Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  During the afternoon, Adamji returned, dressed in a lurid Hawaiian shirt, to ask if he could borrow the Petromax. This is a power light that feeds on petrol, hissing all the while it sends out a staggeringly bright light for a radius of approximately 30 metres. If that were all it did, it would be a miraculous alternative to electricity, but one doesn’t casually light a Petromax, because it is a potentially deadly apparatus that metamorphoses into a wonder lamp. Like the butterfly which has to pass through a much less attractive phase as a caterpillar, a Petromax starts off as an incendiary bomb and then either explodes and burns itself out (destroying its insides in the process) or burns with an astonishing glare. A column of flames up to 2 metres high always leaps from its cap and would certainly burn through the average mud hut’s palm roof. Apparently, the original lamps didn’t do this, but all the new ‘made in China’ ones I have seen, do. Ours was a particularly vicious model with a batting average of nine out of ten burnouts.

  Adamji assured me that it was not going into a mud hut and also that there were experts on site to deal with it. The ritual was to take place in his wife’s family house. This partly ruined but still splendid villa queens it over a palm grove on one side and the sea on the other. With a grand Portuguese external staircase to the veranda, it looks more like a stage set than a village dwelling. Adamji had taken the task of set designer to heart and described how such a light as mine would stage light the set and enhance the night.

  ‘Because there is no moon and it will be pitch dark no one will be able to see a thing without it. With this, though,’ he said, proudly tapping the giant lamp’s umpteenth replacement glass, rather harder than glass usually likes to be tapped, ‘it will look like something out of Rocha’s cinema.’

  He set off swinging the metre-high lamp, chuckling to himself. Close encounters with a Petromax are infrequent here, with less than a dozen of them in the joint villages. Even holding one, it seemed, was to be in possession of a trophy. I heard him stop and explain to several colleagues and then passers-by how he had borrowed it from me for the grand ceremony.

  On the evening of Adamji’s family’s traditional healing ceremony, Sofia and I walked from the front of the college to Rosalina’s. Although Adamji had been unceremoniously divorced many years before, his first wife was well connected locally and the joint owner of a beautiful, run-down villa on the edge of the mangrove beyond the governor’s palace. The ceremony was to take place in the villa’s front garden and the public could watch it from the wide, semi-circular steps of the impressive Portuguese staircase that led up to the stately villa’s porch. By the time we arrived, there was already a clot of children on the steps. The girls wore their hair newly braided for the occasion and some of the boys had newly shaven heads. As Sofia and I approached, the chatter subsided to whispers and then burst into animated comments and laughter as we passed. Both of us were wearing capulanas and college uniform lenzos on our heads as a mark of respect. Sofia regularly dressed like this, but I do so only rarely and although the students insist it is appreciated, the result invariably seems to be that I am mocked.

  By the time we arrived all the actual seats had gone, as had all the good viewing places. Whether it was because we were respectively the president and the head of kitchen from the college, or whether it was because we had lent the ceremony our treasured Petromax, a space was found for us near the top step with a perfect view of the palm-leaf palanquin that had been erected the day before.

  Based only on my ability to dress wounds and lower fevers, Sofia insisted on calling me ‘doctora’. When I insisted on our living and working together on first-name terms, the nearest she would come to it was to call me ‘Doctora Lisa’. On the way there, Sofia had warned me: ‘Be prepared for anything, Doctora Lisa. Remember what I told you about those traditional ceremonies in Maputo. I tell you, there is blood everywhere from chicken and goat sacrifices, and severed chickens’ heads flying around like tennis balls. The screaming is deafening and it all gets very out of hand.’

  Since the ceremony was to last forty-eight hours and neither of us was up to seeing it through to the end, we prearranged a signal so that if it got either too wild for us or we got too tired we could sneak away together.

  Adamji was the meeter and greeter who ushered us up to the front porch and introduced us to a couple of dozen local people, who listened politely while he explained to them who we were, until a stern-looking older man with sunken cheeks and elbows so knobbly that they looked like implants pointed out that everyone already knew who we were. Adamji paused for a moment and seemed to be weighing up whether to take this as a rebuke or a compliment. For the sake of harmony, in the spirit of the evening, he visibly swallowed whatever retort he had been about to make and returned to his post at the foot of the steps after ostentatiously checking on the progress of the Petromax. The latter was throwing out a light so dazzling it was impossible to look into its glare.

  We had been told to be there for 7pm and had actually only managed to arrive by half past seven, with Sofia assuring me, ‘The ceremony is bound to start late because they always do.’

  Apart from the odd white-robed, red-sashed curandeiro appearing on the porch to take a wand from the wand basket or a bandage from a bandage box or paint from a paint basket, nothing happened on the palanquin’s stage until nine o’clock. The audience swelled steadily, the steps filled, the porch filled, the garden filled, the Petromax hissed and there was a great deal of whispering, but the troupe of healers remained inside the patient’s bedroom while we all stared at the floodlit empty stage.

  At nine o’clock, three drummers appeared from the crowd in the garden. They tempered their drum skins over a glowing charcoal fire and took their places centre stage. At 9.15pm, they started drumming. By 9.20, the rhythm had almost silenced the audience. At 9.30, accompanied by hand claps and foot stomps, the curandeiros appeared from the sick woman’s bedroom and began to shimmy across the porch. Unasked, the crowd which had refused to part to let anyone else sit on the steps, parted and the curandeiros shimmied down the steps in a healing conga. Last but one in the dancing line was the sick woman, who was also dressed in red and white and who wore an outsize lenzo cloth wrapped round her head.

  The head of the conga was the chief curandeiro, a woman so fat she had rolls of flesh juddering as she danced. While her apprentices carried small red batons, the head curandeiro carried a fancy red wand double the size of any of the others. Their entrance into the exorcism ring on the palm stage was accompanied by their own ululating battle cry and a tin whistle, which one of the chief curandeiro’s two hench-women blew with the insistence of an outraged referee.

  Like a piece of theatre, what followed was divided into acts and scenes. The protagonist was always the chief curandeiro, her chorus were her eleven disciples, the maiden in distress was the sick woman and the antagonist was the invisible evil spirit or spirits who had possessed her. The plot consisted of a series of complicated ploys to trick the bad spirit into appearing, the better to be exorcized by the healers.

  Many of the scenes required props which the curandeiros had brought with them in a series of baskets. All the scenes were accompanied by frenzied drumming but each had a particular tempo. Each scene incorporated a set of dancing, often in the conga form and always ending with all the curandeiros and the patient exiting back up the steps in a dancing line. This continued for hour after hour with no sign of exhaustion from any of the participants or the audience.

  The drummers, who had worked themselves into a trance, broke many lizard- and gazelle-skin drum tops during the ceremony. Between each session they would re-temper their drums over the waiting charcoal fire, helped by a small group of assistants who let no one else near their open-air workshop. As one drum burst, one or two of the assistants would sit and repair it for the next session and the drummers meanwhile would use another from what appeared to be an endless supply of small hand-drums. Such was the rapid passage of drums on the stage, such was the whirling
of white-robed women in front of the drummers and such was the rapid and intoxicating rhythm, that from my vantage point at the top of the steps I was unable to identify exactly which of the many ceremonial drums were in use that night.

  Approximately every half hour, a member of the audience would be seized by an attack of diavos. Thus possessed, the victim (who was usually female) would leap from her seat and throw herself on to the stage there to thrash and convulse in the grip of her own evil spirit. The audience was very unimpressed by this and the curandeiros even more so. As the conga of healers and patient circled the stage, the presence of an outsider in the throes of a convulsion interrupted their carefully measured dance steps. At each turn, the healers and patient would step over the intruder, but the lack of invitation to the stage did nothing to deter the possessed gatecrashers.

  At one point, there were three such uninvited women on the stage. I asked Sofia in a whisper why the healers didn’t extend their healing to the afflicted gatecrashers. She told me that traditional ceremonies had to be requested and paid for. This one was for Adamji’s ex-wife. It wasn’t for anyone else. If any of the diavos-afflicted audience wanted to be exorcized, they had to apply for the treatment separately and pay for it themselves. I whispered back to ask why, if everyone knew this, were those of the public who were possessed throwing themselves onto the stage.

  ‘It’s the drumming,’ Sofia told me. ‘It brings the diavos out. And some bad spirits are like people, they are show-offs. Look at that one down there,’ she said, scornfully pointing out a young woman in a yellow T-shirt who had been writhing on stage for nearly twenty minutes without a break, convulsing, frothing at the mouth, jerking up and down from lying to sitting in the most alarming way.

  When the curandeiros and patient abandoned the stage and conga-ed back up the steps and into the ceremonial bedroom, the young woman continued to writhe. Her spine arched almost to snapping point and then flopped back to the rhythm of the drums until she passed out, presumably with fatigue. She lay on stage unattended for a few minutes and then came round. She looked up, dazed and shaking. Her face was covered in dust and foam, which she attempted to wipe away with the back of her hand. She had long since been separated from her yellow T-shirt, which was lying in the sand beside her. She picked it up and shook it out and put it back on before staggering to her feet. At that point, an older woman stepped forward to help her back to the empty seat by her embarrassed husband. As she sat down, her husband grabbed her firmly by the lower arm. Later he would try to maintain this grip to no avail because no sooner did the curandeiros appear for the next set than his possessed wife leapt up shrieking and threw herself back on stage.

  Whatever jerks and convulsions, writhing and rolling she had done before were as nothing to her own second set. On her return, she monopolized the show to such an extent that neither the curandeiros nor the patient could get past her. The chief curandeiro frowned and gave the interloper a powerful stare, which calmed the diavos momentarily. But by the time the conga came around again, the gatecrasher was thrashing up a cloud of dust. The chief curandeiro stepped out of the conga and signalled for it to continue without her. Then she pointed her large red wand at the gatecrasher’s back and touched her in the small of her spine with the tip. The effect was instant. The possessed gatecrasher stopped moving and appeared to be dead. Two of the drum assistants hauled her off the stage, where she came round and went back sheepishly to her husband. The chief curandeiro resumed her place at the head of the conga without even looking at the woman she had just commanded to be still. Like Sofia had said, this was not the interloper’s ceremony.

  Later, I asked Adamji if the interloper would have been cured by that wand touch. He shook his head.

  ‘Eee! No chance! She didn’t even buy them a chicken, let alone a goat. It doesn’t work like that. They didn’t come for her. She was just in the way with her diavos.’

  The first two hours were a sensual feast. I felt bombarded by sights and sounds. Deciphering what was going on, what each scene was about took a lot of concentration. At first, Sofia and I whispered to each other what we thought was happening and why, but after the first two hours, most of the scenes seemed to be action replays so I took more to marvelling how the sick woman, who had scarcely been able to stand for over a month, was able to dance round and round that stage and up and down the many steps in and out of the ceremonial room for so long. I wasn’t sick but I would have been exhausted after the first hour. The idea of the ceremony continuing for forty-eight hours was daunting.

  Sofia and I whispered our determination to leave at around 3am at the latest. Meanwhile, the thirteen white robes with the red sashes kept shimmying past us on their way down to the stage and on their way back and the drumming did not stop for a second. Apart from some children who were asleep on rush mats on the porch, splayed out like drying fish, no one showed any sign of flagging. Tin plates of rice and beans or rice and a bony chicken stew and portions of grey manioc chima appeared from time to time in the hands of spectators, who sat and balled the food into bite-sized chunks which they chewed and swallowed without taking their eyes off the stage.

  Four hours into the ceremony, the curandeiros reappeared from the room and shimmied past us with a basket of food which they took to the stage and began to lay out on a mat in a (to me) new ritual. Then, together with the patient, they sat by the food and washed in a traditional Macua ritual I had seen before. Water was splashed seven times on their foreheads and then faces, on each hand and then on each lower arm. Then water was splashed seven times, on their necks and upper chests. When this was done, each woman dipped the fingers of both her hands back into the water seven times shaking them dry each time as they incanted a prayer.

  After that, it was ritual supper time on stage. However, the food was not recognizable from where we were sitting. It seemed to consist of many small roots and blobs of paste. The paste was rolled into balls and partaken by the chief curandeiro and the patient alike. Each food was proffered by the one to the other. It looked a little like a mother bird feeding her young, and the young returning the favour.

  After about half an hour of this particular ceremony, the chief curandeiro touched the sick woman’s forehead with her wand and instructed her to stand up and take a small dish of one of the foods to share with the audience. The sick woman did not seem to understand so the action and instruction were repeated three times. Eventually, very much in a trance, the sick woman stood up and stumbled towards the steps alone. She took a ball of ivory-white substance from the pan she was holding and lunged at random members of the audience, pushing the proffered food into their mouths.

  As she approached us, I saw that what she had in the pan looked very much like the kind of fat that clings to bodies when they drown. I have been squeamish about food since I was a child. If someone were to say, for instance, ‘Eat this bowl of tripe or I will shoot you,’ I would prefer them to pull the trigger than have to eat the tripe. I have personal issues with anything that comes from the inside of an animal. That night, I had issues with whatever was in the patient’s dish; and I had never felt so grateful for being an akunha and thereby the outsider who would not merit having the drowned fat shoved into her mouth. Sofia, who is black and Mozambican and therefore much less of an outsider, was looking distinctly worried. She was staring pointedly away from the approaching patient in the way that lobsters in a restaurant’s fish tank do when a potential client approaches to choose one.

  Despite her best efforts not to be noticed, Sofia got singled out for the honour of having a blob of the fatty thing shoved into her mouth. As it passed her lips, I saw her eyes bulge and water and her throat heave, but she kept whatever it was that had been put in her mouth in there.

  I was just wondering how I could have managed not to throw up if the honour had been mine, when a thumb and forefinger thrust some of the yellowing substance into my mouth.

  Much as I wanted to, I knew I could not spit it out. Equally, with my
gorge already rising, I knew I could not swallow it without throwing up. I noticed a mischievous glee in Sofia’s eyes as she continued to struggle to keep her own mouthful down. I felt a hundred eyes upon me as I battled with the waves of nausea that followed on from discovering how strange the texture was of what I had thought to be fat. It was harder than fat and rubbery and it had a very strange and unpleasant taste.

  When we were little children, my sister, Lali, developed the knack of keeping food in her mouth for hours on end. She used to pouch all the vegetables in her food in one cheek and keep it there in a pellet until she could spit it out on our afternoon walk. Following suit, I pouched whatever it was that I had in my mouth. However, after about half an hour, I noticed that Sofia had stopped regurgitating hers, and the presence of whatever it was we had been given to eat was so unpleasant in my mouth that I decided to swallow it whole and be done with it.

  Having achieved this after a few abortive goes, it sat like a large nugget of lead in my stomach for the next several days. Long after the actual ‘I swallowed a stone’ sensation faded, the sense of weight lingered for weeks. Sofia complained equally of the leaden feeling; and both of us tried quizzing Adamji as to what it was. Either he didn’t know or didn’t want to say because he just kept repeating that it was ‘food from the curandeiros’.

  After the drowned fat episode, neither I nor Sofia could really concentrate properly on the rest of the ceremony and we were both worried about what else in the edible department might get shared around. So we waited until the curandeiros had taken their conga line back into the changing room and made our excuses and left.

  It was a completely moonless night and the hurricane lamp Adamji thoughtfully lent us on our way out was extinguished within seconds of joining the path along the edge of the mangrove. As we bumped into each other and into bushes and trees and the step of the governor’s palace, Sofia announced that compared to the mayhem of Maputo, the Macua festival had been very civilized. From then on, she revised her opinion of the state of savagery of the villagers, whom she could not help but view, through the lens of the Roman Catholicism that was the backbone of her own belief, as hapless heathens. During the months after the ceremony we had witnessed, she went out into the village more than ever, less afraid of the unknown and more at home with the local tradição. Side by side with this new ease was the lingering question: ‘What was it we ate?’ And also, ‘Would the indigestion ever go away?’