You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author, an analyst practicing in South Africa, took advantage of an opportunity to investigate psychoanalytically a young “witch-doctor.” No claim is made that a thorough analysis was carried out; but the author saw John, his subject, quite frequently over a period of two and a half years, and employed the analytic technic in his studies.
Varied groups will find this book stimulating and provocative. It should prove of profound interest to analysts because the subject, a native African raised in a small village and later transplanted to urban life, is representative of a virgin field for study. In its revelations of folk-lore and native tradition, in the illuminating descriptions of life in the villages and in the cities to which the Africans have been lured or driven, there is a wealth of material for the anthropologist, the ethnologist and the sociologist. The Marxists will be interested in the strikingly clear demonstrations of the linkage between economic exploitation on the one hand, and racial and class discrimination on the other.
“If strong drink is so bad,” John asks, “why do white people drink it? And why do they sell all these drinks to the blacks? Money is what they want.” The author encountered much of this type of protest against the humiliations and indignities to which the natives were subjected in every phase of their wretched lives. At a meeting Dr. Sachs attended with John, one of the speakers says: “The same white people teach us that all men—blacks as well as whites—are equal before God, when they want us to become Christians. It is only when we want more money, better work, better opportunities that our black skin becomes such a hindrance to us.”
The natives are beset by many tragedies, not the least of which is their being drawn from the land to the city, where they acquire the white man's vices, at the same time forgetting the saving virtues of native customs, religion and traditional morality. It is a high price they pay for the assumption