Lihoka (the spirit of an individual deceased ancestor)
Makonde · numen · Makonde traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
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.
Domains
- ancestral intercession
- sickness and healing
Powers
- to carry the prayers of the living to the high god Nnungu
- to send sickness or its cure and to secure success in harvest and hunting
Relations
- subordinate to: NnunguThe lihoka and the wider mahoka serve as intermediaries beneath the remote high god, carrying the petitions of the living up to Nnungu.Dias, Jorge, and Margot Dias. Os Macondes de Moçambique. 4 vols. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Cultural / Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964. (secondary)
Sources
- Lihoka is the Makonde term for the spirit of an individual deceased person, one of the mahoka who intercede between the living and the high god and may send either sickness or healing.: Dias, Jorge, and Margot Dias. Os Macondes de Moçambique. 4 vols. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Cultural / Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964. (secondary); Asante, Molefi Kete, and Ama Mazama, eds. Encyclopedia of African Religion. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009. (secondary)