Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
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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.