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From masquerade to video-film : mediatingthe demonic in West Central Africa

Michael Rowlands UCL.

I have a problem with the idea of an

irreplaceable object. The problem is with the

idea that an object has an essence that makes it

irreplaceable. To say that an object is

irreplaceable must assume that it has a

particular character or content; that is unlike

any other. If an essence exists that makes an

object irreplaceable, we must also assume a

single mode of transmission that ensures that

the essence contained in the object remains

irreplaceable. Moreover irreplaceable objects

can not survive exposure as fraudulent or fake ;

like relics they will not survive questioning

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the twinned scrutinies of authenticity and

efficacy.

The focus of my paper is to deny the necessity

for these assumptions empirically in the setting

of West Africa. I will argue that here we can

examine the displacement of the idea of

irreplaceability from one object to another and

from one mode of transmission to another. A

notion of irreplaceability implies the presence

of an economy of replaceables i.e. a search for

new things to re-materialize irreplaceability.

If my argument has weight then the idea of an

irreplaceable object cannot depend on what it

represents or means’. Singularity cannot be fixed

in meaning but rather depends on what the object

or image is or what it does at any particular

moment. The direction of analysis is therefore

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performative rather than interpretive and the

source of debate is Latour but the focus on

efficacy also suggests that what is deemed

irreplaceable at one moment can , at another,

become irrelevant and replaceable and no longer

authentic or efficacious. If the object /image

doesn’t represent or mean anything anymore but

still exists, then it does so because of its

potential.

The assumption I am making about the materiality

of irreplaceable objects takes up two of the

classic arguments made about the definition of

the fetish, in particular as re-interpreted from

Marx by William Pietz (1985:5-17) Pels ( 1998)

and others :

1. The fetish denies a radical separation of

matter and spirit or as pointed out by

Latour at least since Durkheim "the price of

2

entry into the sociology profession" has been

"to realize that the inner properties of

objects do not count, that they are mere

receptacles for human categories" (Latour,

1993: 52). What has become rather generally

argued as the independence of object agency

(eg Gell 199 ) although fetish objects are

usually associated with the body.

Historically, "'fetish' has always been a word of

sinister pedigree", as Pietz remarked (1985: 5).

Initially a product of the encounter between

Europeans and Africans, in particular the

relation of the Portugese with coastal West

Africans in the 16th and 17th centuries, it

became synonymous with the fear of the inability

to keep God and the World apart (Graeber )

Irreplaceable encounters

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In Critique of Judgement Kant insists that we

cannot think of living matter as possible. The

essential character of matter,he argues, is

inertia (Kant Judgement sec 73,# 394) . A

long philosophical history can be invoked in

the West opposing the implications of a |

Kantian perspective turning nature into a

resource or a commodity to stress instead the

spontaneity of matter. What, it would be

asked, are the implications of taking seriously

the vitality of (non-human) bodies? ( Bennett

2010 :viii). As Latour would argue, what

would it mean to treat a resource not as a

commodity but having vitality that is not

necessarily described as having a spirit or

soul ? ( Latour 2004 ).

But this emphasis amongst writers ,such as Gell

( 1998 ),Latour (1994 ) and others, on the

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efficacy of things, sits uneasily with a

European distrust of ‘false objects’ ( objects

that whilst detached from the body can act upon

it and control it). The fear of things subverting

the autonomously acting self, is related historically

to the transformation of the value of relics from

agency to sign during the Counter Reformation of the

Catholic church in Europe.The Protestant appeal

against any kind of proof of divine presence in

the shape of a spirit or a soul occupying

idolatrous statues/relics managed by priestly

led rituals was countered by Catholic retention

of the spirit of God to be encountered

personally in the ritual of the Mass. Although

between 1520 and 1650 , hundreds of thousands

of relics were destroyed in Europe, it didn’t

mean that the irreplaceable nature of the relic

was lost . In defending itself against

Protestantism, Catholicism became both, more

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and less like its adversary. The Catholic

church emphasised hierarchical control at the

expense of the uncontrolled growth of popular

devotions, by pushing for what can be described

as a "modernising agenda": the removal of

"superstitions", which consequently involved

assessments of exactly what kind of belief and

practice should be deemed superstitious and

what should constitute authentic faith; the

elimination of quasi-commercial elements and

overt exchange relations from devotional life

and the examination of legends, saints, relics

and miracles in the light of historical-

critical evidence. Relics came to be treated

as signs of the power of the church rather than

capable in themselves of miraculous powers .In

the hundred and fifty years between 1580 and

1730, relics of saints that had been recently

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re-discovered in the Catacombs of Rome, were

dispersed through large parts of the Catholic

world, reinforcing the power of the church with

Rome as its centre. But, these processes

brought about a new balance between "true and

false miracles, moving attention towards the

question of authenticity and certification and

towards the definition of the modern boundaries

of faith and superstitition, religion and

medicine [or science more generally] that are

still in force today" (Gotor 2004: 123; cited

in Geisbusch nd).

. So today the fact that you can buy your

personal relics on ebay and create your own

household shrine ( cf Geisbusch nd ) also

corresponds with two other moves in the

sacralisation of object collecting. The

first ,coinciding with the disciplining and

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authenticating of relics, is the collection of

exotic objects as ‘curiousities’. As the

miraculous agency of relics weakens, ,( au moins

à partir de 1215, les reliques doivent être

présentées dans des reliquaires fermés, et on ne

peut donc les toucher: Concile de Latran IV,

canon 62 : « que les reliques ne doivent pas être

exhibées ( ostendantur ) en dehors de leur

boite » cf Recht 2008), collections of museum

objects appear instead to provide an avenue to

the wonders of alterity without the superstitious

fear of the object’s capacity to heal or cure.

The rise of the museum in Europe, from Cabinet of

Curiousity in 17th century to ideas of object

classification by the late 18th century, invokes

a second movement towards treating objects as

signs . From the Vatican collection in the mid

16th century onwards in Europe, ethnographic

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objects are collected because they evoke the

capacity to represent some broader concept or

reality . As Peter Pels has documented early

museum objects are chosen to evoke a sense of

wonder , the feeling of being in the presence of

the extraordinary, to create a sense of being out

of place or in a state of radical difference.

And this sense of wonder arises out of feelings

of rupture and wounding; an interruption to the

everyday expectation of things, caused by the

recognition of the entry of the foreign, the

alien or the strange into a world of routine

similarity ; it’s the wonder of alterity ( Pels

1997:91-122).

But if the ethnographic object collected as 17th

century curiousity, shared something with relics

(both are features of the Catholic south of

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Europe ), it was a concern with the materiality

of the object –ie ethnographic objects acted as

rarities or curiousities that were not yet part

of ordered collections, taxonomies or

classifications. Like relics they just were; they

had their own presence as signs of wonder. If the

relic joined the believer to the invisible world

of the saint, the rarity of a cabinet of

curiosity evoked the strange or the uncanny as a

feeling of wonder; awe in the face of alterity.

If the relic had a singular relationship in its

essential relationship to the body of a saint,

the ethnographic curio would in Europe become

part of a more systematic process of

documentation and classification converting the

inert power of the object into a taxonomic sign.

But as Arnold has shown cabinets of curiousity in

Northern Europe became linked instead to

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experimentation and alchemy ( Arnold 1995).

Another source of influencing the body led

eventually to the development of medicine. But

whilst objects were still curiousities in the 17th

century , they could potentially be fetishised,

in the sense of being generic rather than

individual and magical rather than religious.

Moreover, as relics were emptied of their

associations with miraculous powers ,becoming

signs rather than agents, ethnographic

curiousities gained the potency of touch, could

be handled and examined and their alchemic power

exposed. ( cf Classen 2005) It is somewhere

within the culture history of this secularizing

trend to recognize certain ‘magical’ qualities in

everyday objects and substances that ,I would

argue, we can see the diffusion of an idea of the

irreplaceable object in European popular culture.

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It is significant that things as diverse as

toys,models and portrait painting gain value

through their irreplaceability by the end of the

18th century. But another feature of the

irreplaceable as the outcome of the entangled

relationship between relic and curiousity in

Catholic Europe of the 17th century, was the

discovery of the ethnographic object as fetish in

the European encounter with West Africa.

The Mask

Witnessed by the sheer number in museum and

private collections and the quantities produced

for the tourist market, the mask is undoubtedly

the irreducible fetish like object as cultural

stereotype created in European relations with

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Africa . African masks were already selected as

the essential icon of African art by the time

that Picasso and Braque and Apollinaire raised

it to a higher level of primitivism in the

creation of Cubism . Bataille re-iterating Freud

on the uncanny, saw the mask as a Surrealist

disturbance, allowing for both the expression of

anxiety ,a sense of danger and a sexual thrill

(Ades 2006). Uniqueness of the mask as

authentic to primitivism, in particular African

primitivism, in turn relates it to European

encounters with Africa in the origin of the

concept of fetish . Pietz ,for example,

distinguishes the fetish from the idol by its

‘irreducible materiality’ identifying the latter

instead as a physical image of an immaterial

original or idea ( Pietz 1985). A Freudian notion

of the Fetish, defined as an object that does not

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represent anything, hints at a sense of thrill

and horror whilst having knowledge of it doesn’t

deny the temptation of a suppressed desire (Freud

2002) .

The Mask as fetish in the European imagination

evokes horror,–the monstrous created as a

feature of borders and transgressions. Also it

compells an inquiry into the nature of

materializing the invisible. When Europeans in

C16th century drew on the language of fetishism ((

the portugese feiticao) to describe the power of

sculptures encountered on the West African coast

as objects capable of material agency the

reaction was already shaped by the re definition

of the meaning of relics rejection by the

Catholic Counter Reformation. A prominent

feature was the extraversion of the superstitious

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power of the relic to the discovery of the

ethnographic object as fetish in the European

encounter with West Africa. The description of

African masks and figures as fetishes begins

almost immediately with Portugese contact in the

16th century ( Pietz 1985:7). Fetishism was

ascribed to West Africans as a sign of their

inability to cope with the presence of the

invisibility of the spirit world. If

Protestantism had ensured that there could be no

material contact with a transcendant God – only

mediation through prayer and reading a sacred

text , and Catholicism had held on to the literal

meaning of the mass but rejected the materiality

of objects as a means of direct encounter with

the sacred, in the West African periphery, a

third possibility of an animistic relation with

the invisible world of spirits was encountered

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through touching or acting upon sculptures and

masks, supplemented by imports of European cloth,

metal objects, beads ,ceramics and bottles with

or with out alcohol that were rapidly assimilated

as a means of strengthening the mediation.

Given a vaguely anthropomorphic form , it s

not surprising perhaps that masks gained a

prominence in the characterization of the

religious fetish – ie they were material objects

endowed with a certain animisim . Yet they

displayed the chimeric value in Phillippe

Descola’ description of masks as examples of his

monde de enchevetrement (entanglement) – ie

images can possess additive value by being

composed of elements of diverse origins.( Descola

2010) . Unlike the Christian experience of the

relic as a sign of beatification , the African

fetish became its opposite, a sign of the

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material mediation to a monstrous world of

sorcery / evil and horror. The essential point is

that with the relic in the medieval Christian

sense the direct link between the invisible world

and the object is the physical embodiment of

Christ and apostles and subsequent beatifications

of saints and the metonymic qualities of

touch ,handling and contact of their body

substances. . What accompanied the European

interpretation of the African mask as fetish ,

came the horrible thought that literally an

external spirit could invade the object or the

body. The fetish was the inverse of the relic and

it was thought that contact with the fetish

object would corrupt the flesh and damage the

soul of a Christian convert. Hence the long term

hostility to ‘pagan objects’ by Portugese,Dutch

or Spanish missionaries centuries on the West

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African coasts throughout the 16th and 17th

centuries . Up until the late 18th century,

fetishes were burnt or destroyed by Europeans

until the principles of science and evolutionary

classification made collecting them a more

amenable mode of preservation. In fact European

metaphors of bodily invasion would not be

appropriate for understanding indigenous ideas of

body substances and their transmission in much of

west and central Africa but any critique based on

more substantial ethnographic understanding of

African realities would not be relevant here.

Instead it is precisely the hybrid nature of the

way ideas of the relic stripped of animistic

qualities yet still retaining a powerful image

for the curing of bodies and souls entered both

European and African Christian ideas of

conversion and belonging.

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‘Tribal’ Encounters

Over a long durée of several hundred years , in

particular of long term missionary contact , it

is implausible to imagine a dual structure of

European fear of the mask as materialized fetish

and an independent African aesthetic being

maintained in isolation of each other. The mask

is incommensurable with and in several ways a

consequence of the hyphenated European – African

encounter and the several different forms that

can be recognized:

First,the mask as a hybrid product of this

encounter makes its appearance first as a product

of the decontextulaised museum collection. (fig

Michelle Leiris mask collected in the Dakar –

Djibouti expedition). Anthropologists of

African Art ,for example, have spent the last

1

forty years, establishing that the tribal art

image of the African mask bears no relation to

the study of masquerades , ie where the mask is

part of a performance including a use of dance,

music and a materially transformed human body .

Nor can we simply by re-contextualising the

isolated mask change its significance. The mask,

or for that matter the fetish figure in more

general terms, is shown to have a material and

spiritual presence that proves it capable of

having a power in its own right.

Second, we have examples in which the image as

icon has been transformed through the encounter

with European primitivism, In 1958 the Austrian

artist Susanne Wenger living in Nigeria, was

approached by a delegation of officials of the

Yoruba deity Osun who asked for her help in

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repairing their shrines in the town of Osogbo .

These had been in decline for some years and the

sacred forest land was being encroached by

farmers and businessmen. (Probst 2007). As a

devotee of the deity, she accepted the offer and

the repair began with the Idi Baba shrine at the

outskirts of Osogbo on the way to Ibokun. Work on

the main Osun temple in the grove followed after

this was completed. However, what was initially

intended to be just a kind of minor face lift,

ended up as nothing but an iconic riot. Ranging

from small and modest statues to huge and

imposing shrines, the grove became flooded with

new image works. Conceptually, by lending the

various Yoruba deities believed to reside in the

grove a new material presence, the idea was to

reunite art and culture in order to fill the

absence that the alienating effects colonialism

1

and capitalism had caused in Yoruba society. Put

differently and phrased in Weberian terms, what

happened had been a shift from the colonial

processes of disenchantment, to a postcolonial

project of re-enchantment. (Probst 2007: 103 ). .

As far as Wenger was concerned the experiment

was a deliberate move to create new iconic

images “expressing the fluid, open and still

undetermined phase that Yoruba society was

believed to go through “ (Probst 2007:103,

Ogundele 2003:107). Thus in 1965 , five years

after Independence the Nigerian government

declared the Osun grove a national monument. In

the 1970’s a festival committee was established

and over the next two decades the Osun festival

became one of the largest cultural festivals in

Nigeria and a prominent site in the memoryscapes

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of the Yoruba diaspora, entering the UNESCO world

heritage list in July 2005 (Probst 2007: 104).

Relating words to objects

This relationship of words to objects is central

to understanding another aspect of the encounter

between Europeanas and Africans; the impact of

Missionary Christianity . Central to the origins

of the Protestant tradition in the Reformation in

Europe was the status of language . Prayer and

reading aloud replaced the Catholic tradition of

ritual and veneration of objects and images. As

Talal Asad has shown, sincerity of the Christian

believer is based on the belief that words give

outward expression to the inner intentions of

persons. Language is the crucial mediator between

the subject and the object and the intention of

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believers is best evaluated by the purity of

their speech (Asad 1993).

A strong idea exists instead in West Central

Africa that speech activates the power of objects

and substances for either good or bad effects.

Intentions cannot be judged by speech alone but

by the effects speech and words as well as the

tone of the sounds of speech or the level of

noise have on both things and substances that

affect the person. These include substances in

the body and hence illness and death. For long

periods extreme Protestant sects found it

difficult to reconcile their basic hostility to

material objects as fetishes with this

materialized use of speech and sound in many

parts of West Central Africa . Quakers for

example rely on the spontaneity of speech as

2

revelation but it is also believed that speech

itself has material effects and should be frugal

and austere . The power of speech to affect the

material world is deeply embedded in Pentecostal

services ,involving emotional display and noise

as a means of attracting the Holy Spirit .

Through possession the devotee will ‘speak in

tongues’, the unintelligibility of which is a

guarantee of its divine source. What gets mixed

up with this in the African context, is that

speech itself is deemed in certain circumstances

to come from ancestors and is not contained

within or a product of the living person. In fact

this is why angry speech or complaining speech is

powerful in the sense that the speech of

ancestors materializes their mediation with

spirit worlds and their speech can activate the

latter to act either for the good or bad of the

1

living to whom the words are being directed (cf

Dillon 1990). Quite often when someone is heard

speaking loudly or angrily , you will hear

someone in earshot admonishing the person saying

‘bad speech’ brings misfortune whatever the

person’s lack of intentionality. Like the

masquerade held in control by a rope, speech can

get out of control.

There is no irreconcilable difference therefore

between the ‘African’ knowledge of the way words,

sound,touch and objects mediate with invisible

worlds and the hostility to the fetish brought to

bear on this scenario by the prejudice of

missionary activities. The Eurocentric bias

privileges words over objects as a result of the

Protestant turn in Christianity. This difference

varies clearly with the dominance of different

2

schools of Christian thought and their impact

through education of the young. Pentecostals are

largely totally hostile to ‘pagan objects’ whist

Catholicism has traditionally been tolerant.

But the impact of more fundamentalist

Christianity in many parts of west central

Africa, has been to drive masquerades either into

a form of dance group spectacle by which the

family of the deceased will display their

prestige or into undisclosed ,usually nighttime,

activities .

The idea that noise is a bridge or a means

of making connections suggest sound acts as a way

of making the invisible visible as a principal

means of mediation to material and spirit worlds.

It may sound odd but the important point is

neither to separate conceptually the material

1

from the spiritual nor sound from the visual . In

a recent discussion of African religions ,

Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar distinguish

between visible and invisible realms as distinct

space-times set apart in African religions

( Ellis and ter Haar 2004). They argue that

the spiritual or invisible world precedes the

material or visible worlds in time. Spirits are

future oriented and will be in front of the

living in time. The spirit world also has no

spatial constraints ie spirits can travel

anywhere and be there instantaneously. But the

visible and the invisible worlds also overlap ,

and where they do, there are gateways where kinds

of heterotopias form that are materialised as

spirit possession, or objectified in spirit

shrines or Pentecostal churches. Using Badiou,

(2005) this materializing of identities is not

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only principally ritual in form but also is

experienced as an event through the spatialising

act of segmenting and localizing the flux of

temporalities

My general argument is that in non Islamic West

Africa , very broadly, it is sound that activates

objects and substances whether in the form of the

voice and tones of words, or music or more

generally percussive effect. Objects do not have

fixed essences in the sense that they can be

traced to an origin, in particular that of the

body of a saint or the skill of a particular

author . But the idea that certain objects or

sites,once activated, may retain the power to

protect against malevolence and moreover, this

may be reinforced through demonstrable success in

their efficacy,does make them irreplaceable. It

1

is through the idea that combinations of

words ,sounds and objects are efficaciousness in

repressing feelings of anxiety that we can

understand how this serves to displace

expressions of horror to another medium ; the

video horror film .

From mask to videodrama

In the Western genre category of the horror

movie, the monster is a reflection on the nature

of evil that emerges through the actions of

individuals . As Tobias Wendel, has emphasized ,

the internalisation of the horror movie in

Africa, is not simply one of adoption but more a

staging and restaging in local video films of

different expectations of the nature of evil

(Wendel 2001). Witchcraft is a substance that

2

within the body can be activated and take

different forms and powers ,for example the

witchdoctor, the jujuman, evil pastor or the

stealer of body organs for occult rituals. In

both Nigeria and Ghana, video dramas portray the

village and tradition as backward, poor,

dangerous and uncivilised. Fears of witchcraft,,

particularly among the young and urban dwelling,

are directed aagainst close , elderly, kin

living in the village. The difference between

thee domesticated village and the bush or forest

as wild is transformed into village experienced

as a wilderness and the city as the hope for

well-being and success .Yet the village is where

all will claim an origin ; where the dead as a

corpse must be returned for burial and where

access to the invisible world of ancestors and

spirits will be achieved. Hence the frequency

1

with which the village is depicted in films as

over-run by witches and cannibals is matched by

the hero ( for example, a fundamentalist pastor)

who comes to clean the place up and return its

inhabitants back to a moral way of life. Whilst

the city and increasingly the diasporic life

abroad is of the present and the future., the

diaspora is also the world of modernity and

innovation but, in itself, is incapable of

reproduction; it has a sterile quality . In the

literature on ‘bushfalling’ ( literally implying

that the migrant is a hunter who goes to the bush

or wilderness of the modern) , the young who in

the past went to the forest to hunt for bushmeat,

now go to the modern urban equivalent to

gather wealth and items of success. But the

bushfaller (literally the person who falls into

the bush) is unable to reproduce the conditions

2

of success without bringing the products of it

back to the village ( in the form of remittances,

or building a house there) (Nyamnjoh 2011).

Videodramas have the same status as the

mask/masquerade therefore in creating the

conditions for bringing the outside in. If the

mask represents the outside being brought into

the village as a masquerade , it does so because

of its hybrid Euro-African character. However as

image and words, the consumption of video-dramas

is compatible with more fundamentalist Christian

ideals of the religious service ,with a focus

on speech and prayer. It is also more compatible

with modernized forms of witchcraft discourse

linked by some writers to new forms of cultural

economy defined as the conjuring of wealth by

resort to inherently mysterious techniques .

Ellis and ter Haar have already criticized the

1

tendency to use terms like ‘occult’ to generalise

about the nature of African religion. The problem

being that calling them occult implies the

western connotation of an abstract evil separate

from what happens in everyday material life.

Instead a working definition of African religion

used here assumes a more immanent sense of

material efficacy through direct mediation .

Hence if masquerades are nor representative of

anything but are literally deemed to have

significant means to mobilize spirits in

invisible worlds then the same can be said of

video movies. They are not horror movies simply

in the sense of Freud’s release of the repressed

but are more literally a means of describing the

efficacy of an invisible world intervening in the

conditions of material life

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Conclusion

My argument hinges on the idea that the value of

irreplaceability need not be due to a quality of

uniqueness . The idea of unique and

irreplaceable objects, usually with some notion

of emotional attachment, which we associate in

psychoanalytic terms with Melanie Klein’s

discussion of good and bad objectsa or John

Bowlby’s writings on attachment theory, are I

suggest more deeply rooted in the early Christian

ideas of the power of relics and their capacity

to create a special human relationship based on

healing and curing. I would argue that the idea

of the fetish was a product of European anxiety

in dealing with the power of the relic at home

only to encounter its inverse in Africa. But this

was also based on the opposite principle that the

1

idea of the relic as irreplaceable ( linked to

the power of the body as sacrifice in

Christianity) also found its inversion in

Africa; the idea that the irreplaceable depended

on replaceables , on ‘taking the outside in’ .

What I think we need to understand is the economy

of replaceables needed in order to identify an

object as irreplaceable – and how by studying

their different forms over time we can identify –

a preoccupation with the irreplaceable as a

metaphysic that materializes itself in different

forms.

European encounters with Africans was part of the

process by which the vitality of matter was

demonized in order to usher in the 17th century

‘scientific revolution’. If matter was inert and

passive, then unlike ‘in nature’, in itself

matter as inert presents no dangers except from

2

the effects of human intervention. The argument

in this paper participates therefore with a wider

growing consensus on the efficacious powers of

things or the idea of vibrant matter. But while

these arguments are politically also salutary,

they miss the sense of longing that remains

implicit in the notion of ‘irreplaceability’.

Similar to Pierre Lemonnier’s teddy bear as

childhood companion, the idea of ‘growing up’ and

putting childish ‘things’ aside demonizes the

longing for the loss of the relic but also

justifies our everyday adult sense of being a

collector .

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