Introduction

Late one morning in the middle of July 2012, I was sitting with Joao in the cidade market. I had just arrived, and we were both sitting on plastic garden chairs next to Eduardo, who was slumped in his seat, his head hanging back, uncomfortably asleep. As we were catching up on each other's news, a woman trader in the row next to us started laughing, and beckoned Joao over to tell him something. She was pointing out a woman going from stall to stall in the women's sections, offering them small bundles of sticks. Joao smiled and turned to me, asking whether we had paus (sticks or twigs) in England too. I asked him what he meant, and he explained that the woman was selling twigs from a particular plant, to be crushed up by women and put in their husbands’ food, to make them more obedient to their wives. The woman was causing a minor scandal in the usually tranquil market, with more and more heads turning towards her with shocked laughter. Perhaps noticing that she was becoming the centre of attention, the woman moved swiftly from stall to stall to make her offer, before leaving through the market's rear exit.

Raising this incident with other men, in that market and others, opened a rich seam of discussion around the lamentable backwardness and immorality of this type of feitiço. It was mostly greeted with the same mixture of disapproval and amusement that greeted the woman seller in the city market, and feitiço was pronounced by all of the men I worked with to be ‘backward’ (atrasado), and to belong properly in a primitive past. It was called ‘shameful’, and ‘the mark of the African’, with ‘African’ used here in a pejorative sense to denote a supposedly primitive and savage past, tied up with one's fundamental ‘African-ness’, and thus perhaps ineradicable. One man described it as ‘the accumulated rubbish of history’ – belonging in the past, but built up over time, piling up in the present and undermining attempts to ‘develop’, and to leave an unwanted past where it belonged.