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ABSTRACT
Based on fieldwork among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, this essay explores how non-Pentecostal models of transformation shape a people's manner of relating to Pentecostalism. Radical change has long been constitutive of Makhuwa history and subjectivity. Yet Makhuwa patterns of change, commonly conceived in terms of movement, entail regress as much as egress – circular mobilities that disrupt linear teleologies. State administrators and Pentecostal missionaries attempt to reform local inhabitants by, respectively, ‘sedentarising’ and ‘converting’ them. Deploying their historical proclivity towards mobility, those among whom I worked appear simultaneously eager to partake in resettlement schemes and reluctant to remain settled by them. I argue that their ambivalence towards Pentecostal churches and teachings, in particular, challenges two prevailing assumptions within anthropological studies of Christianity: that discontinuity is definitive, and that it is exceptional to Pentecostalism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Derived through the Swahili sadaka and ultimately the Arabic sadaqah (voluntary charity), this word used for the funerary rites of the Makhuwa suggests, according to Edward Alpers (Citation2000: 313), ‘the partial Islamization of pre-Islamic religious practices’ among the Makhuwa.
2 While the ambition of making people ‘permanent Christians’ is not particular to Pentecostalism, there is nevertheless a qualitative shift in intensity from earlier mission practice to what Birgit Meyer describes as Pentecostal and Charismatic churches’ ‘rather merciless attitude toward local cultural traditions and rejection of village cultures’, a difference made manifest in the tendency of Pentecostals ‘to critique mainline churches for seeking to accommodate local culture through Africanization’ (Meyer Citation2004: 456).
3 An analogous historiographic debate has played out regarding the Maravi kingdom that Portuguese imperialists encountered north of the Zambesi River in the early seventeenth century. In response to the prevailing thesis (first expressed in Alpers Citation1975) of widespread Maravi occupation by the sixteenth century due to Maravi migration from the Congo basin as many as two centuries prior, Malyn Newitt (Citation1982) argues for a more variegated succession of sixteenth century migratory groups out of which settled Maravi states were later founded. Incidentally, these migratory groups invaded and conquered existing populations of northern Mozambique, one of which was the Makhuwa.
4 Regarding the Chokwe, as well as the Ndembu and other groups of Lunda origin, Victor Turner writes: ‘All these groups have traditions of migration’ (Turner Citation1957: 59). I turn more fully to what it means to have a tradition of migration in the following section of this essay, titled ‘a culture of mobility’.
5 This version of the myth, documented by Francisco Lerma Martínez (Citation2008: 40–43) closely parallels renditions recited during my fieldwork. Alternative versions have been recorded by Soares de Castro (Citation1941: 10–11) and Pierre Macaire (Citation1996: 19–24).
6 In his masterful study of Makhuwa basket- and mat-weaving, Paulus Gerdes writes, ‘One of the manifestations of the richness of the Makhuwa culture of Northeast Mozambique lies in the way the people explore geometrical phenomena, and then apply these geometrical phenomena creatively in their everyday lives’ (Gerdes Citation2010: 13). If Makhuwa mobility, as an aspect of everyday life, is in some way related to Makhuwa geometry, then it must be relevant that while rectilinear shapes are not absent in Makhuwa geometry, curvilinear shapes predominate. Gerdes discusses at great length the significance of circular mats, circular baskets, spiral patterns woven into winnowing trays, and even notes the custom among Makhuwa fishermen of drying fish by placing them in a circle around a fire.
7 The same ambulatory and circulatory dynamics are crucial in male initiation rites among the Makhuwa. In his study of them, Eduardo Medeiros (Citation2007) describes at length not only the ceremonial processions marking the departure to and return from the bush, but also, within the liminal zone of the bush itself, the frequent movements between what Medeiros calls the ‘subspaces’ that mark off distinct moments of the marginal phase. These subspaces remain well defined and separate, Medeiros argues, even in the wake of colonial and postcolonial pressures to condense and shorten the duration of the rite (Medeiros Citation2007: 289–303).
8 As Sónia Silva has written, ‘Moderns may be convinced that modernity – their time – is the age of mobility. Mobility, however, as both a physical and existential imperative, is not theirs alone’ (Silva Citation2015: 127).
9 A considerable body of research complicates the common celebration of post-war Mozambique as exemplarily stable, peaceful, and pluralistic, calling attention instead to the ongoing confrontations between state institutions and traditional authorities (Bertelsen Citation2003; Kyed Citation2009; Igreja Citation2014).
10 While some scholars of Pentecostalism might take Pastor Simões's insistence on rupture from such ‘traditional’ ways as evidence for the salience of discontinuity among Pentecostals, one might also arrive at the precise opposite conclusion: that the regularity of such entreaties shows that continuities remain. Everyday practice cannot be assumed to follow the rhetoric of church officials, but church leaders’ emphasis on this ‘problem’ can be diagnostic, suggestive of what even they know people to actually do.
11 Among the Nyanja, also of Niassa province, similar conceptions of the vitalizing and mobilizing properties of blood circulation play out in local explanations of the digestive process (Huhn Citation2013).