Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa

BODY, POWER AND SACR IF ICE IN

EQUATOR IAL AFR ICA*

BY FLORENCE BERNAULT

University of Wisconsin-Madison

ABSTRACT: This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonialand postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written byanthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive inte-gration of Africa in the world’s economy and the commodification of the humanbody. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches failto understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participatedin the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examinesEquatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power andsocial reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonialintrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that thecolonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of amodern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moraltransgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans them-selves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolvingaround the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeralpractices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralizedas political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questionsanthropologists’ and historians’ tendency to draw epistemic boundaries betweenwestern and African imaginaries.

KEY WORDS: Equatorial Africa, Gabon, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, witch-craft, power, globalization, colonialism.

THIS article aims to revisit a question that has puzzled historians andanthropologists for the last decade or so, and to provide different answersthan substantiated so far by the discipline. The context is the colonialmoment and its relationship with the shaping of modern Africa.1 The

* I wish to thank Jan Vansina, Phyllis Martin and Peter Geschiere for their reading ofearlier versions of this article. I am still struggling to find answers to their provocativequestions, as well as to the comments sent by Journal of African History anonymousreaders. Long conversations with colleagues in Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville, particu-larly with Joseph Tonda, have been key to elaborating this article. The African studiesprogram at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Department of History andAfricana studies at Florida International University, the Zentrum fur Afrikastudien at theUniversity of Basel and the African history seminar at the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies have invited me to present talks that have helped me to refine my hypotheses. Thebook project on which this paper is based was supported by a John Simon GuggenheimFellowship in 2001–2.

1 Witchcraft beliefs have never been confined to Africa, nor are they markers of any-regional or cultural determinism. For modern occurrences and revivals in the West, seeJeanne Favret-Saada, Les mots, la mort, les sorts (Paris, 1977); Jean Comaroff,

Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 207–39. f 2006 Cambridge University Press 207doi:10.1017/S0021853706001836 Printed in the United Kingdom

question is why the traffic in human body parts – in French le commercedes pieces detachees – has become in today’s Equatorial Africa a pervasivetrope in popular, grassroots understandings of people’s lives and the worldbeyond.The use of body fragments can be traced at least to the end of the nine-

teenth century, where it resonated with ancestral notions connecting thehuman body and power, and the belief that malevolent individuals (Kikongo:bandoki, sing. ndoki) were able to steal human organs in order to feed on theforces contained in their victims’ flesh. Such destructive procedures were,for Equatorial Africans, part and parcel of the criminal realm of *-dogi inBantu languages; in English, witchcraft.2 At first sight, modern discoursesabout the traffic in people’s organs and body fragments seem to derive fromthese ancient conceptions.3 Yet the widely different context in which theysurvive poses important questions about the continuity of cultural valuesand the endurance of religious anxieties.A considerable body of work has already established how modern witch-

craft cannot be explained by a mere persistence of past folklores. For manyscholars, the ‘proliferation’ of occult beliefs in modern sub-Saharan Africabuilds as much on global factors as local dynamics, and needs to be discussedin the context of the continent’s rapid changes (urbanization, literacy,

‘Consuming passions: child abuse, fetishism, and ‘‘the new world order’’ ’, Culture17/1–9 (1997); and Luise White, ‘Alien nation: race in space’, Transition, 63 (1994),359–72.

2 Contra Evans-Pritchard, I use the English terms witchcraft and sorcery inter-changeably to reflect contemporary African usages. On a similar theoretical stand, seePeter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft. Politics and the Occult in PostcolonialAfrica (Charlottesville, 1997), 12–14; and his ‘Sorcellerie et modernite : retour sur uneetrange complicite ’, Politique africaine, 789 (2000), 17–32. However, the remaining eth-nocentricity of the terms tends to force multiple realities into a single and foreign cate-gory. Equatorial Africans talked of the ‘skills ’ or the ‘force’ possessed by individuals(words formed from the proto-bantu verb *-dog-), and discriminated between the wayssuch skills are used either for benevolent or malevolent (anti-social) goals. Manianga, forinstance, distinguished between kindoki kia dia (bad kindoki, literally ‘eating kindoki ’) andkindoki kia lunda (protecting kindoki). Simon Bockie, Death and the Invisible Powers. TheWorld of Kongo Beliefs (Bloomington, 1993), 47. Peter Geschiere aptly observes thatacademic distinctions should not mask the terms’ fluidity and people’s struggles overthem, as they are in practice never self-evident (personal communication, Aug. 2003).

3 For a first approach to modern witchcraft in Equatorial Africa and its rhetorics,see Bockie, Death ; Kajsa Elkholm Friedman, Den magiska varldsbilden (Stockholm,1994); Marc-Eric Gruenais, Francois Mounda-Mbambi and Joseph Tonda, ‘Messies,fetiches et lutte de pouvoir entre les grands hommes du Congo democratique’, Cahiersd’etudes africaines, 137 (1995), 163–94; Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft ; WyattMacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture. The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular(Bloomington, 2000); Filip de Boeck, ‘Le deuxieme monde et les enfants sorciers enrepublique democratique du Congo’, Politique africaine, 80 (2001), 32–57; Joseph Tonda,Le souverain moderne. Le corps du pouvoir en Afrique centrale (Congo, Gabon) (Paris, 2005);Patrice Yengo, ‘Le reve comme realite. Oedipe lignager et mutations sociales del’entreprise sorciere’, Rupture-Solidarite, 5 (2004), 156–80; Florence Bernault, ‘Magie,sorcellerie et politique au Congo-Brazzaville et au Gabon’, in Marc Mve Mbekale,Democratie et mutations culturelles en Afrique noire (Paris, 2005), 21–43.

208 FLORENCE BERNAULT

Christianity) during the last century.4 According to this globalizationnarrative, magical discourses derive from people’s need to confront thedownsides of modernity, and work as an utterly creative repertoire thatallows modern agents to cope with the changes they experience, or sufferfrom.5 As such, witchcraft accusations are investigated as a form of discursiverecapture that, at the risk of aggravating social damage, helps popularworldviews to personalize international capitalism into witch-figures, and toexpose the predation of local resources through plots of dispossession andimpotence.6 As Peter Geschiere elegantly puts it :

It is this remarkable capacity which makes witchcraft a strategic, concrete entrancepoint – unfortunately all too real in the grip it has on people’s minds – for studyinghow globalization is lived in day-to-day life. It can help also to overcome easydistinctions between ‘the’ local and ‘the’ global. Witchcraft discourses highlightthe intricate and often confusing or even frightening articulations of the two.7

From a historical standpoint, the globalization paradigm seems to work tosome extent. From the Atlantic trade to the depletion of postcolonialeconomies, and from eighteenth-century rumors about slaves processed byforeign traders into cheese, gunpowder and wine to the new sorcery of Ekongin Cameroon, the rise of zombies in South Africa, vampires and syringes inCentral and Eastern Africa and the lure of commodities on the Atlantic coast,witchcraft anxieties seem to speak to the long-term integration of Africa inthe global world.8 Moreover, the fact that, in people’s minds, vampirizedhuman organs and zombified victims remain instrumental in the building ofpower can hardly be understood without reference to a long-term com-modification of social hierarchies and social bonds. In today’sWest EquatorialAfrica, persistent rumors on the trading of human organs by ritual

4 Achille Mbembe, ‘La proliferation du divin en Afrique sub-saharienne’, in GillesKepel (ed.), Les politiques de Dieu (Paris, 1993), 177–201. Such scholarly alarms, however,usually fail to present much supporting evidence. For a detailed analysis of problemsposed by this argument, see Florence Bernault, ‘Des noms de l’occulte: essai sur l’ima-ginaire du fetichisme en Afrique equatoriale et ailleurs’, Cahiers d’etudes africaines(forthcoming).

5 In this sense, studies on modern witchcraft have given the final coup de grace to themodernization paradigm.

6 ‘Witchcraft … [makes] large-scale processes concrete in the logic of local motives,identities and physiques [and] permits argument about the causes and consequences,costs and benefits of particular forms of modernity’. Comaroff, ‘Consuming passions’,10.

7 Peter Geschiere, ‘Globalization and the power of indeterminate meaning: witchcraftand spirit cults in Africa and East Asia’, in Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere (eds.),Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford, 1999), 215.

8 Joseph Miller, Way of Death. Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade1730–1830 (Madison, 1988); Geschiere, ‘Globalization’; Birgit Meyer, ‘Commoditiesand the power of prayer: Pentecostalist attitudes towards consumption in contemporaryGhana’, in Meyer and Geschiere (eds.), Globalization and Identity, 151–76; JeanComaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: Notesfrom the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist, 26/2 (1999), 279–303. Onmarket principles invading the practice of human sacrifice in Liberia, see Stephen Ellis,TheMask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an AfricanCivil War (New York, 1999). For a critique of the globalization narrative, see LuiseWhite, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000).

BODY, POWER AND SACRIF ICE IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA 209

specialists, the international circulation of charms and the use of dead peopleas slave workers for powerful patrons point to intriguing equations betweenthe human body, money and power.Yet grand explanatory frameworks have been only partially successful

in explaining the intricate range of meanings carried by the data they use. Toooften, the forces of globalization seem to have won the global battle withoutbeing informed by the thick layers of the local histories they – or so scholarsargue – cross, combine and connect. TheWest is uncritically presented as thematrix of universal ideas, secular approaches and naturalized economicforces, in contrast to a localized, superstitious and reactive ‘non-West’.Globalexchanges are reduced to abstract macro-fluxes among over-generalizedsets of actors, ‘global’ western agents against parochial African partners.9

Last but not least, the objects of exchange remain unproblematized. Thebody, in particular, tends to be analyzed as an uncomplicated entity readyto be absorbed in the flux of liberal capitalism, a fragmented and reifiedcommodity still anchored in the fast-thinning bedrock of local meanings andcultures, yet already drifting in an enlarged and obscure global market.10

By interrogating the notion of the body, this article revisits some of thecore assumptions of this stimulating, yet at times over-reaching, scholarship.For this, I need to narrow the discussion to a specific time, a particular localeand a precise object. The period runs from the 1880s to the 1940s, the place isWest Equatorial Africa and the object the human body. I argue that a narrowfocus on commodification, even when analyzed as both an economic andcultural dynamic, is not enough to understand the significance of the trafficin body parts. In contemporary Equatorial Africa, this narrative reflectsan equally powerful event: the emergence of new representations of powerand the sacred. In the 1880s, both Europeans and Africans recognizedthat the body was a fetish, i.e. that power could be achieved through themanipulation of sacred power sheltered by material bodies, at the same timethey fought to establish hegemonic notions about where power should belocated, how it could be mobilized and represented, and how physical viol-ence could generate legitimate authority.11 By the 1940s, these struggles

9 Jeremy Prestholt, ‘On the global repercussions of East African consumerism’,American Historical Review, 109 (2004), 755–82, uses international trade patterns tochallenge this model. For a critical appraisal of the globalization paradigm, see FrederickCooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005).

10 Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning andMemory in Ghana (Bloomington, 2002), offers a rich corrective to this scholarship. Anearlier attempt to historicize the production and perception of the body in a colonialcontext can be found in John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and theHistorical Imagination (Boulder, 1992), 69–91. For an important discussion of colonialbiopower and commodity fetishism, see Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Man, Lux Women:Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham NC andLondon, 1996), 1–12.

11 In the West, the concept of fetish (from the Portuguese feitico, either a fabricatedobject or a factice thing) holds particularly ambiguous meanings. It is used in the modernsense of a powerful delusion, exhibiting power where it is not. See for instance theFreudian analysis of fetish as a substitute that diverts the patient’s desire away fromsexual organs. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York, 2000;1st edn. 1905), and Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (London, 1922). For Marx,commodity fetishism lies in the merchandise’s power to appear as desirable in itself, thus


had dramatically disturbed accepted divides between the material and theimmaterial, the profane and the sacred and the meanings associated withthese categories.12

The first part of this article looks at how local notions of body and powerin Equatorial Africa were altered by the intrusive presence of whites afterthe 1880s. The second part suggests how in turn white perceptions of thebody shaped European representations of rule, vulnerability and moraltransgression in the colony. The third section explores the traffic in whiteand black corpses at the grassroots and the consequent reshaping ofrepresentations of power and social reproduction across the racial divide.To anticipate my overall argument: in the colony, whites interfered less asforeign purveyors of things and ideas that connected natives to distanthorizons13 or as dei ex machina imposing market values and commodificationonAfricans than as partners in amutual process ofmoral reconstruction. Thisprocess was based on an overarching experience of spiritual and materialdispossession. If colonial politics of the body – as the history of colonialbiomedicine has demonstrated – objectified and subjectified Africans, then,I argue, colonizers experienced a similar fate. This event did not signal amerecapture of the ‘global’ by the ‘local ’.14 Europeans never embodied theglobal, nor did their money, goods and values bring any ‘modern’ or ‘uni-versal ’ stance to the colonized. If anything, whites simply sought to imposea specific, historically localized fetishism of money, market and the body. Butin this process, they entered into an intense, yet hidden conversation acrossthe racial line, and in tangible battles where Europeans controlled blackbodies while Africans attacked, stole and recycled white ones. If somethingglobal came out of it, it was not a shared experience of liberal capitalism,but the emergence of a spiritual imaginary, the transgressive sacrifice.15

A cradle for small-scale, stateless societies prone to fission and migration,West Equatorial Africa had been in regular contact with European traders

distracting people’s awareness from the conditions of its production. Karl Marx, Capital:A Critique of Political Economy (3 vols.) (New York, 1967). For discussion of these ideasin a colonial context, see Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in SouthAmerica (Chapel Hill, 1980), 1–38.

12 I follow Durkheim’s divide between the realm of the sacred and the profane, but Iuse the term sacred as a flexible substitute for religious and religion. Among colonizers, nocommon religion or religious consensus existed. Local societies did not follow a standarddoctrine or obey strict religious hierarchies, nor did notions of extraordinary powerscorrespond at that time with any established religious dogma. Emile Durkheim, TheElementary Forms of the Religious Life (Paris, 1912); MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture.

13 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds.), Modernity and its Malcontents (Chicago,1993), xxii. In the same volume, Deborah Kaspin’s chapter on Chewa rituals (Malawi),and Andrew Apter’s on the Atinga witch-finding movement (Ghana) also presentEuropeans as embodying the global or the outside.

14 On this dynamic and the ‘cattle-ification of money’ in Sudan, see SharonHutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping With Money, War and the State (Berkeley, 1996).On the colonial objectification of black bodies and the subjectification of Africans, seeMeghan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, 1991).

15 Imaginary (imaginaire) is used here instead of the looser term ‘worldview’ to stressthe fact that this historically defined vision – although relatively inarticulate and un-conscious – was as ‘real ’ and powerful as the social dynamics it contributed to create andshape. See Cornelius Castoriadis,The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, 1987).


since the sixteenth century. At the time of conquest, significant urban,creolized communities had emerged on the coast, yet the forested hinterland,especially in southern Cameroon, Gabon and Spanish Guinea, had a repu-tation for sheltering ‘primitive tribes’ inclined to anthropophagy (trafficin human flesh). These visions spurred anxieties among whites over thefragility of colonial rule in this large, scarcely populated region. Africansin turn had long interpreted the demand for slaves, and later the colonialextraction of labor and taxes, as European acts of vampirism. Hence usagesof the body, dead or alive, delineated a particularly heated site of knowledge,discourse and practical conflict between colonial actors.The decades from the 1880s to the 1940s marked the unprecedented

growth of the white presence on the ground. During this period, politicalrepresentation was virtually non-existent in French Equatorial Africa. WhileAfricans had no political rights in the colonial state, colonizers were deprivedfrom electoral representation until 1945, even if the colonial governmentrepresented some of their interests. Because of the brutality of the conquestand because no significant culture of political delegation existed before thelate 1940s, Europeans and Africans experienced a period of high confusionbetween the exercise of material violence and of political authority.Secondly, the first decades of the twentieth century were characterized byeconomic inertia combined with brutal exploitation. The concessionarycompanies, active until the late 1920s, imposed a barter economy that de-liberately prevented any substantial monetary exchanges. Until the 1940s,the introduction of western currencies touched only a minor portion of localand regional transactions, including taxation.16 Therefore, economic factorsalone and initial exposure to colonial capitalism cannot explain why localsocieties started to modify prevalent ideas about trade, the body and power atsuch a rapid pace and in such profound ways. To stretch the ‘globalization/commodification’ explanation back into the early colonial period does not gofar in identifying the true factors in this process. Rather, we need to highlightwhat this type of account has rendered largely invisible to us: the revolutionof local pantheons through the absorption of the white body.

BODY AND POWER IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EQUATORIAL AFRICA

For most societies across West Equatorial Africa in the nineteenth century,the human body was infused with political and sacred symbolism thatseemed to differ in radical ways from the status assigned to the body incontemporary western societies.17 I will elaborate on the second aspect of this

16 For colonial economies as pre- or non-capitalistic, see Jacques Marseille, Empirecolonial et capitalisme francais: histoire d’un divorce (Paris, 1984).

17 The following discussion is supported by fieldwork in contemporary Gabon andCongo-Brazzaville, archival and linguistic evidence, and reading in Equatorial Africananthropology and history. As my discussion focuses on common, often invisible, traitsrather than on wide-ranging variations, I have found it difficult to get away from poten-tially essentialist terms, for instance ‘African’ and ‘European’, even if, whenever poss-ible, I locate ideas and practices in specific historical and geographical contexts and try tohighlight their fluctuations and contradictions. Difficulties aside, the benefits of this ap-proach lie in the possibility of discerning a broader landscape of invisible or discreetvisions that emerged across ethnic and racial lines.


difficult question later, but I would like to suggest a few preliminary ideas. Innineteenth-century Europe, as the body had been progressively objectifiedby scientific and secular thought, the display of physical force had beenlong displaced from direct participation in authority, at least as a legitimatesource for building public power. This is not to say that the body had beenentirely cut from public power. On the contrary, modes of governanceprivileged the body as a site for building knowledge and discipliningtactics (Michel Foucault) ; the corporeal embodiment of social distinction, orhabitus, continued to mark individuals’ behavior and social recognition(Pierre Bourdieu); and the body provided western cultural and politicaldiscourses with core sets of representations and images (Antoine deBaecque).18 In the nineteenth century, however, the relationship between thebody and power had become one of increasing metaphoric distance andmediation.In West Equatorial Africa, by contrast, ethnographic and historical

evidence shows how people perceived a direct, unmediated relationshipbetween the body and authority, as the former represented the privilegedlocation of procedures and institutions that crafted, channeled and controlledpower.19 In doing so, the body was not seen as a physical reality whoseexistence derived from biological integrity, but as a multiple and fragmen-table entity that retained power beyond death and dismemberment. Tounderstand the relationship between power and the human body, a con-venient starting point is the notion that special talents coming from theother-world of spirits and heroes were attached to an individual in theorganic form of a witch-substance located in the belly.20 Most societies in

18 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979); Antoine deBaecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France (Stanford,1993); Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris, 1975). By contrast, see the Europeanmiddle-age visions of an open, fragmented and cosmic body studied by Michael Bakhtin,L’oeuvre de Francois Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen-Age et sous la Renaissance(Paris, 1970).

19 Most Bantu languages had numerous specific terms for both the living and the deadbody (Fang: living body: nyol, cadaver: mbim, Lingala: nzoto, cadaver, but also ebembe :ancestor), but to mention these as equivalent to the univocal word ‘body’ gives a mis-leading image of the ways in which several terms described different aspects or phases ofthis living and multiple entity (for instance Kikongo speakers at the beginning of thetwentieth century would probably talk of vuvudi, the shell, mvumbi, the invisible part ofthe person, kivumunu, the life-giving organ, or mwela, breath, mooyo, life or belly, peeve,spirit or wind, nsala, principle of life, etc.). It also obscures how these various realitieswere in practice usually subsumed in, and undistinguished from personal reference to theindividual person (for instance, to talk of a dead person’s corpse, Fang would call it mod,or man, avoiding the connotation of ‘animal carcass’ contained in the term mbim). SeePhilippe Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations et societes secretes au Cameroun (Paris, 1985), 45; V.Largeau, Encyclopedie pahouine (Paris, 1901), 149–50; Karl Laman, The Kongo, III

(Upsala, 1962), 1–6. I do not have room here to explore the meanings assigned to differentparts of the body.

20 The other world was not inhabited by all deceased people, but only by remarkableones who became ancestors (bekon in Fang, bagulu in Lumbu, malumbi or bamfumbi inPunu). The witch-substance was called evus, evur, evu, ngwel (Fang), inyamba (Myene),likundu, dikundu (Masango, Gisir, Lumbu, Punu, Vili), from the proto-Bantu roots: *-jemba, and *-kundu, this second term meaning stomach. For distribution, see JanVansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Towards a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial


nineteenth century Equatorial Africa had come to think that this substanceexisted in every person and that its size and strength grew according to per-sonal skills. In innocent people, it could remain as a latent, undevelopedtalent, whereas powerful people could expand and shape it, not only for theirown benefit, but for the public good.21 It was then the core component ofleaders’ ability to enact public authority and ensure the prosperity of all. Atthe same time, the substance was highly ambivalent and potentially harmfulif not socialized by proper ritual or if used only for individual, greedypurposes. Yet, this entity (often described as a small animal) was not per-manently attached to a person. It could enter the body or leave it, survive thebody’s death and migrate from the corpse in the form of small animals thatspecialists could capture on the deceased person’s tomb. Indeed, a commonway of manufacturing power in the nineteenth century was to incorporatefragments of the witch-substance (usually removed from a corpse) into acharm.22

Outside observers often qualified this ideology as stubbornly materialistic,suggesting that Equatorial societies were incapable of conceiving immaterial,symbolic manifestations of authority.23 In fact, and in contrast with secularscience and materialist philosophy, local worldviews did not draw animpermeable divide between a physical/material reality and a mystical/immaterial one. Material realities could always transform themselves intodematerialized ones and vice-versa, since the ‘physical world’ was not onlyable to symbolize and signal superhuman forces, as well as individual agency,but had the additional capacity of embodying them. As a result, in theirability to circulate sacred forces that served to ensure individual andcommunal survival, people’s bodies and corporeal fragments did not differontologically from ritually empowered charms.24 As multiple and fragmen-table, immaterial and material, the body could not be described simply as aneutral biological entity guided by an individual mind. Connecting the realmof the ancestors and the realm of the living, sheltering individual skills and

Africa (Madison, 1990), 299–300. Evus was probably a recent innovation formed from theFang term for the second stomach of ruminants, *-pu (J. Vansina, personal communi-cation). For description of modern beliefs in evus, see Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations,59–121. Note that such notions did not prevent precolonial Equatorial societies frompossessing a practical and detailed knowledge of the body and its organic functions.

21 I do not have room to explore the diverse and complex issues arising from the re-lationship between the notions of ‘person’ and ‘body’. But as I have mentioned in n. 19,the latter was probably never seen as a depersonalized object and was always connected toa particular individual, especially through the person’s name. Jacques Binet et PierreAlexandre, Le groupe dit Pahouin (Fang-Boulou-Beti) (Paris, 1958), 104–5. Joseph Tonda,‘Deuil et negotiation des rapports sociaux de sexe au Congo’, Cahiers d’etudes africaines,157 (2000), 2–57.

22 However, many societies believed that the witch-substance could grow again as itsinvisible ‘root’ never left the body. For gendered ideas about evus, see Ralph Austen,‘The moral economy of witchcraft ’, in Comaroff and Comaroff (eds.), Modernity, 91.

23 Against narrow and materialistic views of Equatorial visions of people and agency,Jane Guyer has shown how local representations of ‘wealth in people’ referred to kinshipand followers’ intellectual and spiritual resources, rather than simple labor or repro-ductive potential. ‘Wealth in people as wealth in knowledge: accumulation and compo-sition in Equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History, 36 (1995), 91–120.

24 MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture.


ambivalent forces that served as the core material for public authority, it wasentirely submerged by power.Second, although substantial regional variations existed, nineteenth-

century Equatorial societies probably shared the notion that the body wasnot unidimensional but made out of several entities. Most Bantu languageshad several terms for defining the body-entities of each individual. Maniangaspeakers, for example, distinguished between nitu (the visible body), kini(invisible body-of-the-shade) and mwela (force, intelligence).25 Individualspossessed at least one, and sometimes several, body-of-the-shades that sur-vived decay of the visible body after death and traveled to the world of an-cestors.26 Before death, powerful people could use this body-of-the-shade tomove around and perform occult deeds while their other body seemed toremain immobile. Innocent people’s body-of-the-shades, in turn, could beharmed or captured by malevolent individuals. Although they could travelinvisibly, the bodies-of-the-shades were not of a radically dissimilar sub-stance from the body visible.27 Both belonged intimately to the visible worldas well as to the world beyond and promoted the circulation of sacred(extraordinary) forces between the two. Furthermore, the body as a recep-tacle of vital and sacred forces (tye, tyi or ki in Fang, kindoki in Kikongo),changed according to its circumstantial closeness or distance with the worldof ancestors. Terminologies always discriminated between a living person’sbody (nyol in Fang, nzoto in Lingala, nitu in Kikongo), the dead cadaver(mbim in Fang, ebembe in Lingala) and the person’s ritually empoweredcorpse ready for burial (kon, e.g. ancestor in Fang, lilaka in Lingala, kiubulain Kikongo). This differed spectacularly from the univocal dimension of thebody in Europe, rendered ontologically inert by the increasing use of thesame term (in French, corps) indiscriminately before and after death, inparallel with the perceived material continuity of the medicalized bodybeyond the existence of the person.Finally, the relationship between power/force and its material support was

complicated by the metonymic quality of the body. As Fang informants inCameroon explained to Gunther Tessman in 1913, all living things, includ-ing people, possessed a force that remained in each fragment of the livingentity, even if detached from it. Among human beings, these forces survivedthe organic death of the body as long as the physical elements where it re-sided, such as body parts, bones and skull, did not decay and disappear.28

The integral identity and power of an individual could therefore remain incertain bone fragments, a belief crucial to the widespread cult of relics

25 Bockie, Death, 129–30.26 I borrow the expression from Laburthe-Tolra’s French translation of nsisim as om-

bre, or part ombreuse, in Initiation, 45 and 53. Many variations existed in the beliefs ofmultiple bodies. See for instance Albert Doutreloux, L’ombre des fetiches. Societe et cultureyombe (Louvain, 1967), 234–8.

27 Witnesses today can recognize such bodies because they are never clothed. Theyusually avoid light and other objects associated with civilization (by contrast with therealm of the night and the wild). Interview with Patrice Nguema Ndong, Libreville, 20July 2000.

28 Gunther Tessman, Die Pangwe, French translation in Philippe Laburthe-Tolra andChristiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, Fang (Paris, 1991), 240.


throughout the region.29 These notions, however, have been largely obscuredby Christian inspired attempts to force local cosmologies into western cat-egories.30 I suspect that current analyses of the body and politics in West andCentral Africa do not entirely dissipate such confusion. The much celebratedinterpretation of the rulers’ body as a ‘container’ of sacred forces and vitalsubstances in the Cameroon Grassfields and in the lower Kongo illuminatesthe close relationship between the substance of power and the body of rulersin the region.31 Yet the description of the container in terms of integrity andcohesion (a piggy-bank containing a vital force that can be given to severalpeople-receptacles) runs counter to what Laburthe-Tolra and Tessman haveaptly described as the metonymic nature of the relationship between thebody and the substance of power in Southern Cameroon and Gabon; onefragment of the former carries the full capacity of the latter. In WestEquatorial Africa, the term container runs the risk, therefore, of suggestingthat the body of rulers performed its tasks through a coherence simply co-incidental to the ethnographer’s gaze.

The power to cure and kill

West Equatorial perceptions of human body properties did not develop inisolation from the rest of the world. Europeans had long interacted withAfricans in this region, while a few cosmopolitan families in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries had established a tradition of international training,career building and trade networking throughout the Atlantic world. Even inregions away from direct contact with the ocean and the international trade,the circulation of trading commodities and cultural artifacts sustained con-stant religious and social innovation.32 The end of the nineteenth century,however, represented a turning point. Breaking with the regime of cultural

29 The emergence of Christian relics in late antiquity derived from similar beliefs. PeterBrown,The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981).

30 For instance, Andre Raponda-Walker and Roger Sillans in Rites et croyances despeuples du Gabon (Paris, 1983), describe the ancestors as ‘disembodied souls ’ (ames de-sincarnees). See also Laman, The Kongo, III. The confusion sometimes came from chris-tianized informants trying to fit local worldviews into European categories. See forinstance Doutreloux, L’ombre des fetiches, 231–2.

31 Rulers and notables accumulate the life essence and transmit it to the chosen few(married men of their lineage and political successors). Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘The king ascontainer in the Cameroon Grassfields’, Paideuma, 39 (1993), 306–7. The concept use-fully shows how the container (the body or the nkisi) and the contained vital/sacred forcein it are of the same substance (both material and sacred). For West Equatorial Africa, seeMacGaffey,Kongo Political Culture, 12–33, 43 and 147–8. For conceptual differences thatexist between forest societies and the grassfields, see Geschiere, Modernity of Witchcraft,133.

32 Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest ; Phyllis Martin, ‘Family strategies in nineteenthcentury Cabinda’, Journal of African History, 28 (1987), 65–86; John K. Thornton, TheKongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement,1684–1706 (Cambridge, 1998); Linda M. Heywood (ed.), Central Africans and CulturalTransformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge, 2002); James H. Sweet,Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World,1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, 2003).


influences that had prevailed in the region until then, the presence ofcolonial soldiers, white missionaries and foreign settlers grew intrusive anddevastating on an unprecedented scale. Hegemonic incursions in the realm ofthe political and the judicial undermined local authorities’ ability to regulatethe power to kill and, therefore, to control social reproduction. The humanbody proved central in these struggles.Because bodily configurations signaled the possibility of action and power,

the body provided Equatorial societies with a direct means for qualifying andcountering criminal acts. Intricate layers of borrowing and innovations in-formed these visions, including some triggered by the growing presence ofEuropean penal techniques.33 In order to counter death, sickness and mis-fortune, almost always suspected as deriving from criminal will, ritualspecialists (nganga, pl. banganga) diagnosed the presence of anti-social evusboth in the victim’s and in potentially malevolent individuals’ bodies. Inextreme cases, ritual ordeals could reveal witches and dispose of them. Inthis case, banganga could either remove the witch-substance from thecriminal’s cadaver after her/his execution in order to process it into charmsfor the benefit of the community, or destroy the corpse entirely to get rid ofits nefarious power. Although particularly repugnant to western observers ofEquatorial societies in the nineteenth century, these judicial techniques wereconsistent with local cosmologies. However, as the notion of barbarianAfrican rulers killing innocent people increasingly became a cliche in nine-teenth-century literature, European sources tended to obscure the fact thatthe death sentence only applied to exceptionally dangerous witches. In fact,most judicial strategies spared the accused’s life. Ordeals, for instance, couldbe prepared so that the accused would be convicted but not die.34 Purificationtechniques for the curing of persons who had killed unintentionally weredocumented almost everywhere.35 Intentional witches themselves couldprovide reparation for their deeds, based on compensation and the mobil-ization of kinship. This is well illustrated by the practice of pawnship,wherein criminal debt could be erased by giving a dependent to the victim orhis/her family.36

By the mid-1910s, colonial legislators had succeeded in interfering with alarge portion of local procedures over the body as a judicial terrain.37 Localtribunals (in French: tribunaux indigenes) presided over by a white judgewith decisional power had been set up and were active in most conquered

33 Jan Vansina, ‘Confinement in Angola’s Past’, in Florence Bernault (ed.), A Historyof Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth NJ, 2003). On Equatorial ideas aboutevil agency, and about black and white cannibalism, see John K. Thornton, ‘Cannibal,witches, and slave traders in the Atlantic world’, William and Mary Quarterly, 60/2(2003), 273–94.

34 Unsigned notes on ‘The Mpongoues’ (Raponda-Walker?), Archives de laCongregation du St.-Esprit (hereafter Archives CSSP), 2D60-8-B6.

35 Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations, 134–7; Raponda-Walker and Sillans, Rites, 100.36 For instance, Nzabi (southern Gabon) used either fines for murder (lebumi) or

pawnship (pawn: kodi) to close a criminal debt. Georges Dupre,Un ordre et sa destruction(Paris, 1982), 191–2, 206, 249.

37 Evidence based on surviving criminal trials preserved in the archives. Centre desArchives d’outre-mer, 5D64; Archives nationales du Gabon, Fonds presidentiel (here-after ANG/FP), judicial archives.


districts.38 Following colonial legislation, tribunals forbade the use of ordeals,ritual autopsies and the destruction of the convict’s cadaver, thus deprivinglocal authorities from exploring, testing and curing suspicious bodies.39 Iflocal procedures survived, they did so at high risk. Ritual autopsies in par-ticular were interpreted by European rulers as a profanation of cadavers, andmore often as cannibalism, a crime punishable by the death penalty. In thecontext of the social crises experienced by local societies at the time, the useof violent ordeals and the execution of convicted individuals rarely reachedpopular consensus, thus exposing ritual specialists and rulers to being ac-cused or denounced to colonizers, a fact supported by the significant pres-ence of chiefs and elders as convicts in colonial trials. Victims’ bodies wereless prone to escape local authorities’ control, unless colonizers ordered anofficial autopsy, or exhumed a corpse for investigation. In this case, the re-moval of the victim’s organs by foreigners could be interpreted as manipu-lating spiritual forces.40 Imprisonment itself, by seizing the accused andconfining them in inaccessible jails, confirmed the central role of the body inthe judicial realm while removing the nefarious elements it contained fromthe reach of local specialists.The transition from a legal economy based on compensation to one based

on standardized punishment thus deprived local regimes of the ability toperform established social and spiritual prescriptions. The criminal bodycould not compensate the victims any longer, nor initiate, through the cap-ture of the forces it sheltered, collective healing and concord. The followingexecution illustrates how complex dynamics of competition, disempower-ment and validation could play out between African actors and Europeanlegislators.41

On 14 January 1931, the French officer in charge of the district of Mouilain southern Gabon, a small administrative town located on the Ngounieriver, received the final order from the governor in Libreville to carry out theexecution of a local convict, MaloundouMa I Biatsi.42 The prisoner had beenconducted to the execution ground in front of the firing squad, in the likelypresence of African notables mandated to witness the execution by the

38 African auxiliaries (assesseurs indigenes) serving in local tribunals had only consulta-tive power.

39 Circulaire du gouverneur Merlin sur le fonctionnement de la justice indigene, 17 Nov.1910, in Journal officiel de l’Afrique equatoriale francaise (hereafter JOAEF), 15 Dec. 1911,675–81;Decret relatif a la repression de l’anthropophagie en Afrique occidentale et en Afriqueequatoriale francaise, JOAEF, 15 June 1923, 282.

40 Telegramme-lettre du chef de la region Haut-Ogooue, Franceville, 6 Feb. 1948, ANG/FP, 44.

41 Capital executions occurred regularly, although not often, in the French colonies ofEquatorial Africa. After the sentence was confirmed by a higher court in Brazzaville, theexecution was conducted at the location of the trial. TheMaloundou case is part of a seriesof 35 trials ending in the death penalty for the period of 1912 to 1945, collected in thenational archives of Gabon.

42 Proces-verbal d’execution de Maloundou Ma I Biatsi, signed by Yvan Larrieu, chef dela subdivision de Mouila, 14 Jan. 1931, and Lettre du bureau des affaires civiles a chef de lasubdivision de Mouila, nb 563, 9 Feb. 1931, ANG/FP, 699. The report does not mentionMaloundou’s crime.


district authorities.43 Looking at Maloundou restrained by ropes, and prob-ably kneeling in front of the squad, the white officer elevated his arm andread the capital sentence. He then proceeded to ask the condemned whetherhe had a final request to make. After listening to the interpreter, Maloundoudemanded that his belongings be given to his family, with the exception oftwo pagnes for a fellow convict. Then, probably encouraged by the officer’squestion, Maloundou proceeded to beg for forgiveness and frantically startedto enumerate all the goods he would give for his life. The white officer, notpaying attention to Maloundou’s pleading, lowered his arm and commandedthe troops to fire. As the law provided, the officer shot the condemned in thehead for the final coup de grace. After the dismissal of the spectators, thecorpse was buried in official grounds at the station, thus depriving specialistsfrom access to the criminal’s body and the witch-substance it may havecontained.44

The criminal body has thus been punished, but not disempowered.Escaping local procedures of social healing and retribution, it had trans-formed into a key resource for white power, confirming the position ofEuropeans as inescapable spiritual competitors.

White magic and the morality of exchange

The fact that white people could be perceived as magic contenders was not anew phenomenon. Because the genre bolstered images of European prestigeand African simplicity, travel accounts in Equatorial Africa from the six-teenth century on took great delight in reporting how natives thought ofwhites as ancestors or spirits who were coming back to the world of theliving. These images have been usually analyzed as mirrors of Africans’ lackof familiarity with the sight of Europeans, thus confirming a perceptual gapbetween Africans’ religious naivete and whites’ rational superiority. Yetample evidence demonstrates that until the 1930s, when the risk of colonialretaliation had significantly increased, Africans did not hesitate to attacktraders, loot factories and missionary stations that threatened their controlover regional and long-distance exchanges, bringing about a significantnumber of white casualties.45

Beliefs in whites as ancestors, therefore, did not derive from an un-changing sense of distance, superiority or sacredness, but, instead, from the

43 Although not mentioned in the report on Maloundou’s execution, this was a usualprovision at the time. Arrete fixant les regles d’application du decret du 22 juillet 1939 quisupprime la publicite des executions capitales, no. 688/AP, 26 Feb. 1940, ANG/FP 699.

44 Colonial legislation on the death penalty provided that the corpse should not begiven to the family, but be immediately buried in official grounds. Article 52 du Decretportant reglement sur le service de place, 7 Oct. 1909; and Circulaire du gouverneur generalde l’AEF sur les executions capitales, 16 July 1931, ANG/FP, 699.

45 On death threats against missionaries, looting of convoys and killing of white officersin the region of Lastourville, see ‘St-Pierre Claver’, Annales apostoliques CSSP, 18, 123(Apr. 1897), 536–9. Also Rapport mensuel de la circonscription de la Nyanga on the pil-laging of a factory and the killing of the white manager, unsigned, Dec. 1913, ANG/FP,246; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des grandes companies con-cessionnaires (Paris, 1971); and Nicolas Meteghe N’Nah, Domination coloniale au Gabon:la resistance d’un peuple (1939–1960) (Paris, 1981).


relative position of whites as partners in local spiritual economies. This helpsto move us away from a dominant/subaltern dichotomy and from a depictionof colonial rule as a clash between irreconcilable ideas about the sacred.Instead, understanding spiritual struggles between Africans and whites as aform of competition taking place in specific historical circumstances allowsus to recover subtler forms of confrontation and engagement. I build here onJoseph Tonda’s analysis of the emergence of a modern economy of‘free sacrifice’ (sacrifice gratuit) in twentieth-century Equatorial Africa.46

According to him, colonial struggles over material profits (contentieuxmateriels) changed the local ethos of social and material exchanges, includingthe economy of exchanges with the world-of-ancestors. By demanding un-usual offerings from people (the redeeming of fetishes, the renunciationof polygamy and the submission of their own body for compulsory labor)and failing to provide anything in return, colonizers overturned ancientideas, forcing Africans to transform into victims, while positioning them-selves as powerful sacrificers, or ‘false ancestors’ feeding from local ob-lations. By expanding and historicizing Tonda’s argument for the latenineteenth century, I propose to replace the term ‘free sacrifice’ by ‘trans-gressive sacrifice’, a concept that acknowledges not only the reversal of thesymbolic economy of sacrifice but also its dislocation through the experienceof social destruction and loss, the breaking of normal exchanges and the roleof criminal intruders.The term sacrifice, however, comes from a western tradition powerfully

informed by Christian images of immolation and destruction. Instead,West Equatorial Africans imagined offerings as messengers who carried thecommunity’s demands and respect to the world of the dead. In this spiritualeconomy, most healing and sacralizing techniques were based on the idea ofexchange. Interchangeable vehicles of gifts and sacred forces varied fromcharms, witch-substance, relics and shrines, or the body of the ritualspecialist him/herself. To give away regular offerings allowed the sacrificersto share in with the spirits, to ‘eat’ together (*di : to eat, to consume) in orderto accumulate life force or compensate for the breaking of a taboo. When thegift of a human life promoted this transfer, victims could become spirits inthe process.47 In a context of social reproduction based on trading with theother world, the use of bad kindoki (witchcraft) stood as the inversion ofbeneficial exchanges. Instead of promoting collective prosperity throughregulated exchange, it involved the greedy accumulation of force in an indi-vidual who fed from the secret destruction of victims, thus triggering thebreakdown of kinship and social harmony.At the end of the nineteenth century, relentless economic disruptions and

systematic colonial policies of ‘presence’ posed considerable threats to this

46 Joseph Tonda, Sociologie de la guerison divine en Afrique centrale (Paris, 2002);Joseph Tonda, ‘Capital sorcier et travail de Dieu’, Politique africaine, 79 (2000), 48–65;and idem, Le souverain moderne ; Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Natureand Function (Chicago, 1964).

47 Oblations (ntsago in Mpongwe, eago in Tsogo, dilagu in Gisir) varied from animals,food and goods to valued members of the community, low-status dependants, or in-dividuals with a special connection with the sacred.


exchange economy.48 In French Equatorial Africa for instance, officialinstructions urged local administrators to keep physical contact with localpopulations through regular demands and unyielding surveillance.49 By the1910s, this policy had started to interfere significantly with local politics, as itinvolved a constant military menace combined with regular administrativetours (tournees) for the collection of taxes. In 1913, for example, in a cir-cumscription of southern Gabon, a report recommended that the local ad-ministrator enter in contact with the evasive Akelais and seek recognition ofFrench rule through the enforcement of taxes. In case of failure, the ad-ministrator should immediately create a permanent outpost and maintain aconsiderable number of troops (forts detachements) for the ‘close surveil-lance’ of reluctant natives.50 In addition to material needs, administrativestrategies were not devoid of ideological hopes: a number of reports at thetime explained how permanent residence would make the population ‘feelthe advantage of [the French] presence’, and by ‘virtue of example’, couldhelp ‘to abolish barbaric customs’.51 Such politics of systematic predationand intrusion broke from earlier patterns of contact between Africans andEuropeans, and by threatening the very survival of local societies, en-couraged perceptions of colonizers as destructive magicians.Besides sharing with administrators a belief in the virtue of physical

presence at the grassroots, missionaries’ evangelizing techniques directlyinterfered with techniques of spiritual protection.52 When in the 1880s and1890s, disappointed by local people’s indifference to Christianity, priestsstarted to comb neighboring villages in order to identify potential converts ;bed-ridden villagers who could not flee from the village constituted easytargets.53 Using threats and persuasion to baptize their victims, the Fathersinvoked the fire of hell in which heathens would burn after death and thedivine protection of blessed water that would cleanse their sins. Yet fewlocals were ready to accept baptism, as the dramatic context in which Fatherschose to christen villagers convinced many that baptismal water was thecharm that brought certain death to the sickly,54 while others only acceptedthe water as a last resort.

48 Cf. the well-known exactions committed by concessionary companies in the Frenchand Belgian Congo. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo ; and Adam Hochschild, KingLeopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, 1999).

49 Alain MacLatchy, ‘Rapport sur la subdivision de Mimongo ’ (dated 1942), ANG/FP,3788.

50 Rapport mensuel, circonscription des Nkomis, June 1913, unsigned, ANG/FP, 246.51 Resumes des rapports mensuels, Franceville, Nov.–Dec. 1911, ANG/FP, 48; Xavier

Frass, ‘Monographie de la Cote-Nord du Gabon’ (1908), 12, ANG/FP, 4015.52 Mgr. Augouard, ‘L’anthropophagie dans le bassin de l’Oubanghi’, Annales aposto-

liques de la Congregation du Saint-Esprit (July 1890) (hereafter Annales CSSP), 97–8,argues that the continuous presence of Europeans would lead to the decline of anthro-pophagy.

53 ‘The [catechists also participate] in the hunt for souls, sick and dying people’, in‘Mission Ntre-Dame des Apindjis ’, Bulletin de la Congregation du Saint-Esprit, 311 (Jan.1913) (hereafter Bulletin CSSP), 983. See also cases described in Phyllis Martin, ‘Lifeand death, power and vulnerability : everyday contradictions at the Loango Mission,1883–1904’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 15 (2002), 61–78.

54 Forced baptism is attested at least until 1907 in Gabon. ‘Mission de Donguila’,Annales CSSP (June 1907), 192 and 197.


In 1891, a campaign for baptizing Adouma children resulted in a typicalset of reactions. While most parents expressed terror in front of the blessedwater brought by the Fathers, a distressed mother led the priests to her dyingdaughter and rubbed the water on the child’s forehead in the hope that itwould cure her.55 That water was such an ambivalent ‘medicine’ (medic-ament)56 was consistent with the general ambiguity of local charms that couldeither cure or harm depending on the ritual specialist’s will, and with thecirculation of charms in the region, constantly renewed by contact and bor-rowing. What the Fathers and whites more generally seem to have catalyzedafter the 1880s, however, was a powerful connection between their un-avoidable presence, physical threats and Africans’ fear of social annihilation.In this context, the missionaries’ greed for local charms and converts

proved particularly suspicious:

In the evangelized village, the day of baptism has come … To demonstrate theirgood will, all the villagers wanted to sacrifice their fetishes, their amulets, theirboxes full of skulls, their bracelets, their horns, their bundles, and even the oldvillage sorcerer’s magic tusk! … I took in the pile two bracelets decorated withsmall antelope horns that had the power to stop the rain … Then the villagersbrought the magic tusk in triumph and put it on the pile that we were about tothrow in the river. But then (I must accuse myself of this), I laid hand on thefamous magic tusk. All my colleagues agree that, now secure in my bedroom as asimple souvenir, it is better there than on the bottom of the river.57

By the 1900s, whites had not only significantly disrupted the normal circu-lation of spiritual gifts and social investments, they also had given evidencethat they were feeding on the destruction of charms and the retention ofofferings. Africans could still attack them or try to move away from colonialstations, but as colonial forces increasingly saturated physical and socialspaces, local societies found themselves embedded in an economy of ex-changes that forced them into victims or into reluctant providers of extra-ordinary and useless oblations. Although spurred by specific historicalfactors, these images resembled existing representations of destructive magicthat blamed loss and destruction on the intrusion of greedy individuals intothe flux of spiritual trading. Therefore, while the ethos of the sacrifice con-tinued to inform indigenous interpretations of social survival and spiritualexchanges, its outcome was deeply altered as ancient hopes for exchange and

55 ‘Bapteme d’enfants chez les Adoumas’, Annales CSSP (Oct. 1891), 149.56 A significant tribute to the intrusion of white magic in local beliefs, the term medi-

caments has been appropriated in Francophone Equatorial Africa since the early twentiethcentury to designate charms, particularly those connected to the realm of the whites.

57 ‘La defense magique’, manuscript signed by Jerome Adam (future bishop ofGabon), n.d., Archives CSSP, 271-Dos. B-IV; Lettre de l’abbe Walker a Mgr Le Roy,Sindara, 19 Mar. 1934, Archives CSSP, Dos. B-IV. Other rumors described howchristened people became the slaves of missionaries in the other world. Journal de lacommunaute de Lambarene (Jan. 1883–Aug. 1885), 4, Archives CSSP, 273-A-I. See alsoanonymous missionary accounts: ‘Minise [missionaries] instill death in men’s hearts’, in‘Lastourville’, Bulletin CSSP, 18/123 (Apr. 1897), 537. ‘Feeling that they have beenwaiting for nothing, they [our primitive natives] keep repeating: You do not give usanything, you forbide everything that our fathers loved and used to do, what are you goodfor?’, in ‘Okano: Notre-Dame-des-Victoires ’, Bulletin CSSP, 30 (1921–2), 705.


reproduction were transformed into fears of physical destruction, spiritualdeprivation and social decline.

BODILY VIOLENCE AND COLONIAL TRANSGRESSION

After two generations of scholars have dexterously recovered, under the veilof material domination, the fragility of colonial rule and its uncanny predi-lection for being informed by the colonized, European hegemony seems tohave been exposed to the bone.58 Yet the long-standing absorption socialscientists have felt for the mechanics of domination in Africa has rarely gonebeyond the confines of political and economic power, thus failing to interpretwhites’ incomplete supremacy beyond the survival and reproduction ofpublic authority. The deeper cultural foundations of the process have re-mained underexplained. Moreover, by exposing the vulnerability of col-onialism first and foremost to recover African agency, most studies haveoverlooked the consequences of such contradictions among white colonists,therefore missing key aspects of colonial domination. Using colonial per-ceptions of the body as an entry point, I explore how anxieties about thefragility of their rule allowed colonizers to share a set of crucial visions withthe colonized. To my mind, the colonial state’s inability to impose a viablefiction of hegemonic authority (or symbolic violence) across the racial gap, atleast during the early phase of colonial rule, paradoxically encouraged theemergence of vibrant, if concealed, inter-racial conversations about themeaning of power, social reproduction and the body.59

A drive for hegemony was not lacking in the colony: a flow of justifyingvisions, from the civilizing mission to the well-being of the African organicand political body, poured out of white mouths towards natives, the metro-pole, the outer world and settlers themselves. Although some colonists

58 John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, ‘Coping with the contradictions. The develop-ment of the colonial state in Kenya’, Journal of African History, 20 (1979), 487–505; SaraBerry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, 1993), 24–40. For a recent essay on the colonial state and itscontradictions, see John Comaroff, ‘Governmentality, materiality, legality, modernity’,in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst and Heike Schmidt (eds.), African Modernities(Portsmouth NJ, 2002), 107–34.

59 For analytical needs, I isolate the idea of ‘hegemonic authority’ as a particular layerof struggles and debates that dealt specifically with the legitimacy of power and authoritythemselves, and therefore distinct from other forms of hegemonic projects and con-versations (for instance, religion, domesticity, medicine and healing, etc.). I use it as anequivalent of P. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence (restricted again to the field ofpolitical authority). I do not forget that in colonial Equatorial Africa, diverse realms ofhegemonic struggles overlapped and sometimes produced each other and that they couldthus all be subsumed within a larger project of domination. On symbolic violence, seePierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques. Sur la theorie de l’action (Paris, 1996), 107ff. On col-onial hegemony in Africa, see Steve Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals. Anthropology andHistory in Tanzania (Madison, 1990), and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, OfRevelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, I

(Chicago and London, 1991), 3–32. On the view that colonialism was not a hegemonicform of power, see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power inColonial India (CambridgeMA, 1997), and for a nuanced analysis of competing schools ofthought on this question, Nicholas B. Dirk, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas B. Dirk (ed.),Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992), 7–9.


believed in these ideas and sometimes reached out to Africans for building ashared sense of purpose in the colonial enterprise, official efforts to establishnarratives of legitimate authority remained inseparable from tactics of con-siderable physical oppression. As a result, the hegemonic regime that whiteswished to create in West Equatorial Africa remained largely fictive, and inthe early twentieth century tended to circulate exclusively within the con-fines of the white community. Not only did this hamper the establishment ofreal forms of symbolic violence, but it also had considerable consequences forthe ways in which Europeans could fantasize their rule. The use of physicalforce against Africans, and the extraordinary psychological and materialprofits that colonists were able to derive from it, openly transgressed themoral norms that had informed European political tradition for centuries. InEquatorial Africa, Europeans had to confront their own political regimes withwhat they had long come to regard as pre-political and uncivilized practices,and to embark on a reflexive journey into what they had learned to consideras archaic and depraved politics.60 This experience threatened colonizers’beliefs in the reproduction and legitimacy of white authority, and galvanizedrepresentations of colonial rule that proved strikingly congruent with Africanones.

Sacrifice and self-destruction

Specific anxieties concerning the body help enter the dark side of this moralexperience. I use here the fiction work of two novelists who visitedEquatorial Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as arhetorical window into settlers’ political fantasies. If Equatorial Africansexperienced colonial domination through the act of expending offerings withno returns, I suggest that the novels show how colonizers could not concealthe undeserved benefits they derived from the violence exerted over nativesocieties and their estrangement from their own political values. As a result,the hegemonic pretense that Europeans met African contributions by dis-pensing civilization could not be sustained apart from considerable concernsabout the morality of their rule in the colony. Remarkably, these fears wereformulated in terms of moral and social exchanges, and fluxes of economicprofits and physical massacres.61 Centered on the human body and social

60 On colonizers’ guilt and usurpation, see Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonise, portraitdu colonisateur (Paris, 1957).

61 The fact that colonial economies were hardly capitalistic did not mean that colon-izers’ economic ethos was not. Yet among settlers in this region of Africa, mostly comingfrom a Catholic background, colonialism probably reactivated deep-seated suspicionsabout the morality of liberal capitalism. Even among Protestants, arguably more inclinedto perceive wealth as the just reward of efforts and self-discipline (e.g. a sacrifice of theprinciple of pleasure), unfair profits in the colony challenged this ideology, a fact hardlycompensated by the martyrdom of early explorers, missionaries or colonists. See MaxWeber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1930), and for thecolonial context, see Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation, 60–4. Note that in the latetwentieth century, the capitalistic ideology of ascetic production has been replacedworldwide by euphoric beliefs in the ever-growing power of consumerism. See alsoHubert and Mauss, Sacrifice ; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchangein Archaic Societies (Glencoe IL, 1954). On the endurance of the gift economy in early


reproduction, they placed transgression and human sacrifice at the core ofcolonial imaginaries.In a famous short story entitled An Outpost of Progress (1897), Joseph

Conrad details how the circularity of European fictions of legitimacy, com-bined with brutal material greed, brings about the doom of a Europeanstation on the upper Congo river and the slow, unavoidable death of a pair ofwhite factory managers.62 The story starts when two men, Kayerts andCarlier, are left by their employer at an isolated station 300 miles away fromany other European presence. Their only companion is an experiencedAfrican clerk from Sierra Leone, named Henry Price, who ‘despises the twowhite men’. Inexperienced and imbued with firm ideas about their superi-ority, Kayerts and Carlier progressively dissolve from the stupendous cir-cularity of their conversation and their extreme isolation from others. Theyignore the country entirely and see it as a large void, leaving the care of thefactory to the clerk. In a crucial episode, they let him give ten of their men asslaves to passing-by African traders in exchange for a considerable amount ofivory. After a few months, rendered mad by solitude and greediness andunable to establish any pretense of moral superiority, the two men kill eachother in a frenzy of narcissistic annihilation.A few decades later, the Belgian novelist Georges Simenon provided an-

other portrayal of white society in Le coup de lune (‘A Crazy Spell ’), firstpublished in Paris in 1933. The story, set in 1930 Equatorial Africa, depictsthe journey to Libreville, the capital of Gabon, of a young and inexperiencedFrenchman, Joseph Timar, imbued with moral principles and ideas aboutsocial justice. Upon his arrival in the colony, however, the hero is caught in adestructive passion for an older white woman, Adele, the owner of a localhotel. Beyond the power of physical desire, the white mistress embodies thedecline of French moral values in the colony and the corrosion of socialjustice at large. The confrontation between the two characters shows theirreconcilable conflicts between metropolitan norms and colonial realities.Timar behaves at first as a powerless outsider (‘en dehors du jeu ’),63 out-raged by the sight of colonialists despising and killing natives, yet doingnothing about it. His white lover then unleashes Timar’s worst instincts.Traffic of bodies and debts soon culminate into morbid fluxes of exchangewhen, to Timar’s mounting detachment, Adele casually kills a black servantand bribes a local chief to accuse a fellow black man of the crime. During thearranged trial, Timar weakly tries to react, but unable to disrupt the colonialorder, he collapses into tropical illness and mental breakdown. While Adele

modern times, see Nathalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France(Madison, 2000).

62 Conrad sailed up the Congo river in 1890. Before Heart of Darkness (1899), hepublished ‘An outpost of progress’ in a volume of short-stories entitled Tales of Unrest(1897): ‘ ‘‘An outpost of progress’’ is the lightest part of the loot I carried off from CentralAfrica, the main portion being of course ‘‘The heart of darkness’’. Other men have founda lot of quite different things there and I have the comfortable conviction that what I tookwould not have been of much use to anybody else. And it must be said that it was but avery small amount of plunder. All of it could go into one’s breast pocket when foldedneatly. As for the story itself it is true enough in its essentials. The sustained invention of areally telling lie demands a talent I do not possess’. Author’s note, in Conrad, Tales ofUnrest (1897). 63 Georges Simenon, Le coup de lune (Paris, 1933), 37.


leaves for a plantation in the forest with a gang of forced workers, Timar isforcibly put on a boat back to France, where he spends the journey out of hismind. Again, the hero’s moral decay is captured by his own body’s physicaldecline, suggestively weakened by criminal pleasure, egocentric indulgence,lack of social discipline and undeserved material benefits.Although both stories use the individual body as a symbolic microcosm of

the white community’s political fate, they depart in considerable ways fromwhite fantasies of domination classically documented by colonial scholars.64

Instead of delineating fears of racial contagion and miscegenation, classicengines of colonial tales, they locate settlers’ destructive potential withinthemselves. It is not so much racial proximity or the failure to escape fromnative bodies and culture (‘going native’) that predicates colonial decline,but white people’s evil capacity to create a working regime of destructive andnarcissistic isolation. From this viewpoint, colonial hegemony appears lessthreatened by the blurring of racial frontiers than by the impossibility ofpromoting a productive flux of social and ideological exchanges, and ofescaping the logic of the sacrifice gone wrong.The legendary figure of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) provides a confir-

mation to these ideas. A Protestant minister, physician and musicologistborn in Alsatia in 1875, Schweitzer settled in southern Gabon in the 1910s toorganize a ‘native hospital ’ in the little station of Lambarene on the Ogoweriver. His long and complex life reached a peak in 1952, when he won theNobel Peace prize and achieved world fame, but I will limit my comments onSchweitzer’s particular success as a colonial role model, a success that camein part from his ability to overcome the moral contradictions describedabove.65 It does not take much imagination to see in Schweitzer’s career animage of self-sacrifice of almost Christ-like dimensions, one that can beread as a redeeming resolution to the kind of anxieties Conrad and Simenonexposed in their novels. First as a native from a then martyr province ofEastern France, and secondly as a scientist and intellectual settling in the‘primeval forest ’ and giving up the prospect of a brilliant career in Europe,Schweitzer’s story recalls the earlier and more ambivalent myths of explorersand missionaries in Africa. Yet Schweitzer’s mission replaced the latter’sflamboyant adventures by an organized, routinized and bureaucratized formof heroism in the form of the forest hospital, more fit to the nature – andimaginary – of colonialism at the time. In doing so, the myth allowed whiterepresentations of the colonial encounter to move away from frighteningimages of domination predicated on racial distance, to a narrative ofbenevolent racial hierarchy and scientific expertise.Schweitzer’s patronizing triumph of medical assistance is predicated on

hegemonic exchanges carefully confined to the physical. The revolutionary

64 For studies on colonial fear of disease, contamination and miscegenation, see PhilipCurtin, ‘Medical knowledge and urban planning in colonial tropical Africa’, AmericanHistorical Review, 90 (1985), 594–613; Ann L. Stoler, ‘Sexual affronts and racial fron-tiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial SoutheastAsia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992), 514–51; Vaughan, Curingtheir Ills.

65 Among Albert Schweitzer’s writings on Gabon, see On the Edge of the PrimevalForest (2nd edn., London, 1948);More From the Primeval Forest (London, 1931);AfricanNotebook (Bloomington, 1958; 1st edn. 1939); Civilization and Ethics (London, 1923).


hospital in Lambarene replicates an African village in order to accommodatethe presence of the patients’ relatives and their ways of living. As such, itis conceived as a locale where Schweitzer’s treatment of ailing bodiescan refrain from reaching out to the patients’ inner self or cultural assets.In turn, these charitable contacts are shown as nurturing rather thanthreatening, Schweitzer’s quintessential, iconic European status during hisyears at Lambarene, epitomized by his steady publication of highly regardedtheological, literary and musical studies. In this tale of foster and self-preservation, the Christ-like figure of Schweitzer recalls the French sociol-ogist Marcel Mauss’s paradigm of the sacrifice of the God, a paradoxical giftthat does not annihilate the God, yet gives to his beneficiaries the ultimatepresent of sacredness and redemption.66 It proposed to colonial rule an im-possible triumph: to transform from a vampirizing master bringing violenceand its own demise to a benevolent, self-immolating, yet replenished God,thus over-turning the deadly dynamic of the transgressive sacrifice.

Body as sign, body as fetish

In this perspective, tireless colonial efforts at promoting the ‘civilizingmission’ in Equatorial Africa can be analyzed to a large extent as an endeavorto disengage the native and the white body from the logic of the transgressivesacrifice. Yet confrontation with Equatorial societies’ views on body andpower activated major contradictions in colonizers’ strategies. Deep-seatedinconsistencies on the sacred, symbolic and organic nature of the humanbody that had long existed in the western tradition surfaced uncomfortablyin the colony and touched at the heart of accepted divides between thematerial and the immaterial. They provide a precious indicator of howEuropean cosmologies and beliefs about the supposed materiality of thebody, the proclaimed immateriality of power and the sacred, and the physicallocation of both, could be disturbed in the colonial context.During recent field research in Gabon, a heated discussion with an un-

usually open-minded white Catholic missionary led me to press my inter-locutor about the Church’s failure to use the cult of saintly relics in theevangelization of Gabon. Full of naive provocation, I went on listing thesimilarities that existed between local cults of ancestors and various aspectsof the Christian tradition. Father Zacharie Peron listened patiently, thenobserved that the death of Christ on the cross was not similar to pagan sac-rifices. On the contrary, this had come as the ultimate sacrifice, e.g. as thedemise of the earlier economies of sacrifice. From then on, symbols and signs(the host and the wine for example), although consumed as the real flesh andblood of the Christian god, had replaced the use of human victims. Put in thecontext of the colonial period, these comments point to the considerabledifficulties facing a Christian doctrine that presented itself as radically dis-similar from local religions. Missionaries insisting on the presence of Christ’strue blood and flesh at the Eucharist feared that it would encourage theirconverts to reflect on the parallels that existed between the pagan and theChristian economy of sacrifice. To enforce a strict philosophical distancewith local religions, they could instead insist on the symbolic value of the

66 Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 77–94.


Christian message, thus introducing between the material body of Christ andthe immaterial power it was supposed to signal, a relation of metaphoric andsymbolic distance. Although this strategy could not entirely conceal thetension at the core of Christian philosophy, it had the advantage of parallel-ing secular definitions of power at work in the colony.Western secular views on the materiality and immateriality of power, and

the role of the human body in signifying this basic equation were hardlymore consistent than religious ones. From the eighteenth century on, thewestern body had been progressively imagined as purely material, an organicmachine controlled by specific technical procedures.67 Secular views hadturned the body from being the subject of religious discourses into an objectof medical attention.68 Meanwhile, democratic ideals that celebrated citizens’consensus and moral contract with their ruling elites, to the detriment of theancient Sovereign’s sacred or inherited rights, had relegated physical forceand attributes away from legitimate sources of authority. Therefore,although public power in European nation-states had arguably never ceasedto derive from material bases (economic power and physical violence), itsdominant representations had become increasingly based on the denial ofthis fact.69 Yet, at the same time that secular discourses stripped the physicalbody from exerting power, they continued to use it as a key political reper-toire. During the French Revolution, for instance, fallen royal bodies en-dured as metaphors for public debates on the nature of modern authority, afascination that did not decline in twentieth-century popular views.70

Meanwhile, modern bureaucratic states’ strategies of counting, scrutinizingand disciplining their citizenries increasingly targeted the body of ordinaryindividuals as a key resource for the production and inscribing of publicpower.71 Last but not least, the enduring construction of people’s bodies asmarkers of social identity, and the masking of this social process in natu-ralized or inherent physical traits, indicates how modern western visions didnot make clear distinctions between the materiality of the body and the socialmeanings it symbolized or displayed.72

In the colony, the fissures between the proclaimed disconnect between themateriality of the body and the immateriality of public power needed specialconcealment. Equatorial fetishism, because it proposed a direct engagementwith the material nature of power, threatened to reveal colonial contra-dictions and to expose disquieting parallels between native and European

67 Onmissionaries’ partaking of the dominant ideology of the divide between the sacredand the secular, see Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation, 252.

68 Brian S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford,1984), 36, 55–6; Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique: une archeologie du regardmedical (Paris, 1972), David Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernite (Paris, 1990).For pre-modern conceptions of the western body and its connection with the sacred, seeErnst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology(Princeton, 1957); and Carolyn Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in WesternChristianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995).

69 On the western masking and denial of the material bases of power, see Marxistanalyses in general. Also, Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris, 1987), and for a colonialcontext, Taussig, The Devil, 1–38. 70 De Baecque, The Body Politic.

71 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, and Il faut defendre la societe (Paris, 1997), 213–35.72 Bourdieu, La distinction.


philosophies. Therefore, indigenous treatment of the body as fetish (amaterial entity suffused with sacred power) was dubbed as utterly opposed tothe dominant European culture of the body as a sign (an entity that, albeitmaterial, does not hold but merely signals power, itself perceived as an im-material reality). From this perspective, ritual specialists who found judicialevidence in the suspect’s body through ordeal or autopsy illustrated themonstrous, regressive state of local politics. The idea that a tibia could be-come the seat of the whole persona challenged both white obsessions withbodily integrity and the hegemonic ideology of colonial rule as immaterialpower. Conversely, visions of the white presence as merely educational andreferential masked the reality of domination. This symbolic and metaphorictactic portrayed the white body as the sign of social forces larger thanitself – Europeans’ military, technical and economic superiority – rather thanthe material embodiment of colonizers’ material rule. Hence, at the sametime the white body was displayed among Africans as a material tool ofpower (e.g. as a fetish of colonial rule), it was supposed to recede into therealm of mere signs, and escape Africans’ desire and hatred.Concrete incidents demonstrated how such politics of the body faced im-

mediate sanction on the ground. In the early morning of 19 November 1917,two men of Fang origin, Ekoro Mabizoro and Ndongo Nzigue, approachedthe factory of a local French trader, Pierre Izac, located in an isolated spot atNkogo near the trading and administrative station of Lambarene (Ogowe).That morning Izac had left his wife alone to tend the store in the company ofa teenage black employee. On entering the store, Ndongo chased the boy intothe nearby forest while Ekoro attackedMrs. Izac with a machete. He orderedher to lie down, knocked her on the face, then cut off her hands. The two thentook the corpse to the edge of the forest, re-entered the factory and stole 120pagnes, 9 bars of soap, 4 rolls of thread, 7 small sacks of salt, a jar of fuel, alantern and an alarm clock.73

Although an investigation concluded that the crime was not connected toany open acts of rebellion against colonial rule, its latent political meaningswere hard to ignore. The incident’s graphic violence provided a spectacularenactment of colonial vulnerability and guilt. The cutting off of Mrs. Izac’shands resonated with the most publicized and denounced form of tortureagainst natives in Equatorial Africa, particularly in neighboring Congo. Thestealing of manufactured items reversed the concessionary companies’ on-going predation of resources in the French Congo.74 The killers’ cruelty andgreed, and their lack of clear political motive, replicated the failure of thecolonial project to promote a public order based on anything other thanphysical violence. More importantly, they had taken Mrs. Izac’s physicalexistence seriously and transgressed the order of colonial symbolic tacticstwice: first, by overturning the orderly distance of racial hierarchy into the

73 Rapport sur l’assassinat de Mme Pierre Izac a Nkogo, signed by administrator Boutin,18 Dec. 1917, and Telegramme officiel a gouverneur general du Gabon, signed by Thomann,14 Dec. 1917, ANG/FP, 1696.

74 In 1917, international opinion was aware of private militias and colonial troops cut-ting natives’ hands in the Belgian Congo. See Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo, andHochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. The local meanings assigned to hands and the sexualand gendered connotations of the murder fall outside the scope of this article.


deadly promiscuity of murder, and second, by ignoring the immaterial,fantastic power of domination symbolized by the mortal body of their victim,thus transforming her into a fetish whose value derived from its materialsubstance. The assassination confirmed that in a social system that per-petuated and dissolved primarily through illicit violence, the order of thetransgressive sacrifice could be reversed but not abandoned. And it alsosuggested that if African bodies could never aspire to escape their materi-ality, white bodies could hardly dissimulate their own.

DEATH AND DISPOSSESSION

It should be clear by now why modern imaginaries about the traffic in bodyparts cannot be analyzed apart from larger concerns that arose in the earlycolonial period about the materiality and sacrality of the human body, and itsrelation with power. Far from deriving from an unproblematic process ofcommodification and globalization, these debates were informed by colonialstruggles to regulate the role of the body in the contested building of auth-ority and social reproduction, and beyond, in the shaping of hegemonicdivides between the realm of the material and the realm of the symbolic.Intriguing parallels, proclaimed incompatibilities and fast-pace re-configurations triggered by colonial confrontations are nowhere more obvi-ous than in the arena of death. Here, the status of the body took on criticalimportance, as political imaginaries could decipher its prosaic materialityand its symbolic magnitude. While colonial law attacked local usages of thebody in the management of kinship survival, African initiatives proved ableto expose major contradictions in rulers’ views, revealing the latter’s inabilityto construct stable and coherent visions about the status of the human body,and to defeat African tactics over power and the sacred.75

Early in the twentieth century colonizers imposed drastic regulations forthe management of black and white corpses and created separate cemeteriesfor both communities. But the macabre transfer of racial tactics into therealm of death appears less fascinating than the way they were organizedaround the control of material bodies. By constructing black corpses as deadflesh that should be disposed of in hygienic fashion, white legislatorsendeavored to strip the native body-fetish of symbolic significance, thuslaunching a massive assault on local regimes of power. Yet at the same timethe law sought to decrease the symbolic status of black bodies, it enhancedthe untouchability of white ones. The building of colonial graves served lessto distance European and African corpses than to ascertain a firm monopolyover the material and moral sacredness of the white body.

Re-fetishizing the white body

Sandra Greene’s pioneering study of body and death in colonial Ghanaargues how Christian missionaries and Anlo converts increasingly shared

75 For pioneering analyses on death as a colonial battleground, see Greene, SacredSites ; Achille Mbembe, La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, 1996), 1–36;and Filip de Boeck, ‘Beyond the grave: history, memory and death in postcolonial Congo/Zaire’, in Richard Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony (London and New York,1998).


materialistic and hygienic views of corpses. This argument considers theusual distinctions drawn between western and African views at the same timeas it runs counter to an overgeneralization of the ‘proliferation of witchcraft ’paradigm. Instead, Greene creatively suggests that Anlo engaged in complexcultural initiatives, embracing modern views while displacing older ideasabout the sacred on to disembodied places.76 In Equatorial Africa, however,colonial evidence uncovers different historical dynamics. Under hygienicinitiatives, considerable attention to restoring white bodies’ sacrality faredhigh in colonizers’ agenda.On the surface, colonial hygienic drives seemed to differ little from metro-

politan ones. By contrast with nineteenth-century Equatorial African views,where the body’s capacity to convey power was largely unchanged by passageto the afterlife, the secularization and reification of the body in Europehad encouraged a vision of death as a radical organic failure and social depri-vation.77 Death increasingly appeared as the ultimate sanction of the humanbody’s limited materiality, and hygienic regulations became more importantin the management of funerals and burial regulations, a trend that was thenexported toAfrican colonies as early as the 1880s. InFrenchEquatorialAfrica,stringent medical and sanitary principles governed new funeral laws thatprovided for strict delays of burials, a mandatory depth for tombs and useof wooden coffins. At first seldom enforced in remote locations, colonial regu-lations diffused rapidly across the colony after the mid-1920s. By the 1930s,administrators were busy displacing old cemeteries, creating new ones andasserting amore efficient control of funerals through better census techniques,mandatory death certificates and burial permits (permis d’inhumer).78

Hygienic regulations should not obscure the enduring symbolic power ofdead bodies in the western mind. In twentieth-century Europe, the social,political and familial meaning of cadavers continued to prove highly signifi-cant, even if the religious virtues of the body had become transformedinto secularized forms of sacredness.79 The cult of the dead survives to thisday as the sole religious manifestation shared by believers and non-believers;while family graveyards, national funerals and monuments to dead heroesprovide significant sites for kinship identities and the crafting of collectivememories.80 In the colonies, the symbolic importance of cemeteries and dead

76 Greene, Sacred Sites.77 Philippe Aries, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen-Age a nos jours

(Paris, 1975), originally published as Western Attitudes towards Death: From the MiddleAges to the Present (London and Baltimore, 1974).

78 Failure to bury people in official cemeteries was sanctioned through the Code del’indigenat by a maximum sentence of 15 days in prison and a 100 francs fine. Decret du 31mai 1910 portant reglement sur l’indigenat en Afrique equatoriale francaise, and Arrete de-terminant les infractions speciales a l’indigenat, article 21, JOAEF (1910), 377–8, and 485.Enforcement of administrative authorization for burial is attested in Libreville and itssurroundings in the 1880s. ‘Sainte-Marie du Gabon’, Bulletin CSSP 14 (July 1885–Dec.1887), 385.

79 On the transfer of the sacred from the realm of religion to the realm of politics (e.g.the sacralization of political entities such as the Constitution, the people, etc.), seeMaurice Godelier, L’enigme du don (Paris, 1996), 171–2 and 289–91.

80 Pierre Nora (ed.) Lieux de memoire (3 vols.) (Paris, 1984–97); George Mosse, FallenSoldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990); and DanielSherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999).


bodies remained a key feature of white rule. Missionaries’ tombs served assymbols for the continuity and identity of Christian evangelization, andmonuments devoted to prominent colonial figures crystallized importantnodes in the colony’s spatial and temporal landscape.81 In addition, thesegregation of burial grounds served to enforce white prestige and racialdifference after a circulaire from the Governor General of French EquatorialAfrica in 1916 required the construction of separate cemeteries for whitepeople and Africans.82 Racism, however, does not exhaust the significance ofpost mortem segregation policies in the colony. Rather, the separation ofwhite burial grounds reflects colonizers’ growing worries about indigenoustrafficking in white body parts. In the 1910s, new rumors of stolen corpsesreplaced earlier settlers’ stories about African cannibalism and the nativevoracity for white bodies.Speaking of the violent capture and consumption of whole living bodies,

cannibal stories had unfolded in the nineteenth century as tales of politicalconfrontation and mutual devouring, functioning as a narrative projection ofwhites’ political conquest and African resistance.83 By the 1910s, however,little trace of these stories survived, as they were replaced by fantastic imagesof white corpses being used in native religious ceremonies.84 Rumors aboutthe traffic in body parts played on a more occult, hidden capture of deadwhite body pieces to the benefit of local regimes of power.85 Now dreaded asinert, helpless and fragmented, the white body was seen as trapped in cross-currents of symbolic value and material availability. In 1910, the districtofficer at Sette-Cama asked for funds in order to put up fences around theEuropean cemetery:

I do not want people to say that I did not take all possible means in order to avoidthe profanation of tombs … It is our duty to insure that Europeans buried here canrest in peace, and prevent additional attempts by natives from stealing Europeanskulls or bones in order to organize fetishist rituals.86

81 See Martin, ‘Life and Death’; and Florence Bernault, Democraties ambigues enAfrique centrale, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, 1940–1965 (Paris, 1996). For comparison,Terence Ranger, ‘Taking hold of the land: holy places and pilgrimages in twentiethcentury Zimbabwe’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 158–94.

82 Circulaire no 49 du 11 avril 1916 sur la determination des emplacements de cimetieres.Gouverneur general Guyon aux chefs de circonscription du Gabon, ANG/FP, 551. Before1916, the Governor of Gabon adopted a series of decrees (in 1881, 1887, 1900 and 1903)based on a 1881 metropolitan law on cemeteries.

83 Florence Bernault, ‘Devoreurs de la nation: le mythe des invasions fang au Gabon’,in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Issiaka Mande (eds.), Etre etranger et migrant enAfrique au XXe siecle (Paris, 2003), 169–87.

84 To my knowledge, the last story of a white being consumed by Africans occurred inGabon in 1903–4. Extracts from the Mission St. Martin des Apindjis diary, written byFather Guyader, 10 Dec. 1904, Archives CSSP, Fonds Pouchet, 2D60-6-2; Rapportsmensuels des circonscriptions, 13 Dec. 1913, ns, ANG/FP 246. For comparison, see themurder of two missionaries on Mount Meru, in Thomas Spear, Mountain Farmers(Oxford, 1997), 61–74.

85 For an early example, see the profanation of a nun’s tomb in Gabon, Victor deCompiegne, Afrique equatoriale. Gabonais, pahouins, gallois (Paris, 1876), 352.

86 Letter from chef de circonscription P. Rousselot, no. 70, 20 juillet 1910, Sette Cama,ANG/FP, 551. Also administrative report in 1920, in the Djouah region, aboutthe profanation of a European corpse for making a fetish. Rapport de tournee de


In 1923, the Bishop of Gabon speculated that European skulls were prized inthe making of local charms, a claim replicated in the late 1920s by a localadministrator writing on a new cult in the southern part of the colony.87

Judicial investigations gave credence to the existence of charms said to bemade out of white body fragments.88

The re-fetishizing of the white body tapped into the enduring resilience ofwestern beliefs in the symbolic value of dead corpses, but also signaled thevulnerability of colonial rule as it increasingly engaged with local spiritualregimes. While it is highly probable that white body parts became assimi-lated in numerous rituals and strategies of power-building across the region,the factual reality of this consummation is less important than its politicaland moral meanings. The fact that Europeans were aware of their corpses’use for local purposes and invisible politics proposed a terrifying image of thecolonial enterprise. Colonization, after all, might not be about imposing apolicy of presence and progress for the natives. It could be about providinglocal people with material resources – the white body – for local, incompre-hensible goals that testified to the stubborn vitality of African initiative andthe uselessness of white action.

The criminalization of relics

Among Africans, the new colonial legislation over funerals and burial en-couraged far-reaching reconfigurations of the use of body parts. By prohi-biting the making of relics and charms out of corpses, the law restrictedfuneral techniques that ensured social reproduction and further altered howkinship survival could be envisioned. The position of ritual specialists de-teriorated, popular fears of criminal intrudersbecamemore frequent and relicsno longer were taken solely from the corpses of notable family members.Starting in the 1910s, funeral laws sparked a series of social disasters in

the spiritual exchange of forces between the world of the living and theworld of the dead.89 Colonial requirements of immediate burial preventedfamilies from exposing corpses for several days or weeks, thus impedingthe course of ceremonies of reconciliation in the kin-group and the larger

l’adjudant-chef Chevre au chef de la circonscription de la Karagoua Koudou (Djouah), no.12, 6 Sept. 1920, ANG/FP, 878.

87 Letter from Mgr. Martrou, 25 Aug. 1923, Archives CSSP, Fonds Pouchet 2D 60,dos. 9B4; G. Labrunie, Histoire de la colonie francaise du Gabon. Races, fetichisme, sor-cellerie, initiation noire (n.d., probably 1928), 12, ANG/FP, 3788.

88 For instance, Jugements 34 et 35, 8 and 9 May 1941, Tribunal indigene du second degrede l’Estuaire, ANG/FP, 835.

89 Burial techniques displayed the deceased’s status. Chiefs’ graveyards differed fromcommoners’. Children and important family members were customarily buried next tothe household. Members of founding clans were usually buried in the villages theycreated, thus sustaining later claims over land. Abbe Walker, ‘Les cimetieres de famille auGabon’, undated MS, Archives CSSP, Fonds Pouchet, 2D 60-14-A3. See also FrancoisGaulme, Le pays de Cama. Un ancien royaume cotier du Gabon et ses origines (Paris, 1981),214; Paul du Chaillu, Voyages et aventures en Afrique equatoriale (1st edn., 1867; re-printed by Sepia, Libreville, 1996), 90–1; and Oyoubou Mikassi Christian, ‘Les Seki del’Estuaire duGabon’ (MA thesis, Universite de Libreville, 1982). For a long-term historyof burials on the coast, see Phyllis Martin, ‘Power, cloth and currency on the LoangoCoast’, African Economic History, 15 (1986), 1–12.


community.90 The mandatory use of coffins hampered the performing ofritual autopsies for discovering the cause of death, and, after burial, con-flicted with the collection of body remains for relics.91 The destruction oftraditional burial grounds weakened both families’ protection over their deadand communication with ancestors. Meanwhile, whites’ interference in themanagement of native corpses confirmed local suspicions about colonialgreed for the forces contained in people and body parts. People suspected thepriests of opening graves in mission cemeteries to steal the dead, just as theyfeared that hospitals and dispensaries’ staff could manipulate or obliteratecadavers.92 Medical dissections, judicial autopsies and the more frequentconservation of cadavers in hospital morgues all prevented families fromkeeping a safe watch over their relatives’ bodies.93

The new procedures appeared threatening to the extent that they werecongruent with representations that had long existed in the region.94 First,nineteenth-century rituals and beliefs attest to the fact that almost all bodies,not just those of relatives or outstanding people, could be used for channelingpower and sacred forces. Marginal (warfare) or illicit (sorcery) circum-stances, allowing victorious warriors or skilled witches to access the forces offoreign bodies, provided opportunities and models for such practice.Secondly, even in the case of normal death, ritual uses of the body werealways tainted by high risks of internal conflict and outside aggression.95

During death, individuals’ corporeal power experienced a moment of

90 Some administrators seemed to tolerate a standard two-day exposition of the corpse.Proces-verbal d’enregistement de plainte, affaire Djibo-Boueza, circonscription du Djouah, 11May 1942, ANG/FP, 629.

91 Relics (i.e. ritually empowered bones and skulls) were usually called ancestors, oreven people. For instance, Fang-speakers called relics bieri, but also bekon (ancestors) bot(people, kin). Laburthe-Tolra and Falgayrettes-Leveau, Fang, 290.

92 Delicat Cherubin, ‘La mission catholique de Mayumba’ (MA thesis, Universite deLibreville, 1984), 119. On the traffic of relics in medieval Europe, see Patrick Geary,Furta Sacra (Princeton, 1978), and his article ‘Sacred commodities: the circulation ofmedieval relics’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities inCultural Perspective (Cambridge,1986), 169–91.

93 Ordered by colonial courts, legal autopsies usually took place at a moment when localrules would have forbidden any interaction with the dead or would have allowed only thesecret collecting of bones by specialists. This tended to mix up local sequences of postmortems and the limit between public/private, open/secret acts. Judicial autopsies alsoinvolved the removal of entrails for laboratory tests, a highly significant act from anindigenous perspective.Telegramme-lettre du chef de la region Haut-Ogooue, Franceville, 6Feb. 1948, ANG/FP, 44. For an illuminating discussion of autopsies and surgical in-trusions in the Congo, see Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual,Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo (Durham NC, 1999), 92–6, 176–9 and 189–92.

94 Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations, 339 and 354; and idem, Les seigneurs de la foret. Essai surle passe historique, l’organisation sociale et les normes ethiques des anciens Beti du Cameroun(Paris, 1981), 340–2. However, Tessman argues that only the skulls of relatives can servethe cult of ancestors among Fang. See also his description of how sorcerers capture (un-related) victims’ vital forces. Tessman, Die Pangwe, French trans., 285 and 295.

95 Traces of linguistic borrowing and innovations attest to the fact that the body itselfhad only progressively achieved its preeminence as the fragmentable vehicle for power.See the adoption of the term evus among Fang, and more recently, the borrowing of theFrench term vampire as a modern equivalent for witch-substance. For myths on the originof evus, see Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations, 68–71; and Pierre Nguema-Obam, Aspects de lareligion Fang (Paris, 1983).


abundance and uncontrolled fluidity that threatened to escape a family’swatch. The deceased, with the rare exception of outstanding initiates, couldnot control his/her overflowing force, and the various techniques that hadbeen developed to allow rightful heirs to recover and recycle their relatives’power were always associated with considerable risk of loss and contagion.Therefore, as the person’s forces were detached in the form of body frag-ments and relics, or leaked from the corpse as sacred fluids, a dangerousperiod of appropriation and competition opened.96

The fabrication of relics, taking place several weeks or months after thedeceased’s burial, illustrates how local communities met such dangerswith profuse institutionalization. Collected and cleansed by ritual specialists,processed in red wood powder, installed in special boxes or bundleskept at home, or worshipped in remote shrines, relic boxes ensured that thecirculation of ancestral power occurred in a controlled fashion among properbenefactors for appropriate goals.97 Yet, the fact that the ritual expressedthe possibility of transgression speaks to the central and enduring role ofthe other as provider and competitor. During the public displays ofrelics, for instance, the masters of the ceremony carefully clouded theirmeanings with a wealth of intricate performances designed for the enjoymentand delusion of non-initiates (essentially women and children).98 Hencethe power of societies and religious associations based on the ritualmanipulation of confined knowledge and kinship identities relied to a largeextent on containing the menace of foreign forces, the threat of outsidecompetitors and the blurring of licit kinship.The colonial codification of funerals progressively transformed earlier

notions of elusive ‘others’ who could steal spiritual forces from bodies, intouncontrollable fears provoked by invasive people and unrestricted pro-cedures. Under colonial law, the techniques for taking care of corpses andrelics only survived at the cost of considerable danger and extensive re-composition. Dramatic alterations crystallized after 1923, when a generaldecree systematized European attacks on the collection of relics.99 Under thegeneric title of ‘repression of anthropophagy’, the law criminalized the col-lection of bones (labeled as ‘violation of tombs and profanation of cadavers’)and associated the search for human remains with the consumption and/or

96 Beti charged the cadaver of all existing impurities in order to cleanse the community.Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations, 197. See also the ritual cleansing in the sea among Mpongweafter burial, Archives CSSP Fonds Pouchet, ‘Les Mpongwes’, unsigned notes (dactyl.),2d 60–8 B6. For the same reason, autopsies were sometimes performed by slaves or lowdependants. ‘Cimetieres mpongwes’, unsigned notes, CSSP Fonds Pouchet, 2D60- 8B6.

97 For the Fang: Tessman, Die Pangwe, French trans., 285ff, and Laburthe-Tolra,Initiations, 337–49. For the Mpongwe: Raponda-Walker and Sillans, Rites, 150–4. Forthe Nkomi: Gaulme, Le pays de Cama, 213–15.

98 Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations, 339, 348–9. Relics were also used in the making andempowerment of initiation societies (skulls of initiates buried under main pillar in bwitichapels, remains of powerful women buried in sacred ground of the female njembeinitiation society). Raponda Walker and Sillans, Rites, 153–4.

99 This policy was backed by the missionaries, who unequivocally condemned localcults of familial relics, and observed an ambiguous attitude about the use of Christianones. Interview with Pere Zacharie Peron at Sindara, Gabon, 3 July 2002.


traffic in human flesh (‘anthropophagy’).100 Severe sanctions punished of-fenders, while the range of misinterpretations that characterized Europeanand African visions of death rituals widened. Europeans often misread ritualautopsies as criminal ceremonies organized by witches to dismember andconsume human flesh, or they suspected that people who desecrated tombshad previously killed the person to make fetishes. Both crimes were punishedby the death penalty.By the 1920s, greater difficulty in accessing appropriate relics, especially of

important people who could not escape colonial scrutiny or denunciationfrom rivals, probably encouraged ritual specialists to use alternative sourcesof body remains, and to have recourse to unrelated and undifferentiated bodyparts. This, in turn, triggered competition between families and rising an-xieties about protecting one’s relatives’ corpses. Second, specialists con-fronted by the severe sanctions attached to the profanation of tombs choseinstead to make relics and charms from vulnerable people, even if unrelatedto their patrons. In contemporary Equatorial Africa, rumors about thecriminal use of bodies confirm the extent to which this pattern has taken rootin people’s imagination. Popular stories present the ideal victim as bothvulnerable (i.e. not protected by excessive social or stately scrutiny) and agood source of spiritual power, hence the recurring gossip and fears aboutsacrifices of young women and children, sometimes forced upon weak andisolated parents.In this context, the role of specialists in charge of circulating the sacred

altered considerably. Earlier rituals, although hidden from the profane, de-lineated the specialists’ function of collecting body remains for the good ofthe deceased’s kinship group or initiation society. Secret knowledge wasorganized with the consent of the community and legitimized the position ofritualists, even if occasional doubts about the latter’s benevolence existed. Inthe new economy of the sacred, popular suspicions tended to increase. InCameroon in the 1960s, for example, members ofMelan, an initiation societyin charge of protecting the community through the cult of the dead, wereaccused of stealing buried corpses.101 In Equatorial Africa today, where‘traditional’ associations have lost considerable influence over society atlarge to syncretic churches and elitist cults (Bwiti, Njobi, Pentecostalism),such mistrust runs high. Many are rumored to serve preeminently theirmembers’ selfish thirst for power through the murder of helpless victims.102

In the realm of magic, ritual specialists are less than ever perceived as

100 Decret relatif a la repression de l’anthropophagie en Afrique occidentale et enAfrique equatoriale francaise, JOAEF, 15 June 1923, 282. Although trials show that the1923 law derived from a long jurisprudence, early decrees are difficult to trace, as theywere not published in the Journal officiel, but originated in the governor general’s office inthe form of occasional letters and circulaires.

101 Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations, 348–9. Similar stories, encouraged by whites, plaguedemergent syncretic cults such as Bwiti, Njobi and Mademoiselle in Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville. On Bwiti, see J. W. Fernandez, Bwiti. An Ethnography of the ReligiousImagination in Africa (Princeton, 1982), and Andre Mary, Le defi du syncretisme. Le tra-vail symbolique de la religion d’eboga (Gabon) (Paris, 1999).

102 For instance, the murder of a two-year-old girl before the elections, in ‘Peur sur laville de Mouila’, article in Misamu, 251 (14–28 May 2002), 1–2. Interview on urbanlegends in Libreville with Jean-Ferdinand Mbah, Libreville, 14 June 1998.


invariably enforcing collective prosperity, nor are trusted insider elites.Rather, popular opinion tends to see foreign marabouts or self-proclaimedbanganga as destructive outsiders working for the sole benefit of predatoryleaders.As earlier techniques for the reproduction of kinship came under colonial

attacks, the position of relics and body fragments experienced considerabledisplacements. Starting in the early decades of the twentieth century, theirrole in protecting group identities gradually declined, allowing alien bodiesand criminal procedures to permeate kinship rituals. Yet this deteriorationdid not proceed from a simple process of commodification, converting bodyfragments into neutral and univocally material ‘things’. Rather, it derivedfrom the intense re-enchanting of body fragments in the context ofheightened kinship vulnerability and from the parallel criminalization ofrelic composition by colonial law. This is the reason why the infiltrationof the monetary economy during the colonial period, and of today’s globalmarket forces in the realm of the sacred, has not diminished the spiritualcontent of relics and body parts.103 Modern visions of the body and bodyparts have not derived in Equatorial Africa from linear economic pressure,scientific ideology or the simple reshaping of magical procedures andbeliefs to answer modern fears. They have emerged, instead, from the his-torical accumulation of judicial, moral and spiritual conflicts betweenAfricans and colonizers over power, the sacred, and the rewards of socialexchange.

CONCLUSION – COLONIALISM AND GLOBAL IMAGINARIES

Since the mid-1990s, historians have provided a range of critiques of JanVansina’s famous interpretation of colonialism as a moment of cognitiverupture and cultural breakdown, pointing instead to the survival ofEquatorial worldviews and their fluid combination with colonial repertoiresand practices.104 By depicting colonialism as a forced engagement betweendissimilar traditions, however, most of these works have failed to address thepremise of cultural distance and moral heterogeneity between colonial actors.In addition, whereas African worldviews have been closely scrutinized,European ones seem to stem from short-term colonial circumstancesrather than from a long and intricate history predating conquest. The latterand the former are typically pictured as irreconcilable, and the formationof the colonial state as deriving mostly from ‘creative’ or ‘workingmisunderstandings’, an approach that, although immensely productive, has

103 On commodities and moral evil, see Taussig, The Devil, and Birgit Meyer,Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh,1999).

104 Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge. 1995);Mbembe, La naissance du maquis ; Bernault, Democraties ambigues ; Didier Gondola,Villes-Miroirs (Paris, 1997); Christopher Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in EquatorialAfrica: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester, 2002); Tamara Giles-Vernick,Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rainforest(Charlottesville, 2002).


not added insignificant fuel to the ethnocentric dogma of Europeans andAfricans’ cultural difference.105

In the realm of the imaginary, the criminal and the unconscious, the for-mulaic similarity of white and black visions of the body and power suggeststhat the reconfigurations sparked by the colonial encounter can also be ex-plained by the premise of historical proximity. To suggest that colonizersand Africans shared mutually intelligible ideas and symbolic systems doesnot solve the enigma of the colonial encounter on the cheap, but, instead,pushes intricate issues first uncovered by the premise of difference further.In the realm of body and power, the latent compatibility between Europeanand African symbolic systems did not stem from the mere existence of inertrepertoires across the racial divide. Rather, their combination was promptedby changing engagements between colonial agents, and in the case ofEquatorial Africa, by the failure of colonial hegemonic discourses. Colonialconfrontations encouraged Africans and Europeans to transform theirrepresentations of the corporeal sacred, and to engage in an extensive re-fetishizing of the human body.Nor does attention to the existence of compatible repertoires or cultural

predilections make colonial differences disappear under the thick veil of re-semblance; it merely locates cultural and ideological conflicts on a differentplane. In Equatorial Africa, the politics of difference enforced by Europeansattempted to strip the African body of spiritual and moral eminence andderived largely from the desire to mask any physical or cultural congruencewith the natives in order to render contiguity unthinkable. Therefore, col-onial politics crystallized less from existing symbolic ormaterial discrepanciesthan from conscious or unconscious strategies of organizing racial difference.By contrast, Africans’ absorption of white body parts acted directly upon acapacity to work on the basis of religious and material compatibility.Peter Geschiere has warned against the risk of overrating the colonial in-

fluence on the formation of occult repertoires in contemporary Africa.106 Myown opinion is that we cannot go far enough in identifying in which quali-tative ways the colonial episode informed symbolic configurations at work inmodern Africa and in the world at large. In Equatorial Africa, I have sug-gested that the transgressive sacrifice came to inform most of the interracialdialogue about the body and power that took place after the 1880s. AsAfrican bodies and resources entered a new sacrificial logic and provided thesubstance of colonial power, the absorption of white body parts sustained thelocal repertoires of the sacred. In this process, whites did not interfere as theembodiment of the global, but as intimate actors and resources in the com-position of indigenous cosmologies. In turn, European hegemonic visionsand power tactics could not escape from being informed by grass-rootsconfrontations with African agents and ideologies. At the same time as thisdetour proved critically important in the making of colonial imaginaries, bothgroups tended to experience it as a frightening moment of transgression and

105 For a recapitulation of this approach, see Thomas Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism andthe limits of invention’, Journal of African History, 44 (2003), 3–27. For a suggestivecritique, see Wyatt MacGaffey, ‘Changing representations in central African history’,Journal of African History, 46 (2005), 189–207.

106 Geschiere, in Meyer and Geschiere (eds.), Globalization, 232.


potential destruction. In this process of destructive understandings, they rec-ognized how the production and reproduction of power in the colony reliedon the logic of social mediation, i.e. the need to engage with foreign yetintimate ‘others’. This relational imaginary of power, immersed by threatsof cultural proximity and moral failure, has perhaps not deserted post-colonial visions of economic growth and international transactions. Today,as global economic expansion and depletion are more than ever tied to thereworking of our spiritual imaginations, inhabitants of the global world havenot turned away from the imaginary of the transgressive sacrifice. Nor hasthe body-fetish stopped haunting people’s imagination about the location ofpower, the menace of interpersonal dependency and the possibility of socialsurvival.


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Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa

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