Situating Violence in Mozambique

A Different Kind of War Story is an ethnography by Carolyn Nordstrom about her time spent in Mozambique during their civil war.  As she explains in her book, Carolyn is more interested in studying a process rather than a locale, and this fieldwork is about interrogating civil war and violence rather than Mozambique itself.  As she discusses the realities of, and theories behind, the violent acts she encounters and hears about, Carolyn begins to construct an idea of violence that describes it as both contested and culturally constructed.  Violence, like anything else, is tied to culture, politics and power among other things.  How it is dealt with and how groups and individuals reconstruct their lives after acts of violence depend on their ideas of the causes and effects of violence.  One of the ideas that I found most interesting in this ethnography is the atypical understanding of many Mozambicans that violenc is an illness and as an illness it can be treated using traditional African medicine.

            This book begins with a discussion of violence- what it is and how our definitions of it influence the possibilities for how we can talk about it.  In A Different Kind of War Story Carolyn likens it to power in that

“…violence is essentially contested: everyone knows it exists, but no one agrees on what actually constitutes the phenomenon.  Vested interests, personal history, ideological loyalties, propaganda, and a dearth of first-hand experience or information ensure that many published definitions of frontline violence are powerful fictions and negotiated half-truths.” (Nordstrom, 6)  

She continues to say that many of our ideas of violence are based on writings and stories- in other words representations- rather than experience.  This institutionalized definition of violence allows for the control of what does and does not constitute violence.  In Mozambique, the decades long civil war has directly or indirectly affected almost everyone in the country, causing this shared experience of violence to connect Mozambicans to each other in ways that representations of violence can never accomplish.

            The history behind Mozambique and their civil war as represented by Carolyn Nordstrom starts in the colonial period.  Mozambique was a colony of Portugal until 1975 which is the year that they gained independence.  Frelimo is the Mozambican group that advocated for independence through armed resistance and became the governing body once independence was attained.  Their ideology is described as “scientific socialism.” (Nordstrom, 55)  The idea of an African socialist government was threatening to other governments present in Africa at the time including apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa, who set up and funded a resistance movement named Renamo shortly after the independence of Mozambique.  The war became reified as a struggle between Frelimo and Renamo and their competing ideologies even though neither of these groups were a single entity with much central control.  Adding to this were the various other actors in the war including splinter groups, bandits, militia, foreign advisors and arms merchants.

            Another major theme in this book is the ways in which people reconstitute their identity after acts of violence and the creative process this entails.  During the civil war, much of the population of Mozambique was displaced and lost their land along with members of their family.  People’s daily activities and interactions are a major factor in how we constitute identity and self and these are strongly tied to land and community.  When these daily practices are severed by violence, individuals’ lives, and therefore their identities, are powerfully reconfigured.  In many places, including Mozambique, this reconstitution of identity involves the reproduction of violence.  This has been happening as a result of violence due to the civil war, Portuguese colonial occupation, and events prior to both.  One way that communities in Mozambique have creatively rebuilt without reproducing violence is tied to traditional African medicine in which violence is viewed as an illness.  According to Carolyn Nordstrom, the majority of Mozambicans saw violence similarly to how it was described to her by a healer.

“People have just seen too much war, too much violence- they have gotten the war in them.  We treat this, we have to- if we don’t take the war out of the people, it will just continue on and on, past Renamo, past the end of the war, into the communities, into the families, to ruin us.” (Nordstrom, 214)    

            The ways in which many of these communities in Mozambique view health and illness run counter to global hegemonic ideas.  In doing this, they allow for different possibilities regarding community rebuilding and resistance to violence.  The prevailing institutionalized global view on health tends to come from the perspective of biomedicine, which uses science to define and treat illness.  This dominating view is tied to the power of who funds and therefore controls global health institutions as well as who creates, as and has access to, this knowledge.  According to John Janzen “More complex institutional forms of teaching and practice create a cushion of legitimacy around medical knowledge.” (Janzen, 208)  This institutionalization of health tends to treat illnesses with scientifically backed etiologies, such as HIV and polio, as more legitimate than illnesses that deal with social problems, such as violence. 

            These ideas of health and illness come from how we structure our ideas about the causes of illness, and the creation and dominance of certain ideas over others are based in power.  In the biomedical perspective, illness comes from diseases which are apolitical and can affect anyone in relatively random patterns.  There are many social factors to the transmission and effects of diseases on individuals, but when the problem is framed in biomedical terms these factors can be largely ignored.  “Traditional African medicine” as described by Carolyn Nordstrom was more flexible in that it is “dedicated to healing, protection, and re-creation at all levels of socio-cultural life.” (Nordstrom, 209) 

            In our separation of medicine and social problems, we create the possibilities for both.  Even though our own ideas on these subjects are globally dominant, they create radically different realities for us and for the people of Mozambique.  In both places our practices of health and community enforce and reproduce the ‘truths’ that we believe in.  According to Carolyn Nordstrom

“Chiefly power in Mozambique is strongly tied to the power of African medicine, which ensures the physical and mental health of Mozambicans as well as protecting the political and social health of the entire community.” (Nordstrom, 100)

This view of health as holistic takes into account a person’s overall well-being and allows for the possibility of including social and political factors into the causes and the cure.  This is useful because illness does not occur in a vacuum- there are many social and cultural aspects that influence it. 

            In Mozambique the idea of violence as a disease allowed for more local control over their communities and their daily lives.  The factors contributing to the civil war were many and they included numerous international and national political determinants.  Violence as viewed solely as a byproduct of these political and ideological clashes places the cure for violence in the hands of these ideologies, many of which had no real impact on the everyday structure of these communities.  Violence as a product of politics causes individuals to support one side or the other, and a compromise of politics is necessary for the fighting to end.  When violence is viewed as a disease that can be healed by traditional medicine, this places the cure into the hands of the community themselves and allows for them to resist against violence itself rather than a certain ideology. 

            This idea of giving agency to people is especially important in Mozambique where violent acts commonly reconfigured daily lives.  This helps us to better understand questions surrounding violence, especially ones such as whose definition of violence is most true.  All knowledge is situated, but whose voice is heard is tied to power.  In situations like the civil war in Mozambique the narratives that emerge often come from the political elite, who may frame the conflict as a clash of ideologies, or from our own ‘experts’ on African affairs.   The voices of the people most afflicted by these acts of violence are very rarely brought to the forefront.  As James Pfeiffer and Mark Nichter argue of anthropology

“We can help ensure that the evidence base that frames global health debates is inclusive and represents multiple dimensions of the human experience, including the voices of those whose lives are affected by global processes.” (Pfeiffer and Nichter, 413)     

This is an important aspect of Carolyn Nordstrom’s book A Different Kind of War Story.  It gives a voice to individuals and communities that are most affected by violence.  This is especially important considering that this violence is influenced by global hegemonic political practices. 

            Another way in which Mozambicans connect ideas of healing and social practices is in the way they tie social power to medicine.  As mentioned above by Carolyn Nordstrom, chiefly power is tied to medicine as well as social and political factors of illness.  This reinforces an idea of health as a holistic approach to a person’s and a community’s well-being.  It also allows for the idea that a problem with an individual’s health is not necessarily an abnormality as we seem to perceive when viewing a problem from a biomedical perspective.  Biomedicine attempts to treat diseases by categorizing them and using an ‘objective’ idea of normal with which to compare them to.  But this decontextualizing and categorizing of problems imparts legitimacy to issues that can be explained using the scientific framework of biomedicine over issues that cannot be explained this way.  As Mark Nichter points out through the voice of a practitioner of Ayurveda,

“You cannot just treat diseases, you have to treat bodies, and you cannot just treat bodies unless you understand the lives bodies have become accustomed to living.” (Nichter, 25)  

By allowing for a more encompassing view of health that involves social and political issues and a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of health problems, this Mozambican approach seeks to place ideas of illness into the context of everyday life in order to better understand more of the factors which influence well-being. 

            These ideas of health are not without some problems though.  The same spiritual mediums and African medicine that were a part of fighting violence, and in turn oppressive rule, can have negative consequences on individual’s health.  As Rachel Chapman points out in her article, the largest factor in not seeking prenatal care for the pregnant women she talked to in Mozambique was the fear of “personalistic reproductive threats posed by sorcery and mal espirito.” (Chapman, 366)  Many of these women did not seek biomedical care, which they knew could have positive impacts on their own health and the health of their children, even though it was readily available.  The reasoning behind this is based in African medicine and spirituality.  However, as Rachel discusses later on, this reasoning is used to explain social factors that have real consequences on the mothers and their families, factors with which biomedicine does not engage with.  Many of these factors originate from a conflict between local ideas of community and responsibility, and larger geopolitical practices that are outside the control of the individuals within the community.   

            This is not to say that ideas of African medicine and its connection to local power in Mozambique do not have their own problems.  In every community power is structured so that some people have more access to it than others.  But the ways in which we perceive ideas, such as violence, are culturally situated and have an effect on how they are reproduced.  Who defines what violence is and how it should be dealt with?  The idea of violence, as it exists in some places in Mozambique, is that it is an illness that needs to be addressed by a community.  This comes from not only thinking about it, but from experiencing it.  How can we say that this way of understanding violence is any less true without actually having experienced it ourselves?

            Through over two decades of experiencing violence, from a war against colonial oppression to a civil war over ideological differences, many Mozambicans have gained a much deeper understanding of the realities of violence than most people will ever have.  While experiences of violence are individual, there was a culture of violence, survival and creative resistance that was shared by most in Mozambique.  In an attempt to deal with the consequences of this on the everyday realities of individuals and communities, and the myriad factors which influenced it, many local leaders situated violence in the context of African medicine as an illness.  This helped many in Mozambique to reconstruct their identities and to situate the experiences they had of violence in a coherent world, which allowed them to resume a normal life despite all they had been through. 

 

Nordstrom, Carolyn. A different kind of war story. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Janzen, John M. The social fabric of health: An introduction to medical anthropology. McGraw Hill, 2002.

Pfeiffer, James, and Mark Nichter. "What can critical medical anthropology contribute to global health?." Medical anthropology quarterly 22.4 (2008): 410-415.

Nichter, Mark. Global health: Why cultural perceptions, social representations, and biopolitics matter. University of Arizona Press, 2008.

Chapman, Rachel R. "Endangering safe motherhood in Mozambique: prenatal care as pregnancy risk." Social Science & Medicine 57.2 (2003): 355-374.