13 - Explanation and Prediction

Summary

WHEN YOU WALK ALONG A BUSH PATH AND ARE BITTEN BY A SNAKE or twist your ankle on a root, you will not fail to know the immediate reason for your pain. Disbelieving in coincidence, however, you will want to know more than this. Why was it in your path that the snake or root happened to be lying? Why this particular conjunction of cause and effect?

These are the questions that may worry you, for they clearly point to the witchcraft that interrupts the ideal flow of daily life. You will proceed for advice to a diviner: prudently, since if someone's witchcraft has caused you to be bitten by a snake today, what still more dangerous hurt may not await you tomorrow? Consulting his oracle, the diviner will explain that you are the victim of witchcraft either because you have sinned—gone against the rules—or because, though innocent yourself, you have attracted the malice of someone else who has sinned. In either case he will tell you what to do, so as to avert a worse misfortune in the future.

If worse misfortune still befalls you, it will not follow that the diviner was wrong in his prescriptions or advice. He may have been wrong. Everyone knows that some diviners are better than others. Maybe you will think it well to consult two or more of them—provided, of course, that you can raise the necessary fees. But the reason for continued misfortune may also be that you have yourself continued to offend, failed to make adequate amends to indignant ancestors, or broken some other rule that you had overlooked or set aside as unimportant. The system, in short, is a total one. It protects itself against predictive failure.

These attitudes towards misfortune vary from people to people. In some cases they seem to be more consistently developed than in others. Generally, however, Fortes's dictum about the Tallensi holds good for all in varying degree. In African traditional thought ‘everything that happens has material causes and conditions, but [these] are effective only by grace of the mystical agencies which are the ultimate arbiters of nature and society’: the agencies, that is, which are thought of as having given birth to society and shaped its manner of survival.