Information request: Ngombo - Cesto de adivinhação - Divination Basket (Angola/Tshokwe)

Vincenzo Cammarata Discussion

Hi everyone,

I am currently searching for some specific information about the Tshokwe divination basket (ngombe) and I have found plenty of material regarding the contents and the meanings related to the objects, animal parts and plants (mainly seeds) within the above basket, thanks to the works of several scholars, such as Areia and Bastin, among others.

However, I have not been able to find the exact materials used to make the actual basket. I know they are made with fibers taken from plants but I would like to know the names of those plants so I can develop my research and see if there is any connection with the sacred trees and plants of the Tshokwe tradition.

Can anyone give some hints or recommend some text about the preparation of the actual basket and not its contents?

Thank you very much in advance.

Vincenzo

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Check out Sonia Silva's Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets (Penn Press, 2011).

I'd also recommended posting an enquiry via H-AfrArts.

I may be reading too much into V. Cammarata's phrasing of his initial query in terms of a standardized composition of the baskets, but I wanted to caution against approaching this otherwise well-conceived research in these terms. Objects, or rather compositions, like these are the ad hoc assemblages of the diviners' practices, retaining and reading what they (and their audiences) perceive to have worked. Thus they are distinguishingly idiosyncratic compositions of collective experiences, and hence products of context(s) as well as the diviners' initiatives, assemblages of experiences as well as of objects as their residuals - as one Angolan once explained to me, "like the ashes of a fire", elegantly capturing the animacy of things that to us seem inert. They are thus profoundly historical "documents", archives in themselves, for those involved, evocative of what's shared. If you aren't already "in the know", you'll never know, even with explanation, which is cognitive rather than existential. Our absence is why, to us, they are merely objects. A quest for stable meanings inherent in them is unlikely to capture their intimately human dynamics.

I have not read Sónia Silva's book, which she modestly notes here, but all about it that I find in the usual digital places runs precisely along the lines I urge as likely to be productive.