Free Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West Page A

convulse and, eventually, to fall to the ground in apparent agony. The onlookers laughed nervously. One among the players, whose face was painted in white, kept his feet and approached the lipiko— also left standing—who gave him a small gourd and an angled stick. With these instruments, he approached his writhing colleagues. After placing the gourd on the body of each one, he used the stick to turn them over onto their backs without touching them. It was explained to me that this painted sorcerer was the most experienced of the group; having been injured before, he had learned how to heal the wounds inflicted by antisorcery mitela. He slithered over the bodies of his fellow sorcerers, working on them as an nkulaula, administering the mitela provided him by the lipiko. As he turned their bodies, he “overturned” ( kupilikula ) the nkulaula who had been summoned to protect the victim of their attack and thereby rendered this victim vulnerable once more. 10
    The lipiko now gave the white-faced sorcerer-healer the pot, from which he doled out portions of human flesh to each of the colleagues he had resuscitated. One by one, the recipients placed the flesh in their mouths, alternately grimacing and licking their lips like snakes. The audience studied their every gesture, whispering commentary to one another. Some of the sorcerers displayed surprise, even revulsion, at the taste of the meat, which was bitter, I was told, as a result of the lingering effect of defensive mitela. Still, the sorcerers scuffled over their portions. The white-faced sorcerer himself consumed the greatest portions, but also ensured that each of his colleagues was fed, placing them, I was reminded, in his debt.
     
    Once all had eaten, the white-faced sorcerer returned the pot to the hut, where the lipiko sat waiting. The lipiko now placed the pot on his head, rose, and danced his way out of the enclosure, followed by the other sorcerers. The owner of the house, I was told, was dead.
    The performance over, Marcos and I spent the night in Shitashi. I scarcely slept. The images I had witnessed played again and again in my mind’s eye. I lay awake in the darkness, attentive to every sound. The abundance of noise in the village around me gave testimony to the fact that I was not alone in my insomnia.
    The next morning, Marcos and I shared a meal with Fernando Chofer Nankoma before departing Shitashi. I confessed that I had slept poorly. Chofer told us that the performance of their piece always produced sleepless nights, no matter where it was staged.
    The same was true, Marcos said, of masquerade in the days of his youth. “Of course, when I was young, only initiated men knew that it was just a man behind the mask of the lipiko and not a spirit,” Marcos explained.
    “Nowadays, everyone knows who plays the lipiko,” I commented; indeed, FRELIMO had considered mapiko dancing a means of propagating “obscurantism” and had required dancers to unmask themselves in front of their audiences from the time of the liberation war onward.
    “They also know who plays the parts of the sorcerers in your drama,” I continued, looking at Chofer, “but even so, they do not sleep at night?”
    “Neither did the men who knew the identity of the lipiko back in the days before FRELIMO,” Marcos chimed in.
    Notwithstanding the unmasking of the dancers—Chofer and Marcos each asserted—spirits, and sorcerers, still existed for Muedans, who feared the very real consequences of encounter with them. 11
    Chofer continued: “We stage this piece to show people exactly what sorcery looks like. It is our way of criticizing sorcery. We perform to shame those who do these things.” 12
     
    As I pondered Chofer’s assertion that his troupe’s performance somehow “represented” a “reality” “behind the mask”—that it conjured a world that existed, somewhere, separately, “offstage”—I suddenly remembered my conversation with an elder man standing beside me