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Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power inPostcolonial MozambiqueAuthor(s): Harry WestSource: American Ethnologist, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 119-150Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3095118Accessed: 02/09/2009 21:53

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sorcery of construction and socialist modernization: ways of understanding power in postcolonial Mozambique

HARRY WEST New School for Social Research

In this article I examine how rural Mozambicans 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 transformations brought on by FRELIMO socialism, Muedans often drew on the familiar language of sorcery, notwithstanding FRELIMO attempts to ban- ish 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]

It was 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 Frente de LibertaJao de Mozambique (FRELIMO) and the insurgency, Resistencia Na- cional de Mozambique (RENAMO); the United Nations-sponsored demobilization of combatant armies; and the preparations for the nation's first multiparty national elections (to be staged in October 1994).' I was conducting field research in the heartland of FRELIMO power, on the Mueda plateau where FRELIMO had initiated its anticolonial guerrilla campaign in 1964 and where it had based itself until winning inde-

pendence from the Portuguese a decade later.2 Not only had strict FRELIMO vigilance prevented the South African-backed RENAMO from establishing a presence on the Mueda plateau for the duration of the postindependence civil war (1977-92),3 but FRELIMO rule within the communal villages built on the plateau after independence had also curtailed the activities of local curandeiros (the Portuguese word for healers) like Kalamatatu whose work, according to the party, was at odds with scientific socialism.

When Kalamatatu heard 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 ac-

companying us. Kalamatatu sat on a slab of tree bark that he carried with him from inside his house. Because of his cataracts, he missed us each by a few degrees as he

American Ethnologist 28(1 ): 19-150. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association.

american ethnologist

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:

When a lion is seen in the bush nearby, I prepare a pumpkin gourd with ntela [the general word used to describe a medicinal substance]. Then I go to the place where the lion was seen, and I set fire to the bush. The fire will burn to where the lion is hiding. People follow the fire, discover the lion there, and kill it. The ntela prevents the lion from harming anyone.

Kalamatatu informed 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 Kalamatatu and 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. Kalamatatu told me that they use powerful medicinal substances to bring about these transformations and are then able to use these lions to attack their victims, "just as one would use a knife."

When I asked Kalamatatu why 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. "It is 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's because we live here in these villages now!" He pointed beyond the edge of the village:

We used to live in settlements. There, when problems arose, the settlement head called attention to them. After independence, FRELIMO moved us all into villages where people from many, many settlements have had to live together. Here in the village, there is no one who can oversee the activities of so many people. Everyone does as they please. Each has his own sorcery, and no one can control them all.

socialist modernization and sorcery

Long before FRELIMO's armed campaign for Mozambican independence, Kala- matatu 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.

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sorcery of construction and socialist modernization

From the outset of the FRELIMO anticolonial 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). The decolonization of Mozambique, FRELIMO leaders often indicated, would require the liberation of its constituent communities and their members-in short, the decolonization of individual minds and the creation of what FRELIMO referred 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 FRELIMO as obscurantism.

FRELIMO leaders appreciated that changing the way Muedans and other rural Mozambicans conceived of power also entailed transforming the 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 FRELIMO leaders preaching against, or even prohibiting, the practice of tradition in these new villages.6 Villagization would allow the FRELIMO party-state to rewrite the landscape of power in rural Mozam-

bique by constructing new village-based political and economic institutions (popular assemblies, popular tribunals, and producer and consumer cooperatives, among others) that would supplant the kin-based authority structures FRELIMO considered to be 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 frustration of both Maputo-based planners and Muedans themselves, so-

cialist modernization was realized only in fragmented and, sometimes, absurdly con-

tradictory 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 emer-

gent 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 strain-

gauge" (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

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as a conservative phenomenon. In what follows, I argue that the "cultural schema" of sorcery, to use Sherry Ortner's term (1990), constituted for Muedans both a structured expression of social experience and a structuring framework for 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 transformative historical 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 literature suggesting that "occult cosmologies" flourish in the interstitial spaces 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; Kapferer 1997; Taussig 1987).7 Two ana- lytic strains run through this literature. The first line of argument emphasizes the ways in which people invoke occult cosmologies in order to resistwhen modernization oc- curs 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; Kapferer 1997; 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 distinc- tive vernacular modernity (Donham 1999; Piot 1999). Notwithstanding this, they have not always used the cultural schema of sorcery instrumentally to 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 instrumental use 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 inten- tions, 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

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fundamental characteristics of power and have served as a social diagnostics of power-a vehicle for "raking over the coals of events in search of the sense (and senselessness) of their sociability," to use Michael Taussig's words (1987:394). To these ends, the power of sorcery as a cultural schema has derived precisely from its ambiguity. Through the interpretive logic of sorcery, power is ever on the move, ever changing, ever remaking itself, ever necessary to the production of social well-being, ever dangerous to social harmony. From the settlements of the preindependence period to the villages of the postindependence period, sorcery has been considered an essential medium of power; the powerful, quite simply, have been assumed to act within the invisible realm. The question, then, has been to what ends? In contrast to the discourse of socialist modernization, promising perfectly structured and rationalized economic, political, and social institutions, the cultural schema of sorcery has warned Muedans of the fine line between socially constructive power and power that produces social divisiveness and ruin. Within the cultural schema of sorcery, the constantly shifting terrain of power and the actors that move across this terrain have been constantly subject to social assessment. No pronouncement has been accepted as definitive, no judgment final.

the settlement and its invisible realm

To illustrate historical continuities and changes in the operation and understanding of power in the Mueda plateau region in recent decades, I must first follow Kalamatatu's pointed finger to the settlements of earlier times. Nearly 60 kilometers inland and just south of the Rovuma River that divides Mozambique from Tanzania, the Mueda plateau rises nearly one thousand meters above sea level. Its sandy soils do not hold rain water close enough to the surface to be tapped by wells. Probably for this reason, the plateau remained unsettled until the middle of the 18th century, at which time coastal slave markets provided incentives for an expanding slave trade in the region, and scattered communities sought refuge on the plateau's defensible mar- gins (Alpers 1975). Migrants from several of the surrounding ethnic groups began to arrive on the plateau in parties of varying sizes,8 laying claim to lands that they cleared for cultivation and, in time, adopting the corporate identity of Makonde-a name referring to their shared historical experience as "people in search of fertile land," or likonde (Dias 1964; Liebenow 1971).

In the midst of a turbulent environment, where the threat of sudden and violent raids persisted (Maples 1882; O'Neill 1883; Thomson 1882), plateau residents constructed fortified settlements-each one called a kaja-and sought to augment their populations by themselves raiding neighboring groups situated both on the plateau and in the surrounding lowlands. Consequently, settlements were composed of a di- verse mix of peoples. Nonetheless, residents generally recognized one matrilineage-called a likola-as descendants of the settlement's founder and as proprie- tors of its surrounding lands. They also recognized an elder figure within that matrilineage as nang'olo mwene kaja, or elder steward-of-the-settlement.9

As increasing population density on the plateau heightened the dangers of inter- likola raiding in the mid-19th century, some settlement heads sought alliance with more powerful counterparts, moving their populations inside the fortifications of

larger groups and contributing to common defenses. By the time of the Portuguese conquest (ca. 1917), this trend had given rise to sizable population concentrations

comprised of as many as ten or twelve vakola (pl.) under the leadership of powerful warlords. Regardless of such alliances, each matrilineal likola maintained a distinct identity and a substantial degree of autonomy over its resources and internal affairs.

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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, brought their own sisters' sons into the settlement.

Settlements were composed of homes built in a circle with an open space in the middle.10 Although 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. In the shitala (common meeting house in the settlement center), he resolved conflicting claims over land, intervened in marriage and 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 cara- vans 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 rights to most goods procured in caravan trade, but, in order to enhance the power of the settlement under his charge, he distributed many 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 risk of 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, nomi- nating from among their ranks a humu (counselor figure) who belonged to no specific settlement but rather commanded respect from members of the likola residing in any of its settlements.12 Where 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 contrast with the nang'olo mwene kaja, the humu exercised no control over the economic affairs of 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

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knowledge of medicinal substances (mitela) was believed to determine one's capac- ity, vahumu (pl.) were considered peerless (West 1997b:60-65).

This invisible realm warrants detailed examination.13 According to Makonde beliefs in the precolonial era (beliefs many of which remain salient to this day), mitela were neutral sources of power,14 although elders were presumed to have greater knowledge of mitela than their juniors and men greater than women. Mitela could be used to protect or to attack, to cure or to kill. With the appropriate kinds of mitela, one might prolong life, enhance physical strength, ensure successful harvests, handicrafts, hunts and travels, and protect family members from illness and misfortune (Dias and Dias 1970:367). With other kinds, however, individuals might practice uwavi (sorcery).15

Vavi (sorcerers) achieved invisibility through the use of a rare form of ntela, known only to them and called shikupi, which cloaked them and their activities. Only other sorcerers who also possessed the substance could see an act committed under the veil of shikupi. While using shikupi, vavi might appear to the ordinary person to be sleeping quietly in their beds at night but, in reality, they could be congregating in the settlement center, dancing naked before flying off to feed on the flesh of their victims. If the attacks of vavi went uncontested, their victims would soon die (properly) or become zombie slaves. Most Makonde remained uncertain about what actually happened to sorcerers' victims, just as most failed to understand completely the motives for sorcery. Uwavi, most agreed, was used to destroy, but what did the mwavi (sorcerer) stand to gain? Sometimes, it was believed, vavi rendered their victims invisible so that they might work as zombie slaves (mandandosho) on the sorcerers' fields at night.16 In such cases, vavi would substitute a banana tree-made to look like the victim-for the victim's body, and unsuspecting family members would bury the banana tree, thinking their kin had died. At other times, Makonde believed, sorcerers attacked simply to destroy their neighbors or kin, to feed their uncontrollable cravings for human flesh, or to repay debts to other sorcerers who had shared the meat of pre- vious victims with their nighttime colleagues. In any case, the most dramatic attacks of vavi were accomplished when they took on the form of predators (such as lions or

leopards) or fabricated such animals to work at their behest.17 Whether or not vavi ultimately benefited in the visible realm from their power in

the invisible realm, they constituted a grave danger to ordinary Makonde, who referred to sorcery that produced illness and deaths as uwavi wa kojoa (sorcery of dan-

ger). In the face of menacing and unseen vavi, most Makonde were left with the sense that their own knowledge and stock of mitela was minute. As a result, they often turned to specialists referred to as vanu va mitela (medicine men) or as vakulaula (pl., healers) when met with illness or misfortune. Such specialists accentuated the ambi-

guity of power in the invisible realm even as they treated its casualties. Their first line of defense against uwavi was preventative. A clay pot filled with selected forms of mitela (called a lipande) was buried in the ground beneath a home the healer wished to defend. Should a sorcerer attack, the lipande would explode, wounding the at- tacker. The second line of defense was curative. In some cases, the healer was able to cure the patient by turning over or turning back (kupilikula) the sorcerer's attack; this was accomplished by providing the victim with mitela more forceful than that used by the attacking sorcerer. If such attempts to cure a patient failed, however, the healer

might suspect that the patient was not, in fact, a sorcerer's victim (nkulogwekwa), but rather a sorcerer who had wounded himself or herself (nkulibyaa) during an unsuc- cessful attack on a well-defended target, or who suffered from an attack turned back

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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 trust that the healer had given up uwavi wa kojoa (sorcery of danger), had retired from 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. Disor- der in the invisible realm might all too easily yield chaos in the visible realm. For that reason, a successful settlement head had to rule at night just as he ruled in the day- time. 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 vigor- ously. 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 into the shitala in the wee hours of the morning, just before sunrise, and he would stand and speak out loud at the top of his voice: "I see you! I know who you are! You are killing us, the people of this settlement! You are killing us with your uwavi! If you don't stop, I will drive you from this settlement! I will finish with you! I see you! I know who 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 re- nowned 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 Man- dumbwe 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 predatory sorcerers, his presence on the battlefield shaped the war in definitive ways. The sorcery practiced in

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such a settlement was sometimes referred to 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, in- suring 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 in- tra-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 transform the practice and understanding of power in rural Mozambique came only after important transformations to power wrought by Portuguese rule. For the Makonde of the Mueda plateau, colonialism was a short- lived 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 East Africa (Ferreira 1946; 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.21 Notwithstanding the posting at that time of Portuguese officials to even remote regions like the plateau, indigenous political structures were not dismantled under colonial rule. Throughout the colonial period, settlement heads continued to oversee the affairs of 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. First and 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 require- ments, post administrators elevated 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),22 even 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 self- interest at the expense of the larger community in the visible realm, subordinate populations lost confidence in these leaders to practice a sorcery of construction rather than a sorcery of predation.23

Further complicating matters, great numbers of young men, and even some young women, took to crossing the Rovuma River border to escape the harsh colonial regime (Alpers 1984; Egero 1974; Iliffe 1979; West 1997b:101-111). They often returned years later after having worked on Tanganyikan sisal plantations, usually carrying

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with them unprecedented riches. Unlike meat brought home from the hunt or goods procured in caravan trade, the bicycles, sewing machines, and cash repatriated to the settlement by this new generation resisted appropriation and redistribution by 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.

Returning youths 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.24 In short, despite the preservation of the settlement and its political structures throughout the colonial period, sorcery constituted an ever-increasing threat to Makonde vakola (West 1997b:1 1 1).

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 FRE- LIMO-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 FRELIMO bases in areas that the Front called "liberated zones."

To gain and consolidate the support of the rural populations on whom the guerrilla campaign depended for food, porterage, intelligence, and new guerrilla recruits, it was incumbent on FRELIMO operatives 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 FRELIMO leadership 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 required the attainment of revolutionary class 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 FRELIMO ideological campaign against obscurantist beliefs and institutions was tightly wrapped up with practical concerns of immediate significance to the guerrilla initiative. In the months immediately prior to the inauguration of the armed campaign, as FRELIMO sought to mobilize support in the Mozambican interior through identifying sympathizers and selling membership cards to them, native authorities presented the Front with grave dangers. Those who informed Portuguese officials of the activities of FRELIMO mobilizers placed these young operatives at risk and fright- ened off potential recruits. To overcome this, FRELIMO operatives were required to swing the balance of terror in their favor by undertaking the dramatic assassination of

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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 affairs of their respective vakola, albeit as members of FRELIMO-established committees rather than as vanag'olo vene kaja (pl.).26

The language of power spoken within the new FRELIMO hierarchy differed in more substantial ways than the mere change in titles applied to authority figures. A wartime song sung by FRELIMO Makonde proclaimed:

We are the shadow of the people, We don't trust in mitela, We don't trust in dinumba [pumpkin gourds used to mix and carry medicinal substances], Dyangele [divining] causes conflict among us and sets us back in our war initiatives.

The FRELIMO ban 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 partially because the naming of sorcerers in the close confines of wartime bush bases might have given rise to dangerous moments of dis-

unity. In addition, the guerrilla command structure could 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, "If our

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 Portu-

guese in 1917].27 We needed them to trust in the techniques of guerrilla warfare, not in mitela."

FRELIMO's scientific socialism encompassed the teaching of new languages and

techniques. From early on in the war, FRELIMO began 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 Lipangati ex-

plained to me:

People had to be educated to fight a guerrilla war. They had to be able to read and write to send messages from one base to another. They had to be able to add and sub- tract to manage accounts of the materials traded in and out of the liberated zones. They had to be able to do basic equations to fire a mortar. They had to understand the fundamentals of biology to vaccinate people so as to prevent the spread of epidemics in the liberated zones.

FRELIMO revolutionary socialism consistently juxtaposed science with superstition in its campaign to supplant old forms of power with new.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the residents of the liberated zones did not, in fact, learn the new terms and techniques taught by FRELIMO operatives. 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 revolution-

ary struggle. At the same time, however, despite FRELIMO prohibitions, the more

long-standing language of sorcery proved well-suited to elucidate ongoing historical events and processes.

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The fundamental operative logics of guerrilla warfare, ironically, were highly amenable to the cultural schema of sorcery. As young FRELIMO mobilizers 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 FRELIMO mobilizers 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 FRELIMO cadres in the liberated zones, many Makonde assumed that these FRELIMO cadres were, in the end, more powerful sorcerers than those they subdued.

Then came the war itself. In the 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.28 In 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 over- head, 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 infiltrate the liberated zones, to sew discord by commit- ting atrocities against civilians in the name of FRELIMO, and to report back coordi- nates for bombing raids.

For those living in FRELIMO liberated 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 FRELIMO domain. This, most suspected, was facilitated by infiltrators and collaborators who moved unidentified among them and ferried between the liberated zones and Portuguese bases, providing information. As the effectiveness of counterin- surgents 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 might offer the flesh to repay a debt (perhaps, even, to a Portuguese colleague).

The success of FRELIMO security 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 ex- guerrilla told me of the most feared security operative on the plateau: "He would pass a FRELIMO column 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 traitor to 'D' [the FRE- LIMO prison camp]. He had seen something! He saw everything!" In a word, FRE- LIMO security agents were assumed, in spite of FRELIMO antisorcery rhetoric, to practice sorcery themselves. Because most Makonde supported the FRELIMO agenda, they were inclined to look on FRELIMO leaders as sorcerers of construction (vavi va kudenga) and to conclude that the incarceration or execution of occasional

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individuals was founded on certain knowledge of their destructive deeds, whether these deeds were visible to the ordinary person or not (West 1997b:1 88-192).30 What is more, as several people told me, when FRELIMO leaders led assemblies in the liberated zones in chanting slogans such as "Down with Obscurantism! Down with Sor- cery," it was widely assumed that they were criticizing only uwavi wa kujoa (sorcery of danger) and not uwavi wa kudenga (sorcery of construction). In fact, people who remembered them told me that these call and response exchanges were the enact- ment by FRELIMO leaders of a sorcery of construction in the tradition of settlement heads standing at night in the shitala and calling out, "We don't want your uwavi here!" The respect afforded FRELIMO leaders, like the respect given settlement heads of old, was inseparable from fear of their power in both the visible and invisible realms. Descriptions of FRELIMO guerrillas as "lions of the forest" expressed with deep historical resonance the ambivalence with which most Muedans viewed them.

While FRELIMO leaders at the highest levels-some of whom were Western educated-may have wished completely to eliminate sorcery as a language of power in the liberated zones, FRELIMO operatives at lower levels remained ambivalent about sorcery as a cultural schema, further contributing to its continuing salience. Most guerrillas and, even guerrilla commanders were born in rural communities and were reared believing in sorcery in one form or another. Throughout the war, many openly criticized such beliefs while, at the same time, continuing to consult diviners and healers themselves. Residents of the plateau whom I interviewed could identify consistently to which healers specific commanders went when seeking protective mitela during the war. Even Samora Machel, FRELIMO President from 1969 onward, visited several healers including, frequently, an nkulaula [(s.), healer] named healer Alabi, whose house he entered. Whether or not Machel was treated inside this house will never be known, but that is precisely the point. By entering the healer's house, Machel fed Muedan suspicions that he sought mitela, the currency of power in the invisible realm. Machel could not have been unaware of such suspicions.

rewriting the landscape of power

When the war for Mozambican independence ended in 1974, people in the Mueda region looked forward to moving back to their abandoned settlements, where groves of trees might once more provide sweet fruits and cooling shade and where likola members might once more live in close proximity to the tombs of their ancestors. This hope did not fit with FRELIMO's plans, however. FRELIMO's seizure of state power presented it with the opportunity-the necessity, even-to consolidate control over the former liberated zones. After the withdrawal of Portuguese troops and the granting of independence in 1975, FRELIMO leaders told Muedans that they would be moving en masse to sites where they would construct villages of unprecedented size. These communal villages would serve as models for the rest of the country in FRELIMO's campaign to bring socialist modernization to rural Mozambique (Casal 1991; Coelho 1993; West 1997b:1 97-199).

FRELIMO presented villagization to the populations of Mueda in the form of a social contract. Rural populations would be concentrated into villages of 250 to 1,000 families. They would build their own homes, as well as the buildings that would serve them as schools, health posts, shops, storehouses, and government and party offices. The government would then provide teachers, health workers, medicine, school- books, basic consumer goods, agricultural tools, machinery, extension workers and, of utmost importance on the Mueda plateau, clean water supply. The government would also coordinate transportation and trade between villages and urban centers.

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In cooperation with villagers, the party would even organize cultural and political events and activities in the village center. In short, according to FRELIMO's vision, communal villages would constitute "cities born in the forests" (FRELIMO 1976:8).

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 rural backwardness 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 repre- sent 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 ration-

ally in the interests of all members of the community. In practice, poder popular obeyed a different logic. The lingering command cul-

ture of the guerrilla organization was reinforced by the 1977 transformation of FRE- LIMO into a vanguard party. FRELIMO leaders embraced the mandate to educate the masses and to steer village affairs according 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 FRELIMO political hierarchy, these bodies served more as organs for the dissemina- tion of state directives than as vehicles for democratic governance (Egero 1987). 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 authority of modern state institutions in place of the rule of elder authority figures who had served the Por- tuguese as colonial intermediaries. If plateau populations had returned to their former settlements at independence, FRELIMO would 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 re- gained power within rural society but, also, have governed through the practice of uwavi wa kudenga. FRELIMO party leaders worked systematically and intentionally to insure that elders compromised by collaboration with the colonial regime be ex- cluded 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 dif- ferentials 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.

Ironically, visibility constituted a key medium through which FRELIMO officials 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

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were assigned to 25 family units. From the 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-appointed village president. The president could pass unobstructed through surveillance corridors in a matter of hours where pre- viously 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 promptly would later be interrogated and/or chastised.

The radical transformation of power in rural Mozambique was, in this way, bound up with the dramatic rewriting of 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; Fitzpatrick 1994). According to Scott:

Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society-to vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property, conduct literacy campaigns, conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation stand- ards, catch criminals, start universal schooling-requires the invention of units that are visible. The units in question might be citizens, villages, trees, fields, houses, or people grouped according to age, depending on the type of intervention. Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to 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 attempts to 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,32 he also stresses that the sweeping social transformations such states enact have frequently been conceived of by modernist re- formers 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 infrastructural components. Coming as it did in the midst of postcolonial exuberance, this was certainly true of the FRELIMO campaign to bring about socialist modernization of the nation's rural areas (Casal 1991; Coelho 1993, 1998).

There was, however, another fundamental objective to the FRELIMO villagization project and the campaign to render Mozambicans legible-visible-to the newly independent state. At root, villagization was tightly bound up with issues of state se-

curity (Casal 1991). Having so recently moved among scattered populations recruit-

ing support for antistate insurgency and having so successfully used the forest as a

sanctuary against the power of the colonial state, FRELIMO leaders found dispersed settlements of rural Mozambicans threatening once the party rose to occupy the institutions of state power. FRELIMO anxieties 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 Mozam- bican region and quickly adopted the same strategy FRELIMO had used against the

Portuguese-namely, gathering rural communities close to its bases where they could be integrated into guerrilla activities.33 As civil war spread through Mozambique in the 1980s, FRELIMO sought 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.

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The Mozambican writer Mia Couto poignantly depicts how FRELIMO's postindependence villagization campaign was dedicated to rendering rural Mozambicans 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 returned to 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 setting-they were soon met with unsympathetic FRELIMO officials who arrested and 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). FRELIMO officials made it clear to plateau residents that the war against RENAMO required vigilance, possible only where people lived in village concentrations.

The village-based security strategy deployed in the Mueda region successfully prevented RENAMO from 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 Noorma- homed 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 agricultural cooperatives without tools and seeds.34 The sophisticated water supply system built on the plateau after independence (Tecnica Engenheiros Consultores, Lda. 1994; UNICEF 1993) 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, resent- ment and frustration had spread through the villages of northern Cabo Delgado (Ofi- cina 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 transport harvests to store in their residential compounds. They complained bitterly of 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

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socialist modernization. Instead of seeing rationalized power at work in the villages, Muedans witnessed rampant opportunism as village institutions foundered and col-

lapsed. The story told to me by a villager in Matambalale was typical:

We had a consumer coop here. It purchased clothing and cloth and allocated it to each of the four bairros in the village. The chef do bairro [neighborhood authority] was supposed to ration it evenly so that each family could buy its allotment. It worked okay until about the time that the consumer coop was merged with the producer coop. The finances were combined. It couldn't survive that. It became a big confusion. The producer coop disappeared, the consumer coop disappeared, the money disappeared, and the people who ran it 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 FRELIMO leaders from the Mueda region appeared to Muedans to be on the take as they used military transport planes 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 FRELIMO socialism unraveled during the civil war, the government eventu-

ally conceded to International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored structural adjustment (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. From the perspective of most Muedans, however, things only worsened in the period leading to the accord. FRELIMO leaders-once staunch socialists-now appropriated state farms, warehouses, garages, and petrol stations as their personal property.36 Party and state leaders secured prefer- ential treatment for themselves and their clients by bank officials dispersing Non- Governmental Organization (NGO)-sponsored loans to buy trucks, tractors, and grain mills (West 1997b:253-260). Such behavior often solicited remarks from onlookers about the propensity and ability of these powerful few to "eat everything," a euphemism for predatory acts of sorcery.37

Muedan ways of inhabiting communal villages

FRELIMO's dramatic rewriting of the Muedan landscape survived even the col-

lapse of its socialist modernization project, making it difficult to interpret Muedan re-

sponses 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 retreat into "non-state spaces," which are illegible from the center. Muedans, however, could not abandon their villages and return to 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.38 Villages, 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 vil-

lage market. Old men stood by the roadway that passed through the village, exchang- ing 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

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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 storefront windows, all against the grain of the rationalized urban grid. For de Certeau, urban residents' "ways of doing" such things proliferate as "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 purpose- fully, 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 agricultural plots 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.39 Even 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 prints that, after the 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. Likola women 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 FRELIMO to make me live beside this man who is not my uncle?" (West 1997b:236-247, 1998).

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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 paraphras- ing de Certeau, encompassed specific ways of understanding power. Where FRE- LIMO 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 con- stant 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. Rather than 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 interpreted official 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. Cer- tain 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 first discussed 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 unfamiliar to 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 right to build likola meeting houses from which they might perform this function.41 Therefore, Kalamatatu explained 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. Kalamatatu and others referred to the correspond- ing 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.42 Kalamatatu asked me, rhetori-

cally, "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.43 On this subject, Kalamatatu spoke with a certainty grounded in bit- ter 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 that the water supply system was stopped up with skulls and limbs, the hidden refuse

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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 transformed into 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 risk of head-on encounters with the forces that or- dered their communities. Peter Geschiere has written:

Occult forces are, by definition, hidden, which renders them extra efficacious in an authoritarian context. The intrigue and rumors that surround witchcraft always refer to secrets. Through this, the idiom creates a space, imaginary or not, that is beyond the state's authority. [1997:99]

For Muedans, the cultural schema of sorcery, obscure and ambiguous even to domi- nant political actors, sometimes served as a subaltern discourse. Through cautious and subtle reference to notions embedded within a cultural schema much larger than 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 particular individuals 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. Accumu- lation is justified in a world where the "haves" are victims and the "have-nots" are perpetrators of 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 literature often emphasizes how people use occult cosmologies either to resist or embrace things modern; however, I wish to emphasize the difficulty Muedans would have in instrumentally juxtaposing the visible and invisible worlds to strategic ends. Just as sorcerers wound themselves while attacking victims,

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ordinary Muedans might as easily have injured themselves in attempting to make instrumental use of sorcery accusations.46 Both during the independence war and after- ward, one who spoke too often, too loudly, or too confidently about the use of mandandosho by FRELIMO leaders 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. After structural adjustment gave rise to individual forms of wealth, party and state officials 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 actu-

ally 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 return to 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 frustrated villager 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.47 For most Muedans, the forms of power introduced by socialist modernization and its ultimate collapse were persistently elusive. Through discursive engage- ment with the realm of sorcery-through sustaining suspicions, spreading rumor and innuendo, making accusations and denying them, and proffering explanations- Muedans generally condemned the relatively more rich and powerful among them without condemning riches and power per se, thereby expressing frustration with the unfulfilled promises of modernity while sustaining hope for a future in which the desires cultivated by modernizing institutions and processes would be satisfied.

notes

Acknowledgments. Field research for this article was conducted between August 1993 and February 1995 and between July 1999 and September 1999; it was supported by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the United States Institute of Peace, the Wenner-Gren Foun- dation for Anthropological Research, and the Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom). Institutional support was provided in the field by the Arquivos do Patrim6nio Cul- tural (ARPAC) and the director of their offices in Pemba, Estevao Mpalume, as well as the Asso- ciaCao dos Combatentes de Luta de Liberta5ao Nacional (ACLLN) and the director of their

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department of historical research in Pemba, Lazaro Mmala. 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 ACLLN in 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, Elizabeth Marberry, Todd Sanders, and Mike Wil- liams.

1. For accounts of the Mozambican peace process and elections, see African-European In- stitute/AWEPA 1995; Chan and Venancio 1998; Mazula 1995; Synge 1997; United Nations 1995; and West 1997a.

2. The most comprehensive works on the history of the Mozambican war for independence include Henricksen 1983; Mondlane 1969; and Munslow 1983. See West 1997b:142-196 for broader references to the literature on the war as well as for detailed accounts of the experi- ences of the war shared by residents of the plateau region.

3. For comprehensive accounts of the Mozambican civil war, see Africa Watch 1992; Fin-

negan 1992; and Vines 1991. 4. See Evans 1990 on the use of this term in the context of Laotian socialism. 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 revolutionary transformation.

7. While this term is sometimes read in a pejorative sense, these authors use it to refer sim-

ply 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 responsi- bilities 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 Mak- onde. 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 ritual specialist 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 primarily on 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 neutrality of 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 sorcerers must learn to use mitela to accomplish

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their deeds. Ultimately, translation of belief systems such as uwavi into European terminol- ogy-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 provide readers with a rudimentary meaning of the term, but I remind them that a more precise meaning of uwavi can only be achieved through detailed appreciation of its cultural specificity.

16. Belief in zombie laborers is common in Africa. See, for example, Beidelman 1963; Geschiere and Fisiy 1994; Rowlands and Warnier 1988; Sanders 1999; Shaw 1997; Stadler 1996; and Willis 1968.

17. A team of researchers led by Portuguese anthropologist Jorge Dias observed and docu- mented these beliefs while working in the Mueda region in the late 1950s (Dias and Dias 1970:363). The belief that sorcerers can transform themselves into predatory animals-often called "familiars" in the literature-is widespread not only in Africa, but in other regions of the world as well. See, for example, Auslander 1993; Douglas 1970; Goheen 1996; Jackson 1990; Kapferer 1997; Marwick 1970; Middleton and Winter 1963; Niehaus 1993; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975; Roberts 1986; Schneider 1962; Taussig 1987; and Wyatt 1950. See also Henderson the Rain King, a novel written by Saul Bellow (1958) who studied anthropology before his fiction writing career.

18. The notion that healers are cured sorcerers is also widespread. See Kapferer 1997; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975; and Taussig 1987 for detailed descriptions of this phenomenon.

19. See Masquelier 1992:66 and Weiss 1996:122-124 for discussion of relationships between power and vision in other African contexts.

20. According to Alma Gottlieb's accounts (1989; 1992:104), among the Beng of Cote d'lvoire, political authorities are systematically assumed to be witches who have consolidated power through killing three family members from prescribed categories, thus sacrificing their self-interests (bound up with those of their uterine kin) on behalf of the larger group over which they will govern. Their commission of the "ultimate act of destruction" (1989:262) makes them "ultimately responsible for all illness and misfortune, all crimes and sins-and all acts of witchcraft" (1989:263), which they will thus seek to minimize. See also Goheen 1996 and Schmoll 1993 on the inherently ambivalent power of sorcery and witchcraft.

21. The northern region of Mozambique was granted as a concession to the Nyassa Com- pany between 1891 and 1929, but the company only exploited the plateau region after World War I (Neil-Tomlinson 1977; Vail 1976). The Nyassa Company's rudimentary administrative structures, and many of its personnel, were absorbed by the Portuguese colonial administration when the Company charter expired (West 1997b:90-91).

22. The literature on colonial Africa is filled with accounts of such local level crises of legitimacy provoked by colonial over-rule. See, for example, Lan 1985 and Mamdani 1996.

23. Niehaus (1993:509-514) describes how chiefs under apartheid in South Africa lost control over the local discourse on witchcraft, allowing for dramatic rises in witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts.

24. Geschiere (1997) calls attention to similarly conflicting interpretations of the workings of sorcery in contemporary Cameroon, explaining that some consider sorcery a force that aids in accumulation while others think of it as a leveling force. See also Ashforth 1996 and Bastian 1993.

25. Lan (1985) describes similar attempts by Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) guerrillas to forge revolutionary class consciousness among the peasants of the Dande region in Southern Rhodesia.

26. Interesting comparisons can be drawn between the Mozambican case and that of Zim- babwe as described by Lan (1985). In the Zimbabwean case, ZANLA guerrillas were able to forego a relationship with chiefs discredited by collaboration with the colonial regime by using spirit mediums as their entrees into local communities. In the Mozambican case, FRELIMO was required, eventually, to incorporate former colonial intermediaries into its own administrative hierarchy. While Lan does not dwell on the issue of the threat of violence, other contributions to

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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-Maji rising just across the Rovuma River in German East Africa (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 Kairo that 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 replac- ing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and regulations, they are certain to disrupt the web in ways that they cannot possibly foresee. [1998:256] 33. For detailed accounts of RENAMO tactics, see Africa Watch 1992; Geffray 1990; Hall

1990; Minter 1989; Morgan 1990; Vines 1991; Wilson 1992; and Young 1990. 34. Donham (1999:179) describes similar failures 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 similar trends 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. For other 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 majority of 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 bounda-

ries 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 "neck- lacing" 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) portrays how 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.

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44. Stoller (1995) and Piot (1997:47,101) gives similar accounts of the expression of 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 Shi- makonde. Gable (1995) describes similar expressions 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 New School for Social Research 65 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 westh@newschool. edu

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