Gift , Sacrif ice, and SorceryThe 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 offer-ing.” It spread throughout the country over several weeks, making headlines andfeeding gossip.
Reports say that since yesterday a crazy rumor has been circulating in the country. Accord-ing 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 fordeceased Muslims) to passers-by as charity. But, according to the rumor, “all the peoplewho received these alms (or offerings?) had a fit and died.”1
Several people suspected of distributing the deadly alms were set upon by thecrowd in streets and marketplaces and occasionally attacked. This article seeks toshow that this rumor, as unusual and ephemeral as it might be, is more than justa good story from the perspective of the Senegalese who spread it and the news-papers that made it a headline: it also provides food for thought for the socialsciences. Our work on similar stories involving genital theft, killer telephone num-bers, and miraculous apparitions on mobile telephones has already shown that this
This article was translated from the French by Katharine Throssell and edited by AngelaKrieger, Chloe Morgan, and Nicolas Barreyre.1. “Folle rumeur à Dakar et environs. L’offrande de la mort installe la panique!” L’Obser-vateur, January 26, 2010. The information was printed on the front page.
kind of rumor can shed a unique light on certain social dynamics in contemporaryAfrica, whether they have to do with the reconfiguration of the magico-religiousdomain or sorcery, changing forms of urban sociability, attitudes toward foreigners,the transformation of masculinity, the appropriation of new technologies, and evenurban violence and so-called “mob” justice.2
The rumor about the death offering provides an opportunity to interrogatethe central but problematic place of almsgiving (sarax in Wolof) in Senegalesesociety.3 It constitutes a prism through which social issues concerning beggarsand begging are revealed—particularly the contradictions between public policiesagainst begging and the norms of religious charity. More generally, the rumor raisesthe issue of the meaning and value of gifts. Who do they really benefit? Whatdangers are associated with receiving them? In his famous work The Gift, publishedin 1925 (and translated into English in 1954), Marcel Mauss emphasized theambivalence of gifts, stipulating the “so to speak voluntary character of these totalservices, apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested.”4 Although Mauss essentially focused on the antinomy between free-dom and obligation, insisting on the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, andreciprocating, the death offering emphasizes the tension between disinterested-ness and self-interest. We will show that this tension runs through all registers ofreligious gifts, from alms to offerings and sacrifices.5
By staging a gift that is fatal to the beneficiary, the death offering representsan unprecedented variant on the theme of the poisoned chalice. In a short textthat appeared a year before The Gift, Mauss had already explored the theme of theharmful 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 themodern English sense and “poison,” which is the meaning that has prevailed inGerman.6 Up until now, this theme has been most fruitfully explored in the field
2. Julien Bonhomme, The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of a Rumor, trans. Dominic Hors-fall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Bonhomme, “Les numéros de télé-phone portable qui tuent. Épidémiologie culturelle d’une rumeur transnationale,” Tracés21 (2011): 125–50; Bonhomme, “The Dangers of Anonymity: Witchcraft, Rumor, andModernity in Africa,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2 (2012): 205–33;and Julien Bondaz, “Un fantôme sur iPhone. Apparition miraculeuse et imageriemouride 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 havefollowed the spellings provided by Jean-Léopold Diouf, Dictionnaire wolof-français etfrançais-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 notionenables us to conceptualize the relationships between different kinds of gifts obeyingdistinct rules and values within a single society: see Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).6. Marcel Mauss, “Gift-gift” [1924], in Œuvres (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1969), 3:46–51.3 4 4
of Indian Studies, specifically in the context of a critical dialogue with Mauss’stheses.7 In Hinduism and Jainism, certain types of gifts—alms and offerings—havethe particularity of transferring misfortune, sin, and impurity from the giver to thereceiver. In the case of the death offering, however, the harmful nature of the giftis not seen in terms of contagion or contamination as it is in India, but rather interms of sorcery (liggéey in Wolof). In Senegal, as in many other African societies,this is a common register for explaining misfortune and wrongdoing. In providinga 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 “moraleconomy” of almsgiving in the context of Senegalese Islam (roughly 90 percent ofthe population of Senegal is Muslim). The notion of moral economy was originallydeveloped by E. P. Thompson, whose analysis of the food riots in eighteenth-century Europe emphasized the cultural norms and moral values shared by riotersrather than economic determinism.8 Transferred to anthropology through the workof James Scott in particular, the concept has since gained some traction in the socialsciences, as the work of Didier Fassin attests.9 However, Fassin gives the notionsuch 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 inthe social space”). Without exactly expanding the concept, the notion of moraleconomy 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 betweeneconomic and religious ethoses, studying both the economic aspect of access tothe 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 theDominant Caste in a North Indian Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988);James Laidlaw, “A Free Gift Makes No Friends,” Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute 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 RoyalAnthropological Institute 7, no. 4 (2001): 687–703.8. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the EighteenthCentury,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.9. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in SoutheastAsia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Didier Fassin, “Les économies moralesrevisitées,” Annales HSS 64, no. 6 (2009): 1237–66.10. Weber’s works on the “Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” composedbetween 1910 and 1920, have been assembled and translated into French: see MaxWeber, “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 befound in The Essential Weber: A Reader, ed. Sam Whimster (London/New York: Rout-ledge, 2004). 3 4 5
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 inspiredour work on how charity is understood in Senegal, this article suggests that thefocus 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 putinto perspective by exploring the articulations between the moral economy ofIslam and the “occult economy.” This notion, developed by Jean and JohnComaroff12 but widely used in the field of African Studies, refers to the supposedproduction of wealth by means that are magical, obscure, illicit, or at least shunnedby common morality, generally at someone else’s expense (hence the frequentinterpretation of these forms of enrichment in terms of sorcery). From this perspec-tive, the death offering represents (and was locally interpreted as) a paroxysmalform of wealth-oriented sorcery, which could even go as far as corrupting religiouscharity and its underlying moral economy.
The death offering also leads on to the question of sacrifice (the notion ofsarax, which, at the heart of the rumor, designates both “alms” and “sacrifice” inWolof). The supposed deaths of those who were said to have accepted the mysteri-ous offering were in fact almost universally interpreted by our informants as beingthe giver’s deliberate sacrifice of the receiver. The rumor thus revealed the tensionsbetween several registers of sacrifice. It invoked both the canonical model of Mus-lim sacrifice and the sacrifices for covenants with spirits falling outside or on themargins of Islam. But it also brandished the specter of “human sacrifice,” whichprovoked a kind of moral panic in the country in the wake of a series of macabreevents that had made headlines in Senegal throughout the 2000s. The rumor thusexploited (and dramatized) the threatening possibility that a charitable gift mightin fact conceal a human sacrifice. This threat is based on the contradiction betweenself-interest and disinterestedness that lies at the heart of the sacrificial economy—apoint that Mauss had already discussed at length in his book Sacrifice: Its Natureand Functions, written in collaboration with Henri Hubert.13 Ultimately, the rumorof the death offering provides a new take on the gift and sacrifice, two of the mostclassic themes in anthropology since Mauss.
This attempt to illuminate the rumor of the death offering through a reflec-tion on the moral economy of Islam and a critical discussion of Mauss’s thesesabove all aims to lend further depth to this incident by not reducing it to a purely
11. Jean-Louis Triaud and Leonardo Villalón, eds., “Économie morale et mutations del’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 Abstrac-tion: 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’Afriquedu 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).3 4 6
local anecdote. It is a matter of “making a case” of the rumor, showing how itsvery singularity is problematic and enables us to ask questions with broader impli-cations that make this case especially valuable.14 To achieve this, our articleattempts to combine two interpretative approaches. The first embeds the appear-ance of the rumor in the local (and factual) context of Senegal at the end of the2000s, while the second focuses on the more abstract theme of the ambivalenceof religious gifts. The interconnectedness of these two interpretive threads makesit possible to situate this Senegalese rumor in a comparative setting, considering italongside more typical “sorcery crises” in other regions of Africa.15
Before presenting the rumor in more detail, a few things need to be saidabout the fieldwork and ethnographic data on which our analysis is based. Dueto their volatile and unpredictable nature, rumors resist direct observation andconsequently present a challenge for standard ethnographical methods. In orderto undertake this research, we conducted a joint field study in Dakar and its suburbsin February and March 2011,16 one year after the rumor surfaced. One of us laterreturned in March and April 2013 to collect additional data. We began by gatheringall the articles in the Senegalese press that covered the events (approximately fiftyin 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 passionatelydiscussed and debated in an urban setting, such as newspaper stands, markets, and“maquis” or other local restaurants. We recorded what our many intervieweesremembered about the rumor, how they came to hear about it, what they thoughtof it at the time, what they thought a year later, how they discussed it, and howthey interpreted it. In this way, we were not only able to take full stock of thevarieties of local discourses surrounding the death offering, but also to identifythe main themes on which the interpretations of the rumor focused. Indeed, thisrumor 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 gaverise. We found direct witnesses to various incidents as well as protagonists whowere involved either as accusers or the accused. This freed us from the abstractnarrative formed by the rumor itself and enabled us to describe the events incontext, using scenes involving real people. The goal was to explore how the fictionof the rumor could become real by closely examining the interactions within whichsuspicions and accusations linked to the death offering were able to emerge.Finally, this study of the rumor itself was accompanied by a more classic ethno-graphic 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-ClaudePasseron 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 pente-cotistes 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. 3 4 7
sides of both the giver and the recipient, which provides the background againstwhich the rumor becomes meaningful.
Life and Death of a Rumor
The rumor of the death offering appeared in Dakar or in Saint-Louis around Janu-ary 25, 2010. Although different versions were in circulation, a prototypical situationemerged from the publication of the first media article on the subject (quoted inthe introduction above), which appeared on the front page of L’Observateur onJanuary 26. This version, which was widely copied by rival media outlets andtransmitted by word of mouth, already included the key narrative elements of therumor: 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 causallink 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, evendown 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 rumorwas reported in Gambia and Mali, in the border region of Kayes.18 However, therumor of the death offering was limited to the Senegambian region and, in thisrespect, is distinct from rumors of genital theft and killer telephone numbers,which have a much more transnational dimension. This limited extension canbe explained by the fact that the death offering closely depended on a socioculturalcontext specific to Senegal, linked to the place of charity and begging in society.
The rumor spread by word of mouth, through ordinary conversation as wellas by telephone and text messages. It was publicly discussed in sermons at themosques and widely transmitted by the media, first on the radio and then ontelevision, in the newspapers, and online. Like rumors of genital theft and killertelephone numbers, the death offering attests to sorcery’s entrance into the digitalage. Indeed, these occult rumors are the product of incessant transfers betweenthe media and ordinary conversations. The media provides a sounding board for therumors, which are discussed at length by so-called “titrologues” in the “grand-places” and at newspaper stands.19 This hybrid between word of mouth and mediainformation is often called “pavement radio” or “gossip radio” in francophone
17. Meat and money are the elements of the offering that are the most frequentlymentioned (80 percent of the versions in our corpus).18. This is where, in February 2010, one of us first heard about the death offering whileconducting fieldwork on an unrelated subject.19. The “grand-places” are the public squares where people from the same neigh-borhood meet to play cards or checkers and to discuss the news of the day. The “titro-logues” (from titre, or “title” in French) debate the titles on the front pages of thenewspapers—without necessarily having read the content of the articles. This neologismprobably 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): 129–67.3 4 8
Africa.20 It is a model of collective elaboration of information that leads to theproliferation of dissonant and sometimes contradictory interpretations, all attempt-ing to make sense of uncertain news.21 From this perspective, the credit given tothe rumor of the death offering should not be overestimated. One of the generalcharacteristics of rumors is that they do not need to be believed in order to bespread. They simply have to have a minimum amount of credibility and above allnarrative relevance in the social spheres in which they circulate. It is therefore notsurprising that most of our Senegalese informants did not know what status to givethe rumor of the death offering.
Less than two weeks after its appearance, the rumor disappeared withoutany consensus as to its veracity or meaning. “It didn’t last because the person leftSenegal with their 4×4,” one beggar in Dakar told us. The authorities intervenedto refute the rumor and control the violent reactions, which certainly contributed toits rapid extinction: the head of the National Police put out a very firm press releaseas 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 annualceremony of the Mouride brotherhood, during which hundreds of thousands ofpilgrims converge on the holy city of Touba.22
News of the Magal trumped the death offering not only because it is anevent of national importance, but also because it is a religious festival intrinsicallybound up with gifts: the faithful give offerings to the brotherhood’s dignitaries aswell as generous alms to the countless beggars who come to Touba especially forthe ceremony. All of these gifts are made under the religious protection of theGeneral Kaliph of the brotherhood and are in a sense “made safe” by the mara-bouts’ baraka.23 A beggar sitting outside the Great Mosque in Touba confirmedthat he was “not afraid of taking this so-called ‘deadly’ charity,” reported the WalfGrand Place: “‘If they give it to me here in Touba, I’ll take it because I’m notafraid, man ki la gëm (I believe in that one),’ he declared, pointing to the tomb ofSerigne Touba [Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (1853–1927), founder of the Mouridebrotherhood]. But he added that in his home town of Mbour he would not acceptthe 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 confirmsthat 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,” AfricanAffairs 88, no. 352 (1989): 321–30.21. On the process of the collective elaboration of rumors, see Tamotsu Shibutan, Impro-vised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).22. On the Magal, see Christian Coulon, “The Grand Magal in Touba: A ReligiousFestival 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 dignita-ries, affording them a power of grace and blessing.24. “Rumeur sur l’offrande mortelle : à Touba, l’aumône se prend sans panique,” WalfGrand Place, February 3, 2010. 3 4 9
By placing the religious value of the gift back in the spotlight, the Magal restoredthe beneficiaries’ confidence, which had been brutally shaken by the death offer-ing. Because of this, it directly contributed to weakening the anxiety that lay atthe heart of the rumor.
Rich Givers
While the content of the death offering is often detailed in the narrative of therumor, the identity of the person giving it remains largely unspecified. Only twothings 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 theten-thousand-CFA-franc note,25 the biggest denomination in circulation and toolarge a charitable offering not to be suspicious (ten, twenty, twenty-five, or fiftyfrancs being the usual denominations offered to beggars). The more generous thealms, the more they are suspected of displaying self-interest or concealing some-thing else. In several incidents linked to the rumor, the ostensible wealth of thegiver contributed to crystallizing suspicion. On January 25, Matar Ndoye (a pseudo-nym) narrowly escaped being lynched by the inhabitants of Diokoul, a neighbor-hood of Rufisque. Ndoye, who was Senegalese but living in Europe, had come toinspect a piece of land he had bought in his native town and on which he wishedto build. He arrived in a 4×4, accompanied by a friend and intending to distributemoney to the people living on adjoining land, apparently in an attempt to make agood impression in the neighborhood so as to not jeopardize his real-estate plans.However, this sudden generosity provoked a misunderstanding. The recipientstook it in the opposite sense to how it was intended and suspected that the strangerwas the infamous person distributing the death offerings and driving a 4×4. Theymobbed and began to attack Ndoye, despite the attempted intercession of hisfriend (who lived in the neighborhood). Only the intervention of the authoritiessaved the unlucky man from mob justice.
This incident involving a rich expat is revealing when one considers thatremittances 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-estatespeculation in Dakar.26 In this context, numerous rumors circulate regarding themurky and supposedly illicit origins of the capital used to build the “multi-storybuildings” that have become increasingly prolific in the major cities over the lastdecade. The incident should thus be understood in light of the property-relatedtensions between those who have recently profited from international migration
25. Ten thousand CFA francs is equivalent to fifteen euros. The average monthlyincome 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 àDakar (Paris/Dakar: Karthala/CREPOS, 2009).3 5 0
and the Senegalese who remained at home. From this perspective, the rumor ofthe 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 Senegalesepeople with whom we discussed the offering, it was clear that the mysteriousgiver’s motivation was to become even richer by distributing these deadly offerings.Conversely, the victims chosen by the giver were all beggars (yalwaankat) wholacked the means of refusing this charity and, more broadly, the poor and lowerclasses—known in Senegal as the góorgóorlu, or “those who make do.”27 The rumorthus drew on a kind of moral imagination28 that explains social inequalities throughsorcery: the rich are only rich because they selfishly sacrifice the poor by occultmeans. This is a ubiquitous theme in stories of sorcery in Africa, and there is muchanthropological literature on the subject.29 Up to now, these studies have focusedmore on central and southern Africa than on the Islamic countries of the Sudano-Sahelian zone. Yet the popular imaginary surrounding wealth sorcery is also signifi-cant in this region of the continent, as proved not only by the case of the deathoffering but also by other recent studies devoted to the occult economy of mara-boutage in Senegal and its neighboring countries.30 This kind of wealth sorcery isbased on a moral economy that sees profit as a zero-sum game, whereby for someto win, others must lose.31 The death offering stretches this logic to the point ofparadox because it is the winners who lose: the poor who think they have won byreceiving money through charity lose their lives.
The rumor also attests to the lower classes’ defiance toward the elites. Onthis front, its appearance must be placed in the political context of Senegal duringthe 2000s.32 Abdoulaye Wade, a long-term opponent of the socialist regime, waselected 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 poursurvivre. 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 Imaginationin Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).29. In addition to the work by the Comaroffs cited above, see Peter Geschiere, TheModernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville: Uni-versity Press of Virginia, 1997), especially 137-68.30. Amber B. Gemmeke, Marabout Women in Dakar: Creating Trust in a Rural UrbanSpace (Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2008), particularly 25ff; Dorothea Schulz, “Love Potions andMoney Machines: Commercial Occultism and the Reworking of Social Relations inUrban 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 ComparativeHistory,” 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 since2000: 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). 3 5 1
campaign slogan. The popular enthusiasm provoked by political renewal nonethe-less paved the way for disillusionment in the second half of the decade, particularlyafter Wade’s reelection in 2007. The economic crisis hit the Senegalese hard in2008, with high unemployment, price hikes on foodstuffs and energy (which ledto riots against the cost of living in 2008), and continual power cuts (which led tomore riots in 2011). At the same time, the ostentatious wealth of the political andeconomic elites, the allegations of state racketeering accompanying Wade’s policyof major public works, and accusations of corruption directly concerning the presi-dent and his inner circle led the Senegalese to say that the change of politicalregime (alternance in French) had become an “alternoce” (a pun using the Frenchword noce, or “[wedding] party”) for the sole profit of those in power. The politicalnouveau riche—or the “alternoceurs,” as they were called—flaunted their ostenta-tious 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 men-tioned in the rumor evoke the Wade-era nouveau riche, who drive big cars andspend freely while the lower classes are reduced to begging for charity that endsup killing them (distributing money or luxury cars is apparently a common practicefor politicians before elections). According to an employee at the Hann Zoo inDakar, “It was the higher-ups because it was shiny cars.” A street vendor specifiedthat it was political “maraboutage,” while a journalist from Populaire confirmed thatit was politicians who distributed the death offering “to gain a position,” jadedlyremarking, “It happens all the time.” A parking attendant added, “Even the gov-ernment does it.” The death offering thus evokes the specter of a perversion ofthe relationship between economics, politics, and religion, which have formed thefoundation of the “Senegalese social contract” since the country’s independence.33
It allows for the threatening possibility that strategies for gaining wealth based oncollusion between business capitalism and the state go as far as corrupting thecharitable practices at the heart of religious solidarity.
According to one popular interpretation of the death offering, the Senegalesepeople who were experiencing the full force of the financial crisis were the onesconsciously spreading the rumor in order to take revenge on wealthy politiciansby making them look suspicious: “It is true that the incident occurred at a badtime 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 offerthe weak a weapon against the powerful; as Scott has shown for the everydayforms of resistance to domination and authority practiced by South Asian peasantcommunities, they act as an indirect form of criticism.35 Gossip and rumors allow
33. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Les négociations du contrat social sénégalais,” in Laconstruction de l’État au Sénégal, ed. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, Momar-Coumba Diop, andMamadou Diouf (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 83–93.34. “Offrande mortelle : la police décide de sévir contre la rumeur,” Seneweb.com, Janu-ary 28, 2010.35. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1985).3 5 2
Asian peasants to reaffirm the value of their own moral economy, as opposed tothe hegemonic values of capitalist economy. Whereas the elites publicly presenttheir charitable acts as voluntary altruism, their poorer neighbors present themin their gossip as social and religious obligations that the rich are in fact bound torespect, 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 doubton the morality of the elites’ charitable acts by revealing their self-interested andegotistical nature.
The person distributing deadly alms was not only wealthy, he was alsounknown to the victims. “We don’t know who does it. The car stops, the windowopens, they give the package and leave,” confirmed one of our informants. Thegiver’s anonymity was reinforced by the fact that he concealed his face under aturban 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 talkabout “the 4×4 of death” as if the car were a protagonist in itself: according tosome, the “4×4 distributes alms.” The theme of the death car is found in manyother African rumors and dates back to the colonial era.36 All these rumors evokeanxiety about situations of asymmetrical anonymity, emphasizing the danger ofbeing 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 betweenanonymity and power (having a car with tinted windows requires a special licensein Senegal). Only the powerful have the privilege of remaining anonymous, andthey are often suspected of abusing this power in order to commit all kinds ofwrongdoing.37
In certain incidents linked to the rumor, a car driven by a stranger was enoughto attract suspicion, even when no gift was involved. Anonymous gifts were, how-ever, at the center of most of the incidents. At the beginning of February inCasamance, 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 theregion. 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 thatDiatta’s mother, who lived a few kilometers away, could come and pick it uplater. But the hostile villagers refused to keep the sack and ordered him to leaveimmediately. The same scene played out in another village. Finally, the taxi driverwas obliged to return to Kolda and give the sack back to Diatta. This incident islinked 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 signof 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, herep. 41. 3 5 3
ought to have been a simple gift between relatives became anonymous and there-fore threatening. On the one hand, the giver gave the gift to a go-between; on theother, the villagers were not the final recipients and were thus not expecting toserve as intermediaries. From their perspective, the taxi driver was a stranger whoarrived in their village and insisted on giving them something for which they hadnot asked. That was enough to make the sack of rice suspicious, even though thegift 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-CFA-franc note by the side of the road “just after a 4×4 had gone past.” Instead ofpicking it up he raised the alarm. A crowd formed around the note, but no onedared take it. Someone suggested it be burned. Eventually, a teacher pushed throughthe crowd and picked up the note. This audacious gesture provoked different reac-tions, 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 forfear of falling victim to the death offering via his intermediary. A similar incidentoccurred in front of a mosque in a market in Diourbel on January 27, when a manfound a bag containing some percale. People wondered whether it was the deathoffering that everyone had been talking about or simply a charitable donation thatsomeone had anonymously left outside the mosque, as the Quran recommends.
Begging in Crisis
The rumor of the death offering disrupted attitudes to almsgiving, as seen in theincident in front of the mosque. In this affair, beggars were doubly “victims.” Theywere the main victims of the death offering, but they were also victims of therumor 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 morecautious than usual. As one of them declared, “We live off charity; that is why weare obliged to accept what we are given. But we don’t accept just anything anymoreand, in particular, when someone gives us something, we check to see what is init.” A fear of giving matched this fear of receiving, as the givers feared being takenfor the mysterious distributor of the death offering. Another beggar remarked, “Inthe last few days, we have received fewer offerings. We even sense that the handfulof regular donors who dare to continue to be generous are hesitant at the momentthey give alms. Those who usually get out of the car to greet us limit themselvesto extending a hand before driving off.” This evasive behavior was not withoutrisk, for, in wanting to give alms by stealth, these givers ran an even greater riskof being seen as suspicious. The rumor threw begging into a state of crisis. Bothgivers and recipients were forced to break from their daily routines and to questionjust what was implied by the act of giving or receiving.
Yet begging is an extremely widespread activity in Senegal. In the urbanenvironment, there are daily interactions between passers-by and beggars and,particularly in the center of Dakar, they are omnipresent and sometimes invasive.3 5 4
One popular interpretation of the death offering we heard several times suggestedthat the story was actually intended to discourage begging by provoking the fearof both giving and receiving. According to this interpretation, the rumor was anextralegal plot by the state to put an end to begging. This must be placed inthe context of public policies intended to combat begging and the controversysurrounding the place of beggars in Senegalese society.38 Repressive policies con-cerning beggars were in keeping with the colonial policy of incarcerating those onthe margins of urban society and the “eviction” of the “indigenous neighborhoods”in Dakar. This policy became stricter after independence, particularly from the1970s on, under the pretext that beggars were an obstacle to the development oftourism. The law of July 9, 1975 outlawed begging in public spaces (articles 245 and246 of the Senegalese Penal Code), and regular raids were organized. This brutalpolicy was accompanied by the use of derogatory vocabulary to talk about beggars,who were referred to as “human congestion” or even “human waste” by presidentLéopold 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 thefailure of the struggle against begging. During the 1980s, urban impoverishmentincreased with the cycle of structural adjustment policies. At the same time, thestate’s repressive policies became more flexible and turned to a more humaneapproach in connection with charitable organizations—both religious and secular—and NGOs. Amongst the different categories of beggars, talibé children were at theheart of this new humanitarian program: they were presented as a particularlydifficult population to control because they are extremely mobile, but they werealso seen as victims that the state had to defend against exploitation by corruptand tyrannical Quranic masters.39
This did not prevent attempts to apply the law of July 9, 1975 from periodi-cally resurfacing. Each time, however, this repressive policy met with strong oppo-sition within Senegalese society. The policy outlawing begging in fact remainslargely unenforced, primarily because it was socially unenforceable. Each majorraid provoked public indignation, particularly from religious leaders, who reiteratedthe religious importance of charity and obliged the authorities to retreat. Thistension between public policy and religion, which structures the understanding ofbegging in Senegal, was translated into a lopsided legal compromise. Although beg-ging is forbidden in public spaces, it is tolerated around mosques, particularlyduring 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 Fayeand 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 theterm tends to be used for children who are “exploited” by a Quranic master. See DonnaL. Perry, “Muslim Child Disciples, Global Civil Society, and Children’s Rights inSenegal: The Discourses of Strategic Structuralism,” Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 1(2004): 47–86. 3 5 5
In reality, opponents of the law are defending the interests of givers as muchas those of the beggars. Religious charity rather than begging is what is valuedhere; the Senegalese actually need beggars in order to perform their charity. Therumor of the death offering thus reveals an ambiguity at the heart of attitudestoward almsgiving, manifested in the contradiction between publicly undesirablebeggars and the charity with which the givers cannot dispense. This has been arecurring debate in Senegal since the 1970s; it is also the theme of a famous novelby Aminata Sow Fall, La grève des bàttu, often referred to in discussions of therumor.40 Its story describes a strike among beggars, who refuse to take alms as aprotest against the raids conducted by a politician who hopes to become a ministerby rigorously enforcing the prohibition of begging. In order to accelerate his nomi-nation, he consults a marabout, who tells him to make an offering. But no beggaraccepts his self-interested charity, and he ultimately does not obtain the post hedesires.
Self-Interested Charity
Having looked at begging, it is time to turn to the other aspect of the almsgivingrelationship, the givers, in order to fully appreciate the stakes of this charity withwhich the Senegalese cannot dispense. The death offering appears to be a deviantform of sarax (“almsgiving” in Wolof). In this language, the rumor was often desig-nated by the phrase saraxu dee (alms of death) or sarax buy rey (alms that kill). Theterm sarax stems from the Arabic søadaqa, used in the Quran to refer to almsgiving—acentral theme of Islam that, in reality, distinguishes between two different kindsof alms. The zakat (asaka in Wolof) refers to legal almsgiving, which is theoreticallycompulsory although rarely enforced in Muslim countries.41 It constitutes one ofthe 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, onthe other hand, is what is known as a supererogatory charity, recommended by thereligion but not compulsory.43
Due to its religious value, charity—whether compulsory or voluntary—cannotbe reduced to a sporadic transfer between a giver and a receiver. The concreteaction of giving does not have full meaning for the participants themselves unlessit is part of a broader network of virtual relations. Like any religious gift, almsgivingimplies a third party because God is always implicated. God is less the ultimate
40. Aminata Sow Fall, La grève des bàttu ou Les déchets humains (Paris: Le Serpent àplumes, 1979; repr. 2001). The novel, published in Dakar in 1979, was awarded theGrand Prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire the following year. Since then, it has featuredconsistently 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, “Zakat,” 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, 8:708–16.3 5 6
recipient of the gift than the donee or the addressee; the gift is not given to Godso much as it is given in His name. In Senegal, the beggar extends his hand whilechanting 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 alsointervenes in this process, potentially dispensing reciprocation in the form of “sal-vation goods” (to use the terminology of Weber). This reciprocation is of coursenot automatic and above all cannot be required by the giver: God cannot be boundby the gifts given in His name. In any event, reciprocation does not representa counter-gift because God is not a recipient: He does not “give” but freely“rewards” charitable gifts between men. Nevertheless, divine compensation isgenerally expected or at least hoped for by the giver.
Figure 1. Almsgiving and its reward
The status of reciprocation in the cycle of charity can be better understood ifcharity is compared to another register of religious gift that plays an importantrole 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 andas a sign of voluntary submission to his or her marabout (sériñ, meaning “spiritualleader” or “guide”). This offering, which is generally annual, assumes particularimportance among the Mourides, who see it as a religious obligation and even asa tithe due to the marabout.44 However, this is not to reduce Senegalese Islam tothe Mouride brotherhood and certainly not to its rural version as it was studiedat the end of the 1960s in the classic works of Jean Copans or Donal CruiseO’Brien.45 We only evoke the àddiya to emphasize the circulation of real or sym-bolic goods in which it is inscribed.
44. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Le talibé mouride : la soumission dans une confrériereligieuse 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’Har-mattan, 1980; repr. 1989), particularly p. 182.45. On the Mouride brotherhood in urban areas, see: Momar-Coumba Diop, “Fonctionset 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,” LesAnnales de la recherche urbaine 96 (2004): 135–43. On the contemporary dynamics ofSenegalese Islam, divided between brotherhood, neo-brotherhood, and reformism, see: 3 5 7
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 brotherhoodcharisma, to use a Weber-inspired concept developed by Cruise O’Brien: the dis-ciples’ offerings are given to marabouts in exchange for their baraka.46 The trans-mission of divine grace passes through the marabouts’ active intervention via theirblessings and prayers.47 This economy of charisma implies the reciprocal conver-sion of material goods into salvation goods. As a reward for the offerings to theirmarabouts and the work they do for them, the disciples hope to gain access toparadise. In the mid-1960s, for example, Dramane Mbacké, secretary of the Gen-eral Kaliph of the Mourides, declared that the àddiya represented a “deposit thatwill be reclaimed in the hereafter.”48 In reality, however, this reward vacillatesbetween spiritual investment directed toward the afterlife and material interestfocused on the here and now. On the one hand, the offerings of the faithful canalso be paid back in material goods (in rural areas, for example, a plot of land orassistance 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 successescan thus be interpreted as the fruit of divine blessing granted thanks to the inter-vention of a marabout.50 Salvation goods effectively have a worldly value, as Weberexplained: “Religions promise and offer different salvation goods (Heilsgüter), butempirical researchers [should] not study them only, or even mainly, as ‘other-worldly.’” They belong “very much to this world ... health, long life, and wealth.”51
The expectation of reciprocation is also present in the case of charitablealmsgiving, although it is more indirect. While, as Timur Kuran observes, almshave a “negligible impact on poverty alleviation,” this lack of redistributive justicefor receivers does not prevent them fulfilling other functions for the benefit of
Fabienne Samson, “Identités islamiques revendicatives et mobilisations citoyennes auSénégal : deux mouvements néo-confrériques inscrits dans la globalisation et confrontésau désengagement de l’État,” in Islam, État et société en Afrique, ed. René Otayek andBenjamin F. Soares (Paris: Karthala, 2009), 491–512; Mame-Penda Ba, “La diversité dufondamentalisme sénégalais. Éléments pour une sociologie de la connaissance,” Cahiersd’études africaines 2, nos. 206/7 (2012): 575–602.46. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Don divin, don terrestre : l’économie de la confrérie mou-ride,” Archives européennes de sociologie 15 (1974): 82–100.47. On the transmission of baraka, see Jean Schmitz, “Le souffle de la parenté. Mariageet 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, whereprofits meet prophets and prayers meet prosperity,” as Beth Buggenhagen notes in“Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value inSenegalese 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. 66.3 5 8
givers, as several verses of the Quran and certain hadiths stipulate.52 First, charitypurifies the giver and his or her wealth by subtracting a small part of it. Thisis the main function of legal charity, which is also sometimes called “alms ofpurification.”53 Almsgiving also serves other roles of propitiation and expiation. Itenables the giver to attract divine grace and make amends for sin, and thus toensure 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 countedat the Last Judgment.”54 Divine reward might well be a gratuitous favor granted tomen without it being their due; it is nonetheless considered a proportional recipro-cation for the initial gift. This can be seen in the use of the expression “loan toGod” to designate charity in sura 57 of the Quran: “Indeed, the men who practicecharity and the women who practice charity and [those who] have loaned Allah agoodly 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 divinereward 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 someonewho is physically infirm; it will be doubled for charity dispensed during the Fridayprayer; 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 thisworld and the afterlife. A Wolof proverb, for example, stipulates that “charityincreases 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 recommendedto perform charity every morning to ward off the day’s misfortunes, particularlyafter a nightmare. One of our interviewees, a member of the Tijaniyya, told usthat he gave seven pieces of white sugar (his lucky number and color) to the samegroup of beggars as he left his house every morning. This prompted another ofour 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 bySophie Bava, go even further and consider divine reciprocation for charity in adirectly 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 whogive alms need beggars just as much as the beggars need them.
52. Timur Kuran, “Islamic Redistribution through Zakat: Historical Record and ModernRealities,” in Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Michael Bonner, MineEner, 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 andpresident of its National Association of Imams and Ulama.54. Robert Vuarin, “L’enjeu de la misère pour l’Islam sénégalais,” Revue Tiers Monde123 (1990): 601–21, here p. 608.55. Weir, “Sadaka,” 710 and 714.56. Sophie Bava, “De la ‘baraka aux affaires’: ethos économico-religieux et trans-nationalité chez les migrants sénégalais mourides,” Revue européenne des migrations inter-nationales 19, no. 2 (2003): 69–84. 3 5 9
Beggars play an intermediary role in obtaining divine reciprocation, particu-larly through the prayers they say out of gratitude in the giver’s name.57 From thisperspective, both alms and the marabout offering seem to be situated in the sameeconomy of prayer: material goods are given in exchange for prayers providingaccess to the benefits of salvation.58 However, there is a clear opposition betweenthese two registers of religious gift because of the contrasting social positions ofthe beggar and the marabout in relation to the giver. It is easier to suspect anoffering of being a gift as solicitation, motivated by the self-interested desirefor reward, the giver attempting to gain the favors of the powerful through his orher 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 bereduced, however, to a simple exchange (a transfer in which reciprocation is required)because of the hierarchical relation between the marabout and the believer, whichpowerfully 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 thepotential reward as direct reciprocation by the receiver. However, if charity issituated in the broader cycle of the salvation economy, it is revealed to be just asself-interested. Moreover, to the extent that the beggar is not in a position to refusethe gift, and is thus obligated to the giver (in a moral sense), he or she is moresusceptible of being instrumentalized in the almsgiving relationship. Whereas themarabout is a specialist in religious mediation, the beggar is a simple “instrumentof salvation for the wealthy,” just like the beggar in medieval Christianity.59
Charitable almsgiving and marabout offerings are both wrought with thesame tension between disinterestedness and self-interest. Both types of gifts pre-suppose that the giver is disinterested because they are supposed to be givenfreely, 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 acharitable habitus among the faithful—in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, it provokesan “interest in disinterestedness.”60 This disinterestedness is valued in the nameof higher religious interest because it is the condition for obtaining a nonobligatorytype of reciprocation provided by a third party distinct from the giver: a divinereward that vascillates between salvation in the afterlife and blessing in this life.
57. According to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, almsgiving “affords the courageous personwho practices it the prayers of the poor and the needy.” This phrase comes from oneof 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 PrayerEconomy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 2005).59. Jean-Louis Roch, “Le jeu de l’aumône au Moyen Age,” Annales ESC 44, no. 3 (1989):505–27, here p. 505.60. Pierre Bourdieu, Practial Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. Randal Johnson (Stan-ford: Polity Press, 1998), 85.3 6 0
While God does not return gifts, He does reward disinterestedness. This charitablehabitus produces a specific form of self-interest that we call “self-interested disin-terestedness.” It is, of course, not specific to Senegalese Islam but is a more generalcharacteristic of “monotheistic charity.”61 Islamic charity and Christian caritas havethe same Hebraic roots, and, from this perspective, there is a shared historicallegacy between the zedaqa, which designates charity in Judaism, and the Arabsøadaqa.62 This is most likely a characteristic of all religions involving salvation. Themore 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 immediatereward. The major universalist religions value an ideology of the “pure gift,” givenfreely and disinterestedly, as Jonathan Parry demonstrated in his critical rereadingof 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 thepractices of giving and emphasizes the triple obligation of giving, receiving, andabove all reciprocating. This understanding of the gift explains why he ultimatelyaccords little place to religious gifts and alms, which result in no obligation toreciprocate. Mauss scarcely dedicates more than a two-paragraph “note” to thisquestion 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 liketo 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, becauseNemesis avenges the poor and the gods for the superabundance of happiness andwealth of certain people who should rid themselves of it. This is the ancientmorality of the gift, which has become a principle of justice. The gods and thespirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to themand had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor andchildren. In recounting this we are recounting the history of the moral ideas of theSemites. The Arab sadaka originally meant exclusively justice, as did the Hebrewzedaqa: it has come to mean alms.” Mauss rightly notes the Hebraic origin of “thedoctrine of charity and alms ... which, with Christianity and Islam, spread aroundthe world.” He also identifies the affinity between alms and sacrifice—an importantpoint to which we will return and which will allow us to establish the link betweenMauss’s two texts on the gift and on sacrifice. But these brief remarks on almscome to a sudden end, with Mauss abruptly concluding: “However, let us returnto 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 medievaloccidental,” Hispania 204 (2000): 27–62. On zedaka (or zedaqa, as Mauss spells it), seeIlana 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. 3 6 1
Monotheistic charity strays too clearly from the model of reciprocity at theheart of The Gift.65 From this perspective, reciprocal and non-reciprocal forms ofthe gift can be opposed. Mauss focused on the former, which imply a counter-giftfrom the recipient; this explains why he, and later Claude Lévi-Strauss, consideredthe gift in light of reciprocity, and reciprocity in light of exchange.66 These notionsmust, however, be distinguished from one another, as Alain Testart rightly remindsus. Unlike an exchange, a gift is a non-obligatory transfer of goods for which thepossible reciprocation cannot itself be obligatory.67 In contrast with Maussian reci-procity, religious gifts—whether alms or offerings—represent non-reciprocal gifts.Although reciprocation is not entirely absent, it takes the form not of a counter-gift from the recipient, but of a gift from a third party. While it is still possible tospeak of a gift cycle, this circulation proceeds without reciprocation, either director “generalized.”68 The cycle of the religious gift is radically asymmetrical becauseit can only be completed through a vertical relationship with God, beyond thehorizontal relationships between humans. This verticality evokes the incommensu-rable distance separating God from the faithful—a point that Islam strongly empha-sizes and which makes it impossible to understand the religious gift according themodel of reciprocity between humans.69
The path that led us from alms in Senegal to the critical discussion of Mauss’stheses could (wrongly) seem to have taken us away from the death offering. Inreality, it sheds light on the rumor by showing how the tension between self-interest and disinterestedness develops in the case of religious charity—a tension
65. This reticence toward dealing with almsgiving can also be applied to the politicaldimension of The Gift. As Florence Weber notes in her preface to the recent Frenchedition of Essai sur le don (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), in his conclud-ing chapter Mauss criticizes the charitable conception of social assistance, stating that“the unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior, particularlywhen it has been accepted with no thought of returning it ... . Charity is still woundingfor him who has accepted it [here, there is a footnote mentioning the Quran, sura 2265] and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconsciousand injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver.” Mauss, The Gift, 83–84. In the finalpages 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 almsby 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: Agives to B, who gives to C, who gives to A. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The ElementaryStructures of Kinship, ed. and trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, andRodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).69. Hence the limits of Anita Guerreau-Jalabert’s proposition to consider the economy ofreligious gifts according to the model of generalized exchange that regulates matrimonialalliances in certain societies. Implying asymmetrical relations between social groupsthat are alternatively in the position of recipients and givers of women, the cycle ofmatrimonial reciprocity remains horizontal. The cycle of the religious gift, however,presupposes a relationship to God that is asymmetrical but also vertical.3 6 2
that Mauss placed at the center of the logic of the gift. The self-interested disinter-estedness that motivates charity explains the potential instrumentalization of therecipient by the giver. The interaction between the two parties—the immediateaction of giving—constitutes a relationship set within a higher-level relationshipand with a vertical connection to an invisible third party who is the source of thepossible reciprocation. The tension between self-interest and disinterestednessrunning through the almsgiving relationship is thus based on the fact that thehorizontal connection between the individuals can be nothing more than an instru-ment serving a vertical link to supernatural powers, whether to God or to morallymore ambiguous entities. The rumor of the death offering simply exploits—bypushing it to the extreme—a concern that already latently undermines the alms-giving relationship: the unsettling possibility that not only is this charity self-interested (which it always more or less is), but, even worse, that the self-interestof 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 theprescription of a marabout after a divinatory consultation (using the services ofmarabout as a healer-diviner is a common practice).70 Yet this type of almsgivingfurther increases the tension between self-interest and disinterestedness. At theend 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 isdesired, 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, toincrease one’s clientele, to obtain a promotion, or to pass a test. The marabout’sprescription 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 alsothe 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 theirsize 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 designatea 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 sourcesde l’imaginaire (Dakar: IFAN Cheikh Anta Diop, 2009); Gemmeke, Marabout Women inDakar. On the adaptation of these practices in France, see Liliane Kuczynski, Les mara-bouts africains à Paris (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003).72. “Objects given as sarax ... point to someone’s personal problem or secret, and theysuggest, by their size, something about the scale of the problem.” Gretchen Pfeil, “Saraxand the City,” 39. 3 6 3
The greater the gift, the greater the suspicion that the concerns motivating it areimportant. Worse still, it is often feared that the accomplishment of the giver’sdesire is achieved to the detriment of the recipient. Beggars often complain ofbeing 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 myhead 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 giversays 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 conveyor conceal something else and the concern that misfortune may be transmitted atthe same time as what is given. A watchman in Dakar put it like this: “If there isbad luck on it, it can get you.” Alms prescribed by marabouts are always suspiciousbecause they are very much self-interested, made by a giver “who is in need ofgiving.” The self-interest that they satisfy is not turned toward the afterlife butessentially focused on this life. The beggar is not only the instrument for realizingthe giver’s desire, but can also be the victim of this desire, whether he takes on thegiver’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 maraboutsare themselves ambiguous figures. The polysemy of the term “marabout” concealsa great diversity of actors and ritual practices, in addition to value judgments regard-ing their morality or their lawfulness in the eyes of Islam. Marabouts have a reputa-tion for being able to do evil as much as good, and their clients sometimes turn tothem 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 beingwhat is commonly referred to as “maraboutage” in Senegalese French. As a result,only a thin boundary separates magic from sorcery. From this perspective, themarabout represents a form of sorcery that can be deemed instrumental, distin-guishing it from cannibalistic witchcraft (dëmm).73 The figure of the marabout-sorcerer has increasingly replaced that of the cannibal witch, particularly in urbanareas, a change in the vernacular categories of malfeasance that led Fassin to talkabout the “dusk of witches.”74 Because of this, marabouts increasingly find them-selves the subject of suspicion and rumors of sorcery.
These suspicions put into play a recurring demarcation in popular discourseand public debate in Senegal between “good” and “bad” marabouts, and evenbetween “true” and “false” ones, depending on value judgments that bear as muchon the competence as on the morality of the individuals in question.75 These
73. The distinction between liggéey and dëmm overlaps with the distinction—traditionalin 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 deDakar (Paris: PUF, 1992), 139–46. This is an evolution that the Ortigues had alreadyobserved 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.3 6 4
distinctions partially intersect with the opposition between the religious and themagical aspects of the marabouts’ activity, the latter being divided in turn intomagic and sorcery.76 Good marabouts are supposed to pray to Allah, whereas badones are said to invoke jinns (jinne in Wolof). In reality, the situation is morecomplex. It is necessary to distinguish between good jinns (spirits that intercedebetween God and humans), “pagan” jinns (ceddo), and especially “malevolent”spirits (seytaane, from the Arabic shaytøan, meaning “demon, satan”). It is thus impor-tant to avoid considering “religion,” “magic,” and “sorcery” as well-defined, water-tight categories and to see them instead as ideal types enabling the organizationof a range of popular representations and moral judgments concerning Senegalesemarabouts and their practices.77 As András Zempléni observed about the workof marabouts as early as the 1960s, “if magic infiltrates the realm of sorcery, it alsoreaches certain zones of religion.”78 There is a whole range of intermediary oroverlapping figures between the “good” and the “bad” marabout, depending onthe 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, “Probléma-tiques de la magie-sorcellerie en islam et perspectives africaines,” Cahiers d’études afri-caines, 189/190, nos. 1/2 (2008): 81–99.77. Mauss and Hubert’s A General Theory of Magic is usually remembered for its canonicaldistinction between magic and religion. In reality, the entire text is swarming withambiguous phenomena that challenge the distinction, “those antinomian confusionswhich abound in the history of both magic and religion.” Marcel Mauss and HenriHubert, 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 mentalchez les Wolof et les Lébou (Sénégal)” (PhD diss., University of Paris, 1968), 449. 3 6 5
entities with whom he (or sometimes she) is in relation. The epitome of the badmarabout is thus the marabout-sorcerer who mobilizes malevolent spirits for mara-boutage, whether to directly harm the client’s enemies or whether the fulfillmentof the client’s wishes implies indirectly harming a third party. This figure of themarabout-sorcerer is all the more alarming since bad marabouts are always sus-pected of hiding behind a veneer of honor, masquerading as knowledgeable, hum-ble, and pious.79
The ambivalence of moral judgments regarding the work of marabouts isnever clearer than when this work concerns the spheres of wealth and power.Politicians and businessmen have a reputation for maintaining close ties with pow-erful marabouts and regularly soliciting their services. Fassin notes that “at everylevel of power, we observe connivance between those who have political powerand those who have magical power.”80 In this context, wealth and power can beseen 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 andalms may be involved). The semantic and moral ambiguity associated with thefigure of the marabout encourages us to imagine an alarming proximity betweenthe 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 almsthey receive, particularly those prescribed by marabouts. The more alms appearto be self-interested (that is, the more the giver’s interest is suspected of contribut-ing to the motivation for the gift, selfishly seeking wealth or power), the greaterthe risk that the satisfaction of this self-interest will occur to the detriment of therecipient. There is also a greater risk that these alms have involved the use of amarabout and a pact with malevolent powers (and not a relationship of submissionto God). Overall, the more charity is self-interested, the more it runs the risk oftipping over into sorcery. That is exactly what is at stake in the rumor of thedeath offering.
Gifts and Sacrifices
In discussions with our informants about the death offering, many of them toldus that it was in fact a “sacrifice.” One, a street musician of Fula origin, rememberedthe rumor as “the sacrifice story.” “It’s a sacrifice for killing people,” he said; “theygive passers-by a large sum, or they pick it up, and they end up dying of illnessor something else.” He added that it was “a sacrifice for evil,” and should bedistinguished from alms, which constitute “a sacrifice for good.”
These spontaneous connections between alms and sacrifice are not surpris-ing. In Wolof, the term sarax refers to both alms and sacrifice, and it is frequently
79. Gemmeke, Marabout Women in Dakar, 27.80. Fassin, Pouvoir et maladie en Afrique, 274.3 6 6
translated by the latter term in Senegalese French.81 The alms prescribed by mara-bouts are most often called sacrifices (the expression “take out a sacrifice” is oftenused in this sense). It also happens that alms include the sacrifice of an animal andthe gift of part of its meat to beggars. This type of alms thus constitutes the lastsequence of a blood sacrifice. Regardless of whether a blood sacrifice takes placeor not, all alms are considered by the actors themselves as being a sacrifice, asacrificial offering, to the extent that it is ultimately dedicated to or destined forGod.82 In the “relational economy of alms,” we must thus distinguish between thegiver who is also a “sacrifier” and the “sacrificee,” as distinct from the immediaterecipient: the giver gives to a beggar but at the same time sacrifices to God.83 Atthe frontier between alms, oblation, and sacrifice, the Wolof term sarax has asemantic range that is much larger than its etymon in Arabic, the meaning of whichis limited to charitable gifts.
Figure 3. Alms as sacrifice
In the scenario of the rumor, meat, one of the main ingredients of the deathoffering, is an allusion to animal sacrifice (meat given as charity generally comesfrom a sacrifice). However, as the blood sacrifice is made prior to the offering andno element of the scenario provides any information about it, all kinds of specula-tion 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 thecohabitation between Islam and “paganism,” see Jean Bazin, “Retour aux choses-dieux,” 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 offeringand 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 thesacrificer (the official performing the ritual) and the sacrifier (the person or personsbenefitting 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. 3 6 7
In this sense, the rumor allows those who spread it to anxiously interrogate themorality of the sacrifice. Just as the rumor of the death offering betrays the inherentcontradictions of the moral economy of alms, it also reveals the ambiguities runningthrough the different registers of sacrifice.
In Senegal, Muslim sacrifice provides the reference against which other typesof sacrifice are generally evaluated. Within Islam, the sacrifice of Ibrahim (Abraham)represents a canonical model.84 According to the Quran, Ibrahim dreams that hesacrifices his son and interprets this dream as a divine command, which he decidesto carry out. At the last moment, his son is miraculously replaced by a sheep. Eachyear, for Eid al-Kebir, a festival called Tabaski in Senegal, Muslims sacrifice asheep to commemorate Ibrahim’s submission to God.85 Part of the meat from theanimal 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 adignified way. This type of alms certainly appears to be the last sequence in a bloodsacrifice: charity to the poor completes the sacrifice to God.
Although, in Senegal, the sacrifice of Tabaski represents the supreme sacri-fice, there are other types of sacrificial practice that fall outside or on the edges ofthe Abrahamic model. In theory, according to Islam, a blood sacrifice may only bemade to God. This raises the question of the lawfulness of sacrifices to intermedia-ries between God and humans—for example, to jinns. Opinions about these prac-tices vary not only between different people and their religious affiliation, but alsodepending on the supposed intentions of the sacrifice or the identity of the spiritsfor whom it is destined (Muslim or pagan jinns, or malevolent spirits). This typeof sacrifice, which is illicit in the eyes of orthodox Islam, can sometimes be toleratedon its fringes. However, it is frequently condemned, at least publicly, because itis used more to create a profitable covenant with the spirits than to express thesacrifier’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’sfamous definition, “it is private, secret, mysterious and approaches the limit of aprohibited rite.”86 In contrast, certain sacrifices for covenants with the spirits arepart of an organized cult. For example, within the Lebou and Wolof religioustraditions, which are pre-Islamic in origin, sacrifice (whether or not this be a bloodsacrifice) constitutes a central modality of relations with the spirits. Spirits in thesetraditions 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
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, “Lesacrifice animal au regard des textes islamiques canoniques,” Archives de sciences socialesdes religions 101 (1998): 5–25.85. Anne-Marie Brisebarre and Liliane Kuczynski, eds., La Tabaski au Sénégal. Une fêtemusulmane 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 culte3 6 8
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 aresometimes assimilated to Muslim jinns. It even happens that the neighborhoodimam comes to sacrifice the animal while reciting verses from the Quran and thatpart of the meat is then distributed as charity to the poor, the rest going to thespirits and the community of sacrifiers.88 There are thus all sorts of overlappingelements and adaptive solutions between Muslim sacrifice and sacrifice for cove-nant with the spirits. In this domain, Islam represents both one of the terms ofopposition and the overall category from which this hierarchical opposition is cons-tructed. “Pagan” sacrifices are subordinate to the Muslim model, which enablesus to understand them by way of contrast. The subordination of the ndëpp to Islamseems to have been further accentuated since the work of Zempléni in the 1960s,and more recent studies have suggested that believers themselves situate the cultof rab and tuur “in perfect Muslim orthodoxy.”89 This explains why all sacrificialpractices in Senegal can potentially be interpreted in terms of sarax, a categorythat lies on the border between alms, offering, and sacrifice but which in any caserefers to Islam. In the realm of offering and sacrifice, this semantic dominance ofthe vernacular terms derived from the Arabic søadaqa can also be rather broadlyfound among the Islamized populations of West Africa (for example, with theBambara saraka or the Hausa sadaka90).
A tension between two sacrificial registers thus begins to emerge. This is notso much a direct opposition between two watertight categories as a sort of tensionthat is likely to affect all sacrificial practices because of the overlap and contamina-tion between registers. On the one hand, the model of Ibrahim’s sacrifice marksthe 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 themargins of Islam, the sacrifice for covenant with the spirits, either as private magicor 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 questionof the sacrifier’s self-interest and the place of reciprocation in the economy ofsacrifice.
This tension between self-interest and disinterestedness was underlined byMauss and Hubert in their essay Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, first publishedin 1899 (and translated into English in 1964). This text anticipates the analysesthat would come to be at the heart of The Gift twenty-five years later. Havingobserved 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,” Psycho-pathologie 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, seeGuy Nicolas, Don rituel et échange marchand dans une société sahélienne (Paris: Institutd’ethnologie, 1986). 3 6 9
of a self-interested gift along the model of do ut des (I give to you so you give tome): “But this abnegation and submission are not without their selfish aspect. Thesacrifier gives up something of himself but he does not give himself. Prudentlyhe 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 frequentlybeen conceived of as a form of contract. Fundamentally there is perhaps no sacrificethat has not some contractual element. The two parties present exchange theirservices and each gets his due.”91
Maurice Godelier pointed out the limits of the Maussian theory of the sacrifice-contract, according to which people manage to compel the gods or spirits throughsacrifice.92 In reality, people are in a dependent relationship with regard to thesacrificee, the ultimate recipient of the sacrifice. This hierarchical asymmetryexplains why the sacrifice is so often thought of as the sacrifier repaying a debt (inWolof, the terms njot—“repurchase”—or yool—“retribution”—are sometimes usedabout sacrifice). The sacrifier is not able to oblige the sacrificee to reciprocate, butthe latter has the (supernatural) means of demanding his due, or at least it isimagined so. Sacrifice is thus neither truly a contract nor an exchange: it is a giftto the gods or the spirits, made more or less freely but also more or less self-interested or gratuitous.
The logic of sacrifice appears to be ultimately spread between the two polesof abnegation and self-interest. In Senegal, this takes the form of a tension betweentwo sacrificial registers that partly overlap: sacrifice as submission to God (in whichthe potential reciprocation by the sacrificee plays a secondary role) and sacrificeas 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 slippagesare possible, if only because spirits can be seen as intermediaries between God andhumans. This can be summarized as follows: the more egotistically self-interestedthe objective of the sacrifice, the more the sacrifice as submission to God slidestoward the sacrifice as demand to the spirits. The latter can itself range fromsacrifice for intercession to sacrifices made to malevolent powers.
As Mauss and Hubert argue, in the case of a sacrifice of request “the impor-tance of the victim is in direct proportion to the gravity of the vow.”93 Taken toits extreme, this logic leads to human sacrifice. The sacrificial victim is no longerlimited to a simple animal, a symbolic substitute for a human being: it is actuallya person. This sacrificial victim provides an exchange value, or rather the price ofthe debt contracted with malevolent spirits as an individual makes a pact withmalevolent powers to satisfy his (or her) egotistical desires for wealth or power.Sacrifice thus becomes sorcery. This imaginary surrounding human sacrifices isvery much present in the rumors of sorcery on the African continent, particularly
91. Mauss and Hubert, Sacrifice, 100.92. Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999), 29–31 and 179–98.93. Mauss and Hubert, Sacrifice, 66.3 7 0
in central and western Africa. This can be seen in the case of Gabon, where for anumber of years the many cases of “ritual crimes” have provoked genuine moralpanic within civil society and the highest echelons of the state.
Since the mid-2000s (at least), Senegal has also been concerned by this kindof rumor, as can be seen in a number of macabre news items that made nationalheadlines.94 The Fama Niane affair, referring to the name of the woman founddismembered on a Dakar beach in March 2009 just before the local elections, isundoubtedly the (alleged) “case” of human sacrifice that has had the greatestimpact 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 centralrole in the crystallization of suspicion. It is generally assumed that the personordering the sacrifice is a politician seeking to access or maintain a powerful positionby occult means. Second, these murders are not seen simply as heinous crimes, butas sacrificial rites in the true sense. They are believed to involve victims immolatedin specific ways (the dismembering of the body and the attention paid to specificparts in the context of sacrificial butchery) as well as sacrificers (“fetishers” andother bad marabouts), sacrifiers (politicians), and sacrificees (malevolent powerswhose identities remain obscure in most discourses). In popular discourse and themedia in Senegal, human sacrifices are often seen as a distortion of Muslim sacri-fice, the canon according to which they are conceived. They imitate the religiousrite (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 ofthe ritual and pervert its moral value.
It so happened that the rumor of the death offering occurred a few monthsafter the murder of Fama Niane. It is therefore not surprising that this case wasspontaneously evoked by several of our informants when we asked them aboutthe rumor, which was situated in a chronological series of other rumors and newsitems that contributed to structuring the interpretations to which it gave rise. Thedeath offering was thus interpreted as a unique form of human sacrifice concealedunder the appearance of a sacrificial offering, or, more precisely, of a charitablegift following an animal sacrifice (revealed by the presence of meat in the contentof the offering).
Charitable Gifts and Sorcery Debts
At the end of this process, all that remains is to bring together the elements ofcontextualization and interpretation invoked in this article in order to explain therelational economy implied in the rumor. We have seen that alms—whatever theymay 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 the1970s, 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. 3 7 1
within a larger network of relations including other virtual actors. Concrete inter-action between the giver and the recipient is only the visible part of the gift, andit implies another part that is invisible because it is imagined. The latter is madeup of all the relationships, assumed by the participants, which extend the cycle ofthe gift beyond the material transfer. Some of these relations are, from our pointof view, purely imaginary (relationships with God or the spirits), while others referto interactions that are certainly real and take place before or after the transfer (forexample, the prescription of alms during a consultation with a marabout). Thereare, 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 realintentions. In Senegal, the realm of possibilities in which almsgiving is situatedstretches from pious charity to sorcery, depending on the perceived balancebetween the giver’s self-interest and disinterestedness.
In the case of the rumor of the death offering, it is also necessary to distinguishbetween an overt form (what the alms appear to be) and a hidden form (what thealms actually conceal) within the invisible part of the gift. The overt form ofthe death offering is that of alms representing the last sequence of an animalsacrifice (signified by the offering of meat). This respects—at least putatively—the canon of Muslim sacrifice: someone sacrifices an animal to God and then givespart of the meat away as charity. But the hidden form of the death offering is quitedifferent: the alms are actually the first sequence in a human sacrifice. They areeven 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 areintended for “mystical” powers, whose identities remain unclear in the scenarioof the rumor, as in most discourses on the subject. Our informants also assumedthat a marabout was involved (the death offering generally being interpreted as aform of maraboutage). This can be summarized in the following way (playing onthe double meaning of the term sarax and its local translations as “alms” or “sacri-fice”): a giver sacrifices someone by giving them something out of sacrifice.
Although it appears disinterested, the gift is actually instrumentalized for thepurposes of a hidden sacrifice that is extremely self-interested. Unbeknownst tohimself 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 himselfor herself involved in an obscure relationship of a completely different kind, tohis or her detriment. He or she is objectified and exchanged in an occult transactionbetween the giver and the malevolent powers, sacrificed to the latter in exchangefor 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 the4×4 and the money distributed), the sacrifice seems to amount to settling a debtwith the malevolent powers. Indeed, human sacrifices are generally consideredaccording to the model of debt: out of greed, an individual indebts himself orherself to malevolent powers to which he or she ends up having to sacrifice humanlives. The death offering is thus a gift concealing a debt. The repayment of a debtengaged through sorcery is disguised under the appearance of a charitable gift.3 7 2
In reality, in the scenario of the rumor the overt content of the alms already openedthem up to the suspicion of being a sorcery sacrifice. The thing that is givenbetrays the true nature of the relationship between the giver and the recipient.The invisible part of the death offering, its occult part, appears implicitly throughthe three main ingredients of the “deadly package,” which each evoke an aspectof 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 ambiguouselement of the offering, of which there are two possible forms (overt and hidden):the animal sacrifice that precedes the charitable gesture and the human sacrificedisguised as a gift.
Sorcery and the Crisis of the Gift
The death offering represents a hyperbolic perversion of almsgiving and revealsthe occult underside of the moral economy on which it is based: a charitable giftis used to conceal a sorcery sacrifice—in other words, precisely the opposite ofwhat it should be. What is shocking about the death offering and, as a result, whatgives the rumor its evocative strength, is not so much that greedy individuals areready to sacrifice their neighbors to serve their egotistical desires (no one needsto be convinced of this) but rather that this greed is able to corrupt the charity atthe heart of religious solidarity by taking on its shape. The oxymoronic form therumor 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 poisonedchalice, which reoccurs in stories of sorcery from elsewhere in Africa. Several authors 3 7 3
have stressed that the new forms assumed by sorcery in contemporary Africansocieties attest to a generalized crisis of the gift. Alain Marie interprets the manysuspicions of sorcery that mark the life histories of his informants in Ivory Coastas a symptom of the crisis of solidarity within the family.95 Filip De Boeck paintsa similar picture regarding child-witch accusations in the Democratic Republic ofCongo.96 Children, sometimes very young infants, are accused by their entourageof having become witches after receiving a cursed gift from someone. The giftappears gratuitous, but through it the child in reality contracts a debt to the under-world. According to De Boeck, these stories of child-witches reveal the crisis ofhabitual 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 thiskind of sorcery crisis. It also shows that the crisis affects not only solidarity withinthe family and gifts among relatives, but also religious solidarity and anonymouscharitable practices on a broader scale. This sorcery crisis can be interpreted asthe symptom of a more general crisis in the mechanisms of redistribution in theeconomic and political context of Senegal at the end of the 2000s. As we haveseen, this context provided a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of suspicionsabout 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 bea “total social phenomenon,” in which “all kinds of institutions are given expressionat one and the same time.”98 The crisis of the gift is a phenomenon that is inextrica-bly economic, political, moral, and religious in nature (the latter two aspects beingthe ones we have focused on in this article).
In reality, the rumor of the death offering simply exploits preexisting con-cerns about the morality of religious gifts in the context of Senegalese Islam bypushing them to the extreme. The rumor also highlights the “moral perils” ofalmsgiving, to use Parry’s expression.99 By definition, religious gifts (alms, offer-ings, or sacrifices) can never be reduced to a material transfer between a giver anda recipient, but also imply imagined relations with invisible agents. As a result,they always contain an element of moral ambivalence and ambiguity as to theirdestination that authorizes all kinds of suspicions and runs the risk of tipping theminto the realm of personal magic or, worse, into sorcery. In a context in which allalms are also sacrificial offerings, both a gift and a sacrifice (as shown by the double
95. Alain Marie, “Avatars de la dette communautaire. Crise des solidarités, sorcellerieet procès d’individualisation (itinéraires abidjanais),” in L’Afrique des individus, ed. AlainMarie (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 249–328.96. Filip De Boeck, “The Divine Seed: Children, Gift, and Witchcraft in the DemocraticRepublic 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, 399. Jonathan Parry, “On the Moral Perils of Exchange,” in Money and the Morality ofExchange, ed. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989), 64–93.3 7 4
use of the term sarax), the rumor anxiously interrogates the specter of possibleconnections between these two registers. In so doing, it reveals a disconcertinggray area between religion, magic, and sorcery. To whom are the givers reallysacrificing 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-waygame, instrumentalized by egotistical givers and defenseless against the invisiblepowers of the sacrificees?
This is without a doubt a general characteristic of this kind of rumor. Theydramatize tensions, ambiguities, and concerns that are inherent in particular socialsituations (in this instance the almsgiving relationship). They are collective elabora-tions that, through the innumerable discussions and comments they provoke, allowfor the exploration of the occult aspects of sociality. Ultimately, far from being asimple anecdote, the rumor of the death offering is a heuristic example that canhelp us to understand the moral economy that regulates gifts between humans aswell as their relationship to God and the spirits.
Julien BondazEA HICSA/Labex CAP (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain (EHESS-CNRS)
