According to one Portuguese-Makhuwa dictionary, converter (to convert) translates as opittukuxa murima, literally “to change heart” (Filippi and Frizzi 2005: 1034). Yet whenever villagers talked with me about switching religious allegiance, they never used that term. Much more common were routine verbs denoting spatial movement: to move in the sense of migrating (othama) or in the sense of leaving one religion and entering another (ohiya ettini ekina, ovolowa ettini ekina). In contrast to introspective conceptions of conversion presupposed in Western thought (Swift 2012), conversion among the Makhuwa is embodied and embedded. It is a migratory movement—less spiritual than physical, less a change of heart than a change of place.36
While, in local parlance, othama and ohiya ni ovolowa translate “conversion,” neither term is particular to religious change. Both designate all sorts of geographic relocations. In order to understand the nature of conversion, therefore, I had to study the nature of migration. I discovered in short order that movement—going, but just as often coming—is foundational to the Makhuwa sense of self. One may speak of a Makhuwa disposition toward mobility, a kinetic conception of being that finds expression in migration histories, agricultural techniques, and life-cycle rituals. A typical greeting—what I was met with on the path between the cinema and the healing grounds—is not “are you well?” but “are you walking well?” And as seen on the healing grounds themselves, restoration to health entails bodily transformations, bodily transformations premised on bodily transportations.
Plan of the Book
This book thus unfolds as a series of variations on the theme of mobility—religious, regional, and above all existential. Part I (othama, to move) and Part II (ohiya ni ovolowa, to leave and to enter) are named for the two commonest renderings of “to convert.” Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (in Part I) attend to histories and mythologies of geographic movement, evidence of how wrong it would be to restrict mobility to modernity. To be “rooted” in Makhuwa tradition is paradoxically to be grounded in a transient, seminomadic way of life. Makhuwa historical experience and selfhood manifest an ability to adapt quickly to changing political and environmental circumstances, circumstances that remain unpredictable and precarious up to the present.
Part II begins by shifting attention to the lived body. In Chapter 3, I argue that initiation rituals serve not only to express mobility but also to cultivate dispositions toward it. This chapter also highlights the resonance of discontinuous spheres—between, for example, male and female, young and old, bush and village, night and day—even prior to what I discuss in Chapter 4: the colonial-era fragmenting of social life into discrete domains, and of spiritual life into reified religions. Thus, movement, including interreligious movement, is best seen not as frictionless flux but as the crossing, and recrossing, of borders.
Part III takes its title (okhalano, to be with) from another Makhuwa term, not one for “conversion” but one that sheds light on the symbiotic manner by which the Makhuwa carry out their lives. Chapter 5 documents the matricentric character of Makhuwa society, contending that women, especially, maintain Makhuwa pluralistic propensities amid the ever-increasing hegemony of market logics. Chapter 6 takes up what it means “to be with” Pentecostalism. No less than ancestral traditions, Pentecostalism also is marked by mobility. It presents itself, thus, as continuous with Makhuwa ways of being, continuous precisely through its dynamics of change.
All of this points up a profound irony, the nuances of which the Conclusion explicates and the implications of which it explores. That is the irony of radical change as a cross-cultural constant. Convertibility as a mode of being is present as much in Makhuwa traditions as in Pentecostal traditions, and therefore also in people’s oscillations between the two.
This insight sheds valuable light on the ambivalence with which the Makhuwa have received Pentecostalism. It also suggests a need for nuance in the largely unchallenged narrative of Pentecostalism’s worldwide “explosion.” The propensity for novelty and change that contributes to the rise of Pentecostalism can also contribute to its decline. For just as Makhuwa mobility draws people to the churches and finds reinforcement in the churches, it also facilitates exit from the churches. The Makhuwa are predisposed to convert. But having done so once, they feel little need to stop.
PART I
Othama—To Move
CHAPTER 1
A Fugitive People
The opening chapters of this book take othama (to move) as their guiding motif. Just one of the local metaphors used for religious conversion, it is a term whose relevance lies in its everydayness. Those among whom I lived, although not precisely nomadic, have a propensity for dealing with problems by leaving them behind. Their predilection for flight suggests that to be grounded in Makhuwa tradition is paradoxically to be mobile. It is this fluid way of being, I argue, that informs the facility with which many of the same people who move across space move across religions. In situating historically the regularity and reversibility of both migrations and conversions, the current chapter also demonstrates that the small set of African villages where I worked bears no resemblance to the static enclosure once considered the ethnographic ideal. Hence, as further introduction to the setting of my research, this chapter attends less to the place than to the people—people who inhabit the land not by rooting themselves to it but by moving themselves through it.
Luisinha
The sun just beginning to fall below the forested horizon, ten-year-old Luisinha was doing what she normally did when not helping her mother pound grain or fetch wood.1 She was playing with age-mates on the main road connecting Kaveya village to Maúa town. She likely had on the same tattered dress I always saw her wearing and the same sweet smile I relished whenever she wandered near. I would look up from the water I was boiling or the notebook I was filling, nod toward the 50cc Lifo parked close by, and whisper our secret word: muttuttuttu-ttu-ttu-ttu. Covering her face and laughing, she would reply with the same—our play on muttuttuttu, the Makhuwa word for motorbike.
It was here, in the mud hut compound of Luisinha’s parents, that my wife and I lodged during our stays in the Maúa countryside. Jemusse and Fátima belonged to Kaveya village’s African Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus Africana, or ADA) congregation. They were among its most earnest participants. While from them I learned the rudiments of Makhuwa domesticity and Pentecostal piety, I had their children to thank for helping me most with the language. They tired less of speaking with me, perhaps because of our comparable verbal skills, perhaps because they found endlessly amusing all the mistakes I made, and the game of turning each mistake into a new and silly word.
I was away that day—in the district capital, catching up on correspondences and square meals—but it was told to me that shortly before her mother would have called her in for the evening, Luisinha strayed into the low brush along the road’s edge. Something sharp pierced