Working Hard - Ali

Ali “Zambia” Momadi, 54 – Curandeiro/ Bike Repairman/Guard

Entering what is left of a colonial-era store in Nauela’s marketplace and noting the scratched and faded light-green paint that gives way to patches of exposed brick behind, you catch a glimpse of the past. Indeed, when closing your eyes, you can easily imagine what it must have been like just a short 40 years ago: clean and fully-stocked stores with open kitchens daily serving up hot plates, a well-maintained road with private cars frequenting the nearby Catholic mission or the tea barons in Gurue, and sanitary public bathrooms with running water conveniently located in the business-owners’ lush courtyards to serve passing travelers. To sweeten the deal, commodities were plentiful in the fertile agricultural area during most of the year and luxury items regularly flowed in from Nampula via Nacala, Ilha de Moçambique, and Angoche. Life must have been good…

All these comforts and more would have been available in Nauela 40 years ago to foreigners like you and me… just not to the native residents themselves. And thus, rightfully so, it didn’t last.

Flash back to the present and you start to notice new marks amongst the old: boarded up rooms and a new tin roof for an improvised food storage area, amassed soot where indoor fires are regularly made, and torn clothes strung out across the patio to dry - an impoverished existence in the midst of historical luxury.

This is the reality of Ali, the hired guard of a ruined store in Nauela, who moonlights as a bike repairman (the original reason I’ve come to see him) and, as I’m soon about to find out, a curandeiro, or traditional healer.

With a pointed stick and spinning animal horn in hand, Ali asks me to sit down and chat before starting to work on my bike. Smiling and laughing the whole time, with his browed forehead pushing up on the Kufi cap sitting on top of his head he tells me his story:


Some of the old stores in Nauela's marketplace

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Born in the small port town of Angoche, Nampula in 1957 to the son of a prominent Mosque leader, Ali was 1 of 15 (!) children (5 brothers and 10 sisters). Due to the small nature of the town, the young Ali played and grew close with all the area kids his age, including the child of the local Portuguese administrator at the time. When the administrator decided to move to Zambia in 1961, he asked Ali’s father if he could take the 4-year-old Ali with them to keep his child company, to which Ali’s father conditionally agreed. Thus it was decided for him: almost all of Ali’s memorable childhood would be spent in a foreign land with a family that was not his own.

The years passed by quickly though, with Ali playing with and taking care of the Portuguese family’s children. He made the most of this time, learning various skilled tasks around the farm that would later prove quite useful. In 1973, at the age of 16, Ali’s father finally called for him to return home and the Portuguese man obliged, personally escorting him all the way back to Angoche. Only 4 months after having been reunited with his family though, Ali had had enough and took off for Nampula City.

One day soon after, Ali found himself wandering the streets of Nampula when a local shop owner sized him up and offered him a job driving a tractor on his farm in Mohiua, Nauela. Shrugging his shoulders and figuring “Why not?” he accepted the offer. In short, work and life at the time in Mohiua was calm. Even during the War for Independence that soon followed, things there stayed relatively peaceful and unchanged. As a matter of fact, the local population seemed completely oblivious to what revolutionary actions were underway in other parts of the country. Even after the War for Independence was over and the Portuguese owner had fled the country, Ali continued to work as a tractor driver for 10 more years as the owner managed the business from abroad.

Thinking back on these years as a tractor driver, vivid details about the work or the day’s activities don’t come to mind easily. In Ali’s memory, it all just seems to blur together. Something that does stand out, however, was a particular visit by the Portuguese business owner to check on the farm’s operations. Aware they were being watched, everyone was out to do their best that day. Barking out orders, the owner refused to communicate directly with the field workers like Ali. Instead, he issued commands through the appointed field captain. This went on for a while, the owner shouting and staring down the laborers while the workers stole interested glances back at him. As Ali took a moment to admire the odd foreigner, he was astonished by the fact that the Portuguese man had so much arm hair (most Mozambicans have almost none) that he couldn’t read his watch without brushing it aside… “Sort of like yours!” Ali ends as he reaches out and admires my bushy forearms… Great :-/

During these years in Mohiua, Ali met and later married a young woman named Maria who would, over the years, bear him 6 children. After saving up some money, Ali proudly brought her to Angoche in 1983 to meet his relatives and see if she’d be interested in moving there. She loved it! Coming back to Mohiua to inform her family that they intended to move to Angoche, the civil war broke out, however, and any plans they had of moving would have to wait.

That day never came.

The civil war was particularly unkind to Ali and his family. As it was for everyone else in the area, food, water, clothes, and other necessities were hard to come by. Then, one fateful day, Maria went out to gather firewood as she always did, but after several hours of waiting for her return Ali discovered that she had been attacked and killed by roaming RENAMO soldiers.

Desperately needing someone to help take care of his 6 children, Ali quickly remarried. But even the best wife he could find at the time was a poor substitute - a known local drunkard. His second marriage didn’t last long though, not even through the civil war, because after having drunk excessively one night she fell ill and passed away within a few days.

As fate would have it, Ali’s family would have to make it through these tough times with only one parent.

During these intense years near the end of the war, Ali and his children were too scared to plant crops and, instead, relied entirely on his income from being a curandeiro to the area population. Although his practice didn’t pick up until much later in life, he reportedly received his “powers” at a very young age from his grandfather who had also been a curandeiro. According to Ali, after his grandfather’s death when Ali was 2-3 years old, he became very ill. During this time, Ali experienced dreams where his grandfather would appear and explain the different medicinal properties of various roots. Ali defends his late start as a curandeiro stating that it would have been impossible to start any earlier since he had spent most of his childhood living with that Portuguese family in their house that was painted all white and thus warded off the evil spirits that give him power.

“The devil isn’t accustomed to entering a house painted white” Ali calmly explained.

Expanding this idea about keeping unwanted things out of one’s house, Ali actually tried to protect his family during the war by making a circle around his house with a special kind of root so no one would bother them. And apparently something worked because RENAMO soldiers reportedly passed on all sides of his house but never once actually approached them.

Adjusting to life after the war was rough. All of Ali’s skills surrounding the use of machinery meant next to nothing with no working farm equipment to be found in the area. Instead, Ali resorted to becoming a subsistence farmer and tried his best to provide for his family while still working on the side as a curandeiro. He eventually remarried again and started regularly attending the Friday worship at a reconstructed mosque in Malema, Nampula province (a 2 hour bike ride each way).

To facilitate his Friday worship time, Ali left his wife and children (now 8 in total) behind farming in Mohiua and moved to Nauela in 2003 when its mosque was completed. Being so close to the new mosque, he’s actually able to go there every day to pray and thus has built up quite a relationship with fellow area Muslims. Three years ago, upon the strong recommendation of Nunes, the mosque leader and only current store owner in Nauela, Ali secured a job as a live-in guard for a recently bought colonial-era store. The new owner currently lives in Moloque, but bought the property and just hasn’t had the time or money to fully rehabilitate it yet. Until the time of rehabilitation comes, Ali’s relatively task-free job is secure and allows him to continue being a bike repairman and curandeiro.



Boldly, I ask Ali what people at the mosque think about him being a practicing curandeiro, especially since he keeps referring to it as being the power of “diablo”, the devil. He insists though that everyone at the mosque knows and, although they’ve never come to be seen by him, they’ve never rebuked him for it.

Focusing in on the actual work, Ali informs me that each curandeiro has his/her own specialty – i.e. predicting the future, casting spells, telling you about the unknown, producing natural medicines, etc. Ali allegedly knows how to treat various illnesses with medicinal plants and can use a spinning animal horn filled with money and special roots to respond to questions you need answers to.

Ali’s going rate depends on what exactly you want him to do. The standard is 10 mets for a yes/no question (i.e. – Is my soon-to-be-born child a male?). Supposedly the horn will rotate clockwise if the statement is false and counterclockwise if the statement is true. If you want to know the answers to open-ended questions, however, the price is double (i.e.- Who robbed my house?). In this case, the spinning horn supposedly talks to Ali and he communicates its message to the client (this practice seems pretty dangerous to me!). On the other hand, the medications he dolls out can range from 20 to 50 mets ($1-2 USD) depending on the severity of the illness. A 20 met medicine can supposedly cure things like fevers and headaches while a 50 met medicine can allegedly cure things like a lack of appetite, aching body, hernia, etc.

Although a lot of curandeiros or traditional healers are promoting unstudied or counterintuitive methods of healing, people continue to seek out their treatment today. Historically, there hasn’t been much access to Western medicine in the area and so generations of people have gone to these self-proclaimed healers as their only hope for improvement. Even today at small hospitals and health posts in rural Mozambique, health technicians frequently run out of medicine and can only limitedly help patients (just as it’s tough for a patient in the States to accept that a doctor can’t do much to remedy his/her common cold, it’s tough, perhaps even more so, here since there’s very little understanding of the Germ Theory). This further encourages people to continue to seek out traditional healers who are hard-pressed to identify any illnesses their elixirs supposedly can’t cure.