SANGOMA CONSULTATION REQUEST FORM Wim van Binsbergen / Johannes Sibanda+ version October 2012 |
background
For extensive descriptions of the divinatory method used, and its cultural and historical background, you may consult my various articles as included in this website, or referred to from this website.
intake form
You may initiate a consultation with Wim van Binsbergen / Johannes Sibanda+ by filling out and electronically sending (push the 'Send' button) the SANGOMA CONSULTATION REQUEST FORM below. Your confidential information will be entirely safe, protected by professional oath.
procedure
Real-life sangoma consultations constitute intensive face-to-face sessions between the sangoma and the client, easily lasting a few hours. The consultation is essentially a therapeutic conversation that gradually brings out a detailed coherent story about the client's life and predicament -- a story which the client is brought to recognise as true and revelatory, and which points to specific subsequent action needed in order to solve the predicament and to redress the client's relationship with the supernatural. The client's sponsors and next of kin, and the sangoma's assistants and apprentices, may also attend the session and contribute additional points. Visual and auditive cues play a considerable role in the divining process. Payment is direct and often in kind, and deferred payment -- if at all tolerated -- would be part of an extensive social circle of financial and other obligations involving very limited risk. All these features are absent in worldwide electronic communication. But just like the computer is somehow capable, with the proper software, of replacing the time-honoured divination tablets and produce valuable, inspired divinatory information, so also the electronic consultation can more or less substitute face-to-face consultation, provided some additional clues are offered by the client. These additional clues may compensate for the absence of so much that is taken for granted in face-to-face consultation. This adaptation of the consultation format to global conditions of electronic communication has been the subject of a long and penetrating discussion in my book Intercultural encounters (LIT Verlag, Hamburg, 2003), chapter 7; click here for a page where that chapter can be accessed as PDF.
Over the years I have found that no first consultation ever remains under two and a half hours (including ancestral prayer at the shrine on the client's behalf), and remote electronic consultation involving the writing out of the reading takes at least one hour extra. In the African tradition, as in that of North Atlantic psychotherapy, neither training nor consultation are to be obtained free of charge. In Southern Africa, the standard fee for a consultation is roughly equivalent to one day's wages of a general worker. Taking this as my guide, I have set my fee to US$70, which, in the part of the world where I am currently residing, and after deduction of PayPal's handling fee, means an hourly rate below that of a cleaner in the informal sector.
Current procedure is that, after the a prospective client's SANGOMA CONSULTATION REQUEST FORM reaches me,
The fees are partly used to buy sacrifices (in the form of animal sacrifices and alcoholic libations) for the shrine, and partly forwarded to the sangoma cult's headquarters in Southern Africa; and partly for maintaining this worldwide sangoma consultation service. What little remains may be retained by the sangoma for personal use.
client is requested to acknowledge receipt of the protocol by return mail
The electronic format has the advantage of world-wide availability, thus mediating sangomahood -- as a great achievement of Southern African culture -- to the whole of humankind. But the electronic format also has many disadvantages. For the diviner the electronic consultation has become far more lonely and uncertain than when there is the abundance of sensory cues and communicative reassurance, as in ordinary face-to-face sessions. The diviner in the course of the session braves and mobilises formidable, invisible powers on behalf of the client. In the process, the diviner allows himself to be exposed to the client's predicaments and misery as if they were his own. The diviner comes back with personal information and insights concerning the client, which may be true and relevant, but which may also be wrong and irrelevant in ways which only the distant, largely unknown client can judge. All this creates considerable tension and insecurity in the diviner. From these, only the client can release him, notably by immediate response after receipt of the consultation report. Please acknowledge receipt of the consultation report by returning mail.
feedback service
Usually the consultation report will clearly speak for itself. However, The client is entitled to raise (within two weeks after my dispatch of the consultation report) specific questions of clarification directly relating to the report, and to have these questions briefly but conscientiously answered by me in so far as this can be done without further consultation of the oracle. The client will be informed whenever certain questions exceed her or his entitlement, and such questions will not be answered unless the client specifically agrees to initiate a new consultation, for which again the standard fee of US$70 will be due.
return to homepage | view credentials | sangoma background introduction
page last modified: 21-10-12 14:08:17 |