road mythographies

road mythographies: space, mobility, and thehistorical imagination in postcolonial Niger

ADELINE MASQUELIERTulane University

In this article, I explore how some Hausaphone Mawri in postcolonial Nigermaterialize their experience of modernity. I examine the fundamental rolethat 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 ratherthan 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.

Q O %J

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 West Africa

Thinking historically is a process of locating oneself in space and time. And a location . . .is an itinerary rather than a bounded sitea series of encounters and translations.

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation 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 manyways, the first and most enduring aspect of colonialism affecting Mawri villagers wasthe 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 wouldevoke poignant memories of having to leave behind entire fields ready for sowing orharvest, knowing that their absence would mean starvation, illness, and despair thefollowing year. Villagers who were greeted by the dreaded words "Corvee desRoutes!" (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 Nigerienhistory. 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 Ethnologist29(4):829-856. Copyright 2002, American Anthropological Association.

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missionsent to penetrate the central Sudan and claim it for France in 1898 (Chilson1999; see also Fuglestad 1980). Because he encountered resistance from local popu-lations already facing food shortages and unwilling to provide provisions to the1,700-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 andwars, it left behind a 600-mile trail of devastation and desolation: Villages were sys-tematically plundered and burned, men decapitated, children hung from trees, andwomen taken as captives when they were not killed on the spot (Fuglestad 1983;Klobb and Meynier 1931).

Two years later, on the very path that Voulet had strewn with the lifeless bodiesof 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 weremarched 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 menpounded the material and leveled it into the road (Chilson 1999:86). Workers had toprovide their own food and water. They slept where they worked and risked beatingsif they took a rest and shooting if they tried to escape. Upon its completion and fordecades thereafter, Route 1 served as the main conduit through which the products ofsouthern Niger's agriculture were hauled to the coastal towns of Abidjan and Co-tonouwhere 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 roadsince 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 nowbecome a ubiquitous dimension of the modern landscape for those who ride it or wholive by its side, the kwalta (asphalt road) is nonetheless rarely perceived by Mawritravelers 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 tellyouare 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 villagepaths and dirt roads as well as paved highways or city streets. Some even visit marketsand attend bori possession ceremonies held in their honor (Masquelier 1993, 2001b).Like all other spirits of the Mawri world, iskoki belong to the bush and representforces of the wild. Hence, they are called mutanen daji (people of the bush). Amongstthem, some are revered and placated on behalf of entire communities while othershave been mostly tamed and are now incorporated into the bori pantheon. Spiritswho have been neither domesticated through nature cults nor through bori are espe-cially feared precisely because they fully and unambiguously belong to the bush, thatunknown and mysterious realm outside of human control and always threatening toimpinge on human space. It is to this nonspecific category of wild and mostly harmfulspirits 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 occupationa hint, perhaps, of the road spirits' connection to amythic topography in which, as I will show below, Mawri identities and histories areanchored.1 The creatures that Mawri associate with the road range in appearance

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from beautiful long-haired women who seduce male passengers and later kill themmercilessly to cars and trucks that crash into oncoming vehicles or terrorize isolatedvillagers during the night. For an older generation that still occasionally alludes to theatrocities perpetrated by the Voulet-Chanoine mission, the proliferation of these sinis-ter road spirits is directly linked to the experience of colonization itself, especially thedisplacement 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 theirdwellings and had nowhere to go. Homeless and restless, these ghastly creatures nowroam the paved highway that runs east-west along the country's southern border. Thespirits' 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 Iwill show, the appearance of these sinister beings and their worsening ferocity arerooted 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-itsthrough their threatscontribute to a constitution of the road's space as a sitewhere 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 becomepart of "traveling cultures" (Clifford 1997), it is perhaps fitting that for some milletfarmers eking an existence out of one of the world's poorest countries, the risks andpossibilities of modernity are now epitomized by homeless spirits whose uncontrolledperegrinations closely follow human itineraries. Because they tap into local and tradi-tional understandings of power, progress, and evil, these creatures of the Mawriimagination effectively embody "all the contradictions of the experience of modernityitself, of its inescapable enticements, its self-consuming passions, its discriminatorytactics, its devastating social costs" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: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 emergesmost vividly in people's attitudes toward travel and in the stories they share about theroads, their dangers, and their potentialities. It is remarkably complex and multifac-eted, as measured by the variety of spirits that terrorize the Nigerien landscape. Inspaces unevenly saturated with both modernity's expectations and the ghosts of abloody 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 thewonders of Western commodities in other parts of the globe. I was once shown thephotograph of an alleged bloodthirsty spirit who terrorized the highway. The smilingblue-eyed, faired-skinned woman had been, in a prior incarnation, promoting tires forDunlop. Together these varied spirits illustrate the profoundly contradictory nature ofroads as objects of both fascination and terror. Roads ideally bring jobs, consumergoods, 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. Itis 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 ofthe 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

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through which the past disrupts, invades, but also explains, the present. At anotherlevel, I analyze how the narratives surrounding the road both express and constructthe experience of automotive travel as a process fraught with risky and contradictorypossibilities. 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 aswell as the connections, the perils but also the potentialities so characteristic of theexperience of modernity on a rural African periphery.

roads, modernity, and the historical imagination

Over the last century, anthropologists have produced ample evidence that spaceis 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 scientistshave 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-mains "a kind of neutral grid" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:7), isomorphic with placeand culture to such an extent that even though it functions as a central organizingprinciple in the social sciences, it simultaneously "disappears] from analytical pur-view" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:7).3

With the development of postmodernist theory, postcolonial studies, and a newwave of feminist theory, the convenient isomorphism of space with place, culture, ornation has given way to a more critical understanding of the social production and ex-perience of space (Baudrillard 1988; Flynn 1997; Foucault 1975, 1979; Jameson1984; Ong 1987; Pellow 1991; Pred and Watts 1992). The multiple ways in whichspace simultaneously connects and disconnects people, places, and things hasproven especially relevant to contemporary analyses of violence and modernity(Aretxaga 1997; Feldman 1991; 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 oftheir progress, at least from the standpoint of some analysts (Giles-Vernick 1996; Hunt1999; Roseman 1996). By linking peasant communities to the outside world, pavedroads 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" (1987:731). For some, such instability and movementhave 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 theborder as their own and turning it into "a corridor (^opportunity for them rather thana barrier to opportunity" (Flynn 1997:326). Roseman (1996) similarly reports howGalician villagers in northwestern Spain actively asserted their control over the mean-ing of local events by insistingin direct contradiction with official versions of thathistory that they were the ones who lobbied for a paved road and then volunteeredtheir labor for its construction. In local residents' contestation of the conventionalidea that development projects are delivered to local communities from the outside,the construction of the road became central to their understanding of modernity andof their changing place in it. In East Madagascar, the road built by French colonials tomake 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 figurefdj in local memory" (Cole 1998:621).


In northwestern Portugal, in contrast, roads were perceived by local rural dwell-ers to provoke a breakdown in community relations as villagers neglected smallerpaths and relied increasingly on state structures for the preservation of social order. Asa result, road building has been regarded with suspicion when it was not altogetheropposed by the locals (de Pina-Cabral 1987). Becoming modern, as the northwesternPortuguese case illustrates, is a process fraught with ambiguity, because in addition toopening up rural communities to larger towns and markets, the process also entailsbreaking away from an immanent "past" in which personal and communal identitieswere safely anchored through the ordering of physical space. The same ambivalencetoward modern roads appears to characterize the postcolonial experience of manyAfricans, judging from a growing literature on the dangers of roads and road travelthroughout the continent (Auslander 1990,1993; Bastian 1992, 1998a; Giles-Vernick1996). In eastern Zambia, in the late 1980s, "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 thatseeking gainful employment to become financially and socially independent can be"a dangerous proposition" (Bastian 1998b:121). Drawing on a personal experience in1971, Geschiere (1997) described the night time roads of southeast Cameroon asfilled with invisible witches who plotted mischief of various kinds. In the M'Bres re-gion of the Central African Republic, Giles-Vernik (1995) reports, kolekombo (spiritsof the bush) were reported in the early 1990s 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 theroads also trap people such that they can neither move forward in time and space, norgo back to where they were before the tarmac was built. When they literally bear orbecome connections to the past through the sedimentation of collective and personalhistories, 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 auseful window into how people use space as a mnemonic device through which toarticulate histories and interpret changes.

In the rural town of Dogondoutchi and the surrounding villages where I collectedroad stories, people often commented on the costs and benefits of modernity in waysthat 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 youthsseeking work in oil-rich Nigeriaoften equating wage labor with cannibalism andhead-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 andhealthy bodies of innocent foreigners. Whether they deal with the illicit traffic of bodyparts or the gruesome attacks perpetrated by road spirits, these tales of violence, ter-ror, and exploitation all illuminate how contemporary Mawri, like countless others inAfrica and elsewhere (Bastian 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Farmer 1993;Geschiere 1997; Hunt 1999; Rowlands and Warmer 1988; Shaw 1997; Taussig


1980), account for and manage the meaning of their existence in increasingly restlessperipheries.

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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 highwaystretching like a long narrow ribbon across the flat and sun-parchedlandscape of southern Nigereffectively captures the sinister side of travel and trans-port.4 With its numerous wrecks dotting the land with almost as much regularity asmile 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 ofmotor transportation by recalling a friend's or a neighbor's tragic encounter with aroad spirit.

Whether they focus on hideous beings or enchanting creatures, these repre-sentations of the kwalta (tarred road) in all its terrifying and destructive dimensionscannot 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 retreatinto tradition on the part of confused people caught between two colliding worlds ofvalue. Like other signs of people's involvement in occult economies all over theplanet (Auslander 1990; Bastian 1992; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Hunt 1999),these fantastic tales must be understood as creative efforts to articulate local under-standings of mobility, morality, and marketing in all their literal and metaphoricalmeanings. 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 traveland mobilityof "intertwined roots and routes" (Clifford 1997:4)by linking theroad 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 ofwhat Mbembe and Roitman refer to as "7a crise" (the crisis), there is a widespreadsense among Arewa residents that if highways connect communitiesthereby theo-retically enabling Nigerien villagers to gain access to employment, education, andwealththese arteries so vital to Niger's economic survival also hinder the kind ofmobility that should ideally sustain local rural economies in the face of shifting laborand capital flows. In a fast-paced world increasingly characterized by "powerlessplaces and placeless power" (Henderson and Castells 1987:7), the road in its multipleand contradictory manifestations aptly condenses the mysteries and paradoxes of thispostcolonial epoch for Nigerien millet farmers who, despite their manifold connec-tions to industrial metropoli, have yet to benefit from the development they were oncepromised.

roads, transportation, and mobility in postcolonial Niger

Before some of the narratives that inspired this discussion can be presented, ashort 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 Assuch, they have become central avenues to power and wealth for Nigerien ruraldwellers who can no longer rely exclusively on cultivation as their source of income.6Air transportation within the country is minimal and the long-awaited railway thatwas expected to link the capital of Benin to Niamey and eventually Dosso has nevergone 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 crossesonly three hundred miles of the country on its westernmost edge. Plans were made fora waterway link between Niamey and coastal ports but they have received insuffi-cient support for their realization: The company established in 1975 to transportfreight along the Niger River has never hauled more than a few thousand tons of cargoevery year (Charlick 1991:90, 162). Roads are thus the only way to transport goodsand people throughout the country.

At independence, Niger had no tarred roads and had to devote substantial effortsto improve the rudimentary network of laterite and sand tracks inherited from theFrench administration (Horowitz et al. 1983:6).8 In 1963, the only blacktoppedstretch of highway outside a town in the entire country connected the Niamey airportwith the presidential (formerly the governor's) palace and covered a distance of a fewkilometers (Horowitz et al. 1983:6).9 Since 1965, large amounts of public revenuehave 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 hasdevoted 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 \n Ivory Coast, and 0.9 percentin Senegal. Two thousand kilometers of tarred roads have also been built with foreignaid, primarily Canadian financing for the blacktopped road known as la Route deI'Unite (the road of Unity), which now extends the main east-west highway from Nia-mey to N'Guigmi on Lake Chad. By 1978, the 7,657-kilometer network of nationalroads 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 (Youssouf1988).10

With no signs of upcoming upgrades in air, river, or rail communication, roadsare still the vital links connecting southern cities and joining northern Niger's uraniummines to the capital. Yet, although the road network has expanded considerably in thelast half century, such expansion has done little to improve the situation of the ruralpeasantry. Ever since the first dirt roads were built during the colonial period, thetransportation infrastructure has served primarily foreign economic interests with littleconcern for local topographies and economies, as Charlick notes (1991:89). Dictatedlargely by external proposals, programs, and needs, the construction of the country'smajor roads has not benefited rural communities. For instance, the "uranium road" (asit 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'sdesert regions. Most of the other roads in the country serve government and businessinterest in western Niger by connecting Niamey to the railhead in Benin and to thecash-crop producing regions of the east (Charlick 1991:89). Few attempts have beenmade to improve the web of secondary roads, something that might have broughtmore substantial benefits to local trade networks.

Despite these limitations, villagers routinely cover long distances to attend aneighboring market, smuggle goods into Niger, seek a healer's services, or offer theircondolences 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 carsand the Socit Nationale des Transports Nigeriens (SNTN) provides only limitedtransportation 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 taxisare the legacies of an overburdened but vital freelance rural transport network thatsupports local economiesa network starved of motor vehicles, spare parts, fuel, me-chanics, drivers, and decent roads" (1999:14). Because they are cheap, they arepopular. Yet, because they are also poorly maintained, generally overloaded, andoften driven with frenzied speed on uneven, heavily pitted roads, they are responsiblefor many road accidents. Almost two thousand people are reportedly the victims ofroad accidents every year, including some three hundred fatalities.11 Half of thosecrashes occur on Niger's main highway (Chilson 1999), the Route Nationale 1, whosesordid history and predatory reputation feed the rumor mills. Given the unregulatednature of automotive transport, it is reasonable to assume that many additional deathsand injuries go unreported (Chilson 1999). Such figures should not be interpreted tomean that Nigerien roads are more dangerous than, say, the highways of Nigeria orMali; road travel is perilous throughout this part of the world.

These sobering statistics may partly account for the privileged role the road andits many dangers play in Nigerien popular discourse, but I make no attempt here totest the veracity of the testimonies I have collected. Nor do I try to suggest a crudefunctionalist connection between empirical and symbolic violence on the highway.12To do so would, I think, oversimplify enormously the import and significance of theseroad stories and neglect the specific cultural, socioeconomic, and historical circum-stances out of which they emerged.13 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 ofarticulation between identity and history.14

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;NgugT 1987; Ochri 1991; Soyinka 1973) so as to evoke the range of possible out-comeseither gruesome or fortunatethat 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 forthose who know how to use them. Hence, every year many illiterate young menstruggle to obtain the coveted driver's license that will enable them to achieve themobility so widely associated with modernity. Despite the fact that a driving school,aptly named Auto-Ecole Moderne de Doutchi, opened up in Dogondoutchi in 1994to serve the needs of a growing number of hopeful applicants, few have managed topass the arduous tests. And even fewer have landed jobs as bush-taxi drivers. Roadsdo not only provide income-earning occupations for those who leave, however. Theirattendant motor parks, built to accommodate the increasing passenger traffic, havespawned a complex economy of services, trade, and exchange: fare collectors forbush taxis, spare parts salesmen, mechanics, black-market money traders, food ven-dors, motor car guards, drifters, and job seekers congregate there, waiting for the nextcar, the next load of passengers. Thus, although for older Arewa residents, roads mayrecall painful memories of forced labor and ill treatment, for the newer generation,they symbolize both the promise of a more rewarding life apd the system's failure todeliver 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 roadwhether they evoke images of "cars out of place" that drainAfricans of their blood (White 1993, 2000) or connect the spread of AIDS with theheightened mobility associated with women, money, and automotive travel (Weiss1993)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-standing of modernity.

It would be tempting, as I focus on images of transience, to see displacement as amodern social condition that follows from some definitive break with a prior epochcharacterized 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 importantnot to lose sight of the ways in which certain peopletraders, slaves, pilgrims, faminerefugeesin Niger or elsewhere have experienced dislocation well prior to the pre-sent moment (Clifford 1997; Cooper 1997; Ferguson 1997; Gregoire 1997). 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 strategyand 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 therest of Hausaland (Belle 1913; de Latour 1992), it should not be read as implying thatpeople did not previously move across the landscape. Up until the early 1960s, whenopen space between villages was progressively turned over to farming, rural areaswere characterized by shifting agriculture: Households moved around in search ofgame 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 clustersof 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" (Piot1999:24).

Considerations of historical displacement notwithstanding, Nigerien roadscapesand the experience of those who move across them have been dramatically altered byspeed and technology in the past three decades. For one thing, rural residents havecome to rely increasingly on mobility to satisfy their food and cash needs (Cooper1997; Masquelier 2000; Republique du Niger 1980, 1988; Zirkaleni 1984). Let mestress once again that although I recognize the inherent limitations of assuming a priorlevel of sedentarism, my primary concern here is with Arewa residents' own percep-tions of how this increase in mobility has affected them and what it signifies at a timewhen people on rural peripheries the world over experience a palpable sense of lim-ited opportunities, despite the emergence of new markets and new modes of ex-change. What I hope to show is that Mawri representations of automotive life in late20th-century Niger speak to the larger issues of colonial and postcolonial change, therestless flows of information, goods, and capital, and the accelerated and contradic-tory circulation of valueall of which have become increasingly hard to control,much less understand.


landscapes of memoryAs 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 tothe far-reaching transformations wrought by colonization. When colonial engineersredesigned 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 established their abodes in the trees,caves, and rocky mounds that dotted the landscape were thus forced to relocate. Orthey simply refused to move, thus forcing the French engineers who aimed to "destroyand . . . make new" (Cary 1962:151), to alter their plans.15 In 1988, a Dogondoutchiresident explained this to me:

During chief Soumana's time, there was a big bagaruwa. Spirits used to sit under thetree. 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 build the road. But the Doguwa forced them togo 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.16

In several others cases I heard of, spirits' homes were destroyed when the portions ofRoute 1 that linked Dogondoutchi to Dosso and Konnitwo neighboring townswere built in the 1900s. According to Bagoudou, a healer from the nearby village ofSalkoum,

Even the whites who have cars, they know where there are spirits. Sometimes, theybring a bulldozer to take away a tree but they don't succeed. If they kill the tree, thebulldozer'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 invillages.

However powerful the whites are with their automobiles and bulldozers, spiritsoften have the last word, as Bagoudou seemed to imply. Each curve of the road, eachdeviation 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 thatthe whites managed to displace some spirits by tearing down the trees they lived in orby 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, morespirits found themselves uprooted and restless. No longer respected and placated bydescendants of the settlers who first occupied the region, they roam the very highwaysthat 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 thefrequent occurrence of accidents. It is clear to people that such incidental factors asreckless driving or faulty brakes play a role in promoting accidents. The high rate ofaccidents 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 toevil agencies against whom amulets afford only limited protection. For Arewa resi-dents, wrecks and calamities occurring on the road are never merely accidental theresult 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 whoroam the highway in search of human prey. Once the deed is accomplished, theyoften 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 acorpseall 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 conversionto 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, 2001b), so the intentional destruction of spirit dwellingstomake way for the kwaltaexplains why so many travelers find their death on theroad.17 In short, many of the difficulties people encounter today are rooted in theirprogressive disengagement with the superhuman forces they once pledged to respectand 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 Mawricultivated tight bonds with the various Doguwa spirits who occupied the land whenthe first settlers arrived. These spirits had allegedly played a central role in charting,apportioning, and protecting the spatial reality of these populations (Masquelier2001b). In return for the protection they offered against enemy attacks, drought, andother climatic disasters, the iskoki (spirits) demanded the blood of their favorite sacri-ficial animalusually 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 beoccupied by spirits were entrusted to the care of the clan propitiating these particulariskoki. Spirits liked to reside in trees, caves, or mountains and it is at the foot of suchsignificant landmarks that priest elders shed the sacrificial blood that would sustainthe communities' or clans' powerful but invisible protectors. These natural landmarksconstituted sanctuaries where clan or community members periodically met tostrengthen the bonds that insured communal protection and prosperity.18

In this context, land was not experienced as a neutral and inert physical surfacebroken 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 withthe invisible forces that surrounded them (Masquelier 2001b). Through their appro-priation as spirit abodesand by extension, as sacred sitesa massive baobab or arocky mound would thus become the crucial signifiers of a precolonial order thathinged on the productive collaboration between human communities and those be-ings the Mawri sometimes indiscriminately refer to as "mutanen daji" (people of thebush). 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 subsequentdestruction during colonial times would prove significant, even determinant, to thosewho venture to explain what for others still remains partially unexplainable, namely,the high incidence of frightening encounters on Nigerien roadways. As I have alreadynoted, not everyone directly attributes the proliferation of restless and vengeful spiritsto the construction of colonial roads. Yet, beyond the diffuse sense of menace roadshold, there is a widespread, if implicit, perception that this invisible but threateningtraffic 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 notall 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 safetyduring travel.19 At a time when mobility has become such a vital means of ensuringeconomic 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 ownmovements across the landscape closely intersect with human travel.

That these creatures have become iconic of modernity (to some extent) and of themultiple ways in which subjects experience the workings of globalization does notimply that these restless spirits were ever totally stable, however. All spirits are, afterall, nothing but windhence their name, iska (plur. iskoki, lit. "wind"). Like the windthat often moves them across the landscape, spirits are not constrained by physicalboundaries. Because they lack bodies, they can cover great distances in a flash and gothrough 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. Althoughinvisible to the human eye, they often leave a trace of their presence for those whocan read such signs in the sand, in the remnants of a fire-ravaged home (Masquelier1994), or on the mangled bodies of their victims. At some level, this impermanencespeaks conveniently to the volatility and ephemeral character of values, processes,and practices in the post-Fordist era (Harvey 1989): Money, for instance, appears tochange hands so frequently and at such a dizzying speed that people often compare itto wind or to snakes in order to stress the disconcerting fluidity and elusiveness of thatmedium of exchange (Masquelier 1999).20 Like the breeze one feels but cannot see,money shuns containment and quickly dissipates. Like the snake that slithers alongthe path, disappearing in a flash, money unpredictably slips away, leaving one empty-handed. Similarly, the speed and ethereal quality of spiritsand particularly spirits ofthe road who come and go with no apparent constraints and on whom people exer-cise no controlmake them particularly suitable to personify the rapid transmutationof value so characteristic of modern times.

There have always been spirits without settled homes who consistently roamedthe bush and terrorized the people they ran into by wild looks, violent demeanor, orenigmatic questions. The vast majority of these spirits were nonetheless bound to theland through their anchoring to physical sites that simultaneously sedimented theirmythical histories and concretized their presence for their human neighbors anddevotees. 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 dislodgedby colonial projects and can no longer stay put that they have become frighteninglysimilar to the untamable and homeless spirits whom people always tried to avoid atall cost. A taxi driver once warned me that what makes them even more threateningthan the traditional bush spirits encountered by travelers is that their thirst for revengeis unquenchable, precluding their ever sparing their victims. Thus, although peopleoccasionally allude to the ghastly creatures (an old hag, a beautiful girl) they once metand fled from while walking in the bush, no one, in theory, survives an encounterwith the bloodthirsty creatures that cruise local highways.21 In short, regardless ofwhether they directly connect the perceived proliferation of road spirits to the geo-politics of French colonialism, many Mawri would rather not question the potency ofthese creatures. This bleak picture seems to allow for different perspectives, however.Malam Boubakar, a Qur'anic scholar, told me that God had endowed spirits with verylittle 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 nearthem, they have forgotten [about their plan], which is fortunate because otherwise


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 existencemeant recognizing that although spirits must always be feared and never trifled with,they ultimately answer to God, in whose supreme power travelers must entrust theirlives.

In the same vein, Hamisou, a Muslim schoolteacher, once pointed out to methat, although there are undoubtedly many evil spirits cruising the roads, not all roadspirits have bad intentions.22 He was riding in a car headed toward Niamey one nightin 1983 when, just after the village of Bolbol, a tree to his right suddenly caught fire asif it had been struck by lightning:

My colleague and the driver saw it too. This is when I realized I shouldn't worry. It wasjust a protective spirit manifesting her presence to us. As long as they follow you onyour trip, nothing bad can happen, no other spirits can harm you. Every once in awhile, you simply become alerted to their presence. They stay in very bushy trees. Youcan tell [the spirit's presence] because the tree turns completely red. But you mustn'tbe scared.

Such an experience, probably shared with and circulated among many friends, mayhave palpably heightened some listeners' confidence in the benefits of seeking spiri-tual protection before taking the road. Yet, at another level, it implicitly reinforces thewidely shared notion that the malevolent forces currently harming travelers emergedout of the careless destructions of a prior geomythical order. "They stay in very bushytrees," Hamisou had pointed out, as if to suggest that only good spirits are grounded infamiliar and recognizable landmarksa bushy tree, visible from far away in a regionwhere lingering savannah struggles against invading desert. For those who have wit-nessed the intense desertification of the past decades, the implications are clear: Apartfrom a few large trees that have so far survived the construction of colonial roads andthe overharvesting of firewood for local household consumption, the dry land ofArewa can no longer provide suitable dwellings for the hundreds of spirits that onceprotected 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) progressivelygave way to a tired and almost treeless terrain, the benevolent spirits of the past turnedinto sinister forces.23

mobility and violence in the migratory imagination

During my 1988-89 field research, I heard many terrifying stories about travelersbeing assaulted or killed by spirits who had tricked them into believing they wereharmless foreigners in need of assistance. Those who were lucky enough to survivesuch encounters often insisted that even the most skilled of drivers operating the fastestvehicle could not outdistance the merciless spirit who had come to collect her dues.In fact, one individual philosophically noted, during such encounters, it was pointlessto even try to move because, no matter how fast you tried to go, you would alwaysend up finding the spirit waiting ahead with a grin on her face. On a more recent tripto Niger, my friend Rakiya recounted for me a 1998 accident in which a car filledwith people fell into a ditch. One person had been killed and the others injured. Thepassengers 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. Thedriver couldn't avoid it. The cow was very big and frightening, so everyone startedsaying it was a Doguwa [spirit]," Rakiya explained. In June 1989, I witnessed a seriesof 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, shehad not received the traditional offering of sacrificial blood she expected in return forensuring the market's prosperity (Masquelier 1993).24 Local drivers routinely told meof 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 speedall startling visions that would distract or frighten themenough 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 deadlytrucks 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 seductivecreatures of Western advertisements who tempt consumers with a promise of en-hanced experience in an era of immoderate consumption. I have written elsewhereabout a metal sign in the shape of a smiling creaturewith the upper torso of awoman and a tire in the place of legsonce 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 adeadly machine that would collide into cars so violently no driver nor passenger eversurvived the impact. Because she waited until nightfall to accomplish her evil deedsand later disappeared as mysteriously as she had appeared, the nameless spirit neverleft any clues that could shed light on the accident, especially the baffling absence ofa second vehicle. In its new African context, the Dunlop signan alleged photographof the spirit's halfway transformation from woman to automobile taken by a skilledFrenchmanpersonifies an invisible force of the postcolonial landscape at the sametime 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 blacktrucks "covering the whole road and bearing down from the opposite direction"(1999:4). "Madame Sabot" (Mrs. Hoof) is another foreign spirit who allegedly trapsunsuspecting travelers, especially philandering males, whom she seduces with herbeauty 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 thesound she makes when she walks: People can hear the "kwop, kwop" sound of herhooves, an ominous reminder of her nonhuman essence.26

In all these tales of violence and terror on the road, there is a constant: Instead ofjoining people or communities together, roads sometimes lead to death. Rather thanserving as pathways to prosperity and education, roads can become deceptive trapsthat maim and kill their prey. Like Ben Ochri's (1991) mesmerizing description of aroad that "swallows people," like Wole Soyinka's (1973) comparison of the road to aserpentine funeral shroud unfurling across the landscape, like NgugT wa Thiongo'sportrayal of a road "that has no beginning and no end" (1987:5), the roads that elicitsuch ambivalence from the Mawri peasants who tread them are alive, deceptive, anddangerous. Yet, they also summon worlds of endless wonder, entice young men tobecome 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 theway 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 eachmarket 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 specialprayer at the new kasuwa (marketplace), but the offering of a sacrificial bull to themarket Doguwa was foregone by local town officialsall of whom were Muslim andwanted nothing to do with spirits. For those who saw the lethal car crash as an act ofrevenge, the spirit's brutal response must be read in the context of Islam's progressiveencroachment in the arenas of trade, politics, and religious life. Because she refusedto be relegated to oblivion by an ever more powerful Muslim eliteeager to erase thelast visible signs of people's enduring connections to spiritsthe market Doguwa be-came a great avenger. From this perspective, her role was to punish communities whoblindly indulged in the modern ethos of individualist achievement, commoditizedconsumption, and wealth accumulation, an ethos most blatantly expressed in thenewly erected marketplace. Like other road accidents, the market tragedy illustratesthat although local residents see their struggles as originating in French dominationand in the profound changes that have come in its wake, they nevertheless impute agreat 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 wouldhave 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 dueswhen the time had come, the "sacrifice" of the three travelers vividly outlined theconnection between markets and roads.28 It stood as a hint that when local officialsmoved the market next to the highwayRoute Nationale 1 that connects all the ma-jor towns in the souththey also displaced the market spirit whose new territory nowencompassed the road. Besides suggesting that the relationships between mobility,danger, and wealth are genderedthe spirit embodying such relationships being fe-malethe 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, anddread, Route 1and its attendant traffic of people, opportunities, and commodi-tieshas 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-ityin a world increasingly threatened by forces beyond local control, anyone, eventhose who have ties to the spirits, may become injured in an automobile accident.

At another level, the revenge scenario alludes to the abstract and contradictoryforces of global capital where money is "a sort of whirlwind that strips the poor as itpasses, while giving to the rich in abundance" (de Latour Dejean 1980:138-139). Theexperience 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 thosewho perceive the success of Islam as a fundamental loss. Yet, tempting as it might beto 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 ofcrafts and services have emerged along the road, from petty thieves and gasolinesmugglers to spare part vendors to kamisoua freelance agent who assigns passengersto bush taxismany individuals make a living off the road and its attendant traffic.30Despite the obvious opportunities this conomie routiere has generated, it appears,nonetheless, that the road has not brought to rural communities the prosperity, or touse an anthropological cliche, the cargo it was supposed to bringa state of affairs


Charlick (1972, 1991) blames on Niger's lack of developed infrastructure. The twomajor roads of Niger, as I have already noted, mainly connect large urban centers tothe 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 amuletsthat have the power to avert every kind of misfortune that could occur on the road.31Although 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 onecan acquire to prevent specific problems from happening. I thus heard of a localQur'anic healer who specialized in the manufacture of a medicine that would allowdrivers 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 hadgiven him before he left Dogondoutchi, a friend once told me, he would have crashedhis car into a tree after seeing a blinding fire in front of him as he was driving throughone of the many villages that dot Route 1. Malam Bouba, a Muslim scholar, wasknown throughout my neighborhood for the layu (charms) he sold to drivers anxiousto avoid frightening encounters. Should they cross the path of a spirit, those who worehis layu would be protected in such a way that they would simply not see the creaturetrying to scare them. Or if they saw it, they would remain calm enough to avoid losingcontrol of their vehicles.

Despite the multiple kinds of amulets drivers hang in their car or around theirwaists, accidents regularly happen. So much so, in fact, that certain sections ofroadwhere repeated crashes have occurredhave earned a reputation as "danger-ous places" that harbor frightening road spirits. Lying halfway between Dogondoutchiand the small village of Ahole, Takwa Darko is such a place. The small hamlet thathas 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 therestarted 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, ft was the Doguwa. She isvery dangerous, ff 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 protectionbecause, like everyone else, they are afraid.

Whether or not Muslims are, in Bibata's words, truly "afraid," they are nonethelessoften blamed by spirit devotees for having abandoned the spirits and caused them tobe 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 theroad in front of a brand new Peugeot station wagon. The driver, a pious Muslim, hadbeen 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 understandingsof modernity and mobility. Unlike the other road spirits I have described, the ruthlessDoguwa 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 roadwith the blood of her victims.

Such fears are real enough, and although in my experience they rarely preventpeople from traveling, they must nonetheless be understood as an important dimen-sion of the imaginative practices through which people read the landscape, invest itwith moral significance, and assess their personal vulnerability. "There are placeswhere 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 manyspirits on the road, one commonly experiences this feeling.32 Being able to foretelldanger, for other individuals, means learning to recognize a certain form of heavinessthat both literally and metaphorically prevents people from moving through space."Heavy" (masu nauyi) days are identified through divination as inauspicious timesduring which no journey should be undertaken because bad things would inevitablyhappen. Travelers, hence, customarily ask diviners to set the date of their departuresbefore 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 becauseperil 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 (roadswith spirits) provide further evidence of how violence comes to be inscribed in thelandscape, the encoding of Takwa Darko as a bad place acquires a particular (moreinsistent and threatening) kind of permanence: That stretch of road is now the spirit'svery own home. Road building, as the story of Takwa Darko implies, has not simplyrendered spirits homeless and more dangerous. It has, in some cases, led displacedspirits to settle in the wrong kinds of places. Instead of living in the bush, Takwa Darkonow lives in a village to which she had no prior ties. It is precisely because her choiceof residence cannot be controlled, because she cannot be held at bay that the spirit soaptly symbolizes what can go wrong when roads reconfigure space with no concernfor existing relations, practices, and places. If Takwa Darko's characteristics as abounded 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 ofRoute Nationale 1, as Chilson recalls (1999:68).

Aside from speaking to the nefarious consequences of spirit displacement, thehistory of Takwa Darko and of other similarly threatening creatures of the road speakto another fundamental transformation in human and spirit relations, one that hingeson the practice of sacrifice. I have already noted that in exchange for the protectionthey afforded local communities, nature spirits used to periodically request offering ofsacrificial 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 thisbackdrop of the perceived loss of al'ada (tradition) that the significance of bloodthirstyspirits looking for prey must be assessed, I suggest. Like the Doguwa of the marketwho 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 theirown 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 andcorvee, 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" roadtravelers, an implicit logic nonetheless emerges from all the stories, one that weavestogether different ideas about spirits, blood, and roads and that reveals the world ofviolence, loss, and uncertainty in which the Mawri have lived in the past century.

conclusionWhether 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 alikealso use their feet for what is an astonishing degree of mobility throughout Niger, andall year long. They know the roads and paths well because they are constantly onthem, traveling to and from markets, commuting to and from fields during the rainyseason, migrating, visiting. Although laterite roads, sandy trails, and the bush as awhole can harbor danger and excitement, asphalt roads nonetheless offer a differentkind of travel experience, I have argued. If the speed and efficiency of automotivetravel 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'scapital 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 emergedthat taps into older, collective ideas about spirits and speed, power and blood, andviolence 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 physicalterrain, the long, dusty, and narrow road that, after absorbing the sweat and blood ofcolonial subjects, now swallows travelers, to use Ochri's evocative imagery.

The role that space occupies in Nigerien understandings of modernity is hardlyunique, 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 ofwhat Auge calls "non-places" (1995:78): Wastelands and waiting rooms, shoppingmalls and airport lounges, and hotels and computer stations are all nothing but transitpoints, temporary quarters where individuals become connected to the global econ-omy in a uniform and unmediated manner. At first sight, Route Nationale 1 seems tobe such a place, or rather, "non-place." Highways are after all the space of transit, parexcellence. Yet, although they imaginatively concretize the sense of space-time com-pression that characterizes modernity for rural Nigeriens, the stories discussed abovealso demonstrate the centrality of place in Mawri people's articulation of the past withthe present. The development of the Nigerien landscape has entailed destruction anderasure, but the marks of these transformations themselves remain: Recapitulated inthe bloodied history of Route 1, modernity thus spawns the past in its wake even as itobliterates it. Unlike Auge's "non-places" that "do not integrate the earlier places"(1995:78), the "non-places," dangerous and otherwise, which are discursivelymapped onto southern Niger's highway would not exist without their connections toearlier 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 "thewaves of violence and the predatory economy of the street in fact appear to recovertraces of a collective and very archaic unconscious with regard to fatal sorcery andthe mute revolt of the people in the face of evil" (1995:612). Like the streets of Kinshasa

road mythographles 847

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, themultiple spirits who roam Route 1 ultimately remind us that the global processes thathave unfolded since the violent "conquest" of Niger by Voulet and Chanoine have re-sulted in "place-specific experiences of modernity, in place-specific experiences ofdisjuncture, in place-specific cultural (re)form(ations)" (Pred 1992:107). Within thiscontext-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 neigh-bors in surrounding villages, all of whom welcomed my inquiries into their past and shared withme their lives and memories. A much different version of this article was presented at the Afri-can Studies Association Annual Meeting in Baltimore in November 1990 and at the AfricanStudies Workshop at the University of Chicago in April 1991. The participants at these gather-ings have been generous with their comments on several prior versions of this article althoughthey cannot be held responsible for the remaining flaws. I am particularly grateful to RalphAusten for his support and for suggesting that I read Joyce Cary's Mr. Johnson. Many thanks go toMark Auslander, who organized our panel on roads at the ASA meetings, and to Peter Chilsonfor writing Riding the Demon. Pertinent and constructive criticism by Misty Bastian, Jean Comaroff,Gillian Feely-Harnik, Murray Last, and Nancy Munn greatly facilitated the revision process. Theanonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist have offered very perceptive comments onwhich I have relied heavily. Research on which this article is based was carried out in 1988-89,thanks to a research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health, a dissertation grantfrom the National Science Foundation, and a grant for anthropological research from the Wenner-Cren Foundation. Further research during the summer of 1994 was made possible by a fellow-ship from Tulane University's Committee on Research. Fieldwork in 2000 was supported with aTulane University Newcomb Foundation grant.

1. Female spirits known as Doguwa (lit., "the long one") are native to Arewa. Originallypropitiated for their role in warfare, their ties to the land, and their capacity to ensure communalprosperity, Doguwa spirits became the first spirits to be incorporated in the pantheon of boriaonce dominant religion whose power and visibility has waned with the spread of Islam. A largemajority of Doguwa nonetheless remain "untamed," nameless, and always ready to causetroubleon the road or elsewherewhich is why Arewa is reputed to house the most danger-ous spirits of Niger (see Masquelier 2001 b).

2. Modernity, in this article, is understood to be a worldview through which people assesstheir and other people's degree of "progress" or "backwardness" through an evolutionary idiominherited from the Enlightenment. As has been demonstrated by a growing literature on the sub-ject, modernity is a problematic, but nonetheless conceptually useful, category that often be-comes a means of constructing otherness (Appadurai 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993;Gupta and Ferguson 1992).

3. Early on, feminist theorists understood space as an important dimension of culture andas 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 studieswas caught up in the definitions of spatial dichotomies"public" (male) versus "domestic" (fe-male) spheresthat divided social worlds evenly and rigidly, the second generation of feministtheorists 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(1999:26).


5. In 1994, a French missionary and longtime resident of Niger who had once counted themangled 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 roadthat connected Niamey to Birnin Konni. On the 33-mile section of road between Zinder andTakieta, in southeastern Niger, Chilson similarly counted 17 wrecks, a number that translates asalmost 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, groundnuts, and beans, and on domestic pastoralism (raising goats, sheep, and chickens) for the bulk oftheir subsistence. During the dry season, men migrate in search of seasonal jobs, become pettytraders, or engage in secondary occupations such as tailoring, smithing, or calabash carving tosupplement the income they draw from cash crops.

7. Air transportation (via Air Niger) collapsed after the government withdrew its supportfrom 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 samename. Dogondoutchi, the rural town where most of the stories I am recalling here originated, islocated 137 kilometers east of Dosso.

8. Speaking of Niamey in 1936, Niandou writes that "there were almost no cars. Only thegovernor 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 colonywas 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. Between1969 and 1974, the number of registered vehicles went from 11,694 to 19,591. That numberreached 26,685 in 1977 and then 47,904 in 1982 (Zirkaleni 1984).

11. According to the World Bank, car wrecks are proportionately eight to ten times morefrequent on the African continent than in Western countries and they are a leading cause ofdeath (Chilson 1999:15).

12. Ironically, although passenger traffic seems to have almost doubled between 1979and 1986, the number of accidents declined: In 1981, 598 automobile accidents (resulting in1,353 casualties and 192 deaths) were recorded. In 1986, the number fell to 345 (with 742casualties and 73 fatalities) (Republique du Niger 1988:186).

13. Rumors circulate endlessly and anonymously. They have no traceable sources, noidentifiable owners, yet, despite their elusiveness and indeterminacy, they are powerful, asHomi Bhabha notes: "The indeterminacy of rumour constitutes its importance as a social dis-course. Its intersubjective, communal adhesiveness lies in its ennunciative aspect. Its performa-tive power of circulation results in the contagious spreading, 'an almost uncontrollable impulseto 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 theyconstitute "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 Mister Johnson (Cary 1962), a novel that chronicles theintegration of a small northern Nigerian community to the British colonial empire of the 1920s.Cary describes the roadthe brainchild of an English officer in search of gloryas the symboland embodiment of British colonialism and of the various changes it brings. More than a simplepathway for transport and commerce, the road becomes, for the administrator Rudbeck whohas masterminded the project, "the 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 . . . Idestroy and I make new" (1962:151). This finds echoes in Taussig's (1987:312-319) fascinatinganalysis 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 frontiercapitalism from which each race and class would draw its quotient of redemption" (Taussig1987:317).

16. Soumana was the chefde canton (customary chief) of Arewa from 1942 until his deathin 1981.

Bagaruwa is Acacia arabica, or Egyptian mimosa, the original source of gum arabic (Abraham1962:57,280).

17. People in Arewa associate the coming of Islam with the advent of the pax colonial atthe 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 someof the responsibility for the current travel conditions.

18. Among the aLuund of Congo, the tree "becomes the means by which one's place inthe social landscape is 'rooted' in material historicity and in ancestral space-time/' notes DeBoeck (1998:25). Although Mawri people who worship ancestral spirits appear to similarly usetrees for the "production of historically situated locality" (1998:25), they do not distinguish treesfrom other landmarksa mountain, a cavethat serve as spirit homes. If trees occupy a promi-nent place in local discourses on road construction, it is largely, I suspect, because trees, unlikemountains, 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 somepreviously indiscernible distinctions amongst travelers, I could detect no significant variation inattitude between, for instance, second- or third-generation Muslims who took the road to buyand 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 localcivil 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 Arewahas been only recently Islamized and partly because Muslim and non-Muslim identities remainso complexly intertwined, it is difficult to define the role these identities might play in shapinglocal road mythographies. The fact that even secluded Muslim womenwho rarely step out oftheir compound to travelknow 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 menwould 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 throughthe concept of ku'din iska (wind money). As its name indicates, "wind money" refers to the elu-siveness of cash, which can, after being used in a transaction, disappear without a trace from thecoffer 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 circulatesto meet the needs of everyone (Raynaut 1977) and the speed with which it changes hands, it isno 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 withmoney is aptly captured in the proverb, "Money and serpents, their remedy is killing." Hingingupon the double entendre of the Hausa term for killing, this cynical commentary on the Mawri'sexperience with cash translates well the combination of fear and desire that villagers feel towardcurrency. "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 threatenslives. 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 issuch that they can bypass the current transportation system altogether and more or less flythrough the air at great speed.

23. Spirit worshipers explicitly blame those who have forgotten the spirits for the carelessdeforestation 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 theirvulnerable environment. A bori healer pointed out to me that precautions must be taken to en-sure that trees that proyide housing for spirits are not felled inadvertently. For starters, one mustnever cut down a big, old tree. Sometimes, trees will bleed when the wood is slit by the ax. Ifsomeone chopping at a tree leaves before he has cut the tree down, he may find upon his returnthat the ax has fallen to the ground. This is an indication that a spirit lives in the tree and that it isnot safe to proceed any further. If the ax is still stuck in the tree where the individual left itanindication that no spirit dwells thereit is safe to resume work.

24. Incidentally, in Niger and Nigeria, Hausa speakers supposedly refer to the popularPeugeot 504 as a 'kwarya mutuwa (calabash of death) while at other times, they describe itthrough the grisly proverb dufa duka kashe bakwai bar biyu shaida ("cook them all, kill seven,and leave two to testify"), or in truncated form, dufa duka, "cook them all" (Chilson 1999:47).

25. Chilson recalls a friend's testimony of his encounter with un genie de la route (roadspirit) that nearly made him crash. She was "a very dark skinned woman in black cloth, carryingwood on her head [who] started crossing the road in front of the car" (1999:58). Before he couldsteer 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. Whenthey take on a human appearance, something generally remains of their essential nature that be-trays their lack of humanity. Their human legs will often end with camel or donkey hooves, forinstance (see Crapanzano 1973 for a similar case in Morocco). Men are so taken by the beautyof the female creatures they encounter, however, that they rarely notice that something isslightly wrong with the appearance of these "women."

27. In 1988-89, many of the young men I talked to said that their most cherished dreamwas to be able to take driving lessons; others told me that they were already studying for thedriving test. Earning the coveted driver's license, they knew, would open magic doors to wealth,mobility, and freedom. Mahammadou, my research assistant, told me on numerous occasionshow 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. "Myyounger brother drives a lorry, now. He has such a great life!" he once lamented. My landlord,an illiterate petty 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. Thesignificance of the permis (driver's license) was brought home to me in June 1994 when, in themiddle of the intense recession that followed the dramatic devaluation of the local currency inJanuary of that year, I witnessed the feverish activity surrounding the newly opened auto-4co\e(driving school). At a time when state-sponsored services were rapidly declining, the countrywas paralyzed by a general strike, and everyone was complaining of the rishin ku'di (lack ofmoney), a few young men were nonetheless willing to sacrifice what little they had in exchangefor 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 reasonableto 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 andmust be assessed in terms of newly emerging conceptions of women as sexual and moral threatsthat contradict traditional understandings of femini

road mythographies

Documents

road work

road mythographies

road labor

nigerthe road swallows

experience of modernity

hybrid space

rural mawri

iconic of modernity