52 african appropriations
from 1985 to 1993, was in league with the spirit Mai ya’ki: “Dogonyaro, for
example: since about 1970, when he would go to war, he worked with Mai
ya’ki. W hen he put on his uniform, Mai ya’ki would mount his head and
he would go to war. Others would shoot at him but always miss. Only he
would shoot and hit the others. But it would not be him who would go to
war but Mai ya’ki who would have taken possession of him and fight. Like
this he was able to become famous and is now a powerful man in Nigeria.
Mai ya’ki was the one who supported him” (Mohammadu Kwaki, Kano,
author’s field notes, February 11, 1993). The belief that the postcolonial
soldiers actually “work ” with spirits has been equally present in neighbor-
ing Niger. Paul Stoller (1995) has argued that Lt. Seyni Kountché, leader of
Niger’s military regime from 1974 to 1987, was a Hauka medium, as were
some of his brothers-in-arms, and that in governing the country he had
tapped into the Hauka aesthetic by “reappropriat[ing] the Hauka appro-
priation of the aesthetics of the French Colonial Army” (190). W hether
this is true (Stoller does not reveal any where the basis for his assumption
that Kountché was a Hauka medium), the popular belief that the lieuten-
ant was such a medium suggests that, after all, there might be more to Finn
Fuglestad’s (1975) “theorie de la force” (213) regarding the early Babule/
Hauka mediums than his critic Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1993) might
want to admit.
PAS SIONE S OF THE PAST IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYA lterity may compel mimesis. Following Fritz Kramer (1993), who at-
tributes the power to overwhelm to alterity—likening one’s own body
to that of an alien other might well be understood as a spontaneous
physical reaction in the face of alterity. This must not necessarily imply
possession-trance but rather may be conceived as occurring in many dif-
ferent contexts, from spontaneous everyday playful imitation to more
stylized performances, such as dance and theater. However, mimesis has
not been limited to situations of initial contact. Possession by spirits of
Europeanness is something which occurred in many societies of colonial
Africa and usually became manifest only decades after initial contact,
mostly during the consolidation phases of European rule. As is suggested