Anthropologists of the colonial period in Africa often argued that witchcraft was in some way useful or at least functional. This contrasted with the attitudes of colonial rulers for whom witchcraft beliefs were false and accusations were to be suppressed. Explain with ethnographic details at least three different kinds of such alleged social benefits, and assess the arguments for them.

Witchcraft in one form or another has been practiced in many different societies throughout history, but the 20th Century social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard gives one of the most important insights into this phenomenon. In his highly acclaimed in-depth field study of the Azande of south Sudan (1926), Edwards Evans-Pritchard observed that witchcraft was a regular occurrence and he attempted to analyse this behaviour in relation to the functions it performed within the overall framework of Zande society….(short extract)