the wicked major 37in the fields and organized their communities according to the model
of the colonizers, borrowing military ranks and military comportment
from them.^2 The refusal to be counted and to supply labor were common
forms of passive resistance among Niger’s peasantry (Olivier de Sardan
1993); however, imitating the colonial military and using its system of
ranks as a model for a new social order was anything but common. I turn
to this aspect now and moreover to the fact that the spirits—who were
the spiritual resources of the “movement” and as such are comparable to
the transcendental forces that spoke through the prophets of revitaliza-
tion movements elsewhere—took on French military ranks, sometimes
even the personal names of colonial officers, and were generally believed
to be Europeans.
Historian Finn Fuglestad (1975) argues that in the eyes of the Niger-
ien peasantry, the French colonizers were associated with an unusually
powerful force that had enabled them to conquer the vast territory of the
central Sudan, and that this force could only be explained as emanating
from spiritual sources. Despite Olivier de Sardan’s (1993: 177) nagging
critique, who calls this explanation speculative and “intellectualistic,”
and thus implicitly likens it to the “if-I-were-a-horse” speculations of
nineteenth-century evolutionists (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 24, 43), it may
not be too far-fetched, especially if we take into account that the idea
that warriors were protected by spirits who accompanied them in battle
was a common belief among the Kurfeyawa and Arewa of precolonial
times (Masquelier 1993). According to Fuglestad (1975: 213), the posses-
sion da nces const it uted “a mea ns to ‘capt u re’ t hat new force” a nd made t he
adepts, if not invulnerable, “at least the equals of the French.”
I find intriguing the idea that the Babule followers hoped to acquire
some of the colonizers’ qualities, and further elaboration on the topic is
warranted. First, let us consider why the spirits resembled the French. Fol-
lowing Fuglestad’s (1975) line of thinking, it would seem logical that the
spirits, who lent the French their force, would resemble them in some way.
Adeline Masquelier (2001) has proposed a somewhat more sophisticated
answer. Unlike Fuglestad and his scholarly adversary Jean-Pierre Olivier
de Sardan, who is equally inattentive to that matter, Masquelier (2001),
in her take on the Babule, places special emphasis on the human body as