Healers' Views Of Ngoma Therapy

Muchona, the Ndembu doctor whom Victor Turner relied on extensively for his understanding of Ndembu ritual, including cults of affliction, is depicted as a veritable sage of esoteric lore of the Southern Savanna. There is not a ritual symbol or a gesture that he cannot interpret. Muchona's knowledge is the principal source of our extensive appreciation of Central African ritual color symbolism, of the choreography of the affliction cults, and of our understanding of the way individuals move through the stages of their therapeutic initiations. However, there are very few passages in the exegetical commentary of Muchona in which we actually hear him developing his own views on how the cults of affliction are supposed to work. Usually he is responding to Turner's questions about the interpretation of particular ritual symbols. The closest we come in Turner's Drums of Affliction to a theory of the system is in appendices in which a number of Ndembu men expound on the character of shades (mukishi ), shadow or reflection (mwevulu ), ghost (musalu ), and a dead person (mufu ), the constituent elements of a person, and how these elements can cause disease in others and need to be dealt with. Success in the hunt, according to one, should prompt the hunter to offer an offering to his ancestral shrine tree and to distribute the meat to others. Failure in the hunt may require one to take white clay (mpemba ) to the same shrine tree to invoke assistance from God through the mediation of the shade. Several others emphasize the serious consequences of dreaming (lota ) about the shades, who are normally invisible. Such a dream, or persistent dreams, will cause sickness and require the dreamer to seek out a doctor (chimbanda ) to help the person drink the appropriate medicine. To have identified one's shade is to have a mystical helper who can come to one's assistance. At other times the shades come in dreams and request beer or food offerings. If one does not satisfy these demands with appro-

priate responses, one will be stricken with disease. Usually a diviner is needed to identify the shade and what must be done about it. Becoming a shade is part of the process of dying and having the body, the ghost (mufu ), separated from the shadow and shade (1968:284–290). In this, the role of the ngoma cult of affliction is to be the organized effort to establish appropriate relationships between individuals and their shades. It is also the organized effort to restore health where disease or misfortune have been interpreted by divination as being caused through dreaming of shades. Obviously much is left to the diviner. It is important to note here that what other writers call "possession" or "trance" behavior is mentioned by Turner with reference to only three of the twenty-three cults of affliction: Ihamba, entailing the extraction of the ancestor's tooth; Kayong'u, in which the mode of affliction is respiratory disorders, and the patient dreams of a deceased diviner relative; and Tukuka, wasting or respiratory troubles, in which the patient dreams of spirits of Europeans and speaks with tongues, simulating European behavior (1968:300–302). Why has Western scholarship emphasized possession so much, when it is only a minor feature of the entire ngoma system, in the sense of trancelike or out-of-consciousness behavior?

Elsewhere, as well, demonstrative possession and trance are either absent in the overall system of shade or spirit involvement or they are one way among others of expressing communication with spirits. Or, possession on the part of mediumistic divining or in ritual therapies is a phenomenon that emerges in the context of ngoma institutions at a particular point in history, or declines similarly in other settings. Each of these possibilities needs to be reviewed to accurately understand what the shades or spirits in ngoma mean and how they are used as active presences in ritual.

The ngoma-related role of shades and spirits where demonstrative possession-trance is altogether absent is illustrated in the Western Cape, and perhaps in Natal, thus among most Xhosa, Mpondo, Zulu, and some Swazi settings. Not only is divination done without paraphernalia, there is no demonstrative trance expression of ukutwasa , the state of being "called" by ancestors.

The second condition, in which demonstrative trance-possession moves into a setting, is illustrated by the "red" takoza-sangoma method of mediumistic divining seen in Swaziland and apparently in regions of Mozambique. Most sources, as well as takoza such as Ida Mabuza, said the appearance of this type of divining is of recent origin, having come

from the Thonga, quite possibly the Vandau to whom De Heusch attributed "authentic shamanism."

In actual divination this meshing of the less demonstrative technique with possession-trance divining takes the form of a hierarchy of modes. Ascending from two to thirty-five emlangeni in price are ranged (1) the basic bone-throw divination, (2) bone throw with expert translation by a mediator between the diviner and client; then, in increasing expense and degrees of power, (3) the client's recourse to mediumistic divination with Swazi water spirits, victims of Swazi wars, and alien spirits. Having presented a Western-style family issue to levels 1 and 2 of this system, and having seen the hierarchy of level 3 in operation, I saw that counseling and problem-solving may go on alongside the more formal divination hierarchy. I have similarly seen various mechanistic methods of divining put aside for counseling and interpretation in Kongo settings. It is apparent, however, that although any mode of knowledge is recognized in this African context, ancestrally sanctioned knowledge often has greater legitimacy.

The third possibility, that of the decline of possession-trance in ngoma, may be illustrated in the Tanzanian context, where ngoma, although associated with groups of spirits, is usually done strictly as a dance and therapeutic technique. A form of routinization and control of the ritual, as well as a hierarchization of the organization of healers who practice a particular ngoma, has apparently contained, or controlled, open manifestation of the spirit.

The analytical thread that runs through all these "transformations of spirit" is that they are part of a worldview or ideology of order and misfortune, of health and disease, in which individual experience is brought together with culturally normative knowledge. It is not an exaggeration to speak of particular spirits as specific paradigms and the realm of spirits as a generalized paradigm.

Ngoma needs to be understood as the institutional form that frequently emerges as Central Africans pick up the pieces of their lives following a common and recurring misfortune. Part of this form has to do with the assumption that misfortunes may originate in the realm of human beings or former human beings and spirits, as understood in the proto-Bantu cognate dòg. The particular combination of causal imputations of misfortune and the social context with which this is dealt with does not rule out combining "empirical" or "practical" knowledge with spirit knowledge. Also, because of the social dangers of exposure of individuals with knowledge to envy and accusation, spirit legitima-

tion is a preferred legitimation of both new problems and new solutions. It in no way substitutes for common-sense knowledge or ad hoc problem solving. It is thus a serious oversimplification to restrict what I call the "spirit hypothesis" to possession and trance.

In several of the rare conversations I held with ngoma therapists in which the "theory" was discussed, emphasis was placed on the sufferer's acceptance of the condition and the calling, as interpreted by the diviner or healer, and upon the relationship between the sufferer's song and spirit. One of these accounts is from Cape Town, the other from Dar es Salaam. These lead us to look for other types of analytical models to understand "how ngoma works" than have been sought so far.

Adelheid Ndika, with whom I had the pleasure of speaking on various occasions about her work, spoke of the importance of understanding the sufferer's dreams. They could indicate the nature of the call, and of the spirits, as well as the appropriateness of the sufferer's choice of a sponsoring healer. The acceptance of the challenge, call, or sickness (uvuma kufa ) was the beginning of recovery. (This is similar to Alcoholics Anonymous rehabilitation, or to Csordas's "predisposition.") Physical symptoms such as headache and nosebleeding, and mental symptoms are often the expression of resistance to the sickness. Ndika was not willing to speak of them as the displeasure of the spirits. Acceptance, rather than exorcism, was the preferred mode in which she and other Cape Town healers approached "spirits."

Medicines in the first stage of the initiatory therapy, suggested Ndika, are usually intended to calm and purify the sufferer, to cleanse the thoughts, and to "drive away the darkness." This medicine, which may contain analgesics and hallucinogens, is usually "white," whether it is a plant-derived liquid (ubulau ) or white chalk (ikota ), because the ancestors are of a "white" disposition. Incense used in the early rites of initiation is intended to gain favor with the ancestors. She stressed the importance of the goat sacrifice in her work, in terms of the disposition of the sufferer and the relationship with others and the ancestors. Her theory of the songs emphasized the formation of a strong self through self-presentation in the ngoma sessions.

However, it was in Dar es Salaam, in conversations with the leaders of the coastal healer's association Shirika la Madawa, that a theory of ngoma in relation to spirits emerged. Song was stressed as central to the ritual. Omari Hassan, Muslim mganga and practitioner of ngoma Msaghiro for sufferers of chronic and severe headache caused by the coastal or beach spirits (sheitani) Maruhani, Subizani, Mzuka, and Kin-

yumakero and also of headaches caused by Warungu "inland" spirits of the hills, baobab trees, or mountains, offered this:

The aim of healing ngomas is to make the patient talk, to heighten emotions. If that fails, you go to the forest for roots, give them medicine. Either way, talking is important. The purpose of the drumming is to know the particular spirit, so it speaks out in the patient, so the healer knows how many, which, where they come from, what it wants. When the patient speaks, it's the spirit [speaking]. Spirit and person are one and the same. After medicine is taken, and ngoma is played, the patient must sing in increasing tempo, the song of the particular spirit. It's thus the patient who directs the healer on the type of treatment.

Isa Hassan, also a Muslim healer and officer of the organization, added that:

The spirits like the music, so they may make themselves manifest, so they may talk [through the sufferer]. A specific type of music is for a specific type of spirit; only this way will each spirit reveal ways of releasing the patient. Once the healer has established the type of spirit before him, in the person, he begins the corresponding type of music. The lyrics are the healer's [or sufferer's] own. It is impossible to give lyrics of a particular ngoma because there is so much improvisation and variation, so much depends on the individual case. How then does an ngoma help a person? The music enchants the sufferer so he can express himself better, and reveal the spirit.

"Accepting the sickness," "confessing dreams," "presenting one's self," "the spirits talking," "sufferer and spirit being the same thing," "patient directing the healer" are some of the expressions that get to the core of ngoma discourse. In terms of the communicative structure of this discourse, we have seen (in the previous chapter) how important is not only the two-way discourse between healer and sufferer but that a third pole, a third party, is also common. This may be the therapy manager of Kongo society, the diviner-assigned assistant who says "I agree," in Swaziland, or the small group in the ngoma session who listen and sing back to the sufferer the song just intoned. Spirit, here, may be considered another type of third party in the discourse, which may or may not be dramatically manifested. In other words, spirit is a manner of speaking, a hypothesis, a format.