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The late middle-aged "Arab" diviner runs his profession like a true business; he uses a pocket watch as an oracle. Clients sit around in his ample, well-stocked homestead waiting to be seen, the humbler receiving shorter divinations than the more influential, though the fees are the same (five shillings). He presses clients to agree to his carrying out the therapy on an appointed day after the divination. The "Giriama" diviner, in this case a woman past childbearing age, differs in a number of respects. She divines through spirit possession. She may be found sitting in her mud and wattle hut, unseen from the outside, and apparently withdrawn from the world. The client enters the hut, makes his greeting, and responds to her polite, euphemistic requests for tobacco by placing the two-shilling fee in front of her. The divination begins slowly. Punctuated by sweet refrains, gasps, and whistling as the spirits pause in their reflections, it consists of dramatic use of voice tone and vocabulary. The third diviner, the Muslim Digo (referred to by his fellow African Muslims as "Swahili") is a little less dramatic. His divination is punctuated by the spirits speaking in other ethnic tongues rather than in refrains of song. He accepts the same fee as the Giriama woman, and like her, he puts time and efforts into the divination. The range in style from the least to the most dramatic among these three diviners does not alter certain common themes covered in their divinations.
8 The diviner is not expected to know anything of the victim's affliction nor indeed whether the person in front of himthe clientis himself the victim or a caring relative come to ask for a diagnosis on the victim's behalf. |
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The "Arab" diviner speaks in Swahili. His client has come on behalf of his ten-year-old son, who talks to himself, whoops and yells as if possessed, plays by himself and not with other children, and is easily angered. |
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The diviner's spirits first make these points: |
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He [i.e., the victim] is troubled because of his tradethe trade carried out from his homeI mean the trade that results from a man marrying a wife and having a child by her. I mean that tradefor the wife is the investment and the child the profit. Women are the loads which we men trade with, feeding them, and hoping to trade further with. |
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But the wife can't or won't get out of your bodyshe is the owner of itit's your trade but she is the owner . . . and she can say I don't love you and she can leave you . . . but your child can't say that. |
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That is why I say it is your business which is disturbing you [i.e., he refers to the victim by addressing the client]. |
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By converting one metaphor into another (trade into domestic relations) and by using the metaphors inconsistently, the diviner simultaneously links a number of possible sources of distress: the victim's occupation or trade, the costs of running a family, a dominant and unloving wife, and the loss of a child through her desertion. Of particular note is the fact that the wife is locked in the victim's body, possessing itperhaps even consuming itand yet also leaving it. Bodily posses- |
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