Witchcraft and the Colonial Life of the Fetish Florence Bernault This chapter explores a lexical paradox: the decline of the notion of the fetish among scholars, and its enduring usage in the African vernacular.1 I argue that studies of African witchcraft today, in the wake of Peter Geschiere’s ground-breaking book, The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997), obscure the existence of extensive vocabularies used in Africa to discuss spiritual agency, nefarious forces, and criminal attacks.2 They fail, in particular, to understand how and why many of these words have been borrowed from the colonial lexicon. The repertoire of the fétiche, in French or in English, plays a considerable role in these conversations, a fact inadvertently confirmed by Geschiere on the first page of his book: “I felt ill at ease in the dark but this was apparently not the case for [my assistant] Meke. He suddenly explained with some excitement, ‘Oh, if Mendouga was with us. We are like innocent kids. But she would see the witches that fly around here. She has the second sight. She can see what mischief they are plotting.’ Mendouga was a woman of a neighboring village who regularly visited us. She was also the greatest féticheur (healer or witch-doctor) of the area” (Geschiere 1997, 1). I propose that scholars of religion cannot understand concepts like “witchcraft” or “fetish” without becoming aware of their intellectual and lexical —————— 1 I thank Nicolas Martin-Granel, whose knowledge of the Congolese intellectual and artistic scene informed much of my thinking on the fetish (Martin-Granel 2010). I am also indebted to Michael Schatzberg for editing an intermediate version of this text with tireless grace and humour. 2 Earlier critiques, based on lexical evidence in contemporary Africa, or on sources from western and metropolitan lexicons, argued that the modern witchcraft paradigm belongs to a long series of “incontinent translations” of African realities that continue to exoticize African social practice (Ciekawy 1998; Pels 2003; 1998). Others made the case that modern witchcraft reinforces the meta-narrative of modernity, and is thus unable to capture the significance of local categories (Englund and Leach 2000). This led some scholars to choose the more neutral term of magic, sorcery, or the occult (Meyer and Pels 2003; Parès and Sanai 2011). 50 FLORENCE BERNAULT biographies in the colony.3 Although we know how the fetish, for instance, was invented in the crucible of the Atlantic trade, we do not understand its later reinvention in the context of the colonial encounter. With the exception of Christianity, we still ignore how colonialists produced definitions and legal categories to describe local religions, and how local speakers redefined, ignored and used this phraseology. In the first part of this chapter, I argue that the conceptual displacement of the fetish in academic parlance, combined with the recent infatuation for the modern witchcraft paradigm (Geschiere 1997) has done next to nothing to undermine the ethnocentric idea that the advent of modernity in Africa depends on the separation between the religious and the political. It has encouraged many among us to paint this relationship with undertones of cultural determinism, political impotence and multifarious crisis. Crisis first, when proliferation metaphors describe modern Africans’ religiosity as hopelessly pathological and explosive (Mbembe 1993). Crisis again when the mobilization of the religious imagination in Africa is praised as a response to the global recessions experienced by the continent in the last thirty years (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Marshall 2009; Meyer and Geschiere 1999), or when religious initiatives tend to be analysed from the perspective of political and social disintegration (Ashforth 2005; Devisch 1995; Niehaus 2001). Political impotence, second, when students eager to uncover the religious dimension of African politics are moved by a general diagnosis of failure. Cultural determinism, finally, when the historical significance of modern religiosity in Africa is predicated on the premise of particularism. In the second part of the chapter, I go to colonial Gabon and CongoBrazzaville to trace the trajectory of the lexicon of the fetish and witchcraft. I argue that local speakers were able to defeat the incapacitating views carried by the colonial lexicon, but only partially so. Abandoning the Fetish, Keeping the Universal From the 15th century onwards, European traders, ambassadors, and missionaries to the West coast of Africa defined local religions as the worship —————— 3 This is not confined to Equatorial Africa (see Marshall 2009, 160; Meyer 1999a, 54, 104). WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 51 of fetishes, a Creole term forged in the crucible of the Atlantic trading economy. In 1705, the Dutch trader Willem Bosman coined the term of fetishism, later theorized by the French essayist Charles de Brosses in 1757. The idea proved central in the development of modern Western philosophies (Pietz 2005; 1989; 1987; 1985) and, during imperial conquest in the 19th century, relegated African beliefs to the realm of the “colonial exotic” (Pels 2003, 9). After World War I, however, the nascent discipline of anthropology replaced the fetish with new conceptual magmas such as ‘traditional religions’, ‘magico-religious beliefs’, and ‘witchcraft’. By the late 1930s, the fetish had largely left the centre stage of social sciences for relatively marginal usage in psychoanalytic, literary, and Marxist studies (Pels 2003).4 Against the older notion that African beliefs in the power of the fetish were characterized only by arbitrariness and irrationality, Evans-Pritchard as well as the Manchester school analysed witchcraft as a coherent religious system that regulated local societies and everyday conflicts (Pels 2003).5 Numerous studies followed suit, reaching a peak in the 1960s (Douglas 1970; Marwick 1965; Middleton 1967). In the 1970s, a growing number of scholars voiced concerns about the parochialism of the case-studies used by the Manchester school, and argued that witchcraft was too ethnocentric and abstract a notion to adequately understand the significance of African religious techniques. They abandoned it for more specialized terms such as ‘shamanism’, ‘possession’, or ‘divination’ (Pels 2003). This pragmatic agenda, however, precluded a bolder search for more inclusive theories of African religiosity. The ambition was recaptured by French anthropologists working in the 1970s at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. French anthropologists were not primarily interested in traditional beliefs. Instead, they focused on newer forms of religiosity, especially the travail syncrétique (syncretic process) at work in West African Independent Churches (Augé 1975; Dozon 1974, 80). In the late 1980s, the EHESS Centre for African Studies shifted its gaze from African Independent Churches to the growing influence of Pentecostalism.6 —————— 4 According to Pels, Evans-Pritchard’s decision to use witchcraft instead of magic (a more universalistic term popularized by Malinowski in 1935) betrayed an ethnocentric view of African religions. 5 Anthropologists also reflected on the fact that witchcraft encouraged social antagonisms (Pels 2003, 13). 6 They established collaborations with pioneering specialists of charismatic movements in Brazil (André Corten and Jean-Pierre Laurent), in West Africa (Ruth Marshall), and in 52 FLORENCE BERNAULT Yet, analyses published at the EHESS relied heavily on functionalist interpretations. French anthropologists envisioned African religious movements as the midwives of political and social renewal, and trusted that indigenous forms of Christianity would bring about the decline of older, more constraining forms of social organization. They expected Independent Churches and prophetic movements to break through ethnic boundaries and facilitate the rise of modern nation states. The perspective was tightly enmeshed with another teleological expectation, the progressive secularization of African societies, an idea influenced by the theory of religious rationalization (Weber 1978 [1922]; 2001 [1920]; cf. Meyer 1999). Georges Balandier’s masterpiece Sociology of Black Africa (1970 [1955]) provides a spectacular example of these academic views transferred to the African context. Looking at two Western Equatorial African societies in the 1940s and 1950s (the Fang in Gabon, and the Bakongo in CongoBrazzaville), Balandier argued that messianic and syncretic movements emerged as a response to the crises wrought by colonialism. But he saw them as proto-nationalist forms of consciousness. For him, Bwiti (a syncretic movement that spread among the Fang in the 1930s) and Matswanism (a messianic movement started among the Bakongo in the 1920s) broke down ‘local patriotisms’ and encouraged the formation of a crossclanic, national imaginary (Balandier 1970 [1955]). Moreover, he argued that spiritual initiatives were forms of political “transference” and religious “escapism” that would soon transform into “sacred nationalisms” (Balandier 1970 [1955], 479–481).7 A veritable prophecy of political and national redemption concludes the book: “the Messianic movements of Africa have tremendous possibilities. The plane on which they exist may be essentially religious. They may serve as a refuge for those in total opposition—as was the case in the Ivory Coast after the change in the political orientation of the R.D.S; or, on the contrary, if they come under the control of a successful political movement, they may lose their militancy—as happened in the Congo with the electoral success of the Abbé Fulbert Youlou, chosen as the new symbol of unity and rebirth. At the start, however, their significance is —————— West Equatorial Africa (Achille Mbembe and Joseph Tonda) (see Corten and Mary 2002; Marshall 2009; Mbembe 1993; 1988; Meyer, 1999a; Tonda 2005; 2002). English speaking specialists also published on independent churches and charismatic movements (Fields 1988; Lan 1985; Peel 1968). 7 For similar proto-nationalist perspectives, see Bastide (1961) and Fernandez on Bwiti (1982). For a critique of Christianity as a ‘high religion’ conducive to modern forms of social and political action, see Marshall (2009). WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 53 unmistakable. They betoken the awakening of a people that sees themselves as having neither past or future, that reacts against the slurs upon its dignity. They express a passionate desire for change; and because they assert the universal nature of human dignity, they represent a step towards universality” (Balandier 1970 [1955], 515). This opinion endured well into the 1970s. Twenty years after the publication of Sociology of Black Africa, Marc Augé still described the Harrist movement in Ivory Coast as a dialectical moment opening up to modern political action and nationalist mobilization (Augé 1975, 306). French scholars only recently called attention to the circularity of political explanations that remain extrinsic to the churches’ own discourse (Bayart 1994), and interpret religious movements as a medium for nonreligious realities.8 Yet, when academics hail Africa’s religious ‘indocility’ as pagan resistance to Christianity and colonialism, when they praise the occult and the Pentecostal devil as resurgent, ‘emic’ interpretations that help indigenous agents to make sense of the global forces they endure, they continue to draw an exoticizing divide between two convenient fictions, Traditional-Indigenous (Africa) vs. the Modern-Universal (West) (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; 1999; 1993; Mbembe 1988; Meyer 1999b; Meyer and Geschiere 1999). The paradigm of modern witchcraft itself has contributed to the issue. In Africa, scientific writing continues to be divided into studies on nonChristian beliefs (now dominated by the explanatory model of modern witchcraft), and Christian movements (monopolized by Pentecostal research), blinding us to the fact that modern religious faiths can only be understood from the vantage point of their mutual constitution. Indeed, Pentecostal studies have taught us to realize how the figures of Christianity (and of Western technological reason) are being constituted conjointly with the pagan ones invented by the colonial relationship (Tonda 2005). One needs only to look at the ways in which today’s Revival and Pentecostal Churches invest much of their energy in the diabolization of fetishes, ‘traditional’ healers, and witches to see how these movements are —————— 8 Ruth Marshall, writing on Revivalist Churches in Nigeria, articulates one of the sharpest critiques of religious studies’ tendency to perpetuate ethnocentric contrasts. She shows how, whether working on African Christianity or modern witchcraft, scholars keep assuming an intractable exteriority between ‘local’ strategies of recapture and response, and the various ‘global’ forces that befall or redeem the continent (Marshall 2009, 22– 26). 54 FLORENCE BERNAULT deeply embedded in, and derive their legitimacy from the very enemies they define, confront, and seek to eliminate (Meyer 1999a). Contrary to the hypothesis of “the revenge of paganism” (Mbembe 1988), this does not mean that African Christianity has been unable to break away from older beliefs, or that Western Christianity became cannibalized by the African Fetish. It means that there is no such thing as eternal Christianity, authentic Islam, or indigenous Paganism. These faiths, practices, and theories never existed as pristine tradition, they never emerged in a vacuum or occurred away from each other. Instead, they appeared in specific historical episodes of “mutual constitution” (Marshall 2009, 26; see also Tonda 2005; 2002, 39). This is another reason why the narrow focus of modern anthropologists and political scientists on witchcraft or, conversely, on Christian movements, makes little sense.9 Yet, Pentecostal studies carry their own brand of ethnocentrism. In the late 1980s, hopes in the building of secular nations in Africa went bankrupt. Meanwhile, academic investments in the Foucauldian idea of the ‘invention of the self’ rose exponentially. Studies of African religiosity stopped trusting the vantage point of collective actors and nation-building. Instead, they shifted their attention towards the spectacle of free individual agents embracing the global circulation of commodities and ideas (Meyer and Geschiere 1999).10 The explanatory framework of the ‘self-fashioning subject’, however, remains infused with cultural and political utilitarianism, for instance when it narrows down the meaning of the global Pentecost in Africa to conduits through which individuals can access international networks, exercise multi-layered cosmopolitan cultures, train in capitalistic consumerism, and claim control over political action (Corten and Mary 2002; Marshall-Fratani and Péclart 2002). But, I argue, when academic expectations of ‘modernity’ hail the individual ‘agent’ as an interface between his own culture (or ‘history’) and world networks, they recycle antiquated tales of local progress driven by global changes. —————— 9 The modern witchcraft paradigm also obfuscates the ways in which today’s intersections between Muslim, Christian, and other religious lexicons have been fuelled by older cross-breeding and circulation. With only a few exceptions (Hoehler-Fatton 1996; Peel 2003), these intense moments of philosophical and lexical reform remain terra incognita. 10 Previous studies of independent churches suggested this early on, but not as the major meaning of African Christianity (for instance Augé 1975, 291). WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 55 These silent prescriptions and noisy prejudices do not result only from western stereotypes and imperial ideologies. They were also crafted in the crucible of colonial domination. The Colonial Life of the Fetish Geschiere acknowledges the many issues in translating vernacular ideas by the moralizing terminology of witchcraft/sorcellerie (a reluctant choice he justifies by the popularity of the word in Cameroon), and provides a careful and detailed analysis of vernacular idioms for witchcraft (djambe, evu, nyongo, famla and kupe) (Geschiere 1997, 12–15, 117–68). He fails to pay attention, however, to the intriguing role of other Western words and concepts borrowed from the colonial phraseology. South of Cameroon, ordinary Gabonese and Congolese who employ French words to talk about misfortune and spiritual agency do not usually lump together their speculative concerns in the single term of sorcellerie. Instead, they rely on pluralistic lexicons forged in multiple linguistic, cultural and religious contexts, including racist and prejudiced Western concepts dating from the colonial era.11 Some French locutions are fairly direct translations of local terms, like manger (‘to eat’), or guérisseurs (‘healers’). Some constitute a composite terminology crafted in the crucible of colonial translation and epistemic changes, such as voyants (‘seers’), initiés (‘the initiated’, ‘the knowledgeable ones’), charlatans and charlatanisme (in French, ‘fraud’), fétiches (‘fetishes’), and sorciers (‘sorcerers’). Some come from an indigenized stock of French literary and biomedical locutions, such as Le Très Mauvais Cœur du Diable (‘The Very Bad Heart of the Devil’), les médicaments (‘medicine’), le blindage (armour against witchcraft attacks), le ventre (‘the belly-womb’), les vampires (‘vampires’), or les fusils nocturnes (‘nightly guns’). Local speakers also delight in using witchcraft metaphors in French relating to sexuality and material exchanges: la chose (‘the thing’), les affaires —————— 11 These repertoires include vernacular terms for the mystical substance located in the body of strong people (Myènè: inyemba, Fang: evus, kiKongo: kundu), for the action of harming or killing people by occult forces (kiKongo: kindoki), a crime oftentimes described as ‘eating’ the victim (Lingala: dia), for divining and curing (proto-Bantu: *-bók, Lingala: bíka, Fang: leregue), and for witches (Fang: nem, pl. be yem) and healers (Lingala: nganga, pl. banganga). Note that in Gabon (1.2 million inhabitants) and Congo-Brazzaville (3.6 million), more than 100 languages are spoken today. 56 FLORENCE BERNAULT (‘the [bad] business,’ also used for sexual intercourse) (Gruénais, Mbambi, and Tonda 1995, 165; Tonda 2005, 76–78). Among these terms, the idea of the fétiche (fetish) was instrumental in helping French colonialists to interpret and sanction the societies of Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville.12 During the six or seven decades of the French occupation of Gabon and Congo, witchcraft was never the dominant or preferred term used by missionaries, tradesmen or administrators describing African spirituality. Because witchcraft conveyed the meaning of a coherent and powerful heresy, colonialists favoured the old notion of fetishism theorized by de Brosses and Enlightenment philosophers, an emasculating theory that, from the 15th century onward, had interpreted local cosmologies as a hotchpotch of defeated beliefs and impotent thinking. The following definition, written from Gabon in the mid-19th century, would have made perfect sense both for de Brosses a hundred years earlier, and for French colonists still present in the Congo and Gabon in the 1960s: “Fetishism is the name applied by Europeans to the religion of the tribes and natives of Western and southern Africa. It is derived from the Portuguese term feiticão, signifying magic; and this, in turn, comes from the Nigritian feitico, which means ‘a magic thing’. Among the tribes with which I am familiar, there is no native generic term equivalent to our word religion, and no necessity for one, as they have no idea of a system of belief. By fetishism is understood the worship of idols, and animate and inanimate objects, such as serpents, birds, rocks, mountain peaks, feathers, teeth, etc. […] Their religious notions are of the loosest and vaguest kind, and no two persons are found to agree in any particulars about which the traveler seeks information. After the most careful and extensive inquiries, I am unable to present an array of items from which the reader may make up a theological system. Superstition seems in these countries to have run wild, and every man believes what his fancy, by some accident, most forcibly presents to him as hurtful or beneficial” (Du Chaillu 1861, 383). Contrary to the hypothesis that the ubiquity of witchcraft accusations in today’s Gabon derive from the “diabolizing of all the traditional forces of the African world” (Mary 1998, 53), 19th and 20th century Catholic mis- —————— 12 My findings are based on an extensive collection of texts ranging from local and national reports authored by administrators (kept in the National Archives of Gabon and of Congo-Brazzaville, and in the French Colonial Archives in Aix-en-Provence), Catholic archives and journals (mostly preserved in the archives of the Holy Spirit Fathers, the dominant Congregation on the ground), and travel accounts and memoirs published by Protestant missionaries and amateur anthropologists. WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 57 sionaries did not consider the beliefs they encountered as a coherent doctrine, nor as representing a significant threat against the Church.13 They thought that, left alone, these errors would be vanquished by modern reason and the higher truth of the Christian faith, oftentimes compared to modern science: “magic is to religion what fake money is to real currency, […] a perversion of science and of religion” (Le Roy 1925, 282, 340–347). Catholic reports in Gabon comment on the decline of the fetish as early as the 1900s: “the most worshipped fetishes are starting to be ridiculed,” and “pagan customs are falling into disuse.”14 Although this rationalizing discourse did not prevent brutal campaigns from destroying local shrines and ‘fetishes’, the archives suggest that the missionaries framed such violent action as a mere episode in the modernizing victory of the higher God, a God scientifically and technically stronger than local divinities. Nor was the witchcraft lexicon diffused by Protestant missionaries who worked in the region, whether American, Swedish, Swiss, or French.15 The American Rev. Robert Hamill Nassau relied primarily on fetish and fetishism to describe the religion of the Benga, Fang, and Mpongwe people he lived with on the island of Corisco and in various Gabonese stations from 1864 to 1904 (Nassau 1904). In a chapter entitled Demonology, he never mentions the devil or compares heathenism to satanic practices. Robert Milligan, a Protestant missionary who worked among the Fang in Gabon (Milligan 1908; 1902), seldom uses the word witchcraft and systematically writes it as an equivalent of fetishism. The first foray of Pentecostalism in Gabon, introduced by Swiss missionaries Gaston Vernaud and Samuel Galley in 1935, did not break with this lexical strategy. Whenever they preached and attacked heathenism in the name of the Holy Spirit, Vernaud and Galley relied on the vocabulary of fetishes, fetishism, and fetish-men (féticheurs). When their entourage —————— 13 By contrast with the early evangelizing of the kingdom of Kongo by Italian Capuchins in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries (Thornton 1998). 14 “Ste-Anne des Eschiras”, Bulletin de la Congrégation du St-Esprit, tome 20–158 (1900), 372. “Donguila”, Bulletin de la Congrégation du St-Esprit, tome 24–244 (1907), 191. Archives of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Chevilly La Rue [hereinafter CSSP]. 15 Instead, in Ghana, Birgit Meyer (1999a) insists on the Protestant Pietists’ obsession with demonology and the converts’ fascination with the devil: “Ewe Christians fully adopted Pietism’s dualistic stance which enabled them to dissociate themselves from the old religion which they considered ‘pagan’ and backward.” Both German ministers and the Ewe closely associated the English terms of black magic, witchcraft, and even ‘fetishes’ (dzo in Ewe) with the Christian notion of the Devil (Meyer 1999a, 83–111). 58 FLORENCE BERNAULT started to doubt the fruits of the new evangelizing, they studiously avoided references to demonology. In 1936, for instance, Galley’s wife, shocked by the agitation unleashed by her husband’s preaching among Pentecostal converts, called the trance a “veritable [show] of magic […] [that risks] to awaken pagan superstitions” (Perrier 1988, 44). Thus, sorcellerie (‘witchcraft’/’sorcery’) remained very rare in colonial texts until the late 1920s when the term started to become more visible, prompted, perhaps, by an early and very narrow usage of sorciers (‘witches’) and sorcellerie in a few scholarly studies increasingly aware of the indigenous distinction between ritual specialists able to manipulate extraordinary or otherworldly forces for the social good (kiKongo: nganga, pl. banganga), and criminals who used them for destructive purposes (kiKongo: ndoki, pl. bandoki). From the 1890s onwards, a handful of amateur ethnologists started to confine the term féticheur to nganga, and the term sorcier to ndoki. Perhaps this limited usage opened an avenue for the progressive emergence of witchcraft in colonial parlance. In any case, by the 1930s, sorcellerie had become more present in written colonial texts. Yet, it still lagged far behind fétichisme, and, more importantly, did not express a conceptual shift among white colonialists’ views. Simply, sorcellerie was used as an equivalent to fétichisme. Reports started to switch back and forth, and without apparent logic, between the two repertoires. In 1930, for instance, the Catholic bishop of Gabon described native religion as ‘fetishism,’ and explained that “its minister [was] the witch (sorcier), in turn a physician and a poisoner.”16 This interchangeability endured in common colonial speech in the 1940s and 1950s, and resulted in a significant conceptual deactivation of the repertoire of witchcraft. The latter process was also apparent in administrative phraseology, where sorcellerie remained rare and fétichisme hegemonic throughout the colonial era. In their reports, French administrators in Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon almost never used the witchcraft lexicon, maybe because of their strong anti-clerical tradition. Moreover, and in contrast to the witchcraft ordinances in British colonies, French legislative and penal decrees in Equatorial Africa did not codify accusations against witches as crimes, and they refrained from recognizing sorcellerie itself (in the sense of a real power to harm though spiritual or mystical means) as a legal category. Instead, a few penal decrees defined sorcellerie as fraudulent trickery and deception, a —————— 16 Monsignor Tardy, “Gabon: Five Year Report” (n.d.). CSSP, 271-Dos. A-VI. WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 59 misdemeanour that almost always appeared alongside charlatanisme (charlatanism, fraud), and magie (magic tricks).17 Fetish and Infra-Politics By contrast, the repertoire of the fetish remained hegemonic in administrative usage and conveyed far darker views on local politics. In colonial Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville, the fetish served as an intellectual tool for criticizing the tyrannical authority of local leaders and the superstitious obedience of their subjects. In a significant innovation from the classic fetish-idea crafted in the early modern Atlantic (Pietz 2005), French colonialists inflated the political meaning of fetishism over its theological tenor. In the colony, fetishism became the political limit of the native. I call this powerful prejudice infra-politics, and I suggest that it continues to this day to inform our approach of modern Africa. Infra-politics impose a blocked dialectic onto African political and civic life. As a prejudice and a prescription, it stipulates that religion and politics are two discrete spheres of action. It predicates that modernity depends on the separation between these two spheres of action, and predicts that Africans will never be able to make such disjunction. These analytical dead-ends, for a large part, are rooted in the colonial discourse on the fetish. In late 19th century Equatorial Africa, where decentralized societies remained the major form of political organizing, colonialists understood the power of African ‘chiefs’18 in contradistinction with the centralized and revolutionary tradition of the French democratic regime—itself a productive fiction seeing legitimate power as founded on the visibility and ac- —————— 17 The indigénat system, a lesser penal code geared towards policing public applied by local colonial officers aimed at containing “practices of charlatanism, magic, or sorcery prone to harm or to frighten, but not of a criminal or delinquent nature.” Arrêté de 1929 déterminant les infractions passibles de sanctions de police administratives (Journal officiel de l’Afrique équatoriale française 1929, 1187). 18 19th century speakers used various terms for those who are in power, and are able to intercede with spiritual and sacred forces; mpfumu (kiKongo: a ritually installed chief) mokonzi (Bangala: a powerful and rich man), nzoe (Fang: ‘leader of leaders’), nkumkum (Fang: a rich man), kani (Teke: a wise person, an arbitrator). Historians documented long ago how the colonial notion of ‘traditional chiefs’ in Africa lumped together and ignored a wide array of grassroots institutions (Iliffe 1979). 60 FLORENCE BERNAULT countability of political initiative, and its inscription in a single public sphere regulated by a central legislative and executive power.19 During the military conquest, fétichisme was blamed as the obscure, occult basis for the influence of the men who resisted French control. In 1911, for instance, reports described the Vili rebel leader Bayonne in 1911 as “a formidable féticheur (witch-doctor), […] who enjoys a large influence among his fellows.”20 To curtail the authority of rebellious chiefs, the French often exiled or executed them in public, in order “to free the population from the fear of the power of the féticheurs.”21 Indeed, rejoiced a local administrator in 1914, the arrest of two féticheurs who “terrorized the population” resulted in a significant détente and a better acceptance of French occupation.22 In administrative parlance, fetishism thus became the symptom of Africans’ illegitimate competence to command/obey. The strength of this prejudice can be traced today in the unrelenting discoverydenunciation of the ‘occult’ nature of politics in Africa, ergo its autocratic quality and the narrow basis of its principles. At the end of the military conquest, however, French views on the fétichisme des populations started to shift, dissolving from political resistance to cultural escapism. A patent sign of this disempowerment appears in the monthly political reports written by district officers in Gabon from the 1920s onwards. The rubric for fétichisme progressively moved from the section on ‘political activities’ to the section on ‘religions’.23 At the beginning of the 1950s, district officers systematically lumped together ‘Fetishism, Catholic and Protestant Missions’ in a single rubric. A 1954 administrator in Gabon filled the page with the blasé comment that “the more and more artificial existence of these sects [sic] has little influence on the life of —————— 19 Not all French women and men in the colonies of Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville accepted this fiction without criticism or reserve. But the colonial archive suggests that it worked as a core interpretative tool among rulers whenever they criticized African forms of government. 20 Monthly report on the Oroungous district, August 1911. Gabon National Archives/Presidential Fund [hereinafter ANG/FP] 48. 21 Monthly report on the Oroungous district, December 1911. ANG/FP 48. 22 Monthly report on the Ivindo district, September 1913. ANG/FP 246. 23 See also a 1940 text by Governor Félix Éboué on the Politique indigène (native policy) in Equatorial Africa that entreated French administrators local officials to identify the ‘real chiefs’ at the grassroots. “Occult power,” he explained, has not disappeared. “It survives because it is traditional […] Let us discover it, let us bring it to full recognition, let us honor it, and let us educate it” (Eboué 1940, 16). WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 61 the natives.”24 Reduced to a medley of ‘customary life,’ ‘residual beliefs,’ and Christian superstition, the fétichisme des populations now embodied the failure of indigenous initiatives to transform into modern political activities. The French shifted their scrutiny to ‘secret societies’ (sociétés secrètes), suspected of putting the Gabonese and the Congolese in touch with international anti-colonial movements. In Equatorial Africa, the term sociétés secrètes had solidified during the repression of ‘tiger-men’ murders in 1910s and 1920s southern and eastern Gabon, when the French suspected that occult associations, under the guise of ‘tigers’ (the misleading French term used in Gabon for leopards—in Kota, bangoye), killed and dismembered innocent victims in order to process body parts into power charms, or fétiches.25 For white rulers, the crisis came from a mystic madness originating in a barbaric religious belief. Yet, although administrators interpreted the murders through the filter of witches’ Sabbath, they employed the repertoire of the fetish. After World War II, the French constitution (1945 and 1946) legalized African political parties and granted some electoral rights to a minority of Africans. In an extraordinary moment of lexical violence, rulers described the activities of the emerging political movements by refashioning the repertoire of the fetish and combining it with that of sectarianism into a newly minted term, les sectes mono-fétichistes. In 1950, the governor of Gabon explained that ‘politico-religious sects’ had grown out of older fetish societies modernized through the Christian liturgy and ‘pan-negro political movements’. “One notes an upsurge, not of fetishism but of secret societies […]. I think this can be interpreted as a new form of fetishism, with tighter liaisons than before, but still with the use of sorcerers: Watch Tower and Jehovah Witnesses, RDA [Rassemblement démocratique africain] in Gabon, Matswanism, the Salvation Army, SFIO [Socialist Party] in the North.”26 —————— 24 District chief Titaux, Political Report on the Province of the Ngounié. 30 January 1954, 29–30. ANG/FP 101. 25 Christopher Gray in Gabon (2002), Allan F. Roberts in Tabwaland (1986), and recently David Pratten in Southern Nigeria (2007) explain leopard-murders as a form of pathological response to extreme economic and social stress under colonialism. 26 Note for the Governor General of Gabon. 26 August 1950. Centre for the Colonial Archives [CAOM], Aix-en-Provence, 5D64. 62 FLORENCE BERNAULT Very little had changed in the mind of French rulers since the resistance of the chiefs in the 1900s. Confronted to the rise of modern politics, they continue to despise Africans as autocratic, superstitious and fanatic men, unable to embrace contractual politics and secular reason. Local Appropriations Tracing the reconfiguration of the idea of the fetish that occurred in conversations among Africans and Europeans is a much harder task than delineating its discursive biography in French rulers’ written archives. One issue lies in the fragmentary nature of the sources available to recover, with sufficient confidence or continuity, so recent and ambivalent a linguistic turn. The few surviving texts written by African authors are late and represent only a narrow slice of local conversations. Transcripts of oral usages in the 19th and 20th centuries are infrequent and unreliable. Ethnographic studies in the 20th century disproportionally focus on the rise of independent churches in the restricted kiKongo-speaking region, and seldom document the bilingual expressions, stories, and images used by converts and ordinary people. When they report local idioms, ethnographers rarely provide the French equivalent that may have been used by informants. Conversely, they weave in, without warning, direct translations of their own. To historicize modern usages of the fetish repertoire in Gabon and in Congo-Brazzaville, I use an archive consisting of a series of articles published in French in the monthly journal Liaison by a group of Western educated African authors. Liaison was sponsored by the French authorities and supported the cultural promotion of Africans versus their political autonomy. Although biased, these texts give a full chronological sequence of elite writing in French from 1950 to 1960, an archive prone to bear the trace of lexical and conceptual borrowings. I include a professional memoir written in 1959 by a Fang graduate at the School for Colonial Administrators (École de la France d’Outre Mer) published by James Fernandez (1961). Finally, I use a meticulous anthropological study on ‘Croix Koma’, an independent church that swept southern Congo-Brazzaville in the mid-1960s (Vincent 1966). Based on these sources, I propose that Gabonese and Congolese speakers largely appropriated the French colonial repertoire of the fetish and internalized its derogatory and incapacitating undertones. WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 63 But I also argue that they defeated the disempowering force of the colonial imagination by building new concepts of power with the repertoire of witchcraft and the devil. Infra-politics, or the enduring prescription that public authority must be purified from occult agency, looms large in today’s Equatorial Africa. Consider the following examples, taken from hundreds of similar ones in the local press and radio: “Defending himself against suspicions that he belongs to secret societies or sects, the ‘warrior’ shot back: ‘I am not a member of any secret society. All that is fetishism is repellent to me’” (electoral campaign of Etienne-Guy Mouvagha Tsioba, senator and mayor of Mulundu, Gabon, quoted from Le Nganga 2002a, 3). “Fetishism and grigritism are far from being confined to our ancestors’ history, long passed, long passed [sic]. A proof: in Bikele, a few miles from Libreville, the thing is vampirically current” (Le Nganga 2002b, 6). Such views, internalized from the colonial prescription of infra-politics, were already into place in the early 1950s, as shown by the Gabonese and Congolese literati who wrote articles in Liaison, a monthly journal sponsored by the French government in the four colonies of Equatorial Africa. Most authors used the repertoire of the fetish rather than witchcraft, and applied an extraordinary normative energy to criticize les pouvoirs traditionnels (traditional authorities) as enemies of their own class (Boulala 1951; Gomah 1960; Massambat-Débat 1950; Voumbo 1950). A piece published in 1950 by Jacques Massamba-Débat, a Congolese teacher who served as the leader of the local socialist party (SFIO), made apparent local intellectuals’ eager belief in the Western teleology of the fetish: “Fetishism is a very bad practice, a repulsive legacy, just as magic, of which it is a mere affiliate. The féticheur in the Congo pretends to have the power to cure or to kill, we know this. But a capital question is to know why this practice still endures, and how it will disappear? In the Congo, [fetishism] increasingly declines to the benefit of civilization” (Massamba-Débat 1950, 7–9). In 1955, another article described the Njobi cult in Gabon as one of the “innumerable sects where charlatans exploit the credulity of the simple minded” (Nkogho-Mve 1955, 52–54). Considerable ambivalence, however, compounded these writings. Some articles in Liaison tried to defend le fétichisme, but did so as a cultural patrimony rather than a local theory of political capacity. As a result, the writers encouraged the folklorization of indigenous philosophies, and articulated the notion of the ‘crisis of tradi- 64 FLORENCE BERNAULT tions’ borrowed from the colonial repertoire (Balandier 1970 [1955]). They perceived this crisis as a dichotomy between the loss of their ancestral culture and their opposition to the nefarious power of customs (an idea that clearly derived, at least in part, from colonial propaganda). The dilemma resonated strongly with the colonial construct of the fetish and its untenable contradictions. The legacy of the painful fission between the religious and the secular realm can also be felt today in the concrete policies implemented to regulate ‘fetishistic practices’ in Congo and Gabon today. One example is the recent redefining of the status of féticheurs (here in the sense of healers and diviners) along strict professional boundaries. In the late 1980s in Gabon, a public debate on tradi-praticiens (‘traditional practitioners’) called for the regulation of healers and ritual specialists. The combining of a Western biomedical term (praticiens) with a generic, ethnicized prefix (tradi-), domesticates local traditions by merging them with an international, rational order of professional modernity. The project talks about the unrelenting dream of expelling fetishism from the sphere of political action. It talks also of the hope of restricting its power into an emasculated cultural folklore or a sanitized medical protocol. Witchcraft and the Rise of Satan Yet a more aggressive process of lexical indigenization took place in the colony. While French colonialists viewed the fetish as the occult and impotent side of indigenous politics, Africans enthusiastically embraced the lexicon of witchcraft (sorcellerie) and the devil (le diable) to construct indigenous figures of ultimate evil and maximum power. Throughout a series of productive aggregations, the devil encompassed and bridged grassroots experiences of misfortune, affliction, and capacity. It created a fluid pantheon of evil agents deriving power both from the destructive agency of the witch-substance (kindoki, evus, inyemba), and the dark side of modern political power (Tonda 2005). This historical aggregation can be retrieved from a Gabonese document written in 1959. Paul Bekale, the author, a Fang civil servant studying at the École de la France d’outre-mer, a Christian and a member of a Bwiti chapel, defines the ‘King of Evil’ (Roi du Mal), or Satan, as the ‘Prince Evus’—that WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 65 is, for the Fang, the witchcraft substance that empowers both malevolent witches and good intentioned healers (Bekale in Fernandez 1961). As he goes on explaining, any man possessed by Prince Evus is a sorcerer (nnem, or sorcier). Fétiches, in turn, are simply “the tangible manifestations of the power of Evus.”27 In this new cosmology, manifest in the region in early independent churches and anti-witchcraft movements, the power of ritual specialists was not seen as situational anymore—i.e. determined by the outcome of their actions—but, instead, entirely coincided with evil. The single locution of sorciers (‘sorcerers’), reinvented by local parlance, lumped together different forms of evil, healing and agency, and in particular, the nganga (‘healer’) and the ndoki (‘witch’). Both specialists were swept off in the realm of evil as the defeated powers of the past, and deemed responsible for “the demise of the African race.”28 For Bekale, only the “total extermination of witchcraft,” complete with the destruction of “witches” and their “fetishes” could tame the Devil and bring back “the demographic revival, the liberty and the happiness of the black race” (Fernandez 1961, 267). As suggested by anthropologist Jeanne-Françoise Vincent, this agenda demonstrated the closing in of the ancestral Equatorial African distinction between bad and good spiritual power, a transition already identified by Karl Laman in the 1890s and 1900s.29 The Independent Church of Croix Koma in Southern Congo-Brazzaville documents a similar process in the context of a mass movement of prophetic cleansing and healing. In the early 1960s, the leader of the Church, Victor Malanda, concentrated his mission on the removal of fetishes (enlever les fétiches), the power objects kept by people for protection and power. His prophetic teachings embraced in similar repulsion nganga and —————— 27 Ignemba (‘witch substance’ in Myènè), the anonymous author explains, is called Le Diable (The Devil); “among Blacks, after God, it is Ignemba who is in power […] and knows the science of evil.” 28 The contradictions in this new ethos are captured in a crucial passage from Bekale’s manuscript, when he confesses that he does not understand why “the fetish to protect” can be composed by ‘witches’, since it serves to protect oneself against witches (Bekale in Fernandez 1961, 265). 29 Laman’s study (based on essays in kiKongo written by Mission pupils) documents an early overlap between malevolent and defensive witchcraft (kundu vs. ndoki) in vernacular languages—at least if we trust Laman’s English translation. For instance, “Kundu, the evil in the stomach, does not choose whom to eat. It may turn out to be the child, the wife or the husband. It happens as it were against one’s own will, the kundu just covets flesh” (Laman 1962, 216). 66 FLORENCE BERNAULT ndoki, amalgamated in the single French term of sorcier, while it compressed fétiches and kindoki (spiritual agency) in la sorcellerie (Vincent 1966, 539). Today, Pentecostal ministers continue to preach for an absolute cleansing of older techniques of healing and power. They encourage converts to embrace the Holy Spirit not only as a protection against sin and misfortune, but also as an incarnation of Western modernity and a promise for material redemption (Tonda 2005). Three consequences follow. Firstly, the assault on traditional religion (amalgamated in the figure of witchcraft) results in a paradoxical dynamic: the eternal return of the enemy. Today, the power figures of the fetish, the witches or local healers cannot be defined outside the battle launched against them by Pentecostal and Born Again Churches. The churches themselves cannot be understood or function outside of this raison d’être. They are fully submerged in the logic of the fetish. Secondly, the Revivalist project of destroying the ‘regressive forces’ of the past and making way for spiritual progress and social well-being, is partly but a variation on the colonial dismissal of indigenous fetish power. Like colonialism, they construct a dream of alien modernity, more desirable, destructive and unapproachable than ever. Thirdly, the aggregative power of evil, Satan and witchcraft, attests to the continuity of local theories of power (Ellis and ter Haar 2004; Fernandez 1982; Laburthe-Tolra 1985; MacGaffey 2005; 2000). When contemporary Congolese and Gabonese use fétiches as a translation of power objects and ritual complexes (in kiKongo, nkisi), they recycle in part the prejudice of the colonial repertoire, but they also rely on a long-standing theory of composing power indifferent to the modern prescription on the separation of the secular and the mystical. Popular beliefs in the capacity of the divine and the spiritual have survived the prescription of infrapolitics. Back in the West, I have shown how academics tend to forget how much we are immersed in the intellectual legacies of colonialism. By replacing the fetish idea with the paradigm of modern witchcraft, scholars of Africa distanced themselves from racist models and colonial prejudice. But they only got rid of what they were already aware of, the ethnocentric undertone of the western notion of the fetish. Meanwhile, they continue to carry self-defeating legacies, among which the presumption that religion is a regressive form of politics, the prescription that the two should separate, WITCHCRAFT AND THE COLONIAL LIFE OF THE FETISH 67 and the conviction that African institutions and societies cannot but fail in meeting that injunction. These silent norms can only be challenged if we examine the limitations of western academic science and the blind spots produced by colonial discourse. Only by assuming, rather than criticizing, the consubstantiality of the political and the religious in Equatorial Africa (Tonda 2005; 2002) we will be able to delineate the significance of local theories of power and action, and historicize the pre-colonial binaries we take for granted. For instance, prior to the conquest, the distinction between ndoki and nganga never worked along an absolute divide. 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