| Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis Contributor(s): Murray, Colin (Author), Sanders, Peter (Author) |
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ISBN: 0748652957 ISBN-13: 9780748652952 Publisher: Edinburgh University Press OUR PRICE: $102.00 Product Type: Other - Other Formats Published: March 2012 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - True Crime | Murder - General - History | Africa - General |
| Dewey: 364.152 |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 'very 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 authors draw sensitively and critically on many different and often conflicting sources of evidence. |