A etnografia da “batalha” contra a tradição, a feitiçaria e os espíritos dos ancestrais entre os evangélicos de Maputo, Moçambique

Abstract

This thesis explores, ethnographically, the meanings of “Christian born-again” and self-giving among pentecostal in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. It argues that the pentecostal churches in Mozambique are encompassed by “traditional” practices (always associated with witchcraft and sorcery), which they fight daily, as they cause diseases and other afflictions in the lives of the faithful. This struggle, waged by the pentecostal churches, far from being a new phenomenon, it constitutes a continuation of a war once fought by the post-independence Mozambican socialist state under the leadership of the Frelimo Party, within the scope of the project of invention of the Homem Novo. In fact, there is an analogy between the Homem Novo of Frelimo socialism and the “born-again man” of pentecostal Christianity. This thesis was carried out from a qualitative approach and concludes that both the post-independence Mozambican state and the pentecostal churches are institutions encompassed by these “traditional” practices that they claim to fight.