In 1957, the security force of Angola’s colonial diamond mining company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divination and corporate security that aroused the interest of Filipe Calvão, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute. In a recent article published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, he explores how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. Interview.

How and why did you come to write this article?

By a stroke of luck, I stumbled upon the intelligence and security archives of Angola’s colonial diamond company, otherwise known as Diamang. The company was established in 1917 to administer and effectively colonise the country’s diamond-rich region of Lunda. For the next sixty years, this archive gathered dispatches from spies, secret informants, administrators and security officers detailing the social ramifications of illicit diamond trafficking in the colony. This article is the first publication based on that documentation and is driven by one simple question: what does it mean for a mining company to become the client of a diviner?

You found that African diviners were hired to resolve diamond theft issues. What were the reasons for that surprising recruitment?

One of the cases I describe in the article took place in 1957, when diviners were indeed recruited to assist the company in uncovering the “mystery” of a criminal ring. The 1950s saw a period of profound transformations for Diamang: faced with increasing diamond pilferers and the constraints of conventional information-gathering, the company refined its intelligence methods and extended surveillance over the workforce and population. The company was also grappling with the first signs of anticolonial struggle in neighbouring Congo and the ripple effects from Sierra Leone’s “Great Diamond Rush”. Finally, the company embarked on a systematic study and memorialisation of indigenous Cokwe art and culture by the mid-1950s. It was the combined effect of improved surveillance, growing threats to the company, and a concern over the “occult” knowledge of African beliefs that led to this unusual request.  

What are your main conclusions regarding the tension between colonial knowledge and local beliefs in Lunda?

This tension should be historicised within a broader political economy of mining and corporate surveillance. It is imperative, given the often contested relation between corporate mines and ritual experts, that we examine further how local ideas about social control and knowledge production permeate corporate management and the organisation of work. Finally, the article contributes to a crosscultural understanding of secrecy in the historical convergence of a divinatory system of knowledge with bureaucratic techniques of corporate security and forensic analysis.

Can you tell us more about the “connection between divination and the physical and social economy of diamonds”?

There is, to be sure, an etymological and material association between panning for diamonds and a divination pannier, or basket. My research further approaches divination and corporate security as historically attuned forms of knowledge production in a shared economy of secrecy and social control that has defined life in Lunda for most of the last one hundred years. The cases I examine in the article, spanning over fifty years (1920–1975), provide important clues for understanding this crossover between corporate surveillance and divinatory ritual.

Are diviners still employed in Angola’s diamond mines?

The deployment of diviners by a mining company in a criminal investigation was exceptional in the historical record, and many retired colonial security officers I interviewed had no recollection of similar instances. Today, mining administrators prefer to maintain ritual experts at arm’s length, although traditional healers have been recently recruited by mining companies in South Africa to assist in the fight against the AIDS pandemic.

Calvão, Filipe. “The Company Oracle: Corporate Security and Diviner-Detectives in Angola’s Diamond Mines.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 3 (2017): 574–99.