Media, mediums and metaphors: the modern South African sangoma in various texts.

Postel, Gitte

In several Afrikaans and English novels from 1994 onwards, sangomas play a complex and intriguing role; they heal, reconcile, confront, and unsettle. In the same period, South African sangomas have made a renewed public appearance. During the apartheid years, they were bound to practise their profession largely in the dark; laws prevented them from slaughtering in public, and fear of being arrested for what they might say kept them from going into trances. Since 1994, however, new laws have made their performances legal, and new media have put them in the spotlight. An international focus on indigenous knowledge and a national emphasis on cultural regeneration have made room for sangomas in several public spheres. There they have become characters in several, sometimes hardly compatible, narratives, changing when narrators and audiences change. But they themselves are narrators too; they produce their own, often ritual, narratives.

In these interactive processes, as in all kinds of globalising processes, problems have arisen in the reproduction of what Arjun Appadurai called localities: "localised spaces and times with local subjects possessed of the knowledge to reproduce locality" (1996: 181). According to Appadurai, rituals are important means to (re)produce both locality and the local subjects participating in that locality. Locality is more than a geographical or social concept; even seemingly universal or non-cultural concepts like space and time are socialised and localised through rituals. The local subjects, in turn, give meaning to the images provided by these rituals. However, as Appadurai observed, in a changing, globalising society, localities lose the self-evident, seamless coherence between place, time, rituals, media and subjects. These changes may cause frictions and uncertainty, but they also create the possibility of forming new localities. In this paper, I want to explore, without pretending to be comprehensive, whether and how these shifting forces work and can be detected in literary and other narratives, and how these narratives interact with each other.

In 1996 Nicholas Gcaleka, an Eastern Cape sangoma, had a dream. He dreamt that the skull of the last Xhosa king, Hintsa, was in Great Britain and that Hintsa wanted it back. According to Gcaleka, the well-being of the nation depended on Hintsa's being whole again. In the violence- and poverty-stricken Eastern Cape, Gcaleka may have felt the need to create a meaningful locality; bringing back the skull would not only heal Hintsa, it could be turned into a more comprehensive healing ritual that would "usher in an era of peace in a new democratic South Africa" (Lalu 2009: 1). The Xhosa royal house, however, did not want to become part of his narrative and refused their support. Eventually, the Coca-Cola Company bought Gcaleka a ticket to Great Britain, where, visibly enjoying the extensive media attention, he found a human skull on a Scottish farm, brought it back home and presented it to the Xhosa kings. They sent the skull to the University of Cape Town, where DNA analysis established that it probably belonged to a European woman. The royal house refused to acknowledge the skull, and the University kept it in its archives (Bailey 2003; Lalu 2009; Mkhize 2009).

However, the story does not end at this tragi-comic anti-climax. After a few years, the laughing died down. Gcaleka remained convinced that he had brought back the skull of the famous king, and he was not alone (Bailey 2003; Mkhize 2009). Furthermore, he had inspired not only several historians to review historiography and retell the Eastern Cape's history (Bank 1996; Lalu 2009; Mkhize 2009) but also the playwright Brett Bailey to write his famous play iMumbo Jumbo, which was performed in South Africa and Europe (Bailey 2003). Gcaleka's story had emerged in a time when nothing stayed the same anyway, let alone the meaning of a sangoma's story.

Generally speaking, there have been two types of traditional healers in South Africa, the (usually male) inyanga (herbalist) and the (usually female) sangoma (Ngubane 1981). The latter are often seen more as religious practitioners than as 'healers', because their core task is to communicate with the ancestors (Ashforth 2005; Shaw 1990). Griffiths and Cheetham (1982: 960) argued that "the sangoma is a 'healer' because she is a 'priest' and social psychiatrist, sociologist, ecologist, parapsychologist and an intelligent and highly respected member of the community". And this, adds Ashforth, "is all she is only because her roles in law, justice, and government have been limited by more than a century of colonial and apartheid rule" (Ashforth 2005: 53). Unlike the inyangas, sangomas have been initiated into what John Janzen (1992: 1-3) termed the ngoma cult: an ancient set of rules, rituals and practices that is known in the whole southern half of Africa, with the necessary variations. Both sangomas and herbalists engage in divination and herbal treatments, but where inyangas always work alone, sangomas participate in public (or semi-public) rituals within a community of healers, initiates and their families, which involve drumming, singing and dancing as modes of interaction with ancestors and other spirits (Ashforth 2005; Janzen 1992).

Since the turn of the 21st century, sangomas in South Africa have increased in number and penetrated new domains within the landscapes of media, politics and healthcare. While oral media remain important in South Africa, if only because poverty is still widespread (Mushengyezi 2003), in the post-apartheid era African indigenous narratives also seeped into written literature and the narratives of science, television, the Internet and grand-scale national ceremonies, sometimes making use of the fact that modern media events can function perfectly as rituals. This is a process occurring worldwide: as new media technologies become more and more accessible, different media are used to enhance ritual performance, or to make a ritual performance accessible to a wider public. Rituals are recorded and circulated in new contexts and domains, thus creating new identities, audiences and ways of knowing (Dayan and Katz 1988; Ginsburg 1991).

From using new or different media that reach a broader audience, it follows that new localities are being formed, and in this case the most obvious appearances were those in politics and science. In 1987 the medical practitioner and former community leader Ntatho Motlana, who would later become the private physician of Nelson Mandela, addressed a group of medical students at the University of the Witwatersrand. In his speech he did not conceal his contempt for the practice of traditional healing. Traditional healers, he said, were "dangerous people", belonging to the 12th century, who should be dealt with under the provisions of the anti-witchcraft legislation and put into re-education camps. "Above all," he continued, "health care professionals--including psychologists--must stop romanticising the evil depredations of the sangoma" in order to "wean our black (and white) patients from the tyranny of superstition". Later on during the speech he mellowed a little and stated: "Let us first subject indigenous medicine to rigorous scientific examination before there is the beating of drums in the Great Hall of our University" (cited in Ashforth 2005: 149-50). Twelve years later, at the turn of the century, indigenous knowledge systems had become a focus of the World Intellectual Property Organisation of the United Nations and, according to Mongane Wally Serote, then chair of the South African Committee on Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, "the key to the rebirth of the South African nation" (cited in Ashforth 2005: 151). Traditional healers pleaded with the government "to find a way to recognise traditional healing, arguing that there must be a dialogue between traditional healing, the nation and the church" (Traditional Healers Draft Bill 2001: par. 4). On 13 November 2001, a delegation of traditional healers discussed the matter in parliament, and three years later, the first legislation was approved. In the following years, a combination of (traditional) rituals and mass media was used to create new national localities; several national ceremonies organised by the Freedom Park Trust and performed by sangomas and other spiritual leaders were meant to nurture nation-building and cultural regeneration (Freedom Park Trust 2005). Also, in recent years, some political leaders tried to integrate African rituals into political gatherings by asking sangomas to invoke the blessings of the ancestors (Ashforth 2005:220) or to perform cleansing ceremonies in buildings where people had been tortured and killed during the apartheid years. Gcaleka too used the mass media to call on an audience, and he reached it, even if it was probably not the kind of audience he had expected.

In the meantime, the National Research Foundation had put aside R10 million for indigenous knowledge projects, while Serote's committee had concluded from the public hearings conducted around the country that "one of the oldest key institutions of indigenous knowledge systems is traditional healing" (Traditional Healers Draft Bill 2004: par. 3). However, blending science and indigenous knowledge proves to be a difficult task, firstly, because knowledge systems, including science, "tend to take on absolute connotations for the people who believe in them" and therefore are not able to research other knowledge systems in their own right (Van Binsbergen 2003: 8). Secondly, the classification into indigenous and Western knowledge fails because it seeks to separate and fix in time and space knowledge systems that can never be really separated or fixed (Agrawal 1995). Wim van Binsbergen, an established Dutch professor in anthropology, experienced this when, in later life, he was training as a sangoma in Botswana and trying to make his own sangomahood the subject of his research. He wrote: "Inevitably I found myself caught in all sorts of epistemological, social, medical and legal dilemmas." It was only thirteen years after his initiation as a sangoma that he dared admit to himself that he believed his divining sessions generated true knowledge, and went on to prove it with scientific methods (2003: 3). By doing so, he seemed to agree with Agrawal, who stated that knowledge is not exclusively tied to one system; the same knowledge can be classified one way or the other, depending on the interests it serves, the purposes for which it is harnessed, or the manner in which it is generated (Agrawal 1995).

Seen from this point of view, Nicholas Gcaleka may have provided a narrative which was not only meaningful within his own traditional locality, but also beyond. The Xhosa royal house asked for the skull's DNA test and chose to believe the results, but not everybody did. Nomalanga Mkhize (2009) showed that various members of the public questioned the scientists' findings and rather believed Gcaleka's version. Sangomas in the province were reported to have rejected the DNA results: "They said nobody could believe scientists' findings and added that the result was part of a campaign to undermine traditional healing" (Mkhululi Titi, cited in Mkhize 2009: 220). Gcaleka's wife expressed a similar distrust in science when she exclaimed in an interview, "Scientists know nothing. Anyone can work a computer. They can turn [the skull] into a woman's skull if they want to" (Bailey 2003: 99). The distrust is understandable when considering the role white scientists played in not only providing scientific proof for racism, but also in covering up the crimes of the frontier wars, especially when it came to the mutilation of corpses and the trade in human skulls. In this period, in the nineteenth century, a theory was being developed in Europe assuming that certain character traits were located in specific 'organs' within the brain, and that measuring the skull could therefore reveal the character of a person (Bank 1996). The historian Andrew Bank has pointed out that "the Xhosa wars proved a particularly fertile terrain for sowing the seeds of scientific racism", not only because the wars provided the scientists with African skulls but also because the settlers hated the Xhosa so much that they gladly believed the research outcomes. The fact that the form of African skulls differed in general from European ones proved to them that black people were not only less talented in mathematics and music and more inclined to be criminal than white people, but also that they would never be able to live up to the expectations of the Cape liberals. (See Bank 1996: 387-403)

Although Cape liberals in general rejected the theory, even a liberal like Thomas Pringle sent skulls, as data, to his phrenologist friends in Europe. Surgeons, interested in the anatomy of the African, went into the veld to cut off the, in these times, so conveniently available heads. Or they asked the military to bring them back a few skulls from which to obtain data. Bank quotes a member of the British army who had been fighting in one of the frontier wars, writing:

'Doctor A had asked my men to procure for him a few native skulls of both sexes. This task was easily accomplished. One morning they brought back to camp about two dozen heads of various ages. As these were not supposed to be in a presentable state for the doctor's acceptance, the next thing they turned my vat into a cauldron for the removal of superfluous flesh. And there these men sat, gravely smoking their pipes during the live-long night, and stirring round and round the heads in that seething boiler, as though they were cooking black-apple dumplings.' (Bank 1996:401)

The irony of it all is that while the barbarism of black South African warriors was often supported by the depiction of their savage way of fighting wars, the cruelties on the English side were presented as gathering scientific data, which again helped to prove the savageness of the enemy. In other words, the narrative of warfare, in which, at best, both sides did not differ much in brutality and savagery, was turned into the narrative of science, in which the whites were civilised and looking for truth and the blacks were proven to be criminal.

The skull Gcaleka brought back may not scientifically belong to Hintsa, but bearing in mind the desecration of at least hundreds of skulls in that period, that fact becomes an almost insignificant detail, while the scientists' way of presenting only a small portion of reality seems to be all too familiar. Mkhize points out that the central goal of Gcaleka's quest may have been less to reclaim the actual artifact than to reclaim the right to present a black perspective of this South African story. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Mkhize, as a historian, claimed that right. To him, the story of the headless burial of Hintsa, remembered by Gcaleka, emerged "as an indictment of the horrors that accompanied the wars of dispossession" (2009: 221). In this indictment, oral history and African spirituality claim to hold truth, as much as written history and science do; sangomas are not only traditional healers and spiritual experts but also the keepers of the past, and they possess, beside an extensive knowledge of plants and herbs, the skill to attain knowledge by way of dreaming or "seeing" (Van Binsbergen 2003; Hirst 2005: 5). Within this knowledge system, the skull had been proven to be Hintsa's because Gcaleka had dreamt it, and no DNA-test result could alter that. Mkhize was not the only historian to be affected by the event. Premesh Lalu was inspired to write a book called The Deaths of Hintsa, in which he reasoned that in any case Gcaleka did touch on a sore point in science and historiography, not only because hidden truths were revealed, but also because his way of producing history reminds us of the way history is always being produced, namely by making use of a very diffuse mixture of evidence and imagination (2009: 11).

No matter what impact Gcaleka had on historiography, the fact remains that wherever sangomas entered new arenas, it was usually hard to fit them in. In2003 the Traditional Health Practitioners Bill was approved by parliament, and since February 2008 traditional healers have been granted full health-professional status. They are represented by the National Traditional Healers Council, which had the difficult task of setting the standards for professional healing. During this process of formulating the abilities and responsibilities of the traditional healers, it turned out that it was hard to find common ground, if only because spiritual aspects were left aside, because no one knew how to deal with them in this context (Ashforth 2005). Eventually some basic requirements to obtain official status were formulated: a training period of five years, and the ability to recognise, mix and use most of the 5000 indigenous herbs (Maravanyika 2008). However, the law left several matters unresolved, matters that, more often than not, are related to the changing nature and instability of localities. Most South Africans call themselves Christians. Some of them believe that Christianity is at odds with ancestral communication and therefore fiercely object to the public role of sangomas (Ashforth 2005). But even to supporters of African religion, the possibilities and responsibilities of sangomas are not clear. For instance, can sangomas perform rituals outside of their clan base? Nokuzola Mndende, director of the Icamagu Institute, voiced the necessity of a non-fluid, ethnicity-based locality when she questioned the validity of national homecoming ceremonies at Freedom Park, in which sangomas brought back home the spirits of ANC fighters who had died while in exile. According to her, rituals performed there were a farce, because they were performed by sangomas who did not belong to the same clan as the spirits in question. "Believe me, nothing happened to these spirits," she said, "They have not moved an inch" (Mndende 2007). Apparently, for the same reasons, she publicly attacked Philip Kubukeli, president of the Western Cape Traditional Medical Practitioners, Herbalist and Spiritual Healers Association, for initiating white people as sangomas. These initiations were inauthentic according to Mndende, because an initiate "should be called by his or her ancestors, and the ancestors of white people were buried in Europe, not in Africa" (cited in Gophe 2000: par. 8).

Mndende may have believed that localities cannot be stretched at will, that the right people (and their forebears) have to be at the right place and time to make a ritual work; others, however, complained about the opposite. That is to say, they seemed to believe localities can be stretched, and protested against the effect of this stretching. Only recently, the Freedom Park Trust sent sangomas to Zambia, again to fetch the spirits of ANC fighters who had been buried there. A Zambian priest reacted with outrage because, in his view, no one should disturb the dead. The "underworld" activities, as he termed the ceremonies performed by the sangomas, were against God's commandment and would affect the welfare of the Zambian nation (cited in Kalaluka 2009: par. 3). However, not everybody objects to the uncontrollable effects of globalisation. The fact that traditional healers were the ones seeking the dialogue with the church and the government already suggests that they see advantages there. Also, Mndende's statements on white sangomas have been fiercely contested by other sangomas (Gophe 2000; Reid 2007). A well-known and extreme example of someone who believes in the beneficial possibility of expanding borders of localities is Credo Mutwa. The spirit world in which Mutwa claims to be in contact includes extraterrestrials, his audience and readership stretches from China to the United States, and he uses media like print and the Internet to create an intercultural locality. Outside South Africa, he is being introduced to the public as an authentic Zulu prophet, who is willing to share his pure and uncontaminated indigenous wisdom with the world, while within South Africa Mutwa is mostly seen as a fake, an opportunist and a charlatan (Chidester 2004). "But even if he is fake," comparative religion expert David Chidester had to admit after scrutinising Mutwa's career, he can be seen as "an innovator in African folk religion", doing "real religious work" (2004: 83).

So even within South Africa, opinions about the the nature or scope of sangomas' powers, or the source of their knowledge, differ tremendously. Moreover, there seems to be a gap between the sangoma as a practising individual and the concept of sangomahood. According to Ashforth, many people nowadays tend to believe more in the latter than in the former. He also observed that most of the people in Soweto who were initiated as sangomas did not work as healers, they "just drift away from the whole business". Healing is done by inyangas, who can be called anything between witch doctor and sangoma and are "by no means representative of traditional healing as portrayed in the literature or in the imagery of contemporary political discourse. [They are], however, typical of the sorts of healers plying their trade in Soweto and a thousand other places in South Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century" (2005: 61). Although this observation may have resulted from Ashforth's focus on withcraft and urban environments, the gap between theory and practice does seem to exist in all its complexity. Still, in the end, all these different meanings and values attached to the sangoma have become part of the national imagery of sangomahood.

Now let us return to Nicholas Gcaleka. His story did not only enter politics and historiography, but was also paraphrased in theatre and literature. The playwright Brett Bailey was fascinated particularly by the potential healing power of the rituals that accompanied or should have accompanied Gcaleka's quest. Bailey wanted to turn it into a new sort of theatre. To do that, he spoke at length with Gcaleka and other people who had featured in the story, trying to grasp the real meaning and gathering details that would make up an appropriate discourse. Then he went home and fictionalised the story, designing the stage and writing the actors' texts--after which he gave stage and text back to the actors. He wanted his actors to perform the play as actors, without pretending that they were the actual people they were representing, thus diminishing the distance between audience and play by transforming the fictional event into a more or less realistic event: real people in the audience, looking at real people on stage doing their jobs. His cast were people from the townships and the Transkei: sangomas playing sangomas, choir singers playing choir singers, actors playing actors. Moreover, he wanted the play to have a ritual function. iMumbo Jumbo was structured like a ceremony (Bailey 2003). In his workbook Bailey wrote down a quote from Wole Soyinka: "'Ritual drama is the struggle of man against external forces which challenge his efforts to harmonize with his environment (and ancestors).' My performers," he continued

have to believe in the struggle they are going through.... They need to believe that their actions ... have an effect on the world.... Is it possible for actors, like sangomas, to tap into and release deep collective energies, to serve as ferrymen for their audiences to the sacred groves of psyche, according to the character of dramatic ritual?.... I believe it is. (Bailey 2003: 20)

The play was performed, first in Grahamstown, then in Johannesburg, and finally in Cape Town, before the show went overseas. It changed as the venue, the local actors and the public changed. In Grahamstown, it was a sold-out performance in a community hall. In Johannesburg, Bailey (2003) tells us, it lost its rural touch even though he had prevented the stage manager from forbidding the women to perform bare-breasted. Here the critics loved it, but the public was scarce. In the meantime, Bailey worked on a book, The Plays of Miracles and Wonder (2003), which apart from the usual actors' texts and stage directions, contains photographs of rehearsals and performances, and Bailey's own lengthy accounts and evaluations of the making of his plays, complete with workbook scraps. By writing this book, he is, curiously, taking the story into his own hands again. Actor- and audience-centred as the play may have been during its performances, the book reads like a novel about a playwright coming to terms with his being African, with the sangomas performing the necessary rituals on and off stage.

When South African white writers present a sangoma, or someone with similar powers, it is often as an ambiguous figure who displays a bridge-building, healing quality, but also bears an uncanny association with chaos and randomness. To broaden (or narrow) the potential scope of his or her powers, the sangoma character has been, more often than not, isolated within the text from his or her original cultural context to the extent even that the original cultural context of the character is sometimes no longer detectable. (1) In the process, she or he becomes an almost metaphorical catalyst for transformation, and a confronting and sometimes frightening guide for finding a true identity in Africa, also, or even specifically, for white people. This is not a new concept. In 1974 Nadine Gordimer had already introduced a voiceless sangoma to perform this task in The Conservationist (see Postel 2007). In 1975, in Kroniek van Perdepoort, Anna Louw had Oompie Danster perform his trance dance in an under-appreciated attempt to turn things right (see Postel 2006). In both books the sangoma or shaman is performing in the (textual) margin, offering a new reality which is not yet taken on by the audience or the readers. In the past fifteen years sangomas, as literary characters, have become more visible and more outspoken. In Stringetjie Blou Krale (2000), E K M Dido tells the story of a Xhosa girl whose skin was so light that her parents decided to let her grow up as a coloured girl. Later she is plagued by nightmares until her stepmother brings in a sangoma, who performs the task of reconciling her with her family and her ancestors. The sangoma in this narrative is part of Xhosa culture, and in re-establishing the Xhosa identity of the protagonist, she does not so much stand for cultural purity as for the healing power of truth and awareness. Instead of opposing Xhosa culture to modern society, the story shows how tradition can be valued within modern society, thus bridging the gap between separate localities. In Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney (1998) the sangoma character is far more ambiguous: seen through Miss Beatrice's eyes she seems to hold mysterious powers over life and death. Rejecting the life she is bound to live as a white settler's wife in the early 20th century, Miss Beatrice becomes increasingly dependent on Nomsa, who is her maid and a sangoma. Nomsa unsettles Beatrice by throwing her bones on the farm stoep, which is an act of both seeing and narrating (Van Binsbergen 2003) while keeping the unfolding story to herself, leaving Beatrice grappling in the dark. Nomsa knows and determines the future: when Beatrice gives birth to Nomsa's dead husband's child, Nomsa saves the child but then takes it to her own family to be raised there. By stealing her child, she denies Beatrice the right or possibility to take root in Africa, but she does grant this right to her daughter. Malibongwe, on the other hand, the urban sangoma in Peter Merrington's Zebra Crossings (2008), has completely lost the air of uncanniness and obscurity, firstly because the reader can see through his eyes, and secondly because he is as cosmopolitan and eclectic as can be. Even though he is firmly connected to his Xhosa ancestors, Malibongwe does not seem to be specifically part of Xhosa society, neither does he care where his rituals or instruments come from, as long as they do what they have to do, which is fight the spectres of destruction and violence and heal the broken hearts of trees, spirits, people and nations. Thanks to this variety of rituals and clients, a locality is reproduced which is postmodern and fluent, and accessible to everyone.

Thus, in Afrikaans and English literature the power of sangomas to produce (and stretch) a valid locality seems to be recognised and emphasised. Sometimes, as in Eben Venter's Horrelpoot (2006), this power is represented as a power to exclude white people. Probably, however, Venter's sangoma should not be seen as representing the power of the sangomas, but as representing white people's fears of the power of sangomas. More or less the same could be said about Hans Bokpoot, the Bushman shaman in Anna Louw's Vos (1999), a complex figure that is constructed from a mixture of Christian and Khoisan imagery. As in other globalising settings, in all these novels there is no "seamless interaction of localised spaces and times with local subjects possessed of the knowledge to reproduce locality" (Appadurai 1996: 181). More often than not, the sangomas and/or local subjects are displaced, and the subjects lack knowledge. This can result in some form of hesitation or distrust from the side of the protagonists, attributable more to their being morally or practically or psychologically ill-equipped to enter these localities than to an overall idea that the localities are tied to specific local or cultural contexts.

This entering of new localities seems to be exactly what Bailey experimented with, by transposing the rituals he had personally witnessed and experienced and written about to the stage. What he in his book does not tell, probably because it had not happened yet, is that a slight alteration in the last performance of iMumbo Jumbo in Cape Town outraged part of the public. The story was now out of Bailey's hands again and back into the hands of the news media, like Gcaleka's quest had once been. Only this time the media were not concentrating on the ethics concerning the handling of a human skull, but on the ethics concerning the handling of a chicken. During the play, when "Gcaleka" has retrieved the skull he believes to have belonged to Hintsa, the story is put on hold and a scene, called Rites, is performed before "Gcaleka" returns home. On stage are the sangomas, drumming and chanting, "I mourn my father who was killed". They bring on a chicken, which is slaughtered. Until now, the slaughtering had been fake, but not on this last night. Later Bailey wrote:

I did not want this faking in the latest version. I wanted the ceremony to be culturally accurate. Our resident hen, Veronica, was brought on stage every night, blessed by the sangomas who performed the ceremony, and then returned to her crate. Yet where all other ceremonial details were strictly adhered to, this felt phony. The sacrifice of the hen on Saturday night ... had to be done: the last performance had to be real. (Bailey 2003b)

The public was not amused. iMumbo Jumbo was played in the Baxter theatre, a comfortable, mainstream theatre and very different from the initial venue in Grahamstown. The audience was predominantly white. Judith Rudakoff, who was present in the audience, observed that people started leaving the theatre when the chicken was being blessed. She went on to say, "When it becomes clear the animal has been killed, the people exiting become less polite. Some are in tears, some are speaking quite loudly; though it is difficult to hear what they are saying through the drums and the chanting, it's obvious they are angry and upset" (2004: 85). About thirty people left the theatre, and angry phone calls were coming in even before the play had ended.

"Drama can be like ritual," Bailey wrote philosophically: "an event that incorporates everybody involved--performers and audiences--affecting everybody present at profound levels of consciousness.... A theatrical work can serve as a source of intensely positive (or disturbing) energy" (2003: 19). But as it turned out, it is still another thing to perform actual rituals on stage. Most of the resentment of the public seemed to concentrate on the suffering of the chicken, but, as Rudakoff observed, the crucial point might be that people feel disrespected or even endangered if they are forced to witness a ritual without their knowledge, or consent, or full understanding (2004: 86). As Bailey said, drama, as a ritual event, can create this locality within the four walls of the theatre, and for as long as the play is on stage. But Bailey's ritual, performed by real sangomas, accompanied by real ritual songs, and actualised by the real death of a chicken, which opened up the channels to the realm of the ancestors, may have done more than that. Just as the Zambian priest protested against being drawn into a non-Christian locality by rituals performed by South African sangomas in Zambia, the audience may have protested against being caught in a locality that extended well beyond the walls of the theatre.

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Note

(1.) See Slams in Etienne van Heerden's Toorberg (1986). Phineas's wife in Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974) is a nameless immigrant. Oompie Danster in Anna Louw's Kroniek van Perdepoort (1975) is sent away when he starts dancing. Nomsa in Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney (1998) is a Xhosa sangoma, but she is married to a Khoisan husband and physically isolated from her cultural community. The sangoma in Eben Venter's Horrelpoot (2006) is living alone in the hills. Malibongwe in Peter Merrington's Zebra Crossings (2008) is Xhosa, but only in name.