Among the Songhay people of Niger, the Hauka are spirits who assume the manners, uniforms and bureaucratic identities of colonial Europeans.

During possession ceremonies, mediums do not merely represent colonial authority but physically reproduce and distort it. The coloniser returns as gesture, posture, voice and bodily spectacle—mimicked, mocked and made available for collective interpretation. 

Combining ethnography with colonial history, he asks how political memory survives outside official archives: in rhythm, sensation, ritual and the trained body. The Hauka become a way of understanding how domination is absorbed and transformed, and how communities inhabit histories that have supposedly ended but continue to organise the present. 

A substantial work of sensory anthropology and postcolonial thought, particularly useful for readers interested in embodied memory, mimesis, ritual power and the limits of treating culture as something that exists primarily in language.

Routledge paperback, 1995. Light cover and edge wear; clean, firm copy.