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CHAPTER 2

Between the River and the Road

While Pastor Simões saw fit to censure Jemusse’s and Fátima’s departure from the countryside, a different set of actors in the district capital would have likely looked on with favor. These are the Maúa district officers who affiliate today, as the postindependence state always has, with the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo). Although originally an adversary of the Portuguese regime, Frelimo as a party-state has—from the perspective of many I spoke with—only replicated earlier colonizers’ mania for confiscating lands and concentrating people. In shifting attention from Pentecostal evangelization to Frelimo sedentarization, this chapter explores the political conflicts that emerge out of efforts to manage a population whom Maúa’s district administrator once described to me as “too mobile.” The Makhuwa propensity for mobility has long frustrated state builders’ efforts to settle their intended subjects. It is also, I argue, what stifles church planters’ efforts to do the same.

Lightly on the Land

Local storytellers recount that when their earliest ancestors descended Mount Namuli, different lineage groups dispersed widely enough to remain independent of centralizing chiefdoms and kingdoms. This posed a challenge to invaders bent on ruling the land. Unlike the sixteenth-century Spaniards who came upon territorialized sovereignties in Aztec and Inca capitals, the Portuguese in central Africa encountered only small and scattered chieftaincies. With no large armies for them to defeat and no major battles for them to win, they were forced into warfare with no endgame. African polities’ seeming disorder thus rendered them resilient to European invaders in a way that, ironically, the sophisticated imperial states of the Americas were not (Newitt 1995: 58). This strategic advantage may have been enough to motivate the Makhuwa to live, as they long have, in a diffuse and fragmented manner. Political considerations of this sort are the main subject of this chapter. These, however, are inseparable from more foundational factors to be examined first, factors pointing to what is until today a common Makhuwa assumption about land occupancy—about the impermanent, indeterminate relationship between individuals and the ground on which they stand.

Of greatest significance is the sheer vastness of the terrain across which groups could move. With a mere eleven persons per square kilometer in the year that I lived there, Niassa Province—one of four the Makhuwa inhabit—is the least densely populated of Mozambique.¹ A recent report from a foreign news source put it vividly: “Bright snaking dirt tracks mark the roads and slivers of green trees line the rivers, but there is an overwhelming sense of emptiness about the Niassan countryside. The towns are scarcely different” (Casey 2015). Little has changed, apparently, since the late nineteenth century, when one of the first Europeans to pass through what he called Makua Land declared it “bare and uninteresting, monotonous and dreary” (Maples 1882: 86). Dreariness, however, is not without its advantages, for the local populace, at least. Primary among them is the option of escape whenever rulers and settlers encroach. Vast and land-rich frontiers have long served in this way to underwrite popular freedom (Scott 2009: 4).

Specifically Makhuwa conceptions of the land further foster such centrifugal possibilities. According to Makhuwa norms of matrilineal inheritance, land always passes through the mother’s clan, thereby remaining under local control (Newitt 1995: 64). Moreover, Makhuwa economics is marked by an absence of inheritable goods and a closely linked lack of attachment to specific tracts of land. This may owe to the fact that, while the Makhuwa have been farming for centuries, they subsisted on hunting long after their neighbors turned to settled agriculture (Alpers 1975: 8–10). The resulting tendency toward territorial nonattachment finds expression in the premium placed on being “light-footed” (oveya metto). Whenever I asked about this notion, interlocutors explained it not with words, but with gestures—soft, fluid, and usually barefoot treading on the brown soil beneath us.

A suspicion toward acquisition and an embrace of mobility were widespread among those I came to know in Maúa’s outlying villages. In defiance of their critics in town, they viewed their transience as a reasonable adaptation to a land predictable only in its unpredictability. Historian Malyn Newitt describes an early nineteenth-century period of persistent instability, known as the great Mozambique drought, as possibly the severest rain shortage on record. It was far from the only one. Some years of drought are expected to punctuate every person’s lifespan. As recently as 2003, rains failed to fall in Maúa, forcing kin groups to activate coping strategies honed over centuries: first intensifying hunting and trading, then searching out and moving communally to more fertile regions (Newitt 1995: 253–54).

On a smaller scale, the same mobility transpires, even when the vagaries of drought and famine do not threaten. The Makhuwa of rural Niassa practice what is known as shifting cultivation. Rather than rotating crops within a single field, farmers rotate fields, relocating to a new area every year to preserve soil fecundity. One village elder spontaneously offered this as his example when I asked about the word othama (to move): “Othama is very important,” he said. “The population stays in one place for a time and the land becomes tired. It goes to a new site, and later thinks of returning because the land recovered.” This rotational method is sometimes called “slash and burn,” though this term may be less than helpful due to its disparaging connotation when used by people presuming to speak for modern scientific efficiency (see Cairns 2007). For others, interested less in dominating the land than in caring for it, and receiving its care in return, shifting agriculture has proven effective in adapting to the uncertainties of the physical climate. It is likewise a time-honored response to uncertain political climates (Scott 2009: 178–219). It facilitates flight in case of such unwelcome intrusions as enslavement and war (explored in Chapter 1) or taxation and conscription (to be explored here). Given these advantages, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Makhuwa language has developed entirely different words to distinguish an abandoned crop field (mathala) from a new one (mathatu): an illustration of the many possibilities for talking about, akin to the many possibilities for bringing about, new beginnings in new locations.

The State Against the Peasantry

The characteristic mobility of the Makhuwa runs diametrically counter to the administrative logic of their would-be rulers. Managing a population requires first locating it in place, making it accountable by rendering it legible. Nomadic, fugitive, and maroon communities have therefore always posed a challenge to the state in its function as an “apparatus of capture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 424–73). In her historical ethnography based in southern Mozambique, Merle Bowen (2000) refers to this in conflictual terms, as “the state against the peasantry.” Bowen’s is one of numerous Mozambican studies to chronicle the failure of state-engineered “development” policies to grasp the complexities of local conditions, let alone to promote economic growth. This conflict between state and peasantry is ultimately a conflict between two ways of being-in-the-world: fixity and containment versus mobility and the refusal to be contained (see Bertelsen 2016). Here I trace this particular dimension of the conflict across three major periods of Mozambique’s recent past: the colonial, the postcolonial/socialist, and the postsocialist (during which my fieldwork took place).