Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

However, not many tongues loosen on the subject of Alpino, whose bad habits are feared and whose powers are believed to reach from beyond his grave. His lurking spirit has much to do with the general reluctance to enter the mangrove at night and also a general reluctance to discuss the tradição. When I try to find out more about Alpino’s bad spells, I am advised to take my interlocutor’s word for it that he was a nasty, spiteful, greedy and embittered man whose goal in life was to hurt others. When I asked, ‘But if he was so harmful, why couldn’t the rest of the village do something to stop him?’, this elicited a look of sympathy, as though to wonder how I could be so stupid.

  ‘He was the namirrette.’

  The crack closed and the talk ended. A namirrette (feticeiro) has superhuman powers, he can see into souls. He can read thoughts, pre-empt attacks and provoke sickness and even death. A bad namirrette in a village is a liability, but also, it would seem, a cross the villagers just have to bear.

  Less powerful members of the village still concoct benign spells and there is at least one transformer said to be able to become a fish at will. But the old days of powerful spells and curses have gone. Since 2003, I have wandered through the village freely; but in times past, no one entered it without permission from the regulo. Anyone who ignored this rule was doomed ‘to see the sun set but not live to see it rise again’. During the ‘civil war’ in the 1970s and 1980s, the village was a safe haven for hundreds of refugees from Chocas and Mossuril. The war itself never reached the village, but all who entered it with permission of the regulo were safe for as long as they chose to stay there. Some of the villagers now are former refugees.

  Scraps of cloth and small clay pots filled with roots and leaves balance at the feet of sacred baobab and mutholo trees. Under the latter, small sacrifices of flour are offered to the ancestors, some of whom were buried under mutholo trees long ago. Frayed ribbons and stick arrangements are tied to twigs in the bush. Some of these are calls for help, some are to give comfort, and some are warnings to put the fear of angry gods into the community. Cabalistic warnings are written out on the torn pages of children’s exercise books and stuck in unexpected places or tied with strands of banana palm. Banana palms are good and their leaves and fibres are used in many ways in the ceremonies. But there is also a bad banana, called munhepiri, the fruit of which is never eaten and the leaves and fibres never touched. So bad is this palm believed to be that it is never transplanted even by feticeiros. Where it grows it grows wild and it is watched warily from afar.

  There is also a phantom called Makhuru who occasionally visits from inland. Makhuru has to be exorcized. Here on the coast, this bad spirit is only a danger when anyone travels and inadvertently brings it back with them, or when outsiders visit. Makhuru has only one arm and one hand, one ear and one eye. In fact, of all that a normal person has and is, Makhuru is a 50 per cent clone. It even has only one of each organ such as kidneys and lungs. Out in the bush, it shoots animals and then offers their meat to passers-by.

  ‘Never buy meat from a stranger.’

  Such meat is contaminated and the bad spirit will climb inside you when you swallow it. Alone, or via a possessed victim, Makhuru will spoil field crops and start bush fires.

  ‘Muluku’ is the Macua word for God. It means the one God, singular, and can never refer to ‘the gods’ unless it is specifically pluralized as Muluku Mwanène or Mwanène Muluku. All the local people will tell you that ‘there is only one god and his name is Allah’. Yet in the same breath, they will tell you that there are many gods. To name but two: there is Muluku a Wirimu, God of the Sky, and there is Muluku a Vathí, God of the Earth.

  This is a place of enormous contradictions and also of enormous tolerance. Since time immemorial, it is a place that has survived by everyone getting together and sitting under a baobab tree to resolve problems by reaching a compromise. Just as Christianity compromised by incorporating pagan festivals into its own calendar (most notably allocating the birth of Christ to 25 December to accommodate an ancient fertility rite), so has the tradição adapted and absorbed Islam. So, locally, there is one God, Allah, and there are many gods. There are prophets and there are the ancestors, there are good spirits and angels, demons and bad spirits, and their combined wisdom and strength forms a sacred consortium.

  Democracy rules here, no one person can be right alone. Rightness is a joint decision. Thus, no one god can decide alone, all the gods must have their say as well. The idea of one God is accepted, but the belief is in many gods. In the Koranic schools (one per village), a teacher interprets the Holy Koran. The style of learning by rote of other Islamic countries is less important here than an understanding of the text. What exactly happens when that sacred text contradicts the local beliefs, I don’t know, but the upshot is that nothing changes.

  There is another sacred tree called a murruku-ruku (Kigelia pinnata), which has fruit that dangle down like sausages. These fruits are the object of prayers and oaths. When a prayer has been said or an oath taken, a cut for each is made in the fruit. I used to wonder if, on those puzzling days when a young Koranic student is first confronted with the dual nature of his village creed, he asks the sausage tree for guidance by praying for enlightenment as to which is right: the Holy Book he is studying or the tradição? As time goes by, though, I see this is unlikely. The tradição is rarely dogmatic. Apart from certain taboos, there are no set rules. Its rules are as flexible as the tides. More than any dogma, it is a way of life, and since it is the only way of life anyone knows here, it gathers up and integrates everything and everyone for as far as feet can travel and drum beats can echo.

  There is no border between the natural and the supernatural. The world is a magical place wherein the weird and the wonderful uplift the drudgery of everyday. Birds are rumoured to sleep on the seabed. All creatures from the land are mirrored in the water, breeding their marine equivalent. Over the centuries, fishermen have sighted them all. Only a few years ago, two fishermen were surprised to hear a woman singing in the mangrove during a high tide. Mussagy, the driver, knew the story from his father, Ibraimo.

  ‘When they went to investigate, they found a strange fat woman swimming among the mangrove stilts. More people came to see and the more they observed her, the less human they found her to be. She was naked and had large breasts, but she was half woman and half fish. When she stopped swimming, she couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. Before they could analyse her arrival any further, she swam back out to sea and stayed underwater longer than any diver could, longer even than the ones who can transform so thoroughly that they hardly come up for breath.’

  We discussed this apparition one night at the college and then again the following morning around the well. When I told Mussagy and the guards that the creature was a manatee (of which there are many in, for instance, the Caribbean) and imitated its singing voice, none of the local staff said, ‘Ah, so that’s what it was.’ Instead, I could see them thinking, ‘Respect! Dona Lisa obviously knows a thing or two about magic.’

  In a place were old men become bats at night and hang upside down from palm trees, and drummers induce a frenzy of shrieks and cheers round firelight, summoning rain or ancestral intervention, respite or health, rational explanations are neither wanted nor needed. The tradição has an explanation for everything. With or without their own feticeiro, the local people live within its rigid restraints.

  The tide comes in and out. Birds find their way into the rock pools within the lagoon. From raucous crows (which it is taboo to even shoo away) to tiny scarlet finches, all have a home on Varanda. There are fewer birds at the college, but from time to time, as though to make up for this lack, a fish eagle perches on the top of one of the derelict pillars and watches superciliously as we struggle to make a garden out of a pile of rubble. Even though he has one eye closed, I know he is watching our chickens, mentally measuring the ingredients before swooping on one for a snack.

  So far, the fish eagle and the giant African crows between them have s
napped up over twenty of our chicks. After each raid, there is a long talk about birds and beasts between the kitchen staff and the guards. The conclusion is that strings must be criss-crossed over the courtyard high up in the trees to confuse the crows. No one ever suggests anything like chucking stones at the marauding crows because that would be taboo. Like wayward children in a hippy household, they can do whatever they want; it is for us to defend ourselves against them.

  On their report card, the crows have black marks for killing our chickens, having incredibly loud and unpleasant voices, frightening away songbirds and stealing innumerable bars of aloe vera soap from the shell soapdish on the veranda.

  XVII

  Macua Rituals

  PIECES OF CLOTH AND STONE, twigs, roots, feathers and bones, powdered bark, powdered wood, powdered shells, powdered stone and powdered spice are all used for spells. The quantity and variety of ingredients can give no clue as to the importance of a spell. Some of the simplest recipes are used for the most potent magic or intercession with the spirits. The power of the person relaying the spell is crucial. Mere mortals can only hope to achieve results through fervent prayer. The more heartfelt the prayer, the more help it can bring. In cases of extreme sickness or calamity, many Macua elders must join together to pray specifically for the afflicted so that their prayers may be answered. I have been told here that all prayers are heard but only some are answered, thus the supplicant must petition loudly and forcefully to compete with the millions of other prayers that fill the ears of the Lord.

  For traditional ceremonies beyond the realm of the mosques (despite being administered by most of the same elders), certain places are sacred, certain trees are sacred, certain plants and animals are sacred and certain people are too. I first became aware of the sacred spots here by virtually stumbling over one when I lost my way returning from the dhow ferry beach. Unwittingly, I was stumbling towards an acacia tree with a very small clay pot half hidden in its roots. A handful of stones were scattered in the grass beside this pot and a ragged scrap of ribbon was tied to a low twig. The ribbon flapped its grey tatters in the wind, thereby drawing my attention to it. When I stepped nearer to see what it was that had caught there, my village guide warned to me to step back, shouting, ‘Not there!’

  ‘Where?’ I asked, not having seen the nondescript pot or stones. I moved closer to the short grass by the tree instinctively, imagining a green or black mamba poised in the longer grass to strike me down.

  My guide lunged forward and grabbed the edge of my jacket, gently but firmly guiding me back.

  ‘Our way is over here,’ he said.

  By that time I had seen the array of offerings round the tree and stepped hastily away.

  ‘What is it for?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he muttered.

  ‘Tradição?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he repeated and hurried on, forcing me to hasten to keep up.

  I could judge the significance of what I had seen by his change of pace. There is very little that can do that. Every movement including walking has its own pace, its own immutable rhythm. By altering his pace and hurrying, my guide betrayed his own fear. It was early days for me in this largely benign society and the hair stood up at the back of my neck and on my arms; I was fearful for what would happen if by unwittingly trespassing on a sacred place I had incurred the wrath of the shaman.

  I tried to dismiss the thought on the grounds that decades of movies have implanted irrational fears in me. I walked on; hurrying along a path of trampled grass, African mint and a pretty creeping plant with yellow flowers and seeds like sputniks, whose thorns can drive right through the sole of any normal shoe. Returning mentally to the Macua shrine, I told myself I hadn’t actually touched anything. Approaching the place of spells had been an accident. Hmm, I also told myself; such accidents didn’t help travellers in West Africa or Haiti or even Brazil. I had heard too many stories on my own travels and seen too many unpleasant things where careless accidents occurred and encroached on matters of the occult.

  When I got back to base, rather than keep my fear of waking up the next day as shrivelled as a snakeskin, or even – I luridly imagined – not waking up at all, I decided to consult on the matter with one whom I knew to be high up in the secrets and spells of Cabaceira. More than any Akunha, Sofia and Isabel harboured great fear of the local spells. They are both staunch Catholics, aware, as any Mozambican must be, that there is a dark side to native culture. In Maputo, this dark side must have been much more sinister than it is out here because both were terrified of offending the local people lest they cursed them into a state of paralysis. Sofia was fond of telling me about the traditional ceremonies in the south in which ‘everyone came out spattered in the sacrificial blood of chickens and goats’. Apparently, while under a trance, dancers would bite the heads off living chickens.

  ‘Anyone who got on the wrong side of those witchdoctors could go to sleep and never wake up.’

  When Sofia explained her fear of local spells, it seemed that some of the old myths and clichés about savagery in ‘darkest Africa’ were more prevalent in Maputo than they were abroad. One of our visiting Christian Mozambican staff takes a ritual bucket bath every night in a concoction designed to give protection from curses and evil spirits.

  It was easy to laugh at what Sofia believed would be the consequence of her crossing any of the local people, but it did little to calm her troubled mind. I was an Akunha and obviously didn’t know what I was talking about. However, locked away in the middle of nowhere, I spooked too when I inadvertently invaded a sacred spot. A small world magnifies emotion.

  I remembered an incident earlier in the year when Isabel had a heated discussion about something with one of the locals and fell into a high fever the following night. Scared witless, she and Sofia fled to Ilha and stayed in a hotel whence they sent frantic text and voice messages to inform me that Isabel had been bewitched, poisoned and cursed by her opponent who was, Isabel assured me, ‘trying to kill her’.

  Too terrified to return to the college, Isabel flew back to Maputo. On arrival she was whisked into hospital where analyses showed that she had a bad bout of malaria. After standard treatment, she recovered completely and eventually returned. I was in Amsterdam at the time and could only try to calm all and sundry by phone. Long term, the person who remained most upset was the supposed assassin.

  Not wishing to let my imagination run away with me, I hastened to find the mestre who could help me. We sat down and completed the obligatory ritual greetings, then I invited him to hear my story and advise me what to do. He laughed at my fear, wondering, no doubt, what kind of barbarian society had bred me. I learnt with great relief that the small clay pot contained the evil spirits that had been tormenting a young girl. Had I inadvertently knocked this over, I would have released them. Since I did not touch this pot, no harm had been done.

  ‘If, however, you had released the banished spirits by mistake, no harm would have come to you. But the poor girl’s life would have been in danger. Bad spirits hate being trapped and banished. If they escape, they invariably seek revenge on the recent host.’

  On the following day, perhaps after some consultation with his fellow spiritual leaders, my advisor invited me to step aside and sit with him to learn a little more about the tradição. Bad spirits, fever and pain were regularly taken from the sick and placed in a pot. Ribbons were tied to the trees to honour the guiding spirits and alert them to a new call. The ribbons had a ragged appearance (which was the main thing that made the site sinister to my eyes) because in that poor village, what were there but rags to offer? Each stone had a deep significance. What that significance was or is was not for me to know. What I should know is that the tradição is a force for Good. As in all things, there is scope for a bad practitioner to pervert power, but such things lead to isolation and ultimately ruin. The tradição is an unharnessable force. A few wise men can try to channel a fraction of that force, just as a few engineers might be able t
o channel a river into the sea. We can disrespect the sea but we cannot change its mood. We cannot anger it. We are too insignificant; all we can do is hope to add another drop of water or matter to its massive volume.

  Feeling decidedly silly, I went back to work. But from that day on, I began to notice many more scraps of cloth and stone, many more of these calls for help. These are not, as the sage mestre pointed out, attempts to appease the wrath of any spirit or ancestor but to appeal for their intervention. Like anonymous phone calls from a hapless crowd, they call the ancestors to alert them to their plight.

  The Old know more than the Young and have more mental force. The Dead are stronger and more numerous than the Living. The Dead are untroubled by the fight to survive and can therefore give up all their thought to wisdom and contemplation of the world. The Living are advised and guided by the Dead. The Living should strive to emulate the wise men and heroes of the past. The Living have a duty to care for the legacy of the Dead. The Living are offered many paths and each must strive to find and keep to the true one. All living things have a spirit and all living things must respect these spirits, be they in a fly, a man or a baobab tree. Some species, such as rats and mosquitoes, are messengers from bad spirits, and as such can be killed without much penance. But other species are sent as messengers from the cherifo – the sheriff – to guide and protect us; their spirit is more powerful than ours (for example, crows, dolphins and baobab trees). To harm one of these messengers is strictly taboo and will result in dire consequences. Mankind has been sent by the gods to interpret and carry out their wishes. In order to do this, each person has a potentially powerful spirit; thus to hurt a fellow man is also taboo. Punishment for the deed can be immediate, but can also take years to visit the offender.

  Curandeiros also practise preventative medicine. This is called Mapithela. This word probably comes from the Mapitti tribe, who invaded Mozambique in the second half of the nineteenth century. Arriving from the southern territories of the Zulu and Angones, they attacked the Macua and enslaved many of them. Although their activities never reached the more settled, Arab-influenced and Portuguese-ruled northern coast, news of the invasion travelled, as news will. Now, a century and a half later, Mapithela is medicine to prevent marauding sickness from taking its victim unawares, like the Mapittis took the Macua long ago. Although the curandeiro can stave off disease, his preventative measures will only work if the patient is predestined to go on living.