Sacred forests constitute the traditional locus of political authority of the Jola population in the Casamance region of Senegal. The forests are strictly out of bounds to anyone who is not initiated into their secrets. In the 1980s separatists used the forests to organise their struggle for an independent Casamance. On 6 December 1983, policemen wanted to interfere with a secret meeting in the sacred forest of Diabir, close to the regional capital. The policemen suspected the members of the separatist movement of planning yet another subversive activity, and they thus entered the forest to arrest the suspects. This provoked...

There are various ways to travel from the national capital Dakar to the remote region of Casamance. Many tourists go on daily flights operated by Air Sénégal. However, most Senegalese cannot afford this luxury and travel by road. The journey takes one through a dry and dusty savannah dotted with occasional baobab trees, to a lush landscape of forests and valleys of rice paddies along tidal creeks and rivers. However, before arriving at one’s destination in Casamance one needs to traverse The Gambia, the state that separates the southern region from the rest of Senegal (see Map 1). This idiosyncratic...

Jola rites of passage produce local subjects. However, many members of the Thionck Essyl community no longer live in the village and are dispersed across all Senegal and beyond. We therefore also need an assessment of how a diasporic community reproduces itself in the face of the long-distance migration of its members. Chapter 2 demonstrates how male initiation reproduces local society. Contrary to Appadurai’s rather gloomy view of the decreased capability of local communities to produce locality (Appadurai 1996: 178–99), this chapter takes the point further and attests to the continued capacity of a translocal community to reproduce itself...

Being a good politician requires multifarious personal qualities, some of which depend on the cultural context of the political contest. One specific requirement for politicians operating in Casamance is that they have to be initiated. This chapter deals with the participation of a Senegalese politician in the Jola initiation, and the consequences for a local political contest. The politician is Robert Sagna, the former Senegalese Minister of Agriculture and the present mayor of Ziguinchor. He is a long-time member of the Socialist Party, the party that dominated Senegalese politics until early 2000. Robert Sagna has had a successful career, in...

While the modernist reading of ritual and religion assumed that traditional rituals would vanish in the process of modernisation, the evidence shows that ritual and religion are in no way in decline. This invites us to critically review the assumptions of modernisation theory. One of these assumptions is that urbanisation equals modernisation and that urbanites no longer identify with the traditions associated with their ethnic identity. As Max Gluckman famously said, ‘an African townsman is a townsman, an African miner is a miner’. The extent to which ethnicity continues to prevail in urban areas has been one of the research...

The masquerade is the public face of the secret society. In the past, numerous examples could be given of West African secret societies that operated masks. One of the questions raised in the research on these secret societies is how these secret societies related to public political structures. The intricacies of the debate focused on the extent of the competition between, or interdependence of, these structures. The Poro society, undoubtely the best researched secret society in West Africa, intervenes in many spheres of life, and its intricate political organisation has been amply discussed.¹ In large parts of the precolonial societies...

The Kumpo masquerade is one of the cultural traditions of the Casamance region that is regularly performed in a variety of settings. In many Jola villages, Kumpo is performed by the Kumpo secret society at the village square. However, the Kumpo is today also performed at cultural festivals and hotels, for audiences quite different from those in the villages. The troupes that perform the masquerade in these settings are paid for their performance, which is thus commodified. So far studies on commodification have focused on the social life of objects, which either acquire the status of a commodity and become...

The Casamance cultural repertoire is not restricted to the performances discussed so far but also encompasses cultural forms commonly understood as popular culture. High culture – to use a controversial term to denote the cultural expressions usually associated with it, without suggesting a hierarchy – is far less disseminated. Yet in some middle-class interiors, one may find modern paintings, some of them made by Casamance artists. Although they cater to an audience consisting of the local middle class, the expatriate community and tourists, these artists are inspired by local traditions. In their representations of traditional culture, the artists focus on masquerades and...

Concealment and revelation are part and parcel of the fieldwork experience. Secrecy is performed not only between Casamançais: they often performed secrecy in interaction with me. Secrets and their revelation are often ambiguous, or deliberately meant to produce ambiguity (Piot 1993). I was often at a loss as to what was secret and what not. Often, it was hard to tell whether secrecy was performed for all or just for me. Yet the ambiguity of this fieldwork experience is usually not represented in the ethnographic text. In ethnographic texts fieldwork is often made to appear as the gradual penetration of...