The Church’s stance opened radically in the 1960s, such that today Maúa’s Catholic leaders go so far as to sponsor annual initiation rites.
The openness of Islam and Catholicism to “tradition” fosters considerable resentment among Pentecostal leaders. It makes Maúa, as they see it, singularly sinful and thus unusually unreceptive to God’s truth. As Pastor Manuel once told his congregation (clearly one of vientes): “This is a battle we brought from Maputo, from Nampula, from Beira. When we arrive here, sometimes people come with energy, with great energy, but just crossing the border into Maúa, it seems like angels of the devil stop us. Yes, the word of the Lord here is difficult. If not for us, I would say that here there is no Holy Spirit, only evil spirits.” So framing his struggle as a cosmic battle serves, in part, to rationalize his failure to attract locals to his church. It also goes far toward assuring him of the valor in waging this struggle where he does—on the uncharted peripheries of Pentecostalism, at the farthest fringes of the faith.
Conversion as a Spatial Practice
Besides pastoral claims of demonic impediments are scholarly explanations for why Pentecostalism does not or would not thrive in a place like Maúa. Conventional assumptions that the tradition grows most rapidly in previously Christianized areas imply that growth would be weak in places where Christianity has not established itself. It may well be that “the more Muslim north” of Mozambique is itself a barrier to Pentecostal growth (van de Kamp 2016: 11n20). However, it should be noted that although the region is indeed heavily Islamic, Catholicism also has long been prevalent.35 Another demographic sector frequently associated with Pentecostalism is that of the urban and upwardly mobile. An implication could be drawn from this as well, that a rural district of subsistence farmers lacks the socioeconomic conditions for Pentecostalism to flourish. There may be more explanatory value here, although, as already noted, the provincial capital of Lichinga seemed scarcely receptive to Pentecostalism despite being an urban setting. Meanwhile, researchers in other rural parts of Africa have reported significant Pentecostal impact (e.g., Jones 2011).
In attempting to understand the ambivalence displayed toward Pentecostalism, what struck me most was that whenever I asked people why they joined, why they left, or why they circulated in and out, most struggled to articulate an answer. This absence of ideological formulations and reasoned justifications should be taken seriously (Ahmad 2017). It suggests a need to think beyond the explanatory impulse typically guiding outsiders, whether religious leaders or academic scholars. Rather than trying to find ways to reduce complex and contradictory phenomena to some sensible pattern of cause and effect, I was forced by the pragmatism of those I worked with to turn elsewhere: to mundane metaphors and everyday practices. In the Makhuwa case, these were largely metaphors and practices of mobility.
According to one Portuguese-Makhuwa dictionary, converter (to convert) translates as opittukuxa murima, literally “to change heart” (Filippi and Frizzi 2005: 1034). Yet whenever villagers talked with me about switching religious allegiance, they never used that term. Much more common were routine verbs denoting spatial movement: to move in the sense of migrating (othama) or in the sense of leaving one religion and entering another (ohiya ettini ekina, ovolowa ettini ekina). In contrast to introspective conceptions of conversion presupposed in Western thought (Swift 2012), conversion among the Makhuwa is embodied and embedded. It is a migratory movement—less spiritual than physical, less a change of heart than a change of place.36
While, in local parlance, othama and ohiya ni ovolowa translate “conversion,” neither term is particular to religious change. Both designate all sorts of geographic relocations. In order to understand the nature of conversion, therefore, I had to study the nature of migration. I discovered in short order that movement—going, but just as often coming—is foundational to the Makhuwa sense of self. One may speak of a Makhuwa disposition toward mobility, a kinetic conception of being that finds expression in migration histories, agricultural techniques, and life-cycle rituals. A typical greeting—what I was met with on the path between the cinema and the healing grounds—is not “are you well?” but “are you walking well?” And as seen on the healing grounds themselves, restoration to health entails bodily transformations, bodily transformations premised on bodily transportations.
Plan of the Book
This book thus unfolds as a series of variations on the theme of mobility—religious, regional, and above all existential. Part I (othama, to move) and Part II (ohiya ni ovolowa, to leave and to enter) are named for the two commonest renderings of “to convert.” Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (in Part I) attend to histories and mythologies of geographic movement, evidence of how wrong it would be to restrict mobility to modernity. To be “rooted” in Makhuwa tradition is paradoxically to be grounded in a transient, seminomadic way of life. Makhuwa historical experience and selfhood manifest an ability to adapt quickly to changing political and environmental circumstances, circumstances that remain unpredictable and precarious up to the present.
Part II begins by shifting attention to the lived body. In Chapter 3, I argue that initiation rituals serve not only to express mobility but also to cultivate dispositions toward it. This chapter also highlights the resonance of discontinuous spheres—between, for example, male and female, young and old, bush and village, night and day—even prior to what I discuss in Chapter 4: the colonial-era fragmenting of social life into discrete domains, and of spiritual life into reified religions. Thus, movement, including interreligious movement, is best seen not as frictionless flux but as the crossing, and recrossing, of borders.
Part III takes its title (okhalano, to be with) from another Makhuwa term, not one for “conversion” but one that sheds light on the symbiotic manner by which the Makhuwa carry out their lives. Chapter 5 documents the matricentric character of Makhuwa society, contending that women, especially, maintain Makhuwa pluralistic propensities amid the ever-increasing hegemony of market logics. Chapter 6 takes up what it means “to be with” Pentecostalism. No less than ancestral traditions, Pentecostalism also is marked by mobility. It presents itself, thus, as continuous with Makhuwa ways of being, continuous precisely through its dynamics of change.
All of this points up a profound irony, the nuances of which the Conclusion explicates and the implications of which it explores. That is the irony of radical change as a cross-cultural constant. Convertibility as a mode of being is present as much in Makhuwa traditions as in Pentecostal traditions, and therefore also in people’s oscillations between the two.
This insight sheds valuable light on the ambivalence with which the Makhuwa have received Pentecostalism. It also suggests a need for nuance in the largely unchallenged narrative of Pentecostalism’s worldwide “explosion.” The propensity for novelty and change that contributes to the rise of Pentecostalism can also contribute to its decline. For just as Makhuwa mobility draws people to the churches and finds reinforcement in the churches, it also facilitates exit from the churches. The Makhuwa are predisposed to convert. But having done so once, they feel little need to stop.
PART I
