metaphysical in nature (DeBernardi 1999). This takes a particular form in Pentecostal discourse: of a vigorous struggle between the Holy Spirit and satanic forces. Pentecostalism’s aggressive antagonism toward alternative religious options has proven alarming to governing authorities, (non-Pentecostal) religious leaders, and scholars alike (Hackett 2003). Yet shorn, perhaps, of its extreme Manicheanism, the idea of cosmic conflicts redounding to the mundane is not uniquely Pentecostal. In fact, as theologian Ogbu Kalu (2008) argues, one reason for Pentecostalism’s takeoff in indigenous African societies is a basic ontological compatibility on this point.
A second context for Pastor Simões’s elevation of fight over flight is the political project of nation-state formation. Historians note two complementary factors behind Mozambique’s independence in 1975: the wearing down of Portuguese militants by Frelimo guerillas in a war that began in 1964, and the overthrow of the Salazar regime in Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution. While these factors are interconnected, the Mozambican nationalist narrative, unsurprisingly, accentuates the former, often to the exclusion of the latter (e.g., do Rosário 2004); independence was hard won on Mozambican soil—the result of fierce, armed struggle against the Portuguese. Nothing promotes or celebrates this narrative better than the Kalashnikov on Mozambique’s flag, one of very few national flags to feature a weapon and the only one to feature one so lethal. Significantly, the current flag—which foregrounds a hoe (symbol of agricultural productivity) along with the rifle—was officially adopted in 1983, at the height of the civil war between Frelimo and the Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, or Renamo). Through its slogan and rallying cry—a luta continua (the struggle continues)—Frelimo presented this civil war as an extension of its war of independence, this one also to eliminate a foreign adversary (Renamo’s organizational and operational support came from the white ruling regimes of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia).11 The weapon on the flag therefore not only honors the valor of Frelimo warriors battling Portuguese imperialists, it expresses the need for continued vigilance against threatening foes.
These two larger contexts—the occult one of spiritual warfare and the nationalist one of physical warfare—are not entirely distinct. This is the argument of anthropologist Harry West (2005) in his exploration of sorcery discourse among the Makonde, an ethnolinguistic group of adjacent Cabo Delgado Province. For the Makonde, sorcery attacks do not go unchallenged. Against sorcery of ruin, sorcery of construction (Makonde: kupilikula) is deployed to defend one’s self and one’s kin. Most insightful about West’s ethnography is its argument that, for the Makonde, this dialectic of sorcery and countersorcery has provided an idiom for comprehending and controlling a long history of entanglements with unfamiliar forces. Thus, the projects of Portuguese colonizers and Catholic missionaries, of Frelimo modernizers and neoliberal reformers, have all been subjected to inversion and overturning through Makonde sorcery discourse. Arguably the most pernicious of those forces was that of the Portuguese colonial regime. For their central role in combatting this foe, the Makonde until today hold a privileged place in the narrative of Mozambican nationhood.12
If, among the Makonde, the idiom of countersorcery expresses opposition to powerful forces, ought not the same hold for their Makhuwa neighbors, Jemusse and Fátima among them? In fact, in the days following the death of their daughter, some clan members contended that the only way to solve the problem once and for all was to eliminate the cause, to kill the relative who sent the snake. This could be done by enlisting the aid of a mukhwiri, an occult specialist with the powers of countersorcery. They decided, instead, to move. When I asked Jemusse why he dismissed the advice of some of his kin, he cited the Pentecostal injunction against sorcery and other ancestral practices. “It’s because I handed everything over to God. ‘God, you are the one who made everything, heaven and earth, our entire body.’ I didn’t go to the mukhwiri. It’s true.” Yet as we have seen, even their church’s leader encouraged a kind of countersorcery. Spiritual warfare is common to both Pentecostalism and indigenous traditions. What differ are the weapon (prayer or sorcery) and the cosmic collaborators (Holy Spirit or ancestral spirits). Eschewing counterattack of either sort, Jemusse and Fátima opted instead for simple flight, one among other “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985).
This choice of migration over confrontation is consistent with a relatively nonmilitant approach to adversity that, at least during the colonial period, characterized Makhuwa history. Unlike the Makonde, the Makhuwa never held a prestigious place in Frelimo’s narrative of anticolonial resistance and nation-state formation.13 To the contrary, Frelimo has long treated the Makhuwa with contempt and suspicion for not adequately contributing to the liberation cause (Funada-Classen 2012: 289–91). The possibility of a real divergence in values came across in conversations I had with Makhuwa elders and chiefs. In early visits with them, I would ask who the Makhuwa understand themselves to be. Consistently, their responses made reference to two “pillars”: cultivation (olima) and procreation (oyara).
Noting that the first of those appears on Mozambique’s flag through the image of the hoe, I asked one elder what the symbols of a Makhuwa flag would be. He hesitated to answer. Perhaps it never occurred to him that what I insistently called “the Makhuwa” needed a flag.
“For Mozambique, it is the hoe and the Kalashnikov,” I said, trying to help. “For the Makhuwa, maybe the hoe and …?”
This time, with no hesitation, “the child.”
Migration Histories
If Mozambique’s nationalist values of defense and vigilance suggest a hunkering down, a posture of defiance premised on rootedness to a land, the Makhuwa value of oyara, by contrast, evokes natality. As defined by Hannah Arendt, this is the capacity of human action to initiate new beginnings, to release the future from bondage to the past (1971: 247). An equally apt metaphor for this regenerative capacity is mobility, particularly existential mobility, which (as discussed in the Introduction) connotes human improvisation, experimentation, and opportunism.
Notwithstanding the impression created by postpartition maps of Africa—of definitive boundaries separating discrete populations—the norm for the continent’s inhabitants has long been one of unsettlement and instability, of fluidity and flux.14 Many historians and linguists hypothesize “Bantu expansion” to explain the coast-to-coast distribution of a single language family. In a mere matter of centuries, beginning in West Africa around 1000 BCE, emergent iron-using agriculturalists speaking a proto-Bantu language pushed east and south, eventually spreading across an entire third of the continent. More recent scholarship has problematized the notion of a singular rapid expansion (e.g., Ehret 2001), but it is beyond dispute that the distant forebears of most African peoples migrated over long distances—episodic, gradual, and resistant to historical modeling though their migrations likely were.
Makhuwa, one of an estimated six hundred Bantu languages, is currently mother tongue to some four million inhabitants of Mozambique’s northernmost provinces, those situated roughly between Lake Niassa (also known as Lake Malawi) and the Indian Ocean. Because European contact with the Makhuwa in the early colonial period was limited to the maritime coast, little has been recorded about the lives of those in the interior. Whether they entered the region from the north or the south is a matter of speculation (Newitt 1995: 63). What archaeologists do know is that the current inhabitants did not originate on the land they now call home.15 Their present location owes to migration tracks or miphito, “collective movements [that] were far from random but … were very strategic” (Funada-Classen 2012: 109).
The strategic nature of their movements owes to a series of pressures imposed by external forces. Among the most brutal were slave raiders and slave traders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a dreadful and devastating period throughout northern Mozambique (Newitt 1995: 247) that fell particularly hard on the Makhuwa (Alpers 1975: 219). The Arab slave trade predated that of Europe, but it was only when French sugar plantations emerged on Indian Ocean islands and when Caribbean and Brazilian interests turned to
