This paper attempts to see what emerges when we think about the crises facing the urban Shona-speaking poor in Zimbabwe from the perspective of belief in interventionist spirits. In particular, the paper focuses on ngozi spirits, that is, spirits of the deceased, with a grievance, in search of justice. Using stories about ngozi gathered in and around Harare, Zimbabwe during the (southern) winter of 2017, the paper illustrates how these stories work powerfully to encapsulate a set of local rationalities, moralities, and ethics regarding economics and social cohesion in an era of neoliberalism, AIDS and financial disaster. They also illustrate how and why people make choices to speak in the register of spirits, when negotiating social tensions arising from economic crisis.
Stories about ngozi do not necessarily tell us much about what people actually believe from moment to moment. Local knowledges are not homogenous, and beliefs are not even consistently held by individuals. Rather, statements about belief are positional and strategic. But ngozi stories address fears and hopes about community transformation that conversations about health, housing, education and sanitation cannot address. When fears are immediate, something must be done to turn the tide of death, madness and destitution. And people can exercise immediate agency by diagnosing what is going wrong locally, at the spiritual level.
Stories about unsettled ngozi make sense of the current crisis. In this spiritual framework, the entire economy is an ngozi-generating engine, because so many people are dying without having been paid for their work. Rising mortality and growing mental health problems are framed as evidence of increasing numbers of unsettled ngozi, seeking justice against those whose debts and crimes still need redress. As redress should be collective, stories about ngozi are also a way of ascribing blame and expressing resentment about other branches of the family who are more successful in the urban environment, or who have moved into the diaspora. People express anger that these relatives are not willing to take part in compensation and appeasement rituals to ward off the death, madess and infertility they are suffering. In a very powerful way, these stories assert that people in the diaspora or the wealthy suburbs cannot use their individual wealth to escape their involvement in the suffering of others.
The new urban Pentecostal churches claim to provide a refuge from the death and mental illness associated with ngozi. This is not framed as modern rationalism in conflict with traditional spirit beliefs: it is a struggle about whether spirits should be defeated or appeased. Like privatised social services, the churches remove individuals from collective responsibility for the ngozi, shielding them from the spiritual (but also mortal and mental) consequences of not paying; and thereby leaving the remaining relatives even more exposed to suffering. Consequently, one of the registers in which neoliberalism is being fought out in urban Zimbabwe is as a battle between those who use the spiritual power of the churches to resist ngozi and those who try collectively to appease ngozi instead.
The paper concludes that the ways in which people talk about ngozi today provide a complete, coherent, and local explanation for the tragedies arising from economic crisis, global inequality and climate change. Explanations for why so many ngozi are not being settled are profoundly spiritual explanations, but at the same time they concisely encompass anxieties over economic collapse, globalisation, family disintegration, wealth inequality, and the human costs of neoliberal structural adjustment.