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The second etiological assumption regards the basic rules or prohibitions (tsiku) in Yaka society, also transmitted in the uterine line, as means of consolidating the uterine transmission of life. Any abuse, any infringement of rights, any act which seriously and for no justifiable reason hinders the transmission of life or its flowering is said "to kill the law" (-hoonda tsiku). Such an infringement calls for reparation, since life requires it in view of the exhange of fundamental reciprocity. Hence, any infringement is stereotyped as theft. Sorcery and illicit sexual relations, i.e., those relations that infringe the rights of the married couple or those relations that are considered to harm fertility, are called theft in ritual as well as in popular language. An event can be termed illicit if associated harm is considered, by the oracle or council, to be without reason. According to the divinatory diagnosis, a serious illness finds its origin in theft or an infringement committed by a uterine ancestor. But the oracle is very general about the reconstitution of the historical context, offering only broad indications as to the generation and the groups that are involved. If the oracle names an individual, it will only be by means of his title, e.g., the granduncle or the head of the family. The oracle's relevance is not measured by the empirical reality but by the significant value of the historical conjunction. Retracing the affliction in relation to the essential dimensions of the sociocultural order, the oracle will never ascribe an affliction to one factor only. |
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A third register of the divinatory etiology is related to the question of why the affliction strikes this particular individual instead of someone else, why this particular individual is the point of convergence of singular ill-bringing histories. The oracle considers the wronged party to have spoken by way of a curse (n-sasu) of the need for reparation and revenge. Such a curse invoked the support of a cult and its ancestral or spirtual agencies. This curse is used against kinsmen only and says that afflicition will befall the wrongdoer or one of his uterine ascendants by way of revenge. Curses are never resolved or ended but are "inherited"; although they are tied to uterine relations, they may cross lineages through marriage and birth. A curse threatens all of the uterine kinsmen of the wrongdoer and of the wronged, in fact, all of the kinsmen who might have committed such an infringement. The effects of the curse that are transmitted through uterine lines make up a matrilineal tradition. It is within this same tradition that the hereditary effects are ritually neutralized. The interlinking of infringement, curse, illness, affliction or death, and misfortune management or ritual intervention makes up a "ritual institution or cult" (phoongu). |
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Yaka people maintain ten major translineage cults considered to be capable of both transmitting affliction and offering initiatory treatment. The cults are of almost equal status and each is concerned with a particular syndrome and its social effects. The most important (whose names prove to be practically untranslatable) include khita, mbwoolu, ngoombu, haamba, n-luwa, khosi, and mbaambi (Devisch 1984:8082). In every uterine line the curses that are uttered by the ascendants, as well as the wrong they revenge or the sad consequences they risk incurring, depend on one or another of these cults. In this almost negative way the cult protects and stimulates the flowering of life. The curses are the other |
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