ABSTRACT
Few things can be more memorable than those occasions when everyday routines are shattered abruptly by shocking experiences. One of my most shattering experiences occurred in 1969 in the Republic of Niger. I had been teaching English in the secondary school of Tera, a town of 1000 in the heart of Songhay country. For three months my routine at the school was to teach from early morning to noon and then go to the dusty bar in town to drink beer with my French colleagues. The same routine was repeated at the end of the working day. We came to spend a great deal of time at Chez Jacob, the establishment of a Yoruba trader, one of the few non-European beer drinkers in town. The beer was usually lukewarm due to the temperamental flame of Jacob’s kerosene refrigerator. But neither the temperature of the beer nor the stark décor, a hard bench against a mudbrick wall, kept us from maintaining our European rituals in a strange and distant land. What we did not know about Chez Jacob was that it bordered upon the compound of a zima, a ritual priest of the local possession cult. One afternoon, however, we discovered, to our dismay, the violent nature of the Hauka, one of several ‘families’ of spirits in the pantheon of the Songhay people of the western regions of the Republic of Niger. 1
