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Shamans have the kind of experiential self knowledge that makes their passions servants to the shaman’s will, rather than aspects of the self that are dangerously unknown or unpredictable. The shaman, therefore, is master of him or herself. Neither society nor his or her emotions are master.

The shaman’s mastery is equivalent to radical non-conformity in terms of taking up a fixed and formal social role. The role of superego as agent of social conformity is radically subverted by the shaman’s very being. From an uninformed onlooker’s perspective, this mode of existence, shamanism, goes against the grain of conventional assumptions concerning the possible. The shaman, perversely enough, is no particular social subject, but may change his or her identity at will, according to whim and the imagination. The shaman’s very existence is definitively scandalous – it offends the sense of social norms, as something that ought not to be, as an offence against our socialised conceptions of the possible. Nonetheless Marechera was never more a shaman than, in his ordinary life,when he adorned himself with myriads of cameras to become, in turn, his own idea of a Fleet Street photographer, an old woman, and finally a hunter. (p 225).

The scandalous nature of the shaman attacks our formalised (and indeed often reified) visions of what society ought to be like. As observers of the practice we may too easily be led astray by our emotions and their powers of persuasion, to the point of denying the very possibility of shamanic being. Our cognitive dissonance in the face of superego pressure to conform overwhelms us. Consequently, we believe that there is either normative society or there is madness, but that there is no third category of shamanism – there is no mode of being that evades the necessity of social conformity without being driven completely mad. Yet, the mode of being that is shamanism is a state of having conquered the demands of superego through facing death. Viewed in Hegelian terms, the bondsman is unfree because he is afraid to face death. The shaman, however, is one whose very being is defined by having entered the realm of death. By facing death, he has made himself free of societal constraints – the primary one being the socialising force of superego. Thus the shaman’s identity is not held in place by societal expectations, but by the tranformative force of his own will. That the shamanistic mode of being can look like social death from a spectator’s point of view doesn’t add up to a practical negation of his being. The shaman’s relationship to death is ongoing and dialectical – the negation of his formalised social being fuels his imagination, which stands as a dialectial opposite to the nature and conditions of a fixed state of social being. The shaman’s relationship to normal, conventional society is in the relationship of scandal to a fixed standard of morality.

In the choreodrama, “Portrait of a Black Artist in London,” Marechera invites us to view him in terms of scandal. The choreodrama opposes, with great psychological violence, the formal identity of the black man; the “negro”. It counterposes to this state of being an opposite force, which has as its principle the destruction of the aforementioned public state of identity:

I said take a walk through the mind of negro
Like everything human it’s not a pleasant sight
I cannot meet you there only in the grey area of the mindless
The one they quaintly call the anarchist cookbook ( p 267)