8
Introduction
After ten days of interviewing, we returned to Namapa with more questions about the Namapa Naparamas than answers. The day after we got back, we stopped at a local café. There we encountered a functionary of the district administration having a drink with a young man whom the functionary introduced as a Naparama “major” from Lalaua. We fell into conversation. The two men informed us that the Naparamas in Alua had thrown up a roadblock and had raided the grain warehouse of World Vision, a Christian evangelist non-governmental organization (NGO). The police had eventually intervened but, on last notice, the roadblock was still standing. The major went on to explain that he had been sent by the provincial government to recover some of the looted goods. More interestingly, he had been tasked with “undoing” the parama vaccine as a means of dispensing with the troublesome Namapa Naparamas once and for all. As we subsequently learned, the major, escorted by the Namapa police, was eventually able to recover some sewing machines, cloth, articles of clothing and cassettes, among other stolen goods. He did so by beating Naparamas believed to have participated in the Namapa and Alua riots and by pronouncing his victims “ordinary people” who henceforth possessed no supernatural powers or special immunities. Those Naparamas who were not suspect were simply sprinkled with a liquid “medicine” as a means of dispelling the parama vaccine’s effects.27 By morning the roadblock had been lifted and we drove back to Nampula City, the provincial capital, without incident. One of my first stops back in town was the local office of the Maputo-based daily newspaper Notícias. It was there I picked up two weeks’ worth of newspapers held for me while I was in the outback. I rummaged through the stack, curious as to whether the Naparama riot in Namapa had made national news and, if so, how it had been reported. The story had indeed received coverage. The most striking feature of the write-up was the manner in which an unidentified government source characterized the protesters. According to Notícias, the source maintained that “the area of Namapa doesn’t have the original ‘Naparamas’, ‘the real Naparamas’ in Nampula are in Ribáuè, Mecubúri, Chalaua, up to Moma . . .,’ ” districts to Namapa’s west and south.28 By discrediting the Namapa Naparamas’ claims to state assistance in this manner, the government representative, it seemed to me, was obliquely acknowledging the state’s own hand in the expanded reproduction of the Naparama movement and, by extension, in the production of what officialdom, in retrospect at least, saw as fraudulent Naparamas. For the functionary in question didn’t seem to be charging Zinco with quackery – many of the Naparamas of Mecubúri had also been vaccinated by Zinco and they seemed to pass the authenticity litmus test.29 Nor did it appear as though officialdom subscribed to the view that Zinco’s men in Namapa were imposters – otherwise, the provincial government would not have sent in the Naparama major to neutralize the vaccine’s reputed effects. If the Namapa Naparamas were fakes, they were apparently thoroughly unaware
