Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique by Devaka Premawardhana (review)

Faith in Flux provides an ethnographic analysis of religious and social change in Maúa, a rural district in the Niassa province of northern Mozambique, which is inhabited by the Makhuwa people. Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana focuses on Pentecostalism in a region that was embroiled in Islamization and Catholic missionary evangelization, and where indigenous religions remain prominent in the lives of local residents. What Premawardhana found puzzling was the ease with which many Makhuwa not only joined but also left these churches, in some cases only to return again. In fact, the majority of those who remained in the churches were not local Makhuwa, but immigrants from other regions. Faith in Flux is therefore motivated by this central question: Why do Makhuwa in Maúa defect from Pentecostal churches?

Premawardhana encountered similar trajectories in the migration stories of young Makhuwa, who left their villages for the opportunities of urban living, eventually returning again to their villages and peasant life, confronting delusions of economic and social progress. These decisions, though, were never definitive, as these young men often left their villages yet again for urban life, wafting back and forth.

How to make sense of “these circular migrations,” both religious and spatial? Premawardhana’s engagement with this question generates a work that not only contributes to the literature on Pentecostalism and social change, but also offers a sophisticated exploration of the complexities of the Makhuwa people of Maúa.

Migration and conversion overlap throughout the book, as conversion is locally conceptualized more as a migratory experience—othama meaning “to move”—than as an inward transformation—opittukuxa murima, “to change heart,” an expression that the Makhuwa rarely use (23–24). Faith in Flux, however, understands mobility as more than just spatial movement. Drawing on Ghassan Hage’s (2005) definition of existential mobility, Premawardhana sees mobility, above all else, as having a direction, as “not being stuck” (17).

Each chapter is structured around a story of mobility—men and women who flee after an unexpected, mysterious death; fervent Christians who resort to healers and sorcerers in times of illness; young men who temporarily leave Pentecostal churches to embark on rituals of initiation; and women who move between churches, mosques, and spirit ceremonies, as they confront sicknesses and abusive husbands.

There are also stories about those who remain, like Diniz, an old sugarcane harvester who decides to stay on his land despite the fact that his crops are continuously threatened by the invasions of elephants, since, as he laments, “There is no place without elephants. There is no other possibility” (68). For Premawardhana, this story of perseverance is also one of existential mobility—an example of agency in the face of the forces that impinge upon one’s life.

Nonetheless, Faith in Flux does not interpret Makhuwa mobility merely as a resource to confront the hardships of life, the suffering of illness, and the unpredictability of the world. Nor does it reduce mobility solely to external and global forces, as is often the case with literature about social change in Africa and elsewhere. Rather, Premawardhana’s central point is that movement and transformation are intrinsic to Makhuwa tradition. Being Makhuwa is to be on the move, open to change, in a constantly kinetic state of being.

Premawardhana’s ethnographic investigation of mobility occurs in three parts, each of which refers to a local concept that illuminates the centrality of mobility in the Makhuwa ethos: Othama (“to move”), Ohiya ni Ovolowa (“to leave and to enter”), and Okhalano (“to be with”). The first part—“To Move”—begins by exploring mobility within Makhuwa history, myth, and social and economic structures.

Chapter 1, “A Fugitive People,” shows how the history of the Makhuwa is marked by continuous flights and migrations, the extent to which the Makhuwa can be defined as a seminomadic people. In this respect, mobility functioned as a strategy upon which the Makhuwa drew to avoid slave-trade raids and the civil war. Nonetheless...