The Homecomer: Postwar cleansing rituals in Mozambique

Armed Forces and Society

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 382-395

  Granjo, Paulo ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LISBON   (Portugal)

^b INSTITUTO DE CIÊNCIAS SOCIAIS   (Portugal)

Author keywords

Civil war; Rituals; Veterans

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847683908     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X06296587     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. See Alfred Schutz, "The Homecomer," American Journal of Sociology 50 (1945): 369-376. Schutz' veteran, as a Homecomer, is forever different. Schutz uses the classic Greek tale of Ulysses, who is unrecognized by his own people. As a type, the Homecomer, for Schutz, is forever changed. Those at home have changed, and the Homecomer has changed; they cannot recognize each other. Reintegration may be possible, but neither home nor the Homecomer gets to become once again as they were. This is very much a contrast to the case study examined in this article-in which the entire effort of "reconciliation" is to become as before with a fresh start.
2. For some of those descriptions and characterizations, see E. C. Green and A. Honwana, "Indigenous Healing of War-affected Children in Africa," IK Notes 10 (1999). Literature usually presents this avoidance as resulting from the fear that the angry spirits of people killed during the event may be attracted by its verbalization and cause distress. This explanation seems a bit too simple and contradictory with several main points of the local experts' exegesis about spirits' spatial mobility. Nevertheless, the communal cataloguing of people who keep speaking about their traumatic war experiences as "crazy" (N. Castanheira Ex-criança Soldado: "Não queremos voltar para o inferno" [Maputo: Reconstruindo a Esperança]) may suggest both a folk simplification of experts' speech that approaches the literary explanation and/or-considering the local dominant notions of health-the idea that "mad" verbalization derives from ineffective spiritual cleansing.
3. Singular, nyamussoro. They are putatively possessed by spirits of different "ethnic" origins who give them powers of divination, spirits' exorcism, and the ability to use botanic cures. I wish to acknowledge all those who accepted my presence and questions on this subject, especially Job Massingue. The long conversations with them, together with interviews with two "purified" veterans and the observation of a (very similar) postprison cleansing ritual, were the empiric base for this article. Several postwar cleansing rituals were not performed by vanyamussoro but by mazione priests (i.e., clergymen from a southern African Christian church that reappropriates the local spirits-based beliefs and healing practices through an idiom of Holy Ghost and demons), but I was unable to directly observe this or even acquire a fully reliable description.
4. As it is still very clear in healers' and common people's speech, Nguni warship, healing, and divination practices were assimilated as "superior" ones by former inhabitants. It is also eloquent that to perform all his possible specialized tasks, a healer must be possessed by spirits from the three "ethnic" groups with more conspicuous roles during the invasion (Nguni, Ndau, or Changana/Ronga), who "work" under the supervision of a Nguni spirit in the most crucial rituals.
5. H. Junod, Usos e Costumes dos Bantu (Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, [1912] 1996).
6. The nyamussoro and the veteran could both be women; however, to avoid the systematic duplication of gender references, I will use just the masculine form from now on.
7. The letters nhl stand for an aspired x, vocalized with the tongue arched up in the mouth. Also, two other sets of artifacts often complement this set, which is considered to be of Nguni origin. One is composed of six crocodile-back scales and the other of six nut shells from a nulu tree (lat. carissa arduina). On its use and subjacent logics, see P. Granjo, "Determination and Chaos, According to Mozambican Divination," Etnográfica XI, 1 (2007): 9-30.
8. The principles that rule the local domestication of aleatory are, thus, very similar to the interpretation of Azande witchcraft by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Bruxaria, Oráculos e Magia entre os Azande (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, [1937] 1978); the main difference is the central importance that ancestors' and other deceased's spirits assume in Mozambican prevailing logic. By "domestication of aleatory," I mean the attribution of a sense and causality to aleatory and uncertainty that make them be seen as cognoscible, regulated, explainable, or even dominated by human beings.
9. Changana is the most common language in southern Mozambique.
10. See Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1973). Goffman uses a "dramaturgical approach" in his study, concerning himself with the mode of presentation used by the actor and its meaning in the broader social context. Yes, Goffman is talking about the individual's presenting himself to the group in a completely different context. But how different is it, in actuality, from this dramatic ritual of deeds and misdeeds and the need for a "restored" presentation of the former self to the village group in Mozambique, thousands of kilometers and belief systems away? At an interactive level, there are more similarities that one would readily acknowledge.
11. In cases considered very serious (because of a diagnosis of possession by spirits of high status or power while alive), the exorcism can even precede the kuguiya. On the contrary, if an interference of ancestors' spirits is detected, they are supposed to present their complaints and demands already through divination.
12. These are local textile products that are usually rolled around the waist, as a skirt, or used to carry babies at the loin. Besides those common products, vanyamussoro use capulanas with a special design to distinguish each "ethnic" origin of the spirits who possess them and usually own different ones that correspond to or match each one of their spirits.
13. The belief is that some spirits may understand what is coming and wait outside the healer's premises for the patient's return, while others are thought to be resilient enough to repossess the veteran when he is unprotected in the interim between the xizingo kufemba and the regular cleansing rituals.
14. Before he enters "into the pot," some powder medicines are placed in the patient's nostrils. If he sneezes in the next few minutes, that is considered a sign that the treatment will be effective; otherwise, some other healer must perform it.
15. See E. C. Green, Indigenous Theories of Contagious Disease (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1999);
16. H. West, "Working the Borders to Beneficial Effect: The Not-so-indigenous Knowledge of the Not-so-traditional Healers in Northern Mozambique" (paper to the Social Anthropology Seminar of the London University College, 2004).
17. Water from different origins has, indeed, a big importance in those healers' preparations. Through the same process of metaphor and metonymy applied to river water, lake water is used to steady a desired effect (because "everything that falls into the lakes stays there"), while seawater is used to expel undesired things, because "everything you'll throw into the sea will come out to shore, sooner or later."
18. However, sometimes there is not a river nearby. When this happens, the whole process may be performed in the healer's premises, but it will require some adaptations to substitute those symbolic statements that are only possible in a river. For instance, the patient will be seated inside a hole dug in the ground for that purpose, and the washing up from the goat bath will be done with a mixture of river and seawater. At the end of the ceremony, the patient will get out naked, leaving the capulana inside to be burned over the goat's remains. Finally, the hole is covered immediately after its consumption.
19. There is a hierarchy of "washing animals," according to the seriousness of the affliction, the importance of the intended aftermath, and the patient's status. One should not, thus, be surprised to hear about the use of a chicken instead of a goat in blood washings, even when integrated in cleansing rituals of the poorest people.
20. If this type of treatment is expected by people and is a recurrent practice, the paste components are normally kept secret from even outside researchers, because every healer uses some personal components that he considers an added value.
21. To go deeper into this anthropological category, which covers rituals of status change in which a liminal and mutating state is chronologically and symbolically contained between rites of social separation and reintegration, see A. van Gennep (who formalized it), Os Ritos de Passagem (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1978);
22. V. Turner (who developed it and stressed the crucial importance of its liminal phase and rituals), The Forest of Symbols (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).
23. See C. Geffray, A Causa das Armas em Moçambique: Antropologia da Guerra Contemporânea em Moçambique (Porto: Afrontamento, 1991).
24. In this very lucid work, the author consubstantiates that although the Renamo guerrilla was created by the Rhodesian regime to debilitate its newborn and socialist-oriented neighbor, and after it was maintained by South-African apartheid, both its long resilience against the army of the Frelimo state-party and its actual occupation of large parts of the territory were only possible because at one point of its course, Renamo managed to capitalize on rural-based dissatisfaction toward touchy issues of Frelimo's modernistic agenda and the authoritarian way they were imposed. It is the case of the repression of "feudalism" (hereditary chiefs) and "obscurantism" (spirits-based beliefs, rituals, and healing practices) and of the forced resettlements in large "communal villages" that-besides raising serious political, symbolical, and logistical problems-had a population density that could not be ecologically supported with the available technological means. On this later issue, see A. Yañez-Casal, Antropologia e Desenvolvimento: As Aldeias Comunais de Moçambique (Lisboa: IICT, 1996).
25. See Geffray, A Causa das Armas em Moçambique;
26. N. Castanheira, Ex-criança Soldado: "Não queremos voltar para o inferno" (Maputo: Reconstruindo a Esperança, 1999).
27. C. Alden, "Making Old Soldiers Fade Away: Lessons from the Reintegration of Demobilized Soldiers in Mozambique," Security Dialogue 33, 3 (2002): 341-56.
28. Even if it might seem so, this is not a marginal situation, because of the very old, enduring, and quantitatively huge temporary migrations to South African mines. On this subject, see P. Granjo, "A Mina Desceu à Cidade: Memória Histórica e a Mais Recente Indústria Moçambicana," Etnográfica VII, 2 (2003): 403-29, with an available English version at http://www.ics.ul.pt/corpocientifico/ paulogranjo/english.