Sangoma in the Netherlands -- On integrity in intercultural mediation (English version) Wim van Binsbergen |
Sangoma in The Netherlands
On integrity in intercultural mediation[1]
© Wim van Binsbergen[2]
Provisional
draft translation; not for publication or published comment
INTRODUCTION
At least three main lines I can see in the
live and work of Matthew Schoffeleers. [3]
(1) the
struggle to be allowed to approach a distant, African culture, in
its totality, and on the conditions which that culture imposes,
regardless of the preconceived images and stipulations which
attend such an approach in Matthews society of origin:
Dutch society, the academic subculture, the world of mission and
church
(2) but when
he subsequently produces an image of that distant culture, he
does not wish to dissimulate his attachments to his own society
of origin: he claims the right to present the African culture,
and to interpret it, in the light of dilemmas informed b his own
social, academic and religious experience -- for (despite a few
personal touches) Matthew has committed himself totally, not only
to the distant African culture, but also to the Dutch, academic
and ecclesiastical context;
(3) since
these two points result in a struggle between total commitments
unified in one and the same person, it is inevitable that such a
person emerges from the struggle in a damaged and maimed
condition; but nothing is of greater value than that struggle,
and the severest disfigurement is the price that has to be paid
for the greatest election.
I first met Matthew in 1972, at Terry
Rangers path-breaking Lusaka conference on the history of
Central African religious systems which for both of us would mean
the break-through to an international career in this field of
studies. At the time, Matthew found himself somewhere between
point (1) and (2). He had already been damaged by the
confrontations with his ecclesiastical superiors, as a result of
the unboundedness with which he, as a missionary, has approached
the Manganja culture of southern Malawi. He had already
made the transition from missionary to anthropologist, lecturer
at the university of Malawi; within a few years he would make the
transition to a Dutch readership and soon professorial chair; he
would remain a priest and a monk. But perhaps because he was
frightened of what point (3) would hold in store for him, for the
time being he as channelling his great knowledge and love of the
Manganja culture into a historical study of a local cult;
in a distant past half a millennium behind us, the founder of
that cult, Mbona, was to become the martyr of a process of state
formation which among other factors was due to the earliest
European expansion in this region[4] -- much in the way as Christ was the martyr
of, among other factors, Roman expansion in Palestine. But if
this fascination with the distant past might have been a way of
buying time for himself, it proved impossible to close the road
to Matthews personal here and now. he had by then been
initiated into the notorious Nyau mask society, an for years it
would be him, of all people, who was the driving force keeping
the Mbona cult alive. His work on African theology, African
Christology, on Christ as an African diviner-priest (nganga),[5] merged seamlessly with
the pastoral work he conducted in Malawi and The Netherlands for
many years, and all these are aspects of the way he discharged
point (2). As he pronounced in the build-up towards the final
blessing in the marriage ceremony which he celebrated for my wife
and me (in Belgium, typically way outside the geographical area
of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and with existential African
contributions from all three of us):
It
is my task to make my God visible, wherever, and in whatever form
under which he is permitted to manifest himself.
Only
those who have been very close to Matthew have been privileged to
see a glimpse of point (3), at painful moments which
Matthews struggle, although directed at distant contexts,
temporarily invaded personal relationships but only to leave them
purified and enriched, after a crisis. To a wider audience, and
well under control, this aspect manifested itself in the
disquieting synthesis of structuralist anthropology, theory, and
African religious anthropology that was to constitute his second,
Utrecht inaugural (1991).[6] The maimed figure par
excellence, the figure which has only one side to his body,[7] and who speeds
pathetically through the Central African forest as well as
through the dreams of its inhabitants, is not only Platos
half-man waiting to be re-united with his counterpart, but (as
Matthew succeeded in proving with great exegetic and
structuralist spirit) he is also Christ, Mbona, and in the final
analysis, more than anyone else, Matthew himself.
Perhaps,
in the last instance, the disfigurement which renders god-like
boils down to death as a recondition for resurrection or rebirth;
but this disfigurement is certainly the price which is to be paid
for a total commitment to two domains; it is their tragedy that
only through this very commitment are they constructed to be
irreconcilably opposed to one another. This indicates the central
tragedy of the classic anthropologist, the one who in the course
of years of intensive fieldwork acquires the language and the
customs so as to be able to understand and describe another
culture from the inside. According to a sixteenth-century source[8] there was, among the
possession of the Viking king Svyatoslav in ninth-century Kiev, a
drinking vessel made from a human skull mounted in gold; it bore
an inscription:
In
search of the exotic he lost what was more his own than anything
else
-- his skull, and hence his life; this is a
lesson which eminently befits classic anthropologists.
No two
peoples situations and lifes stories are wholly
identical. My present contribution to Matthews Festschrift
shows to considerable extent to which the three main lines of
Matthews life as a scholar may also be detected in my own
(being Matthews first Ph.D. student). Yet the unwinding of
my own biography was most of the time so much out of phase with
Matthews development that often I had the greatest
difficulty precisely with those of his texts (written after 1980)
in which his scholarship more and more opted for theological and
existential expressions -- and in which he emphatically
identified himself not only as an excellent investigator of the
Manganja but also as a Westerner, and as a Western priest.
After all, Matthew is my senior by nineteen years, and although
the Roman Catholic church did play a major role in my youth I
never took steps towards the priesthood within that organisation.
Until the end of the 1980s I kept hoping that my scientific
approach of African religion[9] would form an effective
canalisation and disenchantment of my own religious sensibility
such as I had acquired in childhood. Quite early I had detached
myself from the Roman Catholic church (to which, incidentally, I
owe an excellent secondary school education). If I came to
anthropology from a thoroughly unhappy childhood, it was not
because of interference from any church, but because of the
kinship dramas dominating the family in which I grew up, shortly
after World War II: dramas around incest, violence, despair, and
father figures who had been absent from the generations
immediately my parents generation. For me, Africa was not a
choice but a refuge, where I kept looking for a home. I found
that, first (from 1972) among the Zambian Nkoya, where I advanced
to the status of adopted member of the royal family inheriting,
at the death of king Kabambi Kahare in 1993, his royal bow and
25km2 of land; and later (from 1989) in Botswana, in booming
Francistown, where somewhat as a Nkoya migrant labourer from
Zambia I found a place for myself in one of the few
lodges centring on therapeutic ecstatic religion,
only to leave that lodge again as a fully initiated and certified
diviner-priest (sangoma).[10] After my clever, but Marxist-reductionist
historical and political analyses of African religion in the
1970s and 1980s, this personal development meant that my
existence has been effectively captured and re-structured by
African religion.
Meanwhile
we are ten years later. I remained a sangoma, in addition
to my other central roles as husband, father, research, professor
and manager. During my frequent visits to southern Africa I
incidentally practice as a diviner-priest, but usually I limit my
practice to a handful of clients in The Netherlands, where I
reside permanently. What is the meaning of such intercultural
mediation, and what questions does it raise concerning integrity?
This is what I intend to explore in this paper.
INTEGRITY
We may define integrity as: a persons
explicitly intended consistency between his behaviour and the
norms and values which he stands for. In present-day North
Atlantic culture, integrity in itself has become one of the more
important norms and values, regardless of what specific norms,
values and behaviour are involved in any particular case. In the
scope of this paper I cannot explore whether this insistence on
integrity is a trap, or an achievement, of North Atlantic
culture.
integrity
is a value we share with many others, e.g. with the members of
our generation, with fellow academics, with fellow nationals (if
we happen to be Dutch, or Americans), with the citizens of the
globalised international society. As such integrity is
intersubjective and constitutes a fairly unambiguous touch-stone.
At the same time however integrity is an individual striving for
self-realisation, and as such its intersubjectivity is inevitably
limited. We do not know exactly whether the norms and values
which a person overtly claims to represent, also are truly
cherished by that person in his or her innermost self. His pubic
claim may be mere lip- service, intended to create the necessary
room for other norms and other values. To the extent to which
that persons publicly expressed norms and values may fail
to entirely account for his public behaviour (for not everyone is
a gifted actor), to that extent such a person may leave an
impression of defective integrity. It is even possible that this
person does not entirely reject but in fact partially subscribes
to the values which he publicly represents, even though these
differ from the one he cherishes in his innermost self; his
integrity would then for instance be manifest from the extent to
which he sincerely and profoundly struggles with the problem that
contradictory norms may both appear as valid at the same time.
But it is also possible to take a very different view o the
matter and to let the central test of integrity reside, not in
the inner struggle but in the successful public testimony of
consistency. Hopefully the latter view will find little support
from the part of anthropologists, who (at least if they have done
prolonged fieldwork outside the society of which they are
competent adult members in the first place) are conversant with
the fact that all social behaviour is so performative and
strategic that the ethnographic road to truth, experience,
underlying attitude behind overt behaviour is always an extremely
difficult and problematic one to go.
So far
we have discussed our operating within Dutch society, against the
background of a shared local cultural framework: that of the
Dutch or, for that matter, the European intelligentsia, which is
used to thinking in national contexts of such norms of values as
are linked effectively to world politics and to world-wide
ideologies. In the intercultural mediation which the
anthropologist seeks to bring about the problem of integrity
takes a rather different shape. If that anthropologist is not an
African herself, her Africa primarily stands out as one of the
many limited local contexts for ordering and signification, and
if the concept of Africa means anything it implies that it has
some kind of a boundary, at which the global outside world is
selectively filtered, transformed, often even kept out. How is
it possible to realise integrity in a situation of
interculturality, which by definition departs from a plurality of
mutually independent norms and values, all of which apply
simultaneously? This corresponds with the points (1) and (2)
as argued above; this is once more a struggle from which one only
emerges with disfigurement (3), but hopefully one acquires a new
value and dignity in the process.
My
claim to have become a sangoma, to have built that
capacity into my very life, and to justifiably derive a limited
therapeutic practice from that capacity, essentially amounts to
the following: I claim that, in addition to my activities as a
prominent Dutch intellectual, I operate simultaneously,
effectively and justifiably in a totally different local cultural
context; in that latter context our pet concept of integrity
would doubtless acquire a totally different meaning -- it is
would fit that context at all. Integrity is perhaps a universal
value of global culture, but there is no evident answer to the
question what integrity might mean with regard to specific and
concrete non-western local contexts, and with regard to the
mediation between those contexts and our own North Atlantic
society.
Could
my own situation as a sangoma shed light on these
questions?
SANGOMAS IN
FRANCISTOWN, BOTSWANA
The relevant local cultural framework is
that of practically illiterate spirit medium (basangoma, sangomas)
living in and around the town of Francistown, which is situated
near the border between Botswana and Zimbabwe. Sangomas
are people who consider themselves, and who are considered by
their extended social environment, as effective healers: as
mediators between people on the one hand, the ancestors, spirits
and God (Mwali on the other -- in a general context where most
bodily afflictions are interpreted in religious terms. These
specialists themselves believe that they have acquired their
special powers of mediation and healing by virtue of a special
supernatural election, which made them into incarnations of
ancestral spirits. Sangomas engage each other in a
constant battle on life and death over prestige and hierarchy,
and control over adepts. Such forms of their institutionalised
behaviour as are open to concrete religious anthropological
research (diagnosis, therapy, training, initiation, graduation),
are considered, by these specialists and their social
environment, as a mere secondary aspect -- as progressive
manifestation and confirmation -- of their fundamental
dispensation, and not as conditions or legitimations of the
latter. Their essential dispensation is considered to be of a
religious nature, and it reveals itself socially when ancestral
spirit, during a public trance, speak through the mouth of the
medium, making coherent and understandable pronouncements in a
language which has local currency.
Around
1990 Francistown boasted half a dozen sangoma lodges,
three of which I got to know well through intensive contact and
personal membership. Out of a total population of some 60,000,
the town possessed no more than fifty sangomas and twazas
(trainee-sangomas), about half one whom I knew personally,
and a quarter of whom were my day to day social contacts whenever
I was in Francistown. So we are dealing here with a speciality
which only very few people engage in: less than one in a thousand
of the urban population.[11] Many
clients pass through the hands of the sangomas. In most
cases the treatment is limited to one or two divination sessions,
some directions as to how to conduct an ancestral sacrifice, or
the administration of herbal medicine derived directly from
nature, or from colleague-practitioners. Only a small portion of
the clients makes the grade to twazahood -- via a public
first initiation, when the candidate receives his (more typically
her) specific paraphernalia and ritual uniform, but not before
mediumistic trance had provided the culturally prescribed proof
of ancestral election. The twaza novice is subjected to
all sorts of servility, and taboos in the nutritional and sexual
domain. Far fewer than half of the twazas concludes this
incubation period, after at least a year, with the final
graduation to sangoma. Such a graduation includes
additional proofs and rituals; a great and expensive ancestral
sacrifice; a public and festive installation during a nocturnal
dancing ritual in from of the sangomas (they may number
several dozens) who graduated earlier from the same lodge. The
graduation is concluded when the new graduate is confirmed in his
high status by being received within the regional shrine of the
High God cult, where again additional paraphernalia and
therapeutic dispensations are extended to him.
Manifestly
a number of different levels of cult organisation may be
distinguished:
the lodge, under the direction of an independent sangoma,
with her (or his) close kinsmen and twaza as co-residing
members
around the lodge a wider congregation of non-residing kinsmen, twazas,
and independent sangomas who have graduated from that
lodge
the regional division of the cult of the High God Mwali, led by a
high priest; each independent sangoma and each lodge is
tributary to this cult, forwarding a portion of the considerable
amount of money derived from the clients and from the ritual
guidance of twazas; and finally
the central shrines of the Mwali cult in the Matopos hills in
South Western Zimbabwe.
This organisation is several centuries old
(not more). It is in constant flux, since at the basis ever new
lodge crystallise out around independent sangomas, while
other lodges disappear when their leader dies or moves away. At
the basis this organisational structure displays typically the
general form of the cults of affliction;[12] at the higher levels a less fluid model
applies, consisting of rather permanent shrines, each with their
own cult region.[13]
Ever
since the enactment of the Societies Act of Botswana (1972) a
parallel organisation has been added to this structure in the
form of a professional organisation (in this case the
Kwame/Legwane Traditional Association). In this society sangomas
associate themselves on a loose basis, under the leadership of
the societys chairman, who is the regional high priest of
the Mwali cult. The sangomas pay a life membership. The
professional organisation is the interface between the
traditional organisational structure on the one hand, and on the
other modern life, where the postcolonial state pretends to watch
over the medical profession. Admission to the society is only
possible at the nomination by another member, who has to be
established as a fully independent sangoma. If the
authorities insist (but civil servants are demonstrable afraid of
these clubs of witchdoctors) this formal organisation
may go through the official motions of producing an general
annual meeting, official annual returns stating the details of
the associations executive, etc. The society enables sangomahood
to present a Janus face to the state:[14] on the one hand one pretends to submit to the
organisational format imposed by the Societies Act, on the other
hand one goes on doing what one ha been doing for dozens if not
hundreds of years, on the basis of a power disposition which is
acknowledged and feared by the wider society, and which is
totally independent from the state.[15] The reader may imagine that our concept of
integrity is not truly constitutive of this professional
association, especially given the deadly competition between
independent sangomas. But one might also interpret the
situation as if these spiritual leaders (like my of their
colleagues in the North Atlantic tradition; cf the Jesuit order)
reserve their integrity for the long term and for their dealings
with the supernatural; while, merely in order to safeguard this
integrity at the highest level, they pay a fairly effective lip
service to publicly mediated norms and values in their dealings
with humans, especially civil servants. This lip service is never
totally convincing, and I think this is on purpose: to the extent
to which the spiritual leader manifestly does not play the pubic
game quite by the rules, to that extent he demonstrates that he
can afford to make light with the rules of the state. This he
mediates, publicly, his own power claims based on esoteric norms
and values which are not derived from the statal domain but which
do have public support -- as is evident from the fact that the sangoma
tends to have a considerable number of clients, many of whom make
great financial sacrifices in the context of their therapy and twazahood,
while also the non-clients including civil servants greatly fear
the sangomas.
During
the colonial period the public practice of sangomahood was
absolutely prohibited, especially four tablet divination which is
an essential element of such practice; the prohibition was
justified by reference to human sacrifices which were sometimes
based on such divination. By that time traditional therapeutic
practices went underground. In independent Botswana (since 1966)
such prohibitions no longer apply. Today the practice of
traditional medicine is regulated by a duly certified license to
be issued, under strict conditions of proven expertise, by a
professional association of traditional healers. Such a document
is recognised by the state as the sole proof of qualification for
the practice of traditional medicine. In principle (not counting
excesses) it protects the bearers from prosecution in case a
patient suffers injury during therapy, or even dies. The same
document exempts the bearer in practice -- perhaps mainly because
of the fear which it inspires -- from a number of government
regulations, such as those concerning endangered animal species
(skins, ivory, and other animal products play a major role in the
traditional medicine of Southern Africa), and more unimpeded
access to domains whose access is highly regulated for the
general public (hospitals, cemeteries, game parks,
wholesalers outlets).
CONCRETE ANSWERS
The above supplies the data required for an
initial answer to the obvious questions concerning the integrity
of my intercultural mediation as a sangoma.
In
accordance with all norms and values of the culture of
contemporary Botswana I have been legitimated as a sangoma
in the only way culturally defined for such legitimation (by
pubic ancestral trance etc., see above). Subsequently, by the
required forms of initiation, I first obtained the degree of twaza,
in the presence of hundreds of eye witnesses. Subsequently, for a
full year I subjected myself to very demanding taboos, in a bid
to undergo further spiritual maturation; I also engaged in
further training in divination. Although this year was largely
spent in The Netherlands, its format was defined by detailed
directions which I received from the lodge beforehand, I was
monitored by correspondence, and after my return to Francistown I
was thoroughly examined as to my faithful performance in the year
of my absence, and my spiritual progress as a result. Back in
Francistown I was told to live for a few weeks in the village of
Matshelagabédi, at a distance of 30 km from the town. In that
period I graduated to become a fully-fledged sangoma, in
the presence of several dozen of witnesses, mainly members i.e.
previous graduates from the same lodge, who had been told by the
lodge leader to travel to Matshelagabédi exclusively for the
purpose of attending my graduation. I was admitted as a member to
one of the four professional associations of traditional healers
which Botswana could boast around 1990 (two of these were
moribund, but our own association was certainly not). Of this
admission I have a duly signed and stamped certificate[16] for display in my
surgery -- which coincides with my study at home. The floor of
that study is partly covered with the consecrated, tanned goat
skins derived from sacrificial animals which I killed in the
context of my several initiations in the presence of other ritual
specialists, and whose pulsating blood I have had to drink
directly from their cut throats when they were being sacrificed.
Besides I have in my possession a smaller certificate of
membership of the professional association, with photograph,
stamp and chairmans signature, meant to be carried by me
from day to day. After my final graduation, I was confirmed in my
office by the oracle of the High God Mwali at the regional shrine
at Nata, Botswana; as proof of this I have in my possession
several consecrated paraphernalia, including a leopard skin
sanctified in that shrine and put on my shoulders by the high
priest. Fellow sangomas, other traditional healers
(including my principal teacher of divination, the late Mr Smarts
Gumede, until his death in 1992 a prominent herbalist in
Francistown and sometime treasurer of the professional
association to which I now belong), and scores of patients in
Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa (not to mention The
Netherlands) have recognised my claim of being a sangoma,
and have enlisted me as their therapist. I was even the spiritual
advisor of Mr Gumede when, just before his death in 1992, he made
his last journey to his region of origin in Zimbabwe. A similar
practical recognition can also be found among a small and
shifting set of clients in The Netherlands. I treat them with the
diagnostic and therapeutic disposition which has been extended to
me as a sangoma. In this practice trance scarcely plays a
role: as with most of my colleagues in Southern Africa, trance
only comes in during the ancestral, dancing rituals which sangomas
perform among themselves, usually in the secluded context of the
lodge.
In the
spring of 1994 a test case offered itself for the extent to which
my claims can be negotiated at the intercultural and
international legal level. I was largely unaware of the CITES
treaty regulations which since the late 1980s have
internationally governed all transactions involving species
threatened with extinction. The large and legitimate game trophy
dealer which had sold me the leopard skin prior to its
consecration at Nata, had told me how to get an export license
for it, and this I obtained in accordance with CITES regulations,
but such a license is for one trip only, and expires within a
year. From 1991 I was used to travel up and down several times a
year between The Netherlands and Southern Africa, carrying my
consecrated leopard skin in my luggage as a matter of course,
never offering bribes but showing my professional license
whenever an explanation was needed. This never posed a problem
until, early 1994, the leopard skin was confiscated at Amsterdam
International Airport in the course of a routine check, and by
reference to the CITES treaties. During half a year a voluminous
file was allowed to build up at the Haarlem regional court under
whose jurisdiction the airport falls, but finally the leopard
skin was returned to me in formal recognition of its
extraordinary religious function. Not only was the skin returned,
I also obtained, at the courts initiative and without me
even asking for it, a permanent, multi-entry import and export
license for this game trophy, which constitutes a prohibited
possession under CITES regulations. This decision is all the more
significant since at the same occasion also a naively important,
non-consecrated python skin was confiscated -- of the kind with
which sangomas like to embellish their surgery. This skin
was not returned but destroyed, and cost me a fine of f200. The
events constitute a most interesting case of jurisprudence in
intercultural environmental legislation.
INSTANT COFFEE, or arabica?
When all is said and done, one of my
interlocutors asks me, what does my sangomahood amount to:
instant coffee, or arabica?
either a feeble imitation which one may appropriate à la minute
(and which perhaps is nothing more but a meaningless,
self-indulgent, exotisising anti-intellectualist stance on my
part), or
the real work which requires years of loving dedication?
The
question looks self-explanatory, and would seem to have a
simple answer. In the same way as so much which the North
Atlantic derives from Africa, is reduced by Westerners to simple,
manageable proportions with astonishing ease: to the format of an
international language, of globally marketed fire arms and
globally enforced national political institutions, to magic words
such as revolution and democracy to which
international institutions and movements provide the magical
power, to elegant interlocutors of the highest political and
intellectual levels dressed in three-piece suits, -- and never,
of course, an indigenous African language which one only masters
by sweat, blood and tears; never the wooden mock weapons, the
deadly poisons and the undomesticated magical incantations of a
local African cult; never the cacophony of voices and of social
claims which in the course of fieldwork in Africa obscures not
only the fieldworkers view of a wider external framework of
theory, but even of herself; the rough concrete floor on which
one first dances the ecstatic dance on ones bare feet until
these are bleeding and sore from stamping, after which one goes
to sleep on the same floor along with ones sisters and
brothers in the lodge who by this time of night are usually
dead-drunk -- their ages vary between seventeen and seventy-five,
but the higher numbers are over-represented by far.
As
Africanist anthropologists it is not our task to judge African
cultures. And just in order to satisfy, or disappoint, both
sides: my sangomahood is both instant coffee (in a
figurative sense) and arabica (in a literal sense) at the same
time. Sangomahood in Francistown is a cosmopolitan,
non-rural, no-longer-local version of the Southern African
mediumistic religion,[17] in
which dark-skinned foreigners (Zimbabweans, South Africans,
Zambians) happen to play dominant roles anyway, to such an extent
that there was certainly room for a couple of light-skinned
Dutchmen (my wife and myself) who turned out to have close
connections with South Central Africa. The Francistown variety of
sangomahood does not entail the construction of a
self-evident, profound symbolic locality such as is for instance
the case in the countryside of Zululand.[18] By contrast, Francistown sangomahood
is a phenomenon of the mass society, in which many clients, and
not just myself and my wife, first have to be converted or
reconverted to the sangoma world view before any kind of
diagnosis and therapy can be extended to them at all. The sangoma
objects (textiles, beads, sacrificial animals which have to be
bought and are not supposed to come from ones own herd,
money, often even the medicines) derive from the diffuse,
unbounded space which we are used nowadays to call the
market -- not the diminutive little vegetable market in the
centre of Francistown (which is shyly tucked away between
megalomaniac secular temples of offices and shopping malls in a
cosmopolitan architecture) but simply the abstract, world wide
network of commercial transactions. Those sangoma
attributes reflect centuries, not of a village horizon closed
onto itself, but of continental and intercontinental trade. And
it is the same trade which had made it possible that an Arabic
divination system (on which we will say more below) has succeeded
in taking root here, in an almost perfect African disguise which
is therefore difficult to see through. As a cosmopolitan system
the sangoma religion is meant to keep a sufficiently low
threshold so as to catch in strangers -- in the first place as
patients, but according to the general structural format of the
cults of affliction some patients are bound to become doctors,
leaders themselves. Probably this is a disappointing statement
for those readers, including many Western medical
anthropologists, who tend to take for granted that indigenous
therapy systems in Southern Africa are characterised by high
levels of aesthetics, originality, inaccessibility, a strictly
local nature, enormous complexity, and the requirement of a
prolonged and difficult training. But although the translocal
nature of the Francistown sangoma complex would run
counter to the assumptions of a classical Africanist anthropology
with its image of Africa as a patchwork quilt of myriad discrete,
bounded, specific cultures each closed into itself, recent work
on the globalisation of African socio-cultural systems is
increasingly offering the interpretative theoretical framework by
which such translocal African cults can be understood.[19]
Cosmopolitan
does not necessarily mean superficial and insincere, and for me
the sangoma religion is a complete form of religiosity and
therapy.
LASTING PUZZLES AND CONTRDICTIONS
However this does not take away the fact
that also I myself am left with fundamental obscurities and
contradictions.
Against
the background of the comparative literature, it is certainly
appropriate to be surprised at the speed of my sangoma
career. I found myself in the hands to two elderly cousins, Mrs
MmaNdlovu (Rosie) en MmaShakayile (Elizabeth) Mabutu, both of
whom were leaders of prominent lodges in Francistown. Their
maternal grandfather had been a white man, and they very soon
became convinced that I was their deceased brother or cousin in
reincarnated form. Johannes is the name of my fathers
brother, it is my third given name, and to boot it is the name
which I myself chose as a ten-year old at the Roman Catholic rite
of confirmation; at the time there was no conscious reference to
my fathers brother -- I was simply impressed by the two
evangelic Johannes figures, the Baptist and the disciple.
However, I absolutely never used the name of Johannes, until the sangoma
leaders projected this name upon me from their own initiative.
Johannes meanwhile is a common given name in Southern Africa,
deriving from the Afrikaner context. With the name of Johannes, I
was no longer an outsider-patient who had been captured to
acquire a ritual role in the lodge, no I had always belonged to
the lodge and I was simply reincorporated in it as a central
member of the sangoma family which constituted the core of
the lodge congregation. At Matshelagabedi, in my capacity of
Johannes, I was shown my grave, my village, and my village
headman. The latter was, as is usual in Botswana, a state
official and he had no family relationship whatsoever with the
two cousins MmaNdlovu and MmaShakayile; but also to him my return
to the village appeared to be the most normal thing in the world,
when I was taken to him and formally introduced during my first
visit to the village. With this construction the lodge members
could entertain the thought that when I spoke in trance, it was
not only my own ancestors who spoke through my mouth (a
transcontinental migrant who from The Netherlands had settled in
South Africa, had participated in the Boer war, and was killed
there; and the Zambian king Mwene Kahare Timuna, whose son Mwene
Kahare Kabambi had adopted me in the course of my life-long
association with his court and his people going back to the early
1970s), but also the ancestors of the lodge leaders.
This
was a major aspect of my rapid career as a sangoma, but I
cannot readily explain where the leaders conviction came
from. Did they read about Johannes return in their oracular
tablets? Had that return been prophesied during their trance (if
so, it would not have registered with themselves in view of their
altered state of consciousness, but it would have been reported
to them by other lodge members after the leaders return to
normal consciousness)? Did they dream about his return? This
point simply never came up, and the power relations with the
lodge made it impossible for me to make this question (or most
other questions) the topic of a long and incisive interview!
Constantly the leaders, especially MmaShakayile, emphasised that
I was to turn out a great healer, who would easily retrieve, from
the revenue out of his practice, all the financial investments
which had to be made during the various initiations. in principle
these are standard pronouncements to be addressed to every twaza.
it is therefore certainly possible to explain these
pronouncements also in my case as merely the justification for
the truly substantial claims which the lodge makes on the twazas.
However, that the lodge leader was in full earnest about my
special election as a healer is suggested by the fact that she
went out of her way to arrange for me to have a license as a
traditional healer, already upon my first accession as a twaza,
when my graduation as a sangoma was still very far away
and might never have materialised. Or alternatively, was the
entire identification between me and their deceased
brother/cousin merely based on the hope which MmaShakayile would
phrase so repeatedly during her nocturnal spells of inebriation:
the hope that after her death I would lead the sangoma
family, look after it financially, and administer the
lodges spiritual inheritance? These were two fairly genial
women, who were fascinated with incarnation and for whom delusion
and reality, life and death, present and past, would constantly
merge -- a blurring of boundaries which might be termed a
professional hazard and which my wife and I experienced ourselves
profoundly during the first weeks of our engagement with the
lodge. In Francistown life, from the part of their neighbours and
occasional patients, these two women were greatly feared and
occasional revered, but they could not escape the awareness that
being a sangoma afforded them a precarious and largely
negative social status: all patients and prospective adepts are
profoundly aware that most local people greatly abhor the thought
that their child, sibling or spouse would become a sangoma
-- with its association of great occult powers and of familiarity
with the dead sangomas in Francistown by 1990 were perhaps
even more proverbial others than even Afrikaner white
Boers. I have little doubt that for MmaNdlovu and MmaShakayile my
entrance into their lives enhanced their desire to resolve the
ambiguities of their status, since my presence allowed them to
insist once more on the idealised white status of their
grandfather, with whom I was constantly associated by them.
Ironically, it was my very status as a white Boer (Dutchmen in
Francistown are automatically classified as such, regardless of
whatever protest is filed on historical, linguistic or genetic
grounds) which had turned out my greatest handicap throughout the
first year of my Francistown research, and in fact I had only
joined the sangomas in search of therapy after my mental
breakdown at the rejection which I was experiencing, from the
local population at large, as another specimen of the local
hereditary enemy, the Boers.[20]
Another
factor which has given rise to surprise has been the fact that
the pubic legitimation of my election as a sangoma had to
be based on mediumistic trance (a combination of an altered state
of consciousness with coherent statements uttered in that
condition). Our North Atlantic Cartesian tradition goes back to
Augustine and late Antiquity as a whole, from there to Plato, and
via him perhaps to Ancient Egypt with its death industry based on
the separation between body and soul. In the context of this
tradition the doctrine of the separation between body and soul
has generated such epistemological and metaphysical aporia, that
professional philosophers are now largely in agreement as to the
obsolete nature of that doctrine. yet the idea of such separation
still dominates the social sciences, as well as much of the pre-
and quasi-scientific language use in the North Atlantic. If we
combine this doctrine with the exotism with which African
religious expressions are usually regarded in the North Atlantic,
then mediumistic trance is likely to be construed to be the
paroxysm of otherness, as a condition which cannot possibly be
within the reach of the normal capabilities of a Dutch
anthropologist / poet / philosopher like myself. What is
mediumistic trance? To what extent has it been acquired by
training? I have been preoccupied with these questions ever since
my earliest research into ecstatic religion, over thirty years
ago in North Africa; and already then I knew, from personal
experience during fieldwork, that it is not so difficult to
induce trance in oneself, provided this is done in the right kind
of environment (among people of the same inclination, people who
know trance and who expect trance) and with the right kind of
music.
Let us
dwell a bit more on the cultural material out of which the trance
is given shape as a performance. The ancestors which manifest
themselves during the mediums trance, make that medium
perform little sketches n which the other cultic personnel of the
lodge acts as interlocutors or extras. These sketches and the
texts spoken in their context are of a highly stereotypical
nature. Almost invariably they are structured in the following
way. The ancestor announces his arrival (ancestors of both
genders manifest themselves) in that the medium begins to speak
in a moaning, faltering, languished voice which is very different
from the mediums normal voice. Lodge members who are not in
trance than engage in conversation with the ancestor. The latter
identifies himself, by manner of speech and personal
idiosyncrasies, and often also by explicitly mentioning his name
and his kin relation vis-à-vis a member of the audience. The
ancestor turns out to be extremely thirsty and hungry, which is
understandable in someone who has bee dead for a long time and
who has not partaken of food nor drink for all that time. Without
delay, soft, easily digestible food and drink is brought: water,
traditionally brewn beer, raw eggs, maize porridge without
relish. Trembling, drooling and massing as befits an centenarian,
the medium eagerly swallows this food and drink. After having
been thus satisfied, the ancestor volunteers important
information concerning those present in the audience: serious
diseases from which one suffers without being aware of this
condition, imminent life danger, sorcery to which one is exposed
without being aware of it, and specific requests which the
ancestor has with regard to the medium through whose mouth he
speaks: the medium is to perform a sacrifice, is to purchase
specific items of clothing and paraphernalia of a specific colour
etc. If there a re young mothers present from among the lodge
membership, they seize the opportunity of bringing the ancestral
spirit in contact with their infant, giving the latter into the
hands of the medium. Gentleness is not an operative word here,
and I have witnessed several times how infants were thoroughly
shaken, or held upside down by one foot, in the hands of a medium
whose possessing ancestor apparently regarded his infant
offspring more like a trophy or a sceptre than as a vulnerable
new-born baby. But the mother fund not the slightest fault with
this way of handling their children. After five to ten minutes
the ancestors voice will sound even more tired and low than
before, the conversation becomes halting and begins to be
alternated with silences, and soon the spirit will depart,
leaving the medium unconscious and unaware of what he has said or
consumed during trance. The medium is then woken up by the lodge
members, and receives a full report of whatever the visiting
spirit has done and said. Great sangomas, like
MmaShakayile, are induced by their visiting spirit to start
dancing, and the spirit then takes his leave while the medium
dances to the tune of a song fitting the occasion, in a mixture
of Ndebele and Kalanga (the two principal languages of
MmaShakayiles lodge):
Sala-, salani
Salani madoda
nokutura
Ndoye-,
ndoyenda
Ndoyenda
madoda sesegamba
Stay, stay
Stay behind
brothers, I am leaving
I go, go, go
stay behind
brothers, I take my leave
Apart
from a certain level of language mastery such mediumistic
sketches do not require any great mental or physical efforts,
regardless of whether one is in trance or not. However it is far
more difficult to deal with the trance condition itself, and this
requires expert supervision by someone who is not himself in
trance.
Besides these interesting but rather innocent puzzles there are the real contradictions which have caused me to be, now and on second thoughts, less defenceless and blindly enthusiastic about the sangoma cult than I let myself be known to be in my first text about sangomahood, many years ago. I have never been able to overcome my repugnance at the excessive alcohol consumption which is the order of the day at the lodge. Then again, it is extremely demanding to devote oneself to ecstatic dancing night after night as the most lowly placed twaza at the inexorable directions of cult personnel some of whom are young enough to be ones own daughter -- at a generally feared witchdoctors compound in Monarch which is one of the most sinister slums of Francistown anyway. The lodge members are singing, drumming and dancing. Dozens of other inhabitants fill this compound to the brim, occupying the many small rooms as distant kinsmen, tenants, and their dependants. Through boozing, consumption of narcotics, inarticulate utterances, obscene songs, electronically produced profane music to which profane dances are danced, these outsides to the sangoma cult explicitly take their distance from the activities of their traditionalist kinsmen and landlords, the sangomas, who are publicly feared by whose activities are also considered a source of embarrassment from the point of view of the public Francistownian culture of churches, pop music and fashionable clothing -- from the point of view of modernity. This distancing from the part of the compound population whose main aim in life, to put it crudely, was to emulate the European lifestyle which I was so emphatically opting out from, lend a disconcerting comment to my own newly acquired sangomahood. Or, to mention something else, when -- walking though the night on my bare feet with a white nylon bed sheet over my head -- I had finally acquired access to the Nata shrine, having brought my expensive leopard skin and having paid the excessive entrance fee to the shrine, of course I had noticed how much the voice of Mwali -- even if it was speaking in Dutch (not Afrikaans) to me -- was similar to the voice of the high priest who was the only one to approach the holy of holies from which the voice was emanating; and of course I felt curtailed in my consumptive freedom when the same voice instructed me to purchase certain additional paraphernalia from the very same high priest at exorbitant prices. Of course I was shocked when the professional associations vice-chairman -- the very person who had taken us to Nata after my graduation -- was not allowed to enter the shrine because after his accession to office he had specialised in procuring success medicine prepared out of childrens penises (a mode of preparation which the original owners of these organs regrettably did not survive). It was certainly disappointing that the clump of solid gold which MmaShakayile gave me after my graduation to take to The Netherlands and sell, turned out to be a pebble covered with gold paint (kindly image the scene a my friendly goldsmiths shop, just around the corner of my Haarlem home!). And of course, in my longing for new dependencies and a new place to feel at home I was rather disillusioned when a friend among the audience told be after the event that the at the day of my graduation some of the sangomas were overheard to say among each other Today we shall kill that Boer thing.[21]
Then it also turned out that the bruises on my body after my main graduation dance had to be attributed to the fact that these same colleagues had not catch me, as is usual, when I fell in trance, but had callously let me drop onto the ground. And finally, it was quite an Aha-Erlebnis when, long after my graduation as a sangoma, one of the first books on brainwashing and deprogramming fell into my hands:[22] the shock techniques of mental subjugation as described there, wee suspiciously similar to the ones which had been administered to me in my role as Johannes. For all
these reasons I broke with my own lodge (MmaShakayiles),
without announcing this in so many words, as soon as -- at the
persuasive insistence of non-sangoma friends -- I allowed
to admit to myself that the rivalry between my fellow sangomas
had led to murder in the recent past (to which MmaNdlovu had
fallen victim) and was likely to lead to a similar effect again -
to judge by the unmitigated envy with which I was received upon
my return from Nata with my newly acquired and consecrated
leopard kin, apparently the sign of a higher rank within the
Mwali cult than the other lodge members could boast with the
exception of MmaShakayile. (In other words, there have been very
practical reasons why I did not prolong my research at the loge
for years on end; the same kind of reasons which brought my
colleague Robert Buijtenhuijs to limit his visits, a quarter of a
century ago, to the front lines of Guinea Bissau and Chad to one
or two weeks. ) But by that time I had already acquired the right
to establish myself independently as a sangoma, and that
is what I did without delay.
All
these are negative sides and contradictions with which I can
live, on second thoughts. Although like any other religion the sangoma
religion is manifestly petty and even disgusting in certain
respects, it shares with all other religions the capacity to
occasionally rise above these human limitations; this higher
capacity is concretely manifested in the new and beneficial
ordering which sangomahood had effected in my life, and in
the capacity for divination and healing which I found in that
connection and which keeps bewildering me.
Hallelujah, I can hear the reader exclaim
sarcastically; he is welcome to his reservations.
This
surplus value of sangomahood has also been the reason why
I have continued not to probe too deeply into the epistemological
status of my sangoma knowledge and of the representations
of the supernatural which sangomahood entails. On a
practical level I engage with the spirits and the powers of the sangoma
religion as if these really exist: in my everyday life, in my
sporadic consultations, and during my short but frequent visits
for libations and prayers at the inconspicuous shrine in my back
garden in Haarlem. All this suits me fine, it explains what I
cannot explain otherwise, and produces great peace of mind. The
Virgin Mary has enjoyed a similar status in my life ever since I
was three years old: as taught by my mother at that age I have
always continued to honour Mary with Hail-Marys,
especially when taking off and landing during air travel, and at
moments of the greatest joy. Likewise Sidi Mhammad - the local
saint whose tomb and come-covered chapel form the centre of the
Tunisian village of the same name where I conducted my first
anthropological fieldwork -- has for thirty years been the patron
saint of my nuclear family, complete with semi-annual sacrificial
meals and more frequent invocations and praises. I still owe two
sacrificial pigs to Mama Jombo, the great territorial spirit and
shrine in northwestern Guinea Bissau,[23] in payment for my eldest son who in fact was
born one and a half years after I pledged the gift of two pigs at
her shrine. However, this obligation does not really count as a
sign of my transcultural religiosity, but is rather due to an
error of intercultural communication. I visited the Mama
Jombos shrine in 1983 during fieldwork, and after I had
explained the purpose of my visit to the land priest in charge (I
wished to investigate the shrines activities in the context
of the indigenous psychiatry), the encouraging answer was that I
could ask anything I wanted; but my scientific
questioning was completely misunderstand, for in the shrine
context to ask something can only mean one thing: to
ask whatever is your desire in the innermost depth of your heart,
and in the panic of that moment I (until then the father of one,
dearly beloved daughter who however had come to be temporarily
estranged from me in the context of divorce) could think of
nothing better than to stammer a son. That could
easily be arranged, and that would cost a mere two pigs;
settlement due as soon as the spirit would press her claim, which
would be within an indeterminate period of years possibly decades
-- I would know the right moments from inexplicable illness and
other misfortunes.
Bach
was a genial composer and a religious person. Admittedly, it has
been most liberating, ever since the Enlightenment, to be able to
break through the compelling blackmail of the religious as
something to be taken for granted and as something inescapable.
But the Enlightenments project is over, and counted are the
days of the agnostic imperative as a precondition for
being taken seriously in the field of religious studies.
This
does not take away the fact that this private attitude is in
principle incompatible with the kind of rationality which is
expected from me in most situations as a researcher and as a
professor. The separation between private and public (sangoma
in private, positive scientist in public) offered only a
very partial way out here. For as a truly passionate scientist it
is my conviction that my innermost convictions should also be
manifest in my pursuit of science. Moreover, I consider the
knowledge which I have acquired as a sangoma and which I
use in my sangoma practice, as valid knowledge, and then
it is far from obvious that I resort to excluding that sangoma
knowledge, as if it were pseudo knowledge, from my professional
pursuit of science. However, I am very conscious of the fact that
I am surrounded by other vocal intellectual producers; they
defend epistemological positions in which they have entrenched
themselves and which do not allow them too many compromises for
fear of threatening their intellectual security; these
intellectual producers perspective is rarely that of the
Africanist, the anthropologist, the intercultural philosopher,
the poet. In such an academic environment, there are likely to be
limits to the extent to which one can negotiate ones sangomahood,
and yet live happily ever after as a successful senior academic.
But these limits have turned out to be surprisingly wide. Out of
respect for my position as a professor (contrary to the US, most
European academic staff is not designated as professorial) and as
an international specialist in the field of African religion, and
carried by the postmodern wave of anti-positivism which has
affected the universities since the late 1980s, it turned out
that the level eccentricity with which I could get away even
within the world of science, was alarming high. To such an extent
that there have been only three prominent colleagues -- all of
them at least ten years my senior -- who have spoken out against
my attempt at scientific mediation of my sangomahood:
Richard Werbner -- for very many years one of my closest friends
and colleagues, the very man who had invited me to Manchester
when I was only twenty-nine years old in order to partake there
of the great honour of a Simon professorship, and who ten years
later had persuaded me to shift my fieldwork site from Zambia to
Botswana; Robert Buijtenhuijs, for over twenty-five years my
friendly colleague at the African Studies Centre, and the person
who in 1975, at the beginning of my career, had invited me to
join him as the editor of what would become my first co-edited
collection in the field of African religion; and Heinz Kimmerle,
who at the Amersfoort Internatinal School for Philosophy
dismissed my presentation on sangomahood as hopelessly
naive, but whom five years later I was to succeed (not without
extraordinarily powerful opposition from his side) in the chair
of foundations of intercultural philosophy. These three friends
(who have perhaps invested too much in me as a junior colleague
than that they can accept me taking my own choices much later in
life) may rest assured: their negative reactions have given me
more food for thought than the many expressions of sympathy and
agreement on the part of equally senior and friendly colleagues.
Pretty soon I was confronted with situations when I found myself
discouraging or prohibiting the same attitudes, opinions and
modes of analysis in my students, as I was myself applying as a sangoma.
Apparently
the attempt to create a framework within which integrity may be
open for discussion, does not mean that in all circumstances one
has the key to integrity at ones disposal. I therefore went
in search of an opportunity to take an objective scientific
perspective on my sangomahood from which I could mediate
this in publications and research, and raising it above the level
of an idiosyncratic ego-trip. By now this opportunity has
realised itself in the form of my appointment as a professor of
intercultural philosophy. Initially however I chose the way out
of historical research -- an escape route from personal
problematics which I had travelled before[24] although not consciously for that purpose,
and which I had seen Matthew Schoffeleers travel before I was
aware of his personal problematics. In the course of the 1990s I
canalised the immense desire for knowledge which my sangomahood
had unchained, into a large project which enable me to retrieve
the origin of the sangoma oracular tablets and of the oral
interpretational scheme which is associated with them. I
identified the Southern African form of the oracle as one of the
offshoots at the large tree of geomantic divination, which is
ramified all over Africa, the Arabic world and the Indian Ocean
region. This is a system which was developed towards the end of
the first millennium of our era in or near the Iraqi harbour city
of Basra, from a combination of the thinking of the philosophical
community of the Ikhwan al-Safaa; the millennia-old,
occult, variegated (but mainly astrological) tradition of the
Ancient Near East as filtered through the doctrines of the Ikhwan
al-Safaa; and at the background the Chinese I Ching.[25] While being absorbed in
the extraordinary adventure which took my mind across thousands
of years and thousands of kilometres, working on Arabic texts,
trying to decode ancient Babylonian and Egyptian myths and
familiarising myself with the parallel histories of other formal
systems such as board games and writing systems, I had little
time nor reason to continue to indulge in the unsolvable puzzles
of intercultural mediation of my own sangomahood.
Another problem concerns the specific nature of knowledge acquisition within the milieu of the sangoma lodge.
My
knowledge of sangomahood in Francistown is based on a year
of fieldwork in 1988-89, followed by research trips of three to
six weeks each, usually two time per year, until 1995. My
election as a twaza on the grounds of public ancestral
ecstasy was in 1990; my graduation as a sangoma in 1991.
The time reserved for prolonged fieldwork, therefore, had already
passed when my break-through to twazahood occurred. But as
described at length elsewhere,[26] the ground work for this had been done during
the earlier, longer spell of fieldwork in 1988-89. Besides I had
grappled intensively with ecstatic and therapeutic ritual since
1968, including my Ph.D. thesis of 1979, had studied the
phenomenon in several places in Africa, and over the years I had
not only gathered a certain knowledge of the phenomenon but had
especially developed a great affinity with it. As a result,
already in 1989, that is one year before my becoming a twaza,
the lodge leaders of Francistown had chosen to treat me --
sponsor and companion of my wife, who by then was already active
as a twaza -- not as an absolute outsider to their
ecstatic religion, but as some kind of a colleague with valid and
relevant knowledge as derived from Zambia and other places in
Africa.
In ways
which I have also described at length elsewhere,[27] I had landed in the lodge milieu as aa
patient who was sincerely looking for remedy, not as a
researcher. As is the case for any patient and any twaza
in this situation, the healing process was at the same time a
learning process concerning the internal relationships within the
lodge, the terminology, the aetiology of the sangoma
religion. At the lodge, in most cases essential knowledge is only
transmitted in passing, and with a few words only. There is no
prolonged formal training except with regard to the divination
tablets and their nomenclature. One factor in this peculiar
knowledge regime is the fact that the lodge is multilingual: the
leaders have Kalanga as their mother tongue, the other members
Ndebele, Sotho, Swati, and a few Zambian languages -- and only a
small minority of the lodge membership has Tswana as a mother
tongue, despite that fact that this language (of which I had
acquired a limited working knowledge) is Francistowns
lingua franca. Initially my ignorance about the details and
implications of sangomahood was sky-high, and under those
conditions I have made many a clumsy or even downright incorrect
pronouncement in my first pieces on sangomahood, some of
which were actually written from the field;[28] even when I was being initiated as a twaza
myself, I did not yet know the difference between a twaza
and a fully fledged, graduated sangoma. In hindsight the
effects of this ignorance might easily -- but wrongly -- be
construed as a sign of lack of integrity.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Is my practising sangoma therapy in
The Netherlands a danger for public health? In the last analysis
only a court of law could settle that question, and the reader is
very welcome to elicit a test case on this issue. My earlier
experiences with the court in the context of sangomahood
inspire me with hope and confidence in this connection. Despite
the fact that only a small number of clients is involved, the
question has interesting aspects from a point of view of the
study of interculturality. For if we feel entitled to set our own
Western medicine loose upon the societies of Southern Africa,[29] then it would be simply
ethnocentric to suggest that the state should prohibit the duly
certified practice of African medicine in the Dutch context -- in
other words, to suggest that such a practice would be quackery,
automatically and under any circumstance. Let us remind ourselves
of what Freud meant by quackery; needless to add that Freud was a
certified physician practising psychotherapy, yet had to defend
his followers against the accusation of quackery:
Permit
me to give the word 'quack' the meaning it ought to have instead
of the legal one. According to the law a quack is anyone who
treats patients without possessing a state diploma to prove he is
a doctor. I should prefer another definition: a quack is anyone
who undertakes a treatment without possessing the knowledge and
capacities necessary for it. Taking my stand on this definition,
I venture to assert that - not only in European countries doctors
form a preponderating contingent of quacks in analysis. They very
frequently practice analytic treatment without having learnt it
and without understanding it.
Tevergeefs zult u mij tegenwerpen dat u de artsen hiertoe, tot
deze gewetenloosheid, niet in staat zou willen achten. Dat een
arts toch weet dat een artsdiploma geen kaperbrief is en een
zieke niet vogelvrij. Dat men er bij artsen altijd op mag rekenen
dat zij te goeder trouw handelen, ook als zij daarbij misschien
dwalen.
De
feiten bestaan; wij willen hopen dat ze zich laten verhelderen op
de manier die u bedoelt. Ik zal u proberen uit te leggen hoe het
mogelijk is dat een arts zich in psychoanalytische
aangelegenheden zo gedraagt als hij op ieder ander gebied
zorgvuldig zou vermijden. [ after which this explanation is
given ] [30]
Apparently my Dutch and my African clients
find that I am offering them something else than quackery. My
African teachers did not only find me, demonstrably, an
accomplished therapist by their own standards, but they have also
impressed me with the awareness that ancestral election to the
rank of sangoma imposes a life-long obligation to make
ones knowledge and skills as a sangoma available to
those clients who request them: people suffering physically, but
especially socially and mentally.
WHAT DOES SANGOMAHOOD MEAN TO ME?
For me this therapeutic obligation is the
real, also political, essence of becoming a sangoma and of
remaining a sangoma. What good can come from Nazareth? How
is it possible that the African continent which the rest of the
world has virtually written off as far as economics and politics
is concerned, may yet offer us the means to heal us? (In the same
way, incidentally, as that very same continent has offered us,
globally and via the immensely painful detour of slavery, the
major musical expressions of our time: jazz, all varieties of pop
music.) I did not go to Botswana in 1988 in order t be converted
to an African religion, but in order to put an end a particular
phase in my research career (a phase particularly concentrated on
Zambia and the countryside) and to begin a new phase - in the
context of a new Southern Africa research programme which I had
initiated at the African Studies Centre. I came back as a
different person, not already immediately in 1989, but certainly
in 1990 and 1991. As an Africanist,. and meanwhile as someone who
has become an adherent of an African religion, I have of course
continued to be someone who uses and appropriates Africa and
African cultural products. But at this point I do no longer
primarily engage in such use and appropriation for the sake of
the instrumental value which these things African might have for
my career and for North Atlantic science, regardless of the local
value which their African creators have consciously imparted to
them. Now my use and appropriation is primarily for the sake of
this local African value, which I have internalised and which I
thus help to transform into a contribution to our general
global-culture-in-the-making. In this way I allow Africa a fair
share of authority over my own life, in exchange for everything I
have derived from her inhabitants and their cultures for so many
years, and after I have profoundly experienced the healing power
of African rituals not only as a detached researcher but also as
an erring and ailing person. In my sangomahood, especially
in The Netherlands of all places, I mediate this politically
liberating and symbolically rehabilitating image of Africa. And
while I am doing so, I may not so much be healing my patients,
but I certainly struggle as a sangoma in sessions of
several hours on end in order to find for these patients the
ways, pronouncements, perspectives, models of enunciation,
liberation, a new ordering, by reference to which they may find
the power to heal themselves. Probably in the last analysis the
truth is this: instead of being healed by me, these clients help
me so that I can become heal, by virtue of my immensely tiring
and often highly frightening subservience to the problematics and
the well-being of these people, who most of the time are and
remain utter strangers to me.
In
Southern Africa the beads around my neck and my wrists, in
specific colours, have a culturally accepted meaning, and like a
priests dog collar in the North Atlantic, they allow people
in Southern Africa to approach me with their predicaments. I do
not solicit them and do not advertise my practice. And the same
applies for my patients in the North, even though the bead
symbolism does not mean a thing here beyond the suggestion of
idiosyncrasy and decontextualised touristic appropriation.
THE THERAPEUTIC PRACTICE
Every consultation is a three-hour struggle
with the fear that the powers attributed to me will not manifest
themselves. These days, in order to diminish that tension I
prepare myself for a consultation: the day prior to an
appointment a pour a libation (a small bottle of beer) on my
shrine, an have an initial preparatory session with my oracular
tablets concerning the client whom usually I have not even seen
by this time.
Also
the computer offers excellent services in this preparation. In
the course of years I have explored the internal systematics of
the divination system to such an extent that I have been able to
rebuild this systematics into a massive computer programme --
even though I detest the typically New Age aspects of such a
development. My own oracular tablets were given to me by
MmaNdlovu a few days before she died; by that time they were
still virgin, powerless dummies, but two years later they were
consecrated in the blood of my final sacrificial goat at my
graduation as a sangoma. Being marked so as to be
distinguished from each other, and having their front and back
sides marked as such, the four tablets when cast all four
together can produce 16 (24) different combinations,
and throwing the tablets therefore constitutes a random generator
capable of producing 16 different values. In the computer
programme this random generator has been replaced by
electronically generated aselect numbers. In normal tablet
divination each throw produces one out of the sixteen possible
configurations, and that particular configuration[31] may be interpreted in
continuity with previous and subsequent throws of the same
session; such interpretation may take place along any of eight or
nine different dimensions: kinship, possessions, sorcery, bodily
aspects, etc. making a specific choice from among these
dimensions or their combination, after each throw the
diviner-priest interprets that throw with an explicit verbal
pronouncement which triggers specific reactions in the client.
These reactions, as consciously and subconsciously taken into
account by the diviner-priest, again inform the interpretational
choice made for the subsequent throw. From the continued series
of throw then gradually arises a coherent story of diagnosis,
cause and remedy, in a subtle dialogue with the client who
however remains largely unaware of his own input into the
dialogue, and instead experiences the oracle increasingly as an
independent, non-manipulated, truth-producing authority. All
these elements have been built into the computer version of the
oracle. After an initial, temporal consecration of the computer
(by means of a small pinch of snuff, sprinkled on the ground as
an offering to the shades), and after familiarising the computer
with the issue and person at hand by establishing physical
contact via the computer mouse...) the programme produces -- as I
have extensively established in numerous sessions -- the same
kind of information as the tablets. The only difference is that
the many different dimensions of interpretation as much better to
manage on the computer: they can be simultaneously visualised,
chosen, remembers, and spun into a meaningful therapeutic
narrative, in ways which are much more difficult to achieve
orally, from sheer memory. Incidentally, some elite clients in
Southern Africa prefer the computer over the oracular tablets.
But
regardless of whether I use the tablets or the computer, the
interpretational freedom which I take as a therapist is an
essential aspect of the Southern African system. This freedom is
utilised by every local diviner in his own way. Conflict,
rivalry, experiences in youth, family histories, anxieties,
sexuality, of course play a major role in these narratives which
are cut to the measure of the individual clients. It is virtually
inevitable that in my own practice, eclectically, themes from the
more dominant Western therapeutic traditions seep through
(especially the psychoanalytical and the Jungian-analytical
traditions); but these, too, are elements of our
global-culture-in-the-making.
Within
the sangoma therapy and within the professional
association catering for that therapy, it is unusual, and in fact
impossible, to distinguish between body, mind and social
circumstances. Yet I refrain personally from the treatment of
somatic complaints. I do not touch the patients except
occasionally in order to give them the oracular tablets into
their hands, so that they may thrown for themselves and so that
their aura may be communicated to the tablets. Without delay, and
emphatically, I refer somatic complaints to the physician
competent to deal with them. I limit my own intervention to
spiritual and social problems. But even so one might have many
objections against my practising an African therapeutic system in
the North.
In
addition to narratives and directives for specific ritual actions
I prescribe nature medicines. These are the pulverised parts of
plants (sometimes animals) which I have learned to recognise and
collect in the Botswana outdoors, or which -- as many Southern
African therapists do -- I have exchanged with my colleagues or
have bought from them. I pulverise this material in my rough
cast-iron mortar (bought from my colleagues in the sangoma
section of the urban market in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe). In Southern
Africa several modes of administration are known for these
medicines: orally, rectally, sprinkled in shallow incisions in
the skin (the constitution of the professional association is
very specific on this point and prohibits incisions deeper than
three millimetres), or strictly external, as an addition to
bathing water or as a simply application onto the closed natural
skin. I exclusively prescribe the strictly external usage, not
out of fear of a Dutch court of law or disciplinary committee,
but simply because I have learned to take the toxic properties of
Southern African plants very seriously.
Every
divination session I hold begins with a transcultural exposé in
order to introduce the client into the world of sangoma
religion. Every session plunges me, every time again, into the
greatest possible insecurity because -- against the rationality
offensive of my daily, passionate pursuit of science -- I only
know too well the contested nature of the powers and existences
to which I appeal as a sangoma therapist. Yet practically
every time I manage to convince my client of the power of my
oracle, through the revelation of real, secret information about
the clients life. This information I derive partly from the
clients own statements in ways which he overlooks, but
partly also from hunches, inspirations, the vehicle for which
apparently consists in my tense, hasty, occasionally desperate
reading of the fall of the tablets. Once the client has come to
be convinced of the power of the oracle, also the rest of the
treatment -- and especially the revelatory personal narrative
from which I derive directives as to what the client must now do
in order to take his situation in his own hands -- acquire a
salutary authority which effectively persuades the client to
re-order his life and to make it more healthy. This happens in
combination with a mode of visualising and naming of causes and
remedies in the clients personal sphere by reference to the
fall of the tablets -- a mode which to the patient is usually
refreshingly new and convincingly concrete. The factual secret
information which the oracle yields in the clients
experience, and the self-evident authority which this produces
for the oracle, its narrative, and its directives, offer the
client an Archimedean fixed point against his own doubt,
uncertainties and anxieties; and from that fixed point he can
pull himself up towards a new healthy confrontation of
lifes problems.
INTEGRITY AS INTERCULTURAL RISK
For myself, however, the significance of sangomahood
reaches further than these incidental therapeutic sessions, and
in fact penetrates my entire present life. For more than a
quarter of a century I have erred from being a poet to being a
Marxist anthropological researcher to being an obscurantist sangoma
cum professor of anthropology, and finally to being, recently, an
intercultural philosopher. Becoming a sangoma meant that
in a tangible way I was offered the possibility of transformation
after which I had longed throughout my entire life, and in my
most existential capacities (as my parents child, as a
poet, as a husband and lover, as a father, as an Africanist
researcher, and as a teacher). From the dilemmas of my past, from
my training to become an anthropologist, from the practice of my
prolonged fieldwork spells in various places in Africa, and from
the examples of manipulative and boundary-effacing practices
which I seemed to witness there, I have for a long time derived
the impression that the multivocal nature of the human reality
and of its ethics preclude or eclipses integrity. Incapable of
appreciating and anchoring my own scientific passion however
unmistakably it presented itself to me, I have for many years
tried to play down scientific production of knowledge as a
trivial, socially determined construct. After all, was I not
primarily a poet, and was I not primarily someone trying to do
justice not to objective data but to the multivocality of the
network of social relationships in which I had to engage in the
course of my doing anthropological fieldwork? The objective
scientific report, cast in predictable and dull ready-to-wear
prose, was not doing any justice to either of these two
self-imposed identities and commitments: those of the poet, and
those of myself as the interaction partner of (other?) Africans.
However, become a sangoma, surrendering myself finally and
rather unconditionally to an African idiom, contains the promise
that ultimately I may yet be redeemed from the original sin
inherent to African Studies; that original sin consists in the
horrible reduction of Africa to a passive object of study which
is subservient to our own North Atlantic careers and to our North
Atlantic construction of knowledge. Being a sangoma at the
same time entails a creative handling of immensely powerful
symbols, which promise an even greater power of life and death
than the linguistic elements which I was (and am) using as a
poet. And finally being a sangoma opens up for my the
possibility of a non-egotistic servitude to the suffering of
others, which to some extent redeems me from myself and from my
own past.
In the
last analysis integrity does not lie in the static parallel
existence, one next to one another, of alternatives, but in the
moment when out of the available alternatives, effectively, with
power, and in the full awareness of the risk of disfigurement and
pain, a compelling choice is made. For me sangomahood
means that choice: in favour of a messy, often disquieting and
threatening, Africa-centred celebration of fellow-humanity, and
in favour of the attending, equally messy and contradictory ideas
concerning the supernatural which make up the sangoma
religion; and against the objectification, the condescending and
hegemonic North Atlantic scientific production concerning African
people -- a production whose contents are often so very poor, and
whose form is often ugly. For me as an established researcher
this implies -- at least socially and collegially -- a risk of
disfigurement. It is an open question whether I will permanently
be able to maintain this intellectual stance, or alternatively,
whether my Africanist colleagues will condemn me to some sort of
mental or collegial early retirement -- after all,
these colleagues are becoming (for reasons which I can understand
but have not the slightest sympathy with) more positivist, more
proudly ignorant of African languages and cultural idioms, more
saturated with the staccato rhythm of North Atlantic hegemonic
complacency, every day.
In 1990
I cried violently and publicly, for relief and joy, at the end of
my initiation into twazahood, in the present of hundreds
of inhabitants of the Monarch suburb (as is customary in such
initiation ceremonies, all these people had been fed and quenched
at my expense). Even more violently I cried in 1991 after my
final graduation when, in private, I was reproached for not
having prayed in Dutch upon the shrine of the maternal ancestors
of MmaShakayile -- for didnt I know that there I was
supposed to pray not to her ancestors but to my own? In line with
the dynamics of knowledge transfer at the lodge which I set out
above, no one had told me. A so it was only immediately after
graduation that I understood, suddenly and in full blow, that my
becoming a sangoma was meant as a home-coming, not in
Botswana but in a Dutch home whose relevance to me I had always
and deliberately dissimulated.
Integrity
does not appear as some pre-existing quality (defined either
within Western culture or in some culture-free manner), which may
subsequently be introduced into transcultural mediation as an
accessory resource. Integrity does not even primarily appear as
the touch stone for the success or failure of such transcultural
mediation. Integrity appears as something which is even more
fundamental: as the eminently risky result which in itself will
never be realised and brought home -- as the result consisting
in the big, disfiguring scars and the violent phantom pains from
which the being who has only one side to his body is suffering
-- but nevertheless a result which is being promised smack at the
very boundaries between cultures, promised in ways which (given
the multicultural nature of global society today) are simply
impossible within the complacent confines of just one culture.
Although
I was Matthew Schoffeleers first Ph.D. candidate, I have
not been his student to a sufficient extent as to make it likely
that the gradual but unmistakable convergence between us with
regard to attempted integrity in intercultural risk, might have
resulted from his example as a supervisor. Our friendship has
persisted rather thanks to our mutual agreement to dissimulate,
rather than to expressly pursue, the problematic of
interculturality. But I recognise the way he went, and I admire
him for it.
[1] With thanks especially to Patricia van
Binsbergen-Saegerman, and moreover to Renaat Devisch, Bonno
Thoden van Velzen, Jacqueline Bhabha, and Robert Buijtenhuijs,
who in the course of important conversations have helped me to
bring at least some clarity into the difficult matter which I try
to set out in the present argument.
[2]
An earlier Dutch version of this paper was published as: van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, Sangoma in Nederland: Over
integriteit in interculturele bemiddeling, in: Elias, M.,
& Reis, R., eds., Getuigen ondanks zichzelf: Voor
Jan-Matthijs Schoffeleers bij zijn zeventigste verjaardag,
Maastricht: Shaker, pp. 1-29; also at http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin
[3]
Matthew Schoffeleers was born 1928 in the southern part of The
Netherlands. Initially he pursued the Roman Catholic priesthood
and mission as a form of selfrealisatiojn and as the obvious
channel of upward social mobility available in that generation,
social class and region. In his mission work in the Lower Shire
valley, Malawi, southern Africa, he identified to a great extent
with the local population and their religion. He was initiated
into the Mbona cult a cult of the fertility of the land,
organised around a local territorial spirit Mbona who is
associated, as a victim, with a process of state formation in
this region c. 1600 CE and into the nyau mask society.
This earned father Schoffeleers serious reprimands from the part
of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He was forced to exchange his
mission work for a study in cultural anthropology at Oxford
although he did not give up his priesthood and remained
active in Malawi, finally as a senior lecturer in African history
and anthropology at the university of Malawi. In 1976 he came to
The Netherlands as Reader in non-western religious anthropology
at the Free University, Amsterdam. Here the first doctorate to be
supervised bu him was defended in 1979, that of Wim van
Binsbergen. In 1980 Schoffeleers Readership was converted
into a full professorship, which by the late 1980s he exchanged
for a special chair in the university of Utrecht. He retired in
the early 1990s.
[4]
Schoffeleers, J.M., 1972, The Chisumphi and Mbona
Cults in Malawi: a Comparative History, paper read at
Conference on the History of Central African Religious Systems,
University of Zambia/ University of California Los Angeles,
Lusaka; in: Schoffeleers, J.M., eds, 1979, Guardians of the
Land, Gwelo: Mambo Press, pp. 147-86; Schoffeleers, J.M.,
1972, The history and political role of the Mbona
cult among the Manganja, in: Ranger, T.O. & I.
Kimambo, eds, 1972, The Historical Study of African Religion,
London: Heinemann, pp. 73-94; Schoffeleers, J.M., 1977,
Cult idioms and the dialectics of a region, in:
Werbner, R.P., Regional cults, New York: Academic Press,
pp. 219-240; Schoffeleers, J.M., 1978, A martyr cult as a
reflection on changes in production: The case of the lower Shire
Valley, 1590-1622 AD, in: Buijtenhuijs, R., & P.L.
Geschiere, eds, 1978, Social Stratification and Class
Formation, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, pp. 19-33;
Schoffeleers, J.M., 1985, Oral history and the retrieval of
the distant past: on the use of legendary chronicles as sources
of historical information, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., &
Schoffeleers, J.M., eds., Theoretical explorations in African
religion, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International for African
Studies Centre, pp. 164-188; Schoffeleers, J.M., 1992, River
of blood: The genesis of a martyr cult in southern Malawi,
Madison: Wisconsin University Press.
[5]
E.g.: Schoffeleers, J.M., 1988, Theological styles and
revolutionary elan: An African discussion, in Quarles van
Ufford, P., & Schoffeleers, J.M., 1988, eds., Religion and
development: Towards an integrated approach, Amsterdam: Free
University Press, pp. 185-208; Schoffeleers, J.M., 1991,
Ritual healing and political acquiescence: The case of
Zionist churches in Southern Africa, Africa, 61, 1:
1-25.
[6]
Schoffeleers, J.M., 1991, Waarom God maar een been heeft,
inaugural lecture, Utrecht: Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht.
[7]
For an exhaustive comparative study, cf. von Sicard, H., 1968-69,
Luwe und verwandte mythische Gestalten, Anthropos,
63-64: 665-737; luwe is also the
Mwendanjangula mentioned in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1981, Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory studies,
London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
[8]
Schreiber, H., n.d. [ ca. 1970 ] , Kooplui veroveren de
wereld: Verlucht met 91 afbeeldingen en 18 kaarten, Den Haag/
Brussel: Van Goor/ Van Hoeve/Manteau.
[9]
Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J. & Schoffeleers, J.M., (eds.),
1985, Theoretical explorations in African religion,
London/ Boston: Kegan Paul International; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1981, Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory studies,
London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
[10] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1990, Een maaltijd
op het land: Religieus veldwerk in Botswana, 1990, in D.
Foeken & K. van der Meulen, Eten met Gerrit, Leiden:
African Studies Centre, 1990, p. 112-122; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1991, Becoming a sangoma: Religious anthropological
field-work in Francistown, Botswana, Journal of Religion
in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344 also at http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin ; vgl. De orakelstenen spraken: word sangoma-priester,
interview met W. van Binsbergen door Koert van der Velde, Trouw,
30.8.97, p. 10.
[11] By way of comparaison: In the countryside of
northwestern Tunisia, where in 1968 I did my first fieldwork on
ecstatic religion, more than a quarter of all adult men was an
adept (faqir, mv. fuqra) of the superficially
islamicised ecstatic cult, which coincided with teh bortherhoods
of the Qadiriyya and Rahmaniyya; of these a small minority (the
cultic personnel with the rank of shawush) was effectively
a spirit medium in that they produced articulated messages when
in trance. In the counryside of western central Zambia, where I
have studied cultus of affliction from 1972 onward, in the early
1970s ten to twinty percent of the adult women was an adept, but
only the female leaders (at most one tenth of the number of
adepts) could effectively be called spirit medums in the above
sense. .
[12] In the religious anthropology of Africa we mean
by cult of affliction:
a therapeutic movement which speads
over a geogrpahical and social space by means of a chain
reaction, in such a way that the members of the congrgation of
clients C(L1)1,2,3,...nwhich has been attracted as
patients by a certain cult leader L1, might in
principle each attain their own independent status of cult leader
L2, with their own group of clients which form a
congregation independent from that of L1; therefore: C(L1)1,2,3,...n
loses one member and becomes C(L1)2,3,...n-1;
that one member however, C(L1)1, becomes L2,
and recruits among people in the same social environment
who however do not belong to any congregation of the same cult
a new congregation C(L2)1,2,3,...n. And so on.
Cf. Turner, V.W., 1968, The drums
of affliction: A study of religious processes among the Ndembu of
Zambia, London: Oxford University Press; White, C.M.N., 1949,
Stratification and modern changes in an ancestral
cult, Africa, 19: 324-31; White, C.M.N., 1961, Elements
in Luvale beliefs and rituals, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper no. 32; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981, Religious Change in Zambia:
Exploratory studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International;
Fortune, G., 1973, Who was Mwari?, Rhodesian
History, 4: 1-20.
[13] Werbner, R.P., 1977, 'Continuity and policy in
Southern Africa's High God cult', in: Werbner, R.P., ed., Regional
cults, New York: Academic Press, pp. 179-218; Werbner, R.P.,
1989, Ritual passage sacred journey: The process and
organization of religious movement, Washington/Manchester:
Smithsonian Institution Press/ Manchester University Press;
Daneel, M.L., 1970, The God of the Matopo Hills: An essay on
the Mwari cult in Rhodesia, The Hague/ Paris: Mouton for
African Studies Centre; Schoffeleers, J.M., & Mwanza, R.,
1979, An organizational model of the Mwari shrines,
in: Schoffeleers, J.M., ed., Guardians of the Land, Gwelo
[ Gweru ] : Mambo Press, pp. 297-315; Schoffeleers, J.M., 1977,
Cult idioms and the dialectics of a region, in:
Werbner, R.P., Regional cults, New York: Academic Press,
pp. 219-240.
[14] Cf. Staugård, F., 1986, Traditional health
care in Botswana, in: Last, M., & G.L. Chavunduka,
1986, eds., The professionalisation of African medicine,
Manchester: Manchester University Press and International African
Institute, pp. 51-86; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1993, African
Independent churches and the state in Botswana, in M. Bax
& A. de Koster, eds., Power and prayer: Essays on Religion
and politics, Amsterdam: VU University Press, pp. 24-56.
[15] This does not preclude the existence of
interfaces with the state, even interfaces independently of the
framework created by the Societies Act. Several sangomas
-- including myself -- count politicians amongtheir clientele,
especially in times of elections; and prominent sangoma
lodges are invited by the authorities to enliven collective
celebrations of Independence Day etc. with their colourful
traditional dances. A local politician was the
socially highest ranking speaker at the funeral of the ldge
leader MmaNdlovu, whose demise under suspect circumstances was so
decisive in the sangoma career of my wife and myself.
[16] Available for inspection at: http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin .
[17] This theme has also been well recognised by John
Janzen in his comparative study of contemporary cults of
affliction (see bove note) in South Central and Southern Africa:
Janzen, J.M., 1992, Ngoma: Discourses of healing in Central
and Southern Africa, Los Angeles/ Berkeley/ Londen:
University of California Press; Janzen, J.M., 1993,
Self-presentation and common cultural structures in Ngoma
rituals of Southern Africa, paper read at the conference
Symbols of change: Trans-regional culture and local
practice in Southern Africa, Berlin, Freie Universität,
January 1993. However, severe criticism has been leveled against
Jansens approach, e.g. by the Workgroup African Religion
Utrecht which was founded by Matthew Schoffeleers; this
collective produced a volume now in press with James Currey (ed. Rijk
van Dijk, Ria Reis en Marja Spierenburg). For important
comparative material from the same region, cf. Oosthuizen, G.C.,
1968, Post-Christianity in Africa: A theological and
anthropological study, Londen: Hurst; Oosthuizen, G.C., 1986,
ed., Religion alive: Studies in the New Movements and
Indigenous Churches in Southern Africa: A symposium,
Johannesburg: Hodder & Stoughton; Oosthuizen, G.C., S.D.
Edwards, W.H. Wessels, I. Hexham, 1989, eds., Afro-Christian
religion and healing in Southern Africa, Lewiston, N.Y.:
Edwin Mellen.
[18] Berglund, A.-I., 1989, Zulu thought-patterns
and symbolism, London/Cape Town & Johannesburg:
Hurst/David Philip, reprint of first edition of 1976; van
Nieuwenhuijsen, J.W., 1974, Diviners and their ancestor
spirits: A study of the izangoma among the Nyuswa in Natal, South
Africa, Amsterdam: Afd. Culturele Antropologie,
Antropologisch Sociologisch Centrum, Universiteit van Amsterdam;
Ngubane [ = Sibisi ] , H., 1977, Body and mind in Zulu
medicine: An ethnography of health and disease in Nyuswa-Zulu
thought and practice, Londen/ New York/ San Francisco:
Academic Press; Sibisi [ = Ngubane ] , H., 1975, The place
of spirit possession in Zulu cosmology, in: M.G. Whisson
& M.E. West (eds.), Religion and social change in Southern
Africa, Cape Town: David Philip, p. 48-57; Ngubane [ = Sibisi
] , H., 1986, The predicament of the sinister healer: Some
observations on ritual murder and the
professional role of the inyanga, in: Last, M., &
Chavunduka, G.L., red., The professionalisation of African
medicine, Manchester: Manchester University Press and
International African Institute, pp. 189-204.
[19] Such work is currently
undertaken in the context of the Theme group on globalisation of
the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands, which I
initiated in 1996 and which I have chaired ever since. The Leiden
programme was largely an offshoot of a wider national project
Peter Geschiere and I initiated in 1993: the programme
Globalization and the construction of communal
identities, funded by the Netherlands Foundation for
Tropical Research (WOTRO, a division of the national sicnece
foundation NWO); the programme, which was completed in Novemebr
1999, comprised scores of researchers in the Netherlands in
various capacities, and moreover generated the International
Network on Globalisation, linking major research instituons and
individual reseqacher both in the South and in the North.
[20] van Binsbergen, Becoming a sangoma,
o.c.; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1993, Making sense of urban
space in Francistown, Botswana, in: P.J.M. Nas, ed., Urban
symbolism, Leiden: Brill, Studies in Human Societies, volume
8, pp. 184-228.
[21] Liburu: Afrikaner, Dutchman;
non-human, neutral (as is indicated by the prefix li-).
[22] Sargant, W., 1957, Battle for the mind: A
physiology of conversion and brain-washing, London: Pan.
[23] Crowley, E.L., 1990, Contracts with the
spirits : religion, asylum, and ethnic identity in the Cacheu
region of Guinea-Bissau Ann Arbor: University Microfilms
International; Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, Department of
Anthropology; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1988, The land as
body: An essay on the interpretation of ritual among the Manjaks
of Guinea-Bissau, in: R. Frankenberg (ed.), Gramsci,
Marxism, and Phenomenology: Essays for the development of
critical medical anthropology, special issue of Medical
Anthropological Quarterly, new series, 2, 4, december 1988,
p. 386-401; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984, Socio-ritual
structures and modern migration among the Manjak of Guinea
Bissau: Ideological reproduction in a context of peripheral
capitalism, Antropologische Verkenningen, 3, 2:
11-43.
[24] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981, Religious Change
in Zambia: Exploratory studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul
International; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain:
Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia,
London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
[25] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, Transregional
and historical connections of four-tablet divination in Southern
Africa, Journal on Religion in Africa 1: 2-29; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, Four-tablet divination as
trans-regional medical technology in Southern Africa, Journal
of Religion in Africa 25(2): 114-140; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1994, Divinatie met vier tabletten: Medische technologie in
Zuidelijk Afrika, in: Sjaak van der Geest, Paul ten Have,
Gerhard Nijhoff en Piet Verbeek-Heida, eds., De macht der
dingen: Medische technologie in cultureel perspectief,
Amsterdam: Spinhuis, pp. 61-110; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, Virtuality
as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the
symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa, The Hague:
WOTRO, Working papers on Globalisation and the construction of
communal identity, 3, pp. 13ff also at http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Rethinking
Africas contribution to global cultural history: Lessons
from a comparative historical analysis of mankala board-games and
geomantic divination, in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen, 1997, ed.,
Black Athena: Ten Years After, special issue, Talanta:
Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society,
volumes XXVIII-XXIX/ 1996-1997, pp. 221-254 also at http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Sub-Saharan Africa,
ancient Egypt, and the World: Beyond the Black Athena thesis,
book MS, 500 pp., in press.
[26] Binsbergen, Becoming, o.c.
[27] Van Binsbergen, Een maaltijd, o.c.;
van Binsbergen, Becoming a sangoma, o.c.;
[28] Binsbergen, Maaltijd, o.c.;
van Binsbergen, Becoming, o.c.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1990, Church, cult, and lodge: In quest of
therapeutic meaning in Francistown, Botswana, paper
presented at the 6th Satterthwaite Colloquium on African Religion
and Ritual, Cumbria (U.K.), 21-24 april 1990, 58 p.; also seminar
paper, University of Cape Town, August 1990, and University of
Louvain, January 1991. Also: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., We
are in this for the money; The sangoma
mediumistic cult of Southern Africa: limitations and potential of
an interpretation in terms of commodification, paper
presented at the international conference: Commodification and
identities: Social Life of Things revisited, Amsterdam, 10-13
June, 1999, at: http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin
.
[29] And certainly not always with eveidently positive
results and without negative side-effects, as documented in: cf.
Staugård, F., 1985, Traditional healers: Traditional medicine
in Botswana, Gaborone: Ipelegeng Publishers; Staugård, F., 1986,
Traditional midwives: Traditional medicine in Botswana,
Gaborone: Ipelegeng; Reis, R., 1991, Over epilepsie en
samenwerking met traditionele genezers en profeten in Swaziland:
Hoe geïnspireerde genezing het onderspit delft, Medische
Antropologie, 3, 1: 28-47; Reis, R., 1992, Waarom
Happiness Dlamini naar de genezers gaat: Epilepsie en
therapiekeuze in Swaziland, Epilepsie Bulletin, 21,
3: 11-19; Reis, R., 1996, Sporen van ziekte: medische
pluraliteit en epilepsie in Swaziland, Ph.D. thesis,
Universiteit van Amsterdam.
[30] Freud, S., 1991, Het vraagstuk van de
lekenanalyse, in: Sigmund Freud: Nederlandse editie, De
psychoanalytische beweging 2, Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 105-195, p.
164; Dutch translation of: Die Frage der
Laienanalyse, first edition 1926, Leipzig/ Wenen/ Zürich:
Internationaler Psychychoanalytischer Verlag. [ In the final
version of this article, the full standard English translation of
Freuds text has to be inserted here: Freud, S., 1962, Two
short accounts of psycho-analysis: Five lectures on
psycho-analysis: The question of lay analysis, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 15th impr ]
[31] E.g the tablets Kwame (whence the
professional association of healers derives its name!), Shilume
and Lungwe open with their frontside up , Ntakwala
closed; this configuration is called Vuba,
mixture.
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