Salati Mukoti

Salati Mukoti of the Mbwa (Dog) clan was born in 1942 in the Lima region. He got ill while still at primary school, went to all clinics and finallly he was treated by a shing’anga, Cipepo, who, however, died while treating him. He then moved to shing’anga Nsakanya whose name as well as those of the other spirits possessing him, Mbaita and Chongo, could later be found often in Chalebaila‘s songs. He ended the period of treatment with a Cibombe ca cisungu. He was possessed by Maluba, a Mwami. Later two other spirits followed, among whom the Bayambo spirit Chalebaila, the spirit of a Twa chief, from the nearby Lukanga swamps. He was not called bamukaMaluba or Maluba because Maluba would only come once in a while for serious cases. He worked for a number of years in the Copperbelt towns where two of his patients became shing’anga.
Married earlier in town with a woman from Chibale, he came to Chibale to heal in 1976. At that moment, there were only a few Mwami shing’anga in Chibale. He was immediately successful and had many patients with serious illnesses and adepts, some of whom became shing’anga, like bamukaKunda Mfwanti and Mbomba. Despite this, his life in Chibale was not without troubles. His health was poor and he often had to visit his shing’anga in the Lima region. He was preoccupied with the jealousy that his success caused. He played with his relatively foreign origin by accentuating it in his way of speaking, songs and dancing. This partly gave him power, as the Lima region was known to have powerful healers, but it also kept him an outsider which fuelled his suspicions based on jealousy.

Together with bamukaNdubeni he was generally seen as the biggest shing’anga in Chibale in the 1980s. This lasted until well in the 1990s when the possession scene diminished and respect for him waned. The spirits left him in 2002 and shortly after that he left Chibale to become a non-possessed herbalist working in Ndola.