the wicked major 31regaining control over his body, the medium, a young man called Isa,
inspected himself and the scene around him, and then he asked us in as-
tonishment what had happened and how he had gotten to where he found
himself now in the early hours of the morning.
In this chapter, I focus on spirit possession as a primary technology
for the mediation of cultural difference in Africa, which is based on the
conception that the human body can serve as a medium for spirits. Rec-
ollecting my own experiences from 1992 to 1994 with Babule spirits in
northern Nigeria (Krings 1997), I trace the origin of these ritual copies of
Europeanness to French colonia l West A f rica in 1925. The spirits that fi rst
manifested themselves during possession rituals in the Hausa-speaking
regions of southwestern Niger embodied the essence of colonial power
and European alterity. “We copy the world to comprehend it through our
bodies,” writes Stoller (1994: 643) in his discussion of Michael Taussig’s
take on spirit possession and Cuna healing figurines. With reference to
Adeline Masquelier (2001), who further developed this argument with
regard to the Babule, I argue that the early Babule mediums did not only
copy to comprehend but also to acquire some of the qualities of those on
whom their ritual copies were modeled. The power thus acquired, how-
ever, was not used against its source to mock or resist the French colonial
regime, as has been contended both by contemporary observers and some
more recent interpreters (Stoller 1984), but against forms of amoral power
and illegitimate authority—that is, witchcraft and local chiefs installed
by the colonizers. I argue that the Babule spirits, far from being ritual
caricatures of colonial Europeans, rather, have to be conceptualized as
embodied pastiches, as particular spiritualized copies of powerful others,
who transferred some of the qualities of the colonial Europeans to those
possessed by the Babule spirits.
W hat becomes obvious by following the traces of the Babule spirits to
the present, as I set out to do, is that they change their meaning according
to respective historic contexts and the social functions of the rituals of
possession they are associated with. W hat began as a revitalization move-
ment inspired by embodied pastiches that formed its spiritual backbone,
in Niger in 1925, became a religious institution around which Nigerien im-
migrants to southern Ghana organized their communities and social life in
the 1950s. In northern Nigeria, where the Babule had been integrated into