46 african appropriations
i nto spi r its, t he colon i zers no longer took pu n it ive ac t ion aga i nst t he pea s-
ants but against the peasant’s “inheritable” spirits. The struggle was thus
continued in the spiritual realm. There, however, the spiritualized Eu-
ropeans fought to the advantage of their human African followers, who
sometimes were plagued by the spirits they inherited. A statement by one
of Olivier de Sardan’s Zerma interlocutors, made at about the same time
as Faulkingham’s observations, suggests that this was not an isolated oc-
currence. He said: “The Hauka are virtually French;... [They] are against
anything that could do harm to black people” (Boubakar Boureyma in
Olivier de Sardan 1982: 196; my translation).
FAST-FORWARD: NIGERIA 1990SAs a generic term Mushe was still in use alongside Babule as a designa-
tion for the spirits I encountered in Kano during the 1990s. They appeared
to be fully integrated into the pantheon of bori spirits, and as Besmer’s
(1983) data, collected between 1973 and 1974, suggests, this must have been
the case for quite some time. Within the complex mythology of Kano bori,
the Babule had developed multiple ties of kinship and joking relation-
ships with other categories of spirits. W hat is more, the Babule had also
accommodated some spirits of the older categories of spirits among their
ra n k s, just a s A f r ica ns had been consc r ipted i nto Eu ropea n a r m ies du r i ng
colonial times (Krings 1997). Although they were also called Tu ra w a (Eu-
ropeans), it became apparent during my conversations with their adepts
that the main signifier of these spirits was no longer primarily their Eu-
ropeanness but rather their “soldierliness.” W hile military comportment
has been a feature of Babule performances from the early days of their
emergence, when soldiers were the only Europeans the Hausa knew, the
relative eclipse of references to Europeanness in the bori of Kano points
to a shift of the template on which the spirits were modeled. During the
1990s, this template was clearly the Nigerian military, and I assume this
shift must have set in at least two decades earlier.
A fter the British colonizers left Nigeria in 1960, the country was gov-
erned by a succession of military regimes for most of the ensuing forty
years. To a certain extent, it is safe to say that the Nigerian military in-