Stories abound in Bairro Acordado of the exploits of witches, sorcerers and other agents of darkness. It was said that local businessmen, for example, flew on sieves to Maputo each day to purchase trade goods cheaply and sell them back in Nampula City for marked up prices. Or that another type of sorcerer called mwawelo dances naked outside people’s houses at night, stealing their money. Victims wake up the next morning and find the money where they left it but they spend it rashly – the mwawelo has stolen the value of the money, but not its material form. People warned each other of sorcerers collecting nail clippings, hair or footprints to inflict curses on their targets. These sorcerers are also reputed to use the cover of the crowd at markets and initiation rites to throw harmful charms at the bodies of their targets. Different rumours have it that wealthy couples in the neighbourhood engage majini (genies), or giant snakes (víbora) to go out and steal for them. In return for their services, the couples let the creatures sleep with the wife and feed off her blood. The darkest, most evil type of sorcerer is called mukhwiri. Mikhwiri kill their own relatives bit by bit, often unconsciously, by turning them into zombies to make them work at night for their personal enrichment.14 The relatives feel worn out, but they will not know what is happening. Eventually, they die from exhaustion. In other versions of this story, mikhwiri kill out of spite, or because they have signed blood pacts. They enter into such pacts involuntarily; other mikhwiri appear in their dreams disguised as family or friends, offering them a plate of what looks like goat meat and they eat it, only
14 See Niehaus (2005) for a more general discussion of discourses of witches and zombies in sub-Saharan
118 to discover afterwards that it was human flesh. You just ate one of our relatives, they are told, now you have to repay us by bringing us one of yours; if you do not, we will eat you (cf. Bowen 2002).
These stories give an impression of the various types of sorcery said to exist in Bairro Acordado.15 While neighbourhood residents perceive other invisible forces such as minepa, (ancestral spirits) and majini as capable of affecting their everyday lives in a variety of ways, I found sorcery to be the dominant framework in people’s interpretations of fluctuations in their wellbeing. Not only do sorcery rumours provide common points of intrigue and conversation, and do neighbourhood residents readily attribute their own experiences of misfortune or the fortunes of others to sorcery, there is also a sense that living in the city makes residents particularly vulnerable to sorcery attacks. This has to do with two factors, both mentioned in the introduction: the perceived affluence of city life compared to the living conditions of relatives in the countryside, and the proximity of strangers in the city. Let me illustrate this with two very short examples, which I will then use as a lens through which to view, more broadly, how substance and personhood are conceived of.
The first example relates the death of the eldest sister of my research assistant Gabriela, a second-generation urban migrant, born in Bairro Acordado. Gabriela’s parents moved to the neighbourhood from the province of Zambézia in the 1960s when her father took up a job with the railways company. Gabriela’s eldest sister grew up there as well, but had since moved to Maputo to work for the Ministry of Defence. When I saw Gabriela the week after the funeral, she sounded calm when she said that she already knew the cause of death. Divination by a curandeiro (healer) had revealed that her sister had died from a sorcery attack by their rural kin. The sequence of events was as follows. One month
15 Following Evans-Pritchard (1937), the different types of sorcery mentioned could be classified into
witchcraft, involving unconscious and inborn psychic powers, and sorcery which consists of the conscious use of tools. While, as I will describe in this section, Makhuwa do distinguish between the two different mechanisms underlying this classification, they use the same word in relation to them, enretthe in eMakhuwa, which I translate, in line with Kottak (2002: 137-144), as sorcery.
119 earlier, the eldest sister had visited the family in Zambézia to attend a funeral. It was the first time in many years that she had visited, and she brought food with her for the ceremony: canned fish, crackers, and so on. When the relatives saw the food, her clothes and her mobile phone, they thought she must be very rich and they became envious and angry. Gabriela’s father had never told them about his wealthy daughter, nor had he shared her riches with them. They concluded that he had “eaten everything alone”. If they could not share in their urban kin’s good fortune, the relatives reasoned, neither should their urban kin. In their malice, they decided to kill the eldest daughter, so that, in Gabriela’s words, “no one would eat”. This had happened after the sister’s return to Maputo – so the distance had not diminished the effectiveness of the sorcery attack. At first glance, it can be seen that this example shows the relevance of the pattern Geschiere and Nyamnjoh describe for Cameroon: the fact that urban migrants live far away from their rural relatives does not reduce their fears of sorcery attacks. Striking in this regard is that, similar to what Andersson found in Zimbabwe, considerations of space and time do not mitigate anxieties. From the perspective of urban migrants, rural kin feel entitled to their share of wealth, and their wrath is capable of reaching their kin in the city regardless of the physical distance.
The second example involves a woman called Sara I knew from my visits to one of the neighbourhood’s Catholic prayer groups. Sara was a first-generation migrant from the province of Cabo Delgado and had come with her husband to Nampula City a decade earlier for reasons of work; he worked for the provincial government at the time, a job he had since lost. One day, Sara told me about an argument she had been having with her neighbour. The neighbour had hit Sara’s seven-year-old daughter because of a fight between the girl and the neighbour’s six-year-old son. When Sara found out about it, she went to confront the neighbour and hit the neighbour’s son in return, after which an argument ensued, which ended with Sara walking away and the neighbour filing a complaint with the police. Sara was summoned and she explained her side of the story, upon which the police referred the case to the neighbourhood authorities, as this was a matter of “between neighbours”, and it should be resolved there. That same night, Sara found an insect behaving ‘strangely’ in her house. She killed it, but her hand kept hurting
120 for several days afterwards. This was how she knew the neighbour had concocted the insect in an attempt to curse her. It was not the first time someone had tried to attack her. Another time, she found a snake in her house and when she killed it, it turned into a folded leaf of the Qur’an. It had been produced by a curandeiro at the request of someone
seeking to harm her.16 On a different occasion, she had dreamt of a potion placed inside the house. Sure enough, when she woke up and went to look for it, she found the potion. She told me that she was not sure who was behind these attacks, but blamed them on envious neighbours. Some of them were single mothers, who must have been jealous of her married state and must have sought to kill her in order to marry the husband
themselves. “This place is very dangerous,” she warned me about Bairro Acordado. “No one cares about their neighbours. All people want is to see others suffer.”
Again, what this example demonstrates at first glance is that Mitchell’s predictions about living among strangers and reduced sorcery fears do not apply in Bairro Acordado. Even though hostility can be expressed openly, and people readily do so, they are afraid that their adversaries resort to sorcery to cause harm. Indeed, as Sara’s warning about neighbourhood suggests, it is precisely the precariousness of social relationships in the city that contributes to fears of sorcery. People do not care. This is what makes them dangerous.
Perceptions among Bairro Acordado’s urban migrants of heightened vulnerability to sorcery attacks are structured, then, by what could be described as a dual sensation of remaining connected to those left behind in the countryside, while having no connection to the people with whom one lives side-by-side. But what accounts such as those by
Mitchell, Geschiere and Nyamnjoh and others do not reveal is that people’s notions of relatedness and personhood are the key to this sensation (cf. Englund 1996, 1999, 2002b). As noted by Ciscato (2012: 29-30), a Catholic missionary from Italy with over 30 years of experience of living among the Makhuwa of Zambézia province, Makhuwa do not
conceive of themselves as individuals, but in terms of interdependence. This sense of
16 A number of curandeiros in Bairro Acordado have Muslim backgrounds and they use their Islamic
121 togetherness is captured by the eMakhuwa term okhalano. From the root verb okhala, to be or to exist, okhalano conceptualises the human condition as ‘being with’. According to Ciscato (2012: 31), it is a feeling of “being member rather than partner”: “…not isolated, but in intimate association and communion with something that is larger.” In similar vein, neighbourhood residents in Bairro Acordado habitually affirmed “estamos juntos” (we are together) in their conversations, and it was frequently suggested to me that personal
wellbeing is mediated by a person’s relationships with others. The accounts of sorcery exemplify this, but people also talked in this regard of their fear of being socially isolated, as this might produce a condition of ‘thinking too much’: worrying or letting negative feelings into one’s heart, losing the will to live or care about others.17
Specifically, I propose, the aforementioned anxieties of connectedness follow from the workings of eruku: according to some accounts, a term meaning shadow or spirit. As one of three elements of mutthu, the eMakhuwa term for person, other researchers define this term by noting the contrast to the second element of personhood: erruthu (the body) (cf. Martinez 1987). Mbwiliza (1991: 70), for instance, translates eruku as the shadow of the body or the reflection one sees of oneself in the water. He compares it to the soul or spirit:
The Makua believe that all objects of nature have a dual existence: they exist in a visible form – errutho, and in an invisible or intangible form as erruko
(shadows). The transition from errutho to erruko takes place at death, and as such death is not an end to life but rather marks a beginning to a new existence. This duality of life forms permeates Makua beliefs and conditions of initiation and burial rites which are seen as the necessary preparations for that
transformation.
Based on descriptions from research participants in Bairro Acordado of their fundamental sense of interrelatedness, however, eruku is better conceptualised in relation to the third element of the person, namely murima, the heart. While the heart is the site of health, luck
17 MacGregor (2006) encountered a similar notion in Cape Town, South Africa, where disability grantees
spoke of ‘nerves’ when they described how being alone led them to focus on their own hardship, feel jealous of people in their surroundings and develop bodily responses accordingly. According to MacGregor, such feelings were aggravated by perceptions of poverty, inequality and the disruption of kinship ties (see also Mann 2013; Scheper-Hughes 1992).
122 and the seat of moral character, where desires dwell and decisions and plans are made, eruku can be defined as the vital substance nurturing the heart. With an adequate supply of eruku, the heart is good (murima orera): the person is healthy, generous, compassionate and eager to contribute to society and its reproduction. But once the stock of eruku is depleted, the heart becomes sickly and filled with individualistic desires such as envy, ambition and greed. The fulfilment of these is thought to cause social disorder, upset and, possibly, death – the heart turns bad (murima onanara).
Eruku has, in my interpretation, several characteristics. Firstly, springing from the
erukulu, an eMakhuwa term which refers to both the womb and the uterine group, it is not of a universal nature, drawn from a shared cosmic pool, but it is unique to each family as it nurtures its members across space and time, both during their worldly existence and beyond, when they live on as ancestral spirits called minepa. Among members of the same nloko (lineage) and nihimo (clan) there appears to be some notion of shared eruku as well, but I found that in practice, the circulation of wellbeing is conceptualised in relation to the erukulu. Secondly, eruku is shared and it connects close kin, automatically transmitting states of wellbeing from one relative to the next, with the erukulu functioning as a circuit. It can be material and embodied as well as immaterial, with eruku flowing through the veins of the members of the erukulu and materialising in their possessions, food, money and other instantiations of wellbeing. Finally, it is limited in supply, meaning that its distribution, as Kottak (2002: 206) describes for Makhuwa perceptions of fortune in general, is a zero-sum game. Participants in my research suggested in this respect that one only gets ahead in life at the expense of others, and that the accumulation of wealth by one member of the kin group automatically means that others have less of it; it is a form of debt to be repaid.
Together, these characteristics of eruku and its effect on the heart explain why people in Bairro Acordado fear sorcery attacks from their rural kin. On the one hand, they regard their own wealth with a sense of alienation and usurpation, as it does not belong to them but to the kin group. On the other hand, they are aware of the destructive consequences that usurpation has for their less fortunate relatives. Because their hearts are related, these
123 ultimately revert back to themselves. One research participant explained the dynamics to me as follows. If someone runs a successful business at the expense of his or her relatives, or while neglecting them, and they take their feelings of envy to heart, or “tie a knot in their heart”, as people in Bairro Acordado say, the owner of the business will be cut off from the kin group. He or she “won’t be well”, feeling weak and apathetic, and the business will collapse. To resolve the situation, the family should sit down, discuss how relations can be restored and seek to remove any ill-feeling from the heart, if necessary with the help of a curandeiro. If not, they risk inviting ever greater cycles of mutual harm and destruction, until one of the parties turns into a mukhwiri, the ultimate example of a person with a bad heart, resulting in the sort of sorcery attack that killed Gabriela’s sister.
The properties of eruku also account for people’s fears of their neighbours. Of relevance here is the understanding that although eruku is not shared between members of different erukulu and questions of its distribution are therefore less of a concern, the conversion of eruku into bodily fluids such as blood, semen and sweat, or into food or objects means that it can be transmitted between amalapo, literally meaning strangers or enemies, as non-kin are called in eMakhuwa. This potentiality generates anxieties about the effects of
transmission on people’s own eruku. Such anxieties are expressed in a number of taboos. For example, mothers are warned not to have sex while their sons undergo initiation rites, because the exchange of blood involved will disrupt the healing process of the sons’ circumcision wounds. For similar reasons, a mother should not have sex as long as she is breastfeeding, because, transmitted via breast milk, the blood of her sexual partner will put too much pressure on the infant’s vulnerable heart.
More important in relation to sorcery, however, are fears about the possibility of appropriation implied in the transferable nature of eruku; people are afraid that non-kin will destroy them by expropriating their wellbeing without reciprocation. These feelings are reinforced by the notion that there is no in-built cap on selfishness in interactions between non-kin. Seeing that their hearts are not interconnected, recovery of eruku is more complicated than it is in the event of usurpation by kin. Neighbours are thereby particularly suspect, because their closeness means materialisations of eruku are within
124 their reach, and they may try and take advantage of the opportunity to try and seize these. A Makhuwa proverb collected by Matos (1982: 168) on the subject of neighbours warns in this regard: Wàttamannaweno t’oniwiva (your neighbour is the one who can kill you). Expressions of this fear can also be found in rural areas of Nampula province, where irukulu reside in homesteads situated relatively far apart from one another, with fields and bush in-between, and interaction between non-kin is strictly regulated and ritualised (cf. Arnfred 2011; Ciscato 1997, 2012; Geffray 1990; Kottak 2002; Martinez 2008). For instance, the exchange of labour between neighbours during the harvest season is organised through an institution called olimiha, with labourers formally given thanks at the end of each work day and presented with food and otheka (a type of millet beer) prepared especially for the occasion (cf. Arnfred 2011: 244-245). Meanwhile, for situations of structural interaction a relation of mutual reciprocity exists to regulate the tensions surrounding the exchange of eruku between irukulu – the partners in this alliance are called anavili. Anavili manage the exchange of blood for procreation through
symmetric exchange of wives in the form of patrilateral cross-cousin marriage. In times of distress, they also support each other, by cooking and cleaning at each other’s funerals for example, when their partners are at their most vulnerable and exposed to the malice of ill- wishers. They enjoy extensive liberty in claiming each other’s possessions and maintain a joking relationship, as a reminder or perhaps a training mechanism to learn to take
grievances not to heart.
Having outlined people’s general fears of sorcery and their rootedness in Makhuwa notions of relatedness and personhood, I will now analyse how their articulation is structured in Bairro Acordado by individual experiences of urban migration. In the next two sections, I will discuss and compare the different life histories and fears of sorcery of