#tswapong

Witchcraft or sorcery, as far as I am concerned, is ... a temporally and spatially changing form of language. In Africa its closest kin is music. Like popular music (High Life, Sukus, Juju, etc.), popular paintings from the Bini or other convents and the slums of Lagos and Kinshasa, or the vibrant Key to Success titles in the so-called Onitsha Market Literature, sorcery constantly changes forms and instruments, but the content remains whatever misery or joy the individual or community might be experiencing at a particular time. Like music, painting, or literature, sorcery is an art of the soul, at once personal and social.

Among Tswapong in east-central Botswana, divination séances have ... come to be important occasions for elites and their fellow villagers, sometimes requiring them to travel great distances. They may meet for consultations remote from home or nearby, as suits the concern. The scale of the occasion, like the reach of the salient affairs, varies considerably from the most intimate and personal to the most public and communal. The reputation of some Tswapong wisdom diviners, especially in the Tswapong Hills at the center of Sedimo, a famous oracular cult that includes a few of the diviners, among others, is so great that they attract strangers as clients from cities and hinterlands hundreds of miles away across Botswana's international borders, but the same wisdom diviners also serve their immediate neighbors in personal or village séances.