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‘We are in this for the
money’ The sangoma mediumistic cult of Southern Africa: limitations and potential of an interpretation in terms of commodification by Wim van Binsbergen paper to be presented at the international conference: Commodification and identities: Social Life of Things revisited, Amsterdam, 10-13 June, 1999 |
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© 1999 Wim van Binsbergen
draft; not for publication or published comment
This
paper addresses a problem which the convenors of the present
conference have highlighted in the following terms:
‘...the many-sided question of the relation between commodities and social identities. There have been a rich array of studies of the role of global commodities, re-appropriated and re-interpreted, in the marking of identities.1 Yet, this link is beset by a basic ambiguity which merits closer attention. Objects — whether old ‘‘prestige goods’’ or imported commodities — may be used to confirm or even to freeze identities. However, the involvement of these goods (also the local ‘‘prestige goods’’) in processes of commodification, related to a market which is in principle open-ended, always undermines such efforts at closure, thus aggravating the struggle for access to these goods. As Birgit Meyer (forthcoming) notes in her study of ‘consumption and conversion’ among Pentecostalists in Ghana: the new consumption goods are not only identity-markers for the people involved; paradoxically they view them, at the same time, as threats, undermining or even dissolving identities. The link between commodities and identities leads to a fetishization of goods, to efforts to ‘‘de-commodify’’ them, which are, however, seldom completely successful. The trajectories of witchcraft beliefs in Africa and Latin America today can be highlighted in these terms. The difficulties in controlling access to commodities — in other words to restrain processes of commodification — allows for continuous re-interpretations of communal boundaries and constantly changing modes of in- and exclusion.2
What
is the potential of a commodification perspective for the
interpretation of symbolic production in contemporary Africa? To
what extent is such a perspective illuminating, and what are its
limitations? In the wake of Social life of things we have
seen a spate of studies on the anthropology of commodities and
consumption, in South countries and elsewhere. Much in the same
way as anthropologists discovered the state in the 1970s, and
identity in the 1980s, they are now reclaiming the economy,
faster than the Dutch can reclaim land from the sea. To a great
extent such intellectual fashions within academic disciplines
reflect real shifts in the North Atlantic society and global
society, and therefore are much more than just fashionable. Even
so, it is advisable to be cautious, lest we put all our
analytical eggs in one basket, risking to break them once again
-- as some fifteen years ago, in the case of our splendid modes
of production models; yet, then as now, we cannot help being
aware of the great analytical and intellectual gains that
counterweigh such risk.
To indicate the general problem, let me evoke some of the
potential, and the dilemma’s, of a commodification
perspective on contemporary African symbolic production such as
it presented itself in my study of the Kazanga festival, which
has been held in western central Zambia since the late 1980s --
one of a growing series of such festivals in Zambia.
In western Zambia a large number of ethnic identities circulate, among which that of the Lozi (Barotse) is dominant because of its association with the Luyana state. The latter had its pre-colonial claims confirmed and even expanded with the establishment of colonial rule in 1900, resulting in the Barotseland Protectorate, which initially coincided with North Western Rhodesia, and after Zambia’s independence (1964) became that country’s Western Province. Lozi arrogance, limited access to education and to markets, and the influence of a fundamentalist Christian mission, stimulated a process of ethnic awakening. As from the middle of the twentieth century more and more people in eastern Barotseland and adjacent areas came to identify as ‘Nkoya’. Ethnicisation was mainly the work of the urban Nkoya ‘elite’, who formed the Kazanga Cultural Association in the early 1980s. The association’s main achievement has been the annual organisation (since 1988) of the Kazanga festival, in the course of which a large audience (including Zambian national dignitaries, the four Nkoya royal chiefs, Nkoya nationals and outsiders), for two days is treated to a complete overview of Nkoya songs, dances and staged rituals.
The Kazanga festival revolves around the mediation of the local Nkoya identity towards the national, and by implication world-wide space, — a mediation which is to transmute the local symbolic production (the local population has hardly any other products eligible for exchange with the outside world) into a measure of political and economic power via access to the national centre. Besides the selection and presentation of culture, this involves the transformation of culture: the Kazanga festival has the appearance of presenting items of traditional Nkoya culture, but in fact all these elements have been totally transformed towards a performative format, orchestrated, directed, rehearsed, subjected to the streamlining ordering by an organising elite and its mobilising and mediating ambitions. The models for this performative format derive from radio, television, the world of Christian missions, agricultural shows, state intervention in national ethnic artistic production through music and dance, and intercontinental pop media culture.
The Nkoya identity which is thus put on display, is not only recent and situational, but also ‘virtual’, in the sense that it does not at all coincide any more with what the participating and performing villagers do experience as the self-evident ordering (in terms of space, time and social relations) of village life, in whose context superficially similar (but on closer scrutiny fundamentally different) truly historic forms of symbolic production are engaged which might be more properly termed ‘Nkoya traditional culture’. The artistic production during the Kazanga festival is somehow suspended in the air, it is intangible, no longer anchored in the social and symbolic particularisms of concrete social groups nor available for effective appropriation by such groups. Yet (or perhaps precisely because these features) it is passionately acclaimed among the very representatives of such particularisms.
Artistic presentation in the context of the Kazanga festival is a form of commoditification. The performative format anticipates on the expectations of the visiting non-Nkoya elite, and has to produce goodwill and rapprochement, some sort of symbolic ready cash, to be effective within the wider world of political and economic power which is represented by these dignitaries. There is also more tangible ready cash involved: the performers are paid a little for their services. Moreover the performances take place in a context which is increasingly dominated by characteristic commodities from the global consumerist culture of reference: the performances are supported — and this is absolutely unheard of in the villages — by public address systems, and all royal protocol has to give in to the urge, among those possessing tape recorders, photo cameras, and video cameras, to ‘record’ the event — an act most characteristic of our electronic age and of the possibilities of individually reproduced and consumed, virtual and vicarious experience it entails. The standardisation of a commoditified artistic production is also borne out by the emphasis (which is in absolute contradiction with historic village patterns) on identical movements according to neat geometrical patterns, the avoidance of ‘offensive’ bodily movements particularly in the body zones singled out by Christian prudery, and in the identical uniforms of the members of the main dancing troupes. The representatives of the urban Kazanga troupe moreover advertise themselves through exceptional commodities such as shoes (which are not only expensive, but offensive and impractical in village dancing), expensive coiffures, sun glasses and identical T-shirts imprinted for the occasion. The commoditification element is also manifest in the separation — extremely unusual in this rural society — between
• passive, culture-consuming spectators, who explicitly are not supposed to join in the singing and dancing,
• the producers (who clearly act not by their own initiative — as in the village — but as they have been told), and
• the supervising elite (who in their turn single themselves out through such commodities as formal jackets and ties).
But as far as the Kazanga festival is concerned, commodification is only one side of the analytical medal. In this incorporative context one borrows freely from a repertoire which has certainly not been commoditified even if it is performative: dressed in leopard skins, around the temples a royal ornament of Conus shells, and brandishing an antique executioner’s axe (all these attributes — regalia, in fact — have now become non-commodities, pertaining to a royal circuit that in the present time is no longer mercantile, although it was more so during the nineteenth century), an aged royal chief, with virtuoso accompaniment from a hereditary honorary drummer of the same age (he has always been far above performing with the state-subsidised royal orchestra in the routine court contexts), performs the old Royal Dance which since the end of the nineteenth century was hardly seen any more in this region; at the climax the king (for that is what he shows himself to be) kneels down and drinks directly from a hole in the ground where beer has been poured out for his royal ancestors — the patrons of at least his part of the Nkoya nation, implied to share in the deeply emotional cheers from the audience. And young women who have long been through girls’ puberty initiation, perform that ritual’s final dance, without any signs of the appropriate stage fright and modesty, and with their too mature breasts against all tradition tucked into conspicuous white bras; yet despite this performative artificiality their sublime bodily movements, which in this case are far from censored, approach the village-based original sufficiently close to bring the spectators, men as well as women, to ecstatic expressions of a recognised and shared identity. Obviously commoditification and transformative selection, however important, do not tell the whole story, and even after the recreation of Nkoya culture in the form Kazanga format enough reason for enthusiasm and identification is left for us not to be too cynical about the globalising erosion of the symbolic and ethnic domain.
Yet, with all the attention for performative control, matched with a strong suggestion of authenticity, it is clear that the Kazanga leadership -- as unmistakable believers in and practitioners of commodification -- does not for one moment lose sight of the fact that the festival is primarily an attempt to exchange the one scarce good which one locally has in abundance, competence in symbolic production, for political and economic power. The national dignitaries, more than the royal chiefs, let alone the audience, constitute the spatial focus of the event, and a large part of the programme is devoted to the dignitaries’ welcome speeches and other formal addresses. Since the political arena is indeed the right place (and not only in Zambia) to exchange symbolic production for development projects, political allocation, and patronage, the harvest of the series of Kazanga festivals since 1988 is by now eminently manifest in a marked increase of Nkoya participation at the national level, in representative bodies and in the media, and in a marked decrease of the stigmatisation to which they used to be subjected under Lozi domination until well after independence. Kazanga is an example of how an ethnic group can not only articulate itself through symbolic production, but may actually lift itself by its own hairs out of the bog.
These
Zambian dilemma’s may inspire us in our analysis of the sangoma
mediumistic cult in nearby Botswana. But before we can proceed to
such analysis, a fair amount of detailed ethnography has to be
presented.
Francistown
is a European creation, with a considerable industrial and
commercial sector, founded a century years ago, and racially
segregated until Botswana’s Independence (1966).
Francistown, a major railhead, has found itself halfway between
rural villages and cattle posts and the distant destination of
labour migration in South Africa, whence it has accommodated
returning migrants and their attitudes, practices, tastes,
fashions etc. as acquired in distant places. There is a keen
awareness of ethnic differentiation and opposition in the town,
reinforced again by a lively political process where ethnic
mobilisation and particularly the issue of Kalanga identity and
assertion are major inputs. Yet if Francistown ever was a Kalanga
town in the sense that the Kalanga ethnic group (as a ‘host
tribe’) dominated both the surrounding countryside and the
town itself, this can no longer be said to be the case: in
addition to a major influx from Zimbabwe, people from all over
Botswana have settled there, and the town’s lingua franca
is no longer Kalanga but Tswana, Botswana’s official
language. Though the vast majority of present inhabitants of the
town was not born there, the place has developed a distinct sense
of a poly-ethnic urbanism, an idiom of public urban discourse in
which the particular cultural inputs from national ethnic groups
and the influence from distant places has amalgamated to form
some common denominator: with attitudes, types of relationships,
pastimes and places to pursue them which are felt to be typically
urban; which elaborate stereotypes characterising the various
townships within the town and ranking them in a classification of
wealth and prestige; and with standard collective representations
and responses, with regard to such matters as neighbourliness,
conflict resolution, norms of urban public behaviour in the
streets, shops, workplaces, fast food outlets, and drinking
places.
This public discourse also defines, on the level of lay
participants and everyday conversation, the major
medico-religious complexes and their characteristics (cf.
Ståugard 1985):
• the clinic or hospital,
where generally high-quality cosmopolitan health care is
dispensed at considerable costs of time and frustration but
against nominal fees (P0.503 per treatment);
• healing churches, with
prophets (baprofiti) as cultic leaders; with services in
which drumming, dancing, singing, speaking in tongues and
laying-on of hands are major ingredients, they form the dominant
public religious expression, and as dispensers of spiritual and
material treatment feature prominently in people’s health
strategies;
• dingaka,
traditional healers (the principal ones organised in various
local professional associations) using a material divination
apparatus (usually the widespread system based on four divining
tablets making for sixteen basic combinations) and a wide
selection of traditional and neo-traditional medicines; and
finally
• basangoma, spirit
mediums whose distinctive feature vis-à-vis the dingaka
is the inclusion of drumming and trance in divination and
treatment, and a greater emphasis on ancestral rather than
sorcery explanations of disease and other misfortune.
People cannot help being aware of these medico-religious
complexes. Cosmopolitan medicine, besides being invoked as a
first resort in cases of illness, forms a regular component of
administrative procedures regulating employment, absence from
work, immigration etc., its physical locations dominate the urban
scene, and the career opportunities it offers especially to women
are greatly aspired. Healing churches exist by the score in
Francistown, and they proclaim their existence by signboards, the
sounds of singing and drumming not only at weekends but also
several evenings and nights through the week. Members can often
be seen in the street in their colourful uniforms specific to a
particular church. Many display the fact that they are adherents
and are being treated in the church by colourful strings of
cotton around their wrists and necks; adherents of the major
healing church, the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), wear enamelled
badges wherever they go. Dingaka, operating in and from
treatment rooms they insist to call ‘surgeries’, are
generally less conspicuous; even the licensed ones rarely put out
signboards, although every inhabitant in town has knowledge of a
number of them and can easily find recommendations to others. The
same applies to basangoma, who however identify themselves
by strings of beads around the neck, wrists and occasionally
ankles, not only in the elaborate display customary at their
professional sessions, but also, less conspicuously, in everyday
life. This does distinguish them from the baprofiti and
their adherents who never wear beads, more so than from the dingaka
some of whom have gone through rituals and continue to adhere to
cults also prescribing the wearing of beads: beads form together
a catalogue of the bearer’s past sacrifices and current
cultic attachments. The commodity angle is important from the
outset of our argument: all beads in Francistown are imported
glass beads exclusively available from the retail trade.
At the level of public discourse, people are only dimly aware, if
at all, of the esoteric specialist knowledge around which these
various medico-religious specialist shape their professional
activities, although these matters constitute cherished topics
for everyday lay conversation. Most townsmen patronise not just
one of the complexes but a combination of them, with this proviso
that basangoma with their prolonged and expensive treatment
searching deep in the patient’s existence and history
normally are referred to as a last resort.
Poly-ethnic public discourse in town classifies not only major
medico-religious complexes and superficially attributes
distinctive traits and evaluations to them, it also offers a
common-sense aetiology, a provisional classification of symptoms
and likely causes necessary for initial crisis mobilisation (of
kinsmen, neighbours, colleagues, fellow-church members, employer
and health specialists) in the urban environment, and stipulates
an initial strategy of health action — to be refined once a
particular medico-religious complex has been approach, and
revised or extended whenever that complex does not soon respond
satisfactorily. In this connexion one major common-sense
interpretation, far from peculiar to Francistown public
discourse, is that of certain complaints (e.g. chronic headache,
swollen extremities, eye trouble, persistent bad luck) as signs
of being possessed by spirits, and of certain family conditions
(notably the prevalence of such possession in previous
generations, handed down in chains of cultic affiliation) as
conducive to these complaints.
Francistown finds itself well inside the catchment area of
Southern Africa’s mayor High God cult, that of Mwali.
Through extensive research by Richard Werbner, Terence Ranger and
others4 we are now beginning to understand the cult’s
history and organisational structure, its significance for the
region’s rural communities, and its political significance
in the struggle for Zimbabwe’s independence. It is
remarkable that the cult is hardly articulated in the public
discourse on medico-religious complexes in Francistown. Only
towards the end of a year’s fieldwork did I once see a group
of Children of Mwali, Bawosana, in uniform (staff, black
cloak, white or black-and-white skirt, white or red sash, and
strings of black beads or a combination of black,
black-and-white, white and red) out on a public road in town; but
by that time I had already made contact with a few Francistown
lodges where Mwali-related sessions of dancing, treatment and
initiation would be held, on private yards which due to the
nature of urban space in African towns would still be fairly open
to the public eye and ear. Well-known Mwali cultic personnel does
have an urban residence: Mr. Vumbu, who is the high priest of the
cult’s southwestern encompassing the North-East District,
and has an oracle inside Botswana’s border (cf. Werbner
1989: 278 and passim), has a house in Francistown’s area L
and runs —— food for a commodification approach! -- a
transport company; but a standard response of my urban informants
was that Mr Vumbu had dropped his cultic activities, was absorbed
in his transport enterprise, and was no longer considered a true
representative of the cult. A similar image of past activities
supplanted by present-day inertia was detectable when I
confronted Francistown lay (and even a few specialist) informants
with my increasing information on what went on in the lodges: the
dancers there were interpreted not as actual Servants of Mwali at
present incorporated in a regional network of cultic prestations
and obligations, but as mere descendants of such adepts,
emulating their ancestors’ dress and paraphernalia in a
fragmented and localised cult which no longer bounds its
present-day members in a viable regional network. Nonetheless,
the extensive cultic network as described by Werbner (1989: ch.
7), spanning the entire North-East district, has far from ceased
operation; the extent of urban-rural ties between Francistown
and, particularly, the rural communities of northeastern Botswana
ensures that a considerable number of urbanites may participate
in rural forms of the Mwali cult.
The urban invisibility of the Mwali cult appears to be partly due
to the obvious seasonal element in the rain cult: from July to
September, towards the end of the dry season, Wosana dancing
sessions are staged in several townships of Francistown, by what
the public discourse calls basangoma, at private residential
plots which accommodate lodges — i.e. centres of divination,
healing and the training of adepts. These sessions, which draw a
lay audience of several scores some of whom join in the dancing,
are rallying points for senior adepts and cult leaders from other
lodges in town, but also for a dozen or more of the dingaka
who are not basangoma and do not have lodges. Participants
of the latter category include some of the most senior dingaka
— chairmen of their local professional associations; while
in attire and ritual practice they identify as Wosana during
these sessions, contrary to the lodge leaders they are not
Ndebele but Kalanga from the North-East district.
Francistown
contains a few communities (I use the word almost is the
monasterial sense), situated on private plots in residential
townships, where the day-to-day life of the members, under the
leadership of a major sangoma who is an adept of the Mwali
cult, revolves on the diagnosis and treatment of mental and
psychosomatic disorders attributed to ancestral and demonic6
affliction, and, in the process, on the training to sangomahood
of those patients who — according to the widespread model of
the cult of affliction — can only be cured by becoming
therapists themselves. I have studied in detail three such
lodges; two or three more exist in. The discussion below
concentrates on the lodge in the Maipaahela residential area.
Maipaahela is a recently upgraded former squatter area. This
offered the opportunity to secure a relatively spacious plot and
to fill it (in a way which would be impossible in a more
controlled site-and-service plot, such as owned these days by an
increasing proportion of Francistown inhabitants) with all sorts
of inexpensive structures as dwellings for adepts and as
treatment rooms, store rooms for paraphernalia and medicines, and
a relatively large area occupied by a shrine: a large platform
made of tree branches The medico-religious emphasis is combined
with secular economic pursuit: in addition to the lodge members
(about half of whom are close relatives of the lodge leader) the
plot houses two tenants, young working women who are not related
to the lodge leader and who have nothing whatsoever to do with
the ritual organisation of the lodge. A similar situation, but
involving rather more tenants, obtains at the lodge in the
Monarch residential area, run by MaShakayile, a classificatory
sister (first cousin) of the Maipaahela leader MaNdlovu.
The lodge is situated at the edge of the township, where
complaints about ritual noise etc. will be minimal, relative
privacy from neighbours maximum (further enhanced by the fact
that the separate buildings are narrowly closed upon one another
to form a secluded yard, which is very a-typical for
Francistown), and finally as near as possible to a small stream.
There
is much to be said for an interpretation of the sangoma cult in
Francistown in terms of commodification: as a context where
religious prestations are turned into marketable commodities, or
where, alternatively, a ritual response to the commodification of
other aspects of contemporary Botswana life is offered. In
earlier work I have been rather optimistic about the
possibilities of a commodification perspective, e.g. in terms of
the religious laundering of money and consumption items:
‘An understanding of the way in which such organisations create identity by imposing boundaries on the initially unlimited flow that globalisation entails, can for instance be gathered from the study of such a widespread phenomenon as the laundering of globally mediated commodities and of money in the context of contemporary religious organisations. Many African Christian churches appear7 as a context for the managing of elements belonging to the inimical domain of commodities, consumption and the market. But we should not overlook that very much the same process is at work outside world religions yet (inevitably, since the problem presupposes the clients’ extensive participation in the world economy) in a context of globalisation — among syncretistic or neo-traditional cults, which have their own forms of formal organisation. Here examples of such ritual laundering can be quoted from urban cultic practice among Surinam Creoles in the Netherlands and from an urban variety of sangoma cults widespread in Southern Africa. 8 (van Binsbergen 1998)
The commodification aspect of the Francistown can be approached
from a number of complementary directions.
In
Maipaahela, the dominant structure on the plot is a fully-fledged
modern four- roomed house, which would satisfy all the
regulations and requirements of state-controlled urban building,
and in appearance, capital investment, and elaborate furnishing
testifies to a very considerable adoption of modern tastes and
life-style, in no way exceptional in Francistown outside the
circles of the very poor. What is exceptional, though, about
the lodge is its perceptible balance between the old and the new
-- in the midst of a Francistown where historic forms of rural
life and symbolism have been virtually banned from public life
and are surviving only implicitly, keeping a very low profile,
having virtually gone underground. At the lodge, on the
contrary, the constant attention for ritual activities and
paraphernalia such as drums, cloths, beads and medicine (items
which the leader constantly carries around in, significantly
again, disposable plastic shopping bags) does not go hand in hand
with a rejection of whatever the modern world has to offer in the
way of furniture, clothing, utensils, child care requisites etc.
Most of the food consumed at the lodge is bought in
Francistown’s large supermarkets — the lodge emulates
the symbolic but not the productive aspects of the rural
socio-economic order. The beer consumed and libated in
considerable quantities at the lodge, particularly during
rituals, is not a ritual home-brew but the simple manufactured Chibuku,
packed in cartons; the leader herself consumes endless series of
canned beer of an unpopular brand called Black Label
— the package in red and white against a basic black (cf.
the Wosana costume) lends it a sanctity which its modern
manufacture and purchase for money does not seem to affect
negatively. By contrast to the sense of diabolical contamination
with attaches to modern consumption and permissiveness in the
idiom of the Francistown healing churches, at the lodge a
carefree sense of immunity appears to reign — not in the
least since money, that major contaminating agent, can
be sanctified on the spot: by the leader’s handling it,
storing it with the paraphernalia in the shopping bags, and
forwarding 5 — 10 % of it to the Manyangwa oracle with which
she is associated. Fees for divinatory and therapeutic services
range from P5 for a simple first consultation, via c. P100 for
extensive treatment, to c. P1000 (not counting sacrificial
animals, firewood, cloth and beads) for graduation to full
sangomahood; by comparison, the average monthly wages in the
formal sector in Francistown are in the range of P150 —
P200.
Of the other two lodges, the Monarch one is very similar to the
one in Maipaahela — since their leaders are sisters, the
Monarch lodge absorbed most of the Maipaahela adepts and patients
when the Maipaahela leader died in 1989. The Monarch lodge
however is situated not at the edge but more towards the centre
of a township, a stream and bush therefore are not very near
(although still not more than a few hundred meters away), and the
plot is secluded from neighbouring plots and particularly from
the main road by a dense growth of giant cactuses, which are
exceptional in Francistown. Situated in the town’s most
dilapidated and disreputable surviving squatter area, the
Masemenyenga lodge, although subservient to the same Mwali oracle
in Manyangwa, is different from the other two in that it has far
fewer adepts (only three Kalanga women in addition to the Ndebele
leader), who in ceremonies wear not the Wosana costume but
instead emulate nineteenth-century Zulu dress. The main
difference lies in the way in which space is sacralised: not
primarily by an outdoor shrine made of branches but by fine
white-washed one-roomed permanent building which is exclusively
used for divination and treatment, carefully kept clean, the
floor covered with elegant reed mats, the walls crammed with
sacred cloths and other paraphernalia, and with two small
decorated ancestral gourds as the mobile centre of the shrine. In
the midst of the — in Francistown proverbial — filth
and devastation of Masemenyenga, the place (occupied by the lodge
leader more than twenty years ago) stands out as a beacon of
purity and vital strength.
A fictive family, the lodge has a firm style of leadership which
makes it far from a democracy. Commodities clearly articulate the
internal relationships at the lodge. The leader’s plastic
bags contain everything that the adepts may ever need for
treatment and initiation, and as such represent the constant
generous flow of healing care -- which is also the transformation
of externally bought commodities, via the leader’s shopping
bags, into internally meaningful paraphernalia, uniforms etc. --
from the leader to her followers, but they also represent the
almost total control which she exercises over the material and
symbolic resources available at the lodge. Keys to the treatment
and store rooms ensure her authority over the lodge’s drums,
pilgrim staffs, consecrated divination tablets, animals waiting
to be sacrificed, butcher’s knives etc. — and this
authority is reinforced whenever she personally hands out these
necessary items. Only fly switches and leg rattles made of
spider’s nests (both indispensable for dancing), uniforms
(for which the material has been bought by the adept personally,
after which it is cut and sewn by the leader) and dummy exercise
tablets for divinatory exercises, are kept by the adepts
themselves. Similarly, individual adepts may administer the
treatments prescribed by the leader, but she alone can prescribe
a therapy, while she oversees all divination going on at the
lodge except for the adepts’ daily exercises with
non-consecrated, dummy divination tablets. This insistence on
control is on the one hand in line with the immense
responsibilities the leader takes upon herself, braving ancestors
and demons in her efforts to restore the patients to health and
preserve the well-being of the adepts despite the supernatural
and psychological risks they run. On the other hand the pattern
of leadership is in line with the managerial problems of the
position of leader, the cleavages and rivalry within the family
which controls both the Maipaahela and the Monarch lodge,
potential tensions within the lodge (between senior and junior
adepts, adepts who are the leader’s kin and those who are
not), and the sharp competition with other Francistown healers,
in which resort to such drastic means as they have professionally
access to is taken for granted.
It is an unmistakable fact that ritual services are being offered
in exchange for substantial amounts of cash.
‘We are in this for the money’
is
what two Francistown sangomas told me at the end of a long and
deeply moving ritual which they had supervised in my Francistown
backyard -- the first bloody ancestral sacrifice I was ever to
make; and while I could scarcely believe that they were being so
tactless at such a sacred moment, they mentioned once again how
much I owed them for their services. Below we shall encounter
these two men as Joshua (a failing ritual entrepreneur) and
Albert (a highly successful one, head of a lodge patronised by
the trading elite of Francistown, and owner of a first-rate motor
vehicle.). We shall see that Joshua was propelled into
sangomahood by the dynamics of Southern African aetiological
categories -- becoming a sangoma was the only way for him to
restore his health after a mental breakdown had destroyed his
splendid intellectual career; sangomahood was scarcely his chosen
profession, let alone a profession he had chosen because of its
lucrative nature. Albert, an androgynous presence when in trance,
successor to his father who was also a successful sangoma, proud
lover of his three female adepts, and enthusiast for early
nineteenth-century Nguni military attire which he and his adepts
don during their trance performances -- Albert gets many more
important things out of his sangomahood, than just money.
I suspect that the blunt insistence on the payment of substantial
sums at the moment when the client is still in the clutches of
spiritual transformation, has one main purpose which North
Atlantic psychiatrist may be ready to recognise (even although
they themselves tend to bill their patient heavily): the money
severs possible ties of lifelong dependence and transference
which would otherwise develop; it is the one reminder that beyond
the dream of a self-contained personal microcosm which the
therapy pretends to restore, lies a world of impersonal,
universalised value, calibrated and rendered infinitely
exchangeable through the external, alien medium of money.
Even so the commodity angle in the Francistown sangoma cult is
conspicuous. Not only are the services heavily paid for. Also the
majority of paraphernalia derives from the market, as
commodities, and rather than by ritual barriers to consumption
and money, life at the lodge can be said to involve a celebration
of consumption and a sanctification of money. Among the
sangoma’s clients are the most wealthy entrepreneurs of
Francistown, and they do not come for personal bodily complaints,
but for success medicine. The training as twaza border on
exploitation, and the final fee which the lodge leader cashes
upon the twaza’s graduation represents the equivalent of a
few months’ income in unskilled formal-sector employment. In
order to justify these expenses, as well as those of the repeated
animal sacrifices, the sacrificial meal at initiation into
twazahood and at graduation (at which literally hundreds of
guests have to be fed at the expense of the candidate), the adept
is constantly told: ‘You will all find it back with the
people’, i.e. with your future clients, in the form of their
fees.
Sometimes the celebration of commodities may border on the
criminal. One of the most prominent lodge members of the Monarch
lodge spent the Christmas period of 1991 in jail, because she was
found trafficking in soft drugs. In the same year, was
presented, upon my own graduation, with what looked like a gold
nugget the size of a small egg; I was exhorted to sell the item
abroad and share the proceeds with the lodge leadership, but it
turned out to be a mere pebble daubed in gold paint. That lodge
was in decline, had a large number of non-productive dependants
and few clients for major, expensive treatments, which in
combination with the high level of alcohol consumption produced a
constant lack of cash.
Two,
rather contradictory, historical arguments might be made in this
connection.
On the one hand, from a commodification perspective one might be
tempted to suggest that the Francistown sangoma cult
represents an eroded, commodified, cosmopolitan form of a ritual
tradition which elsewhere, in remote rural areas of Southern
Africa, would be far more intact, and less polluted by the desire
for money. The fact that the lodge members tend to come from many
different countries, language groups and ethnic groups, already
suggests that the cult does not reproduce some historic localised
identity. Descriptions of sangomahood from more rural parts of
Southern Africa (Berglund, Sibisi-Ngubane, Reis etc.) offer us a
picture of a far less elaborate, more rustic, less lucrative and
more cosmologically underpinned, local idiom, of which the
activities in Francistown might appear to be somewhat virtualised
and bricolaged transformations.
In twentieth-century Southern Africa (ranging from Southern
Zambia, through Zimbabwe and Botswana, to the Republic of South
Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho, with ramifications into Angola and
Mozambique), the term sangoma has stood for any
ritual-therapeutic specialist engaging in a combination of
mediumistic trance, four-tablet divination, and herbalism. This
cultic complex is found in various contexts which may vary from
extreme, culturally specific localisation (homesteads in rural
environments ethnically marked as ‘Zulu’,
‘Swazi’, ‘Ndebele’, ‘Kalanga’) to
regional (by implication global), culturally fairly heterogeneous
or unspecific, urban contexts. Important variations within this
cultic complex can be mapped by a number of oppositions along the
axis of the local/ global distinction:
• the nature and
multiplicity of social and economic relationships between
specialist and client;
• their being embedded in a
shared mother-tongue supported discourse of causation and meaning
— or their having to make shift with a lingua franca and
vastly divergent initial cosmological positions; in the latter
case, the progressive elaboration of a shared fantasy space
between healer and client amounts to the client’s
(re-)conversion;
• the extent, therefore, to
which that discourse (esp. with a view on supernatural agents as
structures of causation and legitimacy) is localised, integrated
and unitarian — or globalising, eclectic, fragmented and
diverse.
As
structured by these and similar oppositions the sangoma
complex, ramifying and kaleidoscopic, could be argued to
constitute a fantasy space within which both clients and
therapeutic entrepreneurs can pursue widely diverging options of
imagery, a choice of repertoires of traditionalism or modernity,
defining several modes of causation with varying detail,
consistency and idiosyncrasy. in urban multiethnic settings such
as Francistown, these options would then be only distantly
informed by the time-honoured, local cultural models which they
do, however, mimic in dress style and imagery. This creative
variability with be set against the background of contemporary
urban Botswana society, featuring among other characteristics:
• the snow-ball
organisational format of the cult of affliction, and the great
premium it lays on cultic and therapeutic competition for the
public opinion i.e. for potential clients’ patronage
• the varieties of
relatively new concerns (general urban insecurity and competition
for jobs, housing and lovers; protection of large entrepreneurial
and political capital for regional and national politicians and
traders in an expanding market; the articulation of manageable
tradition within a modernist nationalistic framework of
politically controlled cultural production)
• the impact of
cosmopolitan organisational formats (political parties, churches,
healers’ professional organisations)
• the amazing extent to
which the entire cultic complex is pervaded by the image of the
market and of the commodity
From
such a conception of urban or cosmopolitan sangomahood, it would
appear to be scarcely a few steps to such virtualised global
belief systems as New Age, UFO-cults, and vampirism. Below I
shall argue that, whatever the ‘modern’, commodified
environment in which the Francistown sangoma cult is embedded and
which it manifestly takes for granted, it would be totally wrong
to deny the very great extent to which that cult is itself in
consonance with time-honoured, cosmologically anchored forms of
therapeutic meaning. If commodification has to be brought in, it
is -- as I shall argue at length -- a something whose effects the
cult confronts, even though it has to a certain extent pervaded
the cult itself.
Another frame of interpretation which presents itself is to look
upon the Francistown sangoma cult as a historic form celebrating
commodities -- to the extent that most paraphernalia and most
sacrificial animals and other sacrificial matter (snuff, beads),
cloths) emphatically has to be bought, and cannot come from
one’s own supplies. Networks of long-distance trade have
traversed East and South Central Africa for millennia, and they
connected the royal an aristocratic courts of the interior with
commodity flows extending all across the Indian Ocean, to Arabia,
Persia, India, China, and Indonesia. it is very likely that the
forms of the sangoma cult owe a great deal to these
intercontinental influences -- the black cloaks, staff, short
dancing-skirt in cloth, crossed bead scapulars, prostration as
ritual gesture, the insistence on bare feet in the presence of
the sacred -- all this suggests specific cultural forms which do
not exactly root in African soil. After the middle of the second
millennium, once splendid state systems of the interior declined
greatly, and it is likely that then regional cults (such as have
survived into the twentieth century, especially the Mwali cult)
came to play an large role in the maintenance of interregional
trade networks, with major shrines acting as nodal points. I find
this a more convincing and attractive hypothetical model in which
to cast the interpretation of the Francistown cult, than the
first one (of an urban commoditised travesty of pure rural
forms). It also ties in with the marked commodity-mindedness of
Botswana, with an elaborate value system geared to the
accumulation and successful upkeep of wealth under condition of
stability and social approval -- a system rather exceptional in
Africa, where such levelling mechanisms as sorcery,
cursing, bridewealth, tend to dissipate and discourage
entrepreneurship and the accumulation of wealth, while on the
other hand many cannot resist the temptation of primitive
accumulation based on uncontrolled access to state resources.
Yet
the ethnographic evidence concerning the Francistown sangoma brings
out that the elements of commodification outlined above, must be
considerably qualified.
As
a minor point, the idea of the cult as a celebration of
commodification is scarcely in line with the actual experience of
adepts who are faced with the task of fulfilling their
sacrificial obligations though the market. They find that that
market is extremely reluctant, difficult to operate, defective.
Because of the history of White monopoly capital in the North
East district, where Francistown is situated, the town is
surrounded by a circle of commercial farms. Within a range of
thirty kilometres, it is therefore virtually impossible to buy a
goat. The ancestral demands in terms of uniforms, beads, other
paraphernalia, are often very specific, and difficult to meet
from the day-to-day supply in Francistown’s shop, where
plastic hairpins are far easier to get by than white glass beads.
But there are other, more profound arguments against the view
that Francistown sangomahood essentially revolves on
commodification.
Unmistakable,
the lodge seeks to function as the centre of a viable, or
restored, whole cosmology with rural referents.
The Maipaahela lodge is situated near a stream. The stream’s
banks covered with shrubs offer a place for ritual ablutions.
Most important however about the stream is that it is (as streams
in the surrounding rural areas) a place where ancestral spirits
are supposed to be eminently present, and approachable; here
novice adepts are chased across the river where they deposit
offerings of bank notes or coins of the highest nomination
(immediately to be retrieved by the adepts and forwarded to the
lodge leader). The plot’s closed lay-out around a central
yard, with only one very narrow entrance, is suggestive of a womb
nurturing and protecting the humans contained in it. It may also
evoke the symbolism (more than the actual physical form) of the
Kalanga homestead and local kin group, the nzi; also, the
demonic cult in which the cult leader specialises beside her
Mwali connections has a decidedly Kalanga signature. Yet the
language of communication at the lodge is Ndebele rather than
Kalanga, and the two languages are not mutually intelligible.
With its elaborate shrine and the adjacent river the lodge
reproduces, in an urban setting where such is very exceptional
indeed, a viable rural, kinship-based social order, a ritual
microcosm where so many of the traditional elements of the
symbolic life are represented. This sacralisation of space
must be an important aspect of the healing potential of this
urban community.
In Francistown, architectural structures which dominate the
townscape are those associated with the state and capitalism.
Only an inconspicuous role is reserved for one category of
structures which in European and American towns is so visually
dominant: churches. Sangomas and baprofiti (‘prophets’,
i.e. leaders of African Independent churches) are the African
Francistonian community’s principal specialists in the
articulation and manipulation of meaning. They are the only ones
to actually sacralise the urban space in its own right through
the creation of shrines and the staging of ritual and sacrifice
in the urban context. It is true that the sangoma shrines
to a considerable extent evoke a viable rural social and
cosmological order revolving on ancestors;9 but at the same time
items charged with cosmopolitan meaning (the lodge leader’s
relatively luxurious town house, modern furniture, emphasis on
cash and on cash-bought paraphernalia and sacrifices, reliance on
manufactured food and drink, even the ubiquitous plastic shopping
bags) are far from shunned, and they are sacralised in the ritual
process continuously going on at the sangoma lodges. The baprofiti’s
position is related but somewhat different: their reference is to
the cosmopolitan repertoires of meaning much more than to the
historic rural repertoire, and they impose severe limitations
upon the selection from the modern society that their adherents
are allowed to indulge in, yet they too offer ritual and symbolic
ways in which the suffering and temptation engendered in that
modern world can be alleviated and a person can return to it
without being overwhelmed by it — ways which make that world
once again an inhabitable place. In this way the baprofiti,
too, sacralise and to some extent rehabilitate the urban space
itself. Both types of ritual specialists offer a way out from the
alienation which for most other Africans in Francistown is both
an accepted fact and a major factor in their strictly utilitarian
approach to the town as intrinsically devoid of (historic, rural)
meaning, as anything but home. Here there is the spatial and
bodily dynamics of group interaction to be appreciated. In
many Independent churches this takes the form of a dancing
chorus, a circular dancing movement, or even a
‘planetary’ movement with the dancers (as detached,
impersonal ‘atoms’, once again?) turning both around
their own axis and, jointly, around a common centre, where often
the congregation’s new-born children, novices, baptismal
candidates, sufferers or sick are placed as if to have maximum
benefit from the energy unleashed by the frantic yet carefully
orchestrated movement of the congregation. Among the Independent
churches, and in the not unrelated sangoma dancing ritual,
we can see the (attempt of a) group-wise appropriation and
hence transformation of a small ritual space inside town, as an
active way of confronting and exorcising the alienation which is
paramount in the everyday living experience of the African
workers in the urban space outside the ritual situation. 10
The basangoma and baprofiti also specifically
mediate between rural spatial symbolism and that in town.
I have already explained how the town’s river beds, in the
African pedestrians’ perceptions, are convenient
passage-ways rather than boundaries. This is the place to point
out that in the symbolism of the urban landscape they feature
also in other capacities. The rivers (whose connotations of
liminality may be obvious) have retained their historic rural
symbolism as the abode of the ancestors, of territorial spirits
and of the Great Water Serpent — even if they are dry most
of the time. The urban rivers play an important part in the
ritual of the town’s sangoma lodges in that every
novice has to be chased across one of them, dropping sacrificial
coins and being beaten by the senior lodge members. Lodge members
ritually wash their bodies outdoors in the thicket adjacent to
the stream, on the occasion of initiation and bereavement. The
rivers also play a role in the baptismal rites of the Independent
churches, whose symbolism is historically African at least as
much as it is biblical.
Hills are in a category akin to rivers. Nyangabgwe Hill does not
only visually dominate the town. The etymology of this place-name
contains virtually the only bit of shared historic collective
consciousness among the local population: many Francistownians
can tell you that the name derives from the Kalanga words for
‘rock’ and ‘to stalk’, and offer the nutshell
myth of a hunter mistaking a rock for a prey he thought to be
stalking. This hill is only the tallest of a system of about ten
hills around the confluence of the Tati and Inchwe Rivers, and on
the tops of several of these hills there are archaeological
sites, with zimbabwe-type fishbone-pattern brickwork
revealing these places to have been residences of regional minor
rulers incorporated in a powerful state (closely associated with
the Mwali cult and the Kalanga language) encompassing much of
northwestern Botswana and Zimbabwe until only a few centuries
ago.11 The contemporary ethnic consciousness of the Kalanga in
and around Francistown lacks awareness of this glorious
historical past and concentrates on their humiliation at the
hands of the Ngwato (a Tswana sub-group) mainly in the colonial
period. I suppose that in the technical legal sense these
archaeological sites are national monuments, but in the
sociological sense they are certainly not, since very few
Francistownians are aware of their presence and significance. The
hills do however feature in the ritual of the (mutually closely
related) Mwali and sangoma cults and in that of the,
somewhat more distantly related, African Independent churches, as
places of theophany comparable with the rivers.
At the Maipaahela lodge, the sacralisation of space goes hand in
hand with the sacralisation of person. The lodge leader is
seen as the incarnation of a major ancestral spirit, whose
presence and sacred status is constantly to be acknowledged by a
ritual greeting: whenever an adept or patient wants to enter the
yard he or she kneels at the narrow entrance and loudly and
slowly claps hands a few times; the leader then calls back ‘Yebó,
yebó, you may approach, the spirit welcomes you.’ The
constant awareness (reinforced by frequent divination in which
more senior adepts attend to the junior ones under the guidance
of the leader) that all adepts host ‘incarnations’
similarly as the leader albeit on a less exalted scale, lends an
extra dimension of ancestral dignity to the adepts’
personalities. Whether from a sense of generational continuity
reinforced by the constant emphasis on the ancestral dimension,
as a reversal of the rejection of children which is attributed to
demons (Werbner 1989), or simply as another enacting of the
quality of rural family life, it is remarkable that the few young
children at the lodge are at the centre of everyone’s
attention, admiration and care. (Such a state of affairs is
rather conspicuous in Francistown, where mothers often find
themselves unable to balance the demands of maternal care with
those of wage labour as a more highly valued activity). The
lodge’s shrine is a focus for sacrifice and libation, which
as elsewhere should be approached respectfully — without
shoes and wristwatches, and with a ankle-length cloth wrapped
around a woman’s legs even if she is in ritual Mwali-cult
attire (with only knee-length plied dancing skirt) — but
this does not preclude joking and laughter in the presence of
this eminently homely epiphany of the sacred.
More even than a dwelling place and a shrine, the lodge is a
therapeutic community: for the ‘outpatients’ who come
and go regularly, but particularly for the adepts. Kinsmen and
non-kin alike identify as children of the leader, despite their
considerable variation in age, mother tongue and ethnic
affiliation: the lodge leaders are Ndebele, but their co-residing
adepts (in so far as they are not recruited from the
leader’s close kindred) may derive from any ethnic group in
and around Botswana. There is great emphasis on mutual warmth,
understanding, assistance both in day-to-day domestic matters and
in ritual and healing, so that an awareness of belonging and
protection is generated (along with the awareness of engaging in
something dangerous, exclusive, often despised and repulsive: the
pursuit of sangomahood). The members are very much aware
of constituting a solidary group, which is further emphasised by
their donning the lodge uniform for ritual occasions which,
however, occur almost every day. The lodge does not house all
adepts permanently. Some of them have, after their graduation
from the esoteric training at the lodge, moved to places like
Tonota and Tshesebe, 30 to 40 km from Francistown; they visit the
lodge several times a month. 12Although the lodge members may
engage in secular activities, including wage labour (some adepts
work as shop assistants, cleaners and bricklayers), even when not
resident at the lodge they are supposed to spend almost all their
free time at the lodge, for both ritual and social action.
Throughout the day, but particularly in the afternoon, early
evening and weekends, new clients may present themselves.
Treatment sessions, during which the patient may be required to
be clothed in nothing but a blanket, take place in the small
treatment rooms, with only one adept in attendance; there is a
strong sense of bodily integrity and privacy. Divination sessions
however are a collective undertaking, when all the adepts gather
around the leader in order to see an application to real-life
situations, of the highly involved and technical divinatory
principles which they have been discussing and practising on
dummy exercise divination tablets during the day. While the lodge
leader oversees all divination sessions and pronounces the main
diagnosis and paths to redress, she often leaves it to a senior
adept to cast the tablets, to name and offer a first
interpretation of the combinations, and to question the patient
in the initial stages. A large proportion of the sessions,
meanwhile, concern not outside patients but the adepts
themselves, and particularly the decisions that have to be taken
at various stages of their progress to healing, graduation and
senior status. In these cases, when all adepts intently bend over
the tablets and try to read them as signs of misfortune and hope
of their fellow-adepts, the nature of the lodge as a therapeutic
community becomes particularly manifest. At the same time the
training component of such sessions is unmistakable: while
present the lodge leader may allow one of the more experienced
adepts to go almost all the way in the diagnostic dialogue,
showing her increasing mastery and gaining credit for it in the
small circle of the lodge.
Each day at the lodge begins with a ritual: in a small treatment
room all adepts present as well as an occasional outpatient under
special treatment (but never the leader) stage a ritual which in
all details is identical to the one described by Werbner (1989:
311f) as the cooling ritual through which a Child of Mwali is
initiated and which has also been adopted by the ZCC. While all
present repeat the following chorus in Ndebele:
‘We black cows drink muddy water,
We black cows of the ancestors’,13
they
take turns in partaking of the foam, and their conscious
interpretation is not -- at least not explicitly -- in terms of
the Mwali cult, but in terms of fortification through the
handling of bitter and repulsive matter, helping the ancestral
spirit in them to emerge. After the morning ritual, a few adepts
may attend to out-patients, administering fumigation, steam
baths, massages etc. Meals are consumed collectively. In the
afternoons adepts often occupy themselves with the practising of
divination, learning the basic combinations and improving their
skills at spinning meaningful stories out of the chance sequences
in which these combinations occur when thrown.
Around the inner core of the lodge there is a very loose network
of free-floating senior adepts: traditional practitioners still
in the process of building up a practice and a following in
Francistown; they have a their own source of esoteric knowledge
and status independent from the lodge leader, but may appeal to
the latter when needing expert advice and ritual. In addition the
lodge sees a coming and going of Francistown lay patients, only
very few of whom will ever be caught in to become trainees. Among
the clients are members of Francistown’s principal trading
and political family.
Every urban lodge heavily relies on nearby (up to than 50 km)
rural homesteads as sources of kin support, vegetable medicine,
and as locations where such secret ceremonies for the demonic
cult can be staged as are considered to be incompatible with the
urban environment. This implies that the sacralisation of space
at the lodge has its limits, not so much because the lodge is
within the municipal boundaries but because its reproduction of
the rural order is balanced by the pursuit of a modern life-style
and consumption patterns.
The leader is the only lodge member with a personal link with the
Mwali cult, having visited the oracle at a critical point in life
and having there received the guidance (not the specific training
and healing) that led to betterment and ultimately to success as
a healer. A junior adept may live at the lodge for years, and
graduate as a fully-fledged sangoma, without ever making the
journey to a central Mwali oracle, and apparently without
developing any clear awareness of the interregional implications
of his or her particular combination of cultic styles, idioms and
paraphernalia.
Within the general setting of life at the lodge as described
above, the restoration of meaning and well-being is brought about
by the movement back and forth between collective consumptive and
didactic routine activities, and the heightened therapeutic
situations of divination, performative ritual and sacrifice. Such
topics cannot be dealt with in passing — they are too
complex and raise too many theoretical questions each of which
has a wide range of possible answers (cf. Devisch 1985). Yet a
few remarks especially on divination are in order here, since
they help to pinpoint the nature of the therapy the lodge has to
offer (for instance, by comparison to the churches), highlight
the role which commodities play in the process, and form a
stepping-stone to the cases to be discussed below.
Divination at the lodges takes place with a combination of
divination tablets and clairvoyant trance. The divining tablets,
their names and associations are derived from the basic pattern
of four as is widespread in the subcontinent. Most divining
tablets are crudely made of freshly hewn wood by the lodge embers
themselves; but it is also possible to buy sets, especially at
the large section of the municipal market devoted to traditional
medicine, in the major town of Bulawayo, just across the
Zimbabwean border. Individual variations include exchanging or
altering the shape and names of certain tablets and combinations,
the use of more than one set of four at the same time, the
addition of ‘joker’ tablets reflecting the
diviner’s personal idiosyncrasies and biography, or the
substitution of this system by the more abstract but essentially
similar system of unmarked nutshells. Trance divination is
supported by such physical requisites as drums, fly-switch,
ceremonial dress comprising beads, ostrich feathers and rare
skins, ceremonial spears or axes, manufactured cloths with
mass-produced representations of sacred animals in prescribed
colours, substances to be rubbed onto exposed parts of the body,
and ancestral gourds. Most of these items are commodities,
purchased from ritual specialists, from the formal-sector
game-skin tanneries in Francistown’s industrial area, or
preferably from the Bulawayo market. Both in tablet divination
and in trance divination, the diviner tends to enter into a
ceremonially restricted dialogue with the client, picking up
minute clues volunteered or inadvertently offered by the client.
If a divination apparatus is used the diviner dextrously juggles
with the many vectors and complexes of meaning and association
with which the physical apparatus is endowed according to a body
of professional knowledge in essence shared by all diviners using
this apparatus, combining this with the process of verbal
exchange during the session. As a result the divination yields a
coherent and often very detailed account, naming specific
supernatural causes (often to the extent that the exact
genealogical position of the ancestor involved may be identified,
or the living evil-doer is characterised in terms of sex, age,
complexion, and significant anecdotal details of the attack),
their effects in the form of illness and other misfortune, and
remedies in the form of sacrifice, retaliation, protective
medicine, or ritual training as the case may be. The specificity
of the message, its symbolic and verbal virtuosity, the generous
attention for the patient’s predicament, and its being
inadvertently guided by the client’s input, produces the
effect of opening up an entire world hitherto hidden, and
stipulating forms of redress which restore the patient’s
grasp of his or her symbolic order: history, ancestry,
obligations and future potential. The restoration of sense gives
on (via performative ritual and sacrifice) to a restoration of
self.
The divinatory apparatus is essentially a machine for producing
stories that are convincing, moving, redemptive, and capable of
identification by the patient. The four tablets, the several
aspects under which each combination may be read at the same
time, and other imagery with its now overlapping now
contradictory contents)14 provide the amazingly complex yet
fairly systematic repertoire of possible interpretations. An
essential stochastic element introduced by the throwing of the
bones. Every new throw (and sessions consist of at least a dozen
throws, sometimes up to thirty and forty) to the patient and
onlookers carries the suggestion that some blind hand of fate and
truth dictates the bones to fall in a specific manner and compels
the diviner to interpret them in one way and no other — as
if the net is further tightening around the evasive truth that is
searched for. Yet in fact each new throw offers the diviner a new
opportunity to page through the entire interpretative repertoire
available and make his selection, taking a new bend or shortcut
through the maze, developing a promising point, abandoning a dead
alley, and triggering new reactions on the part of the patient. The
deception of deliberate (although intuitive) selection posing as
blind necessity could not be achieved without the appearance
of objectivity achieved by the uncontrolled throwing of the
tablets exactly as if they were dice. From a commodity
perspective there is an important lesson to be learned here: the
divinatory dice, and most other paraphernalia used at the lodge,
may be commodities, but they are used to enchant or re-enchant,
instead of disenchant, the modernised world of commodities that
surrounds, and afflicts, the clients and adepts.
The story-producing aspect was never clearer to me than when, at the Maipaahela lodge, I witnessed a small group of three adepts, young women, in their afternoon exercises of throwing the tablets and improvising interpretations. Fondly applying themselves to the task, as children absorbed in a board game, the women bend over the sacrificial goat skin spread out between them and tossed the dummy tablets in their hands. One of the women (Ma-Bigi) threw and the others (Kwani and Ellen) watched and checked whether they agreed with her interpretation. The combination to come up in the throw was Zwibili (sl),15 and Ma-Bigi interpreted:
‘The two children [Zwibili].... are at home,’.
using the complementary
combination underlying Zwibili: Bango (kn,), in its most innocent
aspect of the home (specifically the fence post). The next throw
brought out Mpululu (sn), with its complementary down-facing
combination Take (kl), and while the other women amusedly agreed
Ma-Bigi continued:
‘They
are playing happily,... running about,... and the yard is
peaceful.’
And so the story went on, making
the children tie two strings (Mithengwe, nl), deciding to go and
rest on a mat (Mashangulu, ksnl), etc.— all
very serene and of a charming simplicity, the adepts enchanted
that their efforts to bring the tablets to life began to succeed.
From then on I understood that the purpose of the hours of
relaxed joint exercise with the tablets was not so much to
memorise the correct meaning of every tablet and combination
(although that proved difficult enough when, later, I went
through the training myself), but to develop the ability to spin
stories, of increasing depth, relevance and drama, on the basis
the evolving sequence of throws. And in the professional sessions
with real, medicated tablets, such as would take place a few
times a week in the consulting room cum sitting room of the main
house, one could see the leader and the most senior adepts
display these skills to great heights of performative virtuosity.
This
divinatory process, only loosely indicated here, offers the main
turning points in the following two cases, which involve first an
‘outpatient’ and then a resident junior adept of the
Maipaahela lodge. Their discussion will throw some further light
on the career dynamics of sangomahood (Joshua) and on the very
difficult question of the location, in social and historical
space, of the pathogenic forces addressed in the lodge’s
healing practice.
Is the Francistown sangoma cult a commodified, eroded, urban
transformation of a historic, more authentic, rural cult? Do the
commodities which unmistakably and prominently feature in the
cult, contain specific and articulate messages about modernity
and identity, or may we take them for granted just as much as the
lodge members themselves seem to do? Or do we have to read the
message of commodities and commodification in the lodge situation
at a number of distinct levels, admittedly as a coping with the
modern world through the positioning of re-enchanted commodities
in a process of revitalisation -- but let us not forget that such
coping is a therapeutic response, to a process of dissociation
and affliction which ultimately might well be characterised as
commodification and its aftermath.
Joshua Ndlovu was born in southwestern Zimbabwe in 1937. A brilliant student, he finished secondary school and took a B.A. degree in English. Looking back he can detect in his adolescence one or two signs of an inclination to become a traditional healer, but these were eclipsed by his success in a modern career. In the wake of the massive migration from his region of origin to Botswana in the 1960s and 1970s, he settled in the southern town of Lobatse. There he married, had children, built a house, drove a motorcar, and was a successful secondary-school teacher for over fifteen years. In the early 1980s he had the opportunity to go to the USA, where he studied for a diploma in French.
After a few months abroad he was struck by a mental disturbance (described in terms suggestive of agoraphobia) which made him discontinue his studies, and after months of profound distress and confusion he returned to Lobatse. His wife’s unfaithfulness and lack of understanding for his predicament aggravated his condition. He proved unfit to continue his teaching job, and resigned. A short course of cosmopolitan psychiatric treatment was soon discontinued when the patient realised, and with his verbal virtuosity brought home to the medical staff, that such therapy was irrelevant to his condition. Leaving his wife in charge of the house and the children, he returned to Zimbabwe in search of treatment, still in a state of severe mental disturbance.
In Bulawayo he came in contact with a spiritual group comprising both Africans and Europeans, who combined Christian inspiration with a respect for African religion and medicine; these contacts he found inspiring but they did not in themselves restore his mental health. He was received as a trainee in a lodge in one of the outlying townships of Bulawayo, where his condition was divined to be due to affliction by his paternal grandmother seeking to emerge in him. He was duly initiated as a sangoma, learning a personal repertoire of dance and song, and receiving the beads, cloak, dancing-skirt and pilgrim’s staff of a Mwali adept — although so far he never accompanied the lodge’s leader and other adepts on their infrequent visits to the central Mwali oracle of Njelele.
Restored to full health, having undergone in his late forties a metamorphosis from a drop-out western intellectual to a budding traditional healer, he returned to Botswana and settled in Francistown. Here he tried for a few years to establish himself as a trance diviner and healer. Business was generally low but he managed to secure in Francistown’s new Block VII a SHHA (Self-Help Housing Agency) plot on which he started to build a four-roomed house and, at the back of the yard, a surgery with such basic paraphernalia as a python skin, drums, ancestral calabashes with sacred honey, a limited selection of herbs, etc. He made every effort to identify as a professional, to improve and broaden his diagnostic therapeutic skills, and to move in circles of other healers where he hoped to make contact with clients. He was not yet eligible to join one of Francistown’s professional associations of traditional healers. With one of Francistown’s most reputed dingaka, hailing from the same region in Zimbabwe but not a sangoma, he began to study the casting of divination tablets, although his preference remained with trace divination.
Although since the onset of his disease his sexual interest has been minimum (a condition said to be due to the fact that he is hosting a female ancestor, who must be placated for any — heterosexual — activity on the host’s part), after a few years he became involved with his neighbour Elizabeth, a female head of household around thirty years of age, likewise from Zimbabwe. The love and fulfilment that Joshua had missed for many years he found with her, and he looked upon this as an unexpected and undeserved gift. When she became pregnant it was as if a broken vital chain was restored.
Yet Joshua was eaten by frustration. Elizabeth’s income from employment and rent had to support him when, through most of 1989, no patients turned up at all. Never very self-confident of his status as a sangoma, he began to consider another metamorphosis again, that towards the status of Christian church leader, which he thought to be a more sociable and less lonely profession, closer to the people and with more response from them. The Bible began to compete with Shakespeare as his favourite reading, for which he had more time than he cared for. The sacrifice of an goat to his possessing ancestor, to take place at full moon on his Block VII plot and to be followed a sangoma dancing session, was planned for August 1989, but it did not materialise, partly for financial reasons, partly for a feeling of ritual incompetence on Joshua’s part. In the same month, at a Wosana dancing session in Monarch, Joshua self-consciously dressed up in his ritual costume and volunteered a short performance, but without making any impression on the audience. However, at this session he met the leader of the Maipaahela lodge, and he was soon so impressed by her powers that he asked her to look into the stagnation of his practice. A long and dramatic divination session at the lodge revealed a combination of ancestral wrath and intrafamilial conflict as the causes of misfortune: earlier in 1989, Joshua’s sister’s son Aaron had asked him to accompany him to a church leader in Francistown’s Donga township, and on that occasion Joshua had been persuaded to accept some medicine, through which the diviner in collusion with Aaron had meant to transfer the latter’s misfortune to him; in punishment for this stupidity the possessing ancestor had tied up Joshua’s practice. Deeply moved by this exceptionally long and dramatic divination session, Joshua agreed that the leader and adepts of Maipaahela lodge would spend a weekend at Block VII and stage the necessary rituals of redress there.
Immediately after a week at the branch’s Tshesebe rural outpost where in all secrecy (and to Joshua’s horror when he heard about it) two adepts of the lodge were initiated in the demonic cult, the lodge population came to Block VII on a Saturday evening in September. As could have been expected, the other senior Francistown healers which Joshua had invited did not turn up. After beer drinking and chanting a replica of the lodge shrine was built at night in front of Joshua’s house under the directions of one of the adepts; a goat was slaughtered there and its meat displayed on top of the platform, while its blood and selected intestines were buried beneath it. After the sacrifice a dancing session is staged behind the house, on which a relieved and triumphant Joshua entered into trance, as well (a rare event) the lodge leader herself. In the late morning dancing was resumed in the unroofed central room of the house; in a way supposed to be good for business, this attracted a considerable crowd of neighbours, who looked in through the openings where doors and windows were to be hung in a later stage of completion of the house and of financial success. Towards the evening the party returned to Maipaahela carrying some of the meat and, as an initial payment, three metal window frames which had been waiting to be fitted. The ritual, though expensive, was considered a great success until, at noon the next day, the lodge leader died suddenly and under suspect circumstances.
Consultation with Albert, the leader of the Masemenyenga lodge (likewise Joshua’s home-boy) soon offered Joshua a coherent interpretation of the intrigues, involving both the deceased’s family and other Francistown healers, culminating in the leader’s death. A surer sign that Joshua’s sacrifice had been rejected was hardly possible, and at Albert’s advice the shrine was demolished; the latter considered it alien to Ndebele forms of sangomahood anyway. Accompanying two other patients of Ma-Ndhlovu who found themselves stranded because of her death (my wife and myself), Joshua soon travelled to Bulawayo to visit his lodge of initiation, and with the blessing of its leader and accompanied by a few of his fellow-adepts he made the journey to the Njelele oracle in the heart of the Matopos. The nocturnal experience at the oracle gave him a great sense of mystical fulfilment, and he was deeply moved to be one of the many supplicants united there before what Joshua claimed was called the ‘Mother of Spirits’. The oracle told him that despite recent setbacks he might yet have hope.
A few months later a healthy child was born and Joshua resumed teaching at a secondary school.
Having fled (or destroyed?) his modern world, Joshua for some
years found refuge in the protective alternative world of
sangomahood, but he could scarcely summon the self-confidence,
virtuosity, obsession with power, fascination with the borderline
between life and death, necessary for a successful pursuit of the
career it offered him. The restorative effects of a new love and
a new fatherhood (another inversion of the chain of filiation,
back to normality, after ancestral possession had constituted the
first inversion) made him less dependent on such a solution. A
similar effect was brought about by his continued contact with
alternative viable forms of symbolic production besides
sangomahood: Christianity, Western literature, my own academic
research which greatly interested him (thanks to his introductory
reading of anthropology in the USA he could discuss my research
with rare detachment and insight, and he made significant
contributions towards it as a free-lance research assistant in
the later stages of my fieldwork). The opportunity to resume a
career as a well-paid employee within a modern formal
organisation, rather than as a hand-to-mouth ritual entrepreneur
(daily -- and with increasing sense of helplessness and
incompetence -- exposed to the terrifying powers of the occult
and of rival specialists), tied in with his new responsibilities.
Having been restored to health by the pursuit of sangomahood,
it was not necessary to continue to make his living as a sangoma.
Although within the inner circle of the lodge and the
professional organisation sangomas may take pride in their
speciality, there is very considerable shame and fear involved:
no one with an alternative course will become or remain a sangoma,
and in many cases (perhaps with the exception of those belong to sangoma
families, cf. diagram 4) adepts only yielded to the forces
pulling them to this cultic complex after having exhausted all
other possibilities. It is a choice one makes in utter
desperation, when there really is no choice any more.
Joshua
described a tangential orbit with regard to the Maipaahela lodge,
although his case informs us of the lodge’s life in a
particularly critical episode. More of a centripetal movement is
seen in the case of Litopo, which for the rest displays striking
parallels in terms of career and conjugal development.
Litopo
is a well-educated Mongwato,16 born in Shoshong in 1952. When I
first met him he had spent four months at the Maipaahela lodge.
Although by no means the youngest adept he is obviously the least
senior, and it is he who performs many of the menial tasks such
as killing and butchering sacrificial animals and digging up
vegetable medicine. In dancing sessions his attire cannot not be
distinguished from that of the others, but his movements are far
more awkward, he has not entered in trance yet, and he does not
know most of the songs which are in Ndebele; his only languages
are Tswana and English. His esoteric knowledge of divination,
sacrifice and healing practices is still minimal. He is still
rather an outsider to the lodge, and looks with wonder at many of
its practices, lacks the background knowledge to interpret them,
and occasionally feels bullied by the lodge’s forceful style
of leadership. He has a clear and coherent conception of what had
brought him to the Maipaahela lodge; the following anamnesis
summarises his own account:
Until 1983 Litopo worked for the government of Botswana
as a highly successful co-operatives officer. He had been sent to
Scandinavia twice for training. He owned a motorcar. (His former,
high standard of living was still clear from the few personal
belongings he brought with him to the lodge.) He was married,
with a few young children. All this was wiped out when towards
the end of 1983 illness forced him to give up his job. His
complaints were very severe headache; impaired vision; and pain
between the shoulders.17 Western medication only made these
complaints worse. He went to a place in Malawi (100 km north of
Blantyre) for treatment by a famous traditional healer. Here he
stayed for two and a half years, but his complaints only got
worse. He looks at his best remembered dreams of that period as
revolving on the rejection of Western medicine:
In one dream, after taking two painkilling tablets, he
vomits a huge quantity of such pills.
In another dream he goes to a hospital to be treated for
toothache; the doctor is not in and the nurse tells him to come
back some other time, and gives him two pain-killers. As he walks
out of the hospital he drops the pills and they break in two;
after some hesitation he decides not to pick them up since he has
to come back to the doctor anyway.
Litopo’s Malawian healer advised him no longer to
take Western medicines since ‘his spirits’ (still
unidentified at that stage) apparently objected against them.
Looking back Litopo feels that the Malawian failed because the
treatment of the complaints was not combined with training
through which the patient could become a sangoma himself.
After two and a half
years Litopo gave up hope of being cured in Malawi, and requested
his family in Botswana to sent money for the return journey.
Meanwhile a letter reached him that his wife had had a baby. Back
home he and his family staged a sacrifice of a goat and beer to
his ancestors, and his complaints diminished somewhat. This
convinced Litopo that he must look further in this direction.
Still in Shoshong he
placed himself under the treatment of a female healer who,
convinced of the ancestral nature of his complaints, was
confident that she could help him. She started on a course of
treatment, but the patient ceased dreaming and became more and
more confused. The healer claimed that this would get better with
an adaptation of her therapy. As a rule, in the course of the
therapy the healer or one of her adepts will dream of the
specific type of garment which is favoured by the ancestor which
is about to emerge in the patient. However, such dreams were not
forthcoming. Later the healer dreamed of the patient wearing one
type of garment, covered under another garment which however
snapped off his body and fell on the ground. The healer could not
make sense of this dream, and the treatment was discontinued.
Meanwhile the patient
checked with his relatives whether any of his ancestors had been
a cult adept. None were found in the paternal line, but in the
maternal line connections with the Tswana rain cult were found to
have existed. Litopo than went roaming around Botswana looking
for treatment.
In May 1989, he ended up
in Francistown where one of his brothers is employed, and here he
found his way to MaNdlovu, the leader of the Maipaahela lodge. In
her first divination session it was already ascertained that in
addition to the maternal ancestor with the rain-cult connotations
(whom MaNdlovu is confident to handle in view of her own
association of the Mwali cult), there is a paternal ancestor who
seeks to manifest himself as well. A struggle was said to be
going on between the two spirits as to who will be allowed to
emerge first. This struggle not only explained the dream of the
two garments, but also Litopo’s entire illness. The
treatment now consists in the training to become a sangoma.
Further divination brings out that the paternal ancestor will be
allowed to manifest himself first, after which the maternal
ancestor will follow automatically.
After a few months at the
lodge Litopo feels much better already. He has not lost interest
in his family and national affairs, and obviously misses his
children a lot. He intends to go back to Shoshong for two weeks
at the end of September, in order to cast his vote in the
national elections, and to try and persuade his wife to return to
him: she is aware of his treatment and understands what he goes
through, yet she has returned to her parents.
Litopo’s paternal ancestor must have been reckoned, by the
Maipaahela leader, to have belonged to another cult than the
Tswana rain cult, otherwise there could have been no difference
in garments: the garments identify the cult. As we have seen she
was preoccupied with the Kalanga-associated demonic cult. It
makes sense to presume that it was this cult to which she was
initiating Litopo, too: this being her speciality, it explains
the rapid success of her therapy after so many years of
suffering, and it also explains why Litopo had to come all the
way to Francistown: it seems unlikely that this
Kalanga-associated cult has senior representatives in Shoshong.18
The rain cult however, and hence his maternal ancestor, would
indeed be taken care of ‘automatically’, because of the
lodge’s nature of a peripheral Mwali lodge.
Within the conceptual framework of sangomahood, Litopo’s
case is straightforward and could be rendered in the following
terms: ‘without himself or his senior kinsmen being in the
least aware of this, the patient was torn apart between two rival
ancestors each representing a different cult; after a long
process of trial and error he happens to find a specialist who
pursues the same combination of cults, and who therefore for the
first time can diagnose his predicament properly, and effectively
cure him.’
As analytical social scientists we are expected to reformulate
the mechanism of illness and therapy in a different idiom; there
is nothing against such reformulation, as long as it does not
claim greater validity than the original one. A number of
possibilities to make analytical sense of Litopo’s case
present themselves.
The first paradigm that comes to mind is one looking at the
accumulative effect of social dramas spanning several
generations. Marriage is a relationship between sets of people,
who in and through the conjugal process get mobilised and
articulate themselves vis-à-vis each other in ways which
usually, in addition, are informed by other economic, political,
ethnic, religious, kinship, residential etc. forms of structural
opposition and conflict in the ongoing social process. The
classic work of Turner and van Velsen has sensitised students of
South Central African societies to this type of social process,
the shifting, fictionalised alliances to which they give rise,
largely in localised kin groups, and the social dramas that
evolve around these themes, each involving a unique set of
protagonists, events and trajectory, — a unique historicity
— yet all displaying permutations of structural
possibilities within the same social structure and culture. Often
such a social drama can be shown to span decades, its disruptive
tendency not spilt and dissipated within one generation but
accumulated and (in the form of structural conflict within
families, and in the form of mental conflicts within in the
individual members) reflecting and re-enacting that unique
historicity even if the participants are no longer consciously
aware of its details — in fact, it is likely that the
members of the family have considerable reasons for structural
amnesia in these matters. It is in this sense that intrafamilial
conflict, and individuals’ extreme mental reactions to it,
may be said to become ‘hereditary’: not through genes,
of course, but by response patterns which are peculiar to the
members of a specific family which are repeated, for enforced and
imitated, from one generation to another. In North Atlantic
society, psychiatric research of family settings of neuroses as
by Laing, or studies on the intergenerational cycle of
parent/child incest, intrafamilial violence etc. converges with
these ideas. The participants’ concept of ‘afflicting
ancestors’ then forms an effective shorthand to bring these
patterns of pathogenic response within the scope of
culturally-patterned discourse, and of symbolic redressive
action. The divinatory identification of the point in time or in
the family tree to which the disruptive effect is traced, may be
entirely spurious in some cases, but it is also quite possible
(in fact a point of my repeated personal experience) that the
patient, suffering under this burden of his family history, in
his verbal answers and other non-verbal reactions to the
therapeutic questions in divination inadvertently expresses, once
again, manifestations or echoes pathogenic intrafamilial response
patterns which made him ill in the first place. A talented and
experienced diviner/therapist can scarcely fail to pick up these
reactions. The abundance of possible paths through the divinatory
forest, the proliferation of interpretative stories which with
every progressive throw of the tablets can be further spun out,
often allows the diviner to end up with an interpretation which
is neither stereotypical nor trivial, but which takes aboard
oppositions reflecting the patient’s conflict. Moreover such
an interpretation becomes charged with authority as the awed
patient witnesses how an apparently objective divinatory
apparatus, in the hands of a stranger, tells a story which is
totally new to him but which as it unfolds he is yet brought to
believe is his unique life history. Thus reduced to recognisable
and manageable proportions, the contradictions can then be
resolved, and the patient absolved, through sacrificial ritual
specifically built around the story which diviner and patient
together have constructed during divination.
According to this rough interpretative model, the story as told
by the divinatory interpretation bears only a minimum relation
with the reality of the patient’s pathogenic intrafamilial
past: it only seeks to abstractly rebuild, in metaphoric
material, a vectorial system of conflicts and contradiction more
or less congruent with the otherwise unknown thrust of family
history. The specific ancestors featuring in any divinatory story
of ancestral affliction do not stand for real events surrounding
the patient’s real ancestors. As far as Litopo’s case
is concerned, the association of the maternal and paternal
ancestor each with a cult of his own would be historically
spurious as well. These ancestors, and their postulated cult
associations, would be largely artefacts of the therapy
situation, reflecting the lodge leader’s present involvement
in several cults.
While such an approach, on