Ethnographic Sorcery (5 page)

In this vein, I suggested to my audience in the ARPAC seminar room that lions served Muedans as symbols with which to think about and speak about the complexities and contradictions of power. Sorcery lions, I suggested, served Muedans as metaphors for social predation, whereas the lions that resided in the bodies of
vahumu
served as metaphors for regal power. I neither dismissed nor adopted Muedans’ way of talking about these lions; I pronounced them neither true nor false.
¹²
Even so, Lazaro Mmala protested. In so many words, he told me, “Andiliki, metaphors don’t kill the neighbors, lion-people do!”
¹³

“
T
HE
P
ROBLEM
M
AY
L
IE
T
HERE”

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

“No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.”

«
LEWIS
CARROLL,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
([1865] 1998: 91) »

On 15 June 1994, Marcos and I traveled from the town of Mueda, where we were then staying with one of Marcos’s
likola
sisters,
¹
to the village of Nanenda on the eastern edge of the plateau. Our objective for the day was to identify and interview elders who had witnessed the Portuguese assault on the plateau (ca. 1917) that had culminated in the colonial “pacification” of the Makonde people. We were accompanied on our excursion by Marcos’s brother-in-law, Joseph Mery, who took advantage of the opportunity our trip afforded him to purchase a pig at “village price” and to transport it back to the town of Mueda, where he would butcher it and sell roasted bits of pork to those gathered there the following day to mark the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Mueda Massacre.
²

Mery’s negotiations outlasted our interviews. As we waited for him, I felt unusually tired. My body ached more acutely than
it normally did after a day spent perched precariously on a sagging
igoli.
I considered intruding upon Mery’s negotiations and paying the asking price for the pig myself, but decided better of it. Finally, a price was agreed upon, and we headed for Mueda with a squealing pig in the back of our pickup and my head pounding.

I turned in before the evening meal as Mery busied himself clearing out his chicken coop to house the agitated pig. Despite the noise, I fell fast asleep before the sun had set. Around ten o’clock at night, I awoke with a jolt, my body seized with chills. I trembled uncontrollably beneath the covers. Realizing that something was gravely wrong, I sat up to call for Marcos, who lay sleeping a few meters away. As the night air rushed in beneath the covers, I convulsed violently. Frightened by the apparent vulnerability of my body to the world around me, I recoiled, gathering the covers close. I knew that I could not sleep—that I urgently needed something other than sleep. I convinced myself that I could, with a little courage, tolerate the air and, again, rose to call for Marcos, but the cold was more intolerable than I imagined possible. Overpowered completely by the elements in which I was suspended, I retreated, shivering, into fetal position. I felt as though I would shake myself to pieces. I feared, somehow, that I would dissolve into the world that surrounded me. For more than half an hour, I called to Marcos, my summonses muffled by my own shivering and by the blankets I desperately clenched.

Finally, Marcos awoke. Before I knew what was happening, I felt my bare feet touching the damp ground. On the path to the pit latrine, something broke loose deep inside me, erupting through my chest and out of my mouth. I collapsed. Marcos wrapped his arms around me from behind and, once again, I found myself moving. My legs dangled numbly. I felt another eruption from within, this time flowing beneath me. I was unable to differentiate myself from that which burst out from within me. I became uncontrollable flows of lava. Then, for a moment, my body was solid once more. I rediscovered my arms and legs,
and the back of my neck. A surge of heat passed through me. The cool night air soothed me, and I wanted to sleep. Marcos helped clean me up and lay me down in his bed (closer to the latrine). He sat by my side as I rested. My respite, however, soon expired. I was overwhelmed, again, by a sense of urgency, a sense of disintegration, a sense of doom. Again and again, throughout the night, my body met with overpowering forces from within and opened itself to flow into a hostile world, leaving me more exhausted, each time, than I had ever felt before.

By night’s end, I had found sleep, but I was reawakened by the first rays of sunlight. My eyes ached deeply. I heard voices and scuffling, smelled dust in my nostrils, and then heard the screams of Mery’s pig, at first full-throated but, in time, gurgling with blood. It seemed to me that the animal was forever suspended in the throes of death—that it could escape neither the butcher’s hands nor life itself.

When I next awoke, the sun was high in the sky. It burned me as if from within my body. Sitting beside me, Marcos looked at me with grave concern. I shared his anxiety. For the first time in hours, I was alive enough to fear that I might die. As Marcos could not drive a stick shift, he placed me in the driver’s seat of the pickup. We drove to the United Nations command post, where government troops were then quartered, awaiting demobilization.
³
I requested passage on one of the daily UN helicopter flights between Mueda and Pemba but was denied. An Italian logistics officer at the camp—whom everyone called “Orso” (“bear” in Portuguese)—took pity on me, lending me his bed and asking the camp doctor to look in on me. The doctor did not have the resources with which to test me for malaria or intestinal parasites, but he gave me Fansadar and Flagyl nonetheless. Orso showed me how to fire the AK-47 that he subsequently slipped under the bed. “We’ve had some trouble here lately,” he said, referring to incidents in which troops had taken him hostage and issued demands for larger rations and other handouts. As I slipped off to sleep, I wondered how a loaded weapon under my bed could bring me anything but trouble.

I awoke every few hours to an audience of more than 100
mapiko
masks that Orso had collected during his stay on the plateau. While sitting with me, Marcos and Mery identified several of the masks as ones used in initiation rites in specific Muedan villages in specific years. Several times a day, young men poked their heads into the tent, holding yet another mask in their hands and—confusing me for Orso—asking if I wanted to buy it. When Orso was there, he would analyze the mask and point out its “imperfections,” but he would buy it nonetheless, turning to me and saying, “I don’t want to offend.” When he asked if I knew of any university in the United States that had a museum that might be interested in buying the masks from him, I told him I did not. As I faded in and out of hallucinatory states, I wondered whether or not I was, in fact, Orso and, if not, how my work differed from his crass acquisition of Makonde artifacts.

On the third day, with arms draped over Marcos’s and Mery’s shoulders, I fled the camp and took refuge with a family of British Bible translators living in Mueda town. Dysentery persisted for a week, but a steady diet of Earl Grey tea and bland foods and the attentive care of people who spoke my mother tongue allowed me to gather strength. I eventually drove Marcos and myself off the plateau and back to Pemba, where I caught the next flight to Maputo. In twelve days, I had lost twenty-seven pounds.

Exactly two weeks later, I boarded a plane returning to Pemba. The Mozambican doctor at the U.S. embassy clinic suspected that I had had shigella, malaria, or possibly both. Having regained only two or three pounds, I was not yet ready, physically, to return to Mueda. I knew, however, that if I did not soon return to the plateau, I might never complete my fieldwork. When I fell ill, one of my greatest fears had been realized, but this fear was only one among many that defined my fieldwork experience. Convalescing in Maputo, my fears grew into obsessions with potential menaces awaiting me in Mueda—fatal vehicular accidents; financially or logistically debilitating vehicular
breakdowns; encounters with spiders, snakes, leopards, or lions; landmines (from either the independence war or the civil war); demobilized-troops-turned-armed-bandits; suspicious government officials (who might, for example, deny me access to my field site); extortionist police officers (who might confiscate my vehicle on the pretense that it was stolen);
⁴
encounters with hostile, drunken villagers; cerebral malaria; and so on, ad infinitum. Only by placing myself once more in the field, I knew, could I displace these imagined perils with an existence devoid of their realization.

Within days of my return to Pemba, Marcos and I set off together for Mueda. Seeing the expressions on the faces of people astonished by my rapid return—or by my return altogether—filled me with disorientation but, also, with an exhilarating sense of madness. While I was in this state of mind, Marcos said to me,
“Bwana,
let’s go see Humu Mandia.” I protested that travel to the
humu’s
village of Nimu was not on our agenda—that it was, in fact, well out of our way—but when Marcos insisted, I relented despite not understanding the motive for his unusual rigidity.

When we arrived at Mandia’s compound, we were warmly received. Although we had met Mandia once before in Mueda, we had never had the opportunity to converse with him. Now, we sat quietly in the dark interior of the
humu’s
house. The frailty of Mandia’s voice somehow accentuated the strength of his words. To my surprise, Marcos uncharacteristically (for that time, in 1994) began to ask him questions about sorcery, about his role in combating its destructive consequences in Makonde society, and about the forms of treatment he undertook to protect and cure those who came to him. I was quickly drawn into the fascinating conversation that developed between the two of them, revealing as it did the
humu’s
ambivalent relationship with lions, whose meat he had ritually ingested but with whom, as a “brother,” he had “no contradictions.”

Somewhat against the grain of my anthropological interests, Marcos steered Mandia away from such abstractions, however,
and toward the discussion of specific ailments and their cures. Suddenly, I realized that the subject of Marcos’s interest was
my
ailment and
my
cure.

“Have you had conflictual relations with anyone lately?” Mandia asked me. The question’s syntax reminded me of a health clinic worker interviewing a patient who presented with a sexually transmitted disease, while its semantics conjured for me the image of a homicide detective interrogating members of a victim’s family. Unsure of the sort of conflictual relations Mandia had in mind—unsure of how to go about asking myself the question, much less answering it—I looked to Marcos.

Marcos raised his eyebrows and turned his head downward slightly before meeting my eyes once more. “There was that incident in Namaua,” he said to me in Portuguese.

I nodded in affirmation but remained uncertain, still, how to respond to Mandia.

Marcos spoke for me: “A few days before he fell ill, there was an argument with someone.”

Marcos and I had traveled to Namaua to conduct research there for the first time. As was our practice, we had presented ourselves to the village president, explained our agenda, shown our “credentials” (including a letter of introduction from the district administrator), and requested permission to conduct interviews. The village president had welcomed us to work in his village, but as we sat conversing with him, we were approached by the president of the locality that encompassed Namaua and a few smaller villages. We quickly surmised that he was drunk. He asked what we were doing in Namaua, and when we told him, he declared that we would not under any circumstances work in one of
his
villages. Marcos spoke calmly and respectfully to the official and showed him our credentials, but the locality president only grew more agitated. Marcos decided it best that we leave before the encounter turned violent, and I followed his lead.

“Was the argument resolved peacefully?” Mandia now asked Marcos.

Marcos let loose a snort of laughter. “No one was injured. But the situation was only resolved after the authorities intervened.”

My mind raced back to the conversation that Marcos and I had had as we traveled back to Mueda after being “evicted” from Namaua. Tensions were high at the time, as Muedans prepared for the 1994 elections, and in accordance with the mandate of the ruling FRELIMO party, villagers remained “vigilant” vis-à-vis unfamiliar visitors who might be working in collaboration with the political opposition. Tensions in Namaua were exacerbated by the fact that the village was “home” to the head of the Mozambican military, Brigadier Ladis “Lagos” Lidimo, whose reputation for ruthlessness was as great among the villagers who tended to his local affairs and protected his interests in the region as it had been in the liberated zones he had policed as a security agent during the independence war or among the troops he commanded, or fought against, during the civil war. Understandably, the locality president wished to avoid the introduction of new variables into the complex political environment over which he was expected to preside, and hoped that Marcos and I could be made to disappear. Marcos, however, knew that word would spread that we had been chased from Namaua. If we did not assert our right to work there—if we did not reestablish the legitimacy of our project—authorities in other villages might follow suit, banning us from work in their villages as well. We therefore drove directly from Namaua to the office of the Mueda district administrator to report that, notwithstanding the administrator’s letter of introduction, we had been denied access to one of
his
villages. The administrator had immediately dispatched a messenger to summon the locality president to Mueda town, whereupon the official was “disciplined” and instructed not to interfere with our work in the future.