|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ents, also seated, were always more clearly visible to the diviner than he or she was to them. The diviner began by shaking the gourd rattles rhythmically; in the small hut the sound was quite deafening. Sometimes he or she sang special songs to please the spirits. Then the diviner might begin to make strange noisessnorting, growling, belching, crying. The spirits would begin to speak then. One diviner explained that "the spirits come like a cold wind and stay in my throat and I don't know anything, I just speak." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Often the client could not understand what the spirits said; either their voices were indistinct or they spoke loudly and rapidly in incomprehensible words that were said to be other languages. The diviner had then to tell the client, in a more normal voice, what the spirits were saying. The spirits could speak through the diviner to the client or they could speak to the diviner who then passed the message on to the client. Some diviners apparently used ventriloquism; others seemed to be carrying on a conversation with other voices that were drowned out by the noise of the gourd rattles. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sometimes the potential agents of misfortune themselves (sorcerers, cursers, spirits) seemed to speak to or through the diviner. In one session I recorded, the diviner kept speaking to indistinct voices and then saying to his clients, "the mother's brother is here quarreling," and later, "the father's sister has come to complain" and "now here is another one. . . .'' In the cases which this same diviner recorded himself, he usually wrote that "Hing'ira said . . ."; that is, he wrote as if the divining spirit had spoken to the clients through him. But sometimes the diviner wrote as if the agent had spoken through him: "The mother's brother said, 'bring her so that I may pour water on her, bring her with 20 shillings, there is no one else but me.'" |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In either case, the special quality of the spirit diviner was the ability to speak as another being. Listening to seances, one had the sense of at least three participants: the client, the diviner, and another being or beings (whether divining spirits or potential agents of misfortune), with the diviner mediating between the client and the unseen beings. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The system of divination by calculation and examination of Arabic books is widespread in East Africa.
3 The lamuli (from the Arabic Khatt ar-raml) were Muslim, but in Bunyole a majority of their clients were Christian. Of 101 persons seen for divination and/or treatment by a well-known lamuli, 37 were Roman Catholic, 34 Protestant (Anglican), and 16 Muslim. (Religion was not recorded for 14.) Lamuli seemed to attract clients from other ethnic groups, and this is in some sense a national or international technique. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This method of divination seems to have been introduced into Bunyole by an "Arab" trader who settled in Busolwe in 1902. He and other Swahili or Arab traders taught it to local Muslims. It is still a technique learned by apprenticeship, |
|
|
|
|
|