‘Traditional healers’ (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into ‘schools’ around a senior teacher (gobela). Healing is understood by its practioners to be a profession, not a religion or even a spiritual exercise. Healers actively assess the effectiveness of their healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others’ performances in ways that stray far from the mere transmission of ‘tradition’. Clients are likely to pay sangomas as much as they would medical doctors for their services, which are not limited to the medical. Their practices can be divided into roughly six ‘disciplines’: divination, herbs, control of ancestral spirits, the cult of foreign ndzawe spirits, drumming and dancing, and training of new sangomas. The status of sangoma is achieved through an arduous process of teaching and learning through which the student or initiate is simultaneously ‘healed’ and educated to become a member of the profession that coheres around these knowledge practices.

Among Mijikenda of the Kenya coast, the male Kaya elders (azhere a Kaya) – custodians of sacred spaces and customary knowledge – traditionally undergo years of secretive ritual training and tribulation in order to accrue both expertise and seniority. Over the past few years, however, a series of scandals have fragmented this group, casting them into the national spotlight while fomenting debates about the nature of elders’ expertise. In the ethnically fraught context of Kenyan politics, politicians of Mijikenda and of other ethnic backgrounds have sought out and paid Kaya elders for ritual ‘anointing’ or ‘blessing’ in order to win Mijikenda allegiance in their political campaigns. As public cynicism toward these events has mounted and elders have traded barbed accusations of fraudulence, much discourse has revolved around an idealized and nostalgic model of the kind of expertise considered to be under threat. I discuss the roles of morality, secrecy and ethnic identity in this model, suggesting that these ways of thinking about expertise are not merely reflections of ‘tradition’ but also emergent from presentist struggles for elders’ personal power and for the collective identity of Mijikenda.

This article examines the specialized knowledge practices of two sets of culturally recognized ‘experts’ in Senegal: Islamic clerics and craftsmen. Their respective bodies of knowledge are often regarded as being in opposition, and in some respects antithetical, to one another. The aim of this article is to examine this claim by means of an investigation of how knowledge is conceived by each party. The analysis attempts to expose local epistemologies, which are deduced from an investigation of ‘expert’ knowledge practices and indigenous claims to knowledge. The social processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission are also examined with reference to the idea of initiatory learning. It is in these areas that commonalities between the bodies of knowledge and sets of knowledge practices are to be found. Yet, despite parallels between the epistemologies of both bodies of expertise and between their respective modes of knowledge transmission, the social consequences of ‘expertise’ are different in each case. The hierarchical relations of power that inform the articulation of the dominant clerics with marginalized craftsmen groups serve to profile ‘expertise’ in different ways, each one implying its own sense of authority and social range of legitimacy.

During a mason's apprenticeship in Djenné, the young man acquires not only technical skills, but also appropriate social knowledge and a bodily comportment. Together, these inform his professional performance as a craftsman. Recognized masters of the trade creatively innovate in a manner that effectively expands the discursive boundaries of tradition and what is popularly accepted as ‘authentic’ Djenné architecture. Based on ethnographic work amongst Djenné’s masons, this article explores the complex construction of ‘expert status’, and the negotiation of licence and limits for innovation in this internationally renowned and protected historic urban context.

Recent anthropological studies of divination have been marked by renewed and appreciative concern for the epistemological and performative dimensions of divination. Pursuing these recent investigations, and especially their interest in the nature of the knowledge and modes of knowing underlying divinatory ritual, the first part of the article attempts an understanding of the interpretative operations and modalities of knowledge involved in different forms of divination practised in Senegal and Gambia today. At the same time, and somewhat antithetically, it will be argued that the focus on the question of the cognitive nature of divinatory knowledge and the person of the diviner may also be problematic: it may lead to undervaluing the main quality of divination, which lies perhaps not in its cognitive but its consultational properties. Further decentring its initial cognitive outlook, the second part of the article addresses the question of how to understand the fact that within the divinatory discourse itself it is not the diviner but the divinatory apparatus that is being addressed as the source of enunciation. Where, if not in the person of the diviner, is the source of the knowledge underlying and resulting from divinatory procedure to be located? And in how far is it possible, as the title of this article suggests, to conceive of the divinatory process as being autonomous of the expertise and specialist agency of the individual diviner?

This essay describes the skills of a sand divination expert in Mali through consideration of his expert performance. By relating the description of the expert to Goffman's sociology, it is argued that, in addition to his skilled divination techniques, an expert diviner should be capable of establishing and maintaining the frame of his performance. In the case of the expert described in this essay, it is demonstrated that this frame encompasses a unique and dynamic network of social relations, and comprises a complex set of economic and geographical factors. The historical backdrop to the expert's activities is the ‘occult economy’ (the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends). It is argued that acquiring the skills needed for managing a frame – and a team of people to support the frame – in the conditions described is a major accomplishment. Study of these skills and processes may provide valuable insight into processes of social change at the micro-level.

In studies concerning Islam and gender in West Africa, the expertise of women in Islamic esoteric practices is often overlooked. These practices, that include divination, dream interpretation and prayer sessions, are central in politics, economics and the daily life of most West Africans. Furthermore, their products (such as amulets) and their practitioners (marabouts) travel to Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Despite the importance of Islamic esoteric practices in West Africa and the rest of the world, they are understudied. In this article, I focus upon the life and work of two marabout women living in Dakar: Ndeye Meissa Ndiaye and Coumba Keita. Their position is exceptional: Islamic esoteric knowledge is a particularly male-dominated field. This article describes how two women's Islamic esoteric expertise is negotiated, legitimated and publicly recognized in Dakar.

This article investigates ‘wisdom’ from an ethnographic perspective that pays attention to the ways in which knowledge is performed, appreciated, negotiated and questioned in everyday life in Mombasa, on the Swahili coast. It discusses the baraza setting (daily meeting points for male social peers) as a venue for intellectual practice and the appreciation of wisdom. Basic features of communicative interaction identified there can also be found to be in play when looking at case studies of individuals and their performances. The article looks at how two genres (didactic tenzi poetry and Ramadhan lectures) are used by Swahili intellectuals who are regarded as exceptional in their field. Verbal, performative and social skills are found to be crucial aspects of wisdom, which also has to do with being able to engage with common social concerns in a manner that leads to further insight and intellectual orientation for others. In this sense, social responsibilities and moral obligations in the use of knowledge play an important role. Overall, the article seeks to contribute to a general discussion of wisdom, based on insights gained on the East African coast.