Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets

Chapter 3. Adulthood

3 Adulthood When a newborn lipele is ritually initiated into divination, it becomes an oracle. An adult lipele is a personified basket, a basket endowed with agency, cognitive skills, and psychological traits. From the perspective of the diviner whose basket becomes an oracle, however, the lipele is much more than an awe-inspiring person who stands at the core of sociocultural life in south Central Africa. Basket divination is part of who the diviner is. It would not be far fetched to describe the lipele as a prolongation of his body, as Marx does the working tool. Because the product of divination is ancestral knowledge, for which diviners charge high prices, the stage of adulthood brings us back to the role of commoditization in basket divination through the back door. After all, commoditization does play an important role in basket divination. The commodity , however, is not the lipele itself but the product of its labor—ancestral knowledge. I never saw Sakutemba’s new lipele at work. In line with my core methodology , I had intended to follow the cultural biography of Sakutemba’s lipele into the stage of adulthood, but timing and communication difficulties got in our way, and, before long, my fieldwork had come to an end. I do know, however, that Sakutemba’s lipele attracted many clients from near and far. In , when I visited him again, he projected a new aura of success. I noticed that he had cared to purchase an expensive carrying basket for his lipele, and I was given the opportunity to meet several of his relatives who had meanwhile settled in his village. Now noticeably less concerned with disclosing his Angolan origins, Sakutemba described his neighbors as relatives from Angola who had barely escaped with their lives the latest upsurge of violence in the border region. The Angolan government troops were now pushing the Adulthood 83 UNITA forces eastward, determined to win the civil war in combat since the failure of the  Lusaka Peace Accord. Missing the stage of adulthood in the cultural biography of Sakutemba’s lipele, however, was not without consequences: if not Sakutemba and his lipele, then what diviner and adult lipele could I feature in this chapter? In retrospect, I came to realize that my fieldwork mischance turned out to be a boon in disguise. Because the biographical approach to material things had led me to focus on the oracles and their respective owners, who would summon me on occasion to attend séances, I rarely knew the consulters and was ignorant of their predicaments, a lacuna that complicated my understanding of the divinatory speech. My fieldwork mischance enabled me to consider the clients’ perspective. Basket divination, as Knut Graw puts it, has a defining “consultational quality” (:). During the biographical stages of birth and initiation, previously described, the diviners and their baskets are the main focus of attention and the main goal of ritual action; during the stage of adulthood, however, they recede from awareness and become the means to an end—the revelation of knowledge. For this reason, and because, as mentioned, I never saw Sakutemba’s lipele at work, this chapter deals with an adult lipele that belongs to a diviner chosen by his client, a young Luvale man named Chinyama. The divination session I attended offered a unique opportunity: I knew well the consulters’ party and the details of their predicament, which facilitated my comprehension of the divinatory speech; and I knew Mutondo, the selected diviner, whose older brother, village headman and professional senior (mukulwane) was no one less than diviner Sanjamba. I also hoped that by participating in the séance as a member of the consulters’ party I would be able to overcome the reluctance on the part of diviners, men sharply aware of their profession’s value for both insiders and outsiders, to allow unrestricted recording of their work. This reluctance, compounded by their fear to talk because of their political vulnerability as refugees, proved to be the major obstacle of my fieldwork. Antecedents In the dry season of , Chinyama’s son, Chuki, fell ill in Chitokoloki. Chuki’s maternal relatives had consulted two different doctors (one from the mission hospital, and the other a traditional doctor who had diagnosed children ’s epilepsy), both of whom had failed to cure Chuki. Then, in a moment 84 Chapter 3 of weakness, Chinyama committed adultery with his mother-in-law’s younger sister...