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Venda divination bowl
Wood, 10 x 40 x 40 cm
University Museum, Stellenbosch, South Africa, Anthropology Collection, (collected in Vendaland, Northern Province [then Transvaal] ca. 1930)

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Venda Divining Bowl (Ndilo)

by Anitra Nettleton

he TshiVenda-speaking peoples who inhabit the northeastern corner of South Africa and the southeastern corner of Zimbabwe have utilized various divination methods. Two of these methods appear to be indigenous, and were used at different hierarchical levels of the Venda political structure. One, attached to the courts of the Venda kings, involved a divining bowl (ndilo), which was owned by a specialist diviner (mungoma), whose prerogative it was to use the bowl in divining cases of witchcraft. It appears that the use of these bowls declined within the Venda hierarchy in the early years of the twentieth century, and was obsolete by the mid-1930s. Only one complete explanation for the designs and use of such a bowl has ever been obtained from a TshiVenda informant, by a German missionary at Tshakuma, Mrs. Giesseke; all further interpretation has been based on her reports, together with supplementary information from early ethnographers such as Hugh Stayt and Nikolaas van Warmelo.1

Only ten bowls of this kind have been found and documented,2 and no two have identical designs. Each of them appears to be a complex graphic representation of a Venda cosmogram, which simultaneously refers to Venda political structures in the here and now and to similar structures within a spirit realm. The bowl was used in divination rituals to identify perpetrators of witchcraft and other serious misdemeanors within the community.

These bowls have been carved with wide rims and recessed interiors, with a mound at the center and a rounded underside, deliberately rendered unstable by the projection of three uneven bosses so that the bowl would tilt easily. In a divination ritual, the bowl would be filled with water, which was poured in over the part of the rim where a gap between the carved images formed a "gateway" or entrance. Once the bowl was filled, maize kernels of different colors would be floated onto the surface, the bowl nudged and tipped to make the water move, and the diviner would then note which images on the rim were touched by the kernels, and which images on the floor of the bowl they sank onto or near.

The images on the rim refer to several different categories within the Venda cosmogony. Among these are the different Venda kin groups (sibs), some identified by their emblem (mutupo), including animals such as the crocodile (ngwena) or elephant (ndou), but also animals said to be "witch-familiars," such as the stoat, the owl and other nocturnal birds, the lightning bird (ndzadzi), and crocodiles, especially those basking in the sun on sand banks. Human agency is represented by abstract shapes: rectangles similar to the forms of Venda divining tablets (thangu), where females are differentiated from males by triangular notches at one end. Females are also represented by circular shapes representing grinding stones. The spirit realm is represented through objects such as spears and hoes, associated with the ancestors, and through figures with one arm, one leg, and one eye (the tshidudwane), who inhabit the sacred waters of Lake Fundudzi, Manaledzi Pool, and Phiphidi Falls.3

However, the full extent of the cosmographic reference only becomes evident once the images on the floor of the bowl are understood. At the center of the floor is a boss or mound, the central hollow of which was filled with powerful substances and originally sealed by a cowrie shell; this mound was called the musanda, the term for the royal capital. To one side of the bowl is a batlike form with a long tail, representing the crocodile in its pool,4 which is associated both with the king (Kosi) and the Venda people's culture hero Thoho ya Ndou, who disappeared into Lake Fundudzi to set up a court (khoro) that mirrors exactly those of the kings on land. The other designs are also associated with the chief: the rectangles with bifurcated legs refer to the king's wives, the hollow circle to the grinding stone, and the round projections to the hearth stones of the capital. The groups of three long triangular shapes refer to the ancestral relics (zwitungula), while the single zigzag is called "the path to the capital," associated with the python (tharu), whose apotropaic qualities and strength are central to much Venda cosmological symbolism. The paired zigzags opposite may refer to lightning, believed to be a favorite weapon used by witches against their enemies, or it may refer to the king's cattle enclosure, which is depicted more clearly on other bowls.

When the bowl is full of water, it represents two interlinked realms in Venda cosmology. It "replicates" the sacred Lake Fundudzi, which, like the bowl, has a visible inlet (from the Mutali River) but whose outlet is subterranean; this lake is both the Venda site of Creation and the realm of the culture hero Thoho ya Ndou. The bowl also "replicates" the royal capital, for in the euphemistic speech of the Venda court the king is referred to as "the crocodile" that "does not leave its pool" (i.e., the capital). Surrounding both realms is a graphic rendering of some of the principal elements that make up the world of the living Venda.

In divination rituals, the bowl was manipulated by the mungoma, a visionary capable of penetrating the spirit world, whose special gifts were recognized and then developed through years of training and experience. The diviner used the bowl to ascribe the cause of death, damage, or bodily harm in suspicious circumstances to a specific human or suprahuman agency. Each bowl must have been to some extent custom-designed for a particular diviner, and may have been passed from one generation to the next. Interpretations must have been fairly fluid. One late nineteenth-century source 5 records a divination session conducted by an ndilo in which an entire community was called to the royal capital and arranged seated in the court in concentric circles around the diviner and his bowl, with members of each mutupo seated together. The seating of the different sibs corresponded to the different sections of the bowl's rim, enabling the diviner to determine the source of the witchcraft when the maize kernels touched one of those sections. A highly dramatized set of questions and answers from the gathered crowd would have heightened the power of the performance.

1. See E. D. Giesseke, "Wahrsagerei bei den BaVenda," Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprache 21, no. 1 (1930), pp. 257–310; Hugh Stayt, The BaVenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931); Nikolaas J. van Warmelo, Contributions Towards Venda History, Religion and Tribal Ritual, Government Ethnological Publications no. 52 (Pretoria, 1932.)

2. Even fewer survive. Some are illustrated in the three sources cited in note 1, above.

3. Most of the information presented here is drawn from my Ph.D. thesis ("The Figurative Woodcarving of the Shona and Venda" [Ph.D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1984]), based on field work done in VhaVenda in the late 1970s.

4. See Anitra Nettleton, "The Crocodile Does Not Leave the Pool: Venda Court Arts," in Anitra Nettleton and William D. Hammond-Tooke, African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township (Johannesburg: A.D. Donker, 1989), pp. 67–83.

5. W. Bartels, "Zwei Zauber Hölster der BaVenda im Transvaal," Verhandlunens: Berliner Gesellschaft für Ethnologie (1896), pp. 109–10.