BIBLICAL BRIEFS 150
In Acts 16:16 we read about a spirit of divination which Paul delivered a maid-servant from. It is called “the spirit of the python”. South-Africans grew up with this type of witchcraft as part of an integrating culture – coming from the Black culture, they became comfortable with the witchdoctor or sangoma; from the Indian culture they accepted occult happenings and sometimes they called upon Mohammedans when they were bewitched; from the English culture they were taught how to hold séances and to call up the dead. When the Afrikaners’ ancestors landed here from Europe and South-east Asia, they were not a uniform pious group of proto- Dutch Reformed Church attenders. They carried in themselves a myriad of occult beliefs and witchcraft practices. Those ethnic beliefs were cherished, passed on again, adapted to such an extent, that it stayed alive and were practised among Afrikaners from the Cape to the Lowveld 300 years later. Church reports from the 19th century do not confirm the present-day myth that all the old Afrikaners were pious; on the contrary, the church was at wit’s end regarding a nation’s indifference to the church, who (even when they per chance did attend the church) involved themselves with all kinds of ghosts and beliefs in seers. And when Afrikaners became urbanised and modernised during the 20th century, they merely adapted the rural occult traditions to a modern world by subjecting those to an imported, almost scientifically accurate method. Thus, Afrikaans Spiritism was born. Just how acceptable something like e.g. bone-throwing (“dolosse”) became, can be seen in aspects of the high and low cultural functions. The fact that the great Afrikaans poet D.J. Opperman, named one of his volumes of poetry Dolosse, brought a higher-grade legitimacy to this primitive form of soothsaying. (Opperman was exposed to his father, a well-known and far-famed protagonist for spiritualism.) But in the low cultural function, Glenyss Lynn’s popular hit Ramaja from the seventies, made soothsaying/bone-throwing a household term. Leon Schuster’s movie, Mr. Bones, with a white sangoma throwing bones, joyfully conquered the people and established a positive, association with plenty of goodwill towards this practice. General Mzwandile Petros, former Gauteng chief of police, had a personal sangoma who threw dem bones and then got convulsions if her “own Tokkelossie’s” (her boss) life is endangered! Consequently, the appearance of this is legitimised on government level. On the rugby field, where sangomas do rituals and throw bones in order to gain favour from the forefathers for the Amabokkabokka, it is collectively made acceptable “in the spirit of nation- building”. That which is deliberately established as good and acceptable practice in the South-African psyche, has its roots deeply in shamanism. I am quoting from a website on demonic witchcraft: “Shamans use altered states of consciousness to contact spirits which can be either good or bad in order to learn the future, make decisions, or attempt healings of people who might be oppressed by bad spirits. Shamanism uses spirit guides, contacting these guides in order to have them direct your life. Shamans use astral projection, where the spirit of a person leaves the body and travels into the spirit world, and various means of predicting the future such as throwing bones.” Research by Ingo Lambrecht found that 84 percent of the South African population e.g. visit a bone-thrower more than three times a year. It is calculated that there are more than 200 000 practising sangomas or traditional healers in South Africa. Lev. 20:27 clearly states the strict Biblical point of view with regard to these activities: “And if there be a man or a woman in whom is a spirit of Python or of divination, they shall certainly be put to death …” Of course this should not be done, but it underlines the seriousness not to dabble with these things. We surely do not need any bone-thrower or soothsayer or fortune-teller or sangoma in any facet of our Christian walk.
Dr Tom Gouws
