Hegel hastens his readers along: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit” ([1837] 1956: 99). The subject chosen for action is revealing: “we” world-historical people (non-Africans, for sure) uniquely possess the agency to leave Africa, and should do so forthwith to avoid becoming mired in its morass.4
One suspects such urgency in the speed with which Land Cruisers charge through Maúa’s woodland landscapes. For their occupants, point A and point B—rather than the unmarked spaces between—are what matter.5 Villagers, upon picking up the distant hum of an engine, invariably pause what they are doing and crane their necks to see. When the vehicle emerges from a cloud of dust, someone calls out who among the district’s known akunya (whites) is passing by. Whether lumber extractors from China, game hunters from South Africa, or state administrators from the capital, the pace of these akunya contrasts sharply with that of the subsistence farmers watching from the roadside. These women and men travel by foot, “step by step, like the chameleon” (vakhani vakhani ntoko namanriya). The chameleon, honored through this and other proverbs for its deliberate motions as well as for its chromatic mutations, is mostly admired for the lateral positioning of its eyes. This allows it to see peripherally, to take in the margins—something fleeting motorists cannot possibly do. For such passersby, the blur of roadside peasants can only confirm Hegel’s view that novelty and vitality come from without, that internal to Africa there is “no movement or development to exhibit.”
While such thinking prevails to varying degrees among most of Maúa’s akunya, it is particularly pronounced among the recently arrived Pentecostal missionaries.6 Usually from Mozambique’s coastal cities and southern provinces, these young men express satisfaction at having arrived at “the ends of the earth” to which Jesus directed his disciples (Acts 1:8, New Revised Standard Version). As Pastor Manuel of the Evangelical Assembly of God (Evangélica Assembléia de Deus) church said with what seemed a mixture of pride and concern: “People back home warned me: Maúa is a place where you arrive alive and leave dead.” Yet the very ubiquity of death—Luisinha’s was just one of many during my fieldwork year—also goes far toward assuring outsiders of the urgency of their work. Here, at the ends of the earth, live the damnable and destitute—men and women badly in need of being saved, of being changed, of being moved.
Irreversible Breaks
Pastor Simões surprised me by appearing at the door of my residence in Maúa town. As district head of the ADA, he often wore the sleek, ill-fitting maroon suit that, on this occasion, contrasted with the rags of the shorter man beside him. That was Nório, the deacon of the ADA’s Kaveya congregation, who had just biked in to summon his pastor back out. Knowing the usually jovial demeanor of both men, I sensed something amiss when my boisterous greeting fell flat. “The girl of Papá Jemusse and Mamá,” Pastor Simões muttered in Portuguese before switching to Makhuwa, “òhokhwa.” I froze with shock. Nório filled in the details. Our heads dropped and we all stood still, a silence only breached when I whispered a curse. We made plans to depart together before daybreak, to be with Jemusse and Fátima just as soon as we could.
We arrived to the sight of dozens holding vigil: members of the Kaveya congregation intermixed with members of my friends’ respective clans. The men were gathered together in and around the muttheko, the open-air shed used for receiving visitors. The women, seated on reed mats across the compound, were wrapped in capulanas (lengths of printed cloth), Fátima bare-breasted as is customary for mourners. I spotted Jemusse off to the side, cradling himself on the dirt ground. Dropping my helmet, I walked over, fell to my knees, and embraced him. He never looked up. “Papá,” is all his throat emitted. I held him close. And he cried.
An onlooker with knowledge of Makhuwa cultural codes might have found this unusual. Makhuwa men are not supposed to cry (Macaire 1996: 284). If they do, they do so only on the inside. I often heard the same said of Pentecostals. A charge commonly leveled by villagers against their Pentecostal neighbors is that, when a family member dies, they do not cry (winla), a way of saying they callously neglect the proper funerary rites. It is true that pastors, no less than initiation masters, teach stoicism in the face of hardship, even in the face of death. It is possible, then, that in sobbing uninhibitedly for his daughter, Jemusse was violating norms of both the Makhuwa culture and the Pentecostal church to which he belonged. It is possible that I too was violating norms of my community—the social scientific community—failing to keep my research subjects properly at bay.7 But in the face of death, codes of conduct meant very little. Jemusse’s head buried in his knees and my head buried in his shoulder, I held him close. And we cried.
Luisinha’s body had already been interred. What remained was the third-day visit in which we would carry to the burial plot a floral arrangement the women had put together and a small wooden cross the men were working on. On the crossbar, Luisinha’s name was tenderly inscribed with ink produced from charcoal dust and the sap of a banana flower. During this period, by Makhuwa tradition, immediate family members were also to shave their heads (okhweliwa), though this had not been done.
The procession began at daybreak the third day. We walked silently in single file behind Pastor Simões, still in his maroon suit, who carried the cross in one hand and his Bible in the other. Turning off the main road onto a narrow footpath, we followed it deep into the bush until we reached a clearing studded with mounds of dirt. The men snapped off leafy branches from surrounding trees and used them to sweep around Luisinha’s plot. Cross planted and flowers set down, all of us then crouched low and turned to Pastor Simões.
Figure 3. Preparing the cross for Luisinha, Kaveya village.
He opened with a short prayer before launching into his homily. Rather than reminisce about the dearly departed, he used his time to excoriate Makhuwa conceptions of the afterlife. Luisinha’s munepa (spirit; pl. minepa) is now in heaven, he instructed, and she will not return. She will remain with God and with Jesus. It is only evil spirits (minepa sonanara) who return to the living, demanding food and drink. “But if you do the will of God, you will arrive in heaven and you will return no more.” Luisinha had done the will of God. She would not return; she had already forgotten all the troubles of the world, not least her terrible final hours: “Now she hears nothing, sees nothing, thinks nothing, eats nothing. Everything is forgotten. Therefore, we cannot do esataka. Many people, when somebody dies, they go and buy rice, buy a goat, to go and do esataka. They say it is to help the person who died. Why did they not help the person when he was alive? They say that we do this because our ancestors did it. But to follow the ancestors is a lie! Jesus abolished this.” Pastor Simões was painting an opposition to Makhuwa traditional beliefs about death, grounded as they are in the funerary rite known as esataka.8 This ceremony is understood to join the living to the dead in an act of accompaniment, accompaniment on the recently deceased’s journey to the ancestral abode. Yet just as there is a passage out, there is also a return. Minepa revisit the living, appearing in dreams and requesting to be fed, offering help to some and causing havoc to others.
It is precisely such regressions that Pastor Simões labored to denounce. His message was that Jesus introduced a new conception of death: one without return, a permanent state of rest at God’s side. There was thus no need for esataka, nor, for similar reasons, for okhweliwa: “Even if you shave your head, the child has already gone.” Our responsibility is not to the dead but to the living, particularly at this time to the bereaved. There was a good deal of compassion in Pastor Simões’s message for my grief-stricken friends, consistent with his willingness to overlook that they permitted the use of traditional remedies on their daughter. He seemed to respect that in such dire straits, they simply could not refuse any of the few measures available to them. But he was going to make sure no more backsliding (voltando atrás) occurred. He knew,
