38 african appropriations
an important tool of kinesthetic learning and understanding. She argues
that among the Arewa and Kurfeyawa “understanding is often embedded
in praxis” and thus more corporeal than textual:
For the young men and women who became possessed by Baboule spirits,
getting a grasp of the colonial situation involved imitating the bodily
movements and attitudes of the men who had conquered the central
Sudan through military force and who would subsequently administer
the newly founded colony of Niger. In the pre-literate, pre-Islamic society
where educating oneself and learning were mostly based on direct obser-
vation and imitation... , coming to an understanding of the colonials’
power and learning to be strong like them was thus a matter of using one’s
body the way the French did. (185–186)Copying the French with their own bodies and therefore internalizing,
as Masquelier (2001) describes it, “what they took to be embodied forms
of foreign selfhood and authority” meant not only “understanding and
mastery over the alien universe of French colonial rules” (163) but actually
acquiring certain qualities of the French—their force perhaps, as Fugle-
stad (1975) would have it, or whatever had turned the foreigners into such
powerful human beings. W hat we observe here is a particular instance of
copy and contact, in which the possessed imitated the powerful others to
acquire some of their qualities.
Let me further complicate this by addressing the question of agency I
have overlooked so far. According to the local conception, mediums do
not produce spirits at will, and spirits are thought to be entities endowed
with agency of their own. They are believed to have existed since time
immemorial, and only at the time of their revelation, when they choose to
reveal themselves to humans, are they known. Bori mediums are concep-
tualized as “horses” (doki, masculine; godiya, feminine) of the spirits. The
spirits “mount” (hau) their mediums during rituals of possession. “Bab-
ule ya hau Shibo” would be one way of expressing that “a Babule spirit
mounted Shibo,” marking the spirit an agent and its medium a passive
instrument, or “patient.” How, then, can we grasp the relationship among
the model, its copy, and the one who copies (the French and the Babule
spirits and their human mediums) without ignoring this emic conception
and the distribution of agency it implies? With the help of Fritz Kramer
(1993: 58–59), we may draw on Godfrey Lienhardt’s interpretation of the