In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique by Paolo Israel (review)

Paolo Israel’s excellent book is a celebration of creativity, play, and the near limitless human capacity for generating its own realities — in the past and in the present. Through a meticulous mapping of the styles of carving, imagining, and performing masks known as mapiko, we are as readers invited into a perpetually evolving world of intense bodily movements, multi-semic forms of competition, and complex socio-political dynamics. Based on a firm grip of the Makonde language and drawing on over three years of fieldwork on, significantly, both the Mueda Plateau and the often ignored coastal lowlands in northern Mozambique, Israel details mapiko’s wide array of styles, settings, and sequences of dance and carving.

The book is organized in four parts and eleven chapters. “Part One: Directions” sets the ground for analyses to follow by critically engaging earlier mapiko works (notably those undertaken by famed Portuguese anthropologists Jorge and Margot Dias). It also serves to theoretically contextualize the analyses to follow in which scholars like Mikhail Bakhtin, Johan Huizinga, and Gregory Bateson are among those whose visions shape Israel’s thought. “Part Two: Cosmopolitanism (1917–62)” makes use of a great number of interviews, secondary sources, and memory material to explicitly trace the (perhaps surprisingly) rich genres of mapiko that emerged during the colonial era — crucially staying clear of any form of colonial nostalgia or historical revisionism. “Part Three: Revolution (1962–92)” expounds upon the attempts by Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) to generate a new society and to produce effective ruptures with the colonial orders — also within the domain of what was defined as culture. Again Israel finely analyzes how mapiko is integral to, shapes, and is influenced by novel Socialist institutions, including the communal village, or novel ideological orientations, such as feminism. The last section, “Part Four: After Socialism (1992–2009)” traces the complex and chaotic period shaping Mozambique with the coming of peace (1992) and first elections (1994). Part four effectively summarizes the book — also by showing how earlier styles of mapiko reappear in (supposedly) novel forms. A number of the performances that are so vividly and minutely described in the book are available online (https://vimeo.com/mapiko) and it is highly recommended to consult these while reading.

Brimming with interpretative possibilities, the book oscillates between a number of theoretical and analytical positions. For instance masks and masquerades are seen as reflecting deep-seated socio-cultural structures that, on the one hand, define the grammar of initiation, the secrecy of ritual, and the power of lineage politics, while, contrarily, it is also suggested that mapiko has the capacity to revolt or to unchain such logics. To this reviewer, the juggling of positions and possibilities only enhance the book’s readability as it works to underline the complexity of mapiko. Moreover, Israel displays a fine-tuned approach to transformation, such as in the excellent chapter three on “meat-is-meat,” the (slightly) contraintuitive notion designating the disintegration of lineage power over masks during the early twentieth century following Portuguese colonial pacification of the area. This rupture, irreducible to modernist disenchantment, is brilliantly evoked through the detailing of new styles of dancing, carving, performing — and the sedimentation of the shifts embedded in these. Crucial here is how Israel locates the motor for the emergence of “meat-is-meat” not externally but within “the exploratory space of initiation rituals” (68).

For those interested in the relations between African political history and domains of performance, one may find that the overarching historical and political trajectories are sidelined (or, better, sidestepped) in Israel’s desire to accord firm voices to mapiko. I would disagree with such critique. While a macro-historical framework is, indeed, analytically important, the tropes used to recount this trajectory in the Mozambican context, is in dire need of renewal. An important step in this direction — to destabilize...