The Mayeyi people are a breakway grouping of the Wayeyi people of the Okavango Delta. They are known to tourists who visit Botswana as the people who make their livelihoods in the swamps themselves and are characteristic of their use of mokoros, canoes dug out from the trunk of a sausage tree.

Between the late 1950s and 1969 the Mayeyi were forcibly removed from the Linyanti marshes so that they could be better administered by the then South West African Government. As a result, the Mayeyi, a once water-bound semi hunter-gather and small scale agricultural people were forced into the dryland north of hte marshes and had to take up the practice of pastoralism. Like many groups in Africa, the Mayeyi, an impoverished people, find themselves struggling between the disjuncture of tradition and modernity.

Part of the internal struggle to comprehend and make sense of the world and its injustices can be seen through the lens of witchcraft and spirit possession belief. These practices not only make sense of the world, an often confusing and contradictory place, but enable people to engage with the world in an imaginative manner.

 

The course of my research between 2002 and 2006 covered 6 months of living with the Mayeyi near Sangwali Village. During this time I attended a number of all-nigh-drummings, exhaustive affairs where specially trained traditional healers (shamans) engaged with the spirit world in oreder to restore balance in the 'real' lived in world. During these drummings numerous participants would fall into trance, walk through burning frames, or ingest red-hot coals without any seeming pain (or after effects such as scarring for that matter). Symbolically the world inverted, trancended and then finally restored during the course of the all-night-drummings.

For more information about the Mayeyi, or for papers that I have presented on spirit possession and witchcraft belief among the Mayeyi please do not hesitate to contact me.