Placemaking through the invisible: Nyau rituals, spiritual citizenship, and the politics of space among migrants in peri-urban Zimbabwe

This paper examines how Malawian descendants in Lydiate, a peri-urban settlement in Zimbabwe, use spirituality to construct belonging, authority, and claim space in the absence of formal recognition. Moving beyond economic and legal interpretations of migration and urbanization, the study demonstrates how Lydiatians practice spiritual placemaking by using ritual, fear, and moral performance to materialize land claims and sustain governance in conditions of exclusion. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis demonstrates how Nyau ritual societies, witchcraft discourses, and Pentecostal churches each function as infrastructures of power that produce territorial legitimacy through both visible and invisible means. Nyau’s ancestral performances generate moral order and masculine authority, while witchcraft operates as a defensive infrastructure that enforces social boundaries through fear and deterrence. Pentecostalism, in turn, reconfigures the spiritual landscape by reframing deliverance and purity as modes of spatial renewal. Together, these practices reveal the urban frontier as a plural spiritual geography rather than a secular urban margin. The paper argues that authority in such contexts emerges not from legal recognition but from ritual visibility and moral sovereignty, showing that modernity and enchantment are co-productive forces shaping Africa’s urban futures. The concept of spiritual placemaking thus offers a framework for rethinking migration, governance, and religious life in the postcolonial city, highlighting the invisible infrastructures through which marginalized populations make place and meaning.