the wicked major 33Nothing is known about the immediate context in which this happened.
It is also unclear why Shibo, daughter of the chef de village of Shikal in the
neighboring canton of Kurfey, went to that particular Arewa village. The
spirit, however, must have struck a chord with the villagers who flocked
to the séances Shibo began to organize. Soon, more villagers, especially
young people, became possessed, and the number of spirits grew. Em-
bodying spirits such as the Governor, Commandant de Cercle, and Capi-
taine, the possessed “became invulnerable, swallowing cinders, flogging
each other with torches and so on” (Fuglestad 1983: 129). W hen Shibo and
her followers began to agitate against the chef de canton, Tassao Gao, the
French stepped in with a number of unsuccessful disciplinary measures.
The spirits and their cult then spilled over into neighboring regions, and
by May 1926, had already spread among the Hausa-speaking Mawri of
the subdivision of Dogondoutchi. Meanwhile, Shibo, who had returned
together with a number of followers and musicians to Shikal, her home
village in Kurfey, continued to initiate new adepts into the cult of the
strange spirits. By February 1927, the cult had spread across the whole of
Kurfey. Like before in Arewa, they also began to agitate against the chef
de canton of Kurfey, Gado Namailaya. A French official described the
situation as follows: “A woman of Shikal, Shibo, and her father, Ganji, have
invented a sect that copies our administration. Young boys and girls come
together, found villages, name governors, commanders, doctors, exercise
with wooden rifles, arrest the native guards.... Shibo enters into trance,
preaches insubordination, urges people to stop paying taxes and to refuse
to work ” (Scheurer, in Olivier de Sardan 1984: 282; my translation). To
reassert their presence among the peasants, the French decided to carry
out a population census of the Kurfey canton. Led by a young and inexpe-
rienced official keen to break the passive resistance of the population, this
census turned into a punitive expedition. However, the administration at
Niamey disapproved of this development and decided to compensate the
victims, among them also followers of the Babule spirits (Echard 1992;
Fuglestad 1975). The Babule adepts and their followers claimed this suc-
cess as their own and as proof of the power of their spirits. According to
Fuglestad (1983), two further events must have contributed to a growing
conviction among the peasants that the tables were beginning to turn: the
death of the chef de canton, Gado Namailaya, who was the most proximate