Vimbuza: The Dance That Calls The Spirits Back

By Maya Chukwu

In the northern reaches of Malawi—and across parts of Zambia and Tanzania—a powerful, centuries-old ritual continues to pulse with rhythm, healing, and connection between worlds. This is Vimbuza: a dance that is also a spiritual practice, a form of therapy, and a cultural declaration that the living and the dead remain intertwined.

A Tradition of Healing and Possession

Vimbuza is far more than a performance. It is a healing ritual of the Tumbuka people, centred on the belief that certain illnesses are caused by spirits who must be appeased, engaged, or persuaded to leave. Those afflicted—most often women—enter trance-like states through a combination of drumming, singing, and dance. The movements, music, and collective energy invite the healing spirits into the space, turning the body into a vessel through which balance can be restored.

At the heart of this ceremony are the ng’oma—drums whose deep, resonant rhythms are believed to call and guide the spirits. Each spirit is said to have its own rhythmic pattern, and the drummers shape their beats accordingly. Around the central dancers, the community forms a living circle, singing and clapping, creating a soundscape that allows the ritual to take hold.

Origins in Resilience

Vimbuza emerged in the mid-19th century, shaped by waves of conflict, displacement, and cultural suppression. It became a way for the Tumbuka people to process grief, trauma, and the psychic wounds of upheaval. In a world where personal struggles were often viewed through a spiritual lens, the dance offered a socially recognised way to confront distress, to make it visible, and to begin the work of healing in public.

Despite repeated attempts by missionaries and colonial authorities to ban or dilute it, Vimbuza endured. Its survival speaks to its role as both a spiritual anchor and a form of communal care. For generations, it has been a place where pain is not hidden, but transformed.

The Language of Spirits

The ritual recognises many kinds of spirits. Some are said to be the souls of fallen warriors. Others are animal spirits—lions, pythons, and birds—whose attributes are embodied in the dance. There are also spirits of powerful healers or seers from the past, whose presence is both protective and demanding.

Those possessed often wear clothing or adornments linked to the spirit they host: skins, bells, or symbolic objects like staffs and axes. Each choice reflects not only the spirit’s identity but the transformation of the dancer from everyday person to spiritual medium.

In certain more intense versions of the ceremony, the dance takes on an exorcistic form, seeking to drive the spirit out entirely. These performances can be physically demanding, emotionally charged, and filled with symbolic gestures that communicate with the unseen.

Ceremony, Expression, and Community

The phrase often associated with Vimbuza is “dance your disease”—the belief that movement, rhythm, and spirit can work together to restore balance. The possessed dancer is never left to move alone; the community surrounds them, offering song, drumming, and collective energy to guide the process.

For the audience, this is not mere spectacle. It is participation in a deeply human form of empathy—bearing witness to another’s suffering and actively helping to lift it. In the process, the boundaries between healer, patient, and onlooker blur.

Between Heritage and Modernity

Today, Vimbuza exists in two overlapping worlds. In rural communities, it is still practised in its traditional form, led by experienced healers who have inherited the knowledge from their elders. In cities and at cultural festivals, it is also performed as heritage—an art form to be appreciated for its music, colour, and choreography.

While this recognition has brought pride and preservation, it also raises questions. When taken from the healing ground to the performance stage, does Vimbuza lose some of its power? Or can it live in both spaces—ritual and theatre—each feeding the other?

The Dance as a Bridge

For those who participate, Vimbuza is a bridge. It connects individuals to their ancestors, the living to the dead, and the suffering to the possibility of renewal. It is also a bridge across time, carrying forward a worldview in which illness is not just a physical state, but a disturbance in the harmony between the human and the spirit worlds.

To watch Vimbuza is to see a community in dialogue with forces beyond sight. The slow build of the drums, the sway of bodies in rhythm, the calls and responses of the singers—all combine to create a space where the air feels charged, as if reality itself has become porous.

A Living Tradition

In an age dominated by clinical definitions of health and strict divisions between the material and the spiritual, Vimbuza offers a reminder of other ways of understanding the human condition. It insists that healing is not only about the body, but also about the heart, the mind, the ancestors, and the unseen.

The dance survives because it still serves a purpose: it allows people to name their pain, to embody it, to transform it. And in that transformation, it offers a vision of wholeness that belongs not to one person, but to an entire community.

Vimbuza is not simply about calling the spirits back—it is about calling the living back to one another.