By Frank George Mgungwe

Using vignettes, this chapter explores “witchcraft doping” practices occurring in rural communities. Rumours, speculations, and accusations of “witchcraft doping” which characterise event build-up conversations are an obvious recipe for conflicts, fights, and pitch invasions if unusual misses, misfiring, and poor officiation occur. These scenarios occurring deep in rural areas are an underlying bottleneck to sports development in Malawi, requiring policymakers to effectively and continuously cascade down the World Anti-Doping Agency code to the local communities. This is so because as team members continue concentrating on “witchcraft doping” by outsourcing witchcraft services, they stop or invest less in their practices and training to acquire and improve technical and tactical skills, believing that supernatural occult powers would enable them to secure victory. The chapter concludes that “witchcraft doping” creates a false-positive illusion of effectiveness in competitors, which affects or influences their substantive on-the-pitch performance like in the placebo effect.