Sorcerers learn their extraordinary powers—flying, changing form, and causing illness or death—through apprenticeships. Together, they manipulate life forces to overpower their enemies: Frequently, they turn into attacking lions or striking lightning; or they might send apparitions to trick and kill. Only diviners and healers, who acquire the same powers to see and cure, can possibly withstand or counter sorcerers’ attacks.

A young girl carries a basket to the river to catch fish. Sticks are often used to drive fish into the basket.

When Chokwe villagers recount their bush experiences late in the afternoon and when they tell yishima around the fire, they speak of a world in which beings fly, disappear and reappear, transform into other shapes, and often harm common people. In their talk, they envision two different dimensions to reality, in between which such beings move. For most hours of the day, villagers notice and live in an ordinary reality: They participate in the day-to-day social events of eating, talking, and greeting one another; they work in their fields, feed their children, and watch animals mature, knowing that life follows certain natural, biological patterns. However, from time to time, beings startle Chokwe villagers into an awareness of that other, extraordinary dimension. Often life-threatening, these “untamed”  beings act unpredictably, ignoring all ordinary social and biological limits. In the bush, these beings move freely in and out of both dimensions. And they enter the village at night.

Because the mundane and extraordinary are shifting, contiguous features of their world, villagers stay alert to both. Much as perception of height, depth, and width depends on the viewer’s perspective, so too these facets of reality are functions of “seeing.” Thus, residing in bush-encircled villages as they do, the Chokwe learn to coexist with wild creatures growling nearby, with “appearances” such as masked figures or a sorcerer’s owl shadowing their windows at dusk, and with deceased presences hovering in their dreams.

In yishima, extraordinary beings regularly appear and interact with humans who enter the wilderness. In fact, in most stories, the characters leave the village to test their maturity in the untamed, complex bush. Listening to these tales and overhearing travelers talk, children learn early that beyond the safe village lies the endless, nourishing, yet dangerous bush whose mysteries—though frightening—irresistibly intrigue.