Dissertation Linda Van de Kamp PDF

Violent Conversion
This research is part of the research programme ‘Conversion Careers in Global

Pentecostalism: A Comparative Study in Four Continents’, funded by the ‘The Future
of the Religious Past’ programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO) and hosted by the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and the African
Studies Centre, Leiden.
Reading Committee:
Prof.dr. R. Sarró (Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon University)
Prof.dr. B. Meyer (VU University, Amsterdam and Utrecht University)
Prof.dr. M. de Bruijn (African Studies Centre, Leiden and Leiden University)
Prof.dr. E. Macamo (Centre for African Studies, University of Basel)
Dr. R. Spronk (University of Amsterdam)
Cover design and illustration: Rufus de Vries, http://www.rufusdevries.nl/
Printed by Wöhrmann Print Service, Zutphen
© Linda van de Kamp, Amsterdam, 2011
All right reserved. Save exceptions stated by the law, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system of any nature, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the author.
VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT
Violent Conversion
Brazilian Pentecostalism and the Urban Pioneering

of Women in Mozambique
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad Doctor aan

de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
op gezag van de rector magnificus
prof.dr. L.M. Bouter,
in het openbaar te verdedigen
ten overstaan van de promotiecommissie
van de faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen
op vrijdag 16 september 2011 om 13.45 uur
in de aula van de universiteit,
De Boelelaan 1105
door
Linda Joanne van de Kamp
geboren te Assen
promotor: prof.dr. A.F. Droogers
copromotor: dr. R.A. van Dijk
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1
PRELUDE 3
1. INTRODUCTION 5
1.1 Pentecostalism 8
1.2 Pentecostalism in Mozambique 12
1.2.1 Brazilian and prominent 13
1.2.2 Urban and gendered 18
1.3 Research topics and questions 19
1.3.1 Pioneering 20
1.3.2 Violence 23
1.3.3 Research questions and the book’s outline 26
1.4 Methodology 28
1.4.1 Researching religion in a city 31
1.4.2 Distance and Intimacy 33
2. PENTECOSTALISM IN AFRICA 37
2.1 Introduction 37
2.2 Pentecostalism, family and gender 37
2.3 Pentecostalism and (in)security 41
2.4 Pentecostalism and development 46
2.5 Conclusion 50
3. THE FORMATION OF A GENDERED NATION-STATE IN MAPUTO 53

3.1 Introduction 53
3.2 The reproduction of life in the formation of the nation-state 54
3.2.1 Labour migration and the colonial state 56
3.2.2 Mother Africa and Father Marx 58
3.3 The city in nation-state formation 62
3.3.1The city as civilizing symbol of the Portuguese colonial
nation-state 63
3.3.2 Frelimo’s continuation of the rural-urban divide 65
3.4 The nation-state’s gendered urban spaces 69
3.4.1 The socialist family in the city 70
3.4.2 Post-war period: A feminizing city? 72
3.5 Conclusion 76
4. TRANSNATIONAL SPACES OF CONQUEST: THE MOBILITY OF
BRAZILIAN PENTECOSTALISM IN THE REPRODUCTIVE DOMAIN 81
4.1 Introduction 81
4.2 Religion and Mobility in Southeastern Africa 82
4.2.1 Mission churches and AICs shaping the Mozambican
nation-state 83
4.3 The transnational mobility of Pentecostalism 89
4.4 South-South Pentecostalism and the Lusophone Atlantic:
‘Macumba’ and ‘feitiçaria’ 93
4.5 Pioneering the urban reproductive domain transnationally 100
4.6 Conclusion 103
5. MOVING FRONTIERS:
THE GENREATIONAL TRAJECTORIES OF PENTECOSTAL WOMEN 107
5.1 Introduction 107
5.2 Four generations of Pentecostal women 110
5.2.1 Generation of 60-75 year olds 111
5.3 The rupture of continued pioneering 126
5.4 Conclusion 129
6. CONVERTING THE SPIRIT SPOUSE:

THE VIOLENT TRANSFORMATION OF THE FEMALE BODY 133
6.2 Socio-spiritual transformations 135
6.3 The South-South transnational spirit of ‘pombagira’ 140
6.4 Converting the spirit spouse: Embodying spiritual warfare 145
6.4.1 Spirit spouse relations as communication 146
6.4.2 Disconnecting the relational body 149
6.4.3 Armed bodies 156
6.5 Conclusion 159
7. ‘TERAPIA DO AMOR’: LEARNING TO LOVE PUBLICLY 161
7.2 Love, sexuality and marriage in Maputo 164
7.3 Romantic love, ‘telenovelas’ and Brazilian pastors 168
7.4 Brazilian Pentecostal Counselling 174
7.5 ‘Terapia do amor’ 177
7.6 Transnational Pentecostal therapeutic reflection and actions 181
7.6.1 Realizing love, disciplining the body 184
7.6.2 The violence of downplaying senses 191
7.7 Conclusion 194
8. THE SOUTH-SOUTH TRANSNATIONAL PROSPERITY GOSPEL:

‘HOLY BONFIRES’ AND CAMPAIGNS 197
8.2 Burying Life 200
8.3 Money and changing dependencies in the urban domain 202
8.4 Tithes, offerings and campaigns 204
8.4.1 Business Courses 206
8.4.2 Luisa’s ‘holocausto’ 208
8.5 Pentecostal aid: Help yourself 211
8.6 Conclusion 217
9. VIOLENT CONVERSION: CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION 221

9.1 Violent conversion 222
9.2 Pentecostalism, family and gender 226
9.3 Pentecostalism and (in)security 228
9.4 Pentecostalism and development 230
APPENDIX: BRAZILIAN PENTECOSTAL CHURCHES IN MOZAMBIQUE 233

Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus 234
Igreja Pentecostal Deus é Amor 237
Igreja Evangélica Cristã Maná 238
Igreja Baptista Renovada 240
Igreja Evangélica Assembleia de Deus 240
BIBLIOGRAPHY 243
NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING – DUTCH SUMMARY 283
RESUMO PORTUGUÊS – PORTUGUESE SUMMARY 293

Acknowledgements
Many people and institutions played a vital role in the writing of this thesis. My greatest
debt of gratitude is to my supervisors: André Droogers and Rijk van Dijk. André, thank
you for offering me intellectually challenging and culturally enriching years as a PhD
student and for giving me the chance to live in Mozambique. I benefited from your
advice on many issues and I appreciated your detailed comments on every text I
submitted. Rijk, this study is clearly the product of the numerous discussions we had in
places as diverse as the African Studies Centre in Leiden and a beach bar in
Mozambique. Thank you for introducing me to the study of religion in Africa. I am
grateful to you for all your bewildering questions that finally led us to acknowledge the
violence in conversion.
Most of all, I am indebted to my Mozambican interlocutors. You all kindly
found the time to share your experiences and life stories with me and these shaped this
study. For reasons of safety and in most cases at your own request, your names cannot
be listed here but I hope that you will recognize aspects of your own conversion in this
book.
I am also indebted to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NWO) for the financial support I received from their Future of the Religious Past
Programme. Their contribution is gratefully acknowledged.
I was helped by numerous persons and institutions in Mozambique and I wish
to thank them all here. The Centro de Estudos Africanos at the University Eduardo
Mondlane kindly allowed me to be an affiliate and I particularly acknowledge the
support of Teresa Cruz e Silva and the assistance of Hilario Dyuty and the library staff.
I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology for
the discussions we had and the chance they gave me to present the preliminary results of
my research in a seminar, and especially Júlio Langa for helping me with the focus
group and doing some fieldwork with me. I also gratefully acknowledge the help
provided by the Direcção Nacional de Assuntos Religiosos (National Religious Affairs
Department) and the Conselho Cristão de Moçambique (Christian Council of
Mozambique) with information about churches in Mozambique; the Forum Mulher and
Women and Law in Southern Africa for organizing a seminar about my research;
Prometra and Narciso Mahumane for introducing me to local healers and allowing me
to join their fieldwork trips; Job Massingue, Joice from Boane, Isaura and Cremildo
from Patrice Lumumba and curandeiros from Maluana and Chibuto-Macalawane for
the knowledge they shared with me about ‘tradition’ and particularly the ‘spirit spouse’;
the Centre Ca Paz in Machava, Henny Slegh and Marcelina Chai Chai for involving me
in the programme of psychosocial assistance in cases of sexual and domestic violence;
the women’s group at one of the Assemblies of God churches in São Damaso for all the
Bible studies I attended and the conversations we had; Esmeralda Pelembe-Marsh for
her useful contacts; Antonio Justino Gune for the Changana lessons; Lenilda Guimarães
and Linda Mercer for demonstrating a different kind of Brazilian involvement in
Mozambique than I had become used to during my research; and Roel Borren, Kitty den
Boogert, Esther Bouma, Hette Domburg, Petra Doorn, Josje van der Linden, the late
José Lovane, Katie Magill, Sanna van Roosmalen, Francisco and Raquel Sevene and
Anoquinha for all their hospitality and wonderful conversations.
This thesis was written in the convivial atmosphere of the Department of
Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the VU
University, Amsterdam (VU) and at the African Studies Centre, Leiden (ASC). I thank
the senior staff, post-docs, PhD students and the support staff at the VU and the ASC
for their inspiration, time and support. I greatly benefited from the meetings of the
research group Conversion Careers in Global Pentecostalism of which this study was a
part and my thanks go to everyone there: André Bakker, Henri Gooren, the late Anton
Houtepen, Kim Knibbe, Daniëlle Koning, Rangel de Oliveira Medeiros, Ikuya Noguchi,
João Rickli, Marjo de Theije, Peter Versteeg and Marleen de Witte. A special word of
thanks to Birgit Meyer for her enthusiasm and encouragement, and to Miranda Klaver
and Regien Smit for their friendship, support and the stimulating discussions we had. I
also greatly enjoyed and benefited from the meetings of the ASC’s Agency in Africa
theme group, and later from the Connections and Transformations group. Special thanks
go to Mirjam de Bruijn and everyone else who participated in them. My thanks also go
to Blandina Kilama, Margot Leegwater, Walter Nkwi, Samuel Ntewusu, Lotte
Pelckmans, Doreen Setume, Sebastiaan Soeters, Lotje de Vries and everyone with
whom I spent some time in the fantastic ASC’s ‘PhD room’.
I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of many colleagues who kindly
provided their time, expertise and contacts at various stages of my research: Manuel G.
Mendes de Araújo, Rogério Batine, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, Jan van Butselaar, José
Capela, Giulia Cavallo, Isaias Chachine, Catrine Christiansen, Astrid Bochow,
Francisco Coelho de Carvalho, Ana Bénard da Costa, Maria Frahm-Arp, Paul Freston,
Paul Germond, Jan-Bart Gewald, Paulo Granjo, Kristina Helgesson, Victor Igreja,
Carolien Jacobs, Peggy Levitt, Clara Mafra, Gilberto Mahumane, Sandra Manuel, Ana
Monteiro, Martijn Oosterbaan, Celeste Quintino, Gerhard Seibert, Bento Sitoe, Jason
Sumich, Roelof and Renske van Til, Klaas van Walraven and Marílio Wane.
My thanks also go to Ann Reeves for carefully correcting the English in this
thesis; to Rufus de Vries for the beautiful photos and for designing the cover; and to
André Droogers and João Rickli for correcting the Portuguese summary.
Finally, I am grateful to my family and friends for their support and interest in
this research. And I thank my husband Peter Mulder from the bottom of my heart for
accompanying me on my fieldwork in Mozambique and for helping me complete this
thesis. I promise that I will not bother you anymore with the ups and downs of a PhD
student’s life and will now embark on new adventures with you.
Prelude
‘You need to pray while walking through the streets of Maputo,’ Joana tells me on the
way to a Brazilian Pentecostal church. Her words need little explanation. My time in
Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and earlier experiences with Joana and others
have taught me important lessons. Robbery is danger Number One and Number Two is
the traffic. However Joana points to a group of men who are sitting on a wall next to
some barracas (stalls) where women dressed in colorful capulanas (printed cotton
clothes) are selling vegetables and drinks. I feel that these men, enjoying a Mozambican
2M beer, have their eyes fixed on us. Joana grabs my arm to cross the street to where
we will catch the chapa (public transport/minibus) to the church. Young guys shout out
the destinations while a crowd of people who have just finished work jostle to find a
seat on their journey home. We are squashed together to allow more people onto the
chapa and when we leave, Joana warms me to take care: ‘Why is someone looking at
you? Why is someone following you? Does he have good or bad intentions?’
It is twilight. The noise of chapa horns, mobile phones and crackling radio
speakers fill the air. The smell of exhaust fumes is pervasive. I had met Joana at her
office at the university before going to her church. She gives me a meaningful look as
she says: ‘It is Friday’. I remember the conversation I had with her and her friend Julia
last week when they explained why they were still unmarried at the ages of 29 and 40
respectively. They told me about Fridays and how it is ‘men’s day’, when men visit
bars, drink and chat up women, or when they secretly visit their amantes (lovers). Julia
and Joana had not accepted their former partners’ ‘Friday sessions’.
Friday evening is also the weekly time for liberating evil powers in Pentecostal
churches. Joana and I enter the church building where about a thousand people, mostly
women, have already started praying and shouting under the guidance of the pastor
who is screaming through huge speakers: ‘Go awaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy, you demon, go,
go, go, go’. Everybody is furiously waving their hands to drive the evil out of their lives
and screaming ‘go out’ and again ‘go out [bad spirit, LvdK], go out and never come
back again’. The pastor continues: ‘You, who follow these women everywhere, even into
their beds, leave them, in the name of Jesus Christ’. Some of the children start crying
when they see their mothers yelling and kicking. This is Joana’s fourth liberation
session in a series of eight. Over these eight weeks she is also fasting and preparing a
financial offering of US$ 2000 (she earns US$ 100 a month) that she will deliver during
the final session. Her aim is to conquer all the evil powers in her life and to open up a
road to future success and happiness.
Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Patrice Lumumba, Maputo © Rufus de Vries
5
1. Introduction
Soon after I arrived in Mozambique in 2005 to study the growth in Brazilian Pentecostal
churches in urban areas, it became clear that they were attracting large numbers of
successful, upwardly mobile women. These women appeared to be attending
Pentecostal services following the breakdown of their marriages due to spirits
obstructing their sexuality and to tensions in relations with their kin and partners. They
were attracted by the Brazilian pastors who openly contested ‘evil’ spirits and were
preaching about romantic love and changing family relationships. The interplay
between Brazilian Pentecostalism and issues of gender, family and sexuality in the lives
of Mozambican women caught my attention as I studied the meaning and force behind
these women’s conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism in their attempts to shape new
lives for themselves. Strikingly, and in contrast to many studies on Pentecostalism, I
discovered that a lot of Pentecostal women were not finding a happy family life,
comfort and confidence after conversion. On the contrary, the process of conversion
often turned out to be violent because tensions in their relationships escalated
afterwards, leading to them breaking away from kin or going bankrupt because of the
high financial demands placed on them by the church. This study considers why and
how conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique has become such a violent
process for these upwardly mobile women.
The study is based on research done in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique,
which is seen as a city of both opportunities and uncertainties by the majority of its
inhabitants. It is the place to be if one wants to access higher education or obtain a good
job. At the same time, however, it is a place where one has to compete with others and
where life is expensive and demanding. Another set of challenges and uncertainties is
related to questions about what Mozambican culture is. This has become an increasingly
pertinent issue as a result of the country’s turbulent history of social transformations and
different cultural policies due to Portuguese colonialism (until 1974), a period of
socialism after independence (ca. 1974-1989), a civil war (ca. 1976-1992) and the
introduction of neo-liberal socio-economic and democratic structures (in the 1990s).
With histories of different cultural policies, upwardly mobile women today
have concerns about relating to kin and spirits, finding a partner and organizing a family
life. Solutions can be unclear and vague yet ill-defined spaces provide people with the
opportunity to explore and occupy them, and to create new ones (cf. de Boeck &
Plissart 2004). After the country’s socialist period when the government tried to control
people’s lives, the current more liberal era is allowing people to look for opportunities
and make deals. Maputo can thus be seen as a pioneering society, where upwardly
mobile women are exploring unknown places in attempts to shape their lives. These
women are seeking ways to gain new and better positions in the urban space. As
6
‘pioneer women’, they are taking on jobs their mothers would never have known and
they are conquering spheres that used to be forbidden to women, such as living alone as
unmarried women in a city where they may earn more than men of a similar age. They
are challenging the socio-cultural frontiers.
Pentecostalism seems to connect well with a pioneering spirit. In the urban
environment of Maputo, where everyone is busy claiming political, cultural and
economic space, Pentecostals are conquering these terrains spiritually. By stamping
their feet on the floor during church services, the converts drive away ‘evil others’ who
might try to claim their life spaces. Pentecostals are busy creating new life spaces by
breaking down boundaries, changing local marriage customs and severing relations with
kin and ancestors. Believers are being encouraged to find new positions by starting
businesses and professional careers and, in situations where original economic activities
and socio-cultural practices have to be discovered, Pentecostalism offers members the
chance to discover and design new lives through the business and marriage courses
offered by pastors. Pentecostal discourses and practices are persuading followers to
move frontiers and take control of their lives and society through the power of the Holy
Spirit.
In their attempts to tame the ‘evil’ in the city, to rescue people from past
bondages and to occupy the urban and national spaces, Pentecostals are, however, using
techniques that regularly result in conflicts between believers and non-believers or place
pressure on followers. To be able to transform one’s life, Pentecostal ideology stresses
that one has to make a break with the past including one’s ancestral spirits that are, by
definition, considered to be evil. Converts consequently become engaged in a spiritual
war against demons, removing evil from their lives by burning the materials that belong
to ‘demonized persons’ such as local healers. Every now and then plastic or wooden
swords and hammers are distributed by pastors for converts to take home to remind
them of their position as a Pentecostal soldier. As part of this war, Pentecostal women
are coming to see their kin and husbands as being imbued with evil powers and cannot
trust them anymore. In practice, this leads to converts breaking with their families and
ancestral kin. And in the context of an African society this effectively means
abandoning their social-security network. In addition, converts – literally – pay a high
price as they are expected to donate huge sums of money to the church, sometimes
amounting to the equivalent of a year’s salary. Such financial offerings are part of the
Pentecostal practice of ‘sowing and reaping’, whereby their church-related investments
in both spiritual and monetary terms will generate success for them in this world in the
form of prosperous businesses and a happy life. As a result, numerous converts give
away large amounts of their income and savings and may even go bankrupt in the
process. In other words, conversion involves violent procedures and may have dramatic
effects. Violent dimensions are, therefore, involved in the practice of ‘pioneering’ and
upwardly mobile women are opting to be part of such religious movements.
7
The aims of this study are twofold. The first is to contribute to discussions
relating to the role of Pentecostalism in processes of social transformations. The
contemporary literature contends that Pentecostalism is a response to globalization and
through religious practices people may give meaning to and be able to deal with the
anxieties of neo-liberal capitalism and commoditization (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000;
Meyer 1998b; Pfeiffer et al. 2007). Some scholars also argue that Pentecostalism offers
help and security in times of uncertainty, insecurity, hardship and poverty (cf. Hunt
2002a, 2002b; Meyer 2007: 122; Robbins 2004: 124; van Dijk 2010a). Conversion to
Pentecostalism can also bring about socio-economic development (Berger undated,
2009; CDE 2008; Martin 2002).
These views, which stress the coping mechanisms of Pentecostalism (see
Chapter 2; cf. van Dijk 2010a), are challenged by observations regarding the Brazilian
Pentecostal missionary presence in Mozambique. I argue that the Mozambican case
demonstrates how the emergence of specific religious movements, like Brazilian
Pentecostalism in Mozambique, should not to be understood primarily as an effect of or
reaction to social, political or economic forces and globalization but that religious
groups act on and actively shape these and alternative forces. This insight comes from
observations of how Brazilian Pentecostal discourses and practices urge converts to
design their own lives: they should not wait until ‘the global’ reaches them but should
make and create it themselves. Women’s conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism is thus
not primarily a response to globalization but a force of globalization in its own right.
The outcome of my research in Mozambique on Pentecostalism as a practice of
pioneering but with violent dimensions provides a new understanding of the role of
Pentecostal religion in social transformation in three fields: (i) family and gender; (ii)
security and insecurity; and (iii) development. These three themes, which will be
examined in more detail in Chapter 2, have played a central role in women’s conversion
to Brazilian Pentecostalism and are the subject of important debates in the social
sciences today (e.g. Bauman 2000; Beck 1999; Beck-Gernsheim et al. 2003; Eriksen et
al. 2010; Giddens 1992, 1994; Lewis & Mosse 2006; Mbembe 2001, 2006).
This study’s second aim is to demonstrate the importance of specific global
links of Pentecostalism. Various scholars have written about the apparent ‘fit’ between
Pentecostalism and globalization, and its diverse ways of manifestation (Droogers 2001;
Meyer 2010; Robbins 2004). In general, the study of global Pentecostalism tends to
focus on the spread of a modern Pentecostal culture that is predominantly Western
(Martin 2002; Poewe 1994; cf. Kalu & Low 2008; Robbins 2004: 118). According to
this view, Pentecostalism is a paradigm case of a global cultural-religious flow that
started in the West and has travelled from country to country introducing a uniform set
of practices and ideologies. Scholars have argued that Pentecostalism is attractive
because it offers access to modern (Western) processes of cultural, economic and
democratic globalization (Berger undated, 2009; Gifford 2004a; Martin 2002).
8
Although this line of research has yielded important and generalized insights, it
has tended to neglect the transnational ties in global Pentecostalism and their diversity.
So far, few studies have considered the increasingly important South-South linkages
within the global Pentecostal movement except for those by Corten & Marshall-Fratani
(2001) and Freston (2001). A good example of South-South transnational Pentecostal
connections is the significant presence of Brazilian Pentecostal churches and
missionaries in Southern Africa (Freston 2005).
Brazilian Pentecostalism in Africa shows that Pentecostalism is not necessarily
part of a globalizing Western modernity (cf. Velho 2007). On the contrary,
Pentecostal’s Southern forms appear to be contributing to and shaping processes of
globalization and modernization in specific ways (van de Kamp & van Dijk 2010). It
could be suggested that what renders global Pentecostalism relevant for its followers is
defined by the particular shape its transnational connections take. The South-South
transnational ties of Pentecostalism in Mozambique offer upwardly mobile women
possibilities to transcend what is local, move away from it and pioneer new life spaces
in order to effect transformations. Given the dominant role of Pentecostalism in global
Christianity today, this insight may influence our understanding of the future of religion
in the 21st century.
The remaining part of this chapter is structured as follows. The next two
sections discuss Pentecostalism in general (Section 1.2) and Pentecostalism in
Mozambique in particular (Section 1.3). Building on this, Section 1.4 elaborates on the
main research focus and questions, and Section 1.5 describes the research methodology.
1.1 Pentecostalism
Pentecostalism broadly includes those churches and religious groups that highlight a
direct personal experience with God through the embodiment of the Holy Spirit by
followers of Jesus Christ. Pentecostals place special emphasis on the gifts of the Holy
Spirit, such as speaking in tongues, prophecy and healing (Anderson 2004: 13, 14).
Although the Bible’s Old Testament speaks of the Spirit of God on various occasions, it
is in the New Testament that the Holy Spirit emerges as a prominent source of power
and a catalyst for change in the lives of Biblical persons and among emerging Christian
churches. As such, the first and most prominent expressions of the Holy Spirit date back
to the day, about 2000 years ago, when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’ disciples,
who suddenly started to speak in tongues (New Testament: Acts 2) on the day of
Pentecost (a Greek term describing the Jewish Feast of Weeks).
The presence of the Holy Spirit in early Christian churches was followed by
periods of decline as a result of the institutionalization of churches, but also periods of
resurgence. A relatively recent (and famous) revival in the history of Western
Christianity took place in Azusa Street, Los Angeles, in 1906, which has come to be
9
considered the birthplace of the Pentecostal church (Anderson 2004).1 Today,

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing and most dominant form of Christianity in the
world with the number of adherents reaching about 500 million worldwide and
representing more than a quarter of all Christians (Anderson 2004: 1; Barrett & Johnson
2008). The vast majority live in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Bediako 2000; Jenkins
2002).2
The present expansion of Pentecostalism, also in Mozambique, could be placed
in what has been referred to as the ‘third wave’ of Pentecostalism.3 This movement,
which is also called neo-Pentecostalism, started in the late 1970s and, despite
encompassing a large variety of Pentecostals, can be identified by the following features
(Anderson 2004: 144-165). First of all, the neo-Pentecostal view of the world is one of a
spiritual battlefield between demonic and heavenly forces. Neo-Pentecostals stress that
the world is a place of spiritual warfare between God and Satan, with powerful
consequences for everyday life. Against this backdrop, neo-Pentecostals in Africa are
concerned with the influence of ancestral spirits, which they consider to be satanic
spirits that need to be combated by the Holy Spirit (Meyer 1998a; van Dijk 1998).
Secondly, neo-Pentecostalism concentrates on the so-called Prosperity
Theology or Health and Wealth Gospel, underlining how a combative faith brings
happiness, health and prosperity in all aspects of life (Coleman 2000; Gifford 2004a;
Martin 2002). This includes the financial practice of ‘sowing and reaping’: the more
money one offers, the more money one may expect to earn. Thirdly, neo-Pentecostal
churches are characterized by an entrepreneurial style of operation, including their own
institutional organization, way of intervening in the media and politics, and the use of
modern marketing strategies (de Witte 2008a; Freston 2001; Marshall 2009; Meyer
2004b; Oosterbaan 2006; Ukah 2008). This corresponds with a fourth characteristic of
the neo-Pentecostal movement, which is its international orientation (Anderson 2004;
Coleman 2000; Martin 2002; Meyer 2010; Miller & Yamamori 2007; Poewe 1994).
Most neo-Pentecostal churches operate in global networks of exchange where the public
media as well as the circulation of charismatic leaders, ideas, books and other materials
are crucial in targeting localities around the world as part of the mission to transform
nations, communities and people’s personal lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.
1
Most historians consider Azusa Street to be the birthplace of Pentecostalism but its roots can be traced to
revivals (including speaking in tongues) in southern India (1860s), Wales (1904), Azusa Street, Los Angeles
(1906), Korea (1907) and Chile (1909) (Anderson 2004: 35-38, 43).
2
For a critical assessment of global Pentecostal trends, see Wijsen & Schreiter (2007).
3
Wagner (1988) described three historical periods of activity of the Holy Spirit in the 20th century. The first
wave refers to the birth of Pentecostalism in the 1906 Azusa Street revival. The second wave was the spread
of the Charismatic movement throughout some Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church in
the 1950s and 1960s. The third wave started in the late 1970s and was also called neo-Pentecostalism or
Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. See Freston (1995) on Brazilian Pentecostalism.
10
Templo da Fé (Temple of Faith), Universal Church, Maputo
Main Cathedral of the Universal Church, Maputo

11
Universal Church at the start of the highway from Maputo to the north of the country
Universal Church Malhangalene, Maputo
© Rufus de Vries
12
The Brazilian churches featuring in this study have neo-Pentecostal

characteristics.4 However, I do not examine their international but their transnational
orientation here. As already mentioned, contemporary Pentecostalism serves as an
example of cultural globalization in modern times. It has captured the fascination of
many by the way its doctrine, organizational format and services have been so easily
adopted around the world irrespective of local cultural variations. However, it is crucial
to see the diverse ways in which, when moving from setting to setting, Pentecostals
negotiate and navigate local cultural traditions. In this regard the South-South links in
Pentecostalism offer an interesting and different perspective on the discussion of
linkage between globalization and Pentecostalism (van de Kamp & van Dijk 2010).
Analyzing the transnational features of South-South Pentecostalism makes it clear that
what renders the faith relevant to its followers are not only the global aspects of the
religion but also its position regarding the nation-state and (national) cultural projects.
The specific ways in which Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique is fostering
identities that transcend national borders and cultural projects highlight the role of
southern Pentecostals in raising critical awareness vis-à-vis certain local cultural
practices.
1.2 Pentecostalism in Mozambique
The numbers and diversity of church groups in Mozambique is vast (Cahen 2000a,
2000b; Cruz e Silva 2008; Helgesson 1994; Pfeiffer et al. 2007; Schuetze 2010: 498-
500; Seibert 2005; van Butselaar 2000; van Koevering 1992).5 In almost every street I
came across churches with names I did not know. The total number of churches
officially registered at the government’s Religious Affairs Department in Maputo6 was
110 in 1992. Some 18 years later, in September 2010, this was 758.7 However, the real
number can be assumed to be even higher since not all churches, especially the smaller
ones, have been able to register (cf. Seibert 2005: 133). Many of these churches were
set up after 1992, shortly after the end of the civil war that lasted for nearly 16 years
from 1976 to 1992. While these churches share a central emphasis on the gifts of the
4
In this study I refer to these churches as Pentecostal churches or Pentecostalism in general.
5
Since the colonial period, the Roman Catholic Church has been the country’s biggest Christian church
followed by various Protestant churches and African Independent Churches (AICs) (see Chapter 3). The
results of the 2007 census show, however, that Catholicism is no longer the most important religion in the
southern provinces of Maputo and Gaza but that Zionism has become one of the country’s main African
Independent Christian groups. For the first time, Evangelicals and Pentecostals were counted together as one
separate category, showing their growing importance. In Maputo city, their share is 21%, and in the rural
province of Maputo 16.9% (INE 2009a, 2009b). For the whole of Mozambique, see
http://www.ine.gov.mz/censos/religião.
6
Ministério da Jusitiça, Direcção Nacional de Assuntos Religiosos, Maputo
7
The numbers show a process of stabilization. From when the peace agreement was signed in 1992 to 2000,
the number of registered churches increased from 112 to 456. This number stood at 650 in 2005 (Seibert
2005: 133).
13
Holy Spirit, they encompass a variety of denominations, doctrinal lineages and

practices.8 Within this wide array of churches, neo-Pentecostal Brazilian churches are
prominent in most of Mozambique’s urban centres.9
1.2.1 Brazilian and prominent

Brazilian Pentecostal churches have been in Mozambique since the beginning of the
1990s, shortly after the end of the civil war (Cruz e Silva 2003; Freston 2005). The end
of the war also marked the end of the socialist era and the start of the democratization
and liberalization of the economic and political domains, including a relaxing of
regulations concerning religious expression. Shortly after the signing of the peace treaty
between Frelimo10 and Renamo11 in October 1992, the Brazilian Universal Church of
the Kingdom of God opened its doors in Maputo.12 Brazilian pastors started to hold
church services in empty cinemas in Maputo and their performances rapidly gained
popularity. Some people initially just attended services out of curiosity, having heard
that the Brazilians were entertaining, exorcized spirits, cured diseases, presented
solutions for problems and could make one rich. Services used to be a good option for
an evening out as no films were screened at cinemas in the early 1990s.13 After the long
period of civil war when everything, including entertainment, had been scarce, new
activities and diversions were welcomed and embraced. Others, however, accused the
church of being a sect and a money machine and of preventing films from being shown
in the cinemas. People wrote letters to the national newspapers in which they
complained that the church and its Brazilian pastors, television and radio programmes
were invading the country, particularly Maputo. However, a growing minority became
active followers of the church and other Brazilian Pentecostal churches and missionaries
8
They range from African Independent Churches to neo-Pentecostal churches. Although Cruz e Silva (2003:
110), Pfeiffer et al. (2007) and Serra (2003a: 64) label Zionist, Apostolic and other African Independent
Churches and neo-Pentecostal churches as Evangelical and Pentecostal, I think it is important to separate the
newer Pentecostal churches from the Zionist and Apostolic churches (cf. Seibert 2005: 143-150; see also
Frahm-Arp 2001). Even though both types of churches may engage with the Holy Spirit and deal with related
issues (Engelke 2010), their messages, cultural style, performance and adherents are generally different (cf.
Meyer 2004a: 448).
9
According to Mozambican sociologist Carlos Serra (2003b: 45), the Brazilian Pentecostal Universal Church
of the Kingdom of God has been able to gather a big following in just a few years, which no other church has
been able to do in Mozambique.
10
The Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) was founded in 1962 to fight
for independence from Portugal. Since independence in 1975, Frelimo ruled, first as a single party and, later,
as the majority party in a multi-party parliament.
11
The Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana) fought Frelimo in the civil war
and since then has been the principal opposition party.
12
The register at the Department of Religious Affairs in Maputo is dated 13 July 1993 (cf. Cruz e Silva 2003:
111). Converts and pastors reported that the first missionaries arrived at the end of 1992 (cf. Serra 2003b: 41).
13
After a gradual decline, the national cinema collapsed in the early 1990s after the liberalization of the media
and the introduction of structural adjustment programmes (Power 2004). In other African countries and
elsewhere, Pentecostal churches have taken over cinemas too, making their engagement with the public sphere
very visible (de Witte 2008a; Meyer 2002; Pype 2008; Meyer & Moors 2006).
14
arrived. Interestingly, most of the Brazilian evangelical missionaries in Africa went to

Mozambique (Freston 2005: 55) and today Brazilian churches are integrated and
prominent in the (semi) urban landscape.
The Brazilian neo-Pentecostal church Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus
(Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, known as the Universal Church) is by far
the largest and most aggressive in terms of recruiting strategies as well as in its critiques
of the local culture. For this reason, this church features in this study as it is the most
prominent case of Brazilian Pentecostal presence in Mozambique.14 In his article on the
manifestation of the Universal Church in Southern Africa (Angola, South Africa and
Mozambique), Freston (2005: 1) claimed that this church is an important player in the
growth and spread of Third World evangelism as it is the ‘first major example in the
region of a new phenomenon: a successful church which is neither of First World nor
African origin’. Another prominent, albeit smaller, Brazilian neo-Pentecostal church in
Mozambique is the Igreja Pentecostal Deus é Amor (The Pentecostal Church God is
Love, known as God is Love). During my fieldwork, a new Brazilian Pentecostal
church was established, the Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus (the World Church of the
Power of God). It is led by a former bishop of the Universal Church and is expanding
rapidly. Brazilian missionaries also work in the classical Pentecostal Assemblies of God
Church, which is generally acknowledged to be the biggest Pentecostal (and maybe
even Protestant and Evangelical) church in Mozambique. It was founded at the
beginning of the 20th century (Upton 1980).15 In addition, Mozambique hosts the
Brazilian Igreja Baptista Renovada (Renewed/Charismatic Baptist church) that also has
some neo-Pentecostal features. 16
Non-Brazilian transnational Pentecostal churches mostly originate from South
Africa or Zimbabwe but sometimes also from Malawi or Tanzania (cf. van Koevering
1992). Other churches come from outside the Southern African region, such as the
Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) which has its roots in Nigeria. And at the
end of my fieldwork I came across the Ghanaian Lighthouse Chapel that had recently
arrived.17 Many of these non-Brazilian churches attract expats but few Mozambicans as
English is the prevailing language used. More importantly, these non-Brazilian
Pentecostal churches lack the cultural imagery that has developed in the transnational
14
For recent studies on this church in Brazil, see Rodrigues and Campos (2008).
15
There are several types of Assemblies of God churches with a variety of transnational links (see Appendix).
16
Recently (January 2010), I heard that a new Brazilian Pentecostal church had opened in Maputo.
17
A few Pentecostal leaders from Asia and the Middle East regularly came to Mozambique. In August 2005,
October 2006 and July 2007, Pastor Dilkumar from the largest Evangelical church in the Middle East, the
King’s Revival International Church in Dubai, held mega services of miracles. As the converts from time to
time switched churches and I followed them, I also visited new, non-Pentecostal churches like the Brazilian-
Japanese Igreja Messiânica Mundial (the Messianic World Church/Johrei Center) with its Buddhist influences
that rapidly became very popular.
15
setting of the Brazilian churches.18 As a result, the transnational neo-Pentecostal

churches in Mozambique remain predominantly of Brazilian origin19 and even if they
did not originate in Brazil, they all, without exception, have close ties with Brazil. For
example, the prominent neo-Pentecostal Igreja Evangélica Cristã Maná (Christian
Evangelical Church Maná, known locally as Maná) originated in Portugal but
Mozambicans consider it as Brazilian as it is also active there.20
The situation is often similar in transnational churches set up by Mozambicans.
For example, the fast-growing Evangelho em Acção (Gospel in Action) maintains close
ties with Brazil. At the end of my fieldwork, I came across a Mozambican pastor who
used to be a pastor in the Brazilian Universal Church and was setting up a new church.
In contrast to the local African Independent Churches, the transnational Pentecostal
churches in Mozambique are, to date, almost all run by foreign pastors21 who are
predominantly from Brazil, and to a lesser extent from Angola, and in the case of Maná
from Portugal too. The Portuguese language and the countries’ shared history as a result
of colonialism have facilitated the connection between Brazilians, Angolans and
Mozambicans. Consequently, the international network these churches in Mozambique
enjoy is primarily Lusophone, with a key role being played by Brazil.22
Since Pentecostal churches do not keep records of members, it is difficult to
say exactly how many people attend Brazilian Pentecostal churches but they attract
substantial numbers. The Universal Church has a total of about 200 similar-looking
church buildings in Mozambique, of which 80 are in Maputo (at least one in every
neighbourhood), mostly at strategic locations like a central market or on a main road.23
Huge cathedrals (catedrais) are also being built. This visible and public presence of
church buildings is an important element in their strategy.
The Universal Church organizes three to six services every day in each of their
buildings and all the churches are packed with both temporary and permanent visitors,
especially at the early-morning and evening services just before and after work hours.
Between 100 and 2000 people attend the different churches, depending on the size of
the building. And with their television and radio broadcasting activities, the Universal
Church has a prominent position in Mozambican urban society. When I was in Maputo,
there was a good chance of encountering a guard in front of most apartment and office
18
The importance of specific transnational cultural forms might also be an important factor in the prominence
of the Universal Church in South Africa. See Freston (2005) and van Wyk (2008) for more on this church.
And on the Universal Church in other African countries, see Freston (2005: 60-62) and Corten et al. (2003).
19
An exception is a fast-growing Pentecostal movement that will not feature in this study, Iris Ministries
(Kantel 2007; Poloma 2003: 215-235). Connected to the Toronto Blessing Renewal, its leaders have set up
care-giving ministries in various regions in Mozambique. Missionaries and volunteers from all over the world,
including Brazil, are actively involved in this project.
20
See the Appendix for more details on the Pentecostal churches mentioned in this thesis.
21
An important exception is the Assemblies of God churches.
22
Lusophone refers to linkages with Portuguese culture and language. The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada
are also active in Mozambique but usually recruit missionaries in and from Brazil.
23
The figures are based on my own observations and interviews with pastors and converts.
16
buildings who would be reading the free weekly publication put out by the Universal
Church, the Folha Universal. Almost everybody I spoke to regardless of their
background had visited this church at least once or had a relative who frequented it.
Based on interviews and observations, I estimate that both Maná and God is Love have
about 50 places of worship in Mozambique.24 Maná has become particularly prominent
due to its radio activities and their radio Viva (Lively or Hurray!) is the preferred
channel in many chapas (public transport, mini-buses) as it features popular (secular)
songs and offers listeners the chance to send messages to friends. Alongside the
international TV channel ManaSat, Maná has also been running a local television
channel for several years. God is Love also uses (radio) air time and the World Church
of the Power of God recently started television activities too.25
Maná Sat © Rufus de Vries
24
According to a Maná pastor they had about ten churches in Maputo and Matola together (conversations, 4
February 2005 and 5 August 2006). Matola is a city near Maputo.
25
They bought and hired radio or television time from existing channels amid fierce competition. I often heard
complaints from the leaders of the God is Love Church and the World Church of the Power of God that as
soon as they tried to fix a deal, the Universal Church would appear and put in a higher bid.
17
Programme of services, Universal Church: ‘Stop Suffering; Daily reunions; Monday - reunion of
entrepreneurs; Tuesday - reunion of health; Wednesday - reunion of God’s children; Thursday - reunion of the
family; Friday - chain of liberation; Saturday - reunion of the greatness of God; Sunday - reunion of the
encounter with God; Participate every day; from Monday to Friday - 6hours 8h 10h 12h 15h 18h; Saturday 6h
etc.; Sunday 6h etc.
God is Love church, Main cathedral, Maputo – before the start of a Sunday service
© Rufus de Vries
18
1.2.2 Urban and gendered
Pentecostalism in Mozambique is flourishing in urban areas26 and amongst women. As

mentioned above, the Universal Church in particular has church buildings at strategic
locations in all the major cities such as Maputo, Beira, Nampula27 and Chimoio.
Mozambique has undergone an impressively rapid socio-economic transformation over
the last two decades, especially in its urban areas. The end of the socialist era at the
beginning of the 1990s was accompanied by the introduction of radical economic and
political reforms. The political reforms included the transition to multi-party democracy
while the economic reforms involved moving from a socialist-oriented economy to a
neo-liberal market economy as a result of the Structural Adjustment Programmes
(SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the IMF.28
Several labour-intensive industries that had been subsidized by the government
in the socialist era went bankrupt following these economic reforms, causing many
people, particularly men, to lose their jobs. In response, their wives found whatever type
of work they could, which led to their increased socio-economic mobility (Sheldon
2002; WLSAMOÇ 2001: 134-138). Moreover, the implementation of democratic social
structures and the influx and rise of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) focusing
on women’s rights and emancipation stimulated women’s access to education and
professional careers (Casimiro 2004: 146; WLSAMOÇ 2001: 117). As a result, a
growing group of urban women have benefited from these reforms.
The enhanced economic position of these women has put them in new socio-
cultural domains. In contrast to former generations of women in the cities, more and
more urban women are no longer dependent on marriage for their economic survival
(cf. Penvenne 1997). And their role in biological reproduction is no longer decisive in
establishing their position and identity either. They are exploring new lifestyles and
cultural positions by living on their own, choosing their partner without the interference
of kin, going on vacation, getting a driving licence and constructing their own houses.
In addition to new opportunities, these new social circumstances are raising questions,
conflicts and uncertainties. Despite or precisely because of their increasing socio-
economic independence, many younger women are not able to find a ‘good’, ‘faithful’
partner. Men are afraid that the women (can) earn more than they do and that they will
lose their position of influence. Families-in-law are not sure whether these women will
26
An exception is the Assemblies of God Church that features more prominently in the rural areas.
Nevertheless, in this study I will refer to this church because of its Brazilian links, the incorporation of some
neo-Pentecostal features and the presence of converts who left the church for or returned to it from the
Universal Church and God is Love.
27
In the more Muslim north, like Nampula, Pentecostals encounter more difficulties in establishing
congregations and are less visible than in southern and central provinces.
28
For an overview, see Pitcher (2002).
19
act as good housewives. In short, these women are benefitting from the new economic
possibilities available to them but, like their partners and in-laws, are uncertain about
how exactly to fulfil their new role.
Many of the women are struggling with the impact of social transformations on
issues of family and marriage and want to develop new styles of family life. The women
constitute a large part of the followers of Brazilian Pentecostal churches: nearly 75% of
the visitors and converts at Pentecostal churches in Maputo are relatively well-educated
women of differing ages.29 In general, women outnumber men in Christian churches
(Woodhead 2001: 73) but when compared to Mozambique’s Catholic and Protestant
mission churches, Pentecostalism is a very ‘female-oriented’ religion. Worldwide,
Pentecostalism attracts high numbers of women with similar percentages to those found
in Mozambique (Chesnut 1997: 22; Hunt 2002: 159-160; Martin 2001: 56). Few studies
have focused on the relationship between Pentecostalism and gender in Africa although
this recently seems to be changing (Cole 2010; Frahm-Arp 2010; Schuetze 2010;
Soothill 2007; cf. Ndaya 2008). During church services, Brazilian pastors address the
new social challenges and issues of uncertainty that the upwardly mobile women in
their congregations are encountering. For example, pastors organize church services
around how to find a faithful husband and how to build a successful marriage and
family. They have also developed business courses that improve women’s economic
skills. When I looked into how their engagement with Pentecostal activities affected
women’s’ lives, I found that women were becoming deeply entangled in a ‘violent
spiritual war’. It is this violence of Pentecostal conversion that emerged as a key issue
in my research.
1.3 Research topics and questions
This study focuses on how and why the conversion of upwardly mobile women to
Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique has become violent by examining
Pentecostalism as a practice of pioneering that involves violent techniques and effects.
This focus emerged after I had completed my fieldwork and while I was writing up this
thesis. When I was analyzing the ethnography of the financial practices of Pentecostals
and the ritual of burying coffins (see Chapter 8), it struck me that the experiences of
Pentecostal women in Maputo are not congruent with the mainstream literature on
29
This figure is based on my own estimates after two years of research. For similar percentages in other
regions of Mozambique, see Igreja & Dias-Lambranca (2009); Pfeiffer et al. (2007) and Schuetze (2010).
Normally the women had at least completed primary-school education and thus spoke Portuguese (the official
language). Some of them were studying at university and at institutes of higher education. In principle they all
earned their own salary, even though the amounts could differ from US$ 50 (minimum wage) to US$ 500 a
month (rates correspond with the fieldwork period, 2005-2007). Based on their education and income,
converts could be said to be part of an (upcoming) middle class.
20
(Pentecostal) conversion as discussed in Chapter 2. The notions of ‘pioneering’ and

‘violence’ began to emerge, illustrating what transpired during the ethnographic process
of participant observation and writing (Section 1.4).
In the remainder of this section I explain my use of the terms ‘pioneering’ and
‘violence’. I then consider the main issues and questions with regard to the role of
Brazilian Pentecostalism in the fields of family and gender, (in)security and
development, followed by an overview of the research questions and the structure of the
study.
1.3.1 Pioneering
When considering Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique as a practice of pioneering,
I want to express how Pentecostal discourse and practices strongly propagate the need
to open up new domains in life. Converts are breaking with specific cultural patterns
and are settling new socio-cultural forms, such as novel ways of relating and
establishing a family or business life. By so doing, they venture into unknown spaces
and are claiming new territories. For example, upwardly mobile Pentecostal women
regularly claimed that they were developing different lives from their (grand)mothers
because they had studied and their main focus was not on being a mother and wife.
While this is characteristic of the lives of many upwardly mobile women in
Mozambique, those who have become involved in Brazilian Pentecostalism have moved
faster than others. Operating as a soldier of God, they have been called to demolish
social and cultural structures and to take risks that locally might be considered
outrageous, for example offering all one’s savings to the church. The Pentecostal
pioneer spirit has a strong element of conquest, which is part of a spiritual war. This
means that converts have to put on the armour that God has given them to fight any evil
spiritual forces, including ancestral spirits (see Chapter 6).
In this sense, Pentecostalism can be seen as a reminder of other pioneer
settings. According to the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1921), a
pioneer mentality lay in the origins of American exceptionalism, i.e. the special niche
the US occupies among the world’s nations because of the urge to push frontiers in the
region between urbanized, ‘civilized society’ and the ‘untamed wilderness’. This
frontier ‘furnished a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the
past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its
restraints and its ideas’.30 This could have been a statement made by a Pentecostal
pastor about removing Mozambique’s cultural past by pushing frontiers to allow new
fields of opportunities, such as jobs and romantic relationships, to develop.
In relation to social-science perspectives, the concept of pioneering used here,
builds on the body of work on the cultural aspects of mobility (Appadurai 1996, 2004;
30
http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/wireader/WER0750.html, accessed 1 April 2010.
21
Clifford 1992; also Chapter 4). With regard to African societies, mobility has been
shown to be an intrinsic part of the history, daily life and experiences of people (de
Bruijn et al. 2001, cf. Kopytoff 1987).31 Taking movement – migration, travel,
exploration, pastoralism, trade and pilgrimage – as the normal and usual way of living
in African societies is a crucial element in viewing how societies are organized,
maintained and transformed and how people explore opportunities and act to satisfy
their dreams and hopes. In this framework, mobility is not just about geographic
movement alone but also about people’s perceptions of movement, how they move,
about their understanding of spaces and places, experiences of mobility, and the
establishment of connections and relations. As upwardly mobile persons, Pentecostal
women in Mozambique are seeking and accessing resources and new socio-cultural
positions to increase and confirm their social mobility. An example of this can be found
in Boehm’s (2006) study of young women in Lesotho who explore new cultural
meanings of adulthood because of the decreasing importance of marriage in order to
enter adulthood. Mozambican women too are seeking to control shifting gender and
family situations, and are aspiring to new forms and meanings of (wo)manhood.
Viewing the Pentecostal movement as a practice of pioneering however
emphasizes the urge to conquer social domains by (spiritual) force. Pentecostalism is
pushing women to move existing spiritual, socio-cultural and economic frontiers,
particularly in the domain of family and gender, and to establish new ones. For
example, the Pentecostal women I studied now have to embody new behaviours in the
public spaces of the city to find good husbands (Chapter 7). They also have to practise
particular Pentecostal business skills that will make them prosperous (Chapter 8). As
Pentecostals and using pioneering techniques, these women need to move quickly to
shape personal and social transformations. Van Dijk (2010a) calls this assertive
Pentecostal attitude ‘social catapulting’ to describe a process that is contrary to the idea
of social capital, whereby believers capitalize on the support that religious groups offer.
Looking at the position of Ghanaian Pentecostal migrants in Botswana, he has observed
how Pentecostal groups foster ‘an entrepreneurial spirit of taking on challenges as a way
forward for the modern believer by creating a context where private initiative is highly
valued’ (van Dijk 2010a: 102). Nieswand (2010) in a comparable analysis says that
West African Pentecostals in Berlin have made spiritual power manifest through their
actions. Both stress the proactive elements of Pentecostalism that I consider to be a
fundamental aspect of Brazilian Pentecostal pioneering by women in Mozambique too.
31
Kopytoff (1987) used Turner’s frontier thesis in his theory of the ‘internal African frontier’ to denote the
expansion of agricultural societies in Africa, calling into question the then prevalent ‘tribal model’ of African
societies. ‘Africa has been a “frontier continent” – the stage for many population movements of many kinds
and dimensions, ranging from such sub-continental proto-historic dispersions as that of the Bantu or the
Nilotes to the local movements preceding the colonial era. In recent times, the urban and industrial expansion
of the colonial and post-colonial eras gave rise to migrations to towns, mines, and plantations, and, in the
process, to a continuing reorganization of ethnic identities’ (Ibid.: 7).
22
This view of Pentecostalism as a pioneering movement does not give priority

to social formation or to agency alone. People’s movements and the changing social
environment are analyzed in the way they are interconnected (de Bruijn et al. 2007;
Vigh 2009). Upwardly mobile Pentecostal women are discovering how their
environment – colleagues, kin and ancestors – is moving and how they should and want
to move in relation to the developments they are participating in. I emphasize that,
although people are shaped by social structures, they also act to gain control over them,
in this case from a religious position.32 Pentecostalism is making these upwardly mobile
Mozambican women increasingly question who is in charge of their lives. Is it kin,
partners, ancestral spirits, colleagues or the government? They have many reasons for
needing to be wary: they are trying to plan their futures but are having to reckon with
others. They are moving and others are moving but they have to move faster.
It is the transnational feature of the mobility of Pentecostalism in Mozambique
that is turning out to enhance this need to scrutinize, claim, push boundaries, conquer
and spiritually combat and that is part of the pioneering effort of Pentecostals (Chapter
4). The South-South transnational links of Pentecostalism offer possibilities for
transcending what is local and for moving frontiers to effectuate transformation (van de
Kamp & van Dijk 2010). The transformative power of the South-South transnational
connection has a historical framework: Brazilian pastors have created a cultural distance
from ‘Africa’ and are aiming to destroy elements of ‘African culture’ on the basis of a
historical cultural proximity in the South-South exchange. Since the transatlantic slave
trade transported many African slaves to Brazil, evil spirits from Africa, in the pastors’
views, also crossed the Atlantic and came to figure in candomblé and umbanda, which
are Afro-Brazilian possession cults. Brazilian missionaries are now re-crossing the
Atlantic to combat the roots of this evil. The examples of Afro-Brazilian spirits used by
Brazilian pastors play an important role in how a group of Mozambicans view
occurrences in their lives (Chapters 4 and 6). Stories about spirits circulating in Maputo
and people’s encounters with them are interpreted according to how Brazilian pastors
perceive Afro-Brazilian practices. Against this background, Pentecostal pioneering has
gained a particular strength because pastors have transgressed and pushed back certain
historical, cultural and spiritual frontiers and provided a space for Mozambican women
to do the same. Transnational mobility highlights how, if a person wants transformation,
s/he has to travel, move and explore. One has to transcend the familiar, one’s family and
culture, and suffer hardship to create new possibilities. The powerful atmosphere of
32
This view engages with academic debates on the relationship and tensions between societal structures and
agency (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984). The notion of pioneering I propose emphasizes the opportunities
and possibilities individuals and social groups perceive and create in specific circumstances and how they
influence societal formations. This view challenges the scholarly use of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus that
emphasizes that social groups are predominantly operating in a stable social field that produces cultural
continuity.
23
conquest that South-South Pentecostalism consequently creates is important in

understanding its violent techniques and effects.
1.3.2 Violence
Exploring, navigating and moving frontiers may imply violence. To conquer, create and
occupy new positions in life, force is needed. The pioneer mentality of settlers in
America in the past involved experiencing hardship, conflict and violence. And the
claiming of cultural and social spaces is a form of conquest that produces conflicts that
may be harmful. For example, African women pioneers in the fields of literature, music,
health and education were trampled on and had to use force to gain an influential
position (Casimiro 2004; Owen 2007; Peabody 2006; Tripp et al. 2009). In a
comparable manner, Pentecostal women have to use their own violent techniques and
endure potentially violent effects in their attempts to tame the ‘evil’ in the city and
occupy urban and national spaces. Yet pioneering in the framework of Pentecostalism
has its own particular forms of violence. Pentecostal practices and discourses are not
violent in the sense that converts and pastors use force to beat, shoot or murder
someone. In the same vein, this is not religious violence such as that associated with the
contemporary context of Islam and terrorism or with religious or civil wars in Africa (as
in Kastfelt 2005). Various scholars have shown that cultures, social structures, ideas and
ideologies all shape particular dimensions and meanings of violence (Scheper-Hughes
& Bourgois 2004; Aijer & Abbink 2000). Pentecostal ideologies and practices involve a
spiritual war in which Pentecostals are soldiers in the fight between God and the Devil.
This spiritual war is very visible during church services. Entering a Pentecostal
church in Mozambique is like entering a war zone. The pastors always have the same
clear message: life is a fight between heavenly and devilish powers. The Devil has to be
conquered because he uses the government, kin and partners to destroy the future of the
Mozambican nation and the lives of its citizens. The following words are frequently
used: lutar (fighting), batalhar (struggling), batalha espiritual (spiritual struggle),
conquistar (conquer), sacrificar (sacrifice), derramar (overthrowing, knocking over),
derramar sangue (shedding of blood), descarregar (discharge, a notion related to the
spiritual world: cf. Corten et al. 2003: 30) and sofrer (suffering). The pastors and
visitors stamp their feet on the floor to fight evil powers. They yell and cry. It is all
accentuated by frightening music and sounds, with persons who start to scream because
evil spirits possess them. Pastors shout at spirits to leave people’s bodies and believers
are called up to burn evil and to embody the struggle.
This fight is violent to the extent that it ‘more or less intentionally inflicts or
threatens to inflict harm to people or things’ (Boeykens in Achterhuis 2008: 78). There
are three important elements in this definition of violence that have a specific meaning
in relation to Pentecostalism.
24
The first deals with intention.33 Pentecostal discourse and practices are
characterized by a constant intention to damage local culture, such as kinship structures.
This may harm the relatives of converts and consequently the believers too as they then
stand alone.
The second element is that violence can be verbal, psychological or
symbolical. There are citizens who feel threatened by what Pentecostal pastors say and
the symbols they use. Chapter 8 offers the example of a riot that broke out in a Maputo
neighbourhood because Pentecostals used coffins as a symbol during a ritual, while
coffins are locally perceived as ‘dangerous’ objects to use. Converts can also feel
intimidated because of the pressure pastors place on them to become successful.
The third element concerns violence in relation to people, including ancestral
kin and demons, and things linked to these people. In respect to things, Pentecostal
believers often burn paraphernalia connected to the local spiritual world. By setting
them on fire, they challenge the power of the Devil and people related to him. A former
local healer who had converted told me34 that after she had been assured of the
Pentecostal pastors’ powers, she had burnt down the hut she used to work in and her
healing materials in the presence of a pastor.35 This was, as she herself acknowledged, a
daring act against what is locally considered an essential element of life as the healing
materials were linked to ancestral spirits who provide for luck and health. Moreover,
Pentecostal pastors regularly accuse converts’ relatives of acts of witchcraft, which is a
terrible accusation for these persons.
The violence of Pentecostalism is specific both in terms of techniques used to
convert and in the effects of conversion. Converts need to appropriate the Pentecostal
techniques of breaking, confronting and destroying. This study will demonstrate all
three by means of three separate case studies. Chapter 6 analyzes how Pentecostal
women have to break with local conceptions of spirits by arming themselves with
Pentecostal weapons to combat the spiritual spouse they belong to as a result of an
ancestor’s deed in the past. Chapter 7 shows the confronting power of Pentecostal
techniques because believers have to oppose local forms of affection by openly
embracing and kissing their partners during the Pentecostal ‘therapy of love’. And
Chapter 8 examines payments of huge amounts of money made by Pentecostals as a
way of destroying local patterns of exchange. These techniques are anti-harmonious and
go against accepted norms, structures and behaviour.
33
In stressing this element of intention as being essential to the meaning of violence, the Dutch philosopher
Hans Achterhuis (2008) moves away from Foucault’s notion of violence that seems to depict all our acting,
speaking and thinking as a form of violence, and presents a concept of violence lacking any distinguishing
features (Foucault 2003 [1976]).
34
On 29 May 2007.
35
This or similar practices happened in the mission churches in various African countries during the colonial
period too (Fields 1985). Chapter 5 elaborates on the particularities of these Pentecostal practices in relation to
those that took place in Mozambique in the past.
25
The violent effects of Pentecostal techniques can be observed in the

accusations of anti-sociality that converts receive, as well as in the emergence of hate,
distrust and downward mobility. Since Pentecostals openly contest the power of
ancestral spirits and connected socio-cultural relations and practices, they provoke
misfortune for their family and the reproduction of social structures (Chapters 6 and 8).
Relationships with boyfriends, husbands and colleagues deteriorate as these persons
become personifications of the Devil (Chapter 7). In addition, the offering of huge
amounts of money by Pentecostals results in tense relations with others who depend on
this money and this frequently puts converts in the problematic situation of not being
able to pay bills or buy basic necessities (Chapter 8).
In analyzing how conversion becomes violent in interaction between
Pentecostal discourses, practices, pastors and converts, there is a connection with forms
of violence in Mozambican society and women’s lives. Sánchez (2008) provides a case
that shows both dimensions – the violence in society and Pentecostal violence – as two
sides of the same coin. He describes how Pentecostal squatters in Caracas, the capital of
Venezuela, who were seized by the Holy Spirit, ‘illegally’ occupied several shops and
buildings within a ‘divinely inspired logic of spatial occupation’. He demonstrates that
the logic of Pentecostal violence evolves in a reality where the squatters are
dispossessed because of the tight control of criminal gangs (with links to all levels of
Venezuelan society) over a large numbers of stalls, shops and buildings. In this situation
Pentecostalism does not necessarily bring relief.
Sánchez (2008: 295-96) illustrates how on the one hand, Pentecostal ritual
power is meant to destroy other powers but, at the same time, this act of violence
creates new forms of violence. In Mozambique, the violence in Pentecostal conversion
appears to interact with a violent history, such as the Portuguese colonial era, the recent
civil war and domestic violence. Chapter 6 shows how the violence of past wars
resulted in many spiritual marriages that subsequently became part of a new Pentecostal
war and eventually created new forms of violence.
In summary, I argue that the growth of religious movements, like Brazilian
Pentecostalism in Mozambique, is not to be understood primarily as a reaction to
globalization and social, political or economic forces. In contrast to the views of
scholars who regard conversion to Pentecostalism as a sort of coping strategy, upwardly
mobile Pentecostal women in Maputo are showing that religion acts on and actively
shapes social, political, economic and global forces. In other words, these women’s
conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism is not primarily a response to globalization but is
a force of globalization in its own right. To some extent, this force is marked by
violence and emerges in the interaction between Pentecostal discourses, practices,
pastors and converts.
26
1.3.3 Research questions and the book’s outline

The explanations above lead us to the central research question. How and why has
conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism by upwardly mobile women in Mozambique
become violent? To answer this, each chapter in this volume explores a particular aspect
of Brazilian Pentecostalism as a practice of pioneering with violent dimensions.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 explore Pentecostal pioneering in relation to Mozambican urban
society and history, while the subsequent Chapters 6, 7 and 8 examine how conversion
becomes violent in interaction between Pentecostal discourses, practices, pastors and
converts. In Chapter 2, the question is how transnational Pentecostalism, as a practice
of pioneering in Mozambique, relates to the study of Pentecostalism in Africa regarding
the themes of family and gender, (in)security and development in general. How do these
themes relate to the key observations about the violent aspects of conversion in
Mozambican society? The main issues and questions that these themes raise are
discussed here.
The theme of family and gender36 emerged during my research because
uncertainty about, loss of control over and critiques of the social (dis)order and cultural
identity were being expressed by Mozambicans in gendered terms and concerned
reproductive life events, such as marriage and sexuality. The relationship between
society and reproduction is central to upwardly mobile women’s involvement in
Brazilian Pentecostalism. The mainstream literature predominantly views conversion to
Pentecostalism as an attempt to regain control over gender roles and family issues
(Brusco 1995) and to treat the breaks in reproduction caused by social disruption, such
as civil war, neo-liberal capitalism and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.37 However, I aim to
show that this very process of regaining control of gender roles does not occur only by
repairing relations but may encourage further breaks and discontinuity, which thus
reinforces distrust and tension.
The second theme, of security and insecurity, discusses how coping
mechanisms, which are thought to offer security and cultural continuity in a context of
change, play a central role in the dominant sociological view of religion, including
Pentecostalism.38 This approach, however, seems to be ill-suited to offering a
satisfactory explanation for the spectacular rise in Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Mozambique. As already mentioned, upwardly mobile Pentecostal women tend to
invest primarily in cultural discontinuity after their conversion, which leads to increased
36
By using the term gender I mean that opinions about roles and practices of women and men are subjective
and not a pre-existing given. They are particular social and historical understandings and representations
(Alsop et al. 2002: 3). The concept of family has also been socially constructed and there is no static or
universal form (Gittins 1992). In this study, the word family may refer to the extended family and local
kinship structures as well as to the nuclear family. Both gender and family relate to the larger reproductive
order that includes issues of marriage and sexuality.
37
For a very recent study on central Mozambique, see Schuetze (2010).
38
For a short overview and discussion, see Hunt (2002a, 2002b) and Robbins (2004: 123-127).
27
insecurity and, in some cases, even to deprivation. This raises important questions about
why relatively well-off people opt for increased insecurity and rupture.
The third theme, which focuses on the relationship between development and
Pentecostalism, questions the emphasis by scholars of Pentecostalism on the role this
religion plays in advancing people’s socio-economic conditions (Berger 2009; Martin
1990, 2002; cf. CDE 2008). It appears, however, that a particular balance has been
achieved in Mozambique between Pentecostalism, South-South relations, social
transformations and urban women. This points to an increasing downward mobility
among Pentecostal converts rather than an advancement in their position. Why is this
happening? Why would these women participate in these churches if it leads to a
worsening of their socio-economic position? Why do they not leave the church when
their situation deteriorates? These three themes and the accompanying questions run
through all the chapters.
Chapter 3 offers a history of Maputo during the formation of the Mozambican
nation-state with a focus on family and gender to provide background information about
why upwardly mobile women are engaging in transnational Pentecostalism as a practice
of pioneering, with its violent dimensions. Chapter 4 analyzes how the South-South
transnational links of Pentecostalism in Mozambique influence the practice of
pioneering. The mobility transnational Pentecostalism produces, with a particular
perception of the historical relationship between Brazil and Africa, is shaping the
spiritual war. Women in particular are finding this transnational perspective attractive
because of its focus on reproductive issues such as marriage, love and sexuality. The
aim of Chapter 5 is to present converts who have engaged in a violent conversion. It
considers the generational differences and how women’s different relationships with the
history of social transformation influence their exploration of transnational
Pentecostalism.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 discuss how conversion becomes violent when there is
interaction between transnational Pentecostal discourses, practices, pastors and
converts. Three cases that correspond with the three central Pentecostal techniques of
violence – breaking, confronting, and destroying – and their subsequent effects will be
analyzed. Chapter 6 deals with the ‘breaking’ aspects of the spiritual war
Pentecostalism has launched in women’s efforts to fight the spirit spouse. In Chapter 7
the confrontational power of Pentecostal violence takes shape and is analyzed, and the
therapy of love (terapia do amor) is investigated in greater depth. In this therapy,
Brazilian Pentecostal pastors train converts in how to love, kiss and embrace their
partner and how the husband and the wife should behave in a marriage. Chapter 8
analyzes the role of financial sacrifices (holocaustos) in creating Pentecostal violence as
a mechanism of destruction. Chapter 9 concludes by drawing all these aspects together
and summarizing the study. It elaborates on the kind of society Pentecostal pioneering is
creating in the fields of family, gender, (in)security and development.
28
1.4 Methodology
I did fieldwork in Mozambique between August 2005 and August 2007, with a one-
month preparatory trip in February 2005. My last visit was in July/August 2008 when I
stayed for three weeks, but I have remained in touch with several people by email and
telephone. My main fieldwork location was Maputo where most of the Brazilian
Pentecostal churches are based. However I also stayed in other cities, for example in
Beira, the second largest city in Mozambique, for three weeks in October 2006. I
decided to concentrate on Maputo because the particularities of a city’s urban history
and its urban trajectories are central to an understanding of the impact of
Pentecostalism. Gaining knowledge of the dynamics of a big city, including a large
network of people, is very time-consuming. I paid various visits in the two years I was
in Mozambique to the provinces of Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane in the south when I
wanted to speak to traditional healers,39 when friends and interlocutors took me to visit
their family homes, and when I went on holiday. I also travelled by bus from Maputo to
Cabo Delgado in the north and spent two weeks in the northern provinces. Although this
was primarily a vacation and a way of seeing other parts of Mozambique, I inevitably
ended up in churches and talked about religion with the people I met.
Even though I was doing research on transnational links between Mozambique
and Brazil, I focused on the South-South transnational setting from the Mozambican
perspective and did not do any fieldwork in Brazil. This study does not deal specifically
with physical travel between Mozambique and Brazil but is about the movement or
travelling of ideas and practices. It describes how Mozambicans move in a South-South
transnational space, not as transnational migrants, and how they cross national cultural
boundaries by participating in Brazilian Pentecostalism (see Chapter 4). Having grown
up in Brazil myself and thus having a general sense of Brazilian culture was very
helpful though.
I used qualitative research methods based on established methodological
canons of anthropological fieldwork (Hammersley & Atkinson 1995; O’Reilly 2005).
My main research technique was participant observation and I participated in the lives
of Mozambicans, especially those involved in Pentecostalism. I went to church with
them, we shopped together, went to plays and films, and we watched Brazilian soaps
(telenovelas) together. They took me to their houses, to weddings and funerals, and to
the beach. I learned most during these informal get-togethers and held numerous
interviews over the two years I was in Mozambique. I tried to have at least two semi-
structured interviews with everyone. The first normally remained superficial, as it was
crucial to first get to know each other, but during the second interview it was easier to
39
I joined some of the NGO Prometra’s activities in Maputo and Gaza provinces.
29
go into more depth. In between, we would probably have met in church or somewhere
else and I thus became more of a person to trust. I established a genuine friendship with
several of the women I met and through the research participants I met other
interviewees and converts. I had various entry points into the field and met older and
young people from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. We often met in
bars or restaurants and those I came to know better invited me to their homes and they
visited my house too. Like most urbanites, I knew some of them quite well, with others
I had special-purpose relationships that gave me in-depth knowledge of some areas of
their lives and less of others, and with some people I just had a nodding acquaintance.
All of them gave me insights in their own manner.
I experienced difficulties recording interviews. People would often refuse to
give certain details when I used the voice recorder or to share information felt to be
sensitive. The level of distrust between people was such that they did not easily open
up. Moreover, spiritual issues were seen as a dangerous subject to discuss. This was
partly due to the country’s socialist past and also because pastors urged converts to keep
things private between themselves and God. Although people were willing to share
parts of their lives with me, these were not for recording. In most cases therefore, I
chose to make notes and trained myself to remember what had been said, sometimes
even complete sentences. Thus not all the quotes I use were recorded and most have
been copied from my fieldwork notes.
Most of the interviews I held were with converts or former converts. Some
changed churches or left their church during my fieldwork period, other interviews were
with pastors, curandeiros (traditional healers), government officials, persons working
for NGOs and journalists. I had conversations with anyone who was willing to talk to
me – people on public transport, at parties, bars, beaches, in the shops in the city centre
where I lived, street sellers, my empregada (maid), guards and taxi and chapa drivers.
All of them gave me important insights into Mozambican life and the role of religion.
Almost all my interviews and conversations were in Portuguese. It is my second
language, as it was for several of my interlocutors too who had grown up with a local
language. But for many converts Portuguese was their first language. They had grown
up in Maputo or another city where their parents considered it important that they learn
the official language. I learned the basics of the locally spoken changana or ronga
language but when I interviewed someone who did not speak Portuguese, I needed an
interpreter. Women form the largest group in the churches I studied so most of my
contacts were with women. To protect the people I met, I have used pseudonyms
throughout.
I was lucky to be able to stay in the field for so long. My initial plan had been
to go for a year but after just a few months I realized I should stay for an extra six
months as it had taken a long time to arrange housing, papers and registration and it was
equally time-consuming to build up a network of persons, especially as there was
30
always the need to be introduced by someone else and people were busy. Before I was
fully acquainted with the social-cultural codes and the dynamics of ‘cultural intimacy’
(Herzfeld 2004), almost a year had passed. I went to Mozambique with my husband
who found a job in one of the government ministries and when he was asked to stay for
another year, I decided to stay as well. Most of my valuable insights were collected in
that second year, based on the efforts of the first year. I worked mostly on my own. In
the beginning I had assistance from Prof. Teresa Cruz e Silva and Hilario Dyuty from
the Center of African Studies at the University Eduardo Mondlane. And later on,
anthropologist Julio Langa, who had been a student at that time, joined me in visiting
several churches, doing some interviews and setting up a focus group. The focus-group
meetings took place once every two weeks on Saturday afternoons for several months in
2006. The group consisted of eight young converts (men and women) from different
churches but usually only three or four of them would appear. We had conversations
about their churches, their views on prosperity, on sexuality, on tradition, on husband-
wife relations, on the problems of HIV/AIDS and so on.
I went to church at least three times a week, sometimes early in the morning at
4 am or 5 am and sometimes for special prayers that started in the evening and lasted
until late in the night. I participated in a Bible group at the Maná church and in some
women’s and youth groups at other churches, and attended a business course and the
therapy of love at the Universal Church. I visited the national archives to read journal
articles from the years when the Brazilian churches were being established in
Mozambique and were a topic of hot debate. I went to libraries, to the university to
exchange ideas with colleagues and to present my research, and attended conferences,
lectures and meetings at faculties and NGOs. I read, heard and observed the churches’
journals, television, radio stations, DVDs and books, read national newspapers and
watched Mozambican television.
In 2006/2007 I took part in the weekly counselling sessions at a local NGO,
Capacitar, that trained people on the outskirts of Maputo to give psychosocial assistance
in cases of sexual and domestic violence and illness (Slegh 2009). Some of the
counsellors were also religious leaders and through this group I joined a Bible study
group with, in contrast to my other interlocutors, much less well-educated women from
the Assemblies of God Church. These women actually wanted to learn from me how to
deal with their husbands and to know about all kinds of sexual diseases and coisas do
lar (things pertaining to married life and the home). They expected me to talk all the
time, whereas I wanted them to talk. I got valuable insight though into the lives of urban
Mozambican women from the lower social classes. In several ways their lives were
comparable to those of my other interlocutors, with the main difference being that the
better-educated women had more possibilities and abilities to improve their own lives.
Participating in this project gave me a better in-depth understanding of the daily
violence women experience in Mozambique. Domestic violence between husband and
31
wife, between relatives, violence used by government officials and witchcraft

accusations were a daily reality.
One of the many conversations I had © Rufus de Vries
1.4.1 Researching religion in a city

The Pentecostal movement I researched in Maputo is predominantly an urban
phenomenon. Cities like Maputo are fascinating places where one can see and feel the
creativity, potential and reality of a nation and in Chapter 3, Maputo is presented as a
mixture of colonial and post-colonial, formal and informal, urban and rural, local and
global cultures. This is not only reflected in what one sees when walking through the
city streets but also in people’s narratives and imaginations. In a single day I could
experience enormous variety. In the morning I might listen to a Brazilian pastor in a
mega church in the city centre who had just arrived from Nigeria. An hour later I would
visit a traditional healer in the same neighbourhood who the week before had attended
clients in South Africa. In the afternoon I could be visiting the house of an elite family
celebrating a traditional wedding ceremony (lobolo), where expensive imported
furniture had been pushed to one side in order to cover the floor with reed mats on
which the exchange of gifts would take place.
It was also challenging doing research in Maputo. Some colleagues consider
Maputo an easy place to do fieldwork because all kinds of facilities are available: water,
electricity, good housing, restaurants and luxury in general. Although I admit that it was
32
nice to have a choice of restaurants, tap water and a cinema, when I was in the rural
areas I found fieldwork much easier in some ways than in Maputo. It was hard to know
where to start in Maputo. In a village it is easier to get to know everybody, to find the
churches, to follow people the whole day and get an overview of the dynamics that are
going on. People in Maputo have little time to meet: they have to work, study, do a
second or third job, and go to church or meetings. It was difficult to become part of a
group or a family. People are less inclined to invite you to their homes. Who can be
trusted? Yet, as soon as I was introduced by a Mozambican to their friends they would
invite me to parties. I am not complaining about the hospitality I received in any way.
But it was clear that people were cautious and they wondered what my intentions were.
The word ‘research’ or ‘investigation’ did not sound good. What was I going to use the
information for? Some explained that the socialist era did not generate trust between
people and so-called Dynamizing Groups (see Chapter 3) had been set up to ‘control’
people in the cities. In addition, life in Maputo is expensive and for most people is a
struggle. What could I offer them in return? It was therefore quite challenging to set up
research in Maputo, also because I wanted a cross-section of converts from all over the
city and not from just one particular neighbourhood. I succeeded in finding them but
this was one of the reasons I restricted myself to Maputo. From my (limited) encounters
in Beira however, I can say that various processes are comparable.
What also made research in Pentecostal churches challenging was that while
churches are normally meeting places, the churches I was interested in were different. It
was not usual for people to speak to each other there and, in fact, it was important not to
get to know each other very well. It was sensible to distance oneself from acquaintances
since when people knew each other too well it could be ‘dangerous’ and generate
jealousy and distrust. This is all part of the violent effects of conversion that influenced
my approach to my research. In the beginning I just approached people, who would then
promise an interview but it never took place. Only after an introduction by a person I
knew did I get a phone number which increased my chances of a meeting. An additional
complication was access to the churches. From colleagues in Brazil and Mozambique I
had learned that the Universal Church was not open to investigators as previous
negative publicity in the media had made them wary. Moreover, as most anthropologists
researching Pentecostal churches experience, it is difficult to participate without being
or becoming a convert. For these reasons, I decided not to focus on one particular
church or organization as the principal place of fieldwork but rather on the converts
themselves. I did not go to a church to meet people but instead found people who would
take me to their church. This turned out to be a wise move. By following people instead
of churches, I gained better insight into their other activities, for example the fact that
they went to several churches at the same time. I also did not lose contact when they
moved to a new church. By presenting myself as not being primarily interested in
churches per se, they would also take me to other events. And because I had not chosen
33
pastors and leaders as gate persons, people felt freer to share their lives with me, also
when it was not congruent with the church’s ideology. At the same time, however, I did
participate as a convert at one Universal Church for several months.
1.4.2 Distance and intimacy

By participating, I gradually embodied ‘native’ cultural knowledge about speaking,
eating, listening, silences, greetings, showing emotion, establishing relations, giving,
sharing and so on. Learning from my interlocutors, from their viewpoints and how they
would phrase things, I experienced how I became a bit ‘Mozambican’ in my ways and
then people started opening up more and more quickly. One difficult topic to talk about
was tradition.40 Educated persons are not supposed to be related to such things. Talking
about it would be suspicious, so how could they have knowledge about it? However, I
gradually learned how to talk about it by referring to others who were involved in
tradition. I could share what I had heard and so could they. It was by getting access to
their ‘cultural intimacy’ (2004) and behaving according to their rules that I discovered
little by little how relations, gifts, money, silence, spirits, sexuality and violence are all
bound to one sphere. I thus gained a sense of the complex aspects of conversion. Before
entering the field, I would not have predicted that I would ultimately focus on the
violent character of conversion. I was initiated into it. This means that the scientific
knowledge presented here is both rational and embodied knowledge. I did not extract
data from people: the data emerged out of a dialogue in which the participants and I
were involved with all our senses. In this contact, people started to reflect on cultural
issues, something they had not always done previously. People also shaped their ideas
and opinions while talking to me. Intentionally and unintentionally, I confronted them
with issues just as I was obliged to consider my own values and opinions. This
generated a dialogue that shaped my study. Some interlocutors would want to talk to me
because they could not talk about certain issues with others. To some, I could function
as a link to Europe.
In this context, I had a particularly insightful but traumatic experience that
helped me realize the reality of urban life and the role of Pentecostalism. In February
2006 I was assaulted inside my own house and had a near-death experience. I recovered
well41 and no longer suffer from this incident but for several weeks I had to stop doing
fieldwork. Having survived this attack, I can look back on it and say that it was also
instructive: I had to learn a new sense of trust and distrust. I used to open my front door
to whoever rang the bell, to be open to people and invite them into my house. Yet
following the incident, when neighbours and friends said that other neighbours or my
40
People often use the word ‘tradition’ when referring to local customs, including beliefs and rituals related to
(ancestral) spirits.
41
Thanks to therapeutic sessions with Henny Slegh and the support of my husband.
34
maid or other friends could have been involved, I realized how people perceived and
related to each other, namely with distrust. Suddenly they all shared the assaults they
themselves had experienced, sometimes even from close relatives. I was advised not to
invite people into my house, not to give out my address, and only to mingle with certain
people from the same social group. In short, I sensed the crisis and confusion people
referred to and, paradoxically, this became an opportunity to become more intimate
with them. As it was essential for my research to contact all kinds of people all the time,
I had to think about how to position myself. By taking more care and not revealing too
much about myself initially, like the participants in my research did too, I was able to
meet the challenge and to enjoy the rest of my fieldwork period.
Although I had to focus on women, who were the principal group of converts, I
also put effort into establishing contacts with men. However, the first attempts were
interpreted as advances with a view to an affair. The fact that I was married was not
taken seriously because why would my husband not accompany me? Or why could I not
have a second or even third partner? As these few men constantly violated my private
space and I was forced to listen to my own feelings more carefully after the assault, I
abandoned some of these contacts. However, I also met various men who had no other
ulterior motives than being my interlocutor and friend and who sometimes were more
open about their frustrations in relating to women than women were about men.
Most of the converts I had contact with were between 15 and 50 years old.
Having an in-between age (I started my research when I was 26) and being a woman
and married but without children facilitated making contact with everyone. As I was
married it was not difficult to relate to older persons and to talk about marriage and
sexuality. At the same time, because I had no children and was still young, it was not
too difficult to relate to the unmarried women I met too. They used me as a source of
information about marriage, love and sexuality. The fact that my husband did not seem
to be upset about being alone at home, that I could join the women who became my
friends whenever I wanted to, that I could use the car for my own purposes, and that my
husband also cooked dinner, amazed them. In addition, they used to enquire whether my
family did not complain that we were living so far away and that I had still not had a
child. It introduced them to new types of ‘cultural intimacy’ as well. The colour of my
skin influenced contacts and I was usually the only white person in the church, so I did
not go unnoticed. People appeared to have all kinds of ideas about whites but I tend to
think that the more I integrated, the less white I became. Being white was also an asset
when doing research as people found it interesting to talk to me. The only disadvantage
in daily life was that people would think I was very rich and would approach me for this
reason.
I was able to participate more or less as a convert as I am a Christian and
presented myself as such. To a certain extent this may have limited what I asked
because I was considered an insider, but it did facilitate access. Precisely because of my
35
own knowledge of and experiences with Christianity, I was able to see how the
interpretation of Bible texts and the meaning of faith were context specific. As I would
never use Bible stories as an incentive to give all my money away, I became curious to
know why converts came to see them in that light.
After two years in the field, writing started, which is part of the ethnographic
process (Etnofoor 2009). It was a struggle between abstracting myself from the life I
had in Mozambique and not wanting to lose touch with it. It was a way of continuing
the dialogue with my interlocutors. By confronting my analysis with my fieldwork
experiences, I would constantly reread my fieldwork diary and stayed in touch with
many Mozambicans. Yet I knew I was the one to represent them. The terms I use, my
interpretations and the choice of chapters are all part of defining and imagining certain
aspects of the world that I and the persons I met lived in. Perhaps they would have
written or expected a different book, although I trust they recognize their realities in this
one. They speak in this thesis and show that their lives question certain academic
assumptions. By wanting to give an ordered overview of complex life worlds I do not
do justice to real life. It would be better if all the chapters could be read at once. In this
sense, writing is a limited representation as it should take in smells, sounds and colours.
The pictures included, which were taken by photographer Rufus de Vries in May 200642
and others that I took myself, give a different representation to the one that words alone
would offer.
42
As part of the dissemination programme of the ‘Conversion Careers in Global Pentecostalism’ research
group funded by the NWO programme on ‘The Future of the Religious Past’, photographer Rufus de Vries
took pictures of the Mozambican research location. They were exhibited at the international conference
entitled ‘Conversion and Time in Global Pentecostalism: A Lifelong “Live” Experience’ that was held at the
VU University in Amsterdam on 12 and 13 June 2008. The pictures do not correspond with the persons
presented in the chapters.
Universal Church, Polana, Maputo
The construction of a new Universal Church building, Hulene, Maputo.
© Rufus de Vries
37
2. Pentecostalism in Africa
2.1 Introduction
In an attempt to understand why Pentecostalism has enjoyed the success it has

worldwide, scholars have focused on the connection between it and issues such as
modernity, gender, politics, globalization, the media and the economy (Robbins 2004;
for Africa see Meyer 2004a). This study focuses on three specific topics related to the
violence surrounding conversion that are playing an important role in the lives of
upwardly mobile women in Mozambique. The first is the position Pentecostalism has in
the field of family and gender, the second is the link between Pentecostalism and
situations of insecurity, and the third concerns Pentecostalism and development. This
chapter elaborates on these three themes by embedding them in a wider overview of
Pentecostalism.
While the three areas are all mentioned in the literature on Pentecostalism in
the world at large, I will concentrate on insights gained from research in Africa as this is
particularly relevant to the case of Mozambique. When I returned from the field to write
this thesis, I realized that my analysis of the Mozambican Pentecostal field was
indicating increased insecurity, downward mobility and stress amongst female converts,
which did not correspond with the mainstream literature. For each of the three themes
under the spotlight in this chapter, I expand on the questions my research raises with
respect to the violence of conversion.
2.2 Pentecostalism, family and gender
Women and Pentecostalism in different African countries have been the focus of several
recent studies.43 Frahm-Arp (2009, on South Africa) and Soothill (2007, on Ghana)
evaluate the ambivalence in an apparent split between Pentecostal women’s private and
public roles and between the promotion of equality between men and women and the
simultaneous adherence to ‘traditional’ patriarchal values (cf. Mate 2002, on
Zimbabwe). For central Mozambique, Schuetze (2010) shows how religious
movements, including Pentecostal churches, are strengthening the position of poorer
women in society at a time when tremendous pressures are threatening their social
43
There is considerable material on gender dynamics in AICs (e.g. Comaroff 1985; Hoehler-Fatton 1996;
Jules-Rosette 1979, 1981; Muller 1999; Mukonyora 2000, 2007; Sackey 1987, 1989). Generally, these studies
have shown how AICs provided alternative communities where participants could find meaning and security
in times of rapid changes and how these churches resisted political oppression and neglect.
38
stability (cf. Pfeiffer et al. 2007). However, a coherent body of work on the relationship
between gender and Pentecostalism in Africa has not yet emerged.
Maná church, main building in front of the market ‘Estrela Vermelha’, Maputo © Rufus de Vries
So far, women’s predominance in Pentecostalism has generated particular

interest among scholars in Latin America (Brusco 1986, 1995; Chesnut 1997; Drogus
1997; Mariz and Machado 1997; cf. Robbins 2004: 132-134) because in Pentecostal
ideology women should be subordinate to men. Positions of leadership in the church are
also held by men. These scholars have shown that women may, nevertheless, fulfil roles
in the church that provide them with the opportunity to develop various skills. In
addition, they have argued that Pentecostalism enhances women’s autonomy and
stresses equality between men and women despite their supposedly different qualities
and roles. The Pentecostal condemnation of drugs, alcohol and polygamy (all of which
are considered to be male domains), as well as the promotion of the household,
positively affect the behaviour of men. These aspects of Pentecostalism may have
special relevance in situations of social change. In Brazil, the new Pentecostal churches
have learned how to address the implications for family structures of intensifying
industrialization and the growth of cities (Freston 1994: 539). This is also relevant in
Mozambique’s cities today. And women who have enjoyed professional careers as a
result of a more liberal socio-economic and political order are finding the Pentecostal
focus on the female body, marriage and family particularly attractive.
39
The question is, however, how Pentecostals’ gender constructions relate to

processes of modernization. The results of my fieldwork in Mozambique shed new light
on this problem. While the observations above on gender and Pentecostalism in Latin
America apply to the Mozambican Pentecostal field, I found that this very field is above
all characterized by increased tensions in households between men and women (cf.
Costa 2007: 114). Family life in Mozambique is under enormous pressure (Fórum
Mulher et al. 2006) despite, or maybe because of, the growing emphasis on women’s
autonomy and equality between men and women. To understand this observation, a
long-term perspective on social change in Mozambique is presented in Chapter 3.
I argue that women’s participation in Pentecostalism in urban Mozambique
reveals a fundamental concern about their role in cultural continuity and change. Due to
colonial capitalism, socialism, the recent civil war and neo-liberalism, conflicting
practices and views exist on what society should be like and how men and women
should contribute to it. For example, the civil war affected kinship structures that to a
large extent supported communities and identities in the past. Families lost kin during
the war and proper funeral rituals often could not be held. It is, therefore, believed that
the spirits of these dead persons are restlessly wandering around, harming regeneration
(Honwana 1996; Igreja 2008; Marlin 2001; Schuetze 2010). Refugees are now living in
different places and have lost touch with their places of origin, and many women from
the rural areas, where the war was primarily fought, have fled to the cities where the
number of female-headed households has increased (WLSAMOÇ 2001: 57-60). The
introduction of a neo-liberal economy has impoverished some families and enriched
others, which in turn has affected kinship structures and social networks and contributed
to feelings of disorder (Costa 2007; Costa & Udelsmann Rodrigues 2007; Lundin
2007). At the same time more women in the urban areas have become better educated
and gained relative financial independence from their kin and partners. They have
started to criticize certain socio-cultural structures and are themselves being criticized
for these new attitudes although they are not sure how to shape their new cultural role.
Durham (2002) notes that it is precisely in those African societies where democracy and
economic reform have been relatively successful in the wake of globalization – such as
for upwardly mobile women in urban Mozambique – that uncertainty is manifesting
itself in people's daily lives and issues of social change (cf. Simone 2001: 17).
A growing group of women is exploring a new lifestyle and cultural position
and their historical role in the development of society is under pressure. Uncertainty,
loss of control and critiques of the social (dis)order and cultural identity are being
expressed in gendered terms and concern reproductive life events, such as marriage and
sexuality. People are asking why so many beautiful, well-educated women are not
married. ‘It is women who are afflicted by spirits’ and ‘Today it is very difficult to
arrange a marriage and have children’ are comments frequently heard. The fact that
40
many households are female-headed and women are not married is why some
Mozambicans are claiming that the balance between humans, families and spirits has
been disturbed and that people should be taught about their ancestors’ culture.
Historically, ancestors and kin have always played an important role in marriage
arrangements and were an essential component in securing the reproduction of life and
society. Others, including Pentecostals, argue, however, that many women are
remaining single precisely as a result of this ongoing ‘backward’ system of dependence
on ancestral spirits.
Indicative of the gendered perception of the changes that are taking place in
Mozambique are existing anxieties about so-called spirit spouses that frustrate women’s
sexual and marital relationships, as is discussed in Chapter 6. I encountered various
explanations for this phenomenon. One claimed that it was a war spirit made up of the
spirit of a murdered person who was seeking revenge and attacking the murderer’s
family with illness and misfortune. Compensation is needed to calm the spirit, for
example by letting the spirit ‘marry’ a virgin from the murderer’s family. This way the
spirit becomes the girl’s spouse but the girl cannot later marry another man. Another
account explains how, in the current neo-liberal economic order, (grand)parents are
selling their children to spirits to become rich. The (grand)parents consult a sorcerer
(feiticeiro) who, in return, is given a girl (because the spirit is male) to ‘feed’ the strong
spiritual powers the sorcerer uses to produce luck and wealth. When telling such stories,
people want, on the one hand, to illustrate how Mozambican society features unstable
kin structures that affect women but, on the other hand, they stress that persons are often
unfamiliar with the kinds of powers they have to deal with. This is precisely the issue
many of them are afraid of: they do not know which powers are controlling and
influencing their behaviour. As such, the spirit spouse is indicative of the entanglement
of reproductive issues (sexuality, marriage, procreation) with social transformations
(Spronk 2006). When women speak of their lack of sexual pleasure, sexual violence,
complicated relations with their husbands, infertility and spirits that obstruct intimacy,
they appear to be speaking indirectly or directly about an infertile and insecure society
too.
It is because of the problems and challenges the upwardly mobile women are
experiencing with their roles in the regeneration of society that many are starting to
frequent Pentecostal churches. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 explore this subject in more detail
and consider how Pentecostals are rearranging relations between reproduction and
society. The mainstream literature predominantly views conversion to Pentecostalism as
an attempt to regain control of gender roles and to treat the ruptures in regeneration
caused by the social disruption of the civil war and the end of the socialist era.
I aim to show that the process of seeking to regain control of gender roles does
not always result in improved relations between husbands and wives and does not
41
automatically bring harmony to household and family relationships. On the contrary, it

often encourages further breaks and discontinuity that reinforce distrust and tension.
Pentecostal pastors are teaching women who want to gain control over their lives to be
aware of possible evil spiritual influences and the involvement of kin and partners with
spirits. They have to combat these aggressively. Pentecostals claim that through the
burning power of the Holy Spirit women can become divorced from their spirit spouse
but then may enter a dangerous realm where a powerful spirit and those people related
to ‘him’ do everything they can to protect their own position. Women who attempt to
break with existing social structures and create new gender roles and family forms with
the power of the Holy Spirit therefore unleash a violent spiritual war.
2.3 Pentecostalism and (in)security
A review of the dominant scientific models of religious conversion shows that, in

religion at large, conversion is primarily used as a mechanism for coping.44 The
individual, often in a situation of crisis and insecurity, can find a solution and a
(temporal) destination in a religious group that offers community, security, love and
care. This view has been central in almost all the approaches to conversion in the social
sciences, as well as in subsequent revisions and elaborations ranging from those of
psychologist William James (1975 [1902]) to sociologists Lofland & Stark (1965), Greil
(1977) and Snow & Machalek (1983, 1984) to psychologist Lewis Rambo (1993) and
the rational choice conversion model of Stark & Finke (2000). Also in the literature on
conversion to Pentecostalism, coping mechanisms have become central (Hunt 2002a,
2002b; Robbins 2004: 123-127; cf. Meyer 2007: 122; van Dijk 2010a). This view
would seem logical because Pentecostal converts were often at the lower end of the
social scale, for example migrants in the urban areas who were trying to access
economic prosperity in difficult conditions. In these circumstances, Pentecostalism
offers hope, escape and a sense of community (Robbins 2004: 123-124).
In the African context, research on the rise of African Independent Churches
(AICs)45 in the cities (Daneel 1974; Kiernan 1977; Sundkler 1961 [1948]; van
Binsbergen 1981; West 1975) has been influential in viewing conversion as a form of
44
In psychology, religion has always been seen to offer healing and in situations of crisis, religious conversion
helps to reorganize the psyche and make people happier (James 1975 [1902]: 194-257). In sociology, religion
is thought to play a role by holding society together (Durkheim 1976 [1912]). And anthropologists have
shown that magical rituals produce tangible results, for example, protecting people from enemies, healing
them and producing economic and romantic success (Frazer 1922; Malinowski 1948).
45
AICs opened in many countries during the colonial period. They were mainly founded by Africans who had
left mission churches to start their own churches. For an overview of the literature on AICs, see Fernandez
(1978) and Meyer (2004a). For a discussion about the inclusion of AICs in the definition of Pentecostalism
because of the role of the Holy Spirit in AICs, see Anderson (2004: 103-122) and Frahm-Arp (2001), and cf.
Engelke (2010). See also Kalu (2008) on African Pentecostalism. This thesis does not include AICs when
referring to Pentecostalism.
42
coping (van Dijk 2010a). From a Marxist perspective, the attraction of AICs as a kind of
new family for first-generation urban dwellers has been emphasized (van Binsbergen
1981, cf. 2000) and the rise of a capitalist economy with its new industry, trade and
commerce led to massive rural-urban migration. Scholars have demonstrated that AICs
helped their followers adapt to an urban and capitalist environment by reducing their
feelings of stress, disruption and loss of village community life and by offering ways of
coping with illness and misfortune. The AICs encouraged incorporating traditional life
in a new context – a villagization of the city (Devisch 1996) – and provided an
important connection between rural and urban life.
This perspective has influenced studies on the rise of AICs and Pentecostal
churches in Mozambique (Agadjanian 1999; Cruz e Silva 2001b; Mateus 2001; Pfeiffer
2002; Pfeiffer et al. 2007). These scholars highlight the state’s inability to organize
basic living conditions in urban areas, which has negatively impacted on women
running a household and taking care of their children. Women have thus turned to the
churches in large numbers for help and healing. Cruz e Silva (2008: 170) concludes that
the AICs are made up of ‘the peripheral and marginalized par excellence’. Agadjanian
(1999) describes how a particular type of AIC, namely the Zionist churches, have
assisted people in overcoming the rural-urban divide by linking up with traditional
cosmology, but they have also introduced new ideas and practices. Pfeiffer et al. (2007)
argue that increasing economic inequality due to the neo-liberal economic reforms has
exacerbated household stress. This is reflected in church attendance (cf. Pfeiffer 2002).
Women in Chimoio, a city in the central-west Manica Province, are increasingly
seeking spiritual help from AICs and Pentecostal churches for reproductive health
problems. In line with the Marxist-Leninist ideology that influenced scholarship in
Mozambique, Serra (in Mateus 2001: 161-162; 2003a: 62-66; cf. Batine 2003) views
religious conversion as a response to deprivation, anomie and social exclusion and as
supporting state power because the churches blame spirits and not politicians for
people’s problems and poverty.
Van Dijk (2010a) describes how the Marxist ‘coping’ approach to the
relationship between religion (particularly AICs) and the economy in Africa has shifted
to an emphasis on ‘expression’ in more recent studies on ‘modernity’s malcontent’
(Comaroff & Comaroff 1993; cf. Taussig 1980, 1987). These studies demonstrate how,
through the expression of religious symbolism and participation, people are giving their
own meaning to the social transformations that are accompanying globalization and
commoditization (see Comaroff & Comaroff 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2001; Fisiy &
Geschiere 1991; Meyer 1998b; Meyer & Pels 2003; Moore & Sanders 2001; for
Mozambique, Honwana 2003). For example, African societies may attribute magical
powers to foreign commodities since their unexpected appearance in local shops proves
that they possess a will of their own by suddenly appearing in people’s lives (Comaroff
43
& Comaroff 1999a, 1999b). More generally, capitalism may be understood by local
people in terms of a mysterious magical power that makes money out of nothing, since
it randomly makes some rich while others continue to experience poverty and exclusion.
People’s fantasies and anxieties about this magical economic enterprise have been
translated in stories that circulate about the occult. In this setting, Pentecostal churches
have warned against dangers commodities could represent (Meyer 1998b). Through
prayer in Pentecostal deliverance services, purchased commodities are cleansed of their
diabolic powers and the dangers attached to wealth are diminished. This enchanted
understanding of the economy would explain why people fervently adopt the
Pentecostal Prosperity Gospel that assumes that economic forces are led by good or evil
spirits (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000).
Pentecostal converts and non-Pentecostals in Mozambique see the economy as
an enchanted enterprise but do not necessarily consider global capitalism confusing or
mysterious. On the contrary, they are actively engaging in the new economic reality by
working in private (international) companies, banks and NGOs and by starting up
(small) shops and businesses and making a profit. They are not looking for a safe shelter
from which to judge the influences of globalization: they are part of it. Similarly, rural
migrants I met at Pentecostal churches had left traditional forms of production behind
when moving to the city where they subsequently arranged jobs in sectors attached to
the global economy. They do not feel dispossessed or lost. As mentioned earlier,
Pentecostal converts in Mozambique are often not at the lower end of the social scale
but are primarily socio-economically upwardly mobile people. Hence, the prevailing
discourse that sees conversion to Pentecostalism in terms of coping would appear to be
inadequate in this respect. This is even truer if we take into consideration the fact that
many people pay a high price for conversion to Pentecostalism: the huge financial
demands and the break with families and ancestral kin that are required by Pentecostal
churches imply increased or greater insecurity in people’s lives. This is elaborated on in
Chapter 8.
Another explanation for the success of the Pentecostal churches is that
Pentecostalism offers a modern continuity with local systems and beliefs (Cox 1995).
As some non-Pentecostal interlocutors suggested, instead of worshipping the ancestors
with ‘disgusting bloody animal sacrifices’, people prefer the clean, white and modern
Pentecostal churches and practices.46 In addition, since people are used to giving money
to kin and local healers in exchange for security and prosperity in any case, it is only a
minor change now to ‘pay’ Pentecostal pastors for healing and success. This view is
essentially a variant of the aforementioned coping mechanism. During my fieldwork it
was voiced by several non-Pentecostal Mozambicans but it is also a dominant view in
46
Someone told me that he liked to go to the Universal Church because, in contrast to other churches and
healing places, it offered electricity and chairs (conversation, 10 October 2005).
44
the study of the role of religion in Africa in times of social change. For example, the
emergence of religious cults in African cities has been understood as a cultural
continuity of traditional religions in rural areas (van Binsbergen & Schoffeleers 1985).
This view was influenced by growing insight at the end of the colonial period that ‘the
African townsman is a townsman’, as Gluckman (1960: 57) so famously put it: Africans
were not only live rural persons, as was the general idea under colonialism. This
literature emerged in response to the fact that religious cults in Africa appeared to exist
in the urban context, which was in contrast to the then-prevailing approach of studying
African rituals as purely rural phenomena that would disappear with ongoing colonial
influence and urbanization (Fabian 1981). In summary, scholars favouring the cultural
continuity thesis interpreted urban religion as a logical outcome for migrants who
wanted to maintain rural-urban ties. Van Binsbergen & Schoffeleers (1985: 9), for
instance, found the ‘structural similarity’ of prophets in the city and diviners in the rural
areas striking and suggested that existing symbols and rituals were being transformed in
a new urban context. Sundkler (1961: 238), who studied the rapid growth of Zionist
churches in South Africa, approached these groups as ‘old wine in new wineskins’. He
interpreted the AICs as a mixture of Christianity and African divination and felt that the
shift from dependence on ancestral spirits to one on the Holy Spirit was a minor
religious change.
The growth of Pentecostalism in the post-colonial era in a context of increasing
modernization and globalization intensified scholarly debate on the role of Christianity,
and Pentecostalism in particular, in circumstances of social change (Gifford 2004b;
Maxwell 1998; Meyer 1998a, 1999; van Dijk 1992, 1998; cf. Comaroff & Comaroff
1991, 1997; Engelke 2004; Marshall 2009; Peel 2000; Robbins 2003, 2007; van der
Veer 1996). Unlike the AICs, the new Pentecostal churches stress cultural discontinuity.
The new urban middle classes that emerged in African cities in the 1970s, 1980s and
1990s found Pentecostalism attractive because it critiqued traditional forms of living,
like the power of the elders and ancestors, and gender structures, and provided a
language and practice of modernity that supported their search for a contemporary
urban identity (Meyer 1998a, 1999; van Dijk 1992, 1998). Pentecostal ideologies and
practices stimulated a cultural break but Meyer (1998a: 340) concluded that the
Pentecostal discourse of cultural discontinuity instead addressed the gap between
people’s aspirations and actual circumstances rather than effectuating a cultural break.
More recently, Marshall (2009) emphasized the centrality of the break with the past in
Nigerian Pentecostalism but argues that all religious practice encompasses old and new
elements.
It is exactly this tension between cultural continuity and discontinuity that is
playing a major role in the lives of Brazilian Pentecostal converts in Mozambique. On
the one hand, cultural continuity is important in that converts can still be influenced by
45
the past and not all converts succeed in breaking with it. However, precisely because the
past continues to be present in converts’ lives, through the activities of ancestral spirits
and the effects of the civil war, the need for many for a rupture with it is becoming more
urgent. The past’s continued influence is often problematic (cf. van Dijk 2005). In
response, Pentecostal pastors are exerting pressure to break with the past and converts
are starting to invest in discontinuity (cf. Pierucci 2006; Robbins 2007). For example,
converts frequently refuse to perform the central part of the local/indigenous marriage
ceremony when gifts are presented to the ancestors in return for their blessing.
Obviously, this leads to tense relations with relatives as contesting the power of
ancestral spirits can provoke misfortune for the family. Although forms of cultural
continuity can still be found in Brazilian Pentecostalism and in converts’ lives, converts
are now actively engaging in a process of cultural discontinuity in spite of the fact that
this is locally regarded as an insecure strategy. Chapter 6 elaborates on Pentecostal
women’s attempts to escape dependence on the web of kin and (ancestral) spirits.
To summarize, while coping mechanisms, such as cultural continuity, play a
central role in the dominant sociological view of religion, including Pentecostalism, in a
context of change, this approach does not offer a satisfactory explanation for the
spectacular rise in Pentecostalism in Mozambique. Pentecostal converts are mainly
upwardly mobile people who are not socio-economically deprived and they tend to
invest in cultural discontinuity after conversion, which may lead to increased insecurity
and even deprivation. As such, the case of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique
demonstrates that the dominant perspective on conversion as an expression of cultural
continuity and security does not provide adequate insight into the implications and
violent consequences of conversion. While it may be a safer option for women to
remain part of their previous social-security networks, they are opting to abandon them
and the security they offered in an attempt to move forward and upward. Their
investment in insecurity and discontinuity could potentially be harmful but they stressed
the need to reach a higher goal. In the process, people related to them have come to feel
terrorized and harmed.
The prominent role of cultural discontinuity raises important questions. Why
do relatively well-off people opt for insecurity and uncertainty? Why do different
converts in similar situations become involved to a different extent in situations of
rupture? What factors determine different forms of religious participation? Chapter 5
examines how a combination of life and generational trajectories influences the degrees
of rupture and insecurity converts engage in. Chapters 3 and 4 explicitly address why
discontinuity is particularly relevant for women in relation to the domain of family and
marriage, taking into account the particular socio-cultural context of Mozambican
society. I demonstrate that the interplay between the Mozambican context – including
its regional history, Portuguese colonialism, the socialist period, the civil war, recent
46
rapid socio-economic changes, spiritual histories and family issues – and a specific form
of South-South Pentecostalism has generated a conversion process that enhances
rupture and insecurity in distinct ways.
New building Universal Church, São Damaso, Machava © Rufus de Vries
2.4 Pentecostalism and development
The study of the interaction between religion and socio-economic development has a
long tradition in the social sciences. Probably one of the most famous contributions to
this debate is the Weberean assumption that has been adopted in the academic study of
Pentecostalism (see Meyer 2007) and suggests that Protestantism has an elective affinity
with both capitalism and democracy. For example, Miller & Yamamori (2007: 168)
posit a clear connection between Pentecostals who live a disciplined, honest life and
enjoy upward social mobility. Along the same lines, the Centre for Development and
Enterprise in South Africa (CDE 2008) recently published a study of the social and
economic role of Pentecostal churches in South Africa and concluded that the
Pentecostal Prosperity Gospel encourages people not to wait for government to
implement change but to take the initiative and engage in entrepreneurial activities
themselves. The report uses the theoretical perspective developed by scholars David
Martin, Peter Berger and, to a lesser extent, Paul Gifford. Looking mainly at Latin
America, Martin (2002) argues that Pentecostalism encourages people’s agency, teaches
47
the skills necessary in a modern society and stimulates upward social and economic
mobility. Gifford (2004a) compares different Pentecostal churches in Ghana by
discussing why they have failed or succeeded in introducing leadership skills that are
necessary in a democratic society and help develop a work ethic. In one of his latest
writings on faith and development, Berger (2009: 71) clearly follows a Weberean
perspective when stating that:
Pentecostalism exhibits precisely the features of the ‘Protestant ethic’ which are
functional for modern economic development. To be sure, Pentecostals are not Puritans.
They are far too exuberant, and they have characteristics that would have appalled the
Puritans (beginning with the speaking in tongues). But they do correspond to the afore-
mentioned elements of an ‘inner-worldly asceticism’— hard work, frugality, ‘delayed
gratification’ and so on. Because of this, I will venture the following, simple but far-
reaching, proposition: Pentecostalism should be viewed as a positive resource for
modern economic development.
In Mozambique, I observed how Pentecostalism stimulates people’s agency, self-worth

and upward socio-economic mobility. For example, one of the Brazilian Pentecostal
pastors’ key messages to the Mozambican people is that they can overcome poverty by
seizing any economic opportunities available. And the Pentecostal business courses
offered to converts, where they are taught how to position themselves better in the neo-
liberal market economy, are another example. Yet I cannot support the positive
evaluation of the ‘help’ Pentecostalism offers. I would prefer to look critically at
Pentecostal’s presumed ‘positive resource for modern economic development’ (Berger
2009: 71). Notwithstanding the aforementioned stand of the Pentecostal pastors, many
converts ultimately lose substantial amounts of money and sometimes even their
businesses as a result of the financial demands placed on them by the church. I elaborate
on this in Chapter 8. The continuous pressure on tithing and sacrificing tends to induce
downward socio-economic mobility among converts rather than the upward mobility
that Martin (2002) and Miller & Yamamori (2007) mention.
The question remains as to whether the increasing interest in the potential of
religion in development programmes (Belshaw et al. 2001; Marshall & Keough 2004;
Ter Haar & Ellis 2006) sufficiently considers the kind of ‘development models’
religions produce. Ellis & Ter Haar (2004, 2007) have outlined how the search for
balance and harmony in relations with the spirit world is of paramount importance in
African societies if the goal is to develop and transform society. They describe how
religion refers to the belief that the existence of the invisible world cannot be separated
from the visible one. Contrary to the general idea of religion in Western societies,
spiritual beings have effective powers over the material world and play a crucial role in
the development of society (Ellis & Ter Haar 2004: 14).
48
Yet there may be enormous differences in how Africans relate to this belief
and its inherent values and practices, and thus how they view and engage in
development. Pentecostals in Mozambique have a profound problem with the fact that
ancestral spirits and Mozambican culture in general are key to socio-economic
development, as is argued by the government and various NGOs. More generally, urban
Mozambicans feel insecure about the role spiritual beings should play as a result of their
experience with violent spirits’ actions, especially war spirits (see below and Chapter 6;
cf. Ashforth 2001). More fundamentally, however, this hesitation regarding the role of
spirits in modern life is related to the country’s history. After independence from
Portugal, the liberation movement Frelimo formed a Marxist-Leninist government and,
in their efforts to establish a modern nation-state, its leaders forbad ancestral rituals (in
line with the former colonial government) and any form of religious worship. Local
culture and spiritual beings were seen as an enemy of modern development. However,
as major discontents that played a role in the course of the civil war arose (Geffray
1991; Wilson 1992), the population felt unprotected due to Frelimo’s rejection of
ancestral powers (cf. Honwana 2003: 63-64) even though it eventually abandoned this
policy. Today, the party’s message is that an awareness and knowledge of
Mozambique’s cultural past will enrich all Mozambicans and is an important instrument
for prosperity and development. Change occurred, for example, in the way the position
of traditional healing became perceived as being part of the nation-state project, among
others through the establishment of AMETRAMO, the government-supported national
association of traditional healers (Honwana 1996).
Many Mozambicans in the urban centres engaged with the colonial project,
with Frelimo’s socialist ideals and with the mission churches, all of which rejected
ancestral powers. As a result, there were Mozambicans who had willingly or
unwillingly broken away from kin and participating in ancestral rituals. To them and
their children, the roots of Mozambique’s problems, such as poverty, are spiritual in
nature. Contrary to their fellow citizens who find the balance between humans and
ancestral spirits crucial to development (Honwana 1996, 2003; Igreja 2007: 90-95, 373-
381), they think that the source of their society’s problems is that these spirits are still,
and even increasingly, prominent. Through conversion to Pentecostalism, they critique
and invest in destroying the existing model of development based on ‘tradition’.
Moreover, as described in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, the type of development Mozambican
Pentecostals are concerned with may not necessarily be directed to progress in a
modernist sense and to harmony, democracy and security. The question is thus how
concepts of development can be viewed through the prism of religious believers.
I address this issue by exploring how the traditionally established links
between religion and development in Mozambique have evolved in particular and often
problematic ways within the urban domain, which is also the primary domain of
49
Pentecostal involvement. The link between traditional religion and development deal
with sustaining the circle of relations between ancestors, kin, money and fertility to
guarantee the reproduction of life (i.e. development). Chapter 8 explains how a principal
point of contestation in this respect is the role of money in relations as the basis for the
development of society. The emerging middle classes in particular are experiencing
reciprocal kin relations as a burden because of the obligation to share money. And the
new economic roles of women in the urban domain are creating complications in
intimate and kin relations. I aim to show that their involvement in Brazilian
Pentecostalism is an attempt to change a socio-economic order that they are
experiencing as a burden by destroying the fundamental structures of this very order.
Believers regularly talk about ‘doing holocaustos’, which refers to a type of Biblical
(Old Testament) offering in which the animal to be sacrificed is consumed by fire.
Financial sacrifices ranging between US$ 50 and US$ 20,00047 materialized women’s
desire to annihilate specific relations. The offerings were accompanied by phrases such
as ‘the burning power of the Holy Spirit’ that would erase the influence of kin, spirits,
unfaithful husbands, jealous colleagues and neighbours. Since the goal is to be born
again and arise transformed as a Pentecostal, one’s old life has to ‘die’. It is this element
of death and destruction that is experienced as violence, particularly by those who are
the object of destruction.
At the same time, converts become afraid of others or feel insecure about their
intentions. When I spent time with converts I was always warned about persons who
would approach me but were in fact demons in disguise. Converts told me about
colleagues who put witchcraft medicines on their office chairs to make them lose their
jobs. I learned about women who used magical powers to seduce the boyfriends of other
women, such as those of the Pentecostal women I met. And parents and grandparents
would offer their children to the Devil in order to become rich. Converts saw and
experienced their lives, their relations, their jobs and government policies as part of the
spiritual war in which they were God’s soldiers and had to combat the Devil and his evil
spirits. Such a military strategy leads to increasing risk and uncertainty but it is,
surprisingly, something that converts deliberately and wholeheartedly engaged in. How
should this be interpreted? Converts go to church because they want to improve their
lives, be healed and prosper in the widest sense (Pfeiffer et al. 2007) but what happens
when people convert and participate in all kinds of Pentecostal services and courses?
What does the ‘help’ consist of? What is the ‘cost’ of developing ‘positive resources’
and ‘skills’? In Chapters 6, 7 and 8, I discuss how Pentecostal ‘agency’ and ‘self worth’
(Martin 2002) in Mozambique are based on an attitude of risk-taking, in which
Pentecostalism turns out to be much more part of a neo-liberal order and economic
47
The Mozambican currency is the Metical but the US dollar is the leading currency in the business circles in
which Pentecostals move and operate.
50
reform than a response to them (van de Kamp 2010; for South Africa, van Wyck 2008;
cf. Comaroff 2009; Meyer 2007; van Dijk 2010a). It demonstrates the way the
Pentecostal Prosperity Gospel has taken shape in Mozambique. This clearly has
implications for how relations between religion and development are perceived.
Sanctuary of Miracles, Universal Church, Maputo. ©Rufus de Vries
2.5 Conclusion
This chapter has discussed the three research themes of family and gender; (in)security;
and development in the wider study of African Pentecostalism in general and in relation
to the Mozambican situation in particular. I reviewed the tendency in the mainstream
literature to understand the emergence of specific religious movements, like
Pentecostalism, in many African societies as an effect of or reaction to social, political
or economic forces and to see how religious conversion is often regarded as a coping
strategy. Scholars have claimed that conversion has a positive effect on marriage,
gender and family and offers security and cultural continuity. Moreover, conversion to
Pentecostalism stimulates socio-economic development. Even though these perspectives
have given important insight into the growth of Pentecostalism that to some extent may
be valuable for Mozambique, I have found a much stronger, alternative development.
Having given several examples from Maputo, I questioned how far Pentecostal
conversion should be approached as a religion that provides comfort, certainty and
51
socio-economic development because converts in Mozambique are facing increasing

insecurity, uncertainty and downward socio-economic mobility.
To find out why this is happening and why converts are continuing to engage
in Pentecostalism, I propose seeing this religion as a practice of pioneering with violent
dimensions (cf. Chapter 1). Pentecostalism as a practice of pioneering views religion as
an active force, shaping social, political or economic forces rather than reacting to them.
It appears to connect well to a pioneer society and mentality, such as the urban
environment of a city like Maputo where everyone is claiming political, cultural and
economic space. Pentecostals are gaining and forming these spaces by breaking down
boundaries, such as local customs of marriage and relations with kin and ancestors. And
Pentecostal discourses and practices are persuading followers to move frontiers and take
control of their lives and society with the power of the Holy Spirit. This Pentecostal
pioneer mentality is involving and creating clashes that may become violent. The
Pentecostal use of ritual power is meant to destroy other powers but this spiritual
violence is also creating new forms of violence, such as social distancing between
partners and kin and the destruction of local practices. This is the analytical framework
that I will substantiate on in the following chapters as I present the ethnography of my
study.
© Rufus de Vries
53
3. The formation of a gendered nation-state in Maputo
3.1 Introduction
Many Mozambicans are questioning where their society is heading and wondering what
kind of society they want in the future. After a socialist period (ca. 1974-1989), a
devastating civil war (ca. 1976-1992) and the introduction of neo-liberal socio-
economic and democratic structures (1990s), these questions have become increasingly
pertinent. And interestingly, debates on how Mozambican society should develop are
often articulated in gendered language. Among Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals alike,
discussions on conflictive relationships and gender roles, how to relate to kin and how a
marriage should work are central. These discussions are focusing on the expected roles
of women in African societies.
In her study on gender and nation, Yuval-Davis (1997) demonstrated that the
development of national identities involves particular views and attitudes specific to
men and women. Gendered bodies have a central role as markers and reproducers of
group identities (cf. Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler 2002) and this includes representations of
a nation in terms of family and sexuality. For example, in socialist art, gender images
reveal how socialist society was imagined with the female metaphor of fertility, nature,
growth and blossoming (Hobsbawm 1978: 133). Mbembe (2006: 167-168) describes the
semiotics of power in post-colonial societal formations in the form of an infinite
erection, where political struggles are nearly always fought in the guise of verifying
virility and femininity (cf. Butler 1992, 1997). Such constructions and imaginations of
the nation tend to position women as signifiers of the community’s honour, making
them subject to forms of control in the name of culture and tradition. At the same time,
this position allows women to enter a dialogue with other groups and to transcend and
cross cultural boundaries (Yuval-Davis 1997; cf. Anzaldúa 1987; Grosz-Ngate and
Kokole 1997). Tripp et al. (2009: 25-28) describe how African women have used their
position as mothers as a resource to demand changes in political culture, whereas
motherhood can sometimes be seen as an obstacle to women’s advancement. Social
transformations in Mozambique, such as those that occurred under colonialism,
socialism, war and neo-liberalism, have induced a certain loosening of the controls of
traditional values and structures, and some cultural boundaries have become more
permeable. Mozambican women have been able to embark on new socio-cultural roles
and cross boundaries that touch on spheres of socio-cultural reproduction such as the
family, marriage and gender roles.
This chapter provides a historical overview of the interplay between family,
gender and the formation of a Mozambican nation-state. It aims to offer a socio-
54
historical background as to why upwardly mobile women48 are engaging in such large
numbers with transnational Pentecostalism as a practice of pioneering, but one that has
violent dimensions. Among Mozambicans, different opinions about the future of their
nation are related to the loosening of control of historical kinship structures and gender
roles. In this process, women who take up new positions and cross boundaries seem to
be connecting with and shaping the pioneer mentality of Brazilian Pentecostalism.
Brazilian Pentecostalism seems to be of special relevance in the urban sphere
and the social-historical narrative focuses on how the process of nation-state formation
has shaped particular dynamics with regard to family and gender in Maputo. I will first
elaborate on the profound impact that labour migration and forced wage labour had on
family life under Portuguese colonialism in the middle and at the end of the 19th
century. The system of labour had a specific influence on women and men in the rural
and urban areas of southern Mozambique.49 In the subsequent post-colonial period,
gendered forms of labour and family structures in Maputo developed further under the
specific circumstances of socialism, war and neo-liberalism. I want to show that
women, unlike in the past when their participation in the formal public spaces of the
city as the centre of civilization of the nation-state was limited, have been conquering
the city streets in recent years. This has influenced perceptions regarding the role of
men and women, their kinship and affective relations, and marriages in the development
of Mozambican society.
The structure of this chapter is as follows. In the next section I focus on the
historical relations between the formation of the Mozambique nation-state and
reproduction, namely gender, family and work. Section 3.3 describes the role of the city
in the history of the nation-state and the following section elaborates on the connection
between the city, gender and family. I end with a summary.
3.2 The reproduction of life in the formation of the nation-state
Historically, the area that is Mozambique today consisted of many different ethnic
groups with their own kinship structures, marital practices and wealth-production
systems. In each of these groups, men and women had their own positions (Sheldon
2002).50 The northern groups were organized along matrilineal kin structures,
48
I focus mainly on women although I am aware that processes of change affect men too. This chapter
demonstrates that there is not one category of women as their lives are determined by their social class, their
life in a city or village, and by specific historical periods and personal circumstances. In Mozambique,
different variants of ‘being a woman’ emerged: pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, modern, traditional,
(post-)war, Marxist, feminist, international, middle-lower-upper class, religious, etc.
49
Since I focus on Maputo, the historical narrative concentrates on the southern part of Mozambique which
was more influenced by the Portuguese colonial government, Christian missions and labour migration to
South Africa than the central and northern regions were.
50
Sheldon describes the situation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
55
whereas the southern Tsonga and Chopi societies were organized according to
patrilineal kin systems. In the patrilineal south, households engaged in agro-pastoral
production under the authority of a senior male. Women had a central role in this
system in food production through their agricultural work, as is expressed in the
Tsonga proverb: ‘The heart of the village is the mortar [for pounding grain]’
(Sheldon 2002: 22). Men were involved in hunting, fishing and livestock and in
supporting the agricultural work, for example through tool making (Junod 1996b
[1912]: 13-85; Zimba 2003: 49-51).51 The reproduction of society depended on
marriage, agricultural work, food preparation and control over a woman’s fertility, in
which lobolo52 played a crucial role. Lobolo is a marriage payment made by the
bridegroom’s family to the bride’s family to compensate the girl’s parents for
bringing her up, to establish kin relations, distribute and accumulate wealth and
maintain the lineage (Feliciano 1998: 249-267; Junod 1996a [1912]: 109-120;
Penvenne 1995: 22-23; cf. Bagnol 2006; Granjo 2005). In the process, the two
families and their ancestors become related, which embeds the bride and bridegroom
in a network of kinship and assures a good marriage and procreation.
The accumulation and exchange of lobolo, as controlled by older men, were
essential for men to gain legitimate access to women’s labour, sexuality and fertility,
and for both men and women to gain adult status and establish their positions in society.
Penvenne (1986:1) said that her male informants ‘typically viewed the acquisition of
bridewealth, lobolo, as a principal goal in their lives’. Despite male domination in
providing the material support of lobolo, these ‘lobolated’ women were in a stronger
position to defend their individual interests than those who were not. Women could
establish powerful positions through their reproductive roles, using their powers of
fertility and healing (Sheldon 2002: 29-32; cf. Loforte 2003). Polygamous unions
enhanced the possibility for women to share the workload with other wives, and senior
women could exercise power over junior ones (Zimba 2003: 54-56).
In short, in line with The Gift, the influential work by Mauss (1969 [1924]),
kinship has been an essential social institution in regulating the exchange relations
necessary for the reproduction of biological, economic and socio-cultural life. Bloch &
Parry (1982) describe the regeneration (or reproduction) of life in which death, birth,
marriage, sexuality, food and money are all bound up in one sphere. All are important
and depend on each other for the smooth running of social life (for Mozambique cf.
Costa 2007; Feliciano 1998: 297-323). The balance between these different aspects of
reproduction changed during the formation of the nation-state, a process that included
specific forms of violence.
51
Zimba (2003) emphasizes the cooperation between men and women. For example, although men hunted,
women were part of its dynamics through their important role in preparations and logistics.
52
Lobolo is Portuguese for lovolo in the southern Mozambican languages of xironga and xichangana (Sitoe
1996:99).
56
3.2.1 Labour migration and the colonial state

In the second half of the 19th century, the existing power relations in southern
Mozambican societies started to alter with the labour migration of young men to
South Africa (Harries 1994). They started to earn money outside the usual exchange
relations described above and the older men began to lose control over work, the
exchange of goods and marriage arrangements because their grandchildren were
earning their own money, were independent of the larger family and could pay their
own lobolo (Harries 1994: 98). Harris (1959) argues that labour migration was
stimulated by the Tsonga laws of inheritance whereby only the oldest son of the first
wife could inherit and any other sons were forced to participate in migrant labour,
which offered a form of social mobility. Another reason was the lack of farmland to
engage in intensive forms of agriculture. In a few areas, women were involved in
subsistence farming without the involvement of men, which made labour migration
an attractive option and allowed men the chance to have a better socio-economic
position (Harris 1959: 57-59).53 In the early 19th century, Nguni kingdoms were
established in southern Mozambique following the dispersal of the Nguni across
Southern Africa in the period of Mfecane, a time of political, economic and social
crisis in Zululand. They established the Gaza Kingdom in southern Mozambique and
incorporated the Tsonga (Liesegang 1975, 1986: 8-12). Control of territory by the
Nguni, especially under King Ngungunyane (1884-1895), restricted male access to
land and hunting and contributed to labour migration (Harries 1994).
Portuguese colonization added a further dimension to migrant labour
patterns. Following their arrival in Southern Africa at the beginning of the 16th
century, the Portuguese tried to colonize Mozambican territories, but the British and
various local regional empires like the Gaza Kingdom made counter claims to the
same territory (Isaacman 1975; Newitt 1997; Vail & White 1980). A decisive step in
the long-term process of integration of a large geographical area was the Berlin
Conference of 1885, when Africa was divided amongst the colonial powers, which
led to revived Portuguese attempts at colonization. Another important step was the
Portuguese conquest of the Nguni in the south in 1895, when they defeated their
leader Ngungunyane. Increased Portuguese colonial control at the end of the 19th
century was the start of more effective incorporation of the various ethnic societies
into larger structures, such as the state and the global economy. This profoundly, and
for some violently, changed the organization of production as well as that of social
and biological reproduction, and influenced the lives of families and individuals
(Feliciano 1998).
53
See Rita-Ferreira (1960, 1961), Harris (1960) and Macamo (2005a) for a discussion on labour migration.
57
From 1926 onwards, with the fascist New State in Portugal, a programme to
restore Portuguese influence was introduced through the rigorous control of colonial
populations (Newitt 1997: 445-482). The system of Indigenato was implemented by
the colonizers, thus introducing a distinction between citizen and subject (Mamdani
1996) with two classes of people: the ‘native’ (‘indígena’) and the ‘non-native’ or
‘assimilated’ (‘não-indígena’ or ‘assimilado’). The ‘native’ was positioned under
customary law and had to do forced labour (chibalo). The ‘non-native’ (Portuguese,
Afro-Portuguese, Asians and those of mixed race) had Portuguese citizenship rights,
lived under civil law and was not subjected to forced labour. A group of ‘natives’
could obtain the status of ‘assimilado’, depending on their position and behavior, by
applying for a certificate of assimilation but were accused of being ‘pocket whites’,
dark-skinned people who carried a document in their pocket that said they were
white (Penvenne 1995: 9).54 The Indigenato created a bifurcated world where
Africans were inferior to whites (Harris 1966) but at the same time these marked
oppositions were conditional and were experienced differently by rural and urban
residents, by men and women depending on which class they belonged to
(O’Laughlin 2000; Penvenne 1995) and the degree of Portuguese influence in their
region.
The decision by the Portuguese colonial authorities to tax the population
forced the ‘natives’ to enter the labour market to earn wages (Newitt 1997: 406-410).
Work thus became part of the colonial system and included labour migration. An
agreement was reached with the South African authorities who paid part of the
salaries of migrant workers as a tax to the Portuguese authorities (Harris 1959: 50).
Wage labour was defined as a male activity but, in the absence of male
breadwinners, women were also forced to work for the state to pay tax (Macamo
2005a: 74; Sheldon 2002: 50, 51). From this time onwards, work was no longer
primarily connected to a village and family life but to the larger entity of the state.
This brought profound shifts in Mozambican households and, in contrast to earlier
forms of labour migration, men were not present for a large part of the year and
women had to take over their work.55 Conjugal relations shifted; men lost their
previous position in the household as well as their influence and control. This
changed and challenged existing relations between men and women, as Ronga56
songs about women’s disrespect for men during this period are witness to (Sheldon
2002: 57). The process whereby older men lost the control they had enjoyed over
54
The photographer Sebastião Langa’s pictures show how Mozambicans integrated in ‘the Portuguese
civilized world’ in Lourenço Marques, the capital of the colonial state (Langa 2001).
55
According to Harris (1959: 51), well over 50% of Tsonga males in the 1950s were away for long periods of
time working for wages in South Africa or somewhere else in Mozambique, like Lourenço Marques. For
current ongoing male migration patterns in South Africa and their impact on issues of gender, see Tvedten et
al. (2010).
56
The dominant ethnic group in Maputo Province in southern Mozambique.
58
work, the exchange of goods and marriage arrangements intensified (Arnfred 2001:
31; Feliciano 1998: 283-294; cf. Lovett 1989: 29).
These social changes brought a worsening of living conditions, just as they
also introduced new opportunities. Some women were active agents in the colonial
world and succeeded in escaping power structures that they found oppressive, while
others became victims (Gengenbach 2003; Sheldon 2002: 46; Zimba 2003; cf.
Allman et al. 2002). In general, forced labour aggravated women’s workloads as
they had to produce more while their menfolk were away. Macamo (2005a: 83)
shows how wage employment brought new meaning to people’s sense of self: ‘wage
labor created individuals out of undifferentiated social contexts and placed them
before the need to find a personality within the new context’. The social changes led
to new and conflicting claims of community and personhood.
Education was also influential in this process. In cooperation with the
Catholic missions, it played a role in the Portuguese’s unifying nationalist colonial
project and thus had a civilizing purpose. Polygamy, lobolo and initiation rituals
subsequently had to be eliminated because they were considered evil and oppressed
women (Sheldon 2002: 79-113). While men were introduced into wage labour and
some into literate culture as a way of incorporating them into nationhood, women’s
roles were directed to the field of nature and, accordingly, they had to invest in the
family. In the Constitution of Portugal’s fascist New State in 1933 during the final
phase of colonialism, it was stated that men were entitled to Portuguese citizenship.
Women had no formal rights to citizenship and their ‘national status’ was restricted
to their role in the family, the ‘Portuguese home’ (Ferreira 1996: 135). In the
Mozambican anti-colonial movement that emerged in the second half of the 20th
century, women negotiated a new status.
3.2.2 Mother Africa and Father Marx 57
Anti-colonial groups were brought together in the Front for the Liberation of
Mozambique (Frelimo) in 1960 to fight for independence from Portugal (Newitt 1997:
517-540). To succeed, the participation of all Mozambique’s ethnic groups was required
and, in this respect, Frelimo adopted the idea of a nationalist project that had previously
been introduced by the Portuguese. The struggle was based on socialist principles and
Frelimo promoted class solidarity and equality between men and women, and addressed
the oppression of women in the colonial system but also in traditional structures.
57
I have borrowed this phrase from a book with the same title by Hilary Owen (2007: 32, 33) who analyzes
the works of various Mozambican female writers in the development of Mozambique’s nation-state: ‘…how
women become historically embodied narrative agents and negotiators of meaning in the conflicted contact
zones and transitional spaces of Mozambique as a “nation-in-the making”’.
59
Frelimo’s leaders considered that ‘the liberation of women is a fundamental

necessity for the Revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the precondition for its
victory’ (Machel 1973). Josina Machel, the wife of the first Mozambican president
Samora Machel, became a heroine during the revolution and the anniversary of her
death on 7 April 1971 is still marked today as Women’s Day in Mozambique.58
Initially, women were supportive of the struggle but were not themselves involved in
combat. However later, with their new-found abilities, they started to demand more
from Frelimo’s male leaders (Isaacman & Isaacman 1983/84) and insisted on receiving
training and proper weapons so they could participate in the struggle. They also wanted
leadership roles, which demonstrates their pioneering spirit at the time. However there
were limitations to their progress in the formation of the Mozambican nation-state
during and after the liberation struggle because of the patriarchal attitudes of the male
leaders, their Marxist orientation in which gender inequality was primarily considered a
class struggle, the limited number of women participating in the struggle and the
internal dynamics within the Mozambican Women’s Organization (OMM, Organização
da Mulher Moçambicana) (Arnfred 2001;Arthur 1998; Casimiro 1986: 9, 10, 135;
Chingono 1996: 214-220; Isaacman & Isaacman 1983; Sheldon 2002: 128, 129, 154-
157). Penvenne (1998: 260) ironically illustrates how Samora Machel’s famous
statement on the liberation of women (see above) was quoted more frequently than his
subsequent clarification: ‘To liberate herself, a woman must assume and creatively live
the political line of Frelimo’.
Frelimo policies also lay at the heart of the difficulties in women’s
emancipation. After independence in 1975,59 the Frelimo government introduced its so-
called abaixo (down with) policy to reduce traditional socio-cultural structures, for
example by abolishing the position of local chief in rural areas (Dinerman 2006: 115-
151). In their efforts to build one national culture based on Marxist-Leninist ideology,
Frelimo was critical of all kinds of traditional rituals, such as lobolo and initiation rites.
Frelimo’s policies aimed to break with a traditional past. What was important for
Frelimo’s success was the modernization of the countryside and creating a united
Mozambique through collective agriculture and communal villages (Dinerman 2006:
51). These villages were supposed to replace older lineage structures, discourage ethnic
loyalties, introduce democratic structures, offer Portuguese lessons60 and provide access
to modern healthcare facilities (Newitt 1997: 546-550). Frelimo’s leaders wanted to
dismantle the oppressive class structures of the colonial state and establish a democratic,
unitary and non-racialist state. However, it was far more difficult to implement the new
58
See the book ‘Josina Machel’ by Matusse & Malique (2008). For more information on the role of women in
the War of Independence, see Casimiro (1986) and Sheldon (2002).
59
Independence was officially granted in 1975 although colonialism actually ended in 1974 with the fall of
the Salazar regime in Portugal.
60
Portuguese became the official national language.
60
structures than had been foreseen and serious constraints prevented the accomplishment
of Frelimo’s nation-state project. At community level, there were leadership conflicts as
rural dwellers were dissatisfied with having to leave their land and live in communal
villages. In comparison to the produce generated by household plots, the collective
fields did not produce surplus value and there was also a shortage of farm tools and
consumer goods. Exports decreased and there were natural calamities and a lack of
institutional capacity.
In its modernist approach, Frelimo leaders felt that many traditional rituals and
social structures subjugated women but they themselves took a different stance on these
issues, as was seen in the many debates that took place in and with the OMM that had to
manage the emancipation of women (Casimiro 2004: 183-193; Sheldon 2002:131-135).
Frelimo’s leaders underestimated the various local differences in female roles and
positions and the fact that for some women the existing structures could strengthen their
position in society. In some cases, the structures Frelimo implemented actually
weakened women’s positions (Arnfred 2001; Penvenne 1998: 261; Urdang 1989). This
was also related to the fact that Frelimo was dominated by men from southern
Mozambique who had been raised in Tsonga culture and society and this resulted in a
national identity that was heavily influenced by Tsonga culture.61 The much more
patriarchally inclined Tsonga culture is different from the northern matrilineal societies.
According to Arnfred (2001), the combination of Tsonga patriarchal culture and
European views on men as heads of households increased male dominance within
Frelimo and influenced male perceptions of family and society.62
These discrepancies were a contestation that was brought into play between
Frelimo and Renamo (Resistencia Nacional Moçambique) and a combination of internal
struggles, economic decline and foreign intervention led to the devastating civil war
between Frelimo and Renamo.63 In response to Frelimo’s support for ZANU, the
Zimbabwean nationalist movement that had been fighting white minority rule, Renamo
combatants were trained by the Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. Later on, when ZANU
came to power, Renamo enjoyed the backing of the South African Apartheid regime
because Frelimo also supported the African National Congress (ANC), the anti-
apartheid movement. The Cold War, which was dominating world politics at the time,
61
See Ngoenha (1999). Harries (1989) even argues that the Tsonga language and ethnic group were an
invention by Swiss missionaries. For more on the Swiss Mission, see Chapter 4. See also Cahen (2004),
Macamo (1998) and Monnier (1995).
62
According to Owen (2002: 82), ‘viewed as principles of connectivity rather than as “wombs of the nation”
or points of origin in the socio-political body, women took on a false neutral, male normative metonymic role,
and tended to be figuratively incorporated into organic images of healthy cells and functional bone structures’.
63
What triggered Mozambique’s civil war has been the topic of extensive debate (Adam 2005: 81-100;
Cabrita 2000; Clarence-Smith 1989; Finnegan 1992; Geffray 1991; Hanlon 1984; O’Laughlin 1992).
Nordstrom (1997: 46-62) shows that several groups including private militias, quasi soldiers, civilian
collaborators, foreign strategists and profiteers all shaped the dynamics of war on the ground, making it
difficult to talk of the war only in terms of the two opposing forces, namely Frelimo and Renamo.
61
turned the socialist Frelimo party into a friend of the governments of Cuba, Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, and it became an enemy of Western governments that
supported Renamo.
Renamo’s tactics were to destroy everything related to the building of the
nation-state in order to frustrate Frelimo’s modernizing national project (Vines 1996:
87, 95; Wilson 1992: 532-3, 540; cf. Hultman 2009). They destroyed roads, bridges,
hospitals and schools. Moreover, the fighting primarily occurred in the countryside,
precisely where Frelimo was trying to set up communal villages as an important
component of its nation-state building. Renamo soldiers ruined crops and rural
technologies and massacred local people, especially in the south of the country where
Frelimo’s power was strongest (Wilson 1992: 533, 558). Furthermore, numerous stories
are recounted of Renamo soldiers arriving in villages late at night and making boys and
young men kill their own family members as a rite of initiation to becoming a Renamo
soldier.64 Women were raped and forced to become the partners of Renamo soldiers.
Renamo thus alienated people from their communities or society and frustrated the
sense of national belonging.65
These violent acts of killing and rape could be interpreted as part of a dispute
on how life, including gender roles, should be reproduced and this played a role in the
fighting (Owen 2007: 110-112; Vines 1996: 5; cf. Wilson 1992: 564). While Frelimo
said it was committed to modernizing kinship, family, production and sexuality,
Renamo claimed it was in favour of reinstalling traditional lineage structures, rural
chieftaincies and traditional hierarchies. These different views of society also involved
gender roles. Frelimo incorporated women in the production process but, according to
Renamo, this happened at the expense of traditional cultural roles and activities.
Correspondingly, Renamo called for the reinstitution of traditional gender roles.66 The
conflicting views of the position of women became ‘shockingly literalized in the form
of real physical attacks on women and girls, as well as in the physical and symbolic
destruction of domestic home spaces’ (Owen 2007: 110).
Even in such contrary circumstances, women became not only victims (cf.
Nordstrom 1997). In her stories about the war, journalist Lina Magaia explores the role
of women in the development of the nation at that time. Her stories of Dumba Nengue,67
64
Attacks were also committed by ‘freelance armed bandits’ who operated opportunely in the general chaos in
rural areas (Vines 1996: 97). Increasingly, stories are told about the misconduct of Frelimo soldiers too, while
the dominating discourse is about the misbehaviour of Renamo soldiers (cf. Igreja 2008). See also Jacobson
(1999: 180).
65
Finnegan (1992: 93) gives another example. During the civil war, Frelimo created special days for
conveying an ideological message, like the special day for Mozambican women and for Mozambican heroes.
But these days became ones to fear because Renamo used them for its attacks.
66
Wilson (1992) demonstrates how, in practice, Frelimo and Renamo could have been acting according to
both sets of opposing views.
67
It means 'trust your feet' and 'think fast' and is translated as ‘run for your life’ in Lina Magaia (1988) and
invokes the violent displacement experienced during the civil war. ‘The phrase “dumba nengue” also denotes
62
women’s performance and their reproduction of cultural life, such as work, cooking,
dancing, praying and participation in weddings and funerals, are central. She shows how
women have restored society and transcended the gender boundaries that Renamo and
Frelimo constructed. Magaia validates both the productive and reproductive roles of
women in her writing (Owen 2007). Paradoxically, the war would also result in new
roles for women. As their husbands had died or had had to fight, living conditions
worsened and, with women no longer able to rely on family ties, they were forced to
become financially independent. This led to changing kin and family relations
(Chingono 1996: 209-243; Lubkemann 2008: 304-330); cf. Jacobson 1999: 184).
Subsequently, this process was reinforced by the introduction of neo-liberal economic
structures in the post-war era when many men lost their jobs and women intensified
their activities in petty trade and the informal markets to generate income (CEA et al.
2000). This process has particularly changed the urban space and has led to increasing
numbers of barracas (stalls) and a greater presence of women on the streets. In the final
section of this chapter I describe how the gendered dimensions of the colonial and post-
colonial state, the war and post-war neo-liberalism have impinged on the urban space.
However I first provide an overview of the role of the (capital) city in the formation of
the nation-state.
3.3 The city in nation-state formation
During the Industrial Revolution, cities in the West grew rapidly and helped promote
their countries’ economic growth (Hall 1998). In Europe, generally, the power of the
nation-state has been correlated with this evolution of cities and the change from an
agrarian to an industrialized society. As administrative, economic and cultural centres,
cities became centres of civilization (Weber 1958) and were central in shaping the
modern nation-state. Planned cities, like Brasilia, or planned parts of cities, such as
Paris, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, are good examples of the central role of the city
in modernizing state projects. Most capitals of nation-states were designed to make a
powerful visual impact and to be controlled, ordered, efficient and functional (Scott
1998: 103-146).
The rise of the modern Western nation-state also included colonial
imperialism. Unlike what was happening in Europe, the establishment of national power
in many of the colonies preceded the formation of metropoles. These cities, as
exemplified by places like Mogadishu and Maputo in Eastern and Southern Africa,
emerged as a result of colonial power, developed as administrative colonial centres and
the illegal, parallel markets which are typically set up in informal refugee settlements’ (Owen 2002: 81).
Today the illegal informal markets are also called dumba nengue referring to the need to run away if the
police turn up.
63
had an entrepot function, exporting raw materials to support European national

economies (Bryceson 2006: 11-17). These cities’ development was in large part based
on agricultural and mineral production. The colonial urban centres became part of the
unifying moral project of Western nation-states (de Boeck & Plissart 2004: 13-61).
Most colonial governments in Africa established strict boundaries between rural and
urban spaces. The rural space was denoted as African and primitive, while the urban
space became the centre of civilization. This pattern also influenced the development of
Mozambique’s capital Maputo.
3.3.1 The city as a civilizing symbol of the Portuguese colonial nation-state

When the Portuguese colonial authorities started to gain more control in southern
Mozambique they decided to develop Xilunguine into Lourenço Marques, which later
became Maputo (Penvenne 1995: 32). Xilunguine was a town inhabited by ‘natives’ and
‘non-natives’ alike, a community of traders, travellers and port workers. It was the land
of the Ronga-speaking people: the Mpfumo, Maxaquene and Polana. The port became
important to South Africa’s mining, agricultural and industrial heartland and to
Mozambican labour in South Africa. South Africa’s export of minerals via Lourenço
Marques intertwined the economies of South Africa and Mozambique’s southern region
south of the River Save.
Lourenço Marques became a white man’s town (Penvenne 1995) and the
colonial authorities transformed the place into a city of whites and ‘assimilados’, a city
for the ‘civilized’ (Jenkins 2006). The most successful colonization by the Portuguese
took place in the urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques, which became
Portuguese places (Lachartre 2000: 26-28). Lourenço Marques was a planned city, as
part of the aforementioned international tendency at the time of modernizing nation-
state projects.68 Maputo, like other Eastern and Southern African cities, is therefore
colonial in origin and in its physical organization, having been built to exclude the
participation of indigenous Mozambicans. The political-administrative elements of the
city were emphasized by the colonial authorities in their urban planning and the city
served as a centre for its agricultural hinterland.
The colonial authorities were subsequently unprepared for the growth of the
city’s population, especially from the 1950s onwards when economic relations with
South Africa and foreign industrial investment resulted in the city expanding rapidly.
Increasing numbers of indigenous people came to the city to engage in wage labour but
they were ignored by the Portuguese settlers who denied them the right to reside there.
From the start, Lourenço Marques was made up of two distinct parts: the Portuguese
68
The Brazilian experience in planning Rio de Janeiro seems to have directly influenced what occurred in
Lourenço Marques. This information was communicated by Gregory Pirio through the H-Net Discussion List
on Portuguese-speaking African Countries in August 2008.
64
cidade de cimento (cement city) and the indigenous cidade de caniço (reed city) that
surrounded the southern European-styled inner city. According to Jenkins (2006: 111),
the development of Lourenço Marques ‘reflected a long-established Portuguese attitude
to urbanism as representing “civilization” when juxtaposed with the largely agrarian
character of the country and its population’. The dual structure of Maputo was also
influenced by the urban model of the Apartheid system in South Africa (Oppenheimer
& Raposo 2002: 39; Penvenne 1997: 348). The division between ‘reed’ and ‘cement’
still exists and has influenced the city’s development (Jenkins 2006; Lachartre 2000:
63-67; cf. Mendes 1988). Today, it is difficult to find housing and the city’s
infrastructure, or its very absence, hinders initiatives in areas like leisure, education and
economy (Oppenheimer & Raposo 2002: 24), especially outside the city centre.
Although this could be partly seen as emanating from its colonial heritage, the
subsequent policies of the post-colonial Frelimo government have not improved the
situation (Jenkins 2009: 97-103; cf. Locatelli & Nugent 2009: 6; Udelsmann Rodrigues
2009), as is shown below.
Neighbourhood Sommerschield, Maputo ©Rufus de Vries

65
3.3.2 Frelimo’s continuation of the rural-urban divide
Frelimo has always been critical of the ‘native’-citizen division in colonial society.
Following independence in 1975 when Frelimo formed the first national government, it
introduced a programme to banish class divisions. From the start, it was an intellectuals’
party with many assimilados (‘civilized natives’) who had grown up in the Portuguese
urban areas (Newitt 1997: 541), and various Mozambican and non-Mozambican
intellectuals, writers and artists also joined Frelimo. In their view, a democratic, unitary
and non-racial state could be reached through socialist programmes, such as that of
communal villages in the countryside where the majority of the population lived
(Dinerman 2006: 51). According to O’Laughlin (2000), Frelimo’s reaction to the dualist
structures of ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’, which had been implemented by the
Portuguese, helped to dig a grave for its own policies that were meant to bring change.
In fact, Frelimo adopted a version of the dualistic view on society by seeing rural
inhabitants as a homogenous group – as the ‘natives’ were seen by the Portuguese – and
underestimating the diversity of the rural economy and power relations. The socialist
policies therefore had a different effect from that planned:
Frelimo’s vision of a homogenous subsistence-oriented peasantry did not recognize the

diversity of rural livelihoods, the dependence of households on the market for inputs as
well as consumer goods, the consequent importance of maintaining rural markets and
transport, the importance of regular wage income, and the role of women in commercial
production. (O’Laughlin 2000: 38)
Views of the rural areas and the nation were urban based and shaped by the Frelimo
elite who had themselves been ‘civilized’ by the white settlers. 69
Frelimo’s focus on the development of the countryside included a perspective
of the city as parasitic (Jenkins 2006: 116, 117).70 Moreover, the city had to become
socialist (Sidaway & Power 1995: 1472-5). The government restricted the supply of
resources there and nationalized the housing stock, with various structures being
implemented to monitor residents. Grupos Dinamizadores or Dynamizing Groups
(GDs) were set up to mobilize the masses to fulfil Frelimo’s objectives (Oppenheimer &
Raposo 2002: 87-91; Pinsky 1982; cf. Loforte 2003: 109). The GDs had to impose new
69
West (2005) provides insightful accounts on how Frelimo’s attitudes to modernization were formulated
from a modernist urban perspective, targeting the rural. He gives the example (Ibid.: xix-xxii) of a Frelimo
administrator in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado who did not want to participate in the
dynamics of local power in which powerful people were thought to cooperate with powers from the invisible
world, such as ancestral spirits. The administrator’s attitude of negation of these powers is understood
according to these local dynamics of power. The population was convinced that the administrator could only
feign negation because he used even more powerful forces.
70
As a result of Portuguese colonial influence on the city in Mozambique, the city, for Frelimo, represented
decadence, colonialism, capitalism and exploitation (Sidaway & Power 1995: 1471).
66
political and social values on urban residents, organize the infrastructure, such as
cleaning the streets and guaranteeing security in neighbourhoods, resolve conflicts and
report back to the central government. They in effect became instruments of political
control and part of the Operação Produção (Operation Production) that urged urban
residents to be productive (Brito 1991: 236-246; Costa 1993: 6-9). Anyone who could
not prove that they were being productive by producing the right documents was
relocated to a communal village in the countryside for re-education as part of Frelimo’s
socialist programme.71 Women were particularly affected as they were less likely to
have a waged job that provided the necessary documents. Literacy levels were lower
among women too, which made it more complicated for them to obtain the documents
required.72
At the same time, the city was losing many of its inhabitants as the Portuguese,
various other settler groups and some assimilados had left the country. The city was
faced with a loss of know-how and a low supply of goods. Frelimo only invested in the
development of a cadre in the cities for its government administration and some people
were trained to be teachers. At independence most Mozambicans – 93% of women and
86% of men – were illiterate (Sheldon 2002: 105; cf. Casimiro 2004: 131). This and the
lack of trained personnel, especially in the education and health sectors, made the
government decide to train teachers (Honwana 2008: 6). Many of my young
interlocutors were the (grand)children of people who had been incorporated in the
Frelimo administration. Their relatives became teachers, administrators and others
worked in the (few) local industries. They were the new middle class then and some
have become part of today’s new elite.
Although Frelimo’s policies were mainly directed at the modernization of the
countryside, their policies appear to have had a more direct effect in the cities. More
people became active in the Frelimo administration and were dependent on income
generated by the state for their own survival. Abrahamsson & Nilson (1995: 83)
claimed that because contact between Frelimo politicians and peasants decreased
Frelimo’s policy rapidly urbanized (cf. Pinsky 1982, Pitcher 2002: 67-100). Contrary to
Frelimo’s intentions, migration to urban areas rose as a result of the difficult conditions
in the rural areas where economic growth was not taking off (Jenkins 2006: 117). The
government failed to nationalize the countryside, while the urban areas became the
country’s most nationalized places (cf. Pitcher 2006: 102, Sumich 2010). In addition to
the GDs, a very concrete example of Frelimo’s control of the city was the
nationalization of land, including urban houses, buildings and industries that belonged
71
See the novel ‘Transit Camp’ by Borges Coelho (2007).
72
In the documentary film The Last Prostitute (Azevedo & Mesquita 1999), five women speak of their
experiences in re-education centres for prostitutes in the forests of Niassa Province.
67
to the former settlers.73 Frelimo also renamed Lourenço Marques as Maputo and the
streets were named after Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenine, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Min and
important national days like 25 September (the start of the liberation struggle in 1964)
and 24 June (the day independence was granted from Portugal). That the Frelimo
government’s main influence was to be found in the city is also illustrated by the last
few years of the war when Renamo dominated Mozambique’s countryside but could not
invade the cities that were controlled by Frelimo. This highlights the ambivalence in the
nation-state project’s rural-urban divide.74
Increasingly however, the government lost control of the city due to economic
decline and massive migration from the rural to the urban areas, which were aggravated
by the civil war. In 1970, 5.7% of Mozambique’s population lived in cities. In 1980 the
figure had risen to 13.1 % and by 1990 it was 26,8% (Matos et al. 2006: 18).75 Today
the figure is 30.4%.76 Access to basic services and infrastructure was not available to all
newcomers and, particularly in the 1980s, there were shortages of everything and urban
citizens started setting up informal economic activities (Lundin 2007: 90-173). People
invaded the city and infused it with their own activities, values and perceptions (cf. de
Boeck & Plissart 2004: 28-39). Lundin (2007:105-108, 147-149) describes how many
urban residents did not share the official state discourse on banishing cultural traditions
although they claimed to have broken with traditional practices to avoid punishment.
Many learned to live in different realities which can still be felt today. This process
continued and got a new focus in the post-socialist, post-war era. Several of its forms
will figure in the following chapters. A central aspect was the clash of interests in
different domains. With regard to the control of property in the urban space, for
example, there was administrative confusion and conflict about the right to appropriate
and control land (Jenkins 2009; Sidaway & Power 1995: 1483). Some clashes also had
spiritual dimensions and conflicts between colleagues and kin over economic success or
failure often developed into witchcraft accusations in which government officials were
thought to have been involved too. It is the contest of the urban space in different
domains that is central to Pentecostal pioneering practices. The next section shows how
this contest has an explicitly gendered dimension.
73
‘The immediate outcome of the resulting decommodification of land was that the circulation of private
capital through investment in land and the closely related activity of construction for speculative profit were
both arrested’ (Sidaway & Power 1995: 1473).
74
Renamo nevertheless succeeded in creating a sense of insecurity in the urban areas (Vines 1996: 100-101).
75
It is important to note that no census was held between 1980 and 1997. Some of these figures are therefore
only estimates. Moreover, different definitions of ‘urban’ were used over the years. For an overview, see
Oppenheimer & Raposo (2002: 12-20). What is clear is that the urban population has grown dramatically
since the 1950s in a process that intensified in the 1980s.
76
Census 2007: http://www.ine.gov.mz/populacao/indicadores/Document.2010-10-28.7436072050, accessed
16 November 2010.
68
© Rufus de Vries
69
3.4 The nation-state’s gendered urban spaces
Using pictures of the ‘cement city’ from Alexandre Lobato’s collection,77 Zamparoni
(2000) shows that Lourenço Marques was a man’s world in the early part of the 20th
century. No women appear in the photographs as the city’s public places were
exclusively male78 and wage labour was directed at men (Penvenne 1995: 1, 5, 6, 1997:
Sheldon 2003; cf. Lovett 1989).79 Not only indigenous women but also white women
experienced constraints and difficulties in finding wage labour (Penvenne 1986: 3;
Zamparoni 2000). The forced contract labour in South Africa and Lourenço Marques
separated men from their female family members: the Mozambican working class
consisted of men who worked in urban places and women who farmed and traded. In
the eyes of the authorities, indigenous women belonged to rural areas, agriculture and
biological reproduction. They would preserve the ideal of African rural life and were to
support the system of forced labour. Their food production made the forced work of
men possible and, as such, women contributed indirectly to urbanization (Sheldon 1996:
5, 6). Passes and identity cards were introduced in 1914 to regulate the movement of
indigenous people but they were primarily issued to men, and women and children were
restricted to the rural communities. In 1946, identity cards were also introduced for
women living in the urban areas. They had to apply for a special pass to travel although
these were only issued with the consent of parents, husbands or other authorities
(O’Laughlin 2000: 14).
Nonetheless, one of the forms of resistance by women against forced colonial
labour was to move from the rural areas to the city due to a combination of economic,
ecological and social factors. Men, who were to provide them with a livelihood, were
failing to return from their long-distance migration (Penvenne 1995: 8) and droughts
were occurring as well. The critical push, according to Penvenne (1997: 364), was
usually personal and familial, like divorce and widowhood, but also included forced
child marriage, physical abuse and/or the death of a parent. Migrating women
contributed to the process of urbanization through their informal and agricultural
activities (Sheldon 2003) but it was much more difficult for them to have a professional
career. Penvenne (1995: 110) describes Lídia Tembe who graduated as a nurse. Her
school fees had been paid for by the millet beer brewed illegally by her mother and
grandmother, but she did not manage to earn enough as a nurse and had to resort to
77
‘Lourenço Marques, Xilunguíne: Biografia da Cidade’ (Lobato 1970).
78
The population figures for Lourenço Marques between 1940 and 1960 show that more than 60% of the
population was male and about 35% female (including ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’). According to Penvenne
(1986: 15), men outnumbered women within the formal boundaries of the city, whereas the male-female ratio
was more balanced in the suburbs (‘reed city’) in the colonial period.
79
For similar and related developments in urban South Africa, see Miller (2008) and Ramphele (1993). In
particular, the urban centres established under European colonialism were overwhelmingly male unlike most
West African cities that were much older and had more equal numbers of men and women (Sheldon 1996: 6).
70
working illegally to make ends meet. Illegal work could vary from selling charcoal and
firewood to prostitution. Cashew-processing factories were opening in the 1950s and
provided women more opportunities to work for a wage, although they earned less than
men (Penvenne 1997; cf. Casimiro 2004: 148). And more women started to do domestic
work that had previously been done by young males (Penvenne 1995: 142-150).
Urban women were usually divorced, single or separated, a fact that concerned
the colonial authorities. The colonial administrators and also African male leaders
(Penvenne 1997: 343, 348-350) saw the many female-headed households in Lourenço
Marques and their lack of husbands as a grave social and moral issue (Sheldon 2002:
66). In colonial reports, indigenous women in the cities were principally talked about in
relation to prostitution and illegal activities like beer brewing (Sheldon 2002: 60, 61).80
Most colonial documentation was, however, articulated around concerns about
Mozambican men (Penvenne 1997: 363), showing the relative unimportance of women
in the colonial nation-state project. This does not imply that they were insignificant in
the nation-state formation but that they had to develop a particular relationship with the
urban space in the context of the colonial nation-state where they could manoeuvre
between ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ positions. From the start, women’s economic, legal and
social space in this new urban setting was profoundly contested as they had far less
access to wage labour. However, their interaction with the urban space gave rise to a
redefinition of who women were. They developed new modes of working, dressing,
expressing and defining their sexuality, creating autonomy as well as dependencies, and
shaping family and community structures (Casimiro 2004: 116; Bagnol 2006; Loforte
2003; Penvenne 1997; Sheldon 2002, 2003).
3.4.1 The socialist family in the city

Keeping the city clean is mainly the task for women.
Are we going to take men out of the factories to come and sweep?
(First Mozambican President Samora Machel, in Chingono 1996: 217)
In contrast to colonial policies, Frelimo encouraged women to engage in wage labour.

From a socialist perspective, women were only considered emancipated if they could
support themselves economically and be productive. Following independence, they thus
had the opportunity to participate in collective production and the number of women
working in factories in the cities rose (Sheldon 2002: 153-194; cf. Oppenheimer &
80
Well-known Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel (who died in 2009) made famous the Rua Araújo
(the street of prostitution) in Lourenço Marques during the colonial period with his photographs (Rangel
2004). Poet Noémia de Sousa used the contestation around the presence of native female bodies in the city in
an almost ironic poem about black prostitutes on the docks where the Portuguese sailors would arrive to
envisage a future revolution: Moças das Docas (Girls from the Docks). See also Owen (2007: 71-76, 102-
105).
71
Raposo 2002: 20, 21). Women’s opportunities depended on their social class. For
women whose fathers had obtained a formal job in the colonial economy, it was easier
to find employment in factories and receive some education (information provided by
informants; cf. Sheldon 2002: 153-183). Most of these women also lived in the ‘cement
city’ (cf. Sheldon 2002: 170,171) while women of lower social status, living in the ‘reed
city’, were often active in urban agriculture and as such contributed significantly to
urbanization because their food supply was necessary for the survival of the urban
residents as rural food production was low. Sheldon (2002: 169) shows how the
‘worker-peasant alliance’ of Mozambican socialism could be found in individual
households where men were working for a wage and women were contributing through
agricultural labour.
Many feminists have been critical of the liberation of women through waged
work. This would be too economic an answer to male and female inequality and the
Marxist approach negated the work women had in the household. The critique has also
been expressed for Mozambique (Tripp et al. 2009: 39) and the division between
domestic work and waged work continued to exist, resulting in tension between
women’s productive and reproductive work (Loforte 2003: 42; Casimiro 2004: 142-
143; Sheldon 2002: 153-194). The new family forms that were introduced by Frelimo
were particularly critically viewed. Frelimo promoted the ‘socialist family’ as the basic
cell of society. This family was composed of a monogamous, nuclear family as opposed
to the polygamous and extended African family (Arnfred 2001: 41-42), which meant, in
reality, that women in the city became much more economically dependent on men than
they had been in the countryside because the urban household economy was much more
based on wage labour, in which mainly men participated.
The Frelimo government said that the nuclear family had to be founded on
reciprocity and equality between the spouses. Everything that was part of the old,
traditional family had to be eliminated, like polygamous relationships. The result was
that polygamous relationships went underground. Where in the rural areas several wives
would live together and share the work in the household, wives in the city did not
always know each other and levels of competition and jealousy were high (Arnfred
2001: 36-44). For women in the urban areas today this continues to be a major concern
and even a reason to start frequenting a Pentecostal church. According to various older
women I spoke to, the problem was (and still is) that old things were abandoned under
the influence of Frelimo’s modernizing ideologies, ‘but nothing came to replace it’. For
example, initiation rites were prohibited but no new form of sexual and marital
education was implemented and since parents were not used to talking about such
(shameful) matters with their children, the rites still had to be practised secretly or
children learned what they needed from friends and television (cf. Costa 2007: 67-97).
New structures could not be forced onto people or were not developed, which created
72
feelings of uncertainty about gender roles, marriage and family life that resulted in a
constant struggle about behaviour and responsibilities (cf. Sheldon 1996: 8, 9; Osório &
Arthur 2002).81 With the economic decline, a growing number of men could not earn a
salary and women who took care of their household started to look for ways to earn
money. This appears to have shaped tensions in husband-wife relations and led to
domestic violence.
However, women also benefitted from Frelimo’s emancipation policies.
Contrary to the Portuguese colonial period, a growing number of women were able to
now go to school and/or engage in wage labour. Most of the OMM’s campaigns, which
tended to be concentrated in the urban areas, offered women the chance to have a
formal function within OMM, receive some form of education and develop ideas about
their social position (Chingono 1996: 215). As already mentioned, the civil war also
offered possibilities for women to improve their position (cf. Tripp et al. 2009: 5).
Although the war was fought mainly in rural areas, its effects were felt in the urban
areas because of the arrival of so many refugees, especially women, who became
alienated from their former networks and kin. As a result, the number of female-headed
households rose (Oppenheimer & Raposo 2002: 20-21) and with women having to
generate their own income, family and gender relations changed further (CEA et al.
2000; Espling 1999; WLSAMOÇ 2001: 24, 31, 108-111).82 This continued after the war
ended and with the introduction of neo-liberal economic structures, which thus
increased women’s presence in the public spaces of the city and challenged past socio-
cultural orders.
3.4.2 Post-war period: A feminizing city?

Today Maputo is home to embassies, NGOs, churches, Coca Cola ads, Shell filling
stations, and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. Since the end of the 1980s, this
formerly socialist country has been transformed into a democratic, capitalist state. An
important moment was the 1989 Frelimo Party Congress when it officially decided to
break with the party’s Marxist-Leninist ideology and implement multi-party democracy.
This happened after several years of a centrally planned economy and civil war that
resulted in Mozambique’s economy becoming bankrupt. From 1987 onwards and under
the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF, the government implemented various
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and privatized government-financed industries
81
An insightful account of the ambiguities is found in a speech by Predisent Samora Machel in Gaza in 1982.
He claimed to be against traditions like lobolo but was also against young people marrying without a specific
ceremony and without consulting their parents. ‘They behave like animals, and they say that this is
Independence’ (Machel 1982: 34). He also said that youngsters felt their parents were outdated but Machel
felt that parents should maintain their authority over their offspring.
82
At the same time, conditions in the city were difficult because the government could not deal with the rapid
increase in the number of inhabitants. ‘Women found that they lost access to their familiar work in
agriculture, yet they did not have entry to new urban sources of income’ (Sheldon 2002: 201).
73
and its social services. The policy’s biggest impact has been in the cities where people
lost their jobs, prices increased and public services, like hospitals and schools, became
unaffordable for many.
Although this meant that women had harder lives, as it became more difficult
to buy food and access healthcare for their children, there were also women who
benefitted from the situation because of new possibilities for physical and social
mobility that came with the reforms. Consequently, more qualified women entered the
work force (Maimuna 2007) and, more generally, women became involved in whatever
type of work they could find (de Abreu & Salomão 1995, Sheldon 2002). The increases
seen in petty trade and informal activities was mainly due to the activities of women
(Lopes et al. 2007a: 79-86), although their numbers in the formal labour market
remained limited (Oppenheimer & Raposo 2007: 30). Some women managed to get
jobs as domestic workers in the homes of the growing middle classes and the ever-
increasing numbers of expat households in the cities. In short, depending on their
position and background (cf. WLSAMOÇ 2001: 106-150), women gained more
financial independence and became less dependent on past kin ties.
The signing of the peace agreement in 1992 that effectively ended the war
prompted the arrival of many new donor organizations in Mozambique. Mozambican
society opened up to the larger world and started to receive new sources of information
such as additional television channels, new journals and the Internet (cf. Pitcher 2006:
98, 99). NGOs focusing on women’s rights and emancipation were set up (Casimiro
2004; Tripp et al. 2009) and new ideas about men’s and women’s roles and the family
were introduced. These developments have given women, especially those in the higher
social classes, opportunities for new types of work, better education and the chance to
revise their thoughts about local cultural practices. More women have started to work in
government positions and their presence in Maputo’s ‘cement city’ has become evident,
as well as in informal activities. A friend told me83 that when she arrived in
Mozambique in 1996 hardly any women were driving cars: all the cars were driven by
men. Today, many women drive a car. Increasingly women are ‘invading’ the city and
doing so more prominently than ever before (Sheldon 2002: 235-239).84
The role of women in the Frelimo party has, however, been declining and the
party now attracts mostly men (Casimiro 2004: 144-149; Sheldon 2002: 204). With the
introduction of multi-party democracy, Frelimo’s leaders had to reach the masses but
seemed to lose their commitment to social change, allowing more room for the type of
83
Conversation, 16 February 2005
84
The 2007 census (INE 2009b: 11-38) shows that in comparison with the 1997 census more women live in
the ‘cement city’ of Maputo. The 1997 census demonstrated that the presence of the women on the outskirts
of Maputo was higher than in the centre of the city (Araújo 2005b: 48-49). The most urbanized and
nationalized part of Maputo, the ‘cement city’, was predominantly male, but now, at least in numbers, is more
female-oriented.
74
men they had previously wanted to keep out, and ultimately they have given women
less space in the party (cf. Werbner & Yuval-Davis 1999: 1). The parties that were
participating in the first multi-party elections in 1994 did not address women’s issues
and women were barely represented in the organizations that took part in the elections
(Jacobson 1995). In spite of the relatively good representation of women in government
positions today (Tripp et al. 2009: 162-163) and a rise in organizations that deal with
gender issues (Casimiro 2004), the nation-state in many ways continues to be a male-
dominated affair (Arthur 2004; Osório 2002; Paraskeva 2009; cf. Tripp et al. 2009: 55,
164-165, 218-219).
The capital city of the nation-state continues in many ways to be viewed and
planned as a male domain. The stories women told me as well as events I experienced
with them showed how their participation in the city’s public spaces is often contested
and negated by the state. Specific examples include women vendors who are
approached by corrupt male police officers on the street who demand payment in the
form of money or sexual favours, and women who only get their diploma or a job if
they sleep with their teacher or director.85 If they have the courage to bring matters of
abuse or domestic violence to court, women usually lose the case and are ridiculed.
Although the law may be on the side of women, men tend to know how to operate the
legal system in their favour (Arnfred 2001: 56).86
Different socio-cultural spaces are being reproduced in Mozambique’s cities.
One example is the differentiation in gender roles that came into being in Lourenço
Marques just after independence. The ‘cultural and symbolic capital’87of migrants,
which is based on life in the countryside, is being reproduced, together with the import
of new cultural variants from foreign countries as a consequence of ongoing processes
of globalization. The subsequent mismatch between older and newer gender roles is
causing tension within families and generating conflicts (cf. Sousa Santos & Trindade
2003). On the one hand, women are sometimes forced or encouraged to study and work
but are blamed when they then cannot take care of the household. Along the same lines,
the prevailing ideas about men show that they are expected to have a job and take care
85
I met a woman who was studying law at university who would not pass the year without sleeping with her
professor (28 June 2007). Another woman told me how she always dressed badly when she went to classes so
that the teachers would not be interested in her (conversation, 3 July 2007). See also the film O Jardim do
Outro Homem (‘Another Man's Garden’, Sol de Carvalho & Zacara 2006). The title refers to the idea that
sending a girl to school is like watering another man's garden. At the same time, however, there are women
who engage in sexual relations to gain a better socio-economic position (Hawkins et al. 2005).
86
This depends, however, on the socio-economic position of women. Those who have a longer history in the
city and whose families have been part of the nation-state project have more power to challenge male
influence and have more options to better their personal situation.
87
Bourdieu (1986) distinguishes three types of capital: (i) economic capital is about one’s access to economic
resources (e.g. money); (ii) social capital relates to people’s social resources: their relationships, membership
of groups and participation in different networks; and (iii) cultural capital involves one’s education and
competences that define one’s status in society. Later, Bourdieu added a fourth capital, symbolic capital, that
deals with honour and recognition and in which gender is an issue. See Bourdieu (2001: 32-42).
75
of the household financially but, in reality, many cannot live up to this ideal since they
are unemployed and their wives are succeeding in earning more money than they can.
This becomes an obvious source of frustration that increases the occurrence of domestic
violence (cf. CEA et al. 2000: 64-65).88 Men also said that it was difficult to find a
partner if they had no money.
The majority of the participants in this research said that they quarrelled about
money and gender roles with their partners. Most of the women I spoke to had
professional careers and wanted to divide up the household tasks. Not all men were
necessarily opposed to cooking and cleaning but most feel uncomfortable dealing with
these tasks. This indicates the problems women face when trying to domesticate men
(cf. Cumbi 2009). Domestic roles in the home become a major source of tension when
the in-laws confront young families with what they see as blurred gender roles.
Mothers-in-law often find the behaviour of their daughters-in-law unacceptable – a
good woman should be at home, cooking and cleaning for her husband – and they
complain to their sons. Another source of friction is the extent to which a couple’s
salaries should be shared with their respective families and the demands of extended
families on urban couples are further deepening conflicts within marriages to the point
that they are experienced as a burden. Frequently, distrust between relatives and couples
about sharing is evident. People complain about the impossibility of setting up
businesses and developing their lives because they have to take care of poorer relatives
and as soon as they have some money, relatives will show up asking for support. ‘That
is why we don’t develop,’ one interlocutor said. ‘The development agencies don’t
understand it. We cannot prosper because we always have to share our income.’89
The Frelimo government’s changing cultural politics are adding a further
dimension to these tensions and feelings of uncertainty about what it means to form a
family and to be a Mozambican man or woman. With the end of its socialist policies,
Frelimo abandoned the rules against local culture and started a strategy of re-
habilitating pre-socialist cultural elements.90 Yet, as already said, various Mozambicans,
88
Several civil-society groups, especially women’s movements, have been involved in designing a new law
against domestic violence as well as new family legislation (Tripp et al. 2009: 136-137).
89
Conversation, 4 February 2007.
90
There are different views on Frelimo’s change in cultural policies that could be caused by external or
internal conditions. A central, dominant internal argument about revitalizing Mozambican traditional culture
was Frelimo’s way of staying in power. The Renamo standpoint, that tradition should have a future, was
incorporated by Frelimo leaders who realized that it was unwise to withdraw rural power structures. This
culturalist position was proposed by the anthropologist Geffray (1991). See also Wilson (1992). According to
Dinerman (2006: 41), an important reason for Frelimo’s change in policy was that ‘tradition’ was making
waves in Western diplomatic, donor and NGO circles. Sitoe (2003) argues that international factors did not
determine the dynamics of political transformation, although they did influence them. He says that as the
leadership had not necessarily thought Marxism-Leninism would be possible, it did not necessarily think
democracy would be either. Particular ideologies legitimize government rule. See also Pitcher (2002). In a
more or less similar line, West (2009) stresses that socialism and post-socialism draw on a pre-socialist world
of invented traditional rule: Frelimo leaders are thus like chiefs.
76
especially in the urban areas, had been exposed to and engaged in the colonial project,
mission churches and Frelimo’s socialist modernizing ideals. They have assumed new
identities (Sumich 2008), become less dependent on their (ancestral) kin, stopped
carrying out certain rituals and now even question what the role of ‘tradition’ should be.
I met some of them and their children at Pentecostal churches. To them, Frelimo’s re-
adoption of traditional culture is the reason for the failure of the post-war neo-liberal
and democratic projects to create more jobs and to combat poverty and domestic
violence. Others, both Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal, blame their parents for not
having introduced them to Mozambican culture. Many parents had not allowed their
children to speak a local language when growing up, in line with the socialist project,
and now these children cannot communicate with their grandparents who do not speak
Portuguese. This process is, however, currently changing as local languages are once
again becoming more important. There seems to be a ‘seemingly arbitrary circulation of
the unknown’ for many in African cities (Simone 2001: 17; cf. Durham 2002) in
relation to traditional culture. Are initiation rituals good or bad? What should the role of
ancestral spirits be? What are appropriate gender positions?
Problematic access to money, distrust in (affective) relationships and
uncertainty about the influence of spiritual beings all figured in witchcraft stories that
were circulating when I was in Maputo. For example, stories were told about why there
are so many beautiful, well-educated and prosperous women who had remained
unmarried. The explanation was that when they were children these women had been
sacrificed to a spirit by their kin in order for the spirit to provide wealth. As the women
were in possession of these powers they were not allowed to marry (cf. Bähre 2002; see
also Chapter 6). This is a grave allegation but illustrates how older structures of
reproducing life, including the regulation of access to women and wealth, are under
extreme pressure. As more and more people are becoming richer and others poorer, and
as fewer ‘normal’ households can be found, it is felt by many people that the patterns of
exchange are no longer healthy and that Mozambique’s future is unstable. It is in this
reality that the pioneering techniques of Brazilian Pentecostalism are flourishing.
3.5 Conclusion
Reproductive relationships, ancestral spirits and gender roles are playing a central role
in discussions about the route Mozambican society should take. Upwardly mobile urban
women are particularly affected by these issues because they are pioneering new
lifestyles and cultural positions. It is felt that their central historical role in kinship
structures, which are crucial for the development of society, is under pressure.
Moreover, upwardly mobile women themselves see their socio-cultural positions as
unstable. Their new positions have to be established and are as yet unbalanced. This
77
situation is the outcome of a history of social transformation that has brought rupture,
conversions, contradictions, conflicts, violence and new opportunities. Several historical
periods – Mfecane, colonialism, socialism, civil war, democracy and neo-liberalism –
have created cultural ruptures for society at large and for individual lives in particular,
shaping opportunities and constraints. People have had to distance themselves from
familiar ways of organizing their lives and have had to engage in new models of
community and personhood that may be conflicting, interesting, challenging and
uncertain. To understand the remarkably high participation of upwardly mobile women
in the transnational Pentecostal churches in Maputo, I have explored the gendered
spaces of the nation, in particular the city, where these churches are growing rapidly.
The formation of the nation-state, the city and gender are interrelated and impact on
each other, shaping the biological, cultural, political and socio-economic dimensions of
the transformations.
With the arrival of the Portuguese colonial authorities, the integration of
regions and ethnic groups into one state accelerated. The process of nation-state
building incorporated Mozambican societies into larger structures, like the state and the
global economy, profoundly changing structures of kinship and marriage. Men and
women have been affected differently. Nation-state formation has been mostly a male
affair, yet women have shaped their own views and activities in the process. The
introduction of forced labour intensified men’s labour migration during the colonial
period, moving from southern Mozambique to the mines in South Africa or to Lourenço
Marques to engage in wage labour. Women had to uphold the ideal of the African
family in the rural area by producing food as the city was considered an immoral place
for them, especially for single women who might be treated as prostitutes or become
involved in illegal activities. Although women had limited access to the formal, national
spaces of the city, they have contributed to the process of urbanization through informal
and formal activities. Women have succeeded in creating a living and sometimes
become successful in the city, often depending on which class or family they belonged
to.
The liberation movement and later the government of independent
Mozambique continued the process of nation-state formation. The liberation struggle
opened up new spaces for women and, after independence, the Frelimo Marxist-Leninist
government offered women possibilities for education, participation in the Mozambican
Women’s Organization and work in factories. Since the Frelimo leadership has
continued to be predominantly male, modernist ideals and women’s public roles in the
city have remained limited. Frelimo’s focus on production has failed to deal with
reproductive issues like the increasing problems of polygamy, domestic violence and
uncertainty about cultural roles. And because so many refugees fled to the urban areas
and the government could not organize the appropriate infrastructure, the war resulted
78
in the Frelimo government losing control over the city. Since then, women have been
invading the city streets more noticeably and also the formal spaces that represent the
nation-state. Women’s growing financial independence has been changing reproductive
patterns and they are now placing less dependence on kin and husbands.
The implementation of neo-liberal and democratic structures has resulted in
increased participation by women at schools and in the labour market. New ideas about
gender and the family are being introduced, and NGOs and the media play a vital role in
this process too. Expatriates have introduced different modes of identification and
migrants from different Mozambican regions, who arrive daily in the city, are bringing
their perceptions and habits with them. Various competing socio-cultural ideas and
practices exist and these are shaping ambivalent feelings about the role of ancestral
spirits, gender and kin in the city. Women’s new positions in the public spaces of the
city, especially in Maputo’s ‘cement city’, are provoking discussions and uncertainties
about what their position and behaviour should be. Can women spend their days sitting
on Maputo’s streets selling products or should they be at home taking care of their
children? How should women dress in public spaces? Like European, American and
Brazilian women, or like African women? These preoccupations are related to general
concerns about Mozambican society. The new positions women are adopting seem to
make these questions even more pertinent because they run against the established roles
they used to have in the city as part of the nation-state formation. Discussions on gender
behaviour often focus on the female body as a marker of national culture (Yuval-Davis
1997). Chapters 6 and 7 elaborate on how the violent transformation of the body in
Pentecostalism is part of the contested position of the female body in contemporary
Mozambican urban society.
The conquest of the city space as the heart of the nation-state is intrinsically
linked to reproductive issues such as marriage and sexuality, topics that are central in
women’s prayers, dreams and concerns and that are crucial in the overall reproduction
of society. In the context of the nation-state, upwardly mobile women are not finding
their desired reproductive well-being. While male positions appear to be clearer and less
contested in the city,91 women still need to prove their capacities, reliability and aptness
to adapt to new roles. Their role is more insecure, reflecting the questions about which
route Mozambique should take.
Prominent in the colonial and the post-colonial state’s policies was the explicit
focus on breaking with a traditional past, which was particularly effective in the urban
areas where the state could exercise most power. Besides the constraints, changed
circumstances have produced new ways of moving forward. Where some people see the
discontinuities with the past as the root of all problems in Mozambican society
91
Additional research should be done on male experiences. See Aboim (2008). Some of the men I met had
similar questions to the women.
79
(Honwana 1996, 2003), I will show that the ruptures cannot go far enough for a growing
group of people. The women I met are creating and searching for alternative spaces in
the city that break with the limits of the nation-state in the city. Religious movements
are, for example, such alternative spaces that do not necessarily offer coping
mechanisms but more generally provide opportunities to explore new possibilities and
cultural positions although they may be risky. Brazilian Pentecostalism is interacting
with the current possibilities in an inchoate city.
Maputo © Rufus de Vries

Universal Church service, Maputo. Converts carry a red scarf with the phrase: ‘Meu sonho vai se realizar’
(My dream will come true) © Rufus de Vries
81
4. Transnational spaces of conquest:

The mobility of Brazilian Pentecostalism in the reproductive domain
4.1 Introduction
Pentecostalism in Mozambique is not only characterized by its urban and gendered

manifestation but also by its explicit transnational features. This chapter focuses on the
transnational dimensions of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique by exploring the
forms of mobility it generates. Many studies have shown how religious forms have
travelled with migrants and how they have set up religious groups in their new home
countries, shaping transnational religious movements. However in the case of
Mozambique, Pentecostal churches are not catering for a Brazilian migrant community
but for local Mozambicans. Through Brazilian Pentecostalism and engaging with the
ideas and practices of Brazilian pastors, Mozambicans can become transnational.
Pentecostal pastors proclaim that faith is capable of moving lives, families and nations
(cf. van Dijk 2006) and that people do not need to accept a low salary, a small house
and an unhappy marriage. These stand for stasis and stagnation and show that
something is blocking one’s well-being and prosperity. The power of the Pentecostal
gospel removes blockades and produces enormous success, according to the Pentecostal
message. Whole nations can move forward and progress with the force of the
Pentecostal faith. The centrality of movement was very present in the lively church
services that I attended where the power of the Holy Spirit was manifest in dancing,
pulsating music and shaking bodies. Moreover, borders were constantly crossed by the
pastors who travelled all over the globe in their efforts to open new places of worship in
different localities.
This chapter starts with a brief overview of the historical dimensions of the
relationship between religion and mobility in southeastern Africa. I will show that the
power of healers often depends on their capacity to transcend boundaries. For example,
the arrival of Christian missionaries in the past allowed people to appropriate powerful
practices, ideas and techniques from abroad that were crucial to moving forward
politically, spiritually, culturally and socio-economically. Then I will focus on the
current transnational mobility of Pentecostalism in Mozambique and its relationship
with the local cultural situation, highlighting how the South-South transnational space is
enhancing a process of cultural discontinuity and conquest that is shaped by the history
of the Lusophone Atlantic. Subsequently, I will argue that Mozambican women, and
especially upwardly mobile women, are finding the transnational Pentecostal field
attractive because of their position in the urban national domain. From these women’s
perspective, the immobile dimensions of the reproductive field in the urban national
82
arena contrast with the mobile forms that the transnational Pentecostal domain offers in
the form of pioneering techniques. For example, Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Mozambique challenges converts to critically reflect on their national culture, thus
distancing them from their nation (van de Kamp & van Dijk 2010). Consequently,
women who are trying to become more mobile by navigating the transnational
Pentecostal field engage in processes of discontinuity, especially in the urban areas.
Throughout this chapter I illustrate this argument with various examples and in the
remaining chapters of this thesis I will elaborate on this macro-social narrative,
providing detailed empirical data in the form of micro stories and ethnographic case
studies.
4.2 Religion and mobility in southeastern Africa
The centrality of motion in Pentecostalism connects to a tradition of healing practices

and missions in southeastern Africa. What is fundamental to the profile of prophets,
missionaries and healers in countries such as Mozambique, Malawi, Botswana,
Zimbabwe, Tanzania and South Africa is the act of crossing boundaries (Luedke &
West 2006;92 cf. Rekdal 1999; Whyte 1988).93 For example, healers in Maputo all seem
to come from elsewhere, either from other parts of Mozambique or from another
country in the region (West & Luedke 2006: 1). In their advertisements, Mozambican
curandeiros (traditional/local healers) stress their experiences in other countries:94 using
‘foreign’ knowledge seems to prove the efficacy of their healing techniques and
medicines. Popular healers, pastors and prophets appear to come from the other side of
a border. Borders and boundaries are not only national and geographical but also
cultural, linguistic, scientific and religious. And healers are frequently ambivalent
beings at the cutting edge of societal structures. While others should behave like
everybody else, healers can cross socially accepted boundaries as this gives them the
power to heal (cf. Bagnol 2006). They possess spiritual powers that allow them to cross
dangerous borders, borders that are too perilous for others to cross.95 Various healing
rituals, such as cleansing rituals after the war in Mozambique (Granjo 2006, 2007), are
about crossing boundaries and moving from a polluted position to a pure one.
As a result of trade, wars and migrant labour, centuries of interaction between
people in Southern Africa have contributed to the learning of one another’s healing
techniques (Feierman 2006).96 In addition, the arrival of missionaries and European
92
Luedke & West (2006) also show how healers reproduce and create borders.
93
Cf. Werbner (1989) for similar observations in other parts of Africa and the world.
94
For instance, advertisements in Savana (25 July 2008) and Magazine Comercial (16 July 2008).
95
The insights on healing and crossing boundaries relate to the longer anthropological tradition of studying
liminality. See Turner (1967) and van Gennep (1980 [1960]).
96
Territorial and regional cults are an example of this exchange (Schoffeleers 1979; Werbner 1977).
83
doctors added to the importance of the transgression of boundaries for the power of
healing. Even in the earliest encounters between Africans and Europeans, both parties
absorbed the aspects of each other’s healing practices and techniques that were
experienced as powerful and efficacious (Comaroff & Comaroff 1997: 364; Vaughan in
Luedke & West 2006: 4). African healers have incorporated Christian, Muslim and
scientific elements in their practices, such as the Koran, the Bible, medical gloves and
white dresses (for Mozambique, see Luedke 2007; West 2005: 120-126). The arrival of
Christian missions in Mozambique, allowed people to appropriate powerful practices,
ideas and techniques that were crucial to moving forward politically, culturally and
socio-economically (Cruz e Silva 2001a; Macamo 1998, 2005; West 2005: 109-132).
This will be elaborated on in what follows from a gendered perspective for the case of
southern Mozambique.
4.2.1 Mission churches and AICs shaping the Mozambican nation-state

The Protestant and Catholic churches had an important function in providing education
and access to the economy during the colonial period in Mozambique. Overall, the
colonial authorities collaborated with the Catholic Church, while the Protestants had a
difficult relationship with the authorities (Cruz e Silva 2001a; Helgesson 1994).
Through its education programmes, the Catholic missions played an important role in
the unifying nationalist colonial project of the Portuguese. While the Catholic mission
incorporated mainly men in these programmes, Sheldon (2000: 28) notes that a few
women became involved with mission centres to escape unhappy marriages. She also
reports that the mission stations were an alternative for local family life for some
African women too, which further influenced the missionaries’ negative view of
African family life (Sheldon 2002: 87). Education was directed towards making African
women into European-style housewives, teaching them domestic skills that were seen as
desirable for them to have in order to join the colonial economy (Comaroff & Comaroff
1997; for Mozambique, see Casimiro 1986: 44, 45; Sheldon 2002: 79-113). In this way,
a small class of Catholic-educated women could also identify with the nation-state
project.
An alternative nation project was developed in the Protestant missions as the
Protestants were suspected of working against the interests of the Portuguese and of
stimulating an indigenous national identity that opposed colonial domination (Cruz e
Silva 2001a). Most of the Protestant mission churches and African Independent
churches (AICs) in southern Mozambique were initiated by returning migrants (Harries
2007; Helgesson 1994: 131-136), particularly Mozambican mine workers returning
from South Africa who had come into contact with mission posts and AICs at the
mines. The knowledge they had gained about Christianity and their ability to read the
Bible were positive assets back home. One pastor at the church who had come from the
84
Swiss Protestant Mission in South Africa said: ‘Imagine, a black person, during the
colonial period, being able to read!’97
The case of the influential Swiss Mission, today the Presbyterian Church, is
illustrative. It started with a Mozambican evangelist, Yosefa Mhalamhala, who came
from the mines in South Africa (van Butselaar 1987: 49-65; Harries 2007: 77-82). As
the emerging church had to operate beyond the control of the Portuguese administration,
it was not possible to establish a mission in Lourenço Marques and the church started to
grow in places in Gaza State that were controlled by the local kingdoms. At the
beginning of the 1880s, the Swiss Mission was especially popular here amongst women
who had converted after experiencing powerful visions and dreams (Harries 2007: 84-
85). Women saw their chances of linking up through religion with new and foreign
possibilities as they had fewer possibilities under the colonial authorities compared to
men who could, for example, go to new places as migrant workers. As women were
used to being spiritual specialists, their involvement in the new religion was an
extension of their own practices. Some Swiss church leaders were preoccupied with the
influence of women’s ‘emotional tendencies’ that were too similar to local practices of
contacting ancestors through dreams and visions, and the Swiss missionaries feared that
converts were misunderstanding the real spirit of Christianity.
As soon as it became easier for the Swiss Mission to operate in Lourenço
Marques, the church attracted many new members, while the number of adherents in the
rural areas stagnated (Harries 2007: 101). In the city, the church played a fundamental
role among the young indigenous urban population whose families were mostly part of
the colonial economy. These youngsters were growing up in the period of Portugal’s
New State, when the Indigenato was being introduced. Through the Swiss Mission it
was possible to have an education in the local languages, as opposed to the Portuguese-
language education offered by the Catholics. According to Cruz e Silva (2001a), this
and the discussions organized within the church contributed to a political consciousness
and the shaping of nationalist sentiments based on local loyalties instead of loyalty to
the Portuguese.
While the majority of adherents were male, women were also part of the
Protestant missions in Lourenço Marquez. Some had influential roles, for example the
female writer Lina Magaia (Cruz e Silva 2001a). Even though girls and boys both had
the opportunity to participate in the church’s youth education system, for girls this was
directed towards family life, the home and cooking (Cruz e Silva 2001a: 53-54).
Various Frelimo leaders were educated by the Protestant missions, among them its
founder Eduardo Mondlane (Swiss Mission), President Samora Machel (Methodist) and
today’s President Guebuza (Swiss Mission). After independence, many political leaders
came from these Protestant churches and so, in this sense, the Protestant churches
97
Lecture by Pastor Américo Zavala at the Presbyterian Church in Magude, 18 July 2008.
85
became closely connected with the formation of the nation-state, like the Catholic
Church had been in the colonial nation-state project.
Directly after independence, the Marxist-Leninist Frelimo government adopted
an anti-religious stance. The Catholic Church, because of its collaboration with the
colonial regime (Morier-Genoud 1996), and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Carvalho 2005:
21-22; Morier-Genoud 1996: 29) who openly resisted Frelimo’s nationalist policies,98
suffered from Frelimo’s position on religion. Traditional healers were also persecuted
(Lundin 2007: 107-108; Pinsky 1982: 41). The Protestant churches, where most of
Frelimo’s leaders originated from, were closer to the state but they too suffered from the
hostile policy towards religion (Cruz e Silva 2008: 164).99 Church ministers were
imprisoned and it became hard to organize activities.100 The meetings of the
Dynamizing Groups (DGs), for example, were expressly organized at the same time as
church services (Morier-Genoud 1996: 31). However, the collapsing economy and
Frelimo’s growing dependence on civil society for the distribution of food, clothes,
schooling and health facilities, changed political attitudes. Moreover, its religious
policies were generating negative publicity in contrast to the generally positive image of
Renamo that was in favour of religion and received support from civil-society groups in
the West, primarily the US (van Koevering 1992: 109, 115-116, 123-124; cf. Morier-
Genoud 1996: 57). In the early 1980s, a new period of more constructive dialogue
between Frelimo and the churches emerged (Morier-Genoud 1996: 57-58; van
Koevering 1992: 107). President Machel confirmed that the government and churches
would, together, improve the situation of Mozambicans but a much more liberal climate
only began in 1986 with Machel’s successor President Joaquim Chissano (Seibert 2005:
132-133). Full religious freedom was introduced with the democratic Constitution of
1990. Shortly afterwards, Catholics and Protestants intervened successfully in the peace
talks between the Frelimo government and Renamo leaders who signed a peace
agreement in 1992 (Vines & Wilson 1995).
Frelimo’s anti-religious position has left its mark on Maputo. Several of my
older interlocutors told me how the importance of religious life and church-going had
decreased. Pinsky (1982: 41) reported on the situation in Hulene neighbourhood:
... the churches had lost much of their influence in Hulene and some had closed down
for lack of adherents. But the group that seemed to be faring the worst were the
98
Jehovah’s Witnesses also refused to participate in Renamo’s war programme in 1984/85 when Renamo was
seeking to establish systematic control over certain regions (Wilson 1992: 558-560).
99
For ambiguities in the relationship, see Morier-Genoud (1996) and Rossouw & Macamo (1993).
100
For example, members of the Assemblies of God Church told me about the imprisonment of their Pastor
Mulungu (cf. Morier-Genoud 1996: 29). However, others said that there was never any persecution of
believers. Experiences have varied (cf. Morier-Genoud 1996; van Koevering 1992: 107). The Constitution
states that citizens had the freedom to believe or not believe in a religion but their rights were unclear and
imprecise (Morier-Genoud 1996: 27).
86
practitioners of traditional medicine. They had suffered a considerable loss of prestige

in the community.
In addition, the war caused a ‘moral collapse’101 but, according to my informants, the
arrival of new churches after it ended caused a religious revival (cf. Cruz e Silva 2008:
165; van Butselaar 2000; cf. Roesch 1994: 20). Many local Zionist and Apostolic
churches were established, a process that had already started in the 1980s, and other
international churches have also arrived more recently. More curandeiros were
beginning to work in the city and the new churches benefitted from the new freedom of
religious expression and Frelimo’s loosening of its control in the city space. The growth
in churches was also related to the rapid urbanization following the war, which drew
refugees from the rural areas into the peri-urban areas where AICs in particular found
fertile ground.
Many of these new churches have become particularly popular with women, or
have at least had a different appeal to women compared to men (Agadjanian 1999; Cruz
e Silva 2001b, 2008; Mateus 2001; Pfeiffer 2002; Pfeiffer et al. 2007). These scholars
see an important link between the feminization of the city and the simultaneous neglect
of the socio-economic reality by the state, which could account for the increase in
religious practices in Mozambique. They point to the state’s inability to organize basic
living conditions in the city context, which has made life especially difficult for women
who have to run a household or take care of their children. Cruz e Silva (2008: 170)
describes how the AICs consist of ‘the peripheral and marginalized par excellence’.
Pfeiffer et al. (2007) argue that women in Chimoio in the central-western Manica
Province are increasingly seeking spiritual help in AICs as well as in Pentecostal
churches for reproductive health problems, whereas men are visiting traditional healers
to engage in ‘occult’ practices to manage their misfortunes related to employment. The
Structural Adjustment Programmes of economic reform have deepened economic
inequality and exacerbated household stresses, which are affecting men and women
differently. This can be seen in patterns of church attendance.
However, the newer Pentecostal churches in the urban areas of Southern Africa
are primarily attracting women who do not have a marginalized position in socio-
economic terms (cf. Frahm-Arp 2009). Pentecostal converts are often economically
successful and at least carry with them the potential for upward mobility.102 Even when
these converts find themselves unsuccessful economically, which was a reason women
101
A term used by one Pentecostal convert (Manuel, 42 years of age) whose family was part of the Catholic
community in Chamanculo neighbourhood. He said that during Machel’s presidency, religion had been
banned, and that ‘we did not care anymore about the Catholic Church’ and that morality disappeared with the
subsequent civil war (conversation, 21 February 2005).
102
It would be interesting to find out whether there are differences between patterns of adherence in cities like
Chimoio compared to Maputo. Maputo has most of the country’s upwardly mobile and has more variety in
socio-economic groups, which could be reflected religiously.
87
mentioned for frequenting a Pentecostal church, their participation in the urban space is
different from that of marginalized citizens as they are not necessarily among
‘modernity’s malcontents’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993). The new churches are full of
women doctors and teachers, and others who run businesses and go to school. So far,
little is known however about the ways in which Pentecostal churches are playing a role
in these women’s self-perceptions and their participation in the public sphere.103
I argue that it is not women’s marginality but their increasingly central
presence that is creating new challenges and tensions and defining their religious
activities. Upwardly mobile women are conquering supposedly male spaces but as
women have always been relatively marginalized in the urban areas, at least in more
formal national spaces, the urban space is not capable of serving these ‘emerging’
women.104 It is significant that many more men and fewer women can be found in the
older Protestant and Catholic churches today than in the AICs and Pentecostal churches.
Many of the women I met at Pentecostal churches had left either the Catholic or older
Protestant churches, complaining that the real issues in life were not being addressed
there, such as divorce, domestic violence and the role of ancestral spirits. These women
felt that, like the government, church leaders were not facing the challenges and
possibilities of urban society adequately. This feeling was intensified by the links
between the churches and state officials. Where the Swiss Mission initially offered an
alternative colonial space to develop a new (urban) identity (Cruz e Silva 2001a;
Macamo 1998, 2005), today the Pentecostal churches are taking this position. This
development cannot be seen as being independent of the transnational character of
Pentecostal churches.
103
Mukonyora’s study of the Johane Masowe Movement in Harare (2007) seems to open up a new
perspective on the relationship between gender, the public sphere and Christianity. She argues that while
women are considered marginal in the city and in the post-colonial state of Zimbabwe, women in the Masowe
Movement have claimed a specific place to express themselves, for example by interrupting men’s sermons
with songs and in the ways they speak in the name of the Holy Spirit and perform healing rituals. For them,
the sacred place where they gather in the city is not marginal but central. In my view, her analysis allows us to
see women not only as victims but also as active agents in the making of the urban world (cf. Comaroff 1985).
104
This may, in different ways, apply to the AICs too (cf. Mukonyora 2007; Scarnecchia 1997), which
questions the perspective of the AICs in offering (only) coping mechanisms. The discussion about the
differences and similarities between AICs and Pentecostal churches has more to do with the diverse ways
these churches participate in modernizing processes. I agree with Engelke (2010) that the issues of cultural
(dis)continuity are central in both the AICs and neo-Pentecostal churches but feel that they are being played
out differently.
88
Recording of television programme, TV Maná Moçambique
Following a course in Lisbon via Maná Sat
© Rufus de Vries
89
4.3 The transnational mobility of Pentecostalism
Growing transnational connections have led to religious forms of belonging acquiring a

new intensity in many parts of the world, often in competition with national citizenship.
Pentecostals and Muslims have increasingly been invading the public sphere by
exploiting new forms of communication through the use of transnational ties and the
mass media (Csordas 2009; Hüwelmeier & Krause 2009; Marshall 2001; Meyer &
Moors 2006; Meyer 2009; Salih 2004). Through their transnational links, religious
groups and ideologies offer possibilities for identification and loyalty that allow groups
to bypass or confront the nation-state and erode its attempts to monopolize identities
and commitment (Beyer 2001; Rudolph & Piscatori 1997; Corten & Marshall-Fratani
2001; van Dijk 2006).
Focusing on Pentecostalism, Corten & Marshall-Fratani (2001) argue that the
transnational character of contemporary religion is taking on a new significance
compared to earlier missionary activities because the role of the nation-state has
decreased and the representation of a Pentecostal global community allows for an
opening up of possibilities for people that goes beyond their local cultural context and
provides them with other modes of identification and belonging:105
In the developing world, the failed promises of the nation-state concerning

modernization have resulted in the de-legitimisation of their ‘mega-rhetoric of
development’ and have opened the field to the work of the imagination of everyday
individuals, fuelled by images, idea and resources from elsewhere, to re-script their
lives, both individually and collectively, finding new ways to appropriate and inscribe
themselves within global modernity (Ibid.: 3).
Most studies of transnational Pentecostalism focus on South-North links, such as the

presence of African or Latin American migrant churches in Europe or the US (Adogame
1998; Adogame & Weissköppel 2005; Adogame et al. 2008; Knibbe & van der Meulen
2009; Levitt 2007; Mafra 2002; Ter Haar 1998, 2008; van Dijk 2004, 2005; Wilkinson
2006).106 These scholars have mainly analyzed the role of Pentecostalism in situations
of migration, following the broader field of transnational studies.
Transnationalism is a notion that has gained a great deal of attention in the
social sciences in the study of an increasingly globalizing world (Appadurai 1996;
105
The Roman Catholic Church is known as a transnational religious organization. However, approaching
transnationalism as a process of transcending national arenas puts the transnational features of the Catholic
Church in a different light. In Mozambique, the Catholic Church was part of the colonial nation-state project
and since independence has focused on Africanizing, nationalizing and ‘Mozambicanizing’ the church
(Morier-Genoud 1996: 33-34). In this sense, the Swiss Mission in Mozambique had more transnational
characteristics because it criticized the colonial state.
106
For studies on South-South religious links, see Corten & Marshall-Fratani 2001; Oro et al. 2009; van Dijk
2003a, 2006).
90
Basch et al. 1994; Burawoy 2000; Hannerz 1996; Kearny 1995; Levitt 2001; Sassen
2007; Smith & Guarnizo 1998; Vertovec 2001, 2007). The first studies on
transnationalism showed the limitations of the national focus. Scholarly analysis used to
position people in fixed groups like tribes, ethnic groups and nation-states, while
increases in trans-border activities have shown the opposite with people transcending
borders and developing multiple and fluid identities (Gupta & Ferguson 1992).
Migrants in particular have been showing that the markers and boundaries of ethnicity
and identity are negotiable and context-contingent. In anthropology this has resulted in
ethnicity becoming an almost unworkable concept. As a result, anthropologists of
migration have started to see transnationalism as their principal focus of interest, which
explains why the concept first emerged in this field of studies (Mazzucato 2004: 131;
Vertovec 2007: 963). Traditional studies of migration focused on immigrants who left
their home countries and adopted a new life in the host country where they started to
integrate. Modern studies of migration take into consideration the fact that immigrants
develop networks that span their home and host societies and, as a consequence, the
flow of people, ideas and goods between regions has been stimulated. Basch et al.
(1994: 7), who were amongst the first to work on transnationalism define it ‘as the
processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that
link together their societies of origin and settlement’. In other words, transnationals are
‘people with feet in two societies’ (Chaney in Ibid.).
Studies on religious transnationalism have addressed the role of religion for
migrants in maintaining the link between the home and host society (Vertovec 2004). A
central question is how transnational religion plays a role in preserving a sense of
cultural continuity or in encouraging cultural change in contact between migrants and
the new society in which migrants are subjected to a forceful public agenda that usually
emphasizes integration. In this context, it has been argued that transnational
Pentecostalism encourages stability in situations of mobility and provides for cultural
continuity by offering migrants a ‘home away from home’ (Adogame 1998, 2004;
Sanneh 1993; Ter Haar 1998; cf. Habermas 2002).
In the case of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique we are not, however,
dealing with a migrant community. Mozambican converts continue to live in their own
society while participating in a setting where relations are developed and maintained
that link Brazilian and Mozambican societies. What exactly is the relevance of
transnational religion and related questions on cultural (dis)continuity and
(dis)integration in such an environment?
Several scholars have pointed to the emergence of transnational spaces that are
not necessarily shaped by international migration but by processes of communication
and exchange generated by capital expansion and the Internet or other forms of
communication between specific nation-states (Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1992;
91
Hannerz 1996; Meyer & Moors 2006; Smith & Guarnizo 1998). These studies analyze
how citizens can develop identities that are not necessarily national, for example
through the development of subjectivities and identities based on ideas, customs,
practices and emotions that enter nation-states via travellers, television and the Internet.
It is this idea of people becoming transnational by engaging in mobile structures,
cultures and ideologies that is relevant in the case of transnational Pentecostal churches
in Mozambique.
This process takes on special dimensions in transnational Pentecostalism in
Mozambique in that converts’ cultural nearness to the local society appears critical.
Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique demonstrates the locally embedded meaning
and development of transnationalism (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2010). Being part of the
local society, unlike in situations of migration, many converts struggle to understand
how their Pentecostal morality and spirituality can remain unaffected or even
‘uncaptured’ by local circumstances, powers or cultural realities. They want to become
independent of locally binding forces, i.e. to become more culturally and socio-
economically mobile and to cross boundaries. Let me illustrate this with the example of
Dona (Madam) Gracelina.
Dona Gracelina (45 years old) was going to open a business with her husband.
She had managed to rent a nice building for their company at a central location in the
city centre and had bought all the necessary equipment. There were also some possible
future customers Dona Gracelina was in contact with and she was all ready to start.
However, after having dealt with the right government department in Maputo for
several months, government officials would not hand over the required licence. She
suspected that the officials were waiting for her to pay them an additional sum of money
to proceed, but she refused. In the Brazilian Pentecostal God is Love Church that she
frequented, she handed over the project file with the company plans and copies of all
the papers she had to arrange for the licence to a Brazilian pastor. He would take it with
him on his travels until he was back in Brazil where the church’s founder was going to
pray for her. During the service it was revealed that an evil spirit stood behind Dona
Gracelina and this was following her wherever she went. The pastor expelled the spirit
and proposed a programme of prayer, offerings and fasting to defeat the demon.107
Dona Gracelina felt paralyzed because of the power the government officials
had over her: she was being kept by ‘evil national powers’. It was through transnational
Pentecostalism that she would be able to break out of this situation, something that was
made real with the business papers that would leave the country to receive a blessing in
Brazil. In this context Dona Gracelina was made aware of the negative impact of
national spiritual connections: through her possible links with ancestral or other spirits
107
Based on various conversations, meetings and church services between February and July 2007.
92
her project was failing but by engaging in transnational Pentecostalism she could move
away from these ‘origins’.
As outsiders, Brazilian pastors108 confront Mozambicans in a variety of ways
with what their culture or life looks like. To question the power of local healers, the
pastors mimic the behaviour of a curandeiro/a when s/he is in a trance. They bring
objects into church that local healers work with and show that they can touch them
without any negative consequences. In the traditional Mozambican context this is
considered offensive and dangerous but the pastors show that one should not be afraid if
one is in the sphere of influence of the borderless power of the Holy Spirit. Another
example is the therapy of love (see Chapter 7). During one therapy session, the pastor
imitated the behaviour of Mozambican couples who, according to Brazilians, are shy,
do not have the courage to look each other in the eyes or to touch their partner in public
spaces. Then the pastor held hands with his wife, embraced her and gave her a kiss to
show what love is but also to demonstrate the shortcomings of local customs. By doing
all this openly, the pastors want to force open cultural values as a way of bringing about
transformation. They urge converts to cross cultural and spiritual boundaries, extending
the tradition that spiritual practices involve boundaries that can be transcended.
Mozambicans do not travel literally to cross boundaries. Brazilian pastors have
done so and it is their trajectory that creates a space of mobility. Mariz (2009) describes
the dislocation by Brazilian pastors within and outside Brazil who leave their homes and
families to preach the gospel. This is valued as an important strategy of spiritual
development because, by leaving one’s family, it is possible to be fully dedicated to the
missionary project. The geographical journey facilitates a radical break with one’s
former life and allows for the formation of a new person. During services in
Mozambique, Brazilian pastors often used their personal journeys as an example of
what faith looks like and what it can achieve. To transform, one has to travel and
transcend the familiar, including one’s family and culture, and suffer hardships to create
new possibilities. By participating in Brazilian Pentecostalism one embarks on a
journey. Mozambican believers leave elements of local culture behind, begin to
experience their lives differently and see things in a new light. Since converting, Dona
Gracelina had started to walk though the city with a particular attitude, alert to all the
(evil) influences that could affect her. Even though bodies remain in the same location
physically, the subjective dislocation and the transnational positioning have the same
effect as embarking on a real journey regarding social and cultural perceptions, values
and practices.
108
There were also Mozambican pastors and pastors from other Portuguese-speaking African countries, such
as Angola. However, the Brazilians offered leadership in the Brazilian churches and most Mozambicans were
only assistant pastors who incorporated the transnational cultural distance. Mozambicans have even adopted
Brazilian Portuguese.
93
While breaking with local socio-cultural structures and practices is an intrinsic

aspect of Pentecostalism in Africa (Meyer 1998a), this is reinforced by its transnational
dimension. In continuity with traditional healers, prophets and missionaries in Southern
Africa, Brazilian pastors, coming from even further away, are perceived as powerful
healers. Yet here the mobility religion effectuates primarily results in a person
becoming a ‘stranger’ in the local environment rather than an ‘insider’ in a strange
reality (cf. Werbner 1989). The regional cults that have emerged in a context of labour
migration in Southern Africa have had an important function in reorganizing socio-
cultural and spiritual lives and providing a home for migrants who were strangers far
away from home (van Binsbergen 1981), as has also been argued for African
Pentecostalism in Europe (Adogame 1998). Instead, in the South-South transnational
movement of Brazilian Pentecostalism, the call for a break with cultural customs shows
religion as a producer of a ‘foreign’ place (van de Kamp & van Dijk 2010). Crossing
(cultural) boundaries is thus not experienced as disconcerting or uprooting, and if such
feelings arise, the church does not provide a ‘home’. The transnational Pentecostal
space is about creating transformation by openly transcending national, cultural and
spiritual boundaries, for example by annihilating the power of government officials,
severing relations of dependence with kin or incorporating new modes of love by
embracing and kissing one’s partner in public.
An atmosphere of contestation and struggle has to be created to ensure a
breakthrough and transformation. A new life can only develop when old ways have
been contested, such as by openly questioning the power of local healers. From their
transnational experiences, pastors develop a superior position in this struggle and
encourage converts to do the same. Brazilian pastors confront their public with spiritual
powers that are involved in their day-to-day lives, stimulating reflections on local
society with the aim of creating a distant position regarding local circumstances. As a
result, specific ideologies, practices and experiences develop. The following section
describes how the formation of the specific transnational Pentecostal space in
Mozambique is being influenced by the history of South-South Atlantic relationships.
4.4 South-South Pentecostalism and the Lusophone Atlantic: Macumba and

feitiçaria
Since the 16th century, the histories of Brazil and Africa have been interrelated due to
the Portuguese presence on both sides of the southern Atlantic. Above all, the traffic of
African slaves to Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries helped to shape relations.
Whereas the majority of slaves came from West and Central Africa (Sweet 2003: 18),
slaves from the Mozambican region arrived in Brazil too (Capela 2002; Rodriguez
94
1997: 450, 490, 517).109 With the end of the slave trade in the 19th century, these South-
South contacts decreased. From a Brazilian perspective, the political and economic
South-South relations that developed during the 20th century were mostly in South
Africa (Filho 2008). However since the 1970s, when Brazilian foreign policy started to
have a globalist instead of a more Americanist approach (Pinheiro 2004), Brazilian
policies, agreements and treaties of cooperation have been established with different
African governments (Visentini 2005). In 1972, Brazil’s foreign minister, Mario Gibson
Barboza, visited nine African countries on the Atlantic coast, which ‘amounted to a
breakthrough in the history of Brazil’s engagement with the region’ (Barbosa et al.
2009: 62).
In the early 1980s, a Brazilian president paid an official visit to Africa
(Nigeria, Senegal, Guinea, Cape Verde and Algeria) for the first time. Later on, during
the presidency of José Sarney (1985-1990), who visited Cape Verde, Angola and
Mozambique, the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) was set up.
Despite the onset of a liberal economic era, Brazilian foreign policy was still
predominantly protectionist at this time although it started to change during President
Cardoso’s administration in the 1990s. The Brazilian army participated in UN
peacekeeping missions in Angola, Mozambique110 and Liberia and a trade agreement
was signed between Mercosur, the South American Common Market and the South
African government.111
The Brazilian worldview, traditionally aligned with those of other developing
countries, was gradually substituted for one that saw Brazil as a potentially developed
country (Barbosa et al. 2009: 63). The Brazilian government started to adopt a stronger
position in trade negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the European Union (EU) and Brazilian
politicians began to criticize asymmetric relations in the global order. For example, with
India, South Africa, the World Health Organization and several other global NGOs they
confronted the lobby of multinational pharmaceutical companies regarding patents on
drugs to combat HIV/AIDS.
Under President Lula, who came to power in 2003, this development
culminated in a strong foreign-policy agenda that focused on intensive South-South
cooperation (Ribeiro 2007; Seibert 2011; Visentini & Pereira 2007) including
109
During his visit to the African Studies Centre in Leiden in the spring of 2009, Prof. Paulo Visentini
(Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil-South Africa Studies Centre) told me that when he was in
Mozambique he noticed Mozambican names and words that are used in Brazil.
110
In September 2005 an exhibition was held at the Brazilian-Mozambican Cultural Center (Centro Cultural
Brasil-Moçambiqe) in Map on Brazilian participation in the UNOMOZ peacekeeping mission in Mozambique
in the early 1990s. This UN mission appears in the novel ‘O Último Voo do Flamingo’ by Mozambican writer
Mia Couto (2000).
111
President Nelson Mandela came to Brazil in 1998.
95
improving the integration of Afro-descendants in Brazilian society.112 The diplomatic

staff in Africa was ‘Africanized’, the number of Brazilian embassies and cultural
centres there increased, educational exchanges between Brazil and Africa expanded and
bilateral trade grew.113 Today 52% of Brazil’s technical cooperation takes place with
Africa (Visentini 2009). And the Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade even declared
Lula to be ‘the first black Brazilian President’ (Lechini 2008: 68). In 2003 a ‘South-
South-South’ initiative was launched with the setting up of the IBSA Dialogue Forum
involving cooperation between India, Brazil and South Africa (Arkhangelskaya 2010).
And the first Africa-South America Summit (ASA) on enhancing partnerships in the
fields of governance, trade, infrastructure and rural development took place in Nigeria
in 2006.114 Cultural exchange has increased substantially in dance, music, film,
television and fashion (Arenas 2011).
This political, economic and cultural interaction has run parallel to the
Pentecostal churches travelling across the Atlantic. While discussions take place about
the extent to which Brazil as a mestiço (mestizo) country may play a different role in
Africa compared to Western countries and China (Fontaine & Seifert 2010; Visentini
2009), Brazilian pastors and African converts have established unique and remarkable
South-South cooperation. The eye-catching white church buildings of the Brazilian
Pentecostals in Southern Africa have made their presence very visible. These churches
are well known for their fanatical demonization of ‘traditional’ religions, fulminating,
for example, against any form of macumba and condemning it as occult. Macumba is a
pejorative term in Brazilian Pentecostal jargon and used to denounce Afro-Brazilian
religions as witchcraft or black magic.115 Since the religions of the African slaves who
112
History books have been rewritten. The Brazilian law 10.639/2003 promotes education about Afro-
Brazilian and African culture in the educational system (Mungoi & Rodrigues 2008).
113
Brazilian companies feature prominently at the annual Facim trade exhibition in Maputo. The companies at
the 2005 fair were doing business in agricultural machinery, home appliances, food, fashion and serigraphy.
Brazil is also active in mining (Companhia Vale do Rio Doce) and biofuels. For an overview of Brazilian
economic relations with Africa, see Barbosa et al. (2009).
114
President Lula’s foreign policy was criticized for being informed by utilitarian interests and for being
predominantly geopolitically inspired with a view to acquiring a seat on the UN Security Council (Visentini
2009; Barbosa et al. 2009: 66, 71-7). In addition, this could be morally justified by referring to the slave past.
After his seventh visit to Africa in October 2007, President Lula claimed that Brazil had all the conditions to
contribute to an ‘African Renaissance’, saying that ‘We want to overcome the cruel past of slavery, which
made us unhappy on both sides of the Atlantic. We have historical bonds. We are ethnically and culturally
similar’ (Valor Econômico, 15 October 2007 in Barbosa et al. 2009: 72).
115
There is no agreement in the literature on the linguistic origins of the term macumba and what it exactly
denotes. Hayes (2007: 287) explained that: ‘Some scholars linked ‘macumba’ to a Bantu language and a
certain type of percussive musical instrument. Given the centrality of percussion in African and
African-derived religions, this may account for the use of the term in reference to the ritual practices of Bantu-
speaking slaves and their descendents, who were especially prominent in Rio from the late eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century. Others associated the term with communities of runaway slaves” (2007: 286). “Any
attempt to affix an original, primary, or static meaning to ‘macumba’ obfuscates the term’s strategic function
as a boundary marker within larger classificatory projects’. For non-practitioners in Brazil’s upper classes,
macumba has a pejorative connotation. According to one of the best Brazilian dictionaries, macumba is a
96
were shipped to Brazil form the basis of all kinds of Afro-Brazilian worship,
Pentecostal pastors consider the heart of all evil to lie in Africa (Macedo 2000; cf.
Birman 2006: 65; Freston 2005: 46, 47). It is this evil that they have come to Africa to
fight.116
The circulation of cultural and spiritual imagery between Brazilian pastors and
Mozambican converts is grounded in the Lusophone Atlantic.117 This is a particular
space of historical, cultural and religious production between Portugal, Brazil and
Africa that has been shaped by diverse colonial encounters (Naro et al. 2007; cf. Gilroy
1992).118 The Lusophone Atlantic is a shared cultural space along which people and
imagery move. Brazilian-Mozambican Pentecostals have created a specific Christian, or
even Pentecostal, transatlantic space of interaction and exchange (cf. Sarró & Blanes
2009a).
A clear example of the Pentecostal Lusophone exchange is the understanding
of feitiçaria, a synonym for macumba or witchcraft for Pentecostals. Since the early
colonial era, feitiço (fetish, literally something made) has become a central, if not
obsessive, focus in outsiders’ discourses on Africa. The word was a Creole term and the
Portuguese used it to refer to amulets and all kinds of devotional objects. When they
arrived in West Africa and saw that Africans were using amulets, they called them
feitiços (Pollak-Eltz 1970: 37-38). Other explorers, such as the Dutch, English and
French, misinterpreted the origins of the word feitiço and saw it as African, applying the
word to everything related to African cults. For them, fetissos were not only magic
charms but also African gods and their priests were the fetisseros (Sansi-Roca 2007:
27). Pentecostals still connect Afro-Brazilian cults to this ‘fetishism’. Pentecostal
pastors in Brazil preach against feiticeiros, the priests of the Afro-Brazilian religions.
Likewise, they preach against feitiçaria in Mozambique, where they regard the
traditional healers, the curandeiros, as feiticeiros and call their practices macumba.
It is striking how on both sides of the Lusophone Atlantic, i.e. in Brazil and in
African countries, the revitalization of an ‘African identity’ is part of the history of
designation by laymen of Afro-Brazilian cults in general (electronic dictionary Houaiss of the Portuguese
language, thanks to Clara Mafra for recommending this source).
116
A Mozambican pastor at the Universal Church explained that there are many more demons in Brazil than
in Mozambique ‘but they came to Brazil because of the slaves, thus their origin is in Africa’ (conversation, 12
March 2007).
117
Strictly speaking, Mozambique is on the Indian Ocean and is geographically not part of the Atlantic, but it
is included in this constellation because the Atlantic has influenced local dynamics in the Mozambican region
and vice versa (Naro et al. 2007: 8).
118
Naro et al. (2007:8) criticize the idea of a ‘Lusotropicalism’ as proposed by Gilberto Freyre, as an idea of
an ‘all-encompassing, culturally specific and transhistorical Portuguese colonial project’. They propose the
Lusophone Black Atlantic as a space of historical and cultural production to demonstrate how the historical
continuities across this historical space are composed of a myriad of local and specific discontinuities, local
cultures and ‘perspectival refractions’ (Ibid.) that extend their influence well beyond the Lusophone context.
For critical reflections on the possibilities of a Lusophone fellowship, see Couto (2007), Thomaz (2002) and
Vale de Almeida (2002).
97
perceptions of feitiçaria.119 Van de Port (2007) evocatively analyzes the beautification

by the Bahian government of the Afro-Brazilian cult candomblé in the northern
Brazilian state of Bahia, where most descendants of Africans live. These cultural
politics are supported by the tourist industry, elaborated on by the entertainment
industry and the media, and receive backup from candomblé priests who are searching
for respectability. The colour white plays a crucial role in these politics and spotless
white has come to dominate the public appearance of candomblé. However this white
has also come to represent everything that the colour seemed to hide for non-
practitioners: the shadows of the occult, the blood of animal sacrifices, death and
violence. It is precisely this ambiguous presence of candomblé imagery that invites one
to look beyond the visible. And it is here that Pentecostals take the opportunity to report
on the satanic behaviour in candomblé (van de Port 2007: 253; cf. Almeida 2009;
Birman 1996; Mariz 1999), as they do with African religions in Africa. They warn
followers to watch out for this feitiçaria by revealing the ‘real’ meaning of candomblé’s
white.
Comparable processes of public imagination are taking place in Mozambique.
As described earlier, Frelimo has embarked on a capitalist, democratic route and started
a process of revaluing traditional Mozambican culture. Mozambicans have to value
their culture as a force for developing a prosperous Mozambican nation. Traditional
healers receive more support, government officials use authentic Mozambican clothes
and traditional rituals take place at official state ceremonies. There is a revival of
Mozambican identity and discussions about what it actually is. Being African is hot and
one should be proud of it.120 Many Mozambicans reject this return to Mozambique’s
past, which for them has so many dark sides that its ‘whitening process’ (cf. van de Port
2007) is vanishing. The clearest expression of this standpoint is heard in Pentecostal
churches where members forcefully reject national cultural politics and promote a
global Christian culture with Brazilian accents. Both the Mozambican government (and
related civil-society organizations) and the Pentecostal churches are thus engaged in a
process of restyling aspects of Mozambican culture, albeit in different and even
opposing ways: the Mozambican government is ‘civilizing’ local healing, while
119
Theories on fetishism (Goldman 2009; Latour 1996; Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988) centre on what it
(mis)represents. Fetishism is about the image that was created of African spirituality and Africans more
generally. In this sense, it was simultaneously a preoccupation of modern Western ideas of religion in which
the fetish, an object with a soul, could not comply with the enlightened ideal of what is to be considered
religion (cf. Keane 1997). In Brazil, studies on the presence of African religions (Bastide 1978; Rodrigues
(1945) [1906]) have dealt with the ‘African purity’ of these religions and the extent to which they can be
considered sorcery. According to Hayes (2008), Bastide’s classification of the various Afro-Brazilian
religions has resulted in a contemporary appropriation of candomblé as part of Brazilian culture while
macumba is perceived as destructive, as feitiçaria. This may be one reason why Pentecostals prefer using the
term macumba (see also Note 24).
120
This attitude is also expressed by groups performing capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian slave dance, in
Mozambique. The Centre of Brazilian Studies (Centro de Estudos Brasileiros) in Maputo offers courses in
capoeira. For a discussion on the origins and development of capoeira, see Röhrig Assunção (2007).
98
Pentecostals stress its ‘uncivilized’ features (cf. de Witte 2008a, 2008b; Meyer 1998a,
2010a; van Dijk 2001).121
These cultural policies echo transnational and national history. During the
colonial era, Mozambican assimilados had to break with feitiçaria and under the
subsequent Marxist-Leninist Frelimo regime, feiticeiros or traditional healers were
persecuted. Today, these healers have become part of the nation-state project but the
current revitalization of curandeiros’ power over good and evil spirits keeps the
imagery of feitiçaria alive. Although members of the upper and middle classes rarely
speak openly about their visits to curandeiros, they warn each other of the disastrous
influences of feiticeiros everywhere, fearing that their material well-being will be the
subject of feitiçaria practices. Numerous stories circulate of suspicious medicines put
under people’s chairs at work, in newly purchased cars or at the doors of luxury houses.
Women share their anxieties about the feitiços used by other women to win over the
hearts of their husbands.
In this myriad of meanings of fetish, the city becomes the central arena. De
Boeck & Plissart (2004) have shown how there is a visible and an invisible city in
Kinshasa where, in addition to the physical and visible urban reality, there is an
invisible immaterial architecture and infrastructure that contains people’s desires,
imaginations, actions and spiritual realities. A city like Kinshasa is thus difficult to
domesticate and impossible to capture in one master narrative. De Boeck & Plissart
(2004: 19) compare it with fetishes because it is a ‘constant border-crossing
phenomenon, resisting fixture, refusing capture’. The same is true for Maputo. People’s
imagery does not consist of a corpus of fixed representations, and a variety of images is
continuously being mediated by television, Pentecostal pastors, traditional healers and
state officials. The extent to which one of these bodies is able to capture the city is
central in the cultural contestation about what should be considered feitiçaria, with the
nation’s capital being the crucial place for the development of a specific cultural
identity. In the case of Pentecostals, their efforts to build the most prestigious buildings
at central locations in Maputo, have media attention and produce loud decibels during
church services that can be heard across a vast area are all part of their attempt to
incorporate the urban space (cf. van Dijk 2001; de Witte 2008b). Meanwhile, new
influences are constantly entering the urban space via migrants, television, the Internet
and tourists. As a result, no one specific body, such as the state or the church, controls
the whole urban space and a web of plural meanings and social imagery is boosted.
Converts are a part of these processes. Dona Gracelina, who was trying to open
a company, grew up in an environment where feitiçaria was something one was not
supposed to talk about because it was only ‘the uncivilized other’ who dealt with such
matters. However, since different forms and interpretations of feitiçaria are less silenced
121
These processes of restyling also involve strategies of ‘organized forgetting’ of the past (Pitcher 2006).
99
and more present in the public sphere, feitiçaria have come to play a new role in
people’s lives. I met converts who were confused about family members who started by
saying that something that happened long ago had consequences for their lives. For the
first time, they were hearing that certain incidents with spirits in the family may have
been behind their failure to marry. To find out about the influence of the past in the
present, they had to participate with their kin in sessions with a local healer. But, often
these healing sessions had not helped them and they misunderstood what happened
during a ritual they had to carry out. Convert Patricia (29 years) explained how the
curandeiro started to put something on her feet and that when she asked what it was all
about, her family told her she should not ask questions.122 Curandeiros/as commented
that sometimes they are incapable of helping their urban clients because they are
unaware of their past and do not want to cooperate with the spirits.123 In addition,
modern, urban people find the rituals of local healers disgusting because the blood of
animals is used and they find the circumstances unhygienic, preferring the clean white
spaces of Pentecostal churches. In contrast to their families and local healers,
Pentecostal pastors explained openly to Dona Gracelina and Patricia what the practices
in their family mean according to the Pentecostal view in a way that connects with
women’s aspirations.
Brazilian pastors have been able to transfer their approach to Afro-Brazilian
religions into the Mozambican context despite the many differences between the
Mozambican spiritual reality and Afro-Brazilian cults. Mozambicans apparently
recognized their experiences in the stories the Brazilian pastors related, while the
Brazilian pastors could easily connect with what they learned about Mozambican
reality. In his description of the Universal Church in Southern Africa, Freston (2005:
41) points out that:
... in its worldwide expansion, the [Universal, LvdK] church has shown flexibility in
small ‘glocalising’ methodological adaptations, … but always remaining essentially the
same in doctrine, organisation and emphases.
Studying the expansion of the Universal Church in Argentina, Oro & Semán (2001:
187) also demonstrate how its daily ritual battle against Afro-Brazilian religions, as
practised in services in Brazil, needed adaptation (‘bridges’ in the following citation) in
the Argentinian context where Afro-Brazilian beliefs are much less influential.
For this reason, the most important bridges articulated by the UCKG [Universal
Church, LvdK] have to do with the image of the Devil. These bridges are intentionally
122
Conversation, 14 March 2007.
123
Interviews with different curandeiros/as held on 15 November 2006, 5 December 2006, and 8, 27 and 28
February 2007.
100
or randomly concentrated around the translation of the Brazilian church’s proposal for
the Argentine public, and facilitate the productivity of its cultural principles.
To reinvent the dormant figure of the Devil in the Argentinian imaginary, pastors made
use of several media, for example the film The Exorcist and Catholic hagiography. As
in the Argentinian case, the Universal Church has adapted to other cultural settings,
with positive and negative results (Corten et al. 2003).
However in my encounters with converts and pastors, I learned that the
‘glocalising methodological adaptations’ (Freston 2005: 41) and ways of ‘translating the
Devil’ (Meyer 1999) imply first and foremost maintaining a certain distance between
Brazilians and Mozambicans and their respective knowledge of each others’ spiritual
world, experiences and imaginations. The capacity of Brazilian Pentecostalism to create
a critical distance to local perceptions of spirits depends on a ‘real’ distance. While both
Brazilians and Mozambicans use the word macumba, they do not share much in its
content, variety, differences and particularities. The orixás, the spiritual entities that
figure in Afro-Brazilian religions and originate from religions in West Africa, and the
spirits active in Southern Africa are all declared ‘demonic’ by Brazilian pastors
(Macedo 2000: 7-19). As many pastors and converts in Mozambique said: ‘the Devil
makes people believe that they are dealing with a specific ancestral spirit, but it is a
demon’. Brazilian pastors claim that in all these cases and wherever they are, they deal
with the same demonic powers. Mozambicans are unfamiliar with the term macumba in
their own languages but today they will talk about macumba, referring to the influence
of evil spirits in their lives. In other words, it appears to be sufficient to acknowledge
the destructive potential of macumba without going into further specificities. It is even
considered dangerous to know too much about macumba. Mozambicans do not need to
know the exact spiritual history of their families or the nature of Afro-Brazilian spirits.
And for Brazilians, the basic information about some central spiritual figures in
Mozambique can suffice.124 The less one knows, the more foreign one can be(come)
and thus one is able to transcend boundaries. It is the combination of comparable
spiritual experiences and the foreign distance of Brazilian pastors that would appear to
make Brazilian Pentecostalism particularly suitable to transgressing local attachments
and limitations.
4.5 Pioneering the urban reproductive domain transnationally
Brazilian pastors’ generation of a transnational power to cross cultural and spiritual

boundaries seems to be making Pentecostalism particularly relevant for the reproductive
domain. At the same time as Dona Gracelina was setting up her company, she and her
124
See Chapter 6 on the spirit spouse. Cf. van Dijk (in preparation).
101
husband reaffirmed their marriage vows. Dona Gracelina explained that she and her
husband had officially got married 25 years ago but that the ceremony had not taken
place under God’s supervision. To mark their new life and for it to go well, she felt that
she needed to have a new wedding ceremony, especially as her husband had converted
too. After the wedding, she showed me pictures of herself in a white wedding dress
accompanied by bridesmaids at her church wedding and photos of her civil wedding
celebrations in the Palácio de Casamentos (Palace of Marriages).125
When it comes to issues of reproduction, i.e. sexuality, marriage, fertility, love
and the family, many upwardly mobile women are opting for the ideas and practices
they can find in a Brazilian Pentecostal church. The most obvious reason is that in these
churches, marriage, love and sexuality are themes that are explicitly talked about, in
contrast to local customs. Brazilian telenovelas (soaps) also deal with the same topics
but often more broadly. For youngsters growing up in Mozambique’s cities, these
telenovelas are part and parcel of their initiation process into the world of love and
sexuality (see Chapter 7). As several of my young female informants commented, they
observed openness towards love and sexuality amongst Brazilians in the telenovelas and
in the lives of their Brazilian pastors that they did not recognize in their own society.
One young woman said: ‘I have never seen my parents kissing each other, but the
Brazilians do’.126 Another had lived with a Brazilian missionary couple for some time
and told me how she had learned from them to show affection to your partner and keep
a relationship warm and lively.127 Another important factor is that Brazilian pastors
offer an adequate framework for addressing the negative influences of spiritual powers
on affective relationships. Their success in combating husband spirits (see Chapter 6),
both in Brazil and in Mozambique, testifies to their superior spiritual power in the
domain of love and sexuality.
Women’s positions as cultural mediators in their reproductive roles connect
with the transnational Pentecostal transcendence of boundaries. As argued in Chapter 3
(cf. Yuval-Davis 1997) on constructions and imaginations of the nation, women on the
one hand appear as signifiers of the community’s honour while this position also allows
them to negotiate new cultural meanings in the contested transitional spaces of a society
in transformation. Under successive national policies, Maputo’s socio-economic life has
been continuously reshaped and this has affected gender positions and women’s
possibilities to position themselves in the urban domain. In the post-war period, new
economic opportunities for women have emerged and it is the women who have
benefitted from these new possibilities who are experiencing the gendered aspects of
urban society in new ways. Although it is now more or less accepted that they will
125
Couples quite regularly reaffirm their marriage vows around the time of their 25th wedding anniversary.
126
Interview, 28 June 2006.
127
Interview, 25 January 2007. This is not the same as saying that her parents did not have a good relationship
but views on intimacy and showing intimacy diverge. See Chapter 7.
102
work, their growing self-awareness and new modes of dress, relating and behaviour are
often the subject of heated debate because others consider them inappropriate for an
‘African woman’, an ‘African marriage’ and an ‘African family’. These women are
contesting Moçambicanidade (Mozambicanness) especially now that the control over
their lives by the state and by kin has diminished and a mixture of influences prevails.
Contradictory expectations and orientations are however increasing. These include
expectations about women’s participation in lobolo, courtship, marriage and the family,
and the ways women dress and move in the urban space. Upwardly mobile women are
caught in a difficult situation as they are maintaining or reshaping their reproductive
roles in the regeneration of society but equally exploring beyond the cultural
boundaries. Here, upwardly mobile women and transnational Pentecostalism are finding
and reinforcing each other in their capacities. Women are taking transnational
Pentecostal tools, training courses and visions to frontier the urban domain in new ways
and challenge and move boundaries in the national sphere about the Mozambican
woman to direct, control and shape new lifestyles. As pioneers, women are exploring
the transformative capacity of Brazilian Pentecostalism.
Women’s cross-cultural activities include attempts to reshape the linkages
between the intertwined productive and reproductive domains of marriage, sexuality,
work and money, which are all bound up in one sphere. All are important and dependent
on each other for the smooth running of social life, although their links are currently
unbalanced and unclear. Dona Gracelina was busy redefining their combination and
how her success in the reproductive domain – a perfect marriage – would affect her
business and vice versa. This was a crucial issue as her relative economic success took
shape when her husband lost his job. While Dona Gracelina said that this was the result
of witchcraft medicines used by his colleagues, she needed to carefully design her
career without allowing suspicion to rise against her. Her success could not influence
her husband’s ‘failure’. Women like Dona Gracelina cannot fall back on a cultural
routine and a stable social field. As women with new socio-economic positions, their
situation is uncertain and they are not in control of all the social and spiritual forces that
impinge on their positions. Their new economic positions open up the chance of
increasing control in their lives and the opportunity to conquer the city by setting up
businesses, living on their own and driving their own car. But they must strategically
manoeuvre their access to new life spaces and Dona Gracelina developed her strategies
by exploring the transnational Pentecostal space.
A particular relationship has emerged between Brazilian transnational
Pentecostalism and Maputo. A recent edited volume on migration and cities shows that
parallel transnational connections may have a different impact in different cities within
one country (Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2010). These differences with regard to the role
and influence of migrants depend on the mutual constitution of the national, local and
103
global. There is variation in how transnational activities restructure, (re)shape and (re-
)imagine urban life. Through Brazilian Pentecostalism, women are developing a new
vision of their place in Maputo in contrast to women’s positions in this city in the past.
Their attachment to the Holy Spirit should make it possible for them to get better
positions in schools, companies, the government and family life. In this sense, converts
are changing Maputo into a transnational Pentecostal urban space.
The transformation of Maputo has appeared in the ways converts walk through
the city. Women regularly summoned me to pray when we were on the street because
we needed to be aware of and protect ourselves against negative spiritual influences and
to be conscious of any potential chances. We had to keep our distance from what was
happening around us as we first had to judge the intentions of people who approached
us, such as the men who asked for our mobile phone numbers. Pastors had made it clear
that women should not date every man who turned up with an impressive car and nice
presents as his intentions should be investigated. Pentecostals could often tell me the
exact moment when someone had approached them on the street or in a building and
how afterwards they had lost their job or their partner had disappeared because the
person they had met had evil intentions. They tried to anticipate possible harm as far as
possible. At the same time, meeting people, be they potential partners or employers,
could be the start of a successful project or life path. Pioneering in the Holy Spirit was
vital when considering these situations and challenging blockades.
The materialization of a local urban transnational field of Pentecostalism is
further enhanced by increased numbers of places of worship and the circulation of
believers between Pentecostal churches. Converts do not confine themselves to
particular church buildings but change from one church to another, sometimes attending
a Pentecostal church for a few weeks, months or years and then switching to a new one.
Some attend services at different churches, compare strategies and the power of
different pastors to find out their effect and extend their variety of transnational
pioneering techniques. Depending on their pioneering abilities, converts not only
overcome the limits of the national urban domain but even the limits of Pentecostalism
itself, as I will demonstrate in Chapters 7 and 8.
4.6 Conclusion
Religious involvement produces forms of mobility. Historically, the powers of different

types of healers in Southern Africa have been attributed to their ability to cross national,
cultural, linguistic, scientific and spiritual boundaries. In this way, healers, pastors,
prophets and missionaries have also shaped conditions for others to become more
mobile culturally and socio-economically. During the colonial period in Mozambique,
for example, the Protestant and Catholic missions offered new opportunities like
104
education. Today, transnational Pentecostalism is generating transformation for socio-

economically upwardly mobile urban women.
This chapter has argued that transnational Pentecostalism and especially its
South-South links are crucial to understanding upwardly mobile women’s religious
involvement in Pentecostalism. It stimulates people to break with local culture, a fact
that is strengthened by the transnational dimensions of Pentecostal churches and
pastors. Transnationalism expresses how the borders of nation-states are transcended.
Mozambicans who participate in the Brazilian Pentecostal churches, for example,
become transnational because they cross national boundaries by criticizing and
distancing themselves from the national context. Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Mozambique contributes to a critical cultural awareness and a destabilization of
continuity by making people an ‘outsider’ instead of an ‘insider’, as is so often the case
in migrant settings where people seek integration. In this sense, Pentecostal converts do
not necessarily respond to situations of mobility, such as processes of globalization and
migration, but instead create mobility. Their participation in transnational
Pentecostalism generates the power of the Holy Spirit to conquer (conquistar) new
modes of being and doing.
The transnational Pentecostal space has become especially relevant to urban
upwardly mobile women who are seeking to direct and control their new social
positions in a shifting and uncertain but challenging urban environment. Uncertainties
about new ways of living demand a critical cultural reflection, especially in the
reproductive domain, such as relationships with kin and men. By navigating
transnational Pentecostalism, they are exploring possibilities and anticipating a life
trajectory to find and create options. The explicit openness of Brazilian pastors towards
issues of love, marriage and sexuality in addition to their spiritual and cross-cultural
strength, which allows them to cross sensitive cultural boundaries, makes them
attractive healers and counsellors when it comes to reforming the regeneration of life. In
this respect, women’s historical position as cultural mediators connects with the
transnational Pentecostal transcendence of boundaries. They find and reinforce each
other in their capacities to challenge and move frontiers in the national sphere around
the ‘Mozambican woman’ and reproductive issues.
In exploring the transnational Pentecostal space in Maputo, the historical
connections of the Lusophone Atlantic serve as a meeting point for Brazilians and
Mozambicans. Brazilians came to combat the origins of macumba and although it is a
Brazilian concept, it has been incorporated by Mozambicans. The presence of macumba
imagery from Brazil via Pentecostal pastors and the focus on feitiçaria are paired with
an opening up of the silencing of talk about spirits in Mozambique. Brazilian pastors
have brought the spirits that travelled to Brazil so long ago with the slaves back to what
is supposed to be their home, to remind Mozambicans of their roots. In the Pentecostal
105
context, these roots are considered dangerous and evil, and the cause of problems in
people’s lives. The exchange between Brazilians and Mozambicans has resulted in a
specific transnational Pentecostal macumba embedded in Mozambique’s urban space.
The following chapters deal with women’s appropriation of transnational
Pentecostal imagery and practices in everyday attempts to reshape the reproductive
sphere. How the explicit conquest in the pioneering practices of converts not only
makes traversing boundaries possible but also creates new and violent ones will be
shown.
© Rufus de Vries
The bay of Maputo; a famous spot to take wedding pictures © Rufus de Vries
107
5. Moving frontiers:
The generational trajectories of Pentecostal women
5.1 Introduction
The previous chapters have offered a macro social narrative of the formation of the
Mozambican nation-state and a framework for understanding Brazilian Pentecostalism
in Mozambique as a critical transnational space regarding gender, reproductive issues
and the urban. This chapter describes micro stories in this larger setting, focusing on
Pentecostal women, and presents the similarities and differences in the life trajectories
of the women I encountered in Maputo while on fieldwork. These plural trajectories of
urban Pentecostal women need to be taken into account when analyzing how their
violent experiences of conversion are shaped by historical social transformations,
personal backgrounds and Brazilian Pentecostalism. The violence of conversion is the
subject of Chapters 6, 7 and 8 where I explore its shaping from an ethnographic point of
view. As such, this chapter acts as a link between the previous and subsequent chapters.
During my research, a mix of life and generational circumstances seemed to
influence the forms and meanings of the violence of conversion. The Pentecostal
women I describe here ranged in age from 15 to 75 and all were preoccupied with issues
related to gender roles, marriage, sexuality, love, pregnancy, children, family relations,
domestic violence, education and careers. However, their particular positions, questions
and answers with regard to these matters differed. In general, in addition to their
personal and specific socio-economic backgrounds, these differences appear to correlate
with their age and, accordingly, with the historical periods in which their lives were
lived. Subsequent periods of socio-economic, political and cultural change have formed
these generations of Pentecostal converts.
Generations used to be considered fixed and stable in the field of anthropology.
However, inspired by Mannheim (1952) and Bourdieu (1986, 1977), recent studies have
shown that meanings and manifestations of generational typologies arise in relation to
particular historical periods, socio-economic developments and cultural understandings,
and that they are gendered (Edmunds & Turner 2002; Cole & Durham 2007). Similarly,
with regard to African societies, several studies have appeared recently that stress the
importance of generation as a form of ‘social becoming’ instead of ‘social being’ (Alber
et al. 2008; Barrett 2004; Christiansen et al. 2006; Evers et al. 2011; Vigh 2006). These
scholars argue that people are not passively committed to ascribed generational
positions but create, inhabit, escape and change them. They focus on how people from
different generations position themselves and are positioned in generational groups, and
how others define their places as part of a larger societal process. The experience of age
108
and the socio-political and cultural aspects of the societies they live in are part of a
power struggle. For example, the shift from childhood to adulthood is often related to
positions of power and authority. Depending on the extent to which someone is able to
generate income, be responsible, control others or marry, one is either considered a
child or an adult. Moreover, generational identities are connected to gender and life
chances. Below, I will show how younger generations of urban Mozambican women
have new possibilities regarding education and work and that these shape generational
characteristics as well as intergenerational differences.
Even though a range of ages is represented in the Pentecostal churches in
Mozambique, the majority of Pentecostal women are under 45, with most being in their
twenties or thirties. Based on my observations and the stories of my interlocutors,
Pentecostal churches attract more relatively younger people than the Catholic Church,
older Protestant churches and the various AICs do.128 Pentecostalism in Africa generally
seems to attract the younger generations (Adogame 2002; de Boeck 2006; Bochow
2008; Gusman 2009; Maxwell 2002; van Dijk 1992, 1998, 2010b)129 who perceive the
particularities of the Pentecostal discourse as very powerful. Pentecostal conversion
demands a break with the bonds of kinship and tradition, and presents an opportunity to
transform one’s life and reduce the influence of others through the power of the Holy
Spirit. Van Dijk (1992, cf. 2008) shows how this Pentecostal message empowers youth
to no longer obey their elders and to define the traditional powerful role of elders as
being imbued with evil forces. Young people are generally open to appropriate
innovative discourses and technologies (Abbink 2005; Burgess 2005) and Brazilian
Pentecostalism in Mozambique is still considered original and new, unlike the older
churches that are seen as being interwoven with the elders and traditions.
As the life stories described in this chapter demonstrate, the new opportunities
youngsters are taking and creating can also be attractive for older persons. Hence the
focus on the correlation between a person’s religious activity and a certain stage in their
life (Gooren 2010).130 In the cases presented below, the life stages were formed by the
historical events described in Chapter 3, namely colonialism, liberation, the civil war
and neo-liberalism, and have been influenced by gender conditions and the rural or
urban context in which people live. The historical periods converts have lived through,
128
As the newer churches become older, the ages of their members increase and bureaucratic dilemmas
emerge that may result in new Pentecostal or religious revival movements in the future (Poloma 1989).
129
However, the category of ‘young’ is relative because African (urban) populations are also young.
According to Mozambique’s 2007 census, 85% of the population of Maputo is under 40 (INE 2009: 6-10; cf.
Lopes et al. 2007b: 46).
130
In the framework of the research programme on conversion and global Pentecostalism of which this study
is a part (Droogers et al. 2003; Droogers et al. 2010), Gooren (2005, 2006, 2010) has developed the
conversion career model in which he includes a life-cycle approach. He found that most of the literature on
religious change only dealt with conversion in adolescents.
109
their position in the urban domain and particular personal circumstances shape the ways
in which they are involved in Brazilian Pentecostalism.
The intensity of the socio-cultural changes in a short period of time in
Mozambique raises questions about how new the practice of pioneering by Pentecostal
women is. For example, most of the oldest generation of Pentecostal converts, who are
now in their fifties and sixties, were already Christians before converting to
Pentecostalism. They or their parents had previously broken with aspects of their local
culture by becoming a Christian and so, in their own ways, Catholics, Methodists,
Presbyterians and Jehovah’s Witnesses were pioneers themselves in the past and had
opened up new frontiers (Macamo 2005) that could generate forms of violence as well
(Pinto 2005; cf. Fields 1985).131 In this respect, Pentecostal conversion can be seen as
being a follow-up to past forms of Christianity (Meyer 1999). The question therefore is
how Pentecostal women position themselves in their society’s Christian history. How is
the focus on rupture in Pentecostal conversion connected to former ruptures in
Mozambican history? It is notable in the cases presented below that Pentecostalism
provides new possibilities for all women to push back cultural boundaries. What is
salient in Pentecostal women’s life histories is that these women are acting in ways that
were difficult or impossible for urban women before. The dominance of women in
Pentecostalism, in contrast to the male dominance in the Christian mainline churches in
the past, is striking in this respect and underlines the significance and force of
Pentecostal conversion.
The following section analyzes the different generational groups in the
Pentecostal churches before elaborating on generational trajectories in relation to the
discussion of rupture and continuity in Pentecostal conversion, which has become a
central theme in the literature on Pentecostalism in Africa (Engelke 2004, 2010;
Marshall 2009; Maxwell 2006; Meyer 1998a, 1999; van Dijk 1992, 1998; cf. Robbins
2003, 2007).132 I argue that, to date, the discussion on conversion as a change or rupture
has not given much insight into the implications and consequences of conversion. The
latter requires that attention for the Pentecostal language of rupture has to be
complemented by experiences of rupture. Rupture gains force and meaning in what
people do and how they shape their lives (Engelke 2010: 196). The backgrounds and
131
Fields (1985) talked about a specific kind of rebellion, the Watchtower Movement which later became the
Jehovah’s Witnesses, that started in (colonial) Central Africa between 1908 and 1925. The Watchtower’s
followers refused to listen to the orders of the established authorities, who were mostly local chiefs but also
the colonial authorities and missionaries in established churches. In relation to the customary order, the
Watchtower’s baptism practices contested the ritual power of local leaders. The government’s Committee on
Race Relations, in reaction to the mass baptisms, concluded that ‘one of the most subversive influences
militating against the maintenance of amicable social relations that came to our notice is that of the
Watchtower movement’ (Ibid.: 265). In Mozambique too, the colonial government saw Jehovah’s Witnesses
as being synonymous with rebellion (Pinto 2005).
132
For this theme in the literature on African conversion to Christianity more generally, see Comaroff &
Comaroff (1991, 1997), Fields (1985), Horton (1971), Keller (2005) and, for Mozambique, Macamo (2005).
110
personal generational trajectories of Pentecostal women in Mozambique that are

presented below influence the meaning and, ultimately, the violence of conversion.
5.2 Four generations of Pentecostal women
I did in-depth interviews with 50 Pentecostal women aged between 15 and 75. They
were divided into four generational types based on the specific historical context of a
particular period since it is this contact that created categories of women who share
similar experiences and opinions. These generational types not only differ with regard
to biological time periods, but also in terms of the different socio-economic, cultural
and political circumstances that formed these women as they were growing up. For
example, women who were born at the end of the colonial period, in the 1950s and the
first half of the 1960s, experienced the impact of Frelimo’s socialist policies on their
lives in Maputo after independence. They therefore participate differently in the current
neo-liberal socio-economic reality compared to women born in the 1980s and 1990s. It
should also be noted that there are differences between the women in these different
categories and that the boundaries are not clear-cut. The division into categories that is
used in this chapter serves to demonstrate that the trajectories of conversion and the
ways in which conversion turns out to be violent are related to the entanglement of
women’s and society’s histories.
All the converts I spoke to were educated and had either completed secondary
school or had a university degree, and they were also ambitious. A central
preoccupation in their lives was their relationships with kin and/or (possible or past)
partners. In particular, the issue of marriage was fundamental and this subject was
brought up in every interview. The younger generation of women frequented church
services to find a partner, arrange a wedding and find out about the spiritual powers that
intervened in their complex relationships with men. The position of these women in
society was defined by their role as mothers and wives. Yet this role became
differentiated over time and space. The increase in women’s roles as (employed)
workers and (official) citizens has progressively shown their social force inside and
outside the domain of the family. In her study of women in Maputo’s Laulane
neighborhood, Loforte (2003: 190) describes the consequence of this development:
In the neighbourhood, the participation of women in political organs surges through two
functions – the traditional one of the socialization of the family and the extra-familial,
covering the double status consigned to women: on the one hand as a mother and
spouse, and on the other as a citizen and worker. This position, which is submerged by
111
the logic of her status in the family, functions through a constant dichotomy and
133
adaptation between one and the other.
Attempts to minimize this ‘constant dichotomy’ appeared to be central in the

experiences and narratives of (Pentecostal) women. However, the ways in which these
women were concerned with the dichotomy differed according to generation. For
example, women generally did not contest the centrality of their identity as a wife and
mother, but the younger generation wanted to give it a new meaning. They rejected
being wives like their mothers were but this perspective was inspired by their newly
found positions as citizens, converts, students and professional workers.
5.2.1 Generation of 60-75 year olds

The converts of this generation were born in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, I only met
one Pentecostal woman who was over 65: she was 75 years old and a member of the
Assemblies of God Church. This church, with its longer history in Mozambique than the
other Pentecostal churches, has relatively more older women in its congregation and the
majority of women in Pentecostal churches were under 60, making this a small
category.134 Most of the converts in this oldest generation had a Christian background,
were from families that had looked for a new sense of person and community in the
mission churches (Macamo 2005; cf. Cruz e Silva and Loforte 1998) and had received
education at mission schools in the colonial period. However, they stressed that their
past affiliation with Catholic or Protestant churches had not been their own choice and
that their conversion to Pentecostalism was their own way of creating their personal life
trajectory.
Dona Lucia (aged 63)135 is a good example. We were sitting in the God is Love
136
Church with a group of women who were all younger than her. And like Dona Lucia,
these women were assistants to the Brazilian pastors: they cleaned the church and
during services they distributed the envelopes for tithes and offerings, prayed and
caught those people who fell during exorcism sessions. They also introduced new
converts to the ins and outs of conversion. They had just been dividing up the tasks for
Dona Gracelina’s wedding ceremony (see Chapter 4) when I asked Dona Lucia how she
came to frequent the God is Love Church. She kept silent for a while and then said:
With me it went like this: my grandfather worked in South Africa. He was from
Manhiça [74 km north of Maputo]. He returned here to Maputo and started a church
133
Translated from Portuguese by LvdK.
134
In Maputo, only 3.6% of the population is over 60 years of age (INE 2009: 6).
135
I use the age the person was when I interviewed them for the first time.
136
21 November 2006.
112
that he had got to know in South Africa.137 He went to the district of his ancestors to
bring the Gospel. … Thus I grew up in a family that belonged to God. But, my family’s
church was not spiritual like this one [God is Love. By spiritual she meant the
importance of the fight between the Holy Spirit and evil spirits, LvdK].
Her grandfather agreed with her grandmother about raising their children as they
wanted. ‘The customs my grandmother had lived with, she would do away with them.
But, my father had several wives who brought along their traditions’. As a child, Dona
Lucia attended a Catholic church because her school belonged to it. ‘I went to this
church but it was not something I chose’. When she grew older she started frequenting
the Assemblies of God Church and stayed for about 15 years before leaving following
internal conflicts. ‘I don’t like conflicts.’ Her niece took her to the God is Love Church
when the services were taking place in Charlot Cinema and she liked it.
I was intrigued by her words about her grandparents wanting to break with
local customs but Dona Lucia did not seem interested in the subject or could not talk
about such a ‘dangerous’ theme.138 She only said: ‘There is a lot of macumba. There is
so much macumba, and God saved me from it.’ According to her, most people went to
church because they were ill or had marital problems. She acknowledged that she had
children but another woman immediately said: ‘but she has never been married’. The
father of Dona Lucia’s children left her for another woman long ago. Our conversation
ended with a request for me to buy meat from her as she earned money by selling meat
from South Africa, travelling there regularly to buy it as it was much cheaper there than
in Maputo.
Dona Lucia’s life was marked by the fact that she could not be considered a
married – and thus respected – woman. Other older Pentecostal women were also living
in circumstances that were locally considered ‘abnormal’ for senior women. I got the
impression that because there were only a few elderly women in Pentecostal churches
compared to other churches,139 the ‘odd’ circumstances of their lives explained why
they had joined a Pentecostal church rather than the churches their contemporaries
attended. Dona Bea (aged 60) was considered ‘different’ because she had been mentally
ill: ‘I was extremely ill when I joined the Universal Church [in the late 1990s, LvdK]
137
According to her, it was a Presbyterian Church. I asked if she meant the Swiss Mission but she said it was
not.
138
It could be that I was the cause. I noticed that, like most of the older people, she reacted to the fact that I
was a white person. She asked me a few times if I was ‘someone who prayed with the people in church’. Via
her sister, she had heard of a white woman working in Bem Fica (a Maputo neighbourhood) who prayed with
people. ‘Would I be that person?’ she asked. Older people in particular thought that I was a missionary, which
would make it difficult to speak about ‘local culture’ because missionaries generally fulminate against local
(religious) practices and in that sense, for older people, were also connected to the colonial past.
139
Most educated women of their age participated in the former mission churches or the Assemblies of God
Church.
113
because of a tragedy in my family’.140 She had been a fortunate woman but she had lost
her way in life. She told me how people started to take things and money away from
her:
Here, in Africa, people are like that, when there is money, people are drawn. But I don’t
care. I have God and He will bless me. I know that all this suffering is necessary to
reach that destiny, waiting for me on the road to the future.
During her years of illness, many curandeiros came to heal her but she turned them
away. Finally, her husband took her to the Universal Church in Nampula in northern
Mozambique,141 although his family was Muslim and Dona Bea used to go to a Catholic
church. ‘In the church the pastors asked me if I believed in God. I said yes. They
blessed me and then I felt peace again.’ She told me how she had always been rebellious
and although her grandmother had prohibited her from going to school, she went
anyway and she secretly went to bars at night. Her grandmother was a local healer and
although it was expected that she would succeed her, Dona Bea refused to follow in her
footsteps.
While elderly women normally have more authority because they become
counsellors for younger generations in the family, mediate in situations of familial
conflict or invoke ancestral spirits, Dona Luisa and Dona Bea positioned themselves
outside the kinship structure. Unlike other women of their age, they did not act as wise,
older women in the kinship structure that initiated younger generations into adult life
and the traditions of the family. But they did counsel the youth in church. Their identity
seemed to be much more defined by their independence from kin, also financially,
which manifested itself in the construction of their own houses.
Dona Bea was still homeless and, as she was not earning much, used to sleep at
the homes of others who, like her, came from Nampula. She stressed that many people
in the Universal Church had companies, big cars and houses but that it had taken a long
time for these people to become fortunate. ‘It takes years of struggle (luta)’. She
reached for her Bible, opened it at the Book of Genesis (Chapter 15), and said:
Do you know how long Abraham had to wait to have a son? I lived a bad life. I was a
woman of the world … drinking and smoking, I went with various men, and thus my
blessings will take a long time to come. First, I need to make sacrifices for a long
140
Interview, 17 November 2005.
141
While most converts were from southern Mozambique, mainly from Gaza and Maputo provinces, like most
of the population of Maputo, converts also came from other provinces and represented a variety of ethnic
groups. However this was not an issue in Pentecostal churches. Mozambican culture and tradition were
considered and presented as part of a comparable African culture. This is part of the transnational power of
the churches: wherever they are, the pastors are always able to discover the Devil’s powers at work behind
seemingly different cultural practices.
114
period. It is a war. Tá amarrado [from estar amarrado, a typical remark used in the
Universal Church to express how the Devil is restrained. The Portuguese verb amarrar
means to restrain/pin down/chain up. LvdK].
I had many conversations with Dona Bea during my fieldwork. She always emphasized
how she was caught up in a war with the Devil and how the medicines that curandeiros
had given her in the past were still in her body and influencing her life. ‘But in the
Universal Church the pastors teach us to not give up,’ she said.
This attitude of not giving up, combined with independence, is nurtured in
Pentecostal churches. Converts are continuously encouraged to make their own choices
and to be responsible for their own lives. They should not depend on or listen to
(grand)parents, aunts and uncles, and should not be sensitive to the opinions of kin but
decide what to do by themselves and in consultation with God. However ridiculous their
attitudes might seem from the local society’s perspective, the Holy Spirit would make
them numb to these ‘devilish’ cultures and views.

Freston (2005: 60) wrote the following about the Universal Church in Southern Africa:
… as almost universally, it [Universal Church, LvdK] has appealed above all to women,
especially those between 30 and 50 years of age and the victims of marital infidelity.
Significantly, the Folha Universal [the Universal Church’s journal, LvdK] dedicates
considerable attention to women’s issues, including equality in the workplace and
‘professional success and personal fulfillment’.
The experiences of Mozambican women who were born in the 1950s and early 1960s
concerning marital infidelity, their new and recent professional careers plus their desire
for personal realization were coloured by the socialist period that followed
independence when most of them were starting their married lives in Maputo. These
women told me about the freedom they had experienced after independence. There was
a positive feeling about all the chances Mozambicans would have to live like the former
Portuguese colonists after the end of colonialism. The women stressed the new
possibilities for breaking with certain cultural expectations and patterns in the
framework of Frelimo’s socialist project.
Dona Silmara (aged 57) grew up in Maputo where her relatives worked for the
colonial authorities and the Frelimo government after independence. Like other women
who were part of the relatively small Mozambican middle class, she received some
schooling and got married in ‘the European way’ just after independence, i.e. she got
married without performing the local marriage tradition or lobolo, which had been
prohibited by Frelimo’s socialist policies. Her friend, Dona Isabel (aged 51), recalled
115
how she even got married without giving advanced notice to her family!142 Even today
this is almost unbelievable in a context where kin continue to play a central role in
marriage arrangements. These women actively engaged in the socialist project of
abandoning ‘backward’ practices in an attempt to modernize society (cf. Sumich 2008).
Dona Silmara and Dona Isabel immediately added that the new type of
marriage turned out to be a deception. They both got divorced and, like many other
women, were the victims of ‘urban polygamy’ (Arnfred 2001: 37-39) and domestic
violence. As part of a new urban socialist middle class, these women became
increasingly involved in domestic life (Arnfred 2001, cf. Lovett 1989: 36). Through
their education and participation in Frelimo’s programmes, they incorporated the ideal
of the nuclear family, namely parents living together and sharing responsibility for their
children and for each other. The father and husband took care of his family financially,
and the mother and wife was willing to be the companion and helpmate of her husband,
taking care of the children and the household. For Dona Isabel, Dona Silmara and other
women, this ideal ended in (urban) polygamy and domestic violence. As described in
Chapter 3, Frelimo’s policies were aimed at abandoning older ways of life and
incorporating new ones. However, this sudden change was not accompanied by an
organized period of transition regarding family issues, and older forms of education
about family life, like the former initiation rites, were not replaced with new ones
(Osório & Arthur 2002). This led to confusion and ambiguity, which the president
himself demonstrated. During a speech in Gaza in 1982, Samora Machel claimed he
was against traditions such as lobolo, but he was also against young people wanting to
marry without a specific ceremony and without consulting their parents. ‘They behave
like animals, and they say that this is Independence’ (Machel 1982: 34). Furthermore,
he said that the youth called their parents outdated but, in his view, parents should
maintain authority over their offspring.
In some cases, the war separated couples. Dona Isabel’s husband was
temporarily transferred to another province to work and it was too dangerous for
them to travel to see each other. He then started a relationship with another woman.
The detrimental effect of the war on the economic situation led to many women
engaging in informal work, such as selling fish, to supplement their household
income. The fact that women frequently succeeded in earning more money than their
husbands increased tensions and domestic violence.143 The majority of the
142
Conversation, 11 January 2006.
143
Domestic violence affects more than half of all Mozambicans (Silva 2003: 163). It is a central theme in the
studies on gender issues in the country (Arthur & Mejia 2006; Fórum Mulher et al. 2006: 45-52; Osório 1997;
Silva 2003). This violence is commonly directed at women and is thought to be part of the social and cultural
norms and values that are part of a patriarchal system in which woman are subordinate to men. However,
domestic violence is a complicated issue as it also involves historical developments such as colonialism and
Marxism (Arnfred 2001) and socio-economic circumstances. I learned from my encounters with women and
participation in the Capacitar project how violence can be triggered by a husband’s unemployment, his
116
Pentecostal women in this generation were separated from their husbands, but being
divorced and without a career was an enormous obstacle to surviving in the city
during the serious economic crisis that hit Mozambique in the 1980s. Their relative
independence from kin meant that they could not always rely on their support,
particularly given that without the social security of lobolo there was nothing for
them to rely on.144 No support could be expected from the state either and the fact
that they had not lived up to the ideal of the ‘socialist family’ affected their self-
esteem. Dona Isabel started drinking with her friend Dona Maria (aged 49), and they
became alcoholics. Uncertainties about gender roles, the financial situation and the
war all played a role in the divorces of women like Donas Isabel, Silmara and Maria.
It was in the early 1990s that the Brazilian Universal Church arrived in
Maputo. Friends invited Dona Maria to go to services there several times but she
refused. She got a job as a secretary and began studying, but life did not work out
well for her because ‘I drank, smoked and came home late at night’.145 Then Dona
Maria started attending the Universal Church. ‘I didn’t really participate; I just went
there on Sundays.’ One day she felt she had to make a choice for or against God: ‘I
couldn’t stay somewhere in between, like the pastors say in church: “you are warm
or cold”’. So she chose God.
My life became structured again. I stopped smoking and drinking, I studied, I had a
purpose in life again, I came to understand what the Bible was saying and who Jesus
was. I learned that there is evil in life, the Devil tries everything. Do you see how many
women we have in church? Many marriages don’t work. The Devil is destroying our
families. Therefore the church has family services, the family is important to the church
and we have to work against the influence of evil in families. … Now I understand why
my husband and I had problems: the Devil had entered our life. But it’s only now that I
know how to prevent the Devil’s influence.
Donas Isabel, Silmara and Maria said that the former mission churches were incapable
of reacting to their problems. When they were confronted with domestic violence and
polygamous husbands, their pastors had no solution or ignored them. Topics such as
domestic violence and polygamy were not openly discussed and the influence of
ancestral spirits and witchcraft practices were negated. The frictions in Dona Silmara’s
alcohol consumption and the new role of wives. There is also the question about whether the contemporary
use and scale of violence are related to a history of punishment in Southern Africa, such as repressive settler
rule, armed liberation struggles and the absence of equitable justice systems. See, for example, the
proceedings of the ‘Histories and Legacies of Punishment in Southern Africa’ conference held at Oxford
University, 17-18 April 2010.
144
Lobolo is a form of social security and the payment guarantees that the husband’s family will take care of
the couple. This system prevents women from getting divorced as they or their family will have to pay the
lobolo back.
145
117
household were intensified by strange happenings. For example, the lights suddenly
switched themselves on in the middle of the night and nobody could sleep. The family
felt a negative influence impinging on their lives and Dona Silmara suspected that
spiritual agents were involved. At her Presbyterian church, people said that the
problems would pass, but they did not. A friend told her that the pastors at the Universal
Church knew how to deal with spiritual agents and finally, after a fire broke out in her
house, she decided to visit the Universal Church.
The women all stressed how the Pentecostal pastors had encouraged them to
pursue professional careers. Dona Maria considered the years she worked in a factory as
a waste of time since she could have been studying. As she moved several times and her
parents divorced when she was a child, she had never attended school regularly. ‘At the
age of 15 I hadn’t even finished primary school and it was difficult to enrol.’ Her father
sent her to work in a factory in Maputo at the end of the colonial era but now, in the
post-war period, she and the other women were all keen to participate in the new socio-
economic order. They had started new studies, followed business services and courses
at the Universal Church and had set up several small businesses. They were busy living
the Pentecostal pioneering spirit. Dona Isabel always emphasized the struggle she was
having to finish her university course. Early in the morning she went to church, during
the day she worked and in the evening she attended classes. There was no time to rest
because at weekends she had to prepare for exams and check up on her businesses. She
also had to visit her parents and resolve family conflicts. She tried not to become too
deeply involved in family issues but her kin complained that she was not contributing
enough financially. According to Dona Isabel, everyone should be responsible for
his/her own finances and she tried to pass on the pastors’ lessons on individual
responsibility, tithing and self-initiative to her kin. Following numerous Universal
Church’s programmes of prayer, fasting and offering money, Dona Maria finally
succeeded in being selected for a Masters programme in Brazil. Dona Silmara, on the
other hand, went bankrupt because she had offered all her money to the church (see
Chapter 8).
118
5.2.3 Generation of 30-40 years olds
This generation lives in an in-between position. Their parents, family members and
(possible) husbands expect them to be a ‘traditional woman’,146 but the world of
education encourages them to continue studying and to pursue a professional career and
also teaches them to be more critical about the supposed role of women. Their education
and professional careers do not necessarily need to conflict with their roles as a mother
and wife, but this is often the case. Paula (aged 37) and Marcia (aged 33) were afraid of
marriage and refused to live the lives their mothers had (Dona Lucia’s generation).
They wanted to share their household responsibilities with their husband, wanted to
keep their financial independence and wanted a faithful husband. They thought this
would be impossible. The domestic violence their mothers, aunts and older sisters
experienced was a constant reminder of ‘what Mozambican men are like’. For example,
Marcia (aged 33), who has a university degree and works as a teacher at a secondary
school, said:
My life is very different from my mother’s. I had the opportunity to study. I am less
influenced by tradition than my mother is. My mother never went to school and the
people she spends her time with are her sisters and aunts. I went to school; I know that
there is more to the world than just raising children. ... I don’t want to marry a
Mozambican man. He always will leave the household work to me. I want a husband
who knows how to clean the house and cook. Everyday I pray to God to ask him for the
right husband, but maybe God doesn’t want me to marry. Our Brazilian pastor is not
married either.147
The pastor she refers to is a woman and the leader of the Brazilian Renewed Baptist
Church that Marcia has attended for several years. Before this, she visited various
Pentecostal churches, such as the Universal Church. According to Marcia, the pastor has
a strong personality that no man is able to tolerate. ‘God had different plans for her than
marrying. Maybe, it is similar for me too.’
Yet, Paula, Marcia and the other women of their generation wanted to get
married to enjoy the status inherent in marriage. Moreover, from the Brazilian pastors
they have learned about the possibility of a marriage based on romantic love (see
Chapter 7). The pastors supported these women in becoming independent of their
families and local culture and taught them how to find and deal with a husband. While
146
This could have different meanings for Pentecostal women: being only a housewife, obedient to one’s
elders and husband, and accepting domestic violence, polygamy and one’s husband’s amantes (lovers).
147
I met Marcia several times. These quotes are from an interview and a conversation that took place on 7
April and 21 April 2006 respectively.
119
the women wanted to be different from their mothers, they felt helpless and did not
know how to achieve a new life. One day,148 a 38-year-old woman lawyer (who was not
a Pentecostal convert) looked on in amazement at her sister’s 14-year-old daughter who
was doing and saying exactly what she felt. ‘Our generation is not like that,’ she said.
She had also read about Dutch men who would take care of the children when their
wives were at work, but she was not sure what she thought about this.
Paula had decided not to marry but changed her mind after converting.149 She
worked at a telecom company and was finishing her studies at the University Eduardo
Mondlane in Maputo. She had been attending services at the Universal Church since
1994 when she had felt depressed and her family was facing problems. ‘In my family
we have a lot of trouble with marriages,’ she reported. Only one of her five sisters
married.
It is said that we carry the names of our ancestors and therefore our ancestral spirits.
Spirits claim persons. … It seems that my grandparents killed people during a war and
that the spirits of those killed wanted some of us. There was no peace in our family.
But, they weren’t ancestral spirits; it is the demons that make us believe this. The Devil
knows that when your grandmother’s spirit asks you to do things, you do it …. I
disliked tradition [a tradição],150 but only after I had entered the Church did I have the
power to protest. Before that, I participated in everything. What could I do? It was a
struggle.
This vengeful spirit manifested itself through Paula at church services for two years. ‘I
tore up various pastors’ dress shirts [this emphasized how strong the spirit was and
difficult to deal with, LvdK]. Then I was finally free.’ Slowly, her life changed and
today she can analyze difficult situations and react calmly. She is in control. At first, her
family did not accept that she would not participate in any kind of family ritual but now
they no longer invite her. Paula said: ‘I don’t teach my children anything about
tradition. More and more people are doing the same, so it will disappear.’ A few years
after her conversion, Paula got married. Because of the violent relationship between her
parents, she had decided not to marry but the pastors convinced her of the possibility of
a different, happy life with a husband. She has two children, one aged 4 and a baby.
However, recently, she started having problems with her husband ‘because of the young
girls who run after married men who own a car’. Paula told me how her husband wanted
to be different from his father who beat his wife and had amantes. But during his
148
7 September 2005.
149
I met Paula regularly in 2006 and 2007. Most of the quotes here are from an interview held on 21 June
2006.
150
As mentioned in Chapter 1, people often used the word ‘tradition’ when referring to local customs,
including beliefs and rituals related to (ancestral) spirits.
120
marriage to Paula he has became more like the father he so detested. According to
Paula, men inherit the behaviour of their male kin.
Compared to other generations, I found that converts in this generation
frequently demonstrated their ambivalent stance towards tradition. Paula was always
outspoken about her vision on ‘tradition’: it should – and would – disappear. Women of
this age blamed their parents for their role in traditional practices that influenced their
bad luck. But, interestingly, they could also accuse their parents of breaking with
tradition. Julia (aged 40) recalled how the fact that her father had not paid lobolo had
brought misfortune.151 Her father had been educated at a Catholic seminary in the
colonial period and was supposed to become a priest. Julia clarified that local customs,
such as lobolo, were barbaric in the eyes of her father and that he ‘had been proud of
having a car and civilization’. For Julia, it was his arrogance that had made him and his
family poor:
Today he has nothing because of this. He should have behaved differently. Now he says
that none of us will progress in our lives. There is a negative atmosphere in our home.
My parents have always quarrelled and so I was afraid of marrying myself. When a man
wanted to marry me, I withdrew. The misfortune of my sisters and I is all the fault of
my father.
Her father should have done lobolo because, without it, people do not belong to any
family and are short of protection from ancestral spirits. Since Julia had only negative
experiences with kin and ancestral spirits, she went to the Universal Church to rid
herself of them.
Julia, Paula and Marcia grew up in Maputo in the period after independence
when cultural customs had to be abandoned and it was forbidden to speak the local
languages (Lundin 2007: 105-108, 147-149, 168-173; Mazula 1995). And at home their
parents thought it better for the future of their children to speak the language they were
being educated in. They could understand the local language but it was not theirs and
they could not or did not speak it. Some of these women are now looking for more
affinity with their cultural past but at the same time also to distantiate even more from
it. They are experiencing the illusiveness of being able to fully become part of the
culture of their ancestors but also to leave it behind.152 In this ambivalent position,
Pentecostal pastors gave them clear instructions: ‘leave the past behind’ and ‘let the
traditions disappear’.
Women of this generation (and some from the previous generation) have
struggled with limitations and restrictions in their professional careers. New institutes of
151
152
There are similarities with the children of international migrants (Merolla 2005).
121
higher education and study programmes opened up after they had already started
working. They therefore studied in the evenings to compete in the emerging job market
in the banking sector, NGOs, consultancies, tourism and government agencies. As part
of a new middle class, they saw the opportunities to start projects and companies in a
city where signs of economic growth were starting to emerge. More people with money
were looking for good food, cars, clothes and holidays and an increasing number of
educated Mozambicans tried to earn money by catering to these needs. Unfortunately
they did not always have the right contacts with the elite who controlled business in the
city and they encountered difficulties in their careers, like Dona Gracelina (see Chapter
4).
The urban area lacks the organization required for the middle-class lifestyle
that people are looking for to succeed. People who receive a middle-class income and
participate in middle-class circles are aiming to develop a lifestyle that corresponds with
this position (cf. Pitcher 2006: 98-103). They are looking for apartments in the city
centre, they want to buy a car, have nice shops and restaurant facilities and other places
of leisure, they want access to communication technologies, and to have post-graduate
courses and career possibilities. Mozambique’s cities do not currently have the
necessary infrastructure to provide for these demands and the upwardly mobile are
complaining about the government’s inability to organize society properly (cf. Jenkins
2006: 120-124). Some of my interlocutors explained these failures by pointing to the
criminalization of the state. ‘It is the elite [leaders of Frelimo and their families, LvdK]
that profit from donor money and economic growth’ (cf. Bayart et al. 1999: 63). Others
said that the government that was in power from 2005-2009 was more concerned with
the countryside than with the city as a result of the decentralization of governance.153 In
the Pentecostal churches, special services and courses are organized for members to
learn how to become successful despite the difficult circumstances today. Converts
participate in business courses that are organized by Pentecostal pastors and attend
special services for success at work, and in finance and business (see Chapter 8). The
pastors explain to women how they can combine a professional career with their
reproductive roles.
Paula explained me that it is of vital importance to change one’s life
personally:
153
Since 2006 central government has given district governments money to spend as they wish on their own
projects. Formally this was called the Orçamento de Investimento de Iniciativa Local (Local Initiatives
Investment Budget), widely known as the ‘7 million’, the size of the original allocation in Mozambican
Meticals (the local currency). President Guebuza seemed to be more popular in the countryside than in the
city.
122
In Mozambique we are talking about the fight against poverty (luta contra a pobreza)
but we have to fight mental poverty, it is a question of mentality. People are just sitting
the whole day selling bananas and waiting for a job, but they have to do something. It is
important to look forward. I have a good job and a good salary but I want to earn more
money so I’m always looking around for another job. You can’t ask God and do
nothing yourself. 154
Paula has incorporated the central idea of tomar posse (taking ownership), as it is
conveyed in Pentecostal churches. A born-again Christian must realize her destiny by
taking what is hers (cf. Gomes 1994: 230-231). The world belongs to God and God’s
belongings are to be enjoyed. Prosperity, health and love are essential for human
existence as they are the signs of having accomplished God’s creation. And even more
than this, every believer must exercise his/her right to prosper.

While earlier generations are often uncertain about their position in the new socio-
economic and cultural order, the youngest generation of converts is much more self-
assured and confident. Young women, such as Marta and Elena, do not need to combat
tradition or adapt to new socio-economic circumstances. Elena was 25 years old when I
first met her. Because of family problems her mother had left the Catholic Church and
started going to the Universal Church soon after it arrived in the early 1990s, taking her
and her sisters to church with her. But only Elena became an active member in 2000. ‘I
didn’t have any problems but I suddenly felt that I wanted to commit.’155 She explained
how she learned to use her faith, developed self-esteem and learned to go after things.
She liked the music and the dynamism in church. Elena was very ambitious, worked
hard and studied seriously as she wanted to become a university professor. At the same
time she wanted to progress in her current job in a company. For years she had worked
in church as a pastor’s assistant but as she wanted to dedicate herself to her studies she
decided to stop, hoping to continue at a later stage. Luckily, her current boyfriend,
unlike the previous one, was as ambitious as she was and supported her. She broke up
with her former boyfriend when she realized that many Pentecostal marriages were not
working ‘because people thought that faith would be sufficient for their marriage to
succeed. But one has to use intelligent faith. It is important to also use your brains’
(emphasis LvdK, see also Chapter 7). Elena felt that converts should think for
154
155
123
themselves about how much they wanted to offer in church as people did not have to do
everything a pastor said.
Marta (aged 22) is a university student. She was Catholic but since she was 17
has frequented the Maná Church. She recounted:
At Maná I learned that when you have faith, you are really able to achieve something in
your life. Often we think negatively, we think of our problems. But we should think
positively.156
Before seriously dating her boyfriend she told him that he would have to live with the
fact that she would often be away from home because of her job and that he would have
to take care of the household at times. Her boyfriend was not necessarily opposed to this
but he found the role uncomfortable. This was a topic many of my participants
quarrelled about, quarrels that were often worsened by their in-laws. Marta’s mother-in-
law and sisters-in-law found her behaviour unacceptable because a good woman should
be at home and cook for her husband. She and her boyfriend were saving money for
their wedding, as Marta narrated:
I prayed a lot to God to have my own business and I succeeded. This year I am going to
get married and they say that usually the man is the one who pays for the celebrations.
But I know how much my boyfriend earns, it is very little. I want to help pay for the
wedding; after all it is our wedding. I also want to have my own cash, to buy my own
things, my clothes. I know that he is not going to like the fact that his girlfriend needs to
have her own business but I don’t see what is wrong with it, I earn my money
honestly.157
In comparison with older generations, Marta and Elena entered institutions of higher
education more easily, had access to computers, Internet facilities and books, and had
grown up with (foreign) television, including the famous Brazilian telenovelas. Their
education was made up of global influences and these had broadened their perspectives
on how society could be organized, including family life and marriage. They had many
aspirations that matched with the Pentecostal message. They did not necessarily
frequent the church because of a problem, as former generations had, but became part of
it through their friends or aunts and found an environment they could identify with,
unlike in their former churches. Pentecostal churches were places where their ambitions
and dreams were fed and young people were given responsibilities as opposed to the
society in which they lived. Many of them were actively involved in the church, for
example as pastors’ assistants. At the same time, they seemed more critical of the
156
157
We met many times. This conversation took place on 7 May 2007.
124
Pentecostal churches than the other generations; they were more used to expressing
their own opinions.
They were disconnected from local culture to a certain extent. Portuguese was
their mother tongue and they did not participate in traditional ceremonies. Now and then
they recounted their shock when suddenly confronted with practices they thought
belonged to the past. When they were unsuccessful with boyfriends, their female kin
took them to curandeiros and sometimes to prophets in the AICs. They told me with
disgust how they had to bathe in the blood of animals or to swallow strange medicines.
Such treatments mostly failed to work. Healers explained that these young girls were
too detached from the worldview and practices of the healers, which complicated their
participation in the healing process.158 Due to the revival of Mozambican traditions, this
generation could also obtain more knowledge about customs and ideas they were not
acquainted with. Interestingly, this search had brought some of them to Pentecostal
churches where traditions were explained and even though pastors approach ‘tradition’
critically, they connect with the youngsters’ wish for more openness on such issues.
The young converts seemed to choose a confrontational position towards local
cultures and elders. Women like Marta became angry about their aunts who told them
that they should accept the behaviour of their future husbands, for example men having
lovers (amantes). They quarrelled about these issues and made it clear that they would
not accept that type of behaviour. Some of them, such as Elena, had boyfriends who
shared these views. In particular the young Pentecostal men I met were also looking for
ways to become ‘new men’. They had experienced the violence their fathers had used
against their mothers and, congruent with their education, they wanted wives as
partners, women with whom they could exchange ideas and who would not be totally
dependent on them. According to some of these men, the majority of the women they
met were unprepared to be such a partner. All these young people in one way or another
were experiencing limits. Especially marriage arrangements and the influence of kin
augmented tensions between couples and between generations. At the same time, the
younger generation ‘educated’ and inspired the older one. For example, Marta’s mother
learned from her how to sign up for university and started joining Marta at church.
These cases reflect the lives of the highly educated youth. In the case of Ana,
Vitória and Madalena (aged 21, 18 and 17 respectively) who come from poorer
families, the situation was different. The three friends had been attending services at the
Universal Church daily for three years. Vitoria and Madalena are in the 10th and 11th
158
Interviews with curandeiros on 15 November 2006, 8 and 28 February 2007.
125
grades159 but Ana had failed to enrol in the new school year because she was staying
with her sister in South Africa. The first time we had a chat, in Vitoria’s house on the
outskirts of Maputo, they were watching a Brazilian soap (telenovela) and discussing
the betrayal of the characters in it.160 Vitoria wanted a boyfriend but so far the
boyfriends she had had always disappeared after a while. So she was attending the
Universal Church’s Therapy of Love. Her mother had taken her to curandeiros and
healers at the Zionist churches but they had not helped her.
In church it is possible to get to know men who are serious; they learn from the pastor
that they should be faithful to their wife. ... I joined the Universal Church because there
they talk about our problems. There they speak about courtship. I lived in the world, I
went out a lot, had various boyfriends but I didn’t’ feel good, I had no peace and felt
that life had no sense. Suddenly I was pregnant, I had a son, but the father disappeared.
Today I know that I should take more care. It is better to marry a man from the church.
As they were the first generation of women in their families to have so many years of
education, they could rely less on a history of female emancipation in their families than
Elena and Marta could. Nevertheless, they shared their desires to get good jobs, engage
in affectionate relations based on romantic love and marry men who would be faithful.
In addition, they were acquainted with the challenges, uncertainties and conflicts of
urban society, having grown up in families that had managed to survive a period of war
and the introduction of a neo-liberal economy. Generally speaking, the transition to a
market economy and the country’s subsequently improved macro-economic situation
have disproportionally enhanced the material well-being of a small minority, while the
majority of Mozambicans struggle to make ends meet (Hanlon & Smart 2008; cf.
MPD/DNEAP 2010). Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, prices have risen and
many government-supported jobs have disappeared. Self-employment has become an
important earning strategy and the informal sector has increased, as can been seen by
the growing number of vendors on the streets and in the bazaars. Agricultural activities,
which always used to be important in Maputo, decreased in the 1990s with the
introduction of the service sector, commerce and trade (Lundin 2007: 90-93). It is in
these sectors that the families of Ana, Vitória and Madalena have specialized. The
young women look for chances and opportunities, encouraged by their participation in
the Pentecostal Church. They articulate fewer opinions and worldviews than Elena and
Marta, but want to influence their future life.
Most of the people from lower-income families live in the suburbs of Maputo,
outside the ‘cement city’ that developed in the colonial period (see Chapter 3). This has
159
Secondary school goes through to 11th or 12th grade (a preparatory year for those who want to go to
university).
160
8 November 2006.
126
caused a renewed segregation in the city in terms of housing and access to facilities like
electricity, water, transport and the Internet (Oppenheimer & Raposo 2002). In the
suburbs, I found the generational makeup of the Pentecostal churches to be less diverse
than in the centre. Comparatively, Pentecostal services in the suburbs appeared to attract
a younger population, which is perhaps influenced by the suburbs’ demographic
composition with their relatively high percentage of young people, and women in
particular (Raposo e Salvador 2007: 109). More migrants live in the suburbs, having
migrated to the capital from other parts of the country since independence due to the
civil war and following the droughts in the 1980s. When I was driving with
Mozambicans through the suburbs of Maputo (such as Hulene and Bem Fica), they
often said that these neighbourhoods did not exist before the war or were not as densely
populated as nowadays. Since the end of the war in 1992, people have remained in the
city and not moved back to the rural areas they came from (cf. Loforte 2003: 90-94).
Families in these areas tend to have shorter histories in the city than those in the central
area. I suggest that women who increase their presence in the ‘formal’ urban spaces
through education, work and participation in state organs are more likely to attend
Pentecostal churches because the Pentecostal discourse of success and courses on
business and marriage connect well with their daily lives.
Converts from the suburbs often also prefer to attend churches in the city
centre, especially if they study or work in the centre. At the same time, several of my
interlocutors from the centre were starting to move to the suburbs where they were
building their own houses because rents in the city centre were too high (cf. Loforte
2003: 9). Paula, Marcia and Marta are good examples. The ‘reed city’ is increasingly
becoming a ‘cement’ one, making the already permeable boundaries between the two
even more diffuse (Araújo 1999, 2005a). The converts who move to the suburbs
continue to attend services in the city centre but have also started frequenting the same
churches in their own neighbourhoods. In particular, the Universal Church is
constructing huge cathedrals at central intersections leading to the suburbs, which may
change the composition of their congregations.
5.3 The rupture of continued pioneering
The role of Christianity, and specifically Pentecostalism, in social transformations has

generated discussions about the extent and levels of cultural change or discontinuity
caused by these religions (Engelke 2010). Robbins (2003, 2007) has elaborated on the
fact that anthropologists, and thus also anthropologists of Christianity, tend to stress
127
cultural continuity rather than discontinuity. In his view, anthropologists present culture
as a deep structure that is constantly being reproduced, even in times of globalization
and modernity. Robbins sees the work by Comaroff & Comaroff (1991, 1997) as
supporting his argument. They argue that conversion to Christianity did not necessarily
imply a ‘real’ conversion but was mainly a (forced) way of entering the world of
Western hospitals, education and economics. As Robbins (2007: 12) put it:
Converts’ fundamental ways of looking at the world have not really changed. People
actually convert for everyday, pragmatic reasons—in search of things like money and
power. These arguments assert that, while converts may dress up their speech and
behavior in the clothes of Christian change, underneath them they are the same people
pursuing goals fully recognizable from within their traditional cultures.
Based on fieldwork amongst Pentecostals in Papua New Guinea, Robbins argues that
conversion as radical change is possible. The group he studied affirmed how they no
longer followed the ways of their ancestors and how everything had changed. They
came to see their lives in terms of Christian conversion: they experienced rupture and
invested in discontinuity.
In an attempt to understand African Pentecostals’ claims of rupture, both
Meyer (1998a) and Engelke (2004, cf. 2010) have highlighted how conversion involves
cultural discontinuity as well as continuity. Conversion enables people to move back
and forth between a past life and present and future lives. By portraying the convert
Gaylord, Engelke (2004) makes a case for seeing conversion as a gradual process.
While Gaylord knows what it means to be a convert, he does not immediately turn out
to be the ideal convert. He has to learn to be a convert moving between his past and new
lives. Moreover, in Gaylord’s accounts, the past with its ancestral spirits, kin, and rituals
continues to play a role (cf. Meyer (1998a). They keep on acting on converts’ lives and
the constant focus of Pentecostals on evil powers holds ancestral spirits centre stage.
The past, inscribed in new ways, remains important in looking forward. Thus both
discontinuity and continuity seem to take place at different levels and converts move
between the two positions. Meyer (1998a: 340) even concludes that the Pentecostal
discourse of cultural discontinuity addresses the gap between people’s aspirations and
actual circumstances rather than effectuating a cultural break. The rupture of
Pentecostal conversion is primarily a discursive process (cf. Meyer 1999: 213-237). It is
a new form of addressing conflicts between tradition and modernity and building a
bridge between the past and the future.
From an historical perspective, conversion to Pentecostalism in Mozambique
can also be seen as a form of continuity with the former Christian missions that brought
change. Similar to what Meyer (1999) described for the Ewe Christians in Ghana, the
128
ancestors of Pentecostal converts in Mozambique expressed their desire to change by

becoming Christians. In the colonial period, Mozambicans were attracted to
Catholicism or Protestantism because it offered them the material and conceptual means
to become ‘civilized’, dissociate from certain backward practices, become a new type of
person, create modern families and participate in new communities like the
Mozambican nation-state (Cruz e Silva 2001a; Macamo 2005). In this sense,
Pentecostalism has brought a ‘second Christianization’ (Schoffeleers in Meyer 1999:
213). Pentecostals are promoting a modern life and the break with tradition with even
more fervour. As Dona Lucia commented, her parents still continue to practise tradition
despite their Christian conversion but she wanted to make a definitive break. In the light
of Mozambican history, it could be said that Dona Lucia’s and other converts’ ruptures
with their culture are a matter of degree. In addition, taking the lives of Donas Isabel,
Silmara and Maria, the Pentecostal emphasis on destroying local culture seems to be a
continuation of Frelimo’s struggle to banish tradition and create a modern nation.
Without wanting to deny these processes of continuity, I would like to stress
the importance of converts’ experiences and practices of cultural discontinuity (cf.
Lubkemann 2008: 326-330). Whereas the concept of macumba did indeed offer Dona
Lucia and Dona Bea new ways of expressing themselves and their past, it did not
principally offer them a bridge to move back and forth to and from a past and future
life. Appropriating macumba was a break with this possibility of back and forth
movement that the former mission churches and the Frelimo government had allowed.
Living the past as macumba makes it impossible for converts to be part of that very
past. Though converts encounter the revitalization of spiritual agents and traditions in
society, they separate themselves from it by being in a transnational Pentecostal space.
They transpose themselves into a Pentecostal frame of space and history. More
importantly, in doing so, they actively engage in wiping out the past. Paula did not teach
her children about tradition; she pretended that it did not exist. Of course, as a side
effect, her and other converts’ emphasis on evil spirits has kept the past alive in a
Pentecostal way. But their attempts to break with spirits and traditions and to silence the
past have had consequences. Marta continuously has conflicts with her in-laws because
she has distanced herself from their view of marriage. Paula’s children cannot talk with
elderly people like their grandparents who only speak the local language. These children
are one step removed from their family’s history.
Converts find it problematic that they can still be influenced and followed by
the past (cf. van Dijk 2005). Even though Julia’s father had broken with traditions, she
and their nuclear family continue to be entangled with their kin’s history. To Julia, the
break has not gone far enough. This being the case, the most important preoccupation
for Julia and other converts is who controls the powers of the past. Who is in control of
ancestral spiritual powers and the course of national history? They acknowledge a
129
historical continuity. Exactly because the past continues to be present in their lives,
especially through the activities of ancestral spirits and kin, and can hamper new ways
of progress, the need for a rupture becomes more urgent every day. Therefore converts
actively engage in what Robbins (2007) stresses is a Christian culture that claims radical
change and expects it to occur. In their efforts to effectuate change, converts distance
themselves from kin (Dona Isabel, Dona Maria, Paula) and quarrel with partners and in-
laws (Marta).
In my view, the discussions on conversion as change or rupture have not given
much insight into the implications and consequences of conversion. The attention paid
to the Pentecostal language of rupture has to be complemented by considering the
embodiment of rupture. Rupture gains its force and meaning in what people do and how
they shape their lives (Engelke 2010: 196). It is important to realize that Pentecostal
converts in Mozambique are mainly women who are struggling with their reproductive
roles in today’s urban society. They are opening up new socio-cultural frontiers. Often it
was the fathers, for example in the cases of Dona Luisa and Julia, who converted to
Christianity in the past (cf. Chapter 4). Today, more women make their own choices. In
the case of Pentecostal converts, most women navigate new terrains. They do things that
were not possible for women before, such as getting a university degree, living on their
own and forcing men to share responsibility for the practicalities of the household. It is
in this setting that the rupture of Pentecostal conversion gets its specific meaning and
force. It is through the transnational power of the Holy Spirit that Paula has gained the
courage to be absent from family ceremonies and Marta dares to confront her partner
and her in-laws about their outmoded views of marriage. It is the specific moments of
connections between political and socio-cultural changes in urban society, the presence
of Brazilian Pentecostalism and women’s new pioneering activities that are shaping the
significance of conversion as a rupture in various generations.
5.4 Conclusion
This chapter has presented some impressions of Pentecostal converts’ lives. These are
micro stories in the framework of the history of the social transformations described in
Chapter 3 in relation to women, the city in the formation of the Mozambican nation-
state and transnational Pentecostal space. At the same time, it has offered background to
the following chapters that deal with converts’ involvement in Brazilian Pentecostalism
as a practice of pioneering that shapes the violence of conversion.
In all the diversity of converts’ lives, it is clear that women’s attempts at
emancipation are entangled with their conversion processes. In one way or another, they
try to harmonize their position as (future) mothers, (divorced) wives and kin relations
with their professional careers and their new realizations of being a Christian, a woman
130
and a partner. Their participation in Pentecostal churches offers women ways of finding
out about the spiritual powers at work in their lives, and of exploring and defining new
gender roles, new ideas about the self, family and community and ways to be successful
professionally.
The differences in converts’ trajectories, as discussed in this chapter, are
correlated with generational settings. Four generational typologies of converts emerged
in relation to particular historical periods as well as socio-economic and cultural
developments. The lives of the first generation of a small category of women born
before the 1950s were marked by the social transformations of colonialism to
independence and to neo-liberalism. In comparison with the dominant local position of
elderly women, I found the ‘abnormal’ status of this generation of converts striking.
They are either not married, have no children or do not carry out their functions as
elders in the kinship structure. Their position matches the Pentecostal discourse on
independence of kin, and ‘thinking and acting for yourself’.
The adult lives of women from the second generation, born in the 1950s and
the early 1960s, were set within socialist structures after independence. They tried to
live according to the ideal of the ‘socialist family’ but were confronted with its failures:
domestic violence, urban polygamy and divorce. Conversion to Pentecostalism is a way
of leaving this life behind and realizing a new one in which they can show themselves
to be capable of surviving autonomously and to be successful professionally and in new
affectionate relationships. The third generation of women, born in the late 1960s and the
1970s, is trying to find their way in a post-socialist and neo-liberal era where gender
roles have become more diverse and contradictory. They are trying to harmonize the
dichotomy between being a mother and spouse, and citizen and employee. In
Pentecostal churches, they can develop their ambivalent stance towards local culture.
The youngest and fourth generation of women, born in the 1980s and 1990s, is much
more confident about its position and prepared for a professional career and new forms
of courtship and marriage. Yet, they are also limited by constraining circumstances and
the influence and authority of kin. The atmosphere of ambition and success in
Pentecostalism corresponds with their aspirations.
In summary, the history of women and their families informs their conversion
processes and conversion influences the perception of these histories and their future
lives. Women connect to transnational Pentecostalism in many ways: they critique,
contest, change and alter life events, socio-cultural positions and economic possibilities.
How successful are these women in changing their life circumstances? Even as the
rupture of conversion implies new forms of realignment with local culture and Christian
history (Engelke 2010; cf. Meyer 1999), upwardly mobile women are busy conquering
new positions in the urban domain. They are finding the transnational Pentecostal
capacity to break frontiers open most significant. Pentecostal rupture and women’s
131
attempts to transcend cultural boundaries are finding and reinforcing each other.
Conversion forcefully pushes women to produce cultural change and to incorporate pro-
active behaviour. The consequences of how women in the South-South transnational
Pentecostal movement embody and shape rupture will be analyzed in the following
chapters.
133
6. Converting the ‘spirit spouse’:

The violent transformation of the female body
6.1 Introduction
At a Universal Church service in November 2006, I received the following invitation on

a small piece of paper:
Attention!!!
Women
This Saturday at 17 hours, come to participate in the

BIG WAR AGAINST MALEDICTIONS
Such as: Sterility, destroyed marriage,
not succeeding marrying, and visited by the husband of the
night, abortion, impotent husband, cooling off
in conjugal life, beating husband, childless,
Husband cheats on you, every man that turns up
leaves you, your husband views you as his sister161
This list of maledictions gives a good indication of why women of various ages have
started to frequent Pentecostal churches. Many told me how a certain spirit obstructed
their intimate relationships and I noted that Pentecostal pastors were busy exorcizing a
specific spirit called the ‘husband of the night’ or ‘spirit spouse’,162 that prevented
women from marrying and conceiving. The symptoms women connected to such a spirit
experience included having sexual intercourse without the physical presence of a man,
not succeeding in marrying, the sudden disappearance of their partner and/or disputes
161
Punctuation marks as in the original. Translated by LvdK from Portuguese: ‘Atenção !!! Mulheres Neste
Sábado às 17hs:00, venha participar da GRANDE GUERRA CONTRA AS MALDIÇÕES Tais como:
esterilidade, casamento destruído, Não consegue casar, e visitada pelo marido da Noite, aborto, marido
impotente, esfriamento na vida conjugal, marido de espanca, não dá filho, Marido te trai, todo homem que
aparece te larga, seu marido te olha como sua irmã.’
162
In churches and conversations, the spirit spouse was called marido espiritual (spiritual husband), espirito
da noite (spirit of the night) or marido da noite (husband of the night). In the local Ronga and Changana
languages, the curandeiros speak of two types of spirit spouses: xikwembu xamathlari (spirit of a person
killed in a violent way) or xikwembu muhliwa (spirit of a person killed or stolen through witchcraft) (cf.
Bagnol 2006: 181). Throughout this text, I use the term ‘spirit spouse’.
134
with them although both loved and longed for each other. When they are married, the
relationship is tense, the husband is not interested in his wife but ‘views her as his
sister’, sexual intercourse is problematic or women do not conceive.
There are numerous explanations regarding this spirit. Local healers
(curandeiros) emphasized the historical roots of the spirit in different wars. For them,
the spirit spouse is a war spirit that seeks revenge and is calmed by receiving a gift, such
as a young woman who becomes married to the spirit. In the stories circulating in
Maputo, the spirit is mostly related to witchcraft practices. Women would be given to
spirits and, in exchange, the family gets rich. Pentecostals see the spirit as a demon and
Brazilian Pentecostal pastors explain who the spirit is by referring to ‘devilish’ Afro-
Brazilian spiritual entities from Brazil. Women that are designated as having a
relationship with a spirit spouse by Pentecostal pastors become engaged in a ‘spiritual
war’ (guerra espiritual) or a ‘big war against maledictions’. Their bodies become the
centre of a battle between the spirit spouse and the Holy Spirit.
The various accounts of the spirit spouse, confusion about its character and
origins, and its central position in Pentecostal churches are intrinsically related to the
social transformations that have been taking place in Mozambique. This chapter shows
that the spirit spouse is acting and is being acted upon in the post-war and neo-liberal
economic era and is impinging on the growing number of single and financially
independent women, female-headed households and gender roles in general and is
creating tense relations between kin and couples. The spirit spouse is thus showing that
social transformations are embodied and spiritual. Spirits, both ancestral and from the
war, are intrinsically linked to the changes in society. However, opinions on the role
these spirits should have in everyday life differ among Maputo’s residents. To some,
war spirits show that the relationship between the spiritual and the social spheres needs
restoring. To others, the destructive influences of spirits demonstrate the opposite:
spirits should be banished. In the first section of this chapter on socio-spiritual
transformations, this debate is described in more detail and the different understandings
of the spirit spouse are presented.
To Mozambicans who are negative or uncertain about ancestral and war spirits,
transnational Pentecostalism is a challenging path to navigate. Pentecostal pastors have
a clear message: by converting to Pentecostalism, war is declared on the spirits. In
Section 6.3, I outline how Brazilian pastors talk about the spirit spouse and how the
spiritual war is taking shape in church services. I then focus on how Pentecostal women
who have to deal with a spirit spouse are participating in this war. Converts and pastors
are continuously emphasizing their involvement in a war against maledictions and talk
about the destructive character of relations with spirits, kin and partners. In general,
women experience forms of domestic violence with their partners and kin. Yet violence,
in its different dimensions, does not disappear during the conversion process. If
135
anything, it increases because of the embodiment of the ‘big war against maledictions’.
This is the first of three chapters that analyze how conversion becomes violent in the
interaction between Pentecostal discourses, practices, pastors and converts. It examines
the Pentecostal ‘breaking’ techniques and their effects on the spirit spouse.
I argue for an understanding of Pentecostal conversion as embodying spiritual
warfare. Conversion is experienced as an ongoing process of fighting the impact of
negative powers on women’s lives and as a challenge to create a new body able to move
forward in life. In the formation of the born-again subject, which entails an ever-
increasing fullness with the Holy Spirit through ritual practices, performances and
bodily techniques, Pentecostal women learn to interpret and frame bodily experiences
and to use their body in novel ways. Remarkably, in doing so, converts detach their
body from their social environment, such as local frames of healing and spirit
involvement. This means that converts have to act on their environment from an
‘individualized’ position. Their struggle against the spirit spouse results in adopting
their own body as a frontier, dressed in the ‘spiritual armour’, as they come to
incorporate the conflicts in their society in the process of conversion. At times, this new
Pentecostal bodily mode is rewarding and promising for upwardly mobile women, but it
can also increase stress and hardship.
The structure of this chapter is as follows. Section 6.2 describes the
entanglement of spirit spouse manifestations with social transformations in
Mozambican society. The following section then presents the transnational Brazilian
Pentecostal approach to the spirit spouse, as well as some experiences of Pentecostal
women with this spirit. Pentecostal embodiment of spiritual warfare in discussion with
the anthropological study of spirit involvement in Africa is considered in the following
section before the conclusion.
6.2 Socio-spiritual transformations
When explaining the role of the spirit spouse,163 curandeiros164 emphasized the
importance of the relationship between persons and spirits in assuring the reproduction
of life. When a person dies and is buried, his/her spirit is believed to go on living. The
spirit (xikwembu) has a powerful influence over the living. There are different types of
spirits that may be considered either good or evil. Good ones are the ancestral spirits
163
Meaning the xikwembu xamathlari (spirit of a person killed in a violent way). See Note 2.
164
I spoke to several local healers from different regions (urban and rural) in southern Mozambique in 2006
and 2007. I thank Prometra-Moçambique, Narciso Mahumane, Job Massingue, Joice from Boane, Isaura from
Patrice Lumumba and Cremildo, and curandeiros from Maluana and Chibuto-Macalawane for sharing their
knowledge with me. While their accounts generally corresponded, some stressed particular explanations and
aspects more than the others. The curandeiros’ explanations largely agreed with Honwana’s (1996, 2003)
outline of spirits in southern Mozambique.
136
that take care of the well-being of their descendants165 and are responsible for the
procreation of the family. They therefore have a central role in customary marriage (e.g.
lobolo166). In essence, gifts oil social and spiritual relations and, in some circumstances,
a woman herself can be offered as a gift in compensation for any harm suffered in
relationships. Following the same logic of the lobolo, she is a gift to establish or
reconcile relationships and can be given to an avenging foreign spirit that belongs to a
murdered or disadvantaged person167 who has not been properly buried and cannot live
on as an ancestral spirit in its family. The spirit seeks revenge by attacking the
murderer’s family with illness and misfortune. To calm the spirit, compensation for his
death and his reintegration into society is needed, which could happen through marriage
to a girl in the murderer’s family.168 The spirit becomes the girl’s spouse and, through
marriage, the restless spirit finds a family and turns into a good spirit.
The curandeiros I spoke to date this as a practice from the 19th century when
major social changes were taking place in Southern Africa as a result of the migration of
Nguni groups (Mfecane).169 A special role was played by King Ngungunyane, who was
from one of the Nguni groups that established the Gaza Empire in southern
Mozambique. King Ngungunyane (1884-1895) was known for the violent wars he
fought against Portuguese colonial oppression and his attempts to incorporate groups
from other parts of the country, like the Ndau of central Mozambique, into his kingdom
(Liesegang 1986). Since the Ndau were murdered and enslaved against their will and
some of the dead Ndau bodies were not properly buried, they came to get revenge in
Nguni and Tsonga families by mupfuka; the spirit of the dead person could resuscitate
and seek rehabilitation and reintegration (cf. Bagnol 2006: 178-214; Honwana 2003:
71-74; Igreja 2003; Igreja et al. 2008; Langa 1992: 29-32, 43-46; Pfeiffer 2002;
Schuetze 2010: 30, 78-156).170
In addition to the ongoing impact of these historical spirits, worries about a
new wave of spirits seeking vengeance have increased in the post-war era (cf. Fry 2000:
80; Igreja 2003; Igreja et al. 2008; Marlin 2001; Schuetze 2010: 126-152). The
destructive results of the latest civil war in Mozambique have been enormous.
Curandeiros explained how the spirits of persons killed in the civil war are expected to
seek revenge in the coming years. Now that soldiers who underwent cleansing rituals
165
If descendants do not listen to their ancestors, these spirits provoke illness and poverty.
166
Lobolo consists of the exchange of gifts between the families and ancestors of the bride and bridegroom
and guarantees the continuation of those families and the social order in general. See Bagnol (2006) and
Granjo (2005) for recent studies on the dynamic individual and social meanings and practices of lobolo in
southern Mozambique.
167
A disadvantaged person might, for example, be a victim of a car accident.
168
Depending on the region and specific family histories, the exact process of reintegrating the spirit differed
but what was central was a gift as compensation, often a virgin girl.
169
See also Chapter 3.
170
For a regional comparison, see Werbner (1991: 151-152, 188-189) on western Zimbabwe. See also Evans-
Pritchard (1973) on revenge for death in southern Sudan.
137
(Granjo 2007) are getting old and dying, spirits that were temporarily calmed by these
rituals are expected to become active again because they are still seeking revenge.
According to both curandeiros and Pentecostal pastors, there are active avenging spirits
in every (extended) family. Moreover, curandeiros pointed to the lack of knowledge of
kinship structures and spirits amongst families in Maputo because many families have
lost kin and refugees have lost touch with their places of origin, including their
ancestors. Knowledge of their family’s spiritual history is fading, according to
curandeiros, as a result of women from the rural areas where the war was fought having
fled to the cities.
According to curandeiros, it is not necessary to suffer from the spirit spouse.
However many people feel that the balance between the social and the spiritual, which
is important for the organization and reproductive force of society, has been disturbed.
The fact that kinship structures are not functioning properly means that the right
procedures to reintegrate the spirit are not being followed. This view was expressed in
conversations and interviews with both Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal individuals,
curandeiros, government officials and opinion leaders such as journalists. It was also
the experience of a large group of women and could be observed in people’s daily lives.
The prevalence of women suffering from a spirit spouse adds a further
dimension to fragile social-spiritual relations. The fact that more girls than boys were
related to a spirit shows the gendered impact of social transformations. In some
curandeiros’ accounts, it was stressed that virgin boys were also given to the avenging
spirit. According to these healers, the spirit can only be reintegrated and the girl can
only marry when the spirit belongs to both a boy and a girl. If the girl is an adult and is
going to marry a physical husband, the lobolo gifts the family receives for the girl are
offered to the spirit of vengeance. Then the spirit should allow the boy to use these gifts
for the lobolo of his future wife. The children that are subsequently born to these
parents will carry the spirit’s name, ensuring its full reintegration and compensation for
his death. In this way, the spirit becomes a genro, a son-in-law, in the family’s kinship
structure and from then onwards, the spirit spouse becomes reasonable and the girl is
allowed to marry.171 Until the right procedures have been performed,172 the girl remains
related to the spirit and faces afflictions, especially in her relationships with men (cf.
Bagnol 2006: 185-202). As organizing lobolo is difficult today because of a lack of
money, conflict and irresponsible men (according to the women and a few men) and
because the presence of a spirit spouse is either silenced by kin or not properly
addressed,173 more women than men are remaining connected to spirit spouses. It was
171
In this case the spirit was called mukon’wana in the Ronga language.
172
Another possibility is accompanying the spirit back home with gifts (cf. Bagnol 2006).
173
Curandeiros said that many women are ignorant of their spiritual marriage because their kin are
embarrassed to inform them of it.
138
also said that cases of women married to a spirit are better known as it is more usual for
men not to marry and to have different relationships than it is for women.174
Suspicions about relations with spirit spouses are encountered when tensions
rise regarding the behaviour of women. Some were accused by their in-laws of having a
spirit spouse if they failed to carry out their obligations as a wife, such as cooking
and/or accompanying their husbands on visits to kin. In this respect, I heard women
complaining about mothers-in-law in particular. In the past, recently married women
often moved to their husband’s family house but today’s upwardly mobile women want
to invest in a nuclear family. Yet in one way or another, they are supposed to show their
mothers-in-law affection by visiting them on a regular basis, bringing presents or even
cleaning their houses, which this younger generation of women considers old-fashioned.
Some mothers-in-law interpret their behaviour negatively saying: ‘she is forgetting her
roots’, ‘she does not know anymore who our ancestors are’ and ‘she has a bad spirit’.
Mothers-in-law can gain a powerful position through relations with their sons, which
are challenged by upwardly mobile (Pentecostal) women. Traditionally, women’s
powerful positions are related to male counterparts such as (grand)fathers, husbands,
brothers and sons (Loforte 2003: 17-19). Some women also complained about their
sisters-in-law. The oldest sister-in-law has an important role in marriage negotiations
and the lobolo procedures (Loforte 2003: 18). Tensions may result in divorce and
accusations of a spirit spouse. At the same time, men explained how their wives were
being influenced by their own mothers and they found it difficult to develop a life with
their wives with the constant presence of her family in the house. The conflicts that
develop between couples sometimes end in accusations of witchcraft or spiritual
marriages.175
Studies on spirit spouses have been carried out in rural and peri-urban settings,
in particular in relation to (traumatic) experiences in the last civil war (Honwana 1996;
Igreja 2003, 2007: 303-346, 373-381; Igreja et al. 2008, Marlin 2001). In line with an
emphasis on religion’s role in bringing certainty and security, these scholars have
pointed to the crucial role of spirit spouses, and spirits in general, in the process of
reconciliation and restoration in post-war Mozambican society (cf. Schuetze 2010: 412-
439; but see Marlin 2001 for a different interpretation).176 In the first place, the
performance of war spirits in certain healing sessions offers a space for communicating
174
Others said that because most murdered persons during the war were men, there are more male spirits who
want a woman. Honwana (2002: 63-64) claims that most of the Ndau spirits were male. The plant named
mvuhko (or mpfuka), through which the Ndau obtained their special powers of resurrection, was given to
babies to protect them for the remainder of their lives. Some of Honwana’s informants said that men and
women alike got this substance, while others said that only men received it (cf. Earthy 1931: 226-227).
175
I was also told about a few cases in which men were thought to be engaged in a spiritual marriage. One
woman accused her husband of having a spirit spouse because he was not taking any interest in her anymore.
176
Marlin (2001: 298) argues that possession by spirits of men killed in the war ‘offers neither resolution nor
the restoration of a previous sense of order’.
139
about sexual violence and murder and plays a role in shaping memories of the war. In
second place, the marriage of the spirit to a woman (and man) contributes to restoring
relations between spirits and the living and, as such, to the renewal of communities and
society. In this context, avenging spirits offer a way of dealing with the traumas of war.
These forms of healing do not make any sense to Pentecostals and many other
people in Maputo. The women I spoke to, including non-Pentecostals, often went to
curandeiros and prophets in AICs because of possible relations with spirits of
vengeance, but they either found the whole healing ritual meaningless or did not feel
any change. Their ambivalent opinions of spirits are connected to a more general feeling
amongst citizens of Maputo that questions the idea that social life is kept in equilibrium
by the combined existence of human beings and spirits. As described in Chapter 3, the
critical view on social-spiritual links is related to the particular history of spirits in
Maputo in the process of nation-state formation.
Julia understood that the reason she had a relationship with a spiritual spouse
was because the lobolo procedures were not carried out when her parents got married
(see Chapter 5). Her father belonged to the group of assimilados (civilized indigenous
people) in Lourenço Marques during the colonial period and he broke with practices
considered uncivilized, such as lobolo. Julia herself grew up in the socialist Frelimo
government time when traditional practices had to be discontinued and the ‘socialist
family’ was promoted as the basic cell of society. Similar to the experiences of the
Donas Isabel, Maria and Silmara, Julia recalled how household tensions increased:
My mother’s parents died young and my mother’s only sister (she has no brothers)
disappeared during the [civil] war. My father did not want to look for her sister; he is
selfish and thinks only of his own [nuclear] family. My father should also have done
lobolo for my mother, but he refused.
Julia’s parents quarrelled about these issues and relations with the father’s kin were
tense. According to Julia, their nuclear family was not protected from any harm or the
influences of spirits with evil intentions because the failure to perform lobolo had
disconnected them from their ancestral spirits and kin. Other women I met also had
parents who refused to talk about or engage with ancestral spirits. Their children,
however, are being confronted with spirits whose presence has become more visible
with the new emphasis on local histories and cultures in the post-socialist era.
Sometimes younger generations are taken to ancestral places or to curandeiros but feel
dissociated from them. Some authors have spoken about the ‘social schizophrenia’
many urban Mozambicans are experiencing (Lundin 2007: 168-171). To the outside
world, people have to show that they are free of ‘backward beliefs’, while they continue
to be entangled with the past. Even though a national identity is being promoted where
‘tradition’, such as traditional healing, local music and fashion, is being revived, the
140
spiritual dimensions of ‘tradition’ are still causing embarrassment and anxieties. To

Julia and others like her, the growing influences of uncontrollable powers, including
spirits, are disorganizing society. For them, Frelimo’s return to tradition is the reason
why the post-war neo-liberal and democratic project is failing and why Maputo has
become an inchoate city (cf. Bertelsen 2003).
Pentecostalism, in contrast, is a route to banishing the spirits and related
cultural traditions forever, and to re-organizing society. The Pentecostal project is all
the more pertinent for women now that another type of spirit spouse177 has become
active. Rumours have started circulating about women who are being ‘eaten’ by spirits.
When I talked about marriage, people often asked: ‘Why is it that so many girls in one
family who are beautiful and well-educated are not marrying?’ To them, it was clear
that spiritual issues were involved. Lowering their voices, as this was a dangerous and
serious matter, they said that (grand)parents were selling their (grand)children to evil
spirits through a feiticeiro (witch doctor) to become rich. The child feeds the strong
spiritual powers needed for luck and wealth.178 The spirit spouse, who provides wealth,
is violent and continuously needs new children, preferably girls, because he is male.
When telling such stories, people stressed that others are often unfamiliar with the kinds
of forces they are dealing with. The people I spoke to were afraid that they were
unaware of the powers that were controlling them. Julia was one such person: she was
angry that her parents had neglected their ancestors and now she and her unmarried
sisters were suffering because a spirit might attack them. Julia had thus developed a
negative view of the role of spirits in society. This intensified when Pentecostal pastors
made her increasingly aware of the dangerous relationships she was entangled in. The
next section considers the South-South transnational Pentecostal ‘translation’ of the
spirit spouse.
6.3 The South-South transnational spirit of pombagira
When Brazilian Pentecostal pastors began holding church services in Maputo’s empty
cinemas in the early 1990s, word quickly spread about their performances and how they
177
This was the second type the curandeiros spoke of: xikwembu muhliwa (spirit of a person killed or stolen
through witchcraft). See Note 2.
178
In this region, this spirit spouse that ‘eats’ human flesh refers to the spirit of persons who have been
appropriated or killed for the benefit of another person. This generally involves accumulating wealth at the
cost of others, which points to witchcraft (cf. Fry 2000: 79, 80; Schuetze 2010; West 2005: 35-39 for northern
and central Mozambique; Bähre 2002; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999a; Niehaus 1997 for South Africa). For
example, Mozambicans were afraid that non-kin, such as domestic workers, would die in their house. The
spirit of the employee would afflict the employer and his family until the work s/he had done was
compensated for through gifts. Dona Silmara (Chapter 5) thought that the strange things that were happening
in her house were related to such a spirit who belonged to a domestic worker (empregado) of her
grandparents. She did not know the true facts but had heard stories circulating in her family.
141
were exorcizing spirits. Mozambicans who attended these services stressed their
amazement at how pastors were openly talking about ancestral spirits and witchcraft,
which had previously been unheard of in an urban centre dominated by a history of
culture policies focused on abandoning ‘backward beliefs’. More than ten years later
when I arrived to do my research, Brazilian outspokenness about spirits was no longer
newsworthy. Yet converts were still fascinated by how Brazilians had been able to
discover the Devil’s tricks in Mozambique. Converts told me that there were numerous
demons in Brazil, such as the spirit of pombagira, whose effects and actions were
similar to what was occurring in Mozambique.
In Afro-Brazilian imagery, pombagira is a female spirit that personifies the
ambiguities of femininity and female sexuality (Hayes 2008) and is known as the
Mistress of the Night or the Lady of the Cemetery. The spirit is attractive and dangerous
and can also be the spirit of a prostitute. Even though experiences of Mozambican
women with the spirit spouse are not usually linked to prostitution, various women told
me that a related problem is that women are not able to control their own bodies or
marry because they are involved with ‘evil’ spiritual forces. The term pombagira was
principally used in the God is Love Church. In the Universal Church, the term marido
da noite (husband of the night) or marido spiritual (spiritual husband) was mainly used
but the pastors there normally talked about cases related to Afro-Brazilian religions.
André Droogers reminded me about Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Madam Flower
and her two husbands, 1969), a popular novel by the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado
about a woman who remarries and is visited by her former husband who died and
reappears as a spirit. The spirit of her late husband interferes with her new marriage.
The novel was inspired by candomblé imagery and, as it was made into a film, was
probably familiar to the Brazilian pastors. It is another example of an apparent link
between how Brazilian pastors approach the spirit spouse and their knowledge of Afro-
Brazilian religions (Chapter 4).
At the services I attended in the God is Love Church in 2006 and 2007, there
was no permanent pastor and Brazilian pastors who were travelling around Africa came
for a few days or weeks. At one Friday afternoon service,179 a Brazilian pastor, who had
just arrived from Nigeria, preached about Revelations 12, focusing on how God kicked
the Devil out of heaven. ‘All demons have been conquered,’ the pastor concluded
before explaining about the various types of demons. He gave the example of the spirit
of pombagira who ‘destroys marriages’:
Why does a girl of 16 stay with a man of 60? It is about money. What should she do
with him? Bath him? If he loses all his money, will he not return to his former wife? …
179
2 March 2007.
142
This problem is the demon of pombagira. Here in Mozambique, you have the marido
da noite [husband of the night], don’t you?
He continued to tell them about how, just after his arrival the previous day, he and his
wife had received several women in the church office:
When I said Paz do Senhor [Peace of the Lord], they fell down on the doorstep [he
looked very satisfied with this, LvdK] and some vomited all sorts of things, it’s all
macumba. The spirits themselves say who they are, so I immediately knew what kind of
spirit I was dealing with.
He then went on to show them what he learned about the marido espiritual from the
sessions:
This spirit blocks women’s possibilities for marrying or they don’t conceive or the
husband leaves after a few years of marriage. Because this spirit is jealous and doesn’t
want you to have another man.
The pastor’s discovery of the work of the Devil in Mozambique within a day of arriving
demonstrated his access to superior spiritual forces and his transnational power over
demons. Wherever the pastor was, demons revealed themselves. He also used examples
from Nigeria, where he had just been:
I was in Nigeria. I have never seen so many macumba!, more than in Mozambique.
They perform rituals where mothers give their children away to a demon in return for
money! But, after driving a big car for some months, they become louca [crazy].180
The transnational connection between Africa and Brazil that includes a shared history of
‘African spirits’ is the medium for discovering and reflecting on the dark powers at
work in Africa. Particularly fascinating is the fact that no precise translation of the
(Afro-) Brazilian cosmology to the African one seems to be necessary. The Brazilian
pastors do not know the history of the spirit spouse (as described in the previous
section) and Mozambicans are unfamiliar with the meaning and role of the spirit of
pombagira in Brazil. The power of the South-South transnational translation is based on
a superficial knowledge of the kind of spirits at work (Chapter 4). To establish a
connection between Brazilian pastors and Mozambican converts, it is important that
pastors show that they know the tricks of the Devil who uses local beliefs and relations
to do his work. At the same time, it is necessary to have a distant position to ‘evil’. The
180
Up to this point, he did not seem to realize that these practices were also happening in Mozambique.
143
less one knows, the more foreign one can be(come) and one can thus break more easily
with devilish ties.
While the pastor preached about various demons, such as those that cause
unemployment, he continuously returned to this spirit. At the end of his sermon, when
prophecies were revealed, the pastor announced: ‘There are several women who are not
able to marry’. Some women raised their hands and the pastor pointed to one young
woman to come forward and asked her if the problem was the marido espiritual. She
nodded. He turned to the audience again: ‘There is someone, when she lies in bed at
night who is visited by a man at midnight who has sexual intercourse with her. It is the
marido espiritual.’ Another young woman came forward. The women - Pentecostal and
non-Pentecostal -, curandeiros and pastors I spoke with all emphasized that there was
no physical person involved but that women experience real sexual intercourse and that
this is visible and can be proved, for example by marks on the body or the presence of
seminal fluid the next day.
The pastor went on: ‘There is also a spirit that makes you women masturbate,
that is also the husband of the night’. Again a woman came forward and the pastor
started praying. One of the three women fell over, her body started trembling and a
strange voice came from her saying that he had obstructed her attempts to marry. The
pastor told her to remain silent and resumed praying, describing a huge demon that was
pursuing someone. ‘Who feels all the time pursued on the streets?’ The second of the
three women at the front fell on the ground. We all had to come closer and direct our
hands towards the women and scream ‘queima, queima, queima’ (‘burn, burn, burn’) to
drive the demons away forever.
The second young woman who came forward was Yvon (aged 23).181 She was
attending classes at a school for higher vocational education and had just returned to the
father of her child but he had sent her back to her family’s home as he had a new
woman he wanted to live with. Yvon had turned to the Universal Church but as this had
had no effect, she had changed to the God is Love Church.182 Yvon gave me examples
of how the spirit spouse had intruded in her life. Besides nightly visits from her spiritual
husband, which was the reason why her partner had separated from her as he had
witnessed his wife behaving as if she was having sexual intercourse with the spirit, she
once also had intercourse with her spirit husband when she was on public transport
(chapa). The men sitting close to her in the overcrowded chapa and the way men
181
I talked to Yvon several times in May 2007.
182
At some places, such as on the Avenida 24 de Julho, which is one of Maputo’s central avenues, the
Universal Church and the God is Love Church are neighbours, which facilitates the movement of believers
between the two churches. I noticed that this was mainly one way: from the Universal Church to the God is
Love Church. The Universal Church seemed to be more demanding of women than God is Love, for example
in the financial offers it requested (Chapter 8). Moreover, the Universal Church encouraged self-
consciousness and good looks (dressing in the latest fashions and using make-up) whereas the God is Love
Church preached modesty in this area.
144
looked at her on the streets provoked her spiritual husband. She decided to stay at home
for some time afterwards because she was embarrassed that people had seen the
movements of her body. How women felt and were perceived when they walked in the
city appeared to be related to the actions of the spirit spouse.
Since Yvon had started participating in the God is Love Church, the spirit had
calmed down but had not completely left her. She had to train her body into a new mode
by learning to stay filled with the Holy Spirit, who would accompany her in the chapa
and on the city streets. For this reason, she consulted one of the pastor’s female
assistants. Mariza (aged 38), had also suffered from a spirit spouse herself and
counselled women like Yvon, advising her not to sleep naked so that the spirit spouse
would not feel invited to visit her.
According to Mariza, the majority of the women in Maputo suffer from a spirit
spouse183 and as they were ignorant about the spirit, she told them about her own
experiences. While Yvon and Julia are examples of urban women who have not
consciously grown up with spirits and have learned about them through Brazilian
Pentecostalism, Mariza demonstrates the trajectory of a woman who grew up with the
spirit spouse but started to experience the spirit in new ways when she migrated to
Maputo.184
Since childhood, Mariza had known that she was married to a spirit. Her
mother had tried to free her by going to curandeiros and prophets at AICs,185 but
without success. Mariza married but she had no children and then got divorced.
Initially, she refused the marriage proposal of her current husband, as she knew the
spirit would act, but she finally relented. Her husband got a job in Maputo where
Mariza’s spirit spouse began to operate fervently: she often fell over in the middle of the
street and when her husband received his salary at the end of the month, she became so
ill that they had to spend all the money on doctors and healers. One day she heard about
the God is Love Church on the radio and started to go to its services in the Charlot
Cinema where a ‘tall black person, a Brazilian pastor, exorcized the spirit’. It took a
183
Similar observations were made by curandeiros and pastors who said that a spirit spouse existed in almost
every extended family.
184
I interviewed Mariza on 21 November 2006 and 9 March 2007.
185
Zionist prophets are also critical about harmonizing relations with vengeance spirits. In her study on spirit
possession in Mozambique, Honwana (1996: 194-229) shows how healers in the Zionist churches consider the
Nguni and Ndau spirits as evil, relying on local Tsonga spirits. Before the invasion of the Nguni into Tsonga
territory, the Tsonga were only related to the spirits of their own ancestors. These did not put the possessed
into a trance as happens to spirit mediums whose bodies are taken over by Nguni and Ndau spirits that want to
talk through the mediums. Tsonga diviners were guided by spirits through dreams. Only after encounters with
Nguni and Ndau did the Tsonga become exposed to this new form of spiritual involvement. The Zionist
medium, however, continues to rely only on local spirits and aims to exorcize Nguni and Ndau spirits.
Describing the role of the Zionist churches in a post-war era, Honwana points to the link between the civil war
and past Nguni wars against the Ndau. Renamo soldiers, who killed many people in southern Mozambique
during the civil war, were mainly associated with the Ndau because most of the Renamo leaders were Ndau.
The historical ill repute of vengeful Ndau spirits amongst the Tsonga was therefore aggravated by the
brutalities of the civil war.
145
year or two before the spirit really left her but she slowly started to change her life.
Mariza said:
I prayed a lot and threw my make-up and trousers away [in the God is Love Church
women wear skirts and long sleeves and do not use make-up and jewellery, LvdK]. It
was difficult as the spirit said that it liked me in trousers. My husband told me that it
would be better to throw them all away than to remain ill.
Finally, after much praying, the spirit left her:
One night I saw the Devil in my dream, he looked very ugly, and said that he would go
away because he was tired of God. God had burned him too often.
When Mariza began to organize her civil marriage, the Devil/spirit spouse returned to
tell her that she would not marry. Right up until the day of her wedding it was uncertain
whether she and her husband would get married or not. But Mariza knew that this was
part of a spiritual battle: she was being tested. With her ‘spiritual armour’ (see below),
she would triumph. On her wedding day, the documents were missing at the civil
registration and as the pastor prayed, he saw the Devil with the papers. In the end, the
documents were found and they were able to get married. Her family was not present
since they could not believe that it would be possible for Mariza to get married. They
were afraid that something terrible would happen but she is still married and is fervently
praying, fasting and sacrificing money in order to conceive.
6.4 Converting the spirit spouse: Embodying spiritual warfare
Manifestations of spirits in various forms have always been important in the study of
African societies (Beattie & Middleton 1969; Boddy 1989; Evans-Pritchard 1974
[1956]; Lambek 1981; Masquelier 2001; van Dijk et al. 2000). Involvement with spirits
has recently been seen by anthropologists as a ‘natural’ cultural model in feeling and
experiencing reality (Behrend & Luig 1999; Lambek 2003; Moore & Sanders 2001).
Especially in discussions on African modernity, spirit manifestations are seen as
offering alternative but normal ways of viewing the world (Meyer & Pels 2003; Moore
& Sanders 2001). In these studies, the modernist assumption of secular rationality is
contested. Spirit possession and involvement appear to be at the very heart of social
transformations and spirits respond to modernism by incorporating or rejecting its logic
and accommodating forms of modernism. These studies present local religions, such as
rituals of spirit possession, in the broader framework of the modern globalizing world.
Local dynamics are being understood in a context of global economic structures, and
patterns of communication and travel that impinge on local societies that respond to
146
such influences through multifaceted forms of spirit possession. Along these lines,
Honwana (2003) argues how spirits of vengeance in Mozambique, like the spirit spouse,
cannot be identified as traditional in a modernist discourse but should be seen as a
flexible and dynamic phenomenon that is part and parcel of the politics of national
culture and of the modern context of a market economy, democracy and globalization.
An important question in this line of thought is whether the Brazilian
Pentecostal version of the spirit spouse can be approached as the latest accommodation
of the spiritual with current urban culture. Although there are many ways in which the
transnational Pentecostal unmasking of the spirit spouse provides a system of meaning
to upwardly mobile women, Pentecostal converts are clear that they do not want to
identify and reconcile themselves with spirits. They find spirits’ adaptations to modern
processes problematic. How should spiritual involvement be seen in the light of
Mozambican Pentecostal women’s attempts to eradicate the influence of the spirit
spouse and related cultural traditions?186
This section analyzes how, in the Mozambican urban context, Pentecostal
conversion implies a process of privatizing one’s body from local forms of spirit
involvement by dressing the body in a suit of armour. Converts come to embody the
spiritual war. Religious experience is always culturally mediated and the body is the
crucial medium (Meyer 2008a). Before elaborating on the specific spiritual experiences
of ‘armed’ Pentecostal women in Maputo, the relationship of Pentecostal women with
the spirit spouse as a cultural form of communication is explored.
6.4.1 Spirit spouse relations as communication

After the so-called functionalist approach of spirit involvement in anthropology
(Crapanzo 1973; Lewis 1971, 1986,) that emphasized problem-solving mechanisms, a
more meaning-centred approach focuses on the symbolic, embodied and aesthetic
dimensions of spirit possession (Boddy 1989, 1994; Csordas 1987; Lambek 1981, 2003;
Masquelier 2001; Rosenthal 1998). In this framework, the lived-in experiences of spirits
are approached as complex cultural statements that express everyday life and enable
multiple interpretations of reality (cf. Honwana 1996, 2003; Igreja et al. 2008; Schuetze
2010 for Mozambique). Lambek (2003) addresses the ‘art of living with spirits’ as a
system of communication because possession transmits messages between people
involved in a specific cultural setting. Lambek introduces a person who is not directly
possessed but in whom a spirit comes to act, which is similar to what is happening to
186
Another problematic point is the idea of spiritual involvement being ‘natural’ to Africans. It would be
completely logical that women would express and experience their situations in a spiritual way. While this
could be said for Mariza, for others, such as Julia and Yvon, the spirit spouse and spirits in general were not
familiar to them. Spirit possession and involvement were not ‘natural’ modes of seeing and feeling the world.
Generally, it should not be taken for granted that members of a society automatically understand spirit
manifestations. See for example JRA (1985) and Gable (1995).
147
Mozambican women.187 The encounter with the spirit was ‘immediate, painful, and
deeply embodied’ but was also ‘distanced and objectified sufficiently to be available to
the person and others in the form of a narrative’ (Ibid.: 54), through which the directions
of that person’s life and related social concerns could be discussed. It is possible to see
the involvement with spirit spouses as part of a communication process about
acceptable and unacceptable gender roles and forms of marriage and sexuality in
Maputo.
Women’s new positions in the public spaces of the city, due to their increased
levels of education, better professional careers and home ownership, are provoking
discussions on and uncertainties about what men’s and women’s positions and
behaviour should be. Can these women take sufficient care of their home and husband?
How should a Mozambican man behave? Should the traditional image of the
polygamous King Ngungunyane, which seems to be increasingly central in Frelimo’s
narration and policing of the nation (Bertelsen 2010), serve as a norm? How should
women dress – as Europeans, Brazilians or Africans? In 2006, there was talk about a
proposed law that would prohibit women from dressing in short skirts because such
outfits were thought to provoke sexual harassment in public spaces.188 According to
some, sexual abuse was the fault of women themselves. If a woman dressed like a
virtuous woman – or like a ‘real African woman’ as was sometimes added – she would
not be harassed by men (cf. Sheldon 2002: 209-210). These matters were related to the
overall insecurity in Mozambican society. What did it mean to be Mozambican in
today’s neo-liberal order after colonialism, socialism and a civil war? The new positions
women have been adopting seem to make these questions more pertinent because
women have not been behaving according to the dictates of the newly revived
‘Mozambican culture’. Debates on proper gender behaviour, such as how to dress, have
focused on the body as a representation of ‘the’ national culture (Yuval-Davis 1997). As
the future of Mozambican culture seems precarious and the control of women’s
sexuality and fertility through lobolo always secured the reproduction of Mozambican
society, the position of women is a sensitive issue (Chapter 3).
At the same time, women themselves embodied the processes of social
transformation in how they experienced their body, sexuality and relationships (cf.
Spronk 2006). While looking for ways to position themselves in the urban space and in
relation to men, families, ancestral spirits and history, Julia, Yvon, Mariza and others
like them have struggled as they fell over in the street, and behaved and dreamed
187
Curandeiros said that women were involved with the spirit spouse but not possessed by it. The term
possession was used for healers whose bodies were used by spirits with healing powers. In principle, women
with a spirit spouse would not go into a trance or perform the bodily moves of possessed healers. Some spirit
spouses also had healing powers and some women married to a spirit could go into a trance and shiver while
others did not.
188
My interlocutors told me that wearing short skirts was more popular because of the famous Brazilian soaps
(telenovelas) that have been increasingly shown on Mozambican television since the 1990s.
148
strangely. To shape their lives in new ways, they had to find a way of living that was
free of the powers that paralyzed them.
In this respect, Boddy (1989) considered the role of involvement with spirits in
creating awareness and feminist consciousness in her study of women’s possession by
alien Zār spirits in northern Sudan. She contested Lewis’s (1971, 1986) conclusions that
their possession demonstrated that women could not help themselves and needed spirits
to resolve their problems. In northern Somalia, young married women, who according
to Lewis (1971: 31) were deprived and isolated, were possessed by Zār spirits that
afflicted them with illness in a ‘sex war’. Women could only be cured through
expensive ceremonies paid for by their husbands (Ibid.: 75-79) so men could not afford
a second marriage. Thus poor, married women indirectly influenced their husband’s
actions while the responsibility lay not with them but with the spirits. Boddy (1989)
presented a different perspective on the sex war. Women were not escaping a weak
position or blameless but actively resisted aspects of their society. Through possession
by alien spirits, women effectuated a degree of detachment from dominant gender
constructs and became conscious of possibilities for negotiating their subordination.
The accommodation of the spirit spouse in the South-South transnational
Pentecostal framework equally allows women to consciously reflect on their position
and adapt to new ones. Initially, Mariza, who migrated to Maputo, seemed to be a
victim in an urban environment that was new to her, a position she compensated for by
claiming her husband’s income. Every time he received his salary, she became ill and
the money had to be spent on her (cf. Lewis 1971: 75-79). However, following Boddy
(1988, 1989), the Brazilian pastors’ perception of the alien spirit offered Mariza the
chance to have a different understanding of herself and her society and to resist her
situation. Brazilian Pentecostal pastors provide women with a particular understanding
and sensation of the spirits at work, as well as with techniques to break with paralyzing
powers by becoming possessed by or involved with the Holy Spirit. Pentecostal leaders
counsel women in how to know, feel and prevent the spirit spouse – and indirectly other
negative powers such as kin and a failing government – from overwhelming them and
taking their responsibility and independence away from them. Praying while walking
down the street, wearing pyjamas at night, distancing oneself from relatives and being
alert to the dangers of spirits are some of the Pentecostal options that can be used to
organize one’s life, relationships and emotions.
Brazilian Pentecostal churches differ from each other in their approach to this
process. Both the God is Love Church and the Universal Church recognize that spirit
spouses claim women’s bodies and obstruct sexuality, marriage and procreation. In the
God is Love Church, women are seen as making themselves vulnerable to the spirit
spouse if they use lipstick and wear trousers but, according to the leaders of the
Universal Church, these can strengthen women’s self-realization as long as they ‘stay in
149
the Holy Spirit’.189 Being trained to live with the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal women have
different options within Pentecostal parameters and power structures to participate in
and shape social transformations.190 However, while there are continuities between the
local setting and transnational Pentecostal ones in the sense that they both offer space
for communication and give meaning, there are aspects of embodiment in the
conversion process that show discontinuities with local spiritual relations. This sheds
new light on the understanding of women’s involvement with spirits as a form of
resistance.
6.4.2 Disconnecting the relational body

After she mentioned the spirit spouse in our conversations, I asked Julia (whose father
had not followed the lobolo procedures) for more information about the spirit. She
started to tell me about her last partner, who she had lived with for several years. He got
a job in Beira, 1,000 km north of Maputo. Julia’s friends told her that she would lose
him if she did not move with him but she was not afraid because they had a good
relationship. Their plan was that her partner would move first and she would follow
later. But then, their contact decreased and Julia found out that he had another wife.
Julia left for Beira where her relationship ended. She looked at me intensely and
continued:
Never give yourself totally to a man. Keep a part of yourself so that you don’t
completely lose your self-worth. To prevent myself from becoming depressed, I went to
the Universal Church. … It was witchcraft. His new wife had taken something from me
and had thrown it into the sea to send me away out of the life of that man. So my
partner became bewitched. Take care; these women from Beira are dangerous.191
Looking back, she recounted how a spiritual dream had been a warning sign. However
since she was not converted when she had the dream, she had failed to recognize its
spiritual dimensions when she had sexual intercourse with a woman.192 ‘At that time I
had no idea that the woman from Beira was asking to possess my man. Such a dream
means that your relationship is over’, Julia said. Some women spoke about dreams they
189
This also means that women should not dress in very short skirts, for example. Some modesty is essential
for Christian woman, but the modesty of the Universal Church was different from that in other churches.
190
In this chapter I do not focus on the sexual education given by pastors and their assistants in discourses on
masturbation and not sleeping naked. See Chapter 7 for more details.
191
25 June 2006. Beira, a city connected with Renamo and the Ndau, is often negatively viewed by
southerners who generally support the Frelimo and disapprove of Ndau spirits that take revenge, like the spirit
spouse (see also Note 25).
192
This was the only time I encountered someone referring to a female spirit spouse. Julia informed her
partner about the dream but he was not happy about its lesbian connotations (cf. Bagnol 2006).
150
had as part of their relationship with a spirit spouse but these dreams were real to the
extent that the intercourse they had with spirits was experienced physically.193
At first, I concluded that Julia’s intertwined narratives about the reasons for her
difficulties with men, namely the failure of her parents’ lobolo, witchcraft and spirit
spouses,194 and the role of the dream showed the embodied spiritual communication on
sensitive issues, such as (lesbian) sexuality, marriage and kinship relations. Dreams can
communicate a lot. In African societies they are mediums for interaction between the
living and the dead, and among the living themselves (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937];
Lambek 1981; Thorpe 1991; Igreja & Dias-Lambranca 2006; cf. Charsley 1987).
Healers can use both the dreams of their clients and their own dreams to analyze illness
and prevent a bad event that is foretold by the dream. In communications between the
healer, the client and the social community, dreams can also restore the equilibrium of
disrupted relations (Igreja & Dias-Lambranca 2006: 150). Yet, interestingly in Julia’s
case as well as in the case of other Pentecostals, dreams had a limited role in stimulating
socio-cultural communication or restoring relationships. Believers kept dreams to
themselves and the only people they would possibly mention them to were pastors.
However, even pastors preferred not to delve too deeply into these experiences. Under
the guidance of the Holy Spirit, converts should be able to detect for themselves which
forces were acting upon them.
Church services were places where converts learned to scrutinize their bodies
in relation to the spiritual. At the start of the Pentecostal services I attended, everyone
had to close their eyes, put their hands on their hearts and start praying so as to allow
the Holy Spirit to reveal the evil in their bodies. Under the guidance of the pastor, who
is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, the evil that is found in one’s body is thrown
out by going all over one’s body with one’s hands and by then pulling one’s hands away
from it. Sometimes everyone has to put their hands on the places where evil is
manifesting itself, for example the stomach of those women who have not conceived,
and they order the Devil to leave it in the name of Jesus. This is accompanied by cries
and yells. Pastors also instruct people to stamp their feet to banish demons. Regularly,
women who have not married or cannot conceive are called forward and are all called to
burn the evil spirits in their bodies in the name of Jesus by yelling ‘burn, burn, burn’. As
demons could be hiding in their houses, they have to direct their hands in the direction
of their neighbourhood too and shout: ‘Sai, sai, sai e não volta nunca mais’ (‘leave,
193
Igreja & Dias-Lambranca (2006: 135) describe women in central Mozambique who reported nightmares
about sexual intercourse with men that appeared to be related to experiences of rape during the civil war. This
may signify that a male spirit wants to marry the woman ‘or to demand justice for a past wrongdoing not done
by the dreamer herself, but by her already deceased relatives’. In addition, it could be a calling to become a
healer.
194
The different reasons Julia mentioned correspond with the three reasons curandeiros specified for
reproductive problems: i) the mother has not been ‘lobolated’; ii) an ancestral spirit wants to say something;
and/or iii) a foreign/war spirit is manifesting itself.
151
leave, leave and never return’). The body of the convert becomes the medium and also
an index of the power of God (Meyer 2008a).
Sometimes I tried to keep my eyes open as I wanted to observe other people
but the assistants who walked around during services told me to close them. Converts
explained that this was essential to disconnect from everything and everybody, and to
connect to God and inspect one’s own body. Importantly and even though they were in
a group of people, converts should also not share their experiences with others. Pastors
stressed that converts should keep their spiritual battle to themselves. At the first
services I attended, I tried to make contact with the people around me but they
responded with caution. Normally, Mozambican churches are meeting places but
participating in a Pentecostal church was a person’s private business. Crucially,
converts should not inform others about the details of their spiritual struggles and only
success stories were shared in public testimonies. What is central is one’s relationship
with God, and the pastor is the only mediator. Others – friends, colleagues, kin, local
healers and even converts – do not have the right spiritual capacities of scrutiny and
might even have bad intentions and try to counter the conversion process.195
Pentecostals have to learn not to listen to others but to the Holy Spirit, who will guide
them in reading their bodies.
Before or after the services, converts and visitors could have a quick
counselling session with a pastor or an assistant but these tended to be very short,
seemed superficial and followed a clearly defined pattern.
Pastor: How is madam doing?

Linda: Fine.
Pastor: Are you experiencing any problems?
Linda: Last week, I was ill.
Pastor: Be careful madam, evil spirits are everywhere, ready to attack. I
will pray for madam. It is important to come to church every
day. [He said a short prayer and turned to the next person.]196
I regularly had such sessions with pastors that were similar to what other converts told
me and what I was able to witness. Dreams or other occurrences were not analyzed as it
was clear that the Devil used them to interfere. In my view, the transnational power of
scrutiny, healing and action depends on a short but in-depth understanding of a person’s
195
I was a foreigner and many converts told me I could do no harm. It was no problem for them to share their
private stories with me, although this could take time and converts only became more open after we met
several times. Then I realized that the converts liked my interviews and conversations because they felt they
were talking to an independent outsider. They often said that I could not be harmful since I was not African
and did not know about ‘black magic’. At the end of my fieldwork, some, like Yvon, also came to ask me
questions as they felt that I had gathered a lot of knowledge.
196
Universal Church, 16 February 2005.
152
problem and this happened in a strict, ritual order: first the nature of the affliction is
depicted – a particular demon – and an action plan of attending services, praying,
fasting and offering money is drawn up.197 Longer-term visitors and converts can
discuss more specific details with pastors and, in some cases, pastors visit converts’
homes to cast away demons there. Still, it is important that no familiar relations are
established. Pastors rarely stay at one church for longer than six months to a year and
frequently move to another neighbourhood, city or country. No long-term relationships
can or should develop.198 Moreover, I learned from the pastors in the Universal Church
that they hardly ever had time to themselves. The only day they had some free time was
on Saturdays when there were fewer services but they then had to meet other pastors
and play sports together or listen to instructions from the bishop. It seemed that every
effort was made to prevent pastors from becoming or staying embedded locally.199 The
necessary transnational distance to local culture to give way to the global power of the
Holy Spirit was enacted in the superficial relations between pastors and converts and by
keeping pastors disconnected from local settings.
In relation to the individualized and culturally disconnected setting, it was
fascinating to hear from two curandeiros that they were developing new healing
techniques because clients were increasingly coming on their own without any relatives.
However a lack of knowledge about their ancestors made it difficult for curandeiros to
perform their work. Illness is normally perceived as a consequence of a problem in
one’s social relations and the healing process consists of untangling the web of relations
the afflicted person is embedded in, most importantly with kin. Healers also said that
they regularly had consultations with women who were sure that they had a spirit
spouse but their symptoms did not prove this. According to some of them, this
happened under the influence of Pentecostal churches. Moreover, the treatment often
did not work because clients were too detached from the worldview and practices of
healers which, curandeiros explained, complicated their participation in the healing
process.200
Pentecostalism connects to and reinforces a person’s disengagement with local
healing systems and ways of living with spirits. The desire for more private healing
settings can be realized in the transnational Pentecostal setting. Upwardly mobile
women find it attractive to judge their situation privately, without depending on their
197
Once (31 January 2006), I said to the pastor that I had no problems. I immediately realized that my answer
did not fit in the standard pattern of pastors’ counselling methods. In their standard conversation techniques,
there was no script for my answer because the spiritual battle always implies that people are experiencing
hardships.
198
This happened to prevent claims from converts who had paid large sums of money without a result (see
Chapter 8).
199
This was also part of the strict control of pastors (see Chapter 8).
200
Interviews with different curandeiros in which these issues came up were held on 15 November 2006, 5
December 2006 and 8, 27 and 28 February 2007.
153
kin. There were also instances where they had no choice but to act independently
because their kin would not confer with healers and religious leaders. Yvon learned
from pastors that she had become related to her spirit spouse because her parents and
grandparents had offered her to the Devil. When I was talking to Yvon about her spirit
spouse, she asked me anxiously whether I thought that her grandmother or her father
would have indeed done such a thing. I suggested talking to her parents about these
issues but she shook her head. This was not an option as her father was against spiritual
practices and would be angry. And it was not the Pentecostal way to consult kin.
The Pentecostal ‘art of living with spirits’ (Lambek 2003) does not allow for a
communication process with others, except for short ones with pastors and God. The
important role of kin and social relations in finding out about the wishes of spirits, to
find a way to live with them and as such to transmit a variety of messages is
unimportant and even destructive in the Pentecostal realm. Converts are left to their
own resources and self-consultations, primarily based on bodily revelations by the Holy
Spirit and on what pastors say.201 The self-analysis and self-help that the transnational
Pentecostal setting allows for, and where only the Holy Spirit and the pastor are needed,
is exactly the attraction of this form of Pentecostalism in Maputo. Upwardly mobile
women are either disembodied from local spiritual communication structures and/or are
happy to act independently of powers in the national and local domains. At the same
time, however, converts become isolated and could feel depressed. I saw how Yvon
found it difficult to be suspicious of her (grand)parents, but could not talk to them about
the subject and felt lonely. Mariza’s kin decided to keep their distance and Julia’s kin
complained about her lack of (financial) cooperation. Converts are thus left with their
own bodies as sites of power. De Boeck noted that post-colonial subjects in Congo seem
to be cut off from biomedical texts and divinatory ritual, which leaves people ‘with their
own bodies as locales of culture (re)production and (political) power, and as sites of
remembering and generating meaning’ (de Boeck & Plissart 2004: 117). Similarly,
struggles in Mozambican society and conflicts between people become embodied as
conflicts within converts. In addition, they embody the clashes that emerge because they
are pioneering in the urban domain, where the spiritual suit of armour is a central
example.
201
Taking the self-help mentality further, there were also a few converts who would go to different churches
and, in a very few cases, to other healers to compare diagnoses, forms of healing and costs. Sometimes people
presented the Pentecostal diagnosis to local healers: ‘I have a spirit spouse’. One example was Patricia
(Chapter 4), who did not trust the healing session with the curandeiro that her kin had taken her to because
nobody wanted to explain why she had to take certain medicines. At one point, she participated in the
Assemblies of God Church and in healing sessions with her relatives, and she considered my research focus
groups as another platform for getting information that could help her judge the reason for her problems.
154
‘Go out evil spirit, go out’, God is Love church, Maputo
Maná church, Maputo

155
Sunday morning service, Universal Church, Maputo
Maná church, Maputo
© Rufus de Vries
156
6.4.3 Armed bodies
Studies on women and possession have largely stressed issues of subordination and
resistance (Boddy 1989; Lewis 1971; Masquelier 2001). More generally, going back to
Gluckman’s ‘rituals of rebellion’ (1970), scholars have suggested that not only armed
struggles meant resistance but also that rituals, dreams and possession showed
techniques for resisting one’s predicament and had political influence (Comaroff 1985;
Fields 1985; Fry 1976; Lan 1985; Ranger 1977; van Binsbergen 1981). These studies
have shown the creative ways religious mediums and participants dealt with the
multiple challenges of colonization, capitalism, wars and new forms of religious
proselytism. In this sense, Boddy has shown how possession by Zār spirits enables
Sudanese women to exercise implicit power and leaves the appearance of power to men.
Masquelier (2001) underscores how spiritual possession in Niger may illuminate how
women make sense of global economic forces, such as capitalist labour and consumer
culture, in their engagement with the spirit of Maria, the prostitute who indulges in
sweet luxuries and causes infertility in women:
... the imagery of consumption and reproduction provides a subtle and meaningful
discourse through which bori devotees202 address the challenges and contradictions of
contemporary life (Ibid.: 229).
Bori practices are attempts to gain control of the forces that threaten daily life.
It is certainly true that the Pentecostal unmasking of demanding spirits as
demons that are keen on money and sexual pleasure also addresses the challenges of
contemporary urban life in Maputo (cf. Meyer 2008b) and offers women techniques to
regain or establish control. However, the language of resistance does not fully capture
the fact that entering the South-South transnational Pentecostal realm is highly
demanding, as converts must tomar posse (take ownership). Success has to be lived as
victory is the reality in which converts live. There seem to be links here with
Mahmood’s work (2005: 118-188) on Muslim women in Egypt, where the pious
individual is constituted by doing. According to Mahmood, embodied actions, such as
veiling and praying, are neither forms of subordination nor of resistance to gender roles
but they realize women’s desires to be pious Muslims. Similarly, Julia, Mariza and
Yvon are praying, fasting and resisting bad powers to live as born-again Christians.
They want to be dedicated to the Pentecostal project and, to that end, they dress in the
spiritual armour of God. Since the battles that converts face are spiritual in nature,
they must fight with spiritual weapons that will protect them and make it possible to act.
Believers must put on the armour of God, such as ‘the belt of truth around the waist’,
202
Bori are invisible beings that populate the bush and are tamed in the context of possession.
157
‘the breast plate of righteousness’, and ‘the word of God as the sword which the Spirit
gives’. Now and then, pastors distribute swords and little wooden soldiers that stand for
these right spiritual mood of action, as described in the Bible Book of the Ephesians
(Chapter 6):
10 Finally, build up your strength in union with the Lord and by means of his mighty
power. 11 Put on all the armor that God gives you, so that you will be able to stand up
against the Devil's evil tricks. 12 For we are not fighting against human beings but
against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and
cosmic powers of this dark age. 13 So put on God’s armor now! Then when the evil day
comes, you will be able to resist the enemy’s attacks; and after fighting to the end, you
will still hold your ground. 14 So stand ready, with truth as a belt tight round your
waist, with righteousness as your breastplate, 15 and as your shoes the readiness to
announce the Good News of peace. 16 At all times carry faith as a shield; for with it
you will be able to put out the burning arrows shot by the Evil One. 17 And accept
salvation as a helmet, and the word of God as the sword which the Spirit gives you. 18
Do all this in prayer, asking for God’s help. Pray on every occasion, as the Spirit leads.
For this reason keep alert and never give up; pray always for all God’s people (Good
News Bible 1994).
Pentecostal Christians are engaged in violent spiritual warfare between the Devil and
God. The spiritual armour, provided by the Holy Spirit, is critical to their participation
in this war. According to Poewe (1989), Charismatic Christianity is a religion of
‘metonymic signs’ that manifest and make the power of the Holy Spirit palpable. It thus
differs from religions of metaphors, such as Orthodox Christianity. The metaphor, for
example icons, represents holy power but metonyms do something (cf. Mahmood 2005:
161-167; Meyer 2009: 6-11). Spiritual armour can be regarded as such a metonym: it
does not only symbolize or imagine the spiritual battle but makes the battle happen.
However, while Poewe says that the experience of doing and happening becomes real in
the imagination, Julia and others had to make things happen in reality. The spiritual
battle is physically tough.
By incorporating the Pentecostal arms, Julia was pushed and encouraged to
find a better job, study, buy a house and marry the right man. With spiritual weapons,
she would not be held back, and dressed in the spiritual armour, she would be
victorious. In fact as a devout Pentecostal she must be sure about her victory and only
needed to collect the fruits of it. For Mariza, spiritual dress materialized by changing
from trousers to a long skirt, so the Devil would not persecute her anymore. Her
marriage preparations were a continuous battle and she felt that every step towards
officializing her relationship was being obstructed. She had to practise her faith.
Wherever they were and went in Maputo, converts always had to use their faith ‘to
158
extinguish the burning arrows shot by the Evil One’. In their houses, converts stamped
their feet on the floor to crush any demons that might be present.
For Poewe, the shift from symbol (metaphor) to sign (metonym) speaks of the
presence of uncertainty in Southern Africa where new political projects are failing. The
metonymic mode of being transforms mundane experiences into religious ones,
meaning that Pentecostalism deconstructs the existing order and offers a reconstruction
with a novel order. The metonymic imagination ‘restores at once a sense of wholeness
and dignity: a new life’ (Poewe 1989: 67). Metonymic events ‘replace former despair; a
sense of wholeness replaces the former sense of conflict; peace and victory replace
dread and fear’ (Ibid.: 82). However, considering the fact that converts have to produce
a new life, it is important to realize that this life may not necessarily be peaceful. The
struggle continues. There is hardly any opportunity to find calm and peace as new
conflicts replace older ones. Pentecostal women who attempt to break with the spirit
spouse through ‘the burning power of the Holy Spirit’ enter a dangerous realm where a
powerful spirit and those related to it are willing to do anything to protect their position.
Women’s attempts to control their own lives and the effects of spiritual armour can start
a war of spirits, as Marzia’s account shows. Converts dare to take this risk because the
universal power of the Holy Spirit is considered to be stronger than local spirits.
Lengthy, detailed and regular testimonies, for example about the Devil walking away
with important wedding papers, are proof of converts’ dedication to the spiritual war
and to reaching a new life. Furthermore, signs of their progress should materialize in a
wedding at the civil registry, tithes and financial offerings, an independent attitude to
relatives, and conscious and controlled behaviour on the city’s streets.
When I talked to Julia several years after her conversion, she looked back on
difficult and exhausting years. As a proof of her success, the pastors demanded tithes
and extra offerings. The additional costs of her house and studies left hardly any money
to buy food and clothes and her daughter complained too, for example working out
when her mother would receive her salary so she could ask for new shoes at the right
time. In the end, Julia could not keep up this demanding lifestyle and endure the
escalating tensions at home. In addition, her sister, who had converted as well, suddenly
became very ill and almost bled to death. According to the pastors, her sister had not
dedicated herself sufficiently to the project of conversion and when a pastor became
angry with her poor results, Julia left the Universal Church and spirits started to follow
her again.203
203
While the highly demanding practices of Pentecostalism and its violent implications have hardly been
described, comparable dynamics have been described for spirit possession. The demands of spirits who use
healers as their mediums can be exhausting. Moreover, the Pentecostal wish to eliminate local structures of
power can also be found in possession cults. For example, Thoden van Velzen & van Wetering (2004) show
how witchcraft accusations in a Surinam Maroon society destroyed whole communities as well as people in
dominant positions.
159
6.5 Conclusion
The spirit spouse has a violent history spanning almost two centuries, starting in the
reign of King Ngungunyane and running through the recent civil war to the struggles in
the new socio-economic era. The high number of spirit spouses who currently penetrate
female bodies demonstrates the crisis in relationships between people and between
people and spirits. Locally, the well-being of one’s body – and one’s life – depends on
being linked in to the overall social and cosmological make-up of one’s community. It
is important to be well related, especially to kin and ancestors, to be healthy and
prosperous. The relational body is important for the continuation of families and
communities, but this body seems to be in crisis. During the civil war in particular,
bodies turned into disrupted entities, which affected reproduction and resulted in the
revenge of the bodies’ spirits. More recently, the harsh reality of neo-liberal socio-
economics appears to be ‘eating’ bodies. Upwardly mobile women are experiencing
these processes through ‘rapes’ by spirit spouses.204 The inherent tensions of social
transformations, such as the inability to belong, are resulting in possessive forms of
sexual relations. In this situation, conversion to Pentecostalism does not necessarily
offer help in the form of reconciliation or harmony. On the contrary, new violent
experiences are emerging because Pentecostals are using techniques to break away from
the role of spirit spouses in the kinship structure.
Upwardly mobile women are engaging in the religious project of conversion.
Due to women’s central role in the biological and socio-cultural reproduction of society,
they are embodying the social transformations in specific ways, to which the spirit
spouse attests. The spirit is participating in women’s new socio-economic positions by
personally interfering in intimate relationships. Consequently, many women are failing
to relate, marry and conceive. Exploring the Pentecostal approach of the spirit spouse
allows the development and imagination of new forms of sexuality and relationships in
the urban sphere. At the same time, Pentecostal incorporation of the spirit spouse
designs options for novel life paths, while explaining the difficulties encountered along
the way.
Conversion is first and foremost a declaration of war on spirits. Pentecostal
women have to close off their bodies from intruders and withdraw from local socially
based healing processes or reinforce their disconnections to them. They participate in
individualized Pentecostal church services and short consultations with pastors to
remain aware of and combat evil powers that could follow them everywhere, even into
the bedroom. By dressing in spiritual armour, converts demonstrate that they are real
204
J.M. Coetzee’s novels show that the violence of the former Apartheid era in South Africa not only persists
visibly today in the political arena but also in personal and intimate relationships. The novels (Coetzee 2000)
portray the tensions of everyday life, including incest, rape and sexual assault (cf. Bähre 2002; Niehaus 2002).
160
Pentecostal soldiers who, because they have broken with local relations, possess the
world, in particular the urban domain. Their conversion is a continuous battle to
demonstrate their success.
Upwardly mobile women want to act in the urban domain and, as Pentecostals,
are taking high risks by doing so. They are no longer protected by the family or
ancestral spirits, which presents feelings of insecurity in a society where one’s life is
generally considered to depend on kin. At the same time, conflicts are emerging or
intensifying because kin are afraid of the consequences of converts’ deeds. And for
believers, pushing change in a Pentecostal framework of breaking implies sleepless
nights of prayer, offering large amounts of money and ever-increasing difficulties in
marrying. Although the impact of the civil war, spirit spouses and dependence on
relatives is decreasing, the South-South transnational Pentecostal transformation of the
spirit spouse is leading to conversion in a new war with its own violent characteristics.
The conflicts in society and between kin and partners are incorporated by Pentecostals
and they are becoming conflicts within converts. Converts become part of the socio-
cultural frontier where the battle is being fought. While women’s bodies used to serve
as gifts of reconciliation in the past, women are now converting them into soldiers in
today’s spiritual war.
161
7. Terapia do Amor: Learning to love publicly
7.1 Introduction
Every Saturday evening, the Universal Church organizes terapia do amor (Therapy of
Love) sessions in several of its buildings.205 The therapy206 is a public meeting that
resembles a church service but is dedicated to the subjects of marriage, love and
sexuality. Thousands of people participate every week and most of them are young
(aged 15-35) and female. The heart of the therapy lies in learning how to express love in
public. An illustration of this is when the pastor asks couples to come forward and stand
in front of the podium. The pastor then says to them: ‘Now apologize to each other for
the mistakes you have committed towards each other’. Romantic music plays and the
pastor and his wife stand on the stage as he continues: ‘Embrace each other, kiss your
partner and say: “I love you”’. The pastor and his wife do the same and start praying for
the couples in front of them.207
Picture published in the Folha Universal (February 2005)
In the Mozambican setting, as in other African societies (cf. Spronk 2002 for Kenya), it
is unusual and often considered shocking to openly express affection to your partner in
205
Services have a special focus every day – Monday: finance and business; Tuesday: health; Wednesday and
Sunday: conversion or personal growth by means of the Holy Communion; Thursday: family; Friday:
exorcism of demons or war; Saturday: therapy of love.
Cf. http://www.uckg.org/Timetable/TIMETABLE.php
206
When I mention ‘the therapy’ in this chapter, I mean the terapia do amor.
207
With slight variations, this ‘kiss-and-embrace’ moment happened almost every time I visited the therapy in
2006 and 2007, and again in July 2008.
162
the presence of others and to talk about sexuality in a public forum. Using force,
Pentecostals are undoing any ‘secrecy’ about sexuality and are introducing particular
concepts and practices of love. This chapter examines this public training of the body in
ways of love, such as embracing and kissing, during Brazilian Pentecostal counselling
sessions on love and sexuality that demonstrate the confrontational techniques that form
a part of conversion. The terapia do amor serves as a key example.208
The role of religion in education about the family, marriage and sexuality is not
new. There is a large body of literature on colonial Christian missions and the shaping
of new identities in relation to work, health, family, sexuality and marriage (Comaroff
& Comaroff 1991, 1997; Ranger 1992). Nonetheless, the era of AIDS prevention and
treatment programmes has created a re-christianization of the public discourse and the
debate on sexuality and marriage due to the increasing influence of faith-based
organizations (FBOs) in AIDS programmes (Prince et al. 2009). This has stimulated
renewed scholarly attention for religion and counselling on sexuality and marriage in
Africa (Becker & Geissler 2007, 2009; Burchardt 2009, 2011; Nguyen 2009; Prince et
al. 2009; van Dijk 2010b).209
As already discussed, the growth of Pentecostal churches in certain areas in
Africa coincided with cultural, social and economic changes that altered the meaning of
sexuality and love amongst younger generations (cf. Bochow 2008, 2010; Frahm-Arp
2010; Prince & Geissler 2007a, 2007b). With the absence of role models amid changing
interpretations of love and relating, the teachings of the pastors on these issues have
been taken as examples. Pentecostals are known for their open therapeutic discourse on
sexuality and relationships and taboos about sexuality, love, marital relations, infidelity
and domestic violence no longer exist. According to Pentecostals, people need to talk
about these subjects as a prerequisite to resolving their problems (cf. Spronk 2006: 227-
229). Hence, pre-marriage counselling sessions, workshops, and group meetings for
married couples are being organized to reflect on love, sexuality and marriage.210
In the literature, I have not come across counselling practices that involve such
explicit bodily lessons about love as those in the terapia do amor, which seems to be a
special feature of Brazilian Pentecostalism. More generally, the Brazilian sensual
orientation to the world (Parker 2009) appears to be helping to constitute the changing
meaning of love in Mozambique. The popular Brazilian telenovelas on Mozambican
television have become particularly important models of identification through the soap
stars’ behaviour and, as such, they are playing a major role in the development of a new
208
In the churches, love is principally discussed in relation to sexuality, courtship and marriage. I too use the
word love in relation to these subjects. Moreover, the idea of love that is portrayed is part of a globalizing
discourse on ‘romantic love’. See the section on ‘Romantic love, telenovelas and Brazilian pastors’ below.
209
There is, of course, a much larger literature on therapeutic traditions in Africa. See, for example, the special
issue on the histories of healing (Schumaker et al. 2007).
210
This chapter shows that there is a difference between counselling as a reflective and consultative practice
and the therapy of love as a method of disciplinary intervention.
163
culture of love and sexuality in Mozambique. With an increased Brazilian presence and
the liberalization of the mass media in the 1990s, there is now a prominent Brazilian
presence in the Mozambican media (Power 2004: 278), most notably due to the
popularity of telenovelas.211 Their increasing influence coincided with and was
reinforced by the arrival of Brazilian missionaries who introduced counselling practices
concerning love, marriage and sexuality. Although the telenovelas and the Brazilian
Pentecostal counselling practices do not necessarily share the same views and methods,
many of the Mozambican converts I spoke to found that the openness about intimate
matters and the bodily gestures portrayed by soap stars and Brazilian pastors were
comparable. Both the Brazilian pastors and the telenovelas stars inform the ideals of
romantic love in Mozambique in specific ways. This chapter explores aspects of
‘Brazilian love’ that are influencing transnational Pentecostal counselling practices in
Mozambique.
The main reasons for Mozambican women to attend Brazilian counselling
practices on love, sexuality and marriage are their desire for a romantic marriage and
their failure to establish lasting bonds with men. The previous chapter showed how the
activities of the spirit world are a major preoccupation when it comes to matters of
sexuality and marital ties. Disrupted family lives, broken marriages and unsuccessful
relationships are often attributed to demons. Consequently, the casting out satanic
influences is central in counselling practices. As was demonstrated with the spiritual
armour in the previous chapter, converts need to alter their lives and demonstrate
change. Against this background, this chapter describes how the Pentecostal therapy
aims to modify the body such that couples are imbuing Maputo with new public norms
of love. It is this connection between love, public space and spiritual armour that forms
the focus of this chapter and presents a new example of the violence of conversion. I
show that the necessary public embodiment and demonstrations of love that are
confronted with local ways of ‘hiding’ expressions of love not only involve the
production of novel modes of love but also invoke the opposite, namely forms of
distrust, loneliness and hate. The appropriation of particular modes of love as a
‘technology of the self’ (Foucault 1988) introduces mechanisms of control and a
pressure to produce successful relations that display the ambiguities and negative
experiences of pleasurable and passionate love.
The issues touched on in this introduction are dealt with in more detail later in
the chapter. First, I describe aspects of sexuality, love and marriage in Maputo before
exploring the Brazilian influence on romantic love in contemporary Maputo. This is
followed by a discussion of forms of Brazilian Pentecostal counselling and the therapy
211
Brazilian media producers and the government/producers in Mozambique worked together in the making
and distribution of documentaries, films and television programmes in the late colonial and early post-colonial
period and this has intensified in recent years (Arenas 2010; Marcus 2004). Some interlocutors told me how
they watched telenovelas on national state television in places such as central city squares back in the 1980s.
164
of love. In subsequent sections, the therapy is analyzed as a South-South transnational

phenomenon that entails particular ways of disciplining the body and a process of
downplaying certain senses. Each section highlights how the development of new forms
of love, marriage and sexuality in Maputo’s different spheres – traditional, modern,
transnational and religious – are full of ambiguities. These culminate in the embodiment
of Brazilian Pentecostal therapeutic forms that are leading to violent feelings and
relationships amongst converts.
7.2 Love, sexuality and marriage in Maputo
Experiences of love and sexuality are intrinsically related to social transformations. An

emerging field of love and sexuality studies in Africa is focusing on the social and
cultural meanings, practices and structures of sexuality, that are dissociated from
dominant constructions of African sexuality which are seen as natural, exotic and
promiscuous (Arnfred 2005; Bochow 2010; Cole & Thomas 2009; Spronk 2006). In her
study of sexuality amongst young urban professionals in Nairobi, Spronk (2006: 5)
analyzed how sexuality has personal, inter-subjective and social dimensions.
Sex is a vehicle for powerful feelings that are experienced very subjectively; in other
words, sex is personal. When engaging in sex, sex is usually an inter-subjective
exchange between people; so sex implies intimacy. Sexuality is also a particularly
sensitive conductor of cultural influences and hence of social and political divisions;
sexuality is also socially defined.
The different dimensions of sexuality are interrelated but not necessarily in line with
each other, which results in tensions and conflicts. The divergent views of sexuality in
the post-colonial context of Kenya were part of the conflicting perspectives on
‘modernity’ and ‘being African’, which created tensions between personal experiences
of sexuality and dominant socio-political discourses. Interaction between the personal,
inter-subjective and social aspects of sexuality and marriage is also shaping the new
sexual practices and relations of Mozambican youth, the tensions they feel and the
options they are creating and exploring.
Most of the available literature on sexuality and marriage in Mozambique is
recent and came out after the AIDS epidemic started to be felt in the 1990s.212 As more
women are infected with HIV than men – about 60% of all HIV-positive adults are
female, particularly in the 15-24 age group (UNAIDS/WHO 2008: 4-5) – most of the
studies are about women, gender and youth. Feminist-oriented works predominantly
212
The most recent figures on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS estimate that, in 2008, 12.5% of sexually active
adults aged between 15 and 49 were HIV-positive (UNAIDS 2008).
165
demonstrate how, due to patriarchal structures, men control women’s sexuality (Cruz e
Silva et al. 2007; Osório & Cruz e Silva 2008; Osório 1997; Santos & Arthur 1994; cf.
Loforte 2003).213 As men engage in multiple relationships and polygamous marriages,
women run a higher risk of contracting HIV because using a condom in marriage or in a
steady relationship is considered problematic: the condom signals distrust. Women’s
socialization in sexuality, both at home and at school, occurs with reference to marriage
and reproduction. Girls are warned against getting pregnant outside marriage and within
marriage sexuality is about becoming pregnant and having children. Boys and men have
more freedom to experiment with sexuality and have the right to demand sex from
women and experience the pleasures of it. The studies conclude that sexuality is marked
by inequality between women and men. Women have little say on sexual issues and
exercise limited power over their bodies and sexual desires.
A younger generation of scholars who have examined narratives, practices and
views on sex amongst the youth in Maputo (Gune 2008; Karlyn 2005; Hawkins et al.
2005; Manuel 2008) have demonstrated that while there are relations of power between
men and women, youth are actively involved in developing new sexual practices and
relations. These scholars describe how young women are also challenging patriarchal
rules and redefining their roles in relation to men (cf. Loforte 2003: 201-223).214 For
example, women are developing new social and sexual identities by engaging in
multiple occasional sexual partnerships and using them to improve their socio-economic
position (cf. Thornton 2009). Hawkins et al. (2005: iv) found that women are
deliberately engaging in so-called transactional sexual relationships:
Through the power of their sexuality, young women are able to extract financial
resources from men in order to access the material goods and lifestyle that
symbolize modernity and success.
This study found that women conceptualize transactional sexual relationships as a

strategy and are thus reversing the existing balance of gender and power relations.
Manuel (2008) describes how young women publicly declare having several
sexual partners or that they have been unfaithful to their boyfriends by having sex with
occasional partners. She concludes that the risk of HIV infection for youth in Maputo is
higher in steady than in occasional relationships. In a steady relationship, trust and love
are central and are proven by an exchange of bodily fluids through sex. This is seen as
‘real sex’ and no condom can be used. In an occasional relationship, where distrust may
213
It is debatable whether the matrilineal kin structures in northern Mozambique have created a different
situation (Rosario 2009).
214
Aboim (2008) describes the pluralization of masculinities in post-colonial Maputo.
166
prevail, protection (i.e. a condom) is thought to be needed when having sex (cf. Gune
2008; Manuel 2005).215
Maputo youth distinguish three types of sexual relationship: the steady
relationship (namoro/courtship) in which sexuality involves love; the occasional
relationship (saca-cena or a one-night stand and pita/o or having a regular male or
female sex partner) where love is not an issue; and the ficar (to stay) relationship that is
somewhere between a steady and occasional relationship. In occasional relationships,
which may last years or just one night and vary from an exchange of kisses to having
sex, there is no bond between the partners. In the words of one of Manuel’s young male
research participants: ‘We do not take her home’, ‘There is no intimacy’, and ‘I do not
value her like I value a namorada [girlfriend]’ (Manuel 2008: 42). A young woman
described a pito as ‘the one with who you cheat on your namorado [boyfriend]’ (Ibid.).
The namoro on the other hand is about respect, affection and a bond. This is a
serious relationship. In the case of namoro, parents and a wider circle of kin are
involved to a greater or lesser degree.216 In this type of relationship it is common to hear
talk about love (amor). For Elena (a 25-year-old university student), love meant that she
and her boyfriend were often together, shared future dreams and supported each other.
For Marta (a 22-year-old university student) love was similar to trust and no secrets
should exist (cf. Manuel 2008). There are several rules attached to a namoro. For
example, namorados are expected to go out together, though this applies more to the
woman than to the man. Often, the namoro relationship is consolidated with ‘real sex’;
sex demonstrates love and trust. By having real sex there is intimate contact with the
partner because ‘blood’ is exchanged. Here, blood is a symbol for what partners give
each other in the exchange of bodily fluids, which proves love.
The people I met who frequented the terapia do amor were all, in various
ways, concerned with the namoro. They were often not able to establish a namoro. They
could be in a ficar relationship. Ficar means ‘to stay’ and its meaning in the context of
an amorous relationship has been adopted from Brazilian telenovelas. This relationship
is more than occasional but is not steady. It may potentially develop into a serious
relationship but women felt that it was difficult to change the ficar situation into a
serious liaison. If they showed their wish for a steadier relationship, they risked their
boyfriend leaving or suddenly disappearing (cf. Chapter 6). In the case of an evolving
215
This suggests that programmes against HIV/AIDS that promote the use of condoms may have had an effect
on occasional sexual relationships but not on steady ones. The focus of the so-called ABC prevention
programmes (Abstinence until marriage, Being faithful and using Condoms) departs from the idea that
infection occurs outside marriage or serious relationships. However, the greatest risk of HIV infection for
women in fact comes from having sex with their husbands (Hirsch et al 2002; cf. Hirsch & Wardlow 2006:
25).
216
This depends on the stage of the namoro. Usually the namorado will present his namorada sooner to his
kin. The boyfriend can only be received at the girlfriend’s home after the relationship has become official
following a particular ceremony – an initial step in the lobolo procedures – that marks the serious nature of the
relationship.
167
namoro it could happen that the men might disappear as soon as the girlfriend’s family
became involved. Women also complained that they felt obliged to have sex with their
boyfriends: they had to show that they were serious about the relationship but they were
not sure whether the boyfriend was as serious as they were. The man said he wanted to
namorar but in fact wanted to have sex, with the social discourse about occasional sex
being mostly negative. Some women were afraid that their namorado had a pita or
saca-cena. In addition, they visited the counselling sessions of Pentecostal pastors
because they wanted a different kind of namoro. Sometimes they and their boyfriends
differed in their opinions about the meaning of love. To some men, a namoro meant that
they should control their girlfriend as that was proof of their love. But the girl would
experience the control as a form of her partner’s distrust of her. Men spoke about
similar experiences and referred to estar engarrafado (being bottled). This is a male
expression suggesting that their girlfriends are controlling them and they do everything
their girlfriend wants.217
Another frequent problem is the role of kin in relationships. Traditionally,
sexuality is regarded as part of the transition from childhood to adulthood, in which kin
play a central role (Loforte 2003: 201-223). The transition was always carefully guarded
by counselling sexuality through initiation rites organized by kin and/or respected
elders. Sexuality was closely linked to adulthood: completing initiation, marrying and
having children. In this setting, sexuality was strongly controlled by kin and was
prohibited before initiation and marriage, as it mainly served for procreational purposes.
Yet, as part of the social transformations that have been described in previous chapters –
including disappearing initiation rites and greater independence from kin due to
education and jobs – sexuality and marriage are no longer necessarily connected to
procreation. Giddens (1992) speaks of ‘plastic sexuality’, a sexuality that is liberated
from the limitation of human reproduction, as a result of effective contraception.218
As part of this process, young people, including young converts, want to
control sexuality individually and without interference from kin. Manuel (2008: 38)
describes how young people define adulthood as independence from parents, which
they express through their own control of their sexual encounters and thus of their
bodies. Yet while namorados find that they are adults and responsible for their own
deeds, this is not always an opinion shared by their kin who intervene in the relationship
and try to influence the namoro and any marriage arrangements. This results in conflicts
because interventions by parents or kin come too late or make no sense to the
namorados (cf. Karlyn 2004; Paulo 2005). Part of the problem is related to the fact that,
217
This is also related to the bottles curandeiros use to keep their magical substances in. Bottles are known to
hold energetic powers, like spiritual forces. Women in particular visited curandeiros to get medicines that
would bring a man into their power but often a man that already had a namorada or had pitas.
218
Gidden’s analysis is based on processes in Western societies. For a discussion of the relevance of his
analysis for African societies, see Bochow (2010).
168
according to local customs, parents do not talk about sexuality and marriage with their
children (cf. Cruz e Silva et al. 2007: 93, 120-122; Loforte 2003: 211; Paulo 2005). For
example, Elena told me that topics related to courtship are taboo and not a subject of
conversation at home. She had never talked with her mother about it, ‘and now I am
25’.219 At the same time, the rites that used to serve to educate youth sexually are
disappearing, particularly in southern Mozambique where the influence of colonialism,
missionaries and socialism was strongest.220 Moreover, several people, including
curandeiros, said that destroyed kinship structures, often due to the war, impeded the
transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Today, youth are finding out
about sexuality from friends, at school and from television, while custom prescribes that
kin are in control of sex education. Elena said: ‘We learn with friends, we learn about it
outside’.
All these particular dynamics of the levels of interaction in the field of
sexuality and relating were important reasons for frequenting Pentecostal counselling
sessions. Women who participated in these meetings were uncertain if they wanted to
get married because of all the risks involved, such as domestic violence, infidelity and
HIV/AIDS. Staying single and/or engaging in occasional relationships gave them more
freedom and power. However, if they were to be respected women, they were expected
to marry and become mothers. Thus their engagement with Brazilian counselling
practices was shaped by a mix of ambiguous feelings and experiences as well as by the
chance to shape a new reproductive lifestyle. These two dimensions – paradoxes of love
and new forms of love – were portrayed in the Brazilian media (telenovelas) and in
Brazilian Pentecostal churches.
7.3 Romantic love, telenovelas and Brazilian pastors
The growing literature on the anthropology of romantic love (Bochow 2008; Etnofoor
2006; Hirsch & Wardlow 2006; Spronk 2006) demonstrates that young people around
the world are talking about the importance of emotional intimacy in the creation of
affective bonds and marital ties. Emotional experiences, such as passion and pleasure,
have become fundamental to modern love. What is striking in this respect is that
courtship and conjugal relationships have become demonstrations of modern
individuality rather than relationships that create obligations between kin groups as well
as between individuals (Giddens 1992; Illouz 1997). A shift has occurred from
‘arranged marriages’ to ‘marriages of love’. Love has come to serve as an ultimate
expression of a progressive relationship. The apparent ‘global ideological shift in
219
220
See Cruz e Silva et al. (2007) for the influence of processes of modernization on the current role or the
absence of rites of passage in relation to sexuality in various parts of Mozambique.
169
marital ideas’ (Hirsch & Wardlow 2006: 2) is related to transformations of socio-

economic structures as well as to cultural globalization (Lindholm 2006). Marriage
alliances in many societies, including Mozambique, used to be essential to economic
and political survival. Marital relations were negotiated by powerful elders who secured
the advance of their family and community (cf. Chapter 3). In these circumstances,
marriage was a necessity and a duty, and romantic attraction was a potential threat to
the stability of extended families (Lindholm 2006: 11). However, the changing
organization of production and consumption has brought more powerful positions for
young people and the formation of nuclear families, a trend that is influencing marital
relations and ideas (Collier 1997; Illouz 1997).
The increase in mass media across the globe (Appadurai 1996) has rapidly
spread new images of and narratives about love, marriage and sexuality. A range of
novel experiences have been introduced to people as a result of cultural globalization.
For example, nurses in Papua New Guinea regard English novels as instruction manuals
on how to shape their romantic lives (Wardlow 2006), and for residents of Nairobi,
radio, film, soap operas and magazines have made the genre of romantic love, which is
equated with happiness, pleasure and consumption, a part of their daily lives (Spronk
2002, 2006). And Latin American telenovelas have played a central role in teaching
women about male-female relationships characterized by romance, respect and mutual
admiration (Hirsch et al. 2006; Verheijen 2006; Vink 1988).
Even though these mass media have similarities, they are also different. Larkin
(1997), for example, emphasizes that Hausa viewers find Indian films about romantic
relations more attractive than Western and Nigerian ones. Vink (1988: 11) stated that
the telenovelas are truly Latin American soap operas in the way they are made. In the
Brazilian case, they are produced locally and portray issues of Brazilian society, such as
the differences between social classes, race, religion and love. Moreover, studies about
the reception of mass media stress the influence of local contexts on the perception of
media messages and images (McCarthy 2001). For the Mozambican women I spoke to
there was something uniquely Brazilian in the ideal of romantic love. In our
conversations about romance, love and marriage, Brazilian telenovelas were important
sources of comparison and inspiration. These women always highlighted particular
issues they found striking in the Brazilian telenovelas that were related to their own
situation. I distinguish five central themes that returned in the Pentecostal counselling
sessions.
The first concerns infidelity. When I visited people at home the television was
often on. For example, when I went to see Ana and her friends (Chapter 5), they were
watching a telenovela and discussing how the negative behaviour of the soap stars
reminded them of their own experiences with boyfriends who had left them for other
girls or had other girlfriends at the same time as they were dating them. When Alda
170
(aged 29) stressed this point, she explained that the telenovelas show that those who are
honest will be rewarded. As long as she behaved correctly, a faithful man would appear
in her life. A second theme relates to what the Mozambican viewers I met depicted as
independent behaviour. They were amazed at the ways in which young people in the
telenovelas spoke to their elders. They noted that children discussed issues of love with
their parents and would even openly take a different view from them. In relation to this,
a young Mozambican man once asked me if the leading role of couples in wedding
preparations were similar to procedures in Europe.221 He could hardly believe that no
arrangements between the families took place, like he had observed in the telenovelas.
A third matter involved relations between a girlfriend and boyfriend, and a
husband and wife. Women were struck by the fact that a man would ask his wife for
forgiveness after a conflict. They saw that it was possible for men and women to discuss
their feelings and exchange opinions, and wanted a similar relationship with a man.
Marta also emphasized that, like the characters in the telenovelas, she would disagree
with her future husband. Women commented on the fact that they had to endure the
nocturnal escapades of their men. If the man arrived home in the middle of the night,
they were expected to be ready to prepare him a meal or a bath. According to Marta,
this was ridiculous behaviour and the telenovelas reconfirmed her opinion. The fourth
issue was about showing love openly. The women I met found it an exciting but
embarrassing idea that their boyfriends or husbands would kiss them on the street or
walk arm in arm with them. Nevertheless, they found it appealing that such intimacy
could be displayed in public. There are a few places in Maputo, such as the Jardim dos
Namorados (the Garden of Lovers), where this happens in addition to some discos and
bars. Generally however, affection is not demonstrated openly.
The fifth issue is the influence of spiritual forces on romantic relationships. In
some telenovelas, supernatural powers are visible. In the Porto de Milagres (Port of
Miracles) telenovela, for example, which takes place in the Brazil’s most Afro-Brazilian
region of Bahia Province, the sea goddess Iemanjá frequently appears and images
related to Afro-Brazilian religions are used. Miracles happen, such as someone suddenly
transforming into another being (cf. Vink 1988: 171). Some interlocutors commented
that the open display of religious aspects in the telenovelas played a role in opening up
debates on this subject in Maputo where the role of spirits had been silenced for a long
time.
Of particular importance here is the link converts established between the
telenovelas and Brazilian missionaries. My interview with Elena offers an example.
After she told me that most women go to the Universal Church because of ‘sentimental
221
Conversation, 26 July 2008.
171
problems’ (problemas sentimentais), I asked her why there were so many of these
problems. She replied:222
The Brazilian pastors say that Mozambican men are cold. In Brazil you hold hands with
your wife, like you see in the telenovelas, he kisses her in the streets, men show
affection. But, here, no, that isn’t possible. If it occurs, it will only happen in the
bedroom.
The Brazilian pastors and the soap stars are both becoming icons of identification in the
development of new conceptions of what courtship and marriage should be.223 Through
multiple levels of movement and framing between Mozambicans, media like
telenovelas and pastors, information related to notions of love, sexuality and intimacy
are materializing. Pastors and soap stars encourage reflecting on society and people’s
expectations, desires and experiences. People are starting to analyze their own situations
with reference to these role models.
Another example of how converts have perceived a kind of shared Brazilian
approach to love is by the manifestation of supernatural powers in amorous relations.
Mozambicans are noting the visibility of the spiritual in the telenovelas as well as in
churches. And the Brazilian television channel of the Universal Church, TV Record,
that operates in Mozambique under the name of Miramar is part of the variety and
dominance of Brazilian television programmes in the country. Even though Miramar
also transmits secular programmes, such as telenovelas, converts consider the whole
channel to be religiously oriented. Dona Bea (Chapter 5), for example, advised me to
only watch Miramar as it was directed by Pentecostals.
Brazilian pastors used the telenovelas in church services and in the terapia do
amor. One Saturday evening,224 I walked into the Templo da Fé (Temple of Faith) on
the Avenida 24 de Julho in the centre of Maputo to attend the therapy together with
about 1500 other people. At the entrance, an obreira (female assistant of the pastor)
with a red scarf around her neck put oil on my fingers, as did an obreiro (male assistant)
with a red tie for the men as they arrived.225 As a woman I was sent to the bathroom to
spread the oil on one of my left ribs. I immediately remembered the Bible story of Eve
who was made out of Adam’s rib (Genesis 2). I asked two young women who were with
me in the toilets what this was all about. They explained that the special oil would help
us to find our alma gemêa (twin soul). It was no coincidence that a telenovela with the
222
223
The HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns and the promotion of condom use have also introduced a new
language about sexuality and relationships (Cruz e Silva et al. 2007).
224
13 January 2007
225
The colour red was often used at the therapies as it symbolizes the colour of a loving heart. At the same
time, red is a symbol of Jesus’s blood that has the power to transform. This is compatible with the local
meaning of red representing a transitory state (cf. Jacobson-Widding 1989: 35).
172
same title was being shown on television around that same time. This telenovela was
very popular and much talked about because people recognized their own experiences
in it. The plot involved a man and a woman falling in love because they are each other’s
twin soul. Evil forces and persons frustrate the relationship but finally pure love
survives. During this particular terapia, the pastor called forward all the single women
who were looking for an alma gêmea. They had to lift up their hands to receive the
Holy Spirit and the single men in the audience had to lay their hands on their hearts
because God would show them whether one of the women present could become their
soul mate.
Similar to Oosterbaan’s (2006) conclusions on mass media and Pentecostalism
in Brazil, I suggest that telenovelas allow viewers to imagine and feel how the spiritual
works (cf. de Witte 2008a; Meyer 2004b, 2006; Pype 2008; Schulz 2003, 2006). For
Pentecostals in Brazil, telenovelas principally seem to mediate the Devil because they
are perceived as diabolical programmes. However, in the Mozambican case, the
ideological battle that takes place between media empires in Brazil, one representing
Catholic and Afro-Brazilian religions (Globo) and the other Pentecostalism (TV
Record), is largely absent. Even though Globo broadcasts on Mozambican television, it
does not carry the cultural baggage it has in Brazil. But in Mozambique too, telenovelas
show the work of the Devil and these dangerous aspects of television should be watched
with caution (cf. Oosterbaan 2006).226 Telenovelas visualize the spiritual battle between
devilish and heavenly powers and, as such, can strengthen the meaning of Pentecostal
conversion. The television shows what is often hidden in daily life. To Pentecostals, the
telenovela alma gêmea demonstrates how the Devil could frustrate love, but also that to
those with the right attitude and behaviour, which to Pentecostals is inspired by the
Holy Spirit, it is most fruitful. In this respect, pastors appropriate the ambiguities played
out in telenovelas about right and wrong for their Pentecostal worldview and rituals.
The pastor’s raising of awareness about macumba has extra impact through its
appearance on the telenovelas. This medium produces a specific sense of the
transcendental as part of the interaction in the South-South transnational Pentecostal
space (Chapter 4).
From the commentaries of converts, such as that of Elena above, it would
appear that converts engage with what they perceive as a Brazilian way of being and
doing. This is linked to a specific kind of openness about love and sexuality, including
explicit sensuality. Whereas the Pentecostal format of bodily love has exclusive
dimensions, the pastors carry their upbringing in Brazil with them in the type of
226
Paula (Chapter 5) was outspokenly critical of some telenovelas because Mozambican girls would copy the
Brazilians who seduce married men. Referring to her husband, Paula said that girls persist in following
unwilling men until they finally give in (conversation, 29 November 2006).
173
sensuality they display.227 In Bodies, Pleasures and Passions, Parker (2009) writes
about a perception of sexuality and sensuality that is tied to the self-interpretation of
Brazilian society:
It is impossible, I think, for anyone who spends any real amount of time in Brazil, or
with Brazilians, to ignore the extent to which a notion of sexuality, or perhaps better,
sensuality, plays a role in their own understanding of themselves (see Wagley 1971, pp.
255-56.) … Brazilians view themselves as sensual beings not simply in terms of their
individuality (though this is too important), but at a social or cultural level – as sensual
individuals, at least in part, by virtue of their shared brasilidade, or ‘Brazilianness’.
Parker (2009) continues by elaborating on the fundamental ambiguities of the sensual or

sexual nature of Brazilian life that figure in the ‘myths of origin’ of Brazil as well as in
the cultural performances of carnaval (Carnival) (cf. DaMatta 1991 [1979]). The myths
developed on the basis of reflections of European explorers who saw Brazilians as
uniquely sexual people, a reputation that Brazilians have further shaped through the
theory of Lusotropicalism228 that legitimizes processes of sexual interaction and racial
mix, considering them positive in nature. This idea has become the most influential
interpretation of ‘Brazilian civilization’ that is on show during Carnival.
Carnaval has become the truest expression of ‘Brazilianness’ (Parker 2009;
DaMatta 1991). It is about ‘Brazil’s peculiarly seductive charms, its exotic sensuality,
its tropical pleasures, its erotic diversity and openness’ (Parker 2009: 183), which is
‘elaborately presented, not only by Brazilians to themselves, but by Brazilians to the
outside world’ (Ibid.: 185). An ambivalence that lies beneath this celebration of
sensuality is connected to the diverse logics that have come to structure the
heterogeneous sexual universe in Brazil. Different ideologies and practices – the
medical, the Christian, the erotic, the patriarchal, the (post-) colonial – have all shaped
multiple and contradictory ethics. The ambiguity of conflicting ethics of sexuality
define Brazilian identity as an outcome of the miscegenation of heterogeneity that has
227
During one of the focus-group discussions (9 October 2006), we spoke about the differences between
Brazilian and Mozambican pastors. One participant felt Brazilians were more passionate, dynamic and open
compared to Mozambicans. During fieldwork, I realized that my own childhood in Brazil manifested itself in
my body language when I met Brazilians in Mozambique and I would immediately change my way of doing
things. It is difficult to describe precisely how, but it was a form of passion exposed in gestures such as
embracing and in a form of openness. Generally, Mozambicans have more reserved bodily movements,
although this is not to say that they are not warm and open. Trying to express differences between Brazilians
and Mozambicans may sound stereotypical but the variation in cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2004) can be
sensed in their interactions.
228
Lusotropicalism is based on the studies of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1962, 1971,
2001[1933]). In a time of increasing critique of colonialism, it propagated the racial mix between black and
white to justify Portugal’s incorporation of its ‘overseas provinces’ into one unified Portuguese nation. See
also Note 27 in Chapter 4.
174
long been the defining metaphor of the Brazilian nation and is celebrated, for example,
in Carnaval (DaMatta 1991; cf. Fry 1982; Velho 1981). 229
Ambiguity is also present in Brazilian Pentecostal counselling sessions in
Mozambique where its own forms emerged combining open sensuality and sexual
restrictions. For example, Célia (a 27-year-old receptionist) told me how her colleague
felt challenged by the pastor’s sensual behaviour and thus came to the therapy in a very
short skirt. However, the assistants (obreiras) covered her colleague’s legs with a
capulana (the cotton cloth women locally use as dresses) ‘because the Brazilians in
church already have someone [a partner, LvdK]’.230 These types of ambiguities in the
transnational Pentecostal domain are considered below.
Watching a telenovela © Rufus de Vries
7.4 Brazilian Pentecostal counselling
Elena said that she and her friends learned about love and sexuality ‘outside’. Such
outside and public spaces include Brazilian churches. In general, Mozambican churches
do not openly organize special teachings on issues of sexuality, love, courtship and
229
According to DaMatta (1991), Fry (1982) and Velho (1981), the prevailing narratives of nationhood in
Brazil have tended to emphasize heterogeneity and the combination of contrasts. See also Hess & DaMatta
(1995).
230
Interview, 24 June 2007. I was frequently told about a former pastor in the therapy – there were special
pastors appointed for this ministry – who had had affairs with Mozambican women and had been fired.
175
marriage, particularly not for young, unmarried people. Most churches, such as the
AICs, the Catholic Church and older Protestant churches, have women’s groups where
coisas do lar (things related to the home and marriage) are discussed (cf. Igreja &
Lambranca 2009: 278-279 for central Mozambique; Soothill 2007: 104-108 for Ghana),
but only married women are allowed to participate. Love and sexuality are not topics to
be discussed with unmarried persons. Married women first asked me whether I was
married (and whether I thus knew about sexuality and marriage) before they would talk
about it with me. On the contrary, most of the Pentecostal pastors are open about these
topics towards youth in the Brazilian churches or churches with Brazilian links (e.g. the
Assemblies of God), which was an important reason for women to attend these
churches. For example, Ana said: ‘I went to the Universal Church because there they
talk about our problems [such as unfaithful men]. There they talk about courtship.’
While pastors may preach about love, sexuality and marriage during services,
this would normally happen at special meetings, such as youth groups and special
workshops. These meetings often had the character of a discussion group with the aim
of counselling Mozambicans about love.231 Counselling is a form of behavioural change
and offers practical advice. One receives advice and guidance from a knowledgeable
person to reflect on and learn about, in this case, how to love (cf. Burchardt 2009;
Nguyen 2009; Prince et al. 2009; van Dijk 2010b). In Pentecostal booklets and in the
Folha Universal, articles and columns with advice are published on how to change
partners and how to stay happily married. 232
The counselling practices are generally performed in public and only the pre-
marriage counselling session takes place in private. It consists of one or two meetings
between the couple and the pastor and his wife who teach about marriage. However,
counselling practices generally are very open. Precisely because sexuality has always
been related to private domains and, according to Pentecostals is silenced, the focus is
on more openness. Taboos about love, sexuality and marriage need to be broken and
231
Subjects such as fertility and parenthood are relatively less prominent and the converts I worked with
hardly touched on these issues. Although converts over 25 were preoccupied with having children, their main
priority was to find a good partner. But the topic of (in)fertility was discussed in the groups of married people
and at church services focusing on health and the family. It was taken for granted that a Christian couple
would raise children and that infertility was caused by the Devil (cf. Asamoah-Gyadu 2007).
232
In the weekly journal of the Universal Church, a special page is dedicated to women: folha mulher. This
page deals with issues of love, marriage and motherhood as well as with fashion and recipes. For example:
‘Who is your boyfriend?’ (Folha Universal, 11-17 September 2005: 6), ‘Is it possible to stay happily married
for ever?’ (Folha Universal, 13-19 February 2005: 6),‘The relationship of the married couple’ (Macedo
2005a: 51-56), ‘Changing your husband’ (Folha Universal, 4-10 September 2005: 6), ‘Love and passion’
(Macedo 2005b: 63), ‘Fashion 2008: Know how to use squared cloth’ (Folha Universal, 27 July-2 August
2008: 7), ‘The dressing of a virtuous woman’ (Macedo 2005b: 37-43), ‘Feminine nightmare’ (Folha
Universal, 19-25 November 2006: 7). See also http://terapiadoamor.org/. The wife of Maná’s Bishop Tadeu,
Cristel Tadeu, broadcast messages about love, marriage and women’s issues on the international television
channel Maná Sat. They all involve a particular therapeutic discourse on affective relationships (Illouz 1997:
198).
See also http://www.espacomulher.eu/home/
176
Mozambicans have to learn to talk about these subjects as a prerequisite to resolving

their problems. Workshops, discussions and group meetings are thus organized.
In the Brazilian Renewed Baptist Church, debating sessions for youth were set
up on namorar (courting). At the first meeting in the series, the opening questions posed
by the organizers to the audience were: ‘What is namorar? Is it ficar? Or is it something
else?’233 Only the men present responded, agreeing that namoro should be preparation
for marriage. One man added that ‘in practice we look at someone’s socio-economic
position. Does (s)he have money?’ Another question was when someone is ready to
namorar. One girl said that it was important to have studied first. For an hour, opinions
were shared amongst those who dared to talk, accompanied by the giggles of the others.
Youth from Maná met with church leaders every Saturday. One day,234 the
subject was lobolo. The chair, who came from another Portuguese-speaking African
country, presented a negative view of lobolo because ancestral spirits were involved.
Some participants reacted by saying that it was possible to do lobolo without consulting
ancestral spirits (cf. van de Kamp & van Dijk 2010:132-133). A discussion followed
between those who were positive about the combination of lobolo and Pentecostalism,
and those who vehemently opposed it because they had experienced the bad side of
‘tradition’ and felt it should be contested. A debate followed about the need to obey
one’s elders. The leader and most of the youth felt that they should follow Jesus, thus
going against the elders. Yet they presented other dilemmas by doing so. One
predicament, for example, concerned the difficulty that parents would not support the
marriage in the absence of lobolo or consent to the choice of partner.
In one of the Assemblies of God churches, a group for married women aged
between 18 and 34 was set up in 2001. The current Mozambican leader of the women’s
group described how she got married in 1996 but only learned how to be a wife thanks
to this group.
I and others, we knew nothing. At that time people did not have an open relationship
with their parents, it depended on kin and the church whether we talked about courtship
and marriage. We had a lot of questions about sexuality. Women said that they disliked
having sex with their husbands or that he did anything he wanted with them. We could
only react by disapproving of our husbands.
A counselling group was thus planned, with the assistance of Brazilians. The leader
explained:
233
15 July 2006. The leader of the discussion was a Mozambican woman who was closely associated with the
Brazilian pastor at the church.
234
5 August 2006.
177
We had questions about why our men were always going out, why they didn’t stay at
home and why they were not touching us. We discussed how the home environment was
of importance. Was it clean or chaotic at home? We also learned the importance of
dressing nicely at home. At home we always look unattractive. But when we go
shopping we dress beautifully, we use make-up and perfume. You need to make yourself
lovely for your husband too; he should find you attractive. So we did. ... Do you know
what happened? [she laughed] My husband asked where I had been. He could not
understand that I had not been out as I was all dressed up. … We women also learned to
take the initiative in sex. We should not be passive.
She explained how their husbands started to distrust them and ask where they had
learned these kinds of things. In the end, men were invited to a session to receive
clarification and later a men’s group was set up as well. The leader said that the current
generation has to deal with different questions:
They know about sex. We didn’t. Today’s women know. Their questions are about how
to combine their professional careers with their household, a marriage and children. ...
Yes, it is really a difference, there is more openness. Youth watch everything on
television. When I was young, few households had a television. But the bad thing is, the
purity has gone, it is not important anymore to be virgin.
The activities described above were discussed in a conversational setting.

Though the leaders generally made it clear what kind of sexual and marital lives
converts should live – abstaining from sex before marriage, fidelity, caring for one’s
partner, enjoying sexuality within marriage and keeping a critical distance from
tradition – there was room for debate, doubts, questions and opposing views. In
contrast, the terapia do amor at the Universal Church is a much more fixed and
controlled ‘treatment’ and route to success.235 Romantic love is created through
prescribed formats and there is no place for doubt and uncertainty. Moreover, the
relationship of confidence that usually exists between counsellors and clients, and
which could be seen in the discussion groups, was impossible to recreate because
hundreds of persons gathered during the terapia do amor sessions.
7.5 Terapia do Amor
The Universal Church organizes its terapia do amor in the Templo da Fé and a few
other buildings in Maputo every Saturday evening. Between 1,000 and 2,000 people
from all over the city, most of them youngsters, come to the Templo every week from
all over the city. Usually the therapy starts with the pastor telling people to put their
235
In the God is Love Church there were also strict procedures for developing a Christian marriage.
178
hands on their hearts, something that happens in almost every church service as well.
Gospel music is then played to lift people up and invoke the Holy Spirit. This is
followed by prayers, when people lift up their hands to God in surrender and talk to
Him. They cry or shout out their personal sentimental problems (problemas
sentimentais). There is always a sermon on a topic such as how to find a good partner;
how to trust each other; whether anal sex is allowed; what love is; or what marriage
should feel like. Participation is important and the pastors ensure the audience is active
and interacts with them. Everyone has to look up Bible passages, repeat words or
complete phrases, give answers to the pastor, look the pastor in the eye and talk to their
neighbours. The pastors are lively, enact sketches and call assistants forward to play
roles, using variations in their voices, making jokes and creating fear. Particular groups
– for example, single women – are called to come forward to receive a special message
or undergo ‘treatment’, such as being appointed one’s twin soul (see Section 7.3). At the
end, financial gifts to ensure ‘true love’ are collected.
Special performances also take place. On one occasion,236 a huge heart stood in
the front of the church, and we237 had to walk under it while the pastor and his assistants
kept praying for us so that God would provide us with luck in our love lives. We had to
form a row of women and a row of men and were paired up to walk through the heart
together.238 Then all the married couples had to come forward, embrace each other and
apologize to each other if they had quarrelled or there had been a lack of understanding
between them. The pastor also embraced his wife and both prayed for the couples. It
was clear that one should engage fully in the therapy to achieve a result.239 The
performance was accompanied by music and sound effects.
The denouncement of destructive powers is an important component of the
therapy. For example, at the start of one therapy,240 the pastor explained why jealousy
and infidelity characterize so many relationships. Sometimes family members engage in
witchcraft because they dislike their daughter-in-law, the pastor explained. Or a woman
consults a curandeiro to receive herbs that will make a man who already belongs to
another woman change his mind and stay with her. He referred to this as meter o homem
na garrafa (putting a man into a bottle, see also section 7.2). To break with evil powers
that keep persons entangled in depressing relationships of jealousy and hate, the
participants had to walk through a bath of salt water in bare feet to neutralize any evil
powers. And to strengthen the emotional and bodily experiences of transformation,
dramatic sound effects accompanied them as they walked.
236
26 July 2008.
237
Now and then I use the form ‘we’ because I participated in the therapy.
238
Two women made up the last pairs as they outnumbered the men.
239
In July 2008 I went to the therapy with a group of youth from the Protestant Church in the Netherlands
who were visiting their Mozambican contemporaries. They just wanted to sit and observe the therapy but the
assistants forced them to participate. The Dutch felt overwhelmed by the need to join in.
240
28 January 2006.
179
The tricks of the Devil were also shown in a joking way. Speaking to the group
of women he had called to come forward, the pastor talked about a man who had
borrowed a car and drove to where the woman he wanted to impress lived.241 All the
women started laughing, while the pastor playfully said to the men in the audience that
their situation would be considered later on. Women should be careful about the kind of
man they are involved with. Is the man who he says he is? Does he really own a car or
did he borrow it? The pastor ended his talk by calling women who felt that they were
losing their partners to step forward. One woman presented her case. She had a picture
of herself and her partner that she felt had been used by her in-laws in a witchcraft ritual
to separate her from him. When the pastor started to pray with her, she became wild and
started screaming as an evil spirit manifested itself. The pastor asked the spirit who he
was and the spirit declared the woman was in his possession and that the relationship
between her and her husband was therefore miserable. The audience were shaking their
heads in disapproval. The pastor asked them who had more power, God or the Devil?
Everybody had to point towards the woman and scream: ‘Queima, Queima, Queima!’
(Burn, Burn, Burn!) to exorcize the demon.
Sermons often deal with the meaning of marriage, which is regarded as a
relationship between two individuals who serve God. The pastors highlight that, through
marriage, a couple are starting a nuclear family by leaving their extended families to
live their own lives. Practical tools are given: the couple should live as far away from
their kin as possible and, contrary to local custom, the wife should not follow the advice
of her mother-in-law but that of her husband. The husband should care of his wife and
make her happy and the two should spend time together, go to the cinema or on holiday.
Women are advised to take note of the culinary tips in Folha Universal. The pastors
criticize local marriages for the dependence they create between the couple and the
extended family which, in their view, hinders the healthy establishment of a Christian
family. The pastors express their particular disapproval of the important role of the
ancestral spirits who have to approve of the marriage during lobolo ceremonies. In
addition, pastors underscore the importance of the role of sexuality in marriage and
stress its pleasure. Sexuality in marriage not only has reproductive goals but should be
something both the man and the woman enjoy. Women are encouraged to play an active
role during sex. In the teachings, the presence of love in a relationship is promoted and
love means that both parties should try to understand each other and make each other
happy.
241
13 January 2007.
180
An advertisement for the Therapy of Love in Folha Universal. ‘Terapia do Amor, OF EVERYTHING LOVE
IS THE BIGGEST’ referring to the Bible verses in 1Corinthians 13.
The pastors give examples from their own lives in Brazil.242 A pastor started a therapy
session devoted to trust by saying that Mozambican men were very shy. ‘You have to
step up to a woman when you like her. Make contact and talk to each other.’243 He and
his wife had been together for eleven years and the pastor told the audience:
I started going to church and learned that it is necessary to take action to become happy.
I saw my wife and chatted with her. I did so several times and told her that I liked her.
In the end, she responded positively. I had already approached several women but love
must be a two-way affair.
He explained how he himself went to see her parents, which contrasted with local
custom in Mozambique where the men’s kin do this. Her father asked him what he
could offer his daughter. His response was: ‘Everything she needs’. The message was
not to give up as you can and will be fortunate. Then recently married couples gave
testimonies about God’s presence in their marriage. At another session, the pastor
interviewed couples about how they had met each other.
The therapies offer space to openly acknowledge abuse. For example, the
pastor asked his assistants for a pillow.244 ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘that this pillow went out
and talked about what you women need to undergo at night [the women had been called
forward]. What would the pillow say?’ The women started laughing and someone
responded: ‘A lot of things’. ‘But,’ said the pastor, ‘a lot of good or bad things?’ ‘Bad.’
Pastor: ‘Do you see? [Está vendo?]’ The pastor finally said that God was crying with
the women. Later he added that women should take action as they are clearly not (only)
positioned as victims but have the power to change a situation.
They should show their agency by participating in a corrente, a chain of
connected weekly therapies. In the course of the therapy, the pastor asks the audience
for a financial contribution. Special ‘therapy-of-love envelopes’ are distributed to
242
I have also seen a pastor from Angola lead the therapy.
243
26 July 2008.
244
13 January 2007.
181
collect special tithes for romantic happiness. These envelopes are linked with a pledge
(propósito). Every month a new envelope can be filled for a specific goal (for example,
finding a namorado) for which four or more connected therapies (correntes) have to be
attended. A person’s dedication and seriousness have to be proved and the specific
requirements of this ‘treatment’ need to be carefully executed. In addition, the pastor
sets up a particular programme of fasting, praying and tithing with participants to fight
for success in love. Converts have to pray at specific moments, try to talk to a potential
partner and keep the envelope under their pillow. The corrente ends with a special
financial donation, which has to be given in front, near or at the church’s altar on the
date specified.
Therapy of Love broadcast, television channel Miramar © Rufus de Vries
7.6 Transnational Pentecostal therapeutic reflections and actions
The counselling sessions aim to create transformations in the field of love, sexuality and
marriage by pushing people to cross cultural and spiritual barriers. Chapter 4 presented
the Brazilian Pentecostal churches as transnational spaces of conquest and counselling
sessions, particularly the therapy of love, are a key example of the Pentecostal way of
confronting local practices. In this framework, the therapy of love functions as a shock
therapy: its openness on intimate matters discloses a contestation of local ideas and
practices of love, sexuality and marriage as a necessary condition for change. People
182
have to learn to think and speak openly about sexuality and relationships. The crucial
role of kin in marriage is criticized; lobolo is attacked; and jealousy, distrust and divorce
result from witchcraft and local accusations of witchcraft are considered offensive.
Abuse is not disclosed in a family setting but on the church’s platform. Couples are
made to apologize to each other and not to involve kin in the settlement of disputes, and
money to prepare for a marriage is not exchanged with kin but presented in church.
Using a passionately provocative style, pastors aim to reverse the sphere of taboo
surrounding intimate matters in the Mozambican context.
Pastors link their power to break through the ‘silence’ surrounding sexuality,
love and marriage with the spiritual domain. When persons want to develop an
independent attitude towards their kin, they not only have to overcome cultural but also
spiritual boundaries. The process of therapeutic counselling thus involves the
transcendence of spiritual boundaries, for instance by speaking up about witchcraft and
exorcizing spirits. The use of examples from Brazil enhances the power of the therapy.
The pastors have succeeded in overcoming evil spiritual powers there, and now they are
doing so in Mozambique too. The examples from Brazil have stimulated a new practice
of love. Pastors explain, from a Brazilian setting, how they met their wives, overcame
difficult and challenging situations, and why and how it went wrong/right.
This South-South transnational Pentecostal space offers converts a place to
reflect, talk and develop new attitudes. Marta, who helped her boyfriend save money for
their wedding (Section 5.2.4), was impressed with remarks during the pastor’s sermon
on how a husband and wife should look for a place to live that is far away from kin. She
compared it with my situation. My husband and I were living alone in Mozambique,
without our families, and, she concluded that we were learning to be independent and
responsible for our own lives. She immediately discussed the issue with her boyfriend
as they were in the process of buying land on which to build a house.
Women find the teachings about husband-wife relations instructive, especially
regarding personal development. Lila (a 32-year-old saleswoman) said that she learned
a lot of lessons at the Universal Church:
I have learned to be independent. It is good for women to study and work. We are not
slaves [escravas] like women are according to Mozambican traditions. … Most women,
as everyone expects, are caseira [stay-at-home wives] and they look like it. They soon
turn old.
Lila had realized that she could influence processes if she thought through her actions
and made plans instead of acting without a purpose as many people do according to her.
She had two children and claimed she would like to have another but she first wanted to
live her own life. Every three months she has a hormone injection to prevent pregnancy:
‘The men here, they don’t like this idea, but women can do it without their husbands
183
knowing about it’. Lila often clashes with her in-laws. For example, she wanted to
spend New Year’s Eve with her husband but he gave in to the wishes of his extended
family and spent the night with them while Lila went to church.
In the construction of womanhood in contemporary urban society, the value of
women’s personal development in Pentecostalism is important. There is the idea that
Evangelical Christianity stresses female domesticity and submission in matters of
gender (Mate 2002; cf. Soothill 2007: 35ff). Even though a woman’s caring role in the
family is underscored as well as her obedience to her husband, a woman’s individual
success is a crucial element of her conversion, as is the transgression of local gender
categories. A woman’s role in the family is part of her personal success and that of her
nuclear family, but it does not go as far as including the extended family. Even though
men and women have different positions, they are spiritually equal. Therefore women
have the right to ‘gain victory’ (ganhar a vitória) and to be ‘winners’ (ganhadores) at
home as well as in public life. And since women are perceived as being more open to
the spiritual world than men, they can gain more power because of the spiritual
influence they are able to exercise over men. Their victory will be public. On the other
hand, there are tensions between individual, social and spiritual concerns. I encountered
several Pentecostal women who tolerated forms of domestic violence because they were
sure that by staying faithful to their husband God would change the situation.245 In other
cases, women’s assertiveness in ‘victory’ implied that they had demonized their
husbands if their men’s non-Pentecostal behaviour remained unchanged.
Another way in which the Pentecostal behaviour could challenge the local
environment concerns abstinence from sexual intercourse until marriage. Felizmina (a
23-year-old university student) said:246
I am a virgin, and my friends and colleagues find it very odd, but not only that, I am
also parva [silly/stupid] according to them. I think it is fine like this, my boyfriend is
also a virgin [he is also Pentecostal but from a different church, LvdK]. ... In the first
place, this follows the Bible, it is something God wants. In second place, sexuality is
not the most important aspect of a relationship. And with all the illnesses we have [the
AIDS pandemic, LvdK], so much is bad today. I am not afraid, like my friends are, that
my boyfriend will betray me, he is also a Christian and I trust him.
The most attractive and exciting aspect of the transnational Pentecostal domain remains
the practice of openly learning, showing and realizing love. When talking about these
aspects, women giggle, laugh and blush. How did they engage with the strong bodily
245
Arthur & Mejia (2006: 68-72) have transcribed an interview in which a woman claims that her husband
changed his violent and unfaithful behaviour after attending services at the Universal Church, but also that he
later fell back into his old ways.
246
184
aspects of the therapy? Why were these women eager to put their love lives on display
in front of the church audience? How did they explore the public character of the
therapy? The next section considers these questions and the ambiguous aspects of the
therapy’s open displays of love that culminate in violence.
7.6.1 Realizing love, disciplining the body

What is striking about women’s participation in the terapia is how the bodily practices
they perform affect their love lives. It would appear that open demonstrations of love
generate forces that make love happen. Love comes into existence by using one’s body
and senses. For example, while telling me about the therapy of the night before,247 Célia
(a 27-year-old receptionist) said unbelievingly: ‘I touched a wedding dress [on the
platform in the church, LvdK] and am now determined to get married’.248 She explicitly
participated in the realization of romantic love by touching the dress and as such
attached herself to the project of love that would materialize in a happy marriage. She
assured me – and herself – that she was ‘living in her victory’, a popular Pentecostal
saying, and that the ideal husband was waiting for her: she only needed to finish her
studies and participate in the therapy. I soon learned not to ask about the realization of
all these plans. It is faith in miracles happening through the enactment of particular
therapeutic forms that confirms that it will occur. My questions were interpreted as a
sign of disbelief. I should also walk in a victorious mood, converts told me. Bodily
involvement in the therapy is a promise and evidence that love is in the air. However,
one has to train one’s body and become sensitive to a new culture of love, which
develops by participating in specific disciplinary Pentecostal formats.
In his history of sexuality, Foucault (1998 [1976]) described how a particular
discourse on sexuality emerged at the start of the modern epoch in Europe. In need of
defining and controlling proper and improper sexuality, various authorities, such as
doctors and religious leaders, started a process of questioning and classifying that
framed the knowledge about sexuality. Sexuality became the object of ‘a judicial action,
a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical
elaboration’ (Ibid.: 31). Rather than hiding sex it had to be discussed, albeit in particular
ways. Policing sexuality – including birth rates and disease – required ‘the wide
dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken
about, for inducing it to speak for itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and
redistributing what is said about it’ (Ibid.: 34). According to Foucault, the knowledge
247
We talked on 24 June 2007.
248
During therapies and services we often had to say ‘I determine that this and that will happen’, so as to
make it seem real. Neo-Pentecostal churches follow the Faith Theology by attributing spiritual power to
spoken words. The idea of the power of the word is known from the Word of Faith Movement, which
originated in the US under the leadership of founding fathers Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth and Gloria
Copeland (Anderson 2004: 39-165; cf. Smit 2007).
185
that emerged about sexuality defined people’s experiences of it. The discourse on
sexuality was imposed on people’s bodies.
In this line of thinking, it could be said that the therapy of love is an example
of a policing device that generates a specific discourse of love, sexuality and marriage.
However, this discourse appears to involve the whole body and not only talking,
listening and theorizing. It is not only what is being said, as in Foucault’s examples, that
produces a particular sexuality or love but it is a process of embodiment that involves
the different senses. Following Csordas (1990: 5), who sees the body as ‘the existential
ground of culture’, it is important to look at the experiential processes persons are
involved in (cf. McGuire 1990). Going further than placing the individual in an
objectified cultural environment, which is a strong perspective in Foucault’s work, the
concept of embodiment looks at the perceptual and habitual processes persons are
engaged in. People are not only constituted by perceptions about love but also by their
ongoing romantic experiences and feelings.
What is interesting about the therapy is that feelings have to be created in
relation to love. The articulation of love depends on the performance of different
formats, for example putting one’s hands on one’s heart or oil on one’s rib, walking
under a heart, showing oneself to a possible partner, and embracing and kissing. By
doing so, converts can be filled with the Holy Spirit who will make them feel and
realize love. As several scholars have demonstrated in studies of religion and
embodiment (Hirschkind 2001; Mahmood 2001, 2005; Meyer 2009), it is by instigating
specific bodily and sensory disciplines that particular religious feelings and responses
are raised.249 Meyer (2008a) speaks of ‘sensational forms’, which are authorized modes
for invoking and organizing access to the divine or transcendental that shape religious
content and norms. These forms involve religious practitioners in special practices of
worship and patterns of feeling. For example, the use of music in the therapy and
services mediates the personal experience of the Holy Spirit. The physical quality of
sound, such as the beat, helps one to feel the Spirit (Marks 1999 in de Witte 2008a:
141). Moreover, the body itself manifests the presence of the Holy Spirit – or evil
powers – when people fall over, scream, cry and speak in tongues.
odily performances happen according to certain scripts: the arrangement of
activities and bodily behaviour are fixed and regulated (cf. de Witte 2008a: 125-171).
The pastor indicates when one prays, sings, walks forward and so on. It is clear which
people are experienced and know the ways in which the Spirit is speaking to them. The
249
Recent anthropological work on religion, the body and the senses has focused on the explicit strategies
through which a religious ‘habitus’ is acquired (Alvez de Abreu 2005; de Witte 2008a; Mahmood 2005;
Klaver 2011a, 2011b). With the notion habitus or embodied culture, Bourdieu (1977) described how
‘objective social structures’ are inscribed in people’s bodies and generate subjective experiences of social
class. However, he stressed the unconscious power of habitus and not the explicit training of experiences that
happens within religious movements (Mahmood 2005: 138-139).
186
first time I did most things wrong: I kept my eyes open when they had to be closed, I sat
when I had to stand, I forgot to lift my hands, and so on. As with other newcomers, the
assistants lifted up my hand when necessary or my more skilled neighbours helped me.
In the end, my body was better trained and I could experience what others said they felt,
such as the urge to cry.250 Particular bodily formats mark spiritual power but one needs
to learn how to experience spiritual power and adjust to it.251
In the framework of the therapy, the power of the Holy Spirit becomes visible in a
loving body. The capacity to create a romantic lifestyle depends on inhabiting certain
formats, such as a ‘new heart’. Célia explained that she needed to change the attitude of
her heart, otherwise she would not succeed in marrying:
God is preparing a husband for me. One day I will get married. My heart is my
problem, the Devil is there, I need to take care, I need to combat my old ways of doing.
Sometimes she sends a nasty message to her boyfriend out of the blue:
I really need to control this kind of behaviour. Today, the pastor asked who wanted a
new heart. I stepped forward. I .., this week..., Friday there was a party after work, I
wanted to drink beer and to smoke, but I really can’t do this, that is how the Devil
tempts you.
She does things she does not want to. By going forward, walking under a heart or
touching a heart, she receives and creates a new heart which will change her behaviour.
Moreover, by following a bodily format, love becomes authorized. When
single (wo)men stood on the platform and had to seek the Holy Spirit with a hand on
their hearts, a particular gaze, revelation or happening could be an indication from the
Spirit that they stood face-to-face with their future spouse. A Pentecostal man, Manuel
(a 42-year-old businessman), told me that he would marry me.252 The Holy Spirit had
given him a Bible verse that said that a woman would appear at the church door and
because he wanted a white woman, he immediately knew I was the one when I entered
the church, as I was generally the only white person present.
Pressure is brought to bear on people to have a partner. Elena (the 25-year-old
university student mentioned in Sections 7.2 and 7.3) reflected on the fact that she
wanted to act in faith and thus quickly became involved in a relationship with a young
250
At the end of my period of fieldwork I felt less of an urge to observe all the time at services and could
invest more in participating. Then I noticed how I also started crying during moments of prayer and surrender
(cf. Knibbe and Versteeg 2008).
251
De Witte (2008a; forthcoming) and Klaver (2011a) describe the tensions between the purely spontaneous
and unruly manifestation of the Holy Spirit and fixed scripts of behaviour.
252
22 February 2005. I told him that he must have misunderstood the Holy Spirit.
187
man who, she later realized, was not the man she wanted to marry.253 Felizmina (the 23-
year-old university student who stressed her virginity, see above) told me about her
sister who had been actively engaged in the therapy.254 Her sister was an obreira and
soon married an obreiro who became a pastor. She hardly knew the man but since the
Holy Spirit showed her that the obreiro would be her husband and they kissed each
other before the altar, true love was guaranteed. Converts told me how pastors pointed
out who they should marry, which particularly happened with obreiros/as. One pastor
told me that to become a pastor, he needed to be married255 and the bishop showed him
an obreira who would be the perfect partner for him.
Elena and Felizmina elaborated on these cases by pointing to the tension
between the manifestation of the Holy Spirit and the responsibility of each Pentecostal
believer to enact Holy power and love. In this respect, Elena explained the concept of
‘intelligent faith’ (fé inteligente):
In church they stress that it is necessary to have faith. Thus I only thought about faith.
With faith everything would be all right. But I learned that wisdom is important as
well.256
She had chosen a boyfriend from the church as a result of her faith. However, ‘in
everything we were each other’s opposite’, Elena said. Her mother and others, including
a pastor, disapproved of their relationship. ‘But, we had faith. God had brought us
together and we made plans about marrying and the future.’ She was strong and self-
assured and had opinions about everything, but not so her partner. She started
dominating him and they quarrelled a lot. ‘Then I realized we should not go on. It is not
only faith, you have to use your brains as well.’ At the time, Elena was also an obreira
and observed that many people in church got married but were unhappy. ‘They go on
because they have faith’. She affirmed that the church’s leadership recognized the
problem and started preaching about intelligent faith. Bishop Macedo introduced this
concept to stress the necessity of knowing how to use faith because many people have
faith but with no results (Macedo 2004a: 81-83):
Only faith of quality can produce a life of quality. ... Certainly this is the biggest
problem among the majority of Christians. They know the Scriptures; pray; fast; read
the Bible; believe in the Lord Jesus; believe in God; and, in a certain way they exercise
253
254
255
2 May 2007.
256
188
faith, but by not having this faith of quality, their efforts are virtually useless (Ibid.:
83).257
At a church service I attended a special message from Bishop Macedo on intelligent

faith was screened. We were called to have faith of trust (fé de confiança) and faith of
intelligence (fé inteligente).258
The aspect of self-responsibility in Elena’s account of intelligent faith struck
me. In the first instance, it seems that, by a repeated performance of bodily gestures that
shows a convert’s faith, specific results will be achieved. However, as Elena as well as
the bishop showed, there is the need to scrutinize whether one’s performance of faith
comprises all the formats – trust and rationality – and whether these have truly taken
root in one’s whole body, including the mind (cf. de Witte forthcoming). The
articulation of performativity depends on different formats, not only kissing or walking
under a heart but also training and use of one’s brain through, for example, sermons.
One performance builds on another (Mahmood 2005: 161-167). If one fails to have a
happy marriage, or to marry at all, it marks one’s inability to form a converted body and
one has to rectify the situation by entering a new cycle of performances, a new corrente
of therapies. In other words, not only the sign of the Holy Spirit’s presence in one’s
bodily performance develops into love but an entire manner of being and acting is also
required (cf. Campos and Gusmão 2008).
Taking all this together, the Pentecostal bodily formats to love demonstrate a
particular relationship between disciplinary structures and agency. It seems that the
agency of the converts is involved in how they embody authorized Pentecostal formats.
Foucault’s analysis of subject formation is useful in understanding the embodiment of
divine power. Foucault’s (1998 [1976]) work highlights disciplining and controlling
structures in society, such as his study of sexuality. According to his (1988) elaboration
of ‘technologies of the self’, disciplining power cannot be understood solely on the
model of domination with a singular intentionality, for example of the pastors, that is
enforced upon others, namely converts. Technologies of the self are the forms of
knowledge and strategies that
permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain
number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of
being, so as to transform themselves (Ibid.: 18).
257
Translation form Portuguese by LvdK.
258
16 November 2005. I do not know whether this happened in all churches but usually the same topics were
central in all church services on the same day. Similar messages also appeared on TV Record/Miramar.
189
In other words, disciplining powers allow agents to define their self. The person is
produced by the relationships they are involved in that simultaneously facilitate the
person to form him/herself.
Foucault’s insights are taken up by Mahmood (2005) in her study of women in
mosques in Egypt. Her work is a reaction to the kind of feminist analyses where
women’s agency would foremost be an act of resistance to male authority. Elaborating
on Butler (1993, 1997), who in her post-structuralist feminist thought draws on insights
by Foucault, Mahmood (2005: 18) argues that agency is not simply a synonym for
resistance to relations of domination but a ‘capacity for action that specific relations of
subordination create and enable’. Adopting this insight for converts in Mozambique, I
suggest that they actively incorporate Brazilian Pentecostal movements of the body to
bring the potentiality of their love life into being (cf. Chapter 6). They realize their self
not by letting authoritative models be imposed on them but by performing Pentecostal
authorized formats. According to some of the women I worked with, this included a
development whereby the pastors also have to learn to perform correctly. In the words
of Felizmina:259
The church also has to learn. I think it is unwise that the pastors match obreiras and
obreiros who have to marry each other. It should be more than that [a match is not
sufficient to enact the Holy Spirit, LvdK], but the church is learning lessons too.
The clearer focus in sermons on intelligent faith is one of the examples in which the
church indeed shows itself to be learning lessons. However, it is also one’s own fault, as
much for pastors as for converts, whether they do something wrong and are not able to
rectify it and play a role in the realization of love and thus of God’s plan for them.
By appropriating intelligent faith, women can obtain a whole new position in
the urban domain. Generally, women were considered to be more emotional than men
and to suffer more. Intelligent faith, on the contrary, stands for the ability to control
one’s emotions. Incorporating a rational intelligence was another weapon in the spiritual
struggle to position oneself in a highly challenging environment. More generally, the
bodily involvement of the therapy happens in interaction with the surrounding urban
space (cf. Csordas 1990). I argue that the particular use of the body during the therapy is
productive in shaping love because of the role of women’s bodies in their pioneering
ambitions in the urban domain.
One consequence of the growing visibility of women in the public sphere has
been concern about the female body. Women’s bodies are contested. It is often said that
the short skirts they wear cause men to harass them (cf. Chapter 6) and young girls’
tight jeans encourage infidelity as their bodies attract married men. I regularly read the
259
190
letters in the newspaper Notícias about women’s fashions. For example, one man
wrote:260
It is with profound distaste that I have followed a tendency of feminine fashion that
lately came to plague our big city. It is normal to see girls and even women wearing
trousers, which I could find elegant if it would not be for one inconvenience: It is that
these trousers were conceived in a way that they expose all a woman’s undergarments
as soon as she moves her body downwards. Today it is very normal in the semi-public
transport where there are seats, to see an exhibition of the undergarments of certain
women when they get up, in this manner offering a free and disagreeable spectacle to
all people that are around. My opinion is that no matter how beautiful the piece of
undergarment is, its appreciation must be restricted to the owner [in Portuguese the
masculine form is being used here: dono, the feminine form is dona, Lvdk] and maybe
extensively only to him with whom a relationship of absolute intimacy is being shared,
and not to any person.
Marta (see Section 7.6) wanted to earn her own money to buy her own clothes because
her boyfriend disliked the fashions she wore as they exposed too much of her body.
Women living on their own, like Célia who touched the wedding dress did, were
approached with suspicion, as were women like Julia (see Chapter 6) who owned a
house. Women continuously struggle with how they are and want to be perceived, and
how they should position themselves.
Since educated women become more self-confident in their public role, they
want this to be answered by men who do not look at them as beings to be possessed and
domesticated but as partners to walk hand-in-hand with along the street. Women want
to break love out of the private sphere and place it in the public space where they are
increasingly visible. But since this has not been women’s ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977) in
the city, they feel uncertain about it, as do men. The therapy trains them in developing
these public skills: it may feel uncomfortable but couples embrace and kiss each other
publicly during the therapy to train their bodies in new modes of love. By offering
money openly, giving public testimony or presenting a case of witchcraft, women
demonstrate that they are capable of dealing with the new demands being placed on
them. They show their commitment to a new cultural project of love and can prove their
competences in this regard. They are taking the lead in their lives and playing a full part
in the urban domain by using their faith, and doing so intelligently.261
260
Notícias, 3 July 2006, translation from Portuguese by LvdK.
261
It is interesting to note that older converts consider themselves too old for these forms of romance. Even
though they sometimes longed for a new husband, they said that they were too old for ‘this thing of love’, as
Dona Isabel said (Chapter 5). It seems that their age, upbringing and marital experiences have shaped their
concerns about their role in the urban domain compared to younger generations.
191
7.6.2 The violence of downplaying senses

The majority of the participants in the therapy are single women. They prefer a
Pentecostal partner because they would be trained to be faithful and caring towards their
wives. Since there are more women at church than men, women complain that there are
insufficient men to engage with. Consequently, their involvement in the therapy does
not often result in a loving relationship. Even though being married is not the only ideal
of women who attend the church, as professional success is equally important, the
underlying idea behind most counselling sessions is that being married is better than
being single and for most women marriage is an ultimate ideal. However, this is an area
that is far less controllable than education and work, thus engagement with their faith is
even more crucial as finding a perfect partner requires a miracle of sorts (cf. Frahm-Arp
2006: 223-224).
The effects of involvement in the therapy are that women feel uncomfortable if
they remain single. When they spoke in terms of ‘God gives me the victory’ or ‘God
gives me a miracle’, they implicitly said they would have a partner. But, when we
became closer friends, it became obvious that the boyfriend never materialized. Célia
spoke about her boyfriend but was vague about their current relationship and he seemed
to be a fictitious being. The only thing she said was that they had not much time to meet
as she needed to study and was working fulltime. She was sure that God was preparing
her marriage, so in that sense she was victorious. In many cases, women were in
relationships with non-Pentecostals. It depended on converts’ performance of faith
whether the constraints of a single life and a non-Pentecostal marriage evolved into a
fruitful element in the process of conversion. Elena and Felizmina, for example, gave
the impression of being able to master these dilemmas in their reflections on conversion
as a way of learning from difficulties and mistakes.
However, I met converts whose position became very precarious. Luisa is one
example. The first time I met the 27-year-old receptionist, in October 2006, she had just
moved to a very small room with no access to water or electricity. She felt very lonely
and she could not trust her family, especially her mother, as they suspected each other
of witchcraft because the mother was connected to curandeiros and Luisa to pastors. In
addition, Luisa had no husband. She prayed and fasted a lot and, for the last three years,
had participated in the therapy of love. ‘It is difficult to find an honest man,’ Luisa
sighed, ‘a man related to God’. On the other hand, she felt it was much better to fight
for a long time to reach her goal instead of just starting a relationship with any man. She
had had various boyfriends but every time she presented them to her mother they left
her. As part of the correntes of therapies she followed, Luisa prepared a huge financial
offering and this special sacrifice was expected to help her overcome her situation.
However, as her salary was not being paid and she could not afford her rent any more
192
and her problems with her relatives increased, she became a less attractive partner for
men.
Luisa’s case is an example of the opposite effect of commitment to the project
of conversion and love. The investment in love and a better life can instead produce
increased loneliness, distrust and loss.262 This violent effect of the therapy and
conversion can be visible in different ways in converts’ lives. When Felizmina’s sister
married the pastor she hardly knew, her father refused to attend the wedding. Laura felt
lonely because contact with her family decreased and, at the age of 19, she had to quit
her studies because she had to (and also wanted to) work in the church as the pastor’s
wife. Felizmina said:263 ‘It is not an easy life. Your whole live takes places in church. If
you want to go out for a day, you have to ask permission. My sister hadn’t realized all
of that.’ Felizmina is soon going to graduate: ‘Now my sister recognizes what she has
lost, the kind of freedom I have’. A little later she concluded: ‘I learned from my sister’s
mistakes’. A Mozambican pastor at the Universal Church told me how he had been
selected to become an assistant pastor to a Brazilian pastor on condition that he was
married.264 In a few months, he married the sister of a good friend who also was an
obreira. It did not work out but he could not be separated from her if he wanted to
continue working as a pastor. He commented: ‘When we marry, we think that the
relationship will become good [i.e. love materializes after performing correctly, LvdK],
that we will grow towards each other. I married too hastily, it was a wrong decision’. I
received various invitations to attend weddings that never took place. Every three
months Marta invited me to her wedding that was going to take place the following
month. And every time it was postponed because she had insufficient money. However
she remained optimistic: ‘God will give me victory. I already have it. I only need to live
in my victory.’
Preoccupation with the activities of either the Holy Spirit or evil spirits in
converts’ lives can further disrupt marriages and relationships. According to the same
pastor, his wife had a demon. When she started beating him in church, the other pastors
also came to the conclusion that she had a bad spirit. The tensions in their relationship
intensified as his wife’s attitude did not change. Converts experience conflicts between
their attempts to inhabit the prescribed formats of affection and romance, and the
control of their behaviour by spiritual forces. As much as the Holy Spirit can imbue
their body, demons may also do so. Despite the emphasis on people’s responsibility to
work on the transformation of their body, the pastors also stress that converts cannot
blame their partners because their adversary is the Devil (cf. Soothill 2007: 209-218).
Jealousy, domestic violence and infidelity are caused by evil spirits. To ensure a
262
The aspect of witchcraft and money offerings in Luisa’s account is the subject of Chapter 8.
263
264
Interview, 2 May 2007.
193
successful marriage, women are thus encouraged to become violent: they have to be
God’s soldiers, confronting the Devil for his control over their husband’s behaviour. In
this respect, it is instructive that the leader of Maná calls love the ‘armour of war’
(Amor, arma de Guerra). Tadeu (2006) writes about God’s love and how people have to
stand and practise ways of confronting Satan.
As a result, some women enter into quite an ambivalent relationship with their
husbands, who they see as being imbued with an evil spirit, like the pastor came to see
his wife, and apparently the wife also came to see her husband, and thus beat him.
Subsequently, they found it difficult to be intimate with their partner and the pastor said
that he and his wife were not having sexual intercourse anymore. Paula, who had never
wanted to marry but changed her mind after hearing the pastor’s sermons about
marriage, was suddenly confronted with a husband who went out a lot at night. Paula
decided not to talk any more to her husband about his nightly escapades and to only
speak about it in prayer. Pastors normally advised not talking about demons with
partners who were not Pentecostal because it would worsen the situation. Instead, born-
again women take responsibility and use spiritual powers and their brain to convert their
partners. As they pray and perform their warrior duties, they demonstrate how to be a
winner, which will then materialize in their partners.
Another ambiguous aspect of the therapy that may result in violence is the
silence surrounding HIV/AIDS. Even though the therapy and other counselling
practices force openness about sexuality, HIV/AIDS is hardly ever discussed. Over the
last few years, huge projects have been introduced in African countries to disseminate
information, change practices, reduce stigma and provide care for those who are HIV-
positive and their relatives. Initially, many religious institutions, and particularly
Pentecostals, were reluctant to engage with HIV/AIDS (Prince et al. 2009: vii-viii).
Nevertheless, the start of PEPFAR265 became a stimulus for faith-based organizations to
participate in AIDS programmes because much of the funding was channelled through
them (Epstein 2005, 2007; Gusman 2009). Pentecostal and mainstream churches have
become more involved in AIDS projects, education, counselling and care for AIDS
patients, and have also influenced the way people manage their health, family, sexuality
and marriage (Adogame 2007; Becker & Geissler 2007, 2009; Burchardt 2009;
Kalofonos 2008; Nguyen 2009; Prince et al. 2009).
While churches in Mozambique are progressively engaging with AIDS
programmes (Kalofonos 2008; Pfeiffer 2004),266 the Pentecostal churches seem to be in
a state of denial, while at the same time realizing that they should be dealing more
265
The US Presidential Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.
266
Particularly the mainline churches.
194
explicitly with the subject.267 AIDS has not been as openly discussed as sexuality.
Sometimes AIDS is mentioned in sermons but stigma surrounding the issue still
predominates. Whenever I heard AIDS mentioned in sermons, it was in the context of a
cure. With faith, a cure would happen and it was always added that one should seek
treatment at a hospital. Nevertheless, as part of pre-marriage counselling, partners have
to undergo an HIV test. Towards each other, they have to be open about the subject but
in my conversations and interviews, people rarely mentioned HIV/AIDS. Converts
seemed to be much more concerned about (economic) success, gender roles and new
forms of affective relationships (cf. Thornton 2009). On the other hand, as HIV/AIDS
plays a role in converts’ lives, which people show in more indirect ways, it influences
their relationships. Especially because of unfaithful partners, women were afraid of
contracting HIV. Paula, who did not to talk to her husband about his nightly escapades,
said: ‘Of course I’m afraid of getting HIV’.268 She said that the only thing she could do
was to continue going to church and to fight for her marriage. Their relationship became
very tense and Paula became depressed. But leaving her husband was not an option as
this would mean she had failed as a (Pentecostal) woman and her salary was not enough
to cover her daily living expenses. However, she made every effort not to become too
financially dependent on her husband.
To sum up these tensions in other words, the creation of specific sensory and
bodily perceptions in the therapy of love means that converts and pastors downplay
other senses or ‘anaesthetize’ them (Verrips 2006; cf. van Dijk 2009). The
transformation of converts’ sensory modes makes them indifferent to other socio-
cultural practices. The Pentecostal techniques of confrontation that are part of the public
display and realization of love impede the sensitivity to (religious) forms of dialogue
and consensus. To realize love, converts change into soldiers, demonize their partners
and silence problems such as HIV/AIDS. By doing so, they remain out of touch with the
reality of their partners and kin and become far removed from the ‘romantic love’
propagated by Pentecostal pastors.
7.7 Conclusion
Mozambican women and youth are actively involved in developing new sexual and
marital practices and relations. Educated, urban women are seeking possibilities to
openly discuss courtship, marriage and sexuality and to appropriate ways of loving and
relating that are compatible with their new positions in the city’s public domain. In a
267
In more personal settings, pastors from the Assemblies of God churches said that converts were indeed
being affected by HIV/AIDS, as were pastors. They felt that they should change their attitudes but were still
thinking about how to do so.
268
Conversation, 29 November 2006.
195
society where affection is generally expressed in rather hidden ways, viewing images of
people showing explicit affection in the telenovelas and in Brazilian churches has made
a powerful impression on them. A particular Brazilian type of sensual love portrayed in
the telenovelas has gained a specific spiritual format in the transnational space of
Pentecostalism. By kissing and embracing in public in the therapy and embodying the
power of the Holy Spirit, converts are confronting local forms of love, sexuality and
marriage, and hope to find romance, happiness and fidelity. Activating a specific bodily
and sensory discipline during the therapy raises feelings towards potential partners and
effectuates marriages. This shows how religion, in this case transnational
Pentecostalism, is not necessarily a response to transformations in the reproductive
domain but actively invests in effectuating change.
Yet the confrontational aspect of the public performance of love, as part of the
spiritual war, carries violent mechanisms. The ambiguities that open, sensual and
passionate bodies carry in the sexual landscape of Brazil (DaMatta 1978; Parker 2009)
have their own dimensions in the interaction between Brazilian Pentecostal pastors and
Mozambican converts, and can become violent. Realizing love through the performance
of Pentecostal technologies of the self (Foucault 1998) by means of mastering a balance
between emotional and rational choices of faith are frustrated by demons who can still
control the bodies of converts and those of their partners and kin. The subsequent
spiritual battle clearly affects relationships. Techniques to confront the Devil who
frustrates amorous relations downplay the sensitivity to alternative forms of creating
love. Living with demonized partners creates relational distance instead of passion. As a
result, the therapy of love seems to be becoming a therapy of hate because partners are
increasingly hurting each other.
‘Sowing and Reaping’, God is Love church © Rufus de Vries
197
8. The South-South transnational Prosperity Gospel: ‘Holy

Bonfires’ and campaigns
8.1 Introduction
The Universal Church organizes a huge biannual event called the Holy Bonfire of Israel
(Fogueira Santa de Israel or Fogueira for short).269 This involves two months of
preparationand is a special time when converts present offerings to demonstrate their
faith. They have to donate their belongings in order to reach a specific goal and some
sell their televisions, cars and sometimes even their houses to sacrifice (sacrificar)
money in church. According to the pastors, their courageous faith will be abundantly
blessed and their dreams will come true. They will become successful entrepreneurs,
find an honest, loving partner and succeed in building their own house. The Fogueira is
called ‘the materialization of faith for the conquest of the impossible’ and is truly
perceived as a fight. In a country where it is hard to own a house and a car and feed and
clothe everyone in one’s household, giving up everything one has is a challenge. Non-
Pentecostal relatives and friends do not understand why the converts do this but the
pastors assure their congregations that this is the way to conquer all the evil in their
lives. This will finally open up the road to prosperity, although it may be long. The
Fogueira is a war against evil, against the devil, demons and evil spirits, and against
evil persons such as jealous relatives and colleagues. Since Pentecostals assume that
evil powers are at the root of poverty and failure, these powers have to be defeated and
this can be done through the Fogueira. Participation is required in early-morning
weekday sessions of prayer at church. At 6 pm, converts are expected to return for the
evening service and special Fogueira prayers when they are encouraged to persevere
with preparations for their (financial) sacrifice. Converts are also supposed to pray (in
church) at noon and during the night at 1.30 am and 3 am in their own homes. People
reported that the ensuing lack of sleep was debilitating.
During the Fogueira in December 2005 in which I participated, a sanctuary
was built on the altar’s platform. It resembled the holiest place in the temple, as
described in the Old Testament. Only priests were allowed to go there under special
conditions to sacrifice an animal as an offering for redemption. A ladder to heaven was
placed in the sanctuary, similar to the ladder in Jacob’s dream270 where a ladder on earth
269
Another version of this chapter was published in Bompani & Frahm-Arp (2010) entitled: ‘Burying Life:
Pentecostal Religion and Development in Urban Mozambique’.
270
Jacob was a faithful follower of God (Genesis 28). The symbolism of the Fogueira is linked to the Old
Testament. In general, Pentecostal pastors use the Old Testament more than the New Testament. The word
fogueira refers to all the offerings from Christian ancestors figuring in the first part of the Bible: Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob and Moses. The story of Jacob was chosen for the Fogueira in December 2005.
198
reached up to heaven. While angels ascended and descended the ladder, God promised
Jacob that through his seed all the families on earth would be blessed. To be part of this
blessing and to reach heaven on earth, all participants in the Fogueira had to enter the
sanctuary to make their sacrifice to God by placing it on the ladder. Afterwards, the
bishops and some of the pastors at the Universal Church in Mozambique and some from
other countries too would travel to Israel to present God with the participants’ wishes.
On the ladder in one of the churches in Maputo, Dona Silmara placed all the money her
business had earned in the last few months, several thousand dollars. And at the end of
another campaign, she sacrificed all the money she had in her savings account: US$
15,000. Why do converts donate such huge sums of money?
Neo-Pentecostalism is known for its ‘Prosperity Theology’ or ‘Health and
Wealth Gospel’ (Gifford 2004a). This underlines how militant and courageous faith
brings happiness, health and prosperity in all areas of life. A central way of
demonstrating conversion is by paying tithes and presenting additional financial
offerings to ensure a more prosperous life. Tithing involves donating 10% of one’s
income to the church on a monthly basis but offerings are extra donations that people
are encouraged to make during church services. The Universal Church is known
internationally for its extravagant practices and, in addition to tithes and offerings,
pastors organize huge pledges and campaigns, such as the Fogueira Santa and correntes
(a chain of weekly therapies of love that end with an offering). Leaders, including those
in Mozambique, have often been accused of becoming rich at the expense of the poor,
of running a money-making machine, a lottery and a business instead of a church (cf.
Mariano 2003: 51-55).271 Similar pledges and correntes take place in the God is Love
Church and, to a lesser extent, in the World Church of the Power of God and the Maná
Church. Many converts are immune to the accusations of money-grabbing by pastors
and some members of other churches even temporarily frequent the Universal Church in
order to participate in the Fogueira Santa.
In line with anthropological notions of the gift generating different forms of
reciprocity (Mauss 1969 [1924]), studies of Pentecostal financial practices mention gifts
that realize particular reciprocal relations amongst the community of believers and with
God (Coleman 2004). In the African context, the Pentecostal gift is also said to free
converts from the constraints of exchange between kin (Gifford 2004a: 105ff; Maxwell
1998; Meyer 1998a; van Dijk 1998, 1999, 2002, 2005). However, hardly any attention
has been paid to the harmful consequences of the Pentecostal financial offerings that
271
Over the years, critical articles have been published in Mozambican journals: ‘Multinacional, Comerciante
da Fé, Parasite de Deus ou Profeta de Espírito?’ (Savana, 7 October 1994); ‘Acção da IURD em
Moçambique’ (Notícias, 8 April 1997); and ‘Desactivada Rede Criminosa na Igreja Universal’ (Magazine, 9
May 2007). The bishop of the Universal Church, Edir Macedo, and some of its other leaders were accused of
fraud and taken to court.
199
destroy the local forms of reciprocity. Gifts of about US$ 20,000 are out of all
proportion and are destructive, as will be shown below.
To understand the enormous financial Pentecostal campaigns and sacrifices in
Mozambique, it is important to connect these practices to converts’ involvement in the
bigger spiritual war (see previous chapters). It is remarkable that converts often spoke
of holocaustos rather than ‘gifts’. This is a ‘burnt offering’, a type of Biblical (Old
Testament) offering in which the animal to be sacrificed is consumed by fire. The
Pentecostal holocausto, which substitutes biblical animals for considerable sums of
money, is part of the discourse and practice of the spiritual war aimed at the liberation
and the erasure of evil. While the money itself is not literally burnt, the sacrifice of huge
sums of money aims to destroy exchange relations with kin and partners, and hampers
the development of a community of believers. The excessive amounts of money
sacrificed express the desire to annihilate reciprocal relations with kin and, at the same
time, are meant to demonstrate one’s pioneering abilities. This chapter explores the
third violent technique and effect of conversion, namely the Pentecostal technique of
destroying.272 The violence of Pentecostal conversion is revealed in the role money
plays in the urban domain in sexuality, marriage and kinship.
To demonstrate the damaging nature of financial sacrifices, I first recapitulate
how, locally, money and gifts are central to maintaining kin relations and guaranteeing
the reproduction of life (i.e. development). Yet in Maputo, the role of money in
relations, as the basis for social development, has evolved in particular and often
problematic ways for the upwardly mobile. They are experiencing reciprocal kin
relations as a burden because of the obligation to share money. The new economic roles
of women in the urban domain are introducing complications in intimate and kin
relations. This chapter focuses on how their involvement in the financial practices of
transnational Pentecostal churches is an attempt to change a socio-economic order that
is being experienced as a burden by destroying and burying its fundamental structures.
Even though the goal is to be born again as a Pentecostal, converts’ old lives, including
exchange relations, have to die by means of a sacrifice. In addition, by paying large
sums of money, Pentecostal women can practise and prove their pioneering skills. The
effect is increasing uncertainty and risk, yet converts deliberately engage in this
behaviour.
272
Chapter 1 explained how the violence in Pentecostalism is specific both in terms of the techniques used to
convert and in the effects of conversion. Converts need to appropriate the Pentecostal techniques of breaking,
confronting and destroying.
200
8.2 Burying life
In December 2006 a news item was broadcast on STV, which was then the most
popular and critical television channel in Mozambique, about a demonstration against
the Universal Church in Maxaquene, one of Maputo’s neighbourhoods. One of those
present told me what happened.273 People saw coffins and open graves on the site of the
Universal Church. The neighbours were shocked and started to throw stones at the
church building and the pastor. The police arrived and took the pastor away for his own
protection. Interviewee: ‘It is very un-African what was happening at this Church’. The
neighbours were afraid that people were being buried, which was inappropriate (it was
not a burial ground) and would cause a lot of harm because the place could become
polluted by the angry spirits of the dead. Some thought that these persons had been
murdered by church members. The neighbours understood this as a witchcraft ritual, an
illegal action that would harm or accumulate wealth by means of supernatural evil
forces.274 The interviewee said that older people in the neighbourhood shared a long-
held opinion that the Universal Church should be prohibited. He said:
These older people still live like in the rural areas. Here in the city there are many other
influences, people are losing their culture. The Universal Church is behaving in ways
that go against the principles of people from here.275
A couple of times I witnessed the use of a coffin in services at the Universal Church.
The following is an extract from my fieldwork notes about a Monday-evening service
on 14 February 2005 on the theme of success in business:
At the entrance to the church building assistants distributed small papers on which to
write down our financial problems. The pastor summoned people to throw their papers
in the coffin that was in the church hall. Later on, he would bury it and our problems. …
The pastor read Psalms 112: 3: ‘His family will be wealthy and rich, and he will be
prosperous for ever’. ... During the sermon everyone who was present, about 1000
people, had to say out loud: ‘Belonging to God brings prosperity’. Then, we had to fix
our eyes on the coffin. The coffin was then closed and wrapped in a red cloth. The
pastor said that many people were the victims of witchcraft and that if we had financial
273
Interview 15 February 2007.
274
In 2005, Zambia's government banned the Universal Church after allegations that it was involved in satanic
rituals (BBC, 30 November 2005). Demonstrations were held in the capital Lusaka because two men were
supposedly kidnapped as part of the church’s rituals.
275
Some who lived in the suburbs said that people over 40 were more rural in their views. Definitions of rural
and urban are diverse and the differences between the two are often not clear as a lot of exchange takes place
(Araújo 1999, 2005a). Costa (2006, 2007) shows how families on the outskirts of Maputo and their kin in the
rural areas maintain relations with each other, for example by exchanging resources (see also Loforte 1987;
Souto 1987). Such relations may be less amongst the newer generations that are growing up in the city (cf.
Chapter 5 on 15-30 year olds).
201
problems and/or our business was not prospering then someone had sent us evil. He
ordered all evil spirits to leave us. Some people started to cry and fall over and spirits
were expelled from their bodies. Everybody with problems was called to take the red
cloth276 in their hands and, while looking the pastor in the eyes, he drove the evil spirit
away. After that, all those remaining could come forward and touch the red cloth. First,
those who gave US$ 500, then those who gave US$ 300 and then US$ 100 etc. The red
cloth was finally put in the coffin [so no people were buried as the neighbours in
Maxaquene thought].
The Universal Church was regarded in many respects as anti-social by critics and older
people like those mentioned by the interviewee above (cf. Maxwell 1998: 366-369).
The pastors had big houses and expensive cars but did not share their wealth with others
while stories circulated of family members who had lost everything because of a
relative making offerings to the church and selling their television, computer and/or car.
Suspicions increased because church members had to act in secrecy and pastors forced
converts to keep matters between themselves and God. No one should talk about how
much money s/he would sacrifice. And suspicious rituals were being performed, such as
the one involving the coffins.
What is fundamental here is the Pentecostal provocation of local notions of
development, in which social relations and prosperity are entangled. Lundin (2007)
describes how social networks based on kinship in Maputo, which can be extended to
‘fictive kin’ such as neighbours, colleagues and friends, are essential for all socio-
economic classes to guarantee their livelihoods in the urban setting (Costa 2007; Costa
& Rodrigues 2007). Access to goods and services are mediated by one’s social position
in a network of relations that are often based on kinship. Kinship has for a long time
been an essential social institution in regulating the exchange relations necessary for the
reproduction of biological, economic and socio-cultural life (see Chapter 3). The lobolo
is an example of the relatedness of economic gift-giving and kinship and it is through a
gift, nowadays in the form of money, that families and the ancestors of the bride and
bridegroom become interrelated and secure reproduction. Exchange between two
families ensures social order as it guarantees the continuation of those families, and thus
of society, through their offspring. Similar to the approach taken by Bloch & Parry
(1989), death, birth, marriage, sexuality and money are all bound up in one sphere. All
are important and dependent on each other for the smooth running of social life. In
addition to the lobolo, this can be observed in several ways in Mozambique. For
example, the first month’s salary in a new job is given to kin and is partly used to offer
presents to the ancestral spirits as a form of respect and gratitude that will guarantee
276
As mentioned in Chapter 7 (Note 21), the colour red is a symbol of Jesus’s blood that has the power to
transform. At the same time, this is compatible with the local meaning of red that represents a transitory state
(cf. Jacobson-Widding 1989: 35).
202
their continuous protection. The activities of the Pentecostal churches go against these
principles of ordering society and developing well-being because the first salary
payment has to be offered to the church.
Researchers of African Pentecostalism (Gifford 2004a: 105ff; Maxwell 1998;
Meyer 1998a; van Dijk 1998, 1999, 2002, 2005) have shown that by converting and
spending money in Pentecostal churches, members cannot maintain their reciprocal
relations with kin and ancestral spirits. Giving their first salary cheque to the church is a
break with expressing gratitude and dependence for one’s prosperity to relatives and
one’s ancestors. And what has been given in church obviously cannot be used to meet
family obligations. In this way, the upwardly mobile can escape the financial burdens
placed on them by family members, who constantly request money and hamper them in
their aspirations (such as building a house, paying for their studies and saving money
for the future). By offering money to the church, they also break away from the spiritual
powers of ancestral spirits that are considered evil in the Pentecostal context. It is now
God, and not family spirits, that influences their well-being. However few studies have
explored how this discontinuity with the prominent worldview not only shapes new
possibilities and meanings but is also problematic (cf. de Bruijn & van Dijk 2009).
Based on the case of the Universal Church in Mozambique, it is important to note the
antagonistic and vulnerable situations being created and why converts deliberately
choose to face breakdown, conflict and uncertainty as a result of sacrifícios.
Locally, the use of the coffin is a strong image of destruction that the
neighbours of the Universal Church understood very well but reacted to with equally
strong feelings. In addition to giving away excessive amounts of money, neighbours and
relatives of church members see these practices as violating the reproduction of life. Yet
for the converts, this is precisely the reason why they joined the church. In my view,
converts are demonstrating their need to destroy their old ways of life prior to starting
something new. Before illustrating this point, I will elaborate on the clash between the
defenders of ‘Mozambican culture’ and Pentecostals, and assess the role of money in
reproducing life and defining the path of development to which converts and non-
converts constantly allude.
8.3 Money and changing dependencies in the urban domain
Chapter 3 argued that the integration of groups of people in the capitalist economy, as
wage workers or entrepreneurs, has had a serious impact on social relations since the
end of the 19th century. Older men have gradually lost the control they used to have
because their grandchildren can now earn money of their own, be independent of the
extended family, pay their own lobolo and establish a nuclear family (Harries 1994: 98).
As a result of the tax system introduced under Portuguese colonialism, work was no
203
longer connected only to the village and family life but also to the larger body of the
state. This brought profound shifts in Mozambican households, such that breaks began
to occur in the local circle of reproduction.
I also explored how these developments were gendered and had particular
implications in Maputo. Since the earliest days of Lourenço Marques, women’s
economic, legal and social space in the urban context was a profoundly contested one as
they had far less access to wage-paying jobs and were dependent on their connections
with (wealthier) men. But women have gradually found more opportunities for work
and, since independence in 1975, they have been openly encouraged to find paid work.
Simultaneously the Frelimo government’s focus on the ‘socialist family’ upheld that
women were economically dependent on their husbands (Arnfred 2001: 41- 42).
However, with the economic decline that was aggravated by the civil war and the
introduction of neo-liberal economic structures in the 1990s, growing numbers of men
have not been able to earn regular salaries. This has complicated the establishment of
stable nuclear households.
As their husbands were unemployed and the cost of living was rising, more
women needed to earn money. In addition, most of the refugees from the war who fled
to the city were women. For the first time, the number of women in the city exceeded
that of men and the number of female-headed households rose (Oppenheimer & Raposo
2002: 20-21). Since women could not rely on their family ties or marriage, they were
forced to become financially independent and this has generated physical and social
mobility (WLSAMOÇ 2001: 106-150). This process has continued since the end of the
war with the implementation of neo-liberal structures. More women are now receiving a
good education and having professional careers.
These developments, which are a central concern for both Pentecostals and
non-Pentecostals, impinge on established reproductive relations and are defining current
relationships (cf. Knauder 2000: 173-191). Women complain about their husbands
failing to offer financial support and men say that it is difficult to find a wife if they
have no car or house. Domestic violence is increasing amid these frustrations, even
more so in cases where women have an income while their husbands are unemployed
(cf. CEA et al. 2000: 64-65). Another source of friction is the extent to which a couple’s
income should be shared with their respective families. The demands of extended
families on relatively wealthy urban couples are deepening conflicts within marriages
and these demands are being experienced as a burden. Distrust about unfair sharing
between relatives and couples is becoming evident. People complain about the problems
of setting up businesses and advancing because they need to take care of poorer
relatives. As soon as they are earning money, their relatives claim to need financial
support. ‘That is why Mozambique isn’t developing,’ one interlocutor said. ‘The
204
development agencies don’t understand. We cannot prosper because we always have to

share our income.’277
Problematic access to money and distrust in (affective) relationships figured in
witchcraft stories circulating in Maputo. For example, there are stories about why so
many well-educated and successful women have not married and how when they were
children these women were sacrificed to a spirit by their family to generate wealth
(Chapter 6; cf. Bähre 2002; Niehaus 2002). Such witchcraft allegations are considered
grave allegations and illustrate how structures of sharing wealth are under enormous
pressure. As more and more people are becoming rich and others poorer, and as fewer
and fewer ‘normal’ households can be found, persons feel that patterns of exchange are
no longer healthy. A deep sense of (spiritual) insecurity involving danger, doubt and
fear plagues many Mozambicans. Strikingly, people particularly feel danger in relation
to those who are closest to them, such as kin, partners and neighbours (cf. Nielsen
2010). Acts of witchcraft can mostly be expected from those within intimate networks
who share or want to share one’s wealth (cf. Ashforth 2001: 215-217). I also had to
learn, as did my friends and interlocutors, to be constantly vigilant and to presume
malice in contacts with them and others regardless of appearances. The fact that I was
robbed several times and assaulted in my own home was a clear manifestation of evil
powers that threatened me, according to converts and pastors, and also non-
Pentecostals. They advised me to dismiss my housekeeper, to suspect my neighbours,
and to be careful when establishing contacts and inviting people into my apartment.
It is in this reality that the financial offerings and the related practices of
Pentecostal churches are taking place. The incident with the coffins touched a raw nerve
regarding the regeneration of life, which is embedded in historical socio-economic
transformations. The Pentecostal churches’ answer was not to call for a revitalization of
faded kin relations and sharing money to sustain the regeneration of life and
development. On the contrary, pastors are calling for a definitive break with patterns of
dependency through demanding holocaustos. Converts have to bury and burn traditional
ways of living by destroying local wealth relations and pay excessive amounts of money
to the church. In the Pentecostal context, people have to distance themselves from
relations that are generally considered as the source of well-being, such as kinship
structures. This appears to be especially appealing to the upwardly mobile women who
participate in the financial campaigns.
8.4 Tithes, offerings and campaigns
According to Pentecostal leaders, tithes and offerings are vital tools for the
dissemination of the Gospel (Macedo 2004b: 60-68; Tadeu undated A).278 It was clear
277
205
and logical to converts that their money was being used to pay the salaries of pastors,
the church rent and to broadcast their message. Moreover, by giving tithes and
offerings, converts became blessed and they had the right to collect their blessings (o
direito de cobrar) according to Malachi 3: 10, a Bible verse that was often used in
services:
Bring the full amount of your tithes to the Temple, so that there will be plenty of food
there. Put me to the test and you will see that I will open the windows of heaven and
pour out on you in abundance all kinds of good things (Good News Bible 1994).
Pastors always used the example of famous people who had shown their respect of God
by paying tithes and had been transformed into millionaires, such as Henry Ford and
William Colgate (Macedo 2004b: 64). By showing similar faith, according to the
pastors, converts would be surprised. Their money would never dry up. On the contrary,
it would continue to multiply and they would have everything they had always wanted,
such as peace, happiness, health, love and food (cf. Macedo 2004b: 64-65; Tadeu
undated A: 83-88). Through the money one gives, God is pressed to offer abundance in
return. Yet the spirit in which one gives is crucial. In principle, offerings are made by
‘free and spontaneous will’ (Macedo 2004: 66). And the most important thing is not the
amount of money donated but whether one gives wholeheartedly. The Bible story of the
poor widow and rich people was told regularly. Many rich people threw large amounts
of money into the temple treasury but a poor widow put in two very small copper coins,
worth only a fraction of a penny. And Jesus said:
I tell you that this poor widow put more in the offering box than all the others. For the
others put in what they had to spare of their riches; but she, poor as she is, put in all she
had – she gave all she had to live on (Marcus 12: 43b-44 in Good News Bible 1994).
In addition, there are special campaigns (campanhas) such as the holocaustos and
Fogueiras that allow people to realize a particular dream, such as finding a faithful
husband. Jesus gave his life in sacrifice and so converts have to make sacrifices as well:
they should concentrate all their energy into one request.279 When I interviewed Dona
Maria (Section 5.2.2),280 she was participating in the Fogueira Santa and explained how
it only works if one is committed and has no doubts about the outcome.
The Fogueira is not just something. For a long time, I didn’t understand it, it isn’t
something anybody can do. You must really want to do it and not have any doubts, and
278
See Kramer (2001: 209-242) on tithes, offerings and sacrifices in the Universal Church in Brazil. For
Mozambique, see Gaspar (2006).
279
See http://www.arcauniversal.com/fogueirasanta/, accessed 22 July 2010.
280
13 June 2006.
206
then big things will happen. This has happened for many people. You give away
something of yourself to God, to obtain something better. Suppose that you want to
build a house but you have 20 or 30 million Meticais [about US$ 600 to US$ 900] and
that isn’t sufficient. Then you give that amount to God, in the sense of, well, it belongs
to Him and he will multiply it. Or if I have an old car but I think I deserve a newer one,
then I give away the old car by selling it and offer the money in church. God will
provide me with a new car. The first time I participated, oh I was really innocent. I
earned a salary of 1 million [about US$ 30] each month, and I gave it with many
requests, I didn’t want to drink anymore, to smoke, I wanted to study and to succeed. I
quit drinking and smoking, yes, I remember that Fogueira very well. The other
Fogueiras, I wasn’t strong, I was doubtful, not serious, I was playing. But this year, I
started things right. I now participate with a lot of faith. It is necessary to have a lot of
faith. I feel that good things are going to happen.
Dona Maria was one of the several converts I met who, with a great deal of effort, had
been gradually successful. She managed, as she dearly wished, to get a scholarship to
study abroad and had started to build a house.
The idea of establishing a particular type of reciprocal relationship between
believers and God seems obvious: converts give to receive plenty in return. However it
appeared that the explanations and practices had adopted a particular dimension in the
South-South transnational exchange between converts and pastors. For example, even
though the Bible passage pastors often cited said that the amount was not important, the
pastors declared that Mozambican coins were worthless and converts should give
banknotes or US dollars. Competition in the quantities people gave was encouraged,
and this ensured that converts gained a certain respect. The pastors asked large amounts
of money, US$ 500 or more, and whoever who came forward received special
privileges. Mutual obligations between converts, pastors and God could barely be
maintained because of the excessive offerings. At first, I had no idea of the real
quantities converts were sacrificing but then started to realize that offerings were out of
all proportion when converts repeatedly talked about conflicts with partners and kin,
and accusations of ‘eating’ money. To put it briefly, giving everything one has, like the
poor widow did, was taking on particular dimensions in the lives of Mozambican
converts and their families, and went beyond the possibility of receiving in abundance. I
illustrate this with the case of Dona Silmara, who followed a Pentecostal business
course, and Luisa, who participated in several correntes and did a holocausto with the
small amount of money she clearly needed to survive on a day-to-day basis.
8.4.1 Business Courses
When I met Dona Silmara in September 2005 (Section 5.2.2), she was following a
business course at the Universal Church. It consisted of ten weekly lessons given by
pastors after the evening services in different branches. I accompanied Dona Silmara to
207
a few of these sessions. The course was meant for converts with a business or plans to
start one, and the central message was that course participants should ‘think big’ and
that limits only exist in people’s minds. God gave the nations, and thus the world, to his
managers (Isaiah 54: 2-4; Psalms 2: 7-9), i.e. to the course participants.281 So the pastor
asked people how they planned to become wealthy and covered themes such as how to
expand one’s business through faith, what a good manager is, how to remain successful
and how to overcome obstacles. One lesson was devoted to achieving one’s goals. The
pastor said: 282
You have to do something. People here [in Mozambique, LvdK] are afraid of starting a
business. Mozambique is lacking many things. There are shops selling fashions, food
and home appliances. But in various neighbourhoods there is a shortage of good
bakeries and of bread deliveries. In addition, I discussed with the bishop how a lot could
be done in the field of tourism. Foreigners are coming to invest in tourism. But you are
here already. There are so many possibilities. Rent an office, take pictures all over the
country and put them on a website!
The participants on the course, the majority of whom were women, were encouraged if
not pushed into becoming local entrepreneurs (cf. van Dijk 2003a, 2003b, 2010a).
Converts were challenged to act in the neo-liberal market and benefit from any
opportunities it offered and to take the initiative to set up as many businesses as possible
because God detests poverty and wants to bless abundance. The pastors taught members
the rationality of the market based on the Gospel (cf. Gifford 2004a). And the bishop of
Maná Church wrote a booklet about finances (Tadeu undated B) in which he used the
parable Jesus told in Marcus 4 about how God’s reign is similar to a farmer who sows
seeds and then harvests them. Thus believers needed to sow money to harvest
prosperity. This parable was used during sermons as well and Tadeu himself preached
about it on his visit to Mozambique.283 The basis of these ideas was that the
responsibility of each believer is crucial for God to realize a prosperous life for the
business (wo)men. Converts thus had to write business plans, set goals, think about
solutions and not about problems, and pray for divine inspiration.
Participants at the Universal Church had to present their business plans to the
pastors during a private meeting. Dona Silmara was nervous and uncertain about her
plan and afterwards she reported that the pastor gave her negative feedback. She had
several small businesses but they were not expanding and the pastor made it clear that
she had to change her strategies. In one session we all had to demonstrate our
281
The pastor knew me as a regular visitor but did not treat me as a full ‘manager’. He nevertheless allowed
me to attend because converts took me to services and there was a chance that I would become a manager.
282
6 October 2005.
283
Cruzada de Milagres (Crusade of Miracles), 20 May 2007.
208
commitment to becoming prosperous managers by throwing grape juice (to symbolize

Jesus’s blood) over the pastor and telling him the amount of money we would sacrifice
to reach the goal we had set. Even before I told Dona Silmara that I was not going to
join in, she had already signalled for me to remain seated. Afterwards she said it would
have been complicated if I had become involved: one has to be a very committed
member of the special group selected by God to be the manager of wealth. It was clear
to her and me that I was (still) not such a manager. It was only a year later when she
talked about several more private meetings with the pastor and the pressure she was
under that I realized she had also wanted to protect me, and probably herself, from the
‘truth’.
The pastor regularly visited her businesses as part of his counselling practices.
To show her progress, she had to submit monthly overviews of the profits she was
making to the pastor who then decided how much money she had to sacrifice. It usually
correlated to the amount she had earned. However after making offerings under pressure
for several years, she ran into difficulties with her business because she could not invest
enough capital in it and could not pay her employees. She finally went bankrupt.
She told me that some time ago she and other fairly successful business people
from the Church had been called for a session with the national bishop who organized a
special campaign for them. The entrepreneurs present had to have a private gathering
with the bishop and they were asked to place their hand on the Bible and say how much
they had in their bank accounts. Dona Silmara looked at me and said: ‘Of course, with
my hand on the Bible I could not lie’ and she told them how much was there: US$
15,000. The bishop then made it clear that she had to sacrifice everything in her bank
account and the next day she went to the bank to collect the money in cash because the
pastors refused to accept cheques and bank transfers. ‘So I cannot prove what
happened,’ Dona Silmara added. The bank manager invited her to make an appointment
with him as he felt her actions were suspicious but Dona Silmara assured him that she
was completely sure about what she was doing. ‘Although, Linda, I felt a lot of pain in
my heart,’ she added. Dona Silmara hid all of this from her children, some of whom
were also converts. Thus nobody knew about the difficulties she had run into. She was
not the only one with problems. For example, Dona Silmara asked me if I had seen the
propaganda for the church’s services and courses on television on Miramar. One
woman who testified how she had become a millionaire in church had later become a
beggar and was living on the streets of Maputo because she had given everything to the
church.
8.4.2 Luisa’s ‘holocausto’

I met Luisa in October 2006 and we talked as we walked to her house, a single room,
with no access to water or electricity. Her mother, who was living with a new man, had
209
sold the house where Luisa had been living with relatives. She hardly had anything but
she told me everything she was going to buy in the near future: a table, a cooker and a
bed. She worked as a receptionist at a new company but her salary had not been paid for
the last two months.
Three and half years ago she had walked into the Universal Church and stayed,
although her mother disliked the fact and their already difficult relationship had
worsened. Luisa had once been very ill and her mother had consulted a curandeiro. But
when Luisa refused the healer’s medicine, her mother put it into her food, which
according to Luisa made her health worse. When she got better she started selling fried
chicken and did very well, but her mother was jealous and sabotaged her project. Luisa
said that now that she was living on her own she would be able to restart the business
and asked my opinion about her one-person household, which is an unusual way of life
for a single woman in Maputo. I asked about her friends. She had none and ‘in church
the women gossip’. The only person she seemed to talk openly to was the pastor. She
longed to get married but, after meeting her mother, her boyfriends had always left her.
A month later we met again in church.284 She had lost weight and was angry
because she had only received part of her salary. Her manager had kept the other part
without giving any reason, and she wanted to buy a table and chairs. ‘I am also angry
with God,’ she said. ‘I took the envelope for my sacrifice.’ When she kept silent, I said:
‘And you tore the envelope up?’. She shook her head and added: ‘Here I am. Today’s
service is for prosperity, I cannot fail.’ The next time we met, she was in a state of
shock as her neighbours had put witchcraft medicines outside her door. Another day,285
she phoned me. Something was wrong. We met in front of the church but she could
hardly talk because of throat problems. Luisa explained that her mother was very close
to feiticeiros (sorcerers) who gave her medicine that had burned her throat. She
discovered that her mother wanted to kill her by offering her to a spirit to become rich
herself. Her mother was conspiring with her neighbours, so she needed to move as
quickly as possible but as she was still not receiving her salary she could not pay rent on
a new room. She prayed a lot with the pastor, made some additional offerings and found
a temporary home but was afraid of becoming homeless because she could not pay the
rent there either. She prepared a holocausto with the pastor which she expected would
solve her problems. The pastor’s assistants told Luisa that she should get married
because she needed company but Luisa had no one she could trust. She would continue
to fight. ‘I have hands and feet and will go after a better job and salary.’ I never saw her
again.
284
20 November 2006.
285
5 February 2007.
210
An assistant puts holy oil on the copies of converts’ identity cards
A former therapy-of-love-pastor who had been dismissed because of his affairs with women, started a lottery
business ‘Moçambique dá $orte’ (Mozambique gives Luck)
© Rufus de Vries
211
8.5 Pentecostal aid: Help yourself
I thought that after sacrificing more than US$ 20,000 and going bankrupt, Dona Silmara
would be angry with the church and its pastors. Surprisingly, she was angry with
herself. ‘How could I have been so blind? Why did I give all my money away?’ she
asked.286 She started frequenting the World Church of the Power of God, ‘where I am
learning facts I never knew’. For example, she learned about the Apostle Peter who
writes about false teachers: ‘In their greed these false teachers will make a profit out of
telling you made-up stories’ (2 Peter 2, verse 3 in Good News Bible 1994). ‘In the
Universal Church they were selective with Bible texts,’ Dona Silmara stated.
... in the World Church there are only tithes and offerings and these you give out of
love. There are no sacrifices, no holocaustos or pledges. If people want to make them,
that’s fine, but it isn’t compulsory.
While she was critical about the behaviour of some of the pastors at the Universal
Church, she continued to wonder ‘how I could have been so stupid’. She could have
read the Bible passages she was learning about in the new church. In line with the idea
of intelligent faith (Chapter 7), she had not used her brains but instead ‘I submitted
myself to their pressure because I felt how my heart almost walked out of my body
[expression of stress and fear, LvdK].’ Dona Silmara and other converts did not simply
perceive the Pentecostal church as a place of support but as a setting ‘that only helps
those who are able to help themselves’ (van Dijk 2009a: 110). A conversation between
her and a Universal Church pastor elucidated this insight.287
The pastor in question, a Mozambican, was badly treated by the national
bishop because ‘he doesn’t take dollars (ele não tira dolares) [from converts, LvdK]’,
Dona Silmara revealed. This pastor was very suspicious about my presence, since any
problem, for example an article I might publish about him, could ruin him, but Dona
Silmara assured him that he could trust me. He and Dona Silmara started talking about a
programme broadcast on STV on tithes. They discussed a woman’s charge against her
husband who had sold their house to be able to offer the proceeds to the Universal
Church. The husband had been asked to promise US$ 1000. The convert said he did not
have that amount but his pastor pressed him to sell his house. On the day the house was
sold, for 90 million Meticais [about US$ 2,700], the pastor took all the money. The
convert’s wife knew nothing about the sale of her house and began legal action. Then,
the pastor who was talking to Dona Silmara mentioned her own case and reminded her
how she had given all her money. Dona Silmara looked tormented. The pastor
286
Conversation, 9 June 2006, about a month after she had left the Universal Church.
287
Conversation, 7 March 2007.
212
continued: ‘At that moment, you fell (a senhora caiu)’. The insinuation was clear to
Dona Silmara and me: a soldier in God’s army should never fall. Dona Silmara had not
used her faith intelligently. It was Dona Silmara’s own fault that she had lost all her
money. This was further clarified by the reactions of other converts who were friends of
Dona Silmara’s but had distanced themselves from her when she left the church. One of
them had an idea of what had happened:288
You must use intelligent faith. I don’t feel obliged to always give what the pastors ask.
In the beginning, I did, as many did and do, but it isn’t necessary. You have to give
when you want to and are able to. Silmara was too obedient.
Intelligent faith also means that converts should be alert to the pastors’ activities. Dona
Silmara’s former friend claimed that pastors can make mistakes and also fall (caiem),
like the pastor who had committed a grave error by taking the money from the house
sale (see above) instead of waiting for the convert to offer it in church. Even pastors can
be imbued with evil, and every convert needs to engage in self-responsibility, which is
central to the Pentecostal faith. Felizmina, whose sister had married a pastor without her
father’s consent, spelled out how:
... some converts are not strong enough to participate in the Universal Church. A lot of
pressure is exerted on you. If you don’t know what your goals and objectives are, it is
possible that you will do things you probably don’t want to.289
To escape the pastor’s orders to pay a huge amount of money at the Fogueira, one
woman decided to tell the pastor that she would sacrifice in the Universal Church in
South Africa because she would be there on the day that the offering was due.290
Pentecostals might consider her strategy as an act of intelligent faith.
Another revealing insight came when Dona Silmara and her former friends
explained that the financial practices of the Universal Church in Mozambique are
dissimilar to those in Brazil and that Bishop Edir Macedo was unaware of what is
happening in Mozambique. One former Mozambican assistant pastor acknowledged
that when Brazilian missionaries arrive in Mozambique, they are shocked about the
financial excesses that are being demanded.291 According to other Mozambican assistant
pastors and obreiros who had left the church, the Brazilians were surprised by the ease
with which Africans offered money.292 Sacrifices have become more extreme in recent
288
Conversation, 17 July 2006.
289
290
Conversation, 9 June 2006.
291
Interview, 1 March 2007.
292
Conversations in May 2007.
213
years, something that was confirmed by converts who had been part of the church since
it started in Mozambique, including Dona Silmara, who said that sacrifices were
becoming disproportionate. As there seemed to be no limits to the sacrifices converts
were prepared to make, amounts had increased over the years. In this sense, the
interaction between Mozambican converts and Brazilian pastors has reinforced aspects
of the Pentecostal Prosperity Gospel, while adding other interpretations to Macedo’s
explanations of certain Bible verses (cf. Maxwell 1998).
Two interrelated developments would appear to be influencing financial
practices in Brazilian Pentecostal churches in Mozambique. First, the tensions, distrust
and fear that exist in social relationships and the spiritual insecurity of spirit spouses
and witchcraft are shaping desires to make a break with spiritual and social relations by
means of holocaustos and Fogueiras. Second, sacrifices are becoming part of the way
women are demonstrating their ability to pioneer and be successful in their careers and
businesses, their marriage and even in church. They have to show that they are
adequately and smartly equipped, or ‘sufficiently strong’ to use the words of convert
Felizmina, to gain and set frontiers in the world. To this end, the transnational space of
conquest encourages them to go even further than they could have imagined, including
in the financial domain.
Take the case of Luisa. I met more women like her, who lived alone and were
desperately looking for a husband. They had very tense relationships with their kin but
it was clear that it was unusual and difficult to live alone. Neighbours became
suspicious and questioned why a woman would be living by herself. Was she involved
in evil practices? These women’s relative independence also complicated their intimate
relationships. Fears about intentions on both sides – is s/he after my money? – and
about possible spiritual involvement made partners wary. Luisa was indeed afraid that
she was possessed by an evil spirit who was obstructing her relationships because a
spirit ‘ate from her wealth’ as the Mozambican saying goes.293 In this context, her
mother and a spirit spouse were interrelated as they wanted to ‘eat’ from her (from her
sexuality and her money). Cases of women like Luisa are good examples of the distrust
that exists between persons, especially kin and partners, in establishing control over
one’s life and one’s resources. I noticed that, in many families, members visited
different churches: one went to Catholic mass, another to the Assembly of God, one to
the Zionists and another to the Universal Church. To prosper, they had to operate
individually, otherwise power and money had to be shared. Everyone was looking for a
powerful spiritual source to protect them against jealousy and harm.
293
When people said that others were ‘eating’ from them, it generally referred to concerns that someone was
accumulating wealth at their expense, which points to witchcraft. See Note 18 in Chapter 6 (cf. Fry 2000: 79-
80; Schuetze 2010; West 2005: 35-39; Bähre 2002; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999a; Niehaus 1997; cf. Bastian
1997; Meyer 2008b).
214
By sacrificing money, Luisa broke off her relationship and dependence on kin,
especially her mother who she thought to be after her money. To protect herself, tithes
or normal offerings would not have sufficient impact and something bigger had to take
place to show her mother and any evil spirits that she was serious and could mobilize
more powerful forces. A powerful miracle had to happen to radically change her
situation. Knowing that money could make or break relations, she did a holocausto.
Instead of her mother destroying her, the opposite would happen and she would triumph
by becoming even wealthier. Hubert & Mauss (1964) examined how consecration,
effected by a sacrifice, is achieved in the destruction of the victim. The victims of
holocaustos and Fogueiras are those who depend on money that is offered, and who, in
this context, are principally relatives and ‘fictive kin’ (Lundin 2007: 115, 116).
Converts were highly critical of society, particularly the pressure of kin and the
role of spirits, and had a deep wish to leave everything behind. Convert Julia, for
example, tried to explain the burden she felt.
My kin visit a curandeiro to get protection. The healer will drive the evil spirits away.
But these evil spirits have to go somewhere, if they leave one person they have to go to
another and they go through blood relations. The evil comes into me or into my sister. I
am so tired of this vicious circle and want to leave Mozambique. I want to live
elsewhere where you are less liable to be affected.294
The possibility of distancing oneself from this vicious circle by going elsewhere is
found by joining the transnational Pentecostal domain of conquista. It is interesting to
note that as part of the Fogueira, pastors and bishops travel to Mount Sinai in Israel,
effectuating a double transnational mobility – Brazil-Mozambique-Israel. This would
seem to demonstrate the strength converts attribute to Fogueira, to the extent that
visitors from other churches are even attracted. The trip to Israel adds to the power of
mobility generated by transnational Pentecostalism as additional boundaries and borders
are crossed.295 Inevitably, it enhances the experience of pioneering, similar to the
experiences of God’s chosen people who went on a journey to the Promised Land.
Having left everything behind in Egypt, they received God’s special blessings on Mount
Sinai (Exodus 19, Good News Bible 1994). Mozambican converts travelled a
comparable journey by following pastors on trips in the mountains along the border
with Swaziland. I participated on such a journey and the walk to the top, where money
was offered (see photo 8.5), was another battle for inexperienced walkers who panted,
and groaned to make the transgression of boundaries and limits possible.
294
295
Saliently, a convert who worked as a stewardess for the Mozambican airline told me that the pastors did
not travel to Israel but went on holiday to South Africa. This convert left the Church (conversation, 9 October
2006).
215
Converts’ investments in demanding trips, devastating financial sacrifices and

‘coffin rituals’ provoke and strengthen feelings of distrust between them and their kin,
partners and neighbours who cannot share in the wealth of their Pentecostal relative and
are afraid of losing their belongings to the church. While church practices are meant to
protect one from begging, distrust, jealousy and evil powers, risk and distrust are in fact
being fuelled. Pentecostal anti-witchcraft rituals suggest to non-Pentecostals that
converts are witches themselves (cf. Marshall 2009; Newell 2007; Smith 2001)296 and
any denial of local social obligations generally triggers witchcraft accusations
(Geschiere 1997).
Converts come to stand alone. Dona Silmara and Luisa became dependent on
the pastors and became deaf or insensitive to other views and Bible passages. When
reflecting on why converts give all their money away, Dona Silmara said: ‘It is as if you
cannot think anymore, you are totally in it’.297 Converts rarely participate in a
community of engaged brothers and sisters with checks and balances where trust can be
built. In contrast to Englund (2007) who concluded that Pentecostalism in Malawi is an
important source for the development of civility and trust, Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Mozambique (and South Africa, see van Wyk 2008) enhances anonymity and distrust.
Converts with problems are avoided by fellow converts. Little to no personal
information is shared and I had difficulty establishing contact within the transnational
churches, in contrast to the AICs and the Assemblies of God churches. I also observed
how attempts to create a group of women to visit the sick or to collect money for
weddings were ignored as far as possible. Converts said that they were too busy for
these sorts of activities. To them, the possibility of remaining relatively anonymous was
an attractive aspect of the Pentecostal churches, exactly because of the level of distrust
in society.
Converts do not necessarily perceive themselves as victims of Pentecostal
financial practices. They have to act through faith and use their intelligence, so blaming
others is senseless. The way in which they participate shows whether they are righteous
pioneers. Dona Silmara commented on how, after the Fogueira, pastors were always
moved on.
296
Other studies of religious groups have also demonstrated how outsiders view these rituals as destructive.
For example, Fields (1985: 265) analyzed how colonial government officials perceived the baptisms of the
Watchtower movement in south-central Africa as ‘one of the most subversive influences militating against the
maintenance of amicable social relations that came to our notice’. For northern Mozambique, West (2005)
described how the local populations identified the government’s negation of local invisible forces as a form of
witchcraft.
297
Conversation, 9 October 2006.
216
If the Fogueira does not produce positive results you can complain to the new pastor,
but he will say that you or the former pastor probably did not perform it properly or that
you didn’t give with your heart, or you didn’t give enough, and so on.298
Some converts remarked that they did not want to leave a church to which they had
already offered so much money and that if a blessing was to come, it would demonstrate
their proven commitment and be the result of their link to a place where they had
repeatedly sacrificed money.
Women of Dona Silmara’s generation are keen to become part of a new socio-
economic and cultural order in which it is possible to study and get a well-paid job. The
Pentecostal business courses, for example, are perceived by these women as a place
where they can gain some basic understandings of the economic market and how to
become successful women in the economic as well as in the socio-cultural sphere. They
feel that they have to learn to make personal choices and take control of their lives.
Upwardly mobile women’s dedication to practices such as burying coffins and
sacrificing money affirms their break with the local culture, their new self-
understanding in life and their progress and success. Luisa, for example, actively
participated and offered money during special services that focused on finding a partner
and a house. It was a strategy to control her own sexual and marital relationships. Her
self-earned money would no longer be a danger in intimate relationships but would
contribute to one and her independence could be converted into ‘affective relationships
based on love’, instead of provoking animosity. Sacrifices were a tool and a test for
women’s capacities to pioneer the urban space.
In this respect, I had the impression that younger converts perceived what was
taking place in the churches as quite normal. The uncertainties and risks that were part
of their daily lives put the practices of the Pentecostal churches in line with ‘normal’
occurrences in society. Compared to the older generation, the younger generations, in
particular 15-30 year olds, were acquainted with the challenges, uncertainties and
conflicts of urban society. They had grown up in a time of war or post-war and during
the introduction of a neo-liberal economy and were better equipped to deal with the
demands being placed on them than women like Dona Silmara. I found that they more
often negotiated with the pastors about their sacrifices and left the church sooner if they
felt their lives were not improving. Even though I am not sure Luisa was able to respond
adequately to the pressure of the pastor, Felizmina and others seemed able to do so and,
by trial and error and after falling over and picking herself up again, Dona Silmara
learned to do so too.
298
Conversation, 9 October 2006.
217
A final observation about the Pentecostal ‘self-help mentality’ regarding

money practices concerns the position of the pastors. Like the converts, the pastors too
have to show that they can be victorious. They operate in a hierarchical church system
where the national bishop, probably at the request of the international leadership, tells
the head pastor of each church to deliver a certain amount of money every month. This
duty is passed on to the assistant pastors whose salary depends on how much they are
able to get from converts.299 The pastor who had demanded that I sacrifice US$ 2000
during the Fogueira came to me afterwards to say that he had no money to travel to a
church branch elsewhere in Maputo, where he had to start all over again as an assistant
pastor. I was so taken by surprise because he suddenly changed from being an
‘oppressive’ pastor into a powerless man that I forgot to offer him a lift, which was
probably the reason for his sudden openness towards me. Had he been dismissed
because I and probably other participants had not paid the full amount he was required
to raise? – another pastor had to give up the car he had received from the bishop
because he refused to take US dollars from the converts. Or had he been too successful
and needed to escape complaints from converts?
8.6 Conclusion
The excessive Pentecostal financial campaigns exceed the boundaries of what can be
considered a healthy economy of exchange in which religion serves the common good.
Admittedly, Brazilian Pentecostal pastors are encouraging Mozambicans to think
positively, start businesses and develop socio-economically (cf. CDE 2008). But the
techniques they are using to produce progress are creating socio-cultural discontinuities,
risk and vulnerability. Particularly for upwardly mobile women, these Pentecostal
techniques of sacrificing money are alluring. Economic liberalism that is generating
new opportunities as well as new risks has affected these women’s reciprocal
relationships while building upon former ruptures in the reproductive order that used to
impact on urban women. Increased access to waged work and changes in gender roles
have shaped a relative independence for women who converted to Pentecostalism.
Simultaneously, these ruptures have introduced uncertainties and vulnerability.
Jealousy, insecurity and fragile kin and intimate relationships were usually central in
Pentecostal women’s lives but, contrary to expectations, Pentecostal churches are not
reacting to this reality by providing a safe shelter, coping strategies, certainty or help in
repairing relations. Instead, ruptures are increasing as a result of the destructive
financial sacrifices that show the violence of conversion in mechanisms of destroying.
Local ideas and practices for achieving prosperity have to disappear. To escape control
299
This information was shared during conversations with the same pastors referred to earlier in this chapter.
Depending on how successful they are, they are given certain privileges, such as a car and a house.
218
by others (kin, partners and spirits) and to achieve control over economic and cultural
conditions, the important traditional social order, which has been supported by the
government since the 1990s, has to be destroyed. A very visible case is the burying of
coffins in or near a Universal Church building accompanied by promises of offerings
that could easily amount to as much as US$ 15,000. This is about a year’s salary for
wealthy converts and an outrageous amount of money for those on a basic income of
about US$ 50 a month.
The act of sacrificing not only shows the need to erase ‘Mozambican culture’
once and for all but also offers the possibility of realizing a new life in the current neo-
liberal society. The assumption is that churches like the Universal Church brainwash
and exploit people and that the prosperity gospel is wishful thinking. But well-educated
converts disagree with this view. They go to the Pentecostal churches and participate in
Fogueiras exactly because of the pastors’ capacities to overrule local powers and
dependencies, and the pastors’ acquaintance with a neo-liberal economy (cf. Comaroff
2009; Meyer 2007; Moreira 2010). While outsiders see the financial activities of
Pentecostal churches as negative, female converts are attracted by the fact that the
churches are not offering help but push them to help themselves, an attitude they aspire
to and through which they can learn and demonstrate their capacities to pioneer in the
world and establish powerful positions. Sacrificing, fighting and struggling are
manifestations of upwardly mobile women and their participation in the urban domain
and its economic activities.
The subsequent violence of the sacrifices women make, such as losing
everything they have, is something that the younger generation appears to take for
granted. The different strategies converts have opted for are related to the experiences
they have already had in the urban domain. Young people seem more acquainted with
the risks and tricks of urban life in which pastors, like everybody else, are pioneering
the options that neo-liberalism and democracy lay bare. Older converts are learning this
by doing. Having participated in the Universal Church for about fifteen years, Dona
Silmara left it and has established a much more independent position towards the
pastors at the new Pentecostal church she now attends. Alternatively, numerous
converts deal pragmatically with their relationship with their church. Because the
church is not a social institution and trust is not cultivated, they can easily leave (cf. van
Wyk 2008). Some temporarily participate in sacrifices to find out what they will gain,
whereas others stay for years. Many converts hop from church to church and this
practice demonstrates how converts are navigating the field of religion. As the church is
part and parcel of a risk society, converts behave accordingly.
The urge to sacrifice so much money, which goes against local social
conventions, has developed as a result of interaction between pastors and converts.
Mozambican converts have pushed the logic of Pentecostal sacrifices much further than
219
the Brazilian missionaries could initially have imagined possible. With few mechanisms
of control, as is characteristic in a pioneer society where everybody is seeking deals and
chances, pastors can experiment to see how far converts are prepared to go. In this
sense, interaction between Mozambicans and Brazilians has reinforced aspects of the
Pentecostal Prosperity Gospel. It will be interesting to see how this transnational
interaction develops. At the end of my fieldwork period, pastors were becoming upset
by the increasing numbers of court cases, although it seemed that people had little
chance of winning their cases because of a lack of evidence as payments are always in
cash. Increasingly, converts who had been with the Universal Church since the start
were leaving it to join the World Church of the Power of God. This reminded them of
the time when the Universal Church’s sacrifices were more modest as the bishop of the
new World Church had been the first bishop of the Universal Church in Mozambique.
And Mozambican assistant pastors who were feeling they had been abused by the
Brazilians were thinking of starting their own churches. The question is whether there
might now be a tendency towards a more balanced connection between individual forms
of accumulation and longer-term social reproduction (cf. Haynes forthcoming). So far,
the pioneering society of Maputo is still offering pastors who left their former churches
the space to start their own practices where they can copy financial campaigns, such as
the Fogueira. In the same pioneering spirit, new converts are enthusiastically starting to
participate in the correntes and offerings in these new Pentecostal churches. Other
converts prefer to stay in the churches where they have already invested so much, as
they know that they will only be rewarded in the long term. This brings us to the
concluding chapter that considers what kind of society these Pentecostal developments
are creating.
Sacrificing on top of a mountain © Rufus de Vries
221
9. Violent conversion: Conclusions and discussion
This study has investigated conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique. It

appears that it is primarily upwardly mobile women who are converting and that their
conversion is usually violent. The aim of the study was to understand this violent
conversion. Analysis has shown that in a shifting, uncertain but challenging urban
environment, like that found in the Mozambican capital Maputo, upwardly mobile
women are seeking to direct and control their new socio-economic and cultural position.
Uncertainties about possible new ways of life require critical cultural reflection by
women, especially in the reproductive domain with regard to their dependence on kin
and partners. Upwardly mobile women’s participation in Brazilian Pentecostalism
demonstrates how they are conquering (conquistar) new ways of being and doing
through the power of the Holy Spirit.
The South-South transnational dimension of Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Mozambique has turned out to be especially relevant for upwardly mobile women in
their exploration of alternative lifestyles and their search for new socio-cultural options.
The openness of Brazilian pastors on issues such as love, marriage and sexuality adds to
the pastors’ spiritual and cross-cultural strengths. This is allowing them to cross
sensitive cultural boundaries and is making them important and attractive healers and
counsellors. In this respect, women’s local socio-cultural position as cultural mediators
connects with the transnational Pentecostal transgression of boundaries. Both find and
reinforce each other in their capacities to challenge and move frontiers in the national
sphere, particularly regarding issues of family and gender. Since Pentecostals aim to
initiate and produce social transformations, they are a pioneering force in the city
(Maputo), the nation (Mozambique) and the world. Pentecostal pioneering behaviour
demands that converts are constantly engaged in the spiritual war between God and the
Devil. As Pentecostal soldiers, they use pioneering techniques to break, confront and
destroy, intentionally inflicting harm on persons and things. The violent effects of these
Pentecostal techniques can be observed in the hate and distrust that are emerging
between Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals and even amongst converts in the
destruction of social security networks, and in the downward socio-economic mobility
numerous converts experience.
Chapters 1 and 2 argued that the literature predominantly shows that religious
manifestations are a response to modernization, globalization and social
transformations. As such, religious conversion is mainly understood as a strategy of
coping, giving meaning and rebalancing to manage poverty, deprivation, illness,
conflict, war, insecurity, uncertainty and neo-liberal capitalism. My analysis, however,
shows that conversion is not best understood in terms of a coping mechanism. The
ethnography presented in this study has revealed that converting to Pentecostalism often
222
implies increasing uncertainty and downward mobility, which comes with the
pioneering spirit that is shaped in the interaction between South-South transnational
Pentecostalism, a gendered urban domain and different generations of upwardly mobile
women. I therefore argue in favour of understanding Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Maputo as a practice of pioneering, but with violent dimensions.
The next section recapitulates the particular aspects explored in every chapter
of this study, following the research questions presented in Section 1.4.3. Then I discuss
the insights that my ethnography provides into the relationship between religion and
social transformations. In doing so, I elaborate on the kind of society Pentecostal
pioneering is creating, with special emphasis on the three central themes discussed in
Chapter 2: family and gender; (in)security; and development.
9.1 Violent conversion
The central research question was: How and why has conversion to Brazilian
Pentecostalism by upwardly mobile women in Mozambique become violent? In an
attempt to answer this question, every chapter explored a particular aspect of Brazilian
Pentecostalism as a practice of pioneering and its violent dimensions. In the first part of
this study (Chapters 3, 4 and 5), Pentecostal pioneering was considered in relation to
Mozambican urban society and history. Chapter 3, on the gendered nation-state
formation in Maputo, provided some historical context about why upwardly mobile
women are engaging in transnational Pentecostalism as a practice of pioneering,
particularly in the field of family and gender. Family and gender have always been at
the heart of social transformations in Mozambique under colonialism, socialism, the
civil war and the current neo-liberal order, respectively. After such different historical
periods with their challenging and contradictory socio-cultural developments,
Mozambicans living in the capital today are uncertain about ‘the national culture’. This
is reflected in the current gendered discussions about the future of the Mozambican
nation-state. How should a Mozambican man or woman behave? How should marriage
and a family work? A growing number of upwardly mobile women (and some men) are
challenging what they consider to be a traditional gendered representation of the
national culture by the government, relatives and fellow citizens. They are shaking the
foundations of what it means to be Mozambican, or even African (cf. Mbembe 2006;
Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler 2002). Since the control of women’s sexuality and fertility
through lobolo always used to secure the reproduction of Mozambican society, the new
positions that urban women are currently taking appear to be making these questions
more pertinent.
Chapter 3 also argued that the position of women in Maputo, compared to
men, has been marginal since its colonial development. The role of women was
223
principally restricted to activities within the family and they were excluded from the
formal spheres of politics and work, even though they contributed to the colonial
economy with their agricultural activities and informal work. While women were
increasingly encouraged to enrol in schools, formal jobs and institutions of governance,
such as the Mozambican Women’s Organization, under the post-colonial Frelimo
government, the simultaneous emphasis on their role as mothers and wives in the
‘socialist family’ resulted in contradictions and restrictions. Consequently, women
remained dependent on their families and husbands and had limited political power,
although the civil war between Renamo and Frelimo forces, the economic crisis and the
subsequent neo-liberal reforms changed their situation considerably as a growing group
of urban women were forced to earn a living. Due to the war, women from the rural
areas fled to the cities and the number of female-headed households increased. Over the
past few years, more women have been able to enrol in schools and universities and to
start professional careers. These developments have made urban women more
independent financially and less dependent on their kin and husbands: they now drive
cars, are starting businesses and criticizing kinship structures. They are crossing
historically shaped boundaries of gender in the city, which is making them pioneers in
their conquest of former male spaces.
In their pioneering activities, women are also connecting to and exploring
Brazilian Pentecostalism. Chapter 4 analyzed how the South-South transnational links
of Pentecostalism in Mozambique are influencing the practice of pioneering. The South-
South transnational dimension of the Pentecostal space appears to be contributing
significantly to providing routes and techniques to transcend and break open the
limitations of national boundaries, such as national institutions of the family and kinship
structures, and the socio-cultural policies of the government and the older churches. In
the South-South transnational Pentecostal domain, businesses can now be set up, ideal
husbands can be found and complicated relations with kin can be erased as a result of
the new space that Brazilian pastors can offer because they have already moved away
from their past life, their families and Afro-Brazilian religions. The South-South
relations of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique are contributing to a critical
cultural awareness and a destabilization of cultural continuity by making people to a
certain extent an ‘outsider’, instead of being an ‘insider’ within their own society. In this
way, Pentecostal women are creating mobility in various domains of their lives,
particularly in the important reproductive sphere. Through their participation in South-
South transnational Pentecostalism, they are gaining access to the power of the Holy
Spirit that helps them to conquer (conquistar) new modes of being and doing with
regard to sexuality, marriage, marital relations, kinship and love.
Throughout my research it emerged that converts were involved differently in
the transnational Pentecostal spiritual war and thus experienced the violence of
224
conversion in a variety of ways. Chapter 5 addressed how these differences coincided

with generational differences. Women’s different relationships with the history of social
transformation (as sketched in Chapter 3) are influencing their exploration of South-
South transnational Pentecostalism. On the one hand, the degree of rupture converts
invest in and experience is related to their age, and thus to the historical periods in
which their lives were set. In general, older women were less integrated in the neo-
liberal economic order. Through their interaction with Pentecostal pastors on business
courses, they received ruthless training in what laissez faire policies can entail, such as
Dona Silmara (cf. Chapter 8). The younger generation tends to be more acquainted with
the liberal era and they frequently considered the pastors as persons with whom they
were ‘doing business’ (Section 9.4). On the other hand, differences among converts are
also related to their personal capacities to incorporate the Pentecostal faith, which was
elaborated on in relation to the Pentecostal concept of ‘intelligent faith’. By this,
Pentecostals mean that it is not sufficient to participate in church services and exorcize
demons but that it is also necessary to inhabit all the elements of faith, such as trust and
rationality. Depending on how fast one succeeds becoming a well trained Pentecostal
believer by following correntes (a chain of services or therapies) and interacting with
pastors, a new life is going to emerge. Chapter 7 demonstrated how Elena learned to
master intelligent faith while others failed to do so or needed more time.
The second part of this study (Chapters 6, 7 and 8) examined how conversion
becomes violent in interactions between South-South transnational Pentecostal
discourses, practices, pastors and converts. Three cases were analyzed that correspond
with the three central Pentecostal techniques of violence and their subsequent effects:
breaking, confronting and destroying. Chapter 6 demonstrated how Pentecostal women
are breaking with the so-called spirit spouse, a spirit of vengeance that is related to wars
and/or witchcraft practices and receives a virgin girl (and in some cases also a boy) as a
gift for reconciliation. I have argued that the current high number of spiritual spouses
that forcefully penetrate and ‘eat’ female bodies demonstrates the crisis in gender roles,
as witnessed by difficulties in relations between kin, between partners and between
people and spirits in the reproductive order in Mozambican society. Upwardly mobile
women are frequenting Pentecostal churches to get rid of this spirit of war and
witchcraft, and of kin who force them to be married to such a spirit. This ‘marriage’
makes it impossible for them to marry a man of flesh and bones. Pentecostal women are
learning to close off their bodies to spiritual intruders and demanding kin by becoming
filled with the Holy Spirit. Yet the way in which the Holy Spirit comes to act on
Pentecostal women’s bodies in the framework of South-South transnational
Pentecostalism is equally violent and is causing afflictions. Converts enter a violent
spiritual war by dressing in spiritual armour to combat spirits, kin and partners. As a
result, converts posit themselves outside local social-security networks, have sleepless
225
nights of prayer, and experience increased tensions in their relationships. They become
part of the frontier where the battle is being fought and incorporate the conflicts in
society and between them, kin and partners, finally coming to stand alone.
Converts must also be able to scrutinize whether all the necessary ways of
being a soldier of God have taken root in their whole body. Converts need to be
attentive and ready soldiers, continuously dressed in their spiritual armour. They are
thus always in a war situation and need a strong and determined attitude. Signs of the
Holy Spirit’s presence in their bodies are not limited to the creation of a happy marriage
and the wish to become successful, but also encompass an entire manner of being and
acting. Believers may need years of training and have to actively participate in parallel
cycles of church services (correntes) and in campaigns that demand sacrifices, such as
fasting, the payment of large sums of money and nightly vigils. The terapia do amor,
examined in Chapter 7, is one such example. Converts can enjoy romance, fidelity and
happiness in their affective relations by learning to incorporate the confrontational
Brazilian Pentecostal bodily forms, such as practices of kissing and embracing in public.
The creation of specific new bodily modes during the therapy elicits feelings for
potential partners and effectuates marriages. Yet the desire to find a partner and get
married may result in premature bonds where misunderstanding and hate develop rather
than love. For example, partners may have become demonized when a relationship did
not work. Nevertheless, resistance and loneliness are logically part and parcel of
fighting an enemy and moving frontiers. And converts and pastors illustrate this with
biblical examples such as Abraham and Jacob.
The destructive and aggressive character of Pentecostal conversion is
particularly noticeable in Chapter 8, where the financial campaigns and the huge
offerings involved in Brazilian Pentecostalism were examined. On the one hand, the act
of sacrificing thousands of dollars in church shows the need to destroy ‘Mozambican
culture’ once and for all. For example, coffins are buried in or near the Universal
Churches and a year’s salary is offered in church, practices that go against and damage
local exchange relations. On the other hand, participation in financial campaigns offers
the possibility of realizing a new life in the current neo-liberal urban society. Female
converts feel attracted by the fact that Pentecostal pastors do not offer help but instead
push them to help themselves. This is an attitude upwardly mobile women aspire to and
through which they can learn and demonstrate their capacities to pioneer. Sacrificing,
fighting and struggling are manifestations of these women’s participation in the urban
domain and economic activities. Depending on their experiences with a neo-liberal
urban society and their personal capacities, Pentecostal women deal differently with the
violence involved in financial sacrifices. Some have lost everything they had, while
others have learned to distance themselves from their pastors and judge for themselves
how much they are prepared to invest in a new life.
226
9.2 Pentecostalism, family and gender
The violent character of conversion has implications for our understanding of the link
between religion and social transformations. The remaining part of this concluding
chapter elaborates on these implications, starting with the field of family and gender.
The relationship between society, family and gender is central to Mozambican upwardly
mobile women’s involvement in Brazilian Pentecostalism. Leading studies on gender
and Pentecostalism in Latin America have argued that tensions in the household
decrease after conversion (Section 2.2). Such cases are also known in Mozambique
(Arthur & Mejia 2006: 68-72). However, in addition to the fact that changes in attitudes
may be temporary (Ibid.: 74-77), in my view it is the violence of conversion –
illustrated by increasing tensions in the household – that is emerging as the most
characteristic feature of Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique with regard to the
family and gender.
One important explanation for this distinctive feature and its impact on family
and marriage in Mozambique could be the appropriation of the South-South
transnational factor of conquest. It can be concluded that Brazilian pastors’ close but yet
distant position to Mozambicans and Mozambican culture (Section 4.4; cf. van de Kamp
& van Dijk 2010) boosts the spiritual war that Pentecostalism generally propagates. The
results of this study suggest that the Pentecostal emphasis on breaking with ‘evil’ local
cultures and investing in the spiritual war is enhanced by the South-South transnational
process as converts start to feel they are strangers in their own society. In addition, the
degree to which converts embody the transnational socio-cultural distance appears to be
correlated with upwardly mobile women’s willingness and ability to explore, occupy
and create life domains. To gain more insight into the realities Mozambican believers
shape, I looked into how women embody the transnational Pentecostal formats in their
daily life. The sensory modes shaped in South-South Pentecostalism make converts
increasingly sensitive to the spiritual war and also indifferent to other (religious) socio-
cultural practices and the experiences of their kin and partners (cf. van Dijk 2009b;
Verrips 2006). Mozambican Pentecostal women lose touch with the reality of their
partners and kin, which creates tensions between them.
Studying the ways in which religion materializes in the field of gender and
family thus requires moving beyond the search for how people establish stable new
identities and relations. Once it is seriously acknowledged that Pentecostalism is playing
an important role in the creation of new domains of social interaction, such as in the
household, we equally have to take into account the fact that conflicts emerge at the
frontiers of these life domains. As Pentecostal women are breaking with established
conventions and pushing out all sorts of boundaries, they are also encountering
opposition. In this respect, it is interesting to reflect on the relationship between a
Pentecostal ethic and the spirit of feminism in a pioneer society. Erikson (1965: 283-
227
284) described American Protestant pioneer women who lived in a society of dynamic
polarities because of the dominant fact of the frontier:
The American woman in frontier communities was the object of intense rivalries on the
part of tough and often desperate men. At the same time, she had to become the
cultural censor, the religious conscience, the aesthetic arbiter, and the teacher. … They
[the children of the woman, LvdK] must be prepared for any number of extreme
opposites in milieu, and always ready to seek new goals and to fight for them in
merciless competition. For, after all, worse then a sinner was a sucker.
In this reality, an Anglo-Saxon Puritan ethic of the self-made and self-conscious

personality was the most pervasive element of the women's role in the shaping of the
American melting pot (Ibid.: 286). Despite the obvious differences between American
frontier society and Maputo, as well as between the Anglo-Saxon Puritan ethic and the
Brazilian Pentecostal ethic, the position of women on the periphery of different cultures
shows some remarkable parallels. Pioneer women have to learn new standards of
conduct because the aspects of mobility in their lives lead to a (partial) departure of
former cultural habits and the need to form new ones. In their efforts to develop a self-
made personality, the particular Protestant ethic of self-sacrificing and self-
consciousness becomes more rigid (Erikson 1965: 286; cf. Meijers 1991). In the South-
South transnational Pentecostal setting in Mozambique, women have to demonstrate
their independent self-made personality, that of a woman capable of organizing a happy
nuclear family and a successful professional career.
This raises questions about whether Brazilian Pentecostalism, through its
impact on upwardly mobile women, will have lasting impact on Mozambican urban
society. In my view, the answer depends to large extent on the (future) role of men in
Pentecostalism, or their comparative absence. In the American case described above,
Protestant women often seemed to have Protestant husbands (Erikson 1965: 279ff; cf.
Meijers 1991: 62-64), which, although perhaps minimally, provided a sense of a
collaborative project among both men and women, and husbands and wives. So far,
Pentecostal conversions in Maputo appear to have contributed to a growing divide
between male and female spaces and between men and women. Pentecostal women are
having to conquer male spaces and this is predominantly taking place without the
conversion and integration of men. Men are not converting to Pentecostalism easily or
in large numbers. Pentecostal pastors are directing their sermons and activities at
women and are barely addressing men at all where gender issues are involved, leaving
the transformation of male spaces to women. In one of the Assemblies of God churches,
efforts are being made to also integrate men in the conversion of gender roles, which
seems to have enhanced cooperation between the sexes (Section 7.4). But often men
become demonized amongst Pentecostal women and only in a few cases are they seen
228
as fellow soldiers. This division is leading to violent conflicts between men and women.
If the Pentecostalization of gender issues is principally producing conflict, how long can
this war continue, especially if one takes into account the fact that the government is in
the process of a re-masculinization of Mozambizan society (Paraskeva 2009)? In my
view, it is the role of Pentecostalism in these spaces of confrontation that will have an
impact on future gender divisions in the city as well as on the extent of the feminizing
influence of Pentecostalism more generally. If the conversion of male spaces does not
manage to integrate more men in the conversion project but instead creates violence, it
is questionable whether Pentecostalism will play an important role in the feminization
of society at large and in establishing workable gender roles. In this case, people, and
primarily converts, will become tired of the violence, as convert Julia showed by
leaving the Pentecostal church (Chapter 6).
9.3 Pentecostalism and (in)security
The violent character of conversion affects issues of security and insecurity, which is
the second theme raised in Chapter 2 of this study. As argued before, the dominant
sociological view on religion, including Pentecostalism, is framed in terms of coping
mechanisms that are thought to offer security and cultural continuity in a context of
change. My analysis, however, suggests that this approach seems to be ill-suited to
offering a satisfactory explanation for the spectacular rise of Brazilian Pentecostalism in
Mozambique, where conversion means people entering or increasing the insecurity and
uncertainty of their position.
The violence of conversion and its generational and personal variety raise
questions about the elective affinity between levels of (in)security in a society and
violent conversion. It is interesting to note that an examination of Pentecostalism in
comparable urban societies, such as in Caracas (Sánchez 2008) and Durban (van Wyk
2008), led to similar observations about the aggressive activities of Pentecostals. These
scholars’ analyses confirm my suggestion that people who appear to be connecting most
to the pioneering techniques of Pentecostalism are those who are trying to benefit from
the unclear, uncertain and open spaces in their society, be they spiritual or physical, that
are being claimed by competing politics, economies, spirits and cultures. These
Pentecostal techniques seem to have a greater impact in environments with a strong
survival-of-the-fittest mentality. And Pentecostal practices are even gaining new
dimensions in such places. Depending on the risks converts are prepared to take and
how experienced they are in doing so, pastors can thus increase the (literal) price of the
sacrifices they demand from their members. It is emerging that the level of people’s
encounters with insecurity as much as their ability to incorporate a pioneering mentality
are influencing the degree of violence created and experienced in the process of
229
conversion. This can also be illustrated by the pragmatic way in which various converts
deal with their relationship with pastors and their churches. As the church is not a social
institution and trust is not being cultivated, people can easily leave and join a new
(Pentecostal) church (cf. van Wyk 2008). The church itself is part and parcel of an
insecure society and converts react to this and behave accordingly. The risks they take
are related to a particular type of society. Macamo (2005c) has noted that for many
African societies, such as those in Lusophone Africa, agents’ risk behaviour is
embedded in a history of vulnerability and violence, and particular circumstances of
social transformation. In a comparative framework, it might be interesting to discern
whether the extent to which conversion turns into risk behaviour and causes
(dis)continuity and (in)security (Engelke 2010) could be related to more general
experiences of insecurity and rupture in a society now and in the past, and the
pioneering possibilities people have. Considering the history of Mozambique, the
discontinuity of conversion might be seen in continuity with a history of insecurity and
rupture in which violence becomes a social condition that both disorders and reorders
social reproduction (Lubkemann 2008).
Another factor to consider is the tension between certainty and uncertainty that
is produced in the conversion process itself. Pentecostals have to demonstrate faith and
this means that they have to show that they are secure in this faith. Yet pressure can be
counterproductive, leading to ambiguity and violence. In the terapia do amor, converts
are certain about the partner appointed to them by the Holy Spirit, even before a loving
relationship has had time to emerge. Unfortunately, some marriages have led to not-so-
loving relationships. By promising a pastor that they will give away all their savings,
converts want to prove their commitment although they cannot always foresee the
effects such promises will have. In his article on religious transformation and
uncertainty, Engelke (2005: 785) says that, based on the work of Crapanzano, ‘the
religious subject can act with certainty and still not understand what that certainty
entails’ (cf. Nieswand 2010). The act of certainty is uncertain in itself and, as I have
shown in this study, potentially violent. Converts know they are still prone to the Devil
and can make mistakes. In this sense, they can never be totally secure about the positive
outcome of their behaviour even though they have converted, since they may become
less vigilant and fail in their faith.
What do the above insights say about the role of religion in a world in which
globalizing forces seem to be generating increasing insecurities and a new collective
risk consciousness (cf. Beck et al. 1994)? There are scholars who believe that people are
finding the processes of globalization uncontrollable, especially in so-called developing
countries, and that religious movements serve to construct ‘defensive identities that
function as refuge and solidarity, to protect against a hostile outside world’ (Castells
1997: 65). Yet besides the fact that at least for upwardly mobile Mozambicans
230
globalization is not necessarily a danger, Pentecostal women in Maputo are illustrative

of the understanding that the possible uncertainties globalization is producing are also a
chance to create new life worlds. The South-South transnational space, like Brazilian
Pentecostalism in Mozambique, is even encouraging these women to produce a
Pentecostal process of globalization by transcending the familiar. Upwardly mobile
converts are displaying how their decisions and actions include being prepared to step
out of well-trodden routines and show a willingness to destabilize the social order (cf.
Eriksen et al. 2010). Crossing boundaries is not being experienced as disconcerting or
uprooting, and religion is becoming important precisely in the way it is destabilizing the
notion of socio-culturally and nationally unified terrains (van de Kamp & van Dijk
2010). At the same time, the efforts of transcending boundaries and transforming imply
that conversion harbours embodied tensions between security and insecurity. Some
converts acknowledged these tensions more openly than others and reflected on their
calculations of risk, like the extent to which they would take a confrontational position
towards kin and partners. Follow-up research might concentrate further on the self-
reflexivity of converts on issues of risk and uncertainty, like in the case of incorporating
the ‘intelligent faith’ mode.
9.4 Pentecostalism and development
The violent character of conversion raises some final questions about the kind of
development transnational Pentecostalism is bringing about in Mozambique. Firstly,
there is the issue of how Pentecostalism relates to existing development models and
then, secondly, what Pentecostal development is like. In relation to existing
development models, converts are fervently criticizing local frameworks of
development. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 analyzed the ways in which converts prefer to detach
themselves from local ideas of development that have been reintroduced in the policies
of the Mozambican government and numerous NGOs. Converts are disconnecting from
local healing rituals, marriage arrangements and exchange relations. Of particular
importance here is the Pentecostal preoccupation with raising awareness of the spiritual
forces that are behind developmental processes based on ‘Mozambican traditions’. In
general, people are worried about the role of spirits in post-war reconstruction activities
and the implementation of neo-liberal economic programmes. They are afraid of the
negative consequences of vengeful spirits as a result of the war and ‘sorcerers’
searching for wealth (Chapter 6). The particular spiritual framework of Brazilian
Pentecostals, which demonizes all spirits, offers a space to address such concerns by
using a confrontational mode. The secrecy that still surrounds the public presence of
spirits due to a history in which they were negated is being opened up by the Brazilian
transnational power of the Holy Spirit that is eliminating ‘traditional’ spiritual forces.
231
This Pentecostal attitude is impacting on the processes of finding a national identity.

Pentecostals want a Mozambican identity free of traditional influences and, in an
attempt to destroy the past, they are burying ‘tradition’ in coffins and sacrificing vast
sums of money (Chapter 8). Their fellow citizens have understood this and are, in turn,
trying to counter this Pentecostal process of forgetting the past and negating the shared
responsibility of social and spiritual security.
Converts want to free themselves of the burden of local forms of security and
development that are built on kinship relations. The risks that they consequently take are
often not in tune with the strategies and interests of other members in their household
who may be frequenting other churches and healers. The fact that persons in the same
home are seeking out different spiritual powers demonstrates the problems surrounding
wealth sharing in Maputo, where growing inequalities between richer and poorer
relatives and distrust between kin and partners are ever present. These tensions
frequently have gendered dimensions and are increasing because of the contradicting
religious routes each is following and subsequent accusations of witchcraft from both
sides. In the field of conflicting views and trajectories of development, the overtly
critical views and, at times, aggressive actions by Pentecostals are leading to an
explosion of tensions, as in the case of the stoning of a Universal Church building
(Chapter 8).
Pentecostals are also critical of international donors’ efforts to ‘discipline
Mozambique through Structural Adjustment’ (Macamo 2005b) and related development
aid programmes. According to Pentecostals, these SAPs have created a mentality of
holding up one’s hands, while pastors and converts agree that people have to help
themselves and be responsible for their own actions. It is here that Pentecostalism seems
to be encouraging a form of socio-economic development that could be useful in a
market economy (Berger undated, 2009; CDE 2008). People have to learn to plan their
lives, be independent, take initiatives and run risks. Yet it is important to realize that
Pentecostal leaders are predominantly seizing the opportunities neo-liberalism offers
rather than helping converts to gain the type of skills that they need in a (new) capitalist
order. The leadership of the churches is paying a high price for air time on television
and is pressing people to offer all their savings to help the Pentecostal movement win
new converts and open new buildings. Pentecostal practices are not a reaction to neo-
liberalism but are enmeshed in it (Comaroff 2009; Meyer 2007) as these churches are,
in many ways, operating as enterprises. Additionally, Pentecostals seem be to working
to expand the boundaries of the present neo-liberal reality. Converts and pastors are
seizing the opportunities they see in the new neo-liberal market where there is little
control by outsiders, and are, for example, pushing the limits on the amount of money
they demand converts sacrifice.
232
A particular transnational Pentecostal development model is being

demonstrated, based on what van Dijk (2010a) terms ‘social catapulting’ to describe a
process that is contrary to the idea of social capital, whereby believers capitalize on the
support that religious groups offer. Pentecostal leaders are pressurizing converts to
engage in opportunities and challenges with a minimum of support. Employing Max
Weber’s general argument that the market can be shaped by religiously inspired ethical
codes of production in an environment of competition like Maputo, the Pentecostal ethic
encourages believers to take a pro-active attitude towards business and ensuring a
prosperous life. The Pentecostal development model that upwardly mobile women are
adopting involves opening up fresh spaces and navigating new cultural and economic
domains, even if this means going beyond what seems feasible, to realize heaven on
earth. Here, violent conversion serves to create a prosperous life.
In summary, conversion to Brazilian Pentecostalism by upwardly mobile
women in Mozambique is violent because it involves forcefully pushing change as they
pioneer new spiritual, cultural, political and socio-economic terrains. The South-South
transnational Pentecostal spiritual war and its techniques of breaking, confronting and
destroying are processes of social transformation that are encouraging the stretching of
societal frontiers. It is at the borders of these frontiers that conflicts are emerging as
different groups, customs, values and policies clash. However, it is precisely at the
frontier that boundaries become more permeable and social change could develop.
Women engaged in Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique are demonstrating how
much religion can influence and shape social transformations.
233
Appendix: Brazilian Pentecostal Churches in Mozambique
Brazilian Pentecostal churches in Mozambique can be placed in the so-called second

and third waves of Brazilian Pentecostalism (Anderson 1994: 72-74; Freston 1995;
Chesnut 1997: 25-48; Mariano 1999; Pierucci & Prandi 1996). The first wave of
Pentecostalism in Brazil was the arrival of Swedish and Italian immigrants from the US
who were part of the Pentecostal expansion after the Azusa Street revival at the
beginning of the 20th century. They founded the Christian Congregation (Congregação
Cristã) in southern Brazil in 1910 and the Assemblies of God in the north in 1911, with
speaking in tongues and baptism with the Holy Spirit as a central doctrine (Mafra 2001:
29-34; Chesnut 1997: 11, 26-30). The second wave was in the 1950s, and the
Evangelical Pentecostal Church Brazil for Christ (Igreja Evangélica Pentecostal Brasil
para Cristo) and the God is Love Pentecostal Church (Igreja Pentecostal Deus é Amor)
date from this period. Both were founded by Brazilians, and the Foursquare Gospel
Church (Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular) was founded by North American
missionaries. These churches emphasized healing, an entrepreneurial style of
institutional organization, and invested in the media and politics, leading the way for the
next phase of Pentecostalism.
The third phase, known as neo-Pentecostalism, began in the 1970s, expanded
in the 1980s and became a significant force in the 1990s. Included in this phase are the
Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus), Reborn
in Christ (Renascer em Cristo) and International Church of God’s Grace (Igreja
Internacional da Graça de Deus). Chapter 1 described how these churches highlight the
Theology of Prosperity and the spiritual war, are expanding internationally and are
investing in marketing, the media (television, radio, the Internet and the press) and
politics. The Universal Church is by far the largest neo-Pentecostal movement in Brazil
and it has an impressive presence worldwide (Freston 2001; Corten et al. 2003).
The Universal Church is the most prominent in Mozambique, followed by the
God is Love Church. Although branches of the Foursquare Gospel Church, the
International Church of God’s Grace and the Christian Congregation are to be found in
Mozambique, according to the official register of churches at the Religious Affairs
Department in Maputo, their presence is minimal in comparison with that of the
churches I focus on in this study. I followed my interlocutors to a variety of churches
but I have never ended up in any of these smaller churches. This could be related to the
fact that my focus was on Maputo and, to a lesser extent, on Beira. For example, the
Foursquare Gospel Church appeared to be active in Chimoio and in her study of the
Universal Church in Mozambique, Cruz e Silva (2003) mentions the Brazil for Christ
Church (Brasil para Cristo), but I was not able to find this church or anyone who knew
234
it.300 It does not even feature in the government register of churches. There may have
been attempts to establish branches in Mozambique but the Universal Church was too
strong.
This appendix presents background information on the churches that feature in
this study. In addition to the Universal Church and the God is Love Church, these
include the Brazilian Renewed Baptist Church (Igreja Baptista Renovada) with its neo-
Pentecostal features, and the prominent neo-Pentecostal Christian Evangelical Church
Maná (Igreja Evangélica Cristã Maná) that originated in Portugal even though some
Mozambicans considered it a Brazilian church as it is also active there. Converts moved
between this and other churches. Brazilian missionaries also work in the classic
Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church. This church is generally acknowledged to be
the biggest Pentecostal – and maybe even Protestant and Evangelical – church in
Mozambique and was founded at the beginning of the 20th century (cf. Garrard in
Burgess & van der Maas 2002: 180). This church has lost many members to the
Universal Church but some have since returned and some neo-Pentecostal elements
have been incorporated in the Assemblies.
Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, also known as the Universal Church,
was founded in 1977 in Rio de Janeiro by Edir Macedo, a white lower-middle class
former state-lottery employee. The Universal Church grew rapidly and by 2000 was
Brazil’s third largest Evangelical church with about 2 million followers (Corten et al.
2003: 33). Macedo was raised a Catholic and in his youth participated in Afro-Brazilian
cults.301 He became Pentecostal when he was an adolescent. Chesnut (1997: 45)
considers this church to be post-modern because ‘the hegemonic beliefs and practices of
classic and modern Pentecostalism are syncretized with elements of umbanda and
reinterpreted through the lens of television culture’. Critical and negative attention is
often paid to the stress on tithes and financial offerings that are exchanged for miracles
and prosperity. This church gained the attention of scholars because of its transnational
expansion. In the words of Freston (2005: 33):
…it is possible that no Christian denomination founded in the Third World has ever
been exported so successfully and rapidly; only 27 years after its establishment in 1977,
300
However this church’s website claims that there is a missionary couple working on a project in
Mozambique with the orphans of rebels. See http://www.missaodesafio.com.br/miss_ext.asp, accessed 10
December 2010.
301
According to Chesnut (1997: 45), he participated in umbanda and according to Mafra (2001: 38) in
candomblé.
235
it has over a thousand churches in some 80 countries around the world, outside its
native Brazil.
Its phenomenal growth has taken place since the 1990s and by 2009 the church claimed
to be operating in over 176 countries, thus in almost every country around the world.302
The Universal Church claims to have over 1000 congregations in Southern Africa
alone,303 200 of which are in Mozambique. About 80 of these braches are in the capital
Maputo.
The Universal Church is found in large cities in Brazil and abroad (Freston
2005: 37). It has always connected with the young urban culture (Freston 1994: 132,
136) and the church has been an urban phenomenon, adapting itself to the intense
industrialization and growth of the city. Its adaptability to a new urban culture, with its
inherent changes of family structures and gender roles, has been relevant in
Mozambique’s urban areas too. The Universal Church and Maná have been less
conservative compared to the other churches in matters such as female fashions and
make-up, thus making themselves more attractive to upwardly mobile women. In the
Universal Church’s weekly journal, Folha Universal, a special page is devoted to
women (folha mulher) where new fashions and trends are presented alongside recipes
and a Christian reflection on women issues.
Although the number of churches worldwide seems impressive, the Universal
Church has experienced considerable difficulties in many countries and was not always
successful in establishing new branches (Oro 2004). Mozambique is one of its success
stories. The church is very much present there and its numerical growth and impact on
public awareness have been significant. The church arrived in Mozambique in 1992 and
was officially registered in 1993. As with everything in the Universal Church, its
transnational expansion to Mozambique was centrally planned. Its strategy for
expansion and conversion relies heavily, as in other countries, on an extensive use of
mass media, a strategic location plan that includes renting cinemas or other public
buildings – such as the Frelimo building in the centre of Maputo304 – and its services
with their regular daily themes. Monday services focus on financial problems; Tuesday
on spiritual healing; Wednesday on personal development; Thursday on prayers for the
family and marriage; Friday on exorcism; Saturday on prayers and the Therapy of Love;
and Sundays are for Holy Communion. The church came to Mozambique at the right
moment just after the civil war and the arrival of significant foreign aid, when the
302
See http://www.uckg.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=73&Itemid=117,
accessed 14 July 2009.
303
See http://www.uckg.org.za, accessed 20 November 2009.
304
Suspicions were raised about the Universal Church’s possible support for Frelimo’s election campaign.
According to the Frelimo leaders however, they rented the building to the church as they would have to any
company or citizen. It was part of a plan to rent out other buildings to raise money (Savana, ‘Multinacional,
Comerciante da Fé, Parasite de Deus ou Profeta de Espírito?’ 7 October 1994).
236
country was opening up to external influences. The government’s new openness for
religious freedom and organized religion in general has worked out positively for the
church.
In its first years in Mozambique, the church encountered numerous disputes. It
was seen as being a church that was getting rich at the expense of its poor believers and
was considered a business organization that was assuming power in the country through
its Brazilian pastors, programmes and literature. It was accused of taking over all the
important buildings in Maputo, and drawing believers away from the other churches.305
The Catholic Church in particular experienced a serious loss of members in this respect.
During my fieldwork, the church appeared in the media again following a conflict with
the municipal council in an elite neighbourhood where the church wanted to build its
main cathedral. However, since the church has been constructing its own buildings, is
seen to be investing in Mozambique, is educating Mozambican pastors and has a
programme of social work (ABC: Associação Beneficiente Cristã), it has increasingly
become part of Mozambican society. Nevertheless, its position remains ambiguous.
While considerable numbers of Mozambicans attend the church, it continues to be
contested because of its explicit strategies of wanting to destroy traditional Mozambican
culture.
According to Cruz e Silva (2003: 128), the church began among the lower and
lower-middle classes but over the last few years it has been winning adherents from
higher social groups, especially from the emerging middle classes.306 Some important
members of the government frequent the Universal Church too and its propaganda
targets the young and literate (Ibid.: 112). I observed that the composition of the
congregations also depends on the locality. In the city centre it attracts the middle and
upper classes and in other neighbourhoods it is the relatively better off in the lower
social classes who attend services (cf. Section 5.2.4). Increasingly the new middle
classes are moving to the areas away from the city centre because of the price of
housing in the centre of Maputo.307
305
Critical articles about the Universal Church appeared in journals in the 1990s. See for example,‘Teologia
do Sucesso’ (Notícias, 22 December 1994); ‘O que faz correr a Igreja Universal’ (Domingo, 12 March 1995);
‘Compra de divisas e aquisições avultadas levantam suspeitas’ (Notícias, 25 September 1995); and ‘Acção da
IURD em Moçambique’ (Notícias, 8 April 1997). The former director of the government’s Department of
Religious Affairs, Mr D. Chambal, informed me that he had to intervene in discussions on television and radio
about whether the church should be ordered to leave the country. He had to explain that Mozambique is a
secular state and defended freedom of religion (interview, 18 February 2005). The former secretary of the
Council of Christian Churches in Mozambique (CCM), Dinis Matsolo, also told me that the CCM supported
the presence of the Universal Church in the country, as freedom of religion had to be maintained (interview,
17 February 2005).
306
However, various converts I met who have been with this church since the beginning were middle class,
and have always been so.
307
‘Middle class’ refers here to a growing group in urban society that has at least primary-school education
and has a monthly income of between US$ 200 and US$ 500 (the minimum basic wage in Mozambique is
about US$ 50 a month). The middle classes also have a specific cultural style.
237
The church’s appeal has been greatly increased by Miramar, its Mozambican
TV channel, which broadcasts the entire content of the Universal Church’s TV Record
from Brazil. Mozambicans’ love of Brazilian linguistic patterns and culture has
increased as a result of the daily transmission of episodes of Brazilian soaps
(telenovelas). Television plays an important role in mediating both religion and
Brazilian culture (Chapter 7). Universal Church affiliates told me how they started to
visit the church after watching Miramar programme. The church also has air time on the
radio and is easily accessed on the Internet.308
The bishop in Mozambique is Brazilian, as are all the regional leaders and the
head pastor of each church. More Mozambicans are being recruited as a result of
government pressure and many of the assistant pastors are Mozambican, or increasingly
Angolan. All these pastors are assisted by obreiros/as (fe/male workers) who have to
prepare the services and walk around during them to distribute the envelopes for tithes
and special offerings, help members to find the right place in the Bible and ensure that
everybody participates.309 Women are not generally admitted as pastors but there are
occasions such as during the Therapy of Love and women’s services when they act as
pastors because their husbands are with the church. In her study of the Universal Church
in Portugal, Mafra (2002) demonstrates that, overall, the Brazilian pastors were poorly
educated and without former international experience, which influenced the cultural
translation of Pentecostal messages.310 At the same time, a career within the church
allows the obreiros/as who usually come from a poorer background to progress and
develop a middle-class lifestyle (Mafra 2001: 44). For Mozambicans, it is important that
their Brazilian pastors have a black skin. For the first time, they are meeting foreign
missionaries of their own colour.
Igreja Pentecostal Deus é Amor
The Pentecostal Church God is Love, in brief God is Love, was officially registered in
Mozambique in 1994. This church seems to move in the footsteps of the Universal
Church, for example, by constructing their buildings next to the Universal Church’s
premises, although the other way around also happens. The former head of the
Department of Religious Affairs told me how he advised the leaders of God is Love to
go to the Universal Church for advice on registering their church.311 Before God is Love
308
See http://www.arcamocambique.com; http://www.igrejauniversal.org.br; http://www.iurdportugal.com;
http://www.uckg.org; http://www.uckg.org.za; http://www.comunidadeisrael.com/; and
www.uckgsweden.org/.
309
Kramer (2001: 234) mentioned a handbook for obreiros.
310
In the exchange between Brazilians and Mozambicans, I have mainly focused on the perceptions of
Mozambicans. However, I would like to study the Brazilian side in more depth in the future, including how
the experiences of Brazilian pastors travel back to Brazil from Africa.
311
Interview, 18 February 2005.
238
and other churches arrived, the Universal Church had already succeeded in establishing
a dominant position. God is Love members have complained that their church could not
afford the prices the Universal Church paid for broadcasting concessions. However God
is Love can be heard on the radio.
David Miranda began God is Love in 1962 in Brazil at the start of the era of
modern Pentecostalism. God is Love synthesized elements of both modern and classical
Pentecostalism and was ahead of its time with Miranda’s popular radio broadcasts, the
use of visual imagery and exorcisms during services which became a popular addition
(Chesnut 1997: 38). The (evil) spirits of Afro-Brazilian religions, like umbanda, were
evoked to be exorcized by a frantic congregation and such practices would become
significant in neo-Pentecostalism. According to Anderson (2004: 69-70), the fact that
Brazil has one of the highest numbers of Pentecostals must be seen in the light of the
significance of movements like umbanda, candomblé and macumba because
Pentecostals accept the reality of the spirit world but exorcize the ‘demons’ of umbanda
and other movements.
God is Love has several branches in Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa,
North America and Asia.312 With some twenty branches in Maputo and five in Beira,
God is Love has to struggle in Mozambique with the popularity of the Universal Church
on the one hand, and the Assemblies of God on the other. Their strict laws of personal
conduct and dress, and men and women sitting separately in church, are in line with
those of the Assemblies. But the prominence of the Prosperity Theology and
transnational connections are similar to those of the Universal Church. In general, God
is Love appeals to a more conservative (lower-) middle class group. While the Universal
Church promotes more fashionable dress and the use of cosmetics, I observed that
several members left this church for God is Love because they felt they could not
compete with the demanding stylish and relatively liberal lifestyle demanded by the
Universal Church. They felt more at home within God is Love. God is Love has several
daily services with the same themes – finances, health, family and exorcism – as the
Universal Church, depending on the day of the week. The pastors are Brazilian – often
with a white skin – and the obreiro/as are Mozambican, as are increasing numbers of
the assistant pastors.
Igreja Evangélica Cristã Maná
Christian Evangelical Church Maná, or Maná for short, was founded in Lisbon in 1984
by the engineer Jorge Tadeu, who was born in Mozambique and converted to
Pentecostalism while living in South Africa. Today this church is to be found in several
312
See www.deuseamor.com.br.
239
countries in Europe, Africa (mostly Lusophone countries) and the Americas (Smit 2009,
forthcoming).313 It was officially registered in Mozambique in 1997 and today has about
60 places of worship across Mozambique, mainly in Maputo. The church is trying to
extend its presence throughout Mozambique but I was told by pastors and church
members that it is short of the financial means needed to construct church buildings,
even though Tadeu himself travels in a private Maná plane. Services are often held in
people’s houses or outside under a tree. Church services are also led by Mozambicans
under the leadership of Portuguese bishops.
Television and radio are used to attract as many people as possible to
Pentecostalism. The Maná Sat television channel is transmitted from Lisbon to
Mozambique and members reported how a service from Lisbon used to be broadcast in
its entirely during a service in Mozambique. However people left the church due to a
lack of local services and so the strategy changed even though Bishop Tadeu still sends
his blessing to Mozambique via the satellite and special services in Mozambique are
sometimes partly led by him. When the converts in Lisbon clap, so do church members
in Mozambique and although the service in Lisbon is often pre-recorded, the impression
is that it is happening at the same time. This is a fascinating example of the role of
television culture and media in general in Pentecostalism. Courses are given via
television as well but radio programmes are broadcast locally by young Mozambicans
and are famous amongst non-Pentecostals because of the popular music they play and
the text messages that are read out on air to friends. In the minibuses (chapas), Radio
Maná was often blasting out. While I was in Maputo on fieldwork, a local television
channel opened in addition to the long-running channel Mana Sat. A Mozambican soap
was even being produced and developments in the church in other parts of the world,
like Brazil, could be followed on Mana Sat.
The church attracts the upwardly mobile urban youth. On Saturdays there were
bands in the church building and a number of youngsters worked in the two restaurants
in Maputo owned by a Portuguese bishop. As well as services on Sundays and Friday
nights, there were courses during the week for new converts and prayer meetings. In
contrast to the Universal Church and God is Love, other activities were regularly
organized, for example, youth meetings and house groups. The church offered
international business courses to teach how God’s blessings become clear through
success in business. The pastors also offer Bible study classes and press people to read
their Bibles, which according to one pastor is the opposite of what is happening at the
Catholic Church where he claimed reading the Bible was not allowed.314 There was a
regular cruzada de milagres (crusade of miracles) on Saturdays and next to the main
313
For a map, see http://www.igrejamana.com/quemsomos/index.php?option=com_content&task=
blogcategory&id=2&Itemid=3
314
240
church building near the Estrela Vermelha Market (which is known for to sell stolen
goods), a small shop sells books written by Jorge Tadeu. In many respects this church
resembles the Universal Church, although its public impact is far less and the number of
adherents much smaller. Several people in Maná had frequented the Universal Church
before, and vice versa. Its leadership was Portuguese and Angolan and assistants and
assistant pastors were Mozambican. Pastors could be either male or female.
Igreja Baptista Renovada
The Renewed Baptist Church has it roots in the classical Baptist Church of Brazil315 and
was set up in Mozambique by a female Brazilian pastor. It demonstrates aspects of the
Health and Wealth Gospel and maintains relations with missionaries from the
Assemblies of God. In addition to its weekly Sunday services, there are prayers on
Tuesday evenings, Bible study on Wednesday evenings, prayers and fasting on Friday
mornings and a service on Friday evenings. On Saturdays there is a programme for the
youth. I attended a meeting for women on the National Day of Mozambican Women
when the topic was women’s value and potential. Several meetings were organized for
the youth to discuss subjects such as dating, love and sexuality. There is also a specific
ministry for deaf persons. Maputo’s main Christian bookshop is to be found on the
church premises and sells literature from Brazil. One Saturday in 2006, I visited the
Festival of Adoration that the church was organizing in a well-known theatre in the city,
Teatro Avenida, where a lot of different music, including rap, was played. The church is
slowly expanding. Its leadership is Brazilian, although various Mozambicans are active
in the church’s organization. I went to the church because some former Universal
Church converts were attending services there and I was curious to see the Brazilian
influences.
Igreja Evangélica Assembleia de Deus
There are several types of Assemblies of God churches in Mozambique. The

Assemblies of God in Mozambique has always had close links with the Assemblies of
God in South Africa where missionaries from the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada
(PAOC), Switzerland, Norway, the UK and the US worked.316 The Canadian Austin
Chawner acquired a temporary visa in South Africa to visit Mozambique for the first
315
For a history of Baptist churches in Mozambique (Igreja União Batista and Convenção Batista em
Moçambique), see Thompson (1989).
316
I thank Reinhard H. Mattheis, who teaches at the school of the Assemblies of God churches in Maputo, for
giving me a review of the development of the Assemblies of God movement in Southern Africa, including
some notes from Austin Chawner (1962) concerning its early Pentecostal work in Mozambique.
241
time in August 1926 (Upton 1980: 32).317 His application to start a mission was not
granted by the Portuguese colonial government so he settled with his wife, Carrie
Chawner, in northern Transvaal Province in South Africa where a lot of Mozambican
migrants worked. In 1929, Ingrid Lokken, from Norway, took up the Pentecostal work
in Mozambique that had begun in 1911 when a migrant worker, Paulo Cossa, returned
home from the South African gold mines where he had converted (cf. Upton 1980: 94).
Austin and Ingrid met in Mozambique and married in 1934 after Austin’s first wife died
of malaria. They continued to set up churches in Mozambique, with a central base in
Lourenço Marques. In 1938, official affiliation came with the Assemblies in Portugal,
which brought their Pentecostal work into contact with Brazilians (Upton 1980: 102).
The colonial authorities blocked the work of the Assemblies but the number of churches
and members kept growing. Mozambican pastors were trained and Pastor Mulungu
became one of the important leaders (cf. note 9 in Chapter 4).318
The work of the Assemblies continues today, with an increasing number of local leaders
and pastors working together with missionaries from countries such as Brazil and
Canada. The Assemblies of God in Mozambique has known different names but the
official one is now Igreja Evangélica Assembleia de Deus (Evangelical Church
Assembly of God). There have been schisms which have resulted in the African
Assemblies of God and the Assemblies International, amongst others. The Zimbabwean
Assemblies of God, Africa, are also active in Mozambique (cf. Maxwell 2006: 69, 99,
101).
There are services on Sundays and Wednesday evenings and special meetings
for the youth, men and women (Section 7.4). In addition to the more classical
Pentecostal features of the Assemblies of God in Mozambique, this church incorporates
more aspects of local culture than the neo-Pentecostal churches and critical views on
traditional customs are articulated in a less confrontational manner. This could explain
the participation of women who began to combine the older and newer cultural
lifestyles. The Assemblies lost many members to the newer Brazilian Pentecostal
churches in the early years following the arrival of these churches but some have since
returned and neo-Pentecostal elements have been incorporated in the Assemblies, such
as a focus on prosperity and the exorcism of demons. The Brazilian missionaries in the
Assemblies are well educated and, compared to the missionaries in the Universal
Church, God is Love and Maná, they openly reflect on their relationship with
Mozambicans and Africans in general. They may be critical of local customs but also
try to connect with their members and to create a ‘Mozambican theology’. One example
is a course given to pastors’ wives about ‘traditional Mozambican ceremonies’ in which
317
Austin was the son of Charles and Emma Chawner who were PAOC missionaries in South Africa.
318
He died in a car accident in 2006 during my fieldwork period.
242
the link between the Bible and different cultures is discussed.319 Most of their services
take place in the local languages alongside Portuguese and the missionaries I met had all
made an effort to learn the local language and were training Mozambican pastors and
leaders. Since arriving in Mozambique during the civil war, the missionaries Bill and
Linda Mercer have helped to set up the church’s theological seminary in Maputo, the
Escola Bíblica da Igreja Evangélica Assembleia de Deus de Moçambique, and several
other branches around the country too.
319
I thank Verónica Muianga for sharing these details with me (interview, 11 June 2007).
243
Bibliography
Abbink, Jon. 2005. ‘Being Young in Africa: The Politics of Despair and Renewal’. In
Jon Abbink and Ineke van Kessel (eds.) Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, Politics and
Conflict in Africa. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 1-33.
Aboim, Sofia. 2008. ‘Masculinidades na Encruzilhada: Hegemonia, Dominação e
Hibridismo em Maputo’. Análise Social XLIII (2): 273-295.
Abrahamsson, Hans and Anders Nilsson. 1995. Mozambique, the Troubled Transition:
From Socialist Construction to Free Market Capitalism. London [etc.]: Zed Books.
Achterhuis, Hans. 2008. Met Alle Geweld: Een Filosofische Zoektocht. [A philosophical
quest for the different forms of appearances and sources of violence]. Rotterdam:
Lemniscaat.
Adam, Yusuf. 2005. Escapar aos Dentes do Crocodilo e Cair na Boca do Leopardo.
Trajéctoria de Moçambique Pós-Colonial (1975-1990). Maputo: Promédia.
Adogame, Afe. 2007. ‘HIV/AIDS Support and African Pentecostalism’. Journal of
Health Psychology 12(3):475–487.
Adogame, Afe. 2004. ‘Engaging the Rhetoric of Spiritual Warfare: The Public Face of
Aladura in Diaspora’. Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (4): 493-522.
Adogame, Afe. 2002. ‘Tomorrow's Leaders as Leaders for Today. Youth Empowerment
and African New Religious Movements’. In Barbara Trudell, Kenneth King, Simon
McGrath and Paul Nugent (eds.) Africa's Young Majority. Victims, Meanings,
Actors. Edinburgh: Centre for African Studies, p. 207-227.
Adogame, Afe. 1998. ‘A Home Away from Home: The Proliferation of Celestial
Church of Christ in Diaspora Europe’. Exchange - Journal of Missiological
andEcumenical Research 27 (2): 141-160.
Adogame, Afe; Roswith Gerloff and Klaus Hock (eds.). 2008. Christianity in Africa and
the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage. London [etc.]:
Continuum Books.
Adogame, Afe and Cordula Weissköppel (eds.). 2005. Religion in the Context of
African Migration. Bayreuth: Breitinger.
Agadjanian, Victor. 1999. ‘As Igrejas Zione no Espaço Sóciocultural de Moçambique
Urbano (anos 1980 e 1990)’. Lusotopie 6 (1/2): 415-423.
Aijer, Göran and Jon Abbink (eds.). 2000. Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural
Perspective. Oxford [etc.]: Berg.
Alber, Erdmute; Sjaak van der Geest and Susan Reynolds Whyte. 2008. Generations in
Africa: Connections and Conflicts. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Alfredsson, Ulla (in collaboration with Calisto Linha). 1999. Onde Deus Vive.
Introdução a um Estudos das Igrejas Independentes em Maputo,
Moçambique.Maputo: Instituto Nacional do Desenvolvimento da Educação.
244
Allman, Jean Marie; Susan Geiger and Nakanyike B. Musisi (eds.). 2002. Women in
African Colonial Histories. Indiana University Press.
Almeida, Ronaldo de. 2009. A Igreja Universal e Seus Demônios, Um Estudo
Etnográfico. São Paulo: Terceiro Nome.
Alsop, Rachel; Annette Fitzsimons and Kathleen Lennon. 2002. Theorizing Gender.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Amado, Jorge. 1969. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. Alfred A. Knopf. [Original
Title: Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos].
Anderson, Allan. 2004. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic
Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anderson, Allan; Michael Bergunder, André Droogers and Cees van der Laan (eds.).
2010. Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods. University of
California Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderland/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2004. ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of
Recognition’. In Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (eds.) Culture and Public
Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 59-84.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis [etc.]: University of Minnesota Press.
Araújo, Manuel G. Mendes de. 2005b. A população das Cidades da Matola e Maputo.
Espaços Urbanos Multifacetados. Maputo: CEP/FLCS, UEM.
Araújo, Manuel G. Mendes de. 2005a. Os Espaços Urbanos em Moçambique Conceitos
e/ou Preconceitos. Paper presented at the Seminar of the Department of
Anthropology and Archeology, Eduardo Mondlane Univeristy, Maputo, 21 October
2005.
Araújo, Manuel G. Mendes de. 1999. ‘Cidade de Maputo. Espaços Contrastantes: Do
Urbano ao Rural’. Finisterra XXXIV (67/68):175-190.
Arenas, Fernando. 2011. Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence. University of
Minnesota Press.
Arkhangelskaya, Alexandra. 2010. India, Brazil and South Africa Dialogue Forum: A
Bridge between Three Continents: Challenges, Achievements and Policy Options.
Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet Policy Notes.
Arnfred, Signe (ed.). 2005. Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska
Afrikainstitutet.
Arnfred, Signe. 2001. Family Forms and Gender Policy in Revolutionary Mozambique
(1975-1985). Talence: Centre d'Étude d'Afrique Noire.
Arthur, Maria José. 2004. ‘Fanstasmas que Assombram os Sindiactos: Mulheres
Sindicalistas e as Lutas pela Afirmação dos seus Direitos, Moçambique,1993-2000’.
In Boaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.) Reconhecer para Libertar: os Caminhos do
osmopolitismo Multicultural. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização, p. 293-326.
245
Arthur, Maria José. 1998. ‘Mozambique: Women in the Armed Struggle’. In Patricia
McFadden (ed.) Gender in Southern Africa: A Gendered Perspective. Harare:
SAPES Books.
Arthur, Maria José and Margarita Mejia (eds.). 2006. Reconstruindo Vidas: Estratégias
de Mulheres Sobrevivente de Violência Doméstica. Maputo: WLSA Moçambique.
Asamoah-Gyadu, J. Kwabena. 2007. ‘Broken Calabashes and Covenants of
Fruitfulness: Cursing Barrenness in Contemporary African Christianity’. Journal of
Religion in Africa 37 (4): 437-460.
Ashforth, Adam. 2001. ‘On Living in a World with Witches. Everyday Epistemology
and Spiritual Insecurity in a Modern African City (Soweto)’. In Henrietta Moore and
Todd Sanders (eds.) Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity,
Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London [etc.]: Routledge, p. 206-
225.
Azevedo, Licínio and Orlando Mesquita (eds.). 1999. The Last Prostitute. Maputo:
Ébano Multimedia.
Bagnol, Brigitte. 2006. Gender, Self, Multiple Identities, Violence and Magical
Interpretations in Lovolo Practices in Southern Mozambique. University of Cape
Town, PhD Thesis.
Bähre, Erik. 2002. ‘Witchcraft and the Exchange of Sex, Blood, and Money among
Africans in Cape Town, South Africa’. Journal of Religion in Africa 32 (3): 300-34.
Barbosa, Alexandre de Freitas; Thais Narciso and Marina Biancalana. 2009. ‘Brazil in
Africa: Another Emerging Power in the Continent’? Politikon 36 (1): 59- 86.
Barrett, Michael. 2004. Paths to Adulthood: Freedom, Belonging and Temporalities in
Mbunda Biographies from Western Zambia. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis
Upsaliensis.
Barrett, David and Todd Johnson. 2008. ‘Missiometrics 2008: Reality Checks for
Christian World Communions’. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32
(1): 27-30.
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound.
Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-
States. Langhorne, PA [etc.]: Gordon and Breach.
Bastian, Misty L. 1997. ‘Married in the Water: Spirit Kin and other Afflictions of
Modernity in Southeastern Nigeria’. Journal of Religion in Africa 27 (2): 116-134.
Bastide, Roger. 1978. The African Religions in Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the
Interpenetration of Civilizations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Batine, Rogério. 2003. Exclusão e Anestesia Social. Um Estudo sobre a IURD do
Chamanculo na Cidade de Maputo. Maputo: Departamento de Sociologia,
Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane,
Licenciatura Thesis.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bayart, Jean-François, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou. 1999. The Criminalization of
the State in Africa. Oxford: James Currey.
246
Beattie, John and John Middleton (eds.). 1969. Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, Ulrich; Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (eds.).1994. Reflexive Modernization:
Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth; Judith Butler and Lidia Puigvert. 2003. Women and Social
Transformation. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang.
Becker, Felicitas and P. Wenzel Geissler (eds.). 2009. Aids and Religious Practice in
Africa. Leiden [etc.]: Brill.
Becker, Felicitas and P. Wenzel Geissler. 2007. ‘Faith and AIDS in East Africa’..
Journal of Religion in Africa 37(1):1–149, Special Issue.
Bediako, Kwame. 2000. ‘Africa and Christianity on the Threshold of the Third
Millennium: The Religious Dimension’. African Affairs 99:303-323.
Behrend, Heike and Ute Luig (eds.). 1999. Spirit Possession: Modernity & Power in
Africa. Oxford: James Currey, Kampala: Fountain Publishers, Cape Town: David
Philip, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Belshaw, Deryke, Robert Calderisi and Chris Sugden (eds.). 2001. Faith in
Development: Partnership between the World Bank and the Churches of Africa.
Oxford: Regnum/World Bank.
Berger, Peter L. Undated. Max Weber is Alive and Well, and Living in Guatemala: The
Protestant Ethic Today.http://www.economyandsociety.org/events/Berger_paper.pdf
(last accessed on 7 September 2010).
Berger, Peter L. 2009. ‘Faith and Development’. Society 46 (1): 69-75.
Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2010. Remoulding the Past. Some Recent Shifts in the
Narratology of the Mozambican Nation. Paper presented at the AEGIS Thematic
Conference ‘Dialogues with Mozambique’, Trondheim, Norway, March 5-6, 2010.
Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2003. ‘”The Traditional Lios is Dead”: The Ambivalent
Presence of Tradition and the relation between Politics and Violence in
Mozambique’. Lusotopie 2003: 263-281.
Beyer, Peter (ed.). 2006. Religions in Global Society. London: Routledge.
Beyer, Peter. 2001. Religion in the Process of Globalization. Wurzburg: Ergon Verlag.
Birman, Patrícia. 2006. ‘Future in the Mirror: The Media, Evangelicals and Politics in
Rio de Janeiro’. In Meyer, Birgit and Annelies Moors (eds.) Religion, Media and the
Public Sphere. Indiana University Press, p. 52-72.
Birman, Patrícia. 1996. ‘Cultos de Possessão e Pentecostalismo no Brasil: Passagens’.
Religião e Sociedade 17 (1/2): 90-109.
Bloch, Maurice and Jonathan Parry. 1982. ‘Introduction: Death and the Regeneration
of Life’. In Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds.) Death and the Regeneration of
Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1-44.
247
Bochow, Astrid. 2010. Intimität und Sexualität vor der Ehe. Gespräche über
Ungesagtes in Kumasi und Endwa, Ghana. Berlin, LIT Verlag.
Bochow, Astrid. 2008. ‘Valentine’s Day in Ghana: Youth, Sex and Fear between the
Generations. In Erdmute Alber, Sjaak van der Geest and Susan R. Whyte (eds.)
Generations in Africa, Hamburg: LIT Verlag, p. 418-429.
Boddy, Janice. 1994. ‘Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality’. Annual
Review of Anthropology 23: 407-434.
Boddy, Janice.1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zār Cult in
Northern Sudan. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press.
Boddy, Janice. 1988. ‘Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics
of Possession and Trance. American Ethnologist 15 (1): 4-27.
Boehm, Christian. 2006. ‘Industrial Labour, Marital Strategy and Changing Livelihood
Trajectories among Young Women in Lesotho. In Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas
and Henrik E. Vigh (eds.) Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social
Becoming in an African Context. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, p. 153-182.
Bompani, Barbara and Maria Frahm-Arp (eds.). 2010. Exploring Religious Spaces in
the African State: Development and Politics from Below. Palgrave MacMillan.
Borges Coelho, João Paulo. 2007. Campo de Trânsito. Maputo: Ndjira.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. ‘The Forms of Capital’. In John G. Richardson (ed.) Handbook
of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, p.
241- 258.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK [etc.]:
Cambridge University Press.
Brito, Luís de. 1991. Le Frelimo et la Construction de l’État National au Mozambique:
le Sens de la Reference au Marxisme (1962-1983). Université de Paris VIII-
Vincennes, PhD Thesis.
Brusco, Elizabeth. 1995. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and
Gender in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Brusco, Elizabeth.1986. The Household Basis of Evangelical Religion and the
Reformation of Machismo in Colombia. University of Michigan, PhD Thesis.
Bryceson, Deborah Fahy. 2006. ‘Fragile Cities: Fundamentals of Urban Life in East and
Southern Africa’. In Deborah Fahy Bryceson and Deborah Potts (eds.) African
Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation? New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
p. 3-38.
Burawoy, Michael. 2000. Global Ethnography. Forces, Connections and Imaginations
in a Postmodern World. University of California Press.
Burchardt, Marian. 2011. ‘Challenging Pentecostal Moralism: Erotic Geographies,
Religion and Sexual Practices among Township Youth in Cape Town’.
Culture, Health and Sexuality 13 (6): 669-683.
248
Burchardt, Marian. 2009. ‘Subjects of Counseling: Religion, HIV/AIDS and the

Management of Everyday Life in South Africa’. In Felicitas Becker and P. Wenzel
Geissler (eds.) Aids and Religious Practice in Africa. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 333-358.
Burgess, Thomas. 2005. ‘Introduction to Youth and Citizenship in East Africa’. Africa
Today 51 (3): vii- xxiv.
Burgess, Stanley M. and Eduard M. van der Maas (eds.). 2002. The New International
Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Butler, Judith.1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New
York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1992. ‘Mbembe’s Extravagant Power’. Public Culture 5 (1): 68-71.
Cabrita, João. 2000. Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy. New York:
Palgrave.
Cahen, Michel. 2004. ‘Mozambique, Histoire Géopolitique d'un Pays sans Nation’.
Lusotopie 1 (1/2): 213-266.
Cahen, Michel. 2000b. ‘L’État Nouveau et la Diversification Religieuse au
Mozambique,1930-1974. II. La Portugalisation Désespérée (1959-1974)’. Cahiers
d’Études Africaines 40 (cah.159): 551-592.
Cahen, Michel. 2000a. ‘L’État Nouveau et la Diversification Religieuse au
Mozambique,1930-1974. I. Le résistible essor de la Portugalisation Catholique
(1930-1961)’. Cahiers d’Études Africaines 40 (cah. 158): 309-349.
Campos, Roberta Bivar C. and Eduardo Henrique Gusmão. 2008. ‘Celebração da Fé:
Rituais de Exorcismo, Esperança e Confiança, na IURD’. Revista AntHropológicas
19 (1): 91-122.
Capela, José. 2002. O Tráfico de Escravos nos Portos de Moçambique. Porto: Edições
Afrontamento.
Carvalho, Francisco Coelho de. 2005. Representações Sociais do HIV/SIDA numa
Comunidade Religiosa: o Caso das Testemunhas de Jeová da Congregação de
Sommerschield (Cidade de Maputo). Maputo: Departamento de Sociologia,
Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane,
Licenciatura Thesis.
Casimiro, Isabel. 2004. “Paz na Terra, Guerra em Casa”:Feminismo e Organizações
de Mulheres em Moçambique. Maputo: Promédia.
Casimiro, Isabel. 1986. Transformações nas Relações Homem/Mulher em Moçambique,
1960-74. Universidade Eduardo Mondlane Maputo, Licenciatura Thesis.
Castells, Manuel.1997. The Power of Identity.Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. 1 The
Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
CDE. 2008. Under the Radar: Pentecostalism in South Africa and its Potential Social
and Economic Role. Johannesburg: Centre for Development and Enterprise.
249
CEA, FM and SARDC-WIDSAA. 2000. Beyond Inequalities: Women in Mozambique.

Maputo and Harare: Centre for African Studies, University Eduardo Mondlane,
Forum Mulher and SARDC-WIDSAA.
Charsley, Simon. 1987. ‘Dreams and Purposes: An Analysis of Dream Narratives in an
Independent African Church’. Africa 57 (3): 281-296.
Chawner, Austin. 1962. A Review of the Development of the Assemblies of God
Movement in Southern Africa (including some notes concerning the Pentecostal
work in the early years). Unpublished Paper.
Chesnut, Andrew. 1997. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the
Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Chingono, Mark F. 1996. The State, Violence and Development: The Political
Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975-1992. Aldershot [etc.]: Avebury.
Christiansen, Catrine; Mats Utas and Henrik E. Vigh (eds.). 2006. Navigating Youth,
Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context. Uppsala:
Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. 1989. ‘The Roots of Mozambican Counter-
Revolution’. Southern African Review of Books April/May: 7-10 (and subsequent
correspondence).
Clifford, James. 1992. ‘Traveling Cultures’. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and
Paula A. Treichler (eds.) Cultural Studies. New York [etc.]: Routledge, p. 96-116.
Cole, Jennifer. 2010. Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar.
University of Chicago Press.
Cole, Jennifer and Deborah Durham (eds.). 2007. Generations and Globalization.
Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy. Indiana University Press.
Cole, Jennifer and Lynn M. Thomas (eds.). 2009. Love in Africa. University of
Chicago Press.
Coleman, Simon. 2004. ‘The Charismatic Gift’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 10: 421-442.
Coleman, Simon. 2000. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the
Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Collier, Jane. 1997. From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish
Village. Princeton University Press.
Collins English Dictionary. 2002. Collins Thesaurus of the English Language – 2nd
Edition. Harper Collins Publishers.
Comaroff, Jean. 2009. ‘The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier’.
Social Analysis 53(1): 17-38.
Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of
a South African People. University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff (eds.). 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture
of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
250
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2000. ‘Privatizing the Millenium: New Protestant
Ethics and the Spirits of Capitalism in Africa, and Elsewhere. Afrika Spectrum
35(3): 293-312.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1999b. ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of
Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’. American Ethnologist 26(3):
279-301.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1999a. ‘Alien-Nation : Zombies, Immigrants, and
Millennial Capitalism’. CODESRIA Bulletin, no. 3/4:17-28.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity,
Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity
on a South African Frontier. University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1993. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and
Power in Africa. University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity,
Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Vol.1. University of Chicago Press.
Corten, André, Jean-Pierre Dozon and Ari Pedro Oro (eds.). 2003. Les Nouveaux
Conquérants de la Foi. L’Église Universelle du Royaume de Dieu (Brésil). Paris:
Karthala [Published in Portuguese with Paulinas, São Paulo, 2003.]
Corten, André and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.). 2001. Between Babel and Pentecost.
Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst &
Company.
Costa, Ana Bénard. 2007. O Preço da Sombra. Sobrevivência e Reprodução Social
entre Famílias de Maputo. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte.
Costa, Ana Bénard. 2006. ‘Urbanos e Rurais. Circulação e Mobilidade nas Famílias da
Peroferia de Maputo’. Lusotopie XIII (1): 147-162.
Costa, Ana Bénard. 2005. ‘Género e Poder nas Famílias da Periferia de Maputo’.
Lusotopie 12 (1/2): 203-216.
Costa, Ana Bénard. 1993. Maputo: Uma Cidade Africana. Lisbon: Centro de Estudos
Africanos/ISCTE.
Costa, Ana Bénard and Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues. 2007. Famílias e Estratégias de
Sobrevivência e Reprodução Social em Luanda e Maputo. In Jochen Oppenheimer
and Isabel Raposo (eds.) Subúrbios de Luanda e Maputo. Lisbon: Edições Colibri
and Centro de Estudos Sobre África e do Desenvolvimento (CEsA/ISEG/UTL), p.
139-161.
Couto, Mia. 2007. ‘Desmontando e Reconstruindo a Ideia de Lusofonia’. Savana 29
June 2007: 16-17.
Couto, Mia. 2000. O Último Voo do Flamingo. Maputo: Ndjira.
Cox, Harvey. 1995. Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and
the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. Reading, Mass: Addison-
Wesley Pub.
251
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1973. The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry.

University of California Press.
Crumbley, Deirdre H.2008. Spirit, Structure, Flesh: Gendered Experiences in African
Instituted Churches among the Yoruba of Nigeria. Madison: Wisconsin University
Press.
Cruz e Silva, Teresa. 2008. ‘Evangelicals and Democracy in Mozambique’. In Terence
Ranger (ed.) Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa. Oxford [etc.]:
Oxford University Press, p. 161-189.
Cruz e Silva, Teresa. 2003. ‘Mozambique’. In André Corten, Jean-Pierre Dozon & Ari
Pedro Oro (eds.) Les Nouveaux Conquérants de la Foi. L’Église Universelle du
Royaume de Dieu (Brésil). Paris : Karthala, p. 109-117. [Published in Portuguese
with Paulinas, São Paulo, 2003.]
Cruz e Silva, Teresa. 2001b. ‘Entre a Exclusão Social e o Exercísio da Cidadania:
Igrejas ‘Zione’ do Bairro Luís Cabral, na Cidade de Maputo’. Estudos
Moçambicanos 19: 61-88.
Cruz e Silva, Teresa. 2001a. Protestant Churches and the Formation of Political
Consciousness in Southern Mozambique (1930-1974). Basel: Schlettwein
Publishing.
Cruz e Silva, Teresa and Ana Loforte. 1998. Christianity, African Traditional
Religions and Cultural Identity in Southern Mozambique. In James L. Cox
(ed.) Rites of Passage in Contemporary Africa. Cardiff: Cardiff Academic
Press, p. 34-45.
Cruz e Silva, Teresa; Ximena Andrade, Maria José Arthur and Conceição Osório. 2007.
Representations and Practices of Sexuality among the Youth, and the Feminization
of AIDS in Mozambique. Maputo: WLSA Mozambique, Research Report.
Csordas, Thomas J. (ed.). 2009. Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and
Globalization. University of California Press.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. ‘Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology’. Ethos 18 (1):
5-47.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1987. ‘Genre, Motive, and Metaphor: Conditions for Creativity in
Ritual Language’. Cultural Anthropology 2: 445-69.
Cumbi, Alberto. 2009. ‘Mulheres com Formação Superior e Emprego Remunerado:
Mulheres Emancipadas’? Outras Vozes 27, June 2009.
DaMatta, Roberto. 1991[1979]. Carnivals, Rogues and Heroes: An Interpretation of the
Brazilian Dilemma. Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press
(translation of Carnavais, Malandros e Heróis: Para uma Sociologia do
Dilema Brasileiro, 1979, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar).
Daneel, Marthinus L.1974. Old and New in Southern Shona Independent
Churches. Volume II: Church Growth – Causative Factors and Recruitment
Techniques. The Hague: Mouton.
252
De Abreu, Alcinda and M. Angélica Salomão. 1995. A Mulher no Caminho da

Democracia. In Brazão Mazula (ed.) Moçambique: Eleições, Democracia e
Desenvolvimento. Maputo: s.n.
De Boeck, Filip. 2006. ‘Youth, Death and the Urban Imagination: A Case from
Kinshasa’. Bulletin des Séances / Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer 52 (2):
113-125.
De Boeck, Philip and Marie-Frangoise Plissart. 2004. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible
City. Tervuren, Amsterdam, Gent: Royal Museum for Central Africa, Ludion
andVlaams Architectuurinstituut VAi.
De Bruijn, Mirjam and Rijk van Dijk. 2009. ‘Questioning Social Security in the Study
of Religion in Africa. The Ambiguous Meaning of the Gift in African
Pentecostalism and Islam’. In Carolin Leutloff-Grandits, Anja Peleikis and Tatjana
Thelen (eds.) Social Security in Religious Networks. Anthropological Perspectives
on New Risks and Ambivalences, New York [etc.]: Berghahn Books, p.105-127.
De Bruijn, Mirjam; Rijk van Dijk and Jan-Bart Gewald (eds.). 2007. Strength
beyond Structure: Social and Historical Trajectories of Agency in Africa. Leiden
[etc.]: Brill.
De Bruijn, Mirjam; Rijk van Dijk and Dick Foeken (eds.). 2001. Mobile Africa:
Changing Patterns of Movement in Africa and Beyond. Leiden [etc.] : Brill
De Witte, Marleen. Forthc. ‘Touched by the Spirit. Converting the Senses in a
Ghanaian Charismatic Church’. Ethnos, forthcoming in 2012.
De Witte, Marleen. 2008b. ‘Accra’s Sounds and Sacred Spaces’. International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research. 32 (3): 690-709.
De Witte, Marleen. 2008a. Spirit Media. Charismatics, Traditionalists, and Mediation
Practices in Ghana. University of Amsterdam, PhD Thesis.
Devisch, René. 1996. ‘“Pillaging Jesus”: Healing Churches and the Villagisation of
Kinshasa’. Africa 66 (4): 555-586.
Dinerman, Alice. 2006. Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Post-
colonial Africa: The Case of Mozambique, 1975-1994. London [etc.]: Routledge.
Drogus, Carol Ann. 1997. Women, Religion and Social Change in Brazil's Popular
Church. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame.
Droogers, André. 2001. ‘Globalization and Pentecostal Success’. In André Corten and
Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.) Between Babel and Pentecost. Transnational
Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst & Company, p. 41-61.
Droogers, André; Henri Gooren, and Anton Houtepen. 2003. Conversion Careers and
Culture Politics in Pentecostalism: A Comparative Study in Four Continents.
Proposal submitted to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Droogers, André; Kim Knibbe and Regien Smit (eds.). 2010. ‘Mobility, Time and Space
in Pentecostalism’. Pentecostudies 9 (2): 145-250, Special Issue.
Durham, Deborah. 2002. ‘Uncertain Citizens: Herero and the New Intercalary Subject
in Postcolonial Botswana’. In Richard Werbner (ed.) Postcolonial Subjectivities in
Africa. London [etc.]: Zed Books, p. 139-170.
253
Durkheim, Emile. 1976[1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London:
George Allen & Unwin LTD.
Earthy, E. Dora. 1931. ‘The Vandau of Sofala’. Africa 4 (2): 222-230.
Edmunds, June and Bryan S. Turner. 2002. Generations, Culture and Society.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Ellis, Stephen and Gerrie ter Haar. 2007. ‘ Religion and Politics: Taking African
Epistemologies Seriously’. The Journal of Modern African Studies 45 (3): 385-401.
Ellis, Stephen and Gerrie ter Haar. 2004. Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and
Political Practice in Africa. London: Hurst.
Engelke, Matthew. 2010. ‘Past Pentecostalism: Notes on Rupture, Realignment, and
Everyday Life in Pentecostal and African Independent Churches’. Africa
80(2): 177-199.
Engelke, Matthew. 2005. ‘The Early Days of Johane Masowe: Self-Doubt, Uncertainty,
and Religious Transformation’. Comparative Study in Society and History 47 (4):
781-808.
Engelke, Matthew. 2004. ‘Discontinuity and the Discourse of Conversion’. Journal of
Religion in Africa 34 (1): 82-109.
Englund, Harri. 2007. ‘Pentecostalism Beyond Belief: Trust and Democracy in a
Malawian Township’. Africa 77 (4): 477-499.
Epstein, Helen. 2007. The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight Against AIDS.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Epstein, Helen. 2005. ‘God and the Fight Against AIDS’. The New York Review of
Books 52:7.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, Ellen Bal and Oscar Salemink (eds.). 2010. A World of
Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security. London/New York:
Pluto Press.
Erikson, Erik H. 1965. Childhood and Society. Penguin Books.
Espling, Margareta. 1999. Women’s Livelihood Strategies in Processes of Change:
Cases from Urban Mozambique. Göteborg: Department of Human and Economic
Geography, School of Economics and Commercial Law, University of Göteborg.
Etnofoor. 2009. ‘Writing Culture’. Etnofoor 21 (1).
Etnofoor 2006. ‘ Romantic Love’. Etnofoor 19 (1).
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1976[1937]. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the
Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1974[1956]. The Nuer Religion. New York [etc.]: Oxford
University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1973. ‘Some Zande Texts on Vengeance for Death’. Africa
43 (3): 236-243.
254
Evers, Sandra J.T.M.; Catrien Notermans and Erik van Ommering (eds.). 2011. African
Children in Focus: A Paradigm Shift in Methodology and Theory? Leiden:
NVAS/Brill Academic Publishers.
Fabian, Johannes. 1981. ‘Six Thesis Regarding the Anthropology of African
Religious Movements’. Religion 11:109–126.
Feierman, Steven. 2006. ‘Afterword: Ethnographic Regions-Healing, Power, and
History’. In Tracy Luedke and Harry West (eds.) Borders and Healers:
Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Indiana University Press,
p. 185-194.
Feliciano, José Fialho. 1998. Antropologia Económica dos Thonga do Sul de
Moçambique. Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique.
Fernandez, James W. 1978. ‘African Religious Movements’. Annual Review of
Anthropology 7:195–234.
Ferreira, Ana Paula. 1996. ‘Home Bound: The Construct of Femininity in the
Estado Novo’. Portuguese Studies 12: 134-144.
Fields, Karen. 1985. Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa. Princeton
University Press.
Filho, Pio Penna. 2008. O Brasil e a África do Sul. O Arco Atlântico da Política
Externa Brasileira (1918-2000). Porto Alegre: FUNAG/MRE.
Finnegan, William P. 1992. A Complicated War: The Harrowing of
Mozambique. University of California Press.
Fisiy, Cyprian F. and Peter Geschiere. 1991. ‘Sorcery, Witchcraft and Accumulation:
Regional Variations in South and West Cameroon’. Critique of Anthropology 11(3):
251–279.
Fontaine, Dana de la and Jurek Seifert. 2010. The Role of South-South
Cooperation in Present Brazilian Foreign Policy: Actors, Interests and Functions.
Stockholm Papers in Latin American Studies.
Fórum Mulher, WIDSAA-SARDC. 2006. Beyond Inequalities 2005: Women in
Mozambique. Maputo and Harare: Fórum Mulher and the Women in Development
Southern Africa Awareness (WIDSAA ) Programme of the Southern African
Reserach and Documentation Centre (SARDC).
Foucault, Michel. 1998 [1976]. The History of Sexuality. The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1.
Penguin Books Ltd.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. ‘Technologies of the Self’. In Luther. H. Martin, Huck
Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.) Technologies of the Self. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press.
Frahm-Arp, Maria. 2010. Professional Women in South African Pentecostal
Charismatic Churches. Leiden[etc.]: Brill.
Frahm-Arp, Maria. 2006. Women of Valour: Professional Women in South African
Pentecostal Churches. University of Warwick, PhD Thesis.
255
Frahm-Arp, Maria. 2001. Problematising Pentecostalism: Towards Understanding a

Modern Religious Movement in South Africa. University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg: Master’s Thesis.
Frazer, James George. 1922. The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion.
London: Macmillan.
Freston, Paul. 2005. ‘The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: A Brazilian
Church Finds Success in Southern Africa’. Journal of Religion in Africa 35(1): 33-
65.
Freston, Paul. 2001. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freston, Paul. 1995. ‘Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History’. Religion 25: 119-133.
Freston, Paul. 1994. ‘Popular Protestants in Brazilian Politics: A Novel Turn in Sect-
State Relations’. Social Compass 41 (4): 537-570.
Freyre, Gilberto. 2001[1933]. Casa-Grande e Senzala. Introdução à História da
Sociedade Patriarcal no Brasil – 1. Rio de Janeiro [etc.]: Editora Record.
Freyre, Gilberto. 1971. Novo Mundo nos Trópicos. São Paulo: Companhia Editora
Nacional.
Freyre, Gilberto. 1962. O Brasil em Face das Áfricas Negras e Mestiças. Rio de
Janeiro: Federação das Associações Portuguesas.
Fry, Peter. 2000. ‘O Espírito Santo contra o Feitiço e os Espíritos Revoltados:
“Civilização” e “Tradição” em Moçambique’. Mana 6 (2): 65-95.
Fry, Peter. 1982. Para Inglês Ver: Identidade e Política na Cultura Brasileira. Rio De
Janeiro: Zahar Editores.
Fry, Peter. 1976. Spirits of Protest: Spirit-mediums and the Articulation of Consensus
among the Zezuru of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge
University Press.
Gable, Eric. 1995. ‘The Decolonization of Consciousness: Local Skeptics and the “Will
to Be Modern” in a West African Village’. American Ethnologist 22 (2): 242-257.
Gaspar, Gabriel Dowyvan. 2006. “É Dando que se Recebe”: A Igreja Universal do
Reino de Deus e o Negócio da Fé em Moçambique. Salvador: Faculdade de Filosofia
e Ciências Humanas, Departamento de História, Master’s Thesis.
Geffray, Christian. 1991 A Causa das Armas. Antropologia da Guerra
Contemporânea em Moçambique. Porto: Edições Afrontamento.
Geissler, P. Wenzel and Ruth J. Prince. 2007a. ‘”‘Life Seen”: Touch and Vision in the
Making of Sex in Western Kenya’. Journal of Eastern African Studies 1 (1): 123-
149.
Geissler, P. Wenzel and Ruth J. Prince. 2007b. ‘Christianity, Tradition, AIDS and
Pornography: Knowing Sex in Western Kenya’. In Roland Littlewood (ed.) Knowing
and Not Knowing in Anthropology. London: UCL Press, p. 87-116.
Gengenbach, Heidi. 2002. ‘”What my Heart Wanted”: Gendered Stories of Early
Colonial Encounters in Southern Mozambique. In Allman, Jean Marie; Susan Geiger
256
and Nakanyike B. Musisi (eds.) Women in African Colonial Histories. Indiana

University Press, p. 19-47.
Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in
Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville [etc.]: University Press of Virginia.
Giddens, Anthony. 1994. ‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society’. In Ulrich Beck,
Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (eds.) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition
and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 56-
109.
Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love and
Eroticism in Modern Societies. Oxford/Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. Constitution of Society: Outline of Theory of Structuration.
Oxford/Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gifford, Paul. 2004b. ‘Persistence and Change in Contemporary African Religion’.
Social Compass 51: 169-176.
Gifford, Paul. 2004a. Ghana's New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising
African Economy. London: Hurst & Company.
Gilroy, Paul. 1992. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Gittins, Diana . 1992. The Family in Question. London: Macmillan.
Glick Schiller, Nina and Ayse Çağlar (eds.). 2010. Locating Migration: Rescaling
Cities and Migrants. Cornell University Press.
Gluckman, Max. 1960. ‘Tribalism in Modern British Central Africa’. Cahiers d'Etudes
Africaines 1 (i): 55-70.
Goldman, Marcio. 2009. ‘An Afro-Brazilian Theory of the Creative Process: An Essay
in Anthropological Symmetrization’. Social Analysis 53 (2): 108-129.
Gomes, Wilson. 1994. ‘Nem Anjos Nem Demônios’. In Alberto Antoniazzi, Cecília
Loreto Mariz, Ingrid Sarti, José Bittencourt Filho, Pierre Sanchis, Paul Freston,
Rogério Valle, Rubem César Fernandes and Wilson Gomes Nem Anjos Nem
Demônios: Interpretações Sociológicas do Pentecostalismo. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes,
p. 225-270.
Good News Bible. 1994. Good News Bible. The United Bible Societies.
Gooren, Henri. 2010. Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation: Tracing Patterns of
Change in Faith Practices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gooren, Henri. 2006. ‘Towards a New Model of Religious Conversion Careers: The
Impact of Social and Institutional Factors’. In: Wout J. van Bekkum, Jan N.
Bremmer, & Arie Molendijk (eds.). Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion.
Leuven: Peeters, p. 25-40.
Goore, Henri. 2005. ‘Towards a New Model of Conversion Careers: The Impact of
Personality and Situational Factors’. Exchange 34 (2): 149-166.
Granjo, Paulo. 2007. ‘The Homecomer: Postwar Cleansing Rituals in Mozambique’.
Armed Forces & Society 33 (3): 382-395.
257
Granjo, Paulo. 2006. ‘Back Home. Post-War Cleansing Rituals in Mozambique’. In

Beatrice Nicolini (ed.) Studies in Witchcraft, Magic, War and Peace in Africa,
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York [etc.]: Edwin Meller Press, p. 277-
294.
Granjo, Paulo. 2005. Lobolo em Maputo: um Velho Idioma para Novas Vivências
Conjugais. Porto: Campo das Letras.
Greil, Arthur L. 1977. ‘Previous Dispositions and Conversion to Perspectives of Social
and Religious Movements’. Sociological Analysis 38 (2): 115-125.
Grosz-Ngate, Maria and Omari H. Kokole (eds.). 1997. Gendered Encounters:
Challenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa. London [etc.]:
Routledge.
Gune, Emídio. 2008. ‘Momentos Liminares: Dinâmica e Significados no Uso do
Preservativo’. Análise Social XLIII (2): 297-318.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1992. Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the
Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7: 6-23.
Gusman, Allessandro. 2009. ‘HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches, and the “Joseph
Generation” in Uganda’. Africa Today 56 (1): 67-98.
Habermas, Jürge. 2002. Religion and Rationality: Essay on Reason, God, and
Modernity. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Hall, Sir Peter. 1998. Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hammersley, Martyn and Paul Atkinson. 1995. Ethnography: Principles in
Practice. London [etc.]: Routledge.
Hanlon, Joseph. 1984 Mozambique: The Revolution under Fire. London: Zed
Books.
Hanlon, Joseph and Teresa Smart. 2008. Há Mais Bicicletas – Mas Há
Desenvolvimento? Missanga Ideias & Projectos Lda. [Do Bicycles Equal
Development in Mozambique? Woodbridge [etc.]: James Currey].
Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places. London
[etc.]: Routledge.
Harries, Patrick. 2007. Junod e as Sociedades Africanas. Impacto dos Missionários
Suíços na África Austral. Maputo: Paulinas [Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss
Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. Oxford: James Currey,
Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, Harare: Weaver Press, Johannesburg : Wits
University Press].
Harries, Patrick. 1994. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in
Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.
Harries, Patrick. 1989. ‘Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: the
Emergence of Ethnicity among the Tsonga-speakers of South-Africa’. In Leroy Vail
(ed.) The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London: James Currey, p. 82-
117.
258
Harris, Marvin. 1966. ‘Race, Conflict and Reform in Mozambique’. In Stanley

Diamond and Fred G. Burke (eds.) The Transformation of East Africa: Studies in
Political Anthropology. New York and London: Basic Books, p. 157-183.
Harris, Marvin. 1960. ‘Labour Emigration among the Moçambique Thonga: A Reply to
Sr. Rita-Ferreira’. Africa 30 (3): 243-245.
Harris, Marvin. 1959. ‘Labour Emigration among the Moçambique Thonga: Cultural
and Political Factors’. Africa 29 (1): 50-66.
Hawkins, Kirstan; Fátima Mussá and Sandia Abuxahama. 2005. “Milking the
Cow”: Young Women’s Constructions of Identity, Gender, Power and Risk in
Transactional and Cross-Generational Sexual Relationships. Options
Consultancy Services and Population Services International (PSI) Mozambique.
Hayes, Kelly E. 2008. ‘Wicked Women and Femmes Fatales; Gender, Power and
Pomba Gira in Brazil’. History of Religions 48 (1): 1-21.
Hayes, Kelly E. 2007. ‘Black Magic and the Academy: Macumba and Afro-Brazilian
“Orthodoxies”’. History of Religions 47 (4): 283–315.
Haynes, Naomi. Forthc. ‘Pentecostalism and the Morality of Money: Prosperity,
Inequality, and Religious Sociality on the Zambian Copperbelt’. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute, forthcoming in 2011.
Helgesson, Alf. 1994. Church, State, and People in Mozambique: An Historical
Study with Special Emphasis on Methodist Developments in the Inhambane Region.
Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Missionary Research.
Herzfeld, Michael. 2004. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New
York [etc.]: Routledge.
Hirsch, Jennifer S. and Holly Wardlow (eds.). 2006. Modern Loves: The Anthropology
of Romantic Courtship & Companionate Marriage. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press.
Hirsch, Jennifer S., Jennifer Higgins, Margaret Bentley and Constance Nathanson.
2002. ‘ The Social Constructions of Sexuality: Marital Infidelity and
STD/HIV Risk in a Mexican Migrant Community’. American Journal of Public
Health 92(8): 1227-37.
Hirschkind, Charles. 2001. ‘The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Auditioning in
Contemporary Egypt’. American Ethnologist 28 (3): 623-649.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1978. ‘Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography’. History
Workshop: A Journal for Socialist Historians 6: 121-138.
Hoehler-Fatton, Cynthia. 1996. Women of Fire and Spirit: History, Faith, and Gender
in Roho Religion in Western Kenya. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Honwana, Alcinda M. 2008. Culture and Politics. War, Reconciliation and Citizenship
in Mozambique. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, Inaugural Address.
Honwana, Alcinda M. 2003. ‘Undying Past. Spirit Possession and the Memory of War
in Southern Mozambique’. In Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds.) Magic and
Modernity. Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, p. 60-80.
259
Honwana, Alcinda M. 2002. Espíritos Vivos, Tradições Modernas. Possessão de

Espíritos e Reintegração Social Pós-Guerra no Sul de Moçambique. Maputo:
Promédia.
Honwana, Alcinda M. 1996. Spiritual Agency and Self-Renewal in Southern
Mozambique. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, PhD Thesis.
Horton, Robin. 1971. ‘African Conversion’. Africa 41 (2): 85-108.
Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. London:
Cohen & West.
Hultman, Lisa. 2009. ‘The Power to Hurt in Civil War: The Strategic Aim of RENAMO
Violence’. Journal of Southern African Studies 35 (4): 821 -834.
Hunt, Steven. 2002b. ‘Deprivation and Western Pentecostalism Revisited: Neo-
Pentecostalism’. Pentecostudies 1(2): 1-29.
Hunt, Steven. 2002a. ‘Deprivation and Western Pentecostalism Revisited: the Case of
“Classical” Pentecostalism’. Pentecostudies 1(1): 1-32.
Hüwelmeier, Gertrud and Kristine Krause (eds.). 2009. Traveling Spirits:
Migrants, Markets and Mobilities. London: Routledge.
Igreja, Victor. 2008. ‘Memories as Weapons: The Politics of Peace and Silence in
Post-Civil War Mozambique’. Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (3): 539-556.
Igreja, Victor. 2007. The Monkeys' Sworn Oath: Cultures of Engagement for
Reconciliation and Healing in the Aftermath of the Civil War in Mozambique.
Leiden University, PhD Thesis.
Igreja, Victor. 2003. ‘Why Are There so Many Drums Playing until Dawn?
Exploring the Role of Gamba Spirits and Healers in the Post-War Recovery Period
in Gorongosa, Central Mozambique’. Transcultural Psychiatry 40: 459-487.
Igreja, Victor and Beatrice Dias-Lambranca. 2009. ‘ The Thursdays as They Live:
Christian Religious Transformation and Gender Relations in Postwar Gorongosa,
Central Mozambique’. Journal of Religion in Africa 39 (3): 262-294.
Igreja, Victor and Beatrice Dias-Lambranca.2006. ‘The Social World of Dreams and
Nightmares in a Post-conflict Setting: The Case of Gorongosa in Central
Mozambique’. Intervention 4(2): 145-157.
Igreja, Victor; Béatrice Dias-Lambranca and Annemiek Richters. 2008. ‘Gamba Spirits,
Gender Relations and Healing in Post- Civil War Gorongosa, Mozambique’. Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(2): 353-371.
Illouz, Eva . 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism. University of California Press.
INE. 2009b. Sinopse dos Resultados Definitivos do 3o Recenseamento Geral da
População e Habitação - Cidade de Maputo. Maputo: Instituto Nacional de
Estatística.
INE. 2009a. Sinopse dos Resultados Definitivos do 3o Recenseamento Geral da
População e Habitação – Província de Maputo. Maputo: Instituto Nacional de
Estatística.
260
Isaacman, Allen F. 1975. ‘The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique’. Africa Today

22 (3): 37-50.
Isaacman, Allen F. and Barbara Isaacman. 1983/84. ‘The Role of Women in the
Liberation of Mozambique’. Ufahamu 13 (2/3): 128-185.
Jacobs, Carolien. 2010. Plurality of Religion, Plurality of Justice: Exploring the Role of
Religion in Disputing Processes in Gorongosa, Central Mozambique. Leiden:
African Studies Centre.
Jacobson, Ruth. 1999. ‘Complicating Complexity: Integrating Gender into the Analysis
of the Mozambican Conflict’. Third World Quarterly 20 (1): 175-187.
Jacobson, Ruth. 1995. ‘Women’s Political Participation: Mozambique’s Democratic
Transition’. Gender and Development 3 (3): 29-35.
Jacobson-Widding, Anita. 1989. ‘ Notions of Heat and Fever among the Manyika of
Zimbabwe’. In Anita Jacobson-Widding and David Westerlund (eds.) Culture,
Experience and Pluralism. Essays on African Ideas of Illness and Healing, Uppsala :
Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Uppsala and Stockholm :
Almqvist & Wiksell International, p. 27-44.
James, William. 1975[1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human
Nature. The Fontana Library of Theology &Philosophy.
Jenkins, Paul. 2009. ‘African Cities: Competing Claims on Urban Land’. In
Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent (eds.) African Cities: Competing Claims on
Urban Spaces. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 81-107.
Jenkins, Paul. 2006. ‘Image of the City in Mozambique: Civilization, Parasite,
Engine of Growth or Place of Opportunity’? In Deborah Fahy Bryceson and
Deborah Potts (eds.) African Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation? New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 107-130.
Jenkins, Philip. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.
Oxford [etc.]: Oxford University Press.
JRA. 1985. Special Issue on Traditional Thought and Secularity. Journal of Religion in
Africa 15 (3): 173-243.
Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1981. ‘Women in Indigenous African Cults and Churches’. In
Filomina C. Steady (ed.) The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Cambridge, Mass.:
Schenkman, p. 185-207.
Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1979. ‘ Women as Ceremonial Leaders in an African
Church: The Apostles of John Maranke’. In Bennetta Jules-Rosette (ed.) The New
Religions of Africa Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation, p. 127-144.
Junod, Henri. 1996b [1912]. Usos e Costumes dos Bantu (Tomo II: Vida Mental).
Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique.
Junod, Henri. 1996a [1912] . Usos e Costumes dos Bantu (Tomo I: Vida Social).
Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique.
Kalofonos, Ippolytos. 2008. “Prayer is Medicine”: HIV Evangelization in
Central Mozambique. Paper presented at the workshop Religious Engagements with
Disease, Past and Present, Copenhagen, 28 April 2008.
261
Kalu, Ogbu. 2008. African Pentecostalism: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.
Kalu, Ogbu and Alaine Low. 2008. Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global
Processes and Local Identities. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Kantel, Donald R. 2007. The Toronto Blessing Revival and its Continuing Impact on
Mission in Mozambique. Regent University, School of Divinity, PhD Thesis.
Karlyn, Andrew S. 2005. ‘Intimacy Revealed: Sexual Experimentation and the
Construction of Risk among Young People in Mozambique’. Culture, Health &
Sexuality 7(3): 279 – 292.
Karlyn, Andrew S. 2004. Sexual Identity, Risk Perceptions and AIDS Prevention Scripts
among Young People in Mozambique. University of London, Centre for Population
Studies, PhD Thesis.
Kastfelt, Niels (ed.). 2005. Religion and African Civil Wars. London: Hurst.
Keane, Webb. 1997. ‘From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject,
and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion’. Comparative
Studies in Society and History 39 (4): 674-693.
Kearney, Michae . 1995. ‘The Local and the Global: the Anthropology of Globalization
and Transnationalism’. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 547-65.
Kiernan, James P. 1977. ‘Poor and Puritan; an Attempt to View Zionism as a Collective
Response to Urban Poverty’. African Studies 36 (1): 31-41.
Klaver, Miranda. 2011b. This is My Desire. A Semiotic Perspective on Conversion in
an Evangelical Seeker Church and a Pentecostal Church in the Netherlands. Pallas
Publications, Amsterdam University Press.
Klaver, Miranda. 2011a. ‘Pentecostal Passion Paradigm. The (in)Visible Framing of
Gibson’s Christ in a Dutch Pentecostal Church’. In Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer
(eds.) Things: Material Religion and the Topography of Divine Spaces. New York:
Fordham University Press, in press.
Knauder, Stefanie. 2000. Globalization, Urban Progress, Urban Problems, Rural
Disadvantages. Evidence from Mozambique. Aldershot [etc.]: Ashgate.
Knibbe, Kim and Marten Van der Meulen (eds.). 2009. ‘The Role of Spatial
Practices and Locality in the Constituting of the Christian African Diaspora’. African
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Africa in a Global World 2(2): 124-244,
Special Issue.
Knibbe, Kim and Peter Versteeg. 2008. ‘Assessing Phenomenology in Anthropology’.
Critique of Anthropology 28 (1): 47 -62.
Kopytoff, Igor (ed.). 1987. The African Frontier. The Reproduction of
Traditional African Societies. Indiana University Press.
Kramer, Eric. 2001. Possessing Faith. Commodification, Religious Subjectivity, and
Collectivity in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. The University of Chicago, PhD
Thesis.
262
Lachartre, Brigitte. 2000. Enjeux Urbains au Mozambique. De Lourenço Marquès à

Maputo. Paris: Karthala.
Lambek, Michael. 2003. ‘Rheumatic Irony: Questions of Agency and Self-deception as
Refracted through the Art of Living with Spirits’. Social Analysis 47 (2): 40-59.
Lambek, Michael. 1981. Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte.
Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lambek, Michael. 1980. ‘Spirits and Spouses: Possession as a System of
Communication among the Malagasy Speakers of Mayotte’. American
Ethnologist 7 (2): 318-331.
Lan, David. 1985. Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe.
University of California Press.
Langa, Adriano. 1992. Questões Cristãs à Religião Tradicional Africana, Moçambique.
Braga: Editorial Franciscana.
Langa, Sebastião. 2001. Sebastião Langa: Retratos de uma Vida. Maputo: Arquivo
Histórico.
Larkin, Brian. 1997. ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of
Parallel Modernities’. Africa 67: 407-439.
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Petite Reflexion sur le Culte Moderne des Dieux Faitiches.
Paris: Synthelabo.
Lechini, Gladys 2008. O Brasil na África ou a África no Brasil? A Construção da
Política Africana pelo Itamaraty. Nueva Sociedad (October): 55-71.
Levitt, Peggy. 2007. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing
American Religious Landscape. The New Press.
Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. University of California Press.
Lewis, Ian M. 1986. Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma. Cambridge:
Lewis, Ian M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion. An Anthropological Study of Spirit
Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Lewis, David and David Mosse (eds.). 2006. ‘Contemporary Anthropological
Perspectives on the Organization of Development’. Oxford Development Studies 34
(1): 1-115, Special Issue.
Liesegang, Gerhard J. 1975. ‘Aspects of Gaza Nguni History 1821-1897’. Rhodesian
History 6: 1-14.
Liesegang, Gerhard J. 1986. Ngungunyane: A Figura de Ngungunyane Nqumayo, Rei de
Gaza 1884-1895 e o Desaparecimento do seu Estado. Maputo, ARPAC: Colecção
Embondeiro 8.
Lindholm, Charles. 2006. ‘Romantic Love and Anthropology’. Etnofoor 21(1): 5-21.
Lobato, Alexandre. 1970. Lourenço Marques, Xilunguíne: Biografia da Cidade.
Lisboa: Agência-Geral do Ultramar.
263
Locatelli, Francesca and Paul Nugent (eds.). 2009. African Cities: Competing Claims on
Urban Spaces. Leiden [etc.]: Brill.
Lofland, John & Rodney Stark. 1965. ‘Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of
Conversion to a Deviant Perspective’. American Sociological Review 30 (6): 862-
875.
Loforte, Ana Maria. 2003. Género e Poder entre os Tsonga de Moçambique.
Lisbon: Ela por Ela.
Loforte, Ana Maria. 1987. ‘Migrantes e sua Relação com o Meio Rural’. Trabalhos de
Arqueologia e Antropologia 4: 55-69.
Lopes, Carlos M; Jochen Oppenheimer, Carlos Sangreman Proença, Mário Ribeiro,
Nuno Cunha and Marco Ferreira. 2007ª. ‘Economia de Luanda e Maputo: Olhares
Cruzados’. In Jochen Oppenheimer and Isabel Raposo (eds.) Subúrbios de Luanda e
Maputo. Lisbon: Edições Colibri and Centro de Estudos Sobre África e do
Desenvolvimento (CEsA/ISEG/UTL), p. 65-103.
Lopes, Carlos M.; Filipe Amado and Ramos Muanamoha. 2007b. ‘ Dinâmica do
crescimento Populacional em Luanda e Maputo’. In Jochen Oppenheimer and Isabel
Raposo (eds.) Subúrbios de Luanda e Maputo. Lisbon: Edições Colibri and Centro
de Estudos Sobre África e do Desenvolvimento (CEsA/ISEG/UTL), p. 37-64.
Lovett, Margot. 1989. ‘Gender Relations, Class Formation, and the Colonial State
in Africa’. In Jane L. Parpart and Kathleen A. Staudt (eds.) Women and the State in
Africa. Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, p. 23-46.
Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2008. Culture in Chaos. An Anthropology of the Social
Condition in War. University of Chicago Press.
Luedke, Tracy. 2007. ‘ Spirit and Matter: The Materiality of Mozambican Prophet
Healing’. Journal of Southern African Studies 33 (4): 715 – 731.
Luedke, Tracy and Harry West (eds.). 2006. Borders and Healers: Brokering
Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Indiana University Press.
Lundin, Iraê Baptista. 2007 Negotiating Transformation: Urban Livelihoods in
Maputo Adapting to Thirty Years of Political and Economic Changes. Göteborg:
Department of Human and Economic Geography, School of Business, Economics
and Law, Göteborg University.
Macamo, Elísio S. 2005c. ‘Incerteza e Identidade na Descrição da Realidade Social’. In
Teresa Cruz e Silva, Manuel G. Mendes de Araújo and Carlos Cardoso (eds.)
'Lusofonia' em África: História, Democracia e Integração Africana. Dakar:
CODESRIA, p. 67-78.
Macamo, Elísio S. 2005b. How Development Aid Changes Societies: Disciplining
Mozambique through Structural Adjustment. Paper presented at CODESRIA’s 11th
General Assembly, Maputo, 6-10 December 2005.
Macamo, Elísio S. 2005a. ‘ Denying Modernity: The Regulation of Native
Labour in Colonial Mozambique and its Postcolonial Aftermath’. In Elísio Salvado
Macamo (ed.) Negotiating Modernity: Africa’s Ambivalent Experience. London
264
[etc.]: Zed Books; Dakar: Codesria Books; Pretoria: University of South Africa
Press, p. 67-97.
Macamo, Elísio S. 1998. ‘A Influência da Religião na Formação de Identidades Sociais
no Sul de Moçambique’. In Carlos Serra (ed.) Identidade, Moçambicanidade,
Moçambicanizão. Maputo: Livraría Universitária, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane,
p. 35-69.
Macedo, Edir. 2005b. O Perfil da Mulher de Deus. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Gráfica
Universal Ltda.
Macedo, Edir. 2005a. O Perfil da Família de Deus. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Gráfica
Universal Ltda.
Macedo, Edir. 2004b. Nos Passos de Jesus. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Gráfica Universal
Ltda.
Macedo, Edir. 2004a. Mensagens que Edificam. Volume 1. Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Gráfica Universal Ltda.
Macedo, Edir. 2000. Orixás, Caboclos & Guias: Deuses ou Demônios? Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Gráfica Universal Ltda.
Machel, Samora. 1982. ‘Discurso na Província de Gaza’. Tempo 600/April 1982.
Machel, Samora. 1973. Opening Address to the Conference of Organização de Mulher
Moçambicana. Maputo: OMM.
Mafra, Clara. 2002. Na Posse da Palavra: Religião, Conversão e Liberdade Pessoal em
Dois Contextos Nacionais. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais/Instituto de
Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa.
Mafra, Clara. 2001. Os Evangélicos. Rio de Janeiro: Jore Zahar Editora.
Magaia, Lina. 1988. Dumba Nengue, Run for your Life: Peasant Tales of Tragedy
in Mozambique. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.
Princeton University Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2001. Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual:
Disciplines of Salãt. American Ethnologist 28 (4): 827-853.
Maimuna, Ibraimo. 2007. A Contribuição da Mulher no Crescimento Económico em
Moçambique: Um Exercísio da Contabilidade do Crescimento. Paper presented at
the Inaugural Conference of the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE),
Maputo, 17 September 2007.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy
of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press and Oxford: James Currey.
Mannheim, Karl. 1952. ‘The Problem of Generations’. In Karl Mannheim Essays on the
Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Manuel, Sandra. 2008. Love and Desire: Concepts, Narratives and Practices of Sex
amongst Youths in Maputo City. Dakar: CODESRIA.
265
Manuel, Sandra. 2005. ‘Obstacles to Condom Use among Secondary School Students in
Maputo City’. Culture, Health and Sexuality 7(3): 293-302.
Mariano, Ricardo. 2003. ‘Brésil’. In André Corten, Jean-Pierre Dozon and Ari Pedro
Oro (eds.) Les Nouveaux Conquérants de la Foi. L’Église Universelle du Royaume
de Dieu (Brésil). Paris : Karthala, p. 45-55. [Published in Portuguese with Paulinas,
São Paolo, 2003.]
Mariano, Richard. 1999. Neopentecostais: Sociologia do Novo Pentecostalism no
Brasil. São Paulo: Loyola.
Mariz, Cecilia Loreto. 2009. ‘Igrejas Pentecostais Brasileiras no Exterior’. Análise
Social XLIV (1): 161-187.
Mariz, Cecília Loreto. 1999. ‘A Teologia da Batalha Espiritual: Uma Revisão da
Literatura’. BIB 47: 5-94.
Mariz, Cecilia Loreto and Maria das Dores Campos Machado. 1997. ‘ Pentecostalism
and Women in Brazil’. In Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino (eds.)
Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America. Westview Press, p. 41-54.
Marlin, Robert P. 2001. Possessing the Past: Legacies of Violence and Reproductive
Illness in Central Mozambique. Rudgers University, PhD Thesis.
Marshall, Ruth. 2009. Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria.
University of Chicago Press.
Marshall, Ruth. 2001. The Global and Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism. In André
Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.) Between Babel and Pentecost.
Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst &
Company, p. 80-105.
Marshall, Katherine and Lucy Keough. 2004. Mind, Heart, and Soul in the
Fight against Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Martin, Bernice. 2001. ‘The Pentecostal Gender Paradox: A Cautionary Tale for the
Sociology of Religion’. In Richard Fenn (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to
Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp.: 52-66.
Martin, David. 2002. Pentecostalism: The World their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell.
Martin, David. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin
America. Oxford: Blackwell.
Masquelier, Adeline. 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and
Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham, NC [etc.]: Duke University Press.
Mate, Rekopantswe. 2002. ‘Wombs as God’s Laboratories: Pentecostal Discourses of
Femininity in Zimbabwe’. Africa 72 (4): 549–68.
Mateus, Valentina . 2001. ‘Crentes e Problemas Sociais nas Igrejas Zione da Cidade da
Beira’. Estudos Moçambicano 18: 161-179.
Matos, Elmer Agostinho C. de; Luísa Vanessa T. Lopes and Francisco Armindo Z.
Chicamisse (under coordination of Manuel G. Mendes de Araújo). 2006. Cidade de
Maputo: Algumas Características Geo-Espaciais. Maputo: Centro de Estudos de
266
População (CEP), Faculdade de Letras e Ciencias Sociais (FLECS)and

Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM).
Matusse, Renato and Malique Josina. 2008. Josina Machel: Ícone da Emancipação da
Mulher Moçambicana. Colecção Embondeiro 29. Maputo: ARPAC.
Mauss, Marcel. 1969[1924]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic
Societies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Maxwell, David. 2006. African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a
Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement. Oxford: James Currey.
Maxwell, David. 2002. ‘A Youth Religion? Born-Again Christianity in Zimbabwe and
Beyond’. In Barbara Trudell, Kenneth King, Simon McGrath and Paul Nugent
(eds.) Africa's Young Majority. Victims, Meanings, Actors. Edinburgh:
Centre for African Studies, p. 185-205.
Maxwell, David. 1998. 'Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?': Pentecostalism,
Prosperity and Modernity in Zimbabwe. Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 350-
373.
Mazula, Brazão. 1995. Educação, Cultura e Ideologia em Moçambique: 1975-1985.
Lisbon: Edições Afrontamento.
Mazzucato, Valentina. 2004. ‘Transcending the Nation. Explorations of Trans
nationalism as a Concept and Phenomenon’. In: Don Kalb, Wil Pansters and Hans
Siebers (eds.) Globalization & Development. Themes and Concepts in Current
Research. Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 131-162.
Mbembe, Achille. 2006. ‘On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics’. African
Identities 4(2): 143-178.
Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
McCarthy, Anna. 2001. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham
and London: Duke University Press.
McGuire, Meredith B. 1990. ‘Religion and the Body: Rematerializing the Human Body
in the Social Sciences of Religion’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29
(3): 283- 296.
Meijers, Daniel. 1991. ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Feminism. Some Food for
Thought’. Ethnologia Europaea 21: 59-70.
Mendes, Maria Clara. 1988. ‘Slum and Squatter Settlements in Maputo, Mozambique:
Structure and Perspectives’. In R.A. Obudho and Constance C. Mhlanga (eds.) Slum
and Squatter Settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa: Toward a Planning Strategy. New
York, N.Y. [etc.]: Praeger, p. 219-230.
Merolla, Daniela. 2005. ‘Deceitful Origins and Tenacious Roots: Moroccan
Immigration and New Trends in Dutch Literature’. In Deborah Bryceson and Ulla
Vuorela (eds.) The Transnational Family, Oxford [etc]: Berg, p. 103-123
Meyer, Birgit. 2010. ‘Pentecostalism and Globalization’. In Allan Anderson,
Michael Bergunder, André Droogers and Cees van der Laan (eds.) Studying Global
Pentecostalism. Theories and Methods. University of California Press, p. 113-129.
267
Meyer, Birgit (ed.). 2009. Aesthetic Formations. Media, Religion and the Senses in the
Making of Communities. New York: Palgrave.
Meyer, Birgit. 2008b. ‘Mami Water as a Christian Demon. The Eroticism of Forbidden
Pleasures in Southern Ghana’. In: Henry J. Drewal (ed.), Sacred Waters: Arts for
Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora. Indiana University
Press, p. 383-398.
Meyer, Birgit. 2008a. ‘Religious Sensations. Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter
in the Study of Contemporary Religion’. In Hent de Vries (ed.) Religion: Beyond a
Concept. New York: Fordham University Press. Pp. 704-723.
Meyer, Birgit. 2007. ‘Pentecostalism and Neo-liberal Capitalism: Faith, Prosperity and
Vision in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches’. Journal for the Study of
Religion 20 (2): 5-28.
Meyer, Birgit. 2006. ‘Impossible Representations. Pentecostalism, Vision and
Video Technology in Ghana’. In Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors (eds.) Religion,
Media, and The Public Sphere. Indiana University Press, p. 290-312.
Meyer, Birgit. 2004b. ‘Praise the Lord: Popular Cinema and the Pentecostalite Style in
Ghana’s New Public Sphere’. American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92-110.
Meyer, Birgit. 2004a. ‘Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-
Charismatic Churches’. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447-474.
Meyer, Birgit. 2002. ‘Pentecostalism, Prosperity and Popular Cinema in Ghana’.
Culture and Religion 3(1): 67-87.
Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil. Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in
Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African
Institute.
Meyer, Birgit. 1998b. ‘Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes
towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana’. Development and Change 29 (4):
751-776.
Meyer, Birgit. 1998a. ‘”Make a Complete Break with the Past”: Memory and
Postcolonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse’. Journal of Religion in
Africa 28 (3): 316-349.
Meyer, Birgit and Annelies Moors (eds.). 2006. Religion, Media and the Public Sphere.
Indiana University Press.
Meyer, Birgit and Peter Pels (eds.). 2003. Magic and Modernity. Interfaces of
Revelation and Concealment. Stanford University Press.
Miller, Donald E. and Tetsuano Yamamori. 2007. Global Pentecostalism: The New
Face of Christian Social Engagement. University of California Press.
Miller, Kari McGriff. 2008. The South African City as a Gendered Space: Memories of
Motherhood and Fragmented Families in Women’s Autobiographies. Paper
presented at Session I-G8 ‘Gender, Space, and Comparative Approaches to Black
Women’s Studies in Southern Africa’, Annual Meeting of the African Studies
Association, Chicago, 13-16 November 2008.
268
Monnier, Nicolas. 1995. Stratégie Missionaire et Tactiques d’Appropriation Indigènes:

la Mission Romande au Mozambique, 1888-1896. Lausanne: Le Fait Missionnaire.
Moore, Henrietta and Todd Sanders (eds.). 2001. Magical Interpretations, Material
Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London
[etc.]: Routledge.
Moreira, Alberto da Silva. 2010. The Global Expansion of Brazilian Pentecostalism.
Paper presented at the GloPent Conference, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 19-20
February 2010.
Morier-Génoud, Eric. 1996. ‘ Of God and Caesar. The Relation Between Christian
Churches and the State in Post-Colonial Mozambique, 1974-1981’. Le Fait
Missionaire 3: 1-79.
MPD/DNEAP. 2010. Pobreza e Bem-Estar em Moçambique: Terceira Avaliação
Nacional. Ministério da Planificação e Desenvolvimento/Direcção Nacional de
Estudos e Análise de Políticas.
Mukonyora, Isabel. 2007. Wandering a Gendered Wilderness: Suffering & Healing in
an African Initiated Church. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, Zomba: Kachere Series.
Mukonyora, Isabel. 2000. ‘Marginality and Protest in the Wilderness: the Role of
Women in Shaping Masowe Thought Pattern’. Southern African Feminist Review 4
(2): 1–22.
Muller, Carol Ann. 1999. Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite
Women’s Performance in South Africa. University of Chicago Press.
Mungoi, Dulce and Vera Rodrigues. 2008. ‘Moçambique e Brasil: O Debate das
Relações Etno-Raciais’. Revista Africa e Africanidades 1 (1).
Naro, Nancy Priscilla; Roger Sansi-Roca and David H. Treece (eds.). 2007. Cultures of
the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ndaya, Julie Tshiteku. 2008. ‘Prendre le Bic': 'Le Combat Spirituel' Congolais et les
Transformations Sociales. Leiden: African Studies Centre.
Newell , Sasha. 2007. ‘ Pentecostal Witchcraft: Neoliberal Possession and Demonic
Discourse in Ivoirian Pentecostal Churches’. Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (4):
461-490.
Newitt, Malyn. 1997. A History of Mozambique. London: Hurst & Company.
Ngoenha, Severino Elias. 1999. ‘Os Missionários Suíços Face ao Nacionalismo
Moçambicano: Entre a Tsonganidade e a Moçambicanidade’. Lusotopie 6 (1/2):
425-436.
Nguyen, V. K. 2009. ‘Therapeutic Evangelism: Confessional Technologies,
Antiretrovirals and Biospiritual Transformation in the Fight against AIDS in West
Africa’. In Felicitas Becker and P. Wenzel Geissler (eds.) Aids and Religious
Practice in Africa. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 359-378.
Niehaus, A. Isak. 2002. ‘Perversion of Power: Witchcraft and the Sexuality of Evil in
the South African Lowveld’. Journal of Religion in Africa 32 (3): 269-299.
269
Niehaus, Isak. 1997. ‘A Witch Has no Horn’. The Subjective Reality of Witchcraft in
the South African Lowveld’. African Studies 56 (2): 251-278.
Nielsen, Morten. 2010. ‘Contrapuntal Cosmopolitanism: Distantiation as Social
Relatedness among House-Builders in Maputo, Mozambique’. Social Anthropology
18 (4): 396-402.
Nieswand, Boris. 2010. ‘Enacted Destiny: West African Charismatic Christians in
Berlin and the Immanence of God’. Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (1): 33-
59.
Nordstrom, Carolyn. 1997. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
O’Laughlin, M. Bridget. 2000. ‘Class and the Customary: the Ambiguous Legacy
of the ‘Indigenato’ in Mozambique’. African Affairs 99: 5-42.
O’Laughlin, M. Bridget. 1992. ‘Interpretations Matter: Evaluating the War in
Mozambique’. Southern African Report 7 (3): 23-33.
Oosterbaan, Martijn. 2006. Divine Mediation. Pentecostalism, Politics and
Mass Media in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro. University of Amsterdam, PhD Thesis.
Oppenheimer, Jochen and Isabel Raposo (eds.). 2007. Subúrbios de Luanda e Maputo.
Lisbon: Edições Colibri and Centro de Estudos Sobre África e do Desenvolvimento
(CEsA/ISEG/UTL).
Oppenheimer, Jochen and Isabel Raposo. 2002. A Pobreza em Maputo. A
Cooperação Direccionada para os Grupos Vulneráveis no Contexto da
Concentração Urbana Acelerada/1. Lisboa: Ministério do Trabalho e Solidaridade,
Departamento de Cooperação.
O’Reilly, Karen. 2005. Ethnographic Methods. London [etc.]: Routledge.
Oro, Ari Pedro. 2004. ‘A Presença Religiosa Brasileira no Exterior: o Caso da Igreja
Universal do Reino de Deus’. Estudos Avançados 18 (52): 139-155.
Oro, Ari; Daniel Alves; Mauro Meirelles and Daniel Francisco De Bem. 2009.
‘Transnacionalização Religiosa’. Debates do NER 10 (16).
Oro, Ari Pedro and Pablo Semán. 2001. ‘Brazilian Pentecostalism Crosses National
Borders’. In André Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.) Between Babel and
Pentecost. Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London:
Hurst & Company, p. 181-195.
Osório, Maria de Conceição. 2002. ‘Poder Politico e Protagonismo Feminino em
Moçambique’. In Sousa Santos, Boaventuta de (ed.) Democratizar a Democracia:
Os Caminhos da Democracia Participativa. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização, p. 419-449.
Osório, Maria de Conceição. 1997. Violencia Contra a Jovem e Construção da
Identidade Feminina. Relatório de Investigação. Maputo: Muleide.
Osório, Conceição and Maria José Arthur. 2002. Direitos Sexuais e Reprodutivos.
Revisão da Literatura. Maputo: FNUAP.
270
Osório, Conceição and Teresa Cruz e Silva (with collaboration of Valuarda Monjane).
2008. Buscando Sentidos: Género e Sexualidade entre Jovens Estudantes do Ensino
Secundário, Moçambique. Maputo: WLSA Moçambique.
Owen, Hilary. 2007. Mother Africa, Father Marx. Women’s Writing of Mozambique
1948-2002. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Owen, Hilary. 2002. ‘Engendering the Aesthetics of Solidarity in Lina Magaia's
“Dumba Nengue”’. Luso-Brazilian Review XXXIX (2): 79-90.
Paraskeva, Joco M. 2009. ‘ Mozambique: Neocolonialism and the
Remasculinization of Democracy’. In Dave Hill and Ellen Rosskam (eds.) The
Developing World and State Education: Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian
Alternatives. New York: Routledge, p. 199-215.
Parker, Richard G. 2009. Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in
Contemporary Brazil (second edition). Vanderbilt University Press.
Paulo, Margarida. 2005. Jovens, Sexualidade e Educação Sexual no Bairro de Mafalala,
Cidade de Maputo, Moçambique. Maputo: Imprensa Universitária.
Peabody, Stanton. 2006. ‘Women who Made a Difference: A Special Record’. Liberian
Studies Journal 31 (1): 63-89.
Peel, John D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Indiana
University Press.
Penvenne, Jeanne Marie. 1998. ‘Mozambique: A Tapestry of Conflict’. In David
Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin (eds.) History of Central Africa: The
Contemporary Years since 1960. London [etc.]: Longman, p. 230-266.
Penvenne, Jeanne Marie. 1997. ‘Seeking the Factory for Women. Mozambican
Urbanization in the Late Colonial Era’. Journal of Urban History 23 (3): 342-379.
Penvenne, Jeanne Marie. 1995. African Workers and Colonial Racism:
Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877-1962.
Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, London: James Currey and Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press.
Penvenne, Jeanne Marie. 1986. Making Our Own Way: Women Working in
Lourenço Marques. Boston University: African Studies Center.
Pfeiffer, James. 2002. ‘ African Independent Churches in Mozambique: Healing the
Afflictions of Inequality’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16 (2):176-199.
Pfeiffer, James; Kenneth Gimbel-Sherr and Orvalho Joaquim Augusto. 2007. ‘The Holy
Spirit in the Household: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Neoliberalism in
Mozambique’. American Anthropologist 109 (4): 688–700.
Pierucci, Antônio Flávio. 2006. ‘Religião como Solvente – Uma Aula’. Novos Estudos -
CEBRAP, São Paulo, n.75: 111-127. [for English see http://socialsciences.
scielo.org/scielo.php?pid=S0101-3300200600 0200002&script=sci_arttext].
Pierucci, Antônio Flávio and Reginaldo Prandi. 1996. A Realidade Social das Religiões
no Brasil. São Paulo: Hucitec.
271
Pietz, William. 1988. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, Part IIIa’. Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics 16 (Autumn): 105-123.
Pietz, William. 1987. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, Part II’. Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics 13 (Spring): 23-45.
Pietz, William. 1985. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, Part I’. Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics 9 (Spring): 5-17.
Pinheiro, Leticia. 2004. Política Externa Brasileira (1889–2002). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge
Zahar Editora.
Pinsky, Barry. 1982. The Urban Problematic in Mozambique: Initial Post-
Independence Responses, 1975-80. University of Toronto: Centre of Urban and
Community Studies.
Pinto, Pedro. 2005. ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses in Colonial Mozambique’. Le Fait
Missionaire 17: 61-123.
Pitcher, Anne. 2006. ‘Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of
Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique’. Africa 76 (1): 88-112.
Pitcher, Anne. 2002. Transforming Mozambique. The Politics of Privatisation,
1975-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poewe, Karla (ed.). 1994. Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture. Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press.
Poewe, Karla. 1989. ‘On the Metonymic Structure of Religious Experiences: The
Example of Charismatic Christianity’. Cultural Dynamics 2 (4): 361-380.
Pollak-Eltz, Angelina. 1970. Afro-Amerikaanse Godsdiensten en Culten. Roermond:
Romen.
Poloma, Margaret. 2003. Main Street Mystics. Oxford: Altamira.
Poloma, Margaret. 1989. Assemblies of God at Crossroads: Charisma Institutional
Dilemmas. University of Tennessee Press.
Power, Marcus. 2004.‘Post-Colonial Cinema and the Reconfiguration of
Moçambicanidade’. Lusotopie 11 (1/2): 261-278.
Prince, Ruth; Philippe Denis and Rijk van Dijk (eds.). 2009. ‘Christianity and
HIV/AIDS in East and Southern Africa’. Africa Today 56 (1): v-117, Special Issue.
Pype, Katrien. 2008. The Pentecostal Melodrama. The Making of. Visions of
Youth, Gender and Religion in Kinshasa’s Media World. Leuven University, PhD
Thesis.
Rambo, Lewis. 1993. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
Ramphele, Mamphela. 1993. A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Hostels of
Cape Town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rangel, Ricardo. 2004. Pão Nosso de Cada Noite: Our Nightly Bread. Maputo:
Marimbique. (Texts by Calane da Silva, José Craveirinha, José Luís Cabaço, Luís
Bernardo Honwana, Nelson Saúte and Rui Nogar).
272
Ranger, Terence. 1992. ‘Godly Medicine: The Ambiguities of Medical Mission in

Southeastern Tanzania’. In Steve Feierman and John M. Janzen (eds.) The Social
Basis of Health and Healing in Africa. University of California Press, p. 256-282.
Ranger, Terence. 1977. ‘The People in African Resistance: A Review’. Journal of
Southern African Studies 4 (1): 125-146.
Raposo, Isabel and Cristina Salvador. 2007. ‘Há Diferença: Ali é Cidade, Aqui é
Subúrbio. Urbanidade dos Bairros, Tipos e Estratégias de Habitação em Luanda e
Maputo’. In Jochen Oppenheimer and Isabel Raposo (eds.) Subúrbios de Luanda e
Maputo. Lisbon: Edições Colibri and Centro de Estudos Sobre África e do
Desenvolvimento (CEsA/ISEG/UTL), p. 105-138.
Rekdal, Ole Bjørn. 1999. ‘Cross-Cultural Healing in East African Ethnography’.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13 (4): 458-482.
Ribeiro, Claúdio Oliveira. 2007. Relações Político-Comerciáis Brasil-África (1985-
2006). University of São Paulo (USP), PhD Thesis.
Rita-Ferreirea, António. 1961. ‘Labour Emigration among the Moçambique Thonga.
Comments on Marvin Harris's Reply’. Africa 31 (1): 75-77.
Rita-Ferreira, António. 1960. ‘Labour Emigration among the Moçambique Thonga:
Comments on a Study by Marvin Harris’. Africa 30 (2): 141-152.
Robbins, Joel. 2009. ‘Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the
Social Productivity of Ritual Forms’. Social Analysis 53(1): 55-66.
Robbins, Joel. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture. Belief,
Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’. Current Anthropology 48 (1): 5-38.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’.
Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117-143.
Robbins, Joel. 2003. ‘What is a Christian: Notes Toward an Anthropology of
Christianity’. Religion 33(3): 191-199.
Rodrigues, Donizete and Roberta Bivar C. Campos (eds.). 2008. ‘ Igreja Universal
do Reino de Deus’. Revista AntHropológicas 19(1), 7- 239, Special Issue.
Rodrigues, Raymundo Nina. 1945[1906]. Os Africanos no Brasil: Revisão e Prefácio
de Homero Pires. Companhia Editora Nacional.
Rodriguez, Junius P. (ed.). 1997. The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Vol. 1.
Santa Barbara, CA. [etc.]: ABC-CLIO.
Roesch, Otto. 1994. ‘The Politics of the Aftermath: Peasant Options in Mozambique’.
Southern Africa Report 9 (3): 16-20.
Röhrig Assunção, Matthias. 2007. ‘ History and Memory in Capoeira Lyrics from
Bahia, Brazil’. In Nancy Priscilla Naro; Roger Sansi-Roca and David H. Treece
(eds.) Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p.
199-217.
Rosario, Camila. 2009. No Safer Sex than Married Sex: Negotiating Marriage
through Sexuality in Northern Mozambique. Paper presented at the European
Conference on African Studies, Leipzig, 4-7 June 2009.
273
Rosenthal, Judy. 1998. Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo.

Charlottesville [etc.]: University Press of Virginia.
Rossouw, G.J. and Eugenio Macamo, jr. 1993. ‘Church-State Relationship in
Mozambique’. Journal of Church and State 35 (3): 537-546.
Rudolph, Susanne H. and James Piscatori (eds.). 1997. Transnational Religion and
Fading States. Boulder: Westview Press.
Sackey, Brigid. 1989. ‘Aspects of Continuity in the Religious Roles of Women in
“Spiritual Churches” of Ghana’. Research Review / Institute of African Studies 5 (2):
18-33.
Sackey, Brigid. 1987. ‘Healing and the Special Position of the Women of the Church of
“Nyamesom Pa” (Ekwam)’. Research Review / Institute of African Studies 3 (2): 84-
111.
Salih, Ruba. 2004. ‘The Backward and the New: National, Transnational and Post-
National Islam in Europe’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30 (5): 995-
1011.
Sánchez, Rafael. 2008. ‘Seized by the Spirit: The Mystical Foundation of Squatting
among Pentecostals in Caracas (Venezuela) Today’. Public Culture 20 (2): 267-305.
Sanneh, Lamin. 1993. Encountering the West. Christianity and the Global Cultural
Process: The African Dimension. New York: Orbis Books.
Sansi-Roca, Roger. 2007. ‘The Fetish in the Lusophone Atlantic’. In Nancy Priscilla
Naro; Roger Sansi- Roca and David H. Treece (eds.) Cultures of the Lusophone
Black Atlantic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 19-39.
Santos, Balbina and Maria José Arthur. 1994. ‘Enquanto os Homens Tiverem o Poder
Sexual....: O Comportamento Sexual e a Expansão do SIDA/DTS na Cidade de
Maputo’. In UNESCO (ed.) Eu Mulher em Moçambique. Maputo: UNESCO and
AEMO, p. 69-81.
Sarró, Ramon and Ruy Blanes (eds.). 2009b. ‘Religion, Space and Mobility’. Análise
Social XLIV (1): 5-226, Special Issue.
Sarró, Ramon and Ruy Blanes. 2009a. ‘Prophetic Diasporas: Moving Religion across
the Lusophone Atlantic’. African Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Africa in a
Global World 2 (1): 52-72.
Sassen, Saskia. 2007. A Sociology of Globalization. W.W. Norton.
Scarnecchia, Timothy. 1997. ‘Mai Chaza’s Cuta re Jehova (City of God): Gender,
Healing, and Urban Identity in an African Independent Church’. Journal of Southern
African Studies 23 (1): 87-105.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Philippe Bourgois (eds.). 2004. Violence in War and
Peace: An Anthology. Malden, MA [etc.]: Blackwell.
Schoffeleers, Jan-Mathijs (ed.) . 1979. Guardian of the Land: Essays on Central
African Territorial Cults. Gwelo: Mambo Press.
Scliar, Moacyr; Mia Couto and Alberto da Costa e Silva. 2005. Pensando Igual.
Maputo: Moçambique Editora.
274
Schuetze, Christy. 2010. The World is Upside Down: Women’s Participation in

Religious Movements and the Search for Social Healing in Central Mozambique.
University of Pennsylvania, PhD Thesis.
Schulz, Dorothea. 2006. ‘Promises of (Im)Mediate Salvation. Islam, Broadcast Media,
and the Remaking of Religious Experience in Mali’. American Ethnologist 33(2): 210-
229.
Schulz, Dorothea. 2003. ‘”Charisma and Brotherhood” Revisited. Mass-Mediated
Forms of Spirituality in Urban Mali’. Journal of Religion in Africa 33(2): 146-171.
Schumaker, Lyn; Diana Jeater and Tracy Luedke. 2007. ‘Histories of Healing: Past and
Present Medical Practices in Africa and the Diaspora’. Journal of Southern African
Studies 33(4): 707-860, Special Issue.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Seibert, Gerhard. 2011. Brazil in Africa: Ambitions and Achievements of an Emerging
Regional Power in the Political and Economic Sector. Paper presented at the
European Conference of African Studies, 14-18 June 2011.
Seibert, Gerhard. 2005. ‘But the Manifestation of the Spirit is Given to Every Man to
Profit Withal’. Zion Churches in Mozambique since the early 20th Century. Le Fait
Missionnaire 17: 125-150.
Serra, Carlos. 2003b. Combates pela Mentalidade Sociológica. Maputo: Imprensa
Universitária.
Serra, Carlos. 2003a. Em Cima de uma Lamina. Um Estudo sobre Precaridade Social
em Três Cidades de Moçambique. Maputo: Imprensa Universitária, Universidade
Eduardo Mondlane.
Sheldon, Kathleen E. 2003. ‘Markets and Gardens: Placing Women in the History of
Urban Mozambique’. Canadian Journal of African Studies 37 (2/3): 358-395.
Sheldon, Kathleen E. 2002. Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics
in Mozambique. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.
Sheldon, Kathleen E. (ed.). 1996. Courtyards, Markets, City Streets. Urban Women in
Africa. Boulder, Col. [etc.]: Westview Press.
Sidaway, James D. and Marcus Power. 1995. ‘Social-spatial Transformations in the
“Postsocialist” Periphery: The Case of Maputo, Mozambique’. Environment and
Planning A 27: 1463-1491.
Silva, Terezinha da. 2003. ‘Violência Doméstica: Factos e Discursos’. In Boaventura
Sousa Santos and João Carlos Trindade (eds.) Conflito e Transformaão Social: Uma
Paisagem das Justiças em Moçambique, Volume 2. Porto: Ediçoes Afrontamento, p.
143- 164.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2001. ‘On the Worlding of African Cities’. African Studies
Review 44 (2): 15-41.
Sitoe, Bento. 1996. Dicionário Changana-Português. Maputo: Instituto Nacional
do Desenvolvimento da Educação.
275
Sitoe, Eduardo. 2003. ‘ Making Sense of the Political Transition in Mozambique:

1984-1994’. In Malyn Newitt, Patrick Chabal and Norrie Macqueen (eds.)
Community and the State in Lusophone Africa. London: Department of Portuguese
and Brazilian Studies, King’s College London, p. 15-34.
Slegh, Henny. 2009. Between Spirits and Rights: Social Navigation of Women in
Southern Mozambique. University of Amsterdam: Master’s Thesis.
Smit, Regien. Forthc. More than Conquerors. A Comparative Study of Two Pentecostal
Migrant Churches in The Netherlands. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, PhD Thesis,
forthcoming in 2011.
Smit, Regien. 2009. ‘The Church Building: A Sanctuary or a Consecrated Place?
Conflicting Views between Angolan Pentecostals and European Presbyterians’.
African Diaspora 2 (2): 182-202.
Smit, Regien. 2007. The Power of the Word. How Angolan Pentecostal Christians in
Rotterdam Experience Power in an Uncertain World. Paper presented at the
conference ‘International Migration, Multi-Local Livelihoods and Human Security:
Perspectives from Europe, Asia and Africa, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague,
30 and 31 August 2007.
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2001. ‘The Arrow of God:’ Pentecostalism, Inequality and the
Supernatural in South-Eastern Nigeria. Africa 71(4): 587-613.
Smith, Michael Peter and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds.). 1998. Transnationalism from
Below. New Brunswick [etc.]: Transaction Publishers.
Snow, David A. & Richard Machalek. 1984. ‘The Sociology of Conversion’. Annual
Review of Sociology 10: 167-190.
Snow, David A. & Richard Machalek.1983. ‘The Convert as a Social Type’. In Randall
Collins (ed.) Sociological Theory. San Francisco [etc.]: Jossey-Bass, p. 259-289.
Sol de Carvalho, João Luis and Gigliola Zacara (eds.) . 2006. O Jardim do Outro
Homem (Another Man’s Garden). Fado Filmes.
Soothill, Jane E. 2007. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic
Christianity in Ghana. Leiden [etc.]: Brill.
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de and João Carlos Trindade (eds.). 2003. Conflito e
Transformaão Social: Uma Paisagem das Justiças em Moçambique, Volumes 1 and
2. Porto: Ediçoes Afrontamento.
Souto, António. 1987. ‘Economia Agrária: A Resistência das Mulheres de Maputo’.
Economia: Revista Económica e Empresarial de Moçambique (1987): 32-38.
Spronk, Rachel. 2006. Ambiguous Pleasures. Sexuality and New Self-definitions in
Nairobi. University of Amsterdam, PhD Thesis.
Spronk, Rachel. 2002. ‘Looking at Love. Hollywood Romance and Shifting Notions of
Gender and Relating in Nairobi’. Etnofoor 15: 229-240.
Stark, Rodney & Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of
Religion. University of California Press.
276
Steady, Filomina C. 1978. ‘The Role of Women in the Churches in Freetown, Sierra
Leone’. In Edward Fasholé-Luke; Richard Gray; Adrian Hastings and G. Tasie
(eds.) Christianity in Independent Africa. London: Collings, p. 151-163.
Sumich, Jason. 2010. Nationalism, Urban Poverty and Identity in Maputo,
Mozambique. Crises States Research Centre Working Paper 68, London School of
Economics.
Sumich, Jason. 2008. ‘Ideologias de Modernidade da Elite Moçambicana’. Análise
Social XLIII (187): 319-345.
Sundkler, Bengt G.M. 1961 [1948]. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. London: Oxford
University Press.
Sweet, James H. 2003. Recreating Africa. Culture Kinship, and Religion in the African-
Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill [etc.]: The University of North Carolina
Press.
Tadeu, Jorge. Undated B. Acerca de FINANÇAS. Maná Igreja Cristã.
Tadeu, Jorge. Undated A. Acerca de Finanças. Maná Igreja Cristã.
Tadeu, Jorge. 2006. Amor, Arma de Guerra. Maná Igreja Cristã.
Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. University of
Chicago Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ter Haar, Gerrie. 2008. ‘African Christians in Europe’. In Katharina Kunter and Jens
Holger Schjørring (eds.) Changing Relations between Churches in Europe and
Africa: The Internationalization of Christianity and Politics in the 20th Century.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, p.241-251.
Ter Haar, Gerrie. 1998. ‘The African Diaspora in the Netherlands’. In Peter B. Clarke
(ed.) New Trends and Developments in African Religions. Westport, CT [etc.]:
Greenwood Press, p. 245-262.
Ter Haar, Gerrie en Stephen Ellis. 2006. ‘The Role of Religion in Development:
Towards a New Relationship between the European Union and Africa’. European
Journal of Development Research 18 (3): 351-67.
Thomaz, Omar Ribeiro. 2002. ‘Tigres de Papel: Gilberto Freyre, Portugal e os Países
Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa’. In Cristina Bastos, Miguel Vale de
Almeida and Bela Feldman-Bianco (eds.) Trânsitos Coloniais: Diálogos Críticos
Luso-Brasilerios, Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, p. 39-63.
Thompson, Phyllis. 1989. Life out of Death in Mozambique. A Miracle of Church
Growth in the Face of Opposition. London [etc.]: Hodder and Stoughton.
Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
1400-1800. Cambridge University Press.
Thornton, Robert J. 2009. Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks, and AIDS in
Uganda and South Africa. University of California Press.
277
Tripp, Aili Mari; Isabel Casimiro, Joy Kwesiga and Alice Mungwa. 2009. African
Women's Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes. Cambridge [etc.]:
Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1921. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt.
Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press.
Tvedten, Inge; Margarida Paulo and Minna Tuominen. 2010. “A Woman Should not be
the Boss when a Man is Present”. Gender and Poverty in Southern Mozambique.
Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute.
Udelsmann Rodrigues, Cristina. 2009. ‘Angolan Cities: Urban (Re)Segregation’. In
Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent (eds.) African Cities: Competing Claims on
Urban Spaces. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 37-53.
Ukah, Asonzeh. 2008. A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power - The Redeemed
Christian Church of God in Nigeria. New Jersey & Asmara: Africa World Press/Red
Sea Press.
UNAIDS. 2008. Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2008. Joint United Nations
Programme on HIV/AIDS.
UNAIDS/WHO. 2008. Epidemiological Fact Sheet on HIV and AIDS: Core Data on
Epidemiology and Response, Mozambique 2008 Update. Joint United Nations
Programme on HIV/AIDS and World Health Organization.
Upton, George R. 1980. The Miracle of Mozambique. The Overseas Missions
Department of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Clearbrook, B.C.: A. Olfert &
Sons Ltd.
Urdang, Stephanie. 1989. And Still They Dance: Women, War, and the Struggle for
Change in Mozambique. London: Earthscan Publications [etc.].
Vail, Leroy and Landeg White. 1980. Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A
Study of Quelimane District. London [etc.]: Heinemann.
Vale de Almeida, Miguel. 2002 O Atlântico Pardo. Antropologia, Pós-Colonialismo
e o Caso ‘Lusófono’. In Cristina Bastos, Miguel Vale de Almeida and Bela
Feldman-Bianco (eds.) Trânsitos Coloniais: Diálogos Críticos Luso-Brasilerios,
Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, p.23-37.
Van Binsbergen, Wim. 2000. ‘Creating “a Place to Feel at Home”: Christian Church
Life and Social Control in Lusaka, Zambia’. In Piet Konings, Wim van Binsbergen
and Gerti Hesseling (eds.) Trajectoires de Liberation en Afrique Contemporaine.
Paris: Karthala, p. 223–250.
Van binsbergen, Wim. 1981 Religious Change in Zambia. Exploratory Studies.
London [etc.]: Kegan Paul International.
Van Binsbergen, Wim and Jan-Mathijs Schoffeleers. 1985. ‘Introduction: Theoretical
Explorations African Religion’. In Wim van Binsbergen and Jan-Mathijs
Schoffeleers (eds.) Theoretical Explorations in African Religion. London [etc.]:
Kegan Paul International, p.1-49
278
Van Butselaar, Jan. 2000. ‘The Role of Religion in Africa Today. A Report from
Mozambique’. Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 56 (2): 133-140.
Van Butselaar, Jan. 1987. Africanos, Missionarios e Colonistas. As Origens da Igreja
Presbiteriana de Moçambique (Missão Suiça), 1880-1896. Lausanne: Département
Missionaire des Eglises Protestantes de la Suisse Romande.
Van Gennep, Anton. 1980[1960]. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Van de Kamp, Linda. 2010. ‘Burying Life: Pentecostal Religion and Development in
Urban Mozambique’. In Barbara Bompani and Maria Frahm-Arp (eds.)
Development and Politics from Below: Exploring Religious Spaces in the African
State. Palgrave MacMillan, p. 152-168.
Van de Kamp, Linda and Rijk van Dijk. 2010. ‘Pentecostals Moving South-South:
Brazilian and Ghanaian Transnationalism in Southern Africa’. In Afe Adogame and
James Spickard (eds.) Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Dynamics in
Africa and the New African Diasporic Religions. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p.123-142.
Van de Port, Mattijs. 2007. ‘Bahian White: the Dispersion of Candomblé Imagery in the
Public Sphere of Bahia’. Material Religion 3(2): 242-273.
Van der Veer, Peter (ed.). 1996. Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of
Christianity. New York/London: Routledge.
Van Dijk, Rijk. In preparation. Peregrination. Anthropological Explorations of
Transcultural Ghanaian Pentecostalism.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2010b. ‘Marriage, Commodification and the Romantic Ethic in
Botswana’. In Marleen Dekker and Rijk van Dijk (eds.) Markets of Well-Being:
Navigating Health and Healing in Africa. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 282-305.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2010a. ‘Social Catapulting and the Spirit of Entrepreneurialism:
Migrants, Private Initiative, and the Pentecostal Ethic in Botswana’. In Gertrud
Hüwelmeier and Kristine Krause (eds.) Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and
Mobilities. London: Routledge, p. 101-117.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2009. ‘Gloves in Times of Aids: Pentecostalism, Hair and Social
Distancing in Botswana’. In Felicitas Becker and P. Wenzel Geissler (eds.) Aids and
Religious Practice in Africa. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 283-308.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2008. Self-framing and Self-mobilization: Pentecostal Faith, Agency
and Youth Ideology in Africa. Paper presented at the conference ‘Young People in
Africa: From Marginalisation to Citizenship’, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague,
20-21 November.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2006. ‘Transnational Images of Pentecostal Healing: Comparative
Examples from Malawi and Botswana’. In Tracy J. Luedke and Harry G. West (eds.)
Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Indiana
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2005. ‘The Moral Life of the Gift in Ghanaian Pentecostal Churches in
the Diaspora: Questions of (in-)Dividuality and (in-)Alienability in Transcultural
Reciprocal Relations’. In Wim M.J. van Binsbergen and Peter L. Geschiere (eds.)
279
Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities (The Social Life of Things

Revisited). Münster: Lit, p. 201-224.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2004. ‘Negotiating Marriage: Questions of Morality and Legitimacy in
the Ghanaian Pentecostal Diaspora’. Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (4): 438-467.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2003b ‘“Beyond the rivers of Ethiopia”: Pentecostal Pan-
Africanism and Ghanaian Identities in the Transnational Domain’. In Wim van
Binsbergen and Rijk van Dijk (eds.) Situating Globality: African Agency in the
Appropriation of Global Culture. Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p.163–189.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2003a. ‘Localisation, Ghanaian Pentecostalism and the Stranger's
Beauty in Botswana’. Africa 73 (4): 560-583.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2002. ‘Religion, Reciprocity and Restructuring Family Responsibility in
the Ghanaian Pentecostal Diaspora’. In Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela (eds.)
The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks. Oxford
[etc]: Berg, p. 173-196.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 2001. ‘Contesting Silence: the Ban on Drumming and the Musical
Politics of Pentecostalism in Ghana’. Ghana Studies vol. 4: 31-64.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 1999. ‘The Pentecostal Gift : Ghanaian Charismatic Churches and the
Moral Innocence of the Global Economy’. In Richard Fardon, Wim van Binsbergen
and Rijk van Dijk (eds.) Modernity on a Shoestring: Dimensions of Globalization,
Consumption and Development in Africa and Beyond. Leiden [etc.]: EIDOS, p. 71-
89.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 1998. ‘Pentecostalism, Cultural Memory and the State: Contested
Representations of Time in Postcolonial Malawi’. In Richard Werbner (ed.) Memory
and the Postcolony. African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London/New
York: Zed Books, p. 155-181.
Van Dijk, Rijk. 1992. Young Malawian Puritans: Young Born-Again Preachers in a
Present-Day African Urban Environment. Utrecht : ISOR.
Van Dijk, Rijk; Ria Reis and Marja Spierenburg . 2000. The Quest for Fruition through
Ngoma: Political Aspects of Healing in Southern Africa. Oxford [etc.]: James Currey
and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Van Koevering, Helen. 1992. ‘Recent Developments in Mozambican Christianity’. In
Paul Gifford (ed.) New Dimensions in African Christianity. Nairobi: All Africa
Conference of Churches, African Challenge Series no. 3, p. 103-134.
Van Velzen, Thoden and Ineke van Wetering. 2004. In the Shadow of the Oracle:
Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society. Long Grove: Waveland.
Van Wyk, Ilana. 2008. Anonymity and Public Blessings in a Church of Strangers: The
Case of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in Durban. Paper
presented at the International Conference ‘Christianity and Public Culture in Africa’,
University of Cambridge, March 2008.
Velho, Gilberto. 1981. Individualismo e Cultura: Notas para uma Antropologia da
Sociedade Contemporânea. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores.
280
Velho, Otávio. 2007. ‘Missionization in the Post-Colonial World: A View from Brazil
and Elsewhere’. Anthropological Theory 7 (3): 273-293.
Verheijen, Janneke. 2006. ‘Mass Media and Gender Equality: The Empowering
Message of Romantic Love in Telenovelas’. Etnofoor 19 (1): 23-39.
Verrips, Jojada. 2006. ‘Aisthesis and An-Aesthesia’. Ethnologia Europea 35 (1/2): 27-
33.
Vertovec, Steven. 2007. ‘Introduction: New Directions in the Anthropology of
Migration and Multiculturalism’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 961-978.
Vertovec, Steven. 2004. ‘Religion and Diaspora’. In Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and
Randi Ruth Warne (eds.) New Approaches to the Study of Religion. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyte, p. 275-303.
Vertovec, Steven. 2001. ‘Transnationalism and Identity’. Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 27 (4): 573-582.
Vigh, Henrik E. 2009. ‘Motion squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social
Navigation’. Anthropological Theory 9 (4): 419-438.
Vines, Alex. 1996. Renamo: From Terrorism to Democracy in Mozambique? London
[etc.]: James Currey.
Vines, Alex and Ken Wilson. 1995. ‘Churches and the Peace Process in Mozambique’.
In Paul Gifford (ed.) The Christian Churches and the Democratization of Africa.
Leiden [etc.]: Brill, p. 130-147.
Vink, Nico. 1988. The Telenovela and Emancipation: A Study on Television and Social
Change in Brazil. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute.
Visentini, Paulo. 2009. Prestige Diplomacy, Southern Solidarity or ‘Soft-Imperialism’?
Lula’s Brazil-Africa Relations (2003 Onwards). Paper presented at the African
Studies Centre, Leiden, 7 April 2009.
Visentini, Paulo. 2005. Relações Internacionais do Brasil: De Vargas a Lula. São
Paulo: Editora Perseu Abamo.
Visentini, Paulo e Analúcia Pereira. 2007. The African Policy of Lula’s Government.
Porto Alegre: NERINT.
Wagley, Charles. 1971. An Introduction to Brazil. Revised Edition. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Wagner, C. Peter . 1988. The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of
Signs and Wonders Today. Servant Publications, Vine Books.
Wardlow, Holly. 2006. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea
Society. University of California Press.
Weber, Max. 1958. The City. New York: The Free Press.
Webber, Robert E. 2002. The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New
World. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.
Welch, Gita Honwana; Francesca Dagnino and Albie Sachs. 1985. ‘Transforming the
Foundations of Family Law in the Course of the Mozambican Revolution’.
Journal of Southern African Studies 12 (1): 60-74.
281
Werbner, Pnina and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.). 1999. Women, Citizenship and Difference.
London [etc.]: Zed Books.
Werbner, Richard. 1991. Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African
Family. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African
Institute.
Werbner, Richard. 1989. Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey: The Process and
Organization of Religious Movement. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Werbner, Richard (ed.). 1977. Regional Cults. New York: Academic Press.
West, Harry G. 2009. ‘From Socialist Chiefs to Postsocialist Cadres: Neotraditional
Authority in Neoliberal Mozambique’. In Harry G. West and Raman Parvathi (eds.)
Enduring Socialism. Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration
and Continuation. Oxford [etc.]: Berghahn Books, p. 29-43.
West, Harry G. 2005. Kupilikula. Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique.
Chicago University Press.
West, Harry G. and Tracy Luedke. 2006. ‘Introduction. Healing Divides: Therapeutic
Border Work in Southeast Africa’. In Tracy Luedke and Harry West (eds.)
Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Indiana
West, Martin E. 1975. Bishops and Prophets in a Black City: African Independent
Churches in Soweto, Johannesburg. Cape Town: David Philip.
Whyte, Susan Reynolds. 1988. ‘The Power of Medicines in East Africa’. In Sjaak van
der Geest and Susan Reynolds Whyte (eds.) The Context of Medicines in Developing
Countries: Studies in Pharmaceutical Anthropology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, p. 217-233.
Wijsen, Frans and Robert Schreiter (eds.). 2007. Global Christianity: Contested Claims.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Wilkinson, Michael. 2006. The Spirit Said Go: Pentecostal Immigrants in Canada. New
York: Peter Lang.
Wilson, Ken B. 1992. ‘Cults of Violence and Counter-Violence in Mozambique’.
Journal of Southern African Studies 18 (3): 527-582.
WLSAMOÇ. 2001. Famílias em Contexto de Mudança em Moçambique. Maputo:
Women and Law in Southern Africa Moçambique, second edition.
Woodhead, Linda. 2001. ‘Feminism and the Sociology of Religion: From Gender-
Blindness to Gendered Difference’. In Richard Fenn (ed.) The Blackwell Companion
to Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 67-84.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997 Gender & Nation. London [etc.]: SAGE Publications.
Yuval-Davis, Nira and Marcel Stoetzler. 2002. ‘Imagined Boundaries & Borders: A
Gendered Gaze’. European Journal of Women's Studies 9(3): 329-344.
Zamparoni, Valdemir . 2000. “A Morada do Homem e o Mundo da Mulher”: Trabalho,
Gênero e Raça numa Sociedade Colonial, Lourenço Marques, Moçambique, nas
282
Primeiras Décadas do Século XX. Paper presented at I Simpósio Internacional,

Salvador, Brazil, 2000 (http://www.desafio.ufba.br/gt3-010.html).
Zimba, Benigna. 2003. Mulheres Invisíveis: O Género e as Políticas Comerciais no Sul
de Moçambique, 1720-1830. Maputo: Promédia.
283
Nederlandse Samenvatting – Dutch Summary
Gewelddadige Bekering: Braziliaans Pentecostalisme en het Stedelijk

Pionieren van Vrouwen in Mozambique
In Maputo, de hoofdstad van Mozambique, zijn Braziliaanse Pinksterkerken in de

afgelopen jaren spectaculair gegroeid. De Pinksterbeweging, ook wel aangeduid als het
Pentecostalisme, is tegenwoordig de snelst groeiende beweging binnen het
Christendom. In deze beweging ligt de nadruk ligt op de Heilige Geest, die de
discipelen van Jezus Christus volgens de Bijbel (Handelingen 2) op de Pinksterdag
ontvingen. Het Pentecostalisme groeit vooral snel in de stedelijke gebieden van Afrika,
Latijns-Amerika en Azië. Steeds vaker ontstaan Pinksterkerken vanuit transnationale
Zuid-Zuid relaties – in Mozambique speelt de relatie met Brazilië een voorname rol en
zijn de Braziliaanse Pinksterkerken in de afgelopen jaren steeds invloedrijker geworden.
Van 2005 tot en met 2007 verbleef ik in Mozambique om de groei van
Braziliaanse Pinksterkerken in stedelijke gebieden te bestuderen. Het werd mij spoedig
duidelijk dat deze kerken vooral sociaal-economisch succesvolle vrouwen aantrekken.
Veel van deze vrouwen bezoeken de kerkdiensten vanwege problematische
liefdesrelaties. Over het algemeen wordt gezegd dat hun relaties mislukken door geesten
die hun seksualiteit belemmeren en die zorgen voor spanningen in hun relaties met
verwanten en partners. Deze vrouwen voelen zich aangetrokken door Braziliaanse
voorgangers die openlijk ‘kwade’ geesten bestrijden en spreken over romantische liefde
en veranderende familierelaties.
Sinds 1990, na het einde van een zestien jaar lang durende burgeroorlog,
hebben Brazilianen in Mozambique Pinksterkerken gevestigd. De grootste en meest
prominente Braziliaanse kerk in Mozambique is de Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus
(Universele Kerk van Gods Rijk). De meeste Braziliaanse kerken en zendelingen in
Mozambique maken deel uit van de zogenoemde neo-Pentecostale beweging of
gebruiken elementen daaruit. In vergelijking met oudere Pinksterkerken staat in deze
kerken vooral ‘spiritual warfare’ centraal: een oorlog tussen God en de Duivel, tussen
het koninkrijk van het licht en het rijk der duisternis. Gelovigen moeten de wapens
opnemen om de geestelijke strijd aan te gaan. Ook moeten ze zich bewust zijn van hun
fouten en die van voorouders, omdat die consequenties hebben voor het heden en de
toekomst. In de Afrikaanse context brengt dit een grote preoccupatie teweeg met
vooroudergeesten. Een ander belangrijk kenmerk van de neo-Pentecostale kerken is de
zogenoemde welvaartstheologie: door een strijdbaar en moedig geloof en inzet worden
gelovigen gelukkig, gezond en welvarend – zowel materieel, sociaal als individueel.
Hierbij is de gedachte van zaaien en oogsten belangrijk: wie veel zaait, zal ook veel
284
oogsten. In het geval van het Braziliaans neo-Pentecostalisme betekent dit bijvoorbeeld
dat je een auto aan de kerk geeft vanuit de gedachte en met de verwachting dat je er
twee of drie auto’s voor terug krijgt. Tenslotte kenmerken neo-Pentecostale kerken zich
vaak door hun ondernemingsgewijze organisatie en hun sterke internationale oriëntatie.
In tegenspraak met veel studies over de Pinksterbeweging, ontdekte ik dat veel
van de bekeerde vrouwen geen gelukkig gezinsleven ontwikkelen en geen rust,
veiligheid, steun en welvaart vinden in de kerken. Integendeel, het bekeringsproces
blijkt vaak gewelddadig uit te pakken omdat spanningen in de relaties van vrouwen
toenemen en escaleren: ze breken met hun familie en ze gaan regelmatig failliet als
gevolg van de hoge financiële eisen die de leiders van de Pinksterkerken aan hen
stellen. Deze studie onderzoekt waarom en hoe de bekering van vrouwen tot het
Braziliaans Pentecostalisme in Mozambique is uitgegroeid tot een dergelijk
gewelddadig proces. Gewelddadig betekent hier in navolging van Hans Achterhuis en
Diederik Boeykens: ‘het min of meer intentioneel toebrengen of dreigen toe te brengen
van schade aan mensen of voorwerpen’.
Pentecostaal pionieren en de Mozambikaanse stedelijke samenleving
De groei van het Braziliaans neo-Pentecostalisme in Mozambique is het meest zichtbaar

in de hoofdstad Maputo. In hoofdstuk 1 en 3 beschrijf ik hoe de meeste inwoners
Maputo zien als een stad met veel mogelijkheden maar ook als een stad van
onzekerheden. Het is dé plek om hoger onderwijs te volgen of een goede baan te
vinden. Tegelijkertijd is er ook veel werkloosheid en concurrentie, en het leven is er
duur en hard. Andere uitdagingen en onzekerheden hebben te maken met de
onduidelijkheid over wat de Mozambikaanse cultuur eigenlijk inhoudt. Mensen vragen
zich af wat het precies betekent om Mozambikaan te zijn. Door de recente turbulente
geschiedenis deden zich snelle en verschillende opeenvolgende sociale veranderingen
voor onder achtereenvolgend het Portugese koloniale regime (tot 1974), een
socialistische regering na de onafhankelijkheid (+/- 1974-1989), een burgeroorlog (+/-
1976-1992) en de introductie van neo-liberale socio-economische en democratische
structuren (jaren 90 van de vorige eeuw). Ook het overheidsbeleid met betrekking tot
culturele normen en waarden, waaronder de rol van mannen, vrouwen en de familie in
de samenleving, wisselde sterk tijdens deze jaren.
Dit alles heeft geleid tot diverse en tegengestelde samenlevingsvormen,
waarbij vrouwen met een opwaartse sociale mobiliteit in Mozambique vandaag de dag
vragen en zorgen hebben over hun relaties met verwanten en geesten, het vinden van
een partner en het organiseren van een huwelijk en gezinsleven. Antwoorden en
oplossingen zijn vaak onduidelijk, maar er bestaat daardoor ook de mogelijkheid om
vage en onbegrensde ruimtes te onderzoeken, in te vullen en te creëren. Na de
285
socialistische periode, waarin de overheid probeerde om het leven van mensen sterk te
controleren, kunnen mensen in de huidige liberale tijd zich vrijer bewegen en nieuwe
kansen zoeken en benutten. In dit opzicht kan Maputo een pionierssamenleving worden
genoemd, waar opwaarts mobiele vrouwen onbekende domeinen verkennen in hun
pogingen om een beter leven te scheppen. Deze vrouwen zoeken naar manieren om
nieuwe en betere posities in te nemen in de stedelijke ruimte. Als ‘pioniersvrouwen’
hebben zij banen die onbereikbaar waren voor hun moeders. Ze veroveren posities die
vroeger voor vrouwen verboden en ondenkbaar waren, zoals in de stad wonen als
ongetrouwde en zelfstandige vrouw en meer geld verdienen dan mannen van dezelfde
leeftijd. Deze vrouwen betwisten en overschrijden daadwerkelijk allerlei sociaal-
culturele grenzen.
Pentecostalisme blijkt goed te passen bij een dergelijke pioniersmentaliteit. In
de stedelijke ruimte van Maputo, waar iedereen druk bezig is politieke, economische en
culturele posities te claimen, nemen de Pentecostalen deze terreinen op spirituele wijze
in. Een concreet voorbeeld is dat mensen tijdens de samenkomsten met hun voeten op
de grond stampen om ‘kwaadwillende anderen’, die hun levensruimtes proberen in te
nemen, klein te maken en weg te sturen. De bekeerlingen worden sterk gestimuleerd om
kansen te benutten, nieuwe bedrijven op te zetten en een professionele carrière te
ontwikkelen. In een omgeving waar nieuwe economische activiteiten en sociaal-
culturele praktijken moeten worden uitgevonden, biedt deze vorm van het
Pentecostalisme aanhangers de kans om nieuwe en alternatieve levensvormen te
ontdekken en te creëren, onder andere door de cursussen die voorgangers geven over
zakendoen en over het huwelijk. Het Pentecostale discours en bijbehorende praktijken
dwingen de volgelingen om grenzen te verleggen, zelf hun leven in de hand te nemen en
een nieuw leven te scheppen door gebruik te maken van de kracht van de Heilige Geest.
In hoofdstuk 4 beargumenteer ik dat deze pionierselementen versterkt worden
door de specifieke Zuid-Zuid transnationale relatie tussen Brazilië en Mozambique. De
Zuid-Zuid transnationale verbindingen van de Pinksterbeweging bieden specifieke
mogelijkheden tot het overstijgen van wat lokaal is en tot het verleggen van sociaal-
culturele grenzen. Zo worden diepgaande transformaties teweeg gebracht.
De transformerende kracht van de Zuid-Zuid transnationale ruimte heeft in het
Braziliaanse Pentecostalisme een specifiek historisch kader. Door de transatlantische
slavenhandel zijn in het verleden veel Afrikaanse slaven naar Brazilië vervoerd.
Volgens de Braziliaanse voorgangers zijn op deze manier ook ‘boze geesten’ uit Afrika
met de slaven de Atlantische Oceaan overgestoken en deze geesten spelen nu een
belangrijke rol in de Afro-Braziliaanse cultussen in Brazilië, zoals Candomblé en
Umbanda. Braziliaanse zendelingen zijn nu op hun beurt de Oceaan overgestoken om
de wortels van dit kwaad te bestrijden. De voorbeelden die de Braziliaanse pastors
gebruiken wanneer zij spreken over Afro-Braziliaanse geesten spelen een belangrijke
286
rol in de manier waarop Mozambikanen gebeurtenissen in hun leven duiden. Verhalen

over geesten die in Maputo de ronde doen en ontmoetingen van mensen met geesten
worden geïnterpreteerd volgens het perspectief van de Braziliaanse pastors op Afro-
Braziliaanse praktijken. Tegen deze achtergrond heeft het Pentecostale pionieren een
specifieke kracht omdat de Braziliaanse voorgangers historische, culturele en spirituele
grenzen zijn overgestoken en hebben ontkracht. Nu bieden zij Mozambikaanse vrouwen
de ruimte om hetzelfde te doen. Transnationale mobiliteit belicht hoe, als een persoon
haar leven opnieuw wil inrichten, zij op ontdekkingstocht moet gaan en in beweging
moet komen. Men moet het bekende - de familie, verwantschapsrelaties en culturele
vormen - overstijgen en ontberingen lijden om nieuwe mogelijkheden te creëren. Op
basis van een historische culturele nabijheid in de Zuid-Zuid relatie ontwikkelen de
Braziliaanse pastors op deze wijze een culturele afstand tot 'Afrika', en zijn gericht op
het vernietigen van elementen van de 'Afrikaanse cultuur'. De krachtige sfeer van strijd
en verovering die het Zuid-Zuid Pentecostalisme daarmee teweeg brengt, is belangrijk
voor het begrijpen van zijn gewelddadige technieken en effecten. In hoofdstuk 5
portretteer ik verschillende Pinkstervrouwen die verwikkeld zijn in de Zuid-Zuid
geestelijke oorlog.
Gewelddadige Bekering
In de hoofdstukken 6, 7 en 8 onderzoek ik de interacties tussen de Braziliaans

Pentecostale vertogen, praktijken, voorgangers en bekeerlingen in de context van de
geestelijke oorlog. In hoofdstuk 6 ga ik in het op het verschijnsel dat vrouwen
voorafgaand aan hun bekering gekweld worden door een gewelddadige geest die met
hen getrouwd is. Deze geest van wraak is vaak gerelateerd aan oorlogen en eist van de
familie van iemand die een (oorlogs)slachtoffer heeft gemaakt, een geschenk ter
verzoening in de vorm van een maagd, meestal een meisje en in sommige gevallen ook
een jongen. De geest wordt op deze wijze de spirituele echtgenoot van jonge vrouwen.
Een andere manier waarop vrouwen een relatie krijgen met een geest is een vorm van
hekserij waarbij familieleden een maagd weggeven of verkopen aan een geest die de
familie rijk zal maken. Vrouwen vertelden mij regelmatig geslachtsgemeenschap te
hebben met hun spirituele echtgenoot zonder de aanwezigheid van een fysiek persoon.
Dit 'huwelijk' maakt het voor hen onmogelijk om een mens van vlees en bloed te
trouwen; als ze dat wel doen, ervaren ze veel problemen in relaties met mannen, hebben
te maken met huiselijk geweld en kunnen geen kinderen krijgen. Ik betoog dat het
huidige hoge aantal spirituele echtgenoten die met kracht de levens van vrouwen
binnendringt, getuigt van de moeilijkheden in de betrekkingen tussen verwanten, tussen
partners en tussen mensen en geesten in de naoorlogse en neo-liberale Mozambikaanse
samenleving. Opwaarts mobiele vrouwen bezoeken Pinksterkerken om zich te ontdoen
287
van deze geest van oorlog en hekserij, en van verwanten die hen dwingen om te trouwen
met een dergelijke geest. Door steeds meer vervuld te raken van de Heilige Geest leren
de vrouwen hun lichaam af te sluiten, om zo spirituele indringers en veeleisende
verwanten te weren.
Echter, ook de manier waarop de Heilige Geest de lichamen van de vrouwen
binnentreedt in de Zuid-Zuid transnationale Pinksterbeweging blijkt gewelddadige
vormen aan te nemen. De bekeerde vrouwen maken onderdeel uit van een spirituele
oorlog waarin ze leren om zich geestelijke wapens toe te eigenen. Gekleed in deze
geestelijke wapenrusting strijden zij tegen geesten, verwanten en partners door middel
van gebed, vasten, het weggeven van geld en het zich afsluiten voor hun verwanten. Zo
nu en dan delen de voorgangers zwaarden en hamers uit van hout en plastic die de
bekeerlingen mee naar huis nemen om hen te herinneren aan hun positie van
‘Pentecostale soldaat’. Als onderdeel van deze oorlog zien bekeerde vrouwen hun
verwanten en echtgenoten steeds meer als personen die vervuld zijn met kwade machten
en vertrouwen zij hen niet meer. Als gevolg hiervan ervaren zij toenemende spanningen
in hun relaties, plaatsen zij zich buiten hun (familie)netwerken van sociale zekerheid,
hebben slapeloze nachten en eten te weinig. Ze begeven zich feitelijk aan het front van
hun samenleving, waar de socio-culturele conflicten worden uitgevochten en waar ze
zich die conflicten gedurende het bekeringsproces ook diepgaand toe-eigenen. Zo
komen ze alleen te staan.
De vrouwen moeten volgens de Braziliaanse voorgangers ook in staat zijn om
bij henzelf te onderzoeken of alle noodzakelijke manieren om Gods soldaat te zijn
werkelijk wortel hebben geschoten in hun hele lichaam. Al hun zintuigen moeten erop
gericht zijn dat zij continu attente en gereedstaande soldaten zijn. Ze verkeren dus altijd
in een oorlogssituatie en moeten een sterke en vastberaden houding tonen. Tekenen van
de aanwezigheid van de Heilige Geest in hun leven zijn daarbij niet beperkt tot het
sluiten van een gelukkig huwelijk en de wens om succesvol te worden, maar omvatten
ook een geheel eigen manier van zijn en handelen. Gelovigen kunnen daarom jaren van
training nodig hebben. Ze nemen daartoe actief deel aan cycli van wekelijkse
kerkdiensten (correntes) en speciale campagnes waar gevraagd wordt om grote offers in
de vorm van vasten, nachtelijk waken en de betaling van grote sommen geld
(sacrifício).
Een ander markant voorbeeld van deze training is de therapie van de liefde
(terapia do amor). In hoofdstuk 7 beschrijf ik dat de Braziliaanse pastors de deelnemers
aan deze therapie laten zien hoe ze kunnen genieten van romantiek, trouw en geluk in
hun affectieve relaties. Dit gebeurt door hun bepaalde omgangsvormen aan te leren die
in de lokale context erg confronterend zijn, zoals het zoenen en omhelzen van een
partner in het openbaar, bijvoorbeeld voorin de kerk. Op deze manier wordt onderwezen
hoe potentiële partners met succes benaderd kunnen worden en hoe vastgelopen
288
huwelijksrelaties nieuw leven ingeblazen kan worden. Zo kan de Heilige Geest tijdens
de therapie partners bij elkaar brengen. Maar de wens en de druk om een partner te
vinden en te trouwen blijkt ook regelmatig te resulteren in premature huwelijken waar
zich in plaats van liefde vooral misverstanden en zelfs haat ontwikkelen. In zo’n geval
worden partners vervolgens nogals eens gedemoniseerd. Weerstand en eenzaamheid
worden gezien als een logisch onderdeel van de bestrijding van een vijand en van
grensverleggende praktijken. Voorgangers en bekeerlingen illustreren dit met Bijbelse
voorbeelden uit de levens van Abraham en Jacob.
Hoofdstuk 8 biedt een analyse van de financiële campagnes en de enorme
offers die deel uitmaken van het Braziliaanse Pentecostalisme in Maputo. Gelovigen
betalen letterlijk een hoge prijs voor hun bekering omdat zij grote sommen geld moeten
doneren aan de kerk – soms ter grootte van een heel jaarsalaris. Ook sluiten mensen
hiervoor leningen af. Dergelijke financiële offers maken deel uit van de Pinksterpraktijk
van ‘zaaien en oogsten’. Het gevolg is dat veel bekeerlingen een groot deel van hun
inkomsten en spaargeld weggeven en failliet gaan. Toch geven bekeerlingen hun geld
weg vanwege de noodzaak om de 'Mozambikaanse cultuur' eens en voor altijd te
vernietigen. Dit zet allerlei relaties in de samenleving onder druk. Zo begroeven
bekeerlingen, als onderdeel van een campagne ter bevordering van welvaart, op een dag
doodskisten in of nabij het kerkgebouw – iets dat sterk indruist tegen lokale gewoontes.
Terwijl de kisten gevuld waren met voorwerpen uit het oude leven van de bekeerlingen
dat ze nu voorgoed achter zich hadden gelaten, dachten hun familie en buurtgenoten dat
de kerk meewerkte aan hekserij, omdat het gebruik van grafkisten zonder gebruikelijke
reinigingsrituelen gevaarlijk is en anderen schade berokkent. Met het aanbieden van een
heel jaarsalaris in de kerk onttrekken bekeerlingen zich aan de lokale uitwisseling van
geld als onderdeel van verwantschapsrelaties. Tegelijkertijd biedt de participatie in de
financiële campagnes van Pinksterkerken de mogelijkheid tot het realiseren van een
nieuw leven in de huidige neo-liberale stedelijke samenleving. De vrouwen voelen zich
aangetrokken door het feit dat Pinksterpastors geen hulp bieden, maar hen dwingen om
zichzelf te helpen. Dit is een houding waar opwaarts mobiele vrouwen naar streven en
waardoor ze hun pioniercapaciteiten kunnen ontwikkelen en demonstreren. Offeren,
vechten en worstelen zijn manifestaties van de participatie van deze vrouwen in de stad,
waar concurrentie, wantrouwen en kansen centraal staan.
Tijdens mijn onderzoek is gebleken dat de Pinkstervrouwen op uiteenlopende
wijzen betrokken zijn bij de transnationale Braziliaanse Pinksterbeweging en de
geestelijke oorlog, en dat de ervaringen van geweld dan ook divers zijn. Sommige
bekeerlingen gaan failliet, terwijl anderen hebben geleerd om zich te distantiëren van de
voorgangers en zelf te beoordelen hoeveel ze bereid zijn te investeren in een nieuw
leven. Ik concludeer dat deze verscheidenheid samenvalt met generatieverschillen en
afhankelijk is van de ervaringen van de bekeerde vrouwen met een neo-liberale
289
stedelijke samenleving. Zoals in hoofdstuk 5 is beschreven, beïnvloedt de plaats van

vrouwen in de sociale verandering in Mozambique mede hun participatie in de kerken.
Over het algemeen zijn oudere vrouwen minder geïntegreerd in de neo-liberale
economische orde en vinden zij het ook lastig om de druk van pastors te weerstaan.
Door hun interactie met de Pinksterpastors tijdens bijvoorbeeld business workshops,
ontvangen zij een ‘effectieve’ training in wat het beleid van een vrije markt kan
betekenen. De jongere generatie is meer vertrouwd met het liberale tijdperk waarin ze
zijn groot gebracht en zij beschouwen de voorgangers vaak als personen om zaken mee
te doen.
Tegelijk houden de verschillende effecten van bekering ook verband met de
persoonlijke capaciteiten van mensen om zich het Pinkstergeloof eigen te maken. De
leiders van de kerken spreken regelmatig over het concept van ‘intelligent geloof’ (fé
inteligente), wat betekent dat het niet voldoende is om deel te nemen aan kerkdiensten
en demonen uit te drijven, maar dat het ook noodzakelijk is zich alle geloofselementen,
zoals vertrouwen en rationaliteit, eigen te maken. Afhankelijk van hoe snel men erin
slaagt om een goed opgeleide Pinkstergelovige te worden, door het volgen van de cycli
van kerkdiensten, cursussen en therapieën en als gevolg van de interactie met
voorgangers, kan een nieuw en gelukkig leven gaan ontstaan.
Pentecostalisme en sociale verandering
Er is vaak gezegd dat de bekering tot het Pentecostalisme een reactie is op processen
van globalisering en sociaal-economische en politieke ontwikkelingen. Volgens deze
benadering biedt het Pentecostalisme mensen stabiliteit in tijden van veranderingen en
door haar internationale netwerken is het Pentecostalisme eveneens een toegangsticket
tot bijvoorbeeld de internationale economie (hoofdstuk 2). Echter, de Mozambikaanse
vrouwen die zich bekeren tot het Braziliaans Pentecostalisme zijn niet zozeer gericht op
het vinden van hulp en stabiliteit en bovendien zijn ze veelal relatief succesvol op de
arbeidsmarkt. Zij zijn actief bezig om zelf hun leven vorm te geven, ze nemen risico’s
en creëren door hun participatie in de Braziliaans-Mozambikaanse of Zuid-Zuid
transnationale Pinksterbeweging een eigen vorm van globalisering. Zij wachten niet op
het moment dat globlasering en sociale veranderingen hun leven gaat verslechteren of
verbeteren, maar gesterkt door een specifiek Braziliaans Pentecostaal pionieren – een
praktijk van geestelijke strijd en grenzen doorbreken – scheppen zij eigen vormen van
sociale verandering en globalisering.
Ik betoog daarom dat de bekering van vrouwen niet primair moet worden
gezien als een antwoord op globalisering en sociale transformaties, maar als een kracht
van verandering en globalisering in zichzelf. In dit proces zijn de Pinkstervrouwen
bovendien niet allereerst bezig met het stabiliseren van hun positie of het zoeken naar
290
veiligheid, maar gooien ze veeleer hun sociale en financiële zekerheden overhoop door
te breken met het verleden, zoals met de afhankelijkheden van hun families en met
heersende socio-culturele normen en waarden. De gevolgen hiervan zijn niet altijd te
overzien en kunnen regelmatig gewelddadige vormen aannemen. Dit gewelddadige
karakter van de bekering van de vrouwen tot het Braziliaans Pentecostalisme in
Mozambique heeft implicaties voor het inzicht in de samenhang tussen religie en sociale
transformaties. In het laatste gedeelte van deze samenvatting ga ik kort in op deze
implicaties in relatie tot de thema’s familie en gender, (on)veiligheid en ontwikkeling
zoals behandeld in het concluderende hoofdstuk 9.
In de participatie van Mozambikaanse vrouwen in het Braziliaans
Pentecostalisme staat de rol van de familie, huwelijk en gender in hun maatschappij
centraal. De onderzochte Pinkstervrouwen zijn druk bezig te breken met gevestigde
conventies, grenzen te verruimen en nieuwe domeinen van sociale interactie, zowel
privé als publiek, te creëren. De vraag is of zij de Mozambikaanse stedelijke
samenleving of een deel daarvan blijvend zullen veranderen. Naar mijn mening hangt
het antwoord in grote mate af van de (toekomstige) rol van mannen in het Braziliaans
Pentecostalisme in Maputo. Tot nu toe zijn er relatief minder mannen betrokken bij deze
vorm van Pentecostalisme en lijkt de bekering van vrouwen te hebben bijgedragen tot
een groeiende kloof tussen mannen en vrouwen. Het veroveren van sociale posities die
eerder vooral mannen toebehoorden en het veranderen van gewoontes realiseren deze
vrouwen vooralsnog vrijwel alleen en ze stuiten daarbij regelmatig op weerstand, met
name van mannen die geen deel uitmaken van dit bekeringsproces. De pastors,
grotendeels mannen, richten hun preken en activiteiten vooral op vrouwen omdat zij er
het meest voor open staan en laten de transformatie van mannen en mannelijke
domeinen over aan vrouwen. Maar vaak worden mannen gedemoniseerd door de
Pinkstervrouwen en slechts in enkele gevallen worden ze gezien als collega-soldaten.
Deze scheiding leidt tot gewelddadige conflicten tussen mannen en vrouwen en in
families en gezinnen. Als de transformatie van genderrollen, van familieverhoudingen
en van huwelijken door de bekering tot het Pentecostalisme voornamelijk een zaak van
vrouwen blijft en geweld oproept, is het is de vraag of de Pinksterbeweging een
belangrijke rol kan spelen in een feminisering van de samenleving en het scheppen van
werkbare genderrollen en goede relaties. Mensen zullen moe worden van het geweld,
zoals diegenen die ik tijdens mijn onderzoek tegenkwam die het Pentecostalisme
verlaten hadden.
Het gewelddadige karakter van de bekering tot het Braziliaans Pentecostalisme
betekent dat de sociale veiligheid van mensen afneemt, zowel voor Pentecostalen als
niet-Pentecostalen, bijvoorbeeld door de spanningen in relaties en door het onstaan van
gebrek aan geld. Dit roept vragen op over de mogelijke samenhang tussen niveaus van
(on)veiligheid in een samenleving en gewelddadige bekering. Mensen die zich het
291
meest lijken te verbinden met deze vorm van Pentecostalisme zijn diegenen die
proberen te profiteren van de onduidelijke, onzekere en nieuwe ruimten in hun
maatschappij, zowel in geestelijke als fysieke zin. De Pentecostale pionierstechnieken
lijken een grote impact te hebben in omgevingen met een sterke survival of the fittest
mentaliteit. De Pinksterpraktijken krijgen in dergelijke omstandigheden zelfs nieuwe
dimensies. Afhankelijk van de risico’s die bekeerlingen bereid zijn te nemen, kunnen
voorgangers de (letterlijke) prijs verhogen van de offers die ze eisen. De risico's die
bekeerlingen nemen lijken gerelateerd te zijn aan een bepaald type samenleving. Dit kan
ook worden geïllustreerd door de pragmatische en vrije manier waarop verschillende
bekeerlingen omgaan met de pastors en hun kerken. De Pinksterkerken worden meestal
niet gezien als sociale instituties waar vertrouwen een belangrijke rol speelt en
verschillende bekeerlingen verlaten de kerken dan ook gemakkelijk om vervolgens een
nieuwe Pinksterkerk te bezoeken. De kerken zijn een essentieel onderdeel van een
onzekere samenleving en versterken wantrouwen en onzekerheid.
De gewelddadige dynamiek van het bekeringsproces roept tenslotte ook vragen
op over het type ontwikkeling van de samenleving dat het Braziliaans Pentecostalisme
in gang zet en wil zetten. Bekeerlingen zijn vurige tegenstanders van ontwikkeling
gebaseerd op wat wel de ‘traditionele Mozambikaanse cultuur’ wordt genoemd – een
ontwikkelingsmodel dat de Mozambikaanse overheid en veel lokale en internationale
NGOs lijken te omarmen. Bekeerlingen willen zich juist losmaken van lokale
genezingsrituelen, huwelijksvormen en verwantschapsrelaties. Ze zijn bezorgd over de
negatieve gevolgen van wraakzuchtige geesten als gevolg van de oorlog en 'tovenaars'
op zoek naar rijkdom (hoofdstuk 6). Het specifieke spirituele kader van Braziliaanse
Pinksterbeweging, dat alle geesten en lokale gebruiken demoniseert, omvat een
effectieve houding om dergelijke problemen op confronterende wijze aan te pakken.
Deze opstelling van de Pentecostalen beïnvloedt de vorming van een gezamenlijke
nationale identiteit. Niet-Pentecostale medeburgers vinden dat Pentecostalen door het
ontkennen en het willen vergeten van het verleden, als ook door het zich onttrekken aan
relaties met anderen, een gedeelde verbondenheid en verantwoordelijkheid
verwaarlozen. De Pentecostalen op hun beurt vinden dat zij hun medeburgers niet
kunnen vertrouwen.
De Pentecostalen zijn ook kritisch over de internationale donoren en hun
programma’s voor ontwikkelingssamenwerking. Volgens de Pentecostalen hebben zij
een mentaliteit van afhankelijkheid gecreëerd en van handen ophouden, terwijl de
Pinkstervoorgangers mensen stimuleren of dwingen om zichzelf te helpen en zelf
verantwoordelijkheid te nemen. In deze zin lijkt de Pinksterbeweging, in navolging van
socioloog Max Weber, een vorm van sociaal-economische ontwikkeling te bevorderen
die nuttig kan zijn in een markteconomie. Toch is het belangrijk om te beseffen dat
Pinksterleiders voornamelijk zelf gebruik maken van de kansen die de neo-liberale
292
samenleving hun biedt, in plaats van bekeerlingen te helpen om vaardigheden te leren

die ze nodig hebben in een (nieuwe) kapitalistische orde. De Pinksterleiders lijken juist
de grenzen van de huidige neo-liberale werkelijkheid te verleggen. Ze grijpen de kansen
die zij zien op een religieuze markt waar zij weinig gecontroleerd worden.
Op deze wijze stimuleren de Braziliaans-Mozambikaanse transnationale
Pentecostalen een specifiek ontwikkelingsmodel waarbij ze elkaar niet ondersteunen
maar onder druk zetten om kansen en uitdagingen aan te gaan en te benutten. Met
minimale steun trekken de strijdbare Pinkstervrouwen erop uit om hun plek in de stad in
te nemen, zelfs als dit betekent dat ze verder gaan dan wat haalbaar is – om uiteindelijk
de hemel op aarde te realiseren.
293
Resumo Português – Portuguese Summary
Conversão Violenta: Pentecostalismo Brasileiro e Mulheres Urbanas

Pioneiras em Moçambique
Em Maputo, a capital de Moçambique, as igrejas pentecostais brasileiras têm crescido

exponencialmente nos últimos anos. O pentecostalismo é o movimento que cresce mais
rápido dentro do cristianismo atualmente. É um movimento baseado na ênfase no
Espírito Santo, a quem, segundo a Bíblia (Atos 2), os discípulos de Jesus Cristo
receberam no dia de Pentecostes. O pentecostalismo cresce especialmente nas áreas
urbanas da África, América Latina e Ásia. Cada vez mais, igrejas pentecostais surgem
nestes locais a partir de relações transnacionais sul-sul. Em Moçambique, o
relacionamento com o Brasil desempenha um papel importante e as igrejas pentecostais
brasileiras têm se tornado cada vez mais influentes em anos recentes.
De 2005 a 2007, vivi em Moçambique para estudar o crescimento das igrejas
pentecostais brasileiras nas áreas urbanas. Logo ficou claro para mim que estas igrejas
atraem principalmente mulheres socioeconomicamente bem sucedidas. Muitas dessas
mulheres frequentam os cultos da igreja por causa de relacionamentos amorosos
problemáticos. Diz-se, geralmente, que seus relacionamentos não funcionam por causa
de espíritos que impedem a sua sexualidade e conduzem suas relações com parentes e
parceiros a tensões. Essas mulheres são atraídas pelos pastores brasileiros que
abertamente lutam contra espíritos ‘maus’ e falam sobre o amor romântico e sobre
relações familiares transformadas.
A partir de 1990, após o término da guerra civil de dezesseis anos, brasileiros
estabeleceram igrejas pentecostais em Moçambique. A igreja brasileira mais influente e
com maior número de templos e adeptos em Moçambique é a Igreja Universal do Reino
de Deus (Igreja Universal). A maioria das igrejas e missionários brasileiros em
Moçambique faz parte do movimento chamado neopentecostal, ou ao menos usam
alguns elementos do mesmo. Em comparação com as igrejas pentecostais mais antigas,
as neopentecostais se caracterizam pela sua ênfase na 'guerra espiritual' – uma guerra
entre Deus e o Diabo, entre o reino da luz e o reino das trevas. Os crentes devem se
armar para lutar espiritualmente. Eles devem também estar conscientes de seus erros e
daqueles cometidos pelos seus antepassados, pois esses têm implicações para o presente
e o futuro. No contexto africano, esta crença levanta grandes preocupações com os
espíritos ancestrais. Outra característica importante das igrejas neopentecostais é a
teologia da prosperidade, que afirma que os crentes que tiverem uma fé combativa e
valente e um compromisso firme serão felizes, saudáveis e prósperos, tanto
materialmente, quanto social e individualmente. Decorre disto a importante ideia de
294
semear e colher: aqueles que semearem muito, colherão muito. No caso do

neopentecostalismo brasileiro em Moçambique, isso significa, em termos práticos, que a
pessoa dá um carro para a igreja com a convicção e expectativa de que receberá dois ou
três carros em troca. Finalmente, as igrejas neopentecostais frequentemente se
caracterizam por sua organização empresarial e sua forte orientação internacional.
Ao contrário do que afirmam muitos estudos sobre o movimento pentecostal,
descobri que muitas das mulheres convertidas não desenvolvem uma vida familiar feliz
e não encontram paz, segurança, apoio e prosperidade nas igrejas. Pelo contrário, muitas
vezes o processo de conversão se torna violento porque as tensões nas relações das
mulheres aumentam: elas rompem com a família e com frequência vão à falência devido
às altas demandas financeiras que lhes são colocadas pelos líderes das igrejas
pentecostais. Este estudo investiga como e por que a conversão das mulheres ao
pentecostalismo brasileiro em Moçambique tornou-se um processo tão violento. Uso o
termo violência, aqui, no sentido que lhe conferem Hans Achterhuis e Diederik
Boeykens: ‘infligir, ou ameaçar infligir, de forma mais ou menos intencional danos a
pessoas ou objetos’.
Pentecostalismo pioneiro e a sociedade urbana Moçambicana
O crescimento do neopentecostalismo brasileiro em Moçambique é mais visível na sua

capital, Maputo. Os capítulos 1 e 3 descrevem como a cidade é vista pela maioria dos
seus moradores como um lugar de muitas oportunidades, mas também de muitas
incertezas. Em Maputo estão as possibilidades de acesso ao ensino superior e aos
melhores empregos, mas também as dificuldades causadas pelos altos índices de
desemprego, a grande concorrência por oportunidades limitadas e o elevado custo de
vida. Outros desafios e inseguranças estão relacionadas à incerteza sobre o real
conteúdo da cultura moçambicana. As pessoas se questionam sobre o significado de ser
moçambicana/o, tendo em vista as grandes, rápidas e variadas mudanças sociais que se
sucederam na turbulenta história recente do país, que saiu do regime colonial Português
(até 1974), passou por um governo socialista após a independência (+/- 1974-1989), por
uma guerra civil (+/- 1976-1992) e pela introdução de estruturas socioeconômicas
neoliberais e democráticas (anos 90 do século passado). Além disso, as intervenções do
governo, relativamente às normas e valores culturais, incluindo o papel dos homens, das
mulheres e da família na sociedade, variaram muito durante estes anos.
Isso levou a várias e conflituosas formações sociais com consequências
diversas. Para as mulheres moçambicanas com uma recente mobilidade social
ascendente, essas consequências se traduzem em questões e preocupações sobre seus
relacionamentos com familiares e com espíritos, sobre como encontrar um parceiro e
organizar um casamento e uma vida familiar. Respostas e soluções são muitas vezes
295
insuficientes e confusas, mas exatamente por isso, também abertas à possibilidade de

explorar, criar e preencher espaços vazios e ilimitados. No clima mais liberal dos dias
atuais, após o período socialista, quando o governo tentava fortemente controlar a vida
dos cidadãos, as pessoas podem circular mais livremente, explorar e encontrar novas
oportunidades. Neste sentido, Maputo pode ser considerada uma sociedade pioneira, na
qual as mulheres com uma mobilidade ascendente exploram domínios socioculturais
desconhecidos na sua tentativa de criar uma vida melhor. Estas mulheres encontram
novas e melhores formas de tomar posições no espaço urbano. Como 'mulheres
pioneiras', elas têm empregos que seriam inatingíveis para suas mães. Elas conquistam
posições anteriormente impensáveis e proibidas para mulheres, tais como viver na
cidade como mulheres solteiras e independentes, ou ganhar mais dinheiro do que seus
pares do sexo masculino. Essas mulheres certamente desafiam e ultrapassam diversas
fronteiras socioculturais.
O pentecostalismo parece se encaixar bem com este espírito pioneiro. Na área
urbana de Maputo, onde todos, de alguma forma, marcam suas posições políticas,
econômicas e culturais, os pentecostais se apropriam de seu espaço de forma espiritual.
Um exemplo concreto é que durante as reuniões na igreja as pessoas pisam no chão com
os pés para intimidar e mandar embora os ‘mal-intencionados’ que tentam invadir os
seus espaços de vida. Os convertidos são fortemente encorajados a aproveitar
oportunidades, criar novos negócios e desenvolver uma carreira profissional. Num
ambiente onde novas atividades econômicas e práticas socioculturais devem ser
inventadas, esta forma de pentecostalismo oferece a oportunidade de criar e descobrir
novas formas e alternativas de vida, através, por exemplo, de cursos ministrados pelos
pastores sobre como fazer negócios e sobre o casamento. Os discursos pentecostais e as
práticas associadas a eles levam seus seguidores a tomar suas vidas nas próprias mãos,
deslocar limites e criar uma nova vida usando o poder do Espírito Santo.
No Capítulo 4, argumento que esses fatores pioneiros são reforçadas pelas
relações específicas transnacionais sul-sul entre Brasil e Moçambique. Estas conexões
do pentecostalismo oferecem oportunidades específicas de ir além do que é local e
mudar limites socioculturais. Assim, transformações profundas são produzidas.
O poder transformador do espaço transnacional sul-sul tem um contexto
histórico específico no pentecostalismo brasileiro. Pelo tráfico transatlântico de escravos
no passado, muitos escravos africanos foram transportados para o Brasil. De acordo
com os pastores brasileiros, dessa maneira também ‘maus espíritos’ da África
atravessaram o Atlântico com os escravos, para desempenhar um papel importante nos
cultos afro-brasileiros, como o Candomblé e a Umbanda. Por sua vez, agora
missionários brasileiros estão cruzando o oceano para combater as raízes deste mal. Os
exemplos que os pastores brasileiros usam ao falar de espíritos afro-brasileiros
desempenham um papel importante na forma como os moçambicanos pentecostais
296
interpretam acontecimentos em suas vidas. Histórias sobre espíritos e encontros de

pessoas com espíritos que circulam em Maputo são interpretados de acordo com a
perspectiva dos pastores brasileiros sobre as práticas afro-brasileiras. Neste contexto, o
pentecostalismo pioneiro exerce um poder especial, porque os pastores brasileiros
atravessaram e refutaram limites históricos, culturais e espirituais. A partir desta
experiência, estes pastores apresentam às mulheres moçambicanas a possibilidade de
fazer o mesmo. A mobilidade transnacional destaca como, se uma pessoa deseja
reorganizar sua vida, ela deveria explorar as possibilidades e começar a se movimentar.
É preciso transcender o conhecido - família, relações de parentesco e formas culturais –
e sofrer dificuldades para criar novas oportunidades. Baseando-se numa proximidade
histórica cultural nas relações sul-sul, os pastores brasileiros desenvolvem dessa
maneira uma distância cultural para com a ‘África’, e pretendem destruir elementos da
‘cultura Africana’. A poderosa atmosfera de luta e conquista que o pentecostalismo sul-
sul traz, é importante para a compreensão de suas técnicas e efeitos violentos. No
capítulo 5 apresento vários retratos de mulheres pentecostais que estão envolvidas na
guerra espiritual sul-sul.
Conversão violenta
Nos capítulos 6, 7 e 8, eu investigo as interações entre os discursos, as práticas, os

pastores e os convertidos no pentecostalismo brasileiro e no contexto da guerra
espiritual. O capítulo 6 discute o fenômeno que ocorre às mulheres antes da sua
conversão: elas são atormentadas por um espírito violento com quem elas estariam
casadas. Este espírito de vingança é frequentemente relacionado a ocorrências de guerra
e às demandas feitas pela família de uma vítima aos parentes de seu agressor. A doação
de reconciliação costumeira é uma virgem. Em alguns casos um menino é exigido. O
espírito da vítima se torna o marido espiritual da jovem mulher. Outra forma das
mulheres acabarem envolvidas em uma relação com um espírito é a partir de um tipo de
feitiçaria, na qual membros da família doam ou vendem uma virgem a um espírito que
vai trazer riqueza à família. Mulheres me disseram ter relações sexuais regulares com o
seu marido espiritual, sem a presença de uma pessoa física. Este ‘casamento' impede
que elas se casem com um homem de carne e osso; se o fizerem, elas experimentam
muitos problemas nos relacionamentos, associados principalmente à violência
doméstica e à impossibilidade de conceber. Sugiro que o número elevado de maridos
espirituais que atualmente invadem com força a vida das mulheres atesta as dificuldades
nas relações entre parentes, entre parceiros, e entre humanos e espíritos na sociedade
moçambicana pós-guerra e neoliberal. Mulheres com mobilidade ascendente visitam
igrejas pentecostais para se livrarem desses espíritos de guerra e de feitiçaria, assim
como dos parentes que as forçam a se casar com eles. Por se encherem cada vez mais do
297
Espírito Santo, as mulheres aprendem a fechar seus corpos, excluindo assim espíritos
intrusos e parentes exigentes.
No entanto, a forma como o Espírito Santo entra nos corpos das mulheres no
movimento transnacional pentecostal sul-sul também parece assumir formas violentas.
As mulheres convertidas fazem parte de uma guerra espiritual na qual elas devem se
apropriar de armas da mesma natureza. Vestidas com esta armadura espiritual elas
lutam contra espíritos, parentes e parceiros, através de oração, jejum, ofertas financeiras
e afastamento de seus parentes. Assim, de vez em quando os líderes pentecostais
distribuem espadas e martelos de madeira ou plástico, as quais as crentes levam para
casa para serem lembradas de sua posição de ‘soldado pentecostal’. Como parte desta
guerra, as mulheres convertidas veem seus parentes e cônjuges cada vez mais como
pessoas dominadas pelas forças do mal e nos quais elas não podem mais confiar. Como
resultado, elas crescentemente experimentam tensões em seus relacionamentos, se
colocam fora de suas redes (familiares) de segurança social, têm noites insones e
comem muito pouco. Elas realmente colocam-se na linha de frente de sua sociedade,
onde os conflitos socioculturais são travados e onde elas também vivenciam
profundamente estes conflitos no processo de conversão. Elas acabam por ficar
sozinhas.
Os pastores brasileiros também exigem que as mulheres sejam capazes de
examinar se todas as formas necessárias para ser um soldado de Deus realmente se
enraizaram em todo o seu corpo. Todos os seus sentidos devem estar alerta para serem
soldados constantemente atentos e prontos. Elas sempre se encontram numa situação de
guerra e devem ter uma atitude forte e determinada. Sinais da presença do Espírito
Santo nas suas vidas não se restringem à busca de um casamento feliz e ao desejo de ter
sucesso, mas também incluem uma forma idiossincrática de ser e agir. Crentes podem,
portanto, precisar de anos de treinamento. Para isso, elas tomam parte ativa dos ciclos
de cultos semanais na igreja (correntes) e campanhas especiais, as quais exigem grandes
sacrifícios na forma de jejuns, noites de vigília e pagamentos de grandes somas de
dinheiro (sacrifícios).
Outro exemplo marcante desse treinamento é a terapia do amor. No capítulo 7
descrevo como os pastores brasileiros mostram aos participantes desta terapia como eles
podem desfrutar de fidelidade, romance e felicidade em seus relacionamentos afetivos.
Isso é feito através do aprendizado de estilos corporais particulares que podem ser
chocantes no contexto local, como beijar e abraçar seu parceiro em público, na frente do
palco na igreja, por exemplo. Desta forma, ensina-se como se aproximar com sucesso de
potenciais parceiros e como reavivar relações conjugais esmorecidas. Assim, o Espírito
Santo junta parceiros durante a terapia. Mas o desejo e a pressão para encontrar um
parceiro e casar também várias vezes resultam em casamentos prematuros nos quais, ao
invés de amor, desenvolvem-se o mal-entendido e até mesmo o ódio. Nesses casos,
298
parceiros frequentemente são vistos como pessoas enfeitiçadas. Resistência e solidão,

porém, são pensadas como uma parte logicamente integrante de qualquer luta contra um
inimigo e de qualquer tipo de pioneirismo. Pastores e convertidos ilustram isso com
exemplos bíblicos da vida de Abraão e de Jacó.
O capítulo 8 apresenta uma análise das campanhas financeiras e dos sacrifícios
enormes que fazem parte do pentecostalismo brasileiro em Maputo. Crentes pagam um
preço alto, literalmente, por sua conversão, pois eles têm que doar grandes somas de
dinheiro para a igreja, somas estas que podem chegar ao valor de um ano de salário. As
pessoas também fazem empréstimos para este fim. Tais sacrifícios financeiros são parte
da prática pentecostal de ‘semear e colher’. O resultado é que muitos convertidos doam
uma grande proporção dos seus rendimentos e poupanças e vão à falência. Mesmo
assim, convertidos continuam doando seu dinheiro por causa da necessidade de destruir
a ‘cultura moçambicana’ de uma vez por todas. Isto coloca muitos relacionamentos na
sociedade sob pressão. Por exemplo, como parte de uma campanha para promover a
prosperidade, os crentes enterravam caixões perto da igreja – atitude que se choca
frontalmente com os hábitos locais. Enquanto os caixões estavam cheios de objetos da
antiga vida dos convertidos, a qual eles agora haviam deixado para atrás, a impressão de
suas famílias e vizinhos era que a igreja estava se envolvendo em feitiçaria, uma vez
que o uso de caixões sem os rituais de limpeza usuais é perigoso e pode causar danos
aos outros. Através da oferta do salário de um ano inteiro na igreja, os convertidos
retiram-se da troca de dinheiro local e de parte de suas obrigações de parentesco.
Simultaneamente, a participação financeira nas campanhas das igrejas pentecostais
oferece a possibilidade de construir uma nova vida na sociedade neoliberal urbana. As
mulheres são atraídas pelo fato de que pastores pentecostais não as ajudam diretamente,
mas sim as forçam a se ajudarem a si próprias. Esta é uma atitude que mulheres com
uma mobilidade ascendente aspiram e através da qual elas podem desenvolver e
demonstrar habilidades pioneiras. Sacrificar, combater e lutar são manifestações da
participação dessas mulheres na cidade, onde concorrência, desconfiança e
oportunidades são essenciais.
Durante minha pesquisa, pude observar que as mulheres se envolviam de
diversas formas no pentecostalismo transnacional brasileiro e na guerra espiritual, e que
portanto, suas experiências de violência são também diversas. Algumas convertidas iam
à falência, enquanto outras aprendiam a se distanciar dos pastores e avaliar sozinhas
quanto se dispunham a investir numa nova vida. Concluo que esta variedade coincide
com diferenças geracionais e depende da experiência de mulheres convertidas na
sociedade neoliberal urbana. Conforme descrito no capítulo 5, a posição das mulheres
na mudança social em Moçambique também afeta a sua participação nas igrejas. Em
geral, as mulheres mais velhas são menos integradas na ordem econômica neoliberal e
elas têm dificuldades de resistir à pressão dos pastores. Ao interagirem com os pastores
299
pentecostais, por exemplo, em workshops de negócios, elas recebem um treinamento

‘efetivo’ sobre o que a política do livre mercado pode significar. A geração mais nova é
mais confortável com a era liberal na qual cresceram. Muitas vezes elas consideram os
pastores apenas como indivíduos com quem fazem negócios.
Simultaneamente, os vários efeitos da conversão também estão ligados à
capacidade pessoal das mulheres de se apropriar da fé pentecostal. Os líderes das igrejas
falam regularmente sobre o conceito de ‘fé inteligente’, significando que não é
suficiente participar dos cultos da igreja e expulsar demônios, mas também é necessário
assimilar todos os elementos da fé, tais como confiança e racionalidade. Dependendo da
rapidez com que elas conseguem se tornar crentes pentecostais bem treinadas, seguindo
os ciclos dos cultos, cursos e terapias, e interagindo com os pastores, uma vida nova e
feliz deveria surgir.
Pentecostalismo e transformação social
Costuma-se dizer que a conversão ao pentecostalismo é uma resposta a processos de

globalização e da evolução socioeconômica e política. Sob esta abordagem, o
pentecostalismo ofereceria às pessoas estabilidade em tempos de mudança e através de
suas redes internacionais o pentecostalismo também ofereceria uma passagem para a
economia internacional (capítulo 2). No entanto, as mulheres moçambicanas que se
convertem ao pentecostalismo brasileiro não parecem estar tão focadas em encontrar
ajuda e estabilidade, além de, em geral, já serem relativamente bem sucedidas no
mercado de trabalho antes de buscarem a igreja. Elas estão trabalhando ativamente para
mudar suas próprias vidas, elas assumem riscos e através da sua participação no
pentecostalismo brasileiro-moçambicano ou transnacional sul-sul elas criam uma forma
própria de globalização. Elas não esperam até o momento em que a globalização e
mudanças sociais vão piorar ou melhorar suas vidas, mas incentivadas por um
pentecostalismo específico brasileiro pioneiro – caracterizado pela prática da luta
espiritual e pelo rompimento de fronteiras – elas criam suas próprias formas de
transformação social e globalização.
Defendo, portanto, que a conversão das mulheres não deve ser vista
principalmente como uma resposta à globalização e às transformações sociais, mas
como uma força de mudança e de globalização em si mesma. Neste processo, as
mulheres pentecostais também não estão principalmente preocupadas com a
estabilização de sua posição ou com a busca de segurança, mas antes, elas abrem mão
de suas seguranças sociais e financeiras ao romper com o passado, com as dependências
de suas famílias e com as normas e os valores socioculturais preponderantes. As
consequências nem sempre podem ser examinadas e muitas vezes podem tomar formas
violentas. Esta natureza violenta da conversão das mulheres ao pentecostalismo
300
brasileiro em Moçambique tem implicações para a compreensão da relação entre

religião e transformações sociais. Na última seção deste resumo, eu trato brevemente
destas implicações em relação aos temas da família e gênero; (in)segurança e
desenvolvimento, tal como discutido no capítulo 9.
O casamento, a família e as questões de gênero desempenham um papel central
na participação das mulheres moçambicanas no pentecostalismo brasileiro. As mulheres
pentecostais investigadas fazem um esforço para romper com convenções estabelecidas,
expandir fronteiras e criar novas áreas de interação social, sejam elas públicas ou
domésticas. Resta saber se elas conseguirão mudar a sociedade urbana de Moçambique,
ou ao menos uma parte dela, de forma permanente. Na minha opinião a resposta
depende em grande parte do (futuro) papel dos homens no pentecostalismo brasileiro
em Maputo. Até agora, há um número relativamente menor de homens envolvidos nesta
forma de pentecostalismo e a conversão das mulheres parece ter contribuído para um
alargamento da ruptura entre homens e mulheres. A conquista de posições sociais que
anteriormente pertenciam em sua maioria aos homens e a mudança de hábitos são ainda
realizadas quase exclusivamente por essas mulheres e elas regularmente encontram
resistência, particularmente dos homens que não fazem parte deste processo de
conversão. Os pastores, principalmente homens, dirigem seus sermões e atividades
especialmente às mulheres, pois elas em geral se posicionam de forma mais aberta. Eles
deixam a transformação de homens e domínios masculinos por conta das mulheres. Mas
os homens são frequentemente vistos como possuídos por demônios pelas mulheres
pentecostais e apenas em alguns casos eles são vistos como soldados companheiros.
Esta separação leva a conflitos violentos entre homens e mulheres e nas famílias. Se as
transformações dos papéis de gênero, das relações familiares e dos casamentos pela
conversão ao pentecostalismo são levadas a cabo principalmente pelas mulheres e
resultam em violência, a questão é se o pentecostalismo brasileiro pode desempenhar
um papel importante na feminização da sociedade e na criação de papéis de gênero
viáveis e de bons relacionamentos. Algumas pessoas acabam por se cansar da violência,
como algumas que encontrei durante minha pesquisa que haviam deixado o
pentecostalismo.
A natureza violenta da conversão ao pentecostalismo brasileiro significa que a
segurança social das pessoas está diminuindo, tanto dos pentecostais quanto dos não-
pentecostais, como exemplificam as tensões nos relacionamentos e a crescente falta de
dinheiro. Isto levanta questões sobre a possível relação entre os níveis de (in)segurança
numa sociedade e a conversão violenta. As pessoas que parecem poder se conectar mais
facilmente com esta forma de pentecostalismo são aquelas que tentam tirar proveito dos
espaços vagos, incertos e novos na sociedade, seja no sentido físico, seja no espiritual.
As técnicas pioneiras pentecostais parecem ter um grande impacto em áreas com uma
forte mentalidade de survival of the fittest. Em tais circunstâncias, as práticas
301
pentecostais até mesmo ganham novas dimensões. Em função dos riscos com os quais
os convertidos estão dispostos a arcar, os pastores podem (literalmente) aumentar o
preço dos sacrifícios exigidos. Os riscos que os convertidos assumem parecem estar
relacionados a uma sociedade de risco. Isto também pode ser ilustrado pela maneira
pragmática e livre como vários convertidos tratam seus pastores e suas igrejas. Igrejas
pentecostais não são geralmente vistas como instituições sociais nas quais a confiança
desempenha um papel importante. Vários convertidos facilmente deixam a igreja para
então visitar uma nova igreja pentecostal. As igrejas são uma parte essencial de uma
sociedade insegura e reforçam a desconfiança e incerteza.
Finalmente, a dinâmica de violência no processo de conversão levanta questões
sobre o tipo de desenvolvimento da sociedade que o pentecostalismo brasileiro lança e
quer lançar. Convertidos são opositores ardentes do desenvolvimento com base na
chamada ‘cultura moçambicana tradicional’ – um modelo que o governo moçambicano
e muitas ONGs locais e internacionais parecem abraçar. Convertidos querem justamente
se desprender de rituais de cura, formas de casamento e relações de parentesco locais.
Eles estão preocupados com as consequências negativas de espíritos vingativos como
resultado da guerra e de ‘feiticeiros’ em busca de riqueza (capítulo 6). O contexto
espiritual específico do pentecostalismo brasileiro, que ‘enfeitiça’ todos os espíritos e
usos locais, compreende uma abordagem eficaz para enfrentar e resolver essas questões.
Esta posição dos pentecostais influencia a formação de uma identidade nacional
comum. Cidadãos não-pentecostais acham que negando e tentando esquecer o passado,
bem como se afastando das relações com os outros, os pentecostais negligenciam a
partilha de solidariedade e de responsabilidade. Por sua vez, os pentecostais sentem que
não podem confiar em seus concidadãos.
Pentecostais também são críticos dos doadores internacionais e dos seus
programas de cooperação para o desenvolvimento. De acordo com os pentecostais, estes
têm criado uma mentalidade de dependência e de pedir dinheiro, enquanto os pastores
pentecostais incentivam ou forçam as pessoas a ajudarem a si mesmas e a assumirem as
suas responsabilidades. Neste sentido, e inspirado pela abordagem do sociólogo Max
Weber, o movimento pentecostal, pode ser visto como incentivador duma forma de
desenvolvimento sócio-econômico que pode ser útil numa economia de mercado. No
entanto, é importante perceber que, na maior parte dos casos, os líderes pentecostais
utilizam em proveito próprio as oportunidades que a sociedade neoliberal lhes oferece,
ao invés de ajudar os convertidos a aprenderem habilidades necessárias num sistema
capitalista (novo). Os líderes pentecostais parecem precisamente deslocar os limites da
atual realidade neoliberal. Eles desfrutam das oportunidades que encomtram num
mercado religioso pouco regulado.
Desta forma, os pentecostais transnacionais brasileiro-moçambicanos
estimulam um modelo específico de desenvolvimento, no qual eles não apoiam pessoas,
302
mas sim colocam pressão uns aos outros, criando desafios e beneficiando-se de
oportunidades. Com um apoio mínimo, as batalhadoras mulheres pentecostais saem
para tomar o seu lugar na cidade, mesmo que isso signifique ir além do viável, para
finalmente realizarem o paraíso na terra.
Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam
DISSERTATION SERIES
• M.M. Meijer, (2004), Does Success Breed Success? Effects of News and Advertising on
Corporate Reputation. Aksant Academic Publishers: Amsterdam, isbn 90 5260 145 3.
• J.J. Woldendorp, (2005), The Polder Model: From Disease to Miracle? Dutch Neo-
corporatism 1965-2000. Amsterdam, isbn 90 77472 05 3.
• Y.P. Ongena, (2005), Interviewer and Respondent. Interaction in Survey Interviews, Yfke
Ongena, Amsterdam, isbn 90 9020070 3.
• M.E.D. Lamboo, (2005), Integriteitsbeleid van de Nederlandse Politie. Eburon: Delft, isbn
90 5972 088 L.
• T.E. Aalberts, (2006), Politics of Sovereignty. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 10: 90
9020656 6 / isbn 13: 978 90 9020656 1.
• E. Zwart, (2006), In Pursuit of Comfort. The Transnationalisation Process of Malaysian
Chinese Small and Medium Enterprises. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 90 8659 024 1.
• H.Haenen, (2006), Afrikaans Denken. Ontmoeting, Dialoog en Frictie. Een Filosofisch
Onderzoek. Buijten en Schipperheijn Motief, Amsterdam.
• A. Claver, (2006), Commerce and Capital in Colonial Java. Trade Finance and
Commercial Relations between Europeans and Chinese, 1820s-1942. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam.
• S. van der Pas, (2006), Intergenerational Relationships of Older Adults. Family Structure,
Contact and Norms. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 10: 90 9022075 X / isbn13: 978 90
9021075 9.
• P. Mika, (2007), Social Networks and the Semantic Web. SIKS dissertation series No. 2007-
03.
• K.E. Knibbe, (2007), Faith in the Familiar. Continuity and Change in Religious Practices
and Moral Orientations of the South of Limburg, The Netherlands. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam.
• C.L. Carabain, (2007), Taking Too Much for Granted? A Study on the Measure of Social
Attitudes. Gildeprint Drukkerijen B.V., Enschede, isbn 978 90 8659 075 9.
• L.M. Cruz, (2007), Repression and Rebellions in Southern Mexico. The Search for a
Political Economy of Dignity. Dutch University Press, Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 361 0050 2.
• C.E. de Vries, (2007), European Integration and National Elections. The Impact of EU
Issue Voting on National Electoral Politics. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 13: 978 90
9022112 0.
• E. Kolthoff, (2007), Ethics and New Public Management. Empirical Research into Effects
of Businesslike Government on Ethics and Integrity. Boom Juridische Uitgevers, isbn 978
90 5454 905 5.
• R. Vliegenthart, (2007), Framing Immigration and Integration. Facts, Parliament, Media
and Anti-Immigrant Party Support in the Netherlands. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn
978 90 9022279 0.
• L.L.J. van Noije, (2007), The Democratic Deficit Closer to Home. Agenda Building
Relations between Parliament and the Press, and the Impact of European Integration, in the
United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978-90-
8659-161-9.
• R. de Man, (2007), Where to Draw the Line? Antecedents and Consequences of the
Integration of Work in Home Life. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• F. Krijtenburg, (2007), Cultural Ideologies of Peace and Conflict: a Socio-Cognitive
Analysis of Giriyama Discourse (Kenya). Vrije Universiteit, isbn 978 90 8659 167 1.
• R. van Steden, (2007), Privatizing Policing. Describing and Explaining the Growth of
Private Security. BJU Legal Publishers, isbn 978 90 5454 953 6.
• L. Reijn, (2008), Identity at Work. Control and Commitment in Post Bureaucratic
Organisations. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 8659 180 0.
• B. Vis, (2008), Biting the Bullet or Steering Clear? Politics of (Not-) Unpopular Welfare
State Reform in Advanced Capitalist Democracies. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978
90 9022715 3.
• M.J.M. de Koning (2008), Zoeken naar een ‘Zuivere’ Islam. Geloofsbeleving en
Identiteitsvorming van Jonge Marokkaans-Nederlandse Moslims. Bert Bakker.
• P. Wiepking (2008), For the Love of Mankind. A Sociological Study on Charitable Giving.
Labor Grafimedia, isbn 978 90 77383 07 0.
• A. Supriyono (2008), Buruh Pelabuhan Semarang. Pemogokan-Pemogokan Pada Zaman
Colonial Belanda Revolusi dan Depublic 1900-1965. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• G. van Noort (2008), Bricks versus Clicks. A Relf-Regulation Perspective on Consumer
Reponses in Online and Conventional Shopping Environments. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 9022845 7.
• W. Stam (2008), Does Networking Work? A Study of Social Capital and Performance
among New Ventures in the Dutch Open Source Software Industry. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 9023014 6.
• A. Wigger (2008), Competition for Competitiveness: The Politics of the Transformation of
the EU Competition Regime. Rozenberg Publishers, isbn 978 90 9023150 1.
• Z. van der Wal (2008), Value Solidity. Differences, Similarities and Conflicts between the
Organizational Values of Government and Business. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn
978 90 9022991 1.
• H.C. van Vugt (2008), Embodied Agents from a User’s Perspective. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 9023086 3.
• J. ter Horst (2008), Weaving into Cambodia. Trade and Identity Politics in the (post)-
Colonial Cambodian Silk Weaving Industry. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90
9023232 4.
• A. Berhe (2008), A Political History of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (1975-1991):
Revolt, Ideology and Mobilisation in Ethiopia. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• H. van den Heuvel (2008), Between Optimism and Opportunism. Deconstructing ‘African
Management’ Discourse in South Africa. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90
9023118 1.
• K. Lasthuizen (2008), Leading to Integrity. Empirical Research into the Effects of
Leadership on Ethics and Integrity. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 813277 1 8.
• I. Reci (2008), Unemployed and Scarred for Life. Longitudinal Analyses of How
Unemployment and Policy Changes Affect Re-employment Careers and Wages in the
Netherlands, 1980-2000. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 9023654 4.
• L.C. Horn (2009), The Transformation of Corporate Governance Regulation in the
European Union. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 9023813 5
• B.E. Büscher (2009), Struggles over Consensus, Anti-Politics and Marketing. Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam.
• H.M. Koolma (2009), Verhalen en Prestaties, een Onderzoek naar het Gedrag van
Woningcorporaties. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 8659 273 9
• J.J. van Wijk (2009), Moving beyond Heroes and Winners. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
isbn 978 90 8659 285 2
• H.A. Binnema (2009), How Parties Change. EU Integration and the Flexible Response of
Political Parties. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 8659 309 5
• E. Grassiani (2009), Morality and Normalcy in Asymmetrical Conflict: Distancing, Denial
and Moral Numbing among Israeli Conscripts in Everyday Practices of Occupation. Vrije
• G. van Koningsbruggen (2009), Processing and Acceptance of Threatening Health
Information: the Effects of Self-Affirmation. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• D. van Bergen (2009), Suicidal Behaviour of Migrant Women in the Netherlands. Vrije
• J. Perry (2009), Goodwill Hunting: Accounting and the Global Regulation of Economic
Ideas. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• A. Linden (2009), Besmet. Levenslopen en Motieven van Extreem-Rechtse Activisten in
Nederland. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• A. Schakel (2009). A Postfunctionalist Theory of Regional Government. An Inquiry into
Regional Authority and Regional Policy Provision. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• I. Plaisier (2009). Work and Mental Health: Studies on the Impact Characteristics, Social
Roles and Gender. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 987 90 86593903
• J. Roeland (2009). Selfation: Dutch Evangelical Youth between Subjectivization and
Subjection. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• A. Vliegenthart (2009), Transnational Actors and Corporate Governance Regulation in
Postsocialist Europe. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• S. Bhagavatula (2009). Weaving Social Networks. Performance of Small Rural Firms in
India as an Outcome of Entrepreneurs’ Social and Human Capital. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam.
• A. van Essen (2009). Seeking a Balance: The Emergence of New Public Management in
Health Care Regulation. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 8659349 1
• J. Soons (2009). Love Life and Happiness: A Study of Partner Relationships and Well-being
in your Adulthood. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 6984 596 8
• J. de Raadt (2009). Contestable Constitutions: the Politics of Institutional Conflict in Post-
Communist East Central Europe. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 86593965
• B. Tasew (2009). Methaphors of Peace and Violence in the Folklore Discourses of South
Western Ethiopia: A Comparative Study. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• D. Gberie (2010). From Chains to Neckties: Liberated Africans and the Making of Modern
Sierra Leone. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• M. Guiaux (2010). Social adjustment to widowhood: Changes in personal relationships and
loneliness before and after partner loss. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• W. Reedijk (2010). Effecten van religieuze dialogen tussen Joden, Christenen en Moslims
op eigen identiteit. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• M. Hellendoorn (2010). Opkomst en Neergang van het Kostwinnaarschapsysteem. Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 9025065 6
• E. Ersanilli (2010). Comparing Integration. Host culture adoption and ethnic retention
among Turkish immigrants and their descendents in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 5335 250 2
• T.S. Salverda (2010). Sugar, Sea and Power: How Franco-Mauritians balance continuity
and creeping decline of their elite position. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• G.A. Moerman (2010). Effecten van doorvraagtactieken in interviews met open vragen.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 9789086594436
• H.L. Duijnhoven (2010). For Security Reasons. Narrative about Security practices and
organizational change in the Dutch and Spanish railway sector. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, isbn 9789086594382
• N. Tuan Anh (2010). Kinship as Social Capital: Economic, Social and Cultural Dimensions
of Changing Kinship Relations in a Northern Vietnamese Village. Vrije Universteit
Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 5335 271 7
• M.J. Kamsma (2010). The Jewish diasporascape in the straits: An ethnographic study if
Jewish Businesses across borders. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 5335 260 1
• B.A. de Jong ( 2010). Trust and Control in Teams. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978
90 5335 287 8
• M.L. Buis (2010). Inequality of educational outcome and inequality of educational
opportunity in the Netherlands during the 20th century. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn
978 90 8659472
• K. Komp (2010). The Young Old in Europe: Burden on or Resource to the Welfare State.
Universiteit van Amsterdam
• J.F. Rickli (2010). Negotiating otherness in the dutch protestant world. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam
• T. Susilowati Prabawa (2010). The tourism industry under crisis, the struggle of small
tourism enterprises in Yogyakarta (Indonesia). Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 979
3823 805
• M. Kobes (2010). Understanding human behavior in fire. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• H. Bakker (2010). Idea Management, Unravelling creative processes in three professional
organizations. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• S. Rebers (2011). The evolution of collective action - Experimental investigations of
theories of cultural group selection. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 5335 358 5
• I.M. Ruigrok (2011). Negotiating Governance - Politics, Culture, and the State in Post-War
Angola. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• T.J. Glasner (2011). Reconstructing event histories in standardized survey research:
Cognitive mechanisms and aided recall techniques. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn
978-90-8891255-9
• G. Verbeek (2011). Zorg: een kwestie van tijd. Afstemming van zorgverlening en
organisatie op tijdsperspectieven van cliënten. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• K. van der Velde ( 2011). Flirten met God. Religiositeit zonder geloof. Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam
• T.T.T. Ngô (2011). The new way: Becoming protestant Hmong in contemporary Vietnam.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
• A. Lombarts (2011). Citymarketing in Amsterdam. Een organisatieantropologische studie
van het publiek-private samenwerkingsverband op citymarketinggebied in Amsterdam.
Antwerpen/Apeldoorn, Garant.
• M.D. Bahlman (2011). An inquiry into the Amsterdam IT and new media-cluster from a
knowledge-based perspective. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90 8570 755 4
• M. Klaver (2011). A Semiotic Perspective on Conversion in an Evangelical Seeker Church
and a Pentecostal Church in the Netherlands. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, isbn 978 90
8555 047 1

Dissertation Linda Van de Kamp PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Dissertation Linda Van de Kamp PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Violent Conversion

This research is part of the research programme ‘Conversion Careers in Global

Cover design and illustration: Rufus de Vries, http://www.rufusdevries.nl/

Printed by Wöhrmann Print Service, Zutphen

© Linda van de Kamp, Amsterdam, 2011

Brazilian Pentecostalism and the Urban Pioneering

ter verkrijging van de graad Doctor aan

Linda Joanne van de Kamp

3. THE FORMATION OF A GENDERED NATION-STATE IN MAPUTO 53

6. CONVERTING THE SPIRIT SPOUSE:

8. THE SOUTH-SOUTH TRANSNATIONAL PROSPERITY GOSPEL:

9. VIOLENT CONVERSION: CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION 221

APPENDIX: BRAZILIAN PENTECOSTAL CHURCHES IN MOZAMBIQUE 233

NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING – DUTCH SUMMARY 283

RESUMO PORTUGUÊS – PORTUGUESE SUMMARY 293

considered the birthplace of the Pentecostal church (Anderson 2004).1 Today,

Templo da Fé (Temple of Faith), Universal Church, Maputo

Main Cathedral of the Universal Church, Maputo

Universal Church Malhangalene, Maputo

The Brazilian churches featuring in this study have neo-Pentecostal

1.2 Pentecostalism in Mozambique

Holy Spirit, they encompass a variety of denominations, doctrinal lineages and

1.2.1 Brazilian and prominent

arrived. Interestingly, most of the Brazilian evangelical missionaries in Africa went to

setting of the Brazilian churches.18 As a result, the transnational neo-Pentecostal

Maná Sat © Rufus de Vries

1.2.2 Urban and gendered

Pentecostalism in Mozambique is flourishing in urban areas26 and amongst women. As

1.3 Research topics and questions

(Pentecostal) conversion as discussed in Chapter 2. The notions of ‘pioneering’ and

This view of Pentecostalism as a pioneering movement does not give priority

conquest that South-South Pentecostalism consequently creates is important in

The violent effects of Pentecostal techniques can be observed in the

1.3.3 Research questions and the book’s outline

wife, between relatives, violence used by government officials and witchcraft

One of the many conversations I had © Rufus de Vries

1.4.1 Researching religion in a city

1.4.2 Distance and intimacy

The construction of a new Universal Church building, Hulene, Maputo.

In an attempt to understand why Pentecostalism has enjoyed the success it has

2.2 Pentecostalism, family and gender

So far, women’s predominance in Pentecostalism has generated particular

The question is, however, how Pentecostals’ gender constructions relate to

automatically bring harmony to household and family relationships. On the contrary, it

2.3 Pentecostalism and (in)security

A review of the dominant scientific models of religious conversion shows that, in

New building Universal Church, São Damaso, Machava © Rufus de Vries

2.4 Pentecostalism and development

In Mozambique, I observed how Pentecostalism stimulates people’s agency, self-worth

Sanctuary of Miracles, Universal Church, Maputo. ©Rufus de Vries

socio-economic development because converts in Mozambique are facing increasing

3. The formation of a gendered nation-state in Maputo

3.2 The reproduction of life in the formation of the nation-state

3.2.1 Labour migration and the colonial state

3.2.2 Mother Africa and Father Marx 57

Frelimo’s leaders considered that ‘the liberation of women is a fundamental

3.3 The city in nation-state formation

had an entrepot function, exporting raw materials to support European national

3.3.1 The city as a civilizing symbol of the Portuguese colonial nation-state

Neighbourhood Sommerschield, Maputo ©Rufus de Vries

3.3.2 Frelimo’s continuation of the rural-urban divide

Frelimo’s vision of a homogenous subsistence-oriented peasantry did not recognize the

3.4 The nation-state’s gendered urban spaces