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From February to June 1995 approximately 300,000 people attended an anti-AIDS healing cult in Malawi. The name given to the cult was mchape. The article investigates the so-called ‘mchape affair’ and compares it with the anti-witchcraft movements which swept Malawi during the 1930s under the very same name. Against the background of this linguistic identity, the article reflects on the politics of healing, social memory and the public sphere as the national space in which the affair assumed its distinctive shape. Focusing on the perception of AIDS as encoding decay, it is argued that the mchape affair can be understood as a negotiation of the limits of power and the meaning of suffering nourished by the moral imagination of post-Banda society.

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Research on heritage preservation in Africa shows a field shaped by different and often opposite positions as to the actual meaning of heritage. Does heritage signify valuable remnants of the past that require safeguarding and protection? Or, is heritage first and foremost a contemporary practice by which the past comes to matter in the present? This paper aims to link and negotiate between these two positions. The empirical basis stems from my own research on how the sacred grove of the Yoruba river deity Osun in Southwest Nigeria became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Drawing on the insights of this research, I argue that heritage is a relationship embedded in spheres of exchange that generate both moral and material forms of value. Conceiving heritage as exchange, so I contend, not only allows for a better understanding of the multiple values of heritage; it also sharpens interest in the struggles of control over the media of exchange. This paper examines these struggles with respect to the different spheres of exchange (local, national, and global) in which the grove of the river goddess Osun is entangled.

Opening ParagraphThe Yoruba word aladura, meaning ‘one who prays’, generally refers to a set of churches that formed a powerful religious movement among the Yoruba in western Nigeria during the first decades of this century. To date, there have been three main lines of interpretation which received general recognition: first, in form of a theological analysis (Turner, 1967); second, in a discussion of social protest (Mitchell, 1970); and finally, through the sociology of religion (Peel, 1968). In this article I propose to introduce another aspect of interpretation. Following the many passing remarks made by these authors in respect to the use of writing within the Aladura churches, I will read their accounts in terms of how people perceived and experienced the written word in the specific context of the Christian–colonial order and consider whether and how this experience has influenced people's actions and religious behaviour. In doing so, I am going to take up a theme which has become widely popular in the anthropological field under the heading ‘the consequences of literacy’.