of large political units that lend stability, flight emerged as the surest means of resisting capture. Whole chieftaincies relocated in the early nineteenth century in search of less easily reached, more easily defended homes.
Far more vivid in the memory of the living are the displacements that attended war. The elders I came to know have lived through two: that of the Frelimo liberation movement against Portugal (1964–74) and that of the postindependence Frelimo state against Renamo (1977–92). The first scarcely reached this part of the countryside. Such was far from the case with the second. Harrowing memories haunt much of the adult population, memories of rebel fighters entering villages, plundering grain, raping women, and kidnapping men (see Newitt 1995: 569–74). The most common response to this latest upheaval was, once again, flight. Nationwide, nearly five million people fled their homes during the civil war (Hanlon 1996: 16). The few villagers of Maúa who were willing to open up about that period told of escaping into forests and mountain caves; others found refuge in large cities or across national borders. Of course, exile did not always, or immediately, solve the problem. Food could not be carried, nor clothes, nor the reed mats used as bedding. The priority was carrying the children. Yet in the most treacherous moments, when speed was of the essence, so too was silence; mothers of crying children had to be left behind, retrieved only when safe to do so. The Makhuwa of Maúa district lived this way—“running like chickens” as Fátima recalled it—for much of the 1980s. They moved from one temporary settlement to another. Lack of land to cultivate and the rapid spread of disease in refugee zones motivated regular relocations, which is why when the fighting finally ended, return routes were soon established. Few lost ties with the people and the lands from which they (temporarily) loosed themselves, certainly not to the degree suggested by the image of refugees as “uprooted” victims (Englund 2002). The current inhabitants of Kaveya village returned to the same area along the Nipakwa River they had earlier occupied. Rebel fighters had burned everything to the ground, so they had to reconstruct their homes and renovate their crop fields, but, as many put it to me, they were content simply to breathe (omumula) again.16
Slavery and warfare infuse the historical consciousness of those among whom I lived.17 Yet the response has typically been neither to resist identifiable adversaries nor to stay put and acquiesce. More commonly, people have solved their problems by leaving them behind. In stark contrast to the view of traditional societies as static, the Makhuwa have long lived their lives this way—on the move. In this regard, they are not unlike nomadic, pastoralist, and other “traditionally” transient peoples in numerous African societies, peoples for whom immobility, in fact, is the anomaly.18
Even in northern Mozambique, it is not only the Makhuwa who have customarily moved in response to ever-changing, ever-precarious circumstances. Flight from slavers is how the Makonde came onto the plateau on which they now live and into the ethnicity by which they now identify. As one of Harry West’s informants told him, “We [Makonde] are really Makua…. We took refuge here from the slave caravans” (2005: 27).19 Significant about the Makhuwa, however, is that they not only came into being as a people on the move, they actualize their being by staying on the move. Makhuwa mobility is evident in the response Jemusse and Fátima chose to their predicament. It is equally evident in what could be called the Makhuwa “culture of mobility,” a paradoxical phrase that highlights the irreducibility of the Makhuwa to a single “culture.” Their characteristic mobility predisposes them to exceed the bounds not only of their geographic “home” but even, as suggested by West’s informant, of their ethnic one as well.
A Culture of Mobility
Humanitarian discourse represents refugees in terms of acute suffering and dramatic loss: helpless victims “stripped of the specificity of culture, place, and history” (Malkki 1995: 12). Distinct from labor migrants, refugees of war—and, one might add, of slave raids—are cast as involuntary migrants, reflexively moving in pursuit of bare survival. Yet the decision to migrate is rarely forced upon people wholly devoid of agency. As Stephen Lubkemann argues in his study of social life amid Mozambique’s civil war, men and women on the move continued to meet the complex demands of everyday existence—cultivating crops, raising children, performing ceremony. Fugitive acts did little to erase their “culturally scripted life projects, most of which … had little to do with the macropolitical interests usually taken to define ‘the war’” (2008: 14).
Indeed, migration not just preserved but enacted such scripts insofar as movement itself was a “well-established coping mechanism forged through a long history of crisis and political duress” (Lubkemann 2008: 196). For the people of Manica Province with whom Lubkemann worked, evasion emerged as a strategy of resistance to a series of resettlement schemes visited upon peasants by the Mozambican state. A similar history, I show in Chapter 2, has long weighed (and still does) on populations of the north. Yet, for the Makhuwa at least, the roots of mobility lie even deeper than that. As with the Ndembu—a central African people famously studied by anthropologist Victor Turner—so too with the Makhuwa, one may readily identify “traditions of migration” that make certain villages constitutionally centrifugal (Turner 1957: 59). These are villages prone not to stability and continuity but to periodic displays of fissure and motion. Consequently, what Turner calls the “modern changes,” such as monetization and immigration, that would seemingly disrupt social continuity and spur spatial mobility in fact “do no more than accentuate tendencies inherent in the indigenous social system” (1957: 51).
Peoples deemed “native” are typically identified with a determinate land to which they are presumed to definitively associate. Cosmogonies are largely responsible for this, referencing as they do a fixed point of origin. For the Makhuwa, that would be Mount Namuli. Situated in the northern part of Zambezia Province, just beyond the borders of Niassa, Mount Namuli is the second tallest landmass of Mozambique and by far the tallest of the region. “She who made others to see the sun”—that is to say, the first human—is said to have originated atop Mount Namuli. Setting off to explore the verdant plains below, she tripped on the perilous slopes and hit the ground hard. Upon regaining consciousness, she opened her eyes to see that blood from her wounds had mixed with water from a stream. As it wound its way down the mountain, the mysterious mixture formed into a solid shape. It was man. From the blood of the first woman came the first man; and from their union came all future generations. These generations followed the pattern of the first: flowing like streams and voyaging long distances, all the while bringing forth new life.20
Conflicts developed, as they inevitably do, between the various lineages born of the first woman and first man. Each lineage group then descended the mountain and spread throughout what is today northern Mozambique. Thus, while the myth of Namuli certainly orients the Makhuwa toward a particular mountain, the myth itself evokes the opposite of geographic fixity. Particularly telling is that, unlike other foundation myths (the Abrahamic, for example) in which the place of origin is also one of departure, Mount Namuli is the place of origin, departure, and return. Upon death, the munepa of a person is restored to its first home: “From Namuli we come, to Namuli we return” (Nikhumale onamuli, nnahokolela onamuli). Contained within all references to Namuli is this dialectic of egress and regress, of risking oneself in the world only to later retreat. Being is thus predicated on mobility or, more precisely, circularity.
So too is well-being. The myth of Namuli constitutes what anthropologist Francisco Lerma Martínez calls the backdrop (pano de fundo) of Makhuwa healing ceremonies insofar as it expresses the human being en passage—from health to illness and back. Lerma Martínez connects this trajectory to the movement all humans make from Namuli to the world and back (1989: 181–82). Virtually every component of the mirusi healing ceremony in particular contains an allusion to the myth of Namuli (Frizzi 2008: 1336–1501). This is as true of the songs chanted through the night as it is of the embodied actions of the ceremony’s participants. Repeatedly between sunset and sunrise, these participants (almost entirely women) leave the healing hut, walking in single file with slow deliberate steps and
