The Moral Economy of Alms in Senegal Julien Bondaz and Julien Bonhomme
In early 2010, Senegal was gripped by a strange rumor known as the “death offering.” It spread throughout the country over several weeks, making headlines and feeding gossip. Reports say that since yesterday a crazy rumor has been circulating in the country. According to the testimonies of several people, a 4×4 was seen “generously” distributing meat, ten thousand CFA francs, and a meter of “percale” (a fabric used to make shrouds for deceased Muslims) to passers-by as charity. But, according to the rumor, “all the people who received these alms (or offerings?) had a fit and died.”1
Several people suspected of distributing the deadly alms were set upon by the crowd in streets and marketplaces and occasionally attacked. This article seeks to show that this rumor, as unusual and ephemeral as it might be, is more than just a good story from the perspective of the Senegalese who spread it and the newspapers that made it a headline: it also provides food for thought for the social sciences. Our work on similar stories involving genital theft, killer telephone numbers, and miraculous apparitions on mobile telephones has already shown that this
This article was translated from the French by Katharine Throssell and edited by Angela Krieger, Chloe Morgan, and Nicolas Barreyre. 1. “Folle rumeur à Dakar et environs. L’offrande de la mort installe la panique!” L’Observateur, January 26, 2010. The information was printed on the front page. Annales HSS, 69, no. 2 (April-June 2014): 343–375.
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Gift, Sacrifice, and Sorcery
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kind of rumor can shed a unique light on certain social dynamics in contemporary Africa, whether they have to do with the reconfiguration of the magico-religious domain or sorcery, changing forms of urban sociability, attitudes toward foreigners, the transformation of masculinity, the appropriation of new technologies, and even urban violence and so-called “mob” justice.2 The rumor about the death offering provides an opportunity to interrogate the central but problematic place of almsgiving (sarax in Wolof) in Senegalese society.3 It constitutes a prism through which social issues concerning beggars and begging are revealed—particularly the contradictions between public policies against begging and the norms of religious charity. More generally, the rumor raises the issue of the meaning and value of gifts. Who do they really benefit? What dangers are associated with receiving them? In his famous work The Gift, published in 1925 (and translated into English in 1954), Marcel Mauss emphasized the ambivalence of gifts, stipulating the “so to speak voluntary character of these total services, apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and selfinterested.”4 Although Mauss essentially focused on the antinomy between freedom and obligation, insisting on the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, and reciprocating, the death offering emphasizes the tension between disinterestedness and self-interest. We will show that this tension runs through all registers of religious gifts, from alms to offerings and sacrifices.5 By staging a gift that is fatal to the beneficiary, the death offering represents an unprecedented variant on the theme of the poisoned chalice. In a short text that appeared a year before The Gift, Mauss had already explored the theme of the harmful gift in Indo-European folklore and law. He noted, among other things, the double meaning of the term gift in old Germanic languages: both “gift” in the modern English sense and “poison,” which is the meaning that has prevailed in German.6 Up until now, this theme has been most fruitfully explored in the field
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2. Julien Bonhomme, The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of a Rumor, trans. Dominic Horsfall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Bonhomme, “Les numéros de téléphone portable qui tuent. Épidémiologie culturelle d’une rumeur transnationale,” Tracés 21 (2011): 125–50; Bonhomme, “The Dangers of Anonymity: Witchcraft, Rumor, and Modernity in Africa,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2 (2012): 205–33; and Julien Bondaz, “Un fantôme sur iPhone. Apparition miraculeuse et imagerie mouride au temps du numérique,” Communication & langages 174 (2012): 3–17. 3. The Wolof are the main ethnic group in Senegal. Their language, also called Wolof, is the lingua franca throughout most of the country. For its transcription, we have followed the spellings provided by Jean-Léopold Diouf, Dictionnaire wolof-français et français-wolof (Paris: Karthala, 2003). 4. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 5. Here, the notion of “gift register” is borrowed from Natalie Zemon Davis. This notion enables us to conceptualize the relationships between different kinds of gifts obeying distinct rules and values within a single society: see Zemon Davis, The Gift in SixteenthCentury France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 6. Marcel Mauss, “Gift-gift” [1924], in Œuvres (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1969), 3:46–51.
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of Indian Studies, specifically in the context of a critical dialogue with Mauss’s theses.7 In Hinduism and Jainism, certain types of gifts—alms and offerings—have the particularity of transferring misfortune, sin, and impurity from the giver to the receiver. In the case of the death offering, however, the harmful nature of the gift is not seen in terms of contagion or contamination as it is in India, but rather in terms of sorcery (liggéey in Wolof). In Senegal, as in many other African societies, this is a common register for explaining misfortune and wrongdoing. In providing a glimpse of the worrying possibility of an affinity between almsgiving and sorcery, this rumor also evokes the specter of a perversion of religious solidarity. Indeed, the death offering reveals the inherent ambiguities of the “moral economy” of almsgiving in the context of Senegalese Islam (roughly 90 percent of the population of Senegal is Muslim). The notion of moral economy was originally developed by E. P. Thompson, whose analysis of the food riots in eighteenthcentury Europe emphasized the cultural norms and moral values shared by rioters rather than economic determinism.8 Transferred to anthropology through the work of James Scott in particular, the concept has since gained some traction in the social sciences, as the work of Didier Fassin attests.9 However, Fassin gives the notion such a broad signification that it evacuates any reference to the economic ethos (the moral economy for him designating the “production, distribution, circulation, and utilization of moral sentiments, emotions, values, norms, and obligations in the social space”). Without exactly expanding the concept, the notion of moral economy has often assumed a religious dimension in the field of African Studies. In an approach inspired by Max Weber, the focus is on the affinities between economic and religious ethoses, studying both the economic aspect of access to the benefits of salvation and the religious dimension of access to material benefits.10 For instance, a recent special issue of the journal Afrique Contemporaine, edited by
7. Jonathan Parry, “The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift,’” Man 21, no. 3 (1986): 453–73; Gloria Goodwin Raheja, The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); James Laidlaw, “A Free Gift Makes No Friends,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 4 (2000): 617–34; and Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, “Beware of Charitable Souls: Contagion, Roguish Ghosts and the Poison(s) of Hindu Alms,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, no. 4 (2001): 687–703. 8. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136. 9. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Didier Fassin, “Les économies morales revisitées,” Annales HSS 64, no. 6 (2009): 1237–66. 10. Weber’s works on the “Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” composed between 1910 and 1920, have been assembled and translated into French: see Max Weber, “L’éthique économique des religions mondiales,” in Sociologie des religions, trans. Jean-Pierre Grossein (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 329–486. A selection of the same texts, including the “Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” can be found in The Essential Weber: A Reader, ed. Sam Whimster (London/New York: Routledge, 2004).
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Jean-Louis Triaud and Leonardo Villalón, looks at the “moral economy and [the] mutations of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.”11 While these studies on the moral economy of Islam in Africa have inspired our work on how charity is understood in Senegal, this article suggests that the focus on religion in the strict sense should be shifted to sorcery or, more precisely, to the gray area between the two. In other words, the death offering should be put into perspective by exploring the articulations between the moral economy of Islam and the “occult economy.” This notion, developed by Jean and John Comaroff 12 but widely used in the field of African Studies, refers to the supposed production of wealth by means that are magical, obscure, illicit, or at least shunned by common morality, generally at someone else’s expense (hence the frequent interpretation of these forms of enrichment in terms of sorcery). From this perspective, the death offering represents (and was locally interpreted as) a paroxysmal form of wealth-oriented sorcery, which could even go as far as corrupting religious charity and its underlying moral economy. The death offering also leads on to the question of sacrifice (the notion of sarax, which, at the heart of the rumor, designates both “alms” and “sacrifice” in Wolof). The supposed deaths of those who were said to have accepted the mysterious offering were in fact almost universally interpreted by our informants as being the giver’s deliberate sacrifice of the receiver. The rumor thus revealed the tensions between several registers of sacrifice. It invoked both the canonical model of Muslim sacrifice and the sacrifices for covenants with spirits falling outside or on the margins of Islam. But it also brandished the specter of “human sacrifice,” which provoked a kind of moral panic in the country in the wake of a series of macabre events that had made headlines in Senegal throughout the 2000s. The rumor thus exploited (and dramatized) the threatening possibility that a charitable gift might in fact conceal a human sacrifice. This threat is based on the contradiction between self-interest and disinterestedness that lies at the heart of the sacrificial economy—a point that Mauss had already discussed at length in his book Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, written in collaboration with Henri Hubert.13 Ultimately, the rumor of the death offering provides a new take on the gift and sacrifice, two of the most classic themes in anthropology since Mauss. This attempt to illuminate the rumor of the death offering through a reflection on the moral economy of Islam and a critical discussion of Mauss’s theses above all aims to lend further depth to this incident by not reducing it to a purely
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11. Jean-Louis Triaud and Leonardo Villalón, eds., “Économie morale et mutations de l’islam en Afrique subsaharienne,” special issue, Afrique contemporaine 231, no. 3 (2009). On the uses of the concept of moral economy in African Studies, see Johanna Siméant, “‘Économie morale’ et protestation – détours africains,” Genèses 81, no. 4 (2010): 142–60. 12. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279–303; Comaroff and Comaroff, Zombies et frontières à l’ère néolibérale. Le cas de l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2010). 13. Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
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local anecdote. It is a matter of “making a case” of the rumor, showing how its very singularity is problematic and enables us to ask questions with broader implications that make this case especially valuable.14 To achieve this, our article attempts to combine two interpretative approaches. The first embeds the appearance of the rumor in the local (and factual) context of Senegal at the end of the 2000s, while the second focuses on the more abstract theme of the ambivalence of religious gifts. The interconnectedness of these two interpretive threads makes it possible to situate this Senegalese rumor in a comparative setting, considering it alongside more typical “sorcery crises” in other regions of Africa.15 Before presenting the rumor in more detail, a few things need to be said about the fieldwork and ethnographic data on which our analysis is based. Due to their volatile and unpredictable nature, rumors resist direct observation and consequently present a challenge for standard ethnographical methods. In order to undertake this research, we conducted a joint field study in Dakar and its suburbs in February and March 2011,16 one year after the rumor surfaced. One of us later returned in March and April 2013 to collect additional data. We began by gathering all the articles in the Senegalese press that covered the events (approximately fifty in total) and then worked with the journalists on the media response to the rumors (not covered in this article). We also studied the rumor and how it circulated, focusing particularly on places where current events and gossip are passionately discussed and debated in an urban setting, such as newspaper stands, markets, and “maquis” or other local restaurants. We recorded what our many interviewees remembered about the rumor, how they came to hear about it, what they thought of it at the time, what they thought a year later, how they discussed it, and how they interpreted it. In this way, we were not only able to take full stock of the varieties of local discourses surrounding the death offering, but also to identify the main themes on which the interpretations of the rumor focused. Indeed, this rumor resonated with a whole range of much more ordinary Senegalese concerns (begging and charity, marabouts and maraboutage, money, politics, and so on). Our study also focused on the multiple incidents to which the rumor gave rise. We found direct witnesses to various incidents as well as protagonists who were involved either as accusers or the accused. This freed us from the abstract narrative formed by the rumor itself and enabled us to describe the events in context, using scenes involving real people. The goal was to explore how the fiction of the rumor could become real by closely examining the interactions within which suspicions and accusations linked to the death offering were able to emerge. Finally, this study of the rumor itself was accompanied by a more classic ethnographic study of the practices and representations linked with almsgiving, on the
14. On the heuristic fertility of the “case” in the social sciences, see Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, eds., Penser par cas (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2005). 15. The expression “sorcery crisis” is borrowed from Pierre-Joseph Laurent, Les pentecotistes du Burkina Faso. Mariage, pouvoir et guérison (Paris: IRD/Karthala, 2003). 16. This collective fieldwork benefitted from funding within the context of the RITME research program (ANR-08-CREA-053-02) directed by Carlo Severi.
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sides of both the giver and the recipient, which provides the background against which the rumor becomes meaningful.
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The rumor of the death offering appeared in Dakar or in Saint-Louis around January 25, 2010. Although different versions were in circulation, a prototypical situation emerged from the publication of the first media article on the subject (quoted in the introduction above), which appeared on the front page of L’Observateur on January 26. This version, which was widely copied by rival media outlets and transmitted by word of mouth, already included the key narrative elements of the rumor: the 4×4 car, the offering of meat, a banknote, and a shroud made of percale (an obvious reference to death), the presumed but never explicitly stated causal link between the gift and death, and reference to the rumor using the oxymoron “death offering.”17 It spread very rapidly and had reached the whole country, even down to Casamance, in less than 24 hours. It primarily circulated in cities and towns, but certain rural communities were also affected. Less than a week later, the rumor was reported in Gambia and Mali, in the border region of Kayes.18 However, the rumor of the death offering was limited to the Senegambian region and, in this respect, is distinct from rumors of genital theft and killer telephone numbers, which have a much more transnational dimension. This limited extension can be explained by the fact that the death offering closely depended on a sociocultural context specific to Senegal, linked to the place of charity and begging in society. The rumor spread by word of mouth, through ordinary conversation as well as by telephone and text messages. It was publicly discussed in sermons at the mosques and widely transmitted by the media, first on the radio and then on television, in the newspapers, and online. Like rumors of genital theft and killer telephone numbers, the death offering attests to sorcery’s entrance into the digital age. Indeed, these occult rumors are the product of incessant transfers between the media and ordinary conversations. The media provides a sounding board for the rumors, which are discussed at length by so-called “titrologues” in the “grandplaces” and at newspaper stands.19 This hybrid between word of mouth and media information is often called “pavement radio” or “gossip radio” in francophone
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17. Meat and money are the elements of the offering that are the most frequently mentioned (80 percent of the versions in our corpus). 18. This is where, in February 2010, one of us first heard about the death offering while conducting fieldwork on an unrelated subject. 19. The “grand-places” are the public squares where people from the same neighborhood meet to play cards or checkers and to discuss the news of the day. The “titrologues” (from titre, or “title” in French) debate the titles on the front pages of the newspapers—without necessarily having read the content of the articles. This neologism probably comes from the Ivory Coast. See Aghi Auguste Bahi, “L’effet ‘titrologues.’ Une étude exploratoire dans les espaces de discussion des rues d’Abidjan,” En quête 8 (2001): 129–67.
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Life and Death of a Rumor
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Africa.20 It is a model of collective elaboration of information that leads to the proliferation of dissonant and sometimes contradictory interpretations, all attempting to make sense of uncertain news.21 From this perspective, the credit given to the rumor of the death offering should not be overestimated. One of the general characteristics of rumors is that they do not need to be believed in order to be spread. They simply have to have a minimum amount of credibility and above all narrative relevance in the social spheres in which they circulate. It is therefore not surprising that most of our Senegalese informants did not know what status to give the rumor of the death offering. Less than two weeks after its appearance, the rumor disappeared without any consensus as to its veracity or meaning. “It didn’t last because the person left Senegal with their 4×4,” one beggar in Dakar told us. The authorities intervened to refute the rumor and control the violent reactions, which certainly contributed to its rapid extinction: the head of the National Police put out a very firm press release as early as January 27. But above all, as is often the case for rumors of this nature, interest in the story petered out on its own and quickly turned to other news. Indeed, the beginning of February marked the start of the Grand Magal, the annual ceremony of the Mouride brotherhood, during which hundreds of thousands of pilgrims converge on the holy city of Touba.22 News of the Magal trumped the death offering not only because it is an event of national importance, but also because it is a religious festival intrinsically bound up with gifts: the faithful give offerings to the brotherhood’s dignitaries as well as generous alms to the countless beggars who come to Touba especially for the ceremony. All of these gifts are made under the religious protection of the General Kaliph of the brotherhood and are in a sense “made safe” by the marabouts’ baraka.23 A beggar sitting outside the Great Mosque in Touba confirmed that he was “not afraid of taking this so-called ‘deadly’ charity,” reported the Walf Grand Place: “‘If they give it to me here in Touba, I’ll take it because I’m not afraid, man ki la gëm (I believe in that one),’ he declared, pointing to the tomb of Serigne Touba [Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (1853–1927), founder of the Mouride brotherhood]. But he added that in his home town of Mbour he would not accept the charity that had caused such terror the week before for anything in the world.”24 The role played by the Mouride pilgrimage in extinguishing the rumor confirms that the death offering can be analyzed as a moment of crisis for the religious gift. 20. On “pavement radio,” see Stephen Ellis, “Tuning in to Pavement Radio,” African Affairs 88, no. 352 (1989): 321–30. 21. On the process of the collective elaboration of rumors, see Tamotsu Shibutan, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 22. On the Magal, see Christian Coulon, “The Grand Magal in Touba: A Religious Festival of the Mouride Brotherhood of Senegal,” African Affairs 98, no. 391 (1999): 195–210. 23. Baraka (barke in Wolof) refers to the charisma attributed to the brotherhood’s dignitaries, affording them a power of grace and blessing. 24. “Rumeur sur l’offrande mortelle : à Touba, l’aumône se prend sans panique,” Walf Grand Place, February 3, 2010.
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By placing the religious value of the gift back in the spotlight, the Magal restored the beneficiaries’ confidence, which had been brutally shaken by the death offering. Because of this, it directly contributed to weakening the anxiety that lay at the heart of the rumor.
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While the content of the death offering is often detailed in the narrative of the rumor, the identity of the person giving it remains largely unspecified. Only two things are known about the mysterious “charitable killer,” as he is often described: he is rich, and he is a stranger. The man’s wealth is manifest in the 4×4 and the ten-thousand-CFA-franc note,25 the biggest denomination in circulation and too large a charitable offering not to be suspicious (ten, twenty, twenty-five, or fifty francs being the usual denominations offered to beggars). The more generous the alms, the more they are suspected of displaying self-interest or concealing something else. In several incidents linked to the rumor, the ostensible wealth of the giver contributed to crystallizing suspicion. On January 25, Matar Ndoye (a pseudonym) narrowly escaped being lynched by the inhabitants of Diokoul, a neighborhood of Rufisque. Ndoye, who was Senegalese but living in Europe, had come to inspect a piece of land he had bought in his native town and on which he wished to build. He arrived in a 4×4, accompanied by a friend and intending to distribute money to the people living on adjoining land, apparently in an attempt to make a good impression in the neighborhood so as to not jeopardize his real-estate plans. However, this sudden generosity provoked a misunderstanding. The recipients took it in the opposite sense to how it was intended and suspected that the stranger was the infamous person distributing the death offerings and driving a 4×4. They mobbed and began to attack Ndoye, despite the attempted intercession of his friend (who lived in the neighborhood). Only the intervention of the authorities saved the unlucky man from mob justice. This incident involving a rich expat is revealing when one considers that remittances are one of the main forces driving the current Senegalese economy. The money of migrants living in Europe or America is reinvested in Senegal, especially in urban property, a situation that contributes to significant real-estate speculation in Dakar.26 In this context, numerous rumors circulate regarding the murky and supposedly illicit origins of the capital used to build the “multi-story buildings” that have become increasingly prolific in the major cities over the last decade. The incident should thus be understood in light of the property-related tensions between those who have recently profited from international migration
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25. Ten thousand CFA francs is equivalent to fifteen euros. The average monthly income in Senegal is roughly forty thousand francs, or sixty euros (World Bank data, 2010). 26. See Serigne Mansour Tall, Investir dans la ville africaine. Les émigrés et l’habitat à Dakar (Paris/Dakar: Karthala/CREPOS, 2009).
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Rich Givers
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and the Senegalese who remained at home. From this perspective, the rumor of the death offering appears to be a variation on the theme of the occult economy. Wealth is one of the leitmotifs of the rumor. In the eyes of all the Senegalese people with whom we discussed the offering, it was clear that the mysterious giver’s motivation was to become even richer by distributing these deadly offerings. Conversely, the victims chosen by the giver were all beggars (yalwaankat) who lacked the means of refusing this charity and, more broadly, the poor and lower classes—known in Senegal as the góorgóorlu, or “those who make do.”27 The rumor thus drew on a kind of moral imagination28 that explains social inequalities through sorcery: the rich are only rich because they selfishly sacrifice the poor by occult means. This is a ubiquitous theme in stories of sorcery in Africa, and there is much anthropological literature on the subject.29 Up to now, these studies have focused more on central and southern Africa than on the Islamic countries of the SudanoSahelian zone. Yet the popular imaginary surrounding wealth sorcery is also significant in this region of the continent, as proved not only by the case of the death offering but also by other recent studies devoted to the occult economy of maraboutage in Senegal and its neighboring countries.30 This kind of wealth sorcery is based on a moral economy that sees profit as a zero-sum game, whereby for some to win, others must lose.31 The death offering stretches this logic to the point of paradox because it is the winners who lose: the poor who think they have won by receiving money through charity lose their lives. The rumor also attests to the lower classes’ defiance toward the elites. On this front, its appearance must be placed in the political context of Senegal during the 2000s.32 Abdoulaye Wade, a long-term opponent of the socialist regime, was elected president of the Republic in 2000, with Sopi (“change” in Wolof) as his
27. On poverty and its social perception in Senegal, see Abdou Salam Fall, Bricoler pour survivre. Perceptions de la pauvreté dans l’agglomération urbaine de Dakar (Paris: Karthala, 2007). 28. On the notion of moral imagination, see Thomas O. Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 29. In addition to the work by the Comaroffs cited above, see Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), especially 137-68. 30. Amber B. Gemmeke, Marabout Women in Dakar: Creating Trust in a Rural Urban Space (Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2008), particularly 25ff; Dorothea Schulz, “Love Potions and Money Machines: Commercial Occultism and the Reworking of Social Relations in Urban Mali,” in Wari Matters: Ethnographic Explorations of Money in the Mande World, ed. Stephen Wooten (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 93–115. 31. Ralph A. Austen, “The Moral Economy of Witchcraft: An Essay in Comparative History,” in Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 89–110. 32. On Senegal in the 2000s, see: Tarik Dahou and Vincent Foucher, “Senegal since 2000: Rebuilding Hegemony in a Global Age,” in Turning Points in African Democracy, ed. Abdel Raufu Mustapha and Lindsay Whitfield (Melton: James Currey, 2009), 13–30; Momar-Coumba Diop, ed., Le Sénégal sous Abdoulaye Wade. Le Sopi à l’épreuve du pouvoir (Paris: CRES/Karthala, 2013).
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campaign slogan. The popular enthusiasm provoked by political renewal nonetheless paved the way for disillusionment in the second half of the decade, particularly after Wade’s reelection in 2007. The economic crisis hit the Senegalese hard in 2008, with high unemployment, price hikes on foodstuffs and energy (which led to riots against the cost of living in 2008), and continual power cuts (which led to more riots in 2011). At the same time, the ostentatious wealth of the political and economic elites, the allegations of state racketeering accompanying Wade’s policy of major public works, and accusations of corruption directly concerning the president and his inner circle led the Senegalese to say that the change of political regime (alternance in French) had become an “alternoce” (a pun using the French word noce, or “[wedding] party”) for the sole profit of those in power. The political nouveau riche—or the “alternoceurs,” as they were called—flaunted their ostentatious luxury, while the lower classes sank deeper into the crisis. There is no doubt that the 4×4 and the ten-thousand-CFA-franc note mentioned in the rumor evoke the Wade-era nouveau riche, who drive big cars and spend freely while the lower classes are reduced to begging for charity that ends up killing them (distributing money or luxury cars is apparently a common practice for politicians before elections). According to an employee at the Hann Zoo in Dakar, “It was the higher-ups because it was shiny cars.” A street vendor specified that it was political “maraboutage,” while a journalist from Populaire confirmed that it was politicians who distributed the death offering “to gain a position,” jadedly remarking, “It happens all the time.” A parking attendant added, “Even the government does it.” The death offering thus evokes the specter of a perversion of the relationship between economics, politics, and religion, which have formed the foundation of the “Senegalese social contract” since the country’s independence.33 It allows for the threatening possibility that strategies for gaining wealth based on collusion between business capitalism and the state go as far as corrupting the charitable practices at the heart of religious solidarity. According to one popular interpretation of the death offering, the Senegalese people who were experiencing the full force of the financial crisis were the ones consciously spreading the rumor in order to take revenge on wealthy politicians by making them look suspicious: “It is true that the incident occurred at a bad time for the leaders of the regime, who often drove big cars with tinted windows. The rumor was bent on attacking those who drove those shiny cars and ate meat. When the people want revenge they’ll always find a way.”34 Indeed, rumors offer the weak a weapon against the powerful; as Scott has shown for the everyday forms of resistance to domination and authority practiced by South Asian peasant communities, they act as an indirect form of criticism.35 Gossip and rumors allow
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33. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Les négociations du contrat social sénégalais,” in La construction de l’État au Sénégal, ed. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, Momar-Coumba Diop, and Mamadou Diouf (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 83–93. 34. “Offrande mortelle : la police décide de sévir contre la rumeur,” Seneweb.com, January 28, 2010. 35. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
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Asian peasants to reaffirm the value of their own moral economy, as opposed to the hegemonic values of capitalist economy. Whereas the elites publicly present their charitable acts as voluntary altruism, their poorer neighbors present them in their gossip as social and religious obligations that the rich are in fact bound to respect, and they do not fail to criticize those whose gifts are not generous enough. Similarly, the rumor of the death offering enabled the Senegalese to shed doubt on the morality of the elites’ charitable acts by revealing their self-interested and egotistical nature. The person distributing deadly alms was not only wealthy, he was also unknown to the victims. “We don’t know who does it. The car stops, the window opens, they give the package and leave,” confirmed one of our informants. The giver’s anonymity was reinforced by the fact that he concealed his face under a turban and remained inside the car, which was often said to have tinted windows. This explains why several versions of the rumor gloss over the driver and talk about “the 4×4 of death” as if the car were a protagonist in itself: according to some, the “4×4 distributes alms.” The theme of the death car is found in many other African rumors and dates back to the colonial era.36 All these rumors evoke anxiety about situations of asymmetrical anonymity, emphasizing the danger of being exposed to the view and the mercy of those who are not themselves visible. The story of the death offering places a particular emphasis on the link between anonymity and power (having a car with tinted windows requires a special license in Senegal). Only the powerful have the privilege of remaining anonymous, and they are often suspected of abusing this power in order to commit all kinds of wrongdoing.37 In certain incidents linked to the rumor, a car driven by a stranger was enough to attract suspicion, even when no gift was involved. Anonymous gifts were, however, at the center of most of the incidents. At the beginning of February in Casamance, a certain Diatta (a pseudonym), who lived and worked in Kolda, wanted to send a sack of rice to his mother, who lived in another village in the region. He gave the sack to a taxi driver he knew who was going in that direction. The taxi driver arrived at the place where he wanted to drop off the sack so that Diatta’s mother, who lived a few kilometers away, could come and pick it up later. But the hostile villagers refused to keep the sack and ordered him to leave immediately. The same scene played out in another village. Finally, the taxi driver was obliged to return to Kolda and give the sack back to Diatta. This incident is linked to the presence of several intermediaries in the transfer of the gift—what
36. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 127–30. 37. “Not appearing—being able to hide behind tinted glass, for example—is thus a sign of privilege, and much is vested in the possibility of acting without being seen.” Gretchen Pfeil, “Sarax and the City: Almsgiving and Anonymous Objects in Dakar, Senegal,” in The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach, ed. Casey High, Ann H. Kelly, and Jonathan Mair (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 33–54, here p. 41.
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ought to have been a simple gift between relatives became anonymous and therefore threatening. On the one hand, the giver gave the gift to a go-between; on the other, the villagers were not the final recipients and were thus not expecting to serve as intermediaries. From their perspective, the taxi driver was a stranger who arrived in their village and insisted on giving them something for which they had not asked. That was enough to make the sack of rice suspicious, even though the gift did not correspond to the prototypical description of the death offering. Other incidents are still more troubling and involve gifts without gift-givers. In early February in a village near Sedhiou, a man found a ten-thousand-CFAfranc note by the side of the road “just after a 4×4 had gone past.” Instead of picking it up he raised the alarm. A crowd formed around the note, but no one dared take it. Someone suggested it be burned. Eventually, a teacher pushed through the crowd and picked up the note. This audacious gesture provoked different reactions, with some applauding his courage and many others criticizing his foolhardiness. After the episode, shopkeepers in the village refused to take the teacher’s money for fear of falling victim to the death offering via his intermediary. A similar incident occurred in front of a mosque in a market in Diourbel on January 27, when a man found a bag containing some percale. People wondered whether it was the death offering that everyone had been talking about or simply a charitable donation that someone had anonymously left outside the mosque, as the Quran recommends.
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The rumor of the death offering disrupted attitudes to almsgiving, as seen in the incident in front of the mosque. In this affair, beggars were doubly “victims.” They were the main victims of the death offering, but they were also victims of the rumor itself. It made charity suspicious, and in doing so it compromised begging. During this period, many beggars ended up refusing charity or at least being more cautious than usual. As one of them declared, “We live off charity; that is why we are obliged to accept what we are given. But we don’t accept just anything anymore and, in particular, when someone gives us something, we check to see what is in it.” A fear of giving matched this fear of receiving, as the givers feared being taken for the mysterious distributor of the death offering. Another beggar remarked, “In the last few days, we have received fewer offerings. We even sense that the handful of regular donors who dare to continue to be generous are hesitant at the moment they give alms. Those who usually get out of the car to greet us limit themselves to extending a hand before driving off.” This evasive behavior was not without risk, for, in wanting to give alms by stealth, these givers ran an even greater risk of being seen as suspicious. The rumor threw begging into a state of crisis. Both givers and recipients were forced to break from their daily routines and to question just what was implied by the act of giving or receiving. Yet begging is an extremely widespread activity in Senegal. In the urban environment, there are daily interactions between passers-by and beggars and, particularly in the center of Dakar, they are omnipresent and sometimes invasive.
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One popular interpretation of the death offering we heard several times suggested that the story was actually intended to discourage begging by provoking the fear of both giving and receiving. According to this interpretation, the rumor was an extralegal plot by the state to put an end to begging. This must be placed in the context of public policies intended to combat begging and the controversy surrounding the place of beggars in Senegalese society.38 Repressive policies concerning beggars were in keeping with the colonial policy of incarcerating those on the margins of urban society and the “eviction” of the “indigenous neighborhoods” in Dakar. This policy became stricter after independence, particularly from the 1970s on, under the pretext that beggars were an obstacle to the development of tourism. The law of July 9, 1975 outlawed begging in public spaces (articles 245 and 246 of the Senegalese Penal Code), and regular raids were organized. This brutal policy was accompanied by the use of derogatory vocabulary to talk about beggars, who were referred to as “human congestion” or even “human waste” by president Léopold Sédar Senghor himself. The authorities thus gave themselves the goal of “cleansing” and “disencumbering” Dakar and other major cities in Senegal. From the end of the 1970s, however, it was necessary to acknowledge the failure of the struggle against begging. During the 1980s, urban impoverishment increased with the cycle of structural adjustment policies. At the same time, the state’s repressive policies became more flexible and turned to a more humane approach in connection with charitable organizations—both religious and secular— and NGOs. Amongst the different categories of beggars, talibé children were at the heart of this new humanitarian program: they were presented as a particularly difficult population to control because they are extremely mobile, but they were also seen as victims that the state had to defend against exploitation by corrupt and tyrannical Quranic masters.39 This did not prevent attempts to apply the law of July 9, 1975 from periodically resurfacing. Each time, however, this repressive policy met with strong opposition within Senegalese society. The policy outlawing begging in fact remains largely unenforced, primarily because it was socially unenforceable. Each major raid provoked public indignation, particularly from religious leaders, who reiterated the religious importance of charity and obliged the authorities to retreat. This tension between public policy and religion, which structures the understanding of begging in Senegal, was translated into a lopsided legal compromise. Although begging is forbidden in public spaces, it is tolerated around mosques, particularly during Friday prayers. 38. René Collignon, “La lutte des pouvoirs publics contre les ‘encombrements humains’ à Dakar,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 18, no. 3 (1984): 573–82; Ousseynou Faye and Ibrahima Thioub, “Les marginaux et l’État à Dakar,” Le Mouvement social 204 (2003): 93–108. 39. Talibé refers to the disciple of a marabout. However, in humanitarian discourse the term tends to be used for children who are “exploited” by a Quranic master. See Donna L. Perry, “Muslim Child Disciples, Global Civil Society, and Children’s Rights in Senegal: The Discourses of Strategic Structuralism,” Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2004): 47–86.
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In reality, opponents of the law are defending the interests of givers as much as those of the beggars. Religious charity rather than begging is what is valued here; the Senegalese actually need beggars in order to perform their charity. The rumor of the death offering thus reveals an ambiguity at the heart of attitudes toward almsgiving, manifested in the contradiction between publicly undesirable beggars and the charity with which the givers cannot dispense. This has been a recurring debate in Senegal since the 1970s; it is also the theme of a famous novel by Aminata Sow Fall, La grève des bàttu, often referred to in discussions of the rumor.40 Its story describes a strike among beggars, who refuse to take alms as a protest against the raids conducted by a politician who hopes to become a minister by rigorously enforcing the prohibition of begging. In order to accelerate his nomination, he consults a marabout, who tells him to make an offering. But no beggar accepts his self-interested charity, and he ultimately does not obtain the post he desires.
Self-Interested Charity Having looked at begging, it is time to turn to the other aspect of the almsgiving relationship, the givers, in order to fully appreciate the stakes of this charity with which the Senegalese cannot dispense. The death offering appears to be a deviant form of sarax (“almsgiving” in Wolof). In this language, the rumor was often designated by the phrase saraxu dee (alms of death) or sarax buy rey (alms that kill). The term sarax stems from the Arabic søadaqa, used in the Quran to refer to almsgiving—a central theme of Islam that, in reality, distinguishes between two different kinds of alms. The zaka¯t (asaka in Wolof) refers to legal almsgiving, which is theoretically compulsory although rarely enforced in Muslim countries.41 It constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam and its payment represents a religious act in its own right, a sort of “financial worship,” according to Jonathan Benthall.42 The søadaqa, on the other hand, is what is known as a supererogatory charity, recommended by the religion but not compulsory.43 Due to its religious value, charity—whether compulsory or voluntary—cannot be reduced to a sporadic transfer between a giver and a receiver. The concrete action of giving does not have full meaning for the participants themselves unless it is part of a broader network of virtual relations. Like any religious gift, almsgiving implies a third party because God is always implicated. God is less the ultimate
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40. Aminata Sow Fall, La grève des bàttu ou Les déchets humains (Paris: Le Serpent à plumes, 1979; repr. 2001). The novel, published in Dakar in 1979, was awarded the Grand Prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire the following year. Since then, it has featured consistently on school reading lists in Senegal. It was published in English as The Beggars’ Strike, or The Dregs of Society, trans. Dorothy Blair (Harlow: Longman, 1986). 41. Aron Zysow, “Zaka¯t,” in The Encyclopeædia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 11:406–22. 42. Jonathan Benthall, “Financial Worship: The Quranic Injunction to Almsgiving,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 1 (1999): 27–42. 43. See T. H. Weir, “Sadaka,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 8:708–16.
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recipient of the gift than the donee or the addressee; the gift is not given to God so much as it is given in His name. In Senegal, the beggar extends his hand while chanting sarax ngir Yàlla, meaning charity “for Allah” or “in the name of Allah.” Almsgiving represents an indirect form of oblation, a gift for God. But God also intervenes in this process, potentially dispensing reciprocation in the form of “salvation goods” (to use the terminology of Weber). This reciprocation is of course not automatic and above all cannot be required by the giver: God cannot be bound by the gifts given in His name. In any event, reciprocation does not represent a counter-gift because God is not a recipient: He does not “give” but freely “rewards” charitable gifts between men. Nevertheless, divine compensation is generally expected or at least hoped for by the giver. Document downloaded from www.cairn-int.info - INIST-CNRS - - 193.54.110.56 - 30/08/2017 11h02. © Editions de l?E.H.E.S.S.
Figure 1. Almsgiving and its reward
The status of reciprocation in the cycle of charity can be better understood if charity is compared to another register of religious gift that plays an important role in Senegal: the marabout offering, called àddiya (from the Arabic hadiyya, or “offering”). This refers to the offering made by a disciple (taalibe) in homage and as a sign of voluntary submission to his or her marabout (sériñ, meaning “spiritual leader” or “guide”). This offering, which is generally annual, assumes particular importance among the Mourides, who see it as a religious obligation and even as a tithe due to the marabout.44 However, this is not to reduce Senegalese Islam to the Mouride brotherhood and certainly not to its rural version as it was studied at the end of the 1960s in the classic works of Jean Copans or Donal Cruise O’Brien.45 We only evoke the àddiya to emphasize the circulation of real or symbolic goods in which it is inscribed. 44. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Le talibé mouride : la soumission dans une confrérie religieuse sénégalaise,” Cahiers d’études africaines 10, no. 40 (1970): 562–78; Jean Copans, Les marabouts de l’arachide. La confrérie mouride et les paysans du Sénégal (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1980; repr. 1989), particularly p. 182. 45. On the Mouride brotherhood in urban areas, see: Momar-Coumba Diop, “Fonctions et activités des dahira mourides urbains (Sénégal),” Cahiers d’études africaines 21, nos. 81/ 83 (1981): 79–91; Sophie Bava, “Le dahira urbain, lieu de pouvoir du mouridisme,” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 96 (2004): 135–43. On the contemporary dynamics of Senegalese Islam, divided between brotherhood, neo-brotherhood, and reformism, see:
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In the case of the marabout offering, the expectation (or at least the hope) of reciprocation is in fact quite explicit. It is part of an economy of brotherhood charisma, to use a Weber-inspired concept developed by Cruise O’Brien: the disciples’ offerings are given to marabouts in exchange for their baraka.46 The transmission of divine grace passes through the marabouts’ active intervention via their blessings and prayers.47 This economy of charisma implies the reciprocal conversion of material goods into salvation goods. As a reward for the offerings to their marabouts and the work they do for them, the disciples hope to gain access to paradise. In the mid-1960s, for example, Dramane Mbacké, secretary of the General Kaliph of the Mourides, declared that the àddiya represented a “deposit that will be reclaimed in the hereafter.”48 In reality, however, this reward vacillates between spiritual investment directed toward the afterlife and material interest focused on the here and now. On the one hand, the offerings of the faithful can also be paid back in material goods (in rural areas, for example, a plot of land or assistance in case of hardship might be bestowed). On the other hand, and above all, the marabouts’ baraka is also supposed to bring success in temporal undertakings: it allows us to have “advance access to paradise on earth.”49 Business successes can thus be interpreted as the fruit of divine blessing granted thanks to the intervention of a marabout.50 Salvation goods effectively have a worldly value, as Weber explained: “Religions promise and offer different salvation goods (Heilsgüter), but empirical researchers [should] not study them only, or even mainly, as ‘otherworldly.’” They belong “very much to this world ... health, long life, and wealth.”51 The expectation of reciprocation is also present in the case of charitable almsgiving, although it is more indirect. While, as Timur Kuran observes, alms have a “negligible impact on poverty alleviation,” this lack of redistributive justice for receivers does not prevent them fulfilling other functions for the benefit of
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Fabienne Samson, “Identités islamiques revendicatives et mobilisations citoyennes au Sénégal : deux mouvements néo-confrériques inscrits dans la globalisation et confrontés au désengagement de l’État,” in Islam, État et société en Afrique, ed. René Otayek and Benjamin F. Soares (Paris: Karthala, 2009), 491–512; Mame-Penda Ba, “La diversité du fondamentalisme sénégalais. Éléments pour une sociologie de la connaissance,” Cahiers d’études africaines 2, nos. 206/7 (2012): 575–602. 46. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Don divin, don terrestre : l’économie de la confrérie mouride,” Archives européennes de sociologie 15 (1974): 82–100. 47. On the transmission of baraka, see Jean Schmitz, “Le souffle de la parenté. Mariage et transmission de la baraka chez les clercs musulmans de la vallée du Sénégal,” L’Homme 154 (2000): 241–78. 48. Cited in Christian Coulon, Le Marabout et le Prince. Islam et pouvoir au Sénégal (Paris: A. Pedone, 1981), 107. 49. Cruise O’Brien, “Don divin,” 97. 50. The prosperous trader is thus found “at the crossroads of heaven and earth, where profits meet prophets and prayers meet prosperity,” as Beth Buggenhagen notes in “Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households,” Journal of Religion in Africa 21, no. 4 (2001), 373–401, here p. 374. 51. Weber, “Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in Whimster, Essential Weber, 55–80, here p. 66.
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givers, as several verses of the Quran and certain hadiths stipulate.52 First, charity purifies the giver and his or her wealth by subtracting a small part of it. This is the main function of legal charity, which is also sometimes called “alms of purification.”53 Almsgiving also serves other roles of propitiation and expiation. It enables the giver to attract divine grace and make amends for sin, and thus to ensure a place in the afterlife. As Robert Vuarin, speaking of Senegal, has remarked, “by this charity, the believer accumulates virtues in this world that will be counted at the Last Judgment.”54 Divine reward might well be a gratuitous favor granted to men without it being their due; it is nonetheless considered a proportional reciprocation for the initial gift. This can be seen in the use of the expression “loan to God” to designate charity in sura 57 of the Quran: “Indeed, the men who practice charity and the women who practice charity and [those who] have loaned Allah a goodly loan—it will be multiplied for them, and they will have a noble reward.” Muslim theologians have elaborated a whole system of accounts to quantify divine reward according to the receiver and the circumstances of the charity. For example, the reward will be ninety times greater than the initial charity for a gift to someone who is physically infirm; it will be doubled for charity dispensed during the Friday prayer; and it will be seventy times greater if it is performed in secret.55 As in the case of the marabout offering, divine reward wavers between this world and the afterlife. A Wolof proverb, for example, stipulates that “charity increases the length of life and reduces sin” (sarax dana yokk fan di wàññi bàkaar). Indeed, alms are supposed to protect the giver from bad luck: it is recommended to perform charity every morning to ward off the day’s misfortunes, particularly after a nightmare. One of our interviewees, a member of the Tijaniyya, told us that he gave seven pieces of white sugar (his lucky number and color) to the same group of beggars as he left his house every morning. This prompted another of our interviewees to say that beggars ask for alms not only to survive, but also to “ensure the survival” of those who perform charity. Some Mourides, quoted by Sophie Bava, go even further and consider divine reciprocation for charity in a directly pecuniary light. According to them, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba taught that “giving alms increases wealth just like saying prayers.”56 For all these reasons, beggars are indispensable actors on the Senegalese religious scene. Those who give alms need beggars just as much as the beggars need them. 52. Timur Kuran, “Islamic Redistribution through Zakat: Historical Record and Modern Realities,” in Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and Amy Singer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 275–93, here p. 275. 53. See Moustapha Guèye, Le droit chemin dans la pratique islamique parfaite (Dakar: NEAS, 2010). The author of this religious treaty is a renowned imam in Senegal and president of its National Association of Imams and Ulama. 54. Robert Vuarin, “L’enjeu de la misère pour l’Islam sénégalais,” Revue Tiers Monde 123 (1990): 601–21, here p. 608. 55. Weir, “Sadaka,” 710 and 714. 56. Sophie Bava, “De la ‘baraka aux affaires’: ethos économico-religieux et transnationalité chez les migrants sénégalais mourides,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 19, no. 2 (2003): 69–84.
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Beggars play an intermediary role in obtaining divine reciprocation, particularly through the prayers they say out of gratitude in the giver’s name.57 From this perspective, both alms and the marabout offering seem to be situated in the same economy of prayer: material goods are given in exchange for prayers providing access to the benefits of salvation.58 However, there is a clear opposition between these two registers of religious gift because of the contrasting social positions of the beggar and the marabout in relation to the giver. It is easier to suspect an offering of being a gift as solicitation, motivated by the self-interested desire for reward, the giver attempting to gain the favors of the powerful through his or her gesture. Because of the marabout’s power to obtain and redistribute baraka, the cycle of the offering resembles the exchange of a gift for a gift. It cannot be reduced, however, to a simple exchange (a transfer in which reciprocation is required) because of the hierarchical relation between the marabout and the believer, which powerfully determines the prayer economy. In the case of charity to the poor, the gift appears to be more disinterested and gratuitous, it being difficult to see the potential reward as direct reciprocation by the receiver. However, if charity is situated in the broader cycle of the salvation economy, it is revealed to be just as self-interested. Moreover, to the extent that the beggar is not in a position to refuse the gift, and is thus obligated to the giver (in a moral sense), he or she is more susceptible of being instrumentalized in the almsgiving relationship. Whereas the marabout is a specialist in religious mediation, the beggar is a simple “instrument of salvation for the wealthy,” just like the beggar in medieval Christianity.59 Charitable almsgiving and marabout offerings are both wrought with the same tension between disinterestedness and self-interest. Both types of gifts presuppose that the giver is disinterested because they are supposed to be given freely, without the expectation that the recipient will reciprocate. In this respect, almsgiving represents the most “pure” gift and a priori the most disinterested. The central role of almsgiving in the Islamic ethic contributes to the creation of a charitable habitus among the faithful—in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, it provokes an “interest in disinterestedness.”60 This disinterestedness is valued in the name of higher religious interest because it is the condition for obtaining a nonobligatory type of reciprocation provided by a third party distinct from the giver: a divine reward that vascillates between salvation in the afterlife and blessing in this life.
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57. According to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, almsgiving “affords the courageous person who practices it the prayers of the poor and the needy.” This phrase comes from one of the many texts attributed to him and broadly distributed in the form of brochures, entitled Les itinéraires du Paradis (Masaalik-Ul Jinaan). 58. The notion of prayer economy comes from Benjamin F. Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 59. Jean-Louis Roch, “Le jeu de l’aumône au Moyen Aˆge,” Annales ESC 44, no. 3 (1989): 505–27, here p. 505. 60. Pierre Bourdieu, Practial Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. Randal Johnson (Stanford: Polity Press, 1998), 85.
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While God does not return gifts, He does reward disinterestedness. This charitable habitus produces a specific form of self-interest that we call “self-interested disinterestedness.” It is, of course, not specific to Senegalese Islam but is a more general characteristic of “monotheistic charity.”61 Islamic charity and Christian caritas have the same Hebraic roots, and, from this perspective, there is a shared historical legacy between the zedaqa, which designates charity in Judaism, and the Arab søadaqa.62 This is most likely a characteristic of all religions involving salvation. The more a religion is oriented toward the afterlife and the more divinity is remote, the less religious gifts appear to provoke the expectation of direct and immediate reward. The major universalist religions value an ideology of the “pure gift,” given freely and disinterestedly, as Jonathan Parry demonstrated in his critical rereading of Maussian anthropology of the gift in light of his own work on Hinduism.63 In The Gift, Mauss focuses on the forms of reciprocity that structure the practices of giving and emphasizes the triple obligation of giving, receiving, and above all reciprocating. This understanding of the gift explains why he ultimately accords little place to religious gifts and alms, which result in no obligation to reciprocate. Mauss scarcely dedicates more than a two-paragraph “note” to this question at the end of the last section of the first chapter, a section that deals with “the present made to humans and the present made to the gods.”64 We would like to quote the central passage here: “[O]ne can see how a theory of alms can develop. Alms are the fruits of a moral notion of the gift and of fortune on the one hand, and of a notion of sacrifice, on the other. Generosity is an obligation, because Nemesis avenges the poor and the gods for the superabundance of happiness and wealth of certain people who should rid themselves of it. This is the ancient morality of the gift, which has become a principle of justice. The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children. In recounting this we are recounting the history of the moral ideas of the Semites. The Arab sadaka originally meant exclusively justice, as did the Hebrew zedaqa: it has come to mean alms.” Mauss rightly notes the Hebraic origin of “the doctrine of charity and alms ... which, with Christianity and Islam, spread around the world.” He also identifies the affinity between alms and sacrifice—an important point to which we will return and which will allow us to establish the link between Mauss’s two texts on the gift and on sacrifice. But these brief remarks on alms come to a sudden end, with Mauss abruptly concluding: “However, let us return to our main subject: the gift, and the obligation to reciprocate.”
61. Miriam Frenkel and Yaacov Lev, eds., Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009). 62. On caritas, see Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “‘Caritas’ y don en la sociedad medieval occidental,” Hispania 204 (2000): 27–62. On zedaka (or zedaqa, as Mauss spells it), see Ilana F. Silber, “Beyond Purity and Danger: Gift-Giving in the Monotheistic Religions,” in Gifts and Interests, ed. Antoon Vandevelde (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 115–32. 63. Parry, “The Gift.” 64. Mauss, The Gift, 22–23.
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Monotheistic charity strays too clearly from the model of reciprocity at the heart of The Gift.65 From this perspective, reciprocal and non-reciprocal forms of the gift can be opposed. Mauss focused on the former, which imply a counter-gift from the recipient; this explains why he, and later Claude Lévi-Strauss, considered the gift in light of reciprocity, and reciprocity in light of exchange.66 These notions must, however, be distinguished from one another, as Alain Testart rightly reminds us. Unlike an exchange, a gift is a non-obligatory transfer of goods for which the possible reciprocation cannot itself be obligatory.67 In contrast with Maussian reciprocity, religious gifts—whether alms or offerings—represent non-reciprocal gifts. Although reciprocation is not entirely absent, it takes the form not of a countergift from the recipient, but of a gift from a third party. While it is still possible to speak of a gift cycle, this circulation proceeds without reciprocation, either direct or “generalized.”68 The cycle of the religious gift is radically asymmetrical because it can only be completed through a vertical relationship with God, beyond the horizontal relationships between humans. This verticality evokes the incommensurable distance separating God from the faithful—a point that Islam strongly emphasizes and which makes it impossible to understand the religious gift according the model of reciprocity between humans.69 The path that led us from alms in Senegal to the critical discussion of Mauss’s theses could (wrongly) seem to have taken us away from the death offering. In reality, it sheds light on the rumor by showing how the tension between selfinterest and disinterestedness develops in the case of religious charity—a tension
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65. This reticence toward dealing with almsgiving can also be applied to the political dimension of The Gift. As Florence Weber notes in her preface to the recent French edition of Essai sur le don (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), in his concluding chapter Mauss criticizes the charitable conception of social assistance, stating that “the unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior, particularly when it has been accepted with no thought of returning it ... . Charity is still wounding for him who has accepted it [here, there is a footnote mentioning the Quran, sura 2 265] and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver.” Mauss, The Gift, 83–84. In the final pages of the book, Mauss again cites a sura on charity from the Quran, but proposes to “substitute for the name of Allah that of society” and to replace “the concept of alms by that of co-operation.” Ibid., 90. 66. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987; repr. 2001). 67. Alain Testart, Critique du don. Études sur la circulation non marchande (Paris: Syllepse, 2007). 68. The circular model of generalized exchange involves at least three participants: A gives to B, who gives to C, who gives to A. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. and trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 69. Hence the limits of Anita Guerreau-Jalabert’s proposition to consider the economy of religious gifts according to the model of generalized exchange that regulates matrimonial alliances in certain societies. Implying asymmetrical relations between social groups that are alternatively in the position of recipients and givers of women, the cycle of matrimonial reciprocity remains horizontal. The cycle of the religious gift, however, presupposes a relationship to God that is asymmetrical but also vertical.
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that Mauss placed at the center of the logic of the gift. The self-interested disinterestedness that motivates charity explains the potential instrumentalization of the recipient by the giver. The interaction between the two parties—the immediate action of giving—constitutes a relationship set within a higher-level relationship and with a vertical connection to an invisible third party who is the source of the possible reciprocation. The tension between self-interest and disinterestedness running through the almsgiving relationship is thus based on the fact that the horizontal connection between the individuals can be nothing more than an instrument serving a vertical link to supernatural powers, whether to God or to morally more ambiguous entities. The rumor of the death offering simply exploits—by pushing it to the extreme—a concern that already latently undermines the almsgiving relationship: the unsettling possibility that not only is this charity selfinterested (which it always more or less is), but, even worse, that the self-interest of the giver works to the detriment of the recipient.
Gifts of Misfortune This concern is all the more salient as, in Senegal, alms are regularly given on the prescription of a marabout after a divinatory consultation (using the services of marabout as a healer-diviner is a common practice).70 Yet this type of almsgiving further increases the tension between self-interest and disinterestedness. At the end of a consultation, the marabout often recommends the person give alms or, as they say in Senegal, “take out a sarax” (génne sarax) in order to obtain what is desired, according to the principle “alms bring luck” (sarax dey ubbi wërsëg).71 The desired result of this charitable gesture may involve conjuration or propitiation. It can, for example, serve to protect one from a bad spell, to cure an illness, to increase one’s clientele, to obtain a promotion, or to pass a test. The marabout’s prescription generally stipulates the nature of the alms (sugar, candles, cola nuts, money, or meat), to whom it should be given (a beggar, a child, a mother of twins, an elderly person, an albino, or even the first person encountered on the street), and the circumstances in which it should be given (the place, the time, and also the prayer to say or the gesture to perform while making the gift). This kind of alms directly reflects the personal issues of the giver, and their size or content risks betraying the nature and the seriousness of the problem.72
70. “Marabout” is a polysemous word (as is its Wolof equivalent sériñ). It can designate a dignitary of a Sufi brotherhood, a Quranic master, or, as it does here, a healer-diviner. 71. On maraboutic practices, see: Ibrahima Sow, Divination marabout destin. Aux sources de l’imaginaire (Dakar: IFAN Cheikh Anta Diop, 2009); Gemmeke, Marabout Women in Dakar. On the adaptation of these practices in France, see Liliane Kuczynski, Les marabouts africains à Paris (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003). 72. “Objects given as sarax ... point to someone’s personal problem or secret, and they suggest, by their size, something about the scale of the problem.” Gretchen Pfeil, “Sarax and the City,” 39.
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The greater the gift, the greater the suspicion that the concerns motivating it are important. Worse still, it is often feared that the accomplishment of the giver’s desire is achieved to the detriment of the recipient. Beggars often complain of being taken for “depositaries of misfortune,” and fear they will receive gifts that “bear bad luck.” One beggar in Dakar said, “If someone turns his alms around my head before giving them, I never accept them. I ask him to take back his alms.” Another beggar from Guédiawaye claimed to refuse “alms over which the giver says incantations.” He added, “I don’t know which prayers he said over them, that’s why I prefer not to take them.” This reveals the fear that the gift may convey or conceal something else and the concern that misfortune may be transmitted at the same time as what is given. A watchman in Dakar put it like this: “If there is bad luck on it, it can get you.” Alms prescribed by marabouts are always suspicious because they are very much self-interested, made by a giver “who is in need of giving.” The self-interest that they satisfy is not turned toward the afterlife but essentially focused on this life. The beggar is not only the instrument for realizing the giver’s desire, but can also be the victim of this desire, whether he takes on the giver’s misfortune (along the model of contagion) or whether he is the target of “maraboutage” (along the model of sorcery). Alms prescribed by marabouts are all the more ambivalent because marabouts are themselves ambiguous figures. The polysemy of the term “marabout” conceals a great diversity of actors and ritual practices, in addition to value judgments regarding their morality or their lawfulness in the eyes of Islam. Marabouts have a reputation for being able to do evil as much as good, and their clients sometimes turn to them to harm their enemies. The magic of marabouts (liggéey, or “work” in Wolof) can be both beneficial (liggéey bu baax) and harmful (liggéey bu bon)—the latter being what is commonly referred to as “maraboutage” in Senegalese French. As a result, only a thin boundary separates magic from sorcery. From this perspective, the marabout represents a form of sorcery that can be deemed instrumental, distinguishing it from cannibalistic witchcraft (dëmm).73 The figure of the maraboutsorcerer has increasingly replaced that of the cannibal witch, particularly in urban areas, a change in the vernacular categories of malfeasance that led Fassin to talk about the “dusk of witches.”74 Because of this, marabouts increasingly find themselves the subject of suspicion and rumors of sorcery. These suspicions put into play a recurring demarcation in popular discourse and public debate in Senegal between “good” and “bad” marabouts, and even between “true” and “false” ones, depending on value judgments that bear as much on the competence as on the morality of the individuals in question.75 These
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73. The distinction between liggéey and dëmm overlaps with the distinction—traditional in anthropology since Edward Evans-Pritchard—between sorcery (malevolent magic) and witchcraft (malevolent power inherent to a person). 74. Didier Fassin, Pouvoir et maladie en Afrique. Anthropologie sociale dans la banlieue de Dakar (Paris: PUF, 1992), 139–46. This is an evolution that the Ortigues had already observed in the 1960s. See Marie-Cécile Ortigues and Edmond Ortigues, Œdipe africain (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1966; repr. 1984), 195. 75. See Gemmeke, Marabout Women in Dakar, 181ff.
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distinctions partially intersect with the opposition between the religious and the magical aspects of the marabouts’ activity, the latter being divided in turn into magic and sorcery.76 Good marabouts are supposed to pray to Allah, whereas bad ones are said to invoke jinns (jinne in Wolof). In reality, the situation is more complex. It is necessary to distinguish between good jinns (spirits that intercede between God and humans), “pagan” jinns (ceddo), and especially “malevolent” spirits (seytaane, from the Arabic shaytøa¯n, meaning “demon, satan”). It is thus important to avoid considering “religion,” “magic,” and “sorcery” as well-defined, watertight categories and to see them instead as ideal types enabling the organization of a range of popular representations and moral judgments concerning Senegalese marabouts and their practices.77 As András Zempléni observed about the work of marabouts as early as the 1960s, “if magic infiltrates the realm of sorcery, it also reaches certain zones of religion.”78 There is a whole range of intermediary or overlapping figures between the “good” and the “bad” marabout, depending on the supposed aims of the magical work and the putative identity of the supernatural Figure 2. The ambivalence of alms prescribed by marabouts
76. On the distinction between magic and sorcery see Constant Hamès, “Problématiques de la magie-sorcellerie en islam et perspectives africaines,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 189/190, nos. 1/2 (2008): 81–99. 77. Mauss and Hubert’s A General Theory of Magic is usually remembered for its canonical distinction between magic and religion. In reality, the entire text is swarming with ambiguous phenomena that challenge the distinction, “those antinomian confusions which abound in the history of both magic and religion.” Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, A General Theory of Magic [1902–1903], trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge, 2011), 101. 78. András Zempléni, “L’interprétation et la thérapie traditionnelles du désordre mental chez les Wolof et les Lébou (Sénégal)” (PhD diss., University of Paris, 1968), 449.
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entities with whom he (or sometimes she) is in relation. The epitome of the bad marabout is thus the marabout-sorcerer who mobilizes malevolent spirits for maraboutage, whether to directly harm the client’s enemies or whether the fulfillment of the client’s wishes implies indirectly harming a third party. This figure of the marabout-sorcerer is all the more alarming since bad marabouts are always suspected of hiding behind a veneer of honor, masquerading as knowledgeable, humble, and pious.79 The ambivalence of moral judgments regarding the work of marabouts is never clearer than when this work concerns the spheres of wealth and power. Politicians and businessmen have a reputation for maintaining close ties with powerful marabouts and regularly soliciting their services. Fassin notes that “at every level of power, we observe connivance between those who have political power and those who have magical power.”80 In this context, wealth and power can be seen as a divine blessing obtained thanks to the marabout’s baraka, or, inversely, as the fruit of much more suspicious maraboutage (and in both cases offerings and alms may be involved). The semantic and moral ambiguity associated with the figure of the marabout encourages us to imagine an alarming proximity between the economy of religious charisma and the occult economy of maraboutage. Ultimately, we can observe how the chain of suspicion is formed, and how, from the perspective of the recipients, it can affect their relationship to the alms they receive, particularly those prescribed by marabouts. The more alms appear to be self-interested (that is, the more the giver’s interest is suspected of contributing to the motivation for the gift, selfishly seeking wealth or power), the greater the risk that the satisfaction of this self-interest will occur to the detriment of the recipient. There is also a greater risk that these alms have involved the use of a marabout and a pact with malevolent powers (and not a relationship of submission to God). Overall, the more charity is self-interested, the more it runs the risk of tipping over into sorcery. That is exactly what is at stake in the rumor of the death offering.
Gifts and Sacrifices In discussions with our informants about the death offering, many of them told us that it was in fact a “sacrifice.” One, a street musician of Fula origin, remembered the rumor as “the sacrifice story.” “It’s a sacrifice for killing people,” he said; “they give passers-by a large sum, or they pick it up, and they end up dying of illness or something else.” He added that it was “a sacrifice for evil,” and should be distinguished from alms, which constitute “a sacrifice for good.” These spontaneous connections between alms and sacrifice are not surprising. In Wolof, the term sarax refers to both alms and sacrifice, and it is frequently
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79. Gemmeke, Marabout Women in Dakar, 27. 80. Fassin, Pouvoir et maladie en Afrique, 274.
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translated by the latter term in Senegalese French.81 The alms prescribed by marabouts are most often called sacrifices (the expression “take out a sacrifice” is often used in this sense). It also happens that alms include the sacrifice of an animal and the gift of part of its meat to beggars. This type of alms thus constitutes the last sequence of a blood sacrifice. Regardless of whether a blood sacrifice takes place or not, all alms are considered by the actors themselves as being a sacrifice, a sacrificial offering, to the extent that it is ultimately dedicated to or destined for God.82 In the “relational economy of alms,” we must thus distinguish between the giver who is also a “sacrifier” and the “sacrificee,” as distinct from the immediate recipient: the giver gives to a beggar but at the same time sacrifices to God.83 At the frontier between alms, oblation, and sacrifice, the Wolof term sarax has a semantic range that is much larger than its etymon in Arabic, the meaning of which is limited to charitable gifts. Figure 3. Alms as sacrifice
In the scenario of the rumor, meat, one of the main ingredients of the death offering, is an allusion to animal sacrifice (meat given as charity generally comes from a sacrifice). However, as the blood sacrifice is made prior to the offering and no element of the scenario provides any information about it, all kinds of speculation are possible as to the nature, meaning, and motivation of this invisible sacrifice. 81. On the links between alms and sacrifice in West African societies marked by the cohabitation between Islam and “paganism,” see Jean Bazin, “Retour aux chosesdieux,” in Des clous dans la Joconde. L’anthropologie autrement (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2008), 493–520, particularly pp. 495–99. 82. This is confirmed by the work of Gretchen Pfeil: “Sarax remains a form of sacrifice, not gifting” (Pfeil, “Sarax and the City,” 37). On the general affinity between offering and sacrifice, see Raymond Firth, “Offering and Sacrifice: Problems of Organization,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 93, no. 1 (1963): 12–24. 83. Since Mauss and Hubert’s Sacrifice, a distinction is commonly made between the sacrificer (the official performing the ritual) and the sacrifier (the person or persons benefitting from the ritual). To these roles we propose to add that of the “sacrificee,” in order to give a specific name to the donee or recipient of a sacrifice.
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In this sense, the rumor allows those who spread it to anxiously interrogate the morality of the sacrifice. Just as the rumor of the death offering betrays the inherent contradictions of the moral economy of alms, it also reveals the ambiguities running through the different registers of sacrifice. In Senegal, Muslim sacrifice provides the reference against which other types of sacrifice are generally evaluated. Within Islam, the sacrifice of Ibrahim (Abraham) represents a canonical model.84 According to the Quran, Ibrahim dreams that he sacrifices his son and interprets this dream as a divine command, which he decides to carry out. At the last moment, his son is miraculously replaced by a sheep. Each year, for Eid al-Kebir, a festival called Tabaski in Senegal, Muslims sacrifice a sheep to commemorate Ibrahim’s submission to God.85 Part of the meat from the animal sacrifice is consumed by the family or given to relatives, while another part, still raw, is distributed to the poor so that they can also celebrate Tabaski in a dignified way. This type of alms certainly appears to be the last sequence in a blood sacrifice: charity to the poor completes the sacrifice to God. Although, in Senegal, the sacrifice of Tabaski represents the supreme sacrifice, there are other types of sacrificial practice that fall outside or on the edges of the Abrahamic model. In theory, according to Islam, a blood sacrifice may only be made to God. This raises the question of the lawfulness of sacrifices to intermediaries between God and humans—for example, to jinns. Opinions about these practices vary not only between different people and their religious affiliation, but also depending on the supposed intentions of the sacrifice or the identity of the spirits for whom it is destined (Muslim or pagan jinns, or malevolent spirits). This type of sacrifice, which is illicit in the eyes of orthodox Islam, can sometimes be tolerated on its fringes. However, it is frequently condemned, at least publicly, because it is used more to create a profitable covenant with the spirits than to express the sacrifier’s submission to God. In exchange for the sacrifices he or she makes, the sacrifier expects the spirits to intervene in his or her favor. Sacrifice to jinns is a kind of personal magic. To use Mauss and Hubert’s famous definition, “it is private, secret, mysterious and approaches the limit of a prohibited rite.”86 In contrast, certain sacrifices for covenants with the spirits are part of an organized cult. For example, within the Lebou and Wolof religious traditions, which are pre-Islamic in origin, sacrifice (whether or not this be a blood sacrifice) constitutes a central modality of relations with the spirits. Spirits in these traditions may be tuur (guardian spirits attached to a lineage or a territory) or rab (spirits of the ndëpp possession cult).87 Covenant with these spirits is modeled on
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84. Pierre Bonte, Anne-Marie Brisebarre, and Altan Gokalp, eds., Sacrifices en islam. Espaces et temps d’un rituel (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1999). See also Constant Hamès, “Le sacrifice animal au regard des textes islamiques canoniques,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 101 (1998): 5–25. 85. Anne-Marie Brisebarre and Liliane Kuczynski, eds., La Tabaski au Sénégal. Une fête musulmane en milieu urbain (Paris: Karthala, 2009). 86. Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, 30. 87. A. Moustapha Diop, “Le sacrifice en milieu lébu (Sénégal),” in Bonte, Brisebarre, and Gokalp, Sacrifices, 331–53; András Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique du culte
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exchange: sacrifices and offerings nourish the spirits in exchange for the health, fecundity, and fertility that they bestow on sacrifiers. In the ndëpp cult, rab are sometimes assimilated to Muslim jinns. It even happens that the neighborhood imam comes to sacrifice the animal while reciting verses from the Quran and that part of the meat is then distributed as charity to the poor, the rest going to the spirits and the community of sacrifiers.88 There are thus all sorts of overlapping elements and adaptive solutions between Muslim sacrifice and sacrifice for covenant with the spirits. In this domain, Islam represents both one of the terms of opposition and the overall category from which this hierarchical opposition is constructed. “Pagan” sacrifices are subordinate to the Muslim model, which enables us to understand them by way of contrast. The subordination of the ndëpp to Islam seems to have been further accentuated since the work of Zempléni in the 1960s, and more recent studies have suggested that believers themselves situate the cult of rab and tuur “in perfect Muslim orthodoxy.”89 This explains why all sacrificial practices in Senegal can potentially be interpreted in terms of sarax, a category that lies on the border between alms, offering, and sacrifice but which in any case refers to Islam. In the realm of offering and sacrifice, this semantic dominance of the vernacular terms derived from the Arabic søadaqa can also be rather broadly found among the Islamized populations of West Africa (for example, with the Bambara saraka or the Hausa sadaka90). A tension between two sacrificial registers thus begins to emerge. This is not so much a direct opposition between two watertight categories as a sort of tension that is likely to affect all sacrificial practices because of the overlap and contamination between registers. On the one hand, the model of Ibrahim’s sacrifice marks the submission of the faithful to God (and is closely linked to the charitable gift, as seen in the example of Tabaski). On the other hand, in the interstices or on the margins of Islam, the sacrifice for covenant with the spirits, either as private magic or in public cults, is always understood as a form of exchange (or reciprocal gifts) between the sacrifier and the sacrificee. As in the case of alms, it is first a question of the sacrifier’s self-interest and the place of reciprocation in the economy of sacrifice. This tension between self-interest and disinterestedness was underlined by Mauss and Hubert in their essay Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, first published in 1899 (and translated into English in 1964). This text anticipates the analyses that would come to be at the heart of The Gift twenty-five years later. Having observed the diverse ways of understanding sacrifice (gift-sacrifice, food-sacrifice, and contract-sacrifice), the authors emphasize the fact that it often takes the form
des rab, Ndöp, Tuuru et Samp. Rites de possession chez les Lébou et Wolof,” Psychopathologie africaine 2, no. 3 (1966): 295–439. 88. Zempléni, “La dimension thérapeutique,” 379 and 426. 89. Diop, “Le sacrifice en milieu lébu,” 337. 90. On the Bambara, see Jean Bazin, “Retour aux choses-dieux.” On the Hausa, see Guy Nicolas, Don rituel et échange marchand dans une société sahélienne (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1986).
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of a self-interested gift along the model of do ut des (I give to you so you give to me): “But this abnegation and submission are not without their selfish aspect. The sacrifier gives up something of himself but he does not give himself. Prudently he sets himself aside. This is because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive. Thus sacrifice shows itself in a dual light; it is a useful act and it is an obligation. Disinterestedness is mingled with self-interest. That is why it has so frequently been conceived of as a form of contract. Fundamentally there is perhaps no sacrifice that has not some contractual element. The two parties present exchange their services and each gets his due.”91 Maurice Godelier pointed out the limits of the Maussian theory of the sacrificecontract, according to which people manage to compel the gods or spirits through sacrifice.92 In reality, people are in a dependent relationship with regard to the sacrificee, the ultimate recipient of the sacrifice. This hierarchical asymmetry explains why the sacrifice is so often thought of as the sacrifier repaying a debt (in Wolof, the terms njot—“repurchase”—or yool—“retribution”—are sometimes used about sacrifice). The sacrifier is not able to oblige the sacrificee to reciprocate, but the latter has the (supernatural) means of demanding his due, or at least it is imagined so. Sacrifice is thus neither truly a contract nor an exchange: it is a gift to the gods or the spirits, made more or less freely but also more or less selfinterested or gratuitous. The logic of sacrifice appears to be ultimately spread between the two poles of abnegation and self-interest. In Senegal, this takes the form of a tension between two sacrificial registers that partly overlap: sacrifice as submission to God (in which the potential reciprocation by the sacrificee plays a secondary role) and sacrifice as a request made to the spirits (in which reciprocation is central for the sacrifier). Between these two registers, a whole range of intermediary forms and slippages are possible, if only because spirits can be seen as intermediaries between God and humans. This can be summarized as follows: the more egotistically self-interested the objective of the sacrifice, the more the sacrifice as submission to God slides toward the sacrifice as demand to the spirits. The latter can itself range from sacrifice for intercession to sacrifices made to malevolent powers. As Mauss and Hubert argue, in the case of a sacrifice of request “the importance of the victim is in direct proportion to the gravity of the vow.”93 Taken to its extreme, this logic leads to human sacrifice. The sacrificial victim is no longer limited to a simple animal, a symbolic substitute for a human being: it is actually a person. This sacrificial victim provides an exchange value, or rather the price of the debt contracted with malevolent spirits as an individual makes a pact with malevolent powers to satisfy his (or her) egotistical desires for wealth or power. Sacrifice thus becomes sorcery. This imaginary surrounding human sacrifices is very much present in the rumors of sorcery on the African continent, particularly
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91. Mauss and Hubert, Sacrifice, 100. 92. Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29–31 and 179–98. 93. Mauss and Hubert, Sacrifice, 66.
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in central and western Africa. This can be seen in the case of Gabon, where for a number of years the many cases of “ritual crimes” have provoked genuine moral panic within civil society and the highest echelons of the state. Since the mid-2000s (at least), Senegal has also been concerned by this kind of rumor, as can be seen in a number of macabre news items that made national headlines.94 The Fama Niane affair, referring to the name of the woman found dismembered on a Dakar beach in March 2009 just before the local elections, is undoubtedly the (alleged) “case” of human sacrifice that has had the greatest impact in recent years. We cannot dwell on these cases in the context of this article, so we will simply emphasize two points. First, the political context plays a central role in the crystallization of suspicion. It is generally assumed that the person ordering the sacrifice is a politician seeking to access or maintain a powerful position by occult means. Second, these murders are not seen simply as heinous crimes, but as sacrificial rites in the true sense. They are believed to involve victims immolated in specific ways (the dismembering of the body and the attention paid to specific parts in the context of sacrificial butchery) as well as sacrificers (“fetishers” and other bad marabouts), sacrifiers (politicians), and sacrificees (malevolent powers whose identities remain obscure in most discourses). In popular discourse and the media in Senegal, human sacrifices are often seen as a distortion of Muslim sacrifice, the canon according to which they are conceived. They imitate the religious rite (for example, by bleeding the victim and turning them to face the east), but, in substituting a human victim for the animal victim, they invert the meaning of the ritual and pervert its moral value. It so happened that the rumor of the death offering occurred a few months after the murder of Fama Niane. It is therefore not surprising that this case was spontaneously evoked by several of our informants when we asked them about the rumor, which was situated in a chronological series of other rumors and news items that contributed to structuring the interpretations to which it gave rise. The death offering was thus interpreted as a unique form of human sacrifice concealed under the appearance of a sacrificial offering, or, more precisely, of a charitable gift following an animal sacrifice (revealed by the presence of meat in the content of the offering).
Charitable Gifts and Sorcery Debts At the end of this process, all that remains is to bring together the elements of contextualization and interpretation invoked in this article in order to explain the relational economy implied in the rumor. We have seen that alms—whatever they may be—only make sense for the participants themselves if they are situated 94. These stories of “ritual crimes,” however, are not entirely new in Senegal. In the 1970s, there were recurrent rumors of children being kidnapped for human sacrifices. See Raymond Sémédo, “Les rumeurs sénégalaises,” Revue africaine de communication 11 (1998): 3–24.
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within a larger network of relations including other virtual actors. Concrete interaction between the giver and the recipient is only the visible part of the gift, and it implies another part that is invisible because it is imagined. The latter is made up of all the relationships, assumed by the participants, which extend the cycle of the gift beyond the material transfer. Some of these relations are, from our point of view, purely imaginary (relationships with God or the spirits), while others refer to interactions that are certainly real and take place before or after the transfer (for example, the prescription of alms during a consultation with a marabout). There are, however, always several ways of imagining the invisible aspect of the gift, particularly from the perspective of a recipient who is ignorant of the giver’s real intentions. In Senegal, the realm of possibilities in which almsgiving is situated stretches from pious charity to sorcery, depending on the perceived balance between the giver’s self-interest and disinterestedness. In the case of the rumor of the death offering, it is also necessary to distinguish between an overt form (what the alms appear to be) and a hidden form (what the alms actually conceal) within the invisible part of the gift. The overt form of the death offering is that of alms representing the last sequence of an animal sacrifice (signified by the offering of meat). This respects—at least putatively— the canon of Muslim sacrifice: someone sacrifices an animal to God and then gives part of the meat away as charity. But the hidden form of the death offering is quite different: the alms are actually the first sequence in a human sacrifice. They are even the tool of this sacrifice because it is the offering that is said to kill the recipient, the latter thus assuming the position of the sacrificial victim. These sacrifices are intended for “mystical” powers, whose identities remain unclear in the scenario of the rumor, as in most discourses on the subject. Our informants also assumed that a marabout was involved (the death offering generally being interpreted as a form of maraboutage). This can be summarized in the following way (playing on the double meaning of the term sarax and its local translations as “alms” or “sacrifice”): a giver sacrifices someone by giving them something out of sacrifice. Although it appears disinterested, the gift is actually instrumentalized for the purposes of a hidden sacrifice that is extremely self-interested. Unbeknownst to himself or herself, one of the subjects of the apparent relationship (the recipient) is thus transformed into the object of a hidden relationship (a sacrificial victim). During what appears to be a banal act of almsgiving, the recipient finds himself or herself involved in an obscure relationship of a completely different kind, to his or her detriment. He or she is objectified and exchanged in an occult transaction between the giver and the malevolent powers, sacrificed to the latter in exchange for the wealth and power the former expects to receive in return. More precisely, since the rumor specifies that the giver is clearly already wealthy (as shown by the 4×4 and the money distributed), the sacrifice seems to amount to settling a debt with the malevolent powers. Indeed, human sacrifices are generally considered according to the model of debt: out of greed, an individual indebts himself or herself to malevolent powers to which he or she ends up having to sacrifice human lives. The death offering is thus a gift concealing a debt. The repayment of a debt engaged through sorcery is disguised under the appearance of a charitable gift.
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CHARITY AND SORCERY
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In reality, in the scenario of the rumor the overt content of the alms already opened them up to the suspicion of being a sorcery sacrifice. The thing that is given betrays the true nature of the relationship between the giver and the recipient. The invisible part of the death offering, its occult part, appears implicitly through the three main ingredients of the “deadly package,” which each evoke an aspect of sacrifice. The shroud in percale evokes the macabre consequence of the offering. The banknote evokes the hidden motive of the sacrifier, in other words his greed. Finally, the meat evokes the blood sacrifice. It represents the most ambiguous element of the offering, of which there are two possible forms (overt and hidden): the animal sacrifice that precedes the charitable gesture and the human sacrifice disguised as a gift.
Sorcery and the Crisis of the Gift The death offering represents a hyperbolic perversion of almsgiving and reveals the occult underside of the moral economy on which it is based: a charitable gift is used to conceal a sorcery sacrifice—in other words, precisely the opposite of what it should be. What is shocking about the death offering and, as a result, what gives the rumor its evocative strength, is not so much that greedy individuals are ready to sacrifice their neighbors to serve their egotistical desires (no one needs to be convinced of this) but rather that this greed is able to corrupt the charity at the heart of religious solidarity by taking on its shape. The oxymoronic form the rumor assumes emphasizes this treacherous inversion of charity. Our informants, as well as the media, speak of a “death offering” but also of a “generous assassin” or “charitable killer.” This makes this rumor a Senegalese variant on the theme of the poisoned chalice, which reoccurs in stories of sorcery from elsewhere in Africa. Several authors
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Figure 4. The death offering
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have stressed that the new forms assumed by sorcery in contemporary African societies attest to a generalized crisis of the gift. Alain Marie interprets the many suspicions of sorcery that mark the life histories of his informants in Ivory Coast as a symptom of the crisis of solidarity within the family.95 Filip De Boeck paints a similar picture regarding child-witch accusations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.96 Children, sometimes very young infants, are accused by their entourage of having become witches after receiving a cursed gift from someone. The gift appears gratuitous, but through it the child in reality contracts a debt to the underworld. According to De Boeck, these stories of child-witches reveal the crisis of habitual forms of reciprocity and the gift within the family. They expose the “cracks and flaws that have started to appear in the urban gift logic.”97 The rumor of the death offering proves that Senegal is not exempt from this kind of sorcery crisis. It also shows that the crisis affects not only solidarity within the family and gifts among relatives, but also religious solidarity and anonymous charitable practices on a broader scale. This sorcery crisis can be interpreted as the symptom of a more general crisis in the mechanisms of redistribution in the economic and political context of Senegal at the end of the 2000s. As we have seen, this context provided a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of suspicions about enrichment through occult means. To use a Maussian concept once again, the rumor of the death offering, as ephemeral as it might be, appeared to us to be a “total social phenomenon,” in which “all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time.”98 The crisis of the gift is a phenomenon that is inextricably economic, political, moral, and religious in nature (the latter two aspects being the ones we have focused on in this article). In reality, the rumor of the death offering simply exploits preexisting concerns about the morality of religious gifts in the context of Senegalese Islam by pushing them to the extreme. The rumor also highlights the “moral perils” of almsgiving, to use Parry’s expression.99 By definition, religious gifts (alms, offerings, or sacrifices) can never be reduced to a material transfer between a giver and a recipient, but also imply imagined relations with invisible agents. As a result, they always contain an element of moral ambivalence and ambiguity as to their destination that authorizes all kinds of suspicions and runs the risk of tipping them into the realm of personal magic or, worse, into sorcery. In a context in which all alms are also sacrificial offerings, both a gift and a sacrifice (as shown by the double
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95. Alain Marie, “Avatars de la dette communautaire. Crise des solidarités, sorcellerie et procès d’individualisation (itinéraires abidjanais),” in L’Afrique des individus, ed. Alain Marie (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 249–328. 96. Filip De Boeck, “The Divine Seed: Children, Gift, and Witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” in Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Alcinda Honwana and Filip de Boeck (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 188–214. 97. Ibid., 209. 98. Mauss, The Gift, 3 99. Jonathan Parry, “On the Moral Perils of Exchange,” in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 64–93.
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use of the term sarax), the rumor anxiously interrogates the specter of possible connections between these two registers. In so doing, it reveals a disconcerting gray area between religion, magic, and sorcery. To whom are the givers really sacrificing when they give alms? What do they hope to obtain from the sacrificee? Overall, is it not the recipients who run the risk of being tricked in this three-way game, instrumentalized by egotistical givers and defenseless against the invisible powers of the sacrificees? This is without a doubt a general characteristic of this kind of rumor. They dramatize tensions, ambiguities, and concerns that are inherent in particular social situations (in this instance the almsgiving relationship). They are collective elaborations that, through the innumerable discussions and comments they provoke, allow for the exploration of the occult aspects of sociality. Ultimately, far from being a simple anecdote, the rumor of the death offering is a heuristic example that can help us to understand the moral economy that regulates gifts between humans as well as their relationship to God and the spirits. Julien Bondaz EA HICSA/Labex CAP (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain (EHESS-CNRS) Julien Bonhomme École normale supérieure Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale
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