A person becomes a sangoma primarily through a sustained period of training, often triggered by a period of illness described as being under water, or in a river. Many sangomas insist that they truly experienced a long period ‘under [or in] water’, eyamanzini. They say they have met the snake that lives in the water. This figure of speech expresses the flow and transmission of knowledge that allows the novice to acquire control over those disembodied, intangible ‘persons’ we call ‘spirits’.

For the sangomas of eastern Mpumalanga, knowledge (lwati [siSwati]; ulwazi [isiZulu]) is the ocean, lwandle. Water (emanti; amanzi) flows like blood and semen (igazi) across generations and flows like knowledge from teachers to students; the bodies it flows into and out of only contain it temporarily. The snake (inyoka) is sinuous, like water. The sangoma feels the pressure of the persons around him or her and is exposed to them as one is exposed to water. Some of this pressure comes from other people, but it also comes from spirits and ancestors and from medicine or muti, the magical substances that heal or protect. All these constitute forms of the person, have intentions and motives and can pressurise like deep water. The eyes are closed but the mind sees in this medium. To carry this burden is like being submerged, while to emerge means the burden can be carried successfully. The constant allusions to water, blood, foam, rain, rivers and the ocean are references to the master trope of water as flow and pressure and of becoming and being a healer.

One can never rely fully upon a supply of water. Like knowledge and rain it can come in torrents or not at all; it evaporates, it soaks in, or falls on, another place, another person. While Michel Foucault taught us to think of power as flowing like water in the channels that knowledge and ‘discourse’ provide (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 184; Foucault 1972, 2008; Gordon 1980), for the healer knowledge is water and water is the medium through which power and knowledge move.