ABSTRACT

The Bemba were the dominant tribe on the North-Eastern plateau of Northern Rhodesia. The environment of the Bemba is also responsible for those health conditions which are the source of many of their anxieties. Bemba men are great hunters, and though game is not now plentiful, hunting, a forest pursuit, is considered the most pleasurable and exciting of activities. One of the most important forms of ordeal they perform is divination by hunting. To recapitulate, Bemba dogma stresses the role of the ancestors in determining human fortunes as well as the power of injured spirits, who revenge the injustices they suffered on earth on the living. The most characteristic features of the Bemba social structure are its hierarchical and authoritarian type of government, of which the apex is a paramount chief believed to have supernatural powers, and its system of matrilineal descent with uxorilocal marriage.