Aside from giving shape to

Zinderois’ emergent fears

of moral disorder, the
controversy surrounding
the Veiled She-Devil
reveals a fragmented
Muslim community torn
by disagreements about
the parameters of Islamic
“tradition.”
When Spirits Start Veiling:
The Case of the Veiled She-Devil
in a Muslim Town of Niger
Adeline Masquelier

In Niger, women have long been seen as embodiments of

virtue (or wickedness). Of late, with the rise of reformist
Islam, their role as upholders of purity has become key to
the definition of moral community. Debates over the control
of female sexuality and the ordering of social spaces have
intensified. While such debates are characteristically framed
in Islamic terms, one should not assume that pre-Islamic
cosmologies—often denigrated by Islam—have become irrel-
evant to local moral concerns. In August 2003, rumors of a
veiled she-devil haunting the streets of Zinder in search of
seductive encounters provoked a moral panic, which eventu-
ally received a full account in a Nigérien newspaper. Muslim
reformists argued the apparition was meant to discourage
women from veiling, but others countered that it served as a
warning to philandering husbands. It demonstrated that far
from waning under the impact of Islamic revivals, figures of
the pre-Islamic past are well entrenched in Islamic towns.
Besides suggesting that non-Muslim others cannot be con-
signed to history, the rumors of spiritual intrusion discussed
in this article highlight the centrality of the non-Muslim other
in popular constructions of Muslimhood. In an age of renewed
Muslim anxiety about forms of femininity perceived to con-
flict with the image of virtuous womanhood, the she-devil
offered Nigérien Muslims a means of pondering the dangers
of women’s sexuality. At another level, her tale is about spir-
its parodying Islam so as to reveal the limits of morality. By
subversively playing with notions of modesty and morality,
the spirit presented a sobering critique of the hypocrisy of the
veil in contemporary Niger.
 Introduction

In Niger, women symbolized virtue (or its absence) long before Islam came to
function as the privileged vehicle for the sustenance of a moral order. In the
aftermath of the Islamic reforms that followed the Nigérien government’s
liberalization of markets and media in the early 1990s, women’s role as
upholders of purity has nonetheless become even more central to the defini-
africa today 54(3)

tion of familial, communal, and national moral boundaries. With the rapid
spread of Izala, an anti-Sufi reformist organization,1 women, their mobility,
and their visibility have been increasingly scrutinized. Their bodies have
become the object of meticulous attention, and as is the case elsewhere in
the Islamic diaspora (Ask and Tjomsland 1998; Bauer 1985, 2005; Brenner
1996; Gaspard and Khosrokhavar 1995; Göle 2002; Ong 1987, 1995; Sand-
ikci and Güliz 2005; White 1999), much of the debate over what constitutes
40

respectability, piety, and modesty has centered on women’s dress and deport-
ment. By advocating veiling, seclusion, and other practices aimed at limiting
When Spirits Start Veiling

women’s mobility and autonomy, Izala members have repeatedly clashed

with advocates of the more “traditionalist” form of Islam, who resent Izala’s
contestations of a previously unquestioned orthodoxy.
Disagreements over the sartorial parameters of piety and the ordering
of social spaces that have ostensibly divided Nigériens into opposed camps2
underscore wider concerns about changing perceptions of gendered reali-
ties. At a time when the West is routinely blamed for producing decadent
lifestyles, conspicuous consumption, and a loss of spiritual values, women
have become the key elements of a new “sacred architecture” of sexuality
(Mernissi [1957] 1987:xvi), designed as a bulwark against Westernization and
its accompanying evils. The management of women’s bodies and the control
of their agency tackle the larger forces at work in the construction of the
body politic. As Ong notes for Malaysia, current contestations over the place
of women in Muslim societies are not about gender politics so much as about
“nationwide struggles over a crisis of cultural identity, development, class
formation, and the changing kinds of imagined community that are envi-
sioned” (1995:187). In such contexts, women’s bodies often end up signifying
order and purity when they are displayed according to morally appropriate
norms of containment and control—though they can just as well become
seen as deviant, “dirty,” or wicked (Douglas 1966; Hodgson and McCurdy
2001; Ong and Peletz 1995; Rosaldo 1974).
Current Nigérien debates on how to produce modest bodies and moral
selves are characteristically framed in Islamic terms and inspired by notions
of a “universalistic” tradition rather than rooted in local understandings
of morality, but it would be a mistake to assume that the local pre-Islamic
cosmologies that are routinely denigrated by Muslims have become entirely
irrelevant to the moral imagination. Notwithstanding Izala’s aggressive
efforts to purify Islam from “animist” elements—perceived as accretions
that have contaminated the faith while ensnaring the minds of Muslims in
bonds of obscurantism—some of these occasionally resurface to problematize
in a dramatic fashion the very issues which local reformists claim to have
identified and provided solutions for. It is precisely what happens when
the boundaries of Islam become (despite constant policing) tainted by non-
Muslim intrusive elements that I wish to explore by focusing on a case of
residual “animism” emerging in the public sphere. Besides pointing to the
impossibility of securely relegating non-Muslim others to a past from which
Islam tries to dissociate itself,3 the case I discuss highlights the centrality of

africa today 54(3)

the non-Muslim other in popular constructions of Muslimhood.
In August 2003, rumors of a veiled female spirit haunting the streets of
Zinder in search of seductive encounters provoked a widespread moral panic
among local residents. Zinder is a city of some 140,000 Hausa-speakers and
the historical capital of the once powerful sultanate of Damagaram. Formerly
a major stopping point on the trans-Saharan trade routes, it is a characteris-
tically Muslim town, so much so that it is often called “the heart of Islam

41
in Niger” (Glew 1999:100). There, spirits do not usually serve as the visual
currency of morality and modesty: quite the contrary. Against all odds, the

Adeline Masquelier
apparition that was thereafter known as Aljana Mai Hijab (the Veiled She-
Devil) became the talk of the town as reports of her frequent encounters with
local residents started circulating widely. Her story received a full account
in the 11 September 2003 edition of Haske, a Niamey weekly that enjoys a
wide circulation, thanks to its regular postings on the Internet4:

The Veiled She-Devil

This past August, there was big scare throughout Zinder when
the city became haunted by a veiled spirit. This apparition,
seemingly on a quest for romantic adventures, provoked such
a panic that local religious leaders were forced to intervene
and provide clarifications [regarding the nature of the appari-
tion] on the airwaves. [The following] is an account of this
very bizarre story.
During the entire month of August, a rumor was circulat-
ing: on the outskirts of Zinder, a spirit had appeared. A grow-
ing number of testimonies started tallying. The districts of
Garin-Liman, Karkada, Hippodrome and Aéroport were her
favorite hangouts; especially at night between midnight and
three o’clock in the morning. Fairly complexioned, slender,
and adorned with shining eyes, she was beautiful and veiled.
Except for her face, her entire body was covered to hide her
hoofed feet, according to those who had met her. Hence the
name given to her by the residents of Zinder: “the Veiled
She-Devil.” She shifts shapes and disappears under the light.
At first, she pretended to request rides from moped-taxis
and would be transported to dark places to then instantly
disappear.
Tailors, mechanics, and numerous late-nighters claim to
have met her at specific times during the night. [During these
 encounters,] she was visibly peaceful and loving. All the men
whom she approached said that she invited them to follow
her. But they were overwhelmed by fear and refused her offer,
seeking only to save their skin. Between the 16th and the 24th
of August, the frequency of her appearances provoked wide-
spread panic among the local population. By ten in the eve-
ning, people would hide in their homes and if they had to be
africa today 54(3)

out, they avoided paths without light. But the intervention of

marabouts on the radio reassured them. [One of them,] Malam
Manirou confirmed the existence of evil spirits in this part of
Zinder. When his students recounted to him their encounters
with the “veiled One,” he advised them to recite the sura
[ayat al-Kursi] “koursyou.” His recommendations [on how
to protect oneself against the spirit] were aired several times
42

on Radio Anfani of Zinder. The theologian Oustaze Bachir

and the priest in charge of the Catholic mission in Zinder,
When Spirits Start Veiling

father Emmanuel N’Gona, provided the [respective] Islamic

and Christian interpretations of what a spirit was. According
to them, within the realm of the spirits, there are good and bad
diables [spirits, devils]. However, following increased urban-
ization and the electrification of cities, these spirits have been
forced to abandon their shelters or their traditional homes.
After that, subsequent sightings of the spirit in Zinder gave
rise to diverging interpretations. The most fundamentalist
[of Muslims] claimed that the spirit acted to prevent women
from wearing the veil. This, in their eyes, is contrary to the
teachings of Islam. Others (especially women), in contrast,
were happy. They hoped that men would be distrustful of [the
spirit] and that they would be forced to remain faithful to their
wives.
Yet others have decided to exploit people’s fears of the
spirit and deceive men in order to rob them. They disguise
themselves as girls [sic] wearing white veils to terrorize their
neighbors. In the face of it all, regional and local authorities
have remained silent. Nothing has officially been done to
reassure the [local] population.
 Amadou Mahamadou

In this essay, I address the relevance of spirits in the Muslim imagination

in an era of Islamic renewal in which what was a once self-evident Muslim
identity must now be continually redefined in terms of “correct” practices
set in opposition to “improper” ones (Masquelier 1996). As nonhuman
and (mostly) non-Muslim, spirits are the ultimate other—the expression
of a wild, yet powerful alterity, which can seldom be contained within the
ordered parameters of social life. If spirit devotees claim that one can com-
municate with spirits to channel their powers productively and reassert
the malleable boundaries between spirit and human worlds, Muslims, in
contrast, must abstain from any contact with these ethereal creatures—even
when it is the latter who initiate contact (Masquelier 2001). Over the past
century, Islam has gained ground over spirit worship on the visible terrain of
religious practices. Today, more than 95 percent of Nigériens consider them-
selves Muslim.5 Now that Islam has become the “taken-for-granted context
in which life is lived” (Delaney 1990:514), spirit devotees are increasingly

africa today 54(3)

perceived as crude and unprogressive by their Muslim fellow citizens—even
if paradoxically, their services are requested in times of “crisis” (Masquelier
2001). Muslims, in their eagerness to construct themselves as sophisticated
urbanites, increasingly avoid associations with spirit devotees, and insist
that they want nothing to do with bloodthirsty spirits (aljanu, plural form
of aljani, a male spirit, and aljana, a female spirit).
“Animism” (as French-educated Nigériens call the practice of worship-

43
ing spirits), is not about believing in spirits so much as it is about communi-
cating with them. The existence of spirits is not questioned by local Muslims

Adeline Masquelier
(many of whom routinely purchase amulets and other Qur’anic medicines
from Muslim religious specialists to ward off any harmful spiritual influ-
ences), but direct dealings with spirits are, publicly at least, denounced as
sinful by the great majority of the faithful. It is precisely because everyone
recognizes the existence—and by implication, the power—of spirits that the
rumors surrounding the Veiled She-Devil affected the Zinderois community
so dramatically. At a time when much scholarly attention is focused on the
globalized and globalizing dimensions of Islam, the panic surrounding the
sighting of the Veiled She-Devil is a reminder that the “local” too can be
fruitfully harnessed in the service of a moralizing ideology predicated on a
notion of a universal, unchanging Islam. It further suggests that despite its
denunciation of spirit related practices, Islam in Niger remains dependent on
its religious “alter ego” for legitimizing its own superiority. In what follows,
I focus on the space of questioning formalized by the proliferation of media
in Nigérien society to examine how the current legitimization of Islamic
practices entails the deployment of images of non-Muslim, marginal, mostly
female others that remain vital to emerging definitions of Islamic identity
and authority. At another level, the tale of the Veiled She-Devil is about spir-
its parodying Islam in a performance that is all the more unsettling in that it
reveals the limits of morality and the porousness of categorical boundaries.
By subversively playing with notions of modesty and morality, the spirit
provided a sobering critique on the hypocrisy of the veil while giving shape to
the anxieties surrounding women’s sexuality in contexts of growing unease
with existing forms of femininity, perceived to be at odds with the image of
proper womanhood championed by reformist Muslims.
The subject of gossip and rumor has traditionally been the province of
folklorists, not anthropologists—whether the stories under scholarly scru-
tiny are about the “real” or the “fantastic.” Stories that cannot be “proved”
present a methodological problem to social scientists. Not only are they
difficult to trace, but they are even more difficult to pin down as evidence.
 Several versions of the same story may coexist at the same moment and spin
off each other, like many-headed hydras, to become more entangled as they
spread and multiply. Rumors are by nature slippery, ephemeral, and unpre-
dictable—in a word: insaisissable. In a fine historical analysis of vampire
rumors in colonial Africa, White (2000) nevertheless urges scholars to take
rumors seriously and treat them as a meaningful economy of information.
Interpreting rumors as regional products, she suggests, “reveals them to be
africa today 54(3)

both socially constructed and socially situated” (White 2000:16). Heeding

White’s advice, I make no attempt to gauge the veracity of the rumors about
the Veiled She-Devil, but focus instead on the “deeper, unspoken truth”
(Farge and Revel [1988] 1991:107), seeking to emerge from the snatches of
knowledge, manufactured memories, half-truths, and make-believe that
form the rumor. This essay is therefore not solely about rumor and gossip,
but “about the world rumor and gossip reveals” (White 2000:5; see also
44

Soares 2003).
When Spirits Start Veiling

The Stubborn Relevance of “Animism”

in the Nigérien Islamic Sphere

Niger has its quotients of stories that feature a person’s encounter with a
perfect stranger who turns out to be very strange indeed. In this stock of
narratives, the so-called strangers are nothing but spirits, who often take the
appearance of eerily beautiful women or innocent-looking, young girls, to
entrap desirous men into their destructive schemes. When the men eventu-
ally discover the real identities of their seductresses, it is usually too late for
them to escape from the malevolent spirits’ clutches. Of significance in these
narratives is the implicit recognition that men’s (and more rarely, women’s)
incapacity to see through the spirits’ treacherous deceits is what inevitably
seals their fate. In this regard, the story of the Veiled She-Devil haunting the
streets of Zinder is hardly exceptional, except for the fact that none of the
victims of her stalking appear to have died. Like other stories of seductive
encounters that I have come across over the years (Masquelier 1992, 1995,
1997, 2002c, 2005, 2008), this one provides an edifying commentary on
the dangers faced by those who blindly follow their sexual impulses—and
thereby fail to notice the hoofed extremities of the lovely “women” whose
company they are enjoying. Hoofed feet, any Nigérien will tell you, provide
an obvious clue that one is dealing with a nonhuman entity that is only
pretending to be human.
Reported accounts of the veiled spirit’s modus operandi conform to
a narrative genre that clearly existed before Islam became identified with
the status quo, but the moral import of these narratives is complicated
extraordinarily by certain elements, most notably the spirit’s apparent
Muslim identity and the sartorial expression of pious womanhood that she
promotes by haunting the streets of Zinder while “hiding” in a veil. For one
thing, there is something of a contradiction in the idea of a spirit wearing a
hijabi, the veil that has since the early 1990s become the sartorial sign of
Izala identity for Nigérien women.6 Female spirits may dress in local garb
(and that may include a head covering), but they do not veil in a recogniz-
ably Muslim manner. Though the repertoire of spirit possession practices
known as bori has been thoroughly influenced by the style and politics of
Muslim worship (Masquelier 2001), there are spirits whose identities have
not been encompassed by the theatrics of bori ceremonies and who are

africa today 54(3)

therefore not domesticated through sacrificial offerings and possession.7 It
is instead when their shrines are destroyed to make space for a road or to
establish a mosque that they resurface to terrify or punish the trespassers.
As we shall see, the Veiled She-Devil is such a spirit—wild, unpredictable,
and often frightening.
Before their uprooting by the twin forces of modernization and religion,
these spirits were regularly propitiated on behalf of lineages and communi-

45
ties through sacrificial offerings. Many of them have been forgotten, but all
remain inescapably rooted in a pre-Islamic, indigenous imagination. There

Adeline Masquelier
is, of course, a whole contingent of male Muslim spirits in the constantly
evolving bori pantheon, but the shape-shifting creatures one occasionally
comes across in the market, in the bush, or even near one’s home on a late
night and who are called mutanen daji ‘people of the bush’ are neither part
of the bori cast of spiritual characters, nor Muslim. They cannot be domes-
ticated through the practices of bori, and are best avoided by bori devotees
and Muslims alike—unless they are identified as the tutelary spirits of a
particular place and venerated by local priests (Masquelier 2001). As the first
occupants of the land, many of these spirits were there long before the advent
of Islam, but most have been displaced by the encroachment of roads and
human communities on the bush (Masquelier 2002c). It is precisely because
they are inextricably defined by their “earthly” attachments that their pres-
ent dispositions and interventions in human lives can rarely be understood
outside of the context of how they came to be there in the first place. Spirits
who haunt stretches of roads or terrorize whole neighborhoods are noth-
ing but displaced creatures, compelled by circumstances to expose their
transience to the people responsible for their displacement.
One of the ways in which those who participate in bori spirit posses-
sion demonstrate the legitimacy of their practices is by claiming to be able
to protect both people and communities from potentially vengeful spirits
looking for prey. From Oustaze Bachir’s and father Emmanual N’Gona’s
explanatory accounts of the spirit’s presence in Zinder, we gather that the
Veiled She-Devil is one of the displaced spirits who seek revenge for the
indignities they have experienced since losing their homes to sprawling
human settlements or electrification. To accommodate the housing needs
of its growing population, Zinder has progressively expanded to incorporate
rural lands into its urban fold—by cutting trees and leveling mounds where
spirits like the Veiled She-Devil probably once resided. Evicted from her
abode by the lights that are now cutting through the darkness of many Zinder
neighborhoods, she wanders at night, searching for some safely obscure
 place. In all probability, her alleged requests to be transported to “dark
places” are nothing but attempts to escape the brightness of urban nights.
When she hits a bright spot, she instantly disappears, we are told. One can
speculate that many of the places that she haunts are in the district that she
once called home.
What makes the Veiled She-Devil’s spectral presence in the dimly lit
streets of Zinder significant is neither her homelessness, nor her avoidance
africa today 54(3)

of bright lights, so much as her style of dress. As noted above, mutanen daji
are not Muslim, nor do they generally hide behind recognizably Muslim
attire. They may disguise themselves as fair-complexioned Fulani women
wearing black clothing and large earrings, but they do not attempt to pass for
Muslims, least of all reformist Muslims. Not only do they stand for all that
most Muslims claim to despise and reject, but they owe their very rootless-
ness in part to the spread of Islam and the concurrent erasure of a complex
46

mythical topography that previously documented and concretized human

communities’ relations of mutual dependency with the “people of the bush.”
When Spirits Start Veiling

As a spirit epitomizing simultaneously a vanishing, local pre-Islamic past

and a newly emerging tradition of Islamic piety rooted in universalistic
values, the Veiled She-Devil is an oxymoron, an uncanny combination of
residual animism and of the strict Islamic reformism that has recently
emerged in Niger.
The professed intent of the hijabi is to hide women from the public eye
and protect their virtue. In Izala households, women and girls as young as
three may don veils. In the 1990s, when these vestiments first appeared on
female bodies, they fell to the knee or the ankle, and generally matched the
rest of their brightly colored outfits—marking their wearers as pious, enlight-
ened Muslims. Ironically, far from ensuring their inconspicuousness, these
vivid expressions of piety would enhance the wearers’ visibility: the deep
yellow, green, purple, or turquoise shades of their attires contrasted strik-
ingly with the polychromatic garb of other women. Today, veils are often
shorter and duller in color, but they can be adorned with lace and imported
from Nigeria. What they have lost in conspicuousness, they have gained in
stylishness—so much so that even non-Izala girls have taken to wearing
them, as they aim to fashion themselves publicly as pious Muslims. Indeed,
because the hijabi is now considered “fashionable,” such veils have become
standard gifts which suitors bring to the women they court—together with
jewelry, hair extensions, and perfume. Though we do not know what color
the spirit’s veil was, mention of her hijabi is enough to imply a reformist
status and membership in Izala, by far the largest and most visible reform-
ist Muslim organization in Niger. We are told that those who capitalized on
residents’ fears of the veiled spirit to rob them adopted a white veil to pass
as the Veiled She-Devil. Whether or not this could be taken as a clue that
the “real” spirit dons a white veil—significantly, white is (with black and
red) a color recognizably associated with spirits—I want to underscore what
the presence of the veil implies for the relevance of stubbornly resistant
and definitionally marginal “animist” forms amid the secularization of
Nigérien society by Muslim reformists intent upon eradicating syncretic and
“magical” practices from daily life.8
Aside from reminding us that spirits are by definition translators well
versed in the art of adaptation and the stylistics of adoption, the diablesse
exemplifies a new form of spirit-centered discourse that is emerging at the
site of its alienation to allow for the fluid dissemination of representations
that Muslims, in their attempts to redefine, authenticate, and universalize

africa today 54(3)

Islam, have been trying to suppress. Rather than opposing Islam to “ani-
mism,” she resignifies “animism” with the authority of Islam at the same
time that she insists on Islam’s dependency on the language of “animism.”
As an uncanny mixture of non-Muslim and Muslim elements, of comfort-
ing familiarity and dangerous otherness, she provides the material basis
for articulating distinctly Muslim issues in “animist” terms. Spirits are of
course part of Islam’s cohort of cosmological others; as such, they figure

47
prominently in the Islamic imagination. What is significant here is that
it is precisely local Muslims’ success in marginalizing spirit possession as

Adeline Masquelier
a forum for resisting Islamic hegemony that has opened up a space for the
emergence of hybrid spirits—recognizably Muslim, yet emblematic of the
“superstition” that reformist Islam disown.
To note here that there is something uncanny about the Veiled She-
Devil is to recognize that she is part of that which Freud characterized as the
unheimliche, namely that category of experiences, feelings, and situations
that seem strange at first but turn out to be recognizable, familiar, and part of
one’s past ([1919] 1962). For Freud, the uncanny was essentially connected to
the reappearance of something familiar from the childhood of an individual
or of humankind, but it also characterized the fear that arose in “primitive
cultures” when beliefs that had been extirpated from local repertoires of
knowledge resurfaced through people’s attempts to face a frightful situation.
Encounters with the Veiled She-Devil aroused dread and horror, but they
also provoked a fleeting sense of recognition: for many, there was something
terrifyingly familiar about the spirit, once one caught sight of the hoofed
extremities hidden under her cloak. In her persona, the past, long forgot-
ten, was resurfacing—and seeping into the present. Later, the veil worn by
the spectral apparition functioned as part of the haunting apparatus, of that
which evoked a feeling of terror, because instead of figuring as an emblem
of piety, it had become the recognizable sign of dreadful alterity, making the
She-Devil a concrete objectification of the “return of the repressed.”
In an account of the “scientization” of the Vedas in colonial and post-
colonial India, Gyan Prakash (2003) demonstrates that trying to disentangle
modernity from magic rarely works—and even when it does, magic and
modernity both end up recast in the image of the other. There, a reform
movement’s efforts to redefine the Hindu nation through the lens of sci-
ence failed, Prakash points out, because it could neither appropriate the
“superstitions” (which had become incommensurable with an emergent
Indian modernity), nor purify science from its inherent magicalities. In the
Nigérien case, one could say—paraphrasing Prakash’s description of science’s
 dependency on Hinduism in colonial India—that in condemning pre-Islamic
practices, reformist Islam has positioned spirits as “demons internal to its
life at the same time as that which remains outside its grasp, and haunts
its dominance” (2003:40). Despite Muslims’—especially Izala members‘—
efforts to purify Islam of its “backward” elements, Islam remains haunted
by myth and superstition.
africa today 54(3)

Spirits in the Islamic Sphere

Throughout Niger, the pluralization of the religious landscape and the spread
of Izala in the 1990s were encouraged by the progressive retreat of the state
from civic life, following the decline of the economy and the implementation
of structural adjustment programs. After the collapse of the military regime
48

and the establishment of the first democratically elected president, in 1993,

the liberalization of politics ushered in an era of public debate through the
When Spirits Start Veiling

creation of new, independent newspapers (such as Haske), the emergence

of private radios, and the foundation of civic organizations and political
parties (Masquelier 1999). Nigériens who had long suffered an austere,
authoritarian regime began to exercise their rights to full participation in the
civil and political life of their country. In the process, Islam became a privi-
leged medium for expressing ideological, political, and even socioeconomic
cleavages (Al-Karsani 1993).
The decade that followed the introduction of civil liberties was none-
theless turbulent and filled with disappointments. After a military coup,
fraudulent elections, and the assassination of one military leader by another,
the civilian government put in place in late 1999 inherited a series of
unsolved political, social, and fiscal crises. Faced with a growing debt and
pressured to implement austerity measures by international lenders help-
ing Niger meet its debt-service obligations, preceding governments had
shrunk their pool of civil servants and trimmed social services, to citizens’
considerable dismay. Recent graduates were no longer offered the bureau-
cratic positions they felt entitled to, farmers could not longer count on state
investments in the rural sector, the educational system was in danger of col-
lapsing, and overtaxed hospitals provided only limited services to the sick
and the needy. The progressive withdrawal of the state from “the realm of
welfare and social entitlements” (Ahmad 1995) left a vacuum that was soon
filled by Islamic associations that provided social and educational services
(sermons, Qur’anic schools, etc.). In 1994, five officially recognized Islamic
associations (one of which was Izala) had emerged next to the Association
Islamique du Niger, a single corporatist association. By the year 2000, this
number had jumped to more than forty (Charlick 2004; Glew 1996). In
the space of a few years, organized Islam had emerged as “a major force in
Nigérien civil society” (Charlick 2004:101).
The spread of new media and the emergence of an Islamic public
sphere enabling discussions about what it means to be Muslim in Niger has
complicated—yet also broadened the terms of—religious debates at the same
time that it has made ideas and information about Islam more readily avail-
able to the public (see Soares 2004 for the case of Mali). Engaging—privately
or publicly—in these debates about the nature of Islamic knowledge and
the correctness of Islamic practices has occasionally forced Muslims to
question previously axiomatic truths and to justify their adoption of par-
ticular “traditions” through an appeal to Qur’anic sources. Distinctions or

africa today 54(3)

deviations in styles of worship, for instance, have been important criteria
for identifying “proper” versus “improper” versions of Islam—each side
confidently claiming to practice the “correct” version. For members of Izala,
ostentatiously wearing prayer beads, practicing zikiri (recitation of one of
the Names of God), and parading to Friday prayer dressed in a richly embroi-
dered babban riga (a voluminous robe worn over matching shirt and pants)
signal that one is not a “good” Muslim: one only pretends to be Muslim

49
through the adoption of showy, superficial attributes—quite the opposite of
what God requires of those who submit to his will. As a “reformist” friend

Adeline Masquelier
once put it, “these [practices] are not part of Islam, they are just what the
hypocrites do.”
For the so-called defenders of “traditionalist” Islam, however, it is
the reforms introduced by Izala in the context of worship, medicine, lei-
sure, commensality, and domesticity that are un-Islamic and therefore
unacceptable—though many nevertheless agree with their reformist foes
about the importance of Qur’anic education and the need to regulate wom-
en’s mobility. Members of Izala thus argue that Qur’anic-based medicines
(such as amulets or washed-out ink used to write a Qur’anic verse) must be
abandoned because they are not mentioned in the Qur’an. Engaging in such
practices, an Izala adherent explained, “is like putting another god between
you and God. It is a sin.” It is also a sin, Izala preachers have pointed out,
to seek “magical” protection against spirits—ironically, something many
Zinderois felt compelled to do when rumors of a spirit haunting the streets of
town surfaced. “Traditionalists,” in contrast, see nothing wrong with manu-
facturing or purchasing protective medicines—as long as these are based on
Qur’anic words. There is, in short, considerable debate as to what constitutes
“Islamic” practice—and what does not. From prayer to bridewealth transac-
tions to how to celebrate the birth of a child, all that traditionally defined
virtuous Muslimhood has become a bone of contention, pitting “reformists”
against “traditionalists” in public arenas.
The question of how, when, and where to pray has been vigorously
debated (Masquelier 1999, in press), but no other issue has aroused more
passion than that of the role, rights, and the visibility of women in Nigérien
society. For one thing, much of the content of Muslim sermons broadcast on
Nigérien airwaves focuses on the management of women’s dress and deport-
ment (Cooper 2006). Over the past twenty years, young women wearing
Western dress or knee-length skirts have been verbally harassed, stripped,
and occasionally beaten by reformists, for whom such “skimpy” attire is
synonymous with impiety and decadence. Tellingly, most of those incidents
 have occurred in Zinder and the neighboring city of Maradi—the latter being
known throughout the country as a hotbed of reformist activism. In Zinder,
in the early 1990s, the newly built women’s cooperative was destroyed by
reformists, who claimed that the members of the cooperative did not follow
properly the principles of the Qur’an (Glew 1999).
In the rest of country too, women have been targeted by conservative
groups claiming to protect society from those who do not adhere to the tenets
africa today 54(3)

of Islam. In 1991, when the Rassemblement Démocratique des Femmes du

Niger (RDFN), a new women’s association, asked to participate in the Sover-
eign National Conference held to reform the Nigérien state, some leaders of
the association were assaulted by reformist Muslims in Maradi and Zinder;
two years later in the capital, those associated with a family-planning cam-
paign were threatened by members of Islamic associations (Charlick 2004).
At that time, the family-code project, which would have provided legal
50

protection for women and children, was similarly opposed by reformists, on

the ground that it was based on secular principles and therefore anti-Islamic.
When Spirits Start Veiling

By mobilizing those who wanted Islam to play a larger role in the politi-
cal life of the country and leading to the creation of two female reformist
associations, the controversy surrounding the project greatly contributed
to the forging of an Islamist consciousness in Niger (Niandou-Souley and
Alzouma 1996). In 1999, protests led by Islamic groups became so intense
that the government, intending to ratify the U.N. Convention on Ending All
Forms of Discrimination against Women, felt obliged to add reservations to
its ratification, thereby, in the eyes of some, effectively nullifying it (Char-
lick 2004). A year later, it was the second edition of the heavily publicized
Festival International de Mode Africaine (FIMA) that became the target of
Muslim anger: in the eyes of “reformists,” scantily clad models parading in
front of a vast audience were an incitement to debauchery. In Niamey, busi-
nesses were vandalized, and inappropriately dressed women were harassed.
In Maradi, protests turned violent, and businesses and compounds were
destroyed (Cooper 2006; Masquelier 2002b). These incidents illustrate how
local efforts to carve out a moral order routinely focus on the creation of the
virtuous woman in contradistinction to Western models of womanhood,
perceived as sources of moral degeneracy. The targeting of women who are
identified as the source of moral contagion is nothing new in Niger. In times
of drought, throughout the Hausa-speaking region, single women and so-
called prostitutes were—and still are—traditionally identified as “culprits,”
and chased out of their communities to permit the rains to come. Concerns
about female visibility and sexuality have nonetheless intensified with the
growth of Islamic reformism—and the rising frustration of young men who,
in their obstructed search for marriage and economic stability, must blame
someone for their economic impotence and dashed hopes. Because, immoral-
ity—or at least, the perception of it—has become the source of all social ills,
it must be aggressively fought if society is to be saved from further decline.
In this regard, the appearance of a mysterious female figure—at once
modest and beguiling—in the streets of Zinder is hardly coincidental.
Emerging as she did in the midst of protracted debates about the place of
Islam in the affairs of the state and the role of women in Nigérien family
and society, the Veiled She-Devil spoke to Nigérien society’s concerns
about female sexuality, space, and status.9 As the personification of female
sexual power in its most dangerous, because unrestrained form, she symbol-
ized for many what happens when people are led astray by a secular state,
which operates with little concern for Islam and for the role that women

africa today 54(3)

should ideally play as upholders of purity. For Muslim reformers who have
denounced French imperialism for having defiled Nigérien society and led to
its ruin, control of women’s sexuality and mobility is key to the envisioned
order that will control the social forces unleashed by Westernization and a
morally corrupt government (see Ong 1995 for a comparable situation in
Malaysia). That so many girls become “spoiled” (that is, pregnant) before
marriage is, these zealots often insist, a sign of society’s moral decadence, a

51
situation that can be remedied only through the imposition of Islam as the
state religion, the implementation of religious education in all schools, and

Adeline Masquelier
the tight regulation of female sexuality. Even when parents do not espouse
the reformist agenda, they worry about the alleged promiscuity of unwed
girls, many of whom engage in premarital sex and ostensibly carry out
affairs with wealthy, married men they do not intend to marry. In the past
decade, I have heard Nigérien mothers complain about the soaring rates of
pregnancies among unwed girls and express frustration at their inability to
control their daughters’ comings and goings—a measure of the increasing
concerns that are given expression through and generated by Izala’s moral-
izing discourses. In 2003, Zinderois preoccupations with the “loose” moral
standards so virulently criticized by reformist leaders throughout the coun-
try found their most concrete expression in the ambiguous persona of the
Veiled She-Devil.
Aside from giving shape to Zinderois’ emergent fears of moral disor-
der, the controversy surrounding the Veiled She-Devil reveals a fragmented
Muslim community, torn by disagreements about the parameters of Islamic
“tradition.” According to the Haske article, while “traditionalist” Muslim
preachers invoked the region’s rich “animist” past to provide a largely bewil-
dered population with a rational explanation for the presence of the fearful
spirit (and by the same token, legitimize their livelihoods as procurers of
Qur’anic protective medicines), Muslim “reformists” argued that the spec-
tral apparition was meant only to discourage women from wearing the veil.
Put differently, if malamai (Muslim religious specialists) long used to devis-
ing practical—as well as remunerative—ways of dealing with the threats
posed by lustful or vengeful spirits, felt no compunctions about recognizing
an “animist” heritage that many would rather bury away, their Muslim foes
appeared more concerned with defending the moral boundaries of “true”
Islam from “animist” contagion. For the latter, the veiled apparition pro-
vided yet another opportunity to disengage Islam from superstition while
reminding everyone of the temptations awaiting the true believer. Arguably,
by mentioning the spirit at all, “reformists” effectively validated the rumors
 of her existence. One could even say that by empowering her with the capac-
ity to “prevent women from wearing the veil” (or simply acknowledging
the risk of such a thing happening), they unwittingly rescued “animism”
from its invisibility to invest it as “the constitutive other [that] haunts the
self’s identity and authority” (Prakash 2003:40). By publicly implying that
she might be a threat (or at least, not denying that it could be), specialists
of all religious persuasions made it acceptable for Muslim Zinderois to seek
africa today 54(3)

protection against a possible encounter with her. Local residents could recite
Qur’anic verses as a protective measure against her without fear of being
labeled “bad” Muslims or accused of dabbling in “pagan” practices.
By appearing in a largely Muslim space, where spirits are not publicly
acknowledged,10 much less dealt with, the Veiled She-Devil forced Zin-
derois to choose sides in the debate on “pious” versus “pagan” practices,
and in so doing, to address the contradiction between their ideal of Islamic
52

unity—the umma—and their experience of Muslim disparity. Though many

Nigériens see themselves as being part of the umma, most are aware that
When Spirits Start Veiling

disagreements between Muslims are not easily reconciled with the idea of
a transnational Islamic community. In addition to promoting an Islamic
consciousness, the multiplication of Islamic associations and the emergence
of reformist currents aiming to rid society of unbelievers (kafirai) facilitated
the standardization of Muslim practices. Some twenty years after the imple-
mentation of the first Izala reforms (in worship, wealth management, dress,
and so on), the substance and expressions of “tradition” remain nonetheless
flexible and subject to reformulation. Despite people’s claims to membership
in mutually exclusive Muslim camps—a situation that, as I have noted, is
often simplified in terms of “traditionalist” versus “reformist” Islam—the
Nigérien religious landscape is more fluid and inconsistent than ever, as
so-called traditionalist and reformist Muslims negotiate their place in the
social order, through not only confrontations, but also compromises and
accommodations (Masquelier 2007). By using the spirit to position them-
selves in relation to the “reformist”/“traditionalist” divide, Zinderois men
and women redefined the borders of their cosmological universe, a universe
that included or excluded the Veiled She-Devil, depending on where they
drew these borders. In so doing, they confronted each other, questioning each
other’s motives and contesting each other’s positions at the same time that
they struggled to come up with a meaningful explanation for the appearance
of such a creature in their midst.
That yet (more skeptical) others would callously appropriate the
rumored encounters with the Veiled She-Devil to perform haunting sessions
of their own and further terrorize an already weary town probably high-
lighted the veracity of these rumors for some of Zinder’s residents—besides
also hinting that not everyone took the story seriously. In my experience,
stories of spirit attacks would occasionally elicit puzzlement, and even
skepticism, on the part of some listeners, but in many cases, only because
the latter claimed to be able to tell a real from a fake attack. From this per-
spective, a false rumor or a faked possession performance only reinforces
the validity of genuine encounters between spirits and humans, be they
beneficial or harmful: intimations of fraud necessarily imply that there is a
“real” way of being attacked or possessed by a spirit. Aside from providing
a vivid demonstration of how “fakery and authenticity require each other”
(Morris 2000:101), those who hid behind the Veiled She-Devil’s veil to
scare nocturnal passersby into submission and rob them provided a blatant
confirmation that appearances can be deceiving indeed.

africa today 54(3)

Veiling as Transgression, Veiling as Transvestism

To follow up on the theme of deception, I want to explore further how the

veil—originally meant to hide women’s charms and protect them from unwel-
come stares—here comes to signify camouflage and imply forgery in complex

53
and tangled ways. As a starting-point, let us assume that there is simply a
spirit who, for reasons that remain far from clear, decides to veil. While she

Adeline Masquelier
looks like a pious Muslim as she prowls through the streets of Zinder, she
is in fact hiding her hooves (and therefore her spirit identity) in the folds of
her hijabi to ease the entrapment of her victims. The veil functions here not
only as an instrument of deceit, but as part of the artifice through which
she seduces her prey: it adds to her mystery and enhances her desirability—
quite the opposite of its intended purpose. Men attracted by what the article
describes as her fair complexion and her brilliant eyes will presumably wish
to see the rest of her slender figure, which she cleverly hides under the fabric
of her “modest” attire. Her apparent modesty operates a double deception: it
conceals both her repulsive animality and her alluring (human) sexuality.
At another level, by hiding not just her bodily charms, but also her
harmful intentions under the cloak of Muslim respectability, the spirit makes
a mockery of Islamic expressions of piety by suggesting that not all women
who veil are pious. Recall that non-Izala young girls who wish to appear
stylish and respectable occasionally don hijabai11 that, largely because they
are imported from Nigeria, are no longer associated with antifashion, but
work instead as signs of cosmopolitanism, as well as expressions of piety. In
Izala households, wives might be using the veil as a cover—for anti-Muslim
undertakings, perhaps. Indeed, it is not unheard of for Izala women to engage
in activities no proper Muslim woman would ever consider engaging in (such
as selling food in the marketplace) simply because the hijabi they wrap them-
selves in enshrouds them in respectability. What it does not do, however, is
fully hide their identities, as some of my non-Izala friends once implied with
a chuckle when they recounted to me how one of our neighbors, a young Izala
woman living in semiseclusion, had been thoroughly beaten by her husband
after men reported seeing her (I suspect that they recognized her purple veil)
trading items at the Friday market in the town of Dogondoutchi.
Similarly, if the Veiled She-Devil could hide (at least, momentarily)
her ugly hooves thanks to her veil, it was paradoxically that very disguise
that distinguished her from other spirits and contributed to her notoriety in
 Zinder and beyond. While the hijabi provided a kind of sartorial alibi that
legitimized the spirit’s presence in public places by offering the portable
form of seclusion that many Muslim women value, it conferred on its wearer
such instant recognition—how often does one see a veiled spirit?—that indi-
viduals looking to pull tricks could now pass as the spirit just by wearing a
white veil. One could almost say that by using an element of women’s garb
that is encoded not just as female, but as Muslim, the spirit was in effect
africa today 54(3)

cross-dressing—a sartorial move that is not without consequences.

Drawing on the work of Marjorie Garber, who sees cross-dressing as a
challenge to comfortable notions of binarity, gendered and otherwise, I want
to consider briefly how the concept of the transvestite, which functions
to indicate the place of the “category crisis” (Garber 1992:28), is suitably
exemplified by the Veiled She-Devil. By adopting a veil and hiding behind
it, the spirit effected multiple vestimentary transgressions: in addition to
54

pretending to be human (something that many spirits do when they do not

alternatively penetrate a human form to momentarily become “fleshy”), she
When Spirits Start Veiling

violated normative boundaries of religious identification by claiming to be

Muslim. As the “pagan” bush spirit who dressed in the shroud of Islamic
piety and as the embodiment of “that which overflows a boundary,” she
thus became “the uncanny supplement” (Garber 1992:28) that “mark[ed] the
space of possibility structuring and confounding culture” (Garber 1992:28).
Gender, I would argue, is a crucial dimension of the kind of trans-
vestism which the spirit can be said to have engaged in. While male spirit
devotees routinely adopt the babban riga (a cumbersome and elaborately
embroidered gown), which marks one as Muslim and bestows upon its
wearer the prestige associated with Islam, women’s dress was, until the
adoption of the hijabi by Izala women, far less indicative of their religious
allegiance. Thus, while it was until recently practically impossible to tell
a female bori devotee from a Muslim woman by inspecting her attire (for
one thing, both wore headscarves), it became possible to differentiate Izala
women from other women—whether they be spirit mediums, traditionalist
Muslims, or Christians—when the former started wearing the hijabi. These
dress codes and the distinctions they articulated were abruptly disrupted
with the appearance of the Veiled She-Devil, however. Having previously
functioned as the definitional element of female Izala sartorial identity,
the veil now became the index of the destabilization wrought by the cross-
dressing spirit. Now that “pagan” figures looked like pious Muslims, the
veil could no longer remain the distinctive feature that once identified
Izala women for what they were: modest, devout, honorable followers of
the Prophet. By borrowing the most visible sign of Izala-ness and making it
her own, the Veiled She-Devil rendered female “reformists” illegible while
insuring her own distinctiveness as a spirit.
A consequence of the kind of vestimentary border crossing that the
Veiled She-Devil engaged in during the summer of 2003 is that one kind of
“crisis” category prefigures, even provokes another. To transgress against
one set of boundaries, Garber points out in a discussion of class and gender,
is to “call into question the inviolability of both, and of the set of social
codes . . . by which such categories [are] policed and maintained” (1992:32).
The veiled spirit’s crossing of the “animist”-Muslim boundary “inevitably
crosse[d] into another” (Garber 1992:28), as the categories of gender and
ontology which appeared to contain and to regulate religious identity were,
in turn, interrogated by it. As she transgressed the sartorial boundaries that
distinguished “animists” from Muslims, she undermined other previously

africa today 54(3)

secure gendered and ontological distinctions: men, eager to take advantage
of a credulous population, thus appeared in the streets of Zinder dressed
“as girls” while pretending to be the Veiled She-Devil. Using the space of
possibility opened up by the tranvestite spirit, these pranksters were fur-
ther destabilizing binarisms (male/female, human/spirit) that functioned
as central axes of the local socio-moral order. As transvestite themselves,
they signaled, through their transgression, not simply the blurring of certain

55
categorical boundaries, but the blurred boundary of category itself (Garber
1992). That categories were in crisis became more palpably apparent with the

Adeline Masquelier
emergence of various, often contradictory, discourses, on the radio and else-
where, following the nocturnal sightings of the spirit. Aside from violating
human space and prompting commentaries about where spirits came from,
the Veiled She-Devil incited furious speculations about the slipperiness of
religious (some veil to demonstrate piety while others veil to prevent yet
others from being pious) as well as gendered (not only women but men as
well dress as women) categories.

Testing the Limits of Piety and Morality

In the context of these slippages and of the anxieties they generated, there
remained one element of constancy: men’s alleged unfaithfulness. At a time
when the distinctions between spirits and people, Muslims and “animists,”
women and men threatened to fade, male infidelities provided the familiar,
steady, and gender-specific ingredient of genuine manhood. Men, it is widely
acknowledged, cheat on their wives—a situation that elicits routine condem-
nation from Muslim preachers during sermons. Significantly, if some men
were momentarily tempted to engage in the illicit pleasures offered by the
seductive aljana, none was known to have taken the bait—and this is why
they had managed to escape alive. As I already noted, spiritual seductresses
who satisfy their carnal appetite by having sex with men are legion in the
local imaginary. At once beautiful and dreadful, they are said to drain their
victims of their strength and life after their sexual encounters. Though they
look harmless, they are nevertheless ruthless: once they have “hooked” a
man, it is generally impossible for the victim to extricate himself from his
enchantress’s clutches.12
The Veiled She-Devil, however, did not look harmless. There was
apparently something ominous (or uncanny) about her making herself sexu-
ally available to total strangers, and as a result, she became immediately
 suspect to the men she propositioned. By almost instantly frightening
potentially adulterous husbands into discontinuing their philandering (and
encouraging even those she did not meet to do the same), she kept men at
home, under their wives’ surveillance. That numerous Zinderoises sup-
ported her tactics is therefore hardly surprising. As wives forced perhaps to
endure the promiscuity of disloyal husbands, they saw her as a potential ally,
which could “straighten” men out and return them to their “proper” mates.
africa today 54(3)

No doubt because they perceived her activity as cleansing rather than pollut-
ing, they welcomed the presence of the spirit in the streets of Zinder. Rather
than embodying the kind of unfettered sexuality that reformist preachers
associate with non-Muslims or “bad” Muslims, she ended up promoting for
these women the very values (sexual restraint, marital fidelity, and so on)
that Izala leaders had aggressively been championing. It is perhaps no wonder
then that the same “reformists” accused the spirit of scaring women into
56

not wearing veils. Only by classifying her as a fake, intent upon discredit-
ing Islam, could they reject her as a non-Muslim creature, with whom they
When Spirits Start Veiling

need not bother.

Despite their efforts, the Veiled She-Devil was not perceived by all as
antithetical to Islam, and it is precisely her enigmatic nature and ambiguous
demeanor (Was she a “true” Muslim? Did she approach men only to scare
them into going home?) that set tongues wagging in Zinder and warranted
a detailed account in one of the country’s most widely read newspapers.
In an age of renewed Muslim anxiety about moral corruption and ungen-
erative sexuality, she offered Zinderois concrete means of pondering not
just women’s needs to veil or rights to enter public spaces, but femininity
and female power more generally. Whether she sought solace in the dark
alleys of Zinder, pursued revenge for the loss of her home, or chased men
off the streets to cleanse the city of its moral contamination, she spoke to
all, regardless of their religious persuasions. As the epitome of the sexually
voracious female bent on destroying her human would-be partners, she not
only dramatically instantiated the fears that surrounded female sexuality in
contemporary Niger: she became the authorizing point for addressing the
place and powers of women in society.
Among Hausaphone communities such as Zinder, women are expected
to marry early and bear numerous children, their virtuous fertility ideally
circumscribed within the protective mud walls of the marital compound.
Women of reproductive age whose sexuality is not regulated by marriage or
who display too much autonomy are widely suspect of engaging in prostitu-
tion. Indeed, the prostitute figures prominently in popular representations
of the moral “threats” currently endangering Nigérien society, its integrity,
and its reproductive potential (Masquelier 1995). As the symbol of an increas-
ingly “immoral” economy, in which the commoditization of sexuality leads
to barrenness, disease, and death, the prostitute and her cohort of seductive
(human or spiritual) sisters are the antithesis of the virtuous Muslim wife,
whose pure, properly restrained, but productive body bespeaks society’s
strictly defined morality.13
 Such gendered equations of unregulated sexuality with social disor-
der are neither new, nor unique to Nigérien society. In northern Thailand,
rumors of widow ghosts looking for men to kill and take as “husbands”
flourished in 1990. Emerging when patterns of generational authority and
gender-role expectations became undermined by labor migrations, this
moral panic had much to do with people’s ambivalence toward national-
ist discourses on development and social change (Mills 1995). Though the

africa today 54(3)

Moroccan she-demon ‘Aïsha Qandisha occasionally looks like an old hag
with pendulous breasts, she takes on the appearance of a beautiful woman
when she wishes to seduce a man. Unless he quickly plunges a steel knife
into the earth, the victim is powerless against her seductive powers; like
the Veiled She-Devil, she is endowed with camel (or donkey) feet, which
she invariably hides under a flowing caftan (Crapanzano 1973). These
similarities alone are suggestive of the ways in which images are borrowed

57
from other places or pantheons so that spirits may play with images of
alterity and translate the foreign into the recognizably “other.” In northern

Adeline Masquelier
Sudan, beautiful prostitute spirits emerge in the context of zar ceremonies
to comment provocatively on all that a Muslim wife should not be: they
are southerners, pagan, uncircumcised beings who “use [their] sexuality
inappropriately and immorally, for personal gain” (Boddy 1989:299). Like
the Moroccan seductress and the widow ghosts of northern Thailand, the
Sudanese prostitutes of the zar pantheon are the spectral manifestations
of widespread anxieties about women’s sexuality. As personifications of
the confident, cunning, and lustful female, who kills the men she sleeps
with, they speak to the dangers of female sexuality that is not controlled
by an array of social, spatial, and sartorial practices centered on marriage
and maternity.
The Veiled She-Devil, too, personified the seductress who tempts
strangers into having sex with her, but she emerged as a more ambiguous
character. She played a double game, luring men with her beauty, only to
scare them into running home. Unlike spirits who undress to seduce their
prey (Masquelier 2005), she covered up. In doing so, she “unveiled” an
important dimension of the veil—namely, its appeal as a fashion statement
and a means to create the kind of respectability that makes Muslim women
attractive to potential husbands.14 Far from constructing a woman as sexu-
ally unappealing, the veil marks her as desirable precisely because it signifies
her inherent virtue. While it translates into unavailability, this very inac-
cessibility makes her appealing: she is pure, virtuous, and unspoiled—and
therefore desirable (Mernissi [1957] 1987). She will make a suitable wife.
This paradox, which is at the heart of the veiling tradition, has little to do
with deception, though it does not prevent the veil from simultaneously
operating as a cover for women’s imperfections, whether moral or physical.
In short, the veil is a useful element, which enhances a woman’s womanli-
ness by highlighting her moral, rather than her sexual, attributes. Young
women know this, and this is why many of them wear a hijabi when they
need to impress a potential suitor.
 By covering up, the Veiled She-Devil played with the ambiguities of the
veil. In so doing, she uncovered a wide deception, one linked to the hijabi’s
function as a screen that often cloaks impious selves. Let me explain. As
mentioned earlier, the wearing of the hijabi is no longer restricted to female
members of Izala households, and even when it is, it sometimes ends up
being more about concealment than modesty. Significantly, hijabi wear-
ers are not always acting on their own when they decide to adopt a more
africa today 54(3)

“modest” garb. “Traditionalist” clerics, who only a decade ago bitterly

criticized Izala women’s headdress, have recently come to recognize that the
hijabi is no longer necessarily synonymous with a strict reformist orienta-
tion, and that it might signify piety in a more encompassing Muslim sense.
They have occasionally urged women to cover their heads and shoulders
under a veil to look more like the “women of Mecca.”
Meanwhile, ever since Izala women have appeared in public spaces
58

wrapped in their hijabai, some of their “traditionalist” counterparts have

disparaged them bitterly for hiding their not always honest intentions behind
When Spirits Start Veiling

a façade of piety—even as they themselves adopt more conservative attire

intended to deflect opprobrium. Nigérien women friends have pointed to
the ways that veiled women take advantage of the supposed anonymity of
the veil to engage in disreputable activities. I was once told that the junior
wife of an Izala businessman in the Hausa-speaking town of Dogondoutchi
had been seen selling cooked food near the car park: “the women who set up
a hotel [portable open air eatery] there, they are all prostitutes,” my friend
and neighbor Hassana, had concluded. The hijabi, she implied, might be an
expression of pious modesty, but it was no guarantee of the purity of the
wearer’s character. In the same town, a highly controversial preacher of Nige-
rian origin had, since 1997, joined his persuasive voice to the chorus of critics
who poured scorn on Izala sartorial reforms. The hijabi was pure hypocrisy,
he told me during a conversation we had in 2000: it enabled women to hide
their malevolent intentions behind a cover of virtue. Ever since the Prophet
was almost killed by a woman who carried a weapon under her veil, he
explained, the hijabi had been forbidden (haram). Though he advocated
the wearing of a head covering for women, he insisted that such a covering
need not fall far below the shoulders—it should shield women’s charms, not
disguise their wickedness. In parodying virtuous Muslim womanhood while
acting as a prostitute (karuwai), the Veiled She-Devil thus used her own
deceptive dispositions to mimic the “fraudulent” ways that the hijabi was
increasingly used to pretend, to conceal, but also to carve out newly config-
ured expressions of morality and piousness. By taking on the mantle of piety
only to demonstrate how impious she remained beneath her “coverup,” she
denounced the hypocrisy of the veil—and of Muslim sartorial practices that
enabled women to move undetected in the most public of spaces, enfolding
them in a moral community they did not truly belong to.
Conclusion

If there is a lesson to be learned from the tale of the Veiled She-Devil, it

must certainly be that despite Izala’s efforts to homogenize Islamic prac-
tice, local Muslim sensibilities remain haunted by a pre-Islamic imaginary,
whose ghosts routinely infiltrate ongoing debates about women, their roles
as repositories of Islamic morality, and their representations in the public

africa today 54(3)

sphere. Far from waning under the impact of Islamic revivals, iconic figures
of the indigenous past turn out to be well entrenched in Muslim spaces—
especially since the emergence of decentralized, private media. While her
frightful presence evoked an era in which spirits roamed the earth undis-
turbed by roads, urbanization, and electricity, the Veiled She-Devil should
not be seen as the frozen remnant of some “animist” past, however. As a
syncretic form, born at the interface of two supposedly distinct traditions,

59
she momentarily highlighted the extent to which Islam and spirit-centered
practices are part of a larger set of intersecting, often dissonant, and rarely

Adeline Masquelier
totally consistent discourses. Operating in the murky space between fraud
and fear, she exemplified how local efforts to purge Islam from “animism”
have concealed the multiple points of intersection between these institu-
tions and produced uncanny hybrids—seemingly Muslim, yet not Muslim.
Because she was Muslim only in appearance, she could reveal through her
artful deception the contradiction of the iconoclasm that had produced her
in the first place. Piety, she showed, can be more a matter of pretense than
faith. By wearing a veil that concealed more than it should have at the same
time that it parodied the dissimulation enacted by seemingly pious women,
she challenged the moral legitimacy of public expressions of piety. As a
hallmark of overdetermination that underminded categorical boundaries,
she ultimately highlighted the cultural constructedness of identities, thereby
setting in motion a debate about the authenticity of these identities. Like
the transvestite described by Garber, she was “both terrifying and seductive
precisely because [she] incarnat[ed] and emblematiz[ed] the disruptive ele-
ment that interven[ed], signaling not just another category crisis, but—much
more disquietingly—a crisis of ‘category’ itself” (1992:32).

Acknowledgements

Research for this essay has been carried out since 1988, supported by awards from the National
Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research; a fellowship from the African Studies Centre, Leiden/Centre
d’Étude d’Afrique Noire, Bordeaux; and fellowships from Tulane University. A prior version of this
essay was presented at the 2004 African Studies Association annual meeting in New Orleans, as
part of a panel on Islam in neoliberal Africa. I am grateful to Benjamin Soares and Marie Nath-
alie LeBlancfor organizing the panel and to Robert Launay for the constructive comments he
offered as a discussant. The paper was also presented at the 2004 Symposium on Contemporary
 Perspectives in Anthropology, organized by Brad Weiss in Guerneville, California. I am grateful
to the participants, especially Misty Bastian, Jean Comaroff, Laurie Hart, and Brad Weiss, for
their valuable suggestions. A somewhat different version was presented in the Department of
Anthropology at Columbia University. I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments I received
from the audience. Marie Nathalie LeBlanc and Benjamin Soares provided much appreciated
feedback. Finally, thanks to the editors of Africa Today and to two anonymous reviewers for their
valuable editorial help.
africa today 54(3)

Notes

1. Izala is short for Jama’atu Izalat al-Bid’a wa Iqamat al-Sunna (Movement for Suppressing
Innovations and Restoring the Sunna). It first emerged in the 1970s in northern Nigeria in
60

response to the perceived excesses of the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya brotherhoods. Its aim was
to eradicate the syncretized habits of local, “traditionalist” Muslims and promote a moral
When Spirits Start Veiling

order that contested the legacies of Western colonialism. It soon became a populist move-
ment, aimed at making war on a society that had long privileged extravagant spending and
conspicuous generosity (see Glew 1999; Grégoire 1993; Gumi 1992; Kane 1994; Loimeier
1997; Umar 1993).
2. As we shall see, the distinction between “reformist” members of Izala and “traditionalist” (or
so-called Sufi) Muslims is somewhat problematic, as it inadequately captures the complex,
and at times rather subtle, distinctions that operate on the ground between, but also within,
various religious “camps.” It incorrectly assumes that the Izala association and Sufi orders are
monolithic institutions, whose values are shared unanimously by a homogenous membership.
Such neat distinctions are nonetheless routinely invoked by Nigériens, regardless of their
religious leanings or their level of education.
3. See Meyer and Pels’s Magic and Modernity (2003) for some insightful analyses of how, far from
having been purged from mystical elements, modernity everywhere is deeply intertwined
with magic and the “primitive.”
4. Because I translated the entire article from the French, I could not retain the typographical
errors. I have nonetheless tried to be as faithful as possible to the author’s style of writing.
5. This percentage is contradicted by reformist Muslims who, in their efforts to extol the unity
of Islam and the Islamic basis of Niger’s “national culture,” claim that practically 100 percent of
the population is Muslim (see Niandou-Souley and Alzouma 1996).
6. There are other Islamic groups in Niger which impose conservative standards of modesty on
their female members and enjoin them to cover their heads and shoulders. In Dogondoutchi,
a Hausaphone town of some 38,000 people, one Sufi preacher enjoins his followers to wear
a white veil that differs slightly (in style, not just in color) from the hijabi that identifies the
wearer as a member of the Izala association. In the last few of years, however, new sartorial
trends have complicated the correspondence between hijabi and reformist Islam, as I note
in the body of this essay.
7. For more on bori, see Besmer 1983; Échard 1991a, 1991b; Masquelier 1995, 2002a; Monfouga-
Nicolas 1972; Onwuejeogwu 1969; Tremearne 1914.
8. I have been inspired by Morris’s insightful analysis of mediumship in northern Thailand (2000).
In her book, In the Place of Origins, Morris documents the revival that mediumship is enjoying
 in the city of Chiang Mai. She shows that while this revival was enabled by the apparent
“secularization” of mediumship performances, the current legitimization of mediumship has
ultimately entailed a renewed magicality (and a return to the past) through the deployment
of technologies of mass mediation that have made renewal and transcendence possible.
9. Promiscuity in either sex is criticized—most notably by Muslim preachers who in their sermons
rant at youth for their indiscipline and immorality—but the Islamic emphasis on female chas-
tity imposes far more stringent restrictions on unmarried females than on unmarried males.

africa today 54(3)

10. When Izala preachers mention the spirit-centered practices of bori practitioners in their
sermons, it is only to define them as part of the “age of ignorance” from which Muslims have
emerged.
11. Hijabai is the plural form of hijabi.
12. One could, of course, turn the argument on its head and, as it has been suggested to me, see
men (rather than women) as the sources of moral contagion. After all, it is they who engage in
adulterous encounters with the spirit. And true, some women did take advantage of the moral

61
panic to suggest that the veiled spirits would indeed dissuade men from wandering down a
dark path. To see the rumors strictly as a commentary on men’s frailties, however, is to ignore the

Adeline Masquelier
region’s history of representations of women as the epitome of wickedness and immorality. Now
more than ever in Niger, women, and the popular images that are associated with them, have
come to define the moral community in all its contradictory dimensions (see Göle 2002).
13. I am not saying here that the prostitute figures as a new index of immorality, for that is hardly
the case: I am suggesting, instead, that as an uncanny mixture of the old and the new, the
Muslim and the kafiri, she took on an added relevance in the context of ongoing debates about
the status of women in Islamic society.
14. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.

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