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is entered by a wild animal from the forest (perhaps echoing the equation of home with wife in the first part). Merged ideas are broken down into separate ones through the idiom of following separate parts of the body. This is followed by a specific statement of the cause of sickness: outside spirits intruding and requiring appeasement. The final part of the divination carries still further the ordered sequencing of ideas and actually spells out the list of medical requirements and the time and place of their application. The shift is from conceptual simultaneity to sequencing. |
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The "Swahili" (Muslim Digo) diviner's client is a young unmarried man who has come on his own behalf. He seems to be suffering from venereal disease. This diviner also begins with a complex linking of concepts: man, woman, sadness, sympathy, lust and longing, including the supreme symbol of suffering, the shoe (kirahu). This word derives from the verb "to go here and there" (ku-kira-kira). The reflexive ku-dzi-kirira means "to walk about aimlessly" (see Deed 1965).
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Why is there this need for sympathy my friend [addressing the client]? There is a woman loving a man. . . . The love is puzzled. The man loves the woman. The man loves with longing/lust [using the word thamaa, which can also stand for penis]. There is longing and there is the shoe. You [i.e., the client] have even followed the shoe [i.e. "you have really suffered"; suffering is implied by the notion of having wandered endlessly on foot.] Why is there sickness as well as longing here? |
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Here the interlinked notions of longing, lust, and the metonymic penis are denoted by the one word and merge into that of sickness. The use of the word shoe and the verb followed anticipates the more extensive treatment of the theme of wandering, as in the previous divination. |
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He [i.e., the victim] is a man and is sick and wandering . . . this way and that. . . . He comes out quickly. . . . He can't cope [for which the verb ku-kola is used, which also means to penetrate]. . . . He runs about here and there . . . struggling, but to no avail. He goes to doctors but to no avail. |
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Why has he this disease of the shoe? He can't stay in bed with the sickness. He wanders with it. Why is it a disease of the top [i.e., of the head]? It has gripped his head, but why the head, my friend? The head goes round and round and becomes dizzy. And because of the dizziness it becomes senseless and loses its memory. His [senseless] mind tells him to cry and produce tears. |
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The disease is in the chest . . . in the stomach . . . in the solar plexus [chembe cha moyo] . . . and even his heart is bursting. . . . It is worn out from beating at great speed. The heart goes fast yet it wanders. It [the disease] is in the arteries and veins [mishipa] and his legs are lazy. |
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Now the sickness is descending. It's in the middle. It is a male's sickness . . . to do with [sexual] satisfaction. . . . It's between the kidneys. Now we find it in the veins of the penis [for which an orthodox word, kilume, is used] . . . |
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