Book Review: Some Comments on David Zeitlyn’s Mambila Spider Divination

Abstract

Although I am neither a social anthropologist like Zeitlyn nor a sociolinguist, I am fascinated by Zeitlyn’s analysis of Mambila spider divination from a metaphysical and (African) philosophy of religion perspective. I have undertaken fieldwork, studied, and published on African divination systems, such as Ifá among the Yorùbá. I have also considered the base-2 numerical system, which undergirds similar divination systems such as the Bamana of Senegal, the Sikidy system of Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, as well as the Hakata four-tablet system in Southern Africa (OFUASIA n.d.n. 2021; OFUASIA 2026). So, upon encountering Zeitlyn’s book on Mambila spider divination, I realised that this is another progressive step in the critical assessment of divination systems in Africa. Aside from the urge to engage with the work as a comprehensive effort to make sense of how ancient Africans diagnose and predict, the second urge or motivation derives from checking whether spider divination among the Mambila parallels or departs from the previous systems of divination that I have studied.