Spirit possession is not a phenomenon confined ONLY to the Budya people of Mutoko, it encompasses the whole of Africa and abroad. Many scholars have thus written on spirit possession among the Shona people, for example Michael. Bourdillon (1987), Michael Gelfand (1965), Hubert Bucher (1980) and others. Bourdillon presents some ritual descriptions of a spirit medium (shave) in Chapter 9 of his book. Bucher (1980:9) writes about the ‘Churches of Spirits’ and strives to show the power of the spirit as found in the society, especially among chiefs and leaders of the African Independent Churches AICs. He classifies the spirits into lion (mhondoro), ancestral (midzimu) and alien (shave). Gelfand (1965) describes the role played by the spirits in general.

It is Bourdillon's anthropological observations of the positive social functions of spirit possession of an individual in Shona society that is of great interest to my study. Bourdillon is cited by Bucher (1980:94) as noting that the possession cults provide Shona women with an opportunity to express, under the protection of the dissociated trance state, inclinations which they would not normally be allowed to manifest in public. This positive aspect of possession is sharply contrasted with the definition of possession by Ter Haar:

It should be noted, however, that the phenomenon of spirit possession, which is positively acknowledged as ‘possessing power’ in African traditional religion, is widely regarded as ‘victimisation by evil spirits’ in many Christian circles.