The bori healer summoned by her father Dako determined at first glance that she was in mortal danger. He diagnosed a Doguwa attack. The spirit would most likely kill her, he warned, if nothing was done to stop her.
The Doguwa spoke in the voice of Mariama. In the presence of several witnesses, the spirit she identified Usuman as her master, who had sent her out to kill Mariama.
She then proceeded to name her previous victims, all ninety nine of them In Gumbin Kano, Usuman underwent the water ordeal, but failed to prove his innocence. When he returned home, he was but a pale image of his former self. He could neither work in his fields, nor resume his trading in the market. All he could do, people told me, was pick rags off the ground and mumble incoherently to himself Aside from being accused of terrible crimes, they are stripped naked and occasionally beaten in front of hundreds of onlookers who sneer or shout insults at them—a mortifying experience, by all accounts, and one which typically causes the accused to become insane.
This is why they accumulate possessively. Discarded items of no use to anyone else become their focus in life—a focus that typifies social exclusion. While most people take great care to protect the integrity of their social persona in the layers and folds of their garments, convicted witches, like mad persons who roam the bush in tattered clothes or undress publicly, have rejected society or been rejected by it.
The unwavering attention these lonely figures devote to collecting shredded cloth speaks to their own decaying social identities and to their surrender to permanent liminality. Little girls made up songs about him, describing how he had been found out and what had happened to his victims, like the song that is featured at the beginning of this essay.
His neighbours avoided him. Eventually, everyone who was unrelated to Usuman moved out of Balgo to resettle a few hundred yards away. Usuman remained in his home with his wife, and his sons and their dependents, but all the other compounds of the hamlet were deserted. They could not expel the witch from their midst, yet they found a means of recreating the boundaries that ideally separate human space from the bush, boundaries which Usuman violated when he invited a wild spirit into his home.
He was a taciturn, unfriendly, and hot-tempered man who quarrelled easily with neighbours. He was also a reputed miser—and therefore, the perfect target for witchcraft accusations. As a witch, Usuman had profited at the expense of his neighbours, allegedly consuming their productive and reproductive powers. After being divested of the Doguwa, he became poor, feeble-minded, and powerless to improve his situation.
At the same time that they eliminate witches, thereby working towards the potential eradication of witchcraft, the practices employed to identify and neutralize mayyu reassert the viability of indigenous religion and its indispensability in the face of hidden threats against which Islam is ineffective.
At a time of intensified debates over the centrality of Islam in local definitions of identity and community, the fact that those who have retained their ties to the spirits are the only ones able to counter the powers of maita —itself increasingly rooted in Muslim values—is evidence that the growing control of Muslims over the terms of trade, religion, and politics remains contested.
In a region where, as people put it, before Islam, everyone sacrificed to the spirits, followers of the Prophet are especially eager to affirm their Muslim identity through distinctive practices —that establish their rupture with a prior order of values. According to Samana, a bori healer and Balgo resident:. But they neglected her and she became meaner. In the past, his father sacrificed a black cow to the spirit every year. One year, there was hunger, and the father sold the cow.
It was the Doguwa, seeking revenge. From then on, she followed Usuman. The only way to hold them at bay is to keep on providing them with victims, which is what Usuman did until one of his victims identified him as a the source of her ill health.
Through witchcraft accusations, poorly understood economic processes and social disparities become objectified in the ample and richly clad bodies of those who, like Usuman, appear to live off the vital substance of fellow villagers.
More than simply providing a stock of images for making sense of emerging inequities, witchcraft enables people to localize and ultimately act upon the visible sources of predation and power—this case, economically successful Muslims who remain vulnerable to accusations of maita thanks to their cultural roots.
It does not obey the ordinary laws of flows and exchange. First, that human blood should serve to fuel the production of wealth in this predatory scheme is no accident. Blood figures as a remarkably generative fluid in local conceptions of physiology and sociality It imparts strength and life to all limbs and organs, and must be continuously replenished though the regular ingestion of food.
Blood, the quality, volume, and consistency of which changes daily, is thus a sort of fuel that gives energy to the body. Through its qualitative and quantitative variations, blood symptomatises the moral and material transactions people engage in.
It follows that individuals who engage in witchcraft have bakin jini, and by extension, bakin fata black skin because the gossip which denounces them as witches have stained them.
She is, after all, a disembodied spirit, a creature of the wild. By depleting a person of her blood, the Doguwa takes away more than life.
She destroys the very ideas of family and reproduction, of how life is renewed, by perverting the terms blood, nurturance, productivity through which kinship is affirmed and sustained.
As a prime symbol of maternity, milk is a marker of kinship. Milk establishes an inalienable bond between a mother and her child. Nicolas 68 notes that while a father is tied to his children through blood jini , attachment is also reckoned matrilineally through milk, the vital substance that sustains children during their infancy. Significantly, it is through milk that a witch is said to pass her malevolent powers to her children which is why a father who suspects his wife of being a maya must pay her for her nono breast milk It can protect against the threat of lightning.
Far then from being a neutral substance, its use and ingestion must be carefully monitored precisely because it is so centrally implicated in the materialization or obliteration of kinship and closeness.
Except for the secrecy that surrounds her presence, she behaves as any member of the household would, living, sleeping, and feeding in the family compound. Indeed, like other members of the household, she contributes to the common wealth and expects to receive sustenance. But then when you tell her to go, she always returns. And she kills the people of your household […] even when she is tired of killing people, she stays with you.
She never goes back to the bush. While the maye is said to own the spirit, in a very real sense, she also owns him. Over time, the maye will be forced to sacrifice his family to satiate her gluttonous appetite for blood. Because the kinship created between the maye and the spirit through the exchange of milk is motivated by selfishness rather than solidarity, it becomes antithetical to true kinship itself. To be sustained, it feeds on the very substance of kinship, blood.
By constantly redefining, contradicting, and undermining the boundaries of kinship, it ultimately betrays them. The recent wave of spirit possession that afflicted Taita schoolgirls in coastal Kenya, he suggests, is a dramatic response to the challenges introduced by the liberalization of the local economy. True, older notions of maita —linked to material wealth, its production and its distortion—have been redeployed to account for new processes and new outcomes—such as when politicians turn to mayu for assistance to embezzle large sums of money from the state coffers.
Nonetheless, I have suggested here, maita increasingly appears to speak to a specific experience of social transformation, having to do with the recent Islamisation of the region. Far from disappearing with the resolute progress of Islam, notions of witchcraft have become central to the ways that ordinary Dogondoutchi residents understand the success and visibility of local elites. Aside from demonstrating that Muslims are, despite adamant claims to the contrary, deeply engaged with the occult, the identification of Muslim witches is an effective strategy for reasserting the centrality of spirit-centred practices aimed at protecting people and places from marauding spirits.
While witchcraft certainly exists within modernity, people in Arewa do not see witchcraft practices as constituents of the modern, quite the contrary. When individuals accused of witchcraft are declared innocent by the chef de canton, people are quick to suggest that bribery was involved. Paradoxically, it is also why Muslims —who claim to be disengaged with pre-Islamic traditions—are thought to engage in such nefarious processes of wealth production.
Thus, while Doguwa-related witchcraft speaks to and helps define the particular modernity that Muslims embody and the far-reaching changes that Islamisation has brought in its wake, it remains the hallmark of the unmodern—and this is what makes it so powerfully effective. A pter , A. C omaroff eds. A sforth , A. B eidelman , T.
W inter eds. B lunt , R. W eiss ed. C iekawy , D. C iekawy eds. C omaroff , J. D arrah , A. Dissertation Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University. D ordet dir. E nglund , H. E vans -P ritchard , E. F aulkingham , R. F erguson , J.
F uglestad , F. G eschiere , P. G reen , M. G reenberg , J. H unter , M. L ambek , M. T erray dir. S trathern eds.
M arwick , M. M asquelier , A. M auss , M. M eyer , B. M iddleton , J. M oore , H. N icolas , G. M eillassoux dir. R utherford , B. S anders , T. S anders eds. S chmoll , P. S mith , D. Like the previous narration, this one literally refers to the fortune-teller and it is just as applicable to the astrologist.
Both claim knowledge of the future. The ordinary fortune-teller claims that the formation of tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, or lines in a palm, tell him the same thing. In both cases, individuals claim the ability to read in the physical formation of created objects, knowledge of the unseen. Belief in astrology and the casting of horoscopes are in clear opposition to the letter and spirit of Islam. It is really the empty soul, which has not tasted real Eemaan belief that seeks out these paths.
Essentially these paths represent a vain attempt to escape Qadar fate. These ignorant believe that if they know what is in store for them tomorrow, they can prepare from today. In that way, they may avoid the bad and ensure the good. I am not except a warner and a bringer of glad tidings to a people who believe. True Muslims are, therefore, obliged to stay far away from these areas. Thus, rings, chains, etc.
SLJ Projects. Privacy Policy. Subscriber Services. Contact Us. It's an odd marriage, and there are some factual inaccuraces e. Photographs and artwork reproductions illustrate the otherwise well-documented series entry. Timeline, websites. Reviewed by Alana Joli Abbott , Apr 01, Get Print. Get Digital. Get Both! Be the first reader to comment.
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