CORPORATE SECURITY AND DIVINATION IN THE HISTORY OF COLONIAL MINING

Upon my return from conducting ethnographic field research in the diamond mining region of Lunda in Angola, I was granted access to the security services' archive of the colonial mining company Diamang.Footnote ¹ This mass of files represents the bureaucratic legacy of Diamang's “Special Section,” a secretive security force renamed “Section of Information and Diligences” (SID) in the early 1950s.Footnote ² As I opened the boxes and flipped through the papers (covering the period 1920–1975), in the midst of diamond trafficking updates, intelligence paperwork, and the verbose “novels” that secret agents were on occasion reprehended for writing, one particular criminal report caught my eye. Written by the Head of SID in 1958, it describes a conspiracy to steal diamonds from Lunda's Central Picking Station (Central de Escolha, henceforth CPS), and includes an unusual request that piqued my interest: for African diviners to help solve the mysterious theft. This event exposes a peculiar alignment between a divinatory system of knowledge and bureaucratic techniques of corporate security and forensic analysis. What can a divinatory ritual reveal about this criminal investigation, or the limits and constraints of conventional information-gathering techniques? More broadly, how might the cooption of divinatory knowledge by a corporate security apparatus shore up, or undermine, the colonial project of control and surveillance?

By examining the historical interplay between criminality, corporate security, and divinatory knowledge in colonial Lunda, this article contributes to the literatures on colonialism, mining economies, and secrecy. The bureaucratic organization of knowledge production in colonial contexts was a quintessential practice of imperial and colonial administrations, and anthropologists and historians have aptly shown the dialogical nature of this knowledge-power regime (Akin Reference Akin2013; Cohn Reference Cohn1996; Cooper and Stoler Reference Cooper and Stoler1997; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1992; Dirks Reference Dirks2001). The will to rule forcefully repositioned the centrality of customary law as a necessary condition, albeit an unpredictable one, for the establishment and maintenance of colonial and postcolonial authority (Luongo Reference Luongo2011; Obarrio Reference Obarrio2014). In complement to research into state-led forms of surveillance in colonial settings (Breckenridge Reference Breckenridge2014; Bayly Reference Bayly1996) and studies focused on native affairs as an instrument of government or an illustration of the “indigenization” of state authority (Igreja Reference Igreja2014), in what follows I explore the deployment of divinatory detection methods by the bureaucratic organization of a mining company.

My analysis historicizes the tension between colonial knowledge and local beliefs within a broader political economy of mining and corporate security (see also Nash Reference Nash1979; Taussig Reference Taussig1980).Footnote ³ From Angola to Sierra Leone, diamonds profoundly defined the exercise of political control (Reno Reference Reno1995: 24–25; Boeck Reference Boeck2001), and the project of maintaining colonial authority has been inseparable from attempts to control illicit mining and diamond smuggling. This historical background informs a critique of private security companies, which have been the object of considerable attention focused largely on questions of legality, human rights violations, and undelivered state functions (Cleaver Reference Cleaver and Phythian2000; Howe Reference Howe2004; Singer Reference Singer2003).Footnote ⁴ In Angola, private security forces generated not just violence but also a blurring of state and private interests through nepotistic and state-organized patronage (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006; Marques Reference Marques2011). And yet, an analysis solely of ownership structures or repressive effects cannot account for complexities in both the practices of these security companies and the spaces in which they operate (Welker Reference Welker2009). As will become apparent in the historical ethnography of criminality and surveillance that I present here, technologies of corporate rule can be experienced and subverted in ways unimagined by those who determine their coercive objectives.

I take inspiration from past scholarship to suggest that the work of divination and that of corporate security can be analyzed as historically attuned forms of knowledge production. I do not treat the security service archive as a piecemeal collection of historical truths about a colonial company, or as a repository of legal and intelligence paperwork, but rather as a site of historical production of what is at once a “process and technology of rule” (Stoler Reference Stoler2002: 100). Reading this complex archival source “along the archival grain” (ibid.), my intent is not to “exhaust” it (Cohn Reference Cohn1980) or fetishize the “secret” and confidential information it contains. Instead, echoing the double-bind of intimacy and trust in witchcraft beliefs (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2013) and the notion of “secretism” as the circulation, valorization, and revelation of protected knowledge (Johnson Reference Johnson2002), my aim is to contribute to the cross-cultural study of secrecy.

In Lunda's diamond mines, diviners and detectives share overlapping and distinctive features comprising what I call “corporate divination.” This goes beyond just the exceptional corporate recourse to knowledge production through divination and accompanying “truth-enhancing” technologies such as x-ray detection and hidden audio-recording devices. More than that, these techniques of security and control, which interlace secrecy with revelation and concealment, provide important clues for understanding the crossover between corporate surveillance and ritual practice. Corporate divination is a lens through which to explore the social and intimate arrangements of organized capital, local knowledge, and corporate security within the struggle for political, social, and cultural control.

There is a connection between divination and the physical and social economy of diamonds, made clear by the etymological and material association between panning for diamonds and a divination pannier, or basket. The motion of diamond panning parallels the shaking up (kusekula) of a divination apparatus.Footnote ⁵ In both practices there is a fundamental moment of revelation wherein either the occult properties of the invisible world or the sparkling gemstones hidden in gravel deposits are exposed. Furthermore, the resemblance is not exclusive to the physical and manual labor of diggers and diviners—the kinds of knowledge required for the ritual interpretation of an oracle and the appraisal of a diamond, are equally bound by the manipulation of signs and a ritualized and performative evaluation.Footnote ⁶ Corporate divination denotes a significance that divinatory knowledge and corporate security intelligence share within an economy of secrecy and control that, to this day, envelops the lives of Lunda's diamond workers and mining corporations.Footnote ⁷ Examining these in tandem allows us to delve into the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social and cultural world it intervenes in, as well as the cultural resources that emerge, and then converge with its technologies of rule to shape or subvert corporate life writ large.

First I need to briefly situate Diamang's security apparatus in the context of colonial mining operations in Southern Africa. From the outset, diamond mining there was concomitant with an “obsession” over diamond theft, often permeated with strong racial prejudices (Worger Reference Worger1987: 118). As early as the 1870s, South African mining security set out to manage migrant labor and impose strict control over diamond ownership. This was soon broadened to include control over the miner's body through strip searches and the legal institutionalization of the notorious closed compound system, meant to ensure order in mining areas and curtail seasonal labor shortages and strikes.Footnote ⁸ These compounds could take on a Panopticon-like spatial disposition (Moodie Reference Moodie1994: 77) or a “quasi-military appearance” (Van Onselen Reference Van Onselen1976: 130), and they interwove anti-theft measures and labor control. Whether premised on labor coercion or a paternalist laboratory of surveillance, each compound was distinct in how it created “subaltern spaces” that encompassed “hidden domains of social intercourse, experience, and activity” (Crush Reference Crush1994: 319).

Angola's diamond-rich provinces of Lunda were no exception to this corporate-colonial regime of coercion and vigilance, but to understand its specific colonial trajectory one must grasp some important historical nuances. The country's history of diamond extraction is inextricably tied to the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, or Diamang, a company formally established in 1917 and dismantled in the 1980s after Angola's independence in 1975.Footnote ⁹ Historians have suggested that the self-described “colonial corporation” (Porto Reference Porto2009: 1) should be regarded as a “kind of state within a state,” fostered by intercolonial relations (Clarence-Smith Reference Clarence-Smith1979: 177). Diamang was a privately owned company that served as a de facto colonial state.Footnote ¹⁰ There is evidence of rapprochements with Forminière, the Belgian colonial mining company, and attempts to replicate South African and West African mining security practices in Angola, and historical accounts have highlighted continuity and coherence across spatial and labor control practices, but more important to us here are the idiosyncrasies of Lunda's security and managerial policies.Footnote ¹¹

My next section considers the history of the company's imprint of fear, suspicion, and secrecy in Lunda in response to what sources identify as “occult” forces. I examine, from a historical perspective, the problem of secretive knowledge as an effective form of intimate control and social practice in this mining context. Then, against the backdrop of the region's history of corporate surveillance and secrecy, I turn to the circumstances that led Diamang's corporate police to recruit African diviners to help solve a criminal case. The overlap of intimacy, confidence, and secrecy as they pertain to corporate techniques of control guide the next section of the paper, in which I discuss the revelatory impetus of divinatory rituals. My final section returns to divinatory techniques of information-gathering by way of an interview with a former colonial “sorcerer-detective,” and the problem of secrecy as revealed in the security force's bureaucratic archive. I conclude by reflecting on the ritual capital of diviner-detectives.Footnote ¹²

FEAR, SUSPICION, AND THE “POWER OF OCCULTATION”

A young military commander, dispatched to Lunda to stifle early signs of anti-colonial rebellion in the early 1960s, provided a hyperbolic description of the people: “The population lives dominated by the terror of SID.… People don't interact with each other. The reason why the inhabitants don't visit each other is because they fear one another.”Footnote ¹³ The mining secret police were no stranger to this culture of fear, which had long been prevalent in Lunda. Former security officers recalled to me a peculiar saying, “Fear guards the vineyard.” The “vineyard” where diamonds “grow,” the saying suggests, was protected by the discipline of “fear.” It served as a clear reminder to colonial workers and the local population alike of the all-encompassing work of security. But what exactly was there to be fearful of, and by what means was that fear inculcated in this colonial society? Conversely, how can we explain this culture of fear in light of historical evidence that portrays security agents as both victims of African mystical beliefs and culprits of diamond theft?

In some measure, this fear stemmed from conventional forms of surveillance practiced by Diamang's security services. A widespread grid of informers, capitas (native guards), and secret agents maintained a tight grip over the intimate lives of workers and native residents. They also kept an eye out for unaccounted-for patterns of consumption and wealth accumulation. Beyond monitoring its own workforce, Diamang's quasi-divinatory finger on the pulse of people's needs, desires, and imaginations targeted mainly merchants and vagrants, which is to say suspicious characters that worked outside of the company's purview or did not work at all. At the crux of this security apparatus was control over the body itself (Calvão Reference Calvão2013), but chief among other mechanisms of surveillance and social control was an “exclusive protection zone” created to closely monitor and direct the movement of goods and both national and foreign citizens across the region. Until the 1960s, Diamang would not authorize merchants to operate inside its exclusive concession area, since they might circumvent its prohibition against conducting commercial or economic transactions with the African population. These measures notwithstanding, it was virtually impossible to control urban centers and colonial outposts in Lunda and its immediate vicinity, where there was ample evidence of diamond trafficking. This raises the question of how to account for this totalizing experience of social control, suspicion, and fear in colonial Lunda and its mining communities.

There are only scant records from Diamang's first years of operation, but the earliest indication of diamond trading dates from 1913, predating the company's formal establishment in 1917. A village chief (soba) was rumored to be “giving diamonds to sell because the English [prospectors and mining operation managers] would buy.” Despite the company's concern, it took decades of trial and error before it finally settled on a stable, if faulty, security service. In the early years of the corporate-colonial presence in Lunda, Diamang had more pressing concerns since its prospecting teams and mining facilities were subject to attacks by the neighboring Cokwe population.Footnote ¹⁴ In retaliation, the colonial state and the company “pacified” the region in a series of military campaigns intended to “eradicate” what stood in the way of Diamang's (colonial) mission and mining activities, and its filling ever-increasing demands for labor (Pélissier Reference Pélissier1986: 380–96).

By the mid-1920s, when the last of these colonial and corporate military raids took place, mining activities were already in full swing. Bento Roma, soon to be governor of Angola, is credited with “having fired the last occupation shots in the increasingly exclusive domain of Diamang” (ibid.: 396). That same year Roma was commissioned to write a report on the company's security. In a highly critical assessment, he faulted the company itself for the increasing problem of diamond theft: “[The company] did not conveniently safeguard the picking sites, and scattered throughout the Province a swarm of individuals with criminal records, calling them its agents and tasking them with buying diamonds.… From this procedure resulted the illicit commerce of stones, which was done until recently with fear and in an occult manner and is now wide open, with all these agents inciting the natives … to steal diamonds with which they obtain bountiful earnings by selling stones to the company and sending others to Europe.”Footnote ¹⁵

In other words, the company's first attempt to curtail illegal trafficking brought added visibility (a “open wide” trade) to what was before done in “fear and in an occult manner.” The company's “secret agents,” in addition to being commissioned to gather information, would often act as first-level buyers of loose diamonds on the market, more often than not for their own benefit. In such cases, an agent would respond for “his” informers, whose actions remained largely unknown to the company. Roma would go on to embarrassingly identify some of the presumed double-agents who bought diamonds on behalf of the company from “natives, traders, and shame to say it, from some administrative [colonial] chiefs” while keeping the stones for themselves. André Pires was one such agent. Increasingly reliant on the trade of goods to relay information on diamonds, Pires was lauded at first for his services to the company but was later found guilty of trafficking diamonds.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite Roma's report's strong criticism of the company's surveillance structure, its representative in Lunda soon recommended the continued support of an “information and espionage service” outside the company's concession area. This proposal built on the assumption that no surveillance force was necessary to control African miners because, it was widely believed, they had little idea of the “real” value of diamond stones.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather, these undercover detectives were tasked with buying loose diamonds in the market and expediting the bureaucracy of judicial cases, legal paperwork, and the archiving of “everything pertaining to diamond theft.” The company by and large willfully ignored evidence of theft in the mines throughout the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁸ Until the establishment of a mining security force based in Lunda, the company's surveillance network was an ad-hoc structure that recruited agents primarily from amongst metropolitan police and part-time amateur detectives in well-placed social circles. One had been a World War I German spy in the service of the American government. By way of this loosely established security network of informants, the company brought together hundreds of people to work under its auspices in seemingly arbitrary arrangements, with some agents placed on the company's payroll while others worked for rewards for supplying information that led to the recovery of diamonds. Eventually, this network of agents achieved some results, such as the dismantling of a number of diamond rings and other petty criminal networks that included miners, foremen, and foreign citizens.

The active criminal persecution of merchants and petty diamond traders, combined with the unprincipled actions of rogue secret agents, led to growing condemnation of the company's repressive measures—its actions aimed at containing theft and illegal trade backfired against it. A collective letter sent to the company by an anonymous group in 1932 complained, “In Angola, any individual that possesses money is immediately suspect of being implicated in the illicit trade of diamonds.… One cannot feel well-rested across the four districts surrounding Lunda, and the entire province, without fearing the police will be at your door, or that secret agents are placing diamonds in our homes to then denounce us.”Footnote ¹⁹

Any regime that stresses secrecy, and the theatricality of fear and suspicion generated by uncovering the secrets, produces unpredictable social effects (Masco Reference Masco2014). The Angolan industry's efforts to counteract the diamond thievery that was increasingly evident in disappearing diamonds, unexplained capital accumulation, and suspicious illicit trade, brought unforeseen and unintended consequences. Various new means were devised to conceal diamonds, and Diamang's agents and informants often expressed anxiety and distress about real or imagined threats of being poisoned or physically threatened. Moreover, the bureaucratic labor of surveillance, discipline, and control were met with unforeseen counterforces; the company had to contend with the “occult … purposes of traffickers” and Lunda's African population's “power of occultation.” António Metello voiced a widespread concern amongst security officials with Africans' “occult powers” when he wrote in a 1930 report to the administration: “I have observed that given the multiple powers of disguise and the power of occultation that blacks have and the small quantity of diamonds that each pilferer may have … it will be difficult to determine their whereabouts and seize them. They conceal from everyone, even their closest relatives, where they hide what they steal.… It will be almost impossible to arrest blacks with diamonds by means of information gained from or surveillance of other blacks.”Footnote ²⁰

The mid-1940s brought a transition to subtler means of surveilling the workforce and the population writ large, and by the late 1950s the security apparatus had become a fully institutionalized division within the company. Diamang was faced with looming anti-colonial resistance in neighboring Congo and the threat of rampant illegal extraction around the Cuango river, which bordered Lunda and was one of the world's richest alluvial diamond deposits. Further away, ripple effects from Sierra Leone's “Great Diamond Rush” threatened to tilt the market held precariously by De Beers, and they were also being felt in Lunda.

This surge of illegal mining and smuggling motivated a visit to Lunda by the leading figure of the newly created “International Diamond Security Organization.”Footnote ²¹ The Catholic Bishop of Malange—the largest city entering the company's exclusive concession area across the Cuango river—complained to a Diamang representative that an on-going inquiry into illegal trading had been “poorly received,” suggesting that the company should “close its eyes as … it would not be convenient to show the blacks that whites also steal.”Footnote ²² They did this and more: shortly after the Bishop's intercession, the priests of a nearby Catholic mission were said to be interested in buying diamonds. They were not alone, and over the years evidence of illicit diamond trading accumulated against hairdressers and phone operators, police officers and secret agents, carpenters and bricklayers, merchants and miners, colonial authorities and subjects, and many others. In this paranoid regime all were potential suspects, and in 1960 the head of the SID's Cuango delegation was given instructions “that all SID native guards … be subject to tight vigilance.”Footnote ²³ The prevalence of diamond trafficking was an open secret, and it was tolerated only to the extent that it was covert.

These security measures reveal the elusiveness both of their object and the associated practices of surveillance, which were by their very nature hidden, but Lunda's mining security regime was unexceptional in this regard. Although white settlers in Rhodesian various mining communities saw security to be effective, they remained anxious against a “background of fear and insecurity” and suspicious of “real or imagined dangers within these compounds” (Van Onselen Reference Van Onselen1976: 150). These developments, and increasing threats, led Diamang and its agents to question the terms of diamond security, framed in the tension between secrecy and disclosure. As the head of the security service wrote in a complaint to Diamang's headquarters in 1957, the biggest obstacle to revealing the motives behind diamond theft was the “mysticism [that natives] persist in keeping secret.”Footnote ²⁴ These words seem prescient in light of the case I will describe next, which illustrates the juxtaposition of corporate techniques of secret surveillance with divinatory practices in the mines.

INTIMATE SECRETS OF CORPORATE DIVINATION

In 1957, Diamang's security force was grappling with a case of diamond theft from the central Central Picking Station in Nzagi. In diamond mining operations, the CPS is a “near-sacred chamber” wherein diamond-bearing ore is crushed and rough stones are stripped of their impurities (Carstens Reference Carstens2001: 11). After visiting Diamang's CPS, Brazilian sociologist and Boas student Gilberto Freyre described it as a “sacred place” made up of “silent, secret, confidential” machines, where “detectives must be … everywhere.”Footnote ²⁵ It was a surprise, then, when a routine Diamang surveillance operation in October 1956 intercepted a letter that revealed a plot to steal from its CPS. The letter was sent by a Joseph Romé in Congo to Ntumba Victor, a tailor and the right-hand man of a local chief in Lunda. It mentioned accomplices working inside the CPS and promised to pay a hefty sum for the stolen diamonds. The security services placed the suspects under watch and launched an investigation to uncover the full extent of the criminal ring.

While the plot resembled many others hatched from the 1920s through the mid-1970s, this investigation and the methods the company employed to elicit information were novel and revealing. One unusual feature was its utilization of diviners, to be discussed presently, but more broadly, there was a continuous engagement by security agents with witchcraft cases among the native population and a shared concern with African “occult” knowledge and its relation to security.Footnote ²⁶ The company's anxiety regarding diamond theft was compounded by its worries about the pervasiveness of poisons and “fetishes,” and worker's absenteeism due to their fears of witchcraft.Footnote ²⁷

Diamang embarked on a mission to gather cultural artifacts, employ sculptors, and display divinatory apparatuses in a newly built “ethnographic museum,” inaugurated in 1950 near the company's headquarters in Dundo. This project of knowledge accumulation was resolutely pursued during the mid-1950s with the first systematic study of Cokwe art and material culture (Bastin Reference Bastin1961; see also Porto Reference Porto2009). This makes it all the more important to examine the intimate “microphysics” (Pels Reference Pels1999) of this colonial contact between diviners and security officers, and the circumstances that led the company to arrange, sponsor, and organize two divination séances.Footnote ²⁸

The séances took place in connection to a particular case, in which there were three main protagonists: Ntumba Victor, the central figure in the criminal ring, his brother Marika Luiz who was responsible for the theft of diamonds from the CPS, and an accomplice named Tumba Ja, a “general capita” or native guard at the CPS. The company police were monitoring the suspects' correspondence and kept them under “tight and discreet” surveillance. They also dispatched a young “agente provocatrice” named Maria Bombo with fake quartz stones to “stimulate the intimacy and trust of Ntumba Victor which could lead to the confidence” about his criminal intentions. After a number of “fortuitous” encounters between the seductive Bombo and Ntumba, the latter surrendered to the “little by little intimacy” and “confided” in her about the plot to acquire diamonds. Bombo showed interest by “confessing” to possess diamonds of her own. Repeatedly dodging Ntumba's request to see them, she eventually agreed to meet him in a deserted area next to the city's water tower. She opened a “small package kept hidden next to her sex” only to have Ntumba question the authenticity of the stones. Citing the expertise of a relative working at the CPS, he told her, “I will show you the diamonds he brings and the difference between those and the ones you have.”

By February 1957, the security force had detained and summoned for interrogation more than thirty suspects, comprising CPS workers, security guards, a cook, a clerk, a seamstress, and an array of accomplices that included “mistresses” and young children. Maria Bombo was also later imprisoned so as to “keep up appearances” with the other suspects, and given her potential “guilty connections” with the remaining group. According to different testimonies and his own confession, Ntumba's brother Marika had picked up five diamonds from untreated concentrated ore waiting to be washed and swiftly sewed them into his pants with the connivance of Tumba Ja, the guard at the washing plant. Outside the mining compound and under Tumba Ja's watchful eye, Marika handed them over to Ntumba. The diamonds were then given to Tshitoco François to take to Congo, and he in turn suggested that his father-in-law Mukeba, a seasoned smuggler, could finalize the transport across the border. As the diamond stones passed from hand to hand, tensions surfaced within the group. The guard Tumba Ja demonstrated his discontent with Ntumba's leading role, and for his part Ntumba threatened to kill Tumba Ja if his brother Marika suffered from the guard's “inconfidence.” If the social pervasiveness of trafficking networks is revealed by the sheer accumulation of actors involved in this case, the investigation that followed throws into bold relief the company's imprint through its secret surveillance and use of truth detection technologies.

Plans were made to reconstitute the scene of the crime and theatrically replay the criminal act, a method investigators had favored since the company began registering a series of organized theft attempts in the 1940s. The day of the re-enactment, Marika suddenly fell ill and was taken to the colonial hospital with internal hemorrhages. He admitted that Tumba Ja had given him a root bark infusion, presumably in an attempt to recover diamonds, though the possibility of poisoning was not discarded.Footnote ²⁹ His food was from then on kept in a sealed box, its key held by a trustworthy colonial assistant responsible for preparing, administering, and tasting the food. A new attempt to reconstitute the events was canceled in late March as Marika's condition worsened. In early April, Marika died in his hospital bed and his corpse was subject to a thorough autopsy and additional x-ray screening in case it might harbor diamonds.Footnote ³⁰

After Marika's death the investigation settled on two courses of action. First, the alleged transporters, François and Muqueba, along with Ntumba, the central node in this criminal ring, were placed in a secretly wired location where their conversations were recorded with a disguised microphone. In tandem with a rumor, initiated by a native security officer, that “whites had called for a ‘machine to kill them and discover the truth,’” suspicious wires caught the group's attention. After seventy-five hours of recordings, the conversations' confessional tone ended, and having guessed that someone was listening in, their talk shifted to inflamed proclamations of innocence in Portuguese.

In a second line of action, to unveil “the mystery that still surrounds some details of this case,” the investigation turned to “the apparatus of the sorcery ritual” and African “magical methods” by organizing a divination séance. The officials in charge asked a company chauffeur's mother, named Jóia (literally “jewel”), to be the diviner, despite concerns about her close kin relation with her son. For fear that Jóia would be reluctant to perform her “quackery” in front of Europeans due to the risk of “estranging her [native] clientele,” the first five-hour séance took place behind closed doors in April 1957.Footnote ³¹ According to the criminal report, the authorities were expecting a “hideous figure of a legendary witch, with mellifluous falsetto in a hoarse voice and lancet eyes capable of dismembering souls and bristling the hair.” To their disappointment and despite a “romantic name—appropriate to this sort of trafficking,” Jóia was just “an old black woman … like all old black women.” Her divination basket contained wooden figurines,Footnote ³² along with bones, seeds, and buttons, mixed in with a “white dust” (lupemba).

The suspects sat around the diviner and replicated Jóia's opening “prayers” and “cabalistic” sayings, “not unlike the cursing of civilized witchcraft.” The group was visibly familiar with the ritual cadence of the ceremony, but to the authorities' disbelief, their “smiles of ironic incredulity … made us fear for its efficiency.” Oblivious to the colonial bewilderment at the suspects' apparent skepticism, Jóia agitated her basket “frenetically” and her ritual pronouncements made the suspects “sweat profusely.” From a tree branch Jóia split off small pieces with incisions of different sizes, each representing one of the suspects. With three branches remaining in the basket, Jóia requested a container with water, dissolved various powders in it, and proceeded to prepare a poison ordeal. Company officials let the expectation mount within the “limits of prudence,” but because “the devil can surprise us” they called the test off before any of the “guilty” culprits had a chance to drink from the poison. This tongue-in-cheek account offers a peculiar colonial representation of African cultural practices, not least given the report's invocation of European folk notions of the devil, mysticism, and “civilized witchcraft.”

Like this first “mystical test,” a second divination ritual was organized out in the open with a Cokwe diviner to appease the cultural precepts of the other suspectsFootnote ³³ and “maybe” benefit from “ethnic antagonism.” Indeed, authorities hoped that the more intricate Cokwe ritual could “exert a decisive influence in the spirit of all,” but the results were equally disappointing. The “sorcerer's” ritual apparatus differed from the first only in a “small and sleazy mirror” that “withered frequently during the ritual.” To the company's dismay, the ritual expert seemed to hold only a “minor psychological influence” over the “patients.” More than a year after the start of the investigation, the report concluded: “Despite everything we failed to achieve the mission's main task: the location of the stolen stones. The culprits' confessions, we obtained them in due time. We are left, however, with the impression that all are convinced that these three natives were culpable.”

This crime was not unique in terms of its magnitude—no more than a handful of diamonds were determined to have been diverted—but the event discloses important aspects of the secret work of surveillance and corporate security. The first pertains to the recurrent use in this investigation of gaining intimacy, trust, and confidence as a data-gathering method. In a literal sense, the archaic verb “to confidence” denotes a secret form of trust or intimate confidentiality. Etymologically, “confidência” (from the Latin confidentia, to have full trust) can be rendered as an indiscrete and inconsequential secret. In the case of this investigation, it fundamentally exposed the thin line separating trust from secrecy, intimacy, and confidentiality. This is exemplified in the female undercover agent Maria Bombo: at first, she was instructed to seek the “intimacy and trust” of the leading suspect so as to “lead [the culprit] to confidence.” After Bombo was cleared of suspicion of complicity, and in an unexpected turn of events, Bombo was seen “lamenting” for another suspect being held for whom she had developed a romantic relationship. Perhaps in order to reach “confidence” as a truth-seeking mechanism, both as a confessional act and a space of secrecy, some form of intimacy is unavoidable. Moreover, what is confidential does not necessarily evoke confidence. Conversely, secrecy, even as an expression of intimate confidence, can never be entirely trusted, as Marika's death at the hands of his criminal associate reminds us.Footnote ³⁴

A second aspect this case reveals is regarding the fact that the diviners were included in the investigation because of their expected ritual efficacy, even though the culpability of the suspects had already been determined. The stolen diamonds' exact location was never revealed and the circumstances of Marika's death remained a matter of speculation. The successful detection of the criminal ring was referred to in the company's 1958 annual shareholders' report, and the final report hinted at “dangerous contacts” that native workers were establishing with their relatives from neighboring Congo. But we wonder to whom the suspects' guilt was intended to be revealed to through this process. To help us answer this, I now turn to the problem of divination more broadly to demonstrate how an anthropological understanding of divinatory knowledge sheds light on the problem of evidence and intimacy in the bureaucratic organization of security and its purportedly secret surveillance.

A MATTER OF EVIDENCE: DIVINING THE OCCULT

Divination is as heterogeneous as it is complex. The inscrutable nature of this esoteric ritual practice has long posed a challenge for anthropological research. My approach to Lunda-Cokwe divination employs a comparative historical perspective based primarily on records of divinatory ritual across Angola, Congo, and Zambia, unevenly representing regional variations between Lunda-Cokwe, Luba, Aruunda, Yaka, Luvale, and Ndembu peoples. Over the years, anthropologists have responded differently to the constraints of eliciting information on forms of knowledge vested in secrecy, and the authorizing and authoritative role of ethnographic interpretation. When barred from initiation, Evans-Pritchard famously played on rivalries between ritual experts when his other attempts to access “secret” knowledge failed (Reference Evans-Pritchard1976 [1937]). “The lack of direct observation” of divinatory practices did not deter Victor Turner from writing about Ndembu divination (Reference Turner1961: 244; see also Peek Reference Peek1991: 9), and Max Gluckman found the “strong suspicion with which Zulus viewed all whites” to be the main obstacle to his collection of data on divination (Reference Gluckman and Gluckman1972: 14).

The “oracular division of labor” across Africa can involve a revelatory or an analytical mode (Shaw Reference Shaw and Peek1991) depending on the self-explanatory or interpretative agency of the oracular device, its clients, and the purported goal of the divination ritual itself (Peek Reference Peek1991; Gluckman Reference Gluckman and Gluckman1972: 14). The instruments deployed are wide and varied, ranging from a fixed set of material artifacts to a mostly verbal and open-ended mode of interpretation. The outcome of divination is differently taken up depending on the nature of the client-diviner interaction, the social and historical context, and the typological boundaries between medicine, witchcraft, and divination proper. At its most basic, divination can provide a catalyst for group decision-making to “patch up” social relationships (Bohannan Reference Bohannan, Beattie and Lienhardt1973: 165), legitimize an effective consensus (Park Reference Park and Middleton1967: 240–41), magically influence a course of events by helping determine a proper course of action (White Reference White1948: 145; Jordán Reference Jordán1996: 209), or validate an accusation in a period of moral crisis (Gluckman Reference Gluckman and Gluckman1972: 24). Finally, a diviner or oracle may be consulted for purposes of witch-finding (Delachaux 1946), herbal doctoring, or both (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1963), or in order to provide an instrument to “unmask … sins and vices” (Turner Reference Turner1961: 17) by “relieving … stresses and strains” (Beattie Reference Beattie and Middleton1967: 231). Not unlike the criminal investigation detailed earlier, the ritual efficacy of divinatory rituals builds upon a rapport of “confidence” between diviner and client (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1963: 126); though at times skeptical, it is not in the client's interest to cheat or question the diviner's trustworthiness (see Gluckman Reference Gluckman and Gluckman1972: 14). The changing nature of divinatory practices in Africa today can call for a new engagement with the senses that transfers the burden of interpretation onto clients themselves, as in the case of “televised divination” in rural Mozambique (Igreja Reference Igreja2015).Footnote ³⁵

Although divination is a disparate and vast field, its practices in northeast Angola share a number of features with the divinations of neighboring populations.Footnote ³⁶ Across these socio-linguistic groups, a diviner purports to render known and visible things that the senses cannot detect (Turner Reference Turner1961; Pritchett Reference Pritchett2001; see Bohannan Reference Bohannan, Beattie and Lienhardt1973: 151). Among Cokwe-speakers in northeast Angola, the diviner is the agent who foretells by way of divination (kutaha). The diviner, or tahi, is a ritual specialist consulted in disputes related to misfortune or death when prior arbitration, treatment, or revelation by conventional doctors (mbuki or cimbanda) has failed to resolve them. Although categorically distinct, mbuki, cimbanda, and tahi often overlap in that witch-finding repression has led diviners to “shelter more and more behind the name of general practitioner” (White Reference White1948: 93). The tahi is an “ambivalent figure,” shrouded in mystery (Jordán Reference Jordán1996: 212) so as to counteract the evil and secretive ways of witches. Cokwe divination, then, delivers the “unseen power” of wanga (White Reference White1948: 83) that animates sorcery by communicating with the occult realm of the invisible world (kuphazu Footnote ³⁷ ) where witches gather in secret.Footnote ³⁸

In light of its cathartic, prescriptive, analytic, or revelatory qualities, divination organizes the social world of the living in moments of affliction and moral crisis.Footnote ³⁹ Divinatory rituals and associated social obligations structure and are conditioned by a wider field of social relations to which they respond in dialogic tension. By inscribing divination as a “system of knowledge in action” within an organized whole, and not as isolated ritual, things and people can be meaningfully repositioned in a larger social context “upon which the proper ordering of social action is based” (Peek Reference Peek1991: 2, 3). As “truth-constructing process” (Shaw Reference Shaw and Peek1991: 140) divination becomes the “evidentiary proxy” that “give[s] material shape to, and thereby reproduce[s] as social reality, the ideologies of invisible essences and agencies on which they are based” (Palmié Reference Palmié2007: 207).Footnote ⁴⁰

These divinatory rituals partake in a broader register of secretive practices that are similarly framed by the perceptual and conceptual drift between hiddenness and openness. In analyzing this, my aim is to reconcile the productive and ever-changing revelatory dimension of these rituals with the unavoidably hidden, secret, or undecipherable components of the “occult economy” they are part of. In the political economy of postcolonial Africa, “appeals to the occult in pursuit of the secrets of capital generally rely on local cultural technologies: on vernacular modes of divination or oracular consultation, spirit possession or ancestral invocation, sorcery busting or forensic legal procedures, witch beliefs or prayer” (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Comaroff and Comaroff2001: 26).Footnote ⁴¹ Such technologies are not an “iteration of, a retreat into, ‘tradition,’”; rather, they are often deployed by “retooling culturally familiar signs and practices” and the “mimicking of powerful new means of producing wealth” (ibid.: 26–27).

To return to the case at hand, what can the impetus in divinatory rituals, undertaken to reveal the unseen and communicate information deemed secret, tell us about the bureaucracy of a security organization expected to control the illicit accumulation of wealth? Conversely, what becomes of the status of secrecy in the political and representational economy of a security force whose existence and inner workings remained, for the most part, a publicly acknowledged secret, both feared and hidden? Perhaps this tension between preserving the unseen and disclosing the object of secrecy is clearest in the trajectory of a self-ascribed “sorcerer-detective” working for the colonial company, to whom I now turn.

THE “DIVINATORY GIFT” OF A SORCERER-DETECTIVE

The frail and docile appearance of the white-bearded man standing before me would not give away his past responsibilities in charge of Diamang's security services. Leonardo Chagas, now in his eighties, arrived in Lunda in 1961, the year anti-colonial violence took the regime by surprise, and he left in the aftermath of Angola's independence in 1975. Chagas went on to embrace an artistic and literary career upon his return to Portugal, where I met him in 2012. His paintings have appeared in murals and on the covers of Diamante, a glossy magazine put out by Diamang's former colonial employees, where his poetry also features prominently. His artistic qualities notwithstanding, Chagas is to this day best remembered by former colleagues for his investigation and interrogation skills. In 2000, the head of Diamang's Labor and Public Relations Department in the 1960s wrote a full-page article for Diamante detailing Chagas's unorthodox method. As he describes Chagas' truth-seeking abilities, “…once interrogated and faced with Chagas' divinatory gift, [the suspect] wholly confessed his action, and denounced those who had assisted” (Cadete Reference Cadete2000: 26).

Let us contextualize the “divinatory gift” of this diamond detective by way of Chagas' own trajectory in Angola. He was initially put in charge of securing a small mining operation, but his previous experience with the Portuguese police bureau of investigation and his “intelligence” training with the U.S. State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Virginia quickly led him to the company's intelligence services in Dundo, Lunda. Chagas held different positions in the security branches of Diamang: at the Office of Security, Mining Activities and Facilities, as delegate for the company's External Representation (SRED), and finally as interim chief for the now familiar SID.Footnote ⁴²

Although by the time I met Chagas he had been retired for many years and cut loose from any security responsibility, my experience of deceitfulness among security officers made me cautious in assessing the veracity of some of his claims in the gap between what is true and fictional.Footnote ⁴³ The documents I found in the archive that explicitly refer to his service do seem to be in line with his account. While in Lunda, Chagas worked in “intelligence services” and fingerprinting analysis (dactiloscopia), with overlapping responsibilities in the fight against the “illicit diamond trade” and “terrorism activities.” A confidential 1967 report described the scope of his security work as reaching far beyond diamond security to include arresting vagrants, incarcerating natives suspected of theft, seizing equipment for alcohol distillation, and imprisoning army deserters.Footnote ⁴⁴ Other evidence seems to corroborate his descriptions of the colony's northern border and negotiations with Congolese nationalist movements.

The limits and jurisdiction of this security force remained ambiguous, and increasingly so once anti-colonial independence movements emerged. SID's European personnel managed over 1,200 capitas, divided between policing mining facilities and controlling people's movements and the borders. As Chagas recognized, and despite unlimited access to certain areas, there were restrictions on his police and judicial powers, and common criminals were in some situations handed over to legitimate colonial authorities, usually the head of the administrative post (chefe de posto).Footnote ⁴⁵ Finally, there were competing security personnel, including the company-sponsored civil “self-defense” force and the “Volunteer Corps” and “special troops,” the latter made up of “former terrorists,” that had the right to pillage villages that accommodated “terrorists.”Footnote ⁴⁶ When all else failed, there were funds to buy off the opposition; Chagas recalled that Diamang “was very big and had a lot of money. We just had to buy.” He claimed that one dissident nationalist group had been paid off in this way.

But where Chagas made a name for himself was as a SID investigator and “sorcerer-detective,” following an institutionalized practice in Diamang's colonial security service investigations of cases related to witchcraft and murder.Footnote ⁴⁷ The self-assured Chagas was keen to tell me that, unlike some of his colleagues and rank and file security officers, he never used physical violence to extract confessions. Instead, “I would use the schemes of interrogation techniques. I'm proud to say that I'm an interrogation specialist—I was certainly the only one to seize [diamonds] without a tip. It's quite a piece of work to convince the suspect to go get the diamonds!”

A fortuitous coincidence paved the way for his reputation as an investigator and fingerprinting expert. Shortly after arriving in Lunda, Chagas stumbled upon a record of over ten thousand fingerprints diligently collected by “a curious employee.” He had taken an introductory course in fingerprinting back in Portugal, and from then on he devoted himself to fingerprint analysis of theft cases. This led him to “create that myth, of the ‘revealing powder’ [which] was a fetish (feitiço) for them [Africans].” His account bears striking resemblance to colonial portraits of disingenuous Africans betraying perhaps the veracity of the events. But, as he explained to me, his rudimentary truth-seeking mechanism was based on the adhesion principle of fingerprinting powders. This proved particularly effective for purposes of interrogation: after inconspicuously dusting one side of a white piece of paper he would flip it around and place it beneath the hand of the suspect being questioned. He would then ask the suspect to answer an innocuous question, followed by another to which Chagas would ask the respondent to lie. In between, and without the suspect noticing, the detective would flip the paper back to the original side with the powder, revealing the suspect's fingerprints.Footnote ⁴⁸ He told me that “suspects would readily confess because they thought [the paper] would never fail in revealing the truth when I said so.”

This rudimentary truth-detector performatively translated one form of infallibility into another. To be ritually effective, Chagas's truth-detection required that the inner workings of his method—his divinatory gift—remain secret so it could be revealed before others. In other words, his repertoire and knowledge had to be elusive in order to effectively empower the bureaucratic organization of the corporate group toward the African population. Secrecy is commonly defined as the intentional concealment of information, and it has long been recognized as integral to sovereign institutions, bureaucratic organizations, and private, collective, and intimate relationships (Bok Reference Bok1982; Masco Reference Masco2014; Melley Reference Melley2012; Piot Reference Piot1993; Scheppele Reference Scheppele1988). If we accept this, then the success of Chagas' revelatory technique was grounded in the cunning visibility of its secretive and hidden properties.

OPEN SECRETS OF CORPORATE CONTROL

The public nature of secrecy has long been debated, from Nancy Munn's discussion of witchcraft as the “open secret” in Gawan everyday life (Reference Munn1986: 215) to Taussig's complex dynamic of the public secret (Reference Taussig1999), in which secrecy is repeatedly staged as such, thus showcasing its boundary-crossing and transgressive qualities (Jones Reference Jones2014). When the mining company approached diviners in 1957, one of its purported goals was to recover stolen diamonds. Though the divination ritual produced disappointing results, what the company failed to realize was that in the process it had transferred onto the diviners the burden of producing knowledge and asserting the value of corporate secrecy. There had been a theft, but there was no longer any secret. By coopting divinatory knowledge for the benefit of its own investigation, the security services overlooked that the strength and efficacy of its mission required that people continue to perceive the services as secret. That is, concealing how the corporate bureaucracy worked was a precondition for establishing the efficacy of its security. In a reversal of the “machine to kill” noted earlier, an instrument rumored to intimidate people into disclosing information, the officials were appealing to diviners as agents of cultural authority. If the veracity of facts had already been determined, the role of the divinatory ritual was to enhance the truth, giving it more substance.

In Max Gluckman's famous theory of moral accountability, a secular response to a crisis in an industrial society is found within a structure of relations whereas “occult beliefs” focus on an embodied cause of disorder, that which hides and produces the conflict at hand (Reference Gluckman and Gluckman1972: 8). This distinction between “magico-religious” and “secular” conflicts, Gluckman suggests, is in part explained by the fact that in modern firms “we no longer depend, in order to make a living, on those with whom we are intimately and sentimentally connected by kinship or in-lawship” (ibid.: 41). The problem of security and secrecy in a colonial mining corporation raises questions regarding this clear-cut distinction, not least in light of the roles that intimacy and kin relations played in the event described in this article. I do not mean to suggest that “secular” or “occult” approaches are interchangeable; to the contrary, they seem to effectively respond in acknowledged opposition and complementarity. This historical precedent and the concurrent features of corporate rule and local cultural expertise are further confirmed by the recent recruitment of traditional healers by mining companies to fight the AIDS pandemic in South Africa (Rajak Reference Rajak2011: 144).Footnote ⁴⁹

The juxtaposition of divinatory knowledge and corporate security examined here encompasses more than their overlapping dynamics of revelation and concealment. As I have suggested, corporate divination speaks to the shared properties of truth detection and surveillance as they pertain to divinatory rituals and corporate security. If the company's control apparatus was driven by local logics of revelation in the attempt to render legible the unseen forces of diamond theft, the growing restrictions on artisanal diamond mining in present-day Lunda have also enabled new oracular potentials for evading control and rendering theft invisible. In this contested relation between corporate mines and ritual experts, local ideas about social control and knowledge production are intertwined in mining labor and corporate management. An anthropological reading of criminality and surveillance, capital and labor, in the end should account for the ways in which seemingly opposite ideologies of secrecy and control can be intimately inhabited, potentially undermined, or displaced away from their strict coercive effects.