Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis
Colin Murray and Peter Sanders
Abstract
Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A startling increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, ... More
Medicine murder involved the cutting of body parts from victims, usually while they were still alive, to be used for the preparation of medicines intended to enhance the power of the perpetrators. A startling increase in cases of medicine murder apparently took place in Basutoland (now Lesotho), in southern Africa, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It gave rise to a dramatic crisis of late colonial rule. Was this increase a real one? If so, why did it happen? How far does it explain the crisis? What other factors contributed? This book offers some comprehensive answers to these difficult, complex and controversial questions and a highly readable analysis of how the crisis arose and of how it fell away. The chapters draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence.
Keywords:
medicine murder,
Lesotho,
Basutoland,
medicines,
body parts,
southern Africa,
colonial rule
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748622849 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748622849.001.0001 |
