Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
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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.
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,