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The War of Lions

A Witch Hunt in the Heartland of the Mozambican Revolution

A novel blending ethnography and creative nonfiction about a contemporary witch-hunt at the center of the Mozambican liberation struggle. 

The War of Lions tells a story of magic, multi-species entanglement, and the unravelling of socialism in the form of a polyphonic ethnographic novel. The book follows a witch-hunt that erupted in 2002 to 2003 in the heartland of the Mozambican revolution as a consequence of a spate of lion attacks. It relates the search for witches and lions from a variety of perspectives, featuring a local intellectual and an anthropologist as characters in the unfolding drama. It aims to be the most vivid and detailed account of a contemporary witch-hunt ever provided, as well as an exploration of creative nonfiction as a mode of ethnographic writing. It is also a unique document of contemporary human-lion entanglement.


250 pages | 18 photographs, 5 maps | 6 x 9 | © 2027

African Studies

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Biography and Letters

History: African History


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
In the Maze of Magic
Nights of Terror
A Research Brigade
Perplexities
A Disgruntled Hunter and a Reticent Healer
The Unwisdom of Intervening in the Midst of Events
To See and to Be Seen
Witchcraft of Misery
Good Witches
A Scramble down the Sugarcane Lowlands
Shielded in Wain
Sharpening Our Arrows
Ill When It Rains
To the Calvary
Accuse Him!
Through the Heart
Back Where You Fetched It
Free Mangoes and Forebodings
Wanderlust and Logging Dust
The Last Lion
Bibliography

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