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1 Birth I wished from the start to work closely with Sanjamba, a senior diviner renowned for his wisdom, boldness, and wealth. He headed a populous and prosperous village; had several wives and many children; owned cattle and two big houses with glass windows; and among his smaller possessions he counted a sling reclining chair, a radio, a bicycle, and an oxcart newly painted in bright blue, reading on one side: Kumona Njamba (Seeing the elephant), a shorthand for the Luvale proverb Kumona njamba kwenda (Only he who travels sees the elephant). His praise name was Kufumana chaPawa Mwiza Kuchimbachila Ngimbu (The Fame of the Pawa Fruit Fools People to Carry an Axe) because he was as renowned and as likely to bewilder his visitors as the blue, shrub-growing pawa fruit, which, because of its fame, misleads people into thinking that it grows on a large tree. Aware of his might, Sanjamba rejoiced in displaying his practicing license as a registered diviner. It was not so much that this document ratified Sanjamba’s Zambian identification card, which the Traditional Healers and Practitioners Association had used to determine his Zambian citizenship, important as this always is for a refugee; rather, his license represented the official recognition of a skill acquired in Angola and so integral a part of his identity. As for working with Sanjamba, it never materialized. Again and again, research-bound, I would peddle thirteen kilometers of sandy terrain to Sanjamba ’s village in Chilyakawa, only to discover that Sanjamba was absent, wished to postpone the meeting, or could only talk for a short while. Sanjamba excelled at hiding information that later, on a whim, he offered freely. I had hoped to work closely with Sanjamba; in the end, however, the first person to draw my attention to the biography of the lipele was not even a diviner. Birth 19 The Fisherman’s Lesson I first met Kakoma on  February . Roy Mbundu, my first research assistant, and I had walked all the way to his village, hoping to meet his daughter Alice. She was known in the area as the skilled basket maker who in her childhood had fallen into an open fire. No sooner had we sat down to watch Alice coiling a flour basket than Kakoma picked up a stool and joined us beneath the mango tree. He introduced himself to us as the headman (chilolo) of that village. He said that although he was a fisherman rather than a basket maker (some men also make baskets), he was an old man who had seen and learned many things in life; if I was interested, before leaving in March for the fishing camps on the Kashiji River, he would teach me the Luvale tradition. Kakoma thus began describing in very lucid and gripping terms various details about basketry. Before long, knowing of my interest in basket divination , he smoothly shifted the conversation in that direction by connecting the weaving of baskets for the storage of food to the weaving of baskets for divining. He explained that a coiled basket used to store flour and a coiled basket used to divine are very different. The first one is narrow and deep; the second is wide and shallow. Although many women can make flour baskets, only those past childbearing age are allowed to weave divination baskets. Making and delivering an ordinary basket are straightforward processes, but that is not the case with a lipele. Then, in a narrative style common among diviners, Kakoma began to explain how a man who lives an ordinary life one day becomes a diviner. A divination basket is not created the day someone announces, “I’ll receive an oracle and become a diviner.” Oh no. First, a man falls sick and his relatives go to a diviner to consult his lipele. The diviner tells them that a deceased relative of theirs owned a lipele while he was alive, and that he now wishes to see it back in the village. The deceased relative is afflicting his descendant in the form of a spirit named Kayongo , because he wants him to fill the divination basket again. So his maternal relatives go and give a deposit to the diviner who will fill and animate the new oracle. This diviner asks them, “Have you kept the oracle that belonged to your late relative?” If they respond that it was buried together with him, he goes on to tell them to commission a new one. To begin...

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