the wicked major 29than 300 people. Soon some of the mediums began to yawn. With trem-
bling bodies and bulging eyes, groaning and frothing from their mouths,
they produced the physical signs of possession trance. The scene grew
wilder by the minute. As if violently thrown across the dance floor by
invisible hands, some mediums traversed the open space half-crawling,
half-jumping—raising clouds of dust. Finally, when the spirits had fully
mounted their horses, the scene calmed down again. Each medium now
moved and spoke according to the personality of the particular spirit he
or she embodied.
Two of the mediums, whose spirits had treated their bodies with par-
ticular harshness, stood erect—their legs apart, hands on their hips—and
announced who they were by shouting their kirari, a form of self-praise, in
a wild mixture of French, English, and corrupted Hausa:
W hat’s up, Monsieur spirits!? Come forward, Monsieur spirits! Only we of
the governor, the lads of the governor! We conquer the town; we pass the
town; we go into hiding as if we weren’t there! One wants us to come; one
wants us to leave! We come to town; the town falls empty; we leave the
town, and the town falls empty! We are pagans who go to sleep at half past
ten and rise at ten! We are pagans who turn the next day into “tomorrow”!
We are killing. People say it’s A llah—A llah is killing. People say it’s us!
Ocho!W hen they had finished, the two mediums were led outside the circle
and got dressed. W hen they came back, one of them was wearing a red
uniform, the other a green one with red applications; both men also wore
sashes across their chests, as well as berets and heav y boots. W hile one of
them used his whip and Thunderer whistle to push back the audience and
rearrange the dance floor, the other greeted the dignitaries among the au-
dience with military salutes and handshakes. As I learned from someone
standing next to me, the one in red was Kafaran, the “Corporal,” and the
one in green Komanda Mugu, the “Wicked Major.” Both belonged to the
family of Babule spirits who are said to be of European descent.
The two Europeans, who temporarily occupied the bodies of their Af-
rican mediums, were almost naturally drawn to the only other European
present, the one “who occupied the body of an anthropologist”—to bor-
row a phrase from Paul Stoller (1994: 646). They came over to me. A fter we