ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British passed laws in most of their African colonies prohibiting any individual from accusing another of practising witchcraft and banning the consultation of ‘witch-doctors’ to identify practitioners of malefic rituals. Scholars have generally concurred that these laws were a natural outgrowth of England’s own decriminalisation of witchcraft, and represented an attempt to introduce British standards of justice to its African territories. However, based on a comparative assessment of laws pertaining to witchcraft in Britain’s Atlantic empire and an overview of the circumstances leading to the initial passage of witchcraft legislation in colonial Africa, this article contests that assumption. Statutes banning ‘witch-doctors’ and witchcraft accusations, which were first passed in the ‘native territories’ annexed to the Cape Colony in 1879, were an aberration from prior British policies, not an extension of them. Furthermore, the colonists’ arguments for humanitarian intervention to rescue Africans who were ‘falsely’ accused of practising witchcraft were far from altruistic; they were an integral part of the Cape colonists’ attempts to justify the permanent annexation of neighbouring Xhosa lands and the commencement of the British colonial project on the African continent.

中文翻译：

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1830 年代至 1870 年代南非东开普省的“被认为是巫术的恐怖”、“异教的残忍”和殖民计划

摘要 在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初，英国在其大部分非洲殖民地通过了法律，禁止任何人指控他人使用巫术，并禁止咨询“巫医”以识别邪恶仪式的实践者。学者们普遍同意，这些法律是英国自己将巫术非刑事化的自然产物，代表了将英国司法标准引入其非洲领土的尝试。然而，基于对不列颠大西洋帝国有关巫术的法律的比较评估以及对导致非洲殖民地巫术立法最初通过的情况的概述，本文对这一假设提出质疑。禁止“巫医”和巫术指控的法规，1879 年在开普殖民地附属的“原住民领土”首次通过，是对先前英国政策的一种反常，而不是这些政策的延伸。此外，殖民者主张人道主义干预以拯救被“错误地”指控为使用巫术的非洲人的论点远非利他主义；他们是开普敦殖民者试图证明永久吞并邻近科萨土地和开始英国在非洲大陆的殖民计划的一个组成部分。