative of how sorcery suspicions are
ordinarily handled. Normally it will be enough for the suspected sorcerers to leave the village
and never return, while people wait for them to become ill and die as a consequence of their
own evil magic. But this transportation of sorcery cases to the sphere of national consciousness
creates crucially different consequences for sorcery belief. The involvement of the state is part
of new and wider perceptions of evil and of its social management. It should be noted that
when the seven men were taken into the state courts, local villagers claimed that they would
kill these men if they returned to the village without being sentenced. It should also be noted
that these men are still in prison, as I am writing this article in 2010.
Rumour has it that they returned to the village in 2002, and continued their black power
activities. For this, they needed fresh blood and to make another killing. They allegedly
captured a young boy and killed him. In order to make it look like an accident they tied a rope
around his neck so that it looked like the rope had been accidently noosed around his neck as
the boy was fastening a bull to a pole. The boy’s dog had run off and some people had
recognized it, and followed it back. When they came to where the dead boy was, they found
the suspected sorcerers there, standing over the dead body. This was all the evidence that the
villagers needed this time. They wanted to kill them right away, but the police again turned up
and secured the men before they were lynched. Subsequently they were taken to the Port Vila
prison again.
We might see this recurring episode as demonstrating the inability of the state court system
to resolve the issues that occur in the context of village life. I am not suggesting that it would
be better if these men had been killed in the village. At any rate this would probably not have
happened either if the first case had been solved in a proper kastom manner in the chiefly
council. After all, a high percentage of Vanuatu people have at some point in their life been
suspected of sorcery and have had to face these accusations in courts and gossip. But due to
the ambiguous nature of sorcery as an inherent part of kastom, there has been very little actual
lynching of sorcerers in Vanuatu so far. Obviously, lynching of sorcerers is not a traditional
practice in Vanuatu. This is now about to change due to the greater involvement of the state
and a greater national presence in these matters.

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CONCLUSION
For me this is an effort to elaborate on the ethnography of the Vanuatu nation-state, and a first
step has been to look at the treatment of sorcery as a changing form of cultural heritage being
managed by the courts and legal system of Vanuatu. This troubling case points to the way law
itself as an institution is being perceived by people in contemporary Vanuatu. Whereas kastom
carries within itself both the means to perform sorcery and to heal and punish it, the state
apparatus of the police and the judicial-penal system are resystematising the violence of sorcery
through seeking to uncover its atrocities and eliminating them using its own forms of
punishment and truth inquiry, but without any cure for its own practice. Interestingly these
state ways of assembling evidence and truth included not just evidence from witnesses and
forensic sources but also extra-judicial forms of violence that produced confessions as the
ultimate proof. This pursuit of the confession has always been part of the extra-judicial
activities of police but it acquires new meanings within the Pentecostal framework of modern
Christianity where it promises reconciliation with the nation and God. In this case, this did
not occur because the accused continued to profess their innocence, which for many proved
how guilty they were and how committed to Satan they had become. The state’s involvement
in sorcery has to do with changing perceptions of evil, changing forms of truth production and
more individualised forms of moral accountability.
Presently, we witness in Vanuatu a proliferation of horrific sorcery cases. In 2003 a woman
was burnt to death in her house in Tanna Island as she was blamed for mysterious previous
deaths. In 2009, there was a case in Vanuatu where dedicated Christians killed their own
daughter, by smashing her head with a stone, as they believed her to be secretly possessed by
a sorcerer. In another case, in March of 2010, two men from Maewo Island were killed by a
group of seven chiefs because they had allegedly committed sorcery among the staff at a
secondary school. This new type of violence feeds on a delocalized national imagery of kastom
as both Satanic evil and obstructive to national development, and I believe that this is only the
beginning of a whole new situation of terror. With the development of ever greater social
inequalities, progressive individualism and generalized anger, the national discourse of’We
stand before God’ and ‘Vanuatu as the Chosen Land’ can also accommodate a practice of more
and more killing.

NOTES
1. This paper was prepared for the conference at Centre for Pacific Studies at University of Hawaii at Manoa titled
‘Pacific Alternatives: Cultural Heritage and Political Innovation in Oceania’, 24-27 March 2009. I wish to thank
organisers Terence Wesley Smith and Edvard Hviding, and participants Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, Ralph Regenvanu,
Lissant Bolton and Lamont Lindstrom for feedback. I want to thank Andrew Lattas and Miranda Forsyth for
reading early drafts and giving very important feedback. I am also very grateful for the two anonymous reports,
and Jadran Mimica for helpful editing.
2. People have described such su to me as a carved stone hidden inside a little sheath made of spider web. The su
itself is dependent on human blood, and its owner can use it for magically draining blood from its victim and
throwing spells at them.
3. See http://www.forumsec.org.fj/pages.cfm/newsroom/press-statements/2009/pacific-model-law-on-traditional-
knowledge.html
4. See http://www.paclii.org//cgi-
bin/disp.pl/vu/legis/num_act/ncoca2006232/ncoca2006232.html?query=ncoca2006232.
5. Find details at http://www.paclii.org/pg/legis/consol_act/sa1971117/
6. I base these details on the documentation from Court Archives in Port Vila and interviews with people from the
Wala-Rano community who were directly taking part in the events. These informants have asked to be
anonymous.

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