This section is basedon a paper presented at the Satterthwaite colloquium on African Religion,20-23 April 1991.
Suàgànames a set of ritual-oaths and masquerading cults, see Zeitlyn 1990b.
Sadly the debate about the significanceof ancestors and how they should be represented quickly decayed intoarguments about definitions and the best translation of individualwords. See Kopytoff's original paper in Africa and the correspondencein Man following Calhoun's response: Kopytoff 1971, 1981,1982;Fortes 1981; Calhoun 1980,1981,1983.
The principal form of Mambila divinationis performed with spiders or land crabs (a single term, nggam,is used for divination, divination spider and crab).
The extent to which this is an adaptationin response to Christian and Islamic teachings is extremely moot.
This is consistent with Horton'sConversion Hypothesis: that a high god cult develops as a result ofcloser involvement with the wider world (Horton 1971, 1975).
This closely resembles the Kalabarinotion of "tamuno" (Horton, 1970) althoughit should be remembered that the Mambila language lacks genders soone cannot ascribe a gender to Càng.
Some examples are described by deSurgy 1983, Buhan & Kange Essiben 1986 and Onwuejeogwu 1981.
The idea of tying corpses to ladderssuggest the practise of "corpse-carrying" (the divinatoryrite practised by some Ghanaian groups in order to discover the witchresponsible for the death) but so far my questions on this point havenot gained any response.
Both they and gourd trumpets arecalled kùrùm.
For example, at the suàgà-oathtaken at Sonkolong in November 1986 to establish peace between Somiéand Sonkolong.
Nggwun is the wardancewhich accompanies the installation of a new chief. It is repeatedevery two years when the Chief repeats his oath of office.
The lom rite isalso held to have had similar effects. Lom is nowdefunct, so data about it is hearsay. It appears to have been a masqueradesociety, possibly recruited through illness.
The clearest evidence for this arethe land tenure maps produced by Jean Hurault after his field tripto the Mambila Plateau in 1988. Mambilla hold the titles to verylittle land indeed.
Is this so different from Mbeereexposure in the bush?
E.g. From the Metropolitan Museumof Art, New York (Gebauer Collection) photo 347#2 shows a cloth wrappabeing worn at kati dance; photo 79#23 commercialloin cloth worn by player of tawong or tungflute. Gilbert Schneider photographed a funeral in Warwar in theearly 1950's (soon before Rehfisch did his fieldwork) at whichcloth was being worn.
