ABSTRACT
Ngozi spirits force people to reconcile, and raise interesting questions about whether coerced reconciliation can nonetheless lead to healing. National healing is often thought of in terms of justice and unity: the nation will be healed when internal political, ethnic, or religious divisions are healed over. In the chiShona-speaking communities, local acts of reconciliation and healing often take the form of rituals to appease ngozi. Spiritual responses to national healing offer people at the grassroots an opportunity to take control of the healing process and initiate it for themselves. Ngozi cases, by contrast, hold individuals responsible for their acts; but the communities of which the individual is an offshoot take collective responsibility for the reconciliation. While trauma healing tends to focus on individuals, and state/non-governmental organisation/human rights interventions tend to focus on communities, ngozi cases address individual, kin, and community as multiple levels of intervention and interaction.
