Move
CHAPTER 1
A Fugitive People
The opening chapters of this book take othama (to move) as their guiding motif. Just one of the local metaphors used for religious conversion, it is a term whose relevance lies in its everydayness. Those among whom I lived, although not precisely nomadic, have a propensity for dealing with problems by leaving them behind. Their predilection for flight suggests that to be grounded in Makhuwa tradition is paradoxically to be mobile. It is this fluid way of being, I argue, that informs the facility with which many of the same people who move across space move across religions. In situating historically the regularity and reversibility of both migrations and conversions, the current chapter also demonstrates that the small set of African villages where I worked bears no resemblance to the static enclosure once considered the ethnographic ideal. Hence, as further introduction to the setting of my research, this chapter attends less to the place than to the people—people who inhabit the land not by rooting themselves to it but by moving themselves through it.
Luisinha
The sun just beginning to fall below the forested horizon, ten-year-old Luisinha was doing what she normally did when not helping her mother pound grain or fetch wood.1 She was playing with age-mates on the main road connecting Kaveya village to Maúa town. She likely had on the same tattered dress I always saw her wearing and the same sweet smile I relished whenever she wandered near. I would look up from the water I was boiling or the notebook I was filling, nod toward the 50cc Lifo parked close by, and whisper our secret word: muttuttuttu-ttu-ttu-ttu. Covering her face and laughing, she would reply with the same—our play on muttuttuttu, the Makhuwa word for motorbike.
It was here, in the mud hut compound of Luisinha’s parents, that my wife and I lodged during our stays in the Maúa countryside. Jemusse and Fátima belonged to Kaveya village’s African Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus Africana, or ADA) congregation. They were among its most earnest participants. While from them I learned the rudiments of Makhuwa domesticity and Pentecostal piety, I had their children to thank for helping me most with the language. They tired less of speaking with me, perhaps because of our comparable verbal skills, perhaps because they found endlessly amusing all the mistakes I made, and the game of turning each mistake into a new and silly word.
I was away that day—in the district capital, catching up on correspondences and square meals—but it was told to me that shortly before her mother would have called her in for the evening, Luisinha strayed into the low brush along the road’s edge. Something sharp pierced her bare left foot, and the swelling came immediately. Vomiting ensued. It was not long before she passed out.
Snakebites were uncommon, but not unknown, in the area. In the recent past, health dispensaries offered the most effective remedy. There had been one nearby, initiated by the Catholic diocese, but Mozambique’s health ministry had recently closed it for reasons unknown to villagers. Lacking that option, Jemusse and Fátima consented to the application of traditional medicines by a local healer. Meanwhile, they focused their own efforts on prayer. I had seen my friends pray on many occasions for their three young children, always with unbridled intensity, frequently with weeping and wailing, even in times of health. I can only imagine how agonized their cries to Christ must have been that night, cradling their little girl as she struggled to stay alive.
At various points it was debated whether to transport Luisinha to the district hospital. The elder of Fátima’s clan dissented, insisting that hospitals cannot cure this kind of bite. He meant that the snake that bit Luisinha, locally known as the evili, was no ordinary snake. He may also have been expressing the common knowledge that even Maúa’s foremost medical facility was so under-resourced that the time spent getting there—hours by bicycle over a deeply rutted road—could be put to better use.
Jemusse and Fátima resolved to keep doing the best they could with the little they had, at least until daybreak when a truck would likely pass by and its driver hopefully take pity. Devastated by these details when I first learned them, I could not help but recall Luisinha’s “muttuttuttu-ttu-ttu-ttu,” and wish with all my being that it had been there that night. It was not, and before the sun rose again, Luisinha breathed her last.
The Ends of the Earth
Bereft not only of health facilities but also of paved roads easing access to one, the village of Kaveya could be classed as an “out-of-the-way place” (Tsing 1993). It is located forty kilometers from the district capital, which lies four hundred kilometers from the provincial capital, which, in turn, lies nearly two thousand kilometers from the national capital. Mozambique itself is relatively unknown and unprosperous, even by African standards. A recent report in National Geographic describes it as the planet’s third poorest nation and calls special attention to the wretched of the rural north: “their ragged clothing, their swollen bellies, their sod houses, their obvious poverty” (Bourne 2014: 71). The article ultimately celebrates signs of development under way. During the past decade, agribusiness multinationals originating in Brazil and China have taken over much of the land, introducing electric power, mechanized equipment, and cash incomes.
They have also transformed much of the landscape, repairing roads first laid by Portuguese concessionary companies and laying many others for the first time. Development workers tout modern infrastructure as the linchpin of progress; roads connect peripheries to centers, people to power. Yet anthropologists have traditionally seen things differently. Roads were reckoned as little more than conduits of contamination. Aiming to investigate unknown people in unreached places, anthropologists took care to accentuate the abysmal quality of the roads leading to their field sites (Dalakoglou 2010: 145).2
In the 1980s, anthropologists came to revise radically the bounded and static conception of culture that undergirded this earlier suspicion of roads.3 No longer a source of anxiety, the trope of mobility came to figure prominently; routes became as interesting as roots (Clifford 1997). The timing of this shift is not incidental. In the late modern world—characterized by decentralized industries, diminished state sovereignty, and advanced transport technologies—migration rates have accelerated at every scale and in every place. Rootedness is now a rarity. Recognition of this has offered not only empirical insights into the present but also a framework for rethinking the past. As Renato Rosaldo argues, “Rapidly increasing global interdependence has made it more and more clear that neither ‘we’ nor ‘they’ are as neatly bounded and homogeneous as once seemed to be the case” (1989: 217).
Yet the very dependence of this argument upon the “rapidly increasing” dynamics of globalization leaves open the question of mobility’s historicity. Most commonly, mobility appears as a feature not of the human condition but of the contemporary human condition (e.g., Urry 2007). It characterizes, exceptionally, the present “age of migration” (Castles and Miller 1998). Indeed, Arjun Appadurai’s own conjecture that place-bound natives “have probably never existed” (1988: 39) is belied by the title and thrust of his influential book Modernity at Large. Wide-scale population movements, he argues there, are among the “brute facts” that ethnographies pertaining to the present must confront. “The landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous” (1996: 48).
But were they ever? Are “traditional” societies historically dynamic only by virtue of their contact with such “modernizing” forces as colonialism and capitalism, radios and roads? The commonplace conflation of mobility and modernity finds classic expression in G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History. After
