At Ansha's: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique 9781978806733

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AT ANSHA’S

MEDIC AL ANTHROPOLOGY: HE ALTH, INEQUALIT Y, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Series editor: Lenore Manderson Books in the Medical Anthropology series are concerned with social patterns of and social responses to ill health, disease, and suffering, and how social exclusion and social justice shape health and healing outcomes. The series is designed to reflect the diversity of contemporary medical anthropological research and writing, and will offer scholars a forum to publish work that showcases the theoretical sophistication, methodological soundness, and ethnographic richness of the field. Books in the series may include studies on the organization and movement of peoples, technologies, and treatments, how inequalities pattern access to these, and how individuals, communities and states respond to various assaults on wellbeing, including from illness, disaster, and violence. For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

AT ANSHA’S Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

Da ri a Trentini

Rutger s Uni v er sit y P r ess

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Trentini, Daria, author. Title: At Ansha’s: life in the spirit mosque of a healer in Mozambique / Daria Trentini. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. | Series: Medical anthropology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043867 | ISBN 9781978806696 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978806702 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978806719 (epub) | ISBN 9781978806726 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978806733 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Healers—Mozambique. | Traditional medicine—Mozambique. | Mozambique—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC RZ400 .T765 2021 | DDC 615.8/809679—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043867 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2021 by Daria Trentini All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

 In memory of Ansha and my grandmother Maria

Shetani is never complete. When he is thinking of becoming something, he has already become something else. —António Lazaro, artist in Nampula

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Foreword by Lenore Manderson xi List of Abbreviations xv Ansha’s Family xvii Note on Languages xix

Prologue

1



Introduction

5

part i: ansha and the spirits 21 1

Rural and Urban

25

2

Health and Healing

31

3

Wives and Husbands

36

4

Demons and Spirits

42

5

Insiders and Outsiders

49

6 Mountains

54

7 Coast

60

8

65

Rivers and Bridges

part ii: outside the mosque 69 9

Makhuwa and Maka

73

10

Books and Roots

80

11

Muslims of the Spirits and Muslims of the Mosque

86

12

Healers and the Governo

93

13

Healers and Nurses

99

14

Knowing and Not-Knowing

105

vii

viii

Contents

part iii: patients 111 15

Good and Evil

115

16

Closed and Opened

121

17

The Dead and the Living

127

18

Juniors and Seniors

133

19

Tradition and Modernity

138

20

Spirits and Women

144

part iv: returns 151 21

Life and Death

153



Epilogue

158

Acknowledgments 159 Glossary 163 Notes 165 References 189 Index 211

ILLUSTR ATIONS

Figure 1. Map of Mozambique and field site xx Figure 2. Ansha in the spirit mosque xxii Figure 3. Shetani, Colheita 4 Figure 4. Ansha, Tiago, and Magaia 22 Figure 5. Ansha as a mwalimu 70 Figure 6. AMETRAMO poster 92 Figure 7. Amadinho in Ansha’s compound 112 Figure 8. Ansha in her compound 152

ix

FOREWORD LENORE M ANDERSON

Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice aims to capture the diversity of contemporary medical anthropological research and writing. The beauty of ethnography is its capacity, through storytelling, to make sense of suffering as a social experience, and to set it in context. Central to our focus in this series, therefore, is the way in which social structures, political-economic systems, and ideologies shape the likelihood and impact of infections, injuries, bodily ruptures and disease, chronic conditions and disability, treatment and care, social repair, and death. Health and illness are social facts; the circumstances of the maintenance and loss of health are always and everywhere shaped by structural, local, and global relations. Social formations and relations, culture, economy, and political organization as much as ecology shape the variance of illness, disability, and disadvantage. The authors of the monographs in this series are concerned centrally with health and illness, healing practices, and access to care, but in each case, they highlight the importance of such differences in context as expressed and experienced at individual, household, and wider levels: health risks and outcomes of social structure and household economy—for instance, health systems factors—and national and global politics and economics all shape people’s lives. In their accounts of health, inequality, and social justice, the authors move across social circumstances, health conditions, and geography—and their intersections and interactions—to demonstrate how individuals, communities, and states manage assaults on people’s health and well-being. As medical anthropologists have long illustrated, the relationships of social context and health status are complex. In addressing these questions, the authors in this series showcase the theoretical sophistication, methodological rigor, and empirical richness of the field, while expanding a map of illness and social and institutional life to illustrate the effects of material conditions and social meanings in troubling and surprising ways. The books reflect medical anthropology as a constantly changing field of scholarship, drawing on research diversely in residential and virtual communities; in clinics and laboratories; in emergency care and public health settings; with service providers, individual healers, and households; and with social bodies, human bodies, and biologies. While medical anthropology once concentrated on systems of healing, particular diseases, and embodied experiences, today the field has expanded to include environmental disaster and war, science, technology and faith, gender-based violence, and xi

xii

Foreword

forced migration. Curiosity about the body and its vicissitudes remains a pivot of our work, but our concerns are with the location of bodies in social life, and with how social structures, temporal imperatives, and shifting exigencies shape life courses. This dynamic field reflects an ethics of the discipline to address these pressing issues of our time. Globalization adds to the complexity of influences on health outcomes; it (re)produces social and economic relations that institutionalize poverty, unequal conditions of everyday life and work, and environments in which diseases increase or subside. Globalization patterns the movement and relations of peoples, technologies and knowledge, and programs and treatments; it shapes differences in health experience and outcomes across space; it informs and amplifies inequalities at individual and country levels. Global forces and local inequalities compound and constantly load on individuals to affect their physical and mental health, as well as their households and communities. At the same time, as the subtitle of this series indicates, we are concerned with questions of social exclusion and inclusion, social justice, and repair, again both globally and in local settings. The books will challenge readers to reflect not only on sickness and suffering, deficit and despair, but also on resistance and restitution—on how people respond to injustices and evade the fault lines that might seem to predetermine life outcomes. The aim is to widen the frame within which we conceptualize embodiment and suffering. Medical anthropologists and others in the humanities and social sciences have a sustained interest in health, illness, and healing; the training and practice of healers; struggles of doctrine; and received wisdom and authority. In this domain, magic, science, and religion converge: for well over a century, the worlds of shamans, sorcerers, witches, midwives, madness, sickness and recovery, miracles, prayers, and despair have captured ethnographic and historical imaginations. Much anthropological research conducted in southern Africa has been concerned with ontology, esoteric knowledge, the etiology of suffering, healing practices, the politics of magic, and the sacred. In At Ansha’s: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique, Daria Trentini returns us to this field, and in her compelling ethnography of one healer, Ansha, she shows us its richness. The ethnographic setting is Nampula, located some two hundred kilometers from the coast of northeast Mozambique, an expanding modern city of diverse peoples and languages, followers of traditional religion, Christianity, and Islam. It is a city steeped in regional history and its layers of conflict, violence, and poverty—of slave trading, colonization and missionization, socialism and the “sixteen-year war,” development agencies and local nongovernmental organizations, the ebbs and flows of political parties and governments, those who hold power and those who are oppressed. Ansha lives in a bairro on the perimeter of the city, and her healing practice largely takes place in her spirit mosque at the edge of the compound. Here Ansha

Foreword xiii

provides care to settle the resistant and persistent physical and mental anguish of her patients: she consults with them; she mixes herbs gathered on the plateau beyond the bairro for their ingestion, massage, and bathing; she diagnoses, prays, makes amulets, and advises; she negotiates with ancestral spirits, tests therapies, and inducts patients as mediums. These everyday acts of healing and care are a pivot from which Ansha’s life story and its contradictions emerge—her background as a revolutionary and her more recent politics; when, how, and why she became a healer; her personal relationships, experiences, and understandings; her eventual declining health. Over a period of four years of research with Ansha and, after her death, through later visits to and conversations with others in Nampula, Trentini documents how Ansha’s practice swayed with changes in her own life, as she moved from traditional healing practices to methods of care more closely aligned to local orthodoxies. She teases out Ansha’s story from the complications of the setting, Ansha’s own inconstancy and wavering, and what she writes of as “the filthy little details [that] confound the grand sweep of each story, which is always constructed anew, emphasizing here, ignoring there.” Trentini tells this story barely, allowing it to unfold in twenty-one short chapters; the theoretical, analytic, and historical details run as an undercurrent, a parallel text sustained in the notes. We are offered an extraordinary opportunity to step into the spirit mosque with the author and with Ansha, through prose that is lyrical, gentle, sparse, and evocative. As readers, we sift through the shadows of facts of Ansha’s life and healing practice, against the complexities and contradictions of the country and its fraught history, to make meaning ourselves. Through this, we come to know Ansha a little—elusive and enigmatic, shrewd, funny, obdurate, determined. And through Ansha, Trentini illustrates how, by interrogating the borders, we are able to apprehend a society where the “visible and invisible, day and night, seen and buried, body and shadow” are simply part of everyday life.

ABBREVIATIONS Languages AR.: Arabic IT.: Italian KISW.: Kiswahili MAK.: Makhuwa MOZ.: Mozambican PORT.: Portuguese SHIM.: Shimakonde

Organizations AMETRAMO: Associação da Medicina Tradicional de Moçambique ­(Mozambican Association of Traditional Medicine) FRELIMO: Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambican Liberation Front); all caps are used for the liberation movement (FRELIMO); only a capital F is used for the political party (Frelimo) OMM: Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (Organization of Mozambican Women) RENAMO: Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Mozambican National Resistance)

xv

ANSHA’S FA MILY

Amadinho: child hospitalized at Ansha’s Ana: Ansha’s niece and successor Irene: Ansha’s assistant João: Makonde nurse Marcela: Ansha’s assistant and friend Paulo (also Epotthá): Ansha’s teacher Rosa: Ansha’s birth name and the name on her state ID and AMETRAMO documents Susana: Ansha’s Christian name (after baptism) Tiago: Ansha’s husband Tomás: Ansha’s nephew Verónica: Ansha’s assistant

xvii

NOTE ON L ANGUAGES

All non-English words are noted. A glossary at the end of the book includes key terms used in the book.

xix

figure 1. Mozambique and field site. (Map by Daria Trentini)

AT ANSHA’S

figure 2. Ansha in the spirit mosque. (Photo by Luca Locatelli, 2009)

PROLOGUE To the Spirit Mosque

“Look what I have inside my bag,” exclaims Ansha. It is a Sunday morning in October 2009. Throngs of people press in on us; the noise is deafening. They are there for the president of Mozambique, Armando Guebuza, who, running for reelection, is coming to Nampula for his final campaign stop. Ansha is there, along with other white-uniformed healers from AMETRAMO, the Mozambican Association of Traditional Medicine to perform makeya, a Makhuwa ritual offering to the spirits to ensure Guebuza’s victory. I am there because healers from the association have invited me to attend the ceremony. We huddle together, anticipating the arrival of the president. As we wait under a mango tree, Ansha approaches, looking at me as if she has known me a long time. She is wearing a white shirt and skirt, with the symbols of AMETRAMO sewn on the shoulders. “I heard you were back,” she says, looking at me intensely with her deepset eyes. “How is your family in the homeland? How is your mother?” She stares at me, as if forgetting why she is there in the first place. She moves nearer, her gleaming eyes becoming larger, interrogative, as they often would. She draws close so as not to be overheard. “You know that you are wandering with healers that have nothing to do in their huts, don’t you? I wonder what these healers do spending the whole day at the AMETRAMO.” Ansha then opens her black bag. It is full of ephepa, sacred flour that healers use to summon the spirits in their divination and rituals. “I did the ritual last night for our father to win the election,” she says with pride. “Guebuza is going to win. Spirits are saying that Frelimo will win. I am Frelimo. My spirits are Frelimo.” Shrieking sirens pierce our conversation as the president’s motorcade approaches. The crowd presses closer to the stage, roaring for the man whom they consider to be one of their own, a man “from the north”—even though his 1

2

At A nsh a’s

family hails from the south—born just one hundred kilometers from Nampula in the town of Murrupula. It is now time for the healers of AMETRAMO to perform makeya. Just before Ansha takes the stage with other healers, she turns to me and says, “If you want to view how a healer works, you better come to my mosque one of these days.” The following Monday, I take a chapa (Moz. collective transport van) from the city center to Ansha’s yard in Nametequeliua, a neighborhood in the central east of the city. From the main road, I walk along narrow, red-clay paths, where side by side stand mud houses erected in recent times and dilapidated cement ones built during colonial times. Cool blasts of wind from the coast offer occasional respite from the stench of rubbish on the street. I cross the railway and walk through a small market selling basic goods. Indian music is playing from a barraca (Port. kiosk) that has been transformed into an open-air cinema. I pass by a white mosque, then turn right. A cashew tree signals my arrival at Ansha’s. On the other side of a bamboo fence lies a huge and tidy yard surrounded by mango and acacia trees that provide shelter from the relentless October sun. At the edge of the yard stand three mud houses, built in recent years to accommodate Ansha’s oldest sister and three of her nephews, who had recently arrived from their homeland in Cabo Delgado. A couple of patients are waiting their turn, lying on mats in the shadows of the trees at the center of the compound. Ansha appears in the yard, approaching with confidence and grace. Her tiny legs are wrapped in an opaque capulana (Moz. printed cloth) that contrasts with her black-and-white striped shirt. Her head is covered by a violet scarf. She is wearing tiny, round, gold earrings. She gestures for me to join her in her mesquita (Port. mosque), a small cement building in a corner of her yard that is partly obscured by a tree whose thriving branches are adorned with faded flags. She calls it a “spirit mosque” (Port. mesquita majini) on account of her Muslim spirits. At the foot of the tree sits an altar of sacred flour, scattered coins, and bottled beverages. I remove my shoes and enter the mosque. The noise of the outside world instantly fades, giving way to the humming of mosquitos around my head. Aromatic vapors of incense waft through the air. Capulanas of red, white, and black, each of which evokes a different group of spirits—spirits of Nampula inland, Muslim spirits, and spirits from Ansha’s homeland in the far north, respectively— hang from the black burlap ceiling, caressing our heads. We sit on mats on the cement floor. Piles of dry, acrid herbs surround us. Beyond them is Ansha’s shrine of burned-up votive candles and millet flour. Next to it lie pamphlets with Guebuza’s face and Frelimo slogans. A ray of light illumines Arabic script and a crescent moon, both painted in red on an otherwise stark white wall.

Prologue 3

I sit opposite Ansha all day long while patients file into her mosque, one after another. I watch divination and healing sessions for women afflicted by spirits, two sick children suspected of being victims of neighbors’ witchcraft, and a couple asking for magical protection of their house. At dusk, Ansha invites me to come back. One day, I ask Ansha whether I can record her story. As we sit together in her spirit mosque, I reach into my bag for my recorder. “Daria, you ask too many questions,” she scolds, looking nervously at the device. “You want to know too many secrets of this mosque. Wait for things to come to you.” “You came from your land to this mosque to study these majini, but they cannot be studied,” she cautions. Then she gets up and leaves the mosque. I remain seated for what seems like an eternity, bewildered about what to do, wondering whether my work with Ansha has already ended. Eventually, however, she returns and takes her seat, then puts some rapé (tobacco) into her nostril and inhales. “Whoever comes to Nampula will sooner or later fall sick to majini. You too, Daria.” She slyly adds, “But you are already sick of spirits.” We both laugh, scattering the dank, weighty air of the mosque. When I later leave, I am encumbered with questions: Do I have spirits too? How will they manifest themselves? Can one be sick with majini without knowing it?

figure 3. Shetani, Colheita. (António Lazaro, January 2020, photo by Daria Trentini)

INTRODUCTION

This is my encounter with Ansha, a migrant from the Cabo Delgado province in the northernmost part of Mozambique, who became a healer in the city of Nampula after the sixteen-year war (1977–1992).1 It is Ansha’s story of her life with spirits, as she and other members of her family shared it with me. It unfolds Ansha’s life and practice as a healer, especially with dozens of patients who attended her mosque during my fieldwork in 2009–2010, 2013, and 2016. When I first met Ansha in 2007, I had no idea that I would later write a book with her as protagonist. Ansha was the oldest sister of a friend, Salmo, who, upon learning that I was working with traditional healers, insisted I meet her.2 I have faded memories of this first encounter on a tepid Sunday afternoon at the end of March. The afternoon rains were delayed, a sign that the rainy season was soon to end. Ansha’s compound was empty and quiet, much different from the hustle and bustle I would come to know years later. I was drawn by her elegance and her yard’s orderliness. Grace and levity marked Ansha’s way of engaging the world. My visit was rushed. I was nearing the end of my first stint of fieldwork. As with any end, especially of fieldwork, I was sorting through mixed emotions, wondering whether I would ever return. Two years later, I did return, intending to resume my fieldwork with a healer named Perequito, a man from the inland who had introduced me to traditional medicine two years earlier. Upon my arrival, however, I discovered Perequito’s life considerably changed. His spirit hut was closed most days, as he could now afford to select his patients, choosing only wealthy and important people who usually visited his hut at night so as not to be seen by others. Perequito instead spent most of his time fixing his car and attending the neighborhood mosque, where he had become a prominent member. He was planning to return to his home village to work the land and build his own mosque. As I processed the end of my fieldwork with Perequito, I spent my first months working with healers in AMETRAMO, interviewing dozens of its members, and attending several of its meetings. The 2009 election campaign was then in full swing. Many healers had closed their huts, putting aside their divination 5

6

At A nsh a’s

and healing to “make campaign.” My days were spent attending political meetings instead of healing sessions. When I reconnected with Ansha at the Armando Guebuza rally and later visited her at her spirit mosque, I began to glimpse a possible future for my research. Ansha would later say that my circuitous path to her was evidence that I had passed a test, just like patients afflicted by spirits, who must pass through many different healers and rituals before discovering who will finally heal them and how. At the beginning of my work in Ansha’s mosque, I grappled with new questions: Could I write a dissertation on healing in Nampula based on fieldwork with only one healer? Could I do so with a Makonde healer in a city composed primarily of Makhuwa healers?3 Ansha, however, was no ordinary Makonde healer: her migrant and healing paths breached the boundaries of the Makonde community. She was married to a Makhuwa man, was initiated into healing by local healers, and had lived most of her life in the predominantly Makhuwa city of Nampula. Both her clientele and her medical practices were thoroughly heterogeneous, composed of people coming from different regions and provinces of Mozambique. Single lives, especially ones of outcasts, defy cultural homogeneity and predictability.4 Not only do they obliquely shed light on what is “regular,” they also unveil “alternative visions of human experience” (Herzfeld 1997, 12). In the words of the historian Carlo Ginzburg, atypical trajectories illumine how “culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty” (Ginzburg 1992, xxi). As I was drawn into the life in the mosque, Ansha began disclosing a life of possibility, a life that was continuously “under construction” (Biehl and Locke 2017, 4). It is a late afternoon in November 2009, just months into my fieldwork. I am sitting on a mat in Ansha’s spirit mosque after a long day of work. As usual, she is revisiting the sessions of the day to help me learn. She stops to tell me the story of how she became a Muslim through spirits: “They [spirits] told me that I was now Muslim and that they did not want me to be Christian.” She then declares, “I am a Muslim, and I am Christian.” This brief exchange characterizes many of my interactions with Ansha. Sometimes she identified as a Makhuwa healer, other times emphasizing her Makondeness. To some audiences, she presented herself as a traditional healer; to others, a Muslim healer. Although she opposed hospital medicine, she called herself a “healer of the government,” referring to her spirit mosque as a hospital. Her divinations and healing were also continually in flux—victims became perpetrators, good spirits turned bad, and patients were offered different, contrasting diagnoses of their illnesses.

Introduction 7

My field notes soon teemed with corrections, insertions, and erasures. I gave up on my project of creating a comprehensive classification of Ansha’s spirits and medical practices. Instead, I began to see how her apparent shifts and inconsistencies defined her very sensibility and world. I turned to the heuristic power of the trope of the border to understand and appreciate these continuous oscillations. On the one hand, Ansha’s actual world was crisscrossed with borders. The northern city of Nampula was patterned by borders created by centuries of trade, repeated migration, the spread of Islam to the interior during the slave trade, Portuguese colonial occupation and missionary activity, the war of independence and its socialist aftermath, the protracted sixteen-year war and concomitant social upheaval, postwar economic liberalizations, and the recent rise of Islamism and evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Throughout this long history, boundaries were established and reified between the peoples of the coast and inland; between traditional religions, Islam, and Christianity; between African traditional, coastal, and Western medicine; between ruling party and opposition; between state power and traditional authority. On the other hand, Ansha’s spirit story involved the constant navigation of these precarious boundaries. Here, the trope of the border gestures toward what can be surmounted or circumvented, drawn differently or erased entirely, or simply fortified and emboldened. Drawing on her spirit agency, Ansha moved back and forth between religious, ethnic, and medical domains, “becoming other” (Biehl and Locke 2017, 4), or sometimes just policing the borders of her world (West and Luedke 2006, 6). Borders are therefore not merely etic tools employed by anthropologists to fathom the shape-shifting qualities of African traditional medicine and its practitioners;5 borders and border-crossing are also emic categories internally constitutive of African epistemology and healing, cognitive tools by which to understand the world. Ansha divided her world along the borders between visible and invisible, day and night, seen and buried, body and shadow. She spoke of the physical body and domestic compound as a set of entries and exits at which borders must be continuously fortified through healing and rituals to prevent external attacks. More generally, the ngoma healing tradition of central and southern Africa (known as ekoma in Nampula) understands healing as a transition from one domain to another: from inside to outside, individual to collective, day to night, illness to health, patient to healer, crisis to solution, darkness to whiteness, evil to good.6 Spirits are themselves the epitome of border-crossing mobility as they traverse different geographical landscapes, infiltrate the porous borders of the body, and break the boundaries of taboos (Behrend 2015, 216).7 This border-crossing mobility finds symbolic representation in Makonde spirit sculptures, known as mashetani.8 These blackwood artifacts, which bear the influence of the Islamic cultures of the Swahili coast in Tanzania, where many

8

At A nsh a’s

Makonde people migrated and lived, represent coastal spirits as anthropomorphic figures disrupted by animal traits, beings simultaneously finished and unfinished, existences always in motion.9 In his work on shetani sculptures among the Makonde in Tanzania, the art historian Zachary Kingdon suggests that the shetani image is “expressive of the quality of ‘boundariness’ that inevitably stands between different worlds of experience and both divides and combines them” (2002, 146).10 Wherever one looks at the sculpture, what one sees is already becoming something else. As a Makonde artist living in Nampula named António Lazaro explained to me, “mashetani are diabos [Port. devil] and maus espíritos [Port. bad spirits] because they deceive a lot; they are always fleeing; they are never complete.”11 For Kingdon, this aesthetic elusiveness represents the world as an unfinished whole, a never-ending search for totality that evokes “refracted versions of the human world” and offers “a perspective on the imagined totality” (2002, 146). Like these wooden sculptures, Ansha’s life with spirits was one of perpetual becoming, an unfinished “not yet” story lived through, between, and beyond the borders of her world—Muslim and Christian, Makhuwa and Makonde, healer and patient, male and female, evil and good. As a healer of spirits, Ansha continually strove to pass beyond borders, to reconcile the irresolvable contradictions of her life and world (Lévi-Strauss 1963b), to reach toward totality.12 To speak of Ansha’s “border work,” “border navigation,” or “border crossing,” however, requires going beyond the trope of the border per se. Borders are spatial in orientation and social in scope, while any “work” that occurs with respect to them happens at some moment by some person. I therefore avail myself of a second trope, that of the event, which is the moment at which an individual exercises agency in relation to borders.13 This agency might be exercised merely to reinscribe a border, and it might be exercised in what appears to be the most mundane of situations; nevertheless, insofar as agency is exercised in relation to borders, there is an event. The narrative mode of the book is developed around a series of such borderevents (with this hyphenated term capturing both the constraining force of borders and the moment of exercising agency in relation to them). In some cases, these border-events were precipitated by the failure of healing or medicine; in other cases, by the occurrence of dreams, a death, or the eruption of violence; in still other cases, simply by Ansha’s audience, including my presence in her mosque. In all cases, these moments were occasions in which Ansha became aware of the borders and exercised agency with respect to them. My analysis of Ansha’s border-events draws on classical sociological theory, along with a more humanistic approach. The Manchester school of the 1960s attended to events as “atypical” happenings, the close investigation of which reveals “dimensions of the potentialities of the realities within which they irrupted”

Introduction 9

(Meinert and Kapferer 2015, 2). Victor Turner later developed the related concept of “social drama,” which understood events as accidental situations in which the contingent eludes the overdetermination of structure (1957, 1974, 1981). For Turner, these detailed situations of crisis made visible not only the contradictions and conflicts between social groups and individuals but also a “multiplicity of potential, a diversity of possible outcomes” (Meinert and Kapferer 2015, 11). Whereas the Manchester school and Turner analyzed the social dimension of events, I look at events more in relation to individual subjectivity and lived experience. In doing so, I draw on Michael Jackson’s existential analysis, which focuses on “difficult events” that “disclose the struggle for a life worth living” (Denizeau 2015, 224). In their definition of existential anthropology, Michael Jackson and Albert Piette emphasize the agentive and creative potential of events by employing Karl Jaspers’ concept of Grenzsituationen (border-situations)— “situations in which we come up against the limits of language, the limits of our strength, the limits of our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, new ways of connecting with others” (2015, 7–8). I narrate life in Ansha’s mosque around these moments in which she—with the aid of spirits—confronts and navigates the borders of postwar Mozambique. Without losing sight of the “structure” of the macrosocial inequity and violence, I focus on Ansha’s border-events as existential “spaces” in which she expresses agency and realizes potential. A funeral, the outbreak of illness, the failure of healing, a death, the arrival of a new patient, a dream, an uprising—all are potential moments in which Ansha articulates alternative understandings of herself, envisions new trajectories for her patients, subverts power relations, and ultimately acts on and re-creates her world. “She is here to study ‘traditional medicine’ ”—that is how Ansha often introduced me to her patients who inquired about my presence in her mosque. For her patients and other healers, I was in Nampula to learn about roots, songs, and spirits. Questions about my research were later directed toward what healers knew or did not know, whether traditional medicine worked or not, whether I believed in it or not. This is not surprising, for missionary, colonial, and scholarly interest has long been fixated on what African healers “know and do” rather than “who they are.” There is abundant scholarship about the symbolic worlds and ritual cosmologies of African medicine and the medical techniques and ritual practices of African healers. Attention has been given to healing and healers’ knowledge—what they do and do not know, their conceptions of maladies, their healing practices, their initiation to healing, how their medical knowledge interacts with other medical discourses. However, we still know little about the lives and personalities of healers, of their kin, and their social world.14

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I therefore heed Susan Reynolds Whyte’s imperative to attend to the “actor’s situation” (Whyte 1997, 25), taking however the perspective of a healer rather than the patient.15 Having spent nearly every day with Ansha during a long span of fieldwork, I became involved in her daily and family life (which can scarcely be separated from one’s work in the case of spirit healers).16 I came to know her story of spirits as she consulted with patients, performed her trade, reflected on her sessions, recalled her past, and envisioned futures for herself and her patients. I witnessed how Ansha deployed cultural tools at her disposal—spirits, rumors, rituals, dreams, divinations—to understand her world, confront critical events, cope with uncertainty during healing processes, engage the borders of her world, and make meaning for herself and her patients.17 In attending the mosque, I also esteemed the charisma, humor, and grace with which Ansha lived her life. The writing of “life stories” has been not without criticism. Pierre Bourdieu (1986), for example, has characterized the genre as “biographical illusion,” the artificial exercise of creating a coherent narrative, with a beginning and conclusion. Likewise, John and Jean Comaroff warn of the dangers inherent in writing biography as an instrument of bourgeois history-in-making, one that reflects “a notion of human career as an ordered progression of acts and events” (1992, 26). The genre of biography is “a projection of a particular idea of personhood” (Blanes 2011, 96) that deploys a chronological linearity and suppresses the coexistence of multiple temporalities. These critiques remind us that “a story” is always shaped by the circumstances of the telling, including the narrator’s cultural and experiential categories. However, Laurel Kendall’s (1988, 13) account of the life of a female shaman in Korea encourages us not to neglect other questions: why people tell stories, and how they fashion the stories they tell. Autobiographical narratives about illness and healing are told and retold by spirit healers in Nampula as a way to legitimize their knowledge and to foster a stronger sense of “experientially based truth” (Pollock 2000, 109). Telling stories humanizes the medical encounter, legitimizes healers’ power and knowledge, and ultimately serves as a tool to heal. By moving between “two worlds”—illness and healing (Hahn 1995)—healers’ stories of illness and healing create intimacy and connection with their patients, providing a means by which tribulation, frustration, helplessness, and hope are shared and articulated.18 How Ansha fashioned her story of spirits not only assumed an ekoma narrative order—a tortuous and circuitous path from illness to healing—but also conveyed a relational idea of personhood. Pieces of her life erupted obliquely in the stories of her patients, in her divinations for them, and through the lives of others around her, especially her husband, Tiago; her master, Paulo; her assistants Verónica and Irene; and me. This book retells Ansha’s story as a patient and a healer, as she shared it with me and fashioned and refashioned it with others, in different circumstances, through different registers, to different ends.

Introduction 11

Additionally, we should ask, Which story gets told? This book in fact tells only one story among many, a story that Ansha shared with me about her life with spirits in illness and healing, silencing or at least disclosing little of her life before and without spirits. This story therefore is, involves, and derives from my encounter with Ansha in a specific time and place. As Vincent Crapanzano writes, the ethnographer’s presence triggers a change of consciousness in both the “informant” and the “ethnographer” (1980, 11). On the one hand, the life that Ansha shared with me was prompted, at least in part, by my own questions and agendas (as is the story that I now share with you). On the other hand, Ansha tailored her life stories to her audiences, me included, with our ethnographic encounter involving how she (and her family and patients) “gazed” at me (Dumont 1992, 3). Although I was at first there “to study traditional medicine,” I eventually began assisting her in her work and ultimately became seen as another patient of majini with whom personal stories and experiences were used to forge connection, empathy, and healing. Ansha’s border work occurred in and around the borderland city of Nampula. Located in a region where the savannah meets the Indian Ocean, Nampula has become the second-largest city of northern Mozambique, with a population of more than seven hundred thousand people.19 The city is a bustling crossroads of peoples, religions, and languages, patterned by borders between urbanites and rural peasants, Christians and Muslims, the city center and surrounding bairros (Port. neighborhoods), immigrants from the inland and immigrants from the coast, Indians and Africans. Since colonial times, Nampula has been the main economic and political center of the entire northern region—known as the rainha do norte (queen of the north).20 The Portuguese did not succeed in penetrating and occupying the presentday province of Nampula until the first decade of the twentieth century (de Castro 1960a), which up until then was the site of many battles between the Portuguese and local chiefs (Viegas 2013). In 1907, a military outpost was erected on former indigenous settlements, from which the Portuguese launched campaigns to conquer one of the last rebellious regions of the entire Portuguese Empire (de Castro 1960a). With occupation, Nampula gradually became the main center of the northern region, including a military headquarters of recruitment and an economic hub for the production of cotton and cashews. With the creation of a Catholic archdiocese in 1940, the region saw intensified missionary presence farther inland. The city did not grow much demographically under Portuguese rule. The majority of Africans were forced to remain in the countryside to work in the colonial plantations. A strict system of policing was employed to enforce this rule and impede migration to urban centers. Rural settlements (Port. aldeamentos), in which the native population was required to reside, were built along country

12

At A nsh a’s

roads (Port. picadas) close to the fields (Dinerman 2006; Premawardhana 2018b), enabling the Portuguese to increase cotton production and to prevent migration to the cities. After independence in 1975, cities and towns remained of secondary strategic importance to Frelimo, whose main goal was to remake Mozambique into a country of socialist-nationalist peasants. Rural populations were dislocated into new agglomerations known as communal villages (Port. aldeias comunais). Migration to the urban centers continued to be strictly policed. These restrictions only ended with the outbreak of the sixteen-year war in the late 1970s, as thousands from the northern regions took refuge in Nampula to escape a war being fought almost exclusively in the rural areas. The neighborhoods that surrounded the city center ballooned, with the biggest concentration of people in the areas closest to the city center, since these were best equipped with facilities, water, and electricity. Population growth further intensified after the sixteen-year war, as the implementation of structural adjustment programs in the late 1980s impoverished the rural areas where the majority of Mozambicans lived.21 With the mineral discoveries of the 2010s, migrants again flocked to the city, this time also from other African countries—especially Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Tanzania—in search of economic opportunities and to start businesses. Despite rapid changes, Nampula still retains the division between the city center and the surrounding bairros. The downtown “cement city” (Port. cidade de cimento) contains government buildings, hotels, universities, Indian and Somali shops selling Chinese products, internet cafés, and the cement houses of the educated elite. Radiating outward from the “cement city” are the bairros in which the majority of Nampula’s residents live, usually in mud and bamboo houses, connected by red clay roads, supported by local markets, yet absent of infrastructure such as sewage systems and rubbish collection. The bairros are crossed by various ethnic, regional, and religious borders, since migration to the city principally followed kinship and regional patterns. Despite ongoing fluidity and heterogeneity, the western areas are associated with migrants from the inland region; the eastern bairros, with migrants from the coast.22 Within these broader areas are smaller pockets in which people of the same village or region, even clan, reside. Present-day Nampula is also a crossroads of Islam and Christianity, for the city includes comparable numbers of Muslims and Christians.23 After the sixteenyear war, the city experienced a proliferation of new religious movements— Islamist movements (known in the bairros as Ahl al-Sunna) and Pentecostal and evangelical churches, which have begun to outpace participation in Sufi orders and Catholic churches, respectively, especially among the younger generations. In spite of this shifting religious landscape, however, ancestral worship and spirit possession—what residents generally refer to as “tradition” (Port. tradição)—

Introduction 13

continue to thrive, especially through the work of some five thousand traditional healers who live and practice in the city.24 I came to know Nampula mostly through the eyes of an outsider—an immigrant who was part of a Makonde minority in an overwhelmingly Makhuwa city.25 The Makonde people hail from the Mueda plateau in the region of Cabo Delgado in the northernmost part of Mozambique along the Tanzanian border. As the director of the Ethnological Museum of Nampula explained to me in a conversation in 2013, the Makonde began migrating to the region of Nampula in search of opportunities and resources during Portuguese occupation.26 Later, during the anticolonial struggle, many Makonde guerrillas were imprisoned in the city of Nampula, remaining there until after independence, when they were joined by relatives. Makonde also came to Nampula—as well as to other parts of Mozambique—after the anticolonial war to “bring the ideology” and “the vision of Samora [Machel],” the first president of Mozambique, from the liberated zones of Mozambique to the entire county.27 The Makonde were the result of the intermixture of various people, including Yao, Makhuwa, and Matambwe. All took shelter on the Rovuma plateau after the disintegration of the Maravi Empire in the seventeenth century, then later during the slave raids of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28 One of the first recorded occurrences of the word “Makonde” appears in an 1810 colonial report about “the small Makonde reign,” an area of the plateau where slaves took refuge (Liesegang 2007, 30). Early references to the Makonde singled out their “fierceness” and “inhospitality,” reputations likely earned by their hostility to slave traders and coastal chiefs. Over time, a distinctive Makonde ethos developed, one that included eluding slavery, resisting Islamization, instituting segmentary social organization, and embracing cultural practices like bodily transformation (tattoos, teeth perforations and sharpening), meat consumption, and masquerading (mapiko).29 The Makonde lived in fortified villages in the most impenetrable parts of the bush on top of an 850-meter-high plateau. As late as the beginning of twentieth century, this region remained independent of Portuguese rule and relatively unexplored (Newitt 1995; Palmer and Newitt 2016). Only during the First World War did the region come to be occupied by the Portuguese. The anticolonial insurgencies in the 1960s and 1970s further differentiated the Makonde as a distinct group. Given their geographical proximity to Tanzania, where many migrated to work in sisal plantations (Liesegang 2007), they were exposed to anticolonial ideas emanating therefrom.30 One of the first anticolonial organizations, the União Makonde de Moçambique (Makonde African National Union, which was then called Mozambique African National Union), emerged out of Makonde organizations and cultural associations. In 1961, União Makonde de Moçambique supporters organized a peaceful demonstration in front of the

14

At A nsh a’s

colonial administration in Mueda, which ended in a bloodbath (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983; Tembe 2013). With the later creation of FRELIMO, many Makonde began actively participating in the war of liberation, providing military support and logistics to FRELIMO combatants against the Portuguese. Following independence, those who had participated in the struggle for independence enjoyed favor from the government, receiving generous pensions and state jobs in recognition of their contributions. In Nampula, Makonde residents often stood out from the Makhuwa due to their higher standard of living and better housing. They also continued to cultivate a distinct and separate identity—for example, by performing mapiko dances during political rallies and maintaining secretive rituals of initiation. I had firsthand experience of Makonde separateness and secretiveness, if only by absence. Although I was allowed to attend Makhuwa rituals of initiation, I was unable to attend a single Makonde one. I came close one day when Ansha took me to a Makonde female ritual of initiation. However, despite her special pleading, I was barred entry by a group of elderly Makonde. I waited alone all night outside. When Ansha finally returned in the morning, she revealed that the ritual involved snakes and other prohibited Makonde things that would have upset me. “It is too frightening,” she summarily asserted, intimating the exclusiveness of the Makonde community in Nampula. Many of the borders that Ansha navigated in Nampula during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were the product of hundreds of years of history. The story of Mozambique in general and the Nampula region in particular is a violent one that moves from slave trade to colonialism, socialism, civil war, and a protracted political instability that many consider an ongoing undeclared war. The precolonial history of inland northern Mozambique is still largely unknown.31 In the second half of the sixteenth century, the region was invaded by armed groups referred to as Maravi,32 who established kingdoms that lasted until the expansion of Indian Ocean trade in the eighteenth century.33 With the dissolution of Maravi rule came a process of differentiation among the northern population, with ethnic labels such as Chewa, Makhuwa, and Yao used to identify groups as they came to be ruled by local warlords and lineage chiefs. After the outbreak of the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century, slave traders of the coast began penetrating inland.34 Thousands of Makhuwa and Yao slaves were sent to Cuba, Brazil, and other French colonies (Bonate 2007a; Capela and Medeiros 1987). A web of allegiances between coastal and inland chiefs was established to facilitate the passage of slave caravans (Bonate 2007a; Capela and Medeiros 1987; Hafkin 1973; Mbwiliza 1991). With these allegiances and exchanges, Islam was diffused inland, as local Makhuwa chiefs began converting, especially due to the work of Muslim teachers and healers (Kisw.

Introduction 15

walimu) who accompanied the slave caravans into the interior (Bonate 2007a; Alpers 1969, 1976). Despite these allegiances, however, trade did not bring stability to the region. In addition to the violence that many Makhuwa experienced as they were abducted and enslaved, the slave trade triggered internal wars, violence, and dislocation among many chiefdoms (Bonate 2007a). Even after the official abolition of slavery in 1869, slave trafficking continued at least through the early twentieth century. Moreover, the abolishment of the slave trade proved to be merely a prelude for another kind of slavery and violence—colonial occupation. Although the presence of the Portuguese in the region dates back to the end of 1400s, official colonial occupation did not begin until the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Portuguese state delegated the administration of much of Mozambique to commercial companies, which were in charge of pacifying, policing, and administrating the colony. Much of northern Mozambique was administrated by the Niassa Company; the Nampula region, however, remained under direct control of the colonial government (Newitt 2017, 107). Nevertheless, the Portuguese began implementing governmental policies and administrative measures that gave formation to a colonial state (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983). In 1898, all male adult Africans were subjected to a system of taxation and forced labor (chibalo), the violence of which constituted “slavery by any other name” (Allina 2012; see also Isaacman and Isaacman 1983, 31). One year later, the Portuguese launched indigenato, a legal system that bifurcated the legal status of the population. The majority of Mozambicans fell into the category of indígena and were therefore obliged to work and subjected to customary law. The other category, não indígena, included the Portuguese and other Europeans, as well as mestizos. An estimated 99 percent of all Mozambicans fell into the first category—indígena—and therefore remained outside the legal framework of colonial administration (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983, 31). In 1926, the Republican regime was overthrown by a military coup and replaced by a fascist regime, the New State (Port. Estado Novo). In the colonies, this new regime brought a shift toward centralization and autarchy. The ultimate goal of the leader of the New State, António De Oliveira Salazar, was complete centralization and full assimilation of the provinces of the Portuguese empire; all Portuguese colonies came under direct state administration. As the grasp of the colonial state tightened, colonization and exploitation of Africans were justified with narratives involving the “civilizing mission” of the Portuguese, carried out mostly by Catholic missionaries. The Concordat Accord with the Vatican in 1940 declared that the Catholic Church and state would work hand in hand to “civilize” and evangelize Africans in the colonies (Morier-Genoud 2019).35 Catholic missionaries in northern Mozambique were on the front line of these efforts, educating, missionizing, and prohibiting traditional practices.

16

At A nsh a’s

Although missionary evangelization largely failed along the northern Muslim coast, it was successful inland. The anticolonial struggle against the Portuguese officially started in 1962, when Julius Nyerere, president of newly liberated Tanzania, merged several different anti-Portuguese forces into a unique organization called FRELIMO.36 The struggle for independence started in Cabo Delgado, with Makonde peasants offering logistic support crucial to the war. During the war, disagreement and division about the future of Mozambique began to appear within FRELIMO, often along regional and ideological lines. One side was guided by FRELIMO’s former leader Eduardo Mondlane, a Mozambican intellectual and anthropologist from southern Mozambique who was educated in the United States and whose main goal was to liberate Mozambique. For the other faction, independence alone did not suffice; Mozambique needed to embrace Marxism-Leninism for its future governance. The latter soon prevailed. Following the unsolved murder of Mondlane in Dar es Salaam in 1969, Samora Machel took over power within the organization. During the war, “liberated zones” became laboratories for the formation of a new socialist society. Basic education and health care were provided; agricultural cooperatives and labor collectivization defined the economy. Repressive tactics against traditional authorities and healers were also enacted. Soon after Mozambique gained independence on June  25, 1975, these policies were extended throughout the country. Rural areas of Mozambique were reorganized into new communal villages (Port. aldeias comunais), to which peasants were forced to move in order to work on collective machambas (Moz. farms, plots). Although brief, the socialist period is still remembered in Nampula as a period of state violence, particularly among the Makhuwa residents, who faced forced villagization, social control, and the repression of local practices and forms of authority. Many in Nampula maintained that state violence during those years paved the way for the sixteen-year war. This war began in 1977 as the power of Frelimo came to be challenged by a new military formation, Renamo (the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana [Mozambican National Resistance]), which was initially created and supported by southern Rhodesia and South Africa in order to destabilize Mozambique, which had provided support both to the anticolonial struggle in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and against apartheid in South Africa.37 Ethno-historical and historiographical work has nevertheless revealed the internal and local dimensions of the conflict, such that many scholars do not hesitate to call it a “civil war” (MorierGenoud, Cahen, and do Rosário 2018).38 Renamo soon gained support from the rural populations of Mozambique, especially many Makhuwa and Muslims, who had been persecuted and disfranchised by Frelimo and its policies against religion and tradition. Renamo’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama, offered a vision of Mozambique that was antithetical to

Introduction 17

socialism, championing democracy and valorizing traditional practices, healers, and religions (Vines 1991). However, the rising popularity of Renamo, in conjunction with an economic crisis in the late 1980s, led Frelimo to gradually dismiss socialism and grant more tolerance to traditional authorities and religions (West 2005; Wilson 1992). Over one million of then thirteen million Mozambicans lost their lives during the sixteen-year war (1977–1992), with an additional four million displaced (1.7 million abroad, 2.3 million to the main cities).39 The Mozambican war was a “dirty war,” where torture, village destruction, sexual violence, starvation, and murder were the main weapons in the arsenal of terror (Nordstrom 1997; see also Finnegan 1992; Hall 1990). The state’s army and Renamo rarely confronted each other directly. Instead, Renamo made communal villages their primary military targets, killing civilians and destroying health care and other social services (Hanlon 1991; Hall 1990; Hall and Young 1997; Vines 1991, 87–91). The war came to an end with a peace accord signed in Rome in 1992, after which Mozambique officially embraced multiparty democracy, neoliberalism. The structural adjustment programs consisted of loans provided by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in exchange for the implementation of democratic and neoliberal policies, which involved decentralization and the participation of local and traditional forms of power in policy and public health (Pitcher 2002; West 2005; Obarrio 2014; Abrahamsson and Nilsson 1995). The advent of democracy and the introduction of a market economy were, however, accompanied by cuts in social services, privatization, and austerity measures that ended up deepening socioeconomic inequality. In spite of the fact that the economy continued to grow during Armando Guebuza’s two mandates (2005–2015), in large part because of the mineral discoveries of late 2000s, the beneficiaries of this substantial economic growth was but a small section of the population (“A Hopeful Continent,” Economist, March 2, 2013; see also CastelBranco 2014; Ali 2010; Fox 2008). With rising inflation, deepening inequality, and growing authoritarianism, social malcontent and protests began to surge in various parts of the country (Bertelsen 2018). Lingering political tension between Frelimo and Renamo constantly threatened to erupt into overt war. In 2013 Renamo returned to the bush during the eve of the municipal election, from which it began launching attacks that have continued up through the present. As I wrote this book, in 2017, another new war raged in the northern region of Cabo Delgado, with attacks from alleged Islamist insurgents, commonly referred to as Ahlu-Sunnah Wa-Jama and locally known as Al-Shabab. Not surprisingly, many in Nampula see this violence as one more confirmation that “the war has never been over” in Mozambique. Although Ansha’s individual spirit story is interwoven with these general historical processes—the journey from colonialism to independence and from socialism to multiparty democracy, through both the anticolonial war and the

18

At A nsh a’s

sixteen-year war—the past, for her, was no mere archive or grid. She continuously engaged with Mozambican and East African history, rewriting it in accordance with circumstances and audiences, emphasizing here and silencing there. History was for her a “living past,” defying linearity, as the borders between past and present, history and myth, and history and biography were continually blurred ( Jackson 2008). My fieldwork itself consisted of border work—a continuous crossing of the space between Ansha and me, illness and health, her languages and mine, and the inside and outside of Ansha’s mosque. I worked with Ansha every day from October 2009 to July 2010, returning for four months in 2013, then again for two months in 2016. In the mosque, I attended divinations, healing sessions, and two ceremonies of majini. I participated in life in the compound with her family and patients. Working daily with her enabled me to become familiar with her healing, tracking her medical trajectories over days, weeks, and months. Since most of Ansha’s clientele were regulars, many patients grew accustomed to and comfortable with my presence. I was not officially apprenticed because Ansha did not ask that of me to participate in her work. Nevertheless, over time I found myself becoming a helper of sorts, as Ansha increasingly involved me in the activities inside and outside the mosque. When introducing me to her patients, Ansha deployed the term mwalí, a term that is generally used for a girl undertaking rituals of initiation, and which Ansha also used for young, unmarried, or childless women. This is how I believe Ansha saw me: a patient, a childless and unmarried woman, someone to be cured. Mwalí also refers to a student, one who is here to learn. While I often struggled to think of Ansha as my curer, at least at the beginning, simply because I hesitated to see myself “sick,” I saw her as my teacher, trainer, and mentor with regard to matters of spirits and healing, as well as life more generally. For those looking at us from outside the mosque, Ansha’s family, her husband, Tiago, most of all, we were simply amigas, friends. Ansha consented to my writing of this book and using her name. She expressed excitement and enthusiasm for the project, though often teased me that it would be an arduous process to write a book about her. I have therefore retained her name, as well as those of her husband, her assistants, and members of her family who gave me explicit permission, while changing the names of her patients and other healers. I try to convey the liveliness of the ethnographic encounter through the use of a variety of narrative registers—dialogues, conversations, diary-like description, dream reports, monologues, and the overlapping resonance of other voices with Ansha’s and mine. Knowledge was produced during these interactions between Ansha and me, Ansha and her patients, and Ansha and her family.40 To convey the sense of simultaneity, happenstance, and rhythm that characterized

Introduction 19

life in the mosque, I use the present tense in retelling my direct interactions and conversations with Ansha and others inside her mosque and elsewhere. I structure these interactions and conversations into short chapters, often developed around specific events, each offering a particular window into the life in the mosque. I organize the book into four main sections. Most chapters revolve around the borders of Ansha’s world and the events in which she navigates them. Part I: Ansha and the Spirits follows Ansha’s story of illness and healing, especially as it crosses multiple religious, medical, and ethnic borders that pattern the city of Nampula. Part II: Outside the Mosque turns to Ansha’s interactions and relations with other religious, medical, and political powers in Nampula. Part III: Patients explores the nature and role of borders in Ansha’s understanding of and intervention in her patients’ illnesses and misfortunes. Part IV narrates my returns to Nampula in 2016 after Ansha’s death. The book addresses themes like gender, migration, religious change, violence, and kinship, as well as historical processes related to life in Ansha’s mosque. Although I often privilege the stories and explanations of Ansha and her patients, I utilize theory and scholarship as “an illumination” of Ansha’s life “rather than as an end in itself ” (Narayan 1989, 11). Historical and theoretical incursions into the life of the mosque are undertaken to better grasp the meaning of particular borders and events. As Michael Jackson points out, “recourse to narrative” aims “to make our accounts of the lives of others do justice to their reality, what is at stake for them, as well as render those lives readable” ( Jackson 2008, 391–392). The book is an unfinished becoming, just like Ansha’s spirit story, indeed every story and any fieldwork. As I returned to my data while writing this book, I constantly discovered new details buried in badly written notes, words hurriedly scribbled that suddenly cast new light and offered new meanings. Susan Rasmussen once explained to me at a conference that ethnography is a retrospective project, often accompanied with regret of not having asked the right question or stayed longer. Much like artisanal labor, ethnographic writing involves a continuous making and unmaking until form takes shape and threads are woven. With humility, we write one story among many possible ones—a story filtered by our subjectivity, by our experience (Rabinow 1977), and by our limits. “We recognise the faces of strangers for their humanity,” as the anthropologist Nigel Rapport writes, “but we can only guess at their individual identity” (2018, 119).

1 • RUR AL AND URBAN

On a blistering morning in late November  2009, Ansha and I leave Nampula before sunrise to journey to the mountains. She needs namatthukula, light green leaves that are used in baths to “open the body” of her patients to the spirits.1 A couple is expected “to dance majini,” an expression that Ansha uses for ceremonies to transform patients afflicted by spirits into healers. The couple— both children of veterans who fought in the anticolonial war at the border with Tanzania—both fell sick to spirits some years ago while working in the field in the province of Cabo Delgado. First the husband, then the wife, visited many local healers in their region, traveling as far away as Tanzania. But the healing was without success, so they decided to visit healers in the city of Nampula. When they arrived to consult with Ansha—“the Makonde curandeira [Port. healer] living in Nampula,” as she was known in Cabo Delgado—spirits came out at once during divination and requested a “big ceremony.” “The couple has strong spirits,” Ansha pronounced during the session, “spirits who want them to become healers.” It takes a full hour for us to make our way out of the city, walking through the clay streets of the bairros. Eventually we arrive at the point where the last huts of the neighborhoods fade into the bush. I pause and look up; clouds are chasing one another across the sky. With the noisy city and dusty road behind us, we cross a stream and climb a stone hill patched with dry shrubs. Ansha, barefoot, is deftly agile in the bush; she knows exactly where to place her feet, one step after another. I struggle to keep up. More than once, she turns back to check on me, teasingly scolding, “I told you that you were going to cry today, Daria.” After one hour, we arrive at the foot of the mountain. Red and white flags bleached by the sun and covered in dust mark the presence of the spirits’ abode. Ansha gives me a heap of ephepa to scatter at the shrine (Mak. epewe) below the flags. She asks the spirits “to open the door” (Mak. otthukula mkhora), granting us permission (Mak. erati) to collect herbs, while protecting us against thieves and bandits who generally hide in these isolated and secluded places. Ansha ties a red sheet to her forehead to be recognized by spirits. Then she introduces me to 25

26

A nsh a a nd the Spirits

the spirits for the very first time since I have begun working with her, telling them I am in Nampula to study traditional medicine: “Please, I am hosting Daria; she came to my house. She is happy to stay here, although she is far away from her home. You need to protect her so that she does not have troubles. Protect her from sorcery [Port. droga] and insults. Here in Nampula, she is learning a lot.” I scatter ephepa, as directed by Ansha, asking the spirits to allow us to enter their mountain and to reveal to us the bushes, trees, plants, leaves, and rocks. We then slowly scramble up the mountain on hands and knees. Upon reaching the peak, Ansha shows me which plants to cut leaves from and how. I am in charge of cutting off namatthukula, a short plant with small, dry, brownish leaves “that never die.” Put into water, the leaves reopen, reacquiring their bright green color. After harvesting a sackful of plants and roots that Ansha places on her head, we climb back down, stopping again at the epewe to thank the spirits and to repay them by offering them coins. “Nampula is a city full of spirits,” Ansha says, wiping dust off the flags. “Why?” I ask, thinking of the couple for whom we are harvesting namatthukula. “Why are people from Cabo Delgado coming to Nampula to heal their spirits?” “It is because of these mountains,” responds Ansha, gazing out at the vast landscape of abundant plants.2 “In Mueda there were not many people with spirits; there were not many healers like here. To contact a healer, you had to walk a lot.” “There are no mountains there?” I inquire. “There are no mountains there like here, Daria. Nampula is full of mountains where spirits live. In the caverns, they are locked there,” she says, peering at the mountain in front of us. “In Nampula, there are a lot of majini; that is because there is a lot of confusion [Port. confusão].”3 To talk about time is to talk about place. Ansha mapped the phases of her life onto the distinctive landscapes she traveled, whether in body or dream—first Mueda and the Rovuma River, then Nampula, the mountains, and the Indian Ocean. Places were transfigured by memory, becoming myths. The Mueda plateau where Ansha was born was a world without spirits, a world of sameness, without confusão. By contrast, the jagged landscape of Nampula, with its mountains, caverns, thick savannah, and overpopulated, muddy bairros, was a world of opaque forces and concealment— a world where Ansha fell sick to majini. I am Ansha, José Bulha. I am from Mueda, Cabo Delgado. Before spirits attacked me, I was Rosa. Ansha is the name of majini.



Rural and Urban 27

One of the first times I met Ansha, she introduced herself by displaying a legible vocabulary, as if reading from an ID document or identifying herself in front of a governmental authority.4 Her staccato words revealed a life split in two: Rosa and Ansha, before and after illness, without and with spirits, Mueda and Nampula. Ansha (then Rosa)5 was born during the colonial period in the town of Mueda in the province of Cabo Delgado. Her childhood on the plateau was informed more by the values of the Catholic Church and the FRELIMO than by Makonde mores and traditions, as first Christianity, then socialism, attempted to eradicate traditional practices and beliefs. Missionary evangelization obliged those who converted to cease being “Makonde.” Traditions that constituted Makondeness—rituals of puberty, ancestral worship, polygamy, and masked dances (Shim. mapiko)—were targeted as an impediment to becoming a proper Christian (West 2005, 114).6 Later, as the missionaries encountered increasing resistance, the church opted for a more tolerant approach, translating local cosmology and indigenous rituals into the language of Christianity. Rituals to spirits were converted into prayers to God; spirits were infused with saintlike qualities. Missions even organized traditional rites of puberty, purifying them of sexual content.7 Although many Muedans looked on the missionaries with suspicion, an increasing number were allured by salaries, better working conditions, services like education and health care, and an exemption from forced labor in the cotton fields. The anthropologist Harry West reports that a small community of these converts formed a settlement adjacent the mission, referring to themselves as Vamissau, “mission people” (West 2005, 117).8 Spiritual proximity to Christianity was vouchsafed by physical proximity to the mission. Ansha’s parents worked on the mission’s plantation, and her father also served as a catechist. During one of my first days in Ansha’s mosque, she recalled her past in Mueda as one suffused with Christian practices and symbols: “I was born Christian. All my family was Christian. My father and my mother were Christian. They married in the church during the colonial period with the Italian fathers. I was baptized and given the name Susana. My father became a pastor; he was teaching catechism. He went to the church daily. My father did not do anything in the machamba without taking the crucifix with him.” In Ansha’s memory, the Portuguese presence in Mueda was nearly imperceptible. By contrast, she recalled her family’s life in the Catholic mission, suggesting the success of the Portuguese in delegating to the missionaries the task of “Portugalizing” Africans through basic education, health assistance, and labor, as well as conversion.9 In the early 1960s, revolutionary, pro-independence ideas that were already circulating on the plateau reached the mission. Ansha’s parents supported the

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struggle against Portuguese occupation, quitting the mission, church, and God for the forest, military training, and Marxism-Leninism. The Makonde plateau became the cradle of the struggle for independence. ­FRELIMO—the anticolonialist Mozambican movement that formed in Tanzania in 1962—not only initiated its campaign against the Portuguese in close proximity to its bases in Tanzania but also maintained its central base on the Mueda plateau in the Mozambican interior (West 2005; Isaacman and Isaacman 1983; Newitt 2017). By early 1965, only a few months after the beginning of the war, most plateau populations had fled their settlements. Some were confined in Portuguese-built strategic hamlets on the plateau. Others crossed the Rovuma River and spent the war in refugee camps in Tanzania. Many moved into the densely forested areas of the plateau interior or the surrounding lowlands, living adjacent to FRELIMO bases in areas called “liberated zones.” The majority of Makonde peasants provided logistical and other support to FRELIMO, without which the struggle against the Portuguese would not have succeeded. Soon, Muedans began learning the language not only of freedom and independence but also of class struggle. Production, war, and education were slogans of the revolution. Socialist modernization demanded the repression of rituals, healing practices, and traditional beliefs that were considered obscurantist and antithetical to the values of the “New Man.” Socialism promised a country no longer divided by tribalism, religion, ethnicity, and occult forces. As West writes with regard to witchcraft in Mueda, “To suggest that power operated in hidden and unpredictable way was to provoke confusão” (West 2001, 121). FRELIMO transformed the ways Muedans and other rural Mozambicans conceived of power by deeply rewriting their geographical and social landscape (West 2005; Israel 2014). People living in remote areas were relocated to socialist communal villages by FRELIMO, ostensibly to provide them with infrastructure, education, and health services. Collective villagization, however, also functioned as a form of biopower by which government officials made citizens “visible” and therefore subject to the power of the state.10 Muedans were required to construct their houses in rows around a central square nearly absent of vegetation (Israel 2014, 161). As Paolo Israel describes in his work on mapiko masquerading on the plateau, “The rectangular grids and the spacious courtyards were instrumental to creating a field of visibility in which no action could go unnoticed” (Israel 2014, 167). No spirits could inhabit such a linear, horizontal, and predictable landscape. Or so it was thought. As one of Ansha’s Makonde assistants, Irene, reflected, “Even if you had spirits during Samora, you had better suppress them.”11 Some places and times are remembered better than others. Some are repeatedly recalled, others silenced. Both remembrance and repression of the past inform who one is in the present.



Rural and Urban 29

Although Ansha talked about life in the mission, at least with me, she never spoke about life after independence in a communal village. Never did Ansha mention socialism or Marxism-Leninism, a stark contrast to many of the other healers of Nampula who instrumentally recalled Mozambique’s socialist era to criticize Frelimo and state power. For Ansha, it was as if the years after liberation had fallen mute. I believe that one reason for this silence was to underscore her life with spirits. Nonetheless, Ansha’s silence also reflected Frelimo’s historical ideology. As a daughter of veterans and a veteran herself,12 Ansha’s reconstruction of the past was deeply informed by Frelimo’s recitation of Mozambique’s postcolonial history. Frelimo leadership had built its party’s legitimacy on nationalist and liberation credentials, such that the history of FRELIMO was the history of postcolonial Mozambique and vice versa.13 Slogans such as “The fight continues” and “Until the final victory,” both of which had once animated the fight against the Portuguese, continued to reverberate in political rallies and speeches. Physical infrastructure was devoted to sustaining Frelimo’s version of Mozambican history: roads, sites, squares, and buildings memorialized heroes, dates, events, and sites of the anticolonial struggle.14 The centrality of the anticolonial struggle and the mythicization of the figure of Samora Machel were airbrushed of any trace of the socialist interlude. The government strove to make memories of the socialist past irrelevant, revealing Frelimo’s uneasy relation to state violence and the failed socialist revolution.15 Ansha’s memories of the struggle surfaced when she and her husband, Tiago— along with many Makonde—were granted veteran status and began receiving pensions in 2011.16 Once a month, approximately three hundred veterans, the majority Makonde migrants, made their way to a former colonial building in the center of the city to collect their pensions, after which they stopped to have a meal on the top floor of the building, where a temporary restaurant was set up just for them. Those mornings were occasions to reconnect with other veterans, catch up on news from their homeland in Cabo Delgado, and share memories of the war. For Ansha, it was also a way to reminisce her parents and family, whom some of the veterans had known. Taking pride in her veteran status, Ansha affirmed, “When I was a child, I suffered with them in the forest to liberate the country.” More mundane acts also kindled Ansha’s memories of the anticolonial revolution. She called her cat Magaia, the name of the FRELIMO politician and soldier killed at the beginning of the anticolonial struggle.17 On the few occasions that Ansha did recall the sixteen-year war, it was usually to disparage it. As she once explained, “That was not a war. It was a joke [Port. brincadeira]. That war was a war among Blacks. The real war was the one of ­FRELIMO against the whites.”

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In the early 1980s, Ansha left her home in Mueda for the city of Nampula— embarking on a journey that would symbolize her passage from youth to maturity, from health to illness, from a world without spirits to one full of them. Ansha’s cousin, a nurse and soldier, had been relocated to Nampula. The family chose Ansha to accompany him to the city. Upon arriving, Ansha and her cousin settled in the dusty bairros that surrounded the “cement city.”

2 • HE ALTH AND HE ALING

“The illness of majini started with the war,” Ansha thinks aloud, while picking up some herbs to give to Cláudia, a middle-aged woman who is visiting Ansha’s mosque after a series of dark dreams. “All healers got majini in the time of the war.” It is 2013. In the midst of the municipal election, Mozambique seems on the brink of a new war. News of military skirmishes outside the city reverberates throughout the bairros. Rumors swirl about local members of the opposition party, Renamo, who have left the city for the countryside and retaken control of their former bases, from which they are launching attacks on public transport and civilians.1 Nobody in the bairros ventures to travel, even to collect herbs or work in the fields on the outskirts of the city. Apprehension of an impending war is further exacerbated by stories of forced recruitments of children who have embarked on rituals of initiation in the bush. As voting day for the municipal election approaches, fear abounds of Renamo’s plan to attack people casting ballots. A number of patients are showing up at Ansha’s mosque, narrating dreams and visions related to the violence of the war.2 “I am dreaming of touching dead bodies,” Cláudia discloses upon entering Ansha’s mosque. She lives in Ansha’s bairro and often comes to the mosque to pick up herbs for bathing and to appease her spirits. In recent days, her dreams have intensified. 3 “You are dreaming the war,” Ansha replies, staring at Cláudia. “Women of majini are dreaming a lot in these days. I myself am dreaming many things. I am seeing troops taking people. My grandfather is telling me, ‘You cannot go to the bush and the machamba.’ ’’ “Yes, everyone is talking about the war these days in the bairro,” agrees Cláudia. We pause for a while. Nobody wishes to go back to the times of the war, but the political violence of recent days triggers intense works of memory.4 “Listen, I fell sick during the war,” Ansha says, finally breaking the silence. “I arrived in Nampula in 1982. I arrived here to take care of my oldest cousin, who was a nurse. He was killed here during the war by a Renamo ambush. I fled into 31

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the bush. The Renamo soldiers thought I went crazy. They did not touch me at all. I was protected by snakes. I drank my pee.” “Whoever has majini will not be killed. Majini protected me; nobody could see me there,” she continues. Ansha then returns to the present violence, “Do people miss killing?” She answers her own question, “We already suffered a lot.” Cláudia takes the herbs, folds them into her capulana, and leaves. She will boil the herbs in water and bathe in the brew to prevent dreaming about the war. As I later prepare to exit the compound, Ansha warns me, “Be aware, Daria, when you walk around. My grandfather came last night to tell me, ‘My daughter, you are not going to do anything now.’ I can’t even go to machamba to harvest nuts. Children will starve this year. It is like we are immobilized [Port. parados].” During the war, many men and women fell sick to majini. In fact, majini were said to be an “illness” that started during the war. As Ansha poignantly declared to Cláudia and me, the suffering attributed to the spirits during the war was framed as a “disorder of the head”—as “becoming crazy.” Several factors account for the proliferation of spirit attacks during the war. One certainly was the suffering and the psychological distress of the war and the displacement and migration it caused. Most healers and patients of majini were women and men whose lives were indelibly marked by the conflict. Some healers were former soldiers who came to be afflicted by spirits during the war or after demobilization. Others were refugees and migrants who had fallen sick when they fled the violence of the countryside. Still others became ill in the aftermath of personal loss of family, friends, and homes. The pervasiveness of spirit illness during the war can also be understood as what I call an “ontology of stuckedness”—the form that life and society assumed during the war.5 The violence of the war not only interrupted everyday life but also forced immobilization.6 When political violence broke out during the electoral season in 2013, many residents of Nampula felt stuck again, recommencing behaviors that characterized the years of the war—avoiding travel to their machambas and to family in their villages, setting annual ceremonies for their ancestors, organizing rituals of initiation in the bush. Ansha poignantly described this sense of immobilization through one of her war-related vision: “My ancestors came last night, saying that I cannot go to the machamba anymore. The war was over. The war spoiled and killed people, not just soldiers, burned our houses and machambas. We cannot do anything. Who is going to feed my children if I cannot go and work in the machamba?” Similar oneiric memories were attested to by other women who attended Ansha’s mosque during this time. One patient, for example, reported, “Many things are coming into my head, and I am unable to live my life now. This war is going to kill people, to destroy our houses again. The problem is that I cannot work. I am not going to the machamba in the village.



Health and Healing 33

We cannot travel. What are we going to eat, mandioca [Moz. cassava]? We are going to starve this year.” This sense of stuckedness resembled the state of being possessed. Migrants and refugees who had taken shelter in the city were unable to move outside the perimeters of the city, just like those who were suddenly “caught” by spirits. The experience of spirit illness was often spoken about in terms of a physical paralysis, an inability to eat and sleep, an incapacity to move or travel, a refusal to talk. Ansha routinely employed these tropes of stuckedness and disruption to describe the experience of being possessed: “Every night I sleep badly. I am stuck. I can’t eat what I want. I cannot bathe.” Other women complained that spirits prevented them from working in their machambas and from traveling to their homelands. Just as life with spirits ruptured into the everyday, so did life during war. Both lifeworlds were “stuck”—paradas. Mozambique’s transition away from socialism to multiparty democracy and neoliberalism was another factor in the surge of spirit possession during the war. Many healers in Nampula identified the sixteen-year war as the period when the governo (Port. government) finally acknowledged the importance of traditional medicine, allowing healers to come back out in the open. With Renamo’s destruction of socialist villages came the crippling of state surveillance; out of the chaos of the war erupted a proliferation of spirits, which prefer confusion and lurk in shadows. António, a Makhuwa healer, remarked during an interview how the war had finally released spirits and healers: “Before the war, there was no God, religion, curandeiros [for the Frelimo]. The war and the Renamo liberated spirits and Mozambique.” Other healers interpreted the proliferation of spirits as punishment for socialist repression of tradition and spirit possession. “Spirits were punishing Mozambique by inflicting illness, for people had forgotten them and the value of tradition. The result was the need for new healers and rituals.” One healer named Waziri called majini God’s revenge against socialism, the government, and Samora Machel: “He [Machel] offended God. Majini were sent to earth as revenge for having abolished tradition.” Another healer, named Mário, who had fallen sick during the war, described majini illness similarly: “The spirits got angry because during the period of Samora Machel they were disliked; traditional power and AMETRAMO were prohibited and the spirits got angry with the governo. Samora Machel said there was no church; ‘I am God.’ The spirits did not like what Frelimo did, and now they are punishing Mozambique.” Irene, Ansha’s assistant, interlaced the country’s political trajectory with her own personal story of illness: “It was in these times that I fell sick of majini, but I refused because of the mentality of those times. I grew up with Samora, against curanderismo, majini.” Many reported that although they had had majini for a long time, it was not until the war that spirits came out through dreams and illness.

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Not only did the sixteen-year war release spirits, allowing healers to practice their medicine in the light; spirits and healers also played an active role in it, affecting the outcome of the war, according to many healers and residents of Nampula.7 The legitimization and valorization of healers at first came from Renamo and its leader, Afonso Dhlakama, who referred to the war as a “war of the spirits” (Port. guerra dos espíritos) (Bertelsen 2016b, 73). Renamo valorized mediums and healers in an attempt to distinguish itself from Frelimo’s repressive policies.8 Gradually, Frelimo was forced to become more accepting of the officers and soldiers who availed themselves of healers and magical practices during the war. In late 1980s, state soldiers fighting in the north claimed military collaboration with a group of magical warriors in the Nampula and Zambezia provinces. These naparama were a group of men who had been magically treated by a Nampula healer known as Manuel António, who was reported to have come back from the dead in 1988 to accomplish the divine mission of defeating the bandidos—as the Renamo soldiers were called—through magical vaccinations.9 His antibullet healing was made from a local plant that, once pulverized, was rubbed onto the body, providing immunization against bullets. Among the people with whom I talked, the naparama continued to be championed as the only positive experience of the war, those who fought “against the war,” protected the people, and eventually put an end to the war. Stories about the war, naparama, and magic militarismo (Port. militarism) came to deeply inform the biographies of healers, who often emphasized warfare stories and practices in their accounts as a way to legitimize and enhance their status as healers. Like the naparama, Nampula’s healers worked for the povo (Port. people); like those who went to fight, healers suffered a lot. Efforts to construct a coherent narrative of illness and fashion a meaningful career of healing counter the “unmaking of a lifeworld” caused by war and illness (Scarry 1985). Telling stories is already part of the therapeutic path, for they give meaning and order to inchoate personal experiences, whether of illness or war. As the anthropologist Michael Jackson points out, “To reconstruct events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with the others and with one’s own imagination” (Jackson 2002, 15).10 This interpretative process occurred as healers reframed their individual experiences of war, violence, and suffering within the spirit narrative of ekoma, a discourse about healing and misfortune in central and southern Africa (Bantu, ngoma). In ekoma cults of affliction, the expression of inner conflict and inchoate experience is followed by its assimilation within a collective script that transfers misfortune and illness from the individual to the spirits (V. Turner 1981, 15–16; Janzen 1992, 110). The pain inflicted by war and illness was thereby attributed to spirits, and suffering caused by the war became a sign of a spirit call to become a healer. The stories of those who came to be healers during the war charted a simi-



Health and Healing 35

lar narrative order: flight to the bush after an episode of violence or death, protection by animals, acquisition of invisibility and immunity to violence, power to see the war from a distance, and eventual return to the village or city with the power of healing and possession of knowledge. By casting personal stories of illness and suffering into this narrative tradition, those possessed were no longer touched by the violence of the soldiers; rather, they were defended and saved by the spirits. Death was transcended by resurrection; illness, by healing. The bush was no longer a site of violence; rather it was transfigured into a phantasmagoric site for healing and transformation. By casting personal stories within this narrative, experiences of illness and war were transformed into accounts of healing, life, and ultimately power. Not only was Ansha’s story of war and illness framed within a shared narrative style; her healing practice also assimilated many aspects of local medicine, including the centrality of the trope of war, the militarismo.11 Through healing, dreams, and spirits, violence was frozen; history fixed in myth.12 Ansha described her majini as soldiers arriving in armed troops (Port. tropas armadas), wearing military uniforms, and carrying guns and weapons. Spirits compelled healers to take up arms in their battle against witches. Ansha provided one patient with her bengala, a sword adorned with black and white pieces of clothing that symbolized the spirits, while treating him for sorcery. The weapons of sorcery were symbolized in the language of “mines”: the removal of sorcery was referred to as “exploding the mine” (Port. rebentar a mina); contracting sorcery involved stepping on a mine. Ansha also made incisions to provide the bodies of her patients with antibullet protection. Antisorcery amulets (Kisw. hiriz) were created from a mixture of traditional herbs and gunpowder, the latter bought by Ansha from a policeman in her neighborhood. Ansha called these amulets mines, which were set like traps to protect clients from the nightly assaults of witches. For Ansha, healing in general was conceptualized as a war waged against witches and bad spirits. Sometimes she dressed like a soldier, with a blue military hat, a white shirt, and a pair of dark pants. “Mjermani has arrived,” she pronounced on one occasion, evoking the occupation of northern Mozambique during the First World War by blond-haired German soldiers with flags and carbines.13 Outside the mosque, few seemed willing to recall this violent past. As the Mozambican writer Mia Couto (2013) explained during an interview, “If you visit Mozambique, you will see that they have decided to forget the war years. It is a tacit decision to forget what were cruel times, because people fear that this cruelty may be back again.” Nevertheless, healers’ autobiographies, dreams, ritual gestures, and healing practices continued to disrupt this silence, giving voice to a past that could not be forgotten, a past ready to seep into the present.

3 • WIVES AND HUSBANDS

After an argument late one afternoon in March 2013, Ansha banishes her husband, Tiago, from the compound. During the following week, we hear rumors that Tiago is wandering alone in the neighborhood, with no place to go. Some of Ansha’s family who live in other bairros report that he has approached them, penniless, asking for forgiveness. Ansha refuses to take him back: “Tiago is nothing. My family is this one, the one from Mueda. I am the oldest of my family here, and I have responsibility for them.”1 Later in the week, we are informed that Tiago has been hospitalized at the Clínica, the psychiatric hospital on the western side of the city. Then, early Saturday morning, Tiago finally stumbles back into Ansha’s compound, sick and exhausted, tottering through the compound, staring at his feet so as not to lose balance. His body trembles with convulsions. He finally collapses on the floor of Ansha’s mosque. Ansha takes some sacred flour and scatters it on Tiago’s body. She then turns to address Tiago, beseeching, “What is the problem?” Seeing that Tiago is unable to speak, she answers her own question, “It is owurya [Mak. drinking].” As if performing a divination, she then explains, “The mother was a Muslim. She is angry seeing her child drinking.” She immerses her hands in a bucket of water and begins cleaning the body of her husband, while Tiago emits deep gasps. He eventually falls asleep. “I have to call my spirits to save my husband. He has no place to go. He has been left alone,” Ansha informs, gesturing toward the compound with her fingers. The tone of her voice then swiftly changes to anger: “I am not his sister. This man just brings me confusion and problems.” Nevertheless, Ansha continues to care for Tiago until he is fully recovered, bringing him back into her home and life. Days later, Ansha reflects upon her marriage to Tiago after a long day of work: “Sometimes I think that my husband will lead me to my death.” After a prolonged sigh, she continues, “Daria, I can’t divorce him. Majini won’t allow me to. He did 36



Wives and Husbands 37

everything for them.” She gazes downward, her hands leaning on her knees, as she always does when weighted by thought. Tiago played a central role in Ansha’s story of affliction and healing. Sometimes he was identified as a source of Ansha’s suffering; other times, as the one who did everything for her healing. Ansha’s story of illness and healing was also the story of Tiago. Tiago is a Makhuwa man with a face full of life. He speaks fluent Portuguese and has a worldly air about him due to his missionary education and years of military service. He was born in Netía, a small town on the way from Nampula to the coast. “I am a Laponi,” he frequently intoned, emphasizing the name of his maternal clan (Mak. nihimo).2 In the early 1970s, Tiago moved to Nampula, where he joined his maternal uncle, a police officer in the colonial administration. Not long afterward, he was introduced to the ideas of liberation that began circulating in the city. Tiago was recruited by the local FRELIMO branch and taken to Tanzania, where he trained in the military. He takes great pride in presenting himself as one of the Makhuwa who fought against the Portuguese and therefore received a pension as a veteran.3 During the war of independence, Tiago returned to Nampula province to fight against the Portuguese. Years later, during the sixteen-year war, he was called back to the front, this time not to fight, he specifies, but “to collect young soldiers who had lost their lives in the fight.” The job required unique courage and extraordinary strength, for which, he admits, he often resorted to drinking and the magic of local healers. Tiago’s memories of the sixteen-year war were rich with detailed stories of ritual preparations undertaken before battles. He used to wear magic cords made from herbs around his waist, which vibrated in proximity to the Renamo enemy. As I listen to Tiago, I come to appreciate how much he knows about traditional medicine and how much of that knowledge he likely transmitted to Ansha. As a “local man”—as he liked to call himself—Tiago introduced Ansha to the Makhuwa language, to what he called the “local mentality” (Port. mentalidade daqui), and to the local healers and traditional healing of Nampula. When Ansha fell sick to spirits, it was Tiago who took charge of her healing and made “of [his] spouse a big curandeira.” Ansha and Tiago met at the Frelimo party headquarters not long after the end of the sixteen-year war. Both were attempting to restart their lives from what they knew best—“the party” (Port. o partido). These were, however, times of transition within Frelimo, as its members were called on to divest themselves of the values of socialism for the promise of multiparty democracy and the free market. Socialist universalism was to be replaced by neoliberal “multiculturalism”;

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socialist uniformity, by “diversity” and tolerance for local traditions (Fry 2000; Obarrio 2014; West 2005). At the time, Ansha was an activist in the Organization of Mozambican Women (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana; OMM), which was itself undergoing postwar transformations parallel to Frelimo’s. The OMM was established during the anticolonial war in 1973 by the central committee of FRELIMO in Tanzania to fight against colonialism and for the liberation of women.4 After independence, the organization worked alongside the party to help build a socialist society, declaring at a 1976 congress that the involvement of women in political life and economic production would fuel social transformation and emancipation.5 Women of the OMM were at the forefront of the party’s campaign against traditional practices like lobolo (bride wealth),6 polygamy, and female rituals of initiation, vowing to eradicate them as symbols of women’s oppression and submission.7 Later in the 1990s, the OMM was transformed into an independent organization that worked with nongovernmental organizations and policy makers.8 It was at that time that the focus of the OMM shifted toward AIDS, economic insecurity, and domestic violence. Ansha and Tiago rented a house in the eastern part of the city. Tiago left the national army and found a job in an international company in charge of reconstructing infrastructure devastated by the war. Ansha was hired in a cafeteria owned by a local Indian family in the city center. There, spirits revealed themselves for the first time. “One day my spouse Rosa fainted while serving clients,” Tiago tells me in May 2016. “The Indian dono [Port. owner] sent someone to call me. I ran and took my wife home. Since then, my wife became a doente [Port. sick]. Turning to look me in the eye, he adds, “Your friend Ansha remained sentada [Port. seated] for a long time.” “This is sentimental,” Ansha says, looking with worry at Muaja, one of the women who attend her mosque for spirit afflictions. Ansha is struck at the sight of this woman’s thin body and tormented face, each witness to a life of majini. The young woman’s husband has recently abandoned her for a younger woman. Muaja now lives with her sister and two small children. “Majini are the effects of women’s suffering,” Ansha bemoans, shaking her head. “When I fell sick, my husband had another wife,” Ansha continues. “He wanted to abandon her to marry me. Every day this woman used to come to our house and insult me. One day, I went to visit my neighbor. At the time, the woman entered my house and put sorcery [Port. droga] where I cooked. I fell sick. I went to the hospital. My womb was closed. Nada [Port. nothing].”



Wives and Husbands 39

As did other female healers, Ansha cast her spirit affliction in the context of marital troubles. When Ansha and Tiago met, Tiago was married to a local Makhuwa woman. For several years, he moved back and forth between the two households, causing Ansha distress, which over time added to the pain caused by miscarriages and hospitalizations.9 Her inability to conceive became a further source of anxiety, as Ansha lived with the fear that Tiago would leave her for the other woman.10 The increase in attacks from evil majini—spirits who wanted only to harm women by causing reproductive problems—symptomized the insecurity several women experienced in the city.11 Even though matriliny continued to endure in northern Mozambique (Arnfred 2011; Bonate 2017), the power and security that women traditionally enjoyed was undermined by a host of social and economic transformations. Attacks against customary law from the government during socialism, the impact of Christian evangelization and Islam, the Family Law of 2003, and the introduction of Western gender ideologies—all moved northern Mozambican society toward modern and patriarchal models of family.12 As matrilineal kinship ties weakened, marriage became more important for women.13 Many married women who attended Ansha’s mosque lived in constant fear that other women would snatch their husbands if they could not conceive. This insecurity was aggravated by the fact that many could no longer rely on the crops of their machambas and the support of their extended families. They were therefore forced to rely on their husbands. Majini offered women a language by which to articulate their vulnerability and remove their sense of guilt (Masquelier 2002).14 Ansha never directly attributed the cause of her miscarriages and illness to Tiago, her marriage, or herself; rather, these faults were the result of majini. A diagnosis of majini did not, however, attenuate alleviate pain for those women who were destined to a life with spirits. Ansha in fact spoke of majini as a sofrimento (Port. pain) that could never be removed. As one of Ansha’s spirit songs goes, “What disease is this that we cannot heal?” Majini healing is about accepting illness.15 “I refused and I refused,” Ansha told me one day, her arms mimicking the act of protecting her slim body from an external attack. “I did not want to become a healer,” she continued. “Daria, a life with majini is a life of suffering.” Ansha often told her story of spirits to her patients as one of capitulation rather than choice and agency. “I had to accept. If I refused spirits, I could die.” There were days in which illness overwhelmed Ansha’s life and work. Her spirits prevented her from working in her mosque and carrying out her domestic activities, even from eating and bathing. When the pain was unbearable, Ansha closed her mosque, explaining to her patients that “spirits are striking.” At these

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times, she remained alone, refusing to share her burden of pain with anybody, especially her patients. She hid herself behind the curtain that functioned as a door, lying down, clutching at her womb, trying to pacify her suffering. Through ritual and healing, Ansha came to accept her condition, transforming her spirit illness into a resource over time. Using a language inflected by the former political struggle, Ansha often characterized majini as “a weapon to fight this war of women against men in the bairros.”16 By drawing on spirits’ agency, women attending Ansha’s mosque could negotiate domestic relationships, earn some material rewards from their husbands, and establish new forms of communication with their spouses and families. The agency of spirits was most effective for those women who embarked on a healing career. In her divinations, Ansha distinguished between two categories of majini affliction. The spirits “who are in the body” were bad ones that needed to be expelled by means of ritual baths (Mak. orapa), saunas (Mak. bafo), and healing sessions. Spirits “who are in the head” were instead invited to remain and provide their hosts with the secret knowledge necessary to become a healer.17 The diagnosis—bad versus good majini—depended on a number of different factors, which a diviner sought to assess. A genealogy of healing in the family, the support of the family, and personal charisma—all were used to differentiate a vocation of spirit healing from simple disease. Material capacity was important too. Impoverished, single women and women who lacked extended families in the city were hardly able to finance the expensive training and ceremonies necessary to become a healer. In most cases, successful healers were married women, whose husbands provided for their rituals and training. In a matrilineal system, expenses for majini afflictions were paid by husbands, since they were required to negotiate their wives with spirits. In addition to reminding husbands of their economic and social obligations, spirits granted some degree of freedom and power to women in their compounds. Spirits dictated when husbands could sleep with their wives and what they could eat. Some husbands of healers became assistants or apprentices of their wives. A healing profession offered women access to the cash economy and some social prominence in the community, enabling some of them to overshadow their husbands. All these gains were not lost on Ansha, who viewed majini as economic and social resources for women: “Women who are suffering, I mean those who do not work, do not have a house, do not have a machamba or a husband—how can they solve their problems? The majini go out and decide to give service so that the person at least can have a house and give food to the children.” Not long after becoming a healer, Ansha bought two houses and one machamba. With newfound economic resources—along with becoming the eldest of her family in Nampula—she became the chief of her compound.



Wives and Husbands 41

Ironically, the first person to view Ansha’s majini as economic and social resources was Tiago. “My husband paid a lot of money to majini,” Ansha explained one day, commenting on the fact that many women diagnosed with “strong” spirits could not perform the rituals due to a lack of resources. “You cannot approach these spirits with empty hands. If they want their wife back, husbands have to pay. A lot.” Many healers’ husbands refused to share their wives with spirits, either by not supporting their healing or by divorcing them. Tiago, by contrast, learned how to get along with Ansha’s spirits. In fact, majini strengthened Ansha and Tiago’s union, keeping them together through the hardest times in their marriage. However, the fact that Tiago paid for and played a central role in Ansha’s healing bestowed him with some power and control over Ansha’s career. Spirits prevented Ansha from leaving the man who had made her a healer. Much like her spirits, Tiago could not be divorced.

4 • DEMONS AND SPIRITS

“Look,” Ansha says to Alima and Anselmo, a young couple who are sitting in the mosque in November 2009. “I was about to marry with my husband, not here in the bairros but in the cathedral in the cidade [city center]. We met with the priest; all was set. We bought a dress and rings. My husband told me, ‘Susana we go to the cathedral.’1 But just days before, spirits came, and I had to quit the church. My heart was beating so much. No wedding, no cathedral. Nothing.” When Alima started refusing to sleep with her husband and to take care of their house, Anselmo believed his wife had been attacked by the demon (Port. demónio) and took her to their Pentecostal church, Assembleia de Deus. But every time Alima approached the building in the city center, her heart throbbed so much that she had to run away. Ever since then, Alima has been sneaking from her house to visit Ansha’s mosque. Most of the time, she just sits and observes Ansha’s healing work, eager to learn how to practice as a healer herself. Occasionally, though, she falls into trance. One day she even took Ansha’s place by performing a divination. Ansha nodded her head, compliant. Ansha now reconfirms that majini want Alima to become a healer. Anselmo, however, immediately protests, insisting his wife continues attending their church. “I cannot do anything. I feel immobilized,” he complains, shaking his head. “How can I carry on living without knowing? What is going on in my life? Where does all this come from? A man needs to know,” he begs, with an inconsolable air about him. “We tried to heal her in the church,” Anselmo begins, but then suddenly stops as if his head is elsewhere. “Does she have to become a Muslim?” he pleads. “You can’t talk like this,” Ansha replies, scolding the young man in a motherly tone. “Majini want Muslims. You cannot eat pork. If you do so, your wife will be sick.” Her tone now becomes more serious: “Your wife has to quit the church if you want her back.” 42



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Then Ansha turns to Alima, staring at her as if they are the only ones in the room: “Do you want to become a healer or attend the church?” “I want majini,” Alima firmly responds, first to Ansha, then defiantly to her husband. The couple leaves. Anselmo informs Ansha that they will have to think about the matter some more and then to find resources for the ceremony. Days later, Alima is back, this time alone. She carries a root that she has collected in the bush at the bank of a stream. She says she fell sick last night and left for the bush. Anselmo and her sister followed her. She hands the plant to Ansha. “This is a big root,” Ansha exclaims, her eyes opened wide as she thoroughly inspects the plant. “This is majini of the coast,” she pronounces. “If you come back to dance majini, we will give this plant water to live. Otherwise, if you go to the church, we will have to throw it away and bury it.” Alima soon leaves. For weeks, we do not see her. Occasionally Ansha looks over the root, which has started to decay. Many weeks later, Alima finally returns. She has lost that confident, sometimes defiant air. “I feel baralhada [Port. confused]. I have not dreamed anymore. How can I dance majini if I don’t dream?” she admits with a soft tone. “Majini are a serious thing. It is not a joke; it is a heavy job,” Ansha responds, irritated by Alima’s persistent indecision and apparent frivolity in dealing with majini. “I should leave majini. My husband is Christian; he is putting pressure on me to go to the church.” Alima’s words come as no surprise. Ansha is usually wary of young women who want “to dance majini” but do not have the financial resources and family support for it. She turns to pick up Alima’s root, which has taken on a yellowish color. “We need to turn this back [Port. virar],” Ansha announces, removing the dust from the bark. “We must throw the plant away, to bury it, so you can go to church and pray,” she adds. Ansha is eager to end the conversation, annoyed that her patient has chosen church over spirits. She stands up and leaves the mosque, carrying the root to bury in her backyard. Alima leaves, this time without saying a word. “Don’t you see? This is majini of jealousy [Port. ciúmes]. She is just jealous of her husband; she only wants attention from him,” Ansha laments as she returns to the mosque. Then, Ansha suddenly returns to the conflict between Christianity and majini that Alima’s case has unearthed: “There was another woman, some days ago, who was married with a Christian. Spirits left her, then she married again with another Muslim, and majini came back. The truth is that majini do not admit Christians.”

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Ansha’s mind still hovers over the irreconcilability of church and spirits, especially as it patterned her own healing trajectory—her life as Susana, the name that was given to her when she was baptized by missionaries, the name that she retained until she was possessed by Muslim spirits and changed her name to Ansha. My husband took care of me. He took me to the hospital. There was a doctor from Kenya who said I was not ill. But when I came home, the pain was getting worse and worse. I behaved like a crazy, you know. Tiago decided to take me to the mission; he thought I had the demon. The priests were trying to expel it, but it did not come out. Nothing. I was doing nothing. They gave me the Bible, but I spat on it. I was throwing away the Bible, the crucifix. I threw the cross into the latrine. My heart was beating so much that I thought I would die if I stayed in the church.

Bodily resistance and iconoclastic actions against Christian symbols and healing marked a shift in Tiago and Ansha’s understanding of her illness. The failure of religious medicine aroused suspicion that she was instead possessed by majini, who never leave the bodies of their hosts and therefore can only ever be appeased. For Ansha, as for other healers in Nampula whose stories traced similar religious trajectories, becoming a healer of majini required the disavowal of Christianity. Healers maintained that only after abandoning the church did spirits permit them to return to their work and move on with their lives. Some retained their Christian faith, making a pragmatic distinction between being a Christian when “seated” (i.e., not possessed by spirits) and a healer “when spirits come.” But these healers were said to lack clients and were considered by patients as “weak.” Ansha’s story of quitting the church and ultimately leaving her baptismal name of Susana reflects the internalization of a Christian discourse that asserts the incompatibility of church and spirits. The origins of this discourse in Mozambique trace back to missionary evangelization and its fervent campaigns against rituals of initiation, spirit possession, and ancestral worship.2 With the rise of Pentecostal and evangelical churches, these campaigns resurfaced, as new members of these churches were forced to disavow their African religions (Premawardhana 2018b). As Ansha described her story, she defined what constituted a good Christian: “One is not allowed to be Christian and engage with spirit practices. Look, a healer cannot stay in a church.” Not only did healers have to leave the church; their medical practices and imaginaries were also absent of Christian traits.3 This incompatibility manifested itself in Ansha’s bodily actions—iconoclastic gestures, sacrilegious performances, and disrespectful behaviors like spitting on or throwing away the Bible. According to Ansha, these forms of bodily resistance were instrumental in compelling the church to recognize the power of spirits



Demons and Spirits 45

and healers: “Catholic churches here in the neighborhoods were almost about to die because all the women were caught by majini inside the churches. So, the padres had to accept spirits.”4 “So, what is the best way to deal with spirits?” Elisa inquires, looking at Ansha. “Pastors or curandeiros?” Elisa’s question comes on the heels of a long discussion about the mental condition of João, Elisa’s twentysomething son. In March 2010, Elisa and her brother, Justino, decided to resort to Ansha after João’s most recent crisis. Elisa reports that her son has been aggressive toward his family and has run away from home several times recently. At first, his family thought he had bad spirits and therefore took him to their evangelical church, the Igreja Universal, to be healed through “reciting the prayer” (Port. récita de oração). But during the service, João beat the pastor and fled, leaving his family deeply embarrassed.5 At Ansha’s, João’s uncle—who was clearly there only for his sister—admits his discomfort with, if not hostility toward, traditional healing: “We have prophets in our church who heal bad spirits. There were many with majini. These spiritual prophets can heal without giving medicaments just by praying,” he asserts. Looking now at me, he continues, “In the church, God is the one who heals; that’s why the church is more powerful than healers. My daughter was healed by the Bible.” Having listened silently for a while, Ansha can hold her tongue no longer: “It is important not to have conflicts during the healing. I do not have any problems with them [Christian pastors]. It is a good thing, but are they able to heal?” Ansha begins explaining that the church was not successful in her case, insisting that majini cannot be healed by the church: “I was taken to the Igreja Universal. But when I was there, I was attacked by majini. The pastor himself took me and tried to give me the thing into the mouth, but nothing improved. My heart began beating so much that I left into the bush. Majini cannot be abandoned.” Ansha then connects the dots between her own story and João’s sickness: “Your son wants to become a Muslim and leave Christianity.” She agrees to treat João that very day. An hour later, the family comes back, this time with João. He is a tall and thin man who stands out among his elderly kin. The young man remains silent. His eyes are wide open, scrutinizing the mosque. Ansha begins interrogating him, asking, “Are you dreaming?” to discern whether he has spirits. “Whenever I move my arms, I want to do the sign of the cross, but I cannot,” João responds. With his family looking on anxiously, João then confidently exclaims, “My family thinks I am sick, but I am not. I don’t know why I am here.”

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João’s words are followed by silence and a certain embarrassment; nobody seems to know how to respond. Anxious seconds tick away. Ansha eventually goes back to her work. She takes out her Islamic book for divination, announcing as if reading, “This young man has majini, but not to become a healer. It is a pity; he is still so young. I can see that spirits are trying to teach him how to use the miheya [shakers to summon spirits during divinations] and to pray La Ilaha Illallah.”6 She then performs a healing ritual, the aim of which does not differ much from that of Christian services, trying to expel the spirits from João’s body by using different media, just as a pastor would do. First, she gives João a ritual bath with herbs to release his body from spirits. Then she asks João’s mother and uncle to make makeya, scattering ephepa to the family ancestors. Finally, she beseeches the maternal ancestors to release the young man from majini: “Please, you, malaika [Kisw. angels, also spirits] that are with God, these majini have to disappear. I am seeing now that these malaika are not giving him luck. There are people dying for majini if they are not treated. Therefore, please, malaika, take these majini back in order to release this boy to live without sickness. You, mother, who are in the sky [maternal ancestor], give luck to this boy.” The healing session is unusually brief. After paying, Elisa expresses relief that her son has at least not tried to beat anyone this time. The uncle mumbles that this is simply because of the presence of a stranger. Afterward, Ansha and I sit together in her mosque. As is sometimes the case, the verdict she earlier delivered is altered after the patient and his family have left. “This boy is a witch,” says Ansha. “I tell you, majini do not drive a person so crazy.” This is not the first time that Ansha has accused a young man of being a witch; disrespectful and undisciplined behavior toward elders is often a telltale sign of witchcraft.7 Nonetheless, Ansha also has words for the uncle, whose behaviors sounded disrespectful of the majini and her mosque: “I do not want this shit in my mosque. I cannot accept those who cannot believe in ephepa. Things occurring now in Nampula are negóçio [Port. business]. I do not want to know anything such as Assembleia de Deus, A Igreja Universal. When I dream, I dream Catholic.” The encounter with members of an evangelical church and their open ­hostility toward spirit healing in her mosque had reunited Ansha with her Catholic past. The rise of new Christian churches in postwar Mozambique constitutes a new chapter to the history of Christianity in Mozambique and its difficult relationship with tradition and spirit practices.8 Several political and economic factors are key



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components of this chapter. Given the demise of socialism, rapid economic change, and a policy of religious “deregulation” after the war (Morier-Genoud 2000), new churches began popping up throughout Nampula.9 Many members were young women and men who explained their decision to join these churches as a better way to cope with the tribulations of life in the city, as well as to wrest control away from gerontocracy and tradition. Much like the missionary churches in the past, these churches promoted the belief that in order to be a good Christian, one had to dismiss traditional religions. The popularity of these churches increased as they offered healing services, especially for spirit afflictions, thereby entering into direct competition with traditional healers. Churches emphasized the healing of “evil spirits” in their sermons and practices. Pastors provided means of expelling a smorgasbord of bad spirits—everything from “classical” forms of possession (demons, the evil, bad spirits), to “the spirits of modern times” (Port. espirítos dos últimos tempos: prostitution, homosexuality, alcoholism, drug addition, extramarital sex, failure to educate children, disobedience, envy, and violence), to “the spirits of the curandeirismo,” like majini and ancestors (who were believed to lead people away from God). Bible- and prayer-based healing attracted followers, mostly female and young, who were inflicted by spirits. To date, these churches in the city and region of Nampula are less successful than in the southern and central regions of Mozambique, one explanation for which is the rooted presence of Islam in the region. Another, as anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana (2018b) maintains, is the refusal of these churches to  embrace local traditions and experiences of religiosity. Nevertheless, these churches had begun to have some detrimental effect on the popularity of healers, especially with female patients. Ansha lost female clients, many of whom had joined churches in recent years. Ansha informed me that, whereas she relied on a group of at least twenty female assistants in the late 1990s and early 2000s, all of whom she had healed and initiated, only two remained in 2015—Irene and Verónica. For Ansha, however, women who left for the church in an attempt to “get rid of spirits” not only were deceived but would return one day: “These women say they feel liberated from spirits after the healing of the church. They say they are not caught anymore by spirits; they claim they can eat whatever they want. These women will come back, because those in the church are not really healed. They think they are able to throw [Port. deitar] majini away. But majini cannot be expelled.” One way in which Ansha opposed these churches was by recalling and reemphasizing her Catholic past. She made a distinction between the padres of the missionary church and the pastors of the newer churches, aligning herself with the former in opposition to the latter. Whereas padres were tolerant and accepting of tradition, pastors advocated against tradition. Compared with missionary Catholic padres,

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pastors were also new on the scene, lacking the experience and knowledge of the padres. Even Ansha herself was superior to the pastors with respect to knowledge about Christianity: “I don’t know what is happening here. These people of Assembleia de Deus come here with their books and invite me to go to their church to pray. I do not know what is happening. . . . ​They want to burn these trees with flags, divination, all to burn. Once I replied to them, ‘There is nothing here to do. My father was a catechist; he went to the church daily. My father did not do anything in the machamba without taking the crucifix. And you come here to teach me to take all my stuff away.’ ” Ansha continued to preserve traces of her Catholic past, albeit discreetly, even inside her mosque of spirits. One day, she showed off the small, brand-new Bible she guarded in the luggage inside in her mosque. On some occasions, she advised her patients to resort to the medicine of the missionaries. My own presence in Ansha’s mosque most likely triggered some of her stories about her Christian past. She introduced me to her patients as a Catholic who attended the mission of the Italian padres. When I introduced her to one Italian padre, Elia Ciscato, who spoke perfect Makhuwa and knew a great deal about ritual practices in the region, their mutual Catholic background offered an instant ground of unity and accord. Ansha even sometimes complained that I spent too much time with majini and not in the church. On Sundays, she often advised me not to go to her spirit mosque but instead to attend the mass at the cathedral. One of Ansha’s memories of her failed healing with the church came just before Christmas 2009. We were resting in her mosque after lunch, discussing my plans to attend Christmas services at the Catholic Church. I was nearly asleep when Ansha began telling me that the missionaries themselves had encouraged her to become a “big healer” of majini, even sanctifying her conversion to Islam. “Finally, I was taken to the nuns. But I left for the bush. I came back with a lot of plants. The nuns prayed for me, took my head, and said, ‘This Susana has to be a healer. She has strong spirits.’ The priest said, ‘What can we do? God has decided that she become a Muslim.’ I then went immediately to the mountains to pick up medicaments. The nuns said, ‘This woman will be a healer; we have to accept it.’ ” Ansha’s words again underscore her multifaceted relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, the alleged approval of her spirit vocation by the padres and nuns magnified her status as a healer, bestowing Christian blessing upon it. On the other, the images of padres and nuns succumbing to the power of her spirits, accepting her vocation of spirit healing, even approving her conversion to Islam, reminded of the long and deep rivalry between churches and spirits. Just as the padres had failed to heal her, so the church had lost the battle against spirits.

5 • INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS

The failure of Christian healing reinforced Tiago’s belief that Ansha’s illness was “coming from outside,” that it was a traditional one. Tiago decided to take Ansha to his mother, who lived in Netía, one hundred kilometers from Nampula on the way to the coast. Netía is a village in the savannah, surrounded by cashew, mango, and baobab trees, on the road that winds down toward the ocean, where the red clay starts to become mixed with white sand. There, Tiago’s mother, like many local women who spent time working on a machamba in the bush, had gained extensive knowledge of medical herbs that could heal women’s spirit afflictions. “The velha [Port. elderly woman] gave me those barks for muru [Mak. head],” Ansha recalled of her encounter with Tiago’s mother. As Ansha underwent these treatments, she started becoming familiar with the names of local remedies collected in the bush. When Tiago returned one month later, however, he found that Ansha’s condition had not improved much. The elderly woman persuaded her son to take his wife back to Nampula, where she believed Ansha could become a “big healer” if properly cured by the healers there. Upon returning to the city, Tiago and Ansha began turning to various local healers, all of whom provided the same diagnosis as Tiago’s mother—that Ansha had been caught by spirits. No healer, however, could tell which spirits Ansha had, because her spirits had not come out yet during healing sessions. “We passed through many curandeiros. Nobody was able to heal her for years,” Tiago told me in 2016. “Spirits refused to come out. They played drums. Nada.” Ansha attributed these initial failures to the healers she consulted, who she believed were weak, lacking knowledge. In the years following the war, Nampula registered a marked rise in healers of majini. Many healers reported that during those times, the roofs of the houses in the bairros burst with red, white, and black flags, signaling the presence of majini curandeiros. The drumming of spirit ceremonies was audible almost every night 49

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from the compounds in the bairros. Anyone could become a healer in those days, for majini indiscriminately attacked men and women, even those without a family history of healing.1 A number of ethnographic accounts have shown how ngoma spirit cults often proliferate in times of social, political, and economic transition (Van Dijk, Reis, and Spierenburg 2000a, 6; Janzen 1992).2 The transformative nature of these rituals of affliction—from sickness to healing, from patient to healer—reflects broader social, political, and economic transformations. This was certainly the case in Nampula, where the increase in drumming spirit ceremonies to make new healers occurred in step with multiparty democracy and economic liberalizations that followed the demise of socialism at the end of the sixteen-year war. Even before the end of the war, Frelimo began reconsidering the role of traditional power in the process of nation building in accordance with the requirement of the financial donors. The structural adjustment program of the 1990s that was directed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank compelled the Mozambican government to include local resources in their efforts to restore a war-tattered health system. Traditional healers came to be viewed as resources to be drawn on in local governance and public health.3 The ban on traditional medicine was lifted in the final years of the war, and AMETRAMO was officially established in 1992 as a way to expand access to health care. In this favorable climate, a career in traditional medicine became alluring to many migrants, who were confronted with the volatility of the market economy. Some had been peasants before the war; others, soldiers who had been demobilized after the war and were rethinking their life anew; still others, workers for state companies and cooperatives that had been destroyed during the war or closed or privatized after the war as part of the structural adjustment programs in the 1990s. The increase in the number of traditional healers, however, did not always correspond to a higher quality of healing. Given that anybody could now become a healer, even those without a family tradition of healing, the genuine practice and knowledge of healers were often suspected by those who consulted them. Moreover, socialist repression and the sixteen-year war had interrupted the structures and processes by which healing knowledge was preserved and transmitted from one generation to the next.4 One healer, for example, explained to me that only those healers who had practiced before socialism were “real” healers, for they “had suffered” and been properly trained. “The others,” he claimed, “were only à procura [in search of a way to live in the city], or charlatans.” The sheer diversity of healing practices in the city constituted yet another source of uncertainty and skepticism. Healers were migrants from all over northern Mozambique who had brought with them a variety of healing practices and styles, which often produced different verdicts and healing paths.5 Even though



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the displacement of ancestral spirits with majini imposed some degree of uniformity in practice, healing in Nampula became highly individualized, with each healer personalizing cosmologies, healing practices, and herbal knowledge according to his or her own distinctive background and experience. As one healer explained to me, “Now majini is a more individualistic thing (Port. individualizado). There is no unitary culture. Every healer calls the herbs and treatments in different ways.”6 Indeed, healers could give different names to the same herbs, provided patients with contrasting diagnoses. Healers themselves also fueled the skepticism of the general public, for in an increasingly competitive market, they continuously accused each other of being charlatans, deceitful, mafioso. Spirits refused to come out for reasons other than the incompetence and ignorance of some healers. Sometimes the blame fell on the patient herself. There were occasions when spirits did not arrive because the patient was inexpert in handling them; this was especially the case for young women. As anthropologist Janice Boddy (1989, 135) shows in the case of zār possession in Sudan, trance behavior is learned. Women require “cultural awareness” about how to accommodate their afflictions, how to articulate their symptoms, and how to become possessed (147).7 Some patients simply had not gone through the lifelong learning process by which children began absorbing trance experience and spirit knowledge from a very young age, attending their first healing sessions while still babies wrapped in capulanas on their mothers’ bodies. I can only guess that Ansha’s initial difficulties were partially due to this lack of experience and knowledge, given that she grew up under Christian and socialist ideologies that officially prohibited such practices. In other circumstances, the failure of spirits to come out was due to a lack of empathy (Port. correspondência) between the patient, the healer, and their respective spirits. In 2016, Tiago indicated this as a reason why Ansha’s spirits did not come out at first: “That was a problem of language. No healer succeeded in speaking the language of her spirits.” Tiago maintained that “there must be correspondence between the master [Kisw. fundi] and the patient [Port. doente].” For healing to succeed, healers, patients, and spirits must be able to communicate. They must therefore speak the same language and share the same ritual culture. Tiago’s words revealed that spirit healing is a matter of language and communication.8 The healer’s songs must be understood by the patient in order for an emotional state to be created that is receptive to spirits. A fundi must speak and understand the language of the spirits attacking the patient. The aesthetic styles, languages, rhythms, and objects used in ritual all serve to trigger the emotional disruptions and dissociative behaviors that announce the arrival of spirits and therefore the possibility of recovery. Only then does the body become “opened” (Mak. otthukuwa), a vector for spirits’ messages. Patients of spirits therefore

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sought healers of the same region, or clan (Mak. nihimo), someone familiar not only with their language but also with their ritual culture.9 Spirit possession therefore effectively linked together migrants from the same region in the new urban context. One explanation for the eruption of majini in postwar Nampula was that these spirits better captured their hosts’ experiences of migration and displacement than the ancestral ones. While ancestral spirits were associated with specific family localities (Mak. elapo), majini were described as transient, migrant spirits coming from larger and less defined places, whether coast or inland, sea or mountains. Majini were not, however, new spirits generated by conflict and migration. They formed a spirit complex that arose through cosmological encounters during the slave trade between the Islamic cultures of the coast and the African cultures of the inland. As in other regions of East Africa, the inland expansion of Islam during the eighteenth-century slave trade was accompanied by Muslim spirits, majini that were absorbed into existing cosmologies (Bonate 2007a, 63).10 Over time, majini were added to previous forms of spirit possession, which were known by the Makhuwa terms mirusi (Mak. drums) and muru (Mak. literally “head”), and which featured maternal spirits (Mak. minepa) as those who attacked and provided healing power to the afflicted.11 Spirit possession in present-day Nampula continues to be classified along two principal lines: on the one hand, the spirits of the inland, known as Makhuwa majini; on the other, the Muslim spirits of the coast, referred to as Amaka majini.12 The spirits of the inland, majini of the mountains, were described as African Black men who spoke Makhuwa or the dialects of the interior, and who came from Mount Namuli, the mythical place of origin for the Makhuwa. Association with Makhuwa myth made these spirits the oldest ones of the region, the spirits of “tradition” (Port. tradição). These spirits were often referred to with Makhuwa terms borrowed from inland cults of possession: Nakuru, Muru, and Eyottho.13 Sometimes they were “mistaken” for family spirits, for they were often inherited by maternal kin who had them in life and worshiped them accordingly. Healers summoned them by shaking maracas (Mak. miheya) made from the fruit of the baobab, the tree under which ancestor-cult ceremonies were held, and praised them through makeya, the ceremony involving the scattering of sacred flour around a tree. Their rural identity was emphasized by the fact that they could transform into animals that were common to the bush and savannah (e.g., lions, monkeys, and rabbits) and were associated with food typical of the inland (e.g., millet porridge [xima] and chicken). If the spirits of the mountains embodied the mythical, pristine past of the inland regions before slave trade and colonization, the Muslim spirits—Amaka majini—were associated with the period of slave trade when Islam began penetrating into the inland of the present-day province of Nampula. Amaka majini



Insiders and Outsiders 53

were the spirits of the Muslim teachers (Kisw. walimu) who had accompanied the slave caravans inland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.14 These spirits were identified by the accoutrements of the walimu: a white tunic, a hat (Mak. ekofiyo), and books (Kisw. vitabu). Muslim spirits were known for their urban character, as displayed in the distinctive behaviors of those they possessed—smoking, bathing, and eating food from the coast (fish and rice). Amaka majini enjoyed imported goods such as their white tunics, hats, books, perfume, and incense. They required their own ceremony—a silent and subdued ritual in which spirits were called by Arabic songs and Islamic prayers. The force of a healer was often measured by the capacity to assimilate even more new spirits into his or her cosmology. Among these additional spirits were Indian spirits known as baniani15 and Portuguese spirits known as akunya (Mak. white). However, these spirits were mostly irrelevant to healing and divinatory practices, which were based on regional spirits, Makhuwa and Amaka majini. The fact that majini were identified with the history of Nampula suggests a further reason why Ansha struggled to find a healer who could converse with her spirits and therefore heal her. Although Ansha’s story displays certain similarities to those of other healers—with regard to the war, reproductive difficulties, and the failure of Christian healing—it was also strikingly different since Ansha was a Makonde migrant who was alien both to the Makhuwa and to cultures of the coast. She did not speak any of the local languages, neither Makhuwa nor languages of the coast. None of the healers whom she visited spoke her own language of Shimakonde. Years therefore passed without healing. Majini therapy can be extremely lengthy, riddled with interruptions, stagnations, and false starts. Much time can pass between an initial divination and the eventual ritual of healing, as the spirits test the perseverance of their hosts and families. Tiago, nevertheless, never lost faith, believing in his wife’s vocation despite these initial difficulties. Tirelessly, he worked to earn enough money at a local construction company to take Ansha to as many different healers as possible. Ultimately, Ansha began dreaming, this time of a healer named Paulo, who was known in Nampula as Epotthá, “the slave,” emphasizing that he was from the inland and Makhuwa. Tiago referred to him as the velho (Port. elder) because, unlike the majority of other healers in Nampula who began working in the city after the war, Paulo had been practicing traditional healing since colonial times. He was known for his practice of the medicine of the mato (Port. bush), which was considered a place of powerful medicine and spirit power. As Tiago remembered in 2016, “Only a true healer could treat my spouse.”

6 • MOUNTAINS

When I returned to Nampula in 2016 after Ansha’s death, Tiago’s life appeared to have little substance. He seemed a changed man, older and more fragile than I remembered. Since Ansha’s death, he had tried to move forward with a new life. He moved in with another woman, with whom he had had a baby girl. Still, to draw on the words that Ansha herself used in her divinations for mourning patients, Tiago remained haunted by Ansha’s shadow (Mak. eruku). In the years that I worked with Ansha, Tiago often reproached me for asking too many questions and urged me to be more patient. “Wait,” he frequently insisted. But during my return after Ansha’s death, Tiago came to visit me almost every day, eager to return to his past with her: “Ask me any question about Ansha. What more do you want to know about her?” Revisiting his past with her kept him anchored to her. One morning in May 2016, Tiago insisted on taking me to visit Paulo and his wife. The elderly healer lived at the edge of the city, where it gave way to the bush. Paulo’s house was austere, without flags or even a sign—a house in the bush more than the city. Paulo worked mostly in his epewe (Mak. shrine) in the mountains; he rarely stayed at home for long. Paulo’s wife welcomed us with a wide smile, assuring us her husband was at home that morning. She remembered me well; I had first visited in 2009 at the beginning of my fieldwork. While we reminisced about old times, Paulo emerged from his hut, quickly putting on an old yellow shirt and lighting a cigarette. He was a slim man with weathered skin and a thick beard that gave him a shabby air. I was often warned by other healers not to engage with Paulo, who had a reputation for being intimidating, rough, and occasionally bad-tempered. That day, however, Paulo was more than willing to talk and spend time with us, probably out of compassion for and solidarity with Tiago’s sorrow. He even asked his wife to share with us a bottle of liquor—a gift from a wealthy patient who received a promotion after his treatment in the mountains. “No doubt your wife Rosa had plenty of majini,” recalled Paulo. “Ah yes, spirits came out,” Tiago reflected. “We danced [for] hours and drank a lot that night.” Paulo’s words pleased Tiago, who recalled not only how Ansha’s 54

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spirits came out right away with Paulo but also how Ansha disappeared into the bush immediately afterward, a sign that Ansha had majini from the mountains that wanted her to become a healer. After the visit, I continued to wonder why Paulo had succeeded where other healers had failed. “If the problem was language,” I eventually asked Tiago, “then why did Paulo succeed in healing Ansha, since he too did not speak Shimakonde or have Makonde spirits?” Tiago replied confidently and without hesitation, “The elder knew how to do things properly.” Tiago went on, explaining that Paulo was well connected with the chief spirits of Nampula—the régulo and pwiyamwene1—who “opened the path” to allow Ansha to become a local healer. “Ansha had majini of Nampula, who had indeed come out that day and spoken in Makhuwa.” When I shared with Tiago my confusion, saying that Ansha was not a Makhuwa, Tiago shook his head again, as if I were still not following. “Your friend Ansha had Makhuwa spirits,” he insisted, raising his voice. Ansha’s spirits, which Paulo summoned, were in fact those of Tiago’s clan, Laponi, which was also the matriclan of Paulo. Paulo, Ansha’s master (Kisw. fundi), was born in a small village in the interior of the province of Nampula, not far from the city. He was raised during colonial times and educated in a missionary school. After falling sick to spirits, his life took an abrupt change. As he explained during a 2009 conversation, “I left the church and I turned back to traditional medicine. I am not religious anymore.” When Paulo fell sick—maluco (Port. crazy), as he put it—he was healed and trained by his eldest brother. Thereafter he would continue the healing tradition of his family. He soon became so successful as a healer that even the Portuguese asked for his healing and divination. After independence, however, Paulo was forced to practice clandestinely. He was once arrested for continuing to practice traditional medicine by the community police, who burned his healing paraphernalia in the square of the communal village where he lived. The villagers, however, protested to the Frelimo village authority, compelling him not only to release Paulo but also to allow his practice to continue. The experience of the sixteen-year war forged Paulo’s story, most of all because it required him to flee his village and move to the city. In 1985, after Renamo soldiers killed his brother in an ambush and threatened to cut off Paulo’s right hand, Paulo finally decided to leave his village. When he arrived in Nampula, accompanied by the soldiers who escorted civilians to the city, Paulo was already an experienced and skilled healer. In Nampula, he adapted his family tradition of healing to the new environment and times, renaming his ancestors as majini.

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In the city Paulo soon became popular since he was one of the few traditional healers with deep knowledge about medical plants and extensive experience with the spirits of the mountains. Unlike the majority of healers, who emphasized their ability to traverse various medical and religious traditions, Paulo resisted any syncretism and defined himself as a healer of tradição, one working exclusively with the spirits coming from Mount Namuli, the mythological origin of the Makhuwa people. Over his life, Paulo refused to embrace other religions and medical cultures. “I am not the ‘church,’ nor am I a Maka,” he maintained. “I am not even Saúde [working with the Department of Health in Nampula],” he further clarified, deriding the idea that a traditional healer could work in a hospital. “I am and will die tradition.”2 To demonstrate his proximity to Makhuwa tradition and to the mountains as symbols of Makhuwaness, he chose to dwell at the edge of the city, close to the bush and the mountains, where he took his patients for healing. “Spirits did not play around at Epotthá’s,” Tiago recalled in May 2016, as he revisited Ansha’s story of healing with me. Ansha began jerking and panting, her heart racing, her shoulders twitching, as in a trance. She stood up and left Paulo’s hut, disappearing into the bush with a knife that Paulo had given her. Tiago followed behind. “Your friend returned to Paulo with a capulana full of roots,” continued Tiago. Paulo then proclaimed, “She has the majini of the mountains.” An ekoma ceremony for these majini was scheduled for the following months, allowing Tiago time to collect the money required for what is a costly ritual. Ekoma is the final act in a long process that begins with divination, then involves various forms of testing—the induction of a trance state in which the patient demonstrates the arrival of spirits that will speak out and express their intentions, and a flight into the mountains to prove that spirits want their host to practice as a healer.3 Ansha never talked about her own ekoma at Paulo’s, mostly likely in an effort to distance herself from her master and stake independence from other healers. The little knowledge that I possess about Ansha’s ekoma came from Tiago’s memories. The description that follows is therefore based both on the ekoma ceremonies that I attended at Ansha’s and on other healers’ accounts of ekoma.4 The ekoma ceremony is a symbolic journey from illness to healing that crosses different borders: inside-outside, inward-outward, night-day, village-bush. Ceremonies typically begin one week before the dance itself, when the patient—mwalí 5— is secluded in a dark room in order to hear “what the spirits have to tell her.” In this liminal period, the patient apprehends knowledge about divination and healing, initially through dreams and visions. This period of seclusion marks the beginning of the transformation from being a patient to becoming a healer. This transition is symbolized by a bucket of fermenting sorghum, which is placed in the room of the

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mwalí and later used to produce ottheka, the beer that is served to entice the spirits during the final ceremony.6 In the meantime, the master healer is charged with collecting and preparing the medical herbs necessary for the ceremony. At sunset on the day of the ceremony, the patient’s body is prepared to receive the spirits. First, a cream is mixed from medicinal plants and red clay, symbols of the spirits of the land, Nampula’s chiefs—régulo and pwiyamwene—the male and female founders of Nampula. This cream is used to prepare the patient’s body to “become opened” (Mak. otthukuwa) to the spirits. A heap of millet flour, symbolizing the ancestral spirits, is then rubbed on the patient’s forehead, and a red sheet is placed on the patient’s head so the mwalí can be recognized and helped by her family spirits. Then, an herbal drink is given to the patient “to open the heart, head, and body to spirits.” Afterward, ephepa is scattered on the shrine to call all the relevant spirits to the ceremony—the ancestors of the patient, the healer, and the spirit chiefs of Nampula. Tiago told me that since Ansha was Makonde and her family was not present, his own family ancestors were called to protect and sustain Ansha during the ceremony as well as to facilitate the arrival of majini. Majini spirits are enticed by a set of songs and dances accompanied by the rhythm of shakers and drums. Each healer has a personal repertoire that serves to identify the particular spirit that possesses the mwalí and thus to prefigure what kind of healer the patient will become. The central part of the ritual is divided into two main sections, each characterized by its own set of songs. The first set consists of what John Janzen calls “therapeutic songs” (1992, 118), songs sung indoors that aim to create an intimate atmosphere that allows the patient to speak out her personal illness and suffering and therefore come to terms with her illness (118–119). The ceremony then moves outside, symbolizing the transition from the individual dimension of the illness and misfortune to the collective one, transferring the cause of illness from the patient to the spirits. Before they go outside, healers and their assistants dress in the clothes of the majini—red, white, and black uniforms; once outside, they walk backward to dance and sing around the fire.7 A second set of songs, identified by Janzen as “coming out songs,” shifts the focus from the patient to the spirits, marking the transition from an individual to a symbolic dimension of affliction. These songs bring inchoate personal experience under structured shared experience through the use of cosmologically significant symbols such as animals, rivers, landscapes, and people. What is inward, personal, and opaque is thereby articulated through public and shared metaphors ( Janzen 1992, 146). Once spirits have come out, a black hen is sacrificed at dawn to symbolize the successful outcome.8 With the slow draining of the hen’s blood onto the floor comes the removal of illness and misfortune, not only from the individual but also from the social body. The arrival of spirits alone, however, does not ensure that the patient becomes a healer.

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The final part of the ekoma tests whether the patient possesses divinatory power. This is generally the least certain part of the ritual, revealing whether spirits will make their host a healer or are only there to provoke illness; whether one is called to become a healer.9 First, the master hides the medicine; then the patient seeks this medicine, testing whether the patient is truly guided by the spirits. Ansha described this ritual passage as “finding out what is hidden”; the search for the medicine indicates whether the spirits chose the patient through a testing of her divinatory skills (Mak. ehakó). Thus, even though the apprentice learns much from her master—healing techniques, the names and preparations of medical herbs, majini songs to sing at ceremonies—one essential part of becoming a healer cannot be learned from the master but rather is bestowed directly by spirits: ehakó, the power of divination. The patient is first covered with several capulanas while a pan of boiled water and herbs is placed at her feet. Meanwhile, the master healer and other assistants shake their miheya (Mak. shakers) and sing songs around the patient. In trance, the patient then leaves, wandering first in the compound and eventually in the neighborhood, as the participants look on with apprehension. When the patient finally returns with the medicine, shouts of joy, clapping, and songs ring out in the yard, announcing the successful ending of the ceremony. The new healer is asked to set the first divination. The master then gives the patient an herbal bath, cuts her hair, and dresses her in a white tunic, signaling that she is a new person, a healer, and that a sense of community has been reestablished.10 A final banquet (Mak. sataka) follows to celebrate the making of the new healer. After her ekoma, Ansha remained at Paulo’s for a week to be trained in herbs and barks. During this time, Ansha and Paulo spent considerable time together in the bush and the mountains, where Paulo revealed to Ansha where to find different kinds of bark, where to dig for roots to expel witchcraft, which trees and plants could heal children’s illnesses and women’s reproductive problems, which trees provided material to manufacture protective amulets, and so on. Back at Paulo’s, Ansha was taught the Makhuwa names of each herb, their uses, and how to convert them into medicine (Mak. murette) for drinking, bathing, and ritual saunas (Mak. bafo). Ansha assisted Paulo in healing sessions, observing how to give ritual baths and where to make incisions on the body against attacks of witchcraft. At the end of this week of training, Ansha headed home, accompanied by Paulo, who blessed the location where she would build her spirit hut by scattering sacred flour to the chiefs and the spirits of Nampula. Tiago often remarked how the old healer of his nihimo, Laponi, had given Ansha a great deal of knowledge about spirits and herbal medicine, highlighting the differences between Paulo and the other, less knowledgeable healers in Nampula. In talking about Paulo, Tiago was also talking about himself and his role in Ansha’s career.

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Ansha, however, held a different version of that period of her life, one that underscored her unique skills, vocation, and identity. Over time, the relationship between Ansha and Paulo grew strained. When I asked Ansha whether I could visit Paulo with her in 2010, she refused, explaining at first that “the velho does not like to see brancos [white people].” Later, she gave a different explanation, one that insinuated a rivalry between the two healers: “Paulo cured me. But my relationship with him is no longer good. The problem is that he did not want me to become a healer. I do not know. I replied to him that each person has her own spirits. He did not want me to become a healer. The velho feared I would surpass him.” Sharing the same illness and participating in the same ceremonies typically established strong, enduring bonds between master and student, which were framed in the language of kinship. In some cases, the “family” of majini was even more important than affinity and consanguinity. When a healer died, the assistants and other close healers, rather than the blood family, were placed in charge of washing the body of the healer and conducting the funeral ceremony. Ansha remained close to some of the women she healed. She was always noticeably saddened when patients left her compound at the end of their training. She symbolized the bond with her patients by offering them a stick that she had collected from the bush, denoting the establishment of a permanent relationship based on a sharing of common experiences, majini most of all. Bonds between masters and students were characterized in the language of kinship: students were called “daughters”; Ansha, their “mother.” Even after their training, Ansha and her students regularly engaged in exchanges of healing, herbal knowledge and participated to each others’ rituals. Yet Ansha was distant from, even in competition with, her teacher, Paulo. Her time as a “student”—mwalí—at Paulo’s was almost completely expunged from her recollection and discourse. Instead, Ansha depicted herself as a healer who was chosen by spirits—a self-made healer who had learned “directly from the spirits and the sky,” rather than as a student of someone else. Ansha reframed her story of healing within the idiom of kinship, claiming that she had inherited the spirits of her grandfather, rather than learning them from Paulo and other healers in Nampula: “Paulo helped me to go to the big mountains. He elevated me, to become a big chief. But listen, I was already a healer. My grandfather said that I had to become a big chief because I already knew a lot about how to heal. When I heal, I talk to him.” Not long after the ekoma at Paulo’s, Ansha’s healing career began to diverge from that of her master. While Paulo remained a healer of Makhuwa majini, Ansha would go on to acquire many other spirits, to speak different languages, and to mix various medical traditions. As she succinctly put it, “I work with a lot of spirits now.”

7 • COAST

The recurrence of dreams signaled that Ansha was still sick, that she had new spirits, spirits from the coast, Amaka majini. “I felt sick again,” Ansha tells me in December 2009 in response to my question about how she became a Muslim. As she opens her green Islamic book with a picture of Mecca on the cover, she continues, “Men came to me; they were dressed in white; they came with their books. Those people were praying Islam in my house. I was sleeping. A mwalimu came and gave me nikombe.1 When I woke up, my heart started beating. My husband said that nobody was in the house.” Not long after the ceremony at Paulo’s, Tiago was again searching for a healer, this time one from the coast who could heal Ansha from these Muslim spirits. Tiago contacted a sharifa, a female Muslim healer. Unlike their male counterparts, walimu, who worked exclusively with Islamic books, sharifas combined knowledge of Islam with knowledge of spirits.2 Specialized in the treatment of Amaka majini, these women migrated from the coast to the city, where they helped many non-Muslim women of the interior dealing with spirits of the coast. Sharifas instructed their patients to sing songs to entice Muslim spirits, to recite Muslim prayers, to purchase Islamic books, and to manufacture protective amulets called hiriz that contained copied pages of Islamic books. Sharifas also initiated non-Muslim women to Islam and coastal medicine and assisted local healers in their rituals for majini of the coast.3 Ansha herself was sometimes assisted by a Mwani sharifa named Marcela, a woman who had moved from the coast of Cabo Delgado to aid the people of Nampula afflicted with Muslim spirits.4 Marcela was an elderly woman with a strikingly melancholic air. She lived alone in a poor hut not far from Ansha’s house. She had a slender body and a bald head, with lines of weariness deeply etched on a hollow face. Despite her age and spiritual suffering, Marcela’s vitality was always striking. Her thin and tall body was the sign of a life riddled by spirits. She gestured Islamic prayers while talking, interlacing Arabic, Kimwani, and Kiswahili words, continuously changing the tone of her voice and jerking her body as if in trance. Unlike Ansha, who defined herself as a “retired healer” who 60

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could control and master her spirits, Marcela was continually overwhelmed by majini. Majini brought Marcela to Nampula after the sixteen-year war. In a conversation in 2009, Marcela explained, “Spirits ordered me to move to Nampula. I was living in Pemba but the spirits sent me to Nampula to save people during the war. Here in Nampula there are not beaches. Since I know the medicaments of the spirits, I am able to help the people. I have water from the sea and shells to heal Amaka majini.” Marcela’s assistance in dealing with Muslim spirits was pivotal to Ansha’s reputation, especially with Muslim women attending her mosque. On Sunday afternoons, Marcela arrived to teach Ansha the songs and litanies to call the spirits from the coast, sometimes creating new ones with Ansha. Marcela advised Ansha about which Islamic books to buy in the central market. She showed Ansha how to use sea water and shells in her rituals; she initiated Islamic prayers at Ansha’s mosque. In recent years, Marcela had fallen into poverty due to a loss of business to other healers, the rising popularity of stricter forms of Islam that campaigned against spirit possession, and the fact that a number of young women decided to attend Qur’anic schools to learn Islam rather than to rely on spirit possession. Eventually, Marcela’s only work occurred at Ansha’s. Over time, Marcela’s worsening economic condition took a toll on her health. During my 2013 visit, Ansha informed me that Marcela had passed away the previous year and her body had been her homeland. For her work with Muslim spirits, Ansha was now assisted by her niece Ana, who had married a Sufi man from the coast. Ana converted to Islam during her wedding, which was officiated by a shehe.5 Possession by Muslim spirits was one way non-Muslim women (as well as some men) reached Islam.6 This path began with illness and dreams, was followed by divination by a specialist, and was consummated by the performance of a ceremony to appease these spirits and legitimize conversion to Islam. Ansha referred to ceremonies for Muslim spirits as dhikr, borrowing the name from Sufi Islam.7 These rituals were always held on Friday afternoons inside Ansha’s mosque. Unlike the ekoma ceremony for the spirits of the inland, these dhikr ceremonies were more private affairs, conducted in the seclusion of Ansha’s mosque and attended only by healers and patients who shared the same illness. Like Sufi ceremonies, these rituals consisted of repeated Islamic chanting and praying. They were also less demanding than ekoma, lasting no longer than one hour. Ansha characterized the role of these small rituals either as “healing” to appease the spirits or as “religious” to display conversion to Islam: “We show Allah that we are Muslim.”8 These ceremonies also incorporated elements from other strands of Islam. Ansha and Marcela engaged in mimetic practices of Muslim teachers (Kisw.

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mwalimu) who had introduced Islam into the inland during slavery. They dressed in white Islamic uniforms (Kisw. male’ia), hats (Mak. ekofiyo), and eyeglasses. Together they performed Islamic ablutions at the beginning of the ceremony, then displayed Islamic books and recited Islamic prayers. Songs invoking Muslim spirits were performed without musical instruments, accompanied only by the gentle swaying of their bodies. The fact that no healer could avoid Muslim spirits and resist spirit conversion to Islam attested to the local power of Islam. Nevertheless, these ceremonies were infused with subversive elements like mockery and transgression. Ansha once referred to Muslim spirits’ ceremonies as a brincadeira (Port. joke) “because the other Muslims do not pray like we do.” The ceremonies also included ritual transgressions such as the inhalation of tobacco and consumption of alcohol. The songs of the ceremony portrayed Muslim spirits as engaging in practices that were not properly Islamic, such as drinking, falling sick to spirits, and collecting medical herbs in the bush—all behaviors generally defining the non-Muslim spirits of the inland and their healers.9 Such subversions did not undermine the efficacy of these rituals, which for Ansha and other female healers with similar trajectories was a legitimate way of reaching Islam. These women, however, identified themselves as a different kind of Muslim—what Ansha referred to as a “Muslim of spirits” rather than “Muslims of the mosque.” By means of these ceremonies, Ansha inscribed Islam into more familiar codes, highlighting the bodily experiences of the former over against the intellectual ones of the latter: “We fell ill; we dreamed; we suffered a lot. We fled to the mountains. Those Muslim men stay in the mosque to pray.”10 Although Ansha refused the institutionalized spaces and times of mosques and prayers, she nevertheless esteemed the stature and power of the male walimu: “My spirits are those of the Amaka. They come from the sea. They are the healers who came here from the sea, the place where the sun rises. They are in the water. I met all walimu with male’ia [Islamic uniform] praying.” Possessed by walimu from the coast, Ansha’s ceremonies and imaginaries revitalized deep-rooted experiences and discourses of Islam in the region, which were distinctive from strands of Islam that began to spread in the twentieth century, Sufism and Wahhabism (Trentini 2016a).11 As Ansha explained, “My Islam is old [Port. antigo].” Ansha made this past her own through the language of kinship. To reinforce her Muslim identity, she recast her family history as a Muslim one, silencing her Christian past: “The family of my grandfather was Maometano. Also the family of my mother, who was living in Tanzania. They are all Muslim. In my family, Christians are few.”12 Speaking of her conversion to Islam as a “return” to her past rather than a rupture from her previous (Christian) identity and deploying the language of kinship were further ways by which Ansha tried to master the power of Islam.13

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Ansha’s break with Christianity and return to Islam through spirit possession bore witness to century-long historical processes. Healers’ conversions to Islam and concomitant disavowals of Christianity recapitulated deep-rooted religious dynamics in the region, which reached all the way back to the tensions between Christianity and Islam during colonial occupation. Conversion to Islam during the colonial period served as a means of resisting colonization and evangelization. In the north, during the last phase of colonial occupation, the missionaries attempted to prevent Islamization from the coast. In fighting against the spread of Qur’anic schools, the Nampula diocese went so far as to ban these schools along the coast. In response, conversions to Islam increased.14 After her ceremony, Ansha was compelled by spirits to adopt some of their rules and take the Arabic name Ansha.15 The spirit hut blessed by Paulo years earlier was renamed a “spirit mosque.” An Islamic script and a crescent moon appeared on the inside walls. When sitting inside, Ansha faced east toward the Muslim coast, the Indian Ocean. Islamic incense wafted through the mosque all day to signal the presence of the spirits of the coast. Ansha also adopted Islamic practices and observances: “Not to eat dirty food, like pork and rats. Wash hands and face. Buy clothes and books. Do not work on Fridays. And do not perform ceremonies during the Ramadan.” Being a Muslim healer of spirits mostly required assimilating aspects of the walimu’s magic: “Adopt books to make divination.” As she explained in reference to one of the books in her collection of tiny Islamic books in English translation that she purchased from Tanzanian traders, “I deploy this book whenever I grapple with big services; I open it, and I start praying.” And as she explained in reference to her divinatory and ritual formulae, it was important to “speak their own language,” which for Ansha was a mix of Kiswahili and Arabic, laced with guttural-sounding made-up words. By becoming a Muslim through spirits, Ansha certainly heightened her therapeutic and magical prestige, as Islam was associated with a more potent kind of magic. Ceremonies for spirits also extended Ansha’s networks, enabling her to work with Muslim healers and acquire Muslim clients. Most of all, however, spirits of the coast brought material benefits. These spirits were regarded as ambiciosos (Port. ambitious), harder to appease materially; healers were therefore required to purchase ritual items such as clothes and books, which were expensive by local standards. In return, however, healers could charge significant sums of money for the ceremonies in which these items were employed. Unlike the spirits of the inland, which were summoned with sacred flour and worshiped with crops from the field, the spirits from the coast asked for money (Mak. musurukhu), clothes, and books.16 Ansha’s performance of her Muslim identity was, however, mostly confined to ritual spaces and specific occasions. “I am Maka when the spirits of the beach

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arrive,” Ansha once explained, suggesting that her Islam was delimited to specific rituals within her spirit mosque. Outside her mosque, Ansha’s life and identity did not change much. Nor did she give much importance to her Muslim faith. One reason for this was her awareness that other Muslims considered healers like her not to be Muslim, even to be haram (Ar. forbidden).17 Even inside her own compound, no one really gave much importance to this side of her healing. Tiago, who remained Christian, sometimes explained Ansha’s conversion in terms of sickness: “She is Maka because she is sick. This is just illness.” At other times, he maintained that Ansha needed to be Muslim because of her spirit work (Port. trabalho espiritual). In fact, Tiago continued to call Ansha by her previous name of Rosa. Only her patients and I referred to her as Ansha, her Muslim name of majini.

8 • RIVERS AND BRIDGES

“Business was never lacking at your friend’s mosque,” Tiago recalls in 2016. He has been reminiscing about his life with Ansha with remarkable frequency and detail. Nothing brings him more pride than the success of Ansha’s healing practice. The popularity of healers after the war was in part due to medical crisis. The destruction of the national health care system during the war, in conjunction with cuts to social and health services following the war, quickly created rising demand for alternative healing practices. This was true not only in the remote areas of Mozambique but also in its main cities. Nampula’s residents frequently complained about the scarcity of medicine and diagnostic instruments, the shortage of staff and lengthy waiting times for appointments at hospitals and clinics, the system of bribes for consultations in the hospital, the overall difficulty in accessing medicine, and the cost of medicine for those who resorted to the black market.1 At the same time, the economic condition of many households in the cities was quickly deteriorating due to high inflation, reduced subsidies, and government layoffs. Privatization measures, the removal of subsidized food prices, and decreased social services for the poor all exacerbated growing socioeconomic disparity. Although Mozambique saw remarkable economic growth after the war, only a small elite benefited from it (Castel-Branco 2014). Even though access to health care was easier in the cities than in rural areas (O’Laughlin 2010), healers were nevertheless visited for their magical protection. Socioeconomic disparity and conflict gave rise to increased mistrust and accusations of witchcraft, heightening the demand for magical protection among city residents. People spoke openly and frequently about the crumbling social environment, which led to a rise in violent crime, rampant theft, seething distrust, competition for jobs, corruption in government, and the loss of community values. Increased altercations and widespread sickness in the bairros earned Nampula the reputation of being a city full of sorcery and occult forces. In this environment, Ansha soon became an established healer with a burgeoning clientele that patiently waited every day in her yard for her healing and magic services. She bought a new garden and a piece of land in another bairro, 65

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where she built and rented a house, as well as a machamba at the edge of the bairros, where she cultivated nuts and mandioca. Many patients came to her spirit mosque for the herbal plants that she collected weekly in the bush. Ansha’s divination and healing were sought for health problems that hospitals often failed to cure. Her healing attracted the most distressed groups of the city’s population—women, infants and children, and youths in search of employment and success in the city. Ansha called herself a “healer for the povo [people],” since her fees were affordable and her services were accessible to all patients, no matter their socioeconomic status. Ansha’s career was further bolstered when she became a member of AMETRAMO in early 2000s and began attending biomedical training at the Saúde (Provincial Department of Health) with nurses and health technicians. In the mid-2000s, Tiago was transferred by his company to outside the city, where he spent months away from home. His departure was counterbalanced by the arrival of Ansha’s family members from Mueda. Life then changed in Ansha’s compound and healing, both of which became “more Makonde.” Ansha’s oldest sister first settled in her compound. Then came Ansha’s nephews and nieces, children of her sisters and brothers in Mueda. To accommodate them, Ansha built three new mud houses in her yard. Her sister’s children—Ana, Mateus, and Tomás—attended school in the morning, then spent the rest of the day helping Ansha in her healing, domestic activities, trips to the bush, and work in the fields. The presence of her Muedan family not only helped Ansha reconnect with her past and family; it also influenced her healing and cosmology. These changes were legitimated by dreams that featured Muedan landscapes and travels back home: “One day, I suddenly started falling ill again. I saw a big road that takes you to Rovuma River.2 A person from Rovuma came to my house and started calling me ‘my grandchild, my grandchild.’ ” Ansha often presented herself as “the Makonde healer” or “the one from Cabo Delgado.” Her medicine was “medicine that comes from outside,” “the medicine from Mueda,” which “Makhuwa from here do not know.” Recurrent dreams of spirits from her homeland not only enabled Ansha to reconnect with her past; they also bestowed on her a healing genealogy that strengthened her position as a healer, for healers who could prove that they inherited spirits from their kin were considered more powerful and knowledgeable. Years prior, when Ansha had fallen sick without her family in the city, she had borrowed Tiago’s ancestors at her ekoma ceremony at Paulo’s. Now, the spirits of her grandfather and grandmother, healers before colonial occupation, guided her in divination, assisted her in healing, and defended her from sorcery. Ansha’s grandmother became the “mother” of the children whom she healed and the babies whom she helped be conceived. Ansha’s grandfather was the chief of her majini: “Majini arrive always with my grandfather. They arrived in a military group. Majini



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are in front, my grandfather follows. Majini come and talk to him about plants, and my father transmits this information to me.” Especially in cases where her patients were Makonde migrants, Ansha renamed her majini with Makonde names; the Makhuwa Nakuru, for example, was given the Shimakonde name Nandenga.3 These changes inspired Ansha to revisit her past and spirit story: I was healed here in Nampula, and I have majini of Nampula. But my grandfather came and started speaking to me. Now I am treating a lot of persons from Cabo Delgado; I am dancing for persons of my land. But I dance also for women from here, from the littoral. I have Makonde spirits, but when they appear they speak Makhuwa and Kiswahili according to the patients. If the spirit appears in my head, I speak the language—sometimes Maka, other times the language of Nakuru [Makhuwa], and still other times akunya [white].

Ansha’s cosmology was not static, nor was it immune from the outside world and social changes. Events that occurred inside and outside Ansha’s spirit mosque inspired her to continually rewrite her spiritual autobiography and identity. One such occasion occurred in 2010, when Armando Guebuza traveled to the border with Tanzania to inaugurate the bridge over the Rovuma River with the president of Tanzania. This event was welcomed by Ansha with great excitement, for it allowed her to better connect with the spirits that she inherited from her mother’s family, which was originally from Tanzania: “Now, my majini from Tanzania can arrive easily. I want to go back there. I want to buy things of majini there that it is not possible to get here: nikombe, for example. I can go live and work there. My spirits from Tanzania are Simba, Ruhani, Mumiani.4 They are Black and Muslim because they are Tanzanian. Now we can go by car to Tanzania, from Nampula direct. We do not have to pass from Maputo [by air].” Spirits coming from Somalia also appeared to Ansha precisely during the time when an increased number of Somali refugees were showing up at Nampula’s UN refugee camp, Marratane, some settling in Nampula to open shops and run businesses. This menagerie of spirits—new and old, familiar and foreign, Makonde, Makhuwa, and Amaka—made Ansha a popular healer in Nampula with a heterogeneous clientele. To Makhuwa patients, she was “the Makonde” who spoke fluent Makhuwa and knew local medicine. To the Makonde, she was the healer who, despite being a Makonde, knew Nampula’s medicine and local witchcraft very well and therefore could advise them. To those people of the interior and to women, she was a Muslim healer who was familiar with potent medicine of the coast. For her patients, it was comforting in times of suffering to be seen by a healer who understood them and spoke their language. Only after Ansha’s death did I realize that there was another side to this story. Ansha’s life with spirits had also made her an outcast—someone who looks on

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from the outside rather than belonging. Although she had local spirits, Ansha was not recognized as a native, a Makhuwa; nor was she a Muslim in the eyes of Muslims of the coast or Muslims “who go to the mosque.” She was even regarded as an outsider by some Makonde because she was married to a Makhuwa man and had spent much of her life in the Makhuwa city of Nampula. When Ansha passed away on January 6, 2015, I was in Johannesburg. Tiago told me on the phone. He also reported that besides her family from Mueda and her remaining assistants, Verónica and Irene, no one attended her funeral—no one from her community of healers and patients, no one from the Makonde community, no one from her neighborhood. Even healers of AMETRAMO disregarded the ceremony. For Tiago, the scarce attendance had to do with Ansha’s profession. “Your friend was not seen well in the bairros because she was a curandeira. She was majini.”

9 • M AKHUWA AND M AK A

Fátima and Yussuf arrive at the mosque for divination after a recent series of uncanny events. Fátima’s head is covered with a brown capulana; Yussuf is wearing an ekofiyo, an Islamic hat. Their clothing signals that they are Muslim, more particularly, Nacasacos, as members of Sufi orders are locally called.1 Searching for employment, the couple recently moved to Nampula from Angoche, which was once the center of the slave trade, though since the colonial period has been a declining coastal city in the south of the province. They settled among people from the same region in the southeastern part of Nampula. Life in the city proved difficult, they say. “Salama Alaykum,” Ansha welcomes the couple. “Salama,” they both respond, as they remove their shoes before entering the mosque. “So what is the problem?” asks Ansha. “We are going through a complicated period. Our bodies are not well,” Yussuf responds. “What happened?” Ansha curiously asks. She does not attend to many patients from the coast. “Last night, someone tried to set our house on fire,” Yussuf reveals with a heavy sigh. Fortunately, Fátima and Yussuf were alerted by their neighbors in time to put out the fire with water. “I am going to do something against the people who did this,” Ansha combatively replies. “War is not lacking in this city,” comments Fátima, feeling reassured by Ansha’s ready understanding. “A neighbor has hired someone to do this,” interrupts Yussuf, who cannot help voicing his suspicions. Ansha informs them that they require magical defense of their bodies and their house. She prescribes an amulet for each of them to wear, as well as a treatment for their compound. 73

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As Ansha details the healing she has in mind, Yussuf wants assurance that it will only be defensive. “We do not want to harm this person. But when he comes, he has to fall, to lose his clothes,” he urges. “That neighbor has to become crazy,” Fátima then adds. Ansha reassures them: “I know. You are Maka [Muslim]; you are not allowed to use any treatments to kill people.” Fátima and Yussuf leave the mosque, informing Ansha that they will come back later for the treatment. They first want to report the episode to the local authorities. As Ansha and I remain in the mosque, she exclaims, “These people are sorcerers. People from Angoche deal with mankawa.” “What is mankawa?” I ask. This is the first time I have heard this Ekhoti word, the language spoken along the southern coast of the Nampula province. “This is their sorcery. They steal the shadow of someone and lock it in a pot until it dies. It is a form of payment for a debt of flesh among them [sorcerers].” Ansha closes the mosque for lunch, while I collect my notebook. As I walk away from the mosque, she suddenly stops dead in her tracks and returns to me: “You should not talk to people from the littoral. Daria, those of the littoral are dangerous people.” Divinations and healing practices reified differences between people of the coast and people of the inland—between Amaka and Makhuwa, as Ansha always referred to the two groups, borrowing terms from the time of the slave trade.2 Each of these groups, however, was far from being ethnically homogeneous and mutually exclusive.3 Historically, the Makhuwa of the inland included people of different origins who had been integrated into the dominant lineages of the region. They shared a similar language and a social system based on matriliny and matrilocality. They were organized into matrilineal, exogamic clans (Mak. mahimo) that were dispersed throughout the region, with economies based on hunting and subsistence agriculture. These groups were united by a common origin myth, whereby all clans hailed from Mount Namuli, the highest mountain in the Zambezia province of inland northern Mozambique. Local and collective identity hinged on the ancestral land that marked a person’s lineage (Mak. nloko), with each lineage claiming to live on the land occupied by their forebears. The centrality of the clan, land and the memory of maternal ancestors were renewed periodically by rituals and sacrifices (Mak. makeya) to the spirits around a sacred tree (Mak. mutholo), during which sacred millet flour symbolizing the land and the spirits was scattered on the ground. Whereas the Mount Namuli myth fostered a sense of common origin and unity for the clans that were dispersed throughout the interior, Islamic faith was what unified the people living along the coast. These populations were the result of cen-



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turies-long migrations and intermarriages between the Makhuwa, Arabs, and immigrants from other coastal areas of the Indian Ocean (Hafkin 1973; Bonate 2006, 2007a).4 What set these people apart from other groups living along the northern coast of East Africa was their Muslim faith combined with an enduring matrilineal system (Bonate 2017; Arnfred 2011). Indeed, many of the practices found on the inland were also encountered along the coast (Hafkin 1973). Traditional practices such as ancestral worship and spirit possession not only were tolerated but also formed an integral component of the cultural and social fabric of the coastal populations, with matrilineal lineage and land remaining pivotal in defining social organization and power, as well as individual and collective identity. Relations between coast and inland were historically marked by exchange and fluidity. Although the slave trade established a social hierarchy that inferiorized people from the interior as “backward” and therefore suitable to enslave, traders and Makhuwa chiefs established political and economic alliances that resulted in the two regions becoming more interconnected and intertwined. During the slave trade, many Makhuwa in the interior either converted to Islam as an alternative to enslavement or migrated to the coast.5 Not until the twentieth century did processes of differentiation between the two regions become more accentuated. Colonial writing depicted those of the coast and those of the inland as distinctive people, with the former as more “advanced” and “civilized” because of their literacy and urbanity.6 After independence, even as the Frelimo strove to end “tribalism,” regionalism became a central theme in postcolonial politics, especially since the ruling elite were based mostly in the south. During the sixteen-year war, ethnic and regional identities came to be a hallmark of the political narrative of Renamo.7 Processes of differentiation and exclusion became even more pronounced after the war due to increasing migration and rising socioeconomic inequality.8 In a city where, in the words of Ansha, “we are all vientes [vernacular, immigrants],” residents continued to define who they were in relation to place of origin, understanding their homeland and identity in juxtaposition to other places and identities.9 Attire, education, religion, linguistic styles, and medical cultures were all recognizable markers of regional identity. Those of the coast often presented themselves as superior to those of the inland, whom they often called “backward,” “uncivilized,” those who eat xima (Moz. porridge), rats who “walk naked.” Migrant healers from the coast claimed superiority over those of the inland because of their religion, education, and literacy skills, all of which were deployed and displayed in their healing. As a Sufi elder from the coastal city of Angoche told me during a conversation, “People of the interior spend their life ploughing their land, while people of the coast were traders [who] traveled and worked in the colonial administration, so they were overall used to engaging with the whites.”

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Conversely, people of the inland often looked on those of the coast with suspicion, accusing them of ambition and ignorance. “People of the coast think they are superior,” Ansha once said. “But they do not know nothing [sic]. They think they can live without tradition without praising their ancestors?” Other inlanders accused those of the coast of simply “doing business,” wondering how they could live without working a machamba. For Ansha, the mere fact of having neighbors from the coast or of living near a mosque was often divined as a cause of illness and misfortune. Rarely, however, were these rivalries overt. Rather, accusations were most frequently articulated through the language of witchcraft and spirit affliction.10 Ansha associated the Makhuwa with types of sorcery that utilized magical wooden sticks (Mak. nipako) to launch attacks against rivals (Mak. otthekela, to harm). By contrast, the Amaka utilized patiri, a written form of sorcery based on the copying of pages from Islamic astrological texts.11 Regional rivalries were occasionally manifested in the community among neighbors. Sometimes, however, they played out within the household between husbands and wives, through the language of spirits. One morning in late April 2010, a middle-aged woman named Helena arrives at Ansha’s mosque accompanied by her daughter and husband. Helena can barely walk; her legs are visibly swollen. After a couple of steps, she stops, breathless, holding on to her daughter. While the two women slowly make their way across Ansha’s yard to her mosque, Helena’s husband, Momade, takes a seat at the back of the yard, waiting for the conclusion of the session. Inside the mosque, Helena is eager to tell her story of affliction and spirits. She moved to the city during the war, in 1988. When her first husband passed away, three years ago, she moved in with Momade, a Sufi from Mocímboa da Praia. Spiritual healing is familiar to Helena, who fell sick to spirits many years ago. “But majini then stopped,” she informs Ansha. “After I began attending the church, spirits left.” After she married Momade, the spirits came back and Helena fell sick again. As a peasant, she is worried that her spirits will prevent her from working in her village machamba, which is her main source of income since her husband has no job. “My legs are taken. I am like a paralyzed person,” she says. Helena now turns to me, as if she has just become aware of my presence in the mosque. She asks, “And you, are there majini in your land?” “There are. She has majini too,” says Ansha. “There are many majini like here,” Helena comments. “How did you fall sick?” I ask Helena, sensing a connection between us. “I remember quite well how my illness occurred. I was coming back from the machamba in Nacala, and I quarreled with my son. I was about to beat him, but



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I fell down. Immediately, I did not feel any suffering, then it started and I became concerned.” “The soreness was getting worse, so I decided to go to the hospital. They plastered my leg, but that night I dreamt. I was escaping from the prison. I entered into the sand and then into the water. I wanted to go to Namapa, to my house, but I could not stand up. I was falling. I woke up and wondered, was I dreaming? I went to the bathroom and I realized that the plaster was destroyed. So I returned to the hospital. Maybe, I thought, the plaster was too short. They did one longer, and I returned home. It cracked another time. They plastered the entire leg three different times. I dreamt that my children were shouting, ‘Aunt, the cobra is entering into the plaster.’ ” Having consulted hospital medicine, Helena turned to healers in the hopes of expelling her bad spirits. She even went back to her homeland of Namapa, hoping that healers there could facilitate her healing path. Despite all these efforts, spirits continued to come and go for years. “Spirits came back to me when I married with this Muslim man, and I had to quit the church,” she now tells us with restless eyes. It was not uncommon for wives to convert to the religion of their husbands. After Helena settled in with her new husband, she began attending the female section of her husband’s mosque, one of the oldest Sufi mosques in the city. She even attended the madrasa and on Thursday afternoons she performed dhikr with other women. “When I used to attend the church, I was healthy,” Helena informs us. Shaking her head, she declares, “No spirits annoyed me.” “Those spirits of the coast annoy a lot,” comments Ansha, indicating that Helena is under attack from Subiana, a coastal spirit whose only purpose is to harm by paralyzing the body.12 “Yes, they just want to eat a lot,” Ansha adds. Helena is first given a ritual herbal bath. Momade, who has so far remained distant, is then called in to take part in the treatment. Reluctantly, he joins us, taking a seat in the mosque. This appears to be his first time at a healer’s. Or maybe he is just intimidated by all these women. “If you want your wife back, you will have to talk to spirits,” Ansha informs him. “I want my wife to be healed,” the husband replies in a feeble voice. Men, who were often depicted as aggressive, oblivious to the cause of women’s suffering, became meek and submissive in Ansha’s mosque. Momade is now invited to pay respect to the spirits and scatter ephepa. Sensing the pressure of her resolution and our gaze, Momade has no choice but to follow Ansha’s direction. He is hesitant, as if not knowing what to do. He begins scattering flour on the plate to ask his family’s dead to help him out. Then, following Ansha’s words, he implores the spirits who are afflicting his spouse to leave her.

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After the treatment, we linger in the mosque. Only after the husband has paid Ansha does his confidence return. “Visiting a healer is like going to the hospital,” Momade comments, as if to justify his presence in a healer’s hut. “There are some problems in life that cannot be solved by religion alone,” he declares, finding his stride. When Helena and her family finally leave, Ansha takes some time to reflect on their story before moving to the next patient. “These people of the coast think they are better than us, that they know more than we do, but I tell you they are ignorant and ambitious.” Punctuating the visit, she now casts doubt on Helena’s recovery by blaming her husband: “That woman will go back to dreams if she decides to stay married with this Maka.” Whereas relations between people from the coast and the inland were often fraught, those between the spirits of the same regions were instead portrayed as peaceful. “There is no problem between them [spirits of the coast and spirits of the inland]. But each spirit has his own habits and comes with his own things,” Ansha responds in answer to my question about the differences between these spirits. For Ansha, the absence of competition between the two groups of spirits was due to the fact that spirits from the interior were superior: “The spirits from the mountains are stronger because of the herbs they show us. Those from the beach are not so strong. These spirits annoy a lot. They just request things. They want to eat food: tea, milk, rice, and sugar.” As in the case of former slaves in Sudan, who drew on spirit cults to articulate a positive self-identity (Makris 1996), Ansha, a Makonde from a non-Muslim region that historically resisted coastal trade, reframed the history of the region from the point of view of the inland and non-Muslim peoples.13 She did not portray the spirits of the mountains as “unknown others,” “outsiders,” as they were typically depicted in spirit possession in East Africa because of their association with the rural bush. Nor were African spirits “uncivilized” or “pagan slaves.”14 On the contrary, their main distinguishing features were force, knowledge, and potency. They were referred to as the most powerful spirits of Nampula—the autochthonous “owners” or “chiefs” (Mak. mamwene) of the land. Their ownership of the city was demonstrated by the fact that, although they arrived from other inland regions, their abode was the bush and mountains surrounding Nampula, where shrines (Mak. epewe) consisting of red and black flags were erected by healers. They were always the first to possess an individual, and their rituals were more involved and protracted. By contrast, the spirits of the coast were said to be “outsiders,” “coming from the coast,” “those who come from the sea.” This reversal was also reflected in Ansha’s healing practices, where the knowledge associated



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with the spirits of the mountains continued to prevail and Islamic elements were marginalized, emerging only on special occasions. Through healing, Ansha not only compelled husbands to succumb to the will of spirits, and therefore also to their wives; she also challenged social hierarchies, even if only inside her mosque. In degrading the power of Muslim spirits, referring to them as “outsiders,” depicting them as less strong, accusing them of bringing illness, and deploying them less frequently, Ansha’s spirit healing asserted the centrality and power of the inland, reminding her patients that Nampula was an inland city where traditional cultures continued to be highly valued in the lives of its residents, Muslims included.

10 • BOOKS AND ROOTS

“I was living there, in Namicopo,” Ansha begins telling Eduardo, a Makhuwa patient who has arrived for consultation about his health conditions. “My husband and I were under patiri [sorcery].” One week earlier, Eduardo appeared for the first time at Ansha’s mosque for divination. He is a teacher at a secondary school. Originally from Maúa, a small inland town, Eduardo now rents a house in the bairro of Namicopo, on the eastern side of the city, which is inhabited mostly by Muslim people from the coast. “I began to feel a disturbing, strange pain along my body,” Eduardo had told Ansha a week ago, while wiping away sweat trickling down his neck. Weeks before that, he had been diagnosed at the hospital with rheumatism. He was given medical treatment, though to no avail. His friends suggested that he consult a diviner and try traditional medicine in order to know “what is going on in my body,” as he told Ansha. He chose Ansha, as he told me, because of her reputation. “The problem is inside the family,” Ansha’s divination had revealed. “This is otthekela,” she had pronounced, explaining that the sorcery used magically treated wooden sticks that were launched into his yard at night. Ansha’s divination pointed to Eduardo’s family, whose members felt abandoned and neglected by Eduardo when he moved to the city and found a good job there. After the divination, Eduardo was given an herbal bath and an assortment of herbs to mix into a brew to be consumed three times a day to expel the witchcraft. One week later, however, Eduardo is back, and his body is still aching, he informs Ansha while touching his back. The failure of healing suggests that there must be another truth, something that is not yet known. Ansha decides to set a new divination. The problem is not in the family, but lies in the neighborhood where Eduardo lives. Muslim neighbors who lack employment and are envious of Eduardo’s position have resorted to the magic of the coast. “Patiri,” pronounces Ansha. Sorcery that uses Islamic books is generally regarded as the most dangerous in Nampula, its power resting on Arabic writing, a skill that continues to be restricted to few healers. 80



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To buttress her divination, Ansha recounts her experience of coastal medicine, when she was living with Tiago and battling illness in the same bairro as Eduardo, Namicopo. “We went ‘to read’ at a house of a mwalimu,” she says. “Thieves entered and stole everything. They put sorcery, and I felt sick. Every month, a person dies in that area.” “It is full of witchcraft,” Eduardo responds, confirming Ansha’s point. “People of the coast are very complicated,” he continues, adding more support. Namicopo holds a sinister reputation in the city. Every time I plan to visit healers there, I am told that that it is a place of confusion. This is partly due to its high presence of Muslims from the coast who are often identified with opposition to Frelimo and support of Renamo. But it also because of the magic practiced by the several walimu living in the neighborhood. Ansha leaves the mosque to pick up some herbs, while Eduardo undresses and waits for her in the mosque. She returns with a small black hen whose legs are tied up. “Orrukunuwa,”1 she announces, naming the treatment she is about to perform. “The walimu do not know what this is about.” Ansha selects herbs from a basket and places them in a pan to boil. Then she immerses the black hen in the hot water and rubs it on Eduardo’s body—back, legs, and arms. After the bath, the hen is sacrificed. Its blood slowly drips into the clay, taking the witchcraft with it. Eduardo is now asked to cut some of his hair and nails and to place them on a white sheet on which Ansha has drawn a cross with black ink. She collects some of Eduardo’s saliva too, which she puts on the sheet along with some gunpowder, the herbs, and pieces of needles. She then mixes everything together, wraps it up, and sews the parcel into a small red cloth, creating an amulet that will not only defend Eduardo from external attacks but also harm whoever intends to attack him.2 “This is going to be strong,” Ansha pronounces, while sewing the amulet in a red cloth. “I will keep it in the mosque tonight. The snake from Mueda will come; it will eat the chicken and spit on it.3 Nobody knows this secret here in Nampula,” she nods, “not even the walimu. Whoever touches this will suffer.” Eduardo returns the following day to collect his hiriz (amulet) and to compensate Ansha for the treatment. “Put the hiriz into your pocket,” Ansha says. “Nobody should see it.” Before he leaves, however, Ansha cautions him that her healing might not work against the magic of walimu. “You will have to leave the bairro at some point,” she warns. “Those Muslim healers may kill you.” Ansha frequently drew attention to the rivalry between her spirit work and the practice of walimu.4 “We traditional healers do not get along with these walimu,” she would say. “There is no understanding between us and them.”

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Antagonism between spirit healers and walimu always seemed rife when I talked to healers.5 Even though walimu were a minority in the local healing community, they were popular in a context of economic uncertainty and widespread mistrust, for their literacy-based magic was regarded as more powerful in dealing with such issues.6 The growing appeal of Muslim healers and their magic was evinced by the increasing number of male spirit-healers who continued to embrace Islamized practices in the fashion of the walimu, viewing the traditional side of their healing as “retrograde.” A growing number of male healers studied with Muslim teachers and attended madrasas where they were initiated into Islamic knowledge and basic Arabic. Spirit healers and walimu had distinctive life trajectories. While the majority of the former were migrants from the inland, the latter were men who had moved from the coast during the colonial period or the sixteen-year war. Since they came from the coastal cities, walimu were more accustomed to urban life and its complications; some had even traveled and studied abroad in Zanzibar, Tanzania, Madagascar, or Malawi (or, if in Mozambique, usually with foreign teachers). Unlike spirit healers, whose healing dominated their lives, walimu interwove their magic practices with attendance at and participation in local Sufi mosques and congregations. Other key differences between spirit healers and walimu involved training and practice. Ansha often contrasted the “written words” of walimu’s healing with the “roots” of traditional healing.7 As she put it on one occasion, “Walimu are taught. We suffer; we go to the bush; we collect roots; we dream of our forebears. Majini is pain. Those [walimu] stay in the mosque to read and write.” The expertise of the walimu was based on the combination of ilim fakihi, knowledge of Islam, with ilim dunia—cosmological and esoteric knowledge.8 Their healing consisted of reading, reciting, and writing surahs of the Qur’an as well as cosmological, astrological, and medical texts that were transmitted to them by other walimu.9 Their divination (ramuli) consisted of associating seeds to letters along with consulting astrological books.10 Walimu’s writing was especially valued for a kind of sorcery called patiri, which consisted of selecting specific parts of Islamic texts, copying them with black ink, and fashioning them into hiriz. All these differences collectively informed different worldviews. Spiritual healing was underpinned by a concept of personhood in which actions were believed to be highly responsive to external forces—spirits, ancestors, and sorcerers. Each person was a strand in a web of matrilineal relationships with the living and the dead, on the basis of which health, fortune, and life depended. Practices like divination, therefore, employed a holistic approach, consisting of monitoring and cultivating relationships with the living and the dead. By contrast, walimu asserted a more individualistic notion of personhood, one that eschewed both rituals to the ancestors and attendance by the entire family during divination and healing.11



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Given this individualistic notion of personhood, walimu’s magic was often regarded as better suited to urban life, especially among men who were more involved in the market economy. Walimu were popular, for example, because of a form of magic called elavilavi (Mak. rascal, secret business), which consisted of magically stealing and accumulating money. The popularity of Nampula’s walimu was experienced as a threat in Ansha’s mosque. Ansha sometimes refused to give divinations and treatments to people whom she suspected of being involved with patiri or who were simply from the coast. She advised these patients to go to a healer who was able to “write and read” in order to expel patiri from their bodies. Coastal medicine was identified as the cause of many disorders and misfortunes in her mosque. According to Ansha, the practice of writing was harmful because it entailed negligence of traditional treatments, especially for infants and children who were punished with illness and disability by their ancestors if their parents failed to perform these rituals.12 However, walimu and their magic also stirred the imagination of female healers like Ansha, who were always curious about what was going on outside their huts. Indeed, one way of mastering the power of these walimu was to become “like them,” to harness their power through mimesis (Taussig 1993; Stoller 1995, 1997). It is early afternoon in December 2009. When I enter Ansha’s compound through the fence, Tiago is listening to the news on Rádio Moçambique. He sees me arriving and stands up, gently reproaching me: “You are late; there has been so much work this morning. Go inside; she is still working.” I accelerate my pace, anxiously remove my shoes, and enter the dark mosque. Ansha pretends not to see me. She is kneeling, eyes closed, in front of a patient, a young man named Alimo. She is wearing a white tunic and an ekofiyo on her head. This is the first time that I have seen Ansha dressed like a male Muslim healer in front of a patient.13 “Salama Alaykum. Salama,” Ansha repeats a couple of times. Even her voice is different, lower and hoarser. She then takes an Islamic book, a tiny green English translation of the Qur’an. She reopens her eyes, looking directly at the patient: “This is not witchcraft. This is minepa.” Ansha puts down the book and asks Alimo, “What is the way to call your spirits in your land? Book or flour in Lichinga?”14 “Flour,” he responds. The divination reveals that Alimo’s family spirits abandoned him when he moved from Lichinga to Nampula in search of fortune. The Yao-speaking man is told by Ansha to perform a ceremony and hold a banquet (Ar. sataka) at his place to restore their protection. Ansha then gives Alimo some udhi (Kisw. incense) to hold in his hands while she prays:

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Allah, Allah. This is a sad story. He cannot get a job. When he gets a job, the following day he loses the job. These things must end. Please, my God, where spirits stand, he needs to get a job. Please, spirits, clean up his body. Mwene, Muluku, Pwiyamwene, Malaika, Majini, Nakuru [chief, God, female chief, angels, majini, Nakuru]. Rehema [luck, mercy]. Open these doors. He will give you food, he will prepare a meal.

At this point Ansha leaves the mosque and heads to the backyard to collect some herbs. Before exiting, however, she removes all the Islamic paraphernalia she is wearing. Alimo now looks light-hearted. He tells me that he has moved to Nampula with his family in search of luck, though he has not yet succeeded in getting a job. When Ansha returns, she performs incisions, making small cuts on his right hand, then rubbing black powder into the incisions. “Not on the whole body,” she explains to me, anticipating my question, “but only the right hand.” Then Ansha adds, “He is not bewitched; he just needs to get a job.” Ansha gives him a yellowish root to rub on a stone before going to his job interviews. All of this has to be accompanied, Ansha advises, by a ceremony to Alimo’s ancestors, which should take place at night. Afterward, I ask Ansha why she dressed like a mwalimu during the healing. Although I am familiar with Islamic symbols and books in her shrine, this is the first time I have seen her dressed like a male Muslim healer during a healing session, especially in front of a Muslim man. “Spirits of the coast have come. The man needs a job,” Ansha explains. “I use books whenever I cope with ‘big’ services. I open it and I start praying. I talk to the Amaka spirits. This is not divination; it is just to use this book to talk and to send the problem to God.” She then concludes, “He is a Muslim.” Ansha deployed books and Arabic-style incantations for consultations about professional issues, such as problems at work or rivalries among workmates, as well as just to obtain a better job or more money. Rarely, however, did she do so for Muslim patients in her mosque. Instead, she usually concealed her Muslim identity in front of other Muslims, especially male Muslims from the coast. She also generally lost her typical confidence when seeing Muslim patients, restraining her speech and measuring her words, manifesting a palpable sense of uneasiness. After these Muslim patients left, Ansha’s insecurity was displaced by suspicion. On one occasion, she cried, “Do they want to put droga here? This is por-



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caria [Port. mess, dirtiness].” On another occasion, she admitted that “it is too dangerous to deal with these people.” In Alimo’s case, however, Ansha freely displayed her Muslim identity, for although Alimo was a Muslim, he was a different kind of Muslim—a “Muslim of the interior.” Islam in northern Mozambique was divided along not only doctrinal but also ethnic and regional lines—between, for example, “Muslims of the coast” and “Muslims of the interior.” In the eyes of coastal Muslims, Muslims coming from the inland—both Yao and Makhuwa Muslims—were inferior, not only because they were relatively new to Islam but also because they mixed Islam and Makhuwa traditions and were therefore accused of practicing “syncretized [Port. misturado] Islam.”15 In the eyes of Ansha, however, Muslims from the interior retained the value of tradition just like her. After Alimo leaves, Ansha and I remain in her hut to rest and escape the heat. I am almost asleep when Ansha returns to Alimo’s healing session. “And I am a Maka,” she insists.

11 • MUSLIMS OF THE SPIRITS AND MUSLIMS OF THE MOSQUE

“The chief of the Ahl al-Sunna mosque has passed away,” says Ana, lowering her voice. It is a torrid morning in November  2013. Ansha’s niece is standing on the mosque’s threshold, clothed in a long, olive-colored Islamic tunic that graces her soft figure. Her head is covered with a white, silk scarf that bestows on her a maturity beyond her years. Ana is providing details about the death of the shehe, whose house is adjacent to hers.1 Ever since the early hours of the morning, dozens of men and women have arrived from all over the city, as well as other villages and towns, to pay tribute to the chefe of the mosque.2 “Listen; this is droga,” interrupts Ansha. “The former husband of his wife bewitched him out of jealously,” she continues, as if delivering the outcome of an unrequested divination. As we talk, a young woman suddenly appears in the compound. She is asking for divination. “The mosque is closed today,” Ansha snaps. “I cannot sing today because people are crying.” The young woman lives on the other side of the city and is unaware of the funeral. She nods, then leaves without uttering a word. “My minepa [Mak. ancestors] are striking today; they are working with the man who is not a munepa [Mak. ancestral spirit] yet,” Ansha says. By means of funerary practices and taboos during the mourning period, the shadow of a person (Mak. eruku) transforms itself into an ancestral spirit. No one is working today. The music from the kiosks is not playing. Not even the children are playing in their yards. The sense of solidarity and commonality that death has established, however, is only apparent. The funeral will soon unearth underlying competition and strife.3 Ana begins to tell me they will bury the shehe’s body today, the same day of his death. 86



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“Sukutis não demoram [waste time]!” Ansha immediately interrupts. Ahl al-Sunna are known for the silence of their funerals and the brevity of their mourning.4 Their rituals last for only three days instead of the forty days of the Sufis.5 “This is sad,” Ansha continues, her tone now changing from defiance to compassionate. “The man is leaving alone without his family. Who will give him orapa [traditional bath]? Who will bury him?”6 She then answers her own questions: “Those people of the mosque! Instead of the family.” “Daria, these Sukutis are doing a lot of shit in this bairro. They did not give [ritual] baths to children, they spit on sacred flour for divination, and they die without family,” Ansha fumes, increasingly belligerent. It is already noon. The silence is deep. A sudden gentle breeze stirs the heat. Ana is eager to return to her compound. As she walks away, Ansha shouts out, “We will come later.” Ana briefly stops, nodding toward the mosque. “Ah, yes.” Then she hitches up her tunic and speeds way. One hour later, Mia, the youngest sister of Ana’s husband, appears in the yard, gasping for air, wiping sweat from her forehead. She has raced through the bairro to reach Ansha’s mosque. “Ana!” she shrieks. “What’s going on?” asks Ansha, trying to read Mia’s eyes. “Majini!” the girl responds, unable to calm her agitation. Spirits have attacked Ana in her yard, shattering the silence of the funeral. Women at the funeral urged Mia to call Ansha, for only a healer could chase away the spirits and restore the silence. Ansha, however, has no intention of performing her healing at the funeral. “Do they want me to go there?” she mutters. “Oh, I am not! To sing majini at the funeral?” Ansha sneers and shakes her head, her eyes knit with vexation. “I am not going there. I do not want to be tied up [Port. amarrado] by spirits too. Someone must carry her here,” she stammers, looking at Mia. Seeing Ansha’s stern resolution, Mia stands up and leaves the compound at once. Ansha looks relieved. I understand Ansha’s decision to remain in her spirit mosque. I talked with many members of Ahl al-Sunna who classified spirits and their practitioners as haram (Ar. forbidden).7 But Ansha also seems pleased by what has happened at the funeral. She turns to me: “Spirits are a troubling issue, Daria. If you have majini, you just cry and cry. Some of them come with guns and shoot at you. You wake up crying: ‘I am dying, I am dying.’ ” Ansha’s images of violence and domination convey the lack of agency involved in spirit encounters. There is nothing one can do; spirits come out whenever and

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wherever they want, even in the middle of an Ahl al-Sunna funeral, irreverently reclaiming their spaces—the yard, the funeral, Alima’s body.8 Their power ultimately lies in this disruptive unpredictability. A shrill mix of hysterical weeping and nervous laughter announces the arrival of Ana. Two women are dragging her body, which continues to battle its removal from the funeral. They hastily drop her body on the floor of the mosque and promptly exit. Hesitant to approach her niece, Ansha first sizes her up from a distance. She then slowly advances, rattling her miheya. As the music grows louder, Ana’s fit begins to subside. The spirits lose their vigor as the rhythm takes over. Ana gathers herself, now sitting on the floor, legs spread, leaning on her elbows. Her tunic is soaked with sweat, sign of a prolonged battle with spirits. Ansha violently removes Ana’s hijab (Ar. veil) and begins waving her shakers around Ana’s head, the place from which spirits depart. Ana’s body continues to jerk, though less violently. Ansha yanks on Ana’s hair, wrapping a red cloth around her head, then placing incense sticks in its folds.9 “Calm, calm,” shouts Ansha now. Ana’s sobbing wanes. Her body goes limp; she collapses onto the floor. The spirits have finally departed. I remain alone with Ana. She is lying on a mat, her pious composure gone, her eyes swimming in tears. She looks like any other woman of majini—elsewhere. Life quickly returns to normal, frenzy followed by oblivion. No one seems to remember what has just occurred. There is an eagerness to move on from this disruptive experience. Or perhaps spirits are just part of the rhythm of life, coming and going and coming again. Ana removes the red cloth from her head, washes her face, straightens her clothes, and returns to her house. Ansha busies herself by washing some rope. She then returns to the mosque, drapes a capulana over her shoulders, and gestures for me to get ready to go with her to the funeral. The arrival of spirits has not altered Ansha’s plans to attend. The house of the shehe is a short walk from Ansha’s compound. Yet it feels so far away. I leave the mosque, shading my eyes from the sun, following Ansha. The compound is packed. Men are standing inside; women, outside. We do not join the crowd, for Ansha stops me before reaching the other women. We perch on the edge of the funeral, behind those who are attending. Our arrival is immediately noticed by the Muslim women, who look directly at us. Amid the barren silence of the funeral, I feel a palpable discomfort, as if attending a party to which I have not been invited. I look around for Ana and cannot find her. She must be inside the house.



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Eventually, the shehe’s body, wrapped in white sheets, is carried from the small cement house, across the yard, and out toward the cemetery at the edge of the city. Not until the body disappears from sight do sound and motion return to the crowd, as a line of dominos slowly falling. Before I know it, Ansha picks her way out of the crowd and heads for home. She moves so fast, I can barely keep up. I am not unfamiliar with her discomfort, even fear, every time she leaves the mosque. When Ansha walks in the city, she often wears a winter jacket even in the scorching heat to protect herself from witches and bandits. This time, though, it is as if Ansha is running away—from the Muslims at the funeral, as well as from me. The sun is already sinking below the horizon, shadows draping the bairro. With Ansha back in her mosque, I decide to leave. I return the next morning. Ansha and Ana are in the midst of a conversation about the funeral. Ana is recalling how her trance started: “I was cooking xima in the yard. I then saw something. I began having visions, black shadows around me. My heart was beating so strong. I had vertigo and got scared.” Ana attributes the cause of the fit to “evil” spirits. Her interpretation squares with her worldview as a “Muslim of the mosque.” She became a Muslim through her marriage with a Muslim of the coast, a Sufi, converting during the wedding when a shehe gave her water with Qur’anic pages in it to drink (Kisw. nikombe). Thereafter, Ana started attending the mosque of her husband and learning Islam from his relatives. For Ana, the arrival of spirits at a Muslim funeral was a mark of impiety, a shameful event.10 For Ansha, however, Ana’s fit was not caused by evil spirits but by the Muslims themselves. “This is a witchcraft attack,” she proclaimed. “By whom?” I ask, confused by the shift from spirits to witches. “All those shehes,” she explains. “You see, Daria, they came to the funeral to bewitch.” “When Sukutis tell healers to abandon spirit practices, I say to them: ‘This is merda [Port. shit]. You are Satan.’ If you take me away from here, to a mosque, I will die. If I don’t follow the path given by God, the donos [Port. chiefs, spirits] will kill me. So leave me here.” Ansha’s attendance of the funeral has altered her interpretation of Ana’s fit. It is now no longer a demonstration of the power of spirits but a manifestation of the witchcraft of Muslims. Witchcraft has been deployed to discredit enemies and rivals, reinscribing boundaries between insiders and outsiders, good and bad, victims and witches. But there is more. The funeral has exposed Ansha, a traditional healer, a “Muslim of spirits,” in front of the Muslim community, in front of the Ahl al-Sunna.

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Ansha exclaims, “Daria, my majini are Nacasaco [Sufi]. When I sleep, I dream Nacasaco.” Ansha has reinstated her Muslim identity by presenting herself no longer as a “Muslim of spirits” but as a Sufi, a “Muslim of the mosque.” Then she concludes, “There are no Sukutis in this compound.” And yet there were. When I returned in 2013, I discovered that three Ahl al-Sunna mosques had been constructed in the area in the last two years. On Fridays, children in white tunics attended madrasas at these mosques. Sufi families regularly complained to Ansha that their children were abandoning the Sufi orders, becoming what they called “Muslims of today.” Even the city center bore the signs of the increased popularity of Islamism with a growing number of women now wearing burkas and hijabs. Islamist ideas had infiltrated not only Ansha’s mosque, by way of her patients, but also Ansha’s family. Ansha’s plans for her fourteen-year-old nephew, Tomás, had changed, I soon discovered in 2013. Years earlier, Ansha believed that Tomás would become a healer, because “he has majini.” Now, however, he was studying in the madrasa of an Ahl al-Sunna mosque. Ansha had bought him a white tunic at an Indian shop in the city. “He will become a shehe,” she confided with pride. Tomás was not the only one who had joined Ahl al-Sunna. So had Ansha’s other nephews and her brother. Parallel changes were occurring in Ansha’s cosmology and healing. She had added new spirits, one of which was a Sukut spirit from Saudi Arabia who wore a “sheet and covered his head.” She claimed, “Now the majority of my majini come from the sea. The Makonde majini, . . . ​I let them go a long time ago. I just have Muslim majini now.” Ansha’s integration of an Islamist spirit was not one of parody or critique, as was the case in the rise of a “veiled spirit” in Niger, as described by anthropologist Adeline Masquelier (2008). Rather, it was another sign of the growing power of Islamist practices and values as they expanded into the social landscape, infiltrating even the field of spirits. The presence of these spirits affected Ansha’s life much more than her healing practice. She no longer worked on Fridays, and she set no rituals during the month of Ramadan, explaining, “I cannot do divination because the spirits from the coast are praying in the mosque.” At the same time that she herself was becoming more Muslim, however, her healing was becoming less Islamic, almost devoid of any reference to Islam and the medicine of the walimu. She no longer displayed Islamic books and objects, nor did she utter Islamic words and phrases in divination. Rather, her divination consisted only of scattering ephepa, and trances had virtually disappeared from her mosque. Her healing had grown silent, for she rarely used shakers to call



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the spirits. Her practices were altogether more ritualistically simple, lacking ostentation and noise. Ansha had become more of an herbalist than a spirit healer. The growing influence of Islamism was not unique to Ansha; it was present in the lives and practices of other healers with whom I had worked. Male healers told me they were quitting “tradition” to become solely Muslim and to build their own mosques. Women healers, who had been at the margins of Islam, were also joining the mosques, claiming that spirits were no longer sufficient for their lives. Many healers, including women, seemed to have internalized the incompatibility between spirit possession and Islam. As one female healer told me late in 2016, “One thing is religion, another is medicine. You cannot pray with batuque [Port. drum]. No! No, and you cannot heal with the Qur’an. People in Nampula are tired of drums. They want prayers.” Indeed, it was becoming rare to hear the drumming of ekoma ceremonies in the neighborhoods of Nampula.

figure 6. AMETRAMO public health poster inviting healers to promote health and

prevention of sickness. (Photo by Daria Trentini)

12 • HE ALERS AND THE GOVERNO

Ansha, Tiago, and I are all sitting in the mosque, drinking Manica beer to celebrate Frelimo’s recent electoral victory. It is a late afternoon in January 2010. Armando Guebuza’s second-term inauguration is a day away. Ansha is wearing a Frelimo capulana printed with the face of Guebuza and patterned with the symbols of the party, corn and drum (Port. maçaroca and batuque). Tiago is huddled over his small radio, attentively listening to a hoarse voice detail the preparations for the inaugural ceremony in the capital. She and Tiago have just attended a mapiko in the campo Makonde of the bairro to celebrate the Frelimo victory, where the head dancer was wearing a mask of Guebuza. Ansha is grinning ear to ear.1 While thumbing through her divination book, a green notebook where she has tucked a picture of Guebuza, she announces, “I will scatter ephepa for our pai [father].” Looking at Tiago, she exclaims, “We won,” her finger pointing to the smiling picture of the president. Ansha informs us, “I cannot stop working. Many people will not work tomorrow; the mosque will be crowded.” “No problem, we will make service for him in the mosque,” Tiago chimes in, as the radio suddenly crackles. Three months earlier, in October 2009, Guebuza’s Frelimo party resoundingly defeated its adversary, guaranteeing continued Frelimo rule. Even in a northern city like Nampula, where anti-Frelimo sentiments have run deep since independence and intensified during the sixteen-year war, Frelimo won handily. Frelimo’s landside success was the result of a capillary campaign that demonstrated its sheer force and totalizing presence in Mozambican society.2 In August and September 2009, nearly everyone at AMETRAMO was working full time to “make campaign” for Frelimo. Healers displayed red pamphlets and small flags of the party in their huts and participated in meetings and rallies, singing, shaking their miheya for Frelimo. And as the president of AMETRAMO had explained to me, healers’ contributions consisted not only of putting posters and flags in their 93

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spirit houses or behind their bikes but also of providing magic. “We are the mukhwiri [sorcerers] of the governo,” he maintained. “We make the work at night. We go to bury droga where the Frelimo hold their rallies in the day.” At night, healers performed ovirela elapo, a treatment to protect the sites of Frelimo rallies; they manufactured amulets and provided ritual baths to Frelimo candidates. Not only was this occult work accomplished in secrecy at night; it was also publicly displayed as part of the electoral dramaturgy, a visible sign that healers and the governo were working together on the same side. The 2009 campaign came to be characterized by national newspapers as a “massive return to régulos [traditional chiefs] and curandeiros” (“FRELIMO Socorre-se De Curandeiros,” Notícias, October 1, 2009). Guebuza commenced his campaign in the central city of Quelimane by performing the ancestral ritual of makeya, in which sacred flour was scattered around a tree to summon his ancestral spirits. In a speech in Maputo, he lauded healers as an integral component of “civil society.” Every day, news of healers and their magic in the service of Frelimo was included in the election update. Ansha herself recognized that “we healers did a lot of things for the party: we put ephepa; every night we cleaned the site for the meetings.” Like many other healers during the campaign, she placed the work of her mosque into the service of Frelimo, scattering ephepa every night on the Guebuza photo that she placed in her divination book and on her shrine. Still, a bitter note can be detected in Ansha’s otherwise celebratory rhetoric: “We [healers] are exploited a lot today. The governo contacts us for medicine to remove sorcery or when there is a war. After that, the governo is not considering us very much; they are not supporting us.” The election provoked critical reflection of the state, especially its relationship with healers. Ansha’s own relationship with the government was divided between her unquestioned loyalty to Frelimo—as a Makonde, veteran, and party member—and her suspicion of the governo, as a traditional healer. This ambivalence was reciprocated by the governo. As one healer declared at the end of the campaign, “The governo takes advantages of healers’ knowledge during the two months of the elections, only to insult them for the rest of the year.” Not long after the election, in April 2010, I had a conversation with a prominent member of Frelimo in Nampula. He was a highly educated man, likely in his midfifties, who, like many young Mozambicans, received a higher education in Bulgaria during the Cold War when socialist Mozambique was part of the Eastern Bloc.3 He returned to Mozambique at the end of the sixteen-year war to occupy a prominent position in the Department of Education. His vision of Mozambique was now informed by neoliberal ideologies and democratic values. He spoke of the importance of decentralization, stressing the role of religious authorities and communitarian leaders in the construction of civil society. But he qualified this role, specifying that local powers must reinforce the presence of the state in the community.



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“Can healers also be involved in the building of civil society?” I asked. The question took him aback. “The traditional doctors?” he repeated, as if he had not understood my question. “They do not hold any role in public,” he then exclaimed, clearly annoyed. “We need to eradicate them and their practices. They divide people, bring social conflicts within the community among neighbors and families. We have to limit their work and fight for the intellectual emancipation of the povo [people].” “Well, AMETRAMO can have some role in controlling the use of herbal medicine,” he continued, attempting to blunt his position. “But healers are not part of civil society,” he firmly added, distinguishing between AMETRAMO, a homogeneous state-controlled entity focused on medical herbs, and individual healers, who were regarded as unruly, subversive, and therefore dangerous. His words came with little surprise. The more I talked to people in the government and healers with roles at AMETRAMO, the more I realized the effort to marginalize healers had not ended with socialism, not even with the creation of AMETRAMO in 1992. Rather, it continued to be ingrained in the minds of Frelimo politicians and civil servants. The association began from the proposal of an American medical anthropologist, Edward Green, and was funded by the European Union to legitimize healers, authorize associations, and initiate collaboration with the national health system (West 2005, 203; 2006, 22–23; see also Meneses 2000). Although the Mozambican government supported the project, it soon took direct control of it, reconfiguring its scope beyond the medical sphere to control healers (Meneses 2000, 24). Over time, AMETRAMO’s main task became monitoring and limiting the work of Mozambican traditional healers rather than promoting medical collaboration between them and the national health system (Bertelsen 2016b, 162). The goal of weakening, even “eradicating,” healers therefore endured, though it came to be pursued indirectly, through bureaucratic and educational regulatory agencies, ultimately by making healers agents of public health (Bertelsen 2016b, 177–180). Even as Guebuza’s stance toward healers was continuously praised in the dramaturgy of the election, his two mandates (2005–2015) effeced a clear return to state centralization in each sector of society, from culture to health.4 In 2010, the Institute of Traditional Medicine (Instituto de Medicina Tradicional) was established within the provincial Department of Health, with official tasks of promoting access to traditional medicine, making the practices of traditional medicine safe, and promoting primary health through traditional healers (Ministério da Saúde 2013, 24). During my return in 2013, I wanted to learn more about the policies implemented by the institute. In November, I headed to the Department of Health, where the institute’s office was located, directly in front of Nampula’s central hospital.

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The president was an energetic and charismatic nurse who spent most of her time traveling to the rural districts to train healers in biomedicine. She was confident about the results of her work, though she admitted there was still “a lot to do” not only in the remote areas of the countryside but also in the city. She rattled off some statistics: in Nampula there were about 5,625 practitioners of traditional medicine, only 3,000 of whom were registered with the Provincial Department of Health. The goal of the institute was to make every healer legible and therefore subject to state control: “In the past, healers worked hidden. Now they are not allowed to do so. Women are those who are more problematic. They cannot stay hidden and behind; they must be public. They must change their ways of working. We need to know whether they are putting at risk the health of the people.” Healers were regularly given documents on which they were compelled to provide personal details, information about the illnesses they claimed to heal, and the healers who trained them. Registration aimed not only to monitor healers but also to collect information in order to reconfigure traditional medicine. The president stressed the importance of education and training “to change the mentality of healers,” especially through palestra, a nine-day seminar of training in primary health. Topics included male and female sexual reproduction; HIV symptoms, transmission, and testing; the use of condoms; the disuse of razor blades; tuberculosis; chronic illness; human rights; and domestic violence. During this training, healers were instructed about the illnesses they were not allowed to heal (e.g., malaria, cholera, and HIV), as well as the rules to follow in their huts, which included prohibitions against domestic visits, hospitalizing patients, and revealing the names of witches during divination. The ultimate aim of this educational program was to make healers part of the public health system, one key practice of which was transferência, “referring” patients to the hospital. As the president of the Department of Health intoned, “I always tell my healers: ‘Send the people to the hospital.’ ” When healers initiated these transfers, they received incentives in return, such as bikes, radios, bags, uniforms, and shirts. In the reconfiguration of traditional medicine within a biomedical framework, healers’ knowledge was inevitably marginalized.5 As the president of the institute said, “There is no evidence of the efficacy of healers’ medical herbs. There is no proof that healers can cure malaria. Do some claim that they can heal AIDS? They should go to a laboratory and test their herbs!” Not only was healers’ knowledge considered ineffective because “it lacked scientific evidence”; it was also potentially harmful. Intoxicação (intoxication) was a key concept in the process of reconfiguring traditional medicine (Ministério da Saúde 2013, 35). The president provided several examples of healers who had been accused of administering herbs and dosages that could jeopardize the health of their patients.



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AMETRAMO, even individual healers, became part of the state’s apparatus of legibility and control (Scott 1998). Healers were subjected to surveillance by other healers, patients, and AMETRAMO, all of whom reported violations to the public health and state authorities of the bairro. However, as the nurse admitted, the chief weakness in the system was a continued lack of legislation in Mozambique: “They are discussing one law that authorizes the arrest of healers when they are responsible for the worsening of a patient’s conditions. Healers can kill, but so far there is no legislation for it. So far it is the AMETRAMO that is in charge of regulating everything.”6 On one of our first days of working together, Ansha presented herself as “a healer of the governo,” further specifying, “I am member of AMETRAMO. I received ‘papers’ and attended palestras.” AMETRAMO, which Ansha identified with the governo, was as much a part of her spirit narrative as her illness, healing, and training: “I was sick; I went to the bush. When I came back, I got documents and began my job. They [AMETRAMO] came here; then I went to the hospital to take courses and started working.” Ansha retained a pile of yellowed, faded, typewritten documents in a worn, leather suitcase. These included her AMETRAMO membership document, the receipts of her annual fees, and her diploma of training at the Provincial Department of Public Health. Each document contained the Mozambican state seal and the words “Republic of Mozambique” on the top. Each document also included a passport-style photograph, along with Ansha’s name and surname, date of birth, and level of education. I could barely recognize Ansha in this black-and-white photo, which was likely from the early 2000s. Her name was listed as Rosa Bulha, her birth name. The presence of the state was also perceptible in some of the norms that regulated the work in the mosque. She urged patients to come with new razor blades for vaccinations against sorcery. She regularly informed the authorities of the bairros about her ceremonies of majini. The outcomes of her divination were often vague, avoiding the revelation of the names of perpetrators, instead using generalities like “family” or “neighbors” that left it to the patient to figure out who exactly the culprit was. Ansha was also wary of accepting patients to her mosque. She sometimes refused to admit seriously ill patients or clients she did not trust in order to avoid problems with AMETRAMO or the local authorities of the bairros. She knew that one errant divination or dosage could spell ruin for her practice. Nevertheless, the fact that there still was no formal legislation over traditional healers offered Ansha and other healers a degree of latitude.7 When I worked with Ansha, she no longer attended training at the Saúde and rarely participated in meetings at AMETRAMO. She viewed work at the association as

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a waste of time: “To do what? To sit there and to do nothing while my mesquita is full of patients?” She accused AMETRAMO of being corrupt and ineffective (“not doing anything for healers”). Healers there were lazy (“they stay all the time seated”). Tiago sometimes scolded her for this: “Do not say these things. It is better not to provoke them.” As a Makonde, veteran, and militant Frelimo, Ansha had little need to attend the association as a way of performing proximity to Frelimo and the state, as many Makhuwa healers did.8 Nevertheless, Ansha was aware that to be a successful healer in Nampula, one had to have one foot in the state, the other foot out of it. She therefore explained her AMETRAMO membership pragmatically—“not to have problems with my patients.” She delegated to Tiago the task of cultivating good relations with other healers: “He is a Makhuwa, they understand each other better.” She also relied on her assistants, Irene and Verónica, to gain information from and about AMETRAMO. At the same time, however, distance from AMETRAMO and the Saúde was strategic for Ansha’s healing work and reputation with patients. Healers who spent most of their time at AMETRAMO were of suspect stature, regarded as “charlatans,” greedy people who “just want to eat.” Ansha knew that the majority of her patients sought healers who were not working at the Saúde or involved in AMETRAMO, healers who provided cures that were an alternative to the biomedicine that failed to cure their ailments, healers who would not “refer” them to the hospital. These healers were regarded as “true” healers, for they did not comingle with the medicine of the government. “Healers working with the Saúde?” Ansha exclaimed with astonishment when I asked her why she did not take part in projects at the hospitals. “Those healers are forgetting their work. Spirits are punishing them; spirits do not send patients because they are not doing their work any longer.”9

13 • HE ALERS AND NURSES

“Some of us are now called on to work in the hospital,” Ansha said in 2013 on one of my first days back after my doctoral fieldwork. She was eager to fill me in about what had happened during my two-year absence. With some pride, Ansha was referring to her two assistants and friends, Irene and Verónica, who over the last year had started participating in public health programs in the hospital and health centers. They were now part of a group of healers who had become involved in cogestão (Port. co-management), which integrated healers into public health programs as a response to labor shortages in the health care sector.1 Whereas Ansha never joined these projects, Irene and Verónica now spent more time in the hospital than in their spirit huts. Like Ansha, Irene and Verónica were Makonde veterans. Their paths toward healing resembled that of their master. Irene was the oldest of the two, though younger than Ansha. She was a robust woman with a rounded face who spoke in a soft, deep voice. Irene was the daughter of veterans. After the war against the Portuguese, she was educated in Frelimo schools across the country, after which she received a good position in an agricultural cooperative in the Nampula province that produced cashew nuts. When the sixteen-year war started, her husband was brutally murdered by Renamo soldiers and the cooperative was set on fire. Irene fled to Nampula, where she soon fell sick to majini. Verónica, the youngest, began suffering from majini after an incorrect diagnosis of AIDS. Ansha healed, danced majini for, and trained the two women together. Over time, however, Irene and Verónica branched off on healing paths different from their teacher’s. Whereas the success of Ansha’s healing rested with her medicine and knowledge of roots and herbs, Irene’s and Verónica’s healing careers relied more on political networks and affiliations—Frelimo, AMETRAMO, and now the Department of Health. Irene believed this work at the Saúde could boost her status at AMETRAMO and reinforce her position within Frelimo. Her political ambitions were rewarded in 2009 when she was elected president of Nampula’s AMETRAMO. It did not last long, however, as Irene was soon forced to resign. As a woman and a Makonde “foreigner,” she was not recognized and supported 99

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by local healers, the majority male and Makhuwa. Afterward, Irene continued to scheme about how to regain a position within AMETRAMO. Acquiring a position within the Saúde was generally viewed as a means to power, prestige, and some economic stability. Many Mozambicans harbored a desire to work in public health as nurses. Even healers looked up to nurses, often borrowing the clothing and implements of hospital medicine to augment their clientele. The figure of the nurse and the power associated with it had been ingrained in historical consciousness since colonial times. During the Portuguese occupation, studying as a nurse was one way to become “assimilated” (Port. assimilado) and enjoy the privileges offered by the colonial administration. The first president of Mozambique, Samora Machel, who was himself a nurse, viewed health care and medical staff as principal instruments of liberation and transformation for the country. During the anti-colonial war, nurses came to be viewed as soldiers and agents of change, hospitals, as a “linha de frente” (military front) where the revolution was carried out (Machel 1974, 45). This idea of nurses as vectors of change endures today. Nurses I talked to explained their role in the hospitals and the community in terms of “transforming the local mentality of the people” rather than simply offering medical care. Hospitals continue to be places where people are instructed about not only hygiene, health, and illness but also the efficacy of “conventional” medicine vis-à-vis the dangers of traditional medicine.2 In addition to the political gain and social prestige that a job in public health could provide, some healers chose a career in the Saúde in hope of a new healing future that would offer better economic security. The increasing precariousness of careers in traditional healing was never as clear to me as when Irene took me for a walk in a bairro on the western side of the city in 2013. The number of migrant healers who had recently settled in the bairros was staggering. Migrants from other regions of Mozambique as well as from other African countries had flooded the city over the last few years, attracted by Nampula’s economic boom due to the oil and mineral discoveries. In order to get by, some migrants started working as healers, combining their own medical traditions with better-known ones, especially as they came to be possessed by local majini. Irene lamented that these hybridized forms of healing practices were increasingly attractive to clients, especially since they offered better means of dealing with economic uncertainty. Their success, however, ate into the profits and clientele of many local healers, who were forced to explore other occupational opportunities. Some stopped their practice altogether, returning to work on their machambas; others, like Irene and Verónica, harnessed the opportunity offered by the Saúde to reinvent their medical career. Programs to integrate traditional healers into national health care in Africa were launched by the World Health Organization in the 1970s and made explicit in the Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978. The WHO increasingly encouraged nation-



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states to harness the contribution of healers in increasing access to health care, while also regulating their practice to promote safety, quality, and evidence of effectiveness (WHO 2013). Collaborative family birth planning and HIV/AIDS programs involving traditional healers were undertaken by national governments and nongovernmental organizations in a number of sub-Saharan African countries.3 In Mozambique, discussions about the deployment of healers began in earnest after the sixteen-year war, with healers viewed as a low-cost resource for repairing the health system. After independence, Mozambique established a primary health care system consisting of community health workers, health posts and centers, rural hospitals, and larger provincial hospitals. Mozambique was soon hailed by the World Health Organization as a model for other developing countries (Hanlon 1984; West 2005; Pfeiffer and Chapman 2010, 2019; McKay 2018). All these efforts, however, were negated by the outbreak of the war. Hundreds of health centers were destroyed and many health workers were killed by Renamo, whose chief military strategy was the destruction of all symbols of state, from socialist villages to hospitals and schools. Moreover, Renamo did not offer any supplementary health assistance for the areas it controlled (Pfeiffer 2003, 728). With the end of the conflict, the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs implemented a new system of public health that was heavily dependent on foreign organization and aid (Pfeiffer 2003; Pfeiffer and Chapman 2010; McKay 2018). In this context, healers came to be viewed as a resource for addressing the shortage of medical staff.4 The integration of healers in public health, however, was limited in scope and ineffective in results.5 Malcontent began to rise among those healers serving the hospitals of Nampula. Many healers left, not only because they received no reward for their time but also in suspicion of the real intent of these projects. Years later, in 2016, Irene indicated that her own enthusiasm for such projects had dissipated, complaining that healers working in the hospitals had very little to do and were suffering a crisis of identity. They were deemed neither nurses nor healers but rather simple voluntários (Port. volunteers) to carry out nonmedical tasks such as “to welcome new patients, prepare beds for new patients, and check the distribution of pharmaceuticals.”6 In exchange for these services, they were given bicycles, radios, and white uniforms (although they were not allowed to wear the uniforms in the hospitals). Healers also often faced belittlement and mistrust from the medical staff. In 2009 a doctor openly dismissed the role of healers in public health on national television: “I am not happy about this. It would be unpleasant to know that there is an office of AMETRAMO in my hospital.” Doctors and nurses found the presence of healers in the hospitals inappropriate,7 since the use of traditional medicine in hospitals was strongly prohibited. Nurses searched patients and their relatives to ensure that they did not bring any traditional medicine into the hospitals.

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Irene and Verónica were planning to quit their work in the hospital. Irene explained that healers were not allowed to bring any of their expertise; they therefore wondered what their role was in these projects. There, we healers are sentados [Port. seated] doing nothing. The truth is that there is no collaboration like the Saúde says. But in reality, what is going on is the repression of healers. Healers are reduced to mediators between the people and the hospital. We are forced to refer people to the hospital, to recognize the symptoms of disease, to stay all the time in the hospital. But the agreement was also the opposite—the hospital sending back patients to us if the hospital does not work out. But this does not occur, and when I asked the Saúde, I was not answered. We are not allowed to heal any disease. . . . ​It is an international problem; we must depend on medicine coming from outside.

The president of the Institute of Traditional Medicine rejected complaints such as Irene’s, instead characterizing the system as one of mutual collaboration and assuring that medical doctors would soon be referring their patients to healers: “We are working toward this. We are setting programs to instruct doctors and nurses to say that the disease is spiritual. The doctor can then consult with the family and send the patient to traditional healers.” However, when I asked how the government intended to do this, asking, for example, whether they would offer courses in which healers could teach medical staff about traditional medicine, the nurse admitted, “We do not know yet. We are working on it.” The opacity of these initiatives and the lack of relevant legislation nevertheless opened up a space for informal cooperation between healers and hospital staff. Outside institutional channels, healers and nurses actively interacted with one another—not in government hospitals but in healers’ huts. Although some nurses belittled healers and their medicine in the hospitals, Ansha’s patients reported that hospital staff often suggested that they seek out healers when hospital medicine did not work. In such cases, nurses and even doctors diagnosed patients as suffering from “traditional illnesses.” One of Ansha’s clients, who underwent treatment at the central hospital of Nampula, told Ansha that his doctor urged him to find a traditional healer because his “disease is not of here.” He was therefore directed to search out healers “because this was a question of spirits.” Diagnosing a patient’s illness as a “traditional one” was, on the one hand, a way by which medical doctors likely concealed the shortcomings of hospital medicine, the shortage of pharmaceuticals, and the lack of specialized medical staff. On the other hand, however, some nurses trusted traditional medicine, resorting to it themselves in cases of personal illness and misfortune.



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One example was a regular patient of Ansha, a nurse named Lúcia whom I first met when she showed up at Ansha’s mosque with two sick members of her family. She knew Ansha well, for Ansha had helped her conceive her two children. One of these sick family members was Lúcia’s maternal aunt, who had been diagnosed at the hospital with ovarian cancer but could not be treated because there was no surgeon there. Ansha’s divination revealed that “this was not a ‘God illness,’ ” which was how Ansha generally named biomedical illnesses that were not caused by “external forces” such as spirits or witches.8 Rather, the woman was under the attack of witchcraft. “Hospital does not heal; it is a thing that has been made ‘outside,’ and if she goes to the hospital, she will die,” Ansha told the nurse. For Ansha, the hospital’s lack of doctors was a sign that spirits “did not want the woman to be cured at the hospital.” Lúcia reinforced Ansha’s diagnosis by offering further details of her aunt’s illness: “She is not sleeping, she is crying, her navel is so hot,” she said, revealing details that were significant in traditional medicine. “This is why I decided to ask for divination,” she concluded. They then turned to Lúcia’s other sick family member, her son, about whom Lúcia asked, “Is this also witchcraft?” Ansha, however, responded, “This is just a ‘God illness.’ ” Lúcia therefore planned to make arrangements for her son to be treated at the hospital. But she also scheduled a ritual bath for him the following weekend as a form of protection. I was struck by the ease with which Ansha and Lúcia together navigated the categories of traditional medicine and biomedicine in the process of making meaning of the illnesses of the two patients. Just as nurses might encourage their patients to visit healers, Ansha’s interactions with hospital medicine occurred daily in her mosque as she deployed biomedical terms in defining her patients’ ailments (e.g., malaria, leprosy, tuberculosis) and advised them to avail themselves of hospital medicine. For some of these patients, Ansha performed rituals and manufactured amulets so they might fare well at the hospital, have successful surgeries, or simply cope with what was often a lengthy wait for hospital treatment. Such interactions were, however, not limited to certain patients. Ansha’s mosque also became a sort of private clinic on some days, offering her patients easier and faster access to biomedical care. João was a regular presence in Ansha’s spirit mosque, not just as a patient but also as a “collaborator” (in Ansha’s words). He was a tall Makonde man, likely in his early thirties. The first time I met him in the mosque, I guessed he worked in the Saúde because he paid for Ansha’s services—in this case an amulet to defend him from witchcraft at his job—with bottles of syrup to treat respiratory infection. Another day, he came with a mosquito net in exchange for a ritual bath “to fortify his body” against ambitious colleagues.

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João moved from Cabo Delgado to Nampula, where he began working as a nurse in one of the city’s health centers. Thanks to Ansha’s magic, his position in the Saúde improved over time. This, however, made him an object of envy and therefore a target of witchcraft from his colleagues. Before long, João began attending Ansha’s mosque not only as a patient but also as a nurse. Ansha called for his help when one of her family members was sick. João arrived with a leather bag full of pharmaceuticals and vitamins. Ansha then compensated him with new ritual baths and amulets. Every now and again, Ansha and João even worked together, providing patients with two different medical cultures at one and the same time. João offered paid consultations to Ansha’s patients and provided them with medicine that was difficult to find in the city pharmacies. When Ansha hospitalized patients with serious illnesses, João periodically assisted by giving Ansha’s patients vitamin injections. João valued his work in the mosque. It was an opportunity to supplement his low state salary, he explained to me.9 For Ansha, having a nurse who practiced biomedicine in her mosque not only enhanced her prestige but also provided her clients the opportunity to take advantage of two different medicines. João also served as a source of innovation for Ansha’s healing.10 Ansha used the pharmaceutical boxes and bottles that João gave her for her medical plants. She spoke of her divinations as “tests” and “medical appointments” (Port. consultas médicas). And she sometimes called her spirit mosque a hospital—for example, when patients complained about having to wait a long time to see her. She even occasionally dressed in her uniform—a white skirt and a shirt with the symbols of AMETRAMO—making it hard to tell whether she was a traditional healer or a nurse.

14 • KNOWING AND NOT-KNOWING

“I want to know what is happening in my body,” says Jacinta. Her pleading soon turns to insistence: “I want to know; do I have SIDA [AIDS]?”1 Silence falls on the mosque. Even Ansha is apparently uncertain about how to respond to this question. Jacinta is a woman in her midtwenties, wearing a blue shirt that graces her slim figure, a violet capulana around her legs, a veil on her head, and colorful bracelets on her wrists that she fiddles with continuously. It is late in the day. Ansha was about to tidy up her mosque, then close it for the day, when Jacinta arrived with her sister. Their choice of consulting a healer was impulsive. Instead of going home after the visit to the hospital, they took a chapa (Moz. collective transport van) to the other side of the city to visit a healer they had never visited before, one who lived far away from their home, neighbors, and kin. Ansha unpacks and lights some incense. Ringlets of smoke fill the air, spiraling off the ends of the sticks, as she waves them around. Ansha then closes her eyes. These are majini. These spirits are bringing you makhurumela. She has dirty sangue sujo [Port. dirty blood].

Makhurumela is an illness similar to AIDS; both are transmitted sexually. Makhurumela is associated with impurity, specifically with “dirty blood” exchanged between sexual partners, generally with the man as the agent of infection.2 Ansha’s divination does not bring relief to the sisters. When makhurumela is named, Jacinta’s sister instead grows more anxious, interrogating Ansha: “Does she have SIDA?” “The spirits are defending her from feitiço [Port. witchcraft]. This is why she is so slim. They are eating up her whole body,” Ansha responds, adding new details that further evade the question. She promptly moves on to her prescription: an 105

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herbal drink and a ritual bath to remove the dirtiness from Jacinta’s womb, and a cord for Jacinta to wear around her waist to defend her body from further attacks. The sister puts ten meticais on the shrine on top of the flour, and they leave. A glance passes between them. Checking to see that the two women have left the compound, Ansha turns to me, “At the hospital, they said she has SIDA, but this is not.” She continues, “That is a big problem, Daria. People with that illness [Port. aquela doença] die.” This was the first time I had heard AIDS come up at a healing session at Ansha’s. I was struck by this omission, given that AIDS was then (and continues to be) the leading cause of death in Mozambique.3 Not only does Mozambique have one of the highest rates of infection; AIDS was also ever present in public discourse, with prominent campaigns against it routinely led by the governmental and nongovernmental organizations.4 How many of Ansha’s patients who arrived with vague diagnoses might have had AIDS? Had women who presented typical symptoms like loss of weight and cramps been diagnosed by the hospital as HIV positive? Had some of the patients who received treatment to be released by the shadow of their kin in fact lost their relatives to AIDS? Silence and not knowing are sometimes preferred to knowing, especially when it comes to what is perceived as a fatal illness (Whyte 1997, 214). AIDS continues to carry social stigma, as one young patient, Graça, revealed during a divination in January 2010.5 An orphan since childhood, the life of this now fifteen-year-old girl was not going well. Graça was failing at school because terrible dreams kept her from sleeping. Just years ago, her grandmother disclosed that both of her parents had died of AIDS: “My family was scared to talk about SIDA,” she revealed to me during the session. Ansha diagnosed the source of misfortune as the shadows of her parents, which haunted her. “They do not want to leave their child,” Ansha said, waving a candle around the girl’s body while commanding the spirits to leave their daughter in peace. This regime of silence and denial was furthered by healers, who translated AIDS into local illnesses during divinations—such as makhurumela, witchcraft, or ehiri (Mak. urinary tract)—or denied it altogether. Ansha refused to name AIDS during her healing sessions, instead employing euphemisms like “that disease” or “the disease” (Port. a doença). These expressions underscored the exceptionality of AIDS, an illness that not only was regarded as a death sentence but also confounded healers’ explanatory idioms since it pointed to individual responsibility instead of external agents (Whyte 1997, 215). After Jacinta’s visit, I ask Ansha questions. “But there is nothing to know,” answers Ansha.



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“Daria, I don’t know anything about it; I do not want to heal it. Those healers who say they can heal SIDA, they are lying.” She then punctuates her denial in a way that terminates our discussion: “I know nothing about that illness, and I don’t want to.” Reluctance to deal with “that disease” is partially attributable to the fact that many healers lacked comprehensive knowledge about it. Research has documented healers’ scant information about AIDS in Mozambique, even among those who received training in public health. During the outbreak of the illness in the 1990s, the medical anthropologist Edward Green (Green, Jurg, and Dgedge 1993, 269) reported that the majority of healers confused AIDS with local interpretations of sexually transmitted diseases. More recently, research in the northern region of Zambezia revealed that lack of knowledge is also the result of the insufficient training healers receive at public health seminars (Audet, Blevins, et al. 2012, 1138). Those who attended workshops remained perplexed about the illness, likely due to the brevity of the workshops, which were one- or two-day seminars in which healers were given only very basic information (Audet, Blevins, et al. 2012). Access to information and training was more available to healers in cities than in remote rural areas. However, healers who participated in public health seminars in the city of Nampula continued to be a slim minority—about two hundred out of over five thousand.6 While healers evinced understanding that AIDS is sexually transmitted, many did not relate it to blood transfusion, therefore failing to understand how their own practices might cause it (Audet, Blevins, et al. 2012, 1135). Furthermore, those healers who did participate in training lamented that they learned more about the rules of not treating AIDS than about AIDS itself. As one healer explained, “We are not allowed even to talk about it. We are not authorized to heal SIDA.” Other healers simply refused to attend these seminars as a form of protest against the marginalization and mistreatment of healers. As one healer told me, every time healers went to the Saúde, they felt “belittled and denigrated by nurses.” Unlike the governments in neighboring countries,7 the Mozambican Health Ministry failed to include healers in active campaigns against AIDS and to integrate healers into the system for HIV screening and referral (Audet, Blevins, et al. 2012), in spite of the willingness of healers to participate (Sundararajan et al. 2019; see also Green, Jurg, and Dgedge 1993). Moreover, AIDS was deployed by the governments as one more tool to police healers. Healers were often blamed for promoting dangerous ideas about sexuality, discouraging people from accessing HIV care and treatment in state-run medical clinics, treating HIV patients through traditional means, and performing medical treatments with unsterilized razor blades.

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Suspicion of healers was the clear undertone of one conversation that I had with a nurse who worked at the Institute of Traditional Medicine: “Do healers claim they can heal SIDA? They have to bring tests . . . ​[laugh]. Healers can be punished. It is the AMETRAMO that intervenes. Healers can be expelled, going to tribunals. But here in Nampula it hasn’t occurred yet, which means that we work very well to prevent dangerous situations. Healers are not allowed to heal this disease, because there is no scientific proof that their herbs and methods work. Our goal is to limit the actions of healers. They can heal only the spiritual ones; they cannot experiment.” This view of healers was reproduced by AMETRAMO itself. In a conversation, the president of the association highlighted that preventing healers from even naming AIDS was paramount: “We [the association] do not know what is SIDA, and nobody of my association knows what SIDA is. The people who say they can heal SIDA are not ours. I always take away the documents of these healers. In the countryside, there are five people who say that they dreamed of a root that can [heal SIDA].” If healers even named AIDS during their divinations, they could be reported, prohibited from practicing, and arrested. In this context, many healers opted therefore for not knowing.8 The claim of not knowing and the refusal to know were strategies deployed by healers to protect themselves from accusation and even arrest.9 One male healer clearly explained that although healers did know, it was better to pretend not to know. “I cannot really talk about this. The healer knows a lot of things. But there are many obstacles [Port. impedimentos]. So I say better to be quiet, not to have issues. But I know that healers who know how to heal SIDA exist; there are [such healers]. We cannot do anything, because this is the governo. We do not know anymore what we can heal and [what we] cannot. We are also scared that if we say something, we can go on trial. We are scared of the government.” Occasionally, the claim of not knowing was followed by an admission that “in reality healers do know, and they do a lot,” often attributing this knowledge to other healers, especially those outside the city who live in the bush. In a few cases, however, healers suggested that they themselves possessed secret knowledge about how to cure AIDS: “Listen, if I say I can heal SIDA, they are going to kill me. It is too dangerous. Things are not like the past. Healers now fear the government; healers can go to prison. Healers from here are able to heal SIDA; they heal it clandestinely. But they do not know. We healers cannot do anything anymore.” What one says or does not say is as important as the form and context in which it is or is not said. Although healers refused to mention AIDS as a “medical problem” during their divination and healing sessions, they discussed it openly as a “political problem” during informal conversations and through alternative discursive genres like rumors.



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“We know why the government does not want us to heal that doença,” Ansha says one morning in January 2010. “The governo, aonde [where]? We are supporting the governo. We healers are like people in prison; we accept everything because there is no other way in Mozambique today.” Ansha has just performed a divination for a sick child whom the hospital failed to cure. As usual, such failure has given rise to suspicion of biomedicine and governo. The child’s father, Hilário, a private driver, has no doubt that lurking behind the medical inefficacy of the hospital is the state’s plan “to kill us, because we are too many in Mozambique,” and “they want to eat alone.” Hilário continues: “Pregnant women are obliged to take some medications, then they are told that they cannot suckle their children because they have SIDA. It is that medication that gives SIDA. We are obliged when we go to the hospital to take ‘their’ medication.” “This story has to stop now,” Ansha declares. “I want to talk on the radio one day. We are said to wash our hands, to clean the latrine, to put condoms on, but for what? Look, diseases are not ending but instead increasing. When I was young in the bush, there were not so many diseases like today. I don’t know what is happening in Mozambique today. Where does this SIDA come from?” “This is not an illness of God!” pronounces Hilário. “It is a worm, small and white that swims inside [the condom]. If your husband uses the condom, the worm enters you and you can die. They are deceiving us with this story of the condoms,” maintains Ansha.10 Hilário agrees, “We are told to use the condoms if we want to sleep with a woman, but the truth is that the condoms have little snakes inside that bring illness. So if you use that, after three days you have SIDA. Because inside there is water. Here people do not talk; they fear.”11 Ansha and Hilário were echoing rumors that were widespread in the neighborhoods—in particular, that AIDS was caused by condoms that were given to people for free by the government. The battle between healers and the governo was also a battle over symbols and meanings. What they say “heals”—chlorine, milk powder, condoms—is actually what “poisons” and causes sickness and death.12 Such battles proliferated in highly polarized settings, triggered by a lack of information about issues of vital importance (Scott 1990; White 2000). AIDS also lent itself to rumors and conjectures because of its “exceptionality”—an illness that kills, an illness that targets the younger generation, an illness for which the government and global medical community were investing extraordinary means and resources (Dilger 2013, 2). Silenced as a medical problem during divinations and healing, AIDS was nevertheless a frequent topic of gossip and rumor. This oscillation between silence and rumor was revelatory not only of healers, who deployed rumors as a

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narrative style that eluded control due to its anonymity and ubiquity, but also of the government, which availed itself of these stories to further discredit healers. At the same time that the government worked assiduously to silence healers even from talking about AIDS, state officials disseminated these rumors as evidence of the backwardness of healers. During a conversation, one healer at AMETRAMO confided, “These boatos [Port. rumors]? It is the governo who make them, and then they accuse healers.”

15 • GOOD AND EVIL

Afonso, a Makonde police man from Cabo Delgado, returns to Ansha’s compound after almost one year. “My father, Gabriel, is severely sick,” he announces, as he enters the compound with his parents. Years ago, Ansha’s magic helped Afonso secure a job with the police in Nampula. Later he was transferred to his homeland in Cabo Delgado. Now he is back in Nampula for his father’s sickness. Gabriel’s illness started months ago with dizziness and headaches. Soon, the headaches became constant; seizures and weight loss followed. After consulting the local hospital in his city of Pemba, the family decided to travel to Nampula to visit what was regarded as the best-equipped hospital in the entire north. However, Gabriel was discharged in a week with a diagnosis that apparently left no hope of recovery. Afonso and his parents never say what the diagnosis was.1 Tiago and Ansha leave the compound and briefly discuss whether to hospitalize Gabriel in the mosque. Although Gabriel’s case looks serious, how can they send him back to the hospital if he has just been discharged? It is already late in the night when they communicate their decision to Gabriel and his family. Ansha hastily arranges a room for Gabriel in the cement house adjacent to her mosque. She waits until dawn to perform divination. In the morning, Gabriel rises from his mat. With the help of his wife, Joana, and a stick, he slowly makes his way to Ansha’s mosque. He is a tall and lanky man, likely in his mid- or late fifties, with anguish etched into his face. His body is stiff and bent; every step he takes requires great strain and produces great pain. When Gabriel finally sits down inside the mosque, he gasps deeply for breath. Ansha enters a light trance and begins asking: What is this? You have to tell me. Spirits? You have to tell me. 115

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Upon reemerging, she scatters flour, first onto her shrine, then onto Gabriel’s emaciated body, to effect communication with the spirits. Divination involves a great chain of communication: Ansha first establishes contact with the spirits of her grandfather and grandmother; they in turn establish communication with the ancestors of Gabriel, who finally reveal Gabriel’s shadow to Ansha.2 The shadow eludes control and visibility; only a healer, through the aid of her spirits, can see it.3 Ansha waves a candle around Gabriel’s body to get a clearer view of his shadow, then reveals that Gabriel has been cursed by another veteran. The outcome of the consultation does not surprise Gabriel and his family. The majority of patients, especially those who suspect they are victims of evil deeds, seek confirmation of their preexisting suspicions rather than revelation of new truths. Ansha’s divination serves as a prelude to a protracted story of rivalry and envy among neighbors and veterans. Originally from central Mozambique, Gabriel moved to Tanzania and the Makonde plateau in the 1970s to join FRELIMO and fight against the Portuguese. After the war, he married a local Makonde woman, Joana, with whom he moved to the city of Pemba. As a war veteran, he was given a generous pension from the state, and with that money, he and his wife built a new house, which stood out in the bairro due to its zinc roof. His wealth attracted envious gossip, especially from one neighbor, another veteran, who received a smaller pension and was unable to save.4 As Gabriel tells this story, he routinely pauses to catch his breath, a constant reminder of his condition. “The war is not over, but this war at night is worse because you do not know who your enemy is,” Ansha interrupts, speaking of the war of witches as a “war at night.” This war is rife among Makonde veterans due to the uneven distribution of pensions, which the state used as a means of creating divisions and conflicts among the Makonde, thereby preventing collaborative revolt against the state (Schafer 2007, 129). Those who once fought together now suspected and accused each other. Ansha decides to begin the healing immediately. Joana helps Gabriel stand up, slowly lifting him to his feet. His fragility is starkly contrasted with his wife’s strength. Ansha and I use some capulanas to cover every crack in the walls. The mosque now reeks of acrid incense and burning herbs. “We are going to fight a war, Daria,” Ansha solemnly proclaims, stroking my shoulder. The treatment goes by the Makhuwa term errukunuwelo, to send the sorcery back to the witch.5 Gabriel first bathes with the help of his wife to reinforce his body for battle. Ansha is waiting in the mosque, completely undressed, the mosque completely dark. As the healing begins, I am overtaken with dizziness; my vision fades. Circles start appearing before my eyes. I fight to recognize whether the figure in front of me is a body or its shadow, Gabriel or Ansha.



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Only after Ansha brushes up against the curtain does a blade of sun penetrate the darkness, allowing me to see what is happening inside the mosque. Ansha is passing Gabriel a sword wrapped with white and red cloths to defend himself during the healing. Gabriel kneels beside Ansha as she makes small incisions on those parts of the body that witches penetrate—neck, elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles. Her hands rub a pulverized black powder made of herbs and gunpowder into his wounds. His flowing blood turns purple. Ansha’s fingers massage the wounds to be certain that the medicine is penetrating under his skin. Gabriel is finally asked to spit three times on a leaf. He then leaves the mosque by crawling through Ansha’s legs. Ansha’s healing has performed what I had so far only heard of—what witches do, how they behave, how they harm their victims6—stripping naked, crab-walking, using black hens as weapons, and hiding under the cover of darkness. This is a world of “shadowy doubts” (Evans-Pritchard 1976, 61), where the lines between victims and perpetrators, shadows and bodies, healers and sorcerers, good and bad, and innocent and guilty are blurred and crossed, where all distinctions are erased (Geschiere 1997, 57). It is within this opacity and permeability that the power of both sorcerer and healer lies. A healer who knows how to extract sorcery knows how to bewitch.7 Defense against sorcery requires turning it back to its sender. The same medical herbs that heal can also harm. Patients who are divined as victims of witchcraft are therefore always the first to be suspected. Gabriel’s son leaves for Pemba the next day. He is relieved that his father can stay at Ansha’s “hospital,” he tells me. Ansha assures him the healing has just begun. Hope of recovery is alive and well. For the next few days, Ansha’s healing regime is intense. It consists of extracting (Mak. okumiha) the dirtiness from Gabriel’s belly with a thrice-daily purgative treatment called wàpèliwa,8 a drink made from reddish bark that Ansha has removed from tree trunks in the mountains. Ansha drinks the medicine first, then gives it to Gabriel. Nothing, however, happens, save that Gabriel begins refusing food. A refrain of “dirtiness is not coming out” begins sounding out in the compound. Gossip and rumors stir. Each gesture and action of Gabriel and Joana comes under scrutiny. Joana has bought a new mattress and begun using Nigerian skinwhitening products. It is said that she does not care about her husband and is “on vacation” in Nampula. The son does not call anymore. Gabriel does not get better. Barriers now divide Ansha’s family from Gabriel and Joana. The couple eats alone, barely speaking to the rest of the compound. Tiago urges Ansha to discharge Gabriel; the situation is becoming “too complicated.” He warns, “He cannot stay here. It is too dangerous. A patient cannot die here.” Ansha nods and waits for some time before summoning Joana to her mosque. When she arrives, Ansha sets a divination to communicate the termination of

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Gabriel’s healing and residency. “I cannot see the shadow of your husband any longer,” Ansha coldly reports. “The dirtiness is not coming out, and this is becoming too dangerous for me,” she adds. Joana remains silent, looking down. Nobody can guess what she is thinking.9 Only after she leaves Ansha’s mosque does Ansha share a different verdict in hushed voice: “Daria, I am thinking too much. This is a heavy service. The man leaves at night [to do sorcery]; he comes back injured.” Two days later it is Saturday, late morning. The air is thick and hot; the compound, quiet and still. Ansha attends to a young woman who asks for the treatment of okumiha to abort her pregnancy because she has another small child. Ansha prepares a drink with Nescafé and herbs. The woman pays fifty meticais and leaves. I am sitting in the center of the yard, lying on the mat under the mango tree, playing with Amadinho, the child hospitalized at Ansha’s. Gabriel’s wife is immersing clothes in a bin of water with detergent, then scrubbing them on a flat stone. Ansha and Gabriel are conversing, sitting on a bench under the eaves of the mosque. A sudden shriek pierces our lethargy. I am confused, trying to see where the noise has come from. I turn toward Ansha. Gabriel is struck by a violent seizure; Ansha is trying to keep him from falling onto the ground. I run toward them, followed by Joana and Ansha’s niece, Ana. Together we carry Gabriel into a dark room adjacent to the mosque, laying his body down on the bare cement. Gabriel’s seizure becomes more severe. His limbs are jerking violently, scraping the cement floor, opening up bleeding wounds over his body. His eyes roll back in his head, and his face turns white. He foams at the mouth. Ansha shouts at me: “Go buy some incense.” I run to the kiosk, returning posthaste. Gabriel’s eyes are now wide open; he is staring off into the distance. He does not blink. The only sign of life is a desperate gasping for breath coming from his mouth. Ansha goes outside. She rips some branches from the tree in front of her mosque, returning to rub the leaves on Gabriel’s body, trying anything to keep him alive. She asks me to wave incense around his head while she shouts, “You have to go away! To release this man! Here are his ancestors!” She waves an Islamic book over his body from head to feet, as if shooing flies. I look around to see Joana and Ana immobilized by fear. Only Ansha appears to have any control over the situation.



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“Please, please, go away, go away,” she shouts. She immerses the branches in water and uses them to sprinkle the water on Gabriel’s body. “Go away, bad spirits! This man is here alone, without family.” As Ansha summons Gabriel’s spirits, his body suddenly twists as if responding now to her words. Ansha gives us a reassuring look, pronouncing, “Everything is all good.” I do not remember when or how Gabriel’s fit subsided. However, I do remember the sight of him afterward—lying on the bare cement floor in a comatose state. Ansha was washing his body, spitting water on his head as she sucked it up from a bucket. Ansha and I then returned to her mosque. “You have seen it, Daria.” “Seen what?” I ask, baffled. “You have finally seen okhwiri [Mak. witchcraft]. Today we won.” She takes the picture of Armando Guebuza out of her notebook, as if clinging to any sign of victory. We inhale rapé to alleviate the tension. Ansha decides to reopen her mosque, welcoming two patients who have just arrived for divination. But no one in the mosque is able to chase away what just happened in the adjacent room. Ansha’s divination becomes an occasion to revisit it. When I return the following morning, I head straight to Gabriel’s room. He lying on his back, motionless, eyes wide open, staring at the muddy ceiling. Joana is sitting by his side, giving him juice and wiping away the sweat from his face. Ansha is in the spirit mosque, talking to some patients. “What illness was that?” I hear one patient ask. “This is not SIDA,” informs Ansha, “because the body has not changed. His body is stinking,” she says, flapping her hands. “His journey has already begun.” When I arrive the next day, Ansha is talking to Tiago in the street outside her yard. When she sees me, she approaches to explain, “Daria, he cannot stay here any longer.” Ansha and Tiago are on the street waiting for a taxi to transfer Gabriel to the hospital. They have called two men from the Makonde community. One is in the governo, a policeman. Ansha and Tiago informed them earlier that morning. Gabriel will go back to the hospital—to die, everybody thinks but fears to say. Tiago and the two Makonde men carry Gabriel’s inert body from Ansha’s compound, through the narrow streets and toward the main road where the taxi awaits. Joana follows, carrying two plastic bags containing all their clothes. The sun is disappearing in a sky full of drifting clouds. Rain begins to spit from the sky, first sweetly, then violently.

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Gabriel and Joana are now inside the car. The driver starts the engine. Ansha makes a beeline for home, trying to avoid the rain. As I struggle to keep up, she mutters, “He no longer has water in his body. I don’t have the tools to heal him.” Tiago finally catches up to us and whispers in my ear, “Daria, we cannot have problems with the ‘community police.’ ”10 With Gabriel gone, everyone is eager to return to normality. The very next day, Ansha is about to start a divination for a young couple who has arrived at the mosque. The woman is telling Ansha that she has just had a miscarriage. The conversation is suddenly interrupted by Ansha’s niece Ana. “Gabriel passed away at the hospital this morning,” she says. “Afonso is coming from Pemba to take his father’s body back home.” “The hospital is killing people,” Ansha exclaims. “How can this woman do everything alone? All the family is away, the son in Pemba.” Ansha then pauses, as if collecting her thoughts. “The man was a witch. He went through many healers, even in Tanzania. Nobody was able to save him.” “His body was heavy. He used to go out during the night. And then he came here in the morning to undergo healing. His back was burned during these night travels.” She touches her own back as if we could see Gabriel’s wounds on her body. “ ‘ Your body is heavy, you are a witch,’ I told him, pleading with him to confess,” Ansha continues, crossing and shaking her hands as a sign of imploring.11 “ ‘I want to embark on healing. I want to confess; I want to cry and no longer bewitch,’ he responded.” As she reports Gabriel’s words, she shakes her head and puts her hands on her breast as a sign of guilt. “We discussed the price of confession, fifteen thousand meticais for the ordeal.” We sit enraptured by Ansha’s tales of the night war. Ansha then suddenly stops, noticing new patients waiting outside. Turning back to the young couple to finish their consultation, she asserts, “This is majini. They do not want you to have children.” We speak of Gabriel no more.

16 • CLOSED AND OPENED

It is a cool early morning in late February 2010 when Madalena, one of Ansha’s regular clients, arrives for divination. This time Madalena is there for her younger sister, Zainab, a robust woman in her midthirties with a round, childlike face riddled with fear. Zainab is from Murrupula, a small town in the interior, where she lives a peasant life with her husband, António. Zainab has temporarily moved to Nampula to begin a series of tests and consultations at the central hospital. She has had another miscarriage, and the remaining tissues of the fetus have to be removed. But there are no doctors in Nampula to perform the procedure (dilation and curettage), Madalena says.1 While waiting for a doctor from the capital, Zainab and Madalena have decided to consult traditional medicine. They are hoping that spiritual healing can obviate the need for surgery. “I want to know what is happening into my body,” begins Zainab. Then all in one breath she blurts out, “I must undertake an operation, but I am scared of that; I don’t want to.”2 Zainab trembles while Ansha reaches out to touch her womb. Zainab’s eyes dart about, searching for somewhere to alight. Ansha lifts her shirt and fondles her flabby belly, coming to rest on her navel. “Majini bring makhurumela. If you have a test at the hospital, you won’t see anything,” says Ansha. Spirit healing sees what biomedicine cannot—the invisible self, the shadow, relations with others, whether spirits, witches, or other living people. Ansha often sees by touching, especially with women and children. She palpitates their bodies with her hands, feeling for temperature, circulation of blood, position of wombs— not only to identify the cause of illness but also, as Susan Rasmussen writes in her work among Tuareg healers, to open “new possibilities for patient and healer negotiating meanings of suffering” (2006, 87). After having scrutinized Zainab’s body, Ansha narrows her eyes and begins pouring ephepa onto the floor. “There is no child inside your belly. This belly is closed.”

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Many of Ansha’s patients were women suffering from reproductive problems or experiencing maternal complications.3 Infertility was source of deep anxiety in the mosque since fertility was a key value taught from early childhood, when girls’ bodies began being prepared for childbearing (Gerrits 1997).4 Girls were instructed by their mothers to enlarge their vaginal lips (Mak. otthuna) by means of a cream from the leaves of a plant (Mak. iphtxo). After their first menstruation, girls embarked on rituals of initiation in which they were thoroughly introduced to sexual education and practices (Arnfred 2010, 71; Bagnol 2013). After the wedding, the couple’s first sexual relation was vouchsafed by a “master” who ascertained that the wife had fulfilled her sexual duties and verified the reproductive capacity of the husband by checking the color of his sperm.5 Ansha employed the trope of “closedness” (Mak. owaliwa) to diagnose women’s reproductive complications and failures. Dirtiness and impurity (Mak. makhurumela) or the presence of spirits “plugged” (Port. tapar) women’s wombs, preventing them from conceiving. Healing, therefore, required “opening” (Mak. otthukula)—specifically to “open the door” (Mak. otthukula mkhora).6 Ansha’s treatments consisted of herbal creams, ritual baths, herbal brews, and spirit sessions in order “to open” a woman’s body. Even the term for “trance” was “becoming open” (Mak. okhunuwa); that for the administration of herbal plants so that women would fall into a trance, to become “open” in order to conceive. If majini were those who closed women’s wombs, opening was facilitated by family spirits (Mak. minepa). Healing reproductive problems therefore often began with offerings to the patient’s spirits to “open the doors.” Opening, however, required more than just the treatment of the body. Ansha’s healing aimed at opening a woman’s “heart and mind” too. Opening was therefore conceptualized by Ansha as a process of discovering and knowing (Mak. osuwela)—not only about one’s ailment but also about oneself. As Ansha explained, otthukula was “to make things opened, to be known [Port. descobertas], and no longer buried [Port. enterradas].” The search for hidden meanings was in fact common to Ansha’s patients. Women encountering reproductive problems arrived at Ansha’s because they wanted to know “what is happening in the body” or “what is occurring in life.” Even when a treatment did not work out, patients stuck around because, as one woman told me, “there is more that I need to know about my illness and my life.” Unlike the hospital, where many complained about confusing diagnoses and absent explanations, Ansha was regarded as a healer “who understands us,” “who knows how to speak well,” and “who knows what she is speaking about.” The majority of Ansha’s patients arrived with fear not only about their health problems but also about the social implications of such disturbances. Women



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were worried that if they failed to perform their reproductive roles, they would be divorced,7 abandoned for other women, mocked in their family, or even accused of being witches.8 This marked a change from the past where, in matrilineal and matrilocal societies, reproductive problems were typically blamed on husbands, who were regarded as “strangers” to the wife’s family, at least until procreation.9 Only once they had demonstrated their reproductive capacity were husbands recognized and respected. In the case of a childless marriage, the husband could be expelled from the wife’s household and replaced with another husband. With the gradual erosion of matriliny, however, blame increasingly shifted from men to women.10 But not at Ansha’s. Her divinations reinstated a matrilineal logic that exonerated women from the burden of infertility, instead reasserting male culpability, whether of husbands or male spirits.11 Divinations were occasions to fault men for engaging in extraconjugal relations that brought makhurumela to their spouses. Male majini were blamed for penetrating women’s bodies and closing their wombs so they were unable to conceive.12 In learning the cause of these ailments, women were therefore offered a sense of control over them. Whereas hospital diagnoses often left little hope for these kinds of troubles, Ansha’s divinations always concluded on a note of possibility—“spirits will leave,” “dirtiness will come out,” infertile women will conceive, spirits will give knowledge, patients will become healers. Zainab is diagnosed with spirits. “Majini. She will have to remove the dirtiness [Port. sujidade] from her womb,” pronounces Ansha. “There is no need for surgery,” she continues, dismissing the hospital’s verdict. “Majini bring makhurumela. If you have a test at the hospital, you won’t see anything. This is spirits.” Ansha names the spirit attacking Zainab: Kaphulo. In naming the spirit, Ansha not only identifies the source of Zainab’s affliction but also inscribes a story on Zainab’s body. Kaphulo is an uncommon male spirit who only attacks mature women. He harms by transforming himself into an insect that usually hides in the ground or termite mounds. He then enters the body, contaminating the blood and causing reproductive issues.13 I glimpse a timid smile cross Zainab’s face, as if she expected such an outcome. Majini often choose women whose nature resembles their own. “I also hide myself. I do not talk to anyone. I never go out. I stay at home alone” Zainab says. “You see, this woman will become a healer,” Ansha chimes, turning toward me and Madalena. Spirit diagnoses never concern the patient alone; the matrilineal family is always involved. Ansha reports, “Her sister has majini; she even danced majini and was about to start divination. The sister was bewitched, and now majini are looking for someone to become a healer.”

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Ansha’s words convey possibility. Zainab begins speaking the language of spirits, a language not only of suffering and tribulation but also of hope: “I am already dreaming,” she says. Zainab readies to leave, but first wants to assure Ansha: “I will go home to get money to embark on the ceremony.” Stories offered during divination are seized by patients, accepted or rejected, remade and repurposed, as patients go about their lives, confronting the contingencies of the world. Zainab will never become a healer. Ansha herself never fully believed such a timid woman could embark on a healing career. When Zainab returns a week later, Ansha administers a medicine to extract the impurity in her womb. Ansha selects the herbs, immersing them in boiling water, then uses branches of nifuso—an aromatic plant whose leaves are said to chase bad spirits away—to sprinkle the water on Zainab’s body. After the bath, Ansha prepares a purgative and emetic medicine made from a mixture of green herbs, a reddish root cut into small pieces, and Nescafé—the very same treatment that Ansha administers to women wanting to abort. Ansha and Zainab first drink the herbal infusion together. Zainab then spends the rest of the day in Ansha’s compound, regularly consuming the potion. She leaves at dusk. “Nothing came out,” Zainab laments when she returns days later. Her tone conveys the discouragement of someone who must continue to deal with an annoyance that should be gone by now. As she sits on the bench outside Ansha’s mosque, nervously handling a black leather bag, she thinks out loud while staring at the ground: I am tired. My child was taken away by witches. I dreamed them taking my child away. They came by planes The child is alive. Now I do not have anything in my belly. Now what can I do against these feitiçeros [Port. witches]? Kill or let them go? At night. Now I am wondering: What can you do with them? What can I do against these witches? To kill them or let them go with my child?

Images of planes and witches taking away Zainab’s child convey a sense of capitulation, the loss of control over her life. But hope is not entirely lost: “The child is alive”; “What can I do?”



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When herbs fail, Ansha turns to ritual. “Let the spirits talk,” she says, directing the outcome of healing to the spirits. “Spirits, you have to open the body of this woman.” We enter the mosque to find the previous patient still there. She wants to attend Zainab’s ritual healing. Not only is illness a shared experience; majini is also a collective therapy. Ansha does not delay; she plays her miheya to summon the spirits. Up and down, up and down, faster and faster, until the spirits arrive. Zainab’s sobbing and shouting finally announce their arrival. “Spirits open her body!” shouts Ansha. The minute twitches of Zainab’s body soon become synchronized with the music, as if neither could be without the other. Ansha then stands up and waves incense around Zainab’s body. Zainab’s convulsing intensifies, while Ansha begins speaking to the spirits, reconstructing Zainab’s story of sickness and suffering: Kaphulo, I am asking you to leave this woman. Spirits, do not stay in her heart and her bones. Please open the doors For her to stay healthy, To put an end to this disease. Majini, do not stay in her head. Listen well, listen well, because you have to listen. She already suffered. Pregnant for ten months Without having a baby. Now I ask To the chief of the majini That she can get well. Put her into a quiet place When she goes to the hospital.

The music stops; Zainab’s body drops to the cement floor like a deflated balloon from the sky. She murmurs something, but we cannot make it out. She speaks again: “I am suffering a lot. I am suffering here. I want to get better.” An expression of despair is now engraved on her face. Spirits have left; this is now Zainab speaking—the voice of one who suffers; one who expected to be healed but must instead face the “power of illness” (G. Lewis 2000, 167).

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Zainab is panting. She takes a small cloth from her bag and dries off her face. “The situation is serious,” Ansha thinks aloud, gazing with compassion at this woman who now looks like someone thrown into the world. Alone. “The body is still closed.” “Because the sister had majini but then she left them, spirits are wandering through the family; they have no peace,” Ansha declares. “The woman has a child inside her womb, but majini are preventing her from giving birth to it; they moved her womb on one side. This woman is full of majini. Her body is full. How can she go to the hospital if she does not cure these majini?” Confronting the resistance of illness, no explanation is left unturned—a healing call, miscarriage, hospital surgery. Zainab should come back, this time with her husband, so they can be treated together. Zainab nods, saying nothing. She recomposes herself, wipes away her sweat, takes her black leather bag from the floor, and walks slowly toward the entrance of the yard. “This woman has strong spirits, but she is too young,” observes Ansha, suggesting Zainab’s timidity and inexperience in dealing with spirits. A month later, Zainab is back in Nampula for treatment at the hospital. She may need to take some expensive pills. She does not know, however, how she will pay for them. She has brought fresh nuts from her machamba in Murrupula. She gives some to Ansha, who immediately begins peeling one. “I am feeling better, though Kaphulo is annoying me a lot,” Zainab reports with a meek smile, sighing. “I continue to dream of swimming in the sea with my husband.” She nods, a sign of a gentle, dissembled resignation. Swimming in the open sea conveys a resistance to closure. Zainab tastes one of her nuts. Two new patients arrive. Zainab senses it is time to leave. She walks through the compound, handling her black bag with her left hand. On her right side, walks Kaphulo.

17 • THE DE AD AND THE LIVING

Amadinho is wearing a striped shirt and faded pants, both encrusted with dust and red clay, a sign of a life spent on the ground. He is sitting on the threshold of Ansha’s mosque, keeping one eye on what is happening inside, the other on the hustle and bustle of the compound. He arrived at the mosque months ago; nobody knows how long he will stay. “This child is going to walk,” pronounces Ansha, turning her gaze toward him. She seizes Amadinho’s arms, dragging him to the back of the mosque to change his pants and give him another bath. Ansha knows when it is time; Amadinho never asks. Amadinho is an eight-year-old boy with clubfeet (Mak. orrakala).1 He was born with what was probably hydrocephalus (Mak. namurru), requiring surgery at birth. Since then, he has spent most of his life shuttled back and forth between hospitals with no sign of improvement. After his parents divorced, Amadinho’s future grew more uncertain. His father is a Muslim civil servant who decided to return to his homeland along the coast. The mother has remarried and moved into the household of her new husband. Neither visits very often. When they do, they pay little attention to their son. One morning, Amadinho’s mother arrives at the mosque with a gift—a soccer ball. We are confounded. How can Amadinho play soccer? After she leaves, Ansha puts the ball in a plastic bag and ties it to a tree so Amadinho can play without the ball getting away from him. “The family does not like him,” Tiago says. “They would like not to support him; that we take care of him.” Amadinho receives attention and affection from all of Ansha’s family, but it is with Ansha whom he bonds most deeply. He can always be found in her mosque, attending healing sessions, listening to conversations between women afflicted by spirits, observing vaccinations and ritual baths for other children. At one ekoma ritual, he astonished the whole audience by staying awake, focused on the ritual, all night long. Since then, he has been called mwàna majini— the child of majini. 127

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Amadinho sleeps in the mosque, the only member of the compound whom Ansha allows to do so. Ansha has arranged a little blue mosquito net, which hangs from the ceiling along with her spirit capulanas. Every night, Ansha covers him with capulanas and performs a little ritual during which she scatters ephepa on his forehead, pleading with her spirits to protect him until morning. This pleases Amadinho to no end. “They [spirits] come and play with him,” Ansha says, reassuring that he will be fine in the mosque alone at night. Many children in Mozambique are disabled from birth.2 Although the Mozambican constitution recognizes the rights of citizens with disabilities, most of the government’s efforts for them have failed or stalled because of insufficient resources. As a social worker at the Social Action, the welfare department for the province of Nampula, admitted during a conversation, “The major problem is the lack of resources and support to the family.” As a consequence, disabled children like Amadinho live almost invisibly, confined to households, lacking accessible transportation, educational accommodations, and care services. Families are the primary caregivers, shouldering the burden all on their own. Disabled children are often fostered by grandmothers and other elderly relatives. With the increase of nucleated households, the care of disabled children has become even more fraught. Invisibility is also due to the stigma experienced by many disabled children. Disability and the presence of physical malformation are traditionally regarded as the sign of cosmic disorder—caused by the “deceit of God” (Mak. Muluku awôka) or the anger of spirits, with broad implications like infertility, famine, and bad harvest. Children with disabilities are sometimes abandoned at the psychiatric hospital (Clínica). The social worker at the Department of Welfare indicated that a major obstacle in the care of disabled children is the children’s families: “Some disabled children are locked up, in some cases ‘chained’ up by their families at home.” 3 Few disabled children were taken to healers. Most families regarded disability as an illness that could not be healed. When families did turn to Ansha, it was either to ascertain the cause of this curse or to seek palliative assistance for it. Not only does everyone in the compound believe that Amadinho will soon walk; they are also committed to assisting in any way possible. Ansha’s nephew Mateus has fashioned a pair of homemade crutches out of sticks. Tiago has brought home a wooden walker. For days, Amadinho shuffles around the compound leaning on the walker, hooting like a train. Every day, Ansha holds Amadinho from behind while instructing him how to place his feet on the ground, one foot in front of the other—left, right, left, right. Most afternoons, Ansha also digs into the soil to bury Amadinho’s legs underground for at least an hour.



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Mobility hallmarks the Makhuwa ethos, history, and socioeconomic structure (Premawardhana 2018b). Teaching children to walk (Mak. omwetteya mwàna) is therefore a key part of child rearing. This includes the use of sympathetic magic. The feet of small children are placed in contact with symbols of motion like the tracks of vehicles or the mortars in which manioc is smashed. Ansha digs her holes again. Amadinho spends hours with his legs buried in the ground, staring at Ansha to see when she will take him out. For weeks, we wait for a sign of movement. But Amadinho remains “seated” (Port. sentado), his legs inert. Over time, Ansha’s efforts become less frequent. Hope fades. Unlike other patients, who leave after treatment, Amadinho remains in the compound, a constant reminder of his disability and failure to heal. “He is still caught,” Ansha says. “By whom?” I ask. “Minepa have not let him go.” Stories have begun to spread about why the healing has not worked. Amadinho is no longer a child of spirits, but a child taken by spirits. The premature death of children, their failure to grow or walk, their physical imperfections—all are signs that they have not yet left the world of spirits, that ancestors still “own” them.4 “Spirits wanted a ceremony for them to give the child to his parents,” Ansha laments. Only with the proper ceremony by Amadinho’s parents can Amadinho be released by spirits and join the world of the living. Amadinho’s parents, however, are nowhere to be found. “My grandmother [ancestor] is speaking a lot,” Ansha frets. “Daria, I am not sleeping because of Amadinho. I am here to reassure them [Amadinho’s spirits].” Ansha blames Amadinho’s parents for his conditions: they have forgotten not only their son but also their dead. A child’s impairment is one visible sign of “distorted relations” (Devlieger 1995, 96). As Julie Livingston (2005, 9) writes in her work on debility in Botswana, healthy bodies and healthy relationships are two sides of the same coin. The well-being of children in Nampula measures their families’ relationship with the dead. Disability, mental illness, and premature death are all attributed to the vengeance of the spirits against the parents of the child. Spirits keep or take back children to punish their descendants for negligence and forgetfulness of their past. Ansha explains that infants are the dead who have come back to check on the behavior of their family members: “Until they eat xima, children are with spirits. When they eat xima, they stop speaking with minepa. The infant is a munepa who, after death, comes to earth to visit their family. Children who die in the first

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months are taken by spirits who come to control and check on families.” For the first years of life, a child is therefore regarded as a host (Mak. muletto) who requires affection and care through ceremonies and taboos that will prevent the child from “going back” (Port. voltar para trás)—that is, from going back to the world of spirits. It is through babies and small children that ancestral spirits mostly exercise power over the living.5 “Babies are not mahala [Moz. free],” Ansha often told parents of sick small children. Children were wealth that needed to be exchanged for food and money. Exchanges occurred ritually during the first years of life. The birth of children was requested through ceremonies to maternal spirits (Mak. natiri, “vow”) in which parents formally promised the ancestors to reciprocate the birth of a child with generous libations. When the child finally arrived, spirits wanted to be thanked and paid through lavish ceremonies (Mak. sataka) in which they were offered food and money. For healthy growth, parents had to subject themselves to the power of spirits, following their rules during the first years of their child’s life. From the time the child was born up until weaning, the mother and child remained secluded inside the family home, with the child attended to only by its mother and close female kin (Lerma 1987; Trentini 2016b). Because many urban households were now nucleated and therefore lacked the support and guidance of elderly women, healers like Ansha often instructed young mothers about what food they had to avoid to prevent compromising the health of themselves and their child. Ansha taught mothers from the time of pregnancy that they had to isolate themselves from their husbands and could not prepare meals for their husbands, at least not for four months after birth. Sexual abstinence (Mak. wìnanela) had to be observed for fear that the father’s sperm could spoil the mother’s breast milk. At the end of this four-month period, a small ritual (Mak. omawkulela mwàna) needed to be performed, with the mother putting certain herbs on the bed, indicating that her period of abstinence had ended. Mother and child were then required to perform a ritual bath and imbibe a ritual drink so that the restoration of sexual relations would not jeopardize the growth of the child. “Look at Amadinho,” Ansha says. “This is what happens when you do not follow tradition. I do not know what is happening in Mozambique today.” 6 Child medicine was pivotal to Ansha’s healing practice. Not only was it a major source of her income; it was also an opportunity to inscribe on the bodies of Nampula’s youngest residents the central values of her healing. Child medicine displayed a relational rather than individualistic understanding of the person, one in which fate and the possibility of change in the world came from the external agency of maternal spirits.



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Rituals and taboos surrounding infants and children reinstated the power of ancestral spirits, thereby functioning as a site for the production of social memory.7 Not only were children bestowed with the names of their ancestors; ceremonies also memorialized the names of their spirits, the founders of their lineage, and the homeland of their ancestors. The past that mattered was always that of the mother and of her lineage. Child medicine therefore reasserted matrilineal values and rules—that the child belonged to the mother, that the role of the father was to provide for the child and pay for healing. Why were families forgetting their ancestors, causing the illness and disability of their children? One reason was attributed by Ansha to religious change. Serious illness, disability, and malformation were all blamed on the “wrong medicine”— that of Muslim walimu or Christian pastors who denied the power of ancestral spirits.8 For Ansha, socioeconomic change was also a reason. Many families, especially nucleated ones, lacked the resources to pay for rituals that were quite expensive by local standards. Others were greedy and selfish and “wanted to eat alone.” Spirits themselves had also become demanding and greedy in the city, adapting their requests to city lifestyles. Not only did they “want to eat more and more,” Ansha maintained; they also requested the most expensive food, like beef, which few families could afford in the city. Whether because of a lack of resources, greediness, or ignorance, many disabled children were destined for a life that was “stuck in the middle” of the dead and the living, the past and the present.9 Ansha has a dream. “Amadinho is taken by Mooma,” she recounts to me the following morning. Mooma is a spirit who takes his name from a mountain vine that grows as groundcover rather than vertically. He is one of a group of random spirits that Ansha calls passanoite—spirits who wander at night, often through wind (Mak. epheyo), just to harm and especially to beat (Mak. omana) children. These spirits stem from the faceless interactions of modern urban life, where danger can come from anywhere and anyone. Amadinho is given another herbal bath. A dream, a new audience, a sudden sign—all are reasons to explain an illness’s resistance to healing and change a patient’s diagnosis. It is March 2010. Many months have passed since Amadinho’s arrival. He is still in the mosque. Nobody knows for how long. Ansha tells some patients that the child “is taken by Subiana,” an evil spirit who usually attacks adults, causing paralysis. The displacement of diagnoses involving ancestral spirits by those blaming malevolent spirits bespeaks Amadinho’s fate. Both Mooma and Subiana attest to Amadinho’s existential condition—abandonment by his parents and ancestors, rendering him unprotected from evil attacks. “I am not seeing the child recovering,” Ansha thinks aloud.

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As I leave Mozambique in July 2010, I see Amadinho sitting in the center of the yard, his tiny legs splayed open. He smiles at me, then quickly looks down. As I turn away, I sense him watching me leave. Two months later, Ansha informs me on the phone that Amadinho has died. “He passed away at the hospital,” she says, without adding any more information. “This is so sad, Daria.” When I return in 2013, Ansha and I fondly yet painfully recall our memories of Amadinho in the compound. “Ah, Amadinho,” Ansha says, clearly moved. Turning to where Amadinho used to sit at the threshold of her mosque, she repeats the only words she can: “This is so sad, Daria.” Tiago later explains to me in 2016 that Amadinho had left Ansha’s mosque for his mother’s home two weeks before his death. After leaving, his health took a turn for the worse, eventually leading to his death. “Your friend knew how to care about him well.” As Tiago speaks, I can still see Amadinho’s tracks in the red clay—those of his arms, by which he dragged his body around; those of his legs, which dangled behind—leading from the mosque to the mango tree under which we all ate together.

18 • JUNIORS AND SENIORS

Abel bursts into tears at the sight of Ansha. He has arrived wrapped in a capulana on the back of his mother’s shoulders. He and his mother, Virgília, came early in the morning, anticipating the afternoon rains. Abel is four years old now. His birth was received as a blessing, his family having struggled for years to conceive. Ansha assisted with Virgília’s conception of both him and his brother. Abel grew so fat and healthy the first years of his life that everyone complimented the family over its luck. Months ago, however, he fell sick, suffering from gastrointestinal distress. He was taken to the hospital, but his condition did not improve. His belly is now swollen, his body feverish. “The child has been taken away at night. A witch [Mak. mukhwiri],” Ansha exclaims. “This is because of a neighbor’s ambition. Witches want to kill him; they take him in the night. His belly is full of sorcery.” “They want to eat my child so that I remain on my own. The younger brother is also not doing well,” Virgília says, confirming Ansha’s diagnosis. “His hair is not growing.” Ansha prepares a brew of water with reddish bark. “The medicine is searching for the things inside the belly,” Ansha explains to Virgília. “Then they take the sorcery out.” Ansha drinks some of the medicine to assure Virgília of its safety. Abel stays at the mosque for the rest of the day, repeatedly forced to imbibe the potion. While his mother holds him still, Ansha pours the medicine down his throat. His body squirms and shakes. Ansha regularly checks whether the drink has expelled the impurity. “No,” the mother responds. Abel begins to nod off, so Ansha instructs his mother to resume the treatment at home. “Children have become keys [Port. chaves],” Ansha later says, explaining her diagnosis to me. “They are used by witches to open the doors of the family they want to injure.” 133

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In addition to evil spirits and the anger of ancestors, witchcraft served as a common explanation for the severe illnesses of children who attended Ansha’s mosque.1 Every day, lines of children wrapped in their mothers’ capulanas waited for healing or divination. Ansha scrutinized them as if she alone could see what these small bodies had experienced during the “night war” as victims of the ambition, greed, and aggression of adults. The fears of mothers took form in Ansha’s divinations. She provided names, images, and stories to make this night war visible and intelligible. Some children had been abducted; others “damaged” (Port. estragados), enslaved, recruited, or consumed, whether by evil spirits or witches. Some witches just used children for leisure, as a toy for play. “Sorcerers are developing new techniques,” Ansha asserted, explaining that the involvement of children in sorcery “as keys” was a recent phenomenon, the result of the sophistication of witches’ evil actions. Witches seized small children to accomplish their malevolent acts so they themselves would not get injured. “It is easier to attack children,” Ansha elaborated. “They are weaker.” The liminal nature and physical fragility of children render them more exposed to these external attacks. “They do not put up much resistance, do not know how to counterattack witches, and are unable to speak and reveal the names of witches” Ansha explains. Although stories about child abductions were neither new nor just stories,2 there was a sense that attacks on children were increasing in Nampula. Not only were witches making their assaults more sophisticated; compounds were also more vulnerable, lacking protection from family spirits and kinship structures. This culture of fear was shared by mothers who visited Ansha’s mosque. One morning in February 2010, a young mother named Verónica explained why, after losing a child to disease, she collected a large sum of money to protect her other children in a “traditional” manner: “In this city, we have to be very, very careful. There is a war out there, and we have to protect our children because children do many things in the yard and will assure us some support when they grow up. Who will take care of me if they die? Who will wash and bury my body?” (Trentini 2016b, 531). Apprehension that children were being seized during the night was a symptom of a waning sense of communal reciprocity and solidarity. Mistrust and social conflict had been exacerbated in recent years by ever-increasing socioeconomic inequalities (Hanlon 2010; Castel-Branco 2014). Neighbors were the first to be suspected of harming and abducting children due to envy, ambition, or greed that marred life in the city. The involvement of children in the “night war” also revealed growing insecurity inside the compound, in the field of kinship, and in the social world of women.3 Occult attacks against children symbolized attacks to a very localized world—the household, women,



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idealized family values, customary law, networks of solidarity, and domestic systems of production in which children played an important role (Trentini 2016b). Women often stressed the importance of their children as material and symbolic capital. From the time they started walking, children contributed to domestic systems of production—cleaning the compound, going to the market, assisting in the machamba, selling homemade products. Older children were also often a source of cash, as they were employed as domestic workers in other compounds or sold homemade products on the streets. The importance of children in the compound was further complicated by nonmaterial factors. Although a rich progeny had once ensured the continuity of the mother’s lineage and determined a woman’s prestige within her family group,4 it was now also an important means of cementing relationships, preventing husbands from leaving wives for other women. Ansha’s medicine was called on to repair such structural vulnerability by “fortifying” (Mak. olipiha) and “locking” (Mak. owala) the boundaries of children’s small bodies. She gave herbal baths (orapa mwàna), cut hair (Mak. ometthela), rubbed bodies with a special oil extracted from herbs, and tied a protective cord (Mak. ekhulala) around their waists (Trentini 2016b). By performing these treatments on children’s bodies, Ansha fenced the social world to which they belonged—their compound and maternal kin group (Douglas 1966). Nonetheless, the insecurity of mothers also came from their own children’s behaviors. One of Ansha’s patients, an elderly woman named Zinha, singled out children’s disrespect as the preeminent threat of the night war: “This war at night is becoming worse than the past one. At least in the last war we could recognize who was the enemy by their uniform, and we fought with weapons. But in this war, you may not know who is harming you. Nowadays, your babies can harm you as well. And you do not know how to protect yourself. You see, during the Portuguese [colonial period], we were educated and we respected our elderly. But now, our children are telling us: we do not respect you anymore” (Trentini 2016b, 531). Spirits tell Ansha that she must change therapy. She must return to the mountains, where there is a special root that grows by the side of a stream, she says to Virgília. Ansha leaves before the sun rises, returning later with the root, which she dries on the floor of the mosque, then grinds with a pestle and mixes into water. Abel is again forced to drink. Abel returns the next day, this time with his mother and his father. Abel’s body is soaked with sweat. “At night he always asks for water,” the father says. “He has water of the sea in the belly. Water to wash dead bodies,” Ansha maintains, leaving open the outcome of the divination.

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“A stronger treatment,” Ansha declares upon returning. She has also decided to inoculate the child. Abel is snatched from his mother’s arms, unwrapped from the comfort of her capulana, stripped naked, forced to drink the stronger potion, then subjected to painful incisions. Ansha uses a new razor blade to make incisions on his elbows, knees, and forehead. Small children are rarely inoculated; this healing is reserved for older children and adults, Ansha explains. She rubs Abel’s wounds with a black powder made of gunpowder, herbs, and sand, then waves candles around him, asking the spirits to help him remain calm and silent (Mak. omàla). Finally, she instructs Abel’s mother to pick him up and carry him out of the mosque by passing through Ansha’s legs—since they are “full of spirits”—to close Abel’s body. Ansha explains that this will “turn around the feitiço” and “defuse the mine” (Port. rebentar a mina). “If the child is a witch, this stuff inside the body will destroy his spine when he leaves at night.” Abel and his relatives depart. “I don’t see this child well,” Ansha confesses after they leave. “His body has become a mine [Port. mina].” Whether as a witch or as a weapon of witches, “the child will stop walking with sorcerers at night.” Ansha’s theory of witchcraft did not foreclose the possibility that small children could themselves be witches, even from an early age. One explanation lay in the logic by which witchcraft was transmitted. The capacity of bewitching (Mak. olava) was imagined as an invisible substance—often visualized as a little worm— that was passed on matrilineally from the eldest to the youngest, sometimes by sharing meat, sometimes through the mother’s breastmilk. As Ansha explained during one conversation, “A big feitiçero gives the feitiço to a child; he chooses a child as heir, and then when the child grows, the child starts killing people.” Shifting understandings of childhood also contributed to this suspicion.5 Migration, urbanization, market labor, state education, increasing focus on the rights of children, and the rise of new religious movements—all served to augment the agency and visibility of children in society, while weakening gerontocracy and increasing generational antagonism. Children were therefore more likely to be suspected of involvement in witchcraft not only as unaware instruments or passive “keys” of older witches but also as active agents themselves. This suspicion took form in oblique expressions used by Ansha during divination: “I am not seeing this child well,” “I don’t know what he is doing at night,” “I cannot see his shadow,” “This child has a bad way of looking,” “He is playing in a strange way.”6 A third factor explaining accusations of child witches concerned the social and gender relationships of the compound. Boys were more often accused of witchcraft than girls because of their greater mobility outside the compound. As one mother explained during a divination, “Better to have a girl than a boy—girls are



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more submissive; boys do not fear their mothers and are rebellious. Boys do not obey. They will leave. They will join other families. Meninas são puxadas para dentro da família, os rapazes para fora [Girls are pulled inside the family, boys outside].” According to matrilineal and matrilocal rules, sons were ultimately destined to leave their families and become part of the family and compound of their wives and families. Since childhood, boys enjoyed much greater freedom outside the compound. Only Ansha’s nephews, for example, attended schools, joined mosques, and, in the case of the older ones, obtained jobs and lived alone. Boys were also ousted from the compound at earlier and earlier ages, since, as one master of male initiation explained to me, economic hardship caused many families to initiate them at younger and younger ages. Whether chosen or forced, this mobility from and outside the compound deepened suspicion that boys were colluding with sinister forces at night, imperiling their own families. Whatever the cause, suspicion and accusation of child witches were reinforced by images and narratives in the divinations and healing sessions of healers. Not only did Ansha’s divinations and healing reflect broader socioeconomic changes; they also contributed to blurring the line between childhood and adulthood. In treating children with adult medicine, narrating the night war during divination, and turning the bodies of children into mines to fight witches, divination and healing stirred patients’ imagination about children leaving their compounds to fight in the night war, whether as the tools of witches, or as witches themselves.

19 • TR ADITION AND MODERNIT Y

“I discovered the importance of traditional medicine in Nampula,” Luís tells me, adding that he had never visited a traditional healer before moving to Nampula from the country. He is a twenty-year-old man, tall and slim, with a brisk expression on his face. He is wearing a green shirt and large beige pants that swallow his thin legs. Years ago, he arrived in Nampula from the interior town of Maúa, joining his oldest brother, who owns a kiosk in the bairro. Luís is full of ambition and ideas. He continually explains that he does not want simply to “get by,” like many young men do in the city, by taking temporary jobs in construction or selling cheap Chinese merchandise on the streets. Luís came to Nampula to pursue higher education. He wants to attend the university, with the goal of obtaining stable employment in the governo as a teacher. However, despite having spent the last two years studying for the admission exam at the university, he has repeatedly failed it. “I am scared that I am going to be stuck the whole year,” he tells Ansha upon showing up for his visit. This time, he and his brother have decided that they will take matters into their own hands, asking a professor at the university for access to the exam in advance. “We paid,” Luís says. “This is what you do nowadays in Mozambique if you want a job or to study.” While waiting for a response, Luís has come to Ansha’s to attenuate his anxiety. Ansha calls the healing oleva, a mix of herbs to bring luck and turn things in his favor.1 After the bath, Ansha scatters ephepa to invoke the spirits. She then inoculates Luís’s right hand, “because the man has to study.” Luís looks satisfied with his treatment. “This woman is helping me a lot,” he gushes, leaving the mosque with a renewed sense that his life is moving on. 138



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Ansha’s male patients were mostly young working-class men and rural migrants facing economic insecurity. Many of these migrants had moved to Nampula to avoid the drudgery of working the land. City life looked “easier,” full of opportunities. The majority, however, struggled to find a job, access higher education, and cope with the rising cost of living. Despite the economic boom caused by the discovery of minerals in the north in the 2000s, however, neoliberal reform spelled economic destitution for the majority of young, male Mozambicans. While national and international investments spawned new luxury hotels, a shopping mall, and residences, unemployment plagued young men in the cities, who lacked the resources to attend university, secure formal employment, or start their own businesses. For those who did have a degree, Frelimo party membership and connection presented an additional set of hurdles in a system that was plagued by clientelism and nepotism. Expressions like being sentado (Port. seated) were frequently used by Ansha’s young clients to characterize their life in the city as unemployed, underemployed, or waiting for a job interview or offer. Being sentado did not mean that one was entirely stuck.2 Young men continued hunting down opportunities, scheming new projects, and envisioning new futures for themselves. Some improvised jobs in an informal market by selling bags, serving as domestic workers, and taking temporary jobs in construction. A few returned to the countryside to work the family land in the interim. Others looked to religious institutions for support and opportunity, augmenting a climate of religious mobility, as young adults moved from one church or mosque to another—or from church to mosque and vice versa—to explore new and better ways of dealing with the insecurity of urban life. Still others saw in religion an opportunity, intending to build their own mosques or churches. While waiting to hear about a job offer or take the university exam, many resorted to traditional or Muslim healers. As one young man explained, there were two ways that one could obtain a job in Nampula: “You pay 13,000 meticais to someone to get a job; at the same time, you pay a healer to make things work.” Ansha set sataka ceremonies to ask spirits to turn things around. She gave her patients ritual baths, performed vaccinations, and gave massages with herbal creams so the recipient would “be liked very much” during job interviews. She covered degrees and driver licenses with ephepa, leaving them overnight in her mosque to accrue the support of spirits in such endeavors. Two weeks later, Luís returns. He has not yet heard from the professor. “I am going to stay sentado for another year,” Luís bemoans, after which he falls silent. “There is a lot of ambition in Mozambique these days, Daria,” Ansha sighs.

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She sets a new divination to ascertain what went wrong with the oleva healing. It is the intrusion of majini, she learns—Nakuru. “He does not want other men to pass over him,” Ansha declares gravely, though with a sympathetic note in her voice. When Nakuru attacked men, he preferred ones who were young adults, usually immigrants. Regarded as a spirit of “tradition” of Makhuwa and rural background, old and strong, Nakuru embodied the values of “tradition” vis-àvis modernidade (Port. modernity) and “ambition.”3 He mostly attacked young men who were searching for independence from their families, who had appetites for earning cash, or who otherwise exhibited individualistic values and behaviors. To rid themselves of Nakuru, Ansha’s patients had to set rituals in which they symbolically returned to the power of tradition and renewed the values of reciprocity. These rituals included paying for rich banquets for Nakuru and the patient’s ancestral spirits. Ansha urges Luís to set a sataka, a ritual offering to the spirits. He pays her cash in advance, which she uses to buy an abundance of food—rice, beans, nuts, and a chicken. In the afternoon, some of the food is spread around the base of the trees in Ansha’s yard. Ansha then implores Nakuru to leave Luís’s body: “He is young, he needs a job and a family.” Luís leaves at the end of the ceremony. One month later Luís returns to the mosque. Given that his goal of attending university has not been realized, he has schemed a new plan. He will put aside studying for a while to try to enter the Saúde: “I am thinking to work in the hospital,” he declares. “I want to take a course to become a nurse.” Ansha manufactures a new hiriz to secure Luís’s body from future attacks of Nakuru. Again, Luís admits “This avó [elderly woman] is helping me. She is making a lot of treatments. She is encouraging me to get something, and this is true because now I have the chance to work in the Saúde.” Ansha, however, warns that spirits will likely bother Luís again. Luís leaves the mosque, never again to return. After he has left, Ansha confides, “Spirits are the source of a lot of trouble. I feel pity for this boy.” Economic uncertainty was not the only source of apprehension for many young migrants who attended Ansha’s mosque. “Tradition”—the pressure of kin and spirits—was often invoked as the chief obstacle to their independence and ­success.4 For some, affliction by Nakuru was a nagging reminder to honor reciprocity and the authority of elders. Those who were married were also disadvantaged by a matrilineal system that still obliged young men to provide not only for their own families but also for the families of their spouses.5



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The pressure of tradition was felt greatest by those men who migrated from the patrilineal south—like João, a regular patient in the mosque. He was from the southern city of Maputo, a former member of the military who moved to Nampula to live with his Makhuwa wife and her family. As João once remarked in Ansha’s mosque, “In Maputo, there are not so many problems as in Nampula.”6 Not only was João jobless; he had also failed to sire progeny for his wife and her family. João blamed Makhuwa tradition for these faults: “There is a problem of culture. In Maputo, if you marry a woman, you do not marry the entire family. I have to give money, food, everything to her family. But I do not have a suitable job to support them. The Makhuwa family is not able of thanking. You give something, and they want more.” Jobless, childless, and forced to live with his in-laws, João was continuously derided not only by his family but also by his neighbors—accused, on the one hand, of material and reproductive incapacity by his in-laws; on the other, of impotency by his neighbors, since he had not yet cheated on his wife. João’s sense of failure was articulated through dreams, which he regularly shared at Ansha’s, the only place where he felt he could reveal his torments: “I am dreaming a lot of dirty things in these nights—for example, that I am approached by women and men who want to have sex with me. I dreamed last night that there was a man who wished to have sex with me. When I woke up, my body was painful. Now when women approach me, I don’t want to have sex with them.” Ansha performed divination that identified spirits as the cause of his dreams, offering João a way to transfer guilt for his dreams to spirits. She also gave him ritual baths so as “not to dream anymore.” Dreams, however, continued to haunt João’s life, as did troubles within his household. The last time he came to visit Ansha, he shared with us his plan to return to Maputo. Whereas Nakuru attacked men’s economic endeavors, sexual afflictions were generally attributed to a female spirit named Rabia. Ansha characterized this light-skinned, Arabic-speaking spirit from the coast as wanting to spoil (Port. estragar) the lives of young men. Rabia was the only female spirit in Ansha’s group of majini, known for embodying the “deceiving” and “dangerous” beauty of women of the littoral, using jewelry and perfume to attract men while hiding an ambitious and greedy heart. My first encounter with Rabia came with a twentysomething patient named Samuel, who attended Ansha’s mosque because of recurrent sexual dreams that prevented him from going about his life in the city. “My life is not running well in the cidade [Port. city],” he exclaimed before one consultation. He had recently moved to Nampula from a coastal town in search of a better life—to find a job and build a family. But he continued to be without success with local women, a problem that he attributed to his dreams: “I dream of women taking my sex. Then I wake up, and I don’t have the will to stay with

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women. I am not married, and I do not have a woman or a job. When I talk to a woman, she leaves.” Ansha’s divination interpreted Samuel’s dreams as a sign of Rabia, who prevented him from staying with other women. “Rabia is a very bad spirit, Daria. I had her, and she always provoked me to have quarrels with Tiago.” Ansha prescribed umba, a plant for Samuel to burn at night to keep Rabia away, and murrima mmosa (the same heart), a root with which Samuel could wash his face in order to help him find a woman “to be attracted by him, to marry him.” Nevertheless, a spirit diagnosis did not always exonerate the spirit host, at least not in the case of men. In fact, there were ordinary reasons why Samuel could not find a woman, reasons that Ansha shared with me as soon as Samuel had left the compound: “This man is a fechador da roupa para mulheres [one who locks up women’s pants]. When he approaches women, they close up their pants. When he is around women, they shut their clothes to avoid sleeping with him. This man is still a mwàna [child]. This is why women flee from him.” Rabia was known for inflicting sexual troubles, undermining the virility of young men. Signs of her presence included erectile disfunction, dreams of same-sex relations, a loss of interest in women, attraction to men, and effeminate behaviors. In identifying Rabia as a “disorder,” Ansha reasserted the dominant gender ideology, for which same-sex relations were taboo. Homosexuality was often identified as an “illness” brought by or affecting only immigrants and whites, the effects of modernidade, the cidade, and desenvolvimento (Port. development). 7 Tradition was called on to oppose this “illness” and to legitimate a strict gender binary.8 At the same time, however, spirit diagnoses afforded men some measure of latitude in expressing their gender and sexual desires and identities, especially through the transference of agency to spirits. In fact, healers themselves crossed the border between genders during their sessions. It was not rare to see male healers wearing capulanas, necklaces, and bracelets during rituals.9 Even Ansha would dress in the outfit of the walimu, or of a soldier, when possessed by spirits. Not only did spirit healing provide a space in which gender fluidity was allowed; it also sometimes interpreted gender fluidity as a sign of spirit vocation. Late in my fieldwork, I discovered a younger generation of healers who were more outspoken about gender fluidity, even outside ritual domains. For them, gender fluidity was a part of their very identity and narrative as spirit healers. Some were married with male spirits with whom they engaged in homosexual relations during dreams. Others explained their effeminate behavior by the inheritance of majini from female kin. One example was Ivo, a young healer in his early twenties who lived not far from Ansha. When I met with him, he told me he had just become a healer, even



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though he had suffered from spirits since he was a child. As Ivo explained to me, he was married to Rabia and therefore unable to have other wives, even to touch or stay with other women: “When I stay with a woman, I do not feel anything. The spirits get annoyed by that. I am married to Rabia. If I touch a woman, I feel ill because she does not want [me to do this]. The relationship with her [Rabia] is that I am not allowed to have other wives. I do not have the will to stay with a woman. I have these spiritual wives.” Ivo had cultivated a successful, small healing business, many of the clients of which were young men.

20 • SPIRITS AND WOMEN

“Why do so many women have majini?” I ask Ansha and her friend Maria. It is a Tuesday afternoon in May 2010. We are sitting in Ansha’s mosque with Maria, Ansha’s neighbor. I came to know Maria early in my fieldwork. She visits Ansha’s mosque regularly at the end of the day to enjoy a drink and rapé (tobacco). Maria is a confident and outspoken Makhuwa woman, who moved to the same bairro as her grandchildren after her daughter died of AIDS. Ansha and I both enjoy the company of Maria. She a talkative and knowledgeable woman who offers thorough explanations of everything. Maria is the only Makhuwa woman whom Ansha trusts, despite their differences about politics. Maria is a Renamo activist and an admirer of its leader, Afonso Dhlakama. She praises Renamo for having saved Mozambique from the Marxism of Frelimo. Unlike Frelimo, “Renamo respects tradition just like the Portuguese did,” avers Maria. For Maria, all of Mozambique’s problems—including the suffering of women—stem from independence and Frelimo. “It is because of men,” Maria responds to my question, bellowing in her baritone voice. “In Mozambique, women are suffering.” I sit on the threshold of the mosque, lighting a cigarette. “Men like a woman, but then after two weeks they abandon her and move on to someone else. It does not matter if they get her pregnant. They do not care.” We pause to take a sip of beer. It is a cool afternoon, caressed by a light breeze that blows through the small door of Ansha’s mosque. Maria is eager to continue holding forth about women’s suffering: “The cause is politics,” she loudly exclaims. Maria is not scared of speaking out against ­Frelimo, which she continues to identify with the past and Marxism-Leninism. “Independence has spoiled everything. At the beginning, this politics said that God does not exist. If you don’t respect God, how can you respect your parents or wife?” Maria was born during the Portuguese, a matter of no small pride: “I got education; I learned to respect my mother and my father.” She values the Portuguese because they respected and maintained tradition.1 144



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Maria then pivots back to the suffering of women, maintaining that “this thing of majini” is a result of suffering caused by Frelimo’s antitradition policies. Spirits are a sign of women’s oppression and insecurity: “The majority of women are possessed by bad majini, not the good ones like the ones your friend [Ansha] has,” she explains. Maria refers to a time before independence, when Makhuwa women not only were respected but also held power in the household and community. “Here in the north, women held an important role. We do not know the consequences of this repression. This situation is the continuation of slavery. We are discriminated against by men.”2 Maria continues pontificating, her voice growing louder and more assertive: “In the past, divorces were not easy like today, with people laughing. Now men are just driven by curiosity. Then they leave without any obligations. There is a lot confusion now.” Ansha echoes Maria, nodding, “Marriage has ended [Port. casamento acabou].” Maria and Ansha give voice to a common view about the diminishing power and security of women in the north.3 Maria continues: “In the past men stayed with women to survive and eat, because women had a machamba, but [now] when men get jobs, they abandon their wives.” “Here in the city, women are alone. They do not have family. They do not have machamba,” Ansha agrees, nodding while she opens another bottle of beer. Maria’s sermon now reaches a fever pitch: “I mean the women of here. This is aggression—domestic aggression [Port. agressão doméstica].” Maria does not exempt women from responsibility. In fact, she is quite harsh on the younger generation: “The problem is that women do not denounce men at the tribunal; nor do they do so to the police. These young women just wait for celeste [a brand of millet flour] from their husbands. They are scared to lose their bread.” Ansha now takes her turn: “The only weapon women have in this city are spirits.” Maria disagrees: “Ansha is the one who has strong spirits. But the majority of women go to healers for weakness. Instead of reporting men to the police, what do women do? They go to curandeiros.” For Maria, the proliferation of spirit attacks is a sign of women’s decreasing power and increasing insecurity. Another is heightened demand for love magic among young women who come to Ansha’s mosque for treatments called wokoma (Mak. to seat at home), a hiriz containing a dry insect (Mak. tomola), red clay (Mak. ekhama), the pith of wood (Mak. evithela), and the root murrima mmosa.4 The amulet alters the behavior of the husband, making him fall in love again. Some women ask for amulets called okhula—to “scrape” or “dig a cave”—or okhoma, to “make stay” or “fix” the husband’s behavior so he does not leave the

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compound and cheat. Others request that their bodies be magically treated to enhance their sex appeal and to put spells on their husbands. This involves the use of an herb made into a cream and rubbed onto the face and the body, changing the touch and smell of the skin so that men do not leave (Mak. vasila sivela). Incisions are made on various parts of the body—the neck and waist (to attract men when they touch these spots), the hand (for when a woman gives her hand to a man when she greets him), the back of the neck (for when men look at a woman as she walks away), and the forehead (for when men look directly at a woman). “I don’t understand how can a woman cry over a man?” Maria sarcastically inquires. “Yes, men are nothing,” Ansha agrees. Preparing to leave, Maria now turns toward me, her eyes fixed on my face. I flick my cigarette away and enter the mosque. “Do not trust Mozambican men, Daria,” Maria instructs, chuckling in an attempt to relieve the anxiety on my face. “Do not marry one of them. They will abuse you. They just want to play around.” “Ah, yes,” Ansha says, her eyes crinkled in amusement. “She has them already.” Ansha is now using both hands to hold back her laughter. When I turn to her with a perplexed and embarrassed gaze, she only says “majini.” “Hurry up,” Ansha blurts into the phone. “We are going to the mountains.” “To do what?” I ask. “To divorce Nakuru,” Ansha flatly responds. It is a lazy Sunday morning in early March  2010, one of the few mornings I have decided to stay home. As I prepare my backpack, it occurs to me that every time I opt to stay home something important happens at the mosque. I dress quickly, board a chapa, and arrive at Ansha’s in less than twenty minutes. Although there is a stiff breeze, the air is thick with a humidity that not even the winter winds can dispel. Ansha is waiting with three patients who are ready to trek to the mountains. They share similar stories of spirit affliction, even though of different ages, experiences, and classes. The youngest, Júlia, is a university student at the local Pedagogic University. She is a slim and tall woman wearing a capulana over skinny jeans. She lives in the city center, a university student who wants to be a teacher. She is here because she is unable to marry. Men take advantage of her beauty, deceiving her and leaving her for other women. Aurora is older, likely in her late twenties. She has been married for years. She believes her husband is cheating on her with other women. Finally, there is Sifa, a woman from the coast in her thirties. She is having trouble conceiving her second child. She fears her husband will leave her for another woman if she cannot have another child.



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Ansha’s divinations have revealed that all three are possessed by the same spirit, Nakuru, the most popular spirit in Nampula, who is known for “liking Nampula’s women very much.” Nakuru is a tall African man who lives in the mountains surrounding Nampula. He is described by Ansha as a spirit with strong masculine traits, embodying an urban conception of manhood—wealthy, strong, with many women. For most women who attend Ansha’s mosque, however, Nakuru is a deceitful spirit. He offers affection and material gifts to attract women, then enters their bodies, refusing to leave. If a woman is married, he prevents her from sleeping with her husband and conceiving; if she is unmarried, he prevents her from getting married. Nakuru is divorced through a ritual that Ansha calls orrula, which literarily means “to withdraw,” also “to undress.” Ansha explains, “Nakuru wants a ceremony to divorce. He likes women a lot. They should buy food and clothes to divorce him.” She then elaborates, “When a woman divorces from her husband, she has to leave him with something, doesn’t she?”5 As we trudge off to the mountains, each of us carries on her head a bucket containing commodities for the ritual of divorcing Nakuru: candles, incense, white and black sheets, a bracelet, and food of the mountains that Nakuru likes—beans, rice, and an egg. When we finally reach the foot of the mountain, Ansha instructs us to gather wood for a fire on which to heat the water and herbs for a ritual bath. She then climbs the mountain to harvest the medicinal herbs, placing them in the heated water upon descending. Ansha asks all the women to undress, including me. Naked, I am revealed as Ansha has likely always seen me—another patient of spirits, unmarried and childless. My sense of disquiet soon flies away, as Ansha slings water at me. I am taken by a gentle breeze that has suddenly arisen from nowhere. Ansha rubs herbs and roots on my body. They pinch, making me feel alive. Ansha speaks in a gentle and firm voice for each of the patients. “Give this young woman a man with whom she can marry and have a house,” Ansha says for Júlia, the youngest. “Give children,” she says for Sifa and Aurora. It is now my turn. “Daria, men like you, but they do not approach you. You know? Spirits do not want you marry.” She then loudly invokes the spirits, “That her life could run well here in Nampula.” Then she adds, “That she might catch a man!” Ansha throws the leftover water on herself. The sun passes behind the clouds, and I begin feeling chilly. We put our clothes back on our leaf-covered bodies. We leave food, incense, and coins in a nearby cave. Ansha instructs us to accompany our offering by reciting the formula, “Nakuru, I am giving you money to leave me.”

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We set out for the city, Ansha bushwhacking our trail. My clothes are clinging to my still-wet skin, and shivers course throughout my body. Ansha suddenly stops. A snake has crossed our path. I see the grass moving. I skitter behind Ansha, clinging to her back. Ansha looks over her shoulder at me, chiding my fear with a maternal tenderness. “This is Nakuru. While you were bathing, he was staring at us. He is departing from us.” One hour later, we have finally returned to Ansha’s, gathering in her mosque. Each of us scatters ephepa, naming our ancestors. When I do so, I decide to summon Isolina, the sister of my paternal grandmother, who was considered a sort of witchdoctor (It. fattucchiera) in her Italian village due to her frequent performance of sequeri, a popular Christian prayer to Saint Antonio to find lost things in life. Like many women of majini, Isolina was a childless woman, abandoned by her husband, who left Italy in search of better fortune after the Second World War. I recall the fear that surrounded this small toothless woman, who always dressed in black, as if mourning life. When I later share this story with Ansha, she smiles: “Daria, you got majini from her.” Toward the end of my fieldwork, I begin dreaming. Mountains, the sea, plants— signs of majini. Something presses, nudges inside. Someone is tugging my arms, holding me. I cannot move or breathe. I wake up, pain racing through my body. I share the dream with Ansha. She too has been dreaming—about me and my grandmother. I must bathe not to dream anymore. It can be dangerous, she says, to leave Mozambique dreaming. For a while, I stop dreaming. Just before I leave, however, dreams return. I dream that I am at an ekoma ceremony. Ansha is dressed in the white AMETRAMO uniform that she wore to the Guebuza rally in September 2009. Her head is wrapped in a white foulard. She is violently rattling her miheya around me as I kneel in front of her. The crowd presses in—noise, songs, bodies, heat. I awake. Rain is coming down in sheets. Shivers are cascading through my body. I walk to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. My eyes are veiled with tears. I stare into the mirror. Then I come closer. I cannot recognize the person staring back at me with unfamiliar eyes. Baths no longer suffice, Ansha says. These are not spirits of my terra. These are majini of here. “You got majini here in the mosque,” she insists. “Coming here always, putting yourself in these kinds of things, touching these capulanas, singing these songs. They are getting used to you.” Women could catch majini just through contamination—by touching a seashell, book, root, or clothes, or by walking near the abode of spirits.



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“You are about to leave Mozambique,” Ansha warns, her voice clearly concerned. “You need to have healing; otherwise you will suffer when you go back in your land, and nobody can help you there.” “This is Mjermani,” she concludes, singling out one of the white-skinned spirits. The ritual is set for a Thursday morning in July 2010. I arrive with the capulanas, candles, and incense I have purchased for the ceremony. Ansha and her assistants, Irene and Verónica, are waiting for me in Ansha’s mosque. They laugh when they glimpse the anxiety on my face. “Undress,” Ansha commands. I take off my pants and T-shirt, after which they cover me with capulanas. Ansha wraps my head with a red sheet, into which she inserts a stick of burning incense, clouding my vision. Irene rubs sacred flour on my forehead to be seen by spirits. Anxiety that I might fall into a trance is soon lifted by the laughter and joking of Ansha and her assistants, who cannot help but notice my disquiet. As Ansha begins rattling her miheya, Irene and Verónica assume serious postures. Spirit talk combines irony and melancholy, levity and gravity, just as the spirits themselves who are simultaneously playful and deceitful. Together, Ansha and her assistants begin singing a song of melancholy and longing, one that I had heard many times and knew well: Kuvina kwa malaika [Dancing for malaika] Kuvina kwa malaika [Dancing for malaika] Please, she is leaving. Nothing can spoil her. All spirits, all ancestors of my family, She has to travel well.

The music deepens my sense of vulnerability. Solitude besieges me as if no one else is around. The familiar humming of mosquitos is masked by the music. I try to plant my knees, then allow the music to take me. Ansha stops. I have not fallen into trance. I feel relief and disappointment. Ansha reassures me that spirits have come nonetheless. She grabs my arms, drawing me back, undressing me, sprinkling water on my body. “Spirits, let her live,” she beseeches. “She has to travel well.” I wrap myself in a capulana. Before I leave, Ansha looks back at me to assure me: “There is no problem, Daria. Feeling a bit sick means we are alive, that God is talking to us.”

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After leaving Mozambique, dreams return. I am in London, attempting to put my life at Ansha’s mosque into words. None come forth. I struggle to live. At night, I dream. I am still held, wrapped tightly, prevented from moving and walking. I wake up freighted yet longing. I report my dreams to Ansha on the phone the following morning. “Mjermani is not leaving you,” she says. In the background, I can hear the laughter of Tiago, interlaced with music. Ansha’s voice grows serious. “You have to come back to Mozambique, Daria.”

21 • LIFE AND DE ATH

On one of my first days back in Nampula in 2016, I meet Dália, Ansha’s last patient of majini. She has just left the secondary school where she works as a teacher. She is dressed in elegant pink and black capulanas; gold jewelry signals that she is a naharra, a woman from the coast. Dália began suffering from spirits after the birth of her third son; it started as a vague malaise that prevented her from carrying out her ordinary life. She visited the hospital repeatedly, though without success. A Makonde colleague advised her to consult Ansha, who was well acquainted with this kind of problem. Ansha attempted to expel the spirits through ritual baths and saunas, but Dália remained sick. The failure of healing was proof that Dália was called by spirits to become a healer. From then on, she devoted her life to becoming a healer, tenaciously persisting in the face of the opposition from her husband and his family, Muslims of the coast. She overcame the skepticism of Ansha too, who questioned whether such a young Muslim woman could join the community of healers. “She believed that I was too young for majini,” Dália reveals. “Your friend lacked empathy with this woman,” Tiago tells me days later. He is eager to share his memories of Ansha’s last days. We are walking in the streets of Nampula, heading to the house that I am renting. We try to avoid the crowd, choosing quieter streets to communicate better. “Ansha thought Dália had ‘majini of jealousy,’ ” he explains, borrowing an expression that Ansha deployed for those women who used majini just to capture the attention of their husbands. Tiago reveals that Ansha was also worried about healing a Muslim woman, thereby exposing her own family to witchcraft from the coast: “She thought the husband had consulted a mwalimu to do oseleliwa [Mak. to delay],” a type of witchcraft launched inside the family to prevent someone from being successful. Despite the doubts of Ansha and the resistance of her husband and his family, Dália persisted. She soon collected a large sum of money for the ekoma. But as the date of the ritual approached, Ansha’s health precipitously declined and preparations for the ritual stopped. 153

154 Returns

Dália’s story offers Tiago a pretext for revisiting Ansha’s illness. He begins by telling me how Ansha’s mosque was closed almost every day in the final months of 2014. Indeed, I had seen signs of her declining health when I visited in 2013, three years after my doctoral fieldwork. When I met her at the airport, I immediately noticed how much more fragile, thin, and aged she looked. We worked very little in the mosque during that time. She refused food and spent most of her time alone in her mosque. She did not want anyone to see a healer suffering. When her family insisted on taking her to the hospital, she firmly refused, later confiding to me, “Majini eat you all—the meat; they suck your blood.” She touched her lanky arms to show they were devoid of flesh, declaring, “There is no blood in my body; majini are sucking all my body.” Her eyes, however, still conveyed indefatigable determination and resilience: “Spirits will tell me the herbs to take to get better.” Tiago regularly called João, the Makonde nurse, who gave Ansha vitamin injections. He insisted on taking Ansha to the hospital. But she again protested, “Majini are not a disease of the hospital. If I go, they will kill me. I won’t take any pills from the hospital.” She insisted that only majini could heal her: “This is majini, and I will heal myself.” Even other healers were not consulted: “They are all sorcerers and will kill me.” Before long, Ansha began spending all her time in a bed in one of the mud houses in the compound. It was the room where Ansha kept the earnings of the mosque and her documents—a room with no windows. When we arrive at my house, Tiago is out of breath and sweating profusely. I worry he is sick. But he assures me he is not. It is just the heat. Continuing his story, Tiago recounts, “One day we went to the mato [bush] together. Your friend could not pick any herb herself. She showed me: Tira isso, tira outro [Pick up this, pick up the other]. She had no strength. After we returned home, all the herbs putrefied [over time].” “I told her family: ‘Let’s take her to the hospital,” Tiago now exclaims, clearly frustrated that he was powerless at the end. “I cannot do anything with her family. I am indirect family. I cannot make any decision.” Ansha’s condition rapidly deteriorated. “My spouse refused and refused any healing. She had no water in her body.” Early one morning in January  2015, Tiago was sitting at Ansha’s side. She asked him for juice. Tiago ran to the kiosk to buy the juice. “A tua amiga [your friend] could not drink. It was too painful. But she was so thirsty.” After attempting to swallow, Ansha gave her last breath. “I remained by her side for one hour. Then, I left the room to tell the family that she had passed. I told them not to cry. We got a car and took her to the hospital.”



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“The family from Mueda organized the funeral,” Tiago reports. Ansha’s burial was carried out according to the “tradition of Cabo Delgado.” I prepare some breakfast—tea and bread with butter and jam—while Tiago waits on the sofa. I can see him from the kitchen; he looks fatigued. “Do you want to rest?” I ask. “No, let’s talk about your amiga,” he insists. “Ansha was taken to the hospital morgue,” Tiago continues, as we eat. “The governo wants people to be born and die at the hospital.” “None really came,” Tiago recounts, turning to the funeral. “Only family from Mueda, Verónica, and Irene. No neighbors, no patients.” “Your friend was not regarded well,” he explains, “because she was a healer.” Healers and members of the AMETRAMO did not pay her tribute. No ritual for majini was performed. Ansha’s ritual instruments and objects were not buried with her, as they should have been to permit her to become a munepa. Tiago speaks as if there were two families in Ansha’s life. The first was of spirits, Makhuwa, including Tiago and Ansha’s master, Paulo. Tiago paid for Ansha’s initiation and ultimately located the healer who would cure and train her. The other family was the family from Mueda, which included not only her actual family but also her assistants Irene and Verónica. Over time, the latter eclipsed the former, marginalizing Tiago. The funeral and burial were carried out by her Makonde family alone. Tiago remarked that although there were never problems between Makhuwa and Makonde spirits, things were different with Makhuwa and Makonde people. “They should have called healers, recited prayers, commemorated her life, and told her story as a healer and antiga combatente [Port. veteran],” Tiago mourns. “Epotthá [a.k.a. Paulo, Ansha’s master] should have been called, and the family and healers should have gone to the mountains to set a ceremony to the spirits and introduce Ana [Ansha’s niece, who had been chosen by Ansha to become her successor].” Later I was to learn that Ansha’s funeral was recalled differently by Ansha’s family. For Tiago, it was a brief despedida (Port. farewell), with no ritual. For Ansha’s brother, Salmo, the funeral was performed according to the Makonde and military traditions, with funeral and casket paid for by the association of veterans.1 The oldest member of Ansha’s family, her brother, performed the ceremony. He gave the eulogy (Kisw. kulila), providing information about the cause of her illness and death—malaria, which Ansha refused to treat with hospital medicine. The family mourned Ansha’s death for forty days. They offered some food to the dead; they visited Ansha’s burial site on the third day (Kisw. tatu) and the fortieth day (Kisw. arobaini) following her death.

156 Returns

After Ansha’s death, Tiago moved out. Ansha’s inheritance went to her Makonde family. So did her majini. Ansha’s assistants, Irene and Verónica, were tasked with the transition of the mosque. “I wanted Mateus to take the job in the mosque,” Tiago says, finishing his breakfast. “But they chose Ana.” I am on my way to Ansha’s. This is my first visit since 2013, my first visit since Ansha’s death. The neighborhood has the same light, the smell of arid land mixed with burnt rubbish, the stands selling the same products, the sounds of Indian music, children playing, people visiting the mosque. This comforting sense of familiarity vanishes as soon as I arrive at Ansha’s compound and meet unfamiliar faces. Ansha has taken the life of the compound with her. The three small houses have been rented out to young couples who have recently migrated from the rural inland. The little mosque is now hidden by overgrown trees and untended plants. The flags are faded and worn. A familiar face snaps me out of a sense of isolation. Ansha’s nephew Tomás is sitting on the bench. He has been waiting for me. He is much taller, with a deep voice, even though his face has not lost the youth I remembered. How much he resembles Ansha. “I think of my avó every day,” he says, gazing at me with his wide, deep eyes. Tomás was very close to Ansha; they went to the mountains together, climbing the most difficult peaks. He knew where to find all the hidden roots. Ansha once believed that he would become a healer. But then Tomás began to attend the mosque. “I would have liked to have become a healer,” he says now, “but majini chose her; Ana remained with all this power.” Many of Ansha’s Makonde family have left the compound. Some of her nephews went back to the homeland, in Mueda, while others found work as a carpenter and moved out. Without Ansha’s pension and income, life has become difficult: “What do you eat if you do not have a machamba and emprego [job]?” Tomás doubts he can realize his goal of completing his education. I enter Ansha’s mosque, where Tiago, Ana, Ana’s husband, Irene, and Verónica are all waiting. There are still a few signs of Ansha in the mosque: some ephepa, a few rotten herbs, a capulana hanging from the ceiling. Ana is sitting at Ansha’s seat. Although she has inherited Ansha’s majini, she makes it clear that she is a different healer, with different spirits and a different style. “I only use ephepa. My spirits are only Muslim. I do not use Ansha’s tools. My divination is different. I only use ephepa because, as a Muslim, I have no authority to use books.” Although it did not take long to replace Ansha in the mosque, the process was more vexed than expected, as Irene and Verónica recall. The third day after the funeral, Irene fell into trance. Ansha told her that her niece was to open her



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mosque and the basket where she kept her instruments for divination. That same day, Ana entered the mosque. Irene and Verónica rattled Ansha’s miheya, expecting that Ana would be visited by Ansha’s spirits. However, nothing happened. Ana remained still as a stone. They all left the mosque puzzled. The next day Irene and Verónica decided to head to Ansha’s grave to scatter ephepa and plead with Ansha to leave her majini to Ana. Upon returning, they entered the mosque and started singing. This time, Ana fell into trance at once and became the dona (Port. owner) of the mosque. Before I leave, Ana informs me that she will soon dance her first ekoma, “Next Saturday there will be a dance of majini for Dália, Ansha’s last patient.” “You are lucky, Daria,” interjects Tiago, laughing and patting me on the back. “As soon as you arrive in Mozambique, you attend a majini ceremony!” I leave the mosque with Irene and Verónica. We walk through the bairro. “Until the end, Ansha believed that spirits could reveal to her the herbs to cure herself,” Irene begins, eager to share her memory of her teacher’s last day. “Verónica and I visited early in the morning on Thursday, January 6, 2015. ‘Irene, I’m going to heal myself,’ she said to me. ‘One of these days I will go to the bush to collect that root, and I will get well,’ ” she continues, taking care to convey Ansha’s final words verbatim. “Although her body was lifeless, her head was well. She believed she could recover. Then we left. Just after our departure, Ansha passed away.” Verónica, who has remained silent thus far, turns to me and earnestly exclaims, “Daria, we complained a lot in the past, but that man [Tiago] did everything for her.” We part ways, promising to meet back up at Dália’s ekoma. Dália failed to become a healer. Spirits did not come out during the dance. Although Ana, Irene, and Verónica danced all night long, Dália showed no sign she had majini. Tiago is sitting in a chair on the verandah at my house. Tiago knows why it failed: “Your friend [Ansha] did not like them to dance majini in her compound.” “Did they really think they could dance majini without me? In my mosque?” Ansha says in a shrill voice. How we miss that voice. Tiago and I look at each other. We smile. We know.

EPILOGUE

When you leave, I will get majini from your home, Daria. I will start talking the language of your land. I will dream it, And we will call each other Through our hearts, during the night. You will start speaking Shimakonde, one night. I know it. Majini will call you back.

My last memory of Ansha—along the stairs of an old, dark building in Nampula just before my departure. She looks up at me. Everyone else has left.

158

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The book owes everything to Ansha, her family, and her patients. To dedicate it to Ansha does little to repay my immeasurable debt and express my immense gratitude to her. Not only did Ansha make possible the project and book itself; she also deeply influenced its shape and trajectory. It is tragic that I cannot share with her the conclusion of our work together. My life continues to be guided by her teachings, lightened by memories of laughing together in her mosque, and accompanied by the spirits we share. Ansha’s family provided support and care throughout my stays in Nampula, even after the loss of Ansha. They always made me feel welcome in their compound and lives. I take some comfort that our bonds have become even stronger after Ansha’s death. I express my deepest gratitude to Tiago for his generosity, knowledge, wit, and humor, all of which have accompanied me over these years. I offer sincere thanks to Tomás, Mateus, Ana, and the rest of Ansha’s family for the kindness with which they welcomed me into their life. I am indebted to the “Makonde family of majini”—Irene, Verónica, and Madalena—for sharing their knowledge of majini and teaching how to be a “strong woman.” I am grateful to my friend Salmo not only for having introduced me to Ansha’s in 2007 but also for his friendship and knowledge along this path. I am also appreciative of the many women, children, and men whom I met at Ansha’s mosque and who shared their stories with me, teaching me endurance and compassion. Outside Ansha’s mosque, I owe gratitude to Perequito and his family, who welcomed me into their house. Perequito initiated me into local healing practices, taught me how to do fieldwork, and encouraged me to pursue anthropology. Over the years, I have been fortunate to encounter many healers who shared their knowledge and time with me. I thank all the healers at AMETRAMO, especially Hilarío Twancha and Rabia, who accompanied me to different parts of Nampula to meet healers, and Momomo, Helena, and Paulo, for their teaching over the years. I also thank the Muslim and Christian communities of Nampula for their generosity and help during my research. This book is the product of a long journey that lasted more than a decade, during which I crossed different geographies, spoke different languages, and encountered different people. I arrived in Mozambique in 2006 as a volunteer at a local psychiatric hospital. It was there—thanks to Dr. Ramon, several patients and their families, and the medical staff—that I started becoming involved in spirit stories, health and illness. 159

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Acknowledgments

I thank Elia Ciscato for having shared with me his knowledge and experience, whether during our walks throughout the city, in his library of anthropological works, or by email during the writing of this book. I thank all the friends in Nampula who have been part of this long path, especially my dear friend Justino Cardoso, who patiently shared daily thoughts, concerns, and enthusiasm about my fieldwork. I am also grateful to Mario “Sem-Medo” and Adelino Mateus Marrupo for patiently assisting me with the Makhuwa language and answering other questions that arose from my fieldwork. I thank the artist António Lazaro for providing consent to use a photograph of one of his Shetani sculptures in this book. I am appreciative for everything that he has taught me about his creation of these sculptures. I have also been blessed by the teaching of many admirable mentors and scholars. I thank Ugo Fabietti, who led me to anthropology in 2004. I am deeply grateful to my PhD supervisor Harry West, whose teachings guided my path in anthropology and encouraged me to find my own way in research and writing. David Pratten and Ruy Llera Blanes offered reliable support and insightful feedback for my doctoral thesis. Lenore Manderson encouraged to write this book when I could not see how to do so; one of the many delights of this book is my good fortune to work with such a generous teacher and inspiring scholar and woman. I thank Rutgers University Press, especially my editor, Kimberly Giunta, for guiding me through this process with kindness and understanding, Jasper Chang and Cheryl Hirsch for their constant assistance throughout the editorial process. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who provided critical feedback and valuable suggestions, all indispensable to completing this book. The years I spent at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg were crucial to the maturation of this book project. I am grateful to the generosity of wonderful colleagues at the university, in particular to the lively intellectual community in the Department of Anthropology and at the Humanities Centre. I thank Pamila Gupta, Robert Thornton, Hylton White, and Eric Worby for their teaching and encouragement. It was a pleasure to share those years with Brigitte Bagnol, Claudia Gastrow, Casey Golomski, Emery Kalema, and Dostin Lakika, all wonderful collogues and friends whose work has been a source of inspiration. I am beholden to Nolwazi Mkhwanazi for her friendship and scrupulous reading of the manuscript; our evenings spent on the terrace in Johannesburg discussing writing and anthropology have inspired many ideas in this book. A special thank-you also to Carol Taylor, who has been an unending source of care and friendship. At Drake University, I found generous and supportive colleagues. I thank those in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society for their support, help, and encouragement in finishing this book. Since my very first day at Drake, Joseph Schneider exuded confidence in my realization of this book, continually

Acknowledgments 161

reminding me not to lose sight of my end goal. My chair, Nancy Berns, helped me balance teaching with writing. I also thank my colleagues and friends Godfried Asante, Ramesh Dhussa, Arturo Marquez Jr., Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, Michael Haedicke, and Janet Wirth-Cauchon, all of whom offered words of encouragement when I needed them most, especially in the midst of frenetic teaching semesters. I am thankful to Sandra Patton-Imani for her friendship and for being a constant source of support during the writing of this book. I am also deeply grateful to my student and research assistant, Bardha Ahmedi, for her generous help during the final phase of the writing. My profound gratitude goes to colleagues and friends who have engaged with my research at different stages in this project and whose own work has been a source of inspiration for me. My friend Giulia Cavallo has been a constant companion in this path, always reminding me to live “sconfinando.” I thank Paolo Israel for shaping my path toward Mozambique and Ansha in so many ways. I owe a huge debt to Liazzat Bonate, whose knowledge and generosity guided me in these years, especially in navigating the complexities of Islam in Mozambique and healers who work with Muslim spirits. I am forever indebted to Signe Arnfred for offering indispensable feedback on sections of this book and for her valuable comments about gender and matriliny in northern Mozambique. A profound thank-you also to Devaka Premawardhana, my northern Mozambican “mate,” for his valuable feedback on this book, as well as for his enduring encouragement. The book would not have been possible without the generous financial support provided by numerous institutions. I thank the British Institute of East Africa, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London, the French Institute of Research in South Africa, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Centre of the University of Witwatersrand, the Anthropology Department at Wits, the Humanities Center at Drake University, and Drake International. This book would not have been completed without the friendship of Dan Howse, Anita Paghera, Misa Tamura, and Giulia Turcatel. Biagio Autieri has been a font of perpetual enthusiasm and inexhaustible endurance. A special thank-you goes to my friend Luca Locatelli, who allowed me to use some of his beautiful pictures, my favorite of which graces the cover of this book. I am fortunate to have shared fieldwork stints with him. His pictures of life in the mosque allow me still to see and remember what I otherwise cannot and might not. I also thank Alessandro Perboni for working on the resolution of the pictures included in the book. Finally, I thank my family, without whose support and love I would have never accomplished most of the things in my life, including this book. My parents, Mina and Raffaele, have seconded and supported my educational and career decisions, even when it was hard for them to understand. My uncle Bepi and aunt Edi have been a constant source of encouragement, even offering me a

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writing retreat one summer. I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing my writing of this book with my brother Matteo, whose patience and irony have made my path less thorny. His mitteleuropean wisdom always puts things in the right perspective. This book is also dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Maria, whose accounts of the Second World War triggered in me a passion for collecting stories ever since I was child. Her trips to Guinea-Bissau when I was a child enabled me to imagine the world beyond our mountains in Lessinia. I thank Frances, James, and my “Iowan shetani,” Laila, for bearing with me while finalizing “THE BOOK.” Finally, I thank my husband, Timothy Knepper, who has lived the writing of this book—in joy and pain—every single day of our relationship. This book comes from your love, generosity, and persistence.

GLOSSARY

Bairro (Port.): Neighborhood Capulana (Moz.): Printed cloth worn by women Curandeira (Port.): Traditional healer Doença (Port.): Sickness Dono (Port.): Owner; chief Ekoma (Mak., from Bantu ngoma, “drum”): Ceremony of spirits to make a patient

a healer

Ephepa (Mak.): Sacred flour of sorghum or millet produced by a family field used

for divination and ancestral worship

Feitiçero (Port.): Sorcerer/witch Feitiço (Port.): Sorcery/witchcraft Governo (Port.): Government Hiriz (Kisw.): Amulet Machamba (Moz.): Cultivated field Majini (Kisw., from Ar. jinni; in Mak., matxini): Spirits Maka (Mak., plural Amaka): Muslim; also a person from the coast Makeya (Mak.): Ritual offering involving the scattering of sacred flour around a

family tree

Mesquita (Port.): Mosque Miheya (Mak.): Shakers Mukhwiri (Mak.): Witch Munepa (Mak., plural minepa): Ancestor Mwalimu (Kisw., plural walimu): Muslim teacher Mwene (Mak. plural mamwene): Chief Nacasaco (Mak., from P. casaco, “jacket”): Sufi member Okhwiri (Mak.): Witchcraft Orapa (Mak.): Bath Pwiyamwene (Mak.): Makhuwa female chief of matrilineal lineage and clan Régulo (Port.): Upper-level native authority Sataka (Mak.): Ritual offering to the ancestors Saúde (Port.): Provincial Department of Public Health; Minister of Health Shehe (Kisw.): Muslim chief Sukut (Ar., “silent”): Islamist; Ahl al-Sunna

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NOTES

Introduction 1. ​I use the term sixteen-year war rather than civil war because this is how Ansha referred to

the postcolonial conflict between the Frelimo and the Renamo. I am aware, though, of the contestations of the term sixteen-year war, which was coined after the war by the Mozambican government in lieu of the term civil war. Recent historiography has criticized the term ­sixteen-year war for failing to recognize the internal causes and dimensions of the war. For such critiques, see Morier-Genoud, Cahen, and do Rosário 2018, 2; Geffray 1990; FunadaClassen 2013. 2. ​In 2007 I was conducting research for my master’s dissertation. 3. ​Anthropologist Joyce Flueckiger (2006, 22–23) grappled with similar questions when she decided to conduct fieldwork with a single healer, Amma, especially as the “validity” of this choice came to be questioned by academic colleagues. 4. ​Anthropological literature is rich with examples of stories of individuals as “outsiders.” One classical example is Victor Turner’s essay on Muchona, a healer who was an outsider to Ndembu society, the son of a slave who lived with his captors and was not a member of any particular lineage. With Muchona’s marginality came a certain freedom. Turner writes that Muchona’s “experience had been richer and more varied than that of most Ndembu” (1967, 134). Another example is Vincent Crapanzano’s (1980, 6–7) portrait of Tuhami, a Moroccan “outsider” whose isolation from society due to mental illness not only accounts for his intense imaginary activity but also offers a window onto central Moroccan values, conventions, and power structures. Flueckiger’s (2006, 24; 2013) ethnography of a “so unusual” Muslim Indian healer, Amma, shows how she nevertheless proactively interacts with dominant gender ideologies. Ruth Behar tells the story of her encounter with a Mexican migrant, Esperanza, an outcast who eludes categorization, a woman who “has a foot in each world” (1993, 10). 5. ​Healers have long been viewed as brokers moving across various social, religious, and medical domains (Luedke and West 2006). Eni Gort refers to Swazi healers as “transitional,” traversing different medical cultures (1989; see also Reis 2000, 72). Bjørn Enge Bertelsen describes healing in central Mozambique as “continuous becoming” (2016b, 142). In India, Flueckiger portrays the Muslim healer Amma’s healing as a crossing of religious boundaries and Amma’s healing room as a crossroads of Muslim and Hindu traditions (2013). For other examples, see Rekdal 1999; Langwick 2008, 2011; Rasmussen 2001; Granjo 2007a. 6. ​ Ngoma: drums; in Makhuwa, ekoma. The term refers to the ritual during which drumming, songs, and dance are performed to call the spirits. See chapter 6 for more about ekoma in Nampula. For classical literature on ngoma and regional cults of affliction in southern Africa, see Janzen 1982, 1992; van Dijk, Reis, and Spierenburg 2000b; V. Turner 1981; Thornton 2017; Schoffeleers 1978; van Binsbergen 1979, 1981; Werbner 1977. For ngoma healing along the East African coast, see Koritschoner 1936; Larsen 2008. For examples of spirit healing in Mozambique, see Luedke and West 2006; West 2005, 2006; Granjo 2007a, 2009; Honwana 1996; Igreja 2003; Igreja, Dias-Lambranca, and Richters 2008; Igreja et al. 2010; Luedke 2006, 2007, 2011. 7. ​See also the work of anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana among Makhuwa in Niassa, northern Mozambique. Premawardhana (2018b, 90) writes about how “border consciousness” is cultivated as early as puberty rituals, where initiates are taught to pass back and forth between ages and genders.

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Notes to Pages 7–13

8. ​According to Zachary Kingdon (2002, 121–129), the shetani genre includes images of sev-

eral different spirits that characterize the Makonde world, including majini.

9. ​Shetani sculptures bear the influence of the Swahili cultures in Tanzania, where many

Makonde moved during colonial times to work in the sisal plantations, then again later during the anticolonial struggle (Kingdon 2002; see also Gandolfo 2007). 10. ​For more on the metamorphic qualities and the moral ambiguity of shetani sculptures, see Rifiotis 1994 and Alpers 1988. Harry West and Stacy Sharpes (2002) report that Makonde artists in Mueda did not refer to mashetani as “spirits”—as Kingdon does in his work on shetani sculptures in Tanzania—but rather as sorcerers. This is because of the decreased relevance of spirits on the Mueda plateau. Also see Stout 1966 for the association of shetani with sorcerers. In this book, I follow Ansha and local artists’ understanding of mashetani as “spirits.” 11. ​Interview, Nampula, January 14, 2020. 12. ​As the missionary Giuseppe Frizzi puts it with regard to the “Makhuwa” way of thinking, “not speculative and abstract knowledge but life in its concreteness, plenitude and abundance” (in Premawardhana 2018b, 105). 13. ​Recent scholarship has looked at the temporalities of boundaries. See, for example, Little 2015; Reeves 2016. 14. ​An abundance of literature has focused on the profession and knowledge of healers rather than on healers and diviners themselves. For examples in Africa, see Langwick 2008; Rasmussen 2001, 2006; Granjo 2007a, 2009; Honwana 1997; Chavunduka 1978; Janzen 1978; Parkin 2014; Reynolds 1996; Thornton 2017; Peek 1991; E. Turner 2006; Whyte 1997; Feierman 1985; Last 1981; Devisch 1991; H. Callaway 1991. 15. ​For biographies of patients and their healing experiences, see Whyte 1997; Crapanzano 1980; G. Lewis 2000; Ashforth 2000; Biehl 2005. 16. ​Victor Turner’s (1967) intimate portrait of the healer Muchona is one exception. There are also exceptions outside African contexts that focus on healers’ lives (McClain 1989; Kendall 1988, 1989) and their “personality and character” ( Jones 1972, 1). See also Singer and Garcia’s (1989) portrayal of a Puerto Rican spirit healer, and Karen McCarthy Brown’s (1991) comprehensive portrait of a Haitian healer, Mama Lola. 17. ​The anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano makes a similar observation, shifting attention from “culture” to the individual and his use of symbols to articulate his own experience (1980, xi–xii). 18. ​On the experience and feeling of physicians becoming and being patients, see Hahn (1995, chap. 9), Oliver Sacks’ (1984) notable story of personal sickness, and Sedgwick’s (1994) Jungian approach to the healer-patient relationship. 19. ​According to the 2017 census, Nampula’s population was then 743,125 (Instituto Nacional de Estatística 2019). 20. ​The Nampula historian and intellectual Alberto Viegas (2013, 4) suggested that Nampula took its name from Mphula, the name of the local Makhuwa mwene (chief) of the territory on which Nampula city was erected. 21. ​Manuel de Araújo (2005, 214) reports that from 1970 to 1997, the population of Nampula sextupled, with most of the growth occurring during and after the sixteen-year war. 22. ​The largest ethnic group of Mozambique, the Makhuwa, is far from being homogeneous. Although they share a similar language and matrilineal social organization, they practice different religions and economic traditions. For more about this, see also chapter 9. 23. ​In the province of Nampula, there are 2,174,247 Muslims, 2,071,688 Catholics, 44,505 Anglicans, 112,453 Zionists, 33,859 evangelicals, 9,543 without religion, and 80,562 of unknown religion (Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 2019). 24. ​AMETRAMO’s data, Nampula, August 2009.



Notes to Pages 13–17

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25. ​Here I use the Makonde and Makhuwa denominations as categories that were commonly

deployed by Ansha and other residents in Nampula to define themselves and others. I am aware of the constructed nature of these ethnic terms and the hybridity and fluidity of these categories. 26. ​Many Makonde artists migrated to Nampula during colonial times (Gandolfo 2007; interviews with Makonde artists in Nampula, April 2016 and January 2020). 27. ​This point was made by a Makonde resident who settled in Nampula after independence (interview, Nampula, January 15, 2020). 28. ​The term “Makonde” probably came from likonde, meaning a fertile land without water (Liesegang 2007; see also Israel 2014, 49–50). The term was used to distinguish the people of the northern interior from the people of the northern coast, both of whom live in the presentday province of Cabo Delgado. For the origins of the “Makonde,” see Israel 2014, 48–51; Kingdon 2002; Liesegang 2007, 30. The anthropologist Harry West (2005, 27) was told by his interlocutors that the Makonde were in fact Makhuwa who took shelter in remote areas during the slave raids. 29. ​Paolo Israel writes that these practices “were strategies of social differentiation, adaption and reproduction, rather than merely as ancestral cultural features” (2014, 50). 30. ​Tanzania became independent in 1961. 31. ​One source from this period is the diary of Henry O’Neill, the British consul of Mozambique, who traveled extensively in the inland regions of northern Mozambique (Palmer and Newitt 2016). 32. ​Groups of Maravi arrived and settled in northern Mozambique from the Congo Basin in the 1500s (Alpers 1975). 33. ​The Portuguese administrator Soares de Castro described the region before Portuguese colonization as “a large, fertile, rich land under the domination of the Maravi, a brave and fierce people that had conquered and subjected peaceful peasants” (1960a, 103, translations are my own). 34. ​The expansion of the slave trade in East Africa and Mozambique was the result of growing demands for labor in French colonies (Bonate 2007a; Hafkin 1973; Mbwiliza 1991). 35. ​ Diversity also existed among Catholic missionaries in Mozambique. Missionaries coming from countries other than Portugal were often more tolerant of African cultures and more critical toward the Portuguese regime (Padre Elia Ciscato, personal communication, Nampula, October 25, 2013). For more about this diversity, see Morier-Genoud 2019, and chap. 4. 36. ​FRELIMO was established with the conjunction of previous organizations: UDENAMO (National Democratic Union of Mozambique), MANU (Mozambican African National Union), and UNAMI (National African Union for Independent Mozambique) (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983). 37. ​A number of scholars have supported the theory that the war was provoked by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa against socialist Mozambique, which supported antiapartheid and anticolonial movements in those countries. See, for example, Minter 1994; Hanlon 1984, 1991. 38. ​Some scholars have looked at the internal causes and dynamics of the war—to Renamo and its transformation into a local force with local consent (Hall 1990; Cahen 2009; FunadaClassen 2013); and to local society, especially ethnic and social tensions as well as opposition to Frelimo and socialism (Vines 1991; Geffray 1990; Finnegan 1992; Lubkemann 2005, 2008; Honwana 1996; Morier-Genoud, Cahen, and do Rosário 2018). 39. ​On displacements and migrations during the war, see Azevedo 2002; Lubkemann 2005, 2008; Englund 2002; Macamo 2006.

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40. ​For examples of dialogical ethnography that focuses on the encounter between infor-

mants and anthropologists, see Rabinow 1977; Crapanzano 1980; Caplan 1997; Dumont 1992; Behar 1993; Biehl 2005.

Part One 1. ​ Majini in Kiswahili, or matxini in the Makhuwa language of the interior. The term comes from the Arabic jinn, supernatural beings dating back to pre-Islamic Arabian and later Islamic mythology and theology. The term majini appeared in the inland of Nampula province during the slave trade and subsequent expansion of Islam from the coast in the 1700s and 1800s (Bonate 2007a, 63). 2. ​For literature that analyzes spirit possession beyond the dimension of illness/healing, especially in relation to knowledge, memory, power, and gender, see Lambek 1981, 1993, 2002; Boddy 1989, 1993; Stoller 1995; van Dijk, Reis, and Spierenburg 2000b; Masquelier 2001; Basu 2008.

Chapter 1 Rural and Urban 1. ​ Namatthukula (medical herb): from Mak. otthukula, to open. 2. ​The mountains that Ansha visited to harvest medical plants and that she referred to as the

“abode of spirits” and “source of knowledge” are the inselbergs surrounding the city of Nampula. Mountains are also of symbolic importance for the Makhuwa, whose myth of origin claims that all matriclans descend from Mount Namuli in the Zambezia province. Makhuwa healing practices and rituals of initiation are frequent occasions to renew this origin myth (Premawardhana 2018b, 46; Macaire 1996). 3. ​Harry West (2001, 121) notes that the Portuguese word confusão means not only confusion but also dissent. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen reports that his interlocutors in the Manica province of Mozambique used the word confusion as “disorder” in relation to sorcery and spirits (2016b, 103, 149). 4. ​West (2003) has written about Muedans’ experience of, familiarity with, and suspicion about colonial identification cards, party cards, and missionary tokens. 5. ​Although this chapter describes Ansha’s life before spirits when she was first named Rosa (at birth) and then Susana (after baptism), I use the name Ansha, since these stories were told to me during my fieldwork—i.e., after Ansha began calling herself Ansha. 6. ​The first Christian missionaries to arrive in Mueda were Montfort missionaries (Liesegang 2007; West 2005; Israel 2014). The first Catholic church was established on the plateau in 1920s. 7. ​For more about the Catholic church campaigns against tradition in the northern region (Cabo Delgado and Nampula) and their impact on local society, see West 2005, 116; Israel 2014, 71; Liesegang 2007; Premawardhana 2018b. 8. ​Although Portuguese missionary evangelization began later (1950s), it was no less influential. Gerhard Liesegang writes about the formation of an elite group of teachers and catechists on the plateau. One sign of the impact of evangelization was that those Makonde who were forced to work in the sisal plantations were distinguished for their Christian faith (Liesegang 2007, 35; see also Israel 2014, 264n10). 9. ​For general studies of Catholic missionary evangelization in Mozambique, see MorierGenoud 2019. For the impact of missionary evangelization and the use of medicine as way to “evangelize,” see Martin Shapiro’s (1983) PhD dissertation on medicine during colonialism in Mozambique.



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10. ​On socialist villagization, its effects, and resistance to it, see Chichava 2013; Geffray 1990;

Dinerman 2006; West 2005; Israel 2014. 11. ​Samora Machel (1933–1986) was the first president of Mozambique (from 1975 to 1986). 12. ​Many children of veterans began receiving pensions from the state for their parents’ service and for their suffering and involvement in the anticolonial war. Ansha began receiving pension in 2011. 13. ​For Frelimo’s instrumentalist valorization of the armed struggle in historiography and culture as a way of legitimizing its authority in postcolonial Mozambique, see Coehlo 2013; Israel 2010, 2013a, 2013b; de Souto 2013. For memories of the war “from below,” see Inguane 2007; West 2000; Bonate 2013; Santos 2010a, 2010b. See also the work of Jonna Katto (2014, 2019) about female combatants from Niassa and in Maputo. 14. ​There is considerable literature on the political use of memory in postcolonial southern Africa both in national discourse and in popular memories. See, for example, Werbner 1998a, 1998b; H. Becker 2011; Pearce 2015. 15. ​Alice Dinerman (2006, 192) writes about Frelimo’s denial of the socialist past (even of the positive aspects of it), especially villagization, as a strategy to maintain legitimacy after the sixteen-year war. For the remembrance of socialism “from below” and in political debates see Pitcher 2006 and Igreja 2008. 16. ​During Armando Guebuza’s mandates, pensions to former combatants were showered on the Makonde, even those who had not fought in the war, as a strategy to prop up social consent and prevent political instability (Israel 2014, 253). 17. ​Filipe Samuel Magaia was a guerrilla leader in FRELIMO during the war of independence. After serving for a number of years, he was assassinated by a FRELIMO soldier who was employed by the Portuguese.

Chapter 2 Health and Healing 1. ​Several events that occurred in the final months of 2013 instigated a renewed military con-

frontation between the state army and Renamo soldiers, which continues through today: Renamo’s boycott of the 2013 municipal elections, its repudiation of the 1992 peace accord, and the retreat of its leader, Afonso Dhlakama, to the bush. As during the sixteen-year war, these confrontations include Renamo attacks on national roads, health care centers, and police barracks (Joseph Hanlon: “Reports and Clippings,” 7th November 2013, n. 234). 2. ​In addition to divination, dreaming was another way by which the dead communicated with the living. The interpretation of such messages was the purview of a specialist, a diviner. 3. ​Victor Igreja and Béatrice Dias-Lambranca (2006) similarly describe an intensification of war-related dreams and the role of local healers in interpreting and preventing these dreams in the Gorongosa region during and after the sixteen-year war. 4. ​For a similar analysis of how recent political violence triggered memories of the war, see Bertelsen’s (2016a) work in central Mozambique. 5. ​In using this term, “ontology of stuckedness,” I draw on Axel Pedersen’s (2011, 35) concept of “ontology of transition,” that he describes as the form that the Mongolian society took after socialism. 6. ​Stephen Lubkemann similarly discusses how the war in Machaze district (central Mozambique) was a process of “increasing immobilization rather than accentuated mobility” (2008, 213). The centrality of “immobilization” in stories of war can be further understood if one takes into account the importance of mobility to Makhuwa culture, history, social structure, and economy, as described by anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana (2018b) in his work on conversion in Niassa.

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7. ​Many of my interlocutors claimed that the war ended because of the magic of healers and naparama. On this point, see also Corinna Jentzsch’s (2018) work on naparama in Zambezia province. 8. ​On the use and valorization of healers and mediums by Renamo during the war, see Wilson 1992; Jentzsch 2018, 89–91; Honwana 1996; Vines 1991, 112–113. 9. ​The word naparama likely comes from emparrámê, which refers to a plant found in the region. In the 1960s the colonial administrator Júlio Dos Santos Peixe (1960) wrote that this magic plant was used against the Portuguese. He described the plant and how its combination with other herbs caused extraordinary excitement in the soldiers who believed the herbs rendered their bodies immune from bullets. On the use of this medicine during the sixteen-year war and the creation of the naparama, see Jentzsch 2018; Wilson 1992; do Rosário 2018. 10. ​On constructing and telling stories as part of individual and collective therapy in postconflict Mozambique, see Bertelsen 2016a; Igreja 2009, 2010, 2012. 11. ​The relation between war and traditional healing has been explored in various regions in Mozambique. See Honwana 1996, 1997; Granjo 2006, 2007b; Igreja 2003; Igreja and Racin 2013; Igreja and Dias-Lambranca 2006; Igreja, Dias-Lambranca, and Richters 2008; Englund 1998; Wiegink 2013. 12. ​Similarly, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen explains how in Manica province “the process of establishing speech genres in ‘Honde’ represents an oral practice that freezes, molds, and generates meaning from a polysemic, fluid, and violent presence” (2016a, 210). 13. ​Mjermani was described as a blond-haired and white-skinned spirit. Paolo Israel reports that one popular mask for mapiko dances on the Makonde plateau during the colonial period was “Germans-in-the-hamlet” (majelemani nkaia), “a couple of white people dressed in fine clothes” (Israel 2014, 83, 121).

Chapter 3 Wives and Husbands 1. ​According to Signe Arnfred (personal communication, July 16, 2020) matriliny in north-

ern Mozambique tended to de-emphasize marriage. In her work in Cabo Delgado (among the Makhuwa), she reports that marriage in these matrilineal settings “was not a big issue anyway” (2017, 17), that husbands come and go and women stay in their own house among their own kin. 2. ​The Makhuwa populations of present-day Nampula province were organized into several matriclans (Mak. mahimo). According to Soares de Castro (1960b, 61), the term Laponi comes from the Makhuwa elapo, “homeland.” Tiago said that many members of his clan were located in Netía and Monapo in the eastern part of Nampula province. 3. ​It was common to encounter in Nampula the belief that the Makhuwa were not as involved in the anticolonial struggle as the Makonde and Yao. This narrative was supported and promoted by the Portuguese, who opposed the “loyal” Makhuwa to the rebellious Makonde (see Alpers 1974, 42). Tiago, however, is an example of Makhuwa involved in the struggle for independence. Edward Alpers (1974) belies the notion of the Makhuwa as a “loyal tribe,” pointing out century-long hostilities between Makhuwa chiefs and the Portuguese. See also Bonate (2007a) for examples of Makhuwa chiefs who resisted and fought against colonial occupation. 4. ​For studies about the OMM, see Casimiro 2004; Arnfred 1988, 2011; Urdang 1989; Sheldon 2002. For examples of the role and contribution of women during the anticolonial struggle, see West 2000; Katto 2014, 2019; Santos 2010b; Israel 2013a; Bonate 2013, 246–250; Sheldon 2002; Gegenbach 2005.



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5. ​Kathleen Sheldon (2002, chap. 5) presents cases of women who benefited from involvement in wage labor, showing also how they contributed to the transformation of labor conditions in Mozambique. 6. ​ Lobolo was, and continues to be, practiced in the southern regions of the country. See Bagnol 2006, 2008; Granjo 2004; Junod 1912. 7. ​Despite these campaigns, many local women continued to “be tacitly disobedient, performing their rituals secretly, at night, for Party (and OMM) officials not to know” (Signe Arnfred, personal communication, July 16, 2020). Arnfred further argues that women “appreciated the traditional rituals of initiation, as women-only spaces, and as spaces for reinforcement of women’s power. This in spite of the mobilization of Frelimo and the OMM for the eradication of these very rituals” (2017, 16). Stephanie Urdang (1989) reports that while the leaders of the OMM were advocating against lobolo and polygamy, lobolo not only continued to be practiced “in secret or at night” (207) but also was favored by many women because it strengthened marriage bonds and protected women from abuse and violence (215). See also Casimiro 2004; Geisler 2004. 8. ​The organization returned as part of Frelimo in 1996 (Geisler 2004, 115–116). 9. ​Maternal and neonatal mortality rates in Mozambique continue to be high. Celso Belo, Paulo Pires et al. (2017, 235) show the links between these rates and structural violence in the region of Nampula. 10. ​In the matrilineal and uxorilocal societies of northern Mozambique, the cause of reproductive issues was generally attributed to husbands. I discuss this more in chapter 16. 11. ​This rise in attacks from bad majini in Nampula is similar to Tumbuka spirit possession in Malawi (Vimbuza), which became an exclusive female domain due to the decline of matriliny and increased insecurity of women in the 1900s. As a result, spirit possession proliferated among women, becoming the only domain in which women could express their own views (Vail and White 1991, 248). 12. ​In her study on sexuality and gender in northern Mozambique, Arnfred (2011) argues that there is continuity and similarity between the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial states viewed and intervened on gender. The colonial regime, socialist state, and donordominated ideologies all worked to impose a patriarchal and androcentric model of society (2011, chap. 5). For the 2003 Family Law and its effects, see Arnfred 2011, 134–135. 13. ​For more about how matriliny and matrilocality empowered women in northern Mozambique, see Geffray 2000; Arnfred 2011. 14. ​For more on the rise of spirit afflictions among local women, see chapter 20. 15. ​As local healers explained to John Janzen, ngoma is not a linear transition from illness to healing, but rather a means of returning to one’s own illness in deepening degrees of acceptance ( Janzen 1992, 142). 16. ​For examples of how spirit possession discloses gender and marital struggles, see the ­classic work of Ioan Lewis (2003), who analyzes zār spirit possession in Somalia as a form of symbolic protest against men and male power, one in which spirits enable women to pursue their interests and demands in domestic settings. Focusing more on the experiences and perspectives of women, Barbara Callaway (1987) shows how bori spirit possession in Nigeria was a resource that Hausa women drew on in their effort to achieve self-determination and autonomy. Grace Harris (1957) looks at Taita women in Kenya who used spirit attacks to gain attention from and negotiate with their husbands. Janice Boddy (1989, 356) analyzes zār spirit possession among women in Sudan as the cultivation and articulation of a “feminist consciousness” in the possessed. 17. ​David Parkin (1991, 168) presents a similar classification among the Giriama in Kenya between the pepo spirits who “enter the body” (pepo/nyama za mwirini), causing pain and stress, and those who “enter the head” (pepo/nyama za kitswa), providing the power of healing.

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Chapter 4 Demons and Spirits 1. ​Susana was the name that Ansha—who was then Rosa—was given after baptism. 2. ​Distinctions must be made among Christian missionaries in Mozambique. For example,

Protestant churches in the south advocated for the use of local languages and played a role in cultivating anticolonial consciousness. By contrast, the Catholic Church imposed the use of Portuguese and became a vector of colonialization (Honwana 1996, 133–134). Differences should also be recognized among Catholic missionaries. For example, Eric Morier-Genoud writes that “Portuguese congregations understood civilization along a (narrow) national line by which Africans needed to become Portuguese, while foreign missionaries had a more complex relation to Portuguese civilization and some even preferred other forms of colonization and civilization, as, for example, that practiced by the British Empire (2019, 52). Padre Elia Ciscato (personal communication, Nampula, October 25, 2013) notes that many foreign missionaries expressed criticism of colonization and Portuguese rule. 3. ​The case of Nampula is different from other regions of the country where local healers draw from Christianity. See, for example, Tracy Luedke’s work on healers possessed by Christian spirits who combine traditional medicine and Christianity in the Tete province (2006). 4. ​Also relevant is the shift within the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council when the missionary church became more tolerant of African indigenous religions. See Premawardhana 2018b and Morier-Genoud’s (2019, 96) work on the diocese of Beira in central Mozambique. 5. ​Igreja Universal is an evangelical charismatic Christian church whose headquarters is in Brazil. 6. ​The formula La Ilaha Illallah (Ar. There is no god but God), the Islamic profession of faith (shahada), was also used by Ansha to indicate being or becoming Muslim. 7. ​For intergenerational antagonism and witchcraft accusations, see chapter 18. 8. ​There is considerable anthropological literature on Christianity in Mozambique, especially in the south. See Kamp 2016, 2018; Cavallo 2011, 2013; Pfeiffer 2002, 2005; Pfeiffer, Gimbel-Sherr, and Augusto 2007; Agadjanian and Yabiku 2015. The recent work of Devaka Premawardhana (2018a, 2018b) focuses on Pentecostalism in the northern region of Niassa, where, by contrast to other regions, these churches have struggled to take root. 9. ​In the 1990s, the state lifted its ban on religion, permitting almost any religious institution to come to Mozambique. In the words of Eric Morier-Genoud (2000, 424), this democratic and neoliberal turn produced a “free religious market” that resulted in the proliferation of religious groups and movements.

Chapter 5 Insiders and Outsiders 1. ​I was often told by healers that in the times of “tradition” and in the rural countryside, one

became a healer by being possessed by the spirits of a maternal kin (Mak. munepa) who had practiced healing in life. In their historical study of African religions, Terence Ranger and Isaria Kimambo show how colonial and postcolonial changes caused a shift from ancestral to foreign spirits, reflecting an “enlargement of scale” in African societies (1976, 14). With regard to Mozambique, Ken Wilson (1991) reports the rapid rise of new cosmologies and religious movements during the sixteen-year war, reflecting the formation of new communities as an effect of dislocation and migration. Mary Anderson and Marshall Wallace (2013, chap. 12; see also Nordstrom 1997, 147–151) likewise examine the rise of a new cult, Mungoi, in southern Mozambique among refugees and displaced people during the war. Anthropologist Victor Igreja (2003) has written extensively on the phenomenon of new spirits called gamba that



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emerged during and after the conflict in Gorongosa, central Mozambique (see also Igreja, Dias-Lambranca, and Richters 2013). 2. ​Victor Turner (1981, 128–129) also reflects on the role of Ndembu cults of affliction in times of transition. See also Janzen 1992, 7; van Dijk, Reis, and Spierenburg 2000b. 3. ​For ethnographic examples of the legitimization of traditional healers after the sixteenyear war and the establishment of AMETRAMO, see West 2005, 2006; Luedke 2006; Bertelsen 2016b; Honwana 1996; Meneses 2000. Anthropologist Juan Obarrio (2014) looks at the role of healers in solving domestic and local disputes in community courts. I discuss AMETRAMO in chapter 12. 4. ​Other ethnographic accounts analyze the effects of socialist repression on local cosmologies and healing practices as well as structures of knowledge transmission. In similar contexts where socialism gives way to neoliberalism, there is a similar proliferation of healers and a growing skepticism toward them. I refer particularly to work on shamanism in postsocialist Mongolia: Buyandelger 2007, 133; 2013, 203–204; Pedersen 2011, 208. 5. ​Adam Ashforth (1998, 2005) examines the forms that spiritual insecurity took in postapartheid Soweto (South Africa) as the effect of the proliferation of interpretive authorities. See also Manduhai Buyandelger’s (2007, 2013) ethnography on shamanism in postsocialist Mongolia. 6. ​Murray Last (1981) makes a similar point in discussing how Hausa medicine in Nigeria was not a “system” but rather characterized by increasing individualism and personalism. 7. ​Michael Lambek also maintains that trance is a learned behavior, the potential for which “has to be activated through specific cultural means, given specific cultural forms and substance” (1981, 6). 8. ​In his classic essay on a Cuna ritual performed for difficult birth, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963a) attributed ritual effectiveness to verbal understanding between the shaman and the patient. Healing succeeded because the patient could understand and relate to the song sung by the shaman during the healing process. For more discussion of the importance of language in ritual and magic, see Stanley Tambiah’s classic “The Magical Power of Words” (1968). With regard to spirit possession, Raymond Firth writes that the “emphasis is upon communication” (2004, xi), specifically the willingness of spirits to say something to the audience. Likewise, Robert Gray describes how the healing power of spirit healers on the Swahili coast concerned their ability to “talk about” (2004, 177). See also Michael Lambek’s (1981, chap. 5) work in Mayotte, where he analyzes spirit possession as a system of transmitting messages between spirits and both individuals and collectivities. 9. ​In cases of witchcraft, patients instead sought diviners and healers from other regions. This was for the sake of secrecy, as well as because the medicine of the “other” was considered more powerful for problems of sorcery. Suzette Heald (1991, 303) similarly discusses the power of foreign elements among Gisu diviners in Uganda. 10. ​For examples of spirit possession in East Africa that are informed by African and Muslim heritages, see McIntosh 2004, 2009; Giles 1995, 1999; Caplan 1997; Parkin 1970; Larsen 1998. 11. ​Literature about spirit possession in the northern region of Mozambique remains scant. In her work on the slave trade and the expansion of Islam into the inland, Liazzat Bonate (2007a, 36; see also Trentini 2016a) mentions the rise of new Muslim and coastal spirits that were supplemented to maternal ancestors and inland Makhuwa spirits. Missionaries have also documented cults of possession among the Makhuwa of the inland (Ciscato 2012; Frizzi 2008). For Makhuwa and Maka ethnic categories, see chapter 9. 12. ​In many spirit cults present in East Africa, spirit distinctions are often between land and water spirits (Caplan 1997; Janzen 1992).

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13. ​The name Nakuru is from the Makhuwa ekuru, meaning “force.” Muru means “head”; Eyottho is the name of both an illness and the drum that heals it (Prata 1990: 76). 14. ​Amaka (sing. Maka): Muslims; people of the coast, vernacular, likely from “Mecca.” 15. ​From the Arabic baniani, also banyani: Indian merchant; Hindu.

Chapter 6 Mountains 1. ​ Régulo: upper-level traditional authority, a colonial designation for a traditional chief (in

Makhuwa, mwene). Pwiyamwene (Mak.): the female chief of the matrilineal clan.

2. ​By tradição (Port. tradition), healers referred to a broad field that included customary law,

rituals of initiation, ancestral worship, majini and herbal medicine. 3. ​Although failure is rarely mentioned, classic studies of ngoma often refer to the uncertain outcomes of these rituals, the success of which is not guaranteed ( Janzen 1992, 88–89; V. Turner 1981, 57). 4. ​I attended three ceremonies of majini between 2008 and 2016. Since the structure of Ansha’s ekoma ceremonies resembled that of other Makhuwa healers’, I can only guess that she performed what she had learned from her master, Paulo, and other local healers. Over the years, particularly with patients from Cabo Delgado, Ansha added Shimakonde and Kiswahili songs. 5. ​ Mwalí: the Makhuwa term used for a girl ready to undertake rituals of puberty; also, an unmarried woman. 6. ​In female rituals of initiation, the fermenting of sorghum serves as a symbol for gestation, transformation, and rebirth. 7. ​Ansha explained walking backward as a technique for defeating sorcerers (who walk in this way) who might try to sabotage the ceremony. Indeed, unlike rituals of initiation, these are public rituals. Victor Turner (1981, 71) reports backward dancing in cults of affliction among the Ndembu. 8. ​A Muslim neighbor was usually in charge of the animal sacrifice during Ansha’s ceremonies. 9. ​Ekoma ceremonies displayed the importance of acquiring diagnostic power from spirits. A successful ceremony was one in which the patient demonstrated the ability to find what was hidden, to divine. The anthropologist Ria Reis (2000, 62) makes a similar point in her work on ngoma in Swaziland, highlighting the importance of acquiring the power to diagnose during the ritual. 10. ​John Janzen defines ngoma ritual as a “course through white,” with white as a symbol of purity and health. White also symbolizes ancestral spirits ( Janzen 1992, 95, 101–104). See also Turner (1981, 270–271) for the significance of the color white as a symbol of “health, strength and long life” in Ndembu rituals.

Chapter 7 Coast 1. ​ Nikombe: conversion by means of drinking water with pages of the Qur’an. Janet McIntosh writes about this practice (kombe) among the Giriama in Malindi (2009, 217). 2. ​Sharifas learned their knowledge of Islam in Qur’anic schools or from family members; they gained knowledge of spirits through illness and rituals with other women of majini. 3. ​Women in Nampula also reached Islam through marriage. An increasing number of younger women (who were more educated than older ones) instead claimed to have reached Islam by joining mosques. 4. ​Mwani: people who live along the coast of Cabo Delgado and speak Kimwani. 5. ​ Shehe: Ansha used this term for Muslim healers, also for chiefs of mosques.



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6. ​Other examples from the East African coast show how Islam was reached among non-Mus-

lim inlanders by means of spirit possession and rituals. See the examples of Giriama possession described in Janet McIntosh’s (2004, 2009) work in Malindi, Kenya, as well as in Parkin (1970, 1991). Although she does not speak of conversion per se, Linda Giles writes that Muslim spirits along the Swahili coast demanded “their human partners lead an exemplary Muslim life” (1987, 245). For the relationship between ngoma and Islam, also see Janzen 1992, 30–32. 7. ​ Dhikr: Sufi chanting ceremonies to remember God. In Nampula, these ceremonies were performed exclusively by female members of Sufi orders every Thursday in the yards of women’s houses. 8. ​The incoroporation of elements from Sufism into spirit practices is also encountered in other examples of spirit ceremonies along the East African coast; see Caplan 1997, 172; Giles 1999, 149. 9. ​Two Kiswahili songs in Ansha’s repertoire bear witness to these transgressions: “Assane amekunywa na amelewa”: Assane is drunk and intoxicated; and “Mwalimu anakwenda kuleta dawa karibu na mlima”: the Muslim teacher goes to bring medicine close to the mountains. 10. ​In her work among Giriama spirit-forced converts, Janet McIntosh (2009, 161) discusses how becoming and being Muslim through spirits “were grounded in the body and material world” which is at odds with the rational and intellectual experiences of Islam among the Swahili Muslims. 11. ​Ansha’s continous references to walimu suggest that spirit possession also resumed older discourses of Islam in the region, discourses that came to be marginalized by Sufism and Islamism in the twentieth century (Trentini 2016a). These older forms of Islam spread into the inland during the slave trade in the nineteenth-century primarily through the proselytizing work of Islamic teachers (walimu) (Alpers 1969, 1976; Bonate 2007a, 2007b). Liazzat Bonate (2007a, 2007b, 2010, 2017; see also Hafkin 1973) refers to it as “chiefship” Islam (or Swahili Islam), highlighting the fact that Islamic authority continued to be located in local chiefs, whose power and legitimacy were the result of being matrilineal lords of the land. The Portuguese defined it as “Black Islam” for its syncretic nature (Bonate 2007a). 12. ​ Maometano: Port. Muslim. 13. ​Devaka Premawardhana (2018a, 2018b) likewise discusses religious conversion among the Makhuwa in Niassa in terms of “regress” since men and women continue to move back and forth between different religious traditions. 14. ​On Islam as a resistance against colonization and missionary evangelization, see Bonate 2007a; Monteiro 1993. Padre Castellari (2015), a Combonian missionary in Nampula province since 1963, witnessed episodes of Islamic resistance to the Catholic Church, especially in the coastal areas where missionary presence failed. 15. ​ Ansha is an Arabic name meaning “she created,” “she started,” “she began.” 16. ​Cases of spirit-forced conversion in East Africa have been analyzed as both benefit and burden. David Parkin (1970, 1991) shows how spirit conversion among Giriama allowed the more enterprising and wealthy young men, who lived in the hinterland of the Kenyan coast, to distance themselves from the authority imposed by their elderly kin and family and to avoid the danger of being bewitched by adopting new dietary customs. Decades later, McIntosh’s (2004, 2009) research among Giriama in the coastal city of Malindi revealed that conversion to Islam through spirit possession was more of a burden than a benefit for many. Many Giriama in fact lived with deep resentment about becoming Muslim and in some cases tried to resist Muslim spirits and forced conversion. 17. ​For similar examples of relations and tensions between spirit possession and Islam, see I. Lewis 2003; Lambek 1981, 1993; Boddy 1989; Masquelier 2001. I discuss Ansha’s relations with other Islamic discourses (Sufism and Wahhabism) in part II, especially chapter 11.

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Notes to Pages 65–74

Chapter 8 Rivers and Bridges 1. ​For an overview of the health situation in Mozambique following the war and during the

structural adjustment program and privatization, see O’Laughlin 2010; Pfeiffer 2003; Pfeiffer and Chapman 2010, 2019. 2. ​The Rovuma River marks the natural border between Tanzania and Mozambique in the province of Cabo Delgado. 3. ​Nandenga (Shim.) is a spirit living in the forest (Kingdon 2002, 126). 4. ​Simba, Ruhani, and Mumiani are spirits found in northern East Africa. Simba (Kisw. lion): Linda Giles (1995, 103) mentions the presence of Simba spirits in Zanzibar. Mumiani (Kisw. mummy, bloodsucker; in Portuguese, chupa-sangue): see the work of historian Luise White (2000, 10–11) on Mumiani’s etymology, origin, and significance in colonial East Africa. Ruhani: these are described as Muslim spirits who live in the sea of the East African coast (Gray 2004, 174); Giles characterizes these spirits as “highly Muslim in their character and demands” (1987, 245–246); see also Larsen (2008, chap. 5), who provides an extensive description of a ritual for Ruhani.

Part Two 1. ​The two main Sufi orders, Qadiriyya and Shadhuliyya, arrived in Mozambique from the

Comoro Islands and Zanzibar in 1896 and 1904–1905 (Bonate 2006, 2007a, 2015; Macagno 2006; Arnfred 2011). Islamism, known in Mozambique as Wahhabism, spread in the last phase of colonial rule during the 1960s (Bonate 2006; 2007a; 2007b). Wahhabis are also associated with the Islamic Council, one of Mozambique’s Islamic organizations. 2. ​For spirit mediums’ resistance to colonial occupation in other southern African contexts, see examples from Zimbabwe (Ranger 1967; Fry 1976; Lan 1985). For Mozambique, see the historical work of Allen Isaacman (1976), who reports on the role of spirit mediums and regional cults in providing magical protection against the Portuguese in the Zambesi valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liazzat Bonate (2007a, 206–207) attests to healers and walimu providing magical, antibullet amulets against the Portuguese army when they originally attempted to occupy the present-day province of Nampula. 3. ​For an overview of traditional medicine under colonialism, see Honwana (1996, 95–107), who reports that healers and their practices in southern Mozambique were repressed. Healers were often imprisoned or sent to forced labor. See also Bastos 2007; Roque 2006, 2014.

Chapter 9 Makhuwa and Maka 1. ​Nacasaco: from the Portuguese casaco, coat or jacket. Sufi members were identified by their Muslim attire, which included long-sleeved tunics and hats. This distinguished them from the Islamist Muslims, who instead wore Western-style clothes. 2. ​Maka is the vernacular translation of Mecca. The term was used to identify the slave raiders and Muslims from the coast. During slave trade, the term Makhuwa was imposed from outside, carrying a strong pejorative connotation of those who were backward and therefore to be enslaved (Bonate 2007a, 53; 2007b, 134). The term Makhuwa probably derives from nikuwa, meaning “bush” (Prata 1990, 103; see also Ciscato 2012). 3. ​For historical relations between the coast and inland of northern Mozambique, see Bonate 2007a (for the Nampula province), Conceição 2006 and Santos 2010a (for Cabo Delgado).



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4. ​People of the coast are commonly classified today as Makhuwa, with the term Maka used only

by Makhuwa of the interior to denote residents from the coast. Following Ansha, I use these terms. 5. ​Although the slave trade contributed to the differentiation of the two groups, it also interconnected the two regions. Rituals, cults, spirit possession, and healing practices all bore witness to encounters between Muslim and African cultures in the region (Bonate 2007a; Mattos 2019). 6. ​One example is the early twentieth-century work of the Portuguese Eduardo Lupi, who described the Makhuwa living beyond the coast with terms like “barbaric,” “backward,” and “inferior” (1907, 110). 7. ​On the role of ethnicity in Mozambican postcolonial politics, see the work of Edward Alpers (1974), who examines rivalries between Makhuwa and Makonde that emerged during the struggle against the Portuguese due to colonial representations and policies. The anthropologist Christian Geffray (1990) analyzes the ethnic tensions between the Makhuwa in Eráti and Macuane, showing how they were reinforced by both colonial and Frelimo governance. Michel Cahen (2000) discusses the role of ethnicity in postcolonial Mozambique, especially in relation to the sixteen-year war and the Frelimo and Renamo parties, arguing that although the war was not an inter-ethnic conflict, ethnic factors played a role in it (173). 8. ​In her work on religious and ethnic identities in Kenya, Janet McIntosh (2009, chap. 1) demonstrates how, despite historical fluidity between the Giriama and Swahili, socioeconomic and religious changes under and after colonialism reified ethnic and religious division between them. 9. ​Relations between the coastal and inland population informed the history and identity of East Africa. For other similar examples in the region, see McIntosh 2009; Parkin 1989, 1991; Caplan 1997; Becker 2008; Larsen 1998, 2008. 10. ​Anthropologist Todd Sanders (2001) makes a similar point in discussing how ethnic identities between the Ihanzu and Sukuma in Tanzania were forged by medical and magic practices. 11. ​The term patiri refers to the short text Al-Badiri, the reading of which was considered a means of bewitching in East Africa (McIntosh 2009, 230). Liazzat Bonate suggests the term comes from Al-Badr, the first battle of Prophet Muhammad’s Medinan forces against the Quraysh of Mecca. Amulets (hiriz) and baths (nikombe) that employ Qur’anic verses mentioning the Battle of Badr (Surahs 3, 8, and 22) are considered the most powerful (Liazzat Bonate, personal communication, August 17, 2020). 12. ​Linda Giles describes Subiana (Subian) as a special type of Arab-African spirit, a “Pemba witchcraft spirit” (1987, 245). See also Larsen 2008. 13. ​There is abundant scholarship about spirit possession as a form of historical consciousness in Africa. See Stoller 1995; Masquelier 2001, 2009; Makris 1996; Lambek 2002; Wendl 1999; Giles 1999; Boddy 1989. 14. ​In examples of spirit possession along the East African coast, African spirits are generally represented as the ultimate “Other,” often infused with pejorative qualities that reinforce the superiority of the spirits of the coast (Giles 1987, 1999; McIntosh 2009; Parkin 1970; Larsen 1998). Liazzat Bonate (personal communication, August 17, 2020) reports that for people living along the Mozambican coast, Muslim spirits were generally regarded as more powerful than those of the inland “because the coastal people defeated and enslaved the peoples of the interior of the continent, unless they became Muslim and kin.” All these studies focus on spirit possession in coastal regions, where Islam is hegemonic, Swahili is the majority ethnicity, and inlanders are immigrants. By contrast, Nampula is an inland city where Makhuwa from the interior are the majority of the local population.

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Chapter 10 Books and Roots 1. ​ Orrukunuwa (Mak.)—literally, “to turn,” in this case to turn the witchcraft back—is a

treatment that underscores the ambiguity of witchcraft and its removal. De-witching requires turning the sorcery back to the witch. See chapter 15 for more discussion. 2. ​Ansha’s preventive healing consisted of reinforcing the margins of the body—hair, saliva, and nails—which were regarded as the most vulnerable parts of the body, the boundaries that witches infringe to harm their victims. See Douglas (1966) on the symbolic and social significance of the margins of the body. 3. ​Ansha explained to me that the snake was her grandfather, who came from Mueda, bringing his expertise of witchcraft. 4. ​I discuss here distinctions that Ansha drew between spirit healers and walimu. In fact, there were several spirit healers from and on the coast who worked with both African and Muslim spirits. 5. ​Rivalries between (male) walimu and (female) healers likely started during the slave trade, when many walimu brought their book-based medicine. Bonate (2007a, 63–64; 2007b, 134; see also Trentini, forthcoming) suggests that while many male healers became walimu, the ritual role of the female leader (Mak. pwiyamwene) might have been challenged by the walimu who provided Makhuwa chiefs with a powerful magic based on literacy. 6. ​There is considerable literature on the perceived magical potency of Arabic literacy in Africa. See, for example, Bledsoe and Robey 1986; Goody 1968; Tom 1985. 7. ​The association of the walimu with literacy dates back to the slave trade, when they spread literacy to the inland not only through Islamic teaching but also through their magic, specifically the manufacture of amulets (Bonate 2016, 69). For more about the role of walimu in promoting Islam and literacy, see the work of Edward Alpers (1969, 1976) in Niassa. 8. ​For similar examples of walimu and their magic in East Africa, see the work of Michael Lambek (1993) in Mayotte, Kjersti Larsen (2002) in Zanzibar, John Janzen (1992) and David Parkin (1970, 1991) in Kenya. For a historical view, see also Pouwels (1987). 9. ​Walimu to whom I talked claimed they had been trained and taught by other walimu. 10. ​ Ramuli: from Khat al-Raml (sand writing); divination practices found in Muslim Africa (see for example Larsen 2002, 178; Bonate 2010). 11. ​Janet McIntosh makes a similar point in discussing Giriama and Swahili conceptions of personhood (2009, 109). 12. ​For more about the perceived harm of walimu’s magic, see chapter 17. 13. ​Spirits enable one to cross not only medical and religious borders but also gender borders. In accordance with the kinds of spirits that possessed her, Ansha dressed and behaved sometimes like a Muslim healer or a male soldier. For more on gender transgression in spirit possession, see Cornwall 1994; Colleyn 1999; Schmidt 2010. I discuss gender transgression and healing more in chapter 19. 14. ​Lichinga: capital of Niassa province, northwest Mozambique. 15. ​For Islam among the Yao, see Amaral 1990; Thorold 1987; Bonate 2012; Alpers 1969, 1976.

Chapter 11 Muslims of the Spirits and Muslims of the Mosque 1. ​In this case, Ansha uses the term shehe (Kisw. coastal chiefs) to refer to a religious leader or

chief of a mosque.

2. ​Although Ahl al-Sunna is a branch of Wahhabism, it works separately from the main-

stream Wahhabi movement in Mozambique. According to Liazzat Bonate (2006, 2007b), the



Notes to Pages 86–88

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Ahl ­al-Sunna movement was founded in 1998 by twenty-four younger Black members of the Islamic Council against the racial discrimination of the Indian-African leadership. 3. ​One classic example is Clifford Geertz’s (1957) analysis of the religious, political, and social competitions that erupted during a Java funeral. For more recent examples of how funerals unveil or trigger social and religious conflicts, especially within Muslim contexts, see Janson 2011; Abashin 2006; Ahmed 2002; F. Becker 2009; Bowen 1993. 4. ​In the bairros, Sufi Muslims were also called Nashidi (from Ar. nashid, clapping hands). Islamists were instead referred to as Sukutis, from the Arabic word “Sukut,” silent. Felicitas Becker found that Islamist Muslims in Tanzania were referred to by the Makonde term Chimumuna, meaning “quietly, hastily, furtively” (F. Becker 2009, 424). As these terms suggest, Islamists eschewed music, drumming, and noise during prayers and funerals in favor of direct and simple worship and ritual. This funeral dispute, however, precedes the arrival of Islamist movements, occurring when a group split from the Qadiriyya because of their “noisy” way of performing funerals (Bonate 2005, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2015). 5. ​It is difficult to draw a clear-cut line between “traditional” funerals and Sufi ones, for Islam deeply affected the ways that funerary rituals were carried out in Nampula. As Ansha once quipped, “There is always a Muslim in the family,” explaining why funerary rituals followed Islamic norms. 6. ​Funerals were central events in the neighborhood, attesting not only to the stature and power the deceased held in life but also to the importance of staging religious ideas and belonging. Diverse funerary practices not only unveiled different ideas of Muslim identity and authenticity but also displayed distinctive notions of person and community. One Sufi Muslim described funerals as collective experiences: the living are concerned about the well-being of the deceased; they recite the Qur’an and perform collective prayers and supplication on behalf of the deceased. Conversely, the imam of the Fatima mosque, the main mosque for the Islamic Council in Nampula, emphasized the individual dimension of funerals: such events were “simple,” without ritual and prolonged mourning; after performing the Ṣalāt al-Janāzah—the Islamic funeral prayer to seek pardon for the deceased in particular and all dead Muslims in general—the participants “pray alone and go on their own way” (Interview, Nampula, January 15, 2020). 7. ​Members of Islamist movements regularly despised curandeiros as “poisonous” (Port. nefasto), witches, evil, haram, that which must be eradicated. Spirits were defined as Satanic, anti-Islamic, tempters of Muslims. I remember the words of one Ahl al-Sunna member who lived in the same neighborhood of Ansha. He was puzzled by the fact that I worked daily with a healer, fearing that I should want to become a healer myself. He began our conversation by explaining that healers “are never right because they are rooted in evil,” implying that I was hanging out with a witch. For similar examples of Islamist opposition to spirits, see Masquelier 2001, 2009; McIntosh 2009; Basu 2008; Behrend 2015. 8. ​Ana’s fit resembles the outbreak of a spirit attack during the construction of a mosque in Niger (Masquelier 2009). Adeline Masquelier analyzes this event as an expression of historical consciousness: “Stories of spirit attacks constitute a form of historical consciousness that reveals much about the ways that Dogondoutchi residents imagine their place in an emerging Muslim order cast against a ‘vanishing’ non-Muslim tradition” (2009, 153). 9. ​Through the act of undressing and dressing, Ansha brings back her niece to the majini community. Religious power is also therefore a matter of “dressing social skin” ( Jean Comaroff 1985, 219). Sufi women were recognized by the capulanas they wore on their heads. Islamist women instead used imported tunics and covered their heads with a hijab. In rituals, women of majini wore black, red, and white cloths, with a crescent moon and other Islamic symbols sewn in them.

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10. ​The attitude of local Sufism toward local traditions has been an object of debate among

scholars. Signe Arnfred (2011, 271–275) reports that Sufi orders along the coast were tolerant of customary matrilineal practices and even implemented elements from them like female leadership and the transmission of leadership through matrilineal lines. By contrast, Liazzat Bonate (2007a) holds that Sufis differentiated themselves from former Islamic discourses by introducing a new conception of religious authority based on learning, reading, and writing Arabic. Many chiefs who joined Sufi orders began refusing to practice certain Makhuwa rituals such as the installation ceremonies of traditional chiefs and the drumming during Islamic festivals. Some of these chiefs even denied having a pwiyamwene (140). I too found that many Sufi Muslims refused to approve Makhuwa traditional practices and spirit possession, regarding them as evil, sickness, or the “religion of women” that should be restricted to the compound. Such statements can also be attributed to the fact that many Sufis were increasingly influenced by Islamist ideas and practices that were popular in the city.

Chapter 12 Healers and the Governo 1. ​ Campo Makonde: a square in an area nearby Ansha’s neighborhood that was inhabited

mostly by Makonde families.

2. ​During the 2009 election, Frelimo was challenged not only by its historical rival, Renamo,

but also by a newly formed, third party, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique, which was run by Daviz Simango, a former Renamo member and the mayor of the city of Beira. 3. ​After independence, many young Mozambicans were educated in Eastern European countries in the Socialist Bloc, where they were trained in socialist ideology, received higher education, and learned different professions. See Allina 2017; Müllerm 2014. 4. ​As one example of centralization, the Guebuza government resumed “Agentes Polivalentes Elementares” in 2010 to extend coverage of the national public health system, especially in rural areas, with regard to the treatment of common ailments. The project was initially launched during the socialist era in 1978, then interrupted during the sixteen-year war (Guenther et al. 2017). 5. ​The anthropologist Stacey Pigg (1995) makes a similar argument, showing how the establishment of a global acronym like TMP (traditional medical practitioner) and the compulsory training of traditional healers within a biomedical framework served to marginalize the work and knowledge of shamans in Nepal. See also Eni Gort’s (1989) research among Swazi healers. 6. ​Mozambique in fact represents an exception among neighboring countries like South Africa and Tanzania, where governments have instead promulgated legislation to control and regulate traditional medicine. In the former case, see Thornton 2009; in the latter, Langwick 2011. 7. ​The anthropologist Robert Thornton (2009) explains how legislation in South Africa included a restricted reconceptualization of traditional medicine that relegated “its knowledge to the category of ‘indigenous African philosophy’ ” (23), thereby undermining healers’ social and medical work. 8. ​Because of historically rooted tensions between Frelimo and healers, there was widespread belief that healers in Nampula, even those who campaigned for the ruling party during the election, were really members of Renamo who opposed the government and Frelimo. 9. ​Ansha’s words confirm a general point made by anthropologists about the implications of the legitimization and professionalization of healers—i.e., how these interventions risk disaggregating healers from their medicines and institutions of social and political power (Feierman 1985; Luedke 2006; Bertelsen 2016b; Langwick 2008, 2011; Thornton 2009; Lan 1985; Cavender 1988; Last and Chavunduka 1986).



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Chapter 13 Healers and Nurses 1. ​The doctor–patient ratio in Mozambique is the fifth worst in the world, with a health-

worker-per-capita ratio of seventy-one in ten thousand (Pfeiffer and Chapman 2019). 2. ​Since nurses and health workers were identified with the government, they often became the target of antistate feelings and revolts, especially in the rural communities during the campaigns for vaccination and the prevention of cholera. For rumors about nurses and health personnel spreading cholera during the prevention campaigns in Nampula, see Serra 2003; Gerety 2018, chap. 5. 3. ​For examples of the employment of healers in governmental projects in Africa, see Birhan, Giday, and Teklehaymanot 2011; Mngqundaniso and Peltzer 2008; Munk 1997. In the case of Mozambique, see Green, Jurg, and Dgedge 1993. See also chapter 14. 4. ​At the Provincial Department of Health, I was told in 2016 that the main problem was a lack of resources. Although the country had seen an increase in new nurses with degrees, many were not employed because of a lack of financial resources to pay their salaries. 5. ​For the political implications of the state’s involvement in and acknowledgment of traditional medicine, see Steve Ferzacca’s (2002) work in Indonesia, which analyzes the integration of traditional medicine in state health as a way to keep at bay those who realize that the state can no longer provide the same level of health care that it did in the past. Likewise, the anthropologist Sean Brotherton (2012) examines the increasing tolerance of the Cuban government toward traditional medicine as a strategy to confront the shortages in medicines and medical supplies after the end of the Soviet Bloc and the strengthening of the American embargo. 6. ​Some healers working in the hospital wore a coat of arms with the title Co-gestão/Saúde (Co-management / Department of Public Health). 7. ​Harry West (2005, 215) found similar skepticism among hospital staff toward traditional healers. 8. ​In her work on healers in Tanzania, anthropologist Stacey Langwick (2011, 154) suggests that origin of the term “God diseases” lies in the use of medicine by missionaries to address ailments that are now treated in the hospital. West (2005, 50) similarly encountered the use of the term of “God’s illnesses” in Mueda to define “contemporary afflictions” that were not attributed to ancestral anger. 9. ​The average monthly salary for a nurse was then about 12,000 meticais (around $193 USD). Many therefore combined their public-sector practice with private consultations. 10. ​For similar examples of “informal” collaborations between traditional medicine and biomedicine, nurses and healers in Africa, see Janzen 1978; Feierman 185; Langwick 2008, 2011, 2015; Marsland 2007.

Chapter 14 Knowing and Not-Knowing 1. ​SIDA: síndrome da imunodeficiência adquirida (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

[AIDS]).

2. ​For other examples of translating AIDS into local conceptions of sexual disturbances, see

Dilger and Luig 2013; Iliffe 2006. In the case of Mozambique, see Passador 2009. 3. ​On a national level, the rate of AIDS patients is 11.6 percent; in Nampula province, 9 percent (Ministério da Saúde 2013; Pires, Marega, and Creagh 2017). AIDS continues to be the leading cause of death in the country (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2019). 4. ​On local definitions and experiences of AIDS in Mozambique, see Kalofonos 2010; Audet et al. 2010; Pfeiffer et al. 2010; Braga 2017; Agadjanian 2005a; Passador 2009; Reed 2018.

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5. ​In a research project on the use and abandonment of antiretroviral treatments in Nampula,

Pires, Marega, and Creagh (2017) showed that the main cause for abandoning this program was social stigma and discrimination. 6. ​Data on healers attending training was presented by the president of the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Nampula in 2013. 7. ​Examples from African countries witness the active and early involvement of healers in programs against HIV. In South Africa, governmental projects were launched to increase the knowledge and skills of traditional healers and to encourage them to refer patients with infectious diseases to health centers (George, et al. 2013; Zuma 2017). In Tanzania, healers were involved in the national health care system to provide treatment and psychological support to patients living with HIV/AIDS (Kayombo et al. 2007; see also Langwick 2011). 8. ​Carolyn Audet, Meridith Blevins, et al. report that because the Ministry of Health discouraged healers to address SIDA, “80% of healers in Zambezia region said they were not knowingly treating HIV” (2012, 1137). 9. ​The importance of “not knowing” in medicine is seldom explored. For research on “not knowing” as an intellectual attitude toward the problematic study of medical “systems,” see Last 1981; Littlewood 2007; G. Lewis 2000. 10. ​On rumors and resistance to the use of condoms in Mozambique, see Pfeiffer 2004; Manuel 2005. 11. ​For similar examples of the use of snake symbols in local interpretations of AIDS, see, Ashforth 2013; in the case of other illness, see Green 1996. 12. ​The claim that AIDS was a plot hatched by authoritarian governments was not new to the African continent. For an overview of interpretations of AIDS “from below,” see Iliffe 2006, chap. 9.

Part Three 1. ​For works that address how the recalcitrance of sickness and failure of healing are constitu-

tive of medicine, see Whyte 1997; Mattingly 2010; Street 2014. For works that discuss how uncertainty in general offers possibilities for meaning and action, see Whyte 1997; Cooper and Pratten 2015; Berthomé, Bonhomme, and Delaplace 2012.

Chapter 15 Good and Evil 1. ​Rarely did patients share hospital diagnoses with Ansha, especially in the case of appar-

ently dire ones. One can understand this reticence either as a result of the stigma that some illnesses carry, or as the patients’ wish to take distance from these diagnoses and start over with a new cure and hope. 2. ​The shadow is considered the private, intimate, emotional part of the self that eludes social control. For examples of the shadow in African understandings of personhood, see Jackson and Karp 1990; Jacobson-Widding 1990; Whyte 1997; Lienhardt 1985. 3. ​Ansha explained that the shadow leaves the body at night to wander with invisible beings, whether spirits or witches. There is always spatial distance between the body and its shadow (for which Ansha used the Makhuwa term eruku), showing that they are separate entities and refer to different dimensions. 4. ​For similar examples of the association of wealth accumulation with witchcraft in postcolonial Africa, see Geschiere 1997; Fisiy and Geschiere 1991; John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff 1993; West 2005; Bertelsen 2016b; Rowlands and Warnier 1988; Shaw 1997.



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5. ​ Errukunuwelo (also orrukunuwa): literally, the act of turning back, of self-change, of change in orientation (Prata 1990, 51). Here the verb is used for sending the sorcery back. To defend the body, sorcery had to be returned to the sender. The same concept can be found in many ethnographic studies of sorcery. For instance, removing witchcraft is epitomized by the Azande as an act of vengeance (Evans-Pritchard 1976). Among the Makonde in Mueda, Harry West (2005) found a similar concept, kupilikula. Jeanne Favreet Saada (1980) describes how the bewitched can only be healed through spells aimed at turning the evil back toward the presumed sorcerer. 6. ​There are few examples of anthropologists with direct experience of witchcraft. In one of the earliest accounts, Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote the following about his personal experience: “I have once seen witchcraft on its path. [. . .] Light is not the witch in person stalking his prey but its emanation from his body” (1976, 11). For other anthropologists who have encountered or been trained in sorcery, see Favreet Saada’s (1980, 2009) experience in the Bocage and Paul Stoller’s (Stoller and Olkes 1987) in Niger. 7. ​For the double-edged qualities of healers and healing, see Ashforth 2000; Evans-Pritchard 1976; Rasmussen 2001; West 2005. 8. ​ Wàpèliwa: the passive form of “to cook,” to be served food. 9. ​I never knew what Joana was thinking and how she might have reacted to Ansha’s words. Given the nature of my relationship with Ansha, I was always reluctant to develop relationships with her patients or to ask them about Ansha’s healing. I never really knew, therefore, what Ansha’s patients thought of her and her healing when it did not work. 10. ​The community police was established by the minister of the interior in 2001 to officially address mistrust of the police and the threat of anarchism after the sixteen-year war (Kyed 2009). 11. ​Confession (Mak. olapha) was the only way to stop witches. Initiative was taken by families or neighborhood authorities to solve disputes within families or among neighbors when other means failed. There were various ways that witches were induced to confess. One way, called mukatthe, involves feeding a witch a rice cake mixed with herbs, after which the witch becomes “mad” and is unable to speak. A second way, called nakhuwo (Mak. millet), instead uses a millet cake mixed with herbs, which causes the witch to behave and talk “like a drunk.” A third way, employed by Muslim healers, involves swearing on the Qur’an.

Chapter 16 Closed and Opened 1. ​Dilation and curettage is a surgical procedure involving dilatation of the cervix and curet-

tage of the uterus, which is performed after a miscarriage or for the removal of cysts or tumors. During an interview in 2016, the woman responsible for women’s health at the Department of Public Health of the province of Nampula indicated that the primary problem for women was a lack of resources—e.g., specialized doctors, technology, and medications, which could only be found in private hospitals. 2. ​Many patients arrived at Ansha’s mosque requesting help in navigating hospital medicine. Some asked for clarification of hospital diagnoses, especially when unaccompanied by explanations. A number of women who had been diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancer resorted to Ansha to grapple with the uncertainty of new diseases about which they did not know much, though also because of the unavailability of oncological treatment at the hospital (McMullin 2016; see also Manderson 1999). For the “invisibility” of cancer in African contexts, see Julie Livingston’s (2012) work in Botswana, and Benson Mulemi’s (2010, 2015) research in Kenya. 3. ​Due to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (AIDS, gonorrhea, chlamydia), Mozambique has high rates of infertility (Arnaldo 2004; Gerrits 1997). Carlos Arnaldo argues that

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infertility rates are higher in the northern regions of Mozambique, especially among the Makhuwa, due to sociocultural practices such as marrying at young ages, more frequent extramarital sexual relations, and general marital instability due to a matrilineal system. This contrasts with southern, patrilineal Mozambique, where there is less tolerance of extramarital sexual relationships (Arnaldo 2004, 191). For other examples, see Mariano and Paulo (2009) and Mariano (2004) in the south, Agadjanian, Yabiku, and Cau (2011) in a southern rural context affected by migration, and Chapman (2010) in central Mozambique. 4. ​From an early age, a girl’s mother and other elderly women introduce her to “labia minora elongation practices” (Bagnol 2013; Bagnol and Mariano 2008; Arnfred 2010). 5. ​For an overview of Makhuwa female rituals of initiation in northern Mozambique, see Lerma 1987; Arnfred 2010, 2011; Bagnol 2013. 6. ​In her work on zār possession in Sudan, Janice Boddy (1989, 72) also identifies the idioms of openness and enclosure as central to local definitions and experiences of womanhood. 7. ​During an interview with the director of women’s reproductive health at the provincial Department of Health, it was made clear that one major challenge involves countering the accusations of husbands. 8. ​For the pressure on women with reproductive issues in Mozambique, see Chapman 2010. More generally, see Bledsoe 2002; Sargent 1982. 9. ​In the patrilineal south, women were instead typically blamed for such reproductive faults (Mariano 2004; Mariano and Paulo 2009). Esmeralda Mariano (2004, 262) reports that infertile women in the southern district of Maguade were often excluded from social activities and fertility rituals. 10. ​Christianity, Islam, state law, and socioeconomic change all granted more power to husbands, increasing pressure on married women. As Rachel Chapman has shown in her work on women’s health in central Mozambique, reproductive problems cannot be analyzed merely as biological problems but must be considered in a wider context of transformation in Mozambican history. Processes such as the slave trade, colonial violence and forced labor, socialism and collective villages, the sixteen-year war, and austerity programs have all marred women’s socioeconomic security and health (2010, 70). 11. ​Ansha’s discourses about infertility are not unlike zār spirit possession in Sudan, which Boddy (1989, 1993) characterizes as a “subversive kinship” in which matrilineal values and rules are reasserted. 12. ​Reproductive issues did not always unveil tensions between husbands and wives. There were also cases in which women were accused in divination of causing reproductive issues. Rivals, polygamous wives, or envious relatives could send majini to stop menstruation or cause miscarriage. The war among women was another sign of the vulnerability and insecurity of women in the city. 13. ​The spirit Kaphulo was also associated with three kinds of disturbances that patients reported to Ansha during divination: menopause, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer. Little is written about cancer in Mozambique. For an overview, see the research of Carolyn Audet, Carla Silva Matos, et al. (2012) in the Zambezia province.

Chapter 17 The Dead and the Living 1. ​The Makhuwa term orrakala (literally “cripple”) refers to being disabled, deformed, or impaired. 2. ​More than 20 percent of the disabled in Mozambique are less than fourteen years old (Eide and Kamaleri 2009). Around 14 percent of children between two and nine years of age are ­disabled in Mozambique; 30 percent of these are disabled from birth. Disease and congenital



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problems at birth are the main causes of disability (UNICEF 2014). For child disability in Mozambique, see Miles and Medi 1994. 3. ​For example, in 2013 the Mozambican UNICEF launched a campaign with the national government to sensitize against the “ignorance about disability and denial of the existence of children with disabilities” (Relief Web 2013). See also Eide and Kamaleri 2009. 4. ​For the liminal qualities and therefore structural fragility of infants and small children, see other ethnographic examples in Africa and beyond: Gottlieb 1998, 2004, 2005; Argenti 2001, 2011; Scheper-Hughes 1992. 5. ​Ethnographic accounts have shown the decreasing importance of ancestor cults in African cosmologies due to a decline in kinship-based systems and subsistence economies (see Fortes 1965; Kopytoff 1971; Ashforth 2005). For a critical discussion about the marginalization of ancestors in postcolonial settings, see Cole and Middleton 2001. In Nampula, matrilineal ancestors remained central to divination and healing. However, they rarely featured as cause of adults’ ailments, which were instead attributed to majini or witches, beings that were more suitable for capturing the complexities of urban life. The central domain in which the power of ancestors remained was therefore child affliction and well-being. 6. ​For other examples in which disability is explained as the transgression of taboos, see Livingston 2005; Devlieger 1995; Talle 1995. 7. ​On children and their medicine and ritual practices as a site for producing social memory, see Nicolas Argenti’s (2011) analysis of rituals of birth in Cameroon and Alma Gottlieb’s (2005) in Ivory Coast. 8. ​Ansha accused walimu of harming children by “reading pages of the Qur’an.” Muslim healers treated children at birth with a prayer called ewateneliwa to purify them. On the tenth day of life, after the navel had healed, the child was brought out of the house for nikombe, a bath mixed with passages from the Qur’an. The pastors of churches also provided rituals for newborns by using the Bible or invoking the Holy Spirit. Some performed oração de bebé (prayer for the baby) that were intended to ensure healthy growth. 9. ​The application of the concept of liminality to those who live with disability is not new; see Murphy et al. 1988. Disabled persons are set apart, often uncategorized, without clear status, simultaneously outside and inside society, just like those undergoing rituals of initiation. See Ingstad and Whyte 1995; Livingston 2005; Devlieger 1995; Talle 1995.

Chapter 18 Juniors and Seniors 1. ​Although significant progress has been achieved since the war, the rates of child morbidity

and mortality remain high, due in part to austerity measures and growing socioeconomic inequalities. About one in every six children born in Mozambique die before reaching their fifth birthday (Dupraz, Handley, and Wills 2006, 82). The level of chronic malnutrition remains one of the highest in the world, with 43 percent of children under the age of five chronically malnourished (UNICEF 2014, 8, 53). Malaria, diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, and vaccinepreventable diseases are the main causes of these deaths (Dupraz, Handley, and Wills 2006; UNICEF 2014). Advances in reducing child mortality are now threatened by HIV and AIDS (Dupraz, Handley, and Wills 2006; UNICEF 2014). 2. ​Child abduction is a phenomenon that is deeply ingrained in the historical consciousness of northern Mozambique. Children were regularly seized by other clans and slave raiders from the coast during the period of the slave trade (Alpers 1983; Capela and Medeiros 1987). During colonial times, violence against children took the form of forced labor (Isaacman 1996; Allina 2012), especially on the machambas of missions. During the sixteen-year war, thousands of children were abducted by Renamo and enlisted as child soldiers (Honwana 1999, 2005; Thompson

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1999; Boothby 2011; Schafer 2004). In present-day Nampula, rumors and news of abuse, kidnapping, and sexual violence against children continue to abound in the bairros, directed mostly against strangers, missionaries, and Renamo soldiers. For more about these rumors, see Serra 2003; Sumich 2010; and Bertelsen 2017, all of which analyze rumors as articulations of discontent against state power and the ruling party. See also Granjo 2011. 3. ​On rumors and fears about child abduction and involvement in the occult, see Ginzburg 1991; Farge and Revel 1991; La Fontaine 2009. For examples in African contexts, see Jean Comaroff 1997; De Boeck 2005, 2009; Diduk 1993; Granjo 2011. 4. ​The world of women is a highly hierarchical system, where age and number of children are criteria that define the position and power of a woman within her family and lineage. 5. ​In early ethnographic accounts, children were either absent from or at the margins of witchcraft (Colson 2000; La Fontaine 1963). Edward Evans-Pritchard (1976, 8) explained that, although children might have the substance to bewitch in their bodies, they were too small to use it to harm. More recent ethnographic research has registered a rise in allegations against children. This shift has been examined in terms of profound transformations in the field of kinship and community caused by the introduction of capitalist economy (Geschiere 1980), missionary evangelization (Brain 1970), evangelical churches, economic transformations, and urbanization (De Boeck 2005, 2009; Molina 2005). 6. ​In contrast to other contexts where children could be accused of being witches, accusations against child witches in Nampula were rarely overt or public. Rather, they were confined to the huts of healers, expressed through innuendos and insinuations. One reason for this difference can be attributed to the relative weakness of newer Christian churches in northern Mozambique, which in other African contexts are often at the forefront of accusing and healing child witches (see, for example, De Boeck 2005, 2009; Molina 2005; Pereira 2011).

Chapter 19 Tradition and Modernity 1. ​The Makhuwa term oleva literarily means “let it be,” “allow,” “be patient,” “get away with it.” The expression was commonly used in reference to avoiding problems with the police or being stopped by the authorities. 2. ​Ghassan Hage (2009) claims that “stuckedness” does not entail the lack of agency. In her work on youth, Alcinda Honwana writes about “waithood” as a possibility for young people who “are creatively harnessing all the means at their disposal to manage their lives” (2012, 20). Julie Archambault likewise discusses waiting (fazer tempo) among young people in Inhambane, Mozambique, as a resource and source of hope; making plans helps them “feel alive rather than merely surviving” (2015, 144). 3. ​Ambition (Port. ambição) was considered by Ansha and her patients to be a negative quality associated with accumulation and individualism. 4. ​Jossias Humbane’s (2018) research on male domestic workers in Nampula reveals that many young men confronted pressure from both their own families and those of their wives. 5. ​Matriliny and matrilocality in northern Mozambique have often been described as a system that accorded authority to women and their families. Upon marriage, men were considered “strangers” who had to demonstrate capacity in producing and reproducing for their wives’ families. The position of the husband inside the household was further restricted by matrilineal rules of descent and inheritance. A father exercised no rights over his children, who instead belonged to his wife’s nihimo, and whose education was the responsibility of his wife’s brother. In cases where his wife died, the husband was excluded from all inheritance (which instead remained within his wife’s matrilineage). See Geffray 2000; Arnfred 2011.



Notes to Pages 141–147

187

6. ​For ethnographic examples of young men in present-day Mozambique see Archambault

2015, 2017; Aboim 2009; Agadjanian 2005b; Groes-Green 2009, 2013; Lundin 2007; Honwana 2012. 7. ​Mozambique decriminalized same-sex sexual activity in June 2015. 8. ​Many invoked the Makhuwa myth of origin that associates men and women with two different mythical spaces, men on one side of a river, women on the other. Others explained how Makhuwa rituals of initiation for men and women performed a division of distinctive and separate genders, assigning boys and girls to specific gender roles and activities and prohibiting them from playing or staying together. 9. ​For other accounts of healers and queerness, see Victor Turner’s (1967) portrait of Muchona, whom he describes as effeminate. In the case of South African sangoma healers, see Morgan and Reid 2003; Nkabinde and Morgan 2006. For an overview in Africa including mediumships, see Dlamini 2006.

Chapter 20 Spirits and Women 1. ​Liazzat Bonate (2017) argues that one reason for the endurance of matriliny in northern

Mozambique involves the Portuguese colonial administration, which availed itself of local institutions and Makhuwa nobility and power, including female chiefs. 2. ​Maria refers to the fact that the matrilineal and matrilocal system accorded significant political power and social security to women both inside and outside the household. Signe Arnfred argues that matriliny and matrilocality were a “source of social authority for women” (2011, 30). In the household, a husband moved to his wife’s group, where he was compelled to provide labor for her family’s machamba, build a house for his family, and sire children to augment the lineage of his wife. The power of Makhuwa women went well beyond the household. Power was always transmitted matrilineally, with the chief of the matrilineage (Mak. mwene) being one of the brothers of the eldest woman of the group, the pwiyamwene (whose sons could, in turn, become the new chief). The pwiyamwene’s political and ritual authority came from symbolically representing the erukulu (Mak. womb) of the group. She was regarded as the “mother of the mothers,” the supreme authority of the customs and history of the lineage. The pwiyamwene actively participated in the polity of the lineage by choosing the mwene, presiding over his investiture ceremony by scattering sacred flour (ephepa) on his head, and supporting the mwene in decisions about female issues of the lineage, such as the organization of female initiation rituals (Arnfred 2011; Geffray 2000; Trentini forthcoming). Note, however, that there are scholarly arguments to the contrary. For example, Conceição Osório (2013) claims that in spite of matriliny, women in the north were nonetheless subjected to subordination to their brothers and uncles. 3. ​The view that divorces are easier now than in the past contrasts the findings of Signe Arnfred’s research among the Makhuwa of Ribáué in the 1990s. She writes: “Previously divorce was easier for both parties. Divorces were often initiated from the wife and her family, and in the case of separation husbands were expelled” (2011, 101). 4. ​For the use of love magic as a symptom of female vulnerability as well as a tool against patriarchy and sexual repression, see Bonnie Keller’s (1978) example in Zambia and Christian Groes-Green’s (2013) example in Maputo. 5. ​The ritual practice of paying Nakuru back as a way to divorce him was modeled on what is known in southern Mozambique as lobolo, a “bride wealth” that is paid by the husband to the family of his wife (which is then returned to the husband in the case of divorce). Although lobolo was traditionally unknown in the matrilineal societies of the north (where men were

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clearly disadvantaged after marriage), the missionaries introduced bride wealth to better control marriage and impose a patrilineal and patriarchal system (Elia Ciscato, personal communication Nampula, April 30, 2016).

Chapter 21 Life and Death 1. ​Given that Ansha had no children, her family did not receive what was called the “pension

of blood,” a reduced salary that children of deceased veterans receive until the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, her extended family received her full salary for six months after her death.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrative ­matter. Abel, 133, 135–136 Afonso, 115, 120 African medicine. See traditional healers and medicine agency: of ­children, 136; of healers, 8, 9; of spirits, 39–40, 87, 130–131, 142 Ahl al-­Sunna movement, 12, 86–88, 89, 90, 178n2 (chap. 11). See also Islamism Ahlu-­Sunnah Wa-­Jama, 17. See also Islamism AIDS (also SIDA): health care programs for, 101, 107–108, 182n5, 185n1; interpretations of, 106, 109, 182n12; prevalence on, 106, 144, 181n3 (chap. 14); as term, 181n1 (chap. 14); traditional medicine and, 99, 105–110, 182nn7–8 akunya, 53, 67 aldeamentos, 11–12 aldeias comunais, 12, 16 Alima, 42–43, 88 Alimo, 83–85 Alma-­Ata Declaration (1978), 100–101 Alpers, Edward, 170n3, 177n7 Al-­Shabab, 17. See also Islamism Amadinho, 112, 118, 127–129, 130, 131–132 Amaka, as term, 23, 74, 174n14. See also Maka, as term; Muslims Amaka majini, 2, 52–53, 60–61, 62, 78–79, 177n14. See also spirit possession ambition, 76, 133, 134, 138, 139–140, 186n3 (chap. 19) AMETRAMO (Associação da Medicina Tradicional de Moçambique): on AIDS treatment, 108; Ansha’s membership in, 66, 97–98; author’s research with, 5–6; election campaigning by, 1–2, 93–94; governo and, 95–98; Irene’s work with, 99–100; poster of, 92. See also traditional healers and medicine Amma, 165nn3–5 amulets, 35, 60, 81, 82, 140, 145, 177n11

Ana: about, 61, 66; Ansha’s death and, 155–157; on Gabriel’s illness and death, 118, 120; on shehe’s death and funeral, 86; spirit attack against, 87–88, 89, 179n8 ancestral spirit. See munepa (minepa); spirit possession ancestral worship, 12, 27, 44, 52, 75, 174n2 (chap. 6). See also spirit possession animal sacrifice, 57, 74, 81, 174n8. See also traditional healers and medicine Anselmo, 42–43 Ansha, xxii, 22, 70, 152; on AIDS, 105–107, 109; AMETRAMO and, 66, 97–98; author’s first and last encounters with, 1, 2–3, 5, 158; border navigation by, xiii, 7–10, 18, 19, 24, 178n13; Catholicism of, 27–28, 46, 47–48; child medicine by, 128–137, 185n8; on coastal vs. inland spirits, 78–79; death and funeral of, 68, 154–157, 188n1; description of mesquita majini, 2; dreaming by, 10, 26, 53, 60, 66; early life of, 27–30; ekoma ceremony of, 56–58, 174n4 (chap. 6); healing practice by, overview, xii–­xiii, 65–68, 90–91, 104; on historical pro­cesses, 17–18; Islamic conversion of, 6, 48; Muslim identity of, 6, 60–64, 84–85, 90, 172n6; naming as Ansha, 23, 26, 64, 175n15; pension of, 29, 169n12; relationship to Tiago, 36–39, 41; Rosa as birth name of, 26–27, 64, 97, 168n5, 172n1 (chap. 4); self-­identification of, 6; spirit story of illness and healing of, 23–24, 35, 38–40, 44, 54–55, 56; Susana as baptismal name of, 27, 42, 44, 48, 168n5, 172n1 (chap. 4); on walimu practices, 81–83; on witchcraft, 74, 76, 89, 116–120, 182n3. See also names of specific patients; traditional healers and medicine anticolonial movements, 13–14, 16, 167n37. See also civil war; colonialism; FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) liberation movement

211

212

Index

António, 33 apartheid, 16, 167n37 aquela doença, as term, 106 Archambault, Julie, 186n2 Arnaldo, Carlos, 183–184n3 Arnfred, Signe, 170n1, 171n7, 171n12, 180n10, 187n2 Ashforth, Adam, 173n5 Aurora, 146–147 autobiographical narratives, 10 backward walking and dancing, 57, 174n7 bafo, 40, 58 bairros, 11, 12 baniani, 53, 174n15 baths. See ritual baths Behar, Ruth, 165n4 bengala, 35 Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge, 165n5, 168n3, 170n12 biography, as genre, 10, 19 Boddy, Janice, 51, 171n16, 184n6 body, 7, 182n3. See also names of specific persons; openness; spirit possession Bonate, Liazzat, 173n11, 175n11, 176n2 (part two), 177n11, 180n10, 187n1 border-­events, as concept, 8 borders and bound­aries: Ansha’s navigation of, xiii, 7–10, 18, 19, 24, 178n13; healing and, 23, 56, 165nn4–5, 165n7; of Nampula, 7, 11, 12, 14, 71, 113 border-­situations, as concept, 9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10 bride wealth, 38, 171nn6–7, 187n5 Bulha, Rosa. See Ansha Cahen, Michel, 177n7 Callaway, Barbara, 171n16 campo Makonde, 93, 180n1 cancer, 103, 183n2, 184n13 capulana, as term, 2 Castellari, Padre, 175n14 Castro, Soares de, 167n33, 170n2 Catholicism: of Ansha, 46, 47–48; Mozambique and Nampula history of, 11, 12, 15, 172n2. See also missionaries ceremonies. See names of specific ceremonies; traditional healers and medicine Chewa, 14

­children: abduction of, 134–135, 185n2, 186n3 (chap. 18); migrations and, 136; morbidity and mortality rates of, 185n1; traditional medicine for, 128–132, 185n8; witchcraft and, 133–137, 186nn5–6 ­children with disabilities, 128–129, 184nn1–2, 185n3, 185n9. See also Amadinho cholera, 96, 181n2 (chap. 13) Chris­tian­ity: Mozambique and Nampula history of, xii, 7, 12, 46–47, 172n2, 186n6; spirits and traditional medicine vs., 42–45, 172n3. See also missionaries Ciscato, Elia, 48, 172n2 civil war: Ansha on, 29; ­causes and effects of, 16–17, 167nn37–38, 177n7; migration and, 12, 32, 172n1 (chap. 5); spirit possession and immobilization during, 31–33, 34–35; as term, 165n1. See also anticolonial movements; colonialism Cláudia, 31–32 coastal ­peoples, identities and terms for, 7, 23, 74–76, 177n4 coastal spirits. See Amaka majini cogestão, 99, 181n6. See also hospital medicine Colheita (sculpture), 4 collective memory, 31, 131, 169n14 colonialism: gender and, 171n12; group divisions and ethnic identities during, 75–76, 177nn7–8; history of Mozambique, 11–15, 167n34, 172n2; re­sis­tance to, and spirit possession, 63, 71–72, 170n3, 175n14, 176n2 (part two). See also anticolonial movements; civil war; slave trade Comaroff, Jean and John, 10 community police: establishment of, 183n10; traditional healers and, 55, 119–120 confession, 120, 183n11 confusão, 26, 28, 168n3 Couto, Mia, 35 Crapanzano, Vincent, 11, 165n4, 166n17 Cuba, 181n5 curandeira, as term, 25. See also traditional healers and medicine Dália, 153–154, 157 democracy, 17, 33, 37, 50, 94. See also neoliberalism Demo­cratic Movement of Mozambique, 180n2

De Oliveira Salazar, António, 15 Department of Public Health. See Saúde dhikr, 61, 77, 175n7 Dhlakama, Afonso, 16–17, 34–35, 144, 169n1 Dinerman, Alice, 169n15 disabled ­children. See ­children with disabilities divination: communication through, 169n2; ehakó, 58; in Islam, 61, 62, 178n10; as term, 82, 178n10. See also dreaming; traditional healers and medicine divorce: of husbands-­wives, 36, 41, 123, 145, 187n3; from spirits, 146–148, 187n5 dono, as term, 38, 89 dreaming: of Ansha, 10, 26, 53, 60, 66; as border-­events, 8, 9, 23; of Cláudia, 31, 32; communication through, 169n2; in Islam, 61, 62; war and, 33, 35, 169n3. See also divination; traditional healers and medicine

Index 213 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) liberation movement, 11–12; demonstrations of, 13–14; establishment of, 14, 16, 167n36; Magaia and, 169n17; mobilization by, 28–29. See also anticolonial movements; civil war Frelimo po­liti­cal party: campaign rallies of, 1–2, 93–94; po­liti­cal goals of, 12, 29; Renamo and, 16; on socialism, 72; on traditional medicine, 50, 72. See also governo French colonialism, 14, 167n34. See also colonialism Frizzi, Giuseppe, 166n12 funerals, 68, 86–88, 89–90, 179nn3–6

Eduardo (patient), 80–81 ehakó, 58 ekhulala, 106, 135 ekoma, as term, 7, 165n6 ekoma ceremonies, 56–58, 61, 174n4 (chap. 6), 174n9 elavilavi, 83 emic/etic. See borders and bound­aries emparrámê, 170n9 empathy, 11, 51, 153 ephepa, as term, 1 Epotthá. See Paulo (also Epotthá) errukunuwelo, 116–117, 183n5. See also orrukunuwa eruku, as term, 54, 182n3. See also shadow evangelization, 7, 12, 168nn9–10. See also Chris­tian­ity; missionaries event, as concept, 8, 71 existential anthropology, 9 Eyottho (spirit), 52, 174n13. See also spirit possession

Gabriel, 115–120 Geertz, Clifford, 179n3 Geffray, Christian, 177n7 gender roles: in ­family and society, 39, 40, 186n5 (chap. 19); in traditional medicine, 142–143, 178n5, 178n13. See also matriliny; men; patriliny; ­women Giles, Linda, 177n12 Ginzburg, Carlo, 6 Giriama, 171n17, 174n1 (chap. 7), 175n6, 175n9, 175n16, 177n8 God disease or illness, as concept, 103, 109, 181n8. See also hospital medicine Gort, Eni, 165n5 governo: repression and control of traditional medicine, 33, 50, 55, 94–98, 176n3 (part two), 180nn4–8; as term, 33. See also Frelimo po­liti­cal party; Guebuza, Armando Graça, 106 Gray, Robert, 173n8 Green, Edward, 95, 107 Grenzsituationen, 9 Guebuza, Armando, 1–2, 17, 67, 93–94, 169n16, 180n4. See also Frelimo po­liti­cal party; governo

­ amily Law (2003), 39 F Fátima, 73–74 feitiçero. See witches feitiço. See witchcraft Firth, Raymond, 173n8 Flueckiger, Joyce, 165nn3–5

Hage, Ghassan, 186n2 Harris, Grace, 171n16 Heald, Suzette, 173n9 healing. See traditional healers and medicine Helena, 76–78 herbal plants. See medicinal plants

214

Index

Hilário, 109 hiriz. See amulets HIV/AIDS. See AIDS (also SIDA) homo­sexuality, 142–143, 187n7 Honwana, Alcinda, 186n2 hospital medicine, 181nn1–9; AIDS treatment and, 101, 107–108, 182n5; Ansha’s training in, 66, 97–98; use of traditional medicine and, 96, 97–104, 107–108, 182n1 (chap. 15). See also national public health system; traditional healers and medicine Humbane, Jossias, 186n4 (chap. 19) ID documentation, 27, 168n4 Igreja, Victor, 169n3, 172n1 (chap. 5) Igreja Universal, 45, 46, 172n5 immobilization, 32–33, 169nn5–6, 186n2 indígena, as category, 15 indigenato system, 15 Indonesia, 181n5 infertility, 122–123, 128, 183n3. See also reproductive health initiation rituals for females, 14, 18, 38, 122, 168n2, 171n7, 174n6, 187n2 inland ­peoples, identities and terms for, 7, 14–16, 52–53, 74–76. See also Nampula, Mozambique inland spirits. See Makhuwa majini Institute of Traditional Medicine (Instituto de Medicina Tradicional), 95–96, 102, 182n6. See also traditional healers and medicine International Monetary Fund, 17, 50, 101 intoxicação, 96 Irene: as Ansha’s assistant, 10, 47, 98, 149, 155; Ansha’s death and, 68, 156–157; ­family of, 99; hospital medicine by, 99, 100, 102; on Samora and healing, 28, 33 Islam: Ansha’s personal conversion to, 6, 48; funerals in, 86–88, 89–90, 179nn3–6; La Ilaha Illallah, 46, 172n6; Nampula history and, xii, 7, 12, 47, 174n3 (chap. 7); sharifas, 23, 60, 174n2 (chap. 7); slave trade and, 24, 52, 71, 175n11; spirit possession and, 2, 52–53, 60–64, 175n6, 175n10; spread of, 7, 14–15. See also Islamism; Maka, as term; Muslims; Sufism; walimu (mwalimu) Islamism: Ahl al-­Sunna movement, 12, 86–88, 89, 90, 178n2 (chap. 11); Ahlu-­Sunnah

Wa-­Jama, 17, 86; markers of, 179n9; spread of, 7; Sukutis as member of, 87, 89, 90, 179n4; vs. traditional medicine, 90–91, 175n11, 179n7; Wahhabism, 62, 176n1 (part two), 178n2 (chap. 11). See also Islam; Sufism Isolina, 148 Israel, Paolo, 28, 167n29, 170n13 Ivo, 142–143 Jacinta, 105–106 Jackson, Michael, 9, 19, 34 Janzen, John, 57, 171n15, 174n10 Jaspers, Karl, 9 jinn, as term, 168n1 (part I) Joana, 115–120, 183n9 João, 45–46, 103–104, 141, 154 Júlia, 146–147 Kaphulo (spirit), 123, 125, 126, 184n13 Kendall, Laurel, 10 ­Kenya, 171nn16–17, 175n16, 177n8. See also Swahili traditions kidnappings, 134–135, 185n2, 186n3 (chap. 18). See also ­children Kingdon, Zachary, 8, 166n8 Kiswahili, 60, 63, 67. See also Swahili traditions La Ilaha Illallah, 46, 172n6 Lambek, Michael, 173nn7–8 language and traditional medicine, 51–52, 53, 60, 63, 67, 173n8. See also traditional healers and medicine Langwick, Stacey, 181n8 Laponi clan, 37, 55, 58, 170n2 Last, Murray, 173n6 Lazaro, António, 8 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 173n8 Lewis, Ioan, 171 liberation movement. See anticolonial movements; FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) liberation movement Liesegang, Gerhard, 168n8 life stories, as genre, 10, 19 Livingston, Julie, 129 lobolo, 38, 171nn6–7, 187n5 Lubkemann, Stephen, 169n6

Lúcia, 103 Luís, 138–140 Lupi, Eduardo, 177n6 machambas, 16 Machel, Samora, 13, 16, 28–29, 100, 169n11 Magaia (cat), 22, 29 Magaia, Filipe Samuel, 29, 169n17 majini, as term, 2, 24, 168n1 (part I). See also munepa (minepa); spirit possession Maka, as term, 74, 176n2 (chap. 9). See also Amaka, as term; Muslims makeya, 1, 2, 46, 52, 74, 94 makhurumela, 105–106, 121 Makhuwa: group identity of, 14, 74–75, 166n22, 167n25; infertility rates of, 184n3; Islam and, 85; knowledge traditions of, 52, 166n12; Makonde and, 13, 14; matrilineage of, 74, 75, 166n22, 170n2, 187n2; origin myth of, 168n2 (chap. 1), 187n8; Portuguese colonials and, 170n3; slave trade and, 14–15; as term, 176n2 (chap. 9), 177n4 Makhuwa majini, 52, 62, 63, 76, 78–79, 177n14. See also spirit possession Makonde: group identity of, 167n25, 167n28; history of, 13, 170n3; missionaries and, 27; rituals of, 14; spirit sculptures of, 4, 7–8; as term, 13, 167n28 Makonde African National Union, 13–14 Makonde majini, 90. See also spirit possession malaria, 96, 103, 155, 185n1 Malawi, 171n11 malnutrition, 185n1 mamwene. See mwene (mamwene) MANU (Mozambican African National Union), 167n36 Manuel António, 34 mapiko, 13, 14, 27, 28, 93, 170n13 Maravi Empire, 13, 14, 167nn32–33 Marcela, 60–62 Maria, 144–146, 187n2 mashetani, 4, 7–8, 166n10. See also shetani sculptures Masquelier, Adeline, 90, 179n8 Matambwe, 13 Mateus, 66, 156 matriliny: about, 186n5 (chap. 19), 187nn1–2; Ansha and Tiago’s life and, 39, 40; Arnfred on, 170n1, 187n2; gender roles in, 39, 40, 137,

Index 215 140; healing practices and, 185n5; of Makhuwa, 74, 75, 166n22, 170n2, 187n2; reproductive issues and, 122–123, 184n3, 184n11. See also patriliny; pwiyamwene; ­women McIntosh, Janet, 175n10, 175n16, 177n8 medical anthropology, overview, xi–­xii, 113, 165n3 medicinal plants: Ansha’s knowledge on, 66; emparrámê, 170n9; harvesting of, 25–26, 32, 147, 168n2, 168n2 (chap. 1); namatthukula, 25, 26, 168n1 (chap. 1); Paulo’s knowledge on, 56, 58; for spirit possession, 57, 122, 142. See also traditional healers and medicine memory. See collective memory men: familial rights of, 184n3, 184n9, 186n5 (chap. 19); traditional medicine and, 139–143, 178n5, 178n13; working conditions and economic status of, 138–139, 156. See also Nakuru (spirit) mesquita, as term, 2 mesquita majini, as term, 2 Mia, 87 migrations: of Ansha’s neighbors and patients, 141, 156; ­children and, 136; due to warfare, 12, 32, 172n1 (chap. 5); majini and, 52, 60; Mozambique histories of, 7, 8, 11–12, 13, 74–75, 167n26, 167n32 miheya, 46, 52, 58, 88, 93, 125, 148, 149, 157 militarismo, 34, 35 minepa. See munepa (minepa) Minister of Health. See Saúde miscarriage, 39, 120–124, 126, 183n1, 184n12. See also reproductive health missionaries: Ansha’s early life and, 27–28; ­family patterns and, 187n5; first Mueda missions, 168n6; healing traditions and, 9; historical overview of, 7, 11, 15–16, 167n35. See also Catholicism Mjermani (spirit), 35, 149, 150, 170n13 Momade, 76, 77, 78 Mondlane, Eduardo, 16 Mooma (spirit), 131 mosque, term for, 2 Mount Namuli myth, 74–75. See also origin myth Mozambican Association of Traditional Medicine. See AMETRAMO

216

Index

Mozambican Liberation Front. See FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) liberation movement Mozambican National Re­sis­tance. See Renamo Mozambique, xx; AIDS epidemic in, 101, 106, 107–110, 181n3 (chap. 14), 182n7, 185n1; colonial history of, 11–15, 63, 167n33, 172n2, 175n14; economic recovery of, 113, 139; migration history of, 7, 8, 11–12, 13, 74–75, 167n26, 167n32; national public health system in, 94–98, 180n4; religious history of, 46–47, 172n9, 176n1 (part two). See also Nampula, Mozambique Muaja, 38 Muchona, 165n4, 166n16 mukatthe, 183n11 mukhwiri, 133. See also witches Mumiani, 67, 176n4 munepa (minepa), 52, 83, 86, 122, 129–130. See also majini, as term; spirit possession; traditional healers and medicine Muru (spirit), 52, 174n13. See also spirit possession Muslim chiefs. See shehe Muslims: Ansha’s identity as, 6, 60–64, 84–85, 90, 172n6; conversion ceremonies of, 61, 89; funerals for, 68, 86–88, 89–90, 179nn3–6; group divisions in Mozambique of, 85; healing rituals of, 183n11; terms for, 23, 74, 174n14, 176n2 (chap. 9). See also Islam Muslim spirits, 2, 52–53. See also Amaka majini; Makhuwa majini; spirit possession Muslim teachers. See walimu (mwalimu) mwalí, as term, 18, 174n5 (chap. 6) mwalimu. See walimu (mwalimu) Mwani, 60, 174n4 (chap. 7) mwene (mamwene), 78, 84, 166, 174n1 (chap. 6), 187 Nacasacos, 73, 90, 176n1 (chap. 9). See also Sufism nakhuwo, 183n11 Nakuru (spirit), 52, 67, 140, 141, 146–148, 174n13, 187n5. See also Makhuwa; men; spirit possession; ­women namatthukula, 25, 26, 168n1 (chap. 1). See also medicinal plants

Nametequeliua, 2 Namicopo bairro, Nampula, 80, 81 Nampula, Mozambique: description of, xii, 6, 11, 12; historical overview of, 7, 13; mountain landscape and plants of, 26; name of, 166n20; population statistics of, 166n19, 166n21, 166n23, 177n14; religious history of, xii, 7, 11, 12–13, 47, 174n3 (chap. 7); socialist era in, 16. See also inland ­peoples, identities and terms for; Makhuwa; Makonde; Mozambique; Yao Nandenga, 67, 176n3 (chap. 8) naparama, 34, 170n7, 170n9 Nashidi, as term, 179n4. See also Sufism national public health system, 94–98, 180n4. See also hospital medicine; Saúde; traditional healers and medicine neoliberalism, 17, 37–38, 172n9, 173n4 Nepal, 180n5 Netía, Mozambique, 49 ngoma, as term, 7, 165n6, 171n15. See also ekoma ceremonies Niassa Com­pany, 15 Niger, 90, 179n8 Nigeria, 171n16, 173n6 nikombe, 60, 67, 89, 174n1 (chap. 7), 177n11 nursing, 66, 100–104, 140, 181n2, 181n4, 181nn9–10. See also hospital medicine Nyerere, Julius, 16 okhwiri. See witchcraft olapha, 120, 183n11 oleva, 138, 140, 186n1 olipiha, 135 ometthela, 135 OMM (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana), 38, 171nn7–8 O’Neill, Henry, 167n31 ontology of stuckedness, 32–33, 169n5 openness, 25, 51, 57, 122, 125, 168n1 (chap. 1), 184n6. See also body orapa, 40, 87, 135 Organ­ization of Mozambican W ­ omen. See OMM (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana) origin myth, 168n2 (chap. 1), 187n8. See also Mount Namuli myth orrakala. See ­children with disabilities orrukunuwa, 81, 178n1 (chap. 10), 183n5

otthekela, 76, 80. See also sorcery otthukula, 25, 122, 168n1 (chap. 1) otthukuwa, 25, 51, 57 otthuna, 122, 184n4 ovarian cancer, 103, 183n2, 184n13. See also reproductive health ovirela elapo, 94 owala, 135 Parkin, David, 171n17, 175n16 patiri, 76, 80, 82–83, 177n11. See also sorcery patriarchy, 39, 171n12, 184n10, 187n5 patriliny, 141, 184n3, 184n9, 187n5. See also matriliny; men Paulo (also Epotthá), 10, 23, 53–56, 58–59, 63, 155, 174n4 (chap. 6) pensions, 29, 169n12, 169n16 Pentecostalism, 7, 12, 42, 44, 172n8 Perequito, 5 Piette, Albert, 9 Pigg, Stacey, 180n5 plants. See medicinal plants police. See community police Portuguese colonialism. See colonialism pregnancy, 109, 118, 125, 130. See also reproductive health Premawardhana, Devaka, 47, 165n7, 169n6, 175n13 Provincial Department of Public Health. See Saúde puberty rituals, 27, 165n7, 174n5 (chap. 6) pwiyamwene, 55, 57, 84, 174n1 (chap. 6), 178n5, 180n10, 187n2. See also matriliny Qadiriyya order, 176n1 (part two), 179n4. See also Sufism Rabia (spirit), 141–143. See also spirit possession ramuli, 82, 178n10 Rapport, Nigel, 19 Rasmussen, Susan, 19, 121 régulo, 55, 57, 94, 174n1 (chap. 6) Reis, Ria, 174n9 religious history: of Mozambique, 46–47, 55, 172n9; of Nampula, xii, 7, 11, 12. See also Catholicism; Chris­tian­ity; Islam; Islamism; Sufism

Index 217 Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana): confrontations and vio­lence by, 16–17, 31, 33, 169n1; establishment of, 16–17; health system and, 101; on spirits, 34. See also civil war reproductive health, 171nn9–10; infertility, 122–123, 128, 183n3; miscarriages, 39, 120–124, 126, 183n1, 184n12; otthuna procedure and, 122, 184n4; ovarian cancer, 103, 183n2, 184n13; pregnancy, 109, 118, 125, 130. See also ­women research methods and strategy, xiii, 2–3, 5, 10, 18–19 respiratory infections, 103, 185n1 Rhodesia, 16, 167n37, 176n2 (part two) ritual baths: nikombe, 174n1 (chap. 7), 177n11; orapa, 40, 87, 135 rituals, term for, 1, 7, 165n6. See also names of specific rituals; traditional healers and medicine ritual saunas, 40, 58 Rosa. See Ansha Rovuma River and bridge, 67, 176n2 (chap. 8) Ruhani, 67, 176n4 rural-­urban migration. See migrations Salmo, 5 same-­sex relations, 142–143, 187n7 Samuel, 141–142 Sanders, Todd, 177n10 sataka ceremonies, 58, 83, 130, 139, 140 Saúde: staff of, 181n2, 181n4; as term, 56; traditional healers and, 56, 66, 97–104, 107, 140; uniforms of, 181n6. See also hospital medicine; national public health system sculptures, 4, 7–8 Second Vatican Council, 172n4. See also Catholicism sexually transmitted diseases, 105–106, 107, 121, 183n3. See also AIDS (also SIDA) Shadhuliyya order, 176n1 (part two). See also Sufism shadow: of Ansha, 54; Ansha’s work on, 7, 74, 106, 116–118, 121, 136; defined, 86, 182nn2–3 sharifas, 23, 60, 174n2 (chap. 7) shehe, 61, 88–90, 174n5 (chap. 7), 178n1 (chap. 11). See also Muslims shetani sculptures, 4, 8, 166nn8–10 SIDA. See AIDS (also SIDA)

218

Index

Sifa, 146–147 Simango, Daviz, 180n2 Simba, 67, 176n4 sixteen-­year war. See civil war slave trade: abolition of, 15; ­children and, 185n2; French colonial ­labor and, 167n34; group divisions during, 75, 176n2 (chap. 9), 177n5; healing traditions and literacy during, 71, 173n11, 178n5, 178n7; Islam and, 24, 52, 71, 175n11; vio­lence and, 14–15; ­women and, 184n10. See also colonialism snakes, 14, 32, 81, 148, 178n3 social drama, as concept, 9 social in­equality, 17 socialism, 16, 28–29, 37–38, 167nn37–38, 169n15, 180n3 Somalia, 67, 171n16 sorcerer, term for, 124. See also witches sorcery: otthekela, 76, 80; patiri, 76, 80, 82, 177n11; terms for, 74, 105. See also witchcraft South Africa, 16, 167n37, 173n5, 180nn7–8, 182n7 spirit. See majini, as term; munepa (minepa) spirit mosque, 2 spirit possession: Amaka majini, 2, 52–53, 60–61, 62, 78–79, 177n14; Ansha’s illness and healing of, 23–24, 35, 38–40; of author, 146–150; bad vs. good forms of, 40, 171n17; in ­children with disabilities, 128–129; Chris­tian­ity and, 42–45, 172n3; dif­fer­ent cults of, 52, 173n12; ekoma ceremonies, 56–58, 174n4 (chap. 6), 174n9; by Eyottho, 52, 174n13; Islam and, 2, 52–53, 60–64, 175n6, 175n10; by Kaphulo, 123, 125, 126, 184n13; in ­Kenya, 171nn16–17, 174n1 (chap. 7), 175n6, 175n9, 175n16, 177n8; as a learned be­hav­ior, 51, 122, 173n7; Makhuwa majini, 2, 52, 62, 63, 76, 78–79, 177n14; Makonde majini, 90; in Malawi, 171n11; by Mjermani, 35, 149, 150, 170n13; by Mooma, 131; by Muru, 52, 174n13; by Nakuru, 52, 67, 140, 141, 146–148, 174n13, 187n5; in Nigeria, 171n16; by Rabia, 141–143; slave trade and, 173n11; during social and po­liti­cal unrest, 12, 31–32, 33, 49–51, 171n16, 172n1 (chap. 5); in Somalia, 67, 171n16; by Subiana, 77, 131, 177n12; in Sudan, 51, 171n16. See also majini, as term; munepa (minepa); names of specific patients; traditional healers and medicine; witchcraft

starvation, 32, 33 stuckedness, 32–33, 169nn5–6, 186n2 Subiana (spirit), 77, 131, 177n12 Sudan, 51, 171n16 Sufism: Ana and, 61; vs. local traditions, 89, 180n10; markers of, 179n9; ­orders of, 12, 175n11, 176n1 (part two); rituals and ceremonies of, 175nn7–8; terms for members of, 73, 90, 176n1 (chap. 9), 179n4. See also Islam; Islamism Sukutis, 87, 89, 90, 179n4. See also Islamism Susana. See Ansha Swahili traditions, 7–8, 166n9. See also ­Kenya; Kiswahili Tanzania: AIDS treatment in, 182n7; ethnic identities in, 177n9; Guebuza’s bridge to, 67; in­de­pen­dence of, 167n30; Islamists in, 179n4; migration history of, 7–8; spirits from, 67. See also Swahili traditions Thornton, Robert, 180n7 Tiago, 22; on Amadinho, 132; on Ansha–­ author relationship, 18; ­after Ansha’s death, 54, 153, 156; on Ansha’s illness, 49, 51, 53, 54–55, 64, 154–155; assistance in Ansha’s work by, 98, 117; Laponi clan of, 37, 55, 58, 170n2; military ser­vice and pension of, 29, 37; relationship with Ansha, 36–39, 41 Tomás, 66, 90, 156 traditional healers and medicine: AIDS treatment and, 99, 105–110, 182nn7–8; animal sacrifice used in, 57, 74, 81, 174n8; as boundary brokers, 23, 56, 165nn4–5, 165n7; for ­children, 128–137, 185n8; community police and, 55, 119–120; empathy and, 11, 51, 153; gender and, 142, 178n5, 178n13; governo’s repression and control of, 33, 50, 55, 94–98, 176n3 (part two), 180nn4–8; hospital medicine and use of, 99–103, 108, 182n1 (chap. 15); vs. Islamism, 90–91, 179n7; language and, 51–52, 53, 60, 63, 67, 173n8; in Nepal, 180n5; patient-­healer bond, 58–59; scholarly research on, 2–3, 5, 9, 107, 165nn3–4, 166n14; during social and po­liti­cal transitions, 31–32, 33, 49–51, 65, 71–72, 171n16, 173nn2–3; in South Africa, 180nn6–7; vs. Sufism, 89, 180n10; in Tanzania, 180n6; terms for, 12, 25, 174n2 (chap. 6); vs. walimu, 81–83, 178n4. See also

AMETRAMO; Ansha; hospital medicine; Institute of Traditional Medicine (Instituta de Medicina Tradicional); medicinal plants; national public health system; Paulo (also Epotthá); spirit possession trance. See spirit possession Tuhami, 165n4 Turner, Victor, 9, 165n4, 166n16, 173n2, 174n7 UDENAMO (National Demo­cratic Union of Mozambique), 167n36 Uganda, 113, 173n9 UNAMI (National African Union for In­de­pen­dent Mozambique), 167n36 União Makonde de Moçambique, 13–14 Urdang, Stephanie, 171n7 Vamissau, 27 Verónica: as Ansha’s assistant, 10, 47, 98, 149, 155; Ansha’s death and, 68, 155, 156–157; hospital medicine by, 99, 100, 102; illness and healing of, 99 villagization, 16, 28, 169n15 visibility and citizenship, 28 Wahhabism, 62, 176n1 (part two), 178n2 (chap. 11). See also Islamism walimu (mwalimu), 175n11; healing traditions and literacy from, 178n5, 178n7; physical description of, 53; vs. spirit healers, 81–83, 178n4; as term, 61–62

Index 219 warfare. See civil war Waziri, 33 West, Harry, 27, 167n28, 168nn3–4 white, as symbol, 53, 58, 174n10 Whyte, Susan Reynolds, 10, 113 witchcraft, 173n9; Ansha on, 74, 76, 89, 116–120, 124, 136, 182n3; anthropological accounts of, 183nn5–6; ­children and, 133–137, 186nn5–6; errukunuwelo (also orrukunuwa) against, 81, 116–117, 178n1 (chap. 10), 183n5; terms for, 105, 119. See also sorcery; spirit possession witches: João as a, 46; terms for, 124, 133. See also witchcraft wokoma, 145 ­women: clothing as markers of, 179n9; colonialism and, 171n12; economic and social resources of, 39, 40, 171n5, 171n16; female rituals of initiation, 14, 18, 38, 122, 168n2, 171n7, 174n6, 187n2; hierarchical system and, 186n4 (chap. 18). See also gender roles; matriliny; reproductive health; spirit possession World Bank, 17, 50 World Health Organ­ization (WHO), 100–101 Yao, 13, 14, 83, 85, 170n3 Yussuf, 73–74 Zainab, 121–126 Zimbabwe. See Rhodesia

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daria Trentini is an assistant professor of anthropology at Drake University.

She has conducted research in northern Mozambique since 2007.

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