Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
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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