Migration and the politics of the everyday: the Malawian experience in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe

Abstract

African spirit world – and much more. With its irregular surfaces, At Ansha’s inevitably presents a few zones of shade. While the text offers evocative descriptions of mountains and forests, mentioning some of the plants that together with the Koran are the core ingredients of Ansha’s craft, no sustained discussion is provided of the healer’s relationship with the vegetal world. Here, non-humans are definitely cast in minor roles. A historically minded reader will wonder about the uneasy relationship between ethnography and biography, considering that Ansha’s life is presented in a patchy and non-linear manner (perhaps echoing her own spirit epistemology). And even though witchcraft is one of the major preoccupations of Ansha and her clients, it is not explicitly thematised and is at times reduced to an allegory of neoliberalism. Finally, for a book that makes so much of dialogue, Trentini spends little or no time discussing the idioms in which such interactions occurred, her level of proficiency in Emakhuwa and her translation strategies. These minor misgivings, though, do not detract in any way from the book’s manifold qualities. At Ansha’s is a thoughtful, engaging, empirically rich and delicately written ethnography. Any scholar of Mozambique, spirit possession and Islam will have much to learn from this carefully crafted gem.