Il missionario, il giudice, il legislatore. Decrittazioni giuridiche della stregoneria nell’Africa occidentale subsahariana (sec. XVII-XX)

Based on a historical-juridical methodology open to the anthropological approach, the essay intends to present some essential conceptual junctions in the history of witchcraft in West Africa. Because of the absence of a written language, the traditional African law was necessarily subject of Western reading over the centuries. Three paragraphs of the essay identify three moments, at the same time enhancing unpublished sources which are partially published in the appendix: 1. the reading by a Capuchin friar in the second half of the seventeenth century; 2. the reading by French judges in the very first sentences of 1821-1822 in Senegal; 3. the reading by the legislator in the face of serious public order problems in the first half of the 1900s.