Adeline Masquelier - Road Mythographies

Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger
Author(s): Adeline Masquelier

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 829-856
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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road mythographies: space, mobility, and the
historical imagination in postcolonial Niger
ADELINE MASQUELIER
Tulane University
In this article, I explore how some Hausaphone Mawri in postcolonial Niger

materialize their experience of modernity. I examine the fundamental role
that space plays in local perceptions of modernity by discussing stories peo-
ple tell about what happens on the road. In particular, I focus on their atten-
tion to the road as part of a complex economy of violence, power, and blood.
By linking the road and its deadly spirits to the region's history of civil engi-
neering, emergent capitalism, and religious transformation, I show that rather
than simply being iconic of modernity, the road is a hybrid space that con-
denses past histories at the same time that it concretizes the perils and possi-
bilities of modern life for rural Mawri. [space, roads, mobility, modernity,
imagination, spirits, Niger]
The road swallows people and sometimes at night you can hear them calling for help,
begging to be free from inside its stomach.
Ben Ochri, The Famished Road
I heard people talk of demons of the road, and of the road itself as a fickle god, a compas-
sionate, jealous, violent, hungry being.
Peter Chilson, Riding the Demon: On the Road in WestAfrica
Thinking historically is a process of locating oneself in space and time. And a location . . .
is an itinerary rather than a bounded site a series of encounters and translations.
James Clifford, Routes: Trave/ and Trans/ation in the Late Twentieth Century
For the Hausaphone Mawri of Arewa (southern Niger), roads are the embodi-
ment of colonial experience (Charlick 1991; Collion 1982; Miles 1994). In many
ways, the first and most enduring aspect of colonialism affecting Mawri villagers was
the construction of roads. When I asked old men what they remembered of the colo-
nial period, they would invariably recall being conscripted for road work. They would
evoke poignant memories of having to leave behind entire fields ready for sowing or
harvest, knowing that their absence would mean starvation, illness, and despair the
following year. Villagers who were greeted by the dreaded words "Corvee des
Routes!" (forced road labor) knew there was no escape from the grueling work. Ni-
ger's Route Nationale 1, which stretches for nearly 905 kilometers along the Ni-
ger-Nigeria border and remains the main artery of the country's social, economic,
and political life, is itself associated with some of the most tragic moments of Nigerien
history. Now a "relic of colonial lust" (Chilson 1999:126), its original course was un-
knowingly plotted by Captain Paul Voulet, who commanded the Voulet-Chanoine
American Ethno/ogist 29(4):829-856. Copyright C) 2002, American Anthropological Association.
830 american ethnologist
mission-sent to penetrate the central Sudan and claim it for France in 1898 (Chilson
1999; see also Fuglestad 1980). Because he encountered resistance from local popu-
lations already facing food shortages and unwilling to provide provisions to the
1,700-man-strong column, Voulet resorted to violence to satisfy the needs of his ex-
pedition. As the column pushed eastward in regions already ravaged by raids and
wars, it left behind a 600-mile trail of devastation and desolation: Villages were sys-
tematically plundered and burned, men decapitated, children hung from trees, and
women taken as captives when they were not killed on the spot (Fuglestad 1983;
Klobb and Meynier 1 931 ).
Two years later, on the very path that Voulet had strewn with the lifeless bodies
of his victims, the construction of Route 1 began, exacting the cost of what would be-
come hundreds of lives as villagers were drafted into forced labor for the sake of ex-
ploiting this arid corner of the French empire: Men, women, and children were
marched out of villages at gunpoint to serve on labor crews. They worked in teams,
the women and children hauling buckets of laterite rock from the bush while the men
pounded the material and leveled it into the road (Chilson 1999:86). Workers had to
provide their own food and water. They slept where they worked and risked beatings
if they took a rest and shooting if they tried to escape. Upon its completion and for
decades thereafter, Route 1 served as the main conduit through which the products of
southern Niger's agriculture were hauled to the coastal towns of Abidjan and Co-
tonou where freighters bound for Europe waited (Chilson 1999:26).
Route 1 was a significant product of, and means of producing, the colonial pro-
ject of modernization in Niger. Colonial modernization did not simply erase the past,
literally and figuratively "covering" it up with layers of gravel and asphalt; my argu-
ment is that the road since 1965, replaced by a tarred road (Zirkaleni 1984:23) re-
tains traces of the violence and terror of colonial times. In this respect, the road en-
dows the past with a tangible, and at times frightening, immediacy. If it has now
become a ubiquitous dimension of the modern landscape for those who ride it or who
live by its side, the kwalta (asphalt road) is nonetheless rarely perceived by Mawri
travelers as an altogether safe or neutral space (as if it had lost its connection to a pre-
vious sociospatial order). Roads (and especially Route 1) as many Mawri will tell
you-are fraught with cruel and bloodthirsty spirits (iskoki) who assail unwary voyag-
ers. Iskoki are not easily deterred by the protective medicines travelers might be carry-
ing. Spirits can be encountered anywhere along one's journey: They tread village
paths and dirt roads as well as paved highways or city streets. Some even visit markets
and attend bori possession ceremonies held in their honor (Masquelier 1993, 2001 b).
Like all other spirits of the Mawri world, iskoki belong to the bush and represent
forces of the wild. Hence, they are called mutanen dayi (people of the bush). Amongst
them, some are revered and placated on behalf of entire communities while others
have been mostly tamed and are now incorporated into the bori pantheon. Spirits
who have been neither domesticated through nature cults nor through bori are espe-
cially feared precisely because they fully and unambiguously belong to the bush, that
unknown and mysterious realm outside of human control and always threatening to
impinge on human space. It is to this nonspecific category of wild and mostly harmful
spirits that the creatures traveling along the road belong. They generally bear no per-
sonal names, though many of them are indiscriminately referred to as Doguwa, a ge-
neric term for the female spirits that inhabited the trees, mounds, and caves of this re-
gion prior to human occupation a hint, perhaps, of the road spirits' connection to a
mythic topography in which, as I will show below, Mawri identities and histories are
anchored.' The creatures that Mawri associate with the road range in appearance
road mythographies
831
from beautiful long-haired women who seduce male passengers and later kill them
mercilessly to cars and trucks that crash into oncoming vehicles or terrorize isolated
villagers during the night. For an older generation that still occasionally alludes to the
atrocities perpetrated by the Voulet-Chanoine mission, the proliferation of these sinis-
ter road spirits is directly linked to the experience of colonization itself, especially the
displacement and development that followed the conquest of Niger. Whole land-
scapes were deliberately destroyed in order to make way for the mapping and crea-
tion of a new order. As trees were cut and boundaries erased, many spirits lost their
dwellings and had nowhere to go. Homeless and restless, these ghastly creatures now
roam the paved highway that runs east-west along the country's southern border. The
spirits' presence on Nigerien roads is thus not fortuitous. Nor is their alleged ruthless-
ness. They are considered by some Mawri to be more destructive than in the past. As I
will show, the appearance of these sinister beings and their worsening ferocity are
rooted in Mawri people's efforts to make sense of the profound dislocations that fol-
lowed colonial occupation. By claiming certain roads or stretches of roads, these spir-
its through their threats contribute to a constitution of the road's space as a site
where collective histories become sedimented and the past and the present are mythi-
cally and progressively unified (Aretxaga 1997).
In an age of space-time compression (Harvey 1989), when geographical and cul-
tural borders are increasingly permeable and growing numbers of people become
part of "traveling cultures" (Clifford 1 997), it is perhaps fitting that for some millet
farmers eking an existence out of one of the world's poorest countries, the risks and
possibilities of modernity are now epitomized by homeless spirits whose uncontrolled
peregrinations closely follow human itineraries. Because they tap into local and tradi-
tional understandings of power, progress, and evil, these creatures of the Mawri
imagination effectively embody "all the contradictions of the experience of modernity
itself, of its inescapable enticements, its self-consuming passions, its discriminatory
tactics, its devastating social costs" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1 993:xxix). In this article,
I explore some of the culturally specific images through which rural Nigeriens articu-
late their experience of modernity, an experience characterized by a profound am-
bivalence toward roads, mobility, and mass transport.2 This ambivalence emerges
most vividly in people's attitudes toward travel and in the stories they share about the
roads, their dangers, and their potentialities. It is remarkably complex and multifac-
eted, as measured by the variety of spirits that terrorize the Nigerien andscape. In
spaces unevenly saturated with both modernity's expectations and the ghosts of a
bloody colonial past, there are, as we shall see, both destructive and protective spirits.
Further, although most of them appear to have roots in the wounded local landscape,
others are decidedly translocal and even resemble the exotic creatures that extol the
wonders of Western commodities in other parts of the globe. I was once shown the
photograph of an alleged bloodthirsty spirit who terrorized the highway. The smiling
blue-eyed, faired-skinned woman had been, in a prior incarnation, promoting tires for
Dunlop. Together these varied spirits illustrate the profoundly contradictory nature of
roads as objects of both fascination and terror. Roads ideally bring jobs, consumer
goods, and economic opportunities, but they can also lead to isolation and marginali-
zation. Although they should open up communities to the world of markets, wage la-
bor, and development, they sometimes become a barrier to wealth and commerce. It
is these contradictory aspects of the road as a space of both fear and desire that inter-
est me. I explore the road's material and iconic dimensions through a discussion of
the Mawri experience of mass transport and mobility. At one level, this means exam-
ining the road as a liminal space in which things (in fact, anything can) happen and
through which the past disrupts, invades, but also explains, the present. At another
level, I analyze how the narratives surrounding the road both express and construct
the experience of automotive travel as a process fraught with risky and contradictory
possibilities. What is significant about these stories of the road, I argue, is their poten-
tial to articulate a wide set of culturally specific forces embodying the disjunctures as
well as the connections, the perils but also the potentialities so characteristic of the
experience of modernity on a rural African periphery.
roads, modernity, and the historical imagination
Over the last century, anthropologists have produced ample evidence that space
is socially constructed. Yet, until the last decade, there has been surprisingly little ef-
fort to analyze space critically (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Referring to the long-
standing devaluation of space in favor of time, Foucault notes that social scientists
have treated space as "the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile" (1980:70)
in contrast to the rich, fecund, vibrant dimension of time. Moreover, he notes that spa-
tial terms seem to have "the air of anti-history" (1980:70). Space, for the most part, re-
mai ns "a ki nd of neutral grid" (Gupta and Ferguson 1 992: 7), isomorph ic with place
and culture to such an extent that even though it functions as a central organizing
principle in the social sciences, it simultaneously "disappear[s] from analytical pur-
view" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:7).3
With the development of postmodernist theory, postcolonial studies, and a new
wave of feminist theory, the convenient isomorphism of space with place, culture, or
nation has given way to a more critical understanding of the social production and ex-
perience of space (Baudrillard 1988; Flynn 1997; Foucault 1975, 1979; Jameson
1984; Ong 1987; Pellow 1991; Pred and Watts 1992). The multipleways in which
space simultaneously connects and disconnects people, places, and things has
proven especially relevant to contemporary analyses of violence and modernity
(Aretxaga 1 997; Feldman 1 991; Shaw 2002). Roads, predictably, occupy an impor-
tant place in some of these analyses because their arrival in previously roadless re-
gions often becomes the turning point in the history of communities and an index of
their progress, at least from the standpoint of some analysts (Giles-Vernick 1996; Hunt
1999; Roseman 1 996). By linking peasant communities to the outside world, paved
roads also symbolize an opening onto what de Pina-Cabral calls "the Future (to His-
tory) that is, to a cosmological condition characterized by permanent instability, ir-
reversibility, and movement" (1 987:731 ). For some, such instability and movement
have provided the very possibility for new identities: Shabe borderlanders, for in-
stance, have embraced their life on the edges of Nigeria and Benin by claiming the
border as their own and turning it into "a corridor of opportunity for them rather than
a barrier to opportunity" (Flynn 1997:326). Roseman (1996) similarly reports how
Galician villagers in northwestern Spain actively asserted their control over the mean-
ing of local events by insisting in direct contradiction with official versions of that
history that they were the ones who lobbied for a paved road and then volunteered
their labor for its construction. In local residents' contestation of the conventional
idea that development projects are delivered to local communities from the outside,
the construction of the road became central to their understanding of modernity and
of their changing place in it. In East Madagascar, the road built by French colonials to
make way for a new order was later subsumed into older forms of community integra-
tion that enabled local residents to "rework the way the outside world figure[d] in lo-
cal memory" (Cole 1998:621).
road mythographies 833
In northwestern Portugal, in contrast, roads were perceived by local rural dwell-

ers to provoke a breakdown in community relations as villagers neglected smaller
paths and relied increasingly on state structures for the preservation of social order. As
a result, road building has been regarded with suspicion when itwas notaltogether
opposed by the locals (de Pina-Cabral 1987). Becoming modern, as the northwestern
Portuguese case illustrates, is a process fraught with ambiguity, because in addition to
opening up rural communities to larger towns and markets, the process also entails
breaking away from an immanent "past" in which personal and communal identities
were safely anchored through the ordering of physical space. The same ambivalence
toward modern roads appears to characterize the postcolonial experience of many
Africans, judging from a growing literature on the dangers of roads and road travel
throughout the continent (Auslander 1990,1993; Bastian 1992, 1 998a; Giles-Vernick
1996). In eastern Zambia, in the late 1 980s, "tarmac" brought wealth from South Afri-
can mines and beyond, but it also allowed for the uncontrolled movement of witches,
spies, suspect Zionist prophets, illicit "truck convoys," and a host of similarly threaten-
ing agencies that co-opted riches and delivered ruin and disease to rural peripheries
(Auslander 1993:169). In southeastern Nigeria, the costs of modernity and of the mo-
bility associated with it often translates into sexualized fraud or exploitation. The vic-
tims of such immoral processes are generally young Igbo women who leave their na-
tal compounds for the perilous motorparks and end up learning at their expenses that
seeking gainful employment to become financially and socially independent can be
"a dangerous proposition" (Bastian 1 998b:121). Drawing on a personal experience in
1971, Geschiere (1997) described the night time roads of southeast Cameroon as
filled with invisible witches who plotted mischief of various kinds. In the M'Bres re-
gion of the Central African Republ ic, G i les-Vern i k (1 995) reports, kolekombo (spi rits
of the bush) were reported in the early 1 990s to lure travelers to their deaths by mak-
ing them "forget the road" (get lost). Throughout Africa, tarred roads emerge as trans-
gressive spaces that enable people to go somewhere literally and figuratively, but the
roads also trap people such that they can neither move forward in time and space, nor
go back to where they were before the tarmac was built. When they literally bear or
become connections to the past through the sedimentation of collective and personal
histories, roads serve as maps that support social memory (Aretxaga 1997; Feely-
Harnik 1991, 1996; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Giles-Vernick 1996; Roseman 1996).
As such, the signs, distinctions, and stories that are associated with them provide a
useful window into how people use space as a mnemonic device through which to
articu late histories and interpret changes.
In the rural town of Dogondoutchi and the surrounding villages where I collected
road stories, people often commented on the costs and benefits of modernity in ways
that left no doubt as to who the victims of so-called progress turned out to be. Moder-
nity, it was tacitly acknowledged, could rarely be achieved without cost. In 1988-89,
local rumors fueled wild speculations about what really happened to Mawri youths
seeking work in oil-rich Nigeria often equating wage labor with cannibalism and
head-hunting (Masquelier 2000). According to those rumors, people who never re-
turned from their migratory travels were the victims of ruthless Igbo-speaking Nigeri-
ans who maintained their prosperous lifestyles by preying upon the young and
healthy bodies of innocent foreigners. Whether they deal with the illicit traffic of body
parts or the gruesome attacks perpetrated by road spirits, these tales of violence, ter-
ror, and exploitation all illuminate how contemporary Mawri, like countless others in
Africa and elsewhere (Bastian 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Farmer 1993;
Geschiere 1997; Hunt 1999; Rowlands and Warnier 1988; Shaw 1997; Taussig
1980), account for and manage the meaning of their existence in increasingly restless
. .
perlp lerles.
In a world overcome by immoral practices, destructive agencies, and the magi-

cal production of wealth from nothing (Masquelier 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001 a), the as-
phalt highway stretching like a long narrow ribbon across the flat and sun-parched
landscape of southern Niger effectively captures the sinister side of travel and trans-
port.4 With its numerous wrecks dotting the land with almost as much regularity as
mile markers, it stands as an ominous reminder of the evils that await and occasion-
ally overtake even the most seasoned traveler.5 Arewa residents regularly take advan-
tage of the relative mobility afforded by bush taxis that ferry them to nearby communi-
ties or to more distant cities, but they are quick to point out the inherent perils of
motor transportation by recalling a friend's or a neighbor's tragic encounter with a
road spirit.
Whether they focus on hideous beings or enchanting creatures, these repre-
sentations of the kwalta (tarred road) in all its terrifying and destructive dimensions
cannot be reduced to a simple critique of motorized transport in contemporary Niger.
Nor can they be dismissed as the fantasies of marginal peasants, a backward retreat
into tradition on the part of confused people caught between two colliding worlds of
value. Like other signs of people's involvement in occult economies all over the
planet (Auslander 1 990; Bastian 1 992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1 999; Hunt 1 999),
these fantastic tales must be understood as creative efforts to articulate local under-
standings of mobility, morality, and marketing in all their literal and metaphorical
meanings. I understand Mawri imaginings of the kwalta as part of a complex econ-
omy of violence in which local images of power, evil, and mobility condense histori-
cal experiences of suffering, exploitation, and dislocation and speak to people's trou-
bled encounters with modernity. People in Arewa express their experience of travel
and mobility of "intertwined roots and routes" (Clifford 1997:4) by linking the
road and its deadly spirits to the region's history of civil engineering, emergent capi-
talism, and religious transformation. Amidst the desires and desperation arising out of
what Mbembe and Roitman refer to as "la crise" (the crisis), there is a widespread
sense among Arewa residents that if highways connect communities thereby theo-
retically enabling Nigerien villagers to gain access to employment, education, and
wealth these arteries so vital to Niger's economic survival also hinder the kind of
mobility that should ideally sustain local rural economies in the face of shifting labor
and capital flows. In a fast-paced world increasingly characterized by "powerless
places and placeless power" (Henderson and Castells 1987:7), the road in its multiple
and contradictory manifestations aptly condenses the mysteries and paradoxes of this
postcolonial epoch for Nigerien millet farmers who, despite their manifold connec-
tions to industrial metropoli, have yet to benefit from the development they were once
prom ised.
roads, transportation, and mobility in postcolonial Niger
Before some of the narratives that inspired this discussion can be presented, a
short description of the transport infrastructure of Niger is in order. In this poor, land-
locked nation, roads are the vital arteries connecting the main commercial centers. As
such, they have become central avenues to power and wealth for Nigerien rural
dwellers who can no longer rely exclusively on cultivation as their source of income.6
Air transportation within the country is minimal and the long-awaited railway that
was expected to link the capital of Benin to Niamey and eventually Dosso has never
gone past the early stages of development, 30 years after its inception (Youssouf
1988).7 The Niger River is of little use to most of the population because it crosses
only three hundred miles of the country on its westernmost edge. Plans were made for
a waterway link between Niamey and coastal ports but they have received insuffi-
cient support for their realization: The company established in 1975 to transport
freight along the Niger River has never hauled more than a few thousand tons of cargo
every year (Charlick 1991:90, 162). Roads are thus the only way to transport goods
and people th roughout the cou ntry.
At independence, Niger had no tarred roads and had to devote substantial efforts
to improve the rudimentary network of laterite and sand tracks inherited from the
French administration (Horowitz et al. 1983:6).8 In 1963, the only blacktopped
stretch of highway outside a town in the entire country connected the Niamey airport
with the presidential (formerly the governor's) palace and covered a distance of a few
kilometers (Horowitz et al. 1983:6).9 Since 1965, large amounts of public revenue
have been expended to endow the country with needed physical infrastructure (Char-
lick 1991). In fact, according to the World Bank (Horowitz et al. 1983:6), Niger has
devoted 8.5 percent of public expenditure to roads and communications; this is a sig-
nificant fraction of government expenditure, especially when compared with 4.0 per-
cent in Mali, 5.0 percent in Sierra Leone, 1.7 percent in Ivory Coast, and 0.9 percent
in Senegal. Two thousand kilometers of tarred roads have also been built with foreign
aid, primarily Canadian financing for the blacktopped road known as la Route de
l'Unite (the road of Unity), which now extends the main east-west highway from Nia-
mey to N'Guigmi on Lake Chad. By 1 978, the 7,657-kilometer network of national
roads included 1,892 kilometers of paved highways and 2,840 kilometers of im-
proved dirt roads (Republique du Niger 1980:322). Road traffic (for semitrucks),
which had already increased considerably in the first two decades since inde-
pendence, was predicted to almost double in the following ten years (Youssouf
1 988).'°
With no signs of upcoming upgrades in air, river, or rail communication, roads
are still the vital links connecting southern cities and joining northern Niger's uranium
mines to the capital. Yet, although the road network has expanded considerably in the
last half century, such expansion has done little to improve the situation of the rural
peasantry. Ever since the first dirt roads were built during the colonial period, the
transportation infrastructure has served primarily foreign economic interests with little
concern for local topographies and economies, as Charlick notes (1991:89). Dictated
largely by external proposals, programs, and needs, the construction of the country's
major roads has not benefited rural communities. For instance, the "uranium road" (as
it is called locally), which makes up nearly one-third of the country's tarred roads,
was built with the taxpayers' money solely to facilitate mining operations in Niger's
desert regions. Most of the other roads in the country serve government and business
interest in western Niger by connecting Niamey to the railhead in Benin and to the
cash-crop producing regions of the east (Charlick 1991:89). Few attempts have been
made to improve the web of secondary roads, something that might have brought
more substantial benefits to local trade networks.
Despite these limitations, villagers routinely cover long distances to attend a
neighboring market, smuggle goods into Niger, seek a healer's services, or offer their
condolences to a mourning household. Although many travel by foot, horse, or don-
key, a growing number of rural Nigeriens now rely exclusively on automobile trans-
port to go almost everywhere. A still relatively small number of Nigeriens own cars
and the Societe Nationale des Transports Nigeriens (SNTN) provides only limited
transportation services. Most of the transportation is thus provided by bush taxis,
some of which convey people and merchandise to isolated and peripheral communi-
ties. Throughout Niger, as well as in the rest of West Africa, Chilson notes, "bush taxis
are the legacies of an overburdened but vital freelance rural transport network that
supports local economies a network starved of motor vehicles, spare parts, fuel, me-
chanics, drivers, and decent roads" (1999:14). Because they are cheap, they are
popular. Yet, because they are also poorly maintained, generally overloaded, and
often driven with frenzied speed on uneven, heavily pitted roads, they are responsible
for many road accidents. Almost two thousand people are reportedly the victims of
road accidents every year, including some three hundred fatalities." Half of those
crashes occur on Niger's main highway (Chilson l 999), the Route Nationale 1, whose
sordid history and predatory reputation feed the rumor mills. Given the unregulated
nature of automotive transport, it is reasonable to assume that many additional deaths
and injuries go unreported (Chilson 1999). Such figures should not be interpreted to
mean that Nigerien roads are more dangerous than, say, the highways of Nigeria or
Mali; road travel is perilous throughout this part of the world.
These sobering statistics may partly account for the privileged role the road and
its many dangers play in Nigerien popular discourse, but I make no attempt here to
test the veracity of the testimonies I have collected. Nor do I try to suggest a crude
functionalist connection between empirical and symbolic violence on the highway.'2
To do so would, I think, oversimplify enormously the import and significance of these
road stories and neglect the specific cultural, socioeconomic, and historical circum-
stances out of which they emerged.'3 The road stories, in my view, constitute the dis-
cursive register that maps out people's experience of the postcolony onto the land-
scape and constructs the road as site of memory, symbol of modernity, and space of
articulation between identity and history.'4
Whether trivial or deadly, events that take place on roadways are projected pro-
fusely in the media (Bastian 1992) and literary works (Achebe 1987; Cary 1962;
Ngugl 1987; Ochri 1991; Soyinka 1973) so as to evoke the range of possible out-
comes-either gruesome or fortunate-that may ensue. This emphasis on the ambiva-
lent nature of road experiences mirrors an equally varied perception of what roads are
(see Hunt 1999). Originally developed to serve the European colonial powers' eco-
nomic and political interests, roads are often cast as pathways to wealth and status for
those who know how to use them. Hence, every year many illiterate young men
struggle to obtain the coveted driver's license that will enable them to achieve the
mobility so widely associated with modernity. Despite the fact that a driving school,
aptly named Auto-Ecole Moderne de Doutchi, opened up in Dogondoutchi in 1994
to serve the needs of a growing number of hopeful applicants, few have managed to
pass the arduous tests. And even fewer have landed jobs as bush-taxi drivers. Roads
do notonly provide income-earningoccupationsforthosewho leave, however. Their
attendant motor parks, built to accommodate the increasing passenger traffic, have
spawned a complex economy of services, trade, and exchange: fare collectors for
bush taxis, spare parts salesmen, mechanics, black-market money traders, food ven-
dors, motor car guards, drifters, and job seekers congregate there, waiting for the next
car, the next load of passengers. Thus, although for older Arewa residents, roads may
recall painful memories of forced labor and ill treatment, for the newer generation,
they symbolize both the promise of a more rewarding life and the system's failure to
deliver the long-awaited blessings of modernity.
Roads do not simply facilitate mobility, marketing, and the (often uncontrolled)
circulation of people and things in the African context. They typify an order of trans-
formation that involves money and commodities by allowing for the movement and
transmutation of value across the landscape (Weiss 1993). In effect, popular repre-
sentations of the road whether they evoke images of "cars out of place" that drain
Africans of their blood (White 1993, 2000) or connect the spread of AIDS with the
heightened mobi I ity associated with women, money, and automotive travel (Weiss
1993) encompass overlapping and contradictory fields of experience. Simultane-
ously sources of hope and fear, memory and desire, the roads in their multiple con-
figurations embody people's conflicted, changing, and contextually disparate under-
stand i ng of modern ity.
It would be tempting, as I focus on images of transience, to see displacement as a
modern social cond ition that fol lows from some defi n itive break with a prior epoch
characterized by sedentary life. At a time when it has become so commonplace to in-
sist on the plurality, hybridity, and instability of modernity, it is nonetheless important
not to lose sight of the ways in which certain people traders, slaves, pilgrims, famine
refugees in Niger or elsewhere have experienced dislocation well prior to the pre-
sent moment (Cl ifford 1 997; Cooper 1 997; Ferguson 1 997; Gregoire 1 997). By argu-
ing that travel has long been a constitutive feature of the Sahelian zone, Rain (1999)
also reminds us that increased mobility must be understood as an economic strategy
and not solely as a sign of degradation (Huntington 1996; Kaplan 1994). Seasonal mi-
gration, he insists, "is a cultural form eminently suited to the seasonal precipitation re-
gime of the Sahel" (Rain 1999:219). If the colonial record suggests that Arewa re-
mained impervious to the twinned influence of commerce and Islam longer than the
rest of Hausaland (Belle 1913; de Latour 1992), it should not be read as implying that
people did not previously move across the landscape. Up until the early 1 960s, when
open space between vi 11 ages was progressively tu rned over to farm i ng, ru ral areas
were characterized by shifting agriculture: Households moved around in search of
game and undisturbed land, settling for a few years and moving on when the land be-
came less fertile and the game less plentiful (Rain 1999:13). Today, with their clusters
of mud or thatched huts clinging to the roadside, Mawri villages may bear all the hall-
marks of tradition, yet they are hardly the bounded, stable, and homogenous commu-
nities they might appear to be. Here, as anywhere on the continent where life is in-
creasingly characterized by mobility and transcultural encounters, one finds a
"paradoxical mix of modernity and tradition at the heart of almost everything" (Piot
1999:24).
Considerations of historical displacement notwithstanding, Nigerien roa

and the experience of those who move across them have been dramatically alter
speed and technology in the past three decades. For one thing, rural residen
come to rely increasingly on mobility to satisfy their food and cash needs
1997; Masquelier 2000; Republique du Niger 1980,1988; Zirkaleni 1984). Let
stress once again that although I recognize the inherent limitations of assuming
level of sedentarism, my primary concern here is with Arewa residents' own pe
tions of how this increase in mobility has affected them and what it signifies a
when people on rural peripheries the world over experience a palpable sense
ited opportunities, despite the emergence of new markets and new modes
change. What I hope to show is that Mawri representations of automotive life in
20th-century Niger speak to the larger issues of colonial and postcolonial change
restless flows of information, goods, and capital, and the accelerated and co
tory circulation of value all of which have become increasingly hard to c
much less understand.
landscapes of memory
As noted above, my discussions with several older Arewa residents often demon-
strated that, for them at least, the proliferation of murderous road creatures was tied to
the far-reaching transformations wrought by colonization. When colonial engineers
redesigned the topography of the Mawri landscape by cutting trees, relocating vil-
lages, and laying down roads, they also disrupted a number of spirit sanctuaries. Spir-
its who, long before the first people arrived, had estabSished their abodes in the trees,
caves, and rocky mounds that dotted the landscape were thus forced to relocate. Or
they simply refused to move, thus forcing the French engineers who aimed to "destroy
and . . . make new" (Cary 1962:1 51), to alter their plans.'5 In 1988, a Dogondoutchi
resident explained this to me:
During chief Soumana's time, there was a big bagaruwa. Spirits used to sit under the
tree. Then, they tried to build the road from Dogondoutchi to Matankari. People car-
ried huge stones on their heads to build the road. And, [the engineers] said it was nec-
essary to cut down the old bagaruwa to bu i Id the road. But the Doguwa forced them to
go around the tree and to build a curve so that they would not cut down the tree be-
cause she liked her home very much.'6
In several others cases I heard of, spirits' homes were destroyed when the portions of
Route 1 that linked Dogondoutchi to Dosso and Konni-two neighboring towns-
were built in the 1 900s. According to Bagoudou, a healer from the nearby village of
Sal koum,
Even the whites who have cars, they know where there are spirits. Sometimes, they
bring a bulidozer to take away a tree but they don't succeed. If they kill the tree, the
bulidozer's driver is going to die. And if they bring another driver, he, too, will die.
This is why whites now avoid trees, and make the road curve instead of cutting a tree.
. . . Since today there isn't much bush left, spirits hang in big trees and others remain in
vi I lages.
However powerfu I the whites are with their automobi les and bu I Idozers, spirits
often have the last word, as Bagoudou seemed to imply. Each curve of the road, each
deviation from the straight trajectory is testimony to the persuasive powers of crea-
tures who do not easily relinquish the locale they have occupied for centuries. Yet,
Bagoudou himself noted that "there isn't much bush left," thereby recognizing that
the whites managed to displace some spirits by tearing down the trees they lived in or
by removing the rocks they occupied. By ignoring local warnings as to the ill conse-
quences of such violations, colonial engineers unlocked a Pandora's box in the popu-
lar imagination. As longer and broader roads unfurled across the landscape, more
spirits found themselves uprooted and restless. No longer respected and placated by
descendants of the seelers who first occupied the region, they roam the very highways
that have rendered them transient and homeless or relocate themselves in inappropri-
ate spaces. As a consequence, no one is safe when taking the road. Even the protec-
tion that travelers might secure from a variety of ritual specialists does not prevent the
frequent occurrence of accidents. It is clear to people that such incidental factors as
reckless driving or faulty brakes play a role in promoting accidents. The high rate of
accidents in itself testifies to the poor quality of vehicles in a threadbare economy;
many Nigerien car owners can barely afford an automobile, much less maintain it.
Nevertheless, the ultimate responsibility for road crashes is invariably attributed to
evil agencies against whom amulets afford only limited protection. For Arewa resi-
dents, wrecks and calamities occurring on the road are never merely accidental the
result of defective brakes, excessive speed, or overloads. Those who are injured or
killed in a car crash are inevitably thought to be victims of bloodthirsty spirits who
roam the highway in search of human prey. Once the deed is accomplished, they
often vanish without a trace. On rare occasions, survivors allegedly are able to de-
scribe their frightening encounters and point to a faint trace in the sand or a mark on a
corpse all unmistakable proof of a spirit's visit.
These deadly spirits, it is commonly acknowledged, act out of revenge for the ne-
glect and ill-treatments they have suffered over the years. Just as people's conversion
to Islam and their oblivious attitude toward spirits that once received periodic offer-
ings of blood are regularly invoked to explain and justify the numerous environ-
mental, economic, and physical problems currently experienced by Mawri commu-
nities (Masquelier 1993, 2001 b), so the intentional destruction of spirit dwellings to
make way for the kwalta explains why so many travelers find their death on the
road.17 In short, many of the difficulties people encounter today are rooted in their
progressive disengagement with the superhuman forces they once pledged to respect
and nurture. In this part of West Africa, Islam has now supplanted indigenous prac-
tices centered around the worship of spirits. Prior to the spread of Islam, the Mawri
cultivated tight bonds with the various Doguwa spirits who occupied the land when
the first settlers arrived. These spirits had allegedly played a central role in charting,
apportioning, and protecting the spatial reality of these populations (Masquelier
2001 b). In return for the protection they offered against enemy attacks, drought, and
other climatic disasters, the iskoki (spirits) demanded the blood of their favorite sacri-
ficial animal usually a goat or an ox. Although land could not be owned by indi-
viduals and had no intrinsic value unless it yielded a crop, certain sites known to be
occupied by spirits were entrusted to the care of the clan propitiating these particular
iskoki. Spirits liked to reside in trees, caves, or mountains and it is at the foot of such
significant landmarks that priest elders shed the sacrificial blood that would sustain
the communities' or clans' powerful but invisible protectors. These natural landmarks
constituted sanctuaries where clan or community members periodically met to
strengthen the bondsthat insured communal protection and prosperity.'8
In this context, land was not experienced as a neutral and inert physical surface
broken here and there by hamlets, cultivated tracks, rivers, or clusters of trees. It con-
stituted a complex phenomenal reality anchored in people's active involvement with
the invisible forces that surrounded them (Masquelier 2001 b). Through their appro-
priation as spirit abodes and by extension, as sacred sites a massive baobab or a
rocky mound would thus become the crucial signifiers of a precolonial order that
hinged on the productive collaboration between human communities and those be-
ings the Mawri sometimes indiscriminately refer to as "mutanen daji" (people of the
bush). Given the role these physical landmarks played in the creation of a mystical ge-
ography, itself an anchor for local identity and a mnemonic artifact that stored reper-
toires of collective histories and practices, it is no coincidence that their subsequent
destruction during colonial times would prove significant, even determinant, to those
who venture to explain what for others still remains partially unexplainable, namely,
the high incidence of frightening encounters on Nigerien roadways. As I have already
noted, not everyone directly attributes the proliferation of restless and vengeful spirits
to the construction of colonial roads. Yet, beyond the diffuse sense of menace roads
hold, there is a widespread, if implicit, perception that this invisible but threatening
traffic would perhaps not have intensified to such an extent had people not disre-
garded their heritage (gado) and turned their back on the spirits. In short, even if not
all Mawri care to listen to what some have to say about the power of occult forces,
many nonetheless routinely blame road accidents on vindictive spirits and even more
spend considerable sums of money to acquire amulets that will ensure their safety
during travel.'9 At a time when mobility has become such a vital means of ensuring
economic survival in farming communities threatened by land shortages, soil degra-
dation, and periodic droughts, it comes to no surprise that the dangers and opportuni-
ties of modernity assume the shape of mysterious and rootless creatures whose own
movements across the landscape closely intersect with human travel.
That these creatures have become iconic of modernity (to some extent) and of the
multiple ways in which subjects experience the workings of globalization does not
imply that these restless spirits were ever totally stable, however. All spirits are, after
al 1, nothing but wind hence their name, iska (plur. iskoki, lit. "wind"). Like the wind
that often moves them across the landscape, spirits are not constrained by physical
boundaries. Because they lack bodies, they can cover great distances in a flash and go
through walls. Just as the harmattan wind that cannot be seen but whose annoying ef-
fects must be endured by all, it is difficult to escape the influence of spirits. Although
invisible to the human eye, they often leave a trace of their presence for those who
can read such signs in the sand, in the remnants of a fire-ravaged home (Masquelier
1994), or on the mangled bodies of their victims. At some level, this impermanence
speaks conveniently to the volatility and ephemeral character of values, processes,
and practices in the post-Fordist era (Harvey 1989): Money, for instance, appears to
change hands so frequently and at such a dizzying speed that people often compare it
to wind or to snakes in order to stress the disconcerting fluidity and elusiveness of that
medium of exchange (Masquelier 1999).2° Like the breeze one feels but cannot see,
money shuns containment and quickly dissipates. Like the snake that slithers along
the path, disappearing in a flash, money unpredictably slips away, leaving one empty-
handed. Similarly, the speed and ethereal quality of spirits and particularly spirits of
the road who come and go with no apparent constraints and on whom people exer-
cise no control make them particularly suitable to personify the rapid transmutation
of value so characteristic of modern times.
There have always been spirits without settled homes who consistently roamed
the bush and terrorized the people they ran into by wild looks, violent demeanor, or
enigmatic questions. The vast majority of these spirits were nonetheless bound to the
land through their anchoring to physical sites that simultaneously sedimented their
mythical histories and concretized their presence for their human neighbors and
devotees. The creatures who currently cause havoc on the highways belong to the lat-
ter group of spirits For some Mawri, it is precisely because they have been dislodged
by colonial projects and can no longer stay put that they have become frighteningly
similar to the untamable and homeless spirits whom people always tried to avoid at
all cost. A taxi driver once warned me that what makes them even more threatening
than the traditional bush spirits encountered by travelers is that their thirst for revenge
is unquenchable, precluding their ever sparing their victims. Thus, although people
occasionally allude to the ghastly creatures (an old hag, a beautiful girl) they once met
and fled from while walking in the bush, no one, in theory, survives an encounter
with the bloodthirsty creatures that cruise local highways.2' In short, regardless of
whether they directly connect the perceived proliferation of road spirits to the geo-
politics of French colonialism, many Mawri would rather not question the potency of
these creatures. This bleak picture seems to allow for different perspectives, however.
Malam Boubakar, a Qurtanic scholar, told me that God had endowed spirits with very
little memory, which is why some travelers occasionally escape from their killers'
clutches: "Spirits think they are going to kill you, but when you [eventually] drive near
them, they have forgotten [about their plan], which is fortunate because otherwise,
road mythographies
841
there would be many more accidents." For this staunch Muslim who spoke unasham-
edly of his deceased father's involvement in bori, leading a morally upright existence
meant recognizing that although spirits must always be feared and never trifled with,
they ultimately answer to God, in whose supreme power travelers must entrust their
I ives.
In the same vein, Hamisou, a Muslim schoolteacher, once pointed out to me
that, although there are undoubtedly many evil spirits cruising the roads, not all road
spirits have bad intentions.22 He was riding in a car headed toward Niamey one night
in 1983 when, just after the village of Bolbol, a tree to his right suddenly caught fire as
if it had been struck by lightning:
My colleague and the driver saw ittoo. This is when I realized I shouldin'tworry. Itwas
just a protective spirit manifesting her presence to us. As long as they follow you on
your trip, nothing bad can happen, no other spirits can harm you. Every once in a
while, you simply become alerted to their presence. They stay in very bushy trees. You
can tell [the spirit's presence] because the tree turns completely red. But you mustn't
be scared.
Such an experience, probably shared with and circulated among many friends, may
have palpably heightened some listeners' confidence in the benefits of seeking spiri-
tual protection before taking the road. Yet, at another level, it implicitly reinforces the
widely shared notion that the malevolent forces currently harming travelers emerged
out of the careless destructions of a prior geomythical order. "They stay in very bushy
trees," Hamisou had pointed out, as if to suggest that only good spirits are grounded in
familiar and recognizable landmarks a bushy tree, visible from far away in a region
where lingering savannah struggles against invading desert. For those who have wit-
nessed the intense desertification of the past decades, the implications are clear: Apart
from a few large trees that have so far survived the construction of colonial roads and
the overharvesting of firewood for local household consumption, the dry land of
Arewa can no longer provide suitable dwellings for the hundreds of spirits that once
protected crops and communities from a variety of disasters. As the "dense forest" de-
scribed almost 150 years ago by the explorer Heinrich Barth (1857:122) progressively
gave way to a tired and almost treeless terrain, the benevolent spirits of the past turned
into sinister forces.23
mobility and violence in the migratory imagination
During my 1988-89 field research, I heard many terrifying stories about travelers
being assaulted or killed by spirits who had tricked them into believing they were
harmless foreigners in need of assistance. Those who were lucky enough to survive
such encounters often insisted that even the most skilled of drivers operating the fastest
vehicle could not outdistance the merciless spirit who had come to collect her dues.
In fact, one individual philosophically noted, during such encounters, it was pointless
to even try to move because, no matter how fast you tried to go, you would always
end up finding the spirit waiting ahead with a grin on her face. On a more recent trip
to Niger, my friend Rakiya recounted for me a 1998 accident in which a car filled
with people fell into a ditch. One person had been killed and the others injured. The
passengers were on their way to a small bush market, some ten miles from Dogon-
doutchi, when it had happened: "They saw a cow that came running their way. The
driver couldn't avoid it. The cow was very big and frightening, so everyone started
saying it was a Doguwa [spirit]," Rakiya explained. In June 1989, I witnessed a series
of conversations about the merciless spirit who had killed the unsuspecting passengers of
a Peugeot 504 because, after the opening of a new marketplace in Dogondoutchi, she
had not received the traditional offering of sacrificial blood she expected in return for
ensuring the market's prosperity (Masquelier 1993).24 Local drivers routinely told me
of mysterious beings that had appeared on the road suddenly, a donkey, an old peas-
ant in ragged clothes, a slender Fulani woman with dangling silver earrings, a blind-
ing light moving at full speed all startling visions that would distract or frighten them
enough to provoke a crash.25
In other accounts, the dangers of the road were tangibly personified by beautiful,
fair-skinned, and youthful female creatures, shape-shifters who became the deadly
trucks that crashed into oncoming vehicles at full speed. Some of these looked noth-
ing like native Doguwa spirits but instead bore striking resemblance to the seductive
creatures of Western advertisements who tempt consumers with a promise of en-
hanced experience in an era of immoderate consumption. I have written elsewhere
about a metal sign in the shape of a smiling creature with the upper torso of a
woman and a tire in the place of legs once used as an advertisement for Dunlop tires
(Masquelier 1992). Although she had originally been created to mythicize the dura-
bility and tensile strength of pneumatics, the seductive blue-eyed tire woman had be-
come, in a Mawri healer's imagination, a murderous spirit who, on the stretch of high-
way between Niamey and Dogondoutchi, could transform herself at will into a
deadly machine that would collide into cars so violently no driver nor passenger ever
survived the impact. Because she waited until nightfall to accomplish her evil deeds
and later disappeared as mysteriously as she had appeared, the nameless spirit never
left any clues that could shed light on the accident, especially the baffling absence of
a second vehicle. In its new African context, the Dunlop sign an alleged photograph
of the spirit's halfway transformation from woman to automobile taken by a skilled
Frenchman personifies an invisible force of the postcolonial landscape at the same
time that it mystifies the road as a channel of sinister forces. Chilson, who rode Niger-
ien bush taxis for a year, collected descriptions of equally threatening leviathan black
trucks "covering the whole road and bearing down from the opposite direction"
(1999:4). "Madame Sabot" (Mrs. Hoof) is another foreign spirit who allegedly traps
unsuspecting travelers, especially philandering males, whom she seduces with her
beauty before killing them. Like the Dunlop "creature," she has long, straight hair,
milky skin, and a beguiling smile. She hails from Abidjan and owes her name to the
sound she makes when she walks: People can hear the "kwop, kwop" sound of her
hooves, an ominous reminder of her nonhuman essence.26
In all these tales of violence and terror on the road, there is a constant: Instead of
joining people or communities together, roads sometimes lead to death. Rather than
serving as pathways to prosperity and education, roads can become deceptive traps
that maim and kill their prey. Like Ben Ochri's (1991 ) mesmerizing description of a
road that "swallows people," like Wole Soyinka's (1973) comparison of the road to a
serpentine funeral shroud unfurling across the landscape, like Ngugl wa Thiongo's
portrayal of a road "that has no beginning and no end" (1987:5), the roads that elicit
such ambivalence from the Mawri peasants who tread them are alive, deceptive, and
dangerous. Yet, they also summon worlds of endless wonder, entice young men to
become bush taxi drivers, and allegedly generate fabulous wealth for transport mag-
nates.27
To shed more light on local understandings of mobility and marketing and on the
way roads call up not simply the colonial past, but also the more recent history of Is-
lamization, I return briefly to the sinister spirit of the marketplace. In Arewa, each
market has a spirit whose support must be secured by offerings of blood if commerce
is to thrive. On the eve of market day, the Imam of Dogondoutchi had led a special
prayer at the new kasuwa (marketplace), but the offering of a sacrificial bull to the
market Doguwa was foregone by local town officials all of whom were Muslim and
wanted nothing to do with spirits. For those who saw the lethal car crash as an act of
revenge, the spirit's brutal response must be read in the context of Islam's progressive
encroachment in the arenas of trade, politics, and religious life. Because she refused
to be relegated to oblivion by an ever more powerful Muslim elite eager to erase the
last visible signs of people's enduring connections to spirits the market Doguwa be-
came a great avenger. From this perspective, her role was to punish communities who
blindly indulged in the modern ethos of individualist achievement, commoditized
consumption, and wealth accumulation, an ethos most blatantly expressed in the
newly erected marketplace. Like other road accidents, the market tragedy illustrates
that although local residents see their struggles as originating in French domination
and in the profound changes that have come in its wake, they nevertheless impute a
great part of the responsibility for the dangers they face on the road to their lack of fi-
delity to spirits.
Significantly, the spirit chose to shed blood not in the marketplace as one would
have expected but on the road and in a car. Aside from reminding people that no one,
however rich and powerful, could prevent the Doguwa from collecting her dues
when the time had come, the "sacrifice" of the three travelers vividly outlined the
connection between markets and roads.28 It stood as a hint that when local officials
moved the market next to the highway Route Nationale 1 that connects all the ma-
jor towns in the south they also dsplaced the market spirit whose new territory now
encompassed the road. Besides suggesting that the relationships between mobility,
danger, and wealth are gendered-the spirit embodying such relationships being fe-
male the story expresses a simple truth:29 For those who, like bori spirit mediums,
have witnessed the progress of Islam with a mixture of nostalgia, suspicion, and
dread, Route 1 and its attendant traffic of people, opportunities, and commodi-
ties has brought mixed blessings. By conjuring up a fearful figure of the past that ef-
fectively captured local imaginations, spirit followers were not simply blaming Mus-
lims for the far-reaching disruptions that had emerged in the wake of colonialism,
commoditization, and development. In their creative efforts to capitalize on the in-
creased road traffic, bori mediums also articulated their growing sense of vulnerabil-
ity in a world increasingly threatened by forces beyond local control, anyone, even
those who have ties to the spirits, may become injured in an automobile accident.
At another level, the revenge scenario alludes to the abstract and contradictory
forces of global capital where money is "a sort of whirlwind that strips the poor as it
passes, while giving to the rich in abundance" (de Latour Dejean 1980:138-139). The
experience of money and markets has been diverse and uneven across Mawri society.
The conspicuous wealth of Muslim elites who control all national commercial net-
works renders more palpable the poverty of the average peasant, especially for those
who perceive the success of Islam as a fundamental loss. Yet, tempting as it might be
to read this story of violence and vengeance as an expression of rural Mawri's aware-
ness of the exploitative nature of national roads, we must keep in mind that all sorts of
crafts and services have emerged along the road, from petty thieves and gasoline
smugglers to spare part vendors to kamisou a freelance agent who assigns passengers
to bush taxis many individuals make a living off the road and its attendant traffic.30
Despite the obvious opportunities this economie routiere has generated, it appears,
nonetheless, that the road has not brought to rural communities the prosperity, or to
use an anthropological cliche, the cargo it was supposed to bring a state of affairs
Charl ick (1 972, 1 991 ) blames on N iger's lack of developed infrastructure. The two
major roads of Niger, as I have already noted, mainly connect large urban centers to
the capital or to foreign cities and have done little to enhance rural economies.
roads, spirits, and blood in Arewa
To prevent accidents and protect passengers, drivers purchase special amulets

that have the power to avert every kind of misfortune that could occur on the road.3'
Although basic charms hung on the steering wheel or the rear view mirror simply in-
sure a safe trip to the passengers of a vehicle, there are more specialized devices one
can acquire to prevent specific problems from happening. I thus heard of a local
Qurtanic healer who specialized in the manufacture of a medicine that would allow
drivers about to run out of gas to transfer petrol from another car's tank into their own,
unbeknownst to that vehicle's driver. Had it not been for an amulet his mother had
given him before he left Dogondoutchi, a friend once told me, he would have crashed
his car into a tree after seeing a blinding fire in front of him as he was driving through
one of the many villages that dot Route 1. Malam Bouba, a Muslim scholar, was
known throughout my neighborhood for the /ayu (charms) he sold to drivers anxious
to avoid frightening encounters. Should they cross the path of a spirit, those who wore
his layu would be protected in such a way that they would simply not see the creature
trying to scare them. Or if they saw it, they would remain calm enough to avoid losing
control of their vehicles.
Despite the multiple kinds of amulets drivers hang in their car or around their
waists, accidents regularly happen. So much so, in fact, that certain sections of
road where repeated crashes have occurred have earned a reputation as "danger-
ous places" that harbor frightening road spirits. Lying halfway between Dogondoutchi
and the small village of Ahole, Takwa Darko is such a place. The small hamlet that
has since given its name to the spirit believed to reside in its midst is dreaded by driv-
ers and passengers alike ever since rumors about the crash that happened there
started circulating several years ago. In 1994, Bibata described this spirit's powers:
Takwa Darko makes cars fall in the ditch. Two cars just had an accident. They all died.
More than eight people. The cars crashed into each other. It was the Doguwa. She is
very dangerous. If a person goes there at night, she will become frightened. [The spirit]
likes to kill people. This road is very dangerous. Even Muslims will ask for protection
because, like everyone else, they are afraid.
Whether or not Muslims are, in Bibata's words, truly "afraid," they are nonetheless
often blamed by spirit devotees for having abandoned the spirits and caused them to
be even more resentful of their human counterpart. Spirits, of course rarely discrimi-
nate between Muslim or non-Muslim victims. Six months before the two-car crash, an-
other accident had occurred in Takwa Darko. Three cows had suddenly crossed the
road in front of a brand new Peugeot station wagon. The driver, a pious Muslim, had
been unable to stop in time and was wounded to the head and hands. Bilen told me,
"His car was ruined. Everybody else was injured. It was the car's first trip to Niamey.
Everybody knows [the spirit], everybody is afraid of her, even Muslims." A once harm-
less cluster of thatched houses thus became mapped out as a new site of danger, an-
other point of reference in the moral geography that structures Mawri understandings
of modernity and mobility. Unlike the other road spirits I have described, the ruthless
Doguwa that personified the perils of automotive travel in Takwa Darko is not home-
less. Travelers now passing through Takwa Darko probably shudder like Bibata at the
thought of the spirit who, on at least two occasions, had stained this portion of road
with the blood of her victims.
Such fears are real enough, and although in my experience they rarely prevent
people from traveling, they must nonetheless be understood as an important dimen-
sion of the imaginative practices through which people read the landscape, invest it
with moral sign if icance, and assess thei r personal vu I nerabi I ity. "There are places
where you feel in your body that something is wrong. This means that there are spir-
its," 36-year-old Ibrahim once explained to me, adding that because there are many
spirits on the road, one commonly experiences this feeling.32 Being able to foretell
danger, for other individuals, means learning to recognize a certain form of heaviness
that both literally and metaphorically prevents people from moving through space.
"Heavy" (masu nauyi) days are identified through divination as inauspicious times
during which no journey should be undertaken because bad things would inevitably
happen. Travelers, hence, customarily ask diviners to set the date of their departures
before making any plans.33 People in Arewa routinely use the roads to smuggle Nige-
rian goods into Niger, visit markets, ask money from salaried kin, or attend bori cere-
monies, but they do so with a certain degree of circumspection, aware that because
peril can strike at any time, it is best to be prepared and protected.
If the dangerous sections of the road distinguished as hanyoyi masu iskoki (roads
with spirits) provide further evidence of how violence comes to be inscribed in the
landscape, the encoding of Takwa Darko as a bad place acquires a particular (more
insistent and threatening) kind of permanence: That stretch of road is now the spirit's
very own home. Road building, as the story of Takwa Darko implies, has not simply
rendered spirits homeless and more dangerous. It has, in some cases, led displaced
spirits to settle in the wrong kinds of places. Instead of living in the bush, Takwa Darko
now lives in a village to which she had no prior ties. It is precisely because her choice
of residence cannot be controlled, because she cannot be held at bay that the spirit so
aptly symbolizes what can go wrong when roads reconfigure space with no concern
for existing relations, practices, and places. If Takwa Darko's characteristics as a
bounded spirit appear atypical, the place she has endowed with a dangerous reputa-
tion is hardly unique. There are dozens of such sections along the entire length of
Route Nationale 1, as Chilson recalls (1999:68).
Aside from speaking to the nefarious consequences of spirit displacement, the
history of Takwa Darko and of other similarly threatening creatures of the road speak
to another fundamental transformation in human and spirit relations, one that hinges
on the practice of sacrifice. I have already noted that in exchange for the protection
they afforded local communities, nature spirits used to periodically request offering of
sacrificial blood. Through sacrifice, villagers renewed the bond formed between spir-
its and people at the beginning of time. With the advent of colonization, and later, Is-
lam, spirits were forgotten, abandoned, or rendered homeless; they were also de-
prived of their sustenance as altars were destroyed and rituals lost.34 It is against this
backdrop of the perceived loss of al'ada (tradition) that the significance of bloodthirsty
spirits looking for prey must be assessed, I suggest. Like the Doguwa of the market
who selected her own sacrificial victims on the road after she was denied a ritual of-
fering of blood, the spirits that haunt Route Nationale 1 have taken things into their
own hands. From passive recipients of blood offerings they have become agentive,
even aggressive, beings who shed themselves the blood they feed on. Human blood,
it appears, is part of that road's history through and through. Whether accidental or in-
tentional, the spirits' resemblance to the French colonials who, through conquest and
corvee, extracted the blood on and with which Route 1 would be built, is compelling
enough. Although we may never be able to piece together the exact origin of the hy-
brid forces who currently exact revenge for their ill-treatments by "sacrificing" road
travelers, an implicit logic nonetheless emerges from all the stories, one that weaves
together different ideas about spirits, blood, and roads and that reveals the world of
violence, loss, and uncertainty in which the Mawri have lived in the past century.
conclusion
Whether they travel by horseback, donkey cart, bush taxi, or in their own auto-
mobiles, the people of Arewa cover great distances by road. Men and women alike
also use their feet for what is an astonishing degree of mobility throughout Niger, and
all year long. They know the roads and paths well because they are constantly on
them, traveling to and from markets, commuting to and from fields during the rainy
season, migrating, visiting. Although laterite roads, sandy trails, and the bush as a
whole can harbor danger and excitement, asphalt roads nonetheless offer a different
kind of travel experience, I have argued. If the speed and efficiency of automotive
travel in the late 20th century blur older spatial and temporal distinctions for Niger-
iens who can now easily cover the distance between Dogondoutchi and the country's
capital in half a day, they have also introduced new forms of violence, fear, and loss.
To make sense of these experiential changes, a whole register of stories has emerged
that taps into older, collective ideas about spirits and speed, power and blood, and
violence and sacrifice. The modernity these stories articulate is both repulsive and al-
luring, familiar, yet also foreign, and at times, confusing and contradictory. Of par-
ticular significance is the visible immediacy that collective histories, personal experi-
ences, and abstract processes acquire as they become mapped onto a physical
terrain, the long, dusty, and narrow road that, after absorbing the sweat and blood of
colonial subjects, now swallows travelers, to use Ochri's evocative imagery.
The role that space occupies in Nigerien understandings of modernity is hardly
unique, of course. As the globe shrinks through terrestrial and cosmic travel, the radi-
cal changes in scale that people experience everywhere have led to a proliferation of
what Auge calls "non-places" (1995:78): Wastelands and waiting rooms, shopping
malls and airport lounges, and hotels and computer stations are all nothing but transit
points, temporary quarters where individuals become connected to the global econ-
omy in a uniform and unmediated manner. At first sight, Route Nationale 1 seems to
be such a place, or rather, "non-place." Highways are after all the space of transit, par
excellence. Yet, although they imaginatively concretize the sense of space-time com-
pression that characterizes modernity for rural Nigeriens, the stories discussed above
also demonstrate the centrality of place in Mawri people's articulation of the past with
the present. The development of the Nigerien landscape has entailed destruction and
erasure, but the marks of these transformations themselves remain: Recapitulated in
the bloodied history of Route 1, modernity thus spawns the past in its wake even as it
obliterates it. Unlike Auge's "non-places" that "do not integrate the earlier places"
(1995:78), the "non-places," dangerous and otherwise, which are discursively
mapped onto southern Niger's highway would not exist without their connections to
earlier material and mythical places.35
In his description of the "predatory economy of the street" in contemporary Kin-
shasa, Devisch powerfully captures the inherent ambiguity of a space that is both a
"non-place" and a space connected to a specific social imaginary. He notes that "the
waves of violence and the predatory economy of the street in fact appear to recover
traces of a collective and very archaic unconscious with regard to fatal sorcery and
the mute revolt of the people in the face of evil" (1995:61 2). Like the streets of Kinshasa
or the roads of the Central African Republic, Niger's Route Nationale 1 has been dis-
cursively created through an imaginative register of violence that is culturally spe-
cific. Whether they hail from the waters of Abidjan or the dry savannah of Arewa, the
multiple spirits who roam Route l ultimately remind us that the global processes that
have unfolded since the violent "conquest" of Niger by Voulet and Chanoine have re-
sulted in "place-specific experiences of modernity, in place-specific experiences of
disjuncture, in place-specific cultural (re)form(ations)" (Pred 1992:107). Within this
context-specific world of meanings, the road, and the modernity it symbolizes,
emerge as a field of overlapping, at times contradictory, and often discontinuous re-
alities where the foreign and the familiar, good and evil, hope and despair underpin,
generate, and presuppose one another.
notes
Acknowledgments. I am deeply indebted to the people of Dogondoutchi and their nei

bors in surrounding villages, all of whom welcomed my inquiries into their past and shared
me their lives and memories. A much different version of this article was presented at the A
can Studies Association Annual Meeting in Baltimore in November 1990 and at the Afr
Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago in April 1991. The participants at these gat
ings have been generous with their comments on several prior versions of this article altho
they cannot be held responsible for the remaining flaws. I am particularly grateful to R
Austen for his support and for suggesting that I read Joyce Cary's Mr. Johnson. Many thanks g
Mark Auslander, who organized our panel on roads at the ASA meetings, and to Peter Chils
for writing Riding the Demon. Pertinent and constructive criticism by Misty Bastian, Jean Comar
Gillian Feely-Harnik, Murray Last, and Nancy Munn greatly facilitated the revision process.
anonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist have offered very perceptive comment
which I have relied heavily. Research on which this article is based was carried out in 1988-
thanks to a research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health, a dissertation gra
from the National Science Foundation, and a grant for anthropological research from the Wenn
Gren Foundation. Further research during the summer of 1994 was made possible by a fell
ship from Tulane University's Committee on Research. Fieldwork in 2000 was supported wi
Tulane University Newcomb Foundation grant.
1. Female spirits known as Doguwa (lit., "the long one") are native to Arewa. Origina
propitiated for their role in warfare, their ties to the land, and their capacity to ensure commu
prosperity, Doguwa spirits became the first spirits to be incorporated in the pantheon of bo
once dominant religion whose power and visibility has waned with the spread of Islam. A la
majority of Doguwa nonetheless remain "untamed," nameless, and always ready to ca
trouble-on the road or elsewhere which is why Arewa is reputed to house the most dang
ous spirits of Niger (see Masquelier 2001 b).
2. Modernity, in this article, is understood to be a worldview through which people ass
their and other people's degree of "progress" or "backwardness" through an evolutionary id
inherited from the Enlightenment. As has been demonstrated by a growing literature on the su
ject, modernity is a problematic, but nonetheless conceptually useful, category that often b
comes a means of constructing otherness (Appadurai 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 199
Gupta and Ferguson 1992).
3. Early on, feminist theorists understood space as an important dimension of culture and
as a crucial parameter in the production and reproduction of gender difference and sexual strati-
fication (Ardener 1981; Ortner 1974; Rosaldo 1974). Although the first wave of gender studies
was caught up in the definitions of spatial dichotomies '}public" (male) versus "domestic" (fe-
male) spheres-that divided social worlds evenly and rigidly, the second generation of feminist
theorists has called into question the universality of the category "woman" and attended to is-
sues of locality and subjectivity.
4. Chilson, who measured the road, claims it is six yards wide and six inches thick
(1 999:26).
5. In 1994, a French missionary and longtime resident of Niger who had once counted the
mangled carcasses of crashed vehicles that had been left to rust on the sides of that highway,
evaluated there was roughly one car per five kilometers along the 420-kilometer stretch of road
that connected Niamey to Birnin Konni. On the 33-mile section of road between Zinder and
Takieta, in southeastern Niger, Chilson similarly counted 17 wrecks, a numberthattranslates as
almost two wrecks per five kilometers or, roughly, three miles (1999:68).
6. A large majority of Mawri rely on wet-season cultivation of millet, guinea-corn, ground
nuts, and beans, and on domestic pastoralism (raising goats, sheep, and chickens) for the bulk of
their subsistence. During the dry season, men migrate in search of seasonal jobs, become petty
traders, or engage in secondary occupations such as tailoring, smithing, or calabash carving to
supplement the income they draw from cash crops.
7. Air transportation (via Air Niger) collapsed after the government withdrew its support
from the small company in 1985 as an austerity measure in the face of an economic crisis result-
ing from the collapse of the uranium market (Charlick 1991 :90).
Dosso is one of the major cities of Niger and the capital of the Departement of the same
name. Dogondoutchi, the rural town where most of the stories I am recalling here originated, is
located 137 kilometers east of Dosso.
8. Speaking of Niamey in 1936, Niandou writes that "there were almost no cars. Only the
governor had some. Everyone traveled by foot, a few on camel- or horse-back" (1976: 22).
9. In contrast to neighboring West African states, French investment in its Nigerien colony
was always minimal. Hence, although France built 640 miles of paved road in French West Af-
rica, only eight of them were in Niger (Charlick 1991 :39).
10. The number of vehicles in Niger has grown rapidly since independence. Between
1969 and 1974, the number of registered vehicles went from 1 l,694 to 19,591. That number
reached 26,685 in 1977 and then 47,904 in 1982 (Zirkaleni 1984).
1 1. According to the World Bank, car wrecks are proportionately eight to ten times more
frequent on the African continent than in Western countries and they are a leading cause of
death (Chilson 1999:15).
12. Ironically, although passenger traffic seems to have almost doubled between 1979
and 1986, the number of accidents declined: In 1981, 598 automobile accidents (resulting in
1,353 casualties and 192 deaths) were recorded. In 1986, the number fell to 345 (with 742
casualties and 73 fatal ities) (Republ ique du N iger 1 988:1 86).
13. Rumors circulate endlessly and anonymously. They have no traceable sources, no
identifiable owners, yet, despite their elusiveness and indeterminacy, they are powerful, as
Homi Bhabha notes: "The indeterminacy of rumour constitutes its importance as a social dis-
course. tts intersubjective, communal adhesiveness lies in its ennunciative aspect. Its performa-
tive power of circulation results in the contagious spreading, 'an almost uncontrollable impulse
to pass it on to another person' " (1994:200). Although in some ways, rumors function as dehis-
toricized discourse, they are a significant means of giving shape to social realities. That they
constitute "an 'abyssal overlapping' of too much meaning and a certain meaninglessness"
(Bhabha 1994:204) should not deter us from studying them as an expression of social con-
sciousness. The relevance of the road stories, in the present case, lies in the very images that ru-
ral Mawri use to describe, and situate themselves within, changing social worlds.
14. Soja (1989) has written extensively on the role of space in the experience and repre-
sentation of modernity.
15. This quote is excerpted from MisterJohnson (Cary 1962), a novel that chronicles the
integration of a small northern Nigerian community to the British colonial empire of the 1 920s.
Cary describes the road the brainchild of an English officer in search of glory as the symbol
and embodiment of British colonialism and of the various changes it brings. More than a simple
pathway for transport and commerce, the road becomes, for the administrator Rudbeck who
has masterminded the project, 88the great, the glorious, the wonder of the world" (1962:205).
Yet, if the road brings wealth and opportunity, it also spawns confusion, disruptions, and contra-
dictions: "I am abolishing the old ways, the old ideas, the old law . . . I am the revolution . . . I
destroy and I make new" (1962:1 51). This finds echoes in Taussig's (1987:312-319) fascinating
analysis of the construction of a road for the extraction of rubber in early-20th-century southwest
Columbia. There, the missionaries who oversaw the construction of what came to be seen as the
"road to redemption" envisioned this pathway into savage, but rubber-rich Amazonia as a pow-
erful vehicle of civilization. As the "Dantean descent into the mysterious world," the road be-
came a magical concept "fusing powerful elements of religious fervor with those of frontier
capitalism from which each race and class would draw its quotient of redemption" (Taussig
1 987:3 1 7).
16. Soumana was the chefde canton (customary chief) of Arewa from 1942 until his death
in 1 981.
Bagaruwa is Acacia arabica, or Egyptian mimosa, the original source of gum arabic (Abraham
1 962:57, 280).
17. People in Arewa associate the coming of Islam with the advent of the pax colonial at
the turn of the century. Although the French are to blame for the destruction of spirit dwellings,
spirit followers nonetheless widely assume that local residents who turned to Islam share some
of the responsibility for the current travel conditions.
18. Among the aLuund of Congo, the tree "becomes the means by which one's place in
the social landscape is 'rooted' in material historicity and in ancestral space-time," notes De
Boeck (1998:25). Although Mawri people who worship ancestral spirits appear to similarly use
trees for the "production of historically situated locality" (1998:25), they do not distinguish trees
from other landmarks-a mountain, a cave that serve as spirit homes. If trees occupy a promi-
nent place in local discourses on road construction, it is largely, I suspect, because trees, unlike
mountains, are disposable and therefore particularly suitable images for recounting Niger's co-
lonial history of tampering, destruction, and loss.
19. Although further research into the traveling population of Arewa might reveal some
previously indiscernible distinctions amongst travelers, I could detect no significant variation in
attitude between, for instance, second- or third-generation Muslims who took the road to buy
and sell goods and spirit mediums who traveled by bush taxi to attend possession ceremonies.
Predictably, self-proclaimed spirit devotees eagerly shared their road encounters with mysteri-
ous beings whereas prominent Muslim businessmen, anxious to avoid being seen as "supersti-
tious," rarely mentioned such encounters. A couple of Islamic scholars and almost all the local
civil servants (three of whom were Christians) I spoke to had experienced at least once a
"spooky" incident that confirmed the presence and power of road spirits. Partly because Arewa
has been only recently Islamized and partly because Muslim and non-Muslim identities remain
so complexly intertwined, it is difficult to define the role these identities might play in shaping
local road mythographies. The fact that even secluded Muslim women who rarely step out of
their compound to travel-know and share frightful road stories further complicates the picture.
All told, it is safe to say that among those who call themselves Muslim, more women than men
would admit to fearing the roads and their many spirits.
20. There are several concepts in Hausa that illustrate the slipperiness of value for impov-
erished Nigeriens struggling to make ends meet. People often say that "life is a mango" to illus-
trate how life can be as pleasurable and sweet yet also as slippery (and, therefore,
unpredictable) as the juicy and fragrant fruit. Further, people often explain their poverty through
the concept of ku'din iska (wind money). As its name indicates, "wind moneyw' refers to the elu-
siveness of cash, which can, after being used in a transaction, disappear without a trace from the
coffer of the seller (Masquelier 1999). Like the wind whose velocity and invisibility it emulates,
this magical currency has an agency of its own. Given the limited amount of cash that circulates
to meet the needs of everyone (Raynaut 1977) and the speed with which it changes hands, it is
no wonder that, for Mawri villagers, money sometimes acquires a magical valence whose im-
poverishing effects can be quite devastating.
The precariousness of life in communities where prosperity is now synonymous with
money is aptly captured in the proverb, "Money and serpents, their remedy is killing." Hinging
upon the double entendre of the Hausa term for killing, this cynical commentary on the Mawri's
experience with cash translates well the combination of fear and desire that villagers feel toward
currency. "Killing money" (kashin ku'di) can be roughly translated as "spending money."
Spending money can be risky when one cannot control the process. For peasants caught in
endless cycles of debt and poverty, money becomes as dangerous as the snake that threatens
lives. Like the snake, it must be killed.
21. There are exceptions to this rule, as I have pointed out earlier.
22. Some benevolent spirits apparently endow their devotees with the fabulous gift of
speed enabling them to cover a distance of 400 or 500 kilometers in a few hours. Their power is
such that they can bypass the current transportation system altogether and more or less fly
through the air at great speed.
23. Spirit worshipers explicitly blame those who have forgotten the spirits for the careless
deforestation that opened a Pandora's box no one has been able to close since. Today, spirit fol-
lowers' respect for the iskoki's habitat is giving shape to a growing ecological awareness of their
vulnerable environment. A bori healer pointed out to me that precautions must be taken to en-
sure that trees that provide housing for spirits are not felled inadvertently. For starters, one must
never cut down a big, old tree. Sometimes, trees will bleed when the wood is slit by the ax. If
someone chopping at a tree leaves before he has cut the tree down, he may find upon his return
that the ax has fallen to the ground. This is an indication that a spirit lives in the tree and that it is
not safe to proceed any further. If the ax is still stuck in the tree where the individual left it an
indication that no spirit dwells there-it is safe to resume work.
24. Incidentally, in Niger and Nigeria, Hausa speakers supposedly refer to the popular
Peugeot 504 as a 'kwarya mutuwa (calabash of death) while at other times, they describe it
through the grisly proverb dufa duka kashe bakwai bar biyu shaida ("cook them all, kill seven,
and leave two to testify"), or in truncated form, deJfa duka, "cook them all" (Chilson 1999:47).
25. Chilson recalls a friend's testimony of his encounter with un genie de la route (road
spirit) that nearly made him crash. She was "a very dark skinned woman in black cloth, carrying
wood on her head [who] started crossing the road in front of the car" (1999:58). Before he could
steer to avoid her, she had disappeared, thereby confirming that she was indeed a road demon.
26. Spirits are shape-shifters who can trick people into thinking they are humans. When
they take on a human appearance, something general Iy remains of their essential nature that be-
trays their lack of humanity. Their human legs will often end with camel or donkey hooves, for
instance (see Crapanzano 1973 for a similar case in Morocco). Men are so taken by the beauty
of the female creatures they encounter, however, that they rarely notice that something is
sl ightly wrong with the appearance of these "women."
27. In 1988-89, many of the young men I talked to said that their most cherished dream
was to be able to take driving lessons; others told me that they were already studying for the
driving test. Earning the coveted driver's I icense, they knew, would open magic doors to wealth,
mobility, and freedom. Mahammadou, my research assistant, told me on numerous occasions
how he regretted almost daily not having taken the permis poids-lourd (lorry-driving license)
that would have helped him escape not only poverty, but also boredom and mediocrity. "My
younger brother drives a lorry, now. He has such a great life!" he once lamented. My landlord,
an illiterate peKy trader who struggled to support his two wives and eight children, had tried un-
successfully several times to pass the examination that would entitle him to drive bush taxis. The
significance of the permis (driver's license) was brought home to me in June 1994 when, in the
middle of the intense recession that followed the dramatic devaluation of the local currency in
January of that year, I witnessed the feverish activity surrounding the newly opened auto-ecole
(driving school). At a time when state-sponsored services were rapidly declining, the country
was paralyzed by a general strike, and everyone was complaining of the rishin ku'di (lack of
money), a few young men were nonetheless willing to sacrifice what little they had in exchange
for the permis that would, they hoped, free them from gloom and scarcity.
28. I did not obtain any information on who the victims were. It is nevertheless reasonable
to speculate that the car owner was relatively wealthy, given his ownership.
29. The female gender of most of the spirits one encounters on the road is significant and
must be assessed in terms of newly emerging conceptions of women as sexual and moral threats
that contradict traditional understandings of femininity and fertility (Masquelier 1995). Al-
though the preponderance of female spirits who insured individual and communal fertility in
precolonial Arewa partly explains why so many of the spirits haunting the road are female, too,
this feminization of roads and transport must also be understood in terms of female forms'
road mythographies
851
capacity to articulate and make concrete various processes of growth, decay, reproduction, de-
struction, and transformation. Lack of space prevents me from further developing this argument
here.
30. Although the presence of rootless spirits is routinely linked to colonial intervention, it
is more difficult to discern the connections between the current proliferation of spirits and the
more recent history of land development and exploitation. In my experience, people never ex-
plicitly spoke of tarred roads as paths for the extraction of their labor and resources, yet, as the
stories of the market spirit and the burning bush suggest, the postindependence forms of mobil-
ity and marketing, speed and violence have held powerful sway on collective imaginations.
Even if for the younger generation, the mention of colonial roads evokes no memories of pain
and no sense of loss, some of them even amongst Muslims-are keenly aware that the intensi-
fication of deforestation, the spread of Islam, and the development of marketing have displaced
spirits and affected their relations with humans usually for the worse. How they choose to
make sense of these transformations is revealed in the varied responses these stories elicit: Not
everyone, in short, believes everything that is said about roads and spirits. Yet, that does not
make these stories, or the connections they make between past and present events, any less true
for those who believe them. As White points out in the context of vampire stories in colonial Af-
rica, "the stories are false, but the names and places and tools in them are true, and the stories
are about the real fears those places and tools aroused" (2000:41 ).
31. Another effective way to ensure both one's safe return home and the success of one's
travel venture is to ask for a bori spirit's help. Some travelers rarely fail to visit the altar of their fa-
vorite bori spirit before taking the road. Asking for the spirit's protection usually entails making a
small offering (money, perfume) and reciting a prayer outlining one's needs. I often heard
would-be travelers promise the spirit they prayed to a sacrificial offering if he or she helped
them achieve what they set out to do.
32. Hassan, a Muslim civil servant employed at Nigelec (the Nigerien electric company),
who had previously disregarded his friends' warnings about dangerous road sections, came to
experience this dreadful feeling once when, walking back from a nearby village around three in
the morning, he heard a sucking noise the kind of noise people make when they call a dog. He
stopped and looked around but saw nothing. A moment later, he felt the hair of his neck stand
on its own. His whole body shuddered. He started running. Upon arriving home, he recounted
his story to an uncle, who told him that he was extremely lucky. Hassan, the uncle had con-
cluded, owed his life to his grandmother's spirit, who had protected him against what had obvi-
ously been a dangerous iska.
33. I myself had to reschedule a journey after a medium possessed by his bori spirit in-
formed me one night that the day I had picked to leave town was inauspicious. To ensure my
safe return, he also advised me to distribute flat bean cakes as sadaka (alms) to the neighbor-
hood children on the Thursday that preceded my departure.
34. See Masquelier (2001 b) for a more detailed account of how spirit devotees articulate
the loss of gado (heritage) when it comes to spirit-related practices.
35. Significantly, these are "non-places" not only for humans but for the unbodied spirits,
as well. Spirits appear to need a place of their own even if, as the evil resident of Takwa Darko
demonstrates, such places often turn out to be inappropriate for their occupants. In contrast to
benevolent spirits who dwell in bushy trees their appropriate homes displaced spirits are
forced to "re-place" themselves in the wrong places or remain transient. I am indebted to
Misty Bastian for pointing this out to me.
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accepted October 24, 2001

final version submitted November 15, 2001
Adeline Masque/ier
Department of Anthropology
Tulane University
New Orleans, LA 701 18-5698
amasquelWtulane.edu

Adeline Masquelier - Road Mythographies

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Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger

Author(s): Adeline Masquelier

American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

In this article, I explore how some Hausaphone Mawri in postcolonial Niger

Ben Ochri, The Famished Road

Peter Chilson, Riding the Demon: On the Road in WestAfrica

American Ethno/ogist 29(4):829-856. Copyright C) 2002, American Anthropological Association.

roads, modernity, and the historical imagination

In northwestern Portugal, in contrast, roads were perceived by local rural dwell-

In a world overcome by immoral practices, destructive agencies, and the magi-

roads, transportation, and mobility in postcolonial Niger

Considerations of historical displacement notwithstanding, Nigerien roa

mobility and violence in the migratory imagination

roads, spirits, and blood in Arewa

To prevent accidents and protect passengers, drivers purchase special amulets

Acknowledgments. I am deeply indebted to the people of Dogondoutchi and their nei

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff

accepted October 24, 2001

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