the wicked major 35Ivory Coast, where Shibo was to return to Kurfey only after nine years
(Echard 1992; Fuglestad 1975). Though the so-called Babule movement
has since lost its political implications, the veneration of the foreign spirits
never ceased to exist. Migrant workers from Niger took them to the colo-
nial Gold Coast where the cult was further elaborated and its pantheon
expanded. Back in Niger, the spirits were integrated into the pantheon of
two older cults of spirit possession—the holey of the Songhay-Zerma and
the bori of the Hausa (Echard 1992; Krings 1997; Rouch 1960).^1
IMAGES OF PAS SIONE S AND EMBODIED PASTICHESFaced with distorted images of themselves and a ritual display of mili-
tary routines that looked like parodies, French colonial officers felt ridi-
culed by colonial subjects who “aped” their colonial masters (Fuglestad
1975: 205). The Annual Political Report for Niamey County of 1925 thus
talks about “young people who under the influence of bori spirits... have
formed groupings that parody our military institutions,” and adds that
“the imposition of some punishments... suffice[d] to restore the calm”
(in Olivier de Sardan 1993: 172; my translation). Perhaps the French of-
ficers experienced the unsettling moment referred to by Michael Taussig
(1993), when the boundaries between self and other collapse and “the self
enters into the alter against which the self is defined and sustained” (273).
On top of this psychologically disquieting experience, French officials
soon began to sense a political motive behind the activities of Shibo and
her followers. Thus, the “movement” was banned in 1927, demonstrating
that the colonial administration took the potential threat to colonial order
quite seriously. This interpretation, later adopted by Paul Stoller (1984) on
the basis of his early encounters with the Babule/Hauka as a young Peace
Corps volunteer in Niger during the late 1960s, is both right and wrong.
I argue that Babule adepts likened themselves to the colonizers not to
ridicule them but to become like them. A lthough Jean-Pierre Olivier de
Sardan (1993) has cautioned us about taking the reports of colonial of-
ficials too literally and also warns against political “over-interpretation”
of the Babule, I find it difficult not to call the Babule follower’s actions
political (173). W hat else, if not political, is the refusal to pay taxes, the