‘We are in war’ (Estamos em guerra), yells a pastor the first time that I enter a Brazilian Pentecostal church in 2005, in the centre of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Sounds of distorted guitars, crashing cymbals and crime thriller music play loudly. There are more than a thousand people present, mainly women, and they all start to stamp their feet on the floor crying, ‘go away, go away [demon], and never return’ (sai, sai, e volte nunca mais). Several women fall down on the floor. The pastor says they are possessed by evil spirits and asks everybody to direct their hands towards the women and scream ‘burn, burn, burn’ (queima, queima, queima) to drive the demons away forever.

While Pentecostals generally stress that the world is a place of spiritual warfare between God and Satan, for women frequenting Brazilian Pentecostal churches in Maputo, this spiritual war appears to have become appropriated in particular ways. Women form the majority of the visitors to Brazilian Pentecostal churches in the city (see below). Throughout the 26 months I lived in Maputo, between 2005 and 2011, many women told me that a certain spirit obstructed their intimate relationships, and I noted that Brazilian Pentecostal pastors were exorcising a specific spirit or demon called the ‘husband of the night’ (marido da noite), ‘spiritual husband’ (marido espiritual) or spirit of Pombagira – an Afro-Brazilian spirit that personifies sexual ambiguities. The symptoms that women who are connected to such a spirit experience include having sexual intercourse without the physical presence of anyone, a lack of success in marriage and the sudden disappearance of their partners and/or disputes with them. If they are married, the relationship is tense, the husband is uninterested in his wife but instead ‘views her as his sister’, or the women do not conceive. In these situations the Maputo women frequently turn to Brazilian Pentecostal churches where pastors fervently combat these and other ‘evil’ spirits.

Pentecostalism is relatively new to Mozambique, where before independence from Portugal in 1975 the religious landscape was largely defined by traditional African religions, Islam, Catholicism, classic Protestantism and African Independent Churches (AICs).