Customer Reviews

Genii of the River Niger

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There is an underground constellation of spirit possession centers that stretches around the globe. Here we find people in trance, dreams moving to the first rank of importance, and known spirits, gods, and ghosts taking possession of living humans, speaking from their mouths. I'm not asking you to believe in all this. It happens in such places, right before your eyes. You will make of it what you will. That's how we understand "reality" every time, isn't it ? You can read about such things among the Mehinaku of the Amazon rainforest, in the candomble centers of urban Brazil, see it happen at the temple of Balaji in Rajasthan, India, or as I have, at many sites in Goa, or at Kataragama in Sri Lanka. The vision experiences of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, Vailankanni, Guadalupe, Medjugorje, and Fatima are closely related. These are but a few of the myriad places where it occurs. Local spirits seize control of the mind of participants, they go into a trance and speak with another voice. Such persons may also indulge in violent physical movement. Music may accompany such events or not. Jean-Marie Gibbal recorded in great detail the atmosphere and mythology of such a spirit possession cult in a remote region of Mali, along the waterways of the inland Niger River delta. While the detail may be overwhelming for a reader not concerned to learn such things, the writing is extremely poetic, the text free of the indigestible jargon of so many French (and other modern) anthropologists.

As Gibbal's description proceeds, we realize the economic distress of the area in the 1980s: dessication was eating up the land, the water was slowly disappearing, people forced to migrate or die. On top of the ecological/economic pressure, fundamentalist Islam was on the rise, after centuries of another, more mystic Islam that tolerated far more variation in patterns of worship and belief. The strict interpretation of Islam labelled the Ghimbala cult, the cult of the water genii, "a work of the devil". Yet the gaw, or healer-priests, persisted. Gibbal traces some history of the cult, describes the ceremonies, tries to understand the different levels of gaw and how they train their successors, and the connection of musicans to gaw. In this aspect, it was pleasingly astonishing to come across the familiar name of Ali Farka Toure, the great Malian musician, who paid homage to the genii and the river cult. You meet him far from the covers of CDs sold in urban music stores or on the net.

What makes this book a 5 star one for me, however, is not the wealth of detail supplied about the river genii and the ceremonies conducted with their participation. Nor is it even the poetic nature of the text. I admired this book because of the honesty and thought of the author. He puts himself in the picture to a great extent. He does not hide beside some curtain of "objectivity". He admits that he too was influenced by the spirits he studied, thereby---I felt---admitting his common humanity with the people he studied, not trying to laugh off their beliefs with a superior European shrug of the shoulders. Above all, I liked his comparison of anthropologists to artists. The painter allows himself to be penetrated by the surrounding world, then tries to interpret that relationship for others. A true anthropologist does the same. A work of anthropology, like a work of art, is not a piece of reality---it is an attempt to interpret reality. You cannot express a dream or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in words. Nor can you do the same for a culture or even a small part of a culture. So much is lost in translation from one world to another, from one language to another. Gibbal argues this point wonderfully well. This is a rare book.