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Take, for example, the work of Jean Comaroff (1985) on Zionist healing cults in South Africa. Comaroff has argued that the physical afflictions suffered by individual Tshidi served, when she conducted her fieldwork among them, as metaphors for the larger “ills” of apartheid society. “The metaphors of social contradiction deployed by these cults,” she has written, “are often rooted in the notion of the body at war with itself, or with its immediate social and material context; and desired transformations focus upon ‘healing’ as a mode of repairing the tormented body and, through it, the oppressive social order itself” (9). More recently, Luise White has advanced a similar argument in her historical work on the widespread belief in colonial Africa in vampire-firemen ( wazimamoto ) who sucked the blood of captured victims: “I think there are many obvious reasons why Africans might have thought that colonial powers took precious substances from African bodies . . . I think bloodsucking by public employees is a fairly obvious metaphor for state-sponsored extractions” (2000: 18, emphasis added). 9 Even more apropos to Muedan sorcery lions, Michael Jackson has asserted that “suwa’ye [“witchcraft” in the language of Karanko in Sierra Leone, among whom he worked] is a common metaphor for extraordinary powers” (1989: 91). “Beliefs,” Jackson has concluded, “are more like metaphors than many dare imagine” (66). 10
    In treating beliefs as metaphors, it would seem that Comaroff, White, Jackson, and many others have escaped the dilemmaposed by assessing their scientific validity. They have suggested that these beliefs constitute alternative ways of talking about historical events and social realities. As White has phrased it, they “look for what such beliefs articulate in a given time and space” 2000: 44).These expressions, they have told us, might best be understood as richly creative languages (to use Beattie’s terminology) with which to talk about reality—languages that inflect and refract others, including the language of science, but that need not be seen as contradicting science. 11
     
    In this vein, I suggested to my audience in the ARPAC seminar room that lions served Muedans as symbols with which to think about and speak about the complexities and contradictions of power. Sorcery lions, I suggested, served Muedans as metaphors for social predation, whereas the lions that resided in the bodies of vahumu served as metaphors for regal power. I neither dismissed nor adopted Muedans’ way of talking about these lions; I pronounced them neither true nor false. 12 Even so, Lazaro Mmala protested. In so many words, he told me, “Andiliki, metaphors don’t kill the neighbors, lion-people do!” 13

 
    “ T HE P ROBLEM M AY L IE T HERE”
    “I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
    “Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.
    “No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.”
    « LEWIS CARROLL, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ([1865] 1998: 91) »
    On 15 June 1994, Marcos and I traveled from the town of Mueda, where we were then staying with one of Marcos’s likola sisters, 1 to the village of Nanenda on the eastern edge of the plateau. Our objective for the day was to identify and interview elders who had witnessed the Portuguese assault on the plateau (ca. 1917) that had culminated in the colonial “pacification” of the Makonde people. We were accompanied on our excursion by Marcos’s brother-in-law, Joseph Mery, who took advantage of the opportunity our trip afforded him to purchase a pig at “village price” and to transport it back to the town of Mueda, where he would butcher it and sell roasted bits of pork to those gathered there the following day to mark the