3 In ‘La sorcellerie des blancs; un anthropologue s'interroge sur ľ Occident’ (Etudes, March 1976), Rene Bureau suggests that what Europeans have always regarded as simply the backwardness of black Africa in the arts and sciences of civilisation is due to a deliberate social choice lying at the roots of African cultures. It is a choice governed by the sentiment of what he calls jealousy. Africans, he suggests, are jealous of their basic human equality ‐ their fundamental political value is therefore not liberty but equality. So they are jealous (not envious) of any man or any initiative which tends to upset this equality. This jealousy finds expression in the universal belief in witchcraft. This is the negative aspect of what he has discovered to be, in contrast with European civilisation, a singularly human and humane and adult culture. He suggests the best translation for African words commonly rendered by witch' or 'sorcerer would be the word ‘superman’. This is the man who has the genius, or the will, or the luck to excel his fellows, for his own ends. And against him African society sets its face in implacable jealousy. Since European civilisation, as experienced by Africans, sets a premium on success, and honours the man who excels (in whatever wav and for whatever purposes), white men are the supermen, the sorcerers par excellence. His studies have all been made in West Africa, and are doubtless not applicable without qualification to the South African village democracy, and especially its capacities to sabotage, with an ironic insouciance, the aims and dreams of western technocratic society.
