Sorcery and Jurisdiction in Angola

When the Portuguese arrived at the mouth of the Zaire River in 1483, two vibrant normative regimes came into contact. The European traders, missionaries, and soldiers who followed the first explorers brought a jurisdictional system of government that accepted local uses and customs as biding and a theological understanding of natural law with universalist claims. They encountered complex African societies based on various normative systems, emphasizing arbitration and mediation between corpor...