Contenu du sommaire : Varia

The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa claimed more than 11,000 lives between 2013-2016. The source is believed to have been a single infection of a small boy, caused by contact with a bat. A huge international effort was mobilized to stem the spread of the disease. However, these efforts were hampered by a strong and sometimes violent resistance against the relief workers. This article focuses on the resistance in Guinea, arguing that the resistance was fueled by conspiracy theories, often originating in urban centers and communicated via social media. The conspiracy theories then merged with local sorcery beliefs, producing narratives in which Ebola relief workers and local politicians were presented as implicated in a sinister occult plot.

In September 1893, the French established the first direct contact with Appiah Akafou, then considered a very influential chief in his region and a potential ally. Less than ten years later, the chief of the Ngban found death in detention, in unclear circumstances and after his physical elimination had been repeatedly advocated by the authorities, both civil and military. During this period, numerous episodes enriched the colonial narrative about this enigmatic and unloved chief, to the point where he became an emblematic figure of the Baoulé resistance. By assembling the pieces of the file, the colonial archive allows the composition of a rich and nuanced portrait of an enemy, made without complacency by “hostile” sources, but which can be questioned in reverse in order to reconstruct the “life of paper” of Akafou Blalè, the “iron man,” whose “small life” was crushed by the same mechanism that allows us to know it today.

This article provides an overview of sources and a discussion on the reality or the assumption of a Nilo-Saharan Judaism. These considerations can clarify the historical context, and help to understand the mechanisms of adherence to a form of Jewish proselytism which differ from those inspired in the fourth century by Christianity and then, from the seventh century, by Islam. Beyond these community-building schemes, it is possible to identify a number of clear points linked to the Nubian space that allows advancing the idea of a plural and complementary Judaism.

This paper deals with the possession by tromba spirit among Tandroy people from the south of Madagascar, who have lived in mobility between their native region and other regions of the country for almost a century. It is a part of a broader discussion on the impact of the mass migrations initiated with colonization on the production of collective identity in post-colonial Madagascar. Tromba spirits are historically linked to the Sakalava monarchy of the north-west of the Island, hegemonic from the 17th to the 19th century. Their diffusion in different places of the island, as well as in the Comoros and Zanzibar, is attested since the second half of the 19th century. In Androy, their arrival in the early 1970 through migration, alters the characteristics of a possession practice structured until then by the invocation of a spirit called kokolampo. This article focuses on the contemporary coexistence of these two categories of spirits, by relying on an ethnography of rituals as well as narratives involving their historicization. What is here at stake is to understand how the latter allows the possessed to actualize their collective identity, summoning a Malagasy national identity while reorganizing locally the ritual expression of their ancestral lignageous identity.

This article deals with the religious imaginaries that are developing around the practices of ancestor and spirit cults in the Central Highlands of Madagascar. The comparison made from two ethnographies shows similarities and the anchoring of spirits in a historical depth. The migratory, commercial and political history of the Big Island, both regionally and internationally, have forged the cults. On the one hand, believers migrate with their practices and the spirits they summon; on the other hand, rituals incorporate spirits with foreign characteristics (vazaha). This leads us to discuss the processes of adapting practices but also of hierarchisation between spirits belonging to the same network.

Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork on a rural region in southwestern Benin, I explore the trajectories of Pentecostals who plant a church in their home village. I detail how church planters combine a rural life project with the conversion and transformation of their families and communities. The experience of church planters and Pentecostal local authorities allows for broader definition of mobility that goes beyond geographical movement. Through religious anchoring, they contribute to producing different forms of mobility: social—creating a new space in which to acquire spiritual and social power—and moral, embodying models of “good” mobility. I argue that these multiple mobilities reveal an active relationship with the place: by planting a church, people are rooting themselves in their village.

In Morocco, recent African migrations have transformed the religious landscape. We will see how mobility reveals new affiliations for some migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, upsets or confirms old ones within their religious movement while fostering encounter with other religions present in the host country. Focusing on the journey of some migrants, « aventuriers, » students at the Al Mowafaqa Theological Institute, we will see how some will gradually integrate other theological visions, built in connection with their investment in Moroccan society and the migratory context, but also discover new vocations.