34 african appropriations
symbol of colonial rule and who died in March 1927, and the assault on the
military post of Tessaoua in June of the same year, which went unatoned.
W hen the cult started spreading among the Songhay-Zerma and Tuareg
of the neighboring cantons later that year, the colonial administration
arrested Shibo and several hundred of her followers.
On the orders of the French commandant de cercle, Horace Croc-
cichia, Shibo, and about sixty of her followers were brought to Niamey
and imprisoned. According to Jean Rouch (1960), who in the 1940s con-
ducted research into the Hauka (as the Babule spirits were called by their
Song hay-spea k i ng adept s), Crocc ich ia locked up t he spi r it med iu ms w it h-
out food for three days and three nights. W hen he called them out of their
cells, they danced and became possessed by their spirits, and Croccichia
slapped them one after another until each admitted that there was no such
thing as Hauka spirits. Rouch reports on a second version of this incident
as well:
“Dance, I want to speak with Hauka!” said Croccichia. So they performed
a ceremony in front of him. They became possessed, and he asked the gods
to weep and to take their tears and put them on the Hauka. The possession
crisis stopped immediately, of course, and the commissioner said, “You
see, there are no more Hauka, I am stronger than the Hauka.” Then he put
them all in jail. W hen they were in jail, one man became possessed and
said, “I am a new Hauka, I’m Corsasi (The Wicked Major)”... , and the
man said, “I’m stronger than all the other Hauka, we have to break out of
jail.” (Rouch 1978: 1008)Some of Rouch’s interlocutors believed that this jailbreak was actually
successful and that the spirit mediums were able to flee to the Gold Coast.
Adeline Masquelier (2001) recorded a similar version from Nigerien Ba-
bule adepts in the 1990s, who turned the historical defeat into a success.
In this version, Croccichia “never had a chance to display his power by
beating the troublemakers,” for the mediums became possessed soon af-
ter their imprisonment and “in a matter of minutes” knocked down the
prison walls with their bare fists and escaped “before anyone realized
what wa s happen i ng” (175). The h istor ica l fac ts, however, read much more
prosaically. The majority of the Babule mediums were discharged after
two months and allowed to return to their villages. But Shibo and some
other prominent figures of the “sect” were deported to Upper Volta and