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 one’s own daughter -- at a generally feared ‘witchdoctor’s 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 association’s 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 children’s 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 goldsmith’s 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 (MmaShakayile’s), 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-Mary’s, 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 Jombo’s 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 shrine’s 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 Enlightenment’s 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 one’s 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 one’s 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-Safa’a; the millennia-old, occult, variegated (but mainly astrological) tradition of the Ancient Near East as filtered through the doctrines of the Ikhwan al-Safa’a; 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 Francistown’s 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 one’s 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 priest’s 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 client’s life. This information I derive partly from the client’s 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 client’s 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 client’s 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 life’s 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 parent’s 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 didn’t 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.

NOTES

[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 M’bona 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 M’bona cult among the Mang’anja’, 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 Jansen’s 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 Africa’s 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 Freud’s 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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