36 african appropriations
refusal to lend one’s body to forced labor, and the audacity to “openly de-
clare that the rifles [of the French] are only good enough to shoot water,
that there are no chiefs in the Kurfey any longer, and finally that the mo-
ment has come for Gandji and Shibo to take over their places” (Annual
Political Report for Niamey County, 1927, in Olivier de Sardan 1984: 283;
my translation)? W hile such actions were just one aspect of the Babule
adept’s activities, they were the biggest worry for the French, and for that
reason colonial observers may have exaggerated their frequency and ef-
fect. Equally important were activities that might be viewed as religious,
such as the Babule follower’s witch-hunting, which according to Nicole
Echard (1992), took place every night.
The Babule followers were in fact far more concerned with the effects
of colonial rule on their immediate social environment and personal lives
than with the European colonizers as such. The colonizers were at a dis-
tance. The effects of their power, however, were mediated by local African
authorities—the chefs de canton and the gardes de cercle (police), who
shared a certain amount of power with the French and used it not just to
enforce French orders but also for personal gain (Echard 1992). And these
locally accessible and highly visible agents of colonial hegemony were the
main targets of Babule actions. For example, the Babule were said to have
arrested the guards de cercle or kept them out of their villages (Fugle-
stad 1975). Likewise, witches, whose activities were felt to have increased
immensely since the advent of colonial rule, were experienced as agen-
cies of dangerous and amoral power that needed to be contained for the
common good. In my view, this suggests that despite its political effects,
the so-called Babule movement is not to be regarded as a political revolt
but rather a “doctrine of resistance and hope” (Worsley 1957: 26), which
included utopian attempts at building a new society based on a radically
different social order in the face of social crisis. Intrinsically considered,
it has much in common with revitalization movements, defined by An-
thony Wallace (1956: 265) as “deliberate, organized, conscious effort[s]
by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture,” which
are often centered on a sacred message proclaimed by a prophet. Cargo
cults are particularly apt examples of such movements. Like the Babule
adepts, the followers of several Melanesian prophets stopped working