At Ansha's

Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

Abstract

Introduction: At Ansha’s is a world that speaks for itself, a place-based ethnography that travels in and out of binaries of extension – spatial and idiomatic antonyms that converge in the making of history and the human. Trentini locates her main protagonist, Ansha, as a migrant from Mueda, Cabo Delgado in Nampula, and offers a rich descriptive landscape that tells many stories; notably, Ansha’s passage from being under the control of majini (spirits) to becoming a healer – a transition from illness to healing. The ethnography, through Ansha’s memory, is situated at the conjuncture of Mozambique’s socialist era, FRELIMO and RENAMO’s confrontation, and the anti-colonial war. It recognises the aftermath of dispossession and state violence as an open wound.