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From the inception of this project more than a decade ago, through its many belabored redefinitions during years thick with personal challenges, I have gathered debts of thanks much the way I gathered the material on which this book is based—with awkward gratitude and guilty wonderment, never quite understanding why so many people shared their time and knowledge with me. I remain painfully aware that gestures of appreciation offered here will mean little to the individuals who merit them most: the women and men of Magude district, and most especially of Facazisse, who tolerated my strange ways, who opened their homes and their hearts to me, and who will not likely ever see or read this product of our combined efforts. To the dozens of self-described swikoxana (old women) of Magude who set aside so many irreplaceable hours to teach me their histories (and feed me, counsel me, heal me, tease me, share their strength when I needed it most), my gratitude is immense. If they could hear me say "Inkomu swinene-nene-nene!" again now, they would know what I meant and smile, I think, at the emotion behind those words. | 1 |
For countless other displays of trust and assistance while I struggled not only to understand Magude's history but to navigate the postwar countryside and simply get by every day, I wish to thank Pastor Carlos Banza, Sinai Mundlovu and Susana Ntimba, the late Vicente Rikhotso, Alfredo Sambo, Caissene Mundlovu, Elmone Mundlovu, Alexandre Mawelele, Samuel Mawelele and Julieta Chavango, Facazisse Khosa, Alexandre Xivuri, Felizberto, and especially "Papa" Ernesto Muhlanga and "Mama" Adelaida Muzimba. To those women who consented to my "visiting" them (as they referred to our interviews) again and again and again, and whose memories form the bulk and spirit of this book—to Lili, Madelena, Amélia, Teasse, Misse, Cufassane, Lise, Talita, Lucia, Albertina, Valentina, and my vakokwana Juliana and Rosalina above all—I can say only that "even a cow would be nothing"; there are no words or deeds large enough to honor what they gave so abundantly. Aida Dzamba, her mother Tercina Ntimane, and her children (especially young Arnaldo) held me steadfastly to my course whether through Aida's help with the rigors of interviewing, Tercina's maternal kindnesses, or unforgettable family evenings of story performance and song. Ruti Nkuna and her irresistible clan of children and adult kin guided, taught, buoyed, rescued, relaxed, chastened, and reassured me every step of the way in Magude. To Ruti, I offer the most bewildered and solemn thanks, and acknowledge without a second's hesitation that the foundations of this ntirho, this work, are no less hers than mine. | |
A number of institutions and individuals lent crucial assistance in the course of my research between 1994 and 1997 in the United States, Europe, and southern Africa. The Social Science Research Council, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota provided generous and flexible financial support without which this project could not have been undertaken. In Lisbon, the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional, the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino endured my Portuguese pronunciation (usually without comment) and provided help when I knew how to ask for it. In Lausanne, Joffre Dias forgave my French—surprised, I know, to find that not all Canadians are fully bilingual—and kindly steered me through the documentary riches of the Swiss Mission Archive. Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause shared their home, splendid cooking, and feline company with me in Geneva. Equally obliging were the staff at the William Cullen Library of the University of Witwatersrand (in Johannesburg) and at the library of the University of South Africa (in Pretoria). In Maputo, Maria Inês Nogueira da Costa and António Sopa of the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique showed enough interest and patience in my project that I overcame (at least partially) my archival uncertainties, despite my uneasiness about imposing on their already overstrained resources. Also in Maputo, staff at the ARPAC library and the libraries of the Centro de Estudos Africanos and the Archaeology and Anthropology Department at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane were friendly and enthusiastically helpful without fail. | |
If the atmosphere at the archives of the provincial and national offices of DINAGECA (Direcção Nacional de Geografia e Cadastre) in Maputo was somewhat less congenial than in these academic spaces, DINAGECA personnel did their best to satisfy my requests for information and material to the extent that was possible in the tense circumstances of postwar land politics. Dr. José Negrão, then of the Núcleo de Estudos da Terra (Land Tenure Center) at UEM, intervened at a critical juncture in my tentative courtship of DINAGECA staff. Through his charming introductions he won me access to maps and land-registration records whose tremendous historical potential I have barely begun to tap. Several other UEM faculty—notably David Hedges, Gerhard Liesegang, Luís Covane, Ricardo Duarte, Paula Meneses, and Ana Loforte—offered valuable suggestions as I was getting the research underway. To David Hedges and Gerhard Liesegang I am particularly grateful, both for their gracious engagement with my research while I was in Mozambique and for the expansive scholarly shoulders they have given me (and so many other historians) to stand on in order to recognize the complexities of southern Mozambique's past. | |
A number of other individuals in Maputo may not have known it at the time, but their curiosity, insights, and ideas were instrumental in getting me, physically and mentally, to Magude itself: Jaqueline Lambert-Madore (CUSO), Lise Stensrud (NRC), Eliseu Machava and Rui (NRC), Gil Lauriciano (then of Mediacoop), Amélia Zambezi (AMRU), Phillip Machon (LINK), Chris Dolan (Wits Rural Facility, Acornhoek), and Philippa Candler (UNHCR). For his instruction in Tsonga/Shangaan and his critical role in introducing me to the Antioka Presbyterian Church (formerly Swiss Mission) community in Facazisse, I will forever be grateful to the Reverend Fernando Khosa. In Magude itself, District Administrator José Cebola contributed jovial and (most of the time) unquestioning official approval of my research as well as his own analysis of the district's history, culture, and current social and economic problems. The Reverend Dr. Simão Chamango, president of the Synod Council of the Igreja Presbiteriana de Moçambique, played perhaps the most vital part of all in arranging, with Antioka pastor Carlos Banza, for me to occupy one of the abandoned infirmary huts on the Antioka church property, in Facazisse locality, for the duration of my stay in Magude. With access to rural accommodations at a premium in the wake of the war, the difficulty of finding reliable shelter was the single greatest obstacle between the idea and the realization of this project. That I found not only a roof but walls and ndzhuti (shade), not only private living space but a community of neighbors, and in Antioka itself not only an institutional base but a living symbol of the prosaic powers of historical remembering is owing, above all, to Dr. Chamango and the IPM. If the Swiss missionaries and their Mozambican descendants in Magude are not always portrayed flatteringly in this book, I hope I have nonetheless conveyed some of the contextual ambiguities and challenges of their historic interactions with women in the Magude area. I hope, too, that IPM and Antioka Christians will forgive my ambivalent relationship to their faith and my sometimes clumsy efforts to straddle the various spiritual fences that crisscrossed the postwar countryside. | 5 |
Friends and colleagues in the United States and Canada have sustained me since my return from Mozambique—and, thankfully, at long last, prodded this book to completion—in more ways than I can enumerate. For any and all they gave me of their guidance, support, interest, companionship, humor, sympathy, encouragement, and sensitive criticism over the years, I thank Emmanuel Akyeampong, Eric and Jessica Allina-Pissano, Jean Allman, Edward Alpers, Amy Bell-Mulaudzi, Sara Berry, Bill Bravman, Antoinette Burton, Susan Cahn, Donald and Edith Collins, John M. Collins, Elizabeth Eldredge, Richard Ellis, Steven Feierman, David Henrickson, Bobbie Isaacman, Jim Johnson, Thomas P. Johnson, Amy Kaler, Daniel Kelliher, Zara Kivi Kinnunen, Scott Kloeck-Jenson (whose tragic death in a 1999 automobile accident in South Africa deprived Mozambique of a keen anthropological eye and a passionate scholarly voice), Premesh Lalu, Peter Lekgoathi, Michael McCormick, Sheryl McCurdy, Patrick and Sheila McDevitt, Liz MacGonagle, Patricia Mazón, Marissa Moorman, Maanda Mulaudzi, Jean O'Brien-Kehoe, Agnes Odinga, Jeanne Penvenne, the Persing family, Anne Pitcher, Alda Saúte, Kathleen Sheldon, Darlene and Doug Shelton, Claudia Shores-Skue, Janet Spector, Thaddeus Sunseri, Bonnie Teitleman, Guy Thompson, Jacob Tropp, Claude Welch, and Dorothy Woodson. Arlindo Chilundo, a Mozambican historian whom I met in Minnesota, offered crucial aid and support, from the beginning of this journey in the United States throughout my stay in Mozambique. It has been a pleasure—and my great fortune—to interact with him as a scholar and a joy to know him and his family. To Arlindo, and to his brothers José, Baltazar, and Mário ("Neves"), a thousand thanks for sharing your Maputo flat, and as many apologies for the times I know my presence complicated your personal lives. | |
As my Ph.D. advisers at the University of Minnesota, Allen Isaacman and Susan Geiger were as nurturing and exacting, affirming and skeptical, patient and firm as any graduate student could want. Without their wisdom and affectionate backing I could never have carried out the research underpinning this book. Thanks seems an especially inadequate expression of my gratitude in this case; and I hope each knew at the time how blessed I felt for their confidence and attention. My debt to Allen is incalculable (as he knows, I still owe him) and I am quite sure I will never fully repay him for his unstinting intellectual, professional, and personal support through the long marathon that this project became. Susan's death from leukemia in 2001 nearly ended this book before it was barely begun; but memories of her uncommon insight, her originality, and her brave, sensible soul returned me at last to an appreciation of the book's simple purpose, inspired from the outset by her pioneering scholarship on gender and historical memory in Africa. I suspect it was Susan's spirit that ultimately enabled me to finish this project. I hope she realizes that I will never finish missing her. | |
In Buffalo and Boston during the past seven years, while I pecked away at revisions, certain individuals went to great (sometimes heroic) lengths to supply the mental and material resources I needed to complete this project. At the State University of New York at Buffalo (1998-2002), financial assistance from the College of Arts and Sciences and from the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender made possible four semesters of wonderful technological collaboration with Carole Ann Fabian (then director of UB's Educational Technology Center) and research assistant Chris Iacovella, who not only created many of the digitized visual and audio components of the book but lent his considerable imagination and computer skills to early conceptualizations of the book's overall design. At Boston University (2002-2005), James McCann and James Pritchett (successive directors of the African Studies Center), Michael Prince (director of the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program), and colleagues at the African Studies Center gave me the vital comforts of an institutional home, ready assistance or distraction when I asked for it, and warm everyday company. Jean Hay and Sandi McCann were particularly helpful sources of wise counsel, friendship, and strength. At Temple Israel in Brookline, Massachusetts, Rabbi Ronne Friedman and Rabbi Jeremy Morrison shored me up spiritually through three rather harrowing years; perhaps more than anything else during this period, it was Jeremy's razor-sharp insight, in our conversations about Judaism, that convinced me in times of doubt of the broader significance of Magude women's stories. | |
From afar, three friends have shown extraordinary determination to keep me afloat (and, more miraculously, keep me writing) over the years. Lisa Banks and Barb Shopland, in Whitby (Ontario, Canada), and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, in Minnesota, have been vansati kulorhi of the most precious kind, sharing their hearts and minds, their homes and families, their brilliance and humor whether I asked for them or not—because somehow they always knew, better than I did, exactly what I needed and when. Thanks, you three. I hope I can one day do the same for each of you. | |
For the opportunity and financial support to reimagine an uncomfortably print-bound doctoral dissertation as an electronic book, I am grateful to Robert Darnton and the American Historical Association's Gutenberg-e award, and to the hugely talented (and hugely patient) editorial and production staff of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) and Columbia University Press. For their substantial creative input, wise guidance, and herculean labors on this project, I especially thank EPIC director Kate Wittenberg, Gordon Dahlquist, Nicholas Frankovich, David Millman, and Sean Costigan. Fellow recipients of the Gutenberg-e award over the last five years have offered helpful suggestions, moral support, and great fun along the way. | 10 |
In the final analysis, it was and continues to be my family—knowingly or not—who inspire my fascination with history, spur my quest to understand women's stories (in whatever form they may be told), and teach me by example the mnemonic politics of everyday life. Whether my sisters Jodi and Jill, brothers-in-law Tom and Jay, brother Kurt, nephews Sam, Duncan, and Eamon, or niece Phoebe ever read this book is beside the point; without their bracing family-heartedness and their company, serious or silly, I would not have been able to pull a sentence, much less a book, from the jumble of the last few years. Rebecca Singer, my stepdaughter for too short a while, surprised me regularly by taking time from the frantic experience of being thirteen and fourteen to pepper me with questions about Africa, Magude, book-writing, life without running water, and giant bugs. She asked many times if she could choose the title for this book; I hope one day she understands that the title I finally chose on my own was and always will be a loving reference, and expression of thanks, to her. Most of all, though, I thank my parents, Eric and Judith Gengenbach, for their patience, their indulgence, their unflinching (at least in my presence) acceptance of the most wild-sounding plans, their bottomless willingness to help, and the binding threads of their own family stories. With love and gratitude, I dedicate this book to them. | |
Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique
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