A lihoka (plural mahoka) is the spirit of a particular deceased Makonde, surviving death to remain among the kin. Because the Makonde are matrilineal, ancestral attention falls especially on the spirits of the mother's line. The mahoka are morally ambivalent: properly honoured, they protect their descendants, cure illness and grant success in farming and hunting; neglected or angered, they send sickness and misfortune. They are the ordinary focus of Makonde religious life and the indispensable intermediaries through whom petitions, above all the communal prayer for rain, reach the remote high god Nnungu. The masked figures of initiation, the midimu, are the visible return of these same ancestral dead.