Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana

same theme suffused Pastor Simões’s graveside homily. Luisinha’s transition from life to death, he taught, is not a passage from one zone to another. Rather, it is a shift from one state to another: from movement to rest, from flux to finality. Thus death, like the ideal conversion, is a rebirth—rebirth conceived as an irreversible break, a point of no return, a deliverance unto rest. Rest and permanence, stability and serenity may be self-evident ideals for self-conscious modernizers; they often are for academics under the sway of Western philosophy’s “search for the immutable” (Dewey 1929: 26–48). Yet immutability—and, likewise, immobility—is impractical, if not downright odd, for many Makhuwa. For them, rebirth is entirely compatible with return, rupture with reversal. Of course, no shortage of Makhuwa men and women, Jemusse and Fátima among them, have embraced Pentecostalism. That embrace, however, is less helpfully seen as a marker of their modernity than as the latest (and not necessarily the last) marker of their mobility.

       Fight or Flight

      Soon after Pastor Simões returned to the district capital, discussions at the compound turned to the tragedy’s real cause. The elder was deemed correct. This was not just any snake. The bite of the evili is usually not fatal—all the proof needed that this one had been transformed. A sorcerer had sent it, and the identity of that sorcerer—Atata Mukwetxhe, an estranged uncle (tata) of Fátima’s—was known to all. This same man had caused a similar death only one year earlier. The occupants of that compound responded by abandoning it and reconstructing a new one in a distant corner of Kaveya village.

      Jemusse and Fátima were now making similar plans—“to leave Atata Mukwetxhe here alone to do his sorcery,” Fátima said. Because the rainy season was fast approaching, and because they wanted to remove their two surviving children from further danger, they planned quickly. After consulting with clan elders, it was decided they would decamp to the district capital. Among Maúa town’s twenty-five thousand inhabitants were both biological kin and surrogate kin (members of the ADA’s central district congregation). Jemusse and Fátima would be able to lean on them for support. Jemusse also foresaw opportunities to reestablish his carpentry trade; although timber was only available in the forested regions of outlying villages, the clients who bought his doors and window frames all resided in town.

      Only two concerns held Jemusse and Fátima back. One was limited means with which to transport their belongings—corn and beans, mortar and pestle, carpentry tools, a bundle of clothes. The other concern was for me. With as much generosity as they had shown in allowing me into their lives, they worried about abandoning the compound I had come to use as my rural base. I begged them not to think at all about the second problem and to let me help with the first. I hired a truck from town that could pick them up and transport them there. It was a small and inadequate reciprocation for their hospitality and companionship. Just before the rains arrived, they returned to the cemetery to tell Luisinha they were leaving, loaded their belongings and children onto the flatbed pickup, and set out for the district capital.

      I was happy to see my friends do what they thought was best, as were their family and fellow congregants. Not, however, Pastor Simões. “It’s not correct to just get up and leave,” he said. “They should have remained there. They should have had the courage to fight.” Turning sermonic, though it was just us talking, he invoked Jesus’s response to Satan testing him in the desert. Jesus did not flee, but remained firm. He stood up to Satan. “A strong person would stay, use the power of prayer and fasting. Only if the person is weak will he leave the situation, change locations.” Besides, merely fleeing the problem does nothing to solve it. “You cannot flee from Satan. If this is sorcery, you cannot flee from sorcery. People here say that the sorcerer travels by night.”

      Pastor Simões did not deny that the occult forces of the sorcerer were real and responsible. He merely maintained that the Holy Spirit is stronger, that it holds the power to protect those who serve it. If only their faith were firm, Jemusse and Fátima could have stayed, fought, and prevailed. This emphasis on fixity recalled the pastor’s graveside message from only a few weeks earlier: his insistence that Luisinha’s munepa would go to heaven and rest eternally there. Nearly everyone and everything around Jemusse and Fátima, however, told them differently. Not only was Luisinha’s munepa on the move. So, too, to protect their remaining children, must they be.

      Evident in Pastor Simões’s critique, besides the value of fixity, is the value of ferocity. One also hears this in his frequent sermons enjoining militaristic vigilance against “traditional” customs and practices. At least two discursive contexts help situate this bellicosity. One is that of spiritual warfare, wherein conflicts of the physical world manifest conflicts that are 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