Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West Read Free Book Online

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