German Pentecostal Witches and Communists: The Violence of Purity and Sameness

This research investigates a commonly held view in certain peri-urban areas around Chimoio, Mozambique, that German Pentecostal pastors and missionaries, as well as German communists, have been operating as witches from the 1990s until the present time. Drawing on ethnographic material (1999–2016), the chapter explores the popular perception that these ‘Germans’ (alemaos) were promulgating an egalitarian value of sameness and an ethos of purity: gradually, however, they came to be regarded as witches, engaged in nocturnal bloodsucking and undertaking savage hunts for children who were subsequently kidnapped or devoured. Drawing on colonial era cases and comparing the material with other African as well as Melanesian cases, the chapter also relates these ideas about the violence of German witches to long-standing experiences of enslavement, domination and violence, which involve dynamics of memorialization common across both Africa and Melanesia.

Pentecostal Germans and Humana Germans-are widely believed to be witches with fully developed lycanthropy. Both groups of Germans are said to violently express the urge to kill and harm, as well as demonstrating a cannibal hunger for human flesh and the life-energy of others. 2 This chapter examines these connections, which were made repeatedly over a number of years by my interlocutors. Two claims are made here: first, that the phantasmagoric characteristics that condense around utopian and radical endeavors-such as Pentecostalism and communismfoment an idea of having already transgressed the everyday and visible worlds. That is, the radically different horizons offered by Pentecostal and Humana German witches revealed their intimate knowledge of forces of cosmological re-formulation and bodily, spiritual and societal transformation-in visions of the coming of Christ, or in the ideals of a future communist community. Moreover, for my interlocutors, it gradually became clear that the knowledge of bodily, spiritual and societal transformation that was possessed by Pentecostal and Humana Germans, also implied that they were well versed in practices of predation and, hence, violence and destruction. As will be explored below, the two groups of Germans believed to have been witches matched a contemporary version of cannibalistic and destructive inclinations associated exclusively with sorcery and witchcraft or uroi (see also Bertelsen 2009bBertelsen , 2014Bertelsen , 2016a. Second, both Pentecostal and Humana Germans proselytized with vigor, militancy and messianic drive these ideals of sameness, equality and communion, which created tensions among members of the community. These tensions were not simply tied to the future-oriented, benign (but differing) worlds offered by both groups-although these visions resonated locally with historical experiments with populist, messianic Afrosocialism following independence (in 1975) from Portuguese colonialism (Isaacman 1978;Sachs and Welch 1990), as well as with a long history of Christian charismatic churches and cults in the region (Bourdillon 1977;Maxwell 2006;Schoffeleers 1992;Sundkler 1964Sundkler [1948). Rather, such tensions also strongly reflected racial, bureaucratic, pecuniary and ecclesiastical hierarchies that remained painfully present and which were unsuccessfully encompassed by the values of egalitarianism, equality, unity and various prosperous futurities. This context engendered a powerful notion of an 'other same', such as a witch-in this case, one with a cannibalistic inclination.

WItchcraft In PostcolonIal MozaMbIque
A former Portuguese colony, Mozambique gained independence in 1975 following a long and bloody war of liberation that itself ended a violent and brutal colonial order (Newitt 1995). Following independence, the liberation movement Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) embarked on a socialist path of development, attempting to revolutionize the justice and production sectors and the domain of government, which drew on its own particular rendition of Afro-Marxism (Saul 1985). These experiments in socialism were not fully realized, however, as a civil war ensued from 1976 to 1992. Frelimo, by then in government, was pitted against Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), a guerrilla group funded largely by racist Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa and the West, but which enjoyed widespread popular peasant support (Geffray 1990). The civil war was characterized by extreme violence, mass kidnapping and forced labor (Bertelsen 2016a).
The civil war ended in 1992, and the post-war period has been characterized by multiple interventions by numerous international development organizations, which have effectively created a constant 'state of structural adjustment' (Obarrio 2014). Propelled by Mozambique's rapid economic growth (Castel-Branco 2014), the post-war era has also seen new forms of socio-economic stratification with an increasing gap between poor and wealthy citizens (Mozambique News reports and clippings 2016). Although predominantly a period of peace, the post-1992 era has nevertheless been characterized by endemic political tension between the government and Renamo. The last decades have also seen spates of lynchings in rural and urban areas, repeated instances of violence by police agents, recurring urban uprisings, and a widespread and growing mistrust of the state and its forces, as these are seen to protect corrupt and greedy networks of politicians and businessmen (Bertelsen 2009a(Bertelsen , b, 2010(Bertelsen , 2011(Bertelsen , 2016a.
Crucially, these longue durée trajectories of predation, wealth accumulation and violence have unfolded alongside perceptions of witchcraft and sorcery. Here, with reference to a case study, I will present some general characteristics. In Honde, a rural to peri-urban locale close to Chimoio in central Mozambqiue, where I have been undertaking fieldwork since 1999, a senior man whom I will call 'Rui' is widely considered to be a witch (muroi) engaging in uroi-a term encompassing domains of both sorcery and witchcraft, as these are commonly distinguished in anthropology (see Evans-Pritchard 1976[1937). A married man in his sixties, with seven children, Rui is a comparatively successful peasant in terms of generating a small income from the sale of agricultural produce (especially tomatoes) at the markets in Chimoio. The suspicion of him being a muroi has been conveyed to me directly and indirectly on numerous occasions by neighbours, kin and even members of his own household. A specific event in around 2000 decided people on the issue, and was recounted repeatedly. Meat was found hanging from the roof beam of his house-and the meat was believed to be of human origin and a result of his nocturnal, predatory forays. Thus, Rui is widely recognized to have as his vice (vicio) the consumption of human meat, which is also indicated by him attending funerals to satisfy his kurha nhama io munho-his lust for human flesh. 3 Rui was also believed to have undertaken other dark forms of uroi. Specifically, he was said to have engaged the forces of the lion (a potent animal) in the form of a mhondoro-a spirit lion. 4 These abilities were appropriated with the help of a n'anga (a traditional healer) in a ritual during which Rui consumed a piece of lion hide. His eating of the skin generates an authority in his body that is physically experienced as a sense of fear in his presence-akin to what people would experience when confronted by a lion or a mhondoro. 5 In conversation, some confirmed that he showed other signs of being a muroi: significantly, he often eats alone. This description is an important constituent of what might be termed a speech genre (Bakhtin 1986) of uroi: a constantly evolving, dynamic and embracive body of expressions and notions, this speech genre includes a number of partly covert ways to allude to someone being a muroi-especially as it evidences greed and anti-social behaviour in the presence of (non-muroi) kin and family (see also Huhn 2016;West 2007). 6 Beyond eating alone, a more visible, tangible and distinguishing characteristic is the rich yield from Rui's machamba (rain-fed garden) and matoro (irrigated garden). This produce provides him with a comparatively high income from cash crops such as tomatoes (matemate). As widely documented in other contexts in Southern Africa, a conspicuously successful crop yield is frequently related to engaging in forms of magic or other illicit behaviour. As Gluckman (1963Gluckman ( [1956: 96) noted half a century ago, "exceptional achievement is bought at the cost of one's fellows. The man who is too successful is suspected of being a witch and himself is suspicious of the witchcraft of his envious fellows." 7 In the speech genre of uroi in Honde (as well as in Chimoio), several methods are envisaged by which crop yields may be increased. One powerful measure is the covert drugging of others in order to force them to undertake labour on a machamba during the night in a practice called kurima no zwiphoko. Another measure uses powerful mutombo (medicine or drugs) to make maize, water-melon, sweet potatoes, beans or other crops increase in size, grow more quickly, evade the gaze of thieves, and avoid pests. 8 Clearly, then, what informs the notion of uroi are both the classical aspects of witchcraft-an internalized craving that may be inherited and sometimes unconsciously enacted-and sorcery-that is, conscious actions undertaken to become empowered through, for instance, eating lion skin. The composite figure of uroi, melding together these classical conceptions of witchcraft and sorcery, thereby reflects broader Southern African trends, as well as historical developments internal to what I have elsewhere called 'the traditional field' (Bertelsen 2016a). However, uroi has also been pentecostalized during recent decades, particularly through a re-definition of uroi as the work of Satan, who is supported by local spirits enlisted as the Devil's lesser demons. Reflecting a global Pentecostal translation of sorcery into demonology (see Chap. 1), the increasing satanification of cosmologies of protection (in the shape of ancestral and other spirits) and predation (zombification and other forms of uroi) has meant that Pentecostal pastors and so-called profete (who heal through the use of the Holy Spirit), increasingly shape the phantasmagoric spaces of sociality and cosmology (Van de Kamp 2016;Pfeiffer 2005). 9 For Rui, this has also meant that his uroi is seen to epitomize Satanic evil-especially among his Pentecostal co-villagers. Nominally a Catholic himself, Rui views Pentecostal churches with suspicion, believing them to be money-making devices for pastors, which is a common accusation across Africa (see Haynes 2012;Meyer 2002Meyer , 2007. In this case, matters escalated and came to a head at an event in 2005. Commanding respect and authority in Honde, despite being viewed as a muroi, Rui organized some co-villagers to meet a local Pentecostal pastor and his aides down by the river-feigning to want to join the church. After the meeting, Rui organized his fellow villagers to beat the pastor with sticks, accusing him of being a thief and stealing people's money. Following this event, Rui was perceived even more strongly to be under the spell of Satanic evil-an accusation supported by accounts of also other acts evidencing uroi. In summary, and as indicated by what Rui is believed to have been involved in, uroi as a phantasmagoric space has been expanded by the impact of Pentecostalism during recent decades-both in Chimoio and Honde, and elsewhere in Mozambique.
huntIng and eatIng chIldren-the Uroi of churches and caMPs In Mozambique's post-war market-oriented context, sorcerous methods of acquiring saleable goods are believed to be common, as in Rui's case. Moreover, post-war Mozambique was inundated with ambitious development schemes, organizations and churches. In one sense these influxes were not new: Manica province has witnessed extensive trade and missionary presence since at least the 1500s. The area has also suffered a number of violent and extractive political, military, economic and administrative regimes, involving European, Arabic and other non-Mozambican agents (Allina 2012;Bhila 1982). However, from the 1990s onwards these factors have multiplied and intensified nationally (Obarrio 2014), and the situation in Honde is no exception. Here, development work and missionary activity-including various forms of Pentecostalism-operate alongside one another. Crucially, in the early to mid-1990s a eucalyptus project was initiated to provide Honde inhabitants with a source of revenue through the sale of timber for house construction and wood for cooking stoves. The project was initiated by Humana People to People, a radical left-leaning organization, often accused of having a cult-like nature. They appropriated a large and attractive area of land between Honde and Chimoio, supported by the local municipality. 10 From the outset, however, the plantation proved problematic-not least because the area had an important local history prior to the development project. Holding traditional graveyards as well as sites of massacres that had taken place during the civil war, local people were critical of it becoming part of a silviculture project. Contrary to how many other foreign development agents behaved-aloof and mostly passing through by car-my Honde interlocutors repeatedly described how the blond tall 'Germans' (alemãoes) insisted on being in close proximity to local people; in fact, they lived at the local school. 11 Probably wishing to establish collective, local 'ownership' of the now transformed land, the Humana Germans organized night-long vigils at which the eucalyptus project was discussed and contextualized within a global political context (see also Walker 2012). At these events, food was always served and the Humana Germans ate similar foodstuffs to people in Honde and emphasized the importance of shared, communal meals. They tended to profess with some intensity the ideals of equality, solidarity and a common humanity (see also Huhn 2016).
At around the same time, a Pentecostal church, known as Igreja da Nova Vida (Church of the New life) or, simply, Nova Vida (New life), was established close to the camp of the Humana Germans, as well as to the eucalyptus plantation. According to my Honde interlocutors, this church was also directly involved in and supportive of the eucalyptus project. Often visited by blonde 'Germans', according to my interlocutors, the church recruited aggressively and drew local people into their compound for sermons, for construction work building walls around the church and for growing vegetables, which they sold at the marketsan attractive feature for cash-strapped local people. The Pentecostal Germans held their main activities during all-night sermons and prayers: they addressed redemption, viciously attacked the widespread work of Satan, exorcized evil spirits from attendees and professed the communion of the church belonging and, mirroring the Humana Germans, the radical equality of humans (see also Englund 2003).
From the numerous accounts I gathered in Chimoio and Honde from 2000 until 2016, both the Humana Germans and the Pentecostal Germans were active in attempting to reshape the local sociocultural order and its cosmological horizons: through prayer sessions at the church or night vigils in the camp, the sinful paths and traits of the peasant majority were addressed, including jealousy, laziness, selfishness, individualism, greed and cruelty. Recounting these attacks on people's behavior during prayers and vigils, an elderly man, 'Rogério,' explained in a conversation with me in 2010: Eh pah! These Germans were heavy (pesados)! There was no playing around -they wanted everything we did to finish. Whether you went to the camp or the church … it was the same: 'You have to change! We are all together! Honde must be a place for all working together, as one'. They were strong, strong, strong. All was working well for them, for us. We were together. Thus, despite initial resentment, the eucalyptus plantation grew and the Humana Germans' camp gradually turned into permanent housing. Similarly, the church's presence consolidated and expanded with the affluence of its pastors; this influence materialized in terms of money, as well as in such items as cars owned by the church. As reflected in Rogério's statements, both the camp and the church seemed successful in drawing together many people from Honde and beyond into their domain.
However, in 1995, according to interlocutors, a dramatic event occurred. In a concerted attack at dusk, Germans from both camp and church drove around in cars and 'fizeram merda' ('did shit'), as some phrased it. Specifically, the Humana and Pentecostal Germans attacked the area around Honde by driving vehicles to which they had attached sharp bamboo poles. They drove the cars on paths and dirt roads, purposefully aiming at children and throwing their victimg into the cars after they had been hit. Ending the attacks abruptly, after returning to their camp and to the walled church, they proceeded to prepare, cook and eat these children. Interlocutors readily shared details from the assault and I was shown by several men the exact locations in which the incidents had occurred. I interviewed a young man (in 2008) who had barely survived the raid and had done so by hiding in the forest. I also spoke to an elderly lady who had lost a son in the 'German witch' attack. Several people claimed that a child's remains were found outside the church. Running through the narrations were descriptions of the Germans as muroi, who during these events had grossly exaggerated features: sharp nails, shrill voices, long teeth and excessive amounts of body hair. Together with the nature of the raid, these grotesque features were said to have revealed them to be muroi.
In shock following these events, the Honde villagers began to imagine sorcerous activities going on within the church walls-or in the houses of the Humana camp. Rumours spread that there had been further attempts to kidnap children, which informed local suggestions that uroi and cannibalism were continuing. This imagery was sustained by Honde residents selling the Germans snakes, chameleons and cats at exorbitant prices. Allegedly preparing these typical sorcerous forms of meats in a stew, the Humana Germans attempted to coerce local people into sharing these meals with them-most rejected it or ran away. The prayers and night vigils at both church and camp, however, still attracted people from Honde: they concentrated, as before, on messages of conversion to create new realities for a Pentecostal-or communist-future.
However, towards the end of the 1990s, the church was suddenly abandoned, the Humana Germans left and the eucalyptus development project failed. Some, in interviews in 2016, gave accounts of a final five children who were lured into cars before the 'Germans' took off, never to return. This might have been the end of the German witches in Honde-but it was not.
gerMan WItches as a recurrIng destructIve force In May 2008, a mhondoro dwozutumua, a form of a lion that devours and destroys, ravaged a community that neighbours Honde, attacking three women who were walking along a path during the day. The animal or animals-people disagreed about whether it was a group or a single animal-killed the women, biting off their heads and dragging their bodies into the forest (mato) to devour them. In what ensued, after the details had been established locally, 12 popular speculation revolved around the past and present contested political and social issues, seeking to locate an originary cause. A typical conversation ran something like the following, which I had with a young man, 'Romeo'. As with many others, Romeo was certain about the non-local origins of the lions: R: The lions were sent. That is what they say. B: Who sent them? R: They were sent by a country. They say it is Germany. The lions are here to create confusion (confusão). B: Why Germany? R: To kill and create trouble. Don't you remember the case of eucalyptus trees and the way the Germans hunted our children? It is the same thing. They send bandits and they send lions and leopards. B: But are the lions made [i.e. man-made]? R: They say they were raised in a park or perhaps outside the country.
And there they were left with nothing to eat for two days. Then they were dropped off close to Gondola [a town near Chimoio]. B: Is it not possible to make a ceremony or protect oneself against these? R: Elder brother (Mano) Bjorn, if it had been a natural lion (leão natural), then you could perform a ceremony to protect. But with this type that is made, you cannot. This type is called mhondoro dwozutumua. It is made to bite, to kill, this one. The traditional type of mhondoro dwozutumua is to guard and roar only, not bite and maim like this. This type we have here is not new, but it is different from the traditional lion. This one is very bad for the gardens (machambas) here. No-one wants to go. And the community police will not go either. B: Why do you not arm yourselves? R: Yes! But the government cannot do it-they have no power. You need special arms to do it. Renamo say that if it had been them in power, this could not have been possible. Renamo is more traditional. They could end this problem. But Frelimo are related to the bandits and only want to fill their bellies.
There is a clear preoccupation here with relations between aid and transgression. 13 In these popular conceptions, 'Germany' and 'Germans' are central to key accounts of the abduction, killing and consumption of children in Honde and beyond. 'Germany' and 'Germans' denote complex practices of a predatory consumption of human flesh, which enables the perpetrators to acquire the life force and to 'appropriate the energy' (Colson 2000: 340; see also Huhn 2016) of others through sorcerous transgression. Further, Germany and Germans were evoked later the same year when a particularly brutal and violent wave of robberies and break-ins terrorized poor areas around Chimoio. Catching some of the alleged thieves and lynching them, people generally agreed that they had been sent by Germany to create problems-equating thieves with witches, as is common in, for instance, Mozambique (Bertelsen 2009a; Jacobs and Schuetze 2011), South Africa (Niehaus 2001;Pelgrim 2003) and in Africa more generally.

cannIbalIsM, chrIstIanIty and colonIalIsM: PartIal connectIons
How are we to understand these beliefs in long-term and recurring cannibalistic and predatory behaviors emanating from this composite German witchcraft complex? A common means of unraveling cases of foreign and/or white alleged cannibalistic behavior in African contexts is to re-contextualize it within the impact of Christianity more broadly. For one, Heike Behrend (2011) demonstrates a number of historical and sociocultural dynamics underpinning witch-hunts undertaken by charismatic offshoots of the Catholic Church in Uganda. Behrend shows that the teaching of the Eucharist in the Tooro Kingdom in Western Uganda, and in particular the central image of transcendentalism-eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ-was disseminated to those who had risen in the hierarchy of local converts. Thus, the Eucharist as a cannibalistic act being revealed only to a few meant that connections were made among cannibalism, Christianity and the arrival of Catholic missionaries in the area. However, other developments that cast into disarray basic life-death sequences were also underway in East Africa from the eighteenth century onwards-not least the arrival of doctors, medical missionaries, and skull, bone and trophy hunters. In the name of science and the advancement of humankind, the doctors and missionaries carried out painful and often lethal tests on more or less willing patients: they extracted body fluids and removed body parts. Over the same period, limbs, skulls and entire corpses were collected from battlefields, or exhumed, often nocturnally, from grave sites and missionary graveyards. This behavior was carried out in the name of 'collecting'. Behrend (2011: 186)  This crucial dimension of tapping into, extracting from, or reconfiguring African bodies-living and dead, parts and wholes-created a sinister yet nebulous mimesis between motley crews of Europeans (missionaries, doctors and body snatching explorers) and the complex local sociocultural order in which cannibalism, as integral to witchcraft, existed as a real possibility. Behrend (2011: 186) notes: "It is as if the African cannibal cooking his victim in a big pot is, above all, an inverted description of European practices in Africa, a mirroring of their own practices in the Other". This confluence of presences-Christian and non-Christian-and how these reflected bodily and corporal dimensions, was identifiable across the Portuguese colonies, such as Mozambique: missionaries were concerned with resurrection, as they were throughout the empire. In addition, as Roque (2010) has shown, skull collection was integral to various aspects (missionary, military, medical and anthropological) of imperial expansion between 1870 and 1930. Crucially, he also suggests that ritual violence is regularly was undertaken by colonial forces and local aides, such as in Timor-leste where "… decapitated heads could add to the vitality of colonial empires at the same time as indigenous headhunting intensified and prospered" (Roque 2010: 17). Further, in a study of race and the Portuguese empire, Matos (2013) explains that Portuguese physical/biological anthropologists were from the 1800s integral to colonial expansion and undertook several expeditions and missions to Mozambique where the collection of skulls was intended to underpin theories of racial superiority and, broadly, legitimize colonial rule and campaigns of pacification.

the gerMan WItches: utoPIan horIzons, vIolent egalItarIanIsM and PredatIon
As Behrend has lucidly shown (2011), and as is evident across lusophone colonial and postcolonial worlds, local understandings of 'the German witch' reflect colonial pan-African dimensions of cannibalism and Christianity. However, the main concern in what follows is to explore an important dimension that is often eclipsed in analyses such as Behrend's, namely, the similarities at various analytical levels between the Pentecostal Germans and the Humana Germans. This analysis extends Behrend's argument to encompass, first, movements that were not Christian; second, it underlines the utopian, egalitarian characteristics of both. The aim is to go some way towards explaining the consistency in histories of cannibal lusts, predatory hunts and kidnappings that over a period of several decades continued to inform fears of both communists and Christian charismatics in Honde. My point of departure is that the egalitarian ethos of sameness and togetherness seems central to both Humana and Pentecostal Germans. This reflects what both Thomas Strong (Chap. 3) and Englund and leach (2000) identify as hypermodern or fundamentalist modern notions of regeneration, renewal and severance (in relation to traditions and to ties to kin) of the Pentecostal modernist orientation (see also Van de Kamp 2016), which are also evident in Humana speeches. Humana also relies on meta-narratives of a coming modernity-one that will eradicate both hierarchies of exploitation and capitalist usurpers of money and life. Significantly, however, this focus on the range of evils attacked by Pentecostal and Humana Germans has tended to propel them into the phantasmagoric space of uroi. The manner in which the Germans became entangled in notions of uroi they thought to be external and impervious to resembles a process minutely described by Rio and Eriksen (2013) in relation to early missionaries in Vanuatu. Here, the missionaries became encompassed by and integral to the very forces of evil and sorcery they sought to combat. In a similar fashion and through their ferocious attacks on various forms of evil, the Germans in Honde generated a powerful notion of the 'other same'-that is, of themselves as witches.
Of course, it is also possible to explore, as others have done, how the German presence as farmers in this region benefitted from the brutal Portuguese colonial regime of forced labor, which over time sedimented into an image of the Germans as bloodsuckers, metaphorically speaking-that is, as drawing the life force out of Africans. This kind of view has been maintained over the decades following independence, and exists now as a stereotypical image of exploitation that draws upon powerful conceptions of uroi. Given the centuries of colonial violence and extractive rule in the area-as shown, for instance, in lubkemann (2008) and Allina (2012)-there is good reason to link present witchcraft accusations and experiences with the long shadow of a violent colonial past. Furthermore, African experiences of enslavement, as well as imagery around zombification, are often understood in terms of histories of capture, the slave trade and forced labour as, for instance, Nicolas Argenti (2007: 93-120) has argued in research on the Cameroonian Grasslands, or as Zimba et al. (2006) suggest is a general pattern in East African oral culture. Finally, of course, there is also a long history in Africa (and elsewhere) of seeing colonial officers and other white men in general as witches, sorcerers and cannibals as, for instance, luise White (1997White ( , 2000 has suggested. Intriguingly, 'Germany' and 'Germans' carry a particular history in postcolonial Mozambique, because a number of children were sent to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1980s in the name of education and socialist solidarity (Slobodian 2015). When the children were separated from their families, schools and local communities, this often seems to have left the impression that they were being snatched away. When returning after the Cold War, often with a socialist stance, to a politically and economically transformed Mozambique, the young magermane-'ma' being a generic collective term and 'germane' denoting the country-are regarded as having become Other. They have their own language (German), which they speak when they meet each other, and they have become estranged, to many Mozambicans (Müller 2014).
Despite being regarded as 'Other', however, magermane are rarely accused of witchcraft; thus, the confluence of Pentecostal and Humana witches/cannibals must lead us to look elsewhere than to instances of past violence or to reverberations from GDR-Mozambique connections-moral accusations from the past propelled into and materializing in the present, as it were. As indicated above in the ethnographic material, there is a constancy over time in communists and Pentecostals coalescing into a witchcraft complex called Germany. This would suggest that we need to open up the analysis of Pentecostals, Communists and uroi to other forces that are perceived to operate in destructive and predatory ways.
As has already been established in general terms by Kapferer (2002), and in specific regions such as Melanesia (Rio 2010(Rio , 2014, witchcraft may be viewed as a phantasmagoric space with realm-opening capacities. From this perspective, witchcraft is analytically constituted as an intrinsic and generative part of reality that transforms, exacts and instantiatesnot necessarily reflecting tangible historical or contemporary processes. A crucial component of this aspect of reality, in a Deleuzian sense (Deleuze andGuattari 2002 [1980]), is its frequently volatile and unpredictable nature: it transforms itself as an open possibility, breaking into and breaking open the mundane in often spectacular ways. This profoundly open nature of witchcraft as part of a cosmological horizon is simultaneously characterizing what one may call the domain of the 'traditional' or 'customary' in Honde and Chimoio. These domains are irreducible to stable sets of sociocultural values, institutions and practices onto which modernity is inscribed; they must be analyzed as continuously evolving domains in their own right (Englund and leach 2000; see also Rio 2010).
Taking seriously this dynamic view of the open-endedness of traditional cosmology and the phantasmagoric space of witchcraft means that it might be extended to engulf and transform the fantastic nature of egalitarian possibilities and revolutionary futures that both Humana and Pentecostal witches preach. Moreover, the radical egalitarianism of Pentecostalism and communism-as they were conveyed in Hondereflected a long trajectory in European pre-and post-Enlightenment thought: Cohn (2004Cohn ( [1957: 187ff) argues, for example, that Greek and Roman cosmologies fueled Christian millenarian politics and cast long shadows into the present. However, irrespective of their European roots, for people in Honde the phantasmagoric possibilities that condensed around their respective utopian and radical endeavors of Pentecostalism and communism necessarily translated as always already having transgressed the confines of the everyday worlds. Differently put, the radical horizons of orientation that were propagated directly by these German witches implied having dipped into forces of not only cosmological creation-in visions of the coming of Christ, or in communist ideals for the future; they also implied, for my interlocutors, that they were knowledgeable about practices of predation (see also West 2005 on witchcraft in Northern Mozambique). This dynamic bears some similarity to what Newell (2007) proposes, based on the research in Cote d'Ivoire: there, the Pentecostal church attacks on witchcraft, constituting its threat as real, meant that the church itself increasingly became encompassed by witchcraft themselves. In Honde, the phantasmagoric space of uroi was similarly appropriated by the Pentecostal Germans and, ultimately, they were consumed by it (see, again, Rio and Eriksen 2013 for a comparative case from Vanuatu).
The intensity of these religious and political encounters is significant, as Pentecostals and communists alike zealously professed equality and communion-facets that were advocated for and proselytized aboutand which increasingly created tensions that fed the dynamic and volatile space of witchcraft. Despite the call to unity and equality, various forms of hierarchies-racial, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical, economic-were revealed, which gradually eclipsed the professed values of egalitarianism.
Accounts of the transformation of the Humana Germans in the camp and the Pentacostelists in the church into predatory beings still haunts the peri-urban landscapes of Chimoio and rural Honde in 2016. In January of that year, having first asked me (again) whether I was German, an elderly man who lived next to where this church had once stood (there seems to be a different church there now), reflected: These were times when the war had ended. Everything was moving [changing]. The eucalyptus [forest] started. The Germans came and told us we all needed to be together, to confront Satan, to fight him! We went there. It was good. We were one and the church was strong! But then they became different. And then came the attacks on our children. Eating our children! We were not the same. This created a lot of problems.
As also suggested in the Introduction to this volume, what we see here through the attacks is the emergence of the powerful and volatile notion of the 'other same' as a witch-in this case, a witch with a cannibalistic inclination. The man's realization that 'we were not the same' further reflects that the egalitarian ethos of forging a common humanity, supported by communion and collective vigils and prayers, was undercut by a notion of sorcerous predation. This is in keeping with Geschiere's (2013: 191) observation that the threat of witchcraft in an increasingly Pentecostalized version of it means that the domains of the intimate and the same comprise the space in which witchcraft makes itself present (see also Badstuebner 2003). Several additional aspects of the case from Honde underline such a reading.
First, both missionaries and communists accumulate bodies in the camp and in the church. This accumulation of bodies as a practice of corporeal power is inherently ambivalent, signifying authority, might and resources. Increasingly, however, it was being understood as predation-key aspects of which are a siphoning off of resources and a tapping into vital cycles of production and reproduction. Such nefarious forms of accumulation are also assumed in relation to maize mill owners, who are regarded as accessing the productive and regenerative capacity of women, and maize mills are thus seen as key sites of witchcraft (Bertelsen 2014). Generally, accumulating bodies and corpses, in parts or whole, is a central feature of witchcraft, which also relate to the kidnapping and devouring of children by white missionaries (Kaspin 1993), or to cases such as the 'Petro-naira' boom in Nigeria in the 1970s, where the national currency was believed to be predicated upon the theft of children and the extraction from or transformation of them into monetary wealth (Barber 1982). In Mozambique, others have shown that the power and predation inherent in witchcraft translates into cannibal desires-and this perception has led to violent confrontation in several places (Israel 2009). For instance, Serra (2003) observed that during an outbreak of cholera in Northern Mozambique in the 2000s, health workers were attacked while distributing chlorine to disinfect wells and to use in the collection of the bodies of the deceased; some were even killed by outraged local people who perceived that the morguebound bodies were to be consumed by cannibals. More recently and in Northern Mozambique, in an analysis of poverty and death, Trentini (2016) maps a perception of a sorcerous and nocturnal war directed against children-often being led by foreigners, state agents, witches or spirits. Similarly, Igreja (2014) documents a complex case in the 2000s, involving cannibal rumours, violence, criminal proceedings and jail sentences for alleged baby-eating witches in nearby Gorongosa.
Second, as both the Humana and Pentecostal witches established themselves within or close to existing settlements, erecting walls around the church and building permanent houses, this actualized the idea of the potential for a better self and society. In a sense similar to how the world of witches was an already accomplished future and better world in the case from PNG analyzed by Thomas Strong (Chap. 3), the emerging permanence of these sites became a materialization of a better world and a foretelling of a utopian future with increased wealth. Moreover, it may have been seen as an intensified and enhanced doubling of existing rural life. This was strengthened by the newcomers' actions in forging new collectivities, as well as other forms of doubling, where the Humana Germans and the Pentecostal Germans mirrored each other in emphasising shared meals and communion. The ethos of production-agriculture, the eucalyptus plantation and water wells-was disseminated in doctrinal settings aimed at the spirit and body of the people of Honde. There were also appeals, of course, to becoming 'new men,' to becoming pure and part of a common, united humanity (see also Rio and Eriksen 2014). This vision, particularly in relation to the Humana Germans, was probably informed by memories of Mozambique's postcolonial socialist politics. In the countryside, this involved the formation of collective farms, the tentative eradication of traditional rituals and ceremonies, and the instalment of a new form of socialist, nominally egalitarian, leadership by committee-the Grupos Dinamizadores, or GDs. These revolutionary transformations were often vehemently contested and were an important aspect of the mobilization to civil war against the state (Bertelsen 2016a;Geffray 1990;Igreja 2008). What is interesting here, however, is that these GDs were sometimes popularly seen as having cannibalistic leanings and in Mozambican Portuguese a member could be been to be a so-called chupasangue (blood-sucker): "a supernatural vampire-like figure, the chupasangue, who sucked people's blood and abducted them" (Obarrio 2014: 125). Thus, the true representatives of the people in the form of the GDs were believed to have covert agendas-the 'same' being more 'other' than equal-and this was increasingly the case as the blood and life force of others were consumed by them.
Bearing in mind this political history of violent (and some would argue predatory) state formation in the name of a future egalitarian socialist republic, it is likely that people recognized-and were wary ofthe similar rhetoric used by the Humana Germans. What my interlocutors stated was that conversations concerning revolution and creating human unity for the future contained a rhetoric with strong political-millenarian or utopian leanings. This corresponds to a large extent with the idioms and ideas expressed in the current Humana Charter: WE, who are not secret drinkers in cradles of comfort while watching the world turn itself into a ball of fire, unite in hearts and in words and in deeds with all mankind.
WE, who hereby salute today and salute tomorrow with a courageous clarion call from the yellow trumpet of the future, hoist our banner high over the flags.
The dehumanized human being, the dehumanized society must meet The Solidary Humanism. Man standing shoulder to shoulder with all mankind. 14 Unfortunately for the Humana Germans, they were in the end perceived to be 'secret drinkers in cradles of comfort'-following the logic of the discernment of evil that is so important to Pentecostal discourse and identification (Igreja 2015): They held nocturnal feasts of witches' food and were regarded as predating on children. The utopian vision of their clarion call for an egalitarian present and future was therefore undercut by assumptions about their acts of witchcraft.
As with Rui, who revealed himself to be a witch, the German witches also erupted violently from the egalitarian ethos of sameness: the 'other same' was believed to be demonic. Tied to the notion that witches travel long distances but are often, at the same time, intimates and kin, the intimacies of the camps and the churches created enduring problematic and violent connections between Honde and the site of witches-Germany. Given the witches' orientation towards, and propensity for, devouring children and adults to eat meat, this problematic relation erupts or actualises from time to time, as in the 2008 case of the mhondoro dwozutumua, or as with the Germany-generated thieving witches haunting peri-urban Chimoio. A specifically German witchcraft complex continues to haunt the region, then, and notably, as Jorgensen suggests in relation to a case in Papua New Guinea, witchcraft frequently has these kinds of "non-indigenous sources" (2014: 267). conclusIon like Rui, Honde's German witches were seemingly successful. And between them, the German witches were promulgating a sense of shared purpose and values of spiritual communion and egalitarian order. However, again like Rui, they were revealed to be predatory creatures-'same others'-whose real intentions only appeared gradually, culminating in the dramatic events of predation outlined at the start of this chapter. In other words, the utopian egalitarianism was believed to have covert hierarchies of predation-fueled by a mutually reinforcing propagation of egalitarian futures by Pentecostal and Humana witches. These dynamics unfolded in a cosmological space of constant creation and recreation and among the phantasmagorics of witchcraft-the ambiguous character of which was crucial in revealing to local people the nature of what was unfolding.
While these particular radical egalitarian futures have thus been foreclosed, the specter of vengeance continues to be exacted on Honde and Chimoio through the presence of murderous and predatory thieving witches, or the lions that were bred to be savage. These events remind people of the dangers of the 'same other', whose proffered bright futures in terms of material wealth have been energized by the labor and corporealities of people in Honde. This produces social asymmetry in the place of communion and equality, thereby strengthening, once more, a Manichean understanding of good and evil, insider and outsider.
In conclusion, then, a general observation may be offered: When we in various ways make comparisons involving Pentecostalism, witchcraft, and the particular sites in which we work, the phenomena of especially Pentecostalism and witchcraft should be removed from their disciplinary confinements and regarded in a less insular way. One way to do this has been undertaken here, in showing how the confluence and mutual intensification of two forces of radical egalitarianism in Honde may point to the analytical value of re-conceiving Pentecostalism and witchcraft in relation to other political and non-political future-oriented entities and orientations, such as communism. Research and fieldwork has also been supported by the project "Gender  (1978), whose work related it to human evolution, population growth and the development of state systems. This perspective has been much criticized, and rightly so (see Arens 1978;lindenbaum 2004;Huhn 2016). These long-standing debates are beyond the scope of the present work, but I approach the cannibal-related acts of witchcraft in Honde as reflecting deep-seated, historically rooted cosmological horizons of predation and power (see also Whitehead 2000Whitehead , 2011. I will therefore use the term 'cannibalism,' instead of the more technical 'anthropophagy,' as the former more aptly retains the sense of moral outrage and despair expressed by my interlocutors than the latter somewhat sanitized term. But see Huhn (2016) for a different analysis of relations among food taboos, sorcery and avoidance of anthropophagy in Northern Mozambique. 3. For a fuller account of Rui's sorcerous proclivities, see Bertelsen (2016a), Chap. 5. 4. Similarly, West (2007: 76) notes that the throat meat of a slain lion is used for nefarious purposes. 5. See also Huhn (2016) for a compelling comparative case from Northern Mozambique of a transformation of a corpse into a sorcerous 'humanlion', as she terms it. Upon seeing visible changes to the corpse, including the development of hide, the mourners undertook several steps to dismember, open and crack the body, succeeding only after several days in blocking the emergence of a 'human-lion'. 6. However, consuming food alone does not unambiguously index antisocial behaviour: in popular corruption discourses in several African countries, 'eat' covers the physical act of consuming food as well as a person engaging in corruption (see also Argenti 2007: 88f;Bayart 1993). Paradoxically, then, eating with others signifies specific anti-social, colluding and predatory forms of communities of corrupt consumption, if I may call it that. This latter form refers more to nocturnal necrophagous feasts of a society of muroi-rather than families sharing their meals among themselves or with visitors (see also Geschiere 1995). 7. Transgressive acts to increase agricultural yields have a long history across Africa. Hilda Kuper's (Kuper 1963: 66) reference to two main types of 'murders for doctoring' were 'agricultural fertility' and 'personal aggrandisement'. Burbridge (1925: 26) also notes, and condemns, this: "Perhaps in no instance does the sinister influence of this man [the 'witch-doctor'] appear in darker colours than in the conditions annexed to the use of this agricultural charm divisi. These conditions, sometimes incestuous, sometimes murderous, always inhuman and unnatural, were eagerly complied with by the superstitious idler, not witting that by the sweat of his brow he must eat his bread. In sloth, he sat with his friendly benefactor by his side pulling the right string to set the mechanical forces free which were to fill his grain-bin." 8. Enslaving others to work in a garden was documented by H. A. Junod (1962Junod ( [1912: 514f). On this form of enslavement or 'zombification', see also Beidelmann (1963: 66) and Ellis and Haar (2004: 123). On sacrifices, such as the killing of relatives and the use of their body parts, and on illicit medicine or drugs to augment yields, see Marwick (1965: 80) and Gelfand (1964: 71-72). Agricultural or economic productivity is sometimes also conceived of in terms of reflecting incestuous relations, which are often understood in relation to the language of sorcery; see Jacobson-Widding (1990: 54) and Aschwanden (1982Aschwanden ( [1976: 101f). 9. There has been much discussion about Pentecostalism and its effects on sociocultural, gendered and economic realities in African as well as Melanesian contexts: Joel Robbins (2004), Matthew Engelke (2010) and Birgit Meyer (2004) have influenced much of this debate. This area is beyond my brief here, but as Premawardhana (2016) suggests, it is important to recognize non-Pentecostal and/or global as well as local cosmologies of rupture and discontinuity when assessing the relative impact of Pentecostalism. Here, I assess the impact of the Humana Germans, as well as Mozambique's past experiments with socialism. For a theological reflection on missionizing in Mozambique, and the challenge of African socio-cultural dynamics and Pentecostal churches, see Meyers (2016). 10. On an international level, Humana People to People is controversial; its charismatic leader, Mogens Amdi Petersen, was arrested (and then released) in Miami in 2002, accused of siphoning off large amounts of money for personal use (Wakefield 2002). More recently, investigative journalists have also been highly critical of the organisation, sometimes known as ADPP (BBC 2016), from the Mozambique subsidiary Ajuda de Desenvolvimento de Povo para Povo/ADPP (Development Aid from People to People). Globally, it is also known as Gaia, Planet Aid and Tvind. 11. The identities of both the Humana and the Pentecostal Germans have been difficult to ascertain. However, there are clear indications (from their names, photographs I have seen, and memorabilia left behind) that many were Northern Europeans, including at least two Danes and, probably, some holding German citizenship. Ascertaining their nationality is not crucial, however, as 'German' and 'Germany' in this particular context have come to encompass sorcerous capacities of externality rather than correspond to bureaucratic notions of citizenship, language or national territory. 12. I made several attempts to locate the families or households of the three women, and to establish their names. I searched for news in the Beirabased regional newspaper Diario de Moçambique, and spoke to a wide network of informants in Chimoio to try to establish additional facts concerning the case, which happened a few days before my arrival. Only a few non-Honde-based informants supported the story while others doubted it. However, the unanimity that characterized the fear of the mhondoro dwozutumwa in Honde supports the use of this example. Moreover, the veracity of the attack as a social fact was confirmed during fieldwork in 2016. 13. Several other significant dimensions are evident here-including the politics of state formation and the domain of the traditional. While this is beyond my brief here, see Bertelsen (2016a). 14. Taken from Humana-People to People's charter 1, First Part, available at http://www.humana.org/English/english-charter-2, accessed 10 December 2016.
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