Christian antipathy towards indigenous diviners
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The Old Testament injunction, "When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there.Let no one be found among you who... practices divination and sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead..." (Deuteronomy 18:9-12) 8 African Christian converts were required to sever all association with their ancestral-spirits and the latter's servants, the diviners. It became standard practice to burn all paraphernalia associated with such indigenous religion.
Anything concerning divination attracts Christian antipathy (based upon the biblical text mentioned), an attitude held by both European and African orthodox Christians.
Related to Christian thinking are early western secular assumptions which made divination illegal in African Customary Law; "Any Native, who for gain practices as a diviner (known to Natives as inyanga yoku bula, isanusi or isangoma) or as a rain doctor or lightening doctor, or professes a knowledge of witchcraft, or the use of spells or charms, or advises any person to bewitch or injure any person or property, or supplies any person with the pretended means of witchcraft, shall be guilty of an offence." Any person found charged would be convicted of obtaining money under "false pretenses" and all "spells, charms" and suchlike would be confiscated.12 What this law did was to group as one phenomenon, traditional religion's positive agents (the diviners) and the negative forces ( the witches or umthakathi) along with all traditional medicines or imithi (the latter considered neutral substances and used by diviners, medicine-men and witches, each to their own purposes).
8. Holy Bible: New International Version New York International Bible Society 1978
12. Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act No 13 of 1928 subsection 129. J Whitfield South African Native Law Johannesburg: Wits University Press Page 541
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