Ethnographic Sorcery (8 page)

Even as Muedans conceived of the visible and the invisible as distinct domains, then, they also understood these domains to be linked. As Muedans described the relationship between these domains, the invisible existed
within
the visible, and the visible
within
the invisible. The cosubstantiality of these domains was made manifest and apparent through the visible effects of invisible forces. Sorcerers, in other words, envisioned the world
and
brought their visions to fruition. Among other things, they imaginatively produced lions that ultimately came to prowl the same, visible, realm in which their victims lived, as Lazaro Mmala reminded me in the ARPAC seminar room. That Muedans thought of, and spoke of, sorcery lions differently than they did ordinary lions
—vantumi va ku mwitu
(bush lions)—bore evidence of their recognition that such beasts originated in a realm apart, a distinct domain. From the safety of distance in space or time, Muedans often referred to such lions as “false”—
vantumi
kulambidyanga
(untruthful lions). Alternatively, they called them
vantumi va malao
(magical lions) or
vantumi va kumpika
(fabricated, or made up, lions). When, however, such beasts were encountered in or around the village—in other words, within the visible realm—Muedans fled them just the same.

M
ASKED AND
D
ANGEROUS

We participate in this world through its illusions, and
as
its illusions. The inventions in which it is realized are only rendered possible through the phenomenon of control and the masking that accompanies it, and the conventional distinctions in which control is grounded can only be carried forth by being re-created in the course of invention.

«
ROY
WAGNER
,
The Invention of Culture
(1975: 53–54) »

In August 1999, Marcos and I sat together around a small fire in the compound of his Matambalale relatives, warming ourselves after a meal of
ugwali
(cornmeal porridge) and roasted chicken. Out of the darkness emerged the figures of three of Marcos’s kin. They had been youngsters when I first met them in 1994, but they had come of age now and served as core members of the village militia. Were we not “family” to them, I might have found them intimidating owing to their shared penchant for drunkenness and bluster. As it was, they often joined us, and other members of their family, after nightfall to exchange stories. It was from them that I first heard about the “sorcery dance.”
1

“The guys in this dance troupe all live in Shitashi,” one of them told me. “They perform a dance that shows
exactly
how sorcerers eat human flesh.”

The next morning, another young man appeared in the compound, sent by our young relatives to speak with us. He told
us that he was in Matambalale visiting his own relatives, but that he was a member of the Shitashi dance troupe. Later in the day, he accompanied us in our pickup truck as we descended the plateau at Namakande and made our way to the steamy village of Shitashi in the lowlands near Lake Nguri. There, we were introduced to Fernando Chofer Nankoma, a young man of perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five years of age,
chefe
(leader) of the dance troupe. Chofer explained to us that he and his dancers performed for a fee of 50,000 meticais
²
at
matanga
(funeral) ceremonies.
³
He agreed to organize a performance for us for the same fee in a week’s time.

When we returned on the appointed day, we found Chofer napping, but as the afternoon sun relented, his troupe of eight dancers appeared. Beneath two enormous mango trees, they constructed an enclosure in which the dance would be held. They then retreated to the edge of the village, where they dressed for the dance. As the sun set, younger boys set fires inside the enclosure and heated the skins of their drums in the flames. Near dusk, the dancers reappeared. One was dressed in a trench coat and wore a crown of porcupine quills. Another sported a pair of aviator glasses. Each dancer wore leg wraps to which dozens of ball-shaped bells had been attached. With every step, they jangled. Their leader was dressed as a
lipiko—
a figure, representing a spiritual entity, that historically appeared to dance at various Makonde ceremonies (including, especially, rites of initiation), striking fear into the hearts of all who remained ignorant of the
lipiko
’s “true” identity.
⁴
Not a patch of skin revealed the human figure within the
lipiko
costume. His torso, waist, and limbs were tightly wrapped in cloth. He wore a straw skirt around his midsection, a helmet mask over his head, and gloves on his hands.
⁵

Out of the cacophony of noises produced by the young boys warming and testing the drum skins, there emerged, in time, a coordinated rhythm. The dancers entered the enclosure and moved in short stutter steps around its circumference. One of the drummers broke away from the fire and approached the
dancers. Turning ninety degrees inward toward the drummer, leaning forward at the waist, hands in front of them, arms bent slightly, the dancers rose to the challenge of his distinctive beat until the drummer retired to the fire. The dancers then circled round the enclosure until the next drummer approached and challenged them. From time to time, observers—boys and girls, elder men and elder women—joined in, following the principal dancers’ trail around the circle. For hours, they danced.
⁶

By midnight, a crowd of several hundred had gathered in and around the enclosure. The drumming came to a halt, and Chofer announced that, in a short time, the troupe would stage a performance in the enclosure.
⁷
The principal dancers left, and a few colleagues prepared the “stage.” A reed mat, curled into a semicircle, was stood on end, and a
capulana
⁸
draped over it, making a tiny hut. A small pot was placed on the ground inside the hut.

Half an hour after they had disappeared, the dancers reemerged from the darkness and drew close to the enclosure. Led by the
lipiko,
the others were naked except for white loincloths. Had it been darker, I was told, they would have been completely naked—“as sorcerers actually are.” A lone dancer ran across the stage and back to the edge of the enclosure to concentrate the audience’s attention. A few minutes later, another did the same. The audience at once grew more attentive and more impatient. Another dancer ran in front of them and said boldly, “Don’t smoke any cigarettes! If you do, you’ll be provoking those of us who have none!” With this public-service announcement made, the performance began.

The troupe stutter-stepped their way into the enclosure, led by the
lipiko.
I was now informed by a young companion of the dancers that this
lipiko
was the most sophisticated and lethal of all sorcerers.
⁹
On their second pass in front of the hut, the
lipiko
entered the dwelling and, there, discovered the small pot. The pot, I was told, was the flesh of the hut’s owner, who—unseen to us but falling within the gaze of the sorcerer bearers of
shikupi—
slept unawares. The
lipiko
pulled several unseen portions of flesh
from the pot and thrust them in his mouth. Several onlookers let loose expressions of horror: “Eeeeeee!”

Once the
lipiko
had departed the hut, a figure emerged from the edge of the stage carrying a bottle. He was an
nkulaula
(healer), I was told. He had been summoned by the owner of the house—who was now suffering from the
lipiko’
s attack—and the bottle he carried was a
lipande
(an antisorcery mine).

When the players passed once more in front of the house, they began, one by one, to convulse and, eventually, to fall to the ground in apparent agony. The onlookers laughed nervously. One among the players, whose face was painted in white, kept his feet and approached the
lipiko—
also left standing—who gave him a small gourd and an angled stick. With these instruments, he approached his writhing colleagues. After placing the gourd on the body of each one, he used the stick to turn them over onto their backs without touching them. It was explained to me that this painted sorcerer was the most experienced of the group; having been injured before, he had learned how to heal the wounds inflicted by antisorcery
mitela.
He slithered over the bodies of his fellow sorcerers, working on them as an
nkulaula,
administering the
mitela
provided him by the
lipiko.
As he turned their bodies, he “overturned” (
kupilikula
) the
nkulaula
who had been summoned to protect the victim of their attack and thereby rendered this victim vulnerable once more.
¹⁰

The
lipiko
now gave the white-faced sorcerer-healer the pot, from which he doled out portions of human flesh to each of the colleagues he had resuscitated. One by one, the recipients placed the flesh in their mouths, alternately grimacing and licking their lips like snakes. The audience studied their every gesture, whispering commentary to one another. Some of the sorcerers displayed surprise, even revulsion, at the taste of the meat, which was bitter, I was told, as a result of the lingering effect of defensive
mitela.
Still, the sorcerers scuffled over their portions. The white-faced sorcerer himself consumed the greatest portions, but also ensured that each of his colleagues was fed, placing them, I was reminded, in his debt.

Once all had eaten, the white-faced sorcerer returned the pot to the hut, where the
lipiko
sat waiting. The
lipiko
now placed the pot on his head, rose, and danced his way out of the enclosure, followed by the other sorcerers. The owner of the house, I was told, was dead.

The performance over, Marcos and I spent the night in Shitashi. I scarcely slept. The images I had witnessed played again and again in my mind’s eye. I lay awake in the darkness, attentive to every sound. The abundance of noise in the village around me gave testimony to the fact that I was not alone in my insomnia.

The next morning, Marcos and I shared a meal with Fernando Chofer Nankoma before departing Shitashi. I confessed that I had slept poorly. Chofer told us that the performance of their piece always produced sleepless nights, no matter where it was staged.

The same was true, Marcos said, of masquerade in the days of his youth. “Of course, when I was young, only initiated men knew that it was just a man behind the mask of the
lipiko
and not a spirit,” Marcos explained.

“Nowadays, everyone knows who plays the
lipiko,”
I commented; indeed, FRELIMO had considered
mapiko
dancing a means of propagating “obscurantism” and had required dancers to unmask themselves in front of their audiences from the time of the liberation war onward.

“They also know who plays the parts of the sorcerers in your drama,” I continued, looking at Chofer, “but even so, they do not sleep at night?”

“Neither did the men who knew the identity of the
lipiko
back in the days before FRELIMO,” Marcos chimed in.

Notwithstanding the unmasking of the dancers—Chofer and Marcos each asserted—spirits, and sorcerers, still existed for Muedans, who feared the very real consequences of encounter with them.
¹¹

Chofer continued: “We stage this piece to show people exactly what sorcery looks like. It is our way of criticizing sorcery. We perform to shame those who do these things.”
¹²

As I pondered Chofer’s assertion that his troupe’s performance somehow “represented” a “reality” “behind the mask”—that it conjured a world that existed, somewhere, separately, “offstage”—I suddenly remembered my conversation with an elder man standing beside me the night before as I watched Chofer’s troupe perform.

“You see the way they eat human flesh?!” he asked me, genuinely scandalized.

“But surely they are just
acting out
what they
imagine
sorcerers do?” I responded.

“Exactly,” the man replied, as if my words proved his point.

I looked at him with confusion.

“Who can imagine such a thing without doing it?!” he asked me, clinching his case.

What we witnessed, my fellow observer insisted, were sorcerers at work. What is more, he assured me, the message these “players” transmitted to their audience was precisely this: that they were
capable
sorcerers, to be respected and feared.
¹³

I now pondered the idea that, even as Muedans imagined sorcery, they experienced these imaginings as real. Sorcery’s reality lay neither in a mask that might be removed nor, somehow, behind a mask—neither “onstage” nor “offstage”—but rather was instantiated through its masking(s). In the moment of performative representation, the realities of the performance and the performed coexisted within one another.
¹⁴

I turned to Chofer and asked him bluntly if my fellow observer had been correct in interpreting the performance we witnessed as sorcery.

“Perhaps,” he answered.

I realized at once that I had backed Chofer into a corner and wondered if he was giving ground to avoid confrontation with me. “But you aren’t sorcerers, are you?” I asked, rhetorically, hoping to alleviate the tension produced by my secondhand accusation.