Of borders and crossings: the lives of a healer in northern Mozambique

Daria Trentini’s book is a narrative exploration of the life and practice of a healer in the northern Mozambican city of Nampula. Ansha, the titular protagonist, was a Makonde migrant from the province of Cabo Delgado who moved to Nampula, converted to Islam and set up a ‘spirit mosque’ in which the Koran and herbal knowledge were used to cure afflictions. Spirit possession (majini) was central both to illness and healing. A being of many worlds, Ansha crossed, navigated and negotiated a number of borders: between ethnicities, regions and religions; between sickness and health, the city and the countryside, the spirit and the human domain. Indeed, the figure of the border – especially the notions of ‘border crossing’ and ‘border events’ – provide the book with its central conceptual anchoring. The book is organised in 22 short chapters, arranged in four parts. The first part charts Ansha’s biography, from her childhood in Mueda through her move to Nampula, the illness that made her discover her vocation as a healer, her conversion to Islam, and her tumultuous marital life, up till her untimely death. The second part explores the social structures that both enabled and constrained Ansha’s practice: ethnicity, religion and the state; healers’ associations and the formal health sector. The third part describes the illness and healing – often unsuccessful – of a number of Ansha’s patients, most of them vulnerable, who turned to her after western medicine had failed to resolve their troubles. The final part comprises two poetic snapshots in the guise of a conclusion. Each of the chapters is broken into sections which move back and forth, from field vignette to historical canvas to anthropological analysis. The writing is sparing, elegant and affecting. Fragmentariness is embraced as a mode of knowing and telling. While the style of the book falls within the paradigm that George Marcus has dubbed ‘the messy baroque’ – with its reflexive field tales, central theoretical riff and reliance on cultural history as provider of surplus meaning, it also ultimately exceeds the genre by openly embracing the idiosyncratic. The conceptual riff announced in the introduction – border crossing and events – is not obsessively rehearsed through the text. To use a musical metaphor, the theme is reprised only in distant keys and variations. In the free interplay between fragments, the life that Trentini has foregrounded in the title is left space to breathe and is never straightjacketed within one overarching theoretical framework. The reader gets to see and hear and feel with Ansha and her friends. This might be one of the book’s strongest virtues. Even within this radical openness and fragmentariness, several strong analytical threads emerge. At Ansha’s vividly illustrates the contemporary transformations of Islam in the city of Nampula, especially the frictions surrounding spirit possession in the context of the gradual demise of Sufism and the spread of Wahhabism and Islamism. There are insights into the emergence of the Ahl al-Sunna movement which will be precious to anyone interested in the current unfolding of the Islamist insurgency in Cabo Delgado. The book also provides unique vistas into gendered aspects of healing; the transformations of matriliny; the tensions between costal and hinterland Makhuwa society; the experience of children as patients; community policing; urbanisation and social struggle in Nampula; the