Wim van Binsbergen
|
Improvising away from fixed
verbal formulae in the four-tablet oracle of sangomas in
contemporary Botswana
Wim van Binsbergen |
| paper presented at the session ‘Het discours van de expert, orale traditie tussen formule en uitvoeringtradition between formula and ’ (‘the expert’s discourse: oral performanceAssociation of African Studies, 2003 ’), Convenor: Jan Jansen, Netherlands Conferentie perspectives in Africa studies’, 26 ‘Power, Politics and Poetry: Dutch september, Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen, Pieter de la Courtgebouw, Wassenaarseweg 52, Leiden |
to Wim van Binsbergen's website on African religion | to the Shikana portal
Wim van
Binsbergen, Improvising away from fixed verbal formulae in
the four-tablet oracle of sangomas in contemporary Botswana
ABSTRACT
The rich literature available
(cf. van Binsbergen, in press, and references cited there) offers
ample evidence for the essential formal and generic unity of such
major African divination systems as Ifa, Sixteen Cowries
(Nigeria, Benin), Sikidy (Madagascar), and Hakata (Southern
Africa), all of which can be regarded as transformations of the
system of ‘Sand Science’ (‘ilm al-raml) or ‘Sand
Calligraphy’ (khatt al-raml) which spread from Abbasid Iraq
all over the Islamic world, the Indian Ocean region, and Africa
from the late first millennia CE onwards. However, between these
various regions, which are up to a few thousand kilometres apart,
considerable variation has developed in the physical details of
the divination apparatus, in the accompanying interpretative
catalogues by reference to which the diviner interprets the
formal patterns produced by the apparatus, and in the discursive
style through which diviners structure the sessions with their
local clients.
Current research on Ifa, especially such research as is conducted
by African academic philosophers (e.g. Abimbola 1976, 1983, 1991;
Bewaji 1992, 1994; Eze 1993; Uyanne 1994), tends to attribute to
the Ifa interpretative catalogues the following characteristics,
among others: the text is orally transmitted, it is yet
considered to be fairly immutable, and it is seen as a timeless
and constant repository of wisdom – as a philosophical
corpus – whose use for divination is almost secondary and an
adulteration. The corpus is extremely systematic and elaborate,
and whenever it happens to be codified (by practicing diviners in
West Africa, Cuba or the South-eastern USA, or by ethnographers
such as Bascom) books of hundreds of pages emerge, with a neat
internal structure that follows the productive mathematics of the
systems 2n-based formalism. This suggests a rather
one-way structure for the divinatory session as a therapeutic
ritual: the eternal wisdom of the corpus is supposed to speak,
through the apparatus and through the diviner’s mouth, with
a timeless authority in the light of which the client’s
personal, topic concerns can only humbly submit, so as to be
radically transformed so as to conform to the available,
time-honoured and formalised wisdom texts.
The older literature from Southern Africa (Bartels 1903; Coertz
1931; de Jager & Seboni 1964; Eiselen 1932; Garbutt 1909;
Hunt 1950; Hunt 1954; Hunt 1962; Laydevant 1933; Seboni 1949;
Seboni 1949) suggests a situation very similar to this West
African model: the Southern African diviner is supposed to learn,
for every formal combination the divinatory apparatus yields, a
specific praise formulae, so the sum of his knowledge would also
be 2n such formulae (here, usually n= 6, so 64).
Typically, this older literature was based on decontextualised, in
vitro, ethnographic practices (seeking to tap the expert’s
knowledge through formal question-and-answer interviews in a
setting chosen and determined by the ethnographer), which did not
convey the praxeological dynamics of real sessions. Against this
background it is surprising to find, in the divinatory practices
of sangomas in Botswana today, a great disregard for the
conventionalised praises with fixed textual contents. Instead,
each of the 16 combination which the oracle can produce, are
interpreted by a highly improvising, creative and intuitive
practice, in which the conventionalised associations of each
combination along a number of divergent dimensions (ancestors,
witchcraft, the body, social interaction, death, animals and
totems, etc.) are mobilised in a kaleidoscopic fashion, guided
more by the emerging conversation between diviner and client hic
et nunc – and somewhat on equal terms – , than by the
timeless and immutable wisdom attributed to a verbal corpus.
Historical and sociological reasons will be advanced to interpret
the amazing ethnographic contrasts between Botswana today, on the
one hand, and, on the other, Southern Africa in the early
twentieth century, as well as West Africa.
At the request
from the chair, in the oral presentation during the panel,
discussion of the above themes was combined with a more general
theoretical and methodological remarks on North Atlantic
researchers’ study of oral tradition and performance in
contemporary Africa. Here the emphasis was on participatory
fieldwork, not so much as a means of collecting cognitive
information, but as an intersubjective testing ground where the
researcher constantly subjects herself to the scrutiny of the
host community in order to allow the latter to assess any
progress the researcher in making in conceptual, linguistic, and
performative cultural learning. Therefore the fact that all
papers in this panel deal with a researcher’s apprenticeship
towards a local African domain of expert symbolic production, is
highly significant and should not be allowed to be obscured under
layers of imposed, etic, objectifying scientific
rationality. In the apprentice process the many aspects of
culture become accessible which are not primarily expressed in
words – not so much because the belong to a domain
constructed as secret, but because they belong to a domain
(comparable to intimacy, corporeality, sexuality) that is too
central to experience and too intersubjective than that explicit
verbalisation could enhance, rather than diminish, its value.
These are themes elaborated in van Binsbergen (2003).
These remarks are not intended to be dismissive of the etic
approaches that dominated at least two of the other papers in the
panel; instead, the message is to try and find a balance between
such analytic rationality, and a celebration of the emic
intersubjectivity around which the original apprenticeship
revolves. To underline the importance also of an etic approach,
finally an extemporised attempt is made to link what appears to
be recurrent themes throughout the panel’s papers: the
interplay between the creation of value, the verbal expression,
and the financial reward. The female bard, the expert jembe
drummer, the Malian sand diviner and the Southern African sangoma
diviner all perform and represent a voice from outside the
vicissitudes of the ongoing social process between humans. Those
themselves involved in this ongoing social process take this
outside voice to be eminently valid and inescapable – hence
constructions of its legitimation in supernatural terms (the
experts’ powers are attributed to ancestors or the high god,
the sangomas are even incarnations of ancestors). One
almost gets the impression as if the construction, through the
experts’ performance, of such an outside focus of comment,
exhortation and criticism, and the verbal and financial exchanges
that link this focus (and the experts’ work) to the ongoing
social process, is in itself much more than a comment – yea,
constitutes a very major factor in the social order. Perhaps it
is no accident that, of all available social roles, the local
format of the apprenticeship towards the local status of expert
is extended to the North Atlantic researcher, the outsider who
seeks to be an insider and who by her distancing commentary in
the form of ethnography also brings out essential aspects of the
local social order.
Abimbola, W., 1976, Ifa: An exposition of the Ifá literary corpus, New York: Nok.
Abimbola, W., 1983, ‘Ifa as a body of knowledge and as an academic discipline’, Journal of Cultures and Ideas, 1: 1-11
Abimbola, W., 1991, ‘Poesie VI: Aus “Sechzehn große Gedichte aus Ifa”‘, in: Kimmerle, H., ed., Philosophie in Afrika: Afrikanische Philosophie: Annäherungen an einen interkulturellen Philosophiebegriff, Frankfurt am Main: Qumran, pp. 226-234; excerpt from: Abimbola, W., ed., 1975, Sixteen great poems of Ifa, no place: UNESCO
Bartels, M., 1903, ‘Die
Würfelzauber südafrikanischen Völker’, Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie, 35: 338-378.
Bascom, W., 1969, Ifa divination: Communication between gods and men in West Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bewaji, J.A.I., 1992, ‘A critical analysis of the philosophical status of Yoruba Ifa literary corpus’, in: H. Nagl-Docekal & F. Wimmers, eds., Postkoloniales Philosophieren Afrika, vol. 6, Wien: Oldenburg, p. 140-154
Bewaji, Tunde., 1994, ‘Truth and ethics in African thought: A reply to Emmanual Eze’, Quest: Philosophical Discussions, 8, 1: 76-89
Coertze, P.J., 1931, Dolosgooiery in
Suid-Afrika, Stellenbosch: University of Stellenbosch, Annale van
die Universiteit van Stellenbosch, jaargang ix, reeks B, afl. 2.
de Jager, E.J., & O.M. Seboni, 1964, ‘Bone divination among the Kwena of Molepolole district, Bechuanaland Protectorate’, Afrika und Übersee 48: 2-16.
Eiselen, W.M., 1931, ‘Voorwoord’,
in: Coertze, P.J., 1931, Dolosgooiery in Suid-Afrika,
Stellenbosch: University of Stellenbosch, Annale van die
Universiteit van Stellenbosch, jaargang ix, , reeks B, afl. 2, 1
ongenummerde pagina.
Eiselen, W.M., 1932, ‘The art of divination as practiced by the Bamasemola’, Bantu Studies, 6: 1-29, 251-263.
Eze, E., 1993, ‘Truth and ethics in African thought’, Quest: philosophical Discussions, 7, 1: 4-18
Garbutt, H.W., 1909, ‘Native witchcraft and superstition in South Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 39: 530-558 + 2 pages of illustrations.
Hunt, N., 1950, ‘Some notes on witchdoctor’s bones’, NADA (Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual), 27: 40-46.
Hunt, N., 1954, ‘Some notes on witchdoctor’s bones’, NADA (Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual), 31: 16-23.
Hunt, N., 1954, ‘Some notes on witchdoctor’s bones’, NADA (Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual), 31: 16-23.
Hunt, N., 1962, ‘More notes on witchdoctor’s bones’, NADA (Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual), 39: 14-16.
Laydevant, F., 1933, ‘The praises of the divining bones among the Basutho’, Bantu Studies, 7, 4: 341-373.
Seboni, M.O.M., 1949, Maboko — Maloba le Maabane, Johannesburg: Via Afrika;
Seboni, M.O.M., 1949, Rammone wa Kgalagadi, Johannesburg: Via Afrika;
Uyanne, F.U., 1994, ‘Truth, ethics and divination in Igbo and Yoruba traditions: (A reply to Emmanual Eze)’, Quest: Philosophical Discussions, 8, 1: 91-96
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., in press (2003), Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin/Muenster: LIT.
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