Witchcraft beliefs as a cultural legacy of the Atlantic slave trade: Evidence from two continents

Strangers and Foreigners: Trust and Attitudes Toward Citizenship

“…In Table 9 we test the potential role of witchcraft beliefs as the channel linking trust to jus soli attitudes keeping in mind that, despite being deeply entrenched, they are both collected from contemporary surveys. Consistent with Gershman (2016), our estimates do replicate for witchcraft beliefs the negative association with trust in others that we obtain for the slave trade (Models 1 and 2). However, no significant correlation emerges between witchcraft beliefs and jus soli attitudes, even though the sign of the coefficient is, as we conjectured, negative (Models 3 and 4).…”

“…We are particularly indebted to Nunn and Wantchekon (2011), who establish how in sub-Saharan Africa trust is determined by the slave trade. Other studies that have linked trust to conflict (Rohner, Thoenig, and Zilibotti, 2013;Besley and Reynal-Querol, 2014), kinship (Enke, 2019;Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson, 2017), and witchcraft beliefs (Gershman, 2016) are also highly relevant for our search for alternative explanations, beside the slave trade, of the deep determinants of citizenship attitudes as channeled through trust. This paper also contributes to a deeper understanding of the long-run consequences of the slave trade on African societies, following among others Nunn (2008), Nunn and Wantchekon (2011), Whatley (2014), Bertocchi and Dimico (2019), and Teso (2019) (see Bertocchi, 2016 and for exhaustive surveys).…”

“…Within the growing research body on the influence of historical legacies for many dimensions of African development, surveyed by Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2020), many contributions lie at the intersection between the issues we address. This is the case, for instance, for the link between the slave trade and conflict Kala, 2015, 2017;Boxell, 2019;Boxell, Dalton, and Leung, 2019;Cherniwchan and Moreno-Cruz, 2019), the slave trade and witchcraft beliefs (Gershman, 2020), kin ties and conflict (Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson, 2020), and kin ties and institutions (Tedeschi, 2021).…”

“…Through the channel of trust, witchcraft beliefs may turn out to be correlated with negative attitudes toward foreigners. Indeed, according to Gershman (2016), believing in witchcraft as an explanation for all kinds of misfortunes is often associated with aggressiveness, hostility, fear of mobility, and a culture of suspicion-which cannot be conducive to welcoming strangers.…”

The Slave Trade and Conflict in Africa, 1400-2000

“…Furthermore, the slave trade has been shown to have large impacts on contemporary outcomes including GDP, trust, polygyny, witchcraft beliefs, gender norms, and HIV infections (Nunn, 2008;Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011;Dalton and Leung, 2014;Gershman, 2018;Teso, 2018;Bertocchi and Dimico, Forthcoming). However, little is known empirically about the short-run impact of the slave trade on African societies.…”