The Sangomas

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No one studies for it. The qualification arrives as a wasting — weeks of dreams that will not resolve into ordinary sleep, a restlessness that empties the appetite, an illness the clinics can neither name nor cure. In the Zulu world that sickness has a reading, and the reading is not disease. It is a summons. The dead of a person’s own line have settled on that person, and the wasting will not lift until the one who is called stops resisting and begins to learn. The isangoma is the specialist whose entrance examination is set by the ancestors, and whose first sign of fitness for the office is being made unwell by it.

The name, the drum, and the record

The isangoma (plural izangoma) is the diviner of the Zulu world — the one through whom the amadlozi, the ancestral shades, are held to speak. The office is named for its instrument. The root is ngoma, the isiZulu word for the drum, and lexicographers and linguists read isa-ngoma as “person of the drum” or “the one who does ngoma” — the drumming and the dance being the means by which the shades are summoned into the charged air of a ceremony. The name fixes the diviner to a sound, and the sound to a purpose: not music for its own sake but a call across the line that separates the living from their dead.

The isangoma is not the inyanga, and the distinction is exact. The inyanga (plural izinyanga) is the herbalist-healer, whose competence lies in the medicines of root, bark, bulb and animal substance, and who is not, in the strict sense, called to the work by the ancestors. As the record puts it plainly, the inyanga is concerned mainly with medicines while the isangoma relies primarily on divination. Diviner and herbalist are two vocations, entered by two different roads — the one by ancestral summons, the other by instruction and apprenticeship in the properties of plants. One person may in practice hold both, and many do; but the roles do not collapse into each other, and keeping them apart is the first thing an outsider must learn about the Zulu healing world.

How old the diviner’s office is cannot be read cleanly off the sources. Within the tradition it is very old, native to the amaZulu and to the wider Nguni world of southeastern Africa, and older than the kingdom that Shaka kaSenzangakhona consolidated in the years around 1816 to 1828. Whether the cult of the diviner took its later shape before that consolidation or was reworked under the kingdom is a genuinely open question, and it cannot be settled from the written record, because the written record begins late and begins inside a colonial encounter. What survives from before that encounter is the living practice itself, carried in households and lineages that never passed through a book to endure.

The first sustained written account is a missionary’s. Henry Callaway (1817–1890), an English physician who took orders in the Church of England and settled in Natal in the 1850s, compiled Zulu religious testimony from named informants in their own words. His compilation, The Religious System of the Amazulu, appeared in parts between 1868 and 1870 in four sections — on uNkulunkulu the First Being, on the ancestral shades, on divination, and on the workers of harm. The third of these, issued in 1870 under the title Izinyanga Zokubula; or, Divination, as existing among the Amazulu, in their own words, is the classic early record of the diviner’s calling and practice. It has to be read for what it is: a document made inside the missionary encounter, its questions shaped by what the mission carried in, its testimony gathered from people who felt that pressure and answered at cross-purposes. That is not a defect so much as a caution. What Callaway’s informants did not invent, and could not have, is the shape they agreed on when they spoke of the diviner — the sickness that calls, the long training, the sight that must be proven.

The twentieth century worked the same ground more carefully. A.T. Bryant, writing early in the century, recorded the diviners of an older Zululand. The mid-century ethnographers extended and corrected the record: Eileen Jensen Krige’s 1936 survey gave the office its social map; Axel-Ivar Berglund, who grew up in Zululand and returned to it as an anthropologist, worked from the diviners’ own testimony in Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (1976); and it was Harriet Ngubane’s Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (1977), written from inside the culture, that made the diviner central to a whole account of health and illness. The knowledge of the office rests jointly on three things kept distinct: the living tradition and the diviners themselves; that primary record read critically; and this body of scholarship. The izangoma are a living institution, and the account of them is present-tense.

Five izangoma at an umgido (ceremony) in Zululand, wearing the beaded regalia and animal skins of their office. Wizzy, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The calling and the office

The vocation is not chosen; it is imposed. The ancestors summon a person through the ukuthwasa, the calling-sickness, which the tradition also names as the ubizo, the call, and links to the idlozi, the shade that has settled on the one it wants. It comes as dreams, illness, insomnia, loss of appetite and a withdrawal from ordinary life — a suffering read not as pathology to be cured but as a spiritual condition to be answered. The tradition holds that to refuse is to let the sickness deepen: the ancestors do not withdraw their claim, and the only path back to health runs through submission to it. The calling is thus a kind of affliction that heals only by being obeyed, and the person it takes becomes the person it makes.

The answer is a long apprenticeship. The one who has been called becomes an ithwasa (also ithwasane), a trainee, and places herself under a senior diviner, the gobela, who is at once teacher, sponsor and guardian through the passage. The training runs, by the accounts, for anywhere between a number of months and several years. Its content belongs to the closed knowledge of the calling and is not a thing set down as instruction; what the record notes of it is its temper — a schooling in humility before the shades, in listening, in the discipline of a person being remade into an instrument. At its close comes a graduation before the community, in which the initiate must demonstrate the sight the office requires by finding sacred objects that have been hidden from her, proving that she can perceive what lies beyond the reach of ordinary eyes. Among the objects she must find is the inflated gall-bladder of the goat slaughtered for the occasion — a detail that carries directly into the diviner’s insignia.

Once graduated, the isangoma divines through the shades. The work is done in dreams, in the reading of omens, and by the throwing of the bones, the amathambo — a set of objects cast and read for the message the ancestors return through them. All of this is treated only at the distance of the public record, never as a manual: the how of divination, like the how of the ukuthwasa training and the making of any medicine, is closed knowledge, and what can honestly be said of it from outside is what it is for, not how it is done. What it is for is plain enough. The isangoma is consulted whenever illness, misfortune or an unaccountable turn of events falls on a household, because it is the diviner who can name the cause — whether the displeasure of a neglected shade, a ritual impurity, or human ill-will — and so tell a family what has gone wrong and what is owed. Sickness in this world is rarely only a fact of the body; it is a message with a sender, and the diviner is the one trained to read who sent it. That is why the diviner is called before the herbalist is: the inyanga can treat a complaint, but it is the isangoma who says what the complaint means and where it began.

The diviner is marked, visibly, by the office. The insignia are read here at the same descriptive distance: white beads and beaded wigs, white being the color of the ancestral and spirit realm in the Zulu scheme; animal skins; and, tied into the hair at the back of the head, the inflated gall-bladder of the goat sacrificed at graduation, worn as a sign of the ancestral contact the diviner has made and is said to keep the ancestors near. The regalia announces the wearer as one who stands where the living and the dead can be brought within hearing of each other.

And the office is carried, decisively, by women. The pattern is old and well attested. Bryant, writing in 1917, recorded that on the order of ninety percent of Zulu diviners were women; Berglund, gathering testimony in Zululand in the third quarter of the century, found that sixty-one of the sixty-eight diviners he interviewed were women. The scholarship reads the preponderance as more than a social accident. Ngubane, herself Zulu, tied the calling to the woman’s place in the movement between the living and the dead — it is through a woman, she argued, that the passage of spiritual beings into the family is made, and this is why the mediators of the shades are mainly women. The isangoma is the mouth of the ancestors, and in the Zulu world that mouth is most often a woman’s.

Reception and the living present

Under the kingdom that the amaZulu built in the early nineteenth century, the diviner was a figure of real public weight, and among the diviner’s older functions was one the colonial order would later suppress by statute: the naming of hidden ill-doers — the pointing-out, in a public setting, of those held responsible for a community’s misfortune. It belongs to the historical register, set down soberly as a documented office of the past and without endorsement; the colonial administrations that followed criminalized the practice, and the law under which the diviners lived for the next century was framed as a suppression of witchcraft. That the same office could name a wrongdoer and heal a household was not a contradiction within the tradition, where misfortune, sickness and human malice are read as parts of one fabric; it became a problem only when a foreign law drew a line through the middle of it.

The colonial encounter reframed the diviner twice over, and both reframings were misreadings. The first was a name. Outsiders fixed on the diviners the slur “witch-doctor” — a phrase that fused the diviner with the very worker of harm she is called to expose, and that told colonial readers to see fraud or menace where the tradition sees a called and authorized healer. The label is a misnaming and is worth naming as one: the isangoma is a diviner-healer of the ancestors, not the sinister figure the term conjures, and the distinction from the inyanga, the herbalist, is not one the slur can hold. The second reframing was of the whole system. In the same missionary current that recast uNkulunkulu for the mission Bible, the diviner’s world was read down as superstition, a thing to be corrected rather than understood — and Callaway’s own testimony of 1868 to 1870, for all that it preserved, was itself a product of that encounter and carries its pressures. Both readings the record now corrects.

Through the apartheid decades the izangoma practiced under witchcraft-suppression law and social stigma, largely outside any official recognition. That has decisively shifted. The Traditional Health Practitioners Act 22 of 2007, published in Government Gazette No. 30660 on 10 January 2008, recognizes traditional health practitioners in South African law and names four categories: the diviner (isangoma), the herbalist (inyanga), the traditional birth attendant, and the traditional surgeon. It establishes a statutory Council to register and govern the professions; an interim Council was constituted, and the Act’s core provisions on the Council and on registration took effect on 1 May 2014. The office that mediates the ancestors is now a registered profession under statute — the isangoma and the inyanga each named in law, and each kept legally distinct, as the tradition has always kept them.

The scale of the healing world the statute governs is large. South Africa is estimated to have on the order of two hundred thousand traditional healers, against a far smaller cohort of some twenty-five thousand biomedically trained doctors. How much of the population consults them is harder to state than it is often stated. A figure of eighty percent is widely repeated, but it does not survive scrutiny: fact-checkers have traced the claim to an unsourced assertion in a book of the early 1980s and found no data behind it, while national household surveys that ask which provider a family would consult first return figures far below that — a small minority naming a traditional healer as the first port of call, the great majority naming a public clinic or hospital. What is not in doubt is that traditional healing occupies a real and central place in South African life; the exact proportions are simply less settled than the round numbers suggest.

One further matter belongs to the record and is kept to a single line. The so-called “muthi murder” — killing for body parts believed to strengthen a preparation — is a crime that traditional healers and the South African state alike publicly condemn as distinct from, and abhorrent to, traditional healing, and it is named here only at that legal register and no further.

The scholarship that framed the diviner in the twentieth century — Callaway read critically, then Krige, Berglund and Ngubane — remains the frame for reading the institution now, and what it described has not gone away. The sickness that calls still arrives unbidden; the training under a gobela still runs its months and years; the graduate still finds the hidden objects and takes up the beads and the skins. What has changed is the standing of the office in the country around it: from a practice the colonial law suppressed and the colonial vocabulary maligned, to a profession named and registered in statute — the izangoma today a living calling at the center of Zulu religious life, women foremost among them, still the mouths through which the dead of a household are heard.

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