Isangoma and Ukuthwasa
The Illness That Ordains
- First attested
- 1870Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu, issued in parts at Springvale, Natal between 1868 and 1870, carries the earliest detailed account of the calling in Zulu with facing English: "The condition of a man who is about to be an inyanga is this: At first he is apparently robust; but in process of time he begins to be delicate, not having any real disease, but being very delicate" (p. 259). His note at p. 131 glosses inyanga as a person skilled in any particular matter — inyanga yemiti a doctor of medicines, inyanga yensimbi a smith — and his informants call the diviner isanusi, ibuda or umungoma; isangoma does not appear in the book. Callaway was an Anglican missionary and the record was gathered inside that relation. Harriet Ngubane's Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (Academic Press, 1977), revised from her 1972 Cambridge thesis, is the standard ethnography; Axel-Ivar Berglund, publishing in 1976, found 61 of the 68 diviners he interviewed were women, and each, on his evidence, called only by the shades of his or her own lineage. The clinical record is small and recent. D. J. H. Niehaus and colleagues reported in Psychopathology in 2004 that among 247 Xhosa patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia, 106 had been explained as amafufunyana and 9 as ukuthwasa, and that a family history of schizophrenia was commoner in the ukuthwasa group; the authors suggest, on those nine, that the two labels may correlate with the difference between familial and sporadic cases. Martine van der Zeijst's team worked at Vulindlela in KwaZulu-Natal, publishing an ethnography in Transcultural Psychiatry in 2021 and a three-year follow-up of 42 apprentices in 2022. Both clinical studies are small; the 2004 one is Xhosa, not Zulu.
Psychiatrists followed 42 ukuthwasa apprentices in KwaZulu-Natal for three years: six of the seven who met criteria for a psychotic disorder at the start had no psychiatric diagnosis at the end.
The Zulu diviner, and ukuthwasa — the ancestral calling that arrives as illness and ends in initiation.
Ukuthwasa is how an isangoma is made. The root -thwasa means to emerge for the first time; in Henry Callaway's Zulu texts of 1870 it is the ordinary word for the new moon and the Pleiades' rising. The calling is named for what comes out, not what afflicts. Callaway's informants describe a man who grows delicate with no real disease, turns particular about food, asking not to be given what makes him ill, and dreams of being carried away by a river. It ends not in cure but in initiation under a gobela, months or years. Harriet Ngubane, the first Zulu woman to take a higher degree, wrote the 1977 standard ethnography. Callaway's word for the diviner was inyanga yokubula — inyanga then meant any skilled person, smiths included — so the modern split from isangoma is younger than it looks.
Light
It reads affliction as vocation. The sufferer does not get an old life back but a new one, answerable to the dead and consulted by the living — and, under the 2007 Act, a name in law: diviner, a registrable category. No register has opened yet.
Shadow
South Africa licensed the diviner without unlicensing the divination. The Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957 still makes it an offence to pretend, for gain, to exercise supernatural power or to tell fortunes; the 2007 Act repeals none of it. Repeal was proposed in 2022.