Enchanted Urbanisms: Migration, witchcraft, cults, and the remaking of authority in rough African peri-urban frontiers

Abstract How do marginalised migrants secure land and recognition when formal titles, party patronage, and kin-based claims are out of reach? Based on two-year ethnographic fieldwork in the Lydiate rough neighbourhood this paper reveals that ritual cults and witchcraft, sometimes operate as novel forms of authority in facilitating access and security over land. The study introduces the concept of “Enchanted Urbanisms” to describe how spirituality and the unseen actively organize political authority in informal urban spaces. The findings reveal that the Nyau cult functions as territorial governance through ritual, fear, and spectacle, while witchcraft operates as an individualized “social fence” that regulates intra-migrant land disputes. These practices produce spiritual citizenship, that is, locally legible forms of recognition and quasi-tenure that partially substitute for absent or hostile formal systems, while coexisting in tension with Pentecostal networks that also offer alternative pathways to legitimacy and protection. The paper reframes peri-urban frontiers as sacralised spaces where modernity is negotiated through material–spiritual alignments, urging migration and urban studies to account for enchanted forms of authority alongside other conventional forms of authority when theorizing authority, survival, and belonging in urban Africa.