Pepo
Pepo ( Swahili , "Wind", plural pepo or mapepo even sheitani, Shetani of Arabic Shaitan ) is the generic term for a group obsession triggering ghost in the culture of Swahili on the East African coast in Kenya and Tanzania . The wandering pepo, predominantly considered to be malicious, infest women in particular and trigger diseases, against which a healing ritual lasting several days is usually carried out. First a fortune teller / healer determines the name of the spirit. The spirit expresses itself in its language through the mouth of the possessed patient and thereby reveals itself. Subsequently, he can be appeased or driven away in a dance ceremony ( ngoma ) tailored to his needs . In addition, hereditary pepo are described that are benevolent and act as guardian spirits.
Pepo , the number of which is indefinitely large, are considered Islamic , Christian or unbelieving and belong to different ethnic groups. Together with other groups of spirits, they form a complex world of otherworldly powers that have arisen from a mixture of Islamic beliefs and African ancestral cults . The worship of most pepo spirit groups is part of the widespread idea in Africa of obsession with foreign spirits.
Word meaning
The names for the phenomena of the spirit world come from the Arabic language or the Bantu language Swahili. An Arabic name implies a historical connection with Arabic traders on the coast, a spirit being with a Bantu-language name is of African origin. With this in mind, the otherwise identical benevolent spirit can be addressed in Arabic as Ruhani or in Bantu as pepo .
Swahili pepo or upepo is translated as "wind", the word combination pepo inavuma or pepo zinavuma means "the wind blows". The verb –pepa is connected with pepo , which means “to stagger (like a drunk)”, “to stagger”; also –pepea, "(like a candlelight) flicker", "flutter", "flow", "fly with the wind". As a causative verb, –pepa means “to blow a fire with a fan”, for example in pepo inapepea, “the wind blows (something) away”. The noun upepeo stands for a large fan and upepe for lightning. Kipepeo can mean fan or butterfly, in Mombasa also popo means "butterfly", whereas popo otherwise stands for "bat". A large number of different spirits are passed down on the island of Pemba , including a spirit called Popobawa ("bat wing"), who became internationally known as a modern legend . The connection between wind and spirit becomes clear in the formulations: kupunga upepo , “to fan the wind (oneself)”, and kupunga pepo, which means in the context of the possession ceremony , “drive out the spirit by wagging a cow's tail over the patient's head becomes". Pepo can mean a good spirit ( pepo mzuri ) or an evil demon ( pepo mbaya ) in Tanzania .
Peponi means "with the spirits" and refers to the otherworld of spirits. The old Swahili word became a term for the Islamic faith in East Africa. In the Islamic context, pepo - with the place peponi - means paradise (Arabic janna ) into which the chosen believers will arrive. In that light-flooded wide land, people will live in golden palaces, surrounded by beautiful trees, flowers and rivers in which honey flows. Everyone will perform ritual prayer ( salāt ) together five times a day .
Cultural environment
In the African context, obsession means that a spirit or an alien personality has entered a person and has completely taken over the control of his organism and his psyche. This happens while the person is falling into a state of trance or ecstasy . His own consciousness is switched off during this time. A distinction is made whether the mind is limited to exercising control over people ( spirit possession ) or whether the meaning of the phenomenon is based essentially on the idea that the mind comes into contact with other people via the possessed person ( spirit mediumship ). In the second case it is usually a religious cult and the person possessed serves as a link ( medium ) between the local world and the world of spirits. In particular, the ancestral chiefs of the clan should be asked for help and asked for positive influence. Probably the most important group of the media attribute their obsession with these ancestral spirits of the tribal leaders. Fortune tellers also occasionally justify their activity with their obsession with a special divination spirit. The geographic center of the obsession cults of the Bantu ethnic groups in southern Africa is Zimbabwe . The tribal media of the southern Bantu are in close cultural connection with the media of the Baganda in the northern intermediate lake area .
According to excavations, there was an Islamic community on the Kenyan island of Lamu in the 8th century . In several places on the coast there were mosques made of massive stone walls in the 11th century. The East African coast is one of the regions in which Islam in Africa already gained a foothold in early Islamic times. Islam is generally in an exchange and competitive relationship with the African religions , which tend to be pushed back. This gave rise to syncretistic cults, which also include the cults of obsession cultivated in Islamized societies. These are generally tolerated by the majority of moderate Muslims as long as they do not exercise political influence.
By the 19th century, the Swahili, strengthened by immigrants from Oman and other Arab countries, had taken over economic leadership through the slave and sea trade and had become the ruling social class. An ethnic identity of the Swahili emerged on the coast, which elevated their “cosmopolitan, civilized” culture above the “backwoods, backward” lifestyle of the African farmers and cattle herders in the interior. The simplest definition of the pluralistic Swahili society made up of Arabs and African ethnic groups is the common language Swahili, a Bantu language with a considerable Arabic vocabulary, and the cultivation of its own, Islamic-syncretistic culture. This includes worshiping Islamic saints and African ancestors. The spirit world of the Swahili is populated according to a possible classification of Islamic, malevolent jinn (Arabic, majini ), ancestral spirits (Swahili, koma ), nature spirits (Swahili, mizimu ) and benevolent protective spirits ( pepo ). Far above all and only accessible through the mediation of the ancestral spirits, the Swahili God ( Mungu ), the Creator ( Muumba ) , is enthroned in the cosmogony . Men and innumerable spirits live under the all-ruling God. The ancestral spirits ( koma ) carry messages from the ancestors to their living descendants at some times when they receive gifts ( sadaka, ritual for maintaining harmony) and offerings ( kafara, ritual as a cleansing atonement).
Obsession in women and men
The Swahili pepo cult is related to other African obsession cults . As with these, predominantly women are ghost possessed. A typical obsession cult practiced by women within Islam is the tsar cult in Egypt and Sudan. The Czar spirits as pepo construed as an invisible wind spirits. Other Islamic obsession cults include Bori and Dodo among the Hausa in northern Nigeria, Holey among the Songhai in Mali, Stambali in Tunisia, and Derdeba in Morocco. A specialty are the cult around the deity Nya in the south of Mali and the cult of the Hamajas around the female spirit Aisha Qandisha , which are practically only possessed by men. Mashawe in Zambia and Vimbuza in Malawi are among the numerous obsession cults within Christianity in southern Africa, most of which are women . According to the British anthropologist Ioan M. Lewis (1971), a distinction is made between “peripheral”, i.e. subcultural obsession as a disease (typically cults of lower-class women in male-dominated societies, such as Tsar , in Somalia saar ) and a “central religion of obsession”, the social Serves high-ranking men to maintain their position of power ( Nya in Mali). Obsession cults can be classified between these two social positions, the classification being shaped by the different perspectives of the social groups.
For several years in which he observed pepo cults, Hans Koritschoner (1936) found , with one exception, only women who were possessed at the dance ceremony ( ngoma ). Those affected did not give any reasons for this. He suspects two possible causes of the high rate of female possession as a suggestive power of tradition and a stronger tendency to hysterical reactions in women. Beginning psychological deviations are generally understood as ugonjwa ya sheitani ("illness caused by a spirit"). Mental illnesses are treated in the same way as physical ones, which means that the sick person is neither blamed nor feared. In Luanda (Angola), according to a report from 1958 (the term “hysteria”, from ancient Greek “womb”), the burdensome role of motherhood, which represents a mythically uncertain phase, is additionally pointed out. This explanatory pattern is put into perspective by the observation that many of the obsession cults cultivated by women in Africa only emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries in cities and / or in areas with a strong influx of foreign groups, which suggests a connection with the social changes during the colonial period indicates.
Ioan M. Lewis (1966) mentions a study on the difference between the Valley Tonga and the Plateau Tonga in southern Africa. Among the Plateau Tonga women and men had been integrated into the modern market economy since the 1930s, they had equal opportunities to work on site during the colonial period, ghost obsession ( masabe ) was rare and when it did occur, it was about the same in both sexes. This is not the case with the Valley Tonga, where men were forced to migrate to work and women who stayed behind were excluded from modern cultural life in the cities. By fleeing into the widespread obsession, the marginalized women obtained leverage to demand a material share of the modern world in the form of clothes and luxurious food from the men. This interpretation of a female obsession arising from a social conflict between men and women ("gender war"), which is often cited for the tsar cult, is countered by Peter J. Wilson (1967) with a thesis that obsession is more of a consequence of conflicts, Competition and jealousy within members of the same sex. None of the proposed reasons are free from the point of view of the European observer. The ultimately still open clarification of the causes of the obsession with pepo spirits, which predominantly occurs in women, affects the question of the possible spread of obsession with foreign spirits. Beatrix Heintze (1970) notes a relationship between tsar in the Horn of Africa , pepo and the ghost cults of Ronga speakers in Mozambique, and believes that female obsession with foreign spirits is likely to spread south along the East African coast. As evidence, Heintze cites a frame drum with string tension, which women beat in trance dances in some regions in southern Africa , which is likely to be of Arab origin. Arab women typically accompany their chants with frame drums (cf. daira ), which are also used in the tsar cult and in the pepo cult for the group of kiarabu spirits. Ralph Skene (1917) names the Swahili frame drum with the Arabic name tari (from tār ).
Alien spirits
Pepo spirits are largely foreign spirits. In addition to revered tribal spirits, spirits of activity (which make certain occupational groups obsessed), indifferent or malicious, ordinary spirits of the dead, family and district spirits, foreign spirits form a separate group of spirits that do not originate from their own tradition, but have been adopted by other ethnic groups. In addition to the Swahili area, foreign spirits occur particularly in the Horn of Africa ( tsar, saar ) in Zimbabwe and Angola . In the West African Togo are specifically Tchamba - cult in the south of the country worshiped spirits of slaves coming from the foreign Islamic north.
The foreign spirits are usually characterized in Swahili and elsewhere by a certain food corresponding to them, which they receive as an offering, and by suitable clothing and attributes that the possessed person wears in the dance ritual. In rare cases, the spirits receive food that has nothing to do with their ethnic group. In the Mwila area in the southwestern Angolan province of Huíla, for example, the spirits of the coal sellers who traded with the Europeans during the colonial period were given "squirrels and dogs" as food, that is, those possessed by these spirits drank the blood of these animals during the ritual. Own spirits of the Nhaneca-Humbe in Angola received eggs and sugar, although neither is consumed by these ethnic groups. In addition to several ethnic groups in south-west Angola, the Chokwe and their neighbors in north-east Angola, in neighboring areas of the Congo and in Zambia, practice intense cults of obsession with foreign spirits. The new mahamba of the Luvale have been obsessing women in particular in a kinship system based on matrilinearity since the 1920s . The Baluba in the Congo have known a European spirit since the 20th century. The shave cult is widespread in Zimbabwe . The foreign spirits among the shave include Europeans ( varungu ) and Mozambicans ( mazungu ).
The obsession cults on the Rovuma , which forms the border between Mozambique and Tanzania, are related to the pepo cults. The methods of the healer ( fundi ) with incense ( ovumba ) and the patient's trance dance are similar. The possessed spirits, including the Makonde living there , are considered malicious and are distinguished from the good ancestral spirits. The most demanding malicious spirit is called msungo , wears a military uniform and a rifle and needs particularly elaborate rituals.
Among the Taita in the county of the same name in southeastern Kenya, the pepo cult is more commonly known as saka . Grace Harris (1957) found up to half of Taita married women at least occasionally possessed by a saka spirit. The therapy follows the pattern of the pepo ceremony. The patient is treated with incense and takes part in drum dances at regular intervals, as the spirit cannot be finally driven out. As elsewhere, women with their obsession demand consumer goods from men that they would otherwise not receive (special clothes, cigarettes, things of European origin). With the Maasai , symptoms of illness that have existed for a long time and certain treatment methods are assigned to the previously unknown concept of possession introduced by the coast. The general Swahili word for spirit, pepo , was in their language Maa to embepo (fem.) And olpepo (mask.). Spirit obsession appeared among the Maasai for the first time in the early 1890s, when most of all cattle perished in the devastating rinderpest and around two thirds of the population died. The surviving Maasai were forced to come into contact with settled Bantu arable farmers outside their settlement area, by whom they were culturally influenced.
Swahili possessed spirits
Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–1881) described in Journeys in East Africa carried out in the years 1837–1855 (published in 1858) as one of the first Europeans a pepo dance ritual in which he immediately identified the evil spirit pepo as the devil against the he, the missionary, needs a steadfastness that only offers him “a special power from above”. Without his God, he would not be able to “stand firm against the dark forces in this hellish atmosphere”. Apparently the strange ritual made such a strong impression on him that he felt the danger of being overwhelmed by what was happening instead of opposing it with his missionary speech.
Colonial reports about pepo in German East Africa have been available since the end of the 19th century (especially Carl Velten , 1903; Raph Skene, 1917). The more precise ethnographic descriptions since the 1970s were initially predominantly case studies that referred to individual towns and villages on the northern Tanzanian and southern Kenyan coasts, treated the subject of possession only marginally and did not always produce generally transferable results. Ann Caplan (1975) made a distinction between two cults of possession on the island of Mafia , a sheitani cult of the lower class, which was strictly rejected as "African" and originating from the interior of the country by Orthodox Muslims, and a jini cult assigned to the coastal region by women of different social classes which seemed rather tolerable from the Muslim side. Linda L. Giles conducted field research from 1982 to 1984. Her research focuses on Mombasa and the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar .
According to their own identity determination, the Swahili initially divide their spirit world according to religious standards into Islamic spirits ( kiislamu ) and un-Islamic spirits ( kafiri, from Arabic kāfir , "unbelievers"). When viewed on a social level, the latter are degraded to kishenzi (Swahili “uncivilized”, “wild”). Geographically, the spirits on the coast ( pwani ) and the spirits in the interior ( bara ) face each other. The further subdivision of the spirits reflects certain ethnicities and population groups in the human world from the point of view of the Swahili. Just as the human community is divided into ethnic groups (Swahili kabila , plural makabila , from Arabic qabīla, " tribe "), the spirit world consists of comparable makabila . East African ethnic groups who do not belong to the Swahili classify their spirit world differently. According to the quantitative data collection by Linda L. Giles (1999), who questioned possessed media about "their spirits", the Swahili, within the spirit world belonging to the coast, distinguish the group of at least 42 Arab spirits ( kiarabu ) from at least 46 spirits on the island of Pemba ( kipemba ). The kiarabu group also includes the Somali spirits ( kisomali ). Most of the media stated that they were possessed by both groups of ghosts; if only one group was possessed, it was predominantly kiarabu ghosts.
In addition to these two main groups, the Mijikenda of Mombasa know the kinyika and the Maasai know the kimasai as smaller groups of ghosts. In Zanzibar City , Malagasy - Comorian ( kibuki ) and Ethiopian spirits ( habeshia ) are mentioned. In her study from 2008, Kjersti Larsen focuses on the lively kibuki cult of Zanzibar City. On Pemba, the spirits of the Shambaa ( kishambaa ), an ethnic group living in the Usambara mountains , and the Nyamwezi ( kinyamwezi ) form further groups.
Helene Basu (2005) summarizes the spirits for the island of Zanzibar in four classes according to social and geographical origin: The masheitani ya Ruhani (plural) are Arab spirits (corresponding to the group kiarabu ), which stand for Islam and civilization. The opposite pole is the masheitani ya rubamba . These are African spirits from mainland East Africa and from the island of Pemba, associated with disbelief, savagery and witchcraft. Masheitani ya habisha (also habeshia ) are Christian Ethiopian spirits, of which there are kings and slaves. The fourth group therefore consists of the masheitani ya kibuki from Madagascar and the Comoros, which always appear in pairs . Although the spirits are divided according to the ethnic categories that predominate in the population, the followers of the cult communities do not consist of the respective ethnic groups.
Kiarabu ghosts
The group of Islamic kiarabu spirits belonging to the coastal region ( pwani ) is considered by the Swahili to be particularly powerful. Ceremonies are held for them in Arabic and the spirits speak (through the mouth of the medium) Arabic. Most Swahili have memorized some Arabic religious texts but cannot converse in Arabic. Linda L. Giles (1999) mentions outside listeners (including a linguist) who noticed that the possessed expressed themselves during the trance with a language competence that they do not have in everyday life. Already in 1917 Ralph Skene stated more critically that the possessed spoke ordinary Swahili, but due to their stressful situation with a nervous, high-pitched voice that was interspersed with inarticulate sounds. By way of explanation, the healers claim that the possessed speak an ancient form of language that only they can understand.
Dealing with kiarabu spirits is difficult, as their power can be useful as well as harmful. Kiarabu spirits, which can also be embodied in people outside of the cults of possession, are assigned to the jinn ( jini, plural majini ) occurring in the Koran according to Islamic understanding . According to Islamic tradition, the jinn, when they are evil, embody the resistance to the rule of Allah and are then regarded as Shaitan ( scheitani, plural masheitani, Satan) who is subordinate to Iblīs (the devil). Djinn who are helpful to humans, however, are subject to the prophet Sulayman , who received power over them from God. Such submissive jinn remove all difficulties for their master, as it says in sura 34 : 12. Not all characterizations of the jinn in the Swahili tradition are laid out in the Koran. On the East African coast, the harmful jinns are not assigned to Iblis and the linguistic distinction between harmful ( sheitani ) and helpful spirits ( jini ) is often dispensed with on Zanzibar. According to the understanding of the cult followers ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī , the founder of the Qādirīya Suf brotherhood, and members of the Sultan's family belong to the masheitani ya Ruhani . Ritual leaders (Swahili fundi ) discuss controversial questions of right belief, including the questions of which spirits were created by Allah and what influence spirits exert on the actions of people.
According to their nature, kiarabu spirits belong to the urban elite and are presented as educated, modern and well-groomed. Those possessed by them wear white clothes and a white turban, prayer chains ( misbaha ) and amulets with Kor claims during the ritual . Her preferred scent is incense sticks with rosewood ( Aniba rosaeodora, Swahili udi ), followed by rose water ( marashi ), which is splashed on clothing and in the room. Kiarabu spirits like to drink kombe, a magical drink made from the ink of copies of the Koran. They would like to receive small offerings on a silver platter ( upatu ), while food and drinks (fruits, nuts, sugar loafs , halva , Arabic coffee) are best placed on a larger metal tray ( sinia ). If musical instruments are used in the ritual, then only a frame drum ( tari, name in an Islamic context).
In a broader sense, kiarabu not only denotes the regional jinn, but all spirits of North African-Middle Eastern origin for which Islamic ceremonies ( dhikri ) have to be held. This broader criterion includes ghosts that came to the Sultanate of Zanzibar with traders and slaves over the past centuries . These include Islamic as well as Christian spirits of the Nubians , Somali , Oromo and Habescha from the Horn of Africa , the Bū-Saʿīd dynasty in Oman and also spirits of the Bedouins ( bedui ). Of these spirits, only the Somali spirits play a role, especially in the ritual communities of Mombasa. The strange spirits require special rituals if they are perceived as kiarabu and not more like African spirits.
Bara ghosts
The African spirits from the interior of the country represent the opposite of the kiarabu spirits in every respect . They are uncivilized, incredulous and impure, which is evident from the black or red clothing used during the ritual. Instead of a Koranic amulet, fly whiskers ( mibwisho ) belong to their insignia. Musical instruments are drums (large single-headed drums), possibly gongs and rattles . As a medicine, they do not drink rose water, but rather a juice made from native plants and roots. They have a foul smell, which is why the smoke from mafusho , a different mixture of plants and herbs that are otherwise used in naturopathy , is sufficient for incense instead of rosewood . The sacrificial foods are commonplace (corn, millet, milk), repulsive and unclean; Bara spirits receive a pombe (millet beer) to drink . The less powerful bara spirits are invoked with non-Islamic dance ceremonies ( ngoma ) instead of Islamic dhikri ceremonies .
The bara primarily include the Maasai and Nyamwezi ghosts because these peoples were actively involved in the East African caravan and slave trade , ghosts of enslaved peoples from the Congo Basin and - to show the disdain for this group - ghosts of wild animals, Cattle and donkeys. The wickedness of the bara spirits is expressed in the wild, uncoordinated dance movements in the rituals, which also contain elements of African initiations . The individual types express themselves in the language of their origin.
Kipemba ghosts
The island of Pemba is regarded as the stronghold of spirits on the East African coast and the kipemba category ( masheitani ya rubamba ) is at the center of the Swahili spirit world, creating an identity. On Pemba they are considered to be the native spirits, from there they are said to have spread along the coast a long time ago. The spirits speak Swahili in the dialect of the coast. Their ritual is non-Islamic ( ngoma ). Detached from the dominant Islamic culture of the cities, the African element of Swahili society comes to the fore in the cult of the kipemba spirits. The tricolor of the kipemba - black, red and white - symbolizes the connection between African (black, red) and Islamic elements (white). In the Tanga region , the possessed wear a tri-colored turban and shirts and trousers. In addition to the fly whisk of the bara spirits, other objects serve as insignia, including roughly worked pieces of wood and corals. The spirits like sweet floral fragrances and at the same time their African temperament bad smells, which corresponds to a combination of rosewood incense sticks and bad-smelling incense ( uvumba ). The offerings consist of flowers, fruits (bananas), honey, sugar cane, betel nuts , raw eggs, flowers and, in smaller quantities, fine edibles according to the offerings to the kiarabu spirits, which are presented on a wooden bowl. Overall, the cult contains known, "civilized" and "uncivilized" elements from the other ghost categories. The instrumentation of the accompanying music with the bowling oboe nzumari (language related to mizmar ), the metal plate upatu struck with a palm leaf rib and drums is unique .
The kipemba spirits reside on the seashore, mostly in caves or on trees that function as shrines ( panga ) for communication with the spirits. At the panga not only the possessed spirits are worshiped, but also guardian spirits, who are asked in rituals by the village community for a rich harvest or other support. In the understanding of the believers, who also differentiate the homesteads of the spirits into Islamic and un-Islamic, the panga are considered purely Islamic. The healing effect in the kipemba cult is not based on the ingestion of Koranic texts (as a drink kombe ), but on natural medicinal herbs such as those used by non-Islamic healers against witchcraft ( uchawi ) and black magic ( ulowa ).
More ghost categories
Kinyika spirits belong to the Swahili culture of the coast, but have their roots in inland Africa and therefore have bara properties. They are common throughout the Swahili area, but most are assigned to the Mijikenda on the Kenyan coast, who have close cultural and economic ties with the Swahili. The spirit world of the Mijikenda consists of ancestral spirits ( makoma ) and malevolent spirits ( mapepo ). The former are good in principle as long as the right rituals are performed for them, the latter bring mental and physical illnesses and must be driven out. For the Swahili, the spirits of the Mijikenda are considered un-Islamic and uncivilized. Irrespective of the fact that the Digo and other subgroups of the Mijikenda have converted to Islam, Swahili pejoratively refer to them as “Nyika”, which means “bushland”. The spirits like incense sticks ( ubani ) made of gum arabic , other incense and herbal medicine. Because they are un-Islamic, they receive palm wine as a food offering . Their impurity comes to the fore when they ask for rats for food. The power of the kinyika spirits is small, but many cult followers feel obsessed with them. As a sign of the close relationship between Swahili and Mijikenda, in the ngoma ceremonies, those possessed by kinyika and kipemba spirits often dance in the style of the other group.
The ghost types mentioned so far can be assigned to the opposite poles Islamic ( kiislami ), coast ( pwani ) - un-Islamic ( kafiri ), inland ( bara ). There are also spirits to which these categories are not applicable. The Ethiopian spirits ( habeshia ) belong to the tsar cult, which concubines of noble Ethiopian origin brought with them to the palaces of the Omani rulers and simple Ethiopian female slaves to the dependent lower class of Zanzibar. On the two very different levels of society, the move Habeshia -Geister. In the first place in the ritual are the well-groomed, noble spirits of the nobles, who are separated from the slave spirits. With the first multi-party elections in 1995 in Zanzibar and the power loss of the Omani-upper class, the cult went Habeshia -Geister back.
The cult of the kibuki spirits introduced by Madagascar and the Comoros contains an approximate reminder of the spirit world of the Malagasy Sakalava kingdoms. The kibuki spirits are considered neither Islamic nor African. They are European types with a penchant for imported alcohol and other European consumer goods, as well as for dance music with the accordion ( gorodo ) popular in Madagascar . With these properties they correspond to the spirits ( tromba ) occurring in the Christian environment in Malagasy possession ceremonies . Throughout Madagascar, the word tromba summarily denotes obsessional spirits that have been mentioned in European and Arab travelogues since the 16th century. Since Roman Catholic missionaries were the first and most successfully to spread their religion in Madagascar, the majority of the kibuki spirits are regarded as French Catholic priests. Compared to the well-groomed kiarabu and habeshia spirits, they are rowdy , loud and arrogant. Historically, the kibuki cult is not associated with the Omani rulers, to whom it expresses a social contrast.
The kizungu spirits are a marginal phenomenon of European colonial rule . Mzungu (plural wazungu ) is a "white European", kizungu means "assigned to a (rich) white person". This type of ghost is rare today , German ghosts were imagined in the area of the former colony of German East Africa (Tanzanian mainland), and British ghosts throughout East Africa. The kizungi spirit cult includes European food (biscuits, cakes, toast, white bread, alcohol, soft drinks, cigars and cigarettes), clothing typical of the colonial era, including pith helmets and military items such as wooden toy guns and models of airplanes and ships. According to the Europeans' demeanor at that time, the spirits appear powerful, authoritarian and coarse, especially the Germans.
Healing ceremony
If a ghost is diagnosed as the cause of a disease, treatment is carried out in two stages. First, the type and name of the ghost must be found out so that it can be honored in a subsequent dance ceremony. In 1917, the British administrative officer of the northern Kenyan district of Lamu, Ralph Skene, described the ghosts pepo or jin of the Swahilis and Arabs on the coast as partly harmless and partly malicious and obsessive, which in his opinion mainly causes a disturbance of the nervous system in women. Skene observed obsessional cults with dance festivals ( ngoma ) in which different drum rhythms could cause ecstasy or immobilization of the patient. Ngoma generally refers to group dances with music and dance competitions. The soothsayer / healer finds out the "ethnicity" of the spirit through the language with which he expresses himself through the mouth of the possessed person. Each pepo within a ghost group has a proper name, which corresponds to a common proper name in the respective human ethnicity. Apart from regional variations, the professional healers are roughly half male and half female. The healer recognizes the language and is the only one who understands the ancient expression. If the pepo does not reveal himself to the healer through the patient (mostly women), another healer has to be found whose level of experience this pepo belongs to.
At the beginning of the subsequent treatment, the healer tries to elicit the statement (through the patient's mouth) from the mind as to what kind of sacrifice he wants so that he is ready to leave her body. In order to get this statement (from the patient's mouth), each healer uses his own recipe of active plant ingredients in a dance ceremony, which are boiled in a water pot. The patient breathes in the medicine vapor with her head hanging over the boiling vessel and completely wrapped in a cloth. The procedure in which the mind should rise into the patient's head is carried out twice a day for one to one and a half hours for several days. This type of medicine is widely used in Swahili culture and is not limited to obsessional cults. Swahili dawa (plural madawa , "medicine") is derived from Arabic dawāʾ (plural adwiya , "remedy", "drug", any substance that affects the body). Dawa is also one of the methods ( uganga , "witchcraft") of the other magical healers (generally mganga, plural waganga , in other Bantu languages nganga ). Swahili mganga goes back to the Arabic word al-maqanqa , with which al-Idrisi referred to the spiritual healers of Malindi in the 12th century , who could have made poisonous snakes harmless with their magical powers.
The cloth that covers the head or the entire body of the patient is a feature of female initiation rites among the Bantu. At the wedding, the bride is sometimes hidden under a cloth, sometimes the son-in-law and mother-in-law are covered with a cloth. Because the cloth in the form of a cowhide is also used at the initiation of a medium (such as the ordination as a rain priest among the Karanga, a Shona language group), it can be understood as a symbol of death and rebirth, like the action itself. Steam baths occur particularly in the pepo cult, they are also widespread among the southern Bantu and are used by healers especially for fevers, colds and other complaints. Also healer of Yao spokesman in Malawi treat from a Masoka -Geist obsessed with steam baths.
If the healer suspects an Islamic spirit, he leaves out the pot and instead writes some of the nicknames of Allah on a wooden board with an aqueous solution of camphor , musk and saffron . The writing is then rinsed with a small amount of the same liquid into a cup, which the patient drinks. Now the price negotiation between the healer, patient and their relatives begins about the costs of the drum players that may be required as well as about the food for the dancers and the guests who are present during the dance ceremony lasting several days. The patient's husband buys the clothes the pepo wants for her .
Ralph Skene lists the names of twelve groups of ghosts that were known in Malindi at the time , including kipemba (from Pemba), kiarabu (Arabs), kisomali (Somali, Muslim), kinubi (only active further south in Kilifi County , Muslim), kihabshi ( Ethiopians, inactive at the time), kiynika (benign, causing at most a headache or cold, not obsession), kigalla ("Galla", derogatory for Oromo) and kisanye (expressed in Dahalo language, otherwise like kigalla ).
In a ceremony for pepo ya kigalla, the steam treatment lasts up to seven days. By then at the latest, the pepo should have spoken. This is followed by a seven-day dance festival, before the beginning of which the patient is dressed in a white hip scarf and a white shirt. At ngoma ya pepo , women usually dance to the accompaniment of the almost always male drummers. In the morning and in the evening, two to three-hour dance ceremonies take place in a room in which only the dancers, drummers, patients and the healer are allowed to stay. Usually on the third day the spirit begins to make itself felt in the patient. With shrugging shoulders to the rhythm of the drums, the patient slowly rises from her seat and joins the dancers. In between the offerings are made and various ritual acts are carried out. Only on the last day, when the patient is considered to be as good as cured, does the company go outside to dance. The ritual for the kipemba spirits lasts eleven days, for other spirits it is shorter. During the treatment, the wishes of the mind expressed in the first part of the ritual are fulfilled, which is intended to calm the mind and encourage it to leave the patient. The usual animal sacrifice is a goat, whose blood the spirit (or patient) gets to drink. Blood is considered the seat of the soul and contains the life force. For a medium, drinking blood at the end of an initiation can mean an alliance with a spirit. There is no connection between drinking blood as food, as occurs in the interior (cattle blood among the Maasai ) and in rituals of possession. The ritual drinking of blood in southern Africa is limited to the east coast and the immediate hinterland and corresponds to the spread of the tsar and pepo cults and the Angolan cults of possession there.
Some dance rituals include - according to the wish of the spirit - that the patient should ride a goat or a cattle on one of the last days. With the conclusion of the ngoma dance ceremony, the spirit has not finally disappeared from the patient, which is why the people afflicted by the same spirit generally remain connected to one another in an emergency community. The healing is incomplete. This allows the person who has become ill through a ghost, i.e. through no fault of their own, to claim further treatment.
In addition to the practice described by Ralph Skene (1917), Linda L. Giles (1987) points out a difference: the division of labor between one healer for the first and another healer for the second part of the ceremony. According to Giles, the diagnosis is made by a healer / fortune teller ( mganga or fundi ) or a special Islamic fortune teller ( mwalimu, plural walimu, Swahili "teacher"). The fortune teller only in some cases carries out the subsequent dance ceremony himself, mostly he sends the patient on to a suitable healer. The mind need only be cast out if it is found malevolent or useless. Otherwise the aim is to achieve an understanding between the spirit and the sick person. If it is an obsessive mind, an attempt is often made to move the mind to a regular residence in the person (in the patient and sometimes also in the healer), so that the person becomes the “chair” (Swahili kiti ) of the mind. The "chair" in Swahili imagery corresponds in other cults of possession to the idea of the possessed as a "horse" on which the spirit rides. If the participants have come to the conclusion that the spirit will regularly take possession of the person in the future, they agree to have a sacrificial ceremony for the spirit at least once a year (plate with food and incense sticks, plus an animal sacrifice) or a form of multi-day, to organize elaborate and expensive dance ceremony.
Social position of the cults of possession
Through the identification of the spirit and the subsequent dance ceremony, the possessed has become an initiated , full member of the cult. The cult member ( mtege or mteje, plural watege or wateje ) should regularly attend the events of the cult group and dance ceremonies of other possessed. Perhaps the spirit indicates that the cult member is called to assume a higher position within the group and to become a healer. In addition to having knowledge and skills ( fundi means “qualified person”, “expert”), the person concerned should regularly contribute to the costs of the events if he wants to be recognized as a healer. A professional healer and fortune teller owns his own medicine collection, which he keeps in a bag ( mkoba, plural mikoba ). Once the healer has achieved this status, he can treat patients himself and, after a while, gather a cult group around him. The healer can get his magical and clairvoyant abilities from one of the benevolent spirits, also known as guardian spirits.
Obsession with a guardian spirit is sometimes inherited, as Carl Velten (1903) describes. The parents say to their son-in-law:
- “Your wife inherited the pepo from her grandmother, and it is he who is now making her sick. When she was still little, we let her grandmother's pepo go into her head and said to the pepo : 'Take care of the upbringing and growth of this child, later, when she has a husband, we will give you your hollow ( with gifts). The grandmother has now died, and since the pepo wants his hollow, he sticks to her granddaughter. "
If the man listens to the words of his parents-in-law and says: "'My wife really has a pepo, I want to drive him out' ( ku-punga ), then the old people are very happy ..." otherwise they would make him curmudgeon call. Velten continues with the description of the seven-day steam treatment. By “hollow”, Velten means a depression on the ground in the hut built especially for the ceremony, in which the offerings are spread out.
Among the Swahili on the coast, a minority - according to Giles (1987) - is practicing cults of obsession. It is difficult for outsiders to judge how large the number of active cult participants is. The participants belong to all ethnic groups and all social classes; this applies to both simple participants and recognized healers. Giles interviewed two female healers from educated Islamic families whose sons or brothers also participated in obsessional cults. One of the healers had previously given Koran lessons. In Zanzibar City, members of the upper class (Omani), consisting of Arabs and Swahili, cultivated the cults of possession of the Ethiopian ( kihabeshia ) and Malagasy spirits ( kibuki ). The habeshia cult was formerly practiced by members of the sultan's family with pompous ceremonies. The kibuki cult in Zanzibar City is mainly practiced by women and also by unmarried male homosexuals, Kjersti Larsen (2008) interprets it for the men involved as an expression of the gender identity of a marginal group in society. Kibuki also requires expensive ceremonies, often funded by rich women from the Middle East, especially Oman, who go to Zanzibar specifically for their treatment. Conversely, well-known fortune tellers / healers travel regularly to their customers in Oman.
Unlike the tsar cult, which is marginalized in Egypt and Sudan , in East Africa there is considerable overlap between the beliefs of Orthodox Islam and the cults of possession. Djinn are mentioned in the Koran, so Muslims generally recognize the existence of spirits, only the handling of them is not clearly regulated and some of the forms of the spirit cult practiced by some consider others to be shirk . According to a study published in 2010, Swahili Muslim clergymen are divided on whether or not the Quran prohibits all forms of magical practices. Of the 60 respondents, 53 percent answered yes and 45 percent no. 45 percent thought that Islam differentiates between good and bad magic . That fortune-telling, whether permissible or not, exists in principle, is read from Sura 2 : 102. When asked directly whether Islam allows fortune-telling, all respondents, contrary to the information given, replied with no, because they associate the word fortune-telling with superstitions with which they do not want to have anything to do.
In Swahili culture, fortune-telling is not, like black magic and witchcraft according to the general Islamic tradition, the work of fallen jinn, but the help of benevolent guardian spirits for humans. Fortune tellers / healers ( waganga ) who work in the Islamic context are called waganga wa kitabu ("healers of the book"). The other healers are called waganga wa pepo ( waganga wa sheitani ) and their methods are considered “African”, even if they differ only slightly. The Qur'anic healers ( walimu ) use similar methods to perform possession rituals and make sacrifices while reciting Quranic verses. Only the initiation of the patient into the cult union with the ngoma drum and dance ceremony distinguishes the waganga wa pepo from the waganga wa kitabu . The Koranic healers have their own very powerful possessed spirits of the Islamic category Ruhani . These are among the most common ghosts that cause obsession. In Mombasa, cult groups that treat Ruhani spirits with Islamic dhikri ceremonies operate alongside cult groups that perform ngoma ceremonies for other spirits with drums and dance .
Publications from the late 19th and early 20th centuries describe obsessional cults as widespread on the East African coast. In contrast, studies from the end of the 20th century reported a general decline in cults. One reason that affects the island of Pemba in particular is the impoverishment of the simple rural population, who have difficulty financing the luxury goods requested as offerings from some spirits and the total cost of the ceremony. At the same time, belief in ghosts is declining. Exceptions are the kibuki cult that is still alive in Zanzibar City and other cults in some large cities such as Mombasa, Tanga and Wete on the island of Pemba. The trend towards urbanization of the ghost cults is explained by the better degree of organization of the urban population, the easier availability of the required consumer goods and props and a higher tendency in the cities to form socio-cultural niches.
literature
- Esha Faki, EM Kasiera, OMJ Nandi: The belief and practice of divination among the Swahili Muslims in Mombasa district, Kenya. In: International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 2 (9), November 2010, pp. 213-223
- Linda L. Giles: Possession Cults on the Swahili Coast: A Re-Examination of Theories of Marginality. In: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 57, No. 2, 1987, pp. 234-258
- Linda L. Giles: Sociocultural Change and Spirit Possession on the Swahili Coast of East Africa. In: Anthropological Quarterly , Vol. 68, No. 2 ( Possession and Social Change in Eastern Africa ) April 1995, pp. 89-106
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Web links
- Alix Haber: Djinn and Tonic. A Study of Health and Healing in Coastal Kenya. (Bachelor thesis) Wesleyan University, April 2011
Individual evidence
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