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Divination in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part 3: Yaka

he Yaka people, who number about 250,000, exist in a political and cultural borderland in the southwestern region of the D.R.C. They live in village groupings of patrilineages, although the northern Yaka recognize descent through the matrilineal line as well. Their land possesses few natural riches; technological development has passed them by; and their young people often leave to go to the capital city of Kinshasa in the hope of finding employment and a better life. René Devisch has written extensively and with great insight on Yaka social institutions and on spirit mediumship, which lies at the heart of Yaka divination.40

Devisch points out that "while the political leader, in consensus with a council of elders or customary judges, can arbitrate in disputes where there is a common rule, the Yaka diviner draws on clairvoyance and can point with authority to the complex intertwinement of social, moral, and physical onset of sickness, ill luck, or death."41 As with the Azande and other peoples of Africa, the Yaka approach problems of sickness and family conflict in terms of a search for a cause, and there are explanations and responses available through common sense, traditional medicinal knowledge, and social memory. However, such solutions to problems are often not adequate in themselves, especially when the problems persist or when the question is why someone has died. Therefore, they use divination to probe further for a larger context of meaning, although such an inquiry is not necessarily their original goal.

In preparation for a divination session, the representatives of the interested groups—for example, two families—will meet with the diviner, who may be male or female, to test his or her divinatory powers, giving no information about the problem. If the matter is very serious, they will seek out a diviner a day or more distant from their village. They must be convinced that the diviner possesses clairvoyance, which is demonstrated by the diviner declaring that they have come as clients and indicating that he/she knows why they have come.42 Then the diviner enters a trancelike state, in which he/she discourses on the complexities of kinship relations and the Yaka code of social behavior, discussing problems such as failing to keep one's obligations to matrilineal ancestors and the consequences that such transgressions might create for living relatives. While speaking, the diviner pays close attention to the clients' reactions, for clues to what is troubling them—nods of the head or murmurs of assent or denial at various statements he/she makes. Through these clues, the diviner begins to discern the problem that has brought them there. In the case of a death or some other extreme problem, they will present the diviner with an object that has been in close contact with the deceased or afflicted person.

Much like a hunting dog that pursues its quarry, the diviner sniffs the object. Knowledge gained through divination entails not only the senses of sight, sound, and touch, but the discriminating capacities of the olfactory sense as well.43 Thus, the action of "sniffing out" information is not only metaphorical—it is prompted by the diviner's heightened physical sensibilities. At night the diviner places the object next to his/her ear and, while asleep, receives the message it conveys in dreamlike images. The next day, he/she incorporates the images into a staccato commentary accompanied by rhythmic tapping on a wooden slitdrum (n-kookwa Ngoombu; fig. 4 , cat. no. 27). The diviner weaves metaphors from his/her dreams together with references to problems of kinship relations and the norms by which members of the community must live. Throughout, he/she listens attentively to the responses of those who have come for help, then presses them to react to what he has been saying and speak among themselves. The diviner's insights help them to see their situation in a new light, to disentangle the threads of conflict by turning their thinking to the fundamental norms of Yaka society, requiring and enabling them to come to terms with the extent to which these norms have or have not been maintained.

Unlike Turner, who interprets divination among the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia in terms of the pragmatics of social transformation and as a multivocal and theatrical drama,44 Devisch approaches Yaka divination as an "event-in-the-making," a "process of reoriginating," a "birthing process" in its ongoing development. Oracular discourse "plunges one's world of speech back into its deepest springs of life."45 Drawing on psychoanalytic studies as well as recent feminist critiques of anthropological inquiries, he interprets the diviner's slitdrum, with its uterine body and phallic head, as a visual expression of the primordial oneness of life, even as a representation of the womb. According to Devisch, as a ritual artifact, it

is more than an object; it is an agent filled with power, a being entailing a developmental symbolic process forming a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds, the realm of the living and the deceased. . . . The divinatory slit drum . . . imprints the sound and message of the oracle (that is, of the spirit speaking through the diviner-medium) upon the clients and the wider society.46

Thus, the Yaka diviner is one who has passed through a process of rebirth. This begins with the onset of excited speech, often sounding clairvoyant, and with erratic behavior due to having been possessed by a deceased diviner in the matrilineal line (n-kooku). Such an abnormal condition identifies an individual (male or female) as a potential diviner and attracts the attention of a senior diviner, who brings the candidate under his or her tutelage in a series of initiation rituals. Initiation begins with seclusion in a specially constructed house for an extended period of time, and includes drinking purgatives, eating special foods, breaking out of the house as a chick breaks through the shell of an egg, being taken into the bush, and returning on the shoulders of young men to the sound of slitdrums. The initiate bites a chicken's head off, clutching it in his/her teeth while being led back to the village. The climax in the initiatory rite comes when, to a chorus of slitdrums, the initiate behaves like an otter-shrew, digging a tunnel in the earth from which he/she reemerges through another hole dug by the senior diviner. The initiate is now prepared to accomplish the task with which he/she has been charged: to bring suppliants in contact with the primordial womb of the world (ngoombu) and "to effect a transition between the ngoombu . . . and the domain of language and culture."47

CONTINUE

Fig. 4. Lusuungu, a Yaka diviner in Yibeengala village, taps a slitdrum (n-kookwa Ngoombu) while possessed by a spirit during a divination ritual.

40. Devisch 1985; Devisch, "Mediumistic Divination," in Peek 1991; René Devisch, "The Slit Drum and Body Imagery in Mediumistic Divination among the Yaka," in Pemberton 2000.

41. Devisch, "Mediumistic Divination," in Peek 1991, p. 112.

42. In every divination rite, an element of doubt is present on the part of the client. As Rosalind Shaw observed in her study of Temne divination in Sierra Leone, divination as a "truth-constructing process . . . presents an image of truth as enigmatic." In contrast to more analytical divinatory procedures, many forms of divination entail understanding and resolution that depend on an "intense act of vision required of the diviner" and an awareness by the suppliant that "powerful hidden knowledge" may have "ambivalent ethical connotations." Shaw, "Splitting Truths from Darkness: Epistemological Aspects of Temne Divination," in Peek 1991, pp. 141–44. Even in the consultations of Ifa, one can discuss matters of concern with the babalawo or ignore him, seek a second opinion by having Ifa cast again, or go to another diviner.

43. Z. S. Strother, "Smells and Bells: The Role of Skepticism in Pende Divination," in Pemberton 2000.

44. Turner 1975.

45. Devisch, "The Slit Drum," in Pemberton 2000.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.