Paper short abstract:

We explore the digital as a public sphere for testifying, demonstrating, and performing occult possibilities in Africa. Digital affordances of virtuality provide modalities for evidencing, communicating, and enacting the veracity of otherworldy forces, and transferring such efficacies on others.

Paper long abstract:

Building on our paper “Decolonizing the Virtual”, we wish to explore the ways in which the occult is rendered visible or demonstrated as true using digital platforms. We investigate the various fault lines between genres of witnessing, testimony, reporting and magical performance that have emerged in what some now call “Digital Africa”, the virtual space in which people from Africa or the African diaspora, dialogue, present themselves, and engage with digital content. We have observed the emergence of witnessing videos, that give testimony of occult activities, mysterious experiences, and new forms sorcercy, witchcraft and magic. Others perform magic across digital space, healing, cursing, exorcising or producing money on screen for the benefit of clients or fans. Some of these miracles are mirage, employing the techniques of fakery, fiction and illusionism to generate images of future possibility. African digital content producers often explore scenarios of human and “extrahuman” relationships; in these narratives, digital infrastructures and devices gain more agency and blend with occult forces. These posters, uploaders and their audiences engage with metanarratives of the emergent veracities of our digital era. After all, digital platforms are new spaces in which occult forces are manifest, witnessed, and experienced collectively. We bring these narrative genres together to ask questions about the imagination of the visible, the invisible, and the means by which truth, suspicion and transformative potential become interwoven with these new public spheres.