The Children of War
The former child soldiers of Mozambique's civil war offer insights into morality and human resiliency
Stress and culture. Diagnosis and healing in Mozambique are very different from western practices, but there are interesting commonalities as well. I spent some time talking to traditional healers, known locally as curandeiros: Rosalina Mondlane and Teresa Xitlango live and work in the same Malehice village as Macamo and Quive. Beatriz Armando Massingue lives in Israel's village; she's his sister. These women are highly regarded in their communities. They have all apprenticed to other healers for three to five years, and although the specifics of their healing practices appear to vary a bit, they all share some general beliefs about mental health and psychotherapy.
They wouldn't use those words, of course, though when pushed they do come up with words for conditions that are roughly translatable to our psychiatric diagnoses. For example, the Shangana word kuxukuvala is a close equivalent of what we would call clinical depression. Kuxukuvala is characterized by abnormal sadness and emotional paralysis. Similarly, Quive and others are thought to suffer from npfuka , which corresponds pretty well to what American psychiatrists would label PTSD. It has the symptoms of nightmares and flashbacks to specific experiences of trauma and violence.
But the Mozambican healers' theories about the causes of such stress disorders are quite different. They believe, for example, that when a soldier murders someone, the spirit of the dead takes up residence in the killer--even if the murder has been coerced, as with the child soldiers. For the sake of mental stability, the spirit of the victim must be driven out.
To that end, the healers might heat a concoction of local herbs and have the returning soldiers breathe it in to accomplish spiritual cleansing. Or they might kill a chicken or a goat, mix the blood with water, then use this potion to "vaccinate" them through pinpricks in the arm. If the healers sense the need for a stronger treatment, they might take the child down to the riverside, because certain spirits are known to reside in the water or in the riverbanks and exposure to these spirits can be tonic. All of this must be done before the emotionally traumatized child is allowed to re-enter the household, to prevent contamination of the home. The healers appear to have an innate sense of what American mental health practitioners call psychiatric prevention; they assume that such trauma and stress will take a toll even if it hasn't already, so they intervene immediately to ward off illness by realigning the spirits.
It's impossible to know which specific elements of these healing practices helped the returning child soldiers, but it's clear that the cleansing rituals were essential to the kids' transitions back to community and family life. When the civil war came to an end, there was a widespread fear that the boys who had served under Renamo would be socially tainted and unwelcome back in their villages because of their "treason" and the hideousness of their war crimes. Indeed, this idea was perpetuated by the Frelimo government, which saw PR value in the idea that Renamo had ruined these kids' lives. But the rejections never happened. Most of the kids were welcomed back with compassion, even joy, and the healers' belief in recovery certainly helped the communities embrace their victimized sons.
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