and roots, and where regenerative energies abound. The last of many such excursions, shortly before the cock’s crow, takes participants to the nearest river—the place of encounter with ancestral spirits (minepa) approaching from the river’s far side. A propitiatory offering there “gives to the spirits the opportunity to come from Namuli and enter the body of the afflicted, thus enabling his or her physical recovery” (Frizzi 2008: 1350; translations mine). It is at the moment of this encounter that the afflicted person’s turn toward health occurs. The procession back from the river is vigorous and triumphant. The remaining ceremonial action transpires outdoors, in the light of the dawning day, with frenetic dancing, singing, and running—evidence that the circular journey to the bush and back is ultimately one of return to life itself.
For the Makhuwa, this oscillatory dynamic describes not only the performance of their ceremonies but even their preservation. The communal ceremony known as makeya consists of sorghum flour offerings made to minepa under the sacred mutholo tree. This ancestor shrine is akin to that of the Ndembu, consisting of “quickset muyombo saplings,” a prime feature of which is the ease with which they may be abandoned when Ndembu villagers move to a new site, as they often do. The impermanence of shrines for the Ndembu, as for the Makhuwa, speaks to the ancestor cult’s association with what Turner calls “the transience of settlement … and with the mobile human group itself rather than its specific habitation” (1957: 173). For the Makhuwa, such sites are not only easily abandoned, they are readily renovated. During the civil war, rebels ransacked and razed villages, forcing inhabitants to flee in haste. When safe to do so, two or three clan members would return and remove a single branch from the abandoned mutholo tree. Near the new site of refuge, another mutholo would be chosen and the lone branch from the old would be laid up against the new. With time, the branch and the trunk would fuse, assuring villagers that to whatever destination they moved, their forebears were there with them. No ancestral practice rivals, in regularity or in importance, the makeya offerings at the mutholo shrine. It takes place at every life-cycle ritual, before any venture is undertaken, whenever adversity strikes. It must be relevant, therefore, that the word makeya derives from omakeya, the modal form of the verb omaka, meaning “to inhabit”; omakeya means, literally, “to be inhabitable” (Frizzi 2008: 1690–91). This suggests that the ceremonial invocation of ancestors arose first and foremost in pursuit of basic habitability—of security, prosperity, and vitality in one’s ever new, though never final, home.
Well-being, for the Makhuwa, is tied less to location than to this capacity for relocation, a capacity instilled and distilled over a long series of situations wherein the inability to move easily meant the immediacy of death. Yet, it is worth recalling, even after death minepa are understood to migrate back to Namuli—“From Namuli we come, to Namuli we return”—then back again, reappearing in the nightly dreams and daily affairs of the living. Mobility is clearly no mere by-product of our contemporary, globalized age. Egress has always been a part of even this most “traditional” of cultures, egress followed almost always by regress.
Religious Movements
When Jemusse and Fáitima moved to the district capital, I lost my base in Kaveya village. I did not care to sleep alone in their now empty compound, in part for fear of the evili that could just as easily have bitten me. It was also my final few weeks in Mozambique, and spending the time in town, synthesizing a year’s worth of material, seemed fitting for where I was in my work.
So we remained neighbors—not cohabitants of the same compound as in Kaveya, but now coresidents of Maúa town. But the rhythm of life there did not allow for the idle palaver I so enjoyed back in Kaveya, sharing stories and sugarcane under the shade of a mango tree. While working hard to reinitiate his carpentry trade, Jemusse’s first priority was securing a means of feeding his family. He and Fáitima had managed to transport surplus grain for the impending rains, but they were already behind schedule for the next year’s harvest.
Given how much busier Jemusse became, I accepted that in the remaining weeks of my fieldwork I would not be seeing much of him. It therefore gave me great joy when, after an obviously long day in the fields, Jemusse showed up at the compound where I lodged in town. After exchanging greetings, I asked him to wait while I fetch him some water. Before letting me do so, he opened his mouth to speak.
“Papá, there’s something I want to tell you.”
“Go ahead, Papá,” I said sitting down, struck by the change in tone.
“You know, my thought was to attack Atata Mukwetxhe,” he said. “I was thinking a lot of things right after my daughter died. I was thinking of doing countersorcery. The family of Mamã was telling us to attack him because there have been five deaths because of him now.”
One week after Luisinha’s death, he told me, he had traveled to Cuamba. There he consulted with a powerful mukhwiri about visiting deadly force upon the man responsible for his family tragedy. Despite the distance, Jemusse made sure to complete the round-trip in one day, so as not to make public the extent to which he nearly engaged the occult forces barred by his Pentecostal faith. He eventually did not go through with it, opting instead to solve his problem by fleeing from it. But that he had come so close was news to me.
I was touched by Jemusse’s openness, his revelation of a secret I had not pried into, nor even suspected. It was common knowledge that he and Fáitima had permitted a traditional healer to offer aid on that terrible night, also that Fátima shaved her head (okhweliwa) when Pastor Simões was no longer around, and that an esataka ceremony was eventually conducted by Fátima’s clan.21 Yet this admission of consultation with a mukhwiri seemed transgressive in a much deeper way. It probably would have incensed Pastor Simões and provoked the reprimand that the other offenses did not. It certainly shocked me, as I struggled to reconcile my experience of such gentle and generous friends with my new knowledge that they nearly tried killing a man.
I thanked Jemusse for sharing but wondered aloud why he chose to do so just then. His answer had to do with a desire to externalize what he had done. He worried that once word reached Pastor Simões, he would be made to feel guilty. To Jemusse, I served simultaneously as an outsider able to carry off this anticipated feeling, and as an insider unconcerned with making him feel it. “When I inform you,” he said, “I don’t have to think any more about this because I am speaking what I did, and when I speak it my words have left my body and are now with you.”
“I am free now,” Jemusse went on, “because I don’t have to think any more about what I was thinking. Now I can forget all of this and begin thinking about other things, about my plans. I can begin again.”
I was silent, moved by the eloquence and expectancy of what my friend had to say—by his arrival, yet again, at what he saw as a fresh start.
“Besides,” he smiled, “it will only go into your little notebook.”
I had nothing to write with just then, but Jemusse knew from observing me at the end of each day (studying me not unlike the anthropologist studying him) that most of what I saw and heard eventually made its way into my field journal. I asked if it would be okay to write his story down to include in the book I planned to write. He said it would. In a context where nearly all are illiterate—even Pastor Simões weaving the Bible into his sermons more from memory than from the text in hand—it is the spoken word that carries real power. That is why Jemusse felt an urge to verbalize his sentiments to me.
Jemusse and Fáitima ultimately chose geographic relocation as the solution to their dilemma. Yet, crucially, the option of occult warfare that they also entertained involved a similar sort of displacement, a violation of their church’s prohibition against sorcery, against returning to “tradition.” This kind of religious mobility is best seen as a variation on the perennial
