It is firmly believed that all life is predestined in some ways. On the day we are born, it is written in the stars the exact time and day when we will die. Within that time (known to the gods, the cherifo, his many servants and our ancestors, but not to us directly), we must incur no shame. Great things achieved beyond our community are of less worth than great things achieved within our community. A man or a woman has lived well when he or she has the love and respect of her family and neighbours. The man or woman who offends the community must redeem him- or herself. Failure to admit failure and failure to make redemption could, in the most drastic of cases, incur banishment from the community. No fate is considered worse than this. Death, torture and agony are as nothing to the terror of banishment. When someone dies far from his own native community and is buried on foreign soil, his soul is doomed to wander for eternity. For Cabaceirians, anywhere beyond Chocas-Mar (six kilometres distant) counts as ‘foreign’ soil.
So when anyone dies, family and friends make every effort to take the body home for burial. In a tropical country where funerals occur within twenty-four hours of death, and where transport is scant and expensive, and where over 90 per cent of the population is grindingly poor, the expense of moving a corpse is usually prohibitive. Thus, people from the villages tend not to go to the hospitals in Nampula or Nacala at all. If they do go to a hospital, as soon as death seems probable the patient is hastily removed and bundled onto the back of a truck or squeezed into an overcrowded minibus and taken home. That last and, for many, agonizing journey is worth the sacrifice because it ensures home burial. The idea of dying far from home is so frightening that those who do die beyond their native community die in fear, thereby adding to the future unrest of their soul. A ‘good’ death is important. We should not fight ‘the call’. When our predestined time has come, it has come, and we should go peacefully into the light.
As soon as someone expires, a stone is placed under the deceased’s head, both eyes are closed and water is sprinkled ritually over the closed lips. The body is then ritually washed by a family member, who has also ritually washed in order to perform the duty. The body is then wrapped in 5 metres of white cloth (7 metres for a woman). Rolls of this white cotton are sold on Ilha in the general store on the corner of the market square. Like so much else here, it is made in China and has purple Chinese characters stamped on the end of each bale. While the death rites are being attended to, simultaneously a messenger will set out to alert the village that so-and-so ‘has been called’.
Family and friends gather round the deceased to keep him or her company on his last night at home. The funeral will take place on the day after the death. Funerals are always well attended. No matter what someone is doing, they will stop, down tools and leave to attend a funeral. In the early days, particularly after the rains when people in the neighbourhood died like flies from malaria, the college kept emptying out completely as all students and workers left en masse to attend another funeral. This was making such a huge dent in the curriculum, the construction schedule and the struggling farm that Morripa and the village elders made a chart for who could attend a funeral. Thus students can attend funerals of immediate family members, next-door neighbours and village elders. A further two students and two workers will be delegated to attend any given funeral to represent the entire college.
Although there are several cemeteries, some people are buried in their own compounds and, in the past, some were buried under sacred trees. There is a strict and intense mourning period of ten days during which rigid rules are observed in diet, dress and behaviour. On the tenth day, the departed spirit is helped on its way by an all-night ceremony of drums, prayers, chants and grilled food. Thereafter, a further thirty-day period of ritual mourning is observed. On the fortieth night after a death, the drums will beat from dusk till dawn in a last farewell. This is the arumaíni rite for the dead. ‘Arumaíni’ means ‘forty’ in Macua. Sometimes it is called by the Arabic ‘ekoti’. No matter how poor a family is, food and tea (matapapishu) must be offered to the numerous guests to accompany the departing spirit. Whatever can be scrabbled together, borrowed or sold will be done to provide this last terrestrial act of respect.
When the time comes for someone to join their ancestors, he or she will enjoy a life eternal in the village of their birth. Once elevated to the rank of spirits, each will take their place at the great community meeting in the sky according to their wisdom and goodness during their brief passage on earth. It is an honour to be called to join the ancestors, but it is never an appointment one can make oneself. We are each obliged to pass the test of life and to enjoy whatever pleasures and endure whatever hardships the Lord and Sheriff (cherifo) sends our way. Suicide is seen as an unforgivable crime against nature and disrespects both the Living and the Dead. Mourning is about the loss endured by the living, who must continue to find their right path without the love and help of the deceased, rather than about the loss of life itself. The one who dies will never suffer again; the one who dies has been released and will live on forever. Thus the ones who have survived weep, wail and pray for themselves and each other because they have to continue their journey without someone they love.
With a population of seven thousand souls, hardly a week goes by without a death, so the drums echo and resound through the bush, carried on the wind from the mangrove into every compound and every mud hut. Sometimes the insistent beats are so loud they seem to be coming from inside my head. They throb as I fall asleep and they wake me up in the small hours as the rhythms change.
Sometimes, between the doleful cries of bushbabies, the nights implode with the eerie sound of women ululating. This elulu vibration is a uniquely female African sound reserved for moments of joy. Its outpouring of happiness carries further than any shout. It is the primitive, spontaneous sound of women when words fail and the normal range of voice becomes redundant. The unique sound is made with the tongue and the lips. It is caused by the tip of the tongue creating vibrations and it has a truly alarming volume.
The nearest we come to it in our society is the visceral grip of the squillo some opera singers can produce at the end of a held note. A squillo causes glass to vibrate and hair to stand on end while throwing its listeners into emotional tumult. Yet when an African woman ululates, the effect is far more emotionally churning. It is a sound that cannot be ignored. As it surpasses a whoop of sheer delight, its effect is exciting and the raw emotion shocks.
It is the women here who vocalize pleasure, and it is they who most vocalize grief. This is a society where men can and do cry. But it is the women who wail. In bereavement, the sheer volume of such cries is sickening to hear. Without the trappings of material riches, wealth is measured in terms of human relations. Thus, when a local person dies, their extended family loses a chunk of everything and it is the women who express the enormity of that loss.
XVIII
A Visit from the Curandeiros
WITHIN OUR TEAM, ADAMJI the guard is one of the people closest to me. By day, we often work side by side gardening. He watches me as I start a new job and then wanders over from his post under the kapok tree by the gate and joins in. Making a garden out of a wilderness is uninspiring as a spectator sport until the positive results have time to show. Most of the agricultural students regard ornamental gardening as a complete waste of time, but Adamji understands and appreciates flowers. It is his pleasure to outdo me in the garden, and mine to be outdone. The college courtyard is gradually being converted from a rubbish dump to a formal garden with stone paths and flowerbeds, fruit trees and a herb garden. Each bed is enclosed by a low stone wall and each stone has to be found and dug into position.
The college grounds are littered with hand-cut stones, in blocks and slabs. Most are still buried under sand and weeds, but Adamji has a knack for finding them. From early on, he sensed that a way to my heart was via these walls. I have mentioned that I like to garden, but ‘like’ doesn’t really describe the obsessive nature of this act
ivity. It would be correct to say that I delight in gardening. In the days when I and the local people were mutual mysteries, Adamji was the first of the team Morripa and the village committee assembled to find some common ground with me. We bonded building walls together in the early hours after dawn and the dead hours of the afternoon. We didn’t talk much: we just fit stone to stone and then drank tea together, admiring our handiwork from afar.
From there, we moved on to conversation. Adamji works on alternate nights, and gravitates from the gateway to the kitchen to sit and talk, keeping me company while I make jam or chilli sauce or bottled fruits. He has become adept at holding an oil lamp at just the right height for me to see what is cooking on the charcoal stove; and he anticipates my need for a new spoon to stir with or a new jar to fill. If a week goes by with no night cooking, he will find papaya or guavas or piri-piri peppers [chillies] and bring them to sell so that the process will restart and we can team up in the outside kitchen under the stars again.
Over the months he has told me about all his family, scattered across the length and breadth of Mozambique: about his daughter in Nampula who has a peanut farm, and his daughter in Quelimane who has invited him to visit, and his daughter in Maputo whose husband fishes for tiger prawns. And he has told me about his first and his second wife and his divorce from both; and about the plot of land by the former governor’s palace that he inherited from his father.
When the other workers and students are around, Adamji is popular and a key person within the village. He is the one who knows all the fishermen. And when no one else can get peanuts or maize flour, he will know where to find them. He has a bicycle which he calls a ‘rooky tooky’ and with which he has a love–hate relationship. It is an old bicycle that keeps breaking down. On many days, he sets off on an errand sitting straight and riding high, ringing his bell as he leaves, proudly flaunting the red and black Dutch postman’s hat which is his favourite part of his uniform. But he sometimes limps back hours later, pushing his bike with savage shoves as though it were a delinquent son. When we are alone, his descriptions of the new bike he will buy one day are almost lyrical.
His dream is based on his memory of a gleaming new Ruff Tuff bicycle. This brand is known in Mossuril as a ‘rufi tufi’, and has filtered down to the Cabaceiras as a ‘rooky tooky’. This new rooky tooky will have dozens of accessories and extra-wide tyres and the almost unthinkable luxury of its own pump. It will travel at speeds unknown to other bikes and will have a basket at the front and a box on the back; it will have a padded seat and gears and it will be painted sky blue with silver lines. When the time comes, we will go together to Nampula to buy it, and while we are there, we will also buy a mattress for his new bed and a china mug for his tea. The contemplation of these future purchases gives him so much pleasure sometimes that he clutches his stomach and laughs out loud.
When not plotting for his own future comfort, Adamji spends a lot of time running around ensuring the comfort of others, including his two ex-wives. Apart from a bad case of malaria, and the occasional headache, he seems to be one of the healthiest of the workers, and yet he was the one who most asked for medicines. After a few months he admitted that these requests were not really for himself: one of his ex-wives was ailing and the pills and potions, liniments and infusions were for her. In the early spring, her cluster of minor ailments stopped and she became seriously sick and fell into a mysterious decline, the escalation of which he updated me on from day to day.
Her condition worsened to the point when she could hardly stand; then the curandeiros were brought in. Their boat glided through the mangroves on a high tide and delivered them to the hem of the village on the edge of the palm grove behind the two-room health post run by the nearly round ‘Dr’ Rocha, one of the most powerful men in the village. Rocha owns land and coconut palms, he owns cashew and mango trees, he owns one of the four motorbikes in the village, his house has electricity and he owns wonders from ‘out there’ such as a fridge, a widescreen TV, a hi-fi sound system with speakers, a DVD player and a veritable library of kung fu movies and Bollywood ‘weepies’. Twice a week, in a purpose-built mud barn beside his home, he charges a few cents for his neighbours to come in and watch either a Chinese kung fu or an Indian weepie, or a double bill of both. The soundtracks, particularly of the latter, drift through the bush and linger in curious echoes in the palm groves. Sometimes, when Rocha’s ‘cinema’ is in full spate, no sound escapes from it at all, deadened by wind, then, out of the blue, on the edge of the shore or in the mangrove or by the church or in one of the ruined places or in our Culture House or in one of the classrooms or on our veranda, ghostly bars of piano music play, or there is a demonic laugh, or, more often since most of the movies come straight from India, there is incredibly high-pitched dialogue bursting into song.
Beware of what you wish for. After longing for and lobbying for light for over a decade, a small part of Cabaceira Grande finally got its wish granted. EDM, the national electricity company, installed poles and looped cables up to and including Morripa’s house. For no apparent reason, the EDM activity stopped a tantalizing 800 metres from the college. When we asked when the work would continue and the college could also have light, we were told:
‘You will have it by the opening.’ (i.e. Sept 2004.)
‘It was not possible for the opening but will be installed by the end of 2004.’
‘They are coming in February 2005 to do the work.’
When February 2005 came and went with no signs of EDM in the neighbourhood, a delegation from the college traipsed back to Ilha to do some more lobbying. Eventually, we were told that we would get our promised energia electrica by the end of March. Extorting this information was a bit like pulling out a strong tooth and required trips to Nacala, Nampula, Ilha, Mossuril and Chocas. Information about what was going on re electricity and the Cabaceiras seemed to circulate on a ‘need to know basis’ in a hierarchy in which neither I nor my niece Ellie nor Morripa obviously had clearance. While a small percentage of the villages luxuriated in the benefits of light (and in the case of Morripa, his brother, and Rocha, a fridge), most villagers cannot afford to pay any electricity at all let alone the cost of installing a meter, and so the cables string over their palm roofs, passing them by.
It all went very quiet on the electrical front until April 2005 when Morripa called me in Amsterdam to announce that the light was finally coming and would be installed and ready to switch on in June of that year. June came and went without any sign of such happening. By September 2005, I had taken up the crusade myself with zero effect. However, just as we began to make serious enquiries into installing alternative energy, an EDM fanfare announced June 2006 as the definitive date when we too would be able to switch on a light, plug in a phone, have ice and music, electrical tools, fax, computers, and the one hundred and one things we take for granted in the West, but which without electricity in the bush I had come to yearn for.
Meanwhile, the happy few, 800 metres up the path, enjoyed their privilege. My laptop was ferried daily to Morripa’s house to recharge. Rocha played eerie films through the late afternoons, alternating this activity with a weekend disco. Depending on the caprice of the wind, this too could sound as though it were emanating from under my own pillow.
Beware of what you wish for indeed. The tom-tom nights whose sound was wrapped only in singing, laughter and silence with the occasional natural shriek of bushbabies has, when the wind dictates it, given way to tunes blasted out of amplifiers. Magical moments in and around the college become surreally framed by Rocha’s soundtracks, which incorporate the worst legacies of Hollywood with absurdly over-emphasized musical scores.
Meanwhile, on the dark side of the village by the shore, a boatload of curandeiros arrived to the more traditional welcome of song and dance Macua-style. Adamji and his ex-wife’s sisters were the joint masters of ceremony on the greeting committee. Amid much cheering, shouting and shuffled dance, the Sisterhood of twelve healers arri
ved and clambered out of a dhow, hitching up their matching robes to wade to the shore. They were under the leadership of a grand-master healer, a woman of about forty-five whom her own apprentices and hosts alike treated like visiting royalty. Two of the sisterhood were seriously fat and they had serious and unseemly problems disembarking. Another pair of apprentices was from the village and they were welcomed home as returning heroes.
After the curandeiros came baskets and bundles of food and fetishes. The food was to be paid for, in part, by Adamji, who had proudly itemized the exorbitant (by Cabaceirian standards) costs. A goat had to be bought and killed, and three chickens and a sack of manioc flour, jumbo-sized mats, macuti to cover the stage, coconuts, spice, salt and also much of the hidden contents of the incoming luggage, including the twelve white robes and headdresses, plus extra white cotton to dress the patient.
For such a stupendous outlay, and for such an event, hundreds of villagers had gathered to watch. Preparations would be made for the same evening; then at 7pm the 48-hour-long ceremony would begin.
Back at the college, Sofia told me that all of the college staff had been invited. Jorge, the head of orientation, and Tigo decided not to attend. Teacher Tauacal (no relation to our deceased builder) was going down with a fever, which left Sofia and me to do the honours.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 19