the wicked major 41applies equally to the relationship between staged performances, such as
drama or spirit possession, and real-life models. Dyer’s definition implies
that the beholder of a pastiche “gets” the references to the absent model
while looking at the pastiche. I suggest that the Babule spirits worked
exactly this way. Speaking “French,” holding military ranks, exercising,
and handling weapons (or at least imitations of the latter) were actions
that made their relationship to the French blatantly obvious. The fact that
everybody “got” the reference accounts for their massive followership and
impact among young people. Pastiche has also been defined as “a way
of learning one’s art” (Dyer 2007: 8), and as such, this form of imitating
goes back to the ancient philosophers, who believed that through imita-
tion “certain emanations are conveyed from the genius of the men of old
into the souls of those who emulate them” (Longinus in Dyer 2007: 36).
Possession by Babule spirits is based on the same logic, on empowering
through emulation. As embodied pastiches, or corporeal emulations of
the French, the Babule spirits were sought to convey “certain emanations”
from those they were modeled after “into the souls” of those who became
possessed by them.
But what about the Babule spirits’ handling of fire and the fact that their
mediums, even while embodying the spirits, remained quite obviously
and visibly African in appearance? According to one of its earliest defini-
tions, a pastiche is “neither original nor copy” but constitutes something
in between, being neither something entirely new nor a simple imitation
of something that already exists (Dyer 2007: 22). The Nigerien peasants
possessed by the Babule spirits displayed “copies” of Europeans through
the medium of their own bodies. The copies were thus shaped by the
very “media” that produced them, and like the content of any medium,
the European spirits inevitably carried features of their African “media.”
However, the Babule were not only shaped by the very corporality of their
human horses but likewise by the ritual framework of bori “spirit posses-
sion,” in which the mediums performed. The Babule spirits’ characteristic
“wa sh i ng w it h fi re” (wankin wuta) has a number of referents: by translating
the awesome power of the French and the spirits associated with them
into a symbolic language, it bespeaks the fact that the Babule are more
than “simple” imitations of something that already exists; it signifies the
power the spirits bestow on their mediums, who become invulnerable