Psychology of witchcraft among the Shona people Myth and Reality:

Case Study of witchcraft among the Shona people of Bikita District of Zimbabwe.

Abstract

Bikita is one of the 59 districts in Zimbabwe. The district lies 80 km East of the town of Masvingo. It has a considerable number of ethnic groups, but the Shona are predominant. The Shona nowadays is no longer a single cultural group but a mixture of other cultural groups that have moved into the district.  This study will be on the Psychology of Witchcraft among the Shona people in that district. It will be argued that witchcraft is a well-known practice across cultures in the history of mankind and that the practice can be explained through the Freudian and Jungian theories of the Psyche whereby witches operate in the unconscious area of the psyche. The paper rejects the idea that witchcraft is a moral issue and suggests that it is a psychological issue. Because of the current Covid -19 pandemic, it has been difficult to carry out on-the-spot interviews, so most of the information was collected through telephone interviews using a mobile phone. In a few instances, however, the researcher had the chance to witness activities that were deemed to be witchcraft.