Between 1960 and 2010, Professor Miller collected about 720 newspaper reports on witchcraft in East Africa from local sources. Reports for Malawi and Zambia were dropped from this analysis to establish a collection of 521 reports for Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. This database has yet to be fully analyzed, and is made available here for further research and publication in the understanding of witchcraft violence. The data may be sorted by date, country, press source, or by major topic using the Excel spreadsheet referenced below. Instructors in such organizations as police academies and NGOs concerned with violence against women may use these press summaries to build case studies on witchcraft-related crimes.
The original clippings and related case materials are held in Boxes 24 and 25 of the Norman Miller Collection at Michigan State University. A manuscript analyzing these press clippings, entitled “Witchcraft in the Press” is in preparation (2019).
Download a brief summary of the African press reports as it appeared in an exhibition on witchcraft at Dartmouth College in 2012.
Witchcraft in the Press Overview
Preview the article summaries categorized by date, country, publication, and subject:
Witchcraft Press Summaries (pdf)
You can also download the same report in Excel (XLS) format to use the press data for research or teaching. In this format, you can sort the data by date, country, publication, and subject.