Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
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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