Book Review: Diviner Mind By Nicola Robins
How organisations can learn from the indigenous science of uncertainty
Review by Sarah Bullen

This book starts with a crazy premise. What may happen if everything you thought you knew was turned on its head? This is how we meet the author Nicola Robins, twenty years into her past.

She’s young, she’s ambitious, she’s a Yale graduate, she’s a top-tier sustainability consultant, and she is in Australia to conduct a sustainability audit at a mine. She’s full of ambition, she’s full of ideas, and she is doing what she’s been trained to do for years. But what happens on that trip changes everything for her. During the audit, as she is holed up in mining barracks, she hears the mountain speak to her.

The mountain that speaks is the one being mined by the mining company at the time. And in a loud and booming voice, it gives her a message and a warning. What happens next is gripping, thrilling and an unstoppable read. The corporate girl goes into a tailspin. She lands back in South Africa, continues her job and her marriage, but starts to go into what could be called a psychotic episode. She can’t sleep. She’s in cold sweats. She’s having aches and pains. Her mind is going mad, and she tries almost everything she knows to do to fix it. She goes from psychologists to doctors to meditation to bodywork. She tries all of the best that medicine has to offer at the time. And we follow this incredibly gripping descent and near-madness with the author until something

extraordinary and unexpected happens. As a last resort, she consults a sangoma or a diviner, who tells her she has a ‘calling from the ancestors’, and that her mental illness is the sickness of calling.  Despite being left-leaning and politically liberal, Nicola still comes from what is termed a Western background. And we follow her thought process as she unpacks the message and what the proposed cure would mean to her life, her work, and her marriage. But she could also see she was caught in a cycle that would end in her psychiatric ward.  And so she chooses to take the route that offers a solution: to train as a sangoma, a diviner. 

“…so I found myself trading my laptop for two stabbing spears. I entered a training school for traditional African diviners on the outskirts of Gaborone, Botswana. I had been told over a series of divinations and consultations that training as a diviner was the cure for my protracted illness. Turns out, that was true.”

Up in Botswana we follow her as she trains with teacher ( or gobela) Pokojwe, otherwise known as Niall Campbell.

It’s also interwoven with a theoretical framework and an unpacking of what she is learning, which makes this book so readable for people at many levels. On one level, it takes you through this training to be a diviner. And on another level, it rigorously and intellectually unpacks and explains the things she is learning, the concepts she is being exposed to. We watch her mind try to unpack the process of divination in a rigorous scientific way.

“It offers an interpretive framing of the Southern African knowledge system known as Ngoma. Ngoma is a Bantu word that loosely translates to “drum”, “song” or “ritual”. Rooted in indigenous African cosmology and associated primarily with the Nguni people of Southern Africa, it brings” together a wide range of traditional healers who are known collectively as sangomas.”

I don’t want to spoil the story, but Nicola graduates. She is a trained Sangoma and Diviner and she moves back to her life with her sanity intact and with skills she never imagined.

But she has to navigate an obligation to this ancient wisdom she learned, these old teachings, and a calling in her professional life to share this knowledge somehow with corporations, with businesses, with organizations.

“To extend the cure beyond the individual, graduating diviners are expected to offer their new skills to the community. By returning to work within the context that gave rise to their sickness, diviner training edges the bigger system towards balance. This is where I found myself. This collective approach to healing, learning and change can work well when your community understands it. Sadly, mine did not. As a business consultant, I worked for the giants of Africa’s capitalist economy.

We follow Nicola over the next decade, trying to integrate this into her career. She goes on to become a globally recognised sustainability consultant and continually tries to bring these indigenous concepts into the boardroom, the older wisdoms, trying to find a way to teach this and share this with organisations, going so far as to do divination techniques with them to understand complexity theory.

The book ends with her explaining a structure she has devised to work within the corporate world and to bring this deeper, richer knowledge to it, which is the process called Diviner Mind.

This book is for two clear audiences. The first audience are those who are interested in the world of ancestors, spirits, the unseen realms of divination and of working with older shamanic and ancestral lineages. The deep dive into her own process, her training and what it entailed is one of the most revealing books I have read on this topic. So anybody with an interest in Indigenous Knowledge Systems will be gripped by it.

The second clear readership is business, which understands and wants a more integrative approach to business engagement with sustainability.

Since the book’s launch in 2025, it has gripped international readers with its incredibly rigorous unpacking of the concept of ancestors and what they are. It goes way beyond explaining them as people who lived before us and moves into sharing knowledge about the different kinds of ancestors. I found this book to shed light on things I’d been interested for a long time and not quite grasped. Nicola brings her wealth of academic background, years of business sustainability experience, and the deeper wisdom she gained through her training to a discussion that unpacks, explains, and demystifies some of the concepts that are increasingly popular.