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Let me ground my observations on this highly interesting collection of essays by reflecting on my own experience of divination in Africa, a series of revelatory if ultimately failed incidents of consultation with Zulu diviners in which the health of my father became central (Fernandez 1967). The women leaders of the Old Men's Cult (Amakahleni, Umulazi District, Durban, Natal), which I was studying, regularly divined the health and life problems of their members and visitors by acting as spirit mediums for the great Zulu deadShaka, Dingane, and the other kingsas well as for the male founder of the cult, John Mfene. Thus I had already taken an interest in Zulu divination generally. I had also read Reverend Callaway, and in September 1965 I went out, accompanied by my Zulu colleagues Joseph Manyoni and Harriet Sibisi, to consult a whistling diviner (inyanga yemilozi), a diviner by means of familiar spirits, in the Valley of the Thousand Hills. |
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This woman, decked out in the elaborate robes and headdress of the diviner, did not offer me a satisfactory divination. She did not really, for example, discover the nature of the hidden object which was to be an initial test of her power, a coin hidden under Mrs. Sibisi's right thigh. Also the whistling voices of the spirits, which seemed to be coming from outside the hut rather than from within it, were not, for me at least, convincing. And the diviner did not really succeed in "seeing" my case very clearly, although she rather quickly divined that I was far away and not in satisfactory contact with my family, particularly with my father, who had been in precarious health for more than a year. She recommended that I should endeavor to be in better contact. That seemed to me a useful if rather obvious observation, so we agreed to terminate the seance for the time being and return another day. I never did. |
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In late November, however, several of the women leaders and diviners of the Old Men's Cult urged me to sacrifice a sheep to the ancestors on behalf of myself and my family and as a gesture of solidarity with the cult. Indeed, the cult members treated me with the greatest hospitality and kindness, and so I made the sacrifice, dedicating the sheep to the dead founder, John Mfene, and bringing my case before him. I retired to an adjacent rondeval and, just before lying down |
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