In Kusamira Music in Uganda: Spirit Mediumship and Ritual Healing, Peter J. Hoesing examines and analyzes traditions and customs of spirit mediumship and ritual healing, showing how kusamira (mediumship/possession) can influence people experiencing nswezi (Kisoga mediumship and ritual healings), and how many ritual processes done by basamizes can help in ritual healing and well-being. Many words from the African languages of southern Uganda are displayed in this book, and to fully understand the book’s themes, readers will need to have these words defined as they appear in the text, which is frequently. And they will require background information on the culture and heritage of this African region. Fortunately, the author provides “Notes on Languages and Orthography” to ensure a better understanding of the African words in the text, particularly those in the Lusoga or Busoga language, but the discussion is still difficult to follow, given the need for additional background information. Furthermore, Hoesing writes in a scholarly manner, making this book a demanding read, although it consists of only a few hundred pages. However, the narrative changes tone in the last two chapters, creating a more personal style in these pages.
The book’s introduction touches on topics treated throughout in a more contextualized manner. It gives information on the author’s research process and mentions the help he was provided, thanking the helpers who pitched in as he created what he terms “this manuscript.” The introduction includes descriptions of repertories, pictures of musical instruments, and geographic orientation to the cities in Uganda where this specialization on spirit mediumship and ritual healing occurs. Hoesing mentions the constant participation of experts in the field, which gives the book an extra dose of credibility.
Chapter 1, “Ritual Work in Twenty-first Century Uganda,” examines the roots of traditional healing and describes the many organizations educating both the people and the government about illness and well-being and their connection to ritual work. We are introduced to five areas of healing activity: spiritual healers, bonesetters, birth attendants, mentalists, and herbalists. All of these practitioners attend a school for traditional healers known as PROMETRA (Uganda’s Institute of Traditional Medicine) for a period of three years. Working with experts, attendees learn about medicinal plants, anatomy, physiology, disease etiology, and therapy, and then, they choose which area of expertise they want to focus on. One pathway is that of the spirit mediums and their patrons, known for their ritual work as spiritual healers. They feature the aforementioned kusamira (mediumship/possession) and nswezi (Kisoga mediumship and ritual healings) making use of music and assisted by healers known as basamize whose appearance is rather critical for the ritual work with their spirit patrons. We also learn how traditional healers gain credibility by registering in health care and medical organizations like PROMETRA. One example is that of a troupe called to sing and dance at the PROMETRA Institute to educate and inform patients about HIV/AIDS or, as the PROMETRA staff puts it, “people living positively” within a range of health issues. This chapter emphasizes how people in southern Uganda perform music as ritual work and how a different approach in the ex-colony provides insight into the intersection of physiological, psychological, and spiritual challenges involving mind, body, and soul.
Chapter 2, “Ecologies of Well-being,” examines the connection between music, ritual, birth gender classification, name affiliation, spiritual connection, and other factors. In the first part of this chapter, the author discusses twins’ songs, birth, and spiritual connections. He also discusses the twins’ affiliation names and their spiritual link from the womb, as well as their characteristics and signs. As twins are not often born in Uganda, people there take a particular interest in twin births. Hoesing provides diagrams, Kisoga repertories, and the lyrical prose of the different songs, with English translations. Some of the songs examined here are from the singer known as Madoxx Ssemanda Sematimba, whose “Ssewasswa,” for example, is a vulgar and explicit song dealing with reproduction, sex, birth, and their animal/spiritual relevance (featuring snakes, including pythons, and leopards). Also, this chapter considers the influence of ritual healing not only by kusamira but also by singers. Hoesing states:
“This kind of cleverly coded index enables singers across many genres—not only kusamira—to invoke the categories of gender, sex, and human reproduction in terms appropriate for a wide variety of contexts. In this way, musical performances articulate and transcend maleness and femaleness through patterns of language enculturation that create a boundary between juvenile vulgarities and the thoroughly adult linguistic codes for sexual intercourse, labor, childbirth, postpartum physical and spiritual phenomena, and initiation of parenthood, particularly parenthood of twins.”
In this chapter the author also explains, step by step, how spirit patrons can influence the beliefs and affiliations of customs and traditions of the people of Uganda by coming in direct contact with them. Spirit patrons, in this case working spirits, take the shapes of items like rocks, trees, totems, birds, etc., which people in Kisoga use as conduits for healing practices that connect them to their clan source of power through continuous sacrifice and rituals for power objects and mediums. Songs are also used for harnessing spirits. For example, there is a song about barrenness, where we can see the influence of the spirit patron on a woman who cannot conceive. Here, the spirit patrons and working spirits are called Buwongo and Namunobe (the unwanted one). Also mentioned is a variety of spirits and their possession through mediums that come into continuous contact with the Ugandan people, as they invoke them through songs, rituals, and continuous sacrifices—for example, Ddungu, a hunting spirit. For such possessions, as described in the book, they use medicinal plants, sacrificial animals, and people carefully selected beforehand. There is also mention of funeral etiquette and practices, and we see that medicinal plants allow mediums to enter the door between the spirit world and the natural world and to magnify their power of human well-being. The focus here is on ecologies of well-being in ritual practices in which the embedded specialists perform songs. These define some of the ontological elements in the region, both specific and general, such as the appearance of spirits as they are demanded, sung, or invoked by the mediums, the possessions featuring sacrifices and sacred objects, and the influence of traditional healers and medicinal plants in the space between life and death.
In chapter 3, “Possessing Sound Medicine,” Hoesing draws attention to a basamize named Kabona Mutale (in Kisoga, a traditional healer), its encounter with the spirit named Nakavuma (a female spirit), and the aid she provides for Nakuba, a patient living with HIV. He goes into detail about the encounter, and discusses how patients living with continuous illness seek both traditional healing practices (as well as modern medicine) and spiritual guidance. It is believed, he tells us, that many illnesses seen by basamizes rely on spiritual guidance and healing. He also mentions the help of power objects, shrines, and church services, and argues that such nswezi practices can be perceived as Christian even though they incur “unwelcome scrutiny from their local Christian congregations” and create worries about “their emyoyo (souls) as conceptualized by their Christian counterparts.” This chapter revolves around the ways nswezi can be of help through music, mediums, and power places such as shrines or church services, with the feature that both spiritual intervention and the intervention of modern medicine can contribute to the art of healing and well-being. The idea, we learn, is to let us experience by ourselves by reading the miracles of spiritual healing and mediumship. Hoesing states that “Basamize and baswezi manipulate musical instruments, ritual power objects, and human spirit mediums to carry out their work, which involves the containment and release of powerful knowledge, medicinal substance, and performance signification.”
Chapter 4, “Sacrifice and Sound,” details how ritual healing, music, and sacrifice go together. Here the author names the different rituals and their specific purposes, noting the relationships that bind them and the year-end festivities that make everything possible. We see that music is prevalent in invoking patron spirits through their mediums and exercising kasumira and nswezi to communicate with both the natural and the spirit world, and that people believe spirits help with many diseases, offer protection, and provide abundance, through beliefs that are passed through the generations. An example of a well-being spirit patron is Ndawula, associated with skin diseases; people call on him to address these afflictions and make sense of them. Spirits are called through festivities done in the shrines where people come together to sing, dance, and sacrifice animals for the patron spirits, as the spirits demand sacrifices of animals, large and small.
This chapter also treats Ddungu, a spirit associated with animal sacrifice. We read of “Ddungu drinking blood directly from a severed neck.” In this chapter we can appreciate the human-spirit relationship, one of mutual respect. As Hoesing writes, a “simple, eloquent greeting expresses the mutual need among humans and spirits that multiple interviewees emphasize as a central feature of kasumira and nswezi.” For example, Lisa Nakawuka informs him that many times she has been possessed by many spirits. She’s an anchor for kusamira through song and nswezi. For her and for others, these rituals, according to Hoesing, enhance people’s “quality of life, a process that didn’t require raucous or expensive sacrifices but rather smaller sacrifices of time and resources.” With music and sacrifice at its heart, according to Hoesing, these rituals reveal “complex ways of producing and preserving repertories of well-being.”
Finally, chapter 5, “From Tea and Coffee Berries to Meat and Beer,” exemplifies and examines traditions of food preparation for sacrifices and possessions, and here the author draws on principles of ethnomusicology in addressing ritual work and spiritual practices in this setting.
In conclusion, Kusamira Music in Uganda: Spirit Mediumship and Ritual Healings focuses on mediumship possession through music, based on the belief that spirits have power in social, economic, and physiological domains. This is a good book for those who take an interest in how the spiritual world and the natural world blend together, offering an African case study oriented to ritual work and informed by ethnomusicological perspectives.
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[Review length: 1689 words • Review posted on April 2, 2025]