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to sleep, drank a potion of herbs, sheep's blood, and gall. I was advised to be attentive to any dreams. |
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Indeed I dreamed! I dreamed, as I recalled, that I was halfway up a ladder that was leaning against a side wall of the Old Men's Chapel. The wall was almost blindingly white, and in the center was a metallic blue window. As I was trying to adjust my eyes, I suddenly felt a shake on the ladder. I looked up, and there at the top of the ladder was the face and shoulders of my father. He either waved or beckoned to me, calling me up the ladder. That ended the dream. |
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The next morning I took my place among those consulting the leader of the cult, MaMfene, who was divining in the chapel. I recounted my dream. MaMfene seemed momentarily disconcerted but went ahead and consulted the ancestors. I was rather disappointed to find that the ancestors were said to be showing their acceptance of my place in the cult and indicating that I was to contribute to the repainting of the exterior of the chapel and also to the reglazing of any broken windows. As to my father, I should call him in America. |
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Well, as I was flying back to America in several weeks' time, I did not make the call. To my sorrow, when I did return I found my father very gravely ill. The family and he had wanted to keep the knowledge from me in the field. A scant two weeks after I returned he died. Shortly after, in a letter thanking my friends at Amakhehleni for their kindnesses, I communicated the facts of my father's death to them. I soon received a letter in return in which among condolences they allowed that the ancestors were well aware of my father's imminent death; in fact, this event had been communicated to me in his farewell gesture at the top of the ladder. But as I was soon returning and nothing could be done anyway, they had not wanted to trouble me with that aspect of my dream. |
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Though these Zulu diviners had surely divined my worriesworries not really apparent to me, incidentally, in the intense involvement of fieldworkI recall being highly skeptical of the whole experience throughout. Subsequently I came to credit diviners with much deeper insight into the human condition and my place in it than I had at first allowed. My impatience, anchored in my research agenda and my professional social science position, apparently had to exclude me from the deeper ''ways of knowing" that they were offering had I had the time and wisdom to explore them. |
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While I was, I think, listening carefully to the discourse in other arenas of African religious life (Fernandez 1966), for some reason I conceived of divination as an arena of rather mechanical, probably fraudulent, communication between gods and men and between diviners and clients. I focused on the recommendations contained in the divination and not on the complexities of the communication itself. If only I had had this collection of essays before me at the time! |
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Given the shortcomings of my fieldwork in this respect, let me orient my afterword to this question: how might my field study of divination have been deepened had I had this collection of essays before me? This question is useful and apt as an afterword, although, of course, it presumes not only this volume as an aid to a former state of mind but twenty subsequent years of anthropological theory |
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