Children War Mozz

Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power in
Postcolonial Mozambique
Author(s): Harry West
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 119-150
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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sorcery of constructionand socialist

modernization:ways of understanding
power in postcolonial Mozambique
HARRY WEST
New School for Social Research
In this article I examine how ruralMozambicans in the Mueda plateau region
experienced the socialist modernization policies of FRELIMO,the anti-colonial guerrilla movement that eventually took power over the postindependence Mozambican state. In interpreting and engaging with the dramatic
transformationsbrought on by FRELIMOsocialism, Muedans often drew on
the familiar language of sorcery, notwithstanding FRELIMOattempts to banish sorcery-related beliefs and practices. While Muedans sometimes resisted
the modernization agenda and sometimes embraced it, they could not make
systematic instrumental use of sorcery discourse to pursue strategic ends.
Rather,sorcery served them more broadly as a social diagnostics of power relations-one that preserved ways of understanding power that are saturated
with ambivalence. [power, postcolonial Africa, sorcery, surveillance, guerrilla war, villagization, modernization]
Itwas Kalamatatu,not I, who broached the topic of sorcery in our first conversation on a cool afternoon in the dry season of 1993. I was too aware of the watchful
eyes and attentive ears of government officials closely monitoring me within the tense
atmosphere created by the recent (October 1992) peace accord between the ruling
and the insurgency, Resistencia NaFrentede LibertaJaode Mozambique (FRELIMO)
cional de Mozambique (RENAMO);the United Nations-sponsored demobilization of
combatant armies; and the preparationsfor the nation's first multipartynational elections (to be staged in October 1994).' I was conducting field research in the heartland
of FRELIMOpower, on the Mueda plateau where FRELIMOhad initiated its anticolonial guerrilla campaign in 1964 and where it had based itself until winning indevigilance
pendence from the Portuguese a decade later.2Not only had strict FRELIMO
on the
a
from
RENAMO
African-backed
South
the
presence
establishing
prevented
Mueda plateau for the duration of the postindependence civil war (1977-92),3 but
FRELIMOrule within the communal villages built on the plateau after independence
had also curtailed the activities of local curandeiros (the Portuguese word for healers)
like Kalamatatuwhose work, according to the party, was at odds with scientific socialism.
When Kalamatatuheard his wife greeting my entourage in the yard outside his
house, he emerged to find out who had come to visit. Chairs were arranged for me,
the two research companions traveling with me on my first research trip to the plateau, Rafael Mwakala and Felista Elias Mkaima, and the local government official accompanying us. Kalamatatusat on a slab of tree barkthat he carried with him from inside his house. Because of his cataracts, he missed us each by a few degrees as he
American Ethnologist28(1 ): 19-150. Copyright? 2001, American Anthropological Association.
american ethnologist
120
offered his hand to greet us. He wore a small tattered hunting cap with earflaps, a
coarsely knit woolen sweater strewn with holes, and tattered trousers. When Rafael
told him that I had come a great distance to learn about the history and culture of the
Makonde people, a mischievous smile broke across his face, exposing two teeth, perfectly asymmetrical, one upper, one lower. He scooted his bark-slab seat closer, apparently intrigued, and waited to hear what I would ask of him.
Given the tense political atmosphere at the time, I had promised myself not to
delve into potentially sensitive issues, and so I queried him about the types of illnesses
commonly brought to him and the nature of the cures he knew. For more than an
hour, he catalogued these for me. Then, abruptly, but with nonchalance, he offered
these words:
Whena lion is seen in the bushnearby,Ipreparea pumpkingourdwith ntela[thegeneral word used to describea medicinalsubstance].ThenI go to the place wherethe
lion was seen, and I set fireto the bush.The firewill burnto wherethe lion is hiding.
People follow the fire,discoverthe lion there,and kill it. The ntela preventsthe lion
fromharminganyone.
Kalamatatuinformed us that he had done this as many as ten times in his career: "Most
are not bush lions" (vantumi va ku mwitu), he added, "Most are people-lions" (vantumi va vanu).
As Kalamatatuand other healers would eventually explain it to me, sorcerers in
the Mueda region are believed to make people-lions from sticks of wood harvested
from a tree called dimika, or to turn themselves into lions. Kalamatatutold me that
they use powerful medicinal substances to bring about these transformationsand are
then able to use these lions to attack their victims, "justas one would use a knife."
When I asked Kalamatatuwhy anyone would want to make a lion and use it to
attack someone else he assured me that, never having done it, he did not know. "It
must be out of jealousy," he conjectured. "Itis always done to destroy, to ruin."Then
he volunteered more information: "In the past, there were many bush lions, but not
too many people-lions. Nowadays, there are not so many bush lions, but there are
plenty made by sorcerers!"When I asked why, he looked surprised, as if the answer
were obvious: "It'sbecause we live here in these villages now!" He pointed beyond
the edge of the village:
We used to live in settlements.There,when problemsarose, the settlementhead
called attentionto them. Afterindependence,FRELIMO
moved us all into villages
where people frommany,manysettlementshave hadto live together.Herein the village,thereis no one who can overseethe activitiesof so manypeople. Everyonedoes
as they please. Eachhas his own sorcery,and no one can controlthemall.
socialist modernization and sorcery
Long before FRELIMO'sarmed campaign for Mozambican independence, Kalamatatu and other healers were waging war against sorcerers who threatened plateau
communities with ruin. These struggles took place in an invisible realm accessible
only to those in possession of requisite medicinal substances and specialized knowledge. For residents of the Mueda plateau region, this invisible realm betokened a
world in which power sometimes operated in hidden, capricious, and even dangerous ways. Power, in this world, was tightly bound up with social hierarchies favoring
men over women, and elders over youth; but, even so, power constituted a constantly
shifting, unpredictable force. While power was essential for creating a productive social environment, it also potentially disrupted social harmony and collective security.
sorcery of construction and socialist modernization
121
From the outset of the FRELIMOanticolonial campaign, the Front sought not
only to free Mozambique from Portuguese rule but, also, dramatically to transform
Mozambican society and the operation of power within it (Munslow 1983:133-148).
leaders often indicated, would require
The decolonization of Mozambique, FRELIMO
the liberation of its constituent communities and their members-in short, the decolonization of individual minds and the creation of what FRELIMOreferred to as the
"new man" (Casal 1991; Machel 1985:2, 43).4 These "new men" (and "new women,"
for the party consistently highlighted the necessity of including women in the ongoing
revolution [Urdang 1989]) would speak a new language of power based on a new
logic of poderpopular(people's power) in which power would operate openly and in
the equal interests of all members of a new classless society (Egero 1987; Hanlon
1990:135-146; Munslow 1983). In this brave new world, to suggest that power operated in hidden and unpredictable ways would be to provoke confusao (meaning, in
Portuguese, not only "confusion" but also "dissension")and to disseminate false consciousness. Consequently, in the communal villages of the postindependence period,
belief in sorcery, and the practice of healing its wounds, was labeled by FRELIMOas
obscurantism.
FRELIMOleaders appreciated that changing the way Muedans and other rural
Mozambicans conceived of power also entailed transformingthe material conditions
of power's discursive formation.5 Communal villages were to constitute a new substrate on which new socialist men would govern themselves through the exercise of
people's power. It was not just a question of FRELIMOleaders preaching against, or
even prohibiting, the practice of tradition in these new villages.6 Villagization would
allow the FRELIMOparty-state to rewrite the landscape of power in rural Mozambique by constructing new village-based political and economic institutions (popular
assemblies, popular tribunals, and producer and consumer cooperatives, among othconsidered to be
ers) that would supplant the kin-based authoritystructures FRELIMO
feudal hierarchies (Machel 1985:41, 57; Munslow 1983:140). What is more, the state
would provide social services-including a clean water supply, health care, and education-to allow villagers to become more "modern," realizing for themselves the
persuasive logic of socialist modernization.
To the frustrationof both Maputo-based planners and Muedans themselves, socialist modernization was realized only in fragmented and, sometimes, absurdly contradictory forms in the communal villages of northern Mozambique, as I shall describe below in detail. What is more, new hierarchies emerged as ranking party-state
officials and local government functionaries exercised privilege over resources rendered scarce by the civil war economic crisis. The new logic of poder popular presented by purveyors of socialist modernization proved inadequate to describe emergent social relations. Notwithstanding socialist modernization, residents of the new
communal villages suspected that the hidden and destructive forces of sorcery ran
rampant in their midst.
Max Marwick suggested decades ago that "rapid social changes are likely to
cause an increased preoccupation with beliefs in sorcery and witchcraft" (1965:247)
and that levels of sorcery and witchcraft could, therefore, be read as a "social straingauge" (1970:300-313). Guerrilla warfare and villagization certainly brought rapid
and dramatic social changes to the Mueda plateau and, according to elders such as
Kalamatatu,sorcery indeed intensified at the same time. According to Marwick, people turn to sorcery and witchcraft in their attempts to "conserve indigenous norms
threatened by modern ones" when faced with events and processes they perceive to
lie largely beyond their control (1965:258). I contest this characterization of sorcery
122
as a conservative phenomenon. In what follows, I argue that the "culturalschema" of

sorcery, to use SherryOrtner'sterm (1990), constituted for Muedans both a structured
expression of social experience and a structuringframeworkfor participation in social
processes. In a changing world, Muedans both made sense of and gave shape to
power relations through their continued reference to sorcery. Of course, as Muedans
invoked the cultural schema of sorcery within the context of transformativehistorical
events, the schema itself underwent transformation(Sahlins 1981). During the independence war, or in the communal villages of postindependence Mueda, sorcery operated in different ways than it did in colonial and precolonial settlements. Above all,
as younger men gained access to novel forms of power in the visible realm-forms
derived from external sources and resistant to social redistribution-they, as a social
category, also came to challenge the balance of power in the invisible realm. This
challenge produced chaos therein, at least according to their elders.
In any case, the modern contexts of guerrilla warfare and postindependence villagization proved highly amenable to the operative and interpretative logic of sorcery. In an environment where power continued to operate in opaque ways-where
the identities, motives, and methods of the powerful remained the objects of general
suspicion-sorcery, quite simply, made sense. This accords with recent contributions
to the anthropological literaturesuggesting that "occult cosmologies" flourish in the
interstitialspaces of modernity-that these cosmologies thrive when people encounter the insoluble contradictions and the unfulfilled desires modernity presents (Apter
1993; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, 1999; Kapferer1997; Taussig 1987).7 Two analytic strains run through this literature.The first line of argument emphasizes the ways
in which people invoke occult cosmologies in order to resistwhen modernization occurs on terms unfavorable to them (Comaroff 1985; Nash 1979; Ong 1987; Taussig
1980). The second line of argument suggests that people make use of occult cosmologies in their attempts to capture the novel forms of power modernity presents (again,
Comaroff 1985; Geschiere 1997; Kapferer1997; Taussig 1993)-to, as Jean and John
Comaroff have suggestively phrased it, "plumb the magicalities of modernity"
(1993:xxx).
Muedans, I suggest, have sought sometimes to evade modernizing power and
sometimes to capture it, and thus they have contributed to the production of a distinctive vernacular modernity (Donham 1999; Piot 1999). Notwithstanding this, they
have not always used the cultural schema of sorcery instrumentallyto pursue explicit
strategies vis-a-vis modern forms of power, whether as resistance or embrace. Most
Muedans do not believe themselves to be capable of acting within, or even seeing
into, the hidden realm of sorcery. Because they can only speculate on occurrences in
that realm, most have not considered sorcery a means for strategic social action, even
if they believe that others among them have made instrumentaluse of sorcery. While
Muedans' discursive engagements with the realm of sorcery-suspicions, explanations, rumor mongering, innuendo, accusations, denials-have had social consequences, I suggest that, as often as not, these consequences have escaped the intentions, or have contradicted the interests, of individual social actors. As the invisible
realm of sorcery coincides with a world in which Muedans experience power as a
slippery phenomenon, their discursive interventions in that world have been similarly
slippery.
In a world where power has often remained inaccessible and uncontrollable,
Muedans have, however, found wisdom in sorcery-related beliefs rather than false
consciousness or obscurantism. Taken collectively, Muedan beliefs in sorcery and
sorcery-related discursive acts have constituted for them a means of apprehending the
123
fundamentalcharacteristicsof power and have served as a social diagnostics of

power-a vehicle for "rakingover the coals of events in search of the sense (and
senselessness)of their sociability,"to use MichaelTaussig'swords (1987:394). To
these ends, the power of sorceryas a culturalschema has derivedpreciselyfrom its
ambiguity.Throughthe interpretivelogic of sorcery,power is ever on the move, ever
changing,ever remakingitself,ever necessaryto the productionof social well-being,
ever dangerousto social harmony.Fromthe settlementsof the preindependenceperiodto the villagesof the postindependenceperiod,sorceryhas been consideredan
essential mediumof power;the powerful,quite simply, have been assumedto act
withinthe invisiblerealm.The question,then, has been to what ends? In contrastto
the discourseof socialistmodernization,promisingperfectlystructuredand rationalized economic, political,and social institutions,the culturalschema of sorceryhas
warnedMuedansof the fine line betweensociallyconstructivepowerand powerthat
producessocial divisivenessand ruin.Withinthe culturalschemaof sorcery,the constantlyshiftingterrainof powerand the actorsthatmove acrossthisterrainhave been
constantlysubjectto social assessment.No pronouncementhas been accepted as definitive,no judgmentfinal.
the settlement and its invisible realm
To illustratehistoricalcontinuitiesand changes in the operation and understandingof power in the Muedaplateauregionin recentdecades, I mustfirstfollow
Kalamatatu's
pointedfingerto the settlementsof earliertimes. Nearly60 kilometers
inlandand just southof the RovumaRiverthatdividesMozambiquefromTanzania,
the Muedaplateaurisesnearlyone thousandmetersabove sea level. Itssandysoils do
not hold rainwaterclose enough to the surfaceto be tappedby wells. Probablyfor
this reason,the plateauremainedunsettleduntilthe middle of the 18th century,at
which time coastalslave marketsprovidedincentivesfor an expandingslave tradein
the region,and scatteredcommunitiessoughtrefugeon the plateau'sdefensiblemargins (Alpers1975). Migrantsfromseveralof the surroundingethnic groupsbegan to
arriveon the plateau in partiesof varyingsizes,8 laying claim to lands that they
cleared for cultivationand, in time, adoptingthe corporateidentityof Makonde-a
name referringto their shared historicalexperience as "people in search of fertile
land,"or likonde(Dias1964; Liebenow1971).
Inthe midstof a turbulentenvironment,where the threatof sudden and violent
raidspersisted(Maples1882; O'Neill 1883; Thomson1882), plateauresidentsconstructedfortifiedsettlements-each one called a kaja-and soughtto augmenttheir
populationsby themselvesraidingneighboringgroupssituatedboth on the plateau
and in the surroundinglowlands.Consequently,settlementswere composed of a diverse mix of peoples. Nonetheless, residents generally recognized one matrilineage-called a likola-as descendantsof the settlement'sfounderand as proprietors of its surroundinglands. They also recognized an elder figure within that
matrilineageas nang'olomwene kaja,or eldersteward-of-the-settlement.9
As increasingpopulationdensityon the plateauheightenedthe dangersof interlikola raidingin the mid-19thcentury,some settlementheads sought alliance with
more powerful counterparts,moving their populationsinside the fortificationsof
largergroupsand contributingto common defenses. By the time of the Portuguese
conquest (ca. 1917), this trend had given rise to sizable populationconcentrations
comprisedof as manyas ten or twelve vakola(pl.)underthe leadershipof powerful
warlords.Regardlessof such alliances, each matrilineallikola maintaineda distinct
identityand a substantialdegreeof autonomyover itsresourcesand internalaffairs.
124
Adult males generally resided in the settlement associated with their likola.
Women of the likola might never have lived in its settlement-each being born in the
settlement of her father and moving to that of her husband when she married-but, on
coming of age, the sons of likola women generally took up residence in the settlement
of the likola, each one next to an njomba (matrilineal uncle) who provided him with
the wealth he needed to arrange a bride and the land necessary for him to establish a
household. These young men, in their turn, broughttheir own sisters' sons into the settlement.
Settlements were composed of homes built in a circle with an open space in the
middle.10Although the home of the nang'olo mwene kaja was situated on the circle
with everyone else's, as the most respected elder in the matrilineage, he was considered njomba to the entire settlement. Inthe shitala (common meeting house in the settlement center), he resolved conflicting claims over land, intervened in marriageand
inheritance disputes, and counseled kinsmen (particularly juniors) to work hard in
their fields and to earn for themselves reputations as wakukamalanga, or providers
(West 1997b:92-101). Young men regarded as lazy might easily have been sold into
slavery by the nang'olo mwene kaja or other likola elders. This threat insured that respect for settlement authority was infused with fear.
If his settlement was industrious, the nang'olo mwene kaja could organize caravans to trade India rubber, gum copal, bee's wax, and sesame at the coast for cloth,
iron, and, most importantly, guns and powder. The settlement head himself held
rightsto most goods procured in caravan trade, but, in order to enhance the power of
the settlement under his charge, he distributedmany of these goods to likola members
so that they might use them to reproduce their households.
Despite the wise counsel and equitable management of a respected nang'olo
mwene kaja, tensions inevitably arose. Women who married into the settlement
might have felt insecure living among members of an unfamiliar likola or might have
resented the presence of co-wives in their households, particularly if these co-wives
enjoyed greater fertility. Young men might have competed with one another for the
praise and favor of elder kinsmen. Older men might have envied the authority of the
settlement head. Tensions sometimes erupted into conflict, frequently expressed most
openly as accusations that one had ensorcelled a relative or neighbor and was, therefore, responsible for illness or death in the settlement. As a result of such accusations,
a faction might have departed the settlement and established its own at a distance."1
Splintering, however, weakened the overall strength of the likola and placed
members in both the old and the new settlements at greater riskof attack by other vakola. By the turn of the century, many Makonde vakola in the plateau region had established a new political institution to cope with the consequences of splintering, nominating from among their ranks a humu (counselor figure) who belonged to no specific
settlement but rathercommanded respect from members of the likola residing in any
of its settlements.12Where the nang'olo mwene kaja failed to resolve conflicts, the
humu intervened, apparently with great success. According to oral testimony today,
members of the likola fell silent in the presence of the humu; those who contested his
judgment were considered deranged.
That the humu was so profoundly respected by his peers is revealing of Makonde
notions of power in the precolonial era. In contrastwith the nang'olo mwene kaja, the
humu exercised no control over the economic affairsof his fellows. He was restricted
from travel beyond likola territory,was barred from working his own fields, and was
not permitted to accumulate personal wealth. But plateau Makonde recognized the
operation of power in both visible and invisible realms. In the latter realm, where
125
knowledgeof medicinalsubstances(mitela)was believed to determineone's capacity, vahumu(pl.)were consideredpeerless(West1997b:60-65).

Thisinvisiblerealmwarrantsdetailedexamination.13
Accordingto Makondebeliefs in the precolonialera (beliefsmanyof which remainsalientto this day), mitela
were neutralsources of power,14althoughelders were presumedto have greater
knowledgeof mitelathantheirjuniorsand men greaterthanwomen. Mitelacould be
used to protector to attack,to cureor to kill.Withthe appropriatekindsof mitela,one
mightprolonglife, enhancephysicalstrength,ensuresuccessfulharvests,handicrafts,
huntsand travels,and protectfamilymembersfromillnessand misfortune(Dias and
Dias 1970:367). With other kinds,however, individualsmightpracticeuwavi (sorcery).15
Vavi (sorcerers)achieved invisibilitythroughthe use of a rareform of ntela,

knownonly to themandcalled shikupi,which cloakedthemandtheiractivities.Only
othersorcererswho also possessedthe substancecould see an act committedunder
the veil of shikupi.While usingshikupi,vavi mightappearto the ordinarypersonto
be sleepingquietlyin theirbeds at nightbut, in reality,they could be congregatingin
the settlementcenter,dancingnakedbeforeflyingoff to feed on the flesh of theirvictims. Ifthe attacksof vavi went uncontested,theirvictimswould soon die (properly)
or become zombie slaves. Most Makonderemaineduncertainabout what actually
happenedto sorcerers'victims,just as mostfailed to understandcompletelythe motives for sorcery.Uwavi, most agreed,was used to destroy,but what did the mwavi
(sorcerer)standto gain?Sometimes,it was believed,vavi renderedtheirvictimsinvisible so thatthey mightworkas zombie slaves (mandandosho)on the sorcerers'fields
at night.16In such cases, vavi would substitutea bananatree-made to look like the
victim-for the victim'sbody, and unsuspectingfamilymemberswould burythe bananatree,thinkingtheirkinhaddied. Atothertimes,Makondebelieved,sorcerersattacked simplyto destroytheirneighborsor kin, to feed theiruncontrollablecravings
for humanflesh, or to repaydebtsto othersorcererswho had sharedthe meatof previous victimswith theirnighttimecolleagues. In any case, the mostdramaticattacks
of vavi were accomplishedwhen they took on the formof predators(suchas lions or
leopards)or fabricatedsuch animalsto workat theirbehest.17
Whetheror not vavi ultimatelybenefitedin the visible realmfromtheirpower in
the invisible realm,they constituteda grave dangerto ordinaryMakonde,who referredto sorcerythatproducedillnessand deathsas uwavi wa kojoa(sorceryof danger).Inthe face of menacingand unseenvavi, mostMakondewere leftwiththe sense
that their own knowledge and stock of mitela was minute. As a result,they often
turnedto specialistsreferredto as vanuva mitela(medicinemen)or as vakulaula(pl.,
healers)when met with illnessor misfortune.Such specialistsaccentuatedthe ambiguityof power in the invisiblerealmeven as they treatedits casualties.Theirfirstline
of defense againstuwavi was preventative.A clay pot filled with selected formsof
mitela(calleda lipande)was buriedin the groundbeneatha home the healerwished
to defend. Should a sorcererattack,the lipandewould explode, woundingthe attacker.The second line of defensewas curative.Insome cases, the healerwas able to
the sorcerer'sattack;this
cure the patientby turningover or turningback (kupilikula)
was accomplishedby providingthe victimwith mitelamoreforcefulthanthatused by
the attackingsorcerer.If such attemptsto cure a patientfailed, however,the healer
mightsuspectthatthe patientwas not, in fact, a sorcerer'svictim(nkulogwekwa),but
rathera sorcererwho had wounded himselfor herself(nkulibyaa)duringan unsuccessful attackon a well-defendedtarget,or who sufferedfroman attackturnedback
126
by a powerful healer. Such patients often confessed to the practice of uwavi when
told by the healer that they could not otherwise be healed.
While the ill risked being accused of sorcery when they approached healers,
they also suspected those who healed them of being sorcerers. Sorcerers, it was commonly said, feared no one; the reason for this was that they "knew something" (to suggest that someone might be a sorcerer, one simply employed the euphemism, "Aju,
andimanya shinu shoeshoe!" [That one, he must know something!]). Healers, quite
obviously, feared no one, including sorcerers; this, most reasoned, was because they
knew more about sorcery than even the ordinary sorcerer. Most people assumed such
knowledge could only be achieved through a successful career of uwavi. Even healers
usually suggested that, in principle, one had to have once practiced uwavi in order to
be capable of turning it over. Most healers, however, suggested that they, themselves,
constituted an exception to the rule. Their explanations generally involved elaborate
stories about the ways in which they learned to heal through having been treated
themselves or through accompanying the careers of healing relatives who were, in
fact, sorcerers. One was simply left to trustthat the healer had given up uwavi wa kojoa (sorcery of danger), had retiredfrom such destruction, and had committed himself
or herself to combating the predatory acts of former colleagues in the interests of the
community as a whole.'8
With the unity and security of the settlement at stake, the settlement head could
not, however, vest all confidence in the ability of healers to defend the settlement
against sorcery and to cure its victims and wounded perpetrators,particularly given
that healers themselves were held in general suspicion by settlement residents. Disorder in the invisible realm might all too easily yield chaos in the visible realm. Forthat
reason, a successful settlement head had to rule at night just as he ruled in the daytime. When the effects of sorcery in a settlement surpassed a tolerable limit-marked,
perhaps, by several deaths in one year-the settlement head would respond vigorously. As the elder Vicente Anawena (once a settlement head) described it to me, the
nang'olo mwene kaja of old practiced uwavi wa kudenga (a sorcery of construction):
He would go out intothe shitalain the wee hoursof the morning,justbeforesunrise,
and he would standand speakout loudat the top of his voice: "Isee you! I knowwho
you are!Youare killingus, the people of this settlement!Youare killingus with your
uwavi!Ifyou don'tstop, I will driveyou fromthis settlement!I will finishwith you! I
see you! I knowwho you are!"
When asked how the settlement head could see sorcerers, Vicente responded (in
the third person): "He was himself a mwavi. He had to be in order to know who the
others were, to monitor and control them."'9 Some settlement heads were also renowned healers but, in any case, most, like healers, denied that they were sorcerers.
Settlement heads often claimed that they could monitor the invisible realm of sorcery
because they were informed of these events by sorcerers somehow beholden to them,
a claim most did not believe, I was often told.
The creation of a secure and productive social environment, my interviewees
told me in reference to this period, necessitated the exercise of power. The language
of sorcery, however, reminded them continually of the fine line between constructive
and destructive power, between protection and predation. As Eusebio Matias Mandumbwe once put it to me in conversation, "Uwavi is war. Only a warrior can fight
another warrior, and only a mwavi can fight another mwavi." If the settlement head
was successful in his campaign to quash the activities of other predatorysorcerers, his
presence on the battlefield shaped the war in definitive ways. The sorcery practiced in
127
such a settlement was sometimes referredto as uwavi wa ishima (sorcery of respect)

because it was held within acceptable bounds.
Even so, in the precolonial settlement, Makonde looked on power, and the powerful, with deep ambivalence. The very individual who policed the invisible realm,
the settlement head, was suspected of once having fed his own appetite within that
realm; there was no guarantee that he would not again satisfy his cravings for human
flesh. Vahumu were also looked on with similar ambivalence because they were believed to be capable of acting decisively in the invisible realm and believed to be
powerful sorcerers. Having undergone ritual investiture supervised by other vahumu-ceremonies described to me by Humu Windu as "dirty, ugly, and dangerous"-they were privy to cult secrets about the uses of the most powerful forms of
mitela known to any Makonde. Having ingested a form of ntela containing the throat
meat of a slain lion (lukulungo Iwa ntumi), vahumu spoke with the voice of a lion, insuring that their words of counsel be heard with respect and fear. Where the predatory
sorcerer sometimes attacked his or her victims in the form of a lion, the humu-the individual vested with ultimate responsibility for resolving conflicts and sustaining intra-likola harmony-took the same form and drew on the same wellsprings of power,
albeit to significantly different ends.20
revolutionary consciousness
and obscurantism
The FRELIMO
campaign to transformthe practice and understanding of power in
rural Mozambique came only after important transformationsto power wrought by
Portuguese rule. For the Makonde of the Mueda plateau, colonialism was a shortlived historical moment. Conquest of the plateau came only within the context of
World War I when the Portuguese moved to secure the northern Mozambican border
region against the threat of German invasion from what was then German EastAfrica
(Ferreira1946; Pelissier 1994; Ponte 1940-41; West 1997b:73-88). It was not until
1929 that the Portuguese actually brought the plateau and its people under direct colonial administration.21Notwithstanding the posting at that time of Portuguese officials to even remote regions like the plateau, indigenous political structureswere not
dismantled under colonial rule. Throughout the colonial period, settlement heads
continued to oversee the affairsof their respective vakola and were succeeded by matrilineal heirs when they died (West 1998). Colonialism nonetheless affected political
structures at the local level in subtle ways. Firstand foremost, the administration required settlement heads to exact taxes and to recruit corvee and plantation laborers
from their populations. To insure that settlement heads complied with these requirements, post administratorselevated some of them to positions of authority over their
counterparts and paid them commissions on the taxes they collected and the laborers
they furnished. Increasingly, plateau residents came to resent authority figures whom
they perceived as willing collaborators with the Portuguese (West 1998; West and
Kloeck-Jenson 1999),22even if they assumed that the ever-increasing power these figures exercised in the visible world paralleled an ever-increasing power in the invisible
realm of sorcery. Where settlement heads practiced the unrestrained pursuit of selfinterest at the expense of the larger community in the visible realm, subordinate
populations lost confidence in these leaders to practice a sorcery of construction
ratherthan a sorcery of predation.23
Further complicating matters, great numbers of young men, and even some
young women, took to crossing the Rovuma Riverborderto escape the harsh colonial
regime (Alpers 1984; Egero 1974; Iliffe 1979; West 1997b:101-111). They often returned years laterafterhaving worked on Tanganyikansisal plantations,usually carrying
128
with them unprecedented riches. Unlike meat brought home from the hunt or goods
procured in caravan trade, the bicycles, sewing machines, and cash repatriatedto the
settlement by this new generation resisted appropriationand redistributionby the settlement head. The discursive terrain of sorcery accusations and counteraccusations
provided a fertile substrate on which plateau residents could express profound ambivalence about the new forms of power these objects represented and constituted.
Returningyouths were considered greedy by many in the settlement and were often
accused of satisfying voracious appetites through using the powerful new techniques
of sorcery that they were assumed to have learned in distant places. Most back home
agreed that to have gathered such wealth, these youths must have had armies of mandandosho (zombie slaves) working for them. Returnees, for their part, suspected those
awaiting them in the village of resorting to sorcery to devour them or the forms of
wealth to which they had gained access.24In short, despite the preservationof the settlement and its political structuresthroughout the colonial period, sorcery constituted
an ever-increasing threat to Makonde vakola (West 1997b:1 11).
The end of the colonial era began in Mueda in 1964, almost a decade before
Mozambican independence from Portuguese rule. This was due to the fact that FRELIMO-the Mozambican nationalist organization formed in Tanzania in 1962 of several smaller movements-initiated its guerrilla campaign against the Portuguese in
close proximity to rear bases in Tanzania and maintained its central base in the
Mozambican interior on the Mueda plateau. By early 1965, only a few months after
the beginning of the war, plateau populations had, almost without exception, fled
their settlements. Some were corralled into Portuguese-built strategic hamlets on the
plateau. Others crossed the Rovuma and spent the war in refugee camps in Tanzania.
Substantial numbers, however, moved into the densely forested areas in the plateau
interior or in the surrounding lowlands where they lived adjacent to FRELIMObases
in areas that the Frontcalled "liberatedzones."
To gain and consolidate the support of the ruralpopulations on whom the guerrilla campaign depended for food, porterage, intelligence, and new guerrilla recruits,
it was incumbent on FRELIMOoperatives to elaborate a vision for a new world in
which power would obey a radically different logic than it had in the colonial era.
Where the Dar es Salaam-based FRELIMOleadership drew on revolutionary socialism to inform its nationalist agenda, FRELIMO
operatives in the Mozambican interior
translated scientific socialism into a program with more immediate meaning for
Muedans. Guerrillas cast the elders who had served the Portuguese as administrative
intermediaries, for example, as feudal authorities whose power facilitated the exploitation of the Mozambican peasantry in the interests of imperial capital. Where the
struggle against Portuguese colonialism requiredthe attainment of revolutionaryclass
consciousness on the part of the peasantry, belief in sorcery (belief in the operation of
power in an invisible realm) could be nothing but a paralyzing distraction, a form of
false consciousness.25
The FRELIMOideological campaign against obscurantist beliefs and institutions
was tightly wrapped up with practical concerns of immediate significance to the guerrilla initiative. In the months immediately priorto the inauguration of the armed campaign, as FRELIMOsought to mobilize support in the Mozambican interiorthrough
identifying sympathizers and selling membership cards to them, native authorities
presented the Frontwith grave dangers. Those who informed Portuguese officials of
the activities of FRELIMOmobilizers placed these young operatives at risk and frightened off potential recruits. To overcome this, FRELIMOoperatives were required to
swing the balance of terror in their favor by undertakingthe dramatic assassination of
129
several of these elders (West 1997b:164-168; West 1998:151-152). In time, a large

percentage of Muedan elders, whether simple settlement heads or those who had
governed areas transcending that of the settlement on behalf of the Portuguese, threw
their lot in with FRELIMO,leading their populations into the FRELIMO-controlled
bush. There they were subordinated to the authority of young FRELIMO
cadres (often
fellow Makonde) but continued to play a significant role in the day-to-day management of the affairsof their respective vakola, albeit as members of FRELIMO-established
committees ratherthan as vanag'olo vene kaja (pl.).26
The language of power spoken within the new FRELIMOhierarchy differed in
more substantial ways than the mere change in titles applied to authority figures. A
wartime song sung by FRELIMO
Makonde proclaimed:
We arethe shadowof the people,
We don'ttrustin mitela,
We don't trustin dinumba[pumpkingourdsused to mix and carrymedicinalsubstances],
Dyangele[divining]causesconflictamongus and sets us backin ourwarinitiatives.
The FRELIMOban on divination was tantamount to a ban on sorcery, as divination
was the means by which healers confirmed that sorcery was at work. FRELIMO
forbid
divination in the liberated zones partiallybecause the naming of sorcerers in the close
confines of wartime bush bases might have given rise to dangerous moments of disunity. In addition, the guerrilla command structurecould not allow for the possibility
that operatives might fail to execute orders due to diviners' warnings that the moment
was not propitious for the assigned task. Out of strategic concern, the Front also
preached against the use of mitela. As Marcos Agostinho Mandumbwe told me, "Ifour
guerrillas had trusted in anti-bullet medicines to protect them, they would have been
shot down like Malapende's men [the Makonde who were conquered by the Portuguese in 1917].27 We needed them to trustin the techniques of guerrillawarfare, not in
mitela."
FRELIMO'sscientific socialism encompassed the teaching of new languages and
techniques. Fromearly on in the war, FRELIMObegan constructing a vast network of
bush schools in which children and adults learned to read and write in Portuguese
and studied mathematics and natural sciences. An ex-guerrilla named Lipangatiexplained to me:
People had to be educatedto fighta guerrillawar. They had to be able to readand
writeto send messagesfromone baseto another.Theyhadto be able to addand subtractto manageaccountsof the materialstradedin and out of the liberatedzones.
Theyhadto be able to do basicequationsto firea mortar.Theyhadto understandthe
fundamentalsof biologyto vaccinatepeople so as to preventthe spreadof epidemics
in the liberatedzones.
FRELIMOrevolutionary socialism consistently juxtaposed science with superstition in
its campaign to supplant old forms of power with new.
Itwould be inaccurate to suggest that the residents of the liberated zones did not,
in fact, learn the new terms and techniques taught by FRELIMOoperatives. Not only
did they successfully prosecute the guerrilla campaign using sophisticated military
hardware, but they also learned to speak the language of class conflict and revolutionary struggle. At the same time, however, despite FRELIMOprohibitions, the more
long-standing language of sorcery proved well-suited to elucidate ongoing historical
events and processes.
130
The fundamental operative logics of guerrilla warfare, ironically, were highly

amenable to the cultural schema of sorcery. As young FRELIMOmobilizers laid the
groundwork for the coming campaign, they met clandestinely with potential sympathizers, usually under cover of night (West 1997b:145-157). When challenging the
interests of elder authority figures assumed to be powerful sorcerers, they showed no
fear, a characteristic that often drew the euphemistic statement, "Aju, andimanya
shinu shoeshoe!" (That one, he must know something!). That Muedans suspected
FRELIMOmobilizers of being powerful in the invisible realm of sorcery was only accentuated by the term they most frequently applied to them-vashilo (night people).
When powerful elders assumed to be sorcerers were assassinated or subordinated to
the younger cohort of FRELIMOcadres in the liberated zones, many Makonde assumed that these FRELIMOcadres were, in the end, more powerful sorcerers than
those they subdued.
Then came the war itself. Inthe early years, FRELIMO
effectiveness was based on
its success in constructing and maintaining a hidden realm deep in the forests of
northern Mozambique. Guerrillas cloaked themselves in this forest realm, attacking
and melting away when they met with response. Their power-like that of vavi-lay
in their ability to see their enemy and yet remain invisible to him. In the later years of
the conflict, however, the Portuguese modified their tactics, seeking ways to see into
and enter the invisible forest realm.28In close parallel to strategies used by the United
States in Vietnam, the Portuguese army deployed caterpillar earth-movers to carve a
grid of crosscutting surveillance corridors in the forest. Portuguese bombers flew overhead, dropping defoliants to burn off forest canopy. Patrols used night vision glasses
to see guerrillas hiding in the dark. And finally, the Portuguese army trained African
troops and deployed them to infiltratethe liberated zones, to sew discord by committing atrocities against civilians in the name of FRELIMO,and to report back coordinates for bombing raids.
For those living in FRELIMOliberated zones, the Portuguese and their African
allies became ever less visible as the war dragged on. At the same time, the success of
Portuguese counterinsurgency, everyone knew, depended on the Portuguese seeing
into the FRELIMOdomain. This, most suspected, was facilitated by infiltratorsand
collaborators who moved unidentified among them and ferried between the liberated
zones and Portuguese bases, providing information. As the effectiveness of counterinsurgents depended on their power to move about invisibly, they were undoubtedly
sorcerers of danger, or vavi va kujoa (West 1997b:1 88-192). As such, they made use
of the materials and opportunities presented them in a changing world, as sorcerers
always do,29 fabricating helicopters to fly invisibly at night to Portuguese bases or
making planes and napalm, or enemy soldiers, to kill those with whom they lived so
that they mightofferthe flesh to repaya debt (perhaps,even, to a Portuguesecolleague).
The success of FRELIMOsecurity operatives in combating counterinsurgency,
most Makonde assumed, depended not on eliminating sorcery altogether, but, rather,
on the operatives' ability to see enemy agents and their acts of destruction. One exguerrilla told me of the most feared security operative on the plateau: "He would pass
a FRELIMOcolumn in the bush and look each man in the eyes. He would select one
from among them and say, 'Come with me!' He would take the traitorto 'D' [the FRELIMO prison camp]. He had seen something! He saw everything!" In a word, FRELIMO security agents were assumed, in spite of FRELIMOantisorcery rhetoric, to
practice sorcery themselves. Because most Makonde supported the FRELIMO
agenda, they were inclined to look on FRELIMOleaders as sorcerers of construction
(vavi va kudenga) and to conclude that the incarceration or execution of occasional
131
individualswas founded on certainknowledgeof their destructivedeeds, whether

these deeds were visibleto the ordinarypersonor not (West1997b:188-192).30What
is more,as severalpeople told me, when FRELIMO
leadersled assembliesinthe liberated zones in chantingsloganssuch as "Downwith Obscurantism!Down with Sorcery,"it was widely assumedthatthey were criticizingonly uwaviwa kujoa(sorcery
of danger)and not uwavi wa kudenga(sorceryof construction).Infact, people who
rememberedthem told me that these call and responseexchanges were the enactment by FRELIMO
leadersof a sorceryof constructionin the traditionof settlement
heads standingat night in the shitalaand calling out, "We don't want your uwavi
here!"The respectaffordedFRELIMO
leaders,likethe respectgiven settlementheads
of old, was inseparablefrom fear of their power in both the visible and invisible
realms. Descriptionsof FRELIMO
guerrillasas "lionsof the forest"expressedwith
historical
resonance
the
ambivalence
withwhich mostMuedansviewed them.
deep
While FRELIMO
leadersat the highestlevels-some of whomwere Westerneducated-may have wished completelyto eliminatesorceryas a languageof power in
the liberatedzones, FRELIMO
operativesat lower levels remainedambivalentabout
as
a
cultural
schema, furthercontributingto its continuingsalience. Most
sorcery
even
and,
guerrillas
guerrillacommanderswere bornin ruralcommunitiesand were
rearedbelievingin sorceryin one formor another.Throughoutthe war, manyopenly
criticized such beliefs while, at the same time, continuingto consult divinersand
healersthemselves.Residentsof the plateauwhom I interviewedcould identifyconsistentlyto which healersspecific commanderswent when seekingprotectivemitela
Presidentfrom1969 onward,visited
duringthe war. EvenSamoraMachel, FRELIMO
several healersincluding,frequently,an nkulaula[(s.),healer]named healerAlabi,
whose house he entered.Whetheror not Machelwas treatedinside this house will
never be known, but that is precisely the point. By enteringthe healer's house,
Machelfed Muedansuspicionsthathe soughtmitela,the currencyof power in the invisible realm.Machelcould not have been unawareof such suspicions.
rewriting the landscape of power
When the war for Mozambicanindependenceended in 1974, people in the
Muedaregionlookedforwardto movingbackto theirabandonedsettlements,where
grovesof treesmightonce moreprovidesweet fruitsand coolingshadeand where likola membersmightonce more live in close proximityto the tombsof theirancestors.
This hope did not fit with FRELIMO's
seizure of state
plans, however. FRELIMO's
it
with
the
even-to
consolidate
control
powerpresented
opportunity-the necessity,
over the formerliberatedzones. Afterthe withdrawalof Portuguesetroops and the
leaderstold Muedansthat they would
grantingof independencein 1975, FRELIMO
be movingen masse to sites where they would constructvillagesof unprecedented
size. These communalvillages would serve as models for the restof the countryin
FRELIMO's
campaignto bringsocialist modernizationto ruralMozambique(Casal
Coelho
1993;West 1997b:197-199).
1991;
FRELIMO
presentedvillagizationto the populationsof Muedain the formof a social contract.Ruralpopulationswould be concentratedintovillagesof 250 to 1,000
families.Theywould buildtheirown homes,as well as the buildingsthatwould serve
them as schools, healthposts,shops, storehouses,and governmentand partyoffices.
The governmentwould then provide teachers, health workers,medicine, schoolbooks, basic consumergoods, agriculturaltools, machinery,extensionworkersand,
of utmost importanceon the Mueda plateau,clean water supply.The government
and tradebetween villagesand urbancenters.
would also coordinatetransportation
132
In cooperation with villagers, the party would even organize cultural and political
events and activities in the village center. In short, according to FRELIMO'svision,
communal villages would constitute "cities born in the forests"(FRELIMO1976:8).
Villagization was to be both the means and ends of socialist modernization of the
Mozambican countryside (Casal 1991; Hanlon 1990:121-131). Communal villages
and the "new socialist man" would bring about the banishment of ruralbackwardness
and superstition, encouraging the growth of a new logic of power-poder popular
(people's power). Villagers would elect peers to popular assemblies that would represent their interests within the postindependence nation. They would also elect judges
to the popular tribunals that would resolve conflicts arising among them. Economic
affairs, including agricultural production and trade for urban-produced consumer
goods, would be mediated by cooperatives whose leaders, too, would be elected
from within. All of this would insure that poder popular functioned openly and rationally in the interests of all members of the community.
In practice, poder popular obeyed a different logic. The lingering command culture of the guerrilla organization was reinforced by the 1977 transformationof FRELIMOinto a vanguard party. FRELIMOleaders embraced the mandate to educate the
masses and to steer village affairsaccording to a revolutionary agenda. To insure that
villagers not go astray in their exercise of democracy, candidates were chosen by
party representatives who orchestrated the public discussion of their merits prior to
calling for a show of hands. As the agenda for elected assemblies was dictated by the
FRELIMOpolitical hierarchy, these bodies served more as organs for the dissemination of state directives than as vehicles for democratic governance (Egero1987). Party
officials also oversaw the selection of members of the popular tribunals and took an
interventionist stance in establishing the norms whereby judgments would be rendered.31
The construction of villages was essential for establishing the authorityof modern
state institutions in place of the rule of elder authorityfigures who had served the Portuguese as colonial intermediaries. Ifplateau populations had returnedto their former
settlements at independence, FRELIMOwould have lost direct contact with those
they had governed in the liberated zones during the independence war. Moreover,
the elders who had governed settlements before the war would not only have regained power within rural society but, also, have governed through the practice of
uwavi wa kudenga. FRELIMOparty leaders worked systematically and intentionally
to insure that elders compromised by collaboration with the colonial regime be excluded from offices in the organs of the new state (Hanlon 1990:170-174). At the
same time, the party sought to undermine traditional hierarchies rooted in power differentials between strong vakola and weaker ones, between elders and youth, and between men and women. In the new villages, this implied the prohibition of sorcery
and countersorcery activities including divination, kupilikula (countersorcery healing) and, even, the use of mitela. In a world where power did not function in hidden
and capricious ways-in a world where power's operation was exposed to view and
rationalized-such measures, it was suggested, could be only charlatanry.
officials
Ironically, visibility constituted a key medium through which FRELIMO
governed communal villages. In fundamental ways, the villages worked like Jeremy
Bentham's panopticon as discussed by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the modern
prison (Foucault 1977), even if the village did not resemble the hub and spokes of a
wheel. Muedans were required to construct their houses in tidy rows on a carefully
surveyed grid. The houses stood naked on a landscape almost devoid of vegetation.
Villages were divided into four quadrants called bairros. Within each bairro, houses
133
were assigned to 25 family units. Fromthe level of the village president down to the
25-family unit, the party appointed officials, often foreign to the community in which
they worked. At the village center, FRELIMO
party offices were constructed. The spatial concentration of the village rendered subjects directly susceptible to a monitoring
eye-embodied in the FRELIMO-appointedvillage president. The president could
pass unobstructed through surveillance corridors in a matter of hours where previously it might have taken days to visit the settlements represented in the village.
When the village president wished to address his charges, he summoned them by
striking an iron rod on an old tractor wheel hung from a tree beside party offices.
Those who failed to appear promptlywould later be interrogatedand/or chastised.
The radical transformation of power in rural Mozambique was, in this way,
bound up with the dramatic rewritingof the landscape, as such endeavors frequently
have been for states enacting what James Scott has called a "high modernist"agenda
(Scott 1998; see also Donham 1999:179; Fitzpatrick1994). According to Scott:
Legibilityis a condition of manipulation.Any substantialstate interventionin society-to vaccinatea population,producegoods, mobilizelabor,tax people and their
property,conduct literacycampaigns,conscriptsoldiers,enforce sanitationstandards,catch criminals,startuniversalschooling-requires the inventionof unitsthat
are visible. The units in questionmightbe citizens, villages,trees, fields, houses,or
people groupedaccordingto age, dependingon the type of intervention.Whatever
the unitsbeingmanipulated,they mustbe organizedin a mannerthatpermitsthemto
be identified,observed,recorded,counted,aggregated,and monitored.[1998:183]
Villagization in northern Mozambique constituted a technique by which government
officials made national subjects more legible in their attemptsto consolidate new relations of power within the state domain.
Although Scott criticizes high modernist state projects for their arrogance and
lack of appreciation for social complexity,32he also stresses that the sweeping social
transformationssuch states enact have frequently been conceived of by modernist reformers as changes for the good of those subjected to them (1998:89). To this end,
modernizers have often justified rewriting the landscape to insure the provision of
fundamental social services, including health care, education, sanitation, and other
infrastructuralcomponents. Coming as it did in the midst of postcolonial exuberance,
this was certainly true of the FRELIMOcampaign to bring about socialist modernization of the nation's ruralareas (Casal 1991; Coelho 1993, 1998).
There was, however, another fundamental objective to the FRELIMOvillagizathe newly
tion project and the campaign to render Mozambicans legible-visible-to
independent state. At root, villagization was tightly bound up with issues of state security (Casal 1991). Having so recently moved among scattered populations recruiting support for antistate insurgency and having so successfully used the forest as a
sanctuary against the power of the colonial state, FRELIMOleaders found dispersed
settlements of ruralMozambicans threatening once the party rose to occupy the institutions of state power. FRELIMOanxieties were not unreasonable. Within two years
of independence, Rhodesian-backed insurgents (later adopted by South Africa and
called RENAMO)initiated a campaign of state destabilization in the central Mozambican region and quickly adopted the same strategy FRELIMOhad used against the
Portuguese-namely, gathering ruralcommunities close to its bases where they could
be integrated into guerrilla activities.33As civil war spread through Mozambique in
the 1980s, FRELIMOsought to use its communal villages as strategic hamlets in the
fight against RENAMO(Hanlon 1990:129), just as the Portuguese had done in their
attempts to contain FRELIMO.
134
The Mozambican writer Mia Couto poignantly depicts how FRELIMO'spostindependence villagization campaign was dedicated to rendering ruralMozambicans
directly accessible and accountable to the institutions of the new state in one of his
short stories entitled "The Story of the Appeared" (Couto 1987:131-141). Couto tells
the tale of two villagers who are caught in a flood, washed down stream, and given up
for dead back in their village. on returning days later, the "disappeared" are not
greeted by relieved and jubilant relatives but by stern, albeit perplexed, village officials. Having been absent from the village, temporarily out of sight of official structures of authority, they are now suspect. Are they returnees from the dead, potentially
polluting and dangerous spirits?Although only alluded to metaphorically, the issue of
their possible contact with the "bandits"(RENAMO)lingers over their heads. The two
"appeared" villagers are now told that they have become a matter for consideration
by higher authorities, an anomaly with which the village is not equipped to deal. They
are told that it would have been better for all concerned had they died, completely.
In 1982-83, a group from Nandimba village on the Mueda plateau found themselves in a similar predicament when they abandoned the village and returnedto the
locale of their former settlement. Having constructed a new settlement on the
site-calling it, in Kiswahili, Nazi Moja, after the lone coconut tree that marked its
officials who arrested and
setting-they were soon met with unsympathetic FRELIMO
detained their leaders, burned their newly-built houses to the ground, and divided
them between three communal villages (Egero 1987; Oficina de Hist6ria 1986; West
1997b:213-219). FRELIMOofficials made it clear to plateau residents that the war
against RENAMOrequired vigilance, possible only where people lived in village concentrations.
The village-based security strategy deployed in the Mueda region successfully
prevented RENAMOfrom gaining a foothold on the plateau throughout the war. Even
so, the war drained precious national resources and constricted the flow of goods and
people necessary to the survival of FRELIMO's"cites born in the forest." FRELIMO
soon proved incapable of meeting expectations raised with the construction of communal villages. Health posts went without medicine and nurses (Cliffe and Noormahomed 1988; Mackintosh and Wuyts 1988; Noormahomed et al. 1990), schools
without books and teacher salaries (Johnston 1990a, 1990b; Marshall 1993), shops
without goods to buy (Egero 1987; Littlejohn 1988; Oficina de Historia 1984), and
state farms and agriculturalcooperatives without tools and seeds.34The sophisticated
water supply system built on the plateau after independence (Tecnica Engenheiros
Consultores, Lda. 1994; UNICEF1993) that had served as a symbolic gesture of national gratitude for the role Muedans had played in the fight for independence soon
ran dry (Cooperasao Suira 1992; West 1997b:206-208). By the early 1980s, resentment and frustrationhad spread through the villages of northern Cabo Delgado (Oficina de Hist6ria 1986).35 Villagers bemoaned the long distances they were required
daily to walk to their fields, the problems they had protecting crops from birds and
animals, and the exhausting work they had to undertake to transportharvests to store
in their residential compounds. They complained bitterlyof FRELIMO's
broken promises.
Some recriminations were grounded in fantastic expectations, including hopes
that all Muedans would have cars soon after winning independence, that a university
would be built on the Mueda plateau, or that a new national capital would be constructed in Negomano-the wilderness area just west of the plateau. Independent of
such wild expectations, FRELIMO
failed in more mundane attempts to build the institutions through which Muedans could enact people's power and enjoy the fruits of
135
socialist modernization. Instead of seeing rationalized power at work in the villages,

Muedans witnessed rampant opportunism as village institutions foundered and collapsed. The story told to me by a villager in Matambalale was typical:
We had a consumercoop here. It purchasedclothingand cloth and allocated it to
each of the four bairrosin the village. The chef do bairro[neighborhoodauthority]
was supposedto rationit evenly so thateach familycould buy itsallotment.Itworked
okayuntilaboutthe timethatthe consumercoop was mergedwiththe producercoop.
The financeswere combined.Itcouldn'tsurvivethat.Itbecamea big confusion.The
producercoop disappeared,the consumer coop disappeared,the money disappeared,andthe people who ranit all disappeared!
Nepotism and corruption overtook cooperatives as ranking members used them to
control access to scarce goods that they often sold on the black market (Egero 1987;
Littlejohn 1988). Even Maputo-based FRELIMOleaders from the Mueda region appeared to Muedans to be on the take as they used militarytransportplanes to deliver to
the plateau construction materials with which they built tin-roofed cement block
homes considered palatial by villagers living in thatch-roof bamboo and mud-walled
houses (West 1997b:255).
As FRELIMOsocialism unraveled during the civil war, the government eventually conceded to InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF)-sponsoredstructuraladjustment
(1987) and donor-led liberalization of its political and economic institutions (Hanlon
1991), adopting constitutional reforms that would make possible the 1992 peace accord and the end of the war with RENAMO. Fromthe perspective of most Muedans,
however, things only worsened in the period leading to the accord. FRELIMOleaders-once staunch socialists-now appropriated state farms, warehouses, garages,
and petrol stations as their personal property.36Partyand state leaders secured preferential treatment for themselves and their clients by bank officials dispersing NonGovernmental Organization (NGO)-sponsored loans to buy trucks, tractors,and grain
mills (West 1997b:253-260). Such behavior often solicited remarksfrom onlookers
about the propensity and ability of these powerful few to "eat everything," a euphemism for predatoryacts of sorcery.37
Muedan ways of inhabiting communal villages
FRELIMO'sdramatic rewriting of the Muedan landscape survived even the collapse of its socialist modernization project, making it difficult to interpretMuedan responses to state power in this period in terms of the model presented by James Scott.
According to Scott, states create and expand "state spaces" in which they read and
manipulate society (1998:186-187). Resistance to state power, he then suggests, is
bound up with the retreatinto "non-state spaces," which are illegible from the center.
Muedans, however, could not abandon their villages and returnto the scattered and
illegible spaces of their former settlements until the end of the civil war, as the 1983
burning of Nazi Moja demonstrated. What is more, many residents found communal
villages attractive in ways that offset the desire to leave them.38Villages, after all, became places of excitement, where things occurred that might never have happened in
the settlements of old. Youth formed football teams to play against other villages and
gathered in the evenings in the village center to dance. Women conversed in the village market. Old men stood by the roadway that passed through the village, exchanging news with travelers.
Rather than resisting the state and retreating to non-state spaces, Muedans instead invested energies in inhabiting their villages in ways that differed profoundly
136
from FRELIMO's
vision for them. I find Michel de Certeau of more use than Scott in interpreting Muedan responses to villagization. De Certeau's work suggests more subtle
strategies vis-a-vis panoptic power. In an essay entitled "Walking in the City"(1984),
he describes how people move through city space, meandering, crisscrossing streets,
lingering to look in storefrontwindows, all against the grain of the rationalized urban
grid. Forde Certeau, urban residents' "ways of doing" such things proliferateas "ruses
and combinations of power that have no readable identity";they are "without rational
transparency" and "impossible to administer" (1984:95). He tells his readers: "The
long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how pan-optic
they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in
conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them)" (1984:101). The
long poem of walking, for de Certeau, "creates shadows and ambiguities within [spatial organization]" (1984:101).
The same might easily be said of Muedans' ways of inhabiting their villages-their long poems of settling communal villages. I use the term settling purposefully, for Muedans brought with them, imaginatively, their settlements of old when
they constructed communal villages. Members of the same likola, formerly residents
of a common settlement, constructed their houses on contiguous residential plots in
the new village. In the absence of any realistic alternative for land distribution, villagers continued to cultivate the same agriculturalplots they had before the war-plots
that were concentrated around their old settlements. Thus, each likola sought to construct its homes in the new village as close to the path leading to their former settlement as possible. Those from settlements to the north of the village, for example, built
homes in the northern bairro. Those whose former settlements were distant from the
village constructed houses on the village periphery, while those who had once lived
nearby often consented to live in the middle of the village. The result of such patterns
was that the preindependence geography of the region was reproduced in the village,
even if in miniature and modified form (West 1997b:236-247, 1998).
At the same time, villagers clumped together by likola continued to recognize respected elders capable of giving counsel and resolving disputes, despite FRELIMO's
insistence that official village structures should handle such affairs.39Even if the kaja
(settlement) no longer existed, each likola knew the identity of its nang'olo mwene
kaja and continued to call him by this title. Quietly, and out of sight of officials, village
residents walked paths to the verandas of these elders, leaving foot printsthat, afterthe
morning sweep with palm fronds, disappeared from view.40
Social practices in the postindependence era, of course, could take place only
within the geographical matrices formed by villagization, as de Certeau cautions
(1984:101); plateau residents were thus constrained in their attempts to recreate the
settlements of old. For example, a likola could not construct a shitala where its men
could pass their evenings sharing meals and conversing. Such behavior would have
been interpreted by officials as sectarian and subversive to the interests of the village
as a whole. Likolawomen could not share tasks as easily as they once had in a
space
adjacent to the shitala. And young men, on marrying,could no longer build homes
beside sponsoring uncles, as there was no room for new construction within the
tightly planned village grid. Young couples were forced to the perimeter of the village,
to dwell among neighbors with whom they often had no connection
apart from
shared residence in the village, and they lamented their situation with a song
asking,
"Who is FRELIMOto make me live beside this man who is not my uncle?" (West
1997b:236-247, 1998).
137
Ways of inhabiting the village were not limited, however, to the visible realm.
Muedans brought with them to the village not only the spatial schema of preindependence geography, but also the cosmological schema of sorcery that, again paraphrasing de Certeau, encompassed specific ways of understanding power. Where FRELIMO sought to render Muedans visible to the state, Muedans sustained, through
persistent beliefs and discursive practices, a realm visible only to the possessor of
shikupi, accessible only to vavi. The occurrence of death in the village provided constant opportunity for talking about sorcery. In preindependence settlements, death
visited only two or three times a year. In the village, Muedans observed, death was
omnipresent, mortality in some villages reaching as high as two or three deaths per
week. Ratherthan accept this as a simple function of a much higher population, most
villagers saw it as evidence of the unchecked practice in the village of uwavi wa kujoa
(sorcery of danger).
In many ways, Muedans expected sorcery to work in the villages much as it had
in the former settlements. At least initially, in some villages, villagers expected village
presidents to practice uwavi wa kudenga, patrolling not only the visible realm, but
also the invisible. Where village presidents refused to do this, former settlement heads
sometimes volunteered their services. In some cases, village presidents accepted
these offers. Where they did not, Muedans often interpretedofficial pronouncements
against the practice of antisorcery measures (including uwavi wa kudenga and healing) as they had during the war, as attacks only on destructive forms of sorcery. Certain that their own work did not fall into this category, many healers continued their
practice, even if they felt obliged to keep their healing activities discreet.
In time, however, Muedans generally concluded that sorcery in the village was
of a different nature than sorcery in the settlements of old. Kalamatatu,the healer with
whom I firstdiscussed these issues, explained to me that the trouble was that sorcerers
of different vakola danced together at night in the village center, exchanged techniques, and bought sorcery (uwavi wa kushuma) one from another. Vanang'olo vene
kaja could not convincingly claim to exercise responsibility over villagers outside
their own vakola whose sorcery techniques were unfamiliarto them. Nor could they
monitor a domain built by someone else, even were they permitted to do so; the government had built the village and sat in power at its center, denying vanang'olo vene
kaja the rightto build likola meeting houses from which they might performthis function.41Therefore, Kalamatatuexplained to me, village authorities had an obligation to
monitor the invisible realm in this new domain to insure a secure and prosperous environment for those under their charge. Obviously, they were not up to the task, he
concluded; witness the continuing poverty and sickness, the amplified social tension,
rivalry,and jealousy in the village. Kalamatatuand others referredto the corresponding chaos in the village's invisible realm as uwavi wa shilikali (government sorcery)
because it was sorcery permitted by the government to happen in its villages, sorcery
occurring in a realm defined by government power.42Kalamatatuasked me, rhetorically, "Does the village president stand in the village center at night and advise sorcerers against their acts? . .. No, because he can't." The village, according to him,
was too complex a social environment and the sorcery in it too powerful for any one
man to control.43On this subject, Kalamatatuspoke with a certainty grounded in bitter experience. His own son, Damiao, had served as president of the village of
Matambalale for a stint that ended with his suicide (West 1997b:246).
The cultural schema of sorcery was well suited to understanding the cynical operation of power in dysfunctional village institutions. For example, Muedans often
said thatthe water supply system was stopped up with skullsand limbs, the hidden refuse
138
of insatiable sorcerers whose predation threatened the entire community. Villagers

seemed more comfortable proferring and accepting speculative diagnostics of evil
doings in the invisible realm than commentary on events in the visible realm. Such
commentary might have indicated that system managers beyond the reach of popular
critique sold the petrol destined for the water system pumping stations on the black
market for personal gain. Sorcery accusations in such contexts allowed Muedans to
remind themselves that in a world where the abuse of state power was not officially
possible, the predation of the powerful remained a tangible threat. Muedans recalled
that sorcerers made use of victims transformedinto zombie slaves in order to accumulate personal wealth. They also remembered that prominent party and state leaders
had long proven their ability to act decisively in the invisible realm. Placed side by
side in night time chats around the cooking fire, these discursive statements could
only lead Muedans to ask unsettling questions about whether now wealthy FRELIMO
leaders and village officials were sorcerers of construction or of ruin.44
"we don't want development"
In the complex social environment produced by independence and villagization,
most Muedans could not afford the riskof head-on encounters with the forces that ordered their communities. Peter Geschiere has written:
Occult forcesare, by definition,hidden,which rendersthem extraefficaciousin an
context.The intrigueand rumorsthatsurroundwitchcraftalwaysreferto
authoritarian
secrets.Throughthis, the idiomcreatesa space, imaginaryor not, that is beyondthe
state'sauthority.[1997:99]
For Muedans, the cultural schema of sorcery, obscure and ambiguous even to dominant political actors, sometimes served as a subaltern discourse. Throughcautious and
subtle reference to notions embedded within a cultural schema much largerthan any
individual speaker, Muedans could posit vague associations between power and predation in specific contemporary contexts, thereby commenting on political and economic processes. To state that sorcerers, these days, possess armies of mandandosho
who, under cover of night, slave away making money, maintaining vehicles, and
building homes for their wealthy masters is clearly a critique of today's rich and powerful. Such critiques might have had a leveling effect where they challenged sorcery itself as a form of social differentiation.45
Sorcery discourse cuts both ways, however. People could just as easily suggest,
in the language of sorcery, that the wealth and power of particularindividuals was the
target of jealous sorcerers of ruin who sought to prevent their neighbors and kin from
improving their condition. Such a critique of jealousy-motivated sorcery and its leveling effects might actually have supported processes of social differentiation.Accumulation is justified in a world where the "haves" are victims and the "have-nots" are
perpetratorsof occult crimes. In either case, talk about sorcery is a phenomenon distinct from, but intimately bound up with, sorcery itself. By momentarily exposing to
imaginative view a realm normally understood to be hidden, talk about sorcery suggestively refers to phenomena in the supposedly visible world that, in fact, remain
hidden (such as jealousy or corruption). Such revelation challenges hidden truths
even when it neither claims nor seeks to do so.
The existing anthropological literatureoften emphasizes how people use occult
cosmologies either to resist or embrace things modern; however, I wish to emphasize
the difficulty Muedans would have in instrumentallyjuxtaposing the visible and invisible worlds to strategicends. Justas sorcererswound themselves while attackingvictims,
139
ordinary Muedans might as easily have injured themselves in attempting to make instrumental use of sorcery accusations.46 Both during the independence war and afterward, one who spoke too often, too loudly, or too confidently about the use of mandandosho by FRELIMOleaders risked their wrath. To talk of sorcery in this way was to
spread confusao (confusion and dissension), an act for which healers were sometimes
executed during the independence war and for which ordinary Muedans might be
classified as "enemies of the people" and sent to "reeducation camps" in the postindependence period. Again, sorcery cut both ways. Authority figures, too, could
wound themselves by talking openly about sorcery, focusing popular suspicions on
themselves as people claiming to know of goings-on in the invisible realm or bringing
the discipline of the party on themselves for trafficking in obscurantism even if, in
their own view, they acted to protect themselves and their FRELIMO
party.Afterstrucand
state officials
tural adjustment gave rise to individual forms of wealth, party
could, ultimately, only call greater attention to their wealth by proclaiming that they
were subject to attack by jealous sorcerers.
Whether rich or poor, powerful or weak, Muedans of any group might also actually have terrorized themselves through talk of sorcery. This was true of those
Muedans who worked for a time in Pemba, the provincial capital of Cabo Delgado, or
in Maputo, the national capital, and then feared to returnto the villages. It was also
true of villagers who acquiesced to the commands of party and state officials for fear
of both visible and invisible consequences. As a result of such unforeseeable and uncontrollable effects, villagers had as much difficulty telling who manipulated whom
through sorcery discourse as they did telling who was eating whom in the invisible
realm of sorcery.
On the whole, however, sorcery-related beliefs and practices nurtured the ambivalence with which Muedans looked on the modern goods and the modernizing institutions and globalizing processes that spawned differentiation and divisiveness
within their communities. "Look at us," one frustratedvillager told me, "we don't
want development here! We are afraid to put tin roofs on our homes for fear that sorcerers will attack us. We are afraid to put shoes on our children's feet for fear that we
will be accused of sorcery." This was an ironic statement of anguish by a Muedan
who, like most, continued to long for things modern, continued to strive for "development" (the term most Muedans now generally chose over "modernization") despite
frustration.47For most Muedans, the forms of power introduced by socialist modernization and its ultimate collapse were persistentlyelusive. Through discursive engagement with the realm of sorcery-through sustaining suspicions, spreading rumor and
innuendo, making accusations and denying them, and proffering explanationsMuedans generally condemned the relatively more rich and powerful among them
without condemning riches and power per se, thereby expressing frustrationwith the
unfulfilled promises of modernity while sustaining hope for a future in which the desires cultivated by modernizing institutionsand processes would be satisfied.
notes
Acknowledgments. Fieldresearchfor this articlewas conductedbetween August1993
and February1995 and between July1999 and September1999; it was supportedby grants
fromthe Fulbright-Hays
Program,the UnitedStatesInstituteof Peace,the Wenner-GrenFoundationforAnthropologicalResearch,and the Economicand Social ResearchCouncil(United
supportwas providedin the field by the Arquivosdo Patrim6nioCulKingdom).Institutional
andthe directorof theirofficesin Pemba,EstevaoMpalume,as well as the Assotural(ARPAC)
and the directorof their
ciaCaodos Combatentesde Lutade Liberta5aoNacional (ACLLN)
140
department of historical research in Pemba, LazaroMmala. Officers and members of the Mueda
chapter of the Associa:ao de Medicina Tradicional de Mo:ambique (AMETRAMO),including
especially President Joao Chombo and Vice-President Terezinha "Nbegweka" Ant6nio, furnished both information and contacts. Fieldwork was facilitated by the generous and insightful
collaboration of Marcos Agostinho Mandumbwe, a historian at the ACLLNin Pemba, and by
the invaluable assistance of Felista Elias Mkaima and Eusebio Tissa Kairo. Rafael Pedro
Mwakala also participated in various components of the research. Drafts of this article were
read by a number of people who provided useful commentary, including Matthew Engelke,
Richard Flores, Peter Geschiere, Peter Loizos, ElizabethMarberry,Todd Sanders, and Mike Williams.
1. Foraccounts of the Mozambican peace process and elections, see African-EuropeanInstitute/AWEPA1995; Chan and Venancio 1998; Mazula 1995; Synge 1997; United Nations
1995; and West 1997a.
2. The most comprehensive works on the historyof the Mozambican war for independence
include Henricksen 1983; Mondlane 1969; and Munslow 1983. See West 1997b:142-196 for
broader references to the literatureon the war as well as for detailed accounts of the experiences of the war shared by residents of the plateau region.
3. Forcomprehensive accounts of the Mozambican civil war, see AfricaWatch 1992; Finnegan 1992; and Vines 1991.
4. See Evans 1990 on the use of this term in the context of Laotiansocialism.
5. See Evans 1990:4, 7 regarding similar attitudes held by Lao Peoples' Revolutionary
Party(LPRP)leaders in Laos.
6. Donham 1999:126-127; Evans 1990:2; and Hale 1994 offer examples of modernizing
state institutions in Laos, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia, respectively, that similarly cast tradition,
vaguely conceived, as an impediment to revolutionarytransformation.
7. While this term is sometimes read in a pejorative sense, these authors use it to refersimply to belief systems engaging with forces understood to be mysterious, secret, or ordinarily hidden from view.
8. I give detailed account of the ethnogenesis of the Makonde in West 2000.
9. For a comprehensive account of social life in precolonial Makonde settlements, see
West 1997b:50-59.
10. See Dias and Dias 1964:9 (desenho 1 [sketch 1]) for a drawing of the settlement.
11. In his study of the neighboring Yao people, J. Clyde Mitchell (1956) describes this
same phenomenon in rich detail.
12. Among the Makua-speaking populations south of the Mueda plateau region, a humu
was a settlement head; always male, he was subordinate to the geographically broader authority of a mwene. Both the mwene and the humu had wives who also discharged ritual responsibilities and were treated with great respect. According to oral testimony, plateau Makonde
borrowed the term humu from the Makua; indeed, people taken from among the Makua by
Makonde raiders may have played an important role in introducing the term among the Makonde. On the Mueda plateau, however, a humu played a different role than among the Makua.
He was neither a settlement head nor superordinate to settlement heads. Rather, he acted as a
counselor and ritualspecialist among populations living in the various settlements of a likola. In
his work, he was generally assisted by three wives.
13. My descriptions of precolonial belief rely primarilyon the testimony of contemporary
elders, some of whom were youths during the last years of this period and some of whom render
accounts based on what they were told by their elders.
14. Alan Harwood (1970) gives detail of the neutralityof similar medicinal substances in
his work on the Safwa of Tanzania. See also Ashforth 1996.
15. I translate uwavi as sorcery, rather than witchcraft, in accordance with distinctions
drawn between the two phenomena by Evans-Pritchard(1970, 1976), who suggests that witchcraft is inherited and psychically enacted while sorcery is learned and requires the intentional
manipulation of medicinal substances. At times, Makonde suggest that the ability to practice
uwavi derives from a substance in the sorcerer's body that is given him or her by an elder family
member. Generally, however, they suggest that sorcerersmust learn to use mitela to accomplish
sorcery of construction
and socialist
modernization
141
theirdeeds. Ultimately,translationof belief systemssuch as uwavi into Europeanterminology-whether witchcraft or sorcery-glosses over distinctions between them that
are often as important, if not more so, than distinctions between witchcraft and sorcery made in the social science literature (MacGaffey 1980). I translate uwavias sorcery to providereaderswith a rudimentary
meaningof the term,but I remindthemthata more
of
uwavi
can
be
achieved
precise meaning
only
throughdetailedappreciationof its cultural
specificity.
16. Belief in zombie laborersis common in Africa.See, for example, Beidelman1963;
Geschiereand Fisiy1994; Rowlandsand Warnier1988; Sanders1999; Shaw 1997; Stadler
1996; andWillis1968.
17. A teamof researchersled by Portugueseanthropologist
JorgeDiasobservedand documented these beliefs while workingin the Mueda region in the late 1950s (Dias and Dias
1970:363). The belief that sorcererscan transformthemselvesinto predatoryanimals-often
called "familiars"
in the literature-iswidespreadnotonly in Africa,but in otherregionsof the
worldas well. See, forexample,Auslander1993; Douglas1970; Goheen 1996; Jackson1990;
Kapferer1997; Marwick1970; MiddletonandWinter1963; Niehaus1993; Reichel-Dolmatoff
1975; Roberts1986; Schneider1962; Taussig1987; and Wyatt1950. See also Hendersonthe
RainKing,a novel writtenby Saul Bellow(1958) who studiedanthropologybeforehis fiction
writingcareer.
18. The notionthat healersare cured sorcerersis also widespread.See Kapferer1997;
Reichel-Dolmatoff
1975; andTaussig1987 fordetaileddescriptionsof this phenomenon.
19. See Masquelier1992:66 and Weiss 1996:122-124 fordiscussionof relationshipsbetween powerand visionin otherAfricancontexts.
20. Accordingto Alma Gottlieb'saccounts (1989; 1992:104), among the Beng of Cote
d'lvoire,politicalauthoritiesare systematicallyassumedto be witcheswho have consolidated
power throughkillingthree familymembersfromprescribedcategories,thus sacrificingtheir
self-interests(boundup withthose of theiruterinekin)on behalfof the largergroupoverwhich
they will govern.Theircommissionof the "ultimateact of destruction"(1989:262)makesthem
"ultimatelyresponsibleforall illnessand misfortune,all crimesand sins-and all acts of witchcraft"(1989:263),which they will thus seek to minimize.See also Goheen 1996 and Schmoll
1993 on the inherentlyambivalentpowerof sorceryandwitchcraft.
21. Thenorthernregionof Mozambiquewas grantedas a concessionto the NyassaCompany between 1891 and 1929, butthe companyonly exploitedthe plateauregionafterWorld
administrative
War I (Neil-Tomlinson1977; Vail 1976). The NyassaCompany'srudimentary
structures,and manyof its personnel,were absorbedby the Portuguesecolonialadministration
when the Companycharterexpired(West1997b:90-91).
22. The literatureon colonialAfricais filledwith accountsof such local level crisesof legitimacyprovokedby colonialover-rule.See, forexample,Lan1985 and Mamdani1996.
23. Niehaus(1993:509-514) describeshow chiefs underapartheidin SouthAfricalost
controloverthe local discourseon witchcraft,allowingfordramaticrisesin witchcraftaccusations andwitch-hunts.
of the workings
24. Geschiere(1997)calls attentionto similarlyconflictinginterpretations
of sorceryin contemporaryCameroon,explainingthatsome considersorcerya forcethataids
in accumulationwhile othersthinkof it as a levelingforce.See also Ashforth1996 and Bastian
1993.
25. Lan(1985)describessimilarattemptsby ZimbabweAfricanNationalLiberationArmy
class consciousnessamongthe peasantsof the Dande
(ZANLA)
guerrillasto forgerevolutionary
regionin SouthernRhodesia.
26. Interesting
comparisonscan be drawnbetweenthe Mozambicancase andthatof Zimbabwe as describedby Lan(1985). Inthe Zimbabweancase, ZANLAguerrillaswere able to
foregoa relationshipwithchiefsdiscreditedby collaborationwiththe colonial regimeby using
was
spiritmediumsas theirentreesintolocal communities.Inthe Mozambicancase, FRELIMO
administrative
into
its
own
intermediaries
former
colonial
to
required,eventually, incorporate
hierarchy.WhileLandoes notdwell on the issueof the threatof violence,othercontributionsto
142
the literature suggest that the Zimbabwean case was fraught with tension (especially Kriger
1988, 1992) as was the Mozambican case.
27. The belief in anti-bullet medicine gave rise to the 1905 Maji-Majirisingjust across the
Rovuma River in German EastAfrica (Adas 1979). Belief in anti-bullet medicines remains salient in the region in the contemporary period. See, for example, Wilson 1992.
28. On Portuguese counterinsurgency tactics, see Beckett 1985; Calvert 1973; Monks
1990; Opello 1974; West 1997b:1 83-188; and Wheeler 1976.
29. I was told by Eusebio Tissa Kairothat sorcerers use whatever is at hand to mask their
deeds: "Where there are lions, they make lions and use them to their own ends to confuse people. Where there is cholera, they make their attacks look like an outbreak. Where there is war,
they make helicopters instead of lions, or they summon up armies to kill their victims. But none
of it is real. It is really a sorcerer attacking."
30. Lan (1985) provides a richly detailed account of how local cosmology and political
discourse similarly framed the experience of the Zimbabwean independence war for people in
the Dande region.
31. For example, the party sought to insure that popular tribunals protect the interests of
women in cases of divorce or inheritance settlements in ways that lay judges might not normally
have done without party intervention (see Sachs and Welch 1990).
32. Scott writes:
Any attempt to completely plan a village, a city, or, for that matter, a language is certain to
run afoul of the same social reality. A village, city, or language is the jointly created, partly
unintended product of many, many hands. To the degree that authorities insist on replacing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and regulations, they are certain to disruptthe web in ways that they cannot possibly foresee. [1998:256]
33. Fordetailed accounts of RENAMOtactics, see Africa Watch 1992; Geffray 1990; Hall
1990; Minter 1989; Morgan 1990; Vines 1991; Wilson 1992; and Young 1990.
34. Donham (1999:179) describes similarfailures in the villages of revolutionary Ethiopia.
See also Clay, Steingraber, and Niggli 1988 and Cohen and Isaksson 1987 on villagization in
Ethiopia.
35. See also Coelho 1998 for a description of similartrends in Tete Province.
36. Similar phenomena are described for the country as a whole in West and Myers 1996.
37. Corruption has been the focus of increasing attention in African studies recently. See,
for example, Bayart,Ellis,and Hibou 1999. Forother accounts where eating is used as a euphemism for power, see Bayart 1993; Piot 1999:68; Schatzberg 1993; Schmoll 1993:207; Shaw
1997; and Weiss 1996:136.
38. Once the civil war had ended, Muedans from several of the plateau villages did move
to occupy former settlements, but the vast majorityof Muedans remain in their villages to this
day.
39. Some village officials themselves consulted these elders and worked to sustain good
diplomatic relations with them.
40. Gottlieb (1992:136) describes similar phenomena among the Beng of C6te d'lvoire.
41. All of these changes meant that sorcery increasingly operated outside of the boundaries of kinship, a phenomenon that parallels developments elsewhere in Africa. I thank Peter
Geschiere for drawing this to my attention (personal communication, December 30, 1998).
42. By contrast, Stadler (1996) describes how South African comrades embraced the role
of policing witchcraft in the late apartheid period, at times gaining popular legitimacy by "necklacing" suspected witches (i.e., beating them, placing a car tire around their necks, dowsing
them with petrol, and setting them alight).
43. Stadler (1996) describes how South African populations concentrated in betterment
schemes in the 1970s felt that these new environments fostered rising levels of witchcraft. Brain
(1982) portrayshow Tanzanians who were moved into ujamaa (unity)villages in the late 1960s
and early 1970s similarly felt that such social environments were rife with witchcraft. See also
Cliffe and Saul 1973; McHenry 1979; and Mwapachu 1976 on villagization in Tanzania.
and socialist modernization
143
44. Stoller(1995) and Piot (1997:47,101) gives similaraccounts of the expressionof popular
ambivalence about political figures through the language of the occult in Niger and in Togo,
respectively.
45. Goheen (1996:160-161) describes how the Nso of Cameroon attempt to socialize the
power of the strongest among them through sorcery discourse.
46. Peter Geschiere suggests that people often entangle themselves in sorcery discourse
(personal communication, December 30,1998).
47. Muedans use the Portuguese term desenvolvimento as there is no such term in Shimakonde. Gable (1995) describes similarexpressions of desire for modernity among villagers in
Guinea-Bissau.
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accepted March 22, 2000
final version submitted May 24, 2000
Harry West
Department of Anthropology
Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science
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65 FifthAvenue
New York,NY 10003
westh@newschool. edu

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Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power in

sorcery of constructionand socialist

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

as a conservative phenomenon. In what follows, I argue that the "culturalschema" of

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

fundamentalcharacteristicsof power and have served as a social diagnostics of

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

knowledgeof medicinalsubstances(mitela)was believed to determineone's capacity, vahumu(pl.)were consideredpeerless(West1997b:60-65).

Vavi (sorcerers)achieved invisibilitythroughthe use of a rareform of ntela,

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

such a settlement was sometimes referredto as uwavi wa ishima (sorcery of respect)

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

several of these elders (West 1997b:164-168; West 1998:151-152). In time, a large

The fundamental operative logics of guerrilla warfare, ironically, were highly

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

individualswas founded on certainknowledgeof their destructivedeeds, whether

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

socialist modernization. Instead of seeing rationalized power at work in the villages,

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

of insatiable sorcerers whose predation threatened the entire community. Villagers

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

and socialist modernization

and socialist modernization

sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

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