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CHAPTER 1

A Fugitive People

The opening chapters of this book take othama (to move) as their guiding motif. Just one of the local metaphors used for religious conversion, it is a term whose relevance lies in its everydayness. Those among whom I lived, although not precisely nomadic, have a propensity for dealing with problems by leaving them behind. Their predilection for flight suggests that to be grounded in Makhuwa tradition is paradoxically to be mobile. It is this fluid way of being, I argue, that informs the facility with which many of the same people who move across space move across religions. In situating historically the regularity and reversibility of both migrations and conversions, the current chapter also demonstrates that the small set of African villages where I worked bears no resemblance to the static enclosure once considered the ethnographic ideal. Hence, as further introduction to the setting of my research, this chapter attends less to the place than to the people—people who inhabit the land not by rooting themselves to it but by moving themselves through it.

Luisinha

The sun just beginning to fall below the forested horizon, ten-year-old Luisinha was doing what she normally did when not helping her mother pound grain or fetch wood.¹ She was playing with age-mates on the main road connecting Kaveya village to Maúa town. She likely had on the same tattered dress I always saw her wearing and the same sweet smile I relished whenever she wandered near. I would look up from the water I was boiling or the notebook I was filling, nod toward the 50cc Lifo parked close by, and whisper our secret word: muttuttuttu-ttu-ttu-ttu. Covering her face and laughing, she would reply with the same—our play on muttuttuttu, the Makhuwa word for motorbike.

It was here, in the mud hut compound of Luisinha’s parents, that my wife and I lodged during our stays in the Maúa countryside. Jemusse and Fátima belonged to Kaveya village’s African Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus Africana, or ADA) congregation. They were among its most earnest participants. While from them I learned the rudiments of Makhuwa domesticity and Pentecostal piety, I had their children to thank for helping me most with the language. They tired less of speaking with me, perhaps because of our comparable verbal skills, perhaps because they found endlessly amusing all the mistakes I made, and the game of turning each mistake into a new and silly word.

I was away that day—in the district capital, catching up on correspondences and square meals—but it was told to me that shortly before her mother would have called her in for the evening, Luisinha strayed into the low brush along the road’s edge. Something sharp pierced her bare left foot, and the swelling came immediately. Vomiting ensued. It was not long before she passed out.

Snakebites were uncommon, but not unknown, in the area. In the recent past, health dispensaries offered the most effective remedy. There had been one nearby, initiated by the Catholic diocese, but Mozambique’s health ministry had recently closed it for reasons unknown to villagers. Lacking that option, Jemusse and Fátima consented to the application of traditional medicines by a local healer. Meanwhile, they focused their own efforts on prayer. I had seen my friends pray on many occasions for their three young children, always with unbridled intensity, frequently with weeping and wailing, even in times of health. I can only imagine how agonized their cries to Christ must have been that night, cradling their little girl as she struggled to stay alive.

At various points it was debated whether to transport Luisinha to the district hospital. The elder of Fátima’s clan dissented, insisting that hospitals cannot cure this kind of bite. He meant that the snake that bit Luisinha, locally known as the evili, was no ordinary snake. He may also have been expressing the common knowledge that even Maúa’s foremost medical facility was so under-resourced that the time spent getting there—hours by bicycle over a deeply rutted road—could be put to better use.

Jemusse and Fátima resolved to keep doing the best they could with the little they had, at least until daybreak when a truck would likely pass by and its driver hopefully take pity. Devastated by these details when I first learned them, I could not help but recall Luisinha’s “muttuttuttu-ttu-ttu-ttu,” and wish with all my being that it had been there that night. It was not, and before the sun rose again, Luisinha breathed her last.

The Ends of the Earth

Bereft not only of health facilities but also of paved roads easing access to one, the village of Kaveya could be classed as an “out-of-the-way place” (Tsing 1993). It is located forty kilometers from the district capital, which lies four hundred kilometers from the provincial capital, which, in turn, lies nearly two thousand kilometers from the national capital. Mozambique itself is relatively unknown and unprosperous, even by African standards. A recent report in National Geographic describes it as the planet’s third poorest nation and calls special attention to the wretched of the rural north: “their ragged clothing, their swollen bellies, their sod houses, their obvious poverty” (Bourne 2014: 71). The article ultimately celebrates signs of development under way. During the past decade, agribusiness multinationals originating in Brazil and China have taken over much of the land, introducing electric power, mechanized equipment, and cash incomes.

They have also transformed much of the landscape, repairing roads first laid by Portuguese concessionary companies and laying many others for the first time. Development workers tout modern infrastructure as the linchpin of progress; roads connect peripheries to centers, people to power. Yet anthropologists have traditionally seen things differently. Roads were reckoned as little more than conduits of contamination. Aiming to investigate unknown people in unreached places, anthropologists took care to accentuate the abysmal quality of the roads leading to their field sites (Dalakoglou 2010: 145).²

In the 1980s, anthropologists came to revise radically the bounded and static conception of culture that undergirded this earlier suspicion of roads.³ No longer a source of anxiety, the trope of mobility came to figure prominently; routes became as interesting as roots (Clifford 1997). The timing of this shift is not incidental. In the late modern world—characterized by decentralized industries, diminished state sovereignty, and advanced transport technologies—migration rates have accelerated at every scale and in every place. Rootedness is now a rarity. Recognition of this has offered not only empirical insights into the present but also a framework for rethinking the past. As Renato Rosaldo argues, “Rapidly increasing global interdependence has made it more and more clear that neither ‘we’ nor ‘they’ are as neatly bounded and homogeneous as once seemed to be the case” (1989: 217).

Yet the very dependence of this argument upon the “rapidly increasing” dynamics of globalization leaves open the question of mobility’s historicity. Most commonly, mobility appears as a feature not of the human condition but of the contemporary human condition (e.g., Urry 2007). It characterizes, exceptionally, the present “age of migration” (Castles and Miller 1998). Indeed, Arjun Appadurai’s own conjecture that place-bound natives “have probably never existed” (1988: 39) is belied by the title and thrust of his influential book Modernity at Large. Wide-scale population movements, he argues there, are among the “brute facts” that ethnographies pertaining to the present must confront. “The landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous” (1996: 48).

But were they ever? Are “traditional” societies historically dynamic only by virtue of their contact with such “modernizing” forces as colonialism and capitalism, radios and roads? The commonplace conflation of mobility and modernity finds classic expression in G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History. After a mere handful of pages disparaging “the Negro” for lacking consciousness of such universal principles as God and Law, Hegel hastens his readers along: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit” ([1837] 1956: 99). The subject chosen for action is revealing: “we” world-historical people (non-Africans, for sure) uniquely possess the agency to leave Africa, and should do so forthwith to avoid becoming mired in its morass.⁴

One suspects such urgency in the speed with which Land Cruisers charge through Maúa’s woodland landscapes. For their occupants, point A and point B—rather than the unmarked spaces between—are what matter.⁵ Villagers, upon picking up the distant hum of an engine, invariably pause what they are doing and crane their necks to see. When the vehicle emerges from a cloud of dust, someone calls out who among the district’s known akunya (whites) is passing by. Whether lumber extractors from China, game hunters from South Africa, or state administrators from the capital, the pace of these akunya contrasts sharply with that of the subsistence farmers watching from the roadside. These women and men travel by foot, “step by step, like the chameleon” (vakhani vakhani ntoko namanriya). The chameleon, honored through this and other proverbs for its deliberate motions as well as for its chromatic mutations, is mostly admired for the lateral positioning of its eyes. This allows it to see peripherally, to take in the margins—something fleeting motorists cannot possibly do. For such passersby, the blur of roadside peasants can only confirm Hegel’s view that novelty and vitality come from without, that internal to Africa there is “no movement or development to exhibit.”

While such thinking prevails to varying degrees among most of Maúa’s akunya, it is particularly pronounced among the recently arrived Pentecostal missionaries.⁶ Usually from Mozambique’s coastal cities and southern provinces, these young men express satisfaction at having arrived at “the ends of the earth” to which Jesus directed his disciples (Acts 1:8, New Revised Standard Version). As Pastor Manuel of the Evangelical Assembly of God (Evangélica Assembléia de Deus) church said with what seemed a mixture of pride and concern: “People back home warned me: Maúa is a place where you arrive alive and leave dead.” Yet the very ubiquity of death—Luisinha’s was just one of many during my fieldwork year—also goes far toward assuring outsiders of the urgency of their work. Here, at the ends of the earth, live the damnable and destitute—men and women badly in need of being saved, of being changed, of being moved.

Irreversible Breaks

Pastor Simões surprised me by appearing at the door of my residence in Maúa town. As district head of the ADA, he often wore the sleek, ill-fitting maroon suit that, on this occasion, contrasted with the rags of the shorter man beside him. That was Nório, the deacon of the ADA’s Kaveya congregation, who had just biked in to summon his pastor back out. Knowing the usually jovial demeanor of both men, I sensed something amiss when my boisterous greeting fell flat. “The girl of Papá Jemusse and Mamá,” Pastor Simões muttered in Portuguese before switching to Makhuwa, “òhokhwa.” I froze with shock. Nório filled in the details. Our heads dropped and we all stood still, a silence only breached when I whispered a curse. We made plans to depart together before daybreak, to be with Jemusse and Fátima just as soon as we could.

We arrived to the sight of dozens holding vigil: members of the Kaveya congregation intermixed with members of my friends’ respective clans. The men were gathered together in and around the muttheko, the open-air shed used for receiving visitors. The women, seated on reed mats across the compound, were wrapped in capulanas (lengths of printed cloth), Fátima bare-breasted as is customary for mourners. I spotted Jemusse off to the side, cradling himself on the dirt ground. Dropping my helmet, I walked over, fell to my knees, and embraced him. He never looked up. “Papá,” is all his throat emitted. I held him close. And he cried.

An onlooker with knowledge of Makhuwa cultural codes might have found this unusual. Makhuwa men are not supposed to cry (Macaire 1996: 284). If they do, they do so only on the inside. I often heard the same said of Pentecostals. A charge commonly leveled by villagers against their Pentecostal neighbors is that, when a family member dies, they do not cry (winla), a way of saying they callously neglect the proper funerary rites. It is true that pastors, no less than initiation masters, teach stoicism in the face of hardship, even in the face of death. It is possible, then, that in sobbing uninhibitedly for his daughter, Jemusse was violating norms of both the Makhuwa culture and the Pentecostal church to which he belonged. It is possible that I too was violating norms of my community—the social scientific community—failing to keep my research subjects properly at bay.⁷ But in the face of death, codes of conduct meant very little. Jemusse’s head buried in his knees and my head buried in his shoulder, I held him close. And we cried.

Luisinha’s body had already been interred. What remained was the third-day visit in which we would carry to the burial plot a floral arrangement the women had put together and a small wooden cross the men were working on. On the crossbar, Luisinha’s name was tenderly inscribed with ink produced from charcoal dust and the sap of a banana flower. During this period, by Makhuwa tradition, immediate family members were also to shave their heads (okhweliwa), though this had not been done.

The procession began at daybreak the third day. We walked silently in single file behind Pastor Simões, still in his maroon suit, who carried the cross in one hand and his Bible in the other. Turning off the main road onto a narrow footpath, we followed it deep into the bush until we reached a clearing studded with mounds of dirt. The men snapped off leafy branches from surrounding trees and used them to sweep around Luisinha’s plot. Cross planted and flowers set down, all of us then crouched low and turned to Pastor Simões.

Figure 3. Preparing the cross for Luisinha, Kaveya village.

He opened with a short prayer before launching into his homily. Rather than reminisce about the dearly departed, he used his time to excoriate Makhuwa conceptions of the afterlife. Luisinha’s munepa (spirit; pl. minepa) is now in heaven, he instructed, and she will not return. She will remain with God and with Jesus. It is only evil spirits (minepa sonanara) who return to the living, demanding food and drink. “But if you do the will of God, you will arrive in heaven and you will return no more.” Luisinha had done the will of God. She would not return; she had already forgotten all the troubles of the world, not least her terrible final hours: “Now she hears nothing, sees nothing, thinks nothing, eats nothing. Everything is forgotten. Therefore, we cannot do esataka. Many people, when somebody dies, they go and buy rice, buy a goat, to go and do esataka. They say it is to help the person who died. Why did they not help the person when he was alive? They say that we do this because our ancestors did it. But to follow the ancestors is a lie! Jesus abolished this.” Pastor Simões was painting an opposition to Makhuwa traditional beliefs about death, grounded as they are in the funerary rite known as esataka.⁸ This ceremony is understood to join the living to the dead in an act of accompaniment, accompaniment on the recently deceased’s journey to the ancestral abode. Yet just as there is a passage out, there is also a return. Minepa revisit the living, appearing in dreams and requesting to be fed, offering help to some and causing havoc to others.

It is precisely such regressions that Pastor Simões labored to denounce. His message was that Jesus introduced a new conception of death: one without return, a permanent state of rest at God’s side. There was thus no need for esataka, nor, for similar reasons, for okhweliwa: “Even if you shave your head, the child has already gone.” Our responsibility is not to the dead but to the living, particularly at this time to the bereaved. There was a good deal of compassion in Pastor Simões’s message for my grief-stricken friends, consistent with his willingness to overlook that they permitted the use of traditional remedies on their daughter. He seemed to respect that in such dire straits, they simply could not refuse any of the few measures available to them. But he was going to make sure no more backsliding (voltando atrás) occurred. He knew, no doubt, that it is at times of death that the threat of backsliding looms largest.

Mobility Beyond Modernity

The insistence on rupture, on a total break with the past, is not unique to Pentecostal forms of Christianity. Historians trace it to the first-century apostle Paul. In his classic study on conversion, A. D. Nock (1933) describes Paul’s as the first Christian conversion insofar as it made the new a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, the old.⁹ Conversion as transference between mutually exclusive faiths was the evangelical ideal in colonial-era missions as well, and consequently became part of social scientific discourse (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 248–51). That discourse changed significantly beginning in the 1980s, with such terms as bricolage, hybridity, and syncretism soon permeating historical and anthropological studies of cross-cultural encounter (McGuire 2008: 185–213). Only in a more recent recalibration have anthropologists studying Christianity swung the pendulum back to the rituals and rhetoric of rupture, doing so largely in response to their prominence in the Pentecostal ministries flourishing today. These do, in fact, instantiate the Pauline ideal.

The intensification of rupture—historically, through Pentecostalism, and theoretically, through the anthropology of Christianity—coincides with coterminous shifts marked by critical theorists and political economists: from modern to postmodern conditions, from Fordist to post-Fordist economies, and from centralized to neoliberal governance (Piot 2010: 12–13). Underwriting each of these are the “meta-narratives of modernity” that posit the modern as a break from the traditional (Englund and Leach 2000). Assumptions about irreversible time thus govern processes of both conversion and modernization. Anthropologists of Christianity have noted the consonance well: “Insofar as [modernity] implies an irreversible break with the past, after which the world is utterly transformed in mysterious ways, it is itself modeled on the Christian idea of conversion” (Cannell 2006: 39).¹⁰ With respect to Pentecostalism, in particular, while its enchanted supernaturalism gives it something of a nonmodern cast, its emphasis on discontinuity “maps neatly onto modernist ideas about the need for radical change and about transformation as progress” (Robbins 2010: 168). Conversion to various forms of Christianity, but particularly to Pentecostal forms, can thus be readily viewed as “conversion to modernities” (van der Veer 1996), both formations entailing or at least enjoining a break with what comes to be seen as a backward past.

Pentecostal pastors in Maúa district, as elsewhere, see themselves as implementing this progressive agenda through their efforts to “mobilize” what they regard as a stagnant population stuck in its ancestral ways. Yet here a paradox emerges. While the kind of movement characterizing Pentecostal conversion may be a movement of rupture, the end of this movement is repose. It is a conversion to end all conversions, a move to end all moves. Pentecostals are not the only recent purveyors of such thinking in Mozambique. At the height of its program of socialist reform (1975–80), the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or Frelimo)—the anticolonial guerilla force turned postindependence ruling party—conceived its work as the “mass mobilization” of the peasantry (see Bowen 2000: 53–57). Yet, simultaneously, it adopted from Karl Marx what Marx adopted from Hegel: the view that the successful revolution is less about movement than about the end of history, that the telos of radical change is perennial stasis. Political and religious reformers operating in postcolonial Mozambique share in common what modernization programs most basically assume: border transgressions permitting no regression, great leaps forward allowing no slides back.

This same theme suffused Pastor Simões’s graveside homily. Luisinha’s transition from life to death, he taught, is not a passage from one zone to another. Rather, it is a shift from one state to another: from movement to rest, from flux to finality. Thus death, like the ideal conversion, is a rebirth—rebirth conceived as an irreversible break, a point of no return, a deliverance unto rest. Rest and permanence, stability and serenity may be self-evident ideals for self-conscious modernizers; they often are for academics under the sway of Western philosophy’s “search for the immutable” (Dewey 1929: 26–48). Yet immutability—and, likewise, immobility—is impractical, if not downright odd, for many Makhuwa. For them, rebirth is entirely compatible with return, rupture with reversal. Of course, no shortage of Makhuwa men and women, Jemusse and Fátima among them, have embraced Pentecostalism. That embrace, however, is less helpfully seen as a marker of their modernity than as the latest (and not necessarily the last) marker of their mobility.

Fight or Flight

Soon after Pastor Simões returned to the district capital, discussions at the compound turned to the tragedy’s real cause. The elder was deemed correct. This was not just any snake. The bite of the evili is usually not fatal—all the proof needed that this one had been transformed. A sorcerer had sent it, and the identity of that sorcerer—Atata Mukwetxhe, an estranged uncle (tata) of Fátima’s—was known to all. This same man had caused a similar death only one year earlier. The occupants of that compound responded by abandoning it and reconstructing a new one in a distant corner of Kaveya village.

Jemusse and Fátima were now making similar plans—“to leave Atata Mukwetxhe here alone to do his sorcery,” Fátima said. Because the rainy season was fast approaching, and because they wanted to remove their two surviving children from further danger, they planned quickly. After consulting with clan elders, it was decided they would decamp to the district capital. Among Maúa town’s twenty-five thousand inhabitants were both biological kin and surrogate kin (members of the ADA’s central district congregation). Jemusse and Fátima would be able to lean on them for support. Jemusse also foresaw opportunities to reestablish his carpentry trade; although timber was only available in the forested regions of outlying villages, the clients who bought his doors and window frames all resided in town.

Only two concerns held Jemusse and Fátima back. One was limited means with which to transport their belongings—corn and beans, mortar and pestle, carpentry tools, a bundle of clothes. The other concern was for me. With as much generosity as they had shown in allowing me into their lives, they worried about abandoning the compound I had come to use as my rural base. I begged them not to think at all about the second problem and to let me help with the first. I hired a truck from town that could pick them up and transport them there. It was a small and inadequate reciprocation for their hospitality and companionship. Just before the rains arrived, they returned to the cemetery to tell Luisinha they were leaving, loaded their belongings and children onto the flatbed pickup, and set out for the district capital.

I was happy to see my friends do what they thought was best, as were their family and fellow congregants. Not, however, Pastor Simões. “It’s not correct to just get up and leave,” he said. “They should have remained there. They should have had the courage to fight.” Turning sermonic, though it was just us talking, he invoked Jesus’s response to Satan testing him in the desert. Jesus did not flee, but remained firm. He stood up to Satan. “A strong person would stay, use the power of prayer and fasting. Only if the person is weak will he leave the situation, change locations.” Besides, merely fleeing the problem does nothing to solve it. “You cannot flee from Satan. If this is sorcery, you cannot flee from sorcery. People here say that the sorcerer travels by night.”

Pastor Simões did not deny that the occult forces of the sorcerer were real and responsible. He merely maintained that the Holy Spirit is stronger, that it holds the power to protect those who serve it. If only their faith were firm, Jemusse and Fátima could have stayed, fought, and prevailed. This emphasis on fixity recalled the pastor’s graveside message from only a few weeks earlier: his insistence that Luisinha’s munepa would go to heaven and rest eternally there. Nearly everyone and everything around Jemusse and Fátima, however, told them differently. Not only was Luisinha’s munepa on the move. So, too, to protect their remaining children, must they be.

Evident in Pastor Simões’s critique, besides the value of fixity, is the value of ferocity. One also hears this in his frequent sermons enjoining militaristic vigilance against “traditional” customs and practices. At least two discursive contexts help situate this bellicosity. One is that of spiritual warfare, wherein conflicts of the physical world manifest conflicts that are metaphysical in nature (DeBernardi 1999). This takes a particular form in Pentecostal discourse: of a vigorous struggle between the Holy Spirit and satanic forces. Pentecostalism’s aggressive antagonism toward alternative religious options has proven alarming to governing authorities, (non-Pentecostal) religious leaders, and scholars alike (Hackett 2003). Yet shorn, perhaps, of its extreme Manicheanism, the idea of cosmic conflicts redounding to the mundane is not uniquely Pentecostal. In fact, as theologian Ogbu Kalu (2008) argues, one reason for Pentecostalism’s takeoff in indigenous African societies is a basic ontological compatibility on this point.

A second context for Pastor Simões’s elevation of fight over flight is the political project of nation-state formation. Historians note two complementary factors behind Mozambique’s independence in 1975: the wearing down of Portuguese militants by Frelimo guerillas in a war that began in 1964, and the overthrow of the Salazar regime in Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution. While these factors are interconnected, the Mozambican nationalist narrative, unsurprisingly, accentuates the former, often to the exclusion of the latter (e.g., do Rosário 2004); independence was hard won on Mozambican soil—the result of fierce, armed struggle against the Portuguese. Nothing promotes or celebrates this narrative better than the Kalashnikov on Mozambique’s flag, one of very few national flags to feature a weapon and the only one to feature one so lethal. Significantly, the current flag—which foregrounds a hoe (symbol of agricultural productivity) along with the rifle—was officially adopted in 1983, at the height of the civil war between Frelimo and the Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, or Renamo). Through its slogan and rallying cry—a luta continua (the struggle continues)—Frelimo presented this civil war as an extension of its war of independence, this one also to eliminate a foreign adversary (Renamo’s organizational and operational support came from the white ruling regimes of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia).¹¹ The weapon on the flag therefore not only honors the valor of Frelimo warriors battling Portuguese imperialists, it expresses the need for continued vigilance against threatening foes.

These two larger contexts—the occult one of spiritual warfare and the nationalist one of physical warfare—are not entirely distinct. This is the argument of anthropologist Harry West (2005) in his exploration of sorcery discourse among the Makonde, an ethnolinguistic group of adjacent Cabo Delgado Province. For the Makonde, sorcery attacks do not go unchallenged. Against sorcery of ruin, sorcery of construction (Makonde: kupilikula) is deployed to defend one’s self and one’s kin. Most insightful about West’s ethnography is its argument that, for the Makonde, this dialectic of sorcery and countersorcery has provided an idiom for comprehending and controlling a long history of entanglements with unfamiliar forces. Thus, the projects of Portuguese colonizers and Catholic missionaries, of Frelimo modernizers and neoliberal reformers, have all been subjected to inversion and overturning through Makonde sorcery discourse. Arguably the most pernicious of those forces was that of the Portuguese colonial regime. For their central role in combatting this foe, the Makonde until today hold a privileged place in the narrative of Mozambican nationhood.¹²

If, among the Makonde, the idiom of countersorcery expresses opposition to powerful forces, ought not the same hold for their Makhuwa neighbors, Jemusse and Fátima among them? In fact, in the days following the death of their daughter, some clan members contended that the only way to solve the problem once and for all was to eliminate the cause, to kill the relative who sent the snake. This could be done by enlisting the aid of a mukhwiri, an occult specialist with the powers of countersorcery. They decided, instead, to move. When I asked Jemusse why he dismissed the advice of some of his kin, he cited the Pentecostal injunction against sorcery and other ancestral practices. “It’s because I handed everything over to God. ‘God, you are the one who made everything, heaven and earth, our entire body.’ I didn’t go to the mukhwiri. It’s true.” Yet as we have seen, even their church’s leader encouraged a kind of countersorcery. Spiritual warfare is common to both Pentecostalism and indigenous traditions. What differ are the weapon (prayer or sorcery) and the cosmic collaborators (Holy Spirit or ancestral spirits). Eschewing counterattack of either sort, Jemusse and Fátima opted instead for simple flight, one among other “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985).

This choice of migration over confrontation is consistent with a relatively nonmilitant approach to adversity that, at least during the colonial period, characterized Makhuwa history. Unlike the Makonde, the Makhuwa never held a prestigious place in Frelimo’s narrative of anticolonial resistance and nation-state formation.¹³ To the contrary, Frelimo has long treated the Makhuwa with contempt and suspicion for not adequately contributing to the liberation cause (Funada-Classen 2012: 289–91). The possibility of a real divergence in values came across in conversations I had with Makhuwa elders and chiefs. In early visits with them, I would ask who the Makhuwa understand themselves to be. Consistently, their responses made reference to two “pillars”: cultivation (olima) and procreation (oyara).

Noting that the first of those appears on Mozambique’s flag through the image of the hoe, I asked one elder what the symbols of a Makhuwa flag would be. He hesitated to answer. Perhaps it never occurred to him that what I insistently called “the Makhuwa” needed a flag.

“For Mozambique, it is the hoe and the Kalashnikov,” I said, trying to help. “For the Makhuwa, maybe the hoe and …?”

This time, with no hesitation, “the child.”

Migration Histories

If Mozambique’s nationalist values of defense and vigilance suggest a hunkering down, a posture of defiance premised on rootedness to a land, the Makhuwa value of oyara, by contrast, evokes natality. As defined by Hannah Arendt, this is the capacity of human action to initiate new beginnings, to release the future from bondage to the past (1971: 247). An equally apt metaphor for this regenerative capacity is mobility, particularly existential mobility, which (as discussed in the Introduction) connotes human improvisation, experimentation, and opportunism.

Notwithstanding the impression created by postpartition maps of Africa—of definitive boundaries separating discrete populations—the norm for the continent’s inhabitants has long been one of unsettlement and instability, of fluidity and flux.¹⁴ Many historians and linguists hypothesize “Bantu expansion” to explain the coast-to-coast distribution of a single language family. In a mere matter of centuries, beginning in West Africa around 1000 BCE, emergent iron-using agriculturalists speaking a proto-Bantu language pushed east and south, eventually spreading across an entire third of the continent. More recent scholarship has problematized the notion of a singular rapid expansion (e.g., Ehret 2001), but it is beyond dispute that the distant forebears of most African peoples migrated over long distances—episodic, gradual, and resistant to historical modeling though their migrations likely were.

Makhuwa, one of an estimated six hundred Bantu languages, is currently mother tongue to some four million inhabitants of Mozambique’s northernmost provinces, those situated roughly between Lake Niassa (also known as Lake Malawi) and the Indian Ocean. Because European contact with the Makhuwa in the early colonial period was limited to the maritime coast, little has been recorded about the lives of those in the interior. Whether they entered the region from the north or the south is a matter of speculation (Newitt 1995: 63). What archaeologists do know is that the current inhabitants did not originate on the land they now call home.¹⁵ Their present location owes to migration tracks or miphito, “collective movements [that] were far from random but … were very strategic” (Funada-Classen 2012: 109).

The strategic nature of their movements owes to a series of pressures imposed by external forces. Among the most brutal were slave raiders and slave traders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a dreadful and devastating period throughout northern Mozambique (Newitt 1995: 247) that fell particularly hard on the Makhuwa (Alpers 1975: 219). The Arab slave trade predated that of Europe, but it was only when French sugar plantations emerged on Indian Ocean islands and when Caribbean and Brazilian interests turned to East Africa that slave trading came to define northern Mozambique’s regional economy (Alpers 1997). Lacking the kinds of large political units that lend stability, flight emerged as the surest means of resisting capture. Whole chieftaincies relocated in the early nineteenth century in search of less easily reached, more easily defended homes.

Far more vivid in the memory of the living are the displacements that attended war. The elders I came to know have lived through two: that of the Frelimo liberation movement against Portugal (1964–74) and that of the postindependence Frelimo state against Renamo (1977–92). The first scarcely reached this part of the countryside. Such was far from the case with the second. Harrowing memories haunt much of the adult population, memories of rebel fighters entering villages, plundering grain, raping women, and kidnapping men (see Newitt 1995: 569–74). The most common response to this latest upheaval was, once again, flight. Nationwide, nearly five million people fled their homes during the civil war (Hanlon 1996: 16). The few villagers of Maúa who were willing to open up about that period told of escaping into forests and mountain caves; others found refuge in large cities or across national borders. Of course, exile did not always, or immediately, solve the problem. Food could not be carried, nor clothes, nor the reed mats used as bedding. The priority was carrying the children. Yet in the most treacherous moments, when speed was of the essence, so too was silence; mothers of crying children had to be left behind, retrieved only when safe to do so. The Makhuwa of Maúa district lived this way—“running like chickens” as Fátima recalled it—for much of the 1980s. They moved from one temporary settlement to another. Lack of land to cultivate and the rapid spread of disease in refugee zones motivated regular relocations, which is why when the fighting finally ended, return routes were soon established. Few lost ties with the people and the lands from which they (temporarily) loosed themselves, certainly not to the degree suggested by the image of refugees as “uprooted” victims (Englund 2002). The current inhabitants of Kaveya village returned to the same area along the Nipakwa River they had earlier occupied. Rebel fighters had burned everything to the ground, so they had to reconstruct their homes and renovate their crop fields, but, as many put it to me, they were content simply to breathe (omumula) again.¹⁶

Slavery and warfare infuse the historical consciousness of those among whom I lived.¹⁷ Yet the response has typically been neither to resist identifiable adversaries nor to stay put and acquiesce. More commonly, people have solved their problems by leaving them behind. In stark contrast to the view of traditional societies as static, the Makhuwa have long lived their lives this way—on the move. In this regard, they are not unlike nomadic, pastoralist, and other “traditionally” transient peoples in numerous African societies, peoples for whom immobility, in fact, is the anomaly.¹⁸

Even in northern Mozambique, it is not only the Makhuwa who have customarily moved in response to ever-changing, ever-precarious circumstances. Flight from slavers is how the Makonde came onto the plateau on which they now live and into the ethnicity by which they now identify. As one of Harry West’s informants told him, “We [Makonde] are really Makua…. We took refuge here from the slave caravans” (2005: 27).¹⁹ Significant about the Makhuwa, however, is that they not only came into being as a people on the move, they actualize their being by staying on the move. Makhuwa mobility is evident in the response Jemusse and Fátima chose to their predicament. It is equally evident in what could be called the Makhuwa “culture of mobility,” a paradoxical phrase that highlights the irreducibility of the Makhuwa to a single “culture.” Their characteristic mobility predisposes them to exceed the bounds not only of their geographic “home” but even, as suggested by West’s informant, of their ethnic one as well.

A Culture of Mobility

Humanitarian discourse represents refugees in terms of acute suffering and dramatic loss: helpless victims “stripped of the specificity of culture, place, and history” (Malkki 1995: 12). Distinct from labor migrants, refugees of war—and, one might add, of slave raids—are cast as involuntary migrants, reflexively moving in pursuit of bare survival. Yet the decision to migrate is rarely forced upon people wholly devoid of agency. As Stephen Lubkemann argues in his study of social life amid Mozambique’s civil war, men and women on the move continued to meet the complex demands of everyday existence—cultivating crops, raising children, performing ceremony. Fugitive acts did little to erase their “culturally scripted life projects, most of which … had little to do with the macropolitical interests usually taken to define ‘the war’” (2008: 14).

Indeed, migration not just preserved but enacted such scripts insofar as movement itself was a “well-established coping mechanism forged through a long history of crisis and political duress” (Lubkemann 2008: 196). For the people of Manica Province with whom Lubkemann worked, evasion emerged as a strategy of resistance to a series of resettlement schemes visited upon peasants by the Mozambican state. A similar history, I show in Chapter 2, has long weighed (and still does) on populations of the north. Yet, for the Makhuwa at least, the roots of mobility lie even deeper than that. As with the Ndembu—a central African people famously studied by anthropologist Victor Turner—so too with the Makhuwa, one may readily identify “traditions of migration” that make certain villages constitutionally centrifugal (Turner 1957: 59). These are villages prone not to stability and continuity but to periodic displays of fissure and motion. Consequently, what Turner calls the “modern changes,” such as monetization and immigration, that would seemingly disrupt social continuity and spur spatial mobility in fact “do no more than accentuate tendencies inherent in the indigenous social system” (1957: 51).

Peoples deemed “native” are typically identified with a determinate land to which they are presumed to definitively associate. Cosmogonies are largely responsible for this, referencing as they do a fixed point of origin. For the Makhuwa, that would be Mount Namuli. Situated in the northern part of Zambezia Province, just beyond the borders of Niassa, Mount Namuli is the second tallest landmass of Mozambique and by far the tallest of the region. “She who made others to see the sun”—that is to say, the first human—is said to have originated atop Mount Namuli. Setting off to explore the verdant plains below, she tripped on the perilous slopes and hit the ground hard. Upon regaining consciousness, she opened her eyes to see that blood from her wounds had mixed with water from a stream. As it wound its way down the mountain, the mysterious mixture formed into a solid shape. It was man. From the blood of the first woman came the first man; and from their union came all future generations. These generations followed the pattern of the first: flowing like streams and voyaging long distances, all the while bringing forth new life.²⁰

Conflicts developed, as they inevitably do, between the various lineages born of the first woman and first man. Each lineage group then descended the mountain and spread throughout what is today northern Mozambique. Thus, while the myth of Namuli certainly orients the Makhuwa toward a particular mountain, the myth itself evokes the opposite of geographic fixity. Particularly telling is that, unlike other foundation myths (the Abrahamic, for example) in which the place of origin is also one of departure, Mount Namuli is the place of origin, departure, and return. Upon death, the munepa of a person is restored to its first home: “From Namuli we come, to Namuli we return” (Nikhumale onamuli, nnahokolela onamuli). Contained within all references to Namuli is this dialectic of egress and regress, of risking oneself in the world only to later retreat. Being is thus predicated on mobility or, more precisely, circularity.

So too is well-being. The myth of Namuli constitutes what anthropologist Francisco Lerma Martínez calls the backdrop (pano de fundo) of Makhuwa healing ceremonies insofar as it expresses the human being en passage—from health to illness and back. Lerma Martínez connects this trajectory to the movement all humans make from Namuli to the world and back (1989: 181–82). Virtually every component of the mirusi healing ceremony in particular contains an allusion to the myth of Namuli (Frizzi 2008: 1336–1501). This is as true of the songs chanted through the night as it is of the embodied actions of the ceremony’s participants. Repeatedly between sunset and sunrise, these participants (almost entirely women) leave the healing hut, walking in single file with slow deliberate steps and the slightest twist of the torso. In this manner they venture into the bush, where the healer (namuku) earlier obtained medicinal herbs and roots, and where regenerative energies abound. The last of many such excursions, shortly before the cock’s crow, takes participants to the nearest river—the place of encounter with ancestral spirits (minepa) approaching from the river’s far side. A propitiatory offering there “gives to the spirits the opportunity to come from Namuli and enter the body of the afflicted, thus enabling his or her physical recovery” (Frizzi 2008: 1350; translations mine). It is at the moment of this encounter that the afflicted person’s turn toward health occurs. The procession back from the river is vigorous and triumphant. The remaining ceremonial action transpires outdoors, in the light of the dawning day, with frenetic dancing, singing, and running—evidence that the circular journey to the bush and back is ultimately one of return to life itself.

For the Makhuwa, this oscillatory dynamic describes not only the performance of their ceremonies but even their preservation. The communal ceremony known as makeya consists of sorghum flour offerings made to minepa under the sacred mutholo tree. This ancestor shrine is akin to that of the Ndembu, consisting of “quickset muyombo saplings,” a prime feature of which is the ease with which they may be abandoned when Ndembu villagers move to a new site, as they often do. The impermanence of shrines for the Ndembu, as for the Makhuwa, speaks to the ancestor cult’s association with what Turner calls “the transience of settlement … and with the mobile human group itself rather than its specific habitation” (1957: 173). For the Makhuwa, such sites are not only easily abandoned, they are readily renovated. During the civil war, rebels ransacked and razed villages, forcing inhabitants to flee in haste. When safe to do so, two or three clan members would return and remove a single branch from the abandoned mutholo tree. Near the new site of refuge, another mutholo would be chosen and the lone branch from the old would be laid up against the new. With time, the branch and the trunk would fuse, assuring villagers that to whatever destination they moved, their forebears were there with them. No ancestral practice rivals, in regularity or in importance, the makeya offerings at the mutholo shrine. It takes place at every life-cycle ritual, before any venture is undertaken, whenever adversity strikes. It must be relevant, therefore, that the word makeya derives from omakeya, the modal form of the verb omaka, meaning “to inhabit”; omakeya means, literally, “to be inhabitable” (Frizzi 2008: 1690–91). This suggests that the ceremonial invocation of ancestors arose first and foremost in pursuit of basic habitability—of security, prosperity, and vitality in one’s ever new, though never final, home.

Well-being, for the Makhuwa, is tied less to location than to this capacity for relocation, a capacity instilled and distilled over a long series of situations wherein the inability to move easily meant the immediacy of death. Yet, it is worth recalling, even after death minepa are understood to migrate back to Namuli—“From Namuli we come, to Namuli we return”—then back again, reappearing in the nightly dreams and daily affairs of the living. Mobility is clearly no mere by-product of our contemporary, globalized age. Egress has always been a part of even this most “traditional” of cultures, egress followed almost always by regress.

Religious Movements

When Jemusse and Fáitima moved to the district capital, I lost my base in Kaveya village. I did not care to sleep alone in their now empty compound, in part for fear of the evili that could just as easily have bitten me. It was also my final few weeks in Mozambique, and spending the time in town, synthesizing a year’s worth of material, seemed fitting for where I was in my work.

So we remained neighbors—not cohabitants of the same compound as in Kaveya, but now coresidents of Maúa town. But the rhythm of life there did not allow for the idle palaver I so enjoyed back in Kaveya, sharing stories and sugarcane under the shade of a mango tree. While working hard to reinitiate his carpentry trade, Jemusse’s first priority was securing a means of feeding his family. He and Fáitima had managed to transport surplus grain for the impending rains, but they were already behind schedule for the next year’s harvest.

Given how much busier Jemusse became, I accepted that in the remaining weeks of my fieldwork I would not be seeing much of him. It therefore gave me great joy when, after an obviously long day in the fields, Jemusse showed up at the compound where I lodged in town. After exchanging greetings, I asked him to wait while I fetch him some water. Before letting me do so, he opened his mouth to speak.

“Papá, there’s something I want to tell you.”

“Go ahead, Papá,” I said sitting down, struck by the change in tone.

“You know, my thought was to attack Atata Mukwetxhe,” he said. “I was thinking a lot of things right after my daughter died. I was thinking of doing countersorcery. The family of Mamã was telling us to attack him because there have been five deaths because of him now.”

One week after Luisinha’s death, he told me, he had traveled to Cuamba. There he consulted with a powerful mukhwiri about visiting deadly force upon the man responsible for his family tragedy. Despite the distance, Jemusse made sure to complete the round-trip in one day, so as not to make public the extent to which he nearly engaged the occult forces barred by his Pentecostal faith. He eventually did not go through with it, opting instead to solve his problem by fleeing from it. But that he had come so close was news to me.

I was touched by Jemusse’s openness, his revelation of a secret I had not pried into, nor even suspected. It was common knowledge that he and Fáitima had permitted a traditional healer to offer aid on that terrible night, also that Fátima shaved her head (okhweliwa) when Pastor Simões was no longer around, and that an esataka ceremony was eventually conducted by Fátima’s clan.²¹ Yet this admission of consultation with a mukhwiri seemed transgressive in a much deeper way. It probably would have incensed Pastor Simões and provoked the reprimand that the other offenses did not. It certainly shocked me, as I struggled to reconcile my experience of such gentle and generous friends with my new knowledge that they nearly tried killing a man.

I thanked Jemusse for sharing but wondered aloud why he chose to do so just then. His answer had to do with a desire to externalize what he had done. He worried that once word reached Pastor Simões, he would be made to feel guilty. To Jemusse, I served simultaneously as an outsider able to carry off this anticipated feeling, and as an insider unconcerned with making him feel it. “When I inform you,” he said, “I don’t have to think any more about this because I am speaking what I did, and when I speak it my words have left my body and are now with you.”

“I am free now,” Jemusse went on, “because I don’t have to think any more about what I was thinking. Now I can forget all of this and begin thinking about other things, about my plans. I can begin again.”

I was silent, moved by the eloquence and expectancy of what my friend had to say—by his arrival, yet again, at what he saw as a fresh start.

“Besides,” he smiled, “it will only go into your little notebook.”

I had nothing to write with just then, but Jemusse knew from observing me at the end of each day (studying me not unlike the anthropologist studying him) that most of what I saw and heard eventually made its way into my field journal. I asked if it would be okay to write his story down to include in the book I planned to write. He said it would. In a context where nearly all are illiterate—even Pastor Simões weaving the Bible into his sermons more from memory than from the text in hand—it is the spoken word that carries real power. That is why Jemusse felt an urge to verbalize his sentiments to me.

Jemusse and Fáitima ultimately chose geographic relocation as the solution to their dilemma. Yet, crucially, the option of occult warfare that they also entertained involved a similar sort of displacement, a violation of their church’s prohibition against sorcery, against returning to “tradition.” This kind of religious mobility is best seen as a variation on the perennial theme, explored throughout this chapter, of physical mobility in Makhuwa history and culture. The prevalence of dislocation, of routinized rupture, in Makhuwa life suggests the centrality of mobility to any understanding of the Makhuwa in general. Its real relevance, however, owes to the semantic point explored in the Introduction—that in the parlance of villagers, othama, “to move,” also translates as “to convert.” Conversion is not an internal transformation but an embodied one, and the regularity and reversibility of spatial shifts give insight into the regularity and reversibility of religious shifts.

Accompanying no act of othama is the illusion that life will be made carefree or stable as a result. By escaping to the district capital, Jemusse and Fátima did not see themselves as transcending their problems but as simply affording themselves new terrain on which to confront them. Life is made viable through these small rebirths, these everyday acts of natality, the latest (and surely not the last) for Jemusse being that of our conversation that day—his off-loading of worries onto me and my little notebook.