During my first week in the town of Manhiça, Mozambique, a neighbor told me that the girls at the secondary school were falling down. My Portuguese was a bit rusty after living in Montana for two years, so I thought perhaps I had misunderstood, or missed a crucial word or phrase. Maybe they were falling down due to the disrepair of the sidewalk – the simple task of walking is actually treacherous in many parts of this country. Or perhaps they were failing a class, not physically falling.
But the next time it came up in conversation, I was able to confirm that the girls, indeed, are falling down. A bit of probing revealed that the secondary school was built atop a cemetery, and that the girls are ostensibly being possessed by discontented spirits. They fall to the ground, unable to control their own bodies, and when they regain basic motor skills, they seek an audience with the school director and aggressively demand that the grounds be cleansed. Once the spirits leave the girls’ bodies, they return to their normal states of mind and make their way home. Many have lain mute and motionless on the floor throughout an entire class period.
As the girls continued to fall day after day, the issue naturally began to receive a lot of attention throughout Manhiça. One Friday evening, while I waited at the bus stop, I noticed a group of people standing in a circle, unusually quiet for a bus stop crowd. All of the sudden there were yelps of fear and the circle broke back in several spots. Finally able to catch a glimpse of what was on the inside, I saw two girls in school uniforms laying on the ground. One was immobile and silent, while the other had sat upright and startled the spectators. Soon after, my bus arrived, and I crowded myself in quickly, as did a good portion of the crowd. For some, the chance to catch a ride to their next destination apparently outweighed the need to see what the girls would do next.
Several days later, I awoke to the sound of marching, chanting, and whistles blowing. The crowd wasn’t right outside my house, but it was large and loud enough to be heard from several blocks away. When I asked my landlady what all the fuss what about, she told me it was the students from the secondary school, protesting the director’s lack of attention to the issue. According to my landlady, and many other people in Manhiça as well, the director needed respond to the spirits’ demands by performing a cleansing ceremony. This would allegedly solve the problem and everything would be business as usual. Skeptic that I am, I agreed with her that if the solution was that simple, it seemed strange that the director continued to refuse.
Two days later, a meeting was called at the school inviting government administrators, teachers, church leaders, and community members to discuss the issue. During the meeting, a boy (to my knowledge, the first affected by this condition) became possessed with a spirit, grabbed a tray, and began to hit the director over the head. Needless to say, no resolution was found and classes remained on hold.
The ubiquity of Christianity in Mozambique today does not preclude traditional animistic beliefs; many people seem to subscribe to an all-powerful God while simultaneously maintaining a healthy fear of spirits. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what portion of the community truly believes that the girls are being possessed by the spirits of those who are dissatisfied with the school currently sitting atop their place of eternal rest. My landlady definitely believes this account whole-heartedly – when I told her about the time that I found a boa constrictor in my house in the Dominican Republic, she immediately wondered if someone in the community had put a curse on me. But others believe that the girls are simply seeking attention or a way to get out of school. Sure enough, the protests and meetings kept everyone out of the classroom. But perhaps the school director himself was staging some sort of protest by not performing the ceremony. I was told that he blamed the fainting on dehydration, which seems highly plausible. Stories like this one are not unheard of in other countries; in Cambodia in 2010, angry spirits were blamed for similar behavior among school girls. Other accounts of that particular phenomenon cited poor diets among the girls, who allegedly were limiting their food intake in order to be thin. A 2011 paper published in the Malawi Medical Journal focused on case studies of mass hysteria in schools across Africa, concluding that it is not an uncommon phenomenon, that “incidence is reportedly higher among girls than boys”, and that attention from authority figures and media can exacerbate the problem. Cases of mass hysteria in American schools are not entirely unheard of in recent years either, though spirits do not seem to be part of the explanation.
According to local sources, girls at the secondary school in Manhiça have been fainting on occasion since 2012, but recent numbers have reached an extreme of 70 per day. In years past, the consensus was that the girls were not getting enough (or any) food and water during the hot hours of the school day, and were therefore fainting. This same reasoning was mentioned to me by my landlady as well (the same one who suspected that I had been sent a boa constrictor by a practitioner of folk medicine). But since nothing has been done to improve the availability of food and water, the claims of dehydration have evolved into claims of possession, resulting in aggressive verbal and physical action toward the school director. When I asked a local health worker why only girls are being affected, he said that girls are more vulnerable to spirits. (He then continued to explain how women are more sensitive than men in general, and the conversation took a decidedly different turn.)
Although UNICEF has reported that 100% of children in Mozambique are enrolled in school, largely due to the fact that primary school fees were eliminated in 2005, girls are at a particularly high risk of dropping out or not attending in the first place. The dynamic in the home still largely favors male children; girls do most of the cooking and cleaning and are often expected to keep quiet.
But the girls in Manhiça have been heard loud and clear. The national evening news featured the story at its height, showing images of school girls laying on the sidewalk. Two nights later, the electricity went out before the evening news could come on, leading suspicious folks in Manhiça to conjecture that it was cut intentionally to curb the hysteria. If this truly was the case, it only added fuel to the fire. As excitement continued to build, local healers decided to take advantage of a grim situation by announcing that their fee to cleanse the school yard would be 65,000 meticais (USD $1,900).
During my last week in Manhiça, I heard that the school director had ‘run away’. Not been fired or resigned, simply left. Can’t say that I blame him; it may have been short-sighted to put off organizing the cleansing ceremony, but I wouldn’t want to stick around to be beaten over the head with a tray either. An interim director was appointed, and that’s the last thing I heard before I left town. If this phenomenon is indeed a conscious effort by disempowered young women to grab the attention of their fellow community members, they exceeded their goal by alerting the entire nation of their plight. If it is a classic case of mass hysteria, then perhaps it will just run its course as others have done. Either way, life in Manhiça will be far from normal until all the students are upright and in the classroom, instead of lying on their backs in the dusty streets.
Mahoxahomo 