White Sangomas: the manifestation of Bantu forms of shamanic calling among whites in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa is one of some few countries where sizeable communities of black and white people live together which have preserved their distinct cultures. Other than in the Americas, South Africa has a black majority with the Bantu African languages and cultural institutions largely preserved – and it has the most marked history of segregation. Thus few elements of Bantu cultures have been adopted by white South Africans. Yet in recent years a core element of Bantu culture, the shamanism and mediumism of the “Sangomas”, has begun to manifest itself among whites in South Africa – in the characteristic forms of such “calling”. Interestingly this has not happened by “cultural learning” in significant cases. This requires a different model of explanation. In this essay Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphogenetic fields” will be applied to this phenomenon and its implications considered.