Social And Political Variables Of A Complex Institution

Formal one-dimensional cultural historical indices such as verbal cognates and the distribution of material culture have set the broad historic boundaries of ngoma. We must now look within the region and its societies to further identify the subject at hand and to establish the hallmarks for its presence within this broad context. The next two chapters on "core features" and "doing ngoma" will further identify behavioral and normative correlates of ngoma, as used in its broader meaning as has emerged in the foregoing pages, and as the set we have been describing as a "cult of affliction." However, first we can identify some of the broad-stroke social and political corollaries of those settings in which ngoma is present and in which it is absent. Second, within the region and societies where this set occurs, we can begin to look for the reasons for the rise and decline of particular manifestations of ngoma the institution, and why it is segmented into many specialized groups in one setting and homogeneous or unitary in other settings. Third, given that ngoma combines features that are normally differentiated in Western institutions and in Western scholarship, what is an appropriate understanding of the cult of affliction and its functions as an institution?

Cults Of Affliction In Centralized And Segmentary Societies

Many of the societies of the subcontinent have been lineage-based agrarian communities, practicing some hunting, and in regions where the sleeping sickness-carrying tsetse fly is absent, livestock tending.

Especially in coastal regions, commercial cities have emerged, linking the continent to overseas mercantile centers. The region includes Southern Savanna matrilineal societies such as the Kongo, Lunda, Cokwe, Kimbundu, and Bemba of Zaire, Angola, Zambia, and Malawi; patrilineal societies such as the Luba, Lozi, Nyamwezi, and others of the central region, and in the southern region, the Nguni-speaking societies of the Zulu, Swazi, and Xhosa; and nearby, the Shona, Sotho, and Tswana, to name a few. The region has seen the emergence of numerous precolonial states and empires, including the cluster of Luba, Lunda, Kimbundu, and Cokwe states; on the western coast, the Kongo, Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo states; the states of the eastern lakes, Busoga and Buganda, and eastward, Nyamwezi; in the Zimbabwe region, the historic state of Monamotapa; more recently, in the early nineteenth century, the Zulu empire and the Tswana chiefdoms, and the Sotho kingdom in the Southern Africa area, associated with the great disturbances known as Mfecane.

Ngoma-type cults of affliction have related dynamically to these states. They have either been brought under the tutelage of government and served the purposes of, and the legitimation for, sovereign power, or they have preserved and perpetuated segments of society not directly related to the state. In the absence of the state, they have provided a format for the perpetuation of social segments, particularly those marginalized or afflicted, such as women, the handicapped, those struck with misfortune in economy-related tasks such as hunting, women's reproductive capacity, or commerce. In some settings, the model of the cult has provided the basis for normative social authority, defining and organizing economic activity, social organization, and more esoteric religious and artistic activities.

In colonial and postcolonial Africa, the logic of the use of affliction and adversity for the organization of social reproduction has contributed to the perpetuation, even the proliferation, of cults of affliction, often in a way that has baffled governmental authorities and outside observers. Cults have arisen in connection with epidemics, migration and trade routes, shifts in modes of production, and in response to changes in social organization and the deterioration of juridical institutions. Colonialism itself undoubtedly generated many of the cults of affliction that appeared in the twentieth century. Postindependence conditions have continued to provide grist for the mill of cult formation.

The picture of cults of affliction within, or in relation to, centralized historic states contrasts markedly with that in the decentralized societ-

ies. Under the shadow of the state they are less influential, or entirely absent, or transformed into the rituals of statecraft. Instructive is their apparent absence in the Tswana chiefdoms, where strong historic chief-ship has provided social continuity, a format for the juridical process, and some means of material support to marginalized and needy people. By contrast, in neighboring Nguni societies, they have thrived alongside or under the tutelage of chiefs and kings.

In other contexts cults are known to have provided the impetus for the emergence of centralized polities, as in the case of the Bunzi shrine of coastal Kongo. Elsewhere, cults have emerged in the wake of historic states, picking up the aura of royal authority, the trappings of sovereignty, and transforming them into a continuing source of mystical power. A prime example is the cult of Ryangombe and the BuCwezi of the lakes region of eastern Central Africa, whose spirits are said to be the royal dynasties of the ancient Cwezi kingdom (Berger 1981). BuCwezi is today found in Tanzania's major cities. The same model has been reported in Mayotte, off the coast of East Africa, where possession spirits are the Saklava kings of Madagascar (Lambek 1981:152).

The dynamic relationship of cults to centralized polities has been accompanied by changes in the way spirits and shades are focused in consciousness and ritual. As the scale and function of a cult expands, narrowly defined ancestor shades may give way to nature, alien, or hero spirits. In a few instances, centralized shrine cults have persisted over centuries, defining primary values and social patterns for generations of adepts. The Bunzi shrine of coastal Kongo, Mbona of Malawi, and Korekore and Chikunda in Zimbabwe are well-studied examples that continue into the present. Some authors have made a distinction between these centralized "regional" cults and topically focused cults of affliction (Werbner 1977). But the orders, taken in their entirety, suggest more of a continuum along several axes: centralized to segmentary, inclusive to specialized, controlled by state sovereignty to independent (or even opposed to state sovereignty). Cults have crystallized opposition to states, both in precolonial, colonial, and to a lesser degree, postcolonial settings. Thus, the Cwezi cult channeled opposition to hierarchized structures in the Interlacustrine state of Rwanda (Berger 1981). Cult leaders organized opposition to Rhodesian labor recruitment practices in the early twentieth century and inspired early strikes in the mines (Van Onselen 1976). In the Zimbabwean war of independence, mediums played a role of legitimating the claims to land by the elders, and the aspirations of the guerrilla fighters, although the par-

ticulars have only begun to be studied carefully (Fry 1976; Ranger 1985:187–216). The role of ngoma networks in popular resistance in South Africa's townships is not yet known to scholars, but it may be substantial.

In the twentieth century, cults of affliction have tended to be short-term movements of panacea (DeCraemer, Vansina, and Fox 1976), often born in desperation. They have provided expression to the pains and social problems of wide segments of the populace. There has been a great deal of interpenetration between the cults and independent Christian churches, and with Islamic orders. New permanent cults have arisen around characteristic ills such as the isolated nuclear household in the urban setting; epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, and getting by with the chronic problems related to it; the divination of social problems such as unemployment in a proletarian setting; how to succeed in business and how to retain a job; how to protect wealth once it is acquired. Many cults focus on the alienation and entrapment so common in the African urban setting.

In the urban centers of Zaire, Tanzania, Swaziland, and South Africa the historic cults as well as new adaptations are represented by part-time and full-time healers and priests and their adepts. In most instances the ethnic communities of the rural hinterlands have brought their religious institutions with them to the city, where they have undergone shifts of function and signification.

Unitary And Diverse Manifestations

A further issue in considering independent variables surrounding the origin, persistence, and change in ngoma has to do with its alternative unitary and diverse manifestation across the region where it is found. This contrast is most marked in comparing the central region of the continent with the southern region. Across the mid-continent, from the Congo coast, across the Southern savanna, to the Tanzanian highlands and the coastal region, ngoma-type institutions are usually represented in multiples. Turner's work (1968) among the Ndembu, a society incorporated on the periphery of the Lunda empire, counted twenty-three ngoma orders; Cory's writing on the Sukuma of the Lake Victoria shores in western Tanganyika enumerated about twenty-five ngoma orders. Some of these pertained to women's reproductive disorders or child rearing. Others had to do with men's problems, either in produc-

tive work or in social roles. Several had to do with societal dangers, either from the natural world (e.g., poisonous snakes) or from spiritual threats (witches) or alien spirits. Others could be seen as ceremonial leadership organizations that consolidated responsibilities such as witch finding or the sponsorship of periodic rituals. In the southern region, particularly in Nguni-speaking societies of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho, ngoma is mainly presented as a homogeneous type of institution, devoted to the recognition of ancestors and addressing general human problems.

It is difficult to interpret this contrasting configuration in terms of an independent variable, either in the past or in the present. It is tempting to look at this contrast in terms of a kind of Durkheimian or Spencerian social structural proliferation or specialization that occurs in most societies with advancing time. The older societies in the Bantu expansion, notably of the central area, would have shown greater institutional diversity because of their greater historical depth in that setting. Whereas the Nguni in the south, exemplifying the end result of migrations and frontier-type settings, would have retained a less differentiated type of society. This perspective might then reveal something about the original role of ngoma in the "Bantu frontier," perhaps in the need to consolidate authority and to come to terms with threats and contradictions of various kinds. However, there is no way to test such a theory or hypothesis, much less determine which are the independent and dependent variables, until far better historical understanding is available.

There are indications in specific settings of trends in cults of affliction toward greater proliferation, or toward greater homogeneity, which may offer a less grandiose approach to the issue. The salient independent variable here seems to be political and social consolidation. In the seventeenth-to nineteenth-century coastal Congo setting, in which the Lemba cult emerged, there was a proliferation of nkisi medicines, charms, and ngoma-type orders, especially along the coast as the coastal trade eroded political states such as Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo, as well as the Kongo kingdom, and undermined the juridical functions that these states were able to fulfill. The decline of the states may be correlated directly with the increase of charms, medicines, and cults, including Lemba. However, within Lemba—the major regional ngoma-cult organization, which reflected trade, alliance building, and healing—there emerged a consolidation of some of the diverse sub-charms and functions. For example, the coastal midwifery order Pfemba, the preva-

lent way of dealing with women's reproductive issues, was co-opted by Lemba (Janzen 1982:56). Its representation in the Lemba order and nkobe basket of medicines came to be known as "Pfemba-Lemba" (Janzen 1982:253–254). In other regions Lemba appears to have incorporated, or aligned with, other distinctive ritual functions and medicines. We may project this procedure to its logical extension and imagine that multiple ritual functions might be similarly absorbed within a single institution, leading to greater functional homogeneity. At the extreme, this might have led to complete integration of ritual functions within the state or some other absolutistic type of institution. Or, it could, as in the case of coastal Kongo, indicate that where the centralized state had collapsed, ngoma-type orders took up some of the functions of state, such as conflict resolution, social control of threat, and the channeling of useful knowledge as applied to problem solving.

Another example of movement toward ritual consolidation from the contemporary ngoma picture comes from Tanzania. There, a modern state-sanctioned organization of ngoma healers, the Shirika la Madawa described in the previous chapter, controls the resource of ngoma recruitment. Indeed, this control of accesss to the role of ngoma healer and membership in the association is sufficiently restrictive that one of the major legitimating criteria of admission, namely certified possession by a sheitani spirit, occurs in only four out of a hundred individuals treated by the ngoma group. But the Shirika's ability to control diversity is offset by competition from the many other ngoma orders in Dar es Salaam.

It is difficult to formulate a strict calculus of the myriad range of transformations ngoma may undergo across the region where it has been reported. A few generalizations are possible. Ngoma appears to fade away where there is a strong central authority with a highly developed judicial tradition (e.g., Tswana). It seems to proliferate on the social and geographical margins of large empires (e.g., Ndembu in the Lunda empire; BaCwezi in Ryangombe) or as a mechanism for the consolidation of authority in the interstices of society where misfortune lurks (e.g., Bilumbu in Luba society). It proliferates where misfortune is rampant and where social chaos prevails (e.g., early colonial resistance, postwar Zimbabwe, South African urban townships). In the wake of the demise of centralized states, it may take on the functions of the state (e.g., Lemba in coastal Kongo).

Do the constant features through all these transformations represent an institution? If so, how can that be characterized?