Possession and exorcism on the margins of Islam: Mali

Abstract

This article focuses on three different patterns of spirit possession in Mali, a country where spirits interact with human beings. Some Malian cases – but not all of them – comfort the well-received theory asserting that possession is a form of protest and is related to a historical crisis. African possession cults are generally considered as characteristics of marginal groups in response to the domination of a monotheist religion, especially Islam and Christianity, but several cults from the Minianka area contradict this ideal type. At a national level, some cults look for a compromise with the spirits, while others are aimed to get rid of them.

Introduction

Possession and exorcism are very difficult themes to analyse because in Euro-American cultures the principle ‘one mind – one body’ is generally admitted even if it has been seriously challenged in different disciplines, especially in the history of religions and in psychoanalysis. Another problem is related to the vocabulary that we use. Anthropologists ‘do things with words’ and cannot do otherwise, but they have learnt that none of these words are neutral and that they do not have the same meaning in different contexts (Austin, 1991). There is nothing like a raw fact without any interpretation because perception, observation, and recording are from the very beginning highly selective. More and more anthropologists agree on the fact that the ‘data’ are indeed always constructed, as they result from an intersubjective process in the field. Data have to be considered as the product of a complex collaboration with the people we interact with in the field, rather than as fixed empirical entities.

I have lived part-time around possession practitioners since 1972, first among the Minianka of Mali, where, at the time, only a minority of elites and traders were Muslim. Since then, I kept going back for several months in the same area roughly every two years, and I have witnessed dramatic changes in the religious sphere, including a massive Islamization. As I used to be housed by a chief of a Nya religious society, I was subsequently said to be on the tracks of chiefdom and not on the tracks of possession. However, I collected more than 100 confessional conversations with possessed people, and some of them were filmed or videotaped (Colleyn, 1988, 1993, 1996, 1999). ¹ I use the term confessional because an official medium of a possession cult normally has no right to talk about possession with somebody who is not himself ‘on the road of possession’. ² Since 2012, as it was impossible for insecurity reasons to go in Koutiala cercle, I worked in the main city of Bamako on other possessions cults. In parallel, I worked in a collaborative project of visual anthropology with other researchers: in South Togo (1988, with Marc Augé), in Brazil (1990 with Veronique Boyer), in Bijago Islands (1992, with Alexandra de Sousa), in Venezuela (1993 with Gemma Orobitg), and in Senegal (2019–2020, with Manthia Diawara). ³ This gives a wide range of spirit possession cases presenting many differences but also many resemblances, the possessed person displaying numerous features – in their facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, relation to music – during the time of what can be considered as a performance.

This article focuses on three different patterns of spirit possession in Mali, a country where spirits are part of the natural and social world and interact with human beings. The field of possession and exorcism is a difficult one because, as de Certeau (1987) stresses it, ‘the representation disguises the praxis that is organizing it’ (p. 69). Some Malian cases comfort the well-received theory asserting that possession is a form of protest related to a historical crisis, but several cults from the Minianka area ⁴ contradict this ideal type. Possession cults are generally considered by anthropologists as characteristics of marginal groups in response to the domination of a monotheist religion, especially Islam and Christianity, but I do not think that this pattern can be generalized. For sure any single case of spirit possession is more complex than the models that we can propose but we can underline for the sake of comparison on some striking structural oppositions. This comparative agenda does not allow entering into detailed case studies, but those are available in other publications.

Central possession cults

In Mali, particularly among the Minianka, some cults can be seen as ‘central possession cults’ – a concept borrowed to I.M. Lewis’s (1971). They do not legitimize another power than themselves. Historically, these cults did not appear in reaction to a dominant religious order, they were genuinely the main religious institution of hundreds of villages not yet converted to Islam. ⁵ Many sanctuaries were devoted to different deities – Klè, Nya, Nagho (Nankon) – that still exist although today in a residual form, due to the spread of Islam from the early 1960s on. ⁶ These deities are not organized in a pantheon or united by a consistent theology or mythology and there is no central political authority: before colonization, this area was divided in small chiefdoms (kafow). During the nineteenth century, the Segu Empire was threatening them in the North and Kenedugu in the South. In 1987, a large village like Mpessoba (6136 habitants in the 1987 census) had at least 21 Nya temples each of them having around 50 persons as active members. Until the 1960s, in the Minianka area, so-called ‘traditional cults’ reunited 80% of the population, but today the proportion is reverse and the ‘fetishists’ ⁷ hardly dare to declare themselves as such any more. During colonization, the ‘animist’ cults were sometimes prosecuted by Muslim ‘Chefs de canton’ appointed by the colonial administration. The first Malian Republic, of socialist obedience under the impulse of Modibo Keita, considered those cults as backward, and it was roughly the same under the regimes of General Moussa Traoré (1968-1991), Alpha Konaré (1992 à 2002), and Amadou Toumani Touré (2002–2012). From the early 1960s, the conversions to Islam have been massive. Current social instability, far from favouring the animist cults, tends to diminish their importance. With the expansion of Islam, development of economic exchanges, the deployment of state institutions (courts, schools, etc.), and the progress of Islam, old Nya temples for instance lose their prestige and pass from a central to peripheral status. In all those ancient central spirit possession cults, there is no suspense during the ceremonies: the musicians and singers play and one or two entitled possessed persons are ‘seized’ by Klè, Nya, or Nagho and act as ‘officials’ of the cult. The possessed person is always ‘taken’ by the same deity and never by another one. In this context, no one considers possession as a pathological symptom, and the possessed person cannot be considered as marginalized or underprivileged persons. In no case, the possession crisis can be seen as a form of insurrection. The purpose of the ritual is not to heal a possessed person, and a psychological stress does not cause the recruitment into the cult. Most of the possessed persons receive the office by heritage within their family. The status of ‘possessed person’ – better translated as the deity’s messenger (tudumu) – used to be an honour, but it is progressively transformed in a subject of shame (Colleyn, 1996, 1999). More and more young people refuse the ‘calling’ of possession, a destiny that people foreign to the cult and who have attended school tend erroneously to conflate with jinè bana, the illness caused by spirits, very popular in other regions of Mali.

For a long time, the Minianka epitomized the resistance to Islam, but even in their non-Muslim ritual life, they have borrowed most of their religious keywords to Arab language via Bamanan-kan, the Malian lingua franca in the country (Colleyn, 2014; Koné, 2012). They call the deities they were or still are worshipping (Nya, Nagho, Komo, Kono, Nama, Manya, Ciwara, etc.) setane (or sitani), an Arab term which, for the Minianka, is not specially related to the Devil (Iblis) but which indicates that these deities can be mean and dangerous. Setane in this context is even a laudatory name, addressed to entities metaphorically identified as ‘wild beasts’ (waraw). At the same time, they credit the same spiritual powers with the praise-name Mangala (God). Interestingly, only Klè is recognized as the unique ‘unbegotted and creator of all things God’, whose strength does not rest on hand-built sacred objects and who is the same God worshipped by the Muslims. The cult devoted to Klè is a possession cult as well, but it has indeed Muslim roots. In a remote time (nobody recalls when), a traveling Muslim marabou walked through the Kenedugu, preaching for a new God (Allah kura). He was taken as a saint (wali), maker of miracles, but when he died, his relics were safeguarded and a new cult to the supreme God (Klè i.e. Sky) was created. Klè also seeks ‘to ride its horses’: in some villages a man (like in Karagouroula), in others a duo of possessed women (like in Sanga). He is not remembered by his name but by the word Nabun (Nampun, the foreigner). Two festivals celebrate him and his wife. No photograph, film, or simply a record of the possession ritual is allowed, but we have witnessed several venues of the Nabun. The Klè messenger (Klè-tudumo), with a voice distorted by a kazoo, warns the villagers about possible threats on their harvest or on their health (bush fire, locust invasions, epidemics, etc.). The messenger always recommends some offerings and sacrifices to influence the course of history.

Nya cult

All the other deities who ‘take people in possession’ are honoured through sacrifices on sacred altars (b: boliw, m: yapèrlè). ⁸ At certain dates, these deities capture (m: co) accredited men and speak through their mouth. Nya influences rainfall, favour fertility, and protect against witches (b: subaga; m: siganfè). Twice a year, a ceremony stages a raid of Nya into the bush, from where deep knowledge is said to come. In the tumult of a dancing crowd with a band of musicians, a procession takes form around the two or three accredited possessed men. One of them opens the temple and carries the three bags containing the sacred altars, in order to ‘go into the bush’. The destination is actually a special enclosure called Nya’s wood (Nya-tu) where sacrifices have to take place (Colleyn, 1988, 2004). During the trip, the musicians sing the praises of Nya. The altars (boliw) are taken from the bags and placed in large potteries on top of which dogs and chicken are sacrificed. As diurnal inhabitant of the village, the dog is viewed as a substitutive victim replacing the hyena, wild and nocturnal animal of the bush, considered as an expert in witchcraft. ‘To nourish Nya’, the altars are covered with sacrificial blood, while the meat is transported to the village in order to be cooked and eaten by the initiates, including the women. In the evening, the musicians go back to their instruments and start to sing Nya’s praises while the deity mounts its ‘horses’ again ‘to go home’. In the weak light of a straw fire, at the door of the temple, with his hands resting on the altars bags, the elder of the possessed men – called ‘Nya’s mouth’ (Nya da) or ‘Nya’s messenger’ (m: tudumo) – pronounces oracles, foretells, gives advices, threatens the witches, answers the supplications, and mediates in conflicts. It is why we call him medium. Nya’s work (bara) is to resolve dispute, restore solidarity, facilitate reconciliation between individuals or families, and protect mystically the village and its environment. ⁹ The principle of ‘possession’ is a complex one. The horse metaphor is already not completely consistent with the principle of incorporation, although the ‘horse’ itself can tell afterwards that Nya ‘was in him’ or that he was himself ‘under the sitani’ (mè wa sitani nyoni)’. When he talks in the name of Nya, the possessed man uses the first person: ‘I am not something from today’.

This entire system looks like an institutionalized adorcism, but it is quite common that in the course of his life, the messengers of Nya try to resist the possession. This might have an ideological explanation or a psychological one. Following the emic theory of possession, the medium is indeed ‘captured (co) by Nya’; it is unthinkable that he would offer himself to Nya. From a psychological point of view, a question remains: Why, in a family famous for its tradition of mediumnism, is it this boy rather this other one who is fulfilling this role? The life history of possessed people is rarely a quiet river. The elders affirm that in ancient times, refusing the destiny of the messenger of Nya to become Muslim would have been immediately punished by death, but nowadays, most of the possessed persons have been through Muslim episodes, as if there were an hesitation between domestication of the jinè and expulsion. Some of them asked secretly for a Muslim ritual of exorcism (roqia) but most of the time in vain. Nyatyè Coulibaly, a famous Nya messenger of a village close to the city of Koutiala who is one of my friends for many years, tried several times ‘to pray’ in the local mosque, but he was ‘taken by Nya’ right in the middle of the mosque so that the imam ended by asking him to leave and to never come back. Did Nyatyè really want to quit the Nya cult or did he go to the mosque as a provocation? It is hard to tell. I have known a former Nya messenger who left his village (26 miles away), converted himself to Islam, and became mechanic in the cotton factory of Koutiala. But every time there was a Nya festival in his village, he lost control of himself and was not able to go to his work. In Watorosso, another close friend, Kuntigi Sanogo, was a messenger of Nya. When he became the head of the cult in 1981, he continued to act as a messenger, although he was more than 60, to prevent his unique son to become possessed. ‘Nya has taken me, but I refuse that my son would be taken too’. He considered that possession is a very painful job and wanted to protect his son, but when he died in 2010, his son became the messenger of Nya. In Waki-Sokurani, a man in his thirties tells me:

The messenger of Nya, Saliya, is my best friend, but it took a while for him to understand his own situation. He thought that he would be able to beat Nya. Do you know somebody who can refuse the setane? We were really very close. Many times, we were sleeping in the same room. He was praying (Allah) for one year but one night, the Nya took him. He was shaking and screaming. I did not know it was Nya. I tried to calm him down but he whisked me away like straw in the wind and since then he is back in the Nya society as a messenger. ¹⁰

As a student of Georges Balandier, Marc Augé, and Jean Bazin, I was well aware of the historical dimension of social life. I was keen to study the evolution of the texts recorded from the Nya messengers as they were talking in the name of Nya. But I was brought to recognise their remarkable constancy: they give advices, they condemn misbehaviours and ritual neglects, they threaten the witches, they praise the ancestors, but they carefully avoid any political verbal confrontation with the local authorities and with Islam. Their metaphors refer, as they did before, to the nature, the bush, and the ancient customs: nothing about modernity except migrations of young people to the cities and Ivory Coast plantations. There is nothing there that can be compared to the hawka possessions crises as depicted in Niger by Jean Rouch in his famous film The Mad Masters ¹¹ (Colleyn, 2019; Rouch, 1955).

The meaning of the sacrifice is to ‘nourish’ Nya who, while receiving the sacrificial blood on the sacred objects, is devouring the witches. In no case the sacrificial victim could be assimilated to the possessed person or to the person offering the sacrifice: On the contrary, the animal is a substitute for the witch who is killed by Nya (Colleyn, 1988). Those central possession cults are rural; possession used to be the privilege of a minority of male members of a society (b: jo) into which they have been initiated; they still belong to powerful lineages; their careers never begin as an illness; trance has no therapeutic value; and possession confirms a dedication to a specific localized deity. Spirit possession is here a means of expression of a superior ‘voice’. Moreover, far from flourishing in the margins of dominant Islam, the Nya loses its influence whereas Islam is spreading (Colleyn and Péché, 1983; Colleyn and Bonmariage 1988).

Peripheral possession cults (jinè-ton)

There are also in Mali other possession cults, the jinèton a term that can be translated as a society or an association organized around a spirit (jinè). The cult is also known as jinèdon, which can be translated as the dance for the spirits. Unlike the Minianka cults, the jinèton flourished, from the very beginning, probably in the Kayes region, under the umbrella of Islam (Gibbal, 1982, 1988) and most of them are female associations. For the Muslim people, unlike the setane, the jinèw may be good or bad, Muslim or ‘pagan’. They are normally invisible but their society is parallel to human society, and there is a sort of loose pantheon with kinship relations and marriage. We have seen, for instance, the incarnation of

• – Tanba Keita, the hunter, king of Narena, the territory of the spirits. He is dressed in black;

• – Hudé Tanba’s son and chief of his military staff;

• – Sanba Jaré, griot (cèli) of Tanba; his dress has black, yellow and white stripes;

• – Suko (or Jaba Suko), Tanba’s granddaughter. She is the archetypal idealized wife but can switch into a witch. She is a pagan (bamana or kafri) spirit;

• – Soma Suleymani Keyta (King Salomon), Tanba’s grandson is a Bamana hunter as well, dressed in black, like his grandfather;

• – Jorobo Sitan, Tanba’s granddaughter, housewife;

• – Kaba, a human person transformed into a jinè. He is a horse-rider fighter in the service of Tanba;

• – Sanba Fulani is herding the cows of Hudé;

• – Sunkutuba, who lives on the ponds bottom, is half-crocodile, half a crippled human;

• – Fatimata Haydara, a pious old woman, always dressed in white.

And many others.

Unlike in the Minianka cults, where the possessed person is only ‘taken’ by a unique power, here, an experimented possessed person might have successively, during the same performance, up to 10 different incarnations. In contrast to the Nya and other central cults, the jinèton can be considered as a cult of affliction, ¹² dominated by women, with clear therapeutic aims. The managers of the jinèton advertise their ability to cure an ‘illness inflicted by the spirits’ (b: jinè bana), but as Olivier de Sardan (1994) argues, in a religious landscape dominated by Islam, the therapeutic activity might be the only slot allowed.

The jinèton affirm Muslim legitimacy, arguing that in the sunna (the life and acts of the Prophet Muhammad) the evidence of possession and exorcisms are many: jinns (djinn) are mentioned 31 times in the holy book. There are, indeed, in the present-day Muslim world many examples of possession rituals, especially in the Sufi traditions. ¹³ Many authors show, on one hand, the effort of possession cults practitioners to link their beliefs to Muslim cosmology and calendar, on the other hand, how Islamic reformists target spirit possession cults in the hope of banning them. But they also want to ban thousands of marabous who claim to be able to ensure success for all the wishes possible, including school exams, job application, or appointment in a foreign development project. Most of the jinè-ton coexist peacefully in the different sections of Bamako, but some Muslim youth associations or medias link them to debauchery, obscenity, alcohol consumption, and even prostitution. What many Muslim authorities, first of all, the imams, condemn in the jinèton is the fact that the women when taken by the jinèw, lose control of their own body, take off their headscarf, roll on the floor, dance extravagantly, and may adopt sexually provoking attitudes. But there are compromises. In 2015, Nah-jinètigi (Aminata Coulibaly), who lives in Bamako (in Nafadji Sèrèbatou section), healed the son of a ‘Whahhabi’ imam who could not be cured by the Muslim specialists in exorcism nor by the medical doctors. In the early 1990, a Fula sheikh, Sidy Modibo Kane Diallo, organized expeditions in Bèlèdugu and Kaarta to burn thousands of Bamana ritual objects, and to perform exorcism on women suffering from jinè bana (illness caused by a jinè). But he measured the popularity of a famous female jinètigi who operated in the first village he paid a visit to and recognized publicly the legitimacy of her healing activity (Berger, 2010; Soares, 1997: 154).

In Mali today, while all the medias make their front-page titles on jihad and salafism in the North and the centre of Mali, the jinèton is literally booming in Bamako and other cities of the Niger Valley. ¹⁴ Not confined to urban poor sections and the suburbs, they are also well represented in the chic neighbourhoods of Titibougou or Sebeninkoro, not far from the former president of Mali’s private residence. ¹⁵ The jinèton are small communities, sometimes related to each other and most of the time ruled by a woman. Unlike a widespread opinion, the patients and clients do not belong to the underprivileged social class. Generally speaking, in the patrilineal and virilocal kinship and alliance system, many married women are far from their own primary family and have to share their husbands with co-wives. If they are unhappy in their husband’s family, they might be prone to suffer from isolation and moral solitude. The ethical code forbids them to say one word that could embarrass their husband. In such a context, the jinèton appears as a helping support group. The leader of a jinèton (the jinètigi) endowed with a strong personality, accumulates power and wealth, and redistributes ostensibly. As they are reputed to master occult knowledge, their followers (kalandenw) call them karamogo (master, teacher, and scholar), a title originally given only to the Muslim marabous. Jinèton are primarily concerned with curing individuals suffering from mental disorders suspected to be caused by malevolent or resentful spirits, but they seldom chase the spirit away. The ritual aims rather to convert the spirit into a benevolent protector. The priest (jinètigi) concludes a pact with the jinè, obtaining in the course of the negotiation, some advantages for herself or her community. It is why the word jinètigi has different significations: In one sense, it refers to ‘the woman (sometimes the man) who can deal with the spirits’, and in another sense, it means ‘the master of the spirits’. The priests play, of course, astutely on this double sense.

Jinè associations seem to fit the ideal type of cult of affliction proposed by I. M. Lewis (1966, 1986, 1989). The career of the religious healer starts with an initiatic illness, the affliction is being attributed to a superior power. I do not use here the adjectives ‘preternatural’ or ‘supernatural’, because they are inadequate from an emic point of view. For Muslim and Bamana as well, spirits exist out there, but ordinary people in ordinary conditions cannot see them. The first symptom of contact with them is mental confusion or persistent bad luck. After having been cured through a ritual trance of possession, and guided by the jinètigi during several years, the person can be set free and might then start receiving, in turn, ‘patients’ for her own account. The many women who are famous jinètigiw represent undoubtedly a female power but they never openly challenge the overwhelmingly male-dominated Islamic values and social norms. If some of them could not remain married ‘because of their spirit’s jealousy’, several of them seem to have a happy conjugal life. But in these cases, they are actually the real head of the family and their husband assists them. Undeniably, the dance of the jinèw, where female possession is preponderant, emerges as a kind of counterpower, even if the messages are never openly feminist. The difference between catharsis and healing is subtle, but the transformation of the subject at the individual level is nevertheless impressive. During a decisive ritual, the individual suffering from a personal pain, for instance, a pathetic spouse neglected by her husband and harassed by her co-wife, transforms herself – at least for a few hours – into a brave warrior or a renowned hunter, speaking with a strong male voice. Through dance and possession, she gains a special spiritual power and can find a new personal balance through the community created by the believers. The group solidarity creates a sort of social security that no State institution seems to be able to offer. This type of initiation is an alternative solution to radical exorcism; it transforms the aggression into an alliance with the spirits. In the jinè-don context, the sacrifice also has a very different meaning than in the Minianka central possession cults we have seen infra: The animal sacrificed appears to be a sort of substitute to the person for whom the sacrifice is performed like in the Senegalese Ndoep ritual analysed by Zempléni (1985 and 1987). Many features of the sacrifice are aimed to establish a continuity between the chickens and goats sacrificed and the possessed person’s body. The sacrifice is not aimed to nourish power objects.

Many charismatic leaders of the jinèton have the same type of mythical personal biography: In their youth, they disappeared for quite a long time because they had been captured by the jinèw and lived with them in the bush or in a river (under the water). When they came back to the village, they had learnt a lot of things from the jinèw and knew how to cure the suffering persons who had been attacked by jinèw, or those ‘who have things on their head’ (kuna fen bè ma mina), that is that they were suffering from a spell. Such a spell can prevent young women from getting married or giving birth to babies; it can also deprive a man of his virility. In Gouana, a Bamako Northern suburb, Nènè Doumbia and Boubakar Traoré, a married couple in their 40s – and both healers – practice adorcism as well as exorcism:

We can make a jinè come for somebody to help her (or him). Sometimes there are people who have jinèw and act extravagantly, so that, at home, nobody can cope with them anymore. Their parents hire a taxi and bring that person to us. We give her medications, and the jinè flees away. ¹⁶

Exorcism

Some Muslim scholars tend to consider that possession by Pagan jinèw is due to the patient’s sinful life, but generally, the people afflicted by the ‘illness of the jinè’ (jinèbana) are not taken as responsible for their mental condition. In any case, the most radical solution for the illness of the spirits is exorcism and many marabous made their reputation on their ability to expel malevolent spirits. Before organizing a ritual to chase away an abusive spirit, the healer observes his client, talks with her about her parents and husband and proceeds to a divinatory consultation with cola nuts or geomancy (signs on the sand or on a paper).

Nushrah is the first notion to take into account in the next therapeutic action. We can translate it by ‘spell removal’, and it consists mainly in countering a spell by another spell, a more powerful one, practiced under the protection of the all-mighty God. Some Muslim theologians condemn this method as ‘satanic’ because you need to convince the Devil, master of the jinèw, to cancel its attack against the person. But a second method – called Roqya (or rokya, rukiya, rukiyya) – is approved as the Muslim exorcism. Constant Hamès affirms that this practice was deeply enrooted in Arab society in Muhammad’s time (Hamès, 2007: 38-40; Hamès, 2008) but had experienced an eclipse for centuries. The spectacular contemporary revival of this therapeutic ritual is due to the fact that a new generation of Muslim healers, influenced by reformist Islam, have massively adopted it. Since about 30 years, the roqya ritual is quite popular in the entire Maghreb, in all the Sahelian countries, up to Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Nigeria. This agonistic ceremony is organized to force the jinns who harass suffering persons to declare themselves through the patient’s voice. The exorciser is then able to talk to them and order them to leave the patient’s body. The tools used are the recitation and songs of precise Quran verses associated with holy water aspersion. Roqya’s historical basis resides in the multiple hadiths that the Prophet left on the subject and its efficiency is due to the strength of the blow of a person filled with baraka while he pronounces the Quranic suras. Anthropologists and historians define baraka as a beneficial divine force that is the source of power and authority of saint lineages in Africa. Today many websites advertise the roqya method. A good example is in Niger, the ‘Centre Roqya Soins et Thérapie. Formateur en Roqya at ONG Roqya Coran Guérit International’. Like before them the ‘prophets’ of Ivory Coast, the roqya specialists have borrowed some habitus from the hospitals: nurses gowns, admission forms and tariffs. An example of such expertise can be seen as it is practiced in Bamako, in my film Chasser le génie (Colleyn, 2018). Roqya has also penetrated in immigrant circles in all the main European cities. The sociologist Moussa Khedimellah made fieldwork on the practice of ruqiya in Lorraine in the North-East of France, by a well-known Muslim figure of Algerian origin, who is at the same time architect, imam, and Muslim theologian (Khedimellah, 2007). Most of the time, the roqya expert discovers incidentally that he has a gift as a miraculous healer and is forced to embrace this mystical obligation. This is a constant pattern: Healers and possessed persons say that they are ‘called’, forced to accept their destiny, many times against their own will. However very popular, Roqya is controversial within the Muslim world. Roqya’s revival can be seen as a sign of the antagonist attitude of many Muslim movements against what is remaining of a pagan heritage; an attitude that one can compare to the holy wars of the nineteenth century. In a way, roqia can also be seen as a male way to prevent suffering young ladies to join the jinètonw and follow the way of spirit possession.

We may find some strong relations between the ritual of exorcism and the analytic concept of abjection (Kristeva, 1982). In any culture, there is a dialectic between incorporation and expulsion, as there is a complex relation between subject and object. Abjection is related to the imperative of exclusion, it is a rejection of something that the human subject unconsciously desires. This foreign object in the body can be a poison, a negative force, a spell, a deity, a spirit, an ancestor, a vocation, and a destiny. Abjection can thus be defined as an unbearable presence of a foreign element inside the body. An element that must be expelled as would be expelled excrement. The expulsion seems then to be crucial to protect, preserve, and guarantee the integrity of the person. The intrusion of Another in someone’s body creates fear, disgust or horror, but it can also bring grace, as a result of a kind of exceptional election, and the person can feel a sort of ambiguity toward the intruder. But even if a foreign force seduces the subject, the disorder can be unbearable for the family, the neighbours, the colleagues, the authorities, and the public sphere in general. To be possessed by an absolute Other is indeed, in religion and mythologies, a common fantasy. Notice that, while in The Mad Masters, the horror documentary film by Jean Rouch (1955), the possessed persons incarnate the crazy masters of colonialism – the General, the Governor, the doctor, the locomotive, in a fiction series like The Exorcist, the Arab world and Africa are ‘the locus for possessing entities that control the bodies of young and innocent white women’ (Wetmore, 2014).

The perverse effect

What if exorcists were actually reinforcing what they affirm to combat?

Capitalizing on their baraka, through their pretention to be stronger than the Devil and more powerful than the witches or the spirits, the marabous fuel indeed the beliefs of those powers. They have indeed paved the way for a spectacular revival of Satan. Finally, they appear to be closer than they think to the so-called traditional priests against whom they declare to fight. The difference resides in the fact that the baraka is a divine flux, directly coming from God, while pagan priests try to conclude an alliance with the jinèw, even if, today, they take care of never seem to challenge the all-mighty God.

What is for sure is that the disenchantment of the world under the pressure of scientific and technical rationality was only an evolutionist modern myth, not confirmed by the facts. Different Islamist movements propose a modernist project based on the elaboration of a new society animated by a religious ideal of justice. They rest on the charismatic leaders and recycle elements of the Muslim and Bamana magic. Salafist movements on their side theoretically refuse the principle of personal charisma in favour of an austere ethos and a code of conduct dictated by an Islam of the origins. But all these movements converge in the exorcist project to stand against the wiles of the Devil. Each of the Muslim brotherhood (tariqa) contains a nebula of marabous, who are offering on a daily basis their services against the malevolent spirits, the Devil, and the witches. They compete on the ritual and religious market with the many Bamana healers who make today a better life in the large cities than in the countryside. None of them belong to a pre-modern world; they are contemporary adaptations in a changing environment.