the wicked major 53by the historical circumstances of the Babule’s apparition, alterity must
be experienced as the source of passiones in order to trigger mimetical
reactions. Occurring within the framework of spirit possession, the ap-
parition of the early Babule has to be considered nonintentional, based on
a behavior that must be qualified as involuntary and nonpurposive, and
that is also experienced as such by those who feel the compulsion to liken
themselves to an other (locally conceptualized as a “spirit”). The appari-
tions, however, were then shaped in complex feedback processes among
the spirits, while embodied by their mediums, and their human, nonpos-
sessed interpreters. Babule rituals thus became arenas of bodily appro-
priation and “kinesthetic learning” (Masquelier 2001: 186) and were used
to comprehend and literally grasp the power of the European other. As
embodied pastiches of colonial Europeans, the spirits were molded after
the very sources of the possessed’s passiones and at the same time became
their remedy, a means of resisting colonial rule and its effects on daily life.
The very paradox that “contestation is intermixed with appropriation, and
condemnation with identification” may be explained by the fact that the
Babule adepts, just like the followers of many other revitalization move-
ments, “appropriated icons of power they associated with military force
and reforged them to serve their own interests and to articulate their local
world with broader horizons” (Masquelier 2001: 173). Once the spirits had
assumed shape and were given meaning, they could be used not only for
social purposes but also for passing on to others and thus for transmission
over space and time. The social purposes they served differed consider-
ably, and so did the wider social acceptance beyond the limited numbers
of their mediums and immediate followers. From a marginal cult geared
toward the revitalization of local life in the early twentieth century, the
veneration of the Babule developed into an almost central religion of the
Niger ien d ia spora i n Gha na before losi ng t hat posit ion aga i n back i n Niger
and Nigeria because of its integration into the established cults of spirit
possession. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, these
cults have become more marginal than ever before due to the strong re-
sistance to them by fundamentalist Islam.
In Nigeria, and perhaps also in Niger, the Babule are no longer limited
to “embodying colonial memories” (Stoller 1995). As I have shown, the
templates on which they are modeled have been expanded and at present