Eco-intimacy and spirit exorcism in the Nigerian Sahel

Abstract

A fervent politics of the senses sparked off in northern Nigeria, when, in 1995, more than 600 Muslim secondary school girls became possessed by spirits, with the new sign of “dancing like they do in Indian film.” Spirit possession in this Bollywood form spread across northern states, co-evolving with a meningitis epidemic as it swept through the desert to kill thousands. This article traces emergent eco-intimacies and the resonant politics of the senses as Bori and Qur’anic scholar-healers, or malams, linked these events, via assertions of ontological power, in the sensory geographic and affective-material movements of humans, spirits and pathogens. Malams reprimanded followers of Bori for calling spirits with music and dance, thus eroding the geographic and bodily boundaries between humans and spirits. They converted humans and spirits to their forms of orthodoxy before expelling spirits from their human hosts. The sensory politics of boundary monitoring and maintenance that emerged underpinned the 2000 implementation of sharia criminal codes across northern states. But, the affective senses of contamination and care did not align with any singular spiritual-political position, eliciting ongoing debates over appropriate spirit-human contact, and double binds in the sensory politics of medicine and state.