introduction 21said to be of European descent. I trace the origins of these ritual copies of
Eu ropea n ness to French colon ia l West A f r ica, i n about 1925. R econst r uc t-
ing the context of their early manifestations in rituals of spirit possession,
a social technology of mediation well established in this region of Africa
at the time, allows me to explore the relationship between original and
copy specific to this corporeal form of mediation, and to speculate about
the social functions allotted to the copies. The possessed embodied the
essence of European difference and colonial power, represented through
their spirits’ military comportment, and sometimes also took the form
of specific colonial personnel—such as Horace Crocchichia, a French
commandant de cercle (district commander), immortalized as Komanda
Mugu, the Wicked Major. The ritual copies, I argue, were used to con-
nect with the invisible power hidden behind European force. The power
acquired in this way, however, was not used against its source to mock or
resist the French colonial regime as has been contended by several con-
temporary observers. Instead, it was used against local forms of amoral
power and illegitimate authority—that is, to resist witchcraft and colonial
African chiefs. In the early days, the spirits played an important role both
as witch-hunting agencies and as spiritual guides of a revitalization move-
ment whose purpose it was to rebuild local society by imitating certain
aspects of colonial modernity. Over time and with changing social con-
texts, the functions of these spirits changed. W hen I encountered them in
Kano, Nigeria, in the 1990s, they were integrated into the pantheon of the
bori cult of spirit possession, where they appeared to be just one of several
categories of foreign spirits. Unlike the others, however, they “embodied
colonial memories” (Stoller 1995) and were sought after when it came to
curing afflictions or solving problems somehow associated with moder-
nity by their local clients: misuse of hemp, compulsivity in gambling, and
failure in school.
Chapter 2 addresses the remediation of Western modernity through
African Film, a magazine of photo novels that enjoyed almost Pan-African
circulation during the second half of the 1960s. Produced by South Africa–
based Drum Publications Ltd., each issue of this twice-monthly magazine
was read and looked at by about half a million people in English-speaking
Africa, between South Africa and Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria. Devoted
to the adventures of Lance Spearman, an African crime fighter inspired in