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etiological approach seems not to differ in the rural and urban contexts. The Yaka diviner is mediumistic and oracular but not prophetic in the way some prophets and religious leaders of independent African churches are (Devisch and Vervaeck 1985). |
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There are about 250,000 Yaka, widely dispersed all over western Bandundu in the southern savannas, a region of Zaire bordering Angola and situated between the Kwaango and Waamba Rivers. The present-day Yaka reflect a sustained intermixture of cultural traditions in the borderland between the spheres of influence of Koongo and Luunda. Because the area has few natural riches and motorized access from Kinshasa across the sandy plateaus of northern Yaka land is difficult, the Yaka region has remained marginal to the mainstream of technoeconomic development in Zaire. There is very little production for commerce. Many young men migrate periodically to Kinshasa to earn some income from casual wage labor and petty commerce. |
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The Yaka organize in segmentary patrilineages. Each person is socially identified in relation to his patrilineal ascendants from whom he receives his position in the kin group, his rights, privileges and ancestral names, in short his social identity. Extended families live as corporate groups and make up hamlets formed according to patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence. A village numbers between one hundred and two hundred inhabitants who are divided over three to six extended families, each of which is headed by a family elder. The northern Yaka recognize uterine descent as well, thereby emphasizing the corporeality that characterizes the mother-child relation. It is believed that physical and innate characteristics, such as health, blood, inborn capacities, and the potency to develop and transmit life, are passed on to the individual primarily through maternity and the uterine line from a source of life that is conventionally associated with the individual's matrilateral great-grandmother (Devisch 1984). Siblings "coming from the one womb" share privileged bonds of warmth, trust, and mutual help in the household. Several major healing roles, as well as the clairvoyance and mediumistic role of the diviner, are also thought to be passed on through the uterine line. |
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Within the scope of this essay I deal with mediumistic divination only. The diviner can be man or woman: "his/her gift of divinatory clairvoyance" (ngoombu) is "innate and transmitted through the mothers" (yibutukulu). An individual's calling to become a diviner follows a given pattern. Diviners-to-be and young diviners commonly display hysteriform symptoms of depression. A few months before and after the death of a particular diviner, one of the uterine descendants begins to behave in a strange way, suffering from a persistent wasting illness. These candidates complain of chronic abdominal pains, nausea, anorexia, and/or dysmenorrhea. Some also suffer from headaches, suffocation, stiffening, cervical pains, |
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