Branhamist Kindoki: Ethnographic Notes on Connectivity, Technology, and Urban Witchcraft in Contemporary Kinshasa

Abstract

Based on an exploration of how Branhamist Christians in Kinshasa represent and live with kindoki (sorcery/witchcraft), this article attempts to bring science and technology in the debate about witchcraft. The Branhamist Christian community is divided among groups who jettison information and communication technologies (ICT) outright, while others formulate a pedagogy of responsibility and awareness of the potentially immoral nature of ICT. The ethnographic material leads me to call for more attention to connectivity, or the accessibility to social and spiritual others, as an important mode in emic theories of witchcraft. Finally, in order to do justice to the heterogeneity of objects that can trigger kindoki—such as ancestral objects but also ICT goods—I propose the notion of “the witchcraft complex.”