from Africa Today Volume 50, Number 4

Excerpt from

Encompassing the State: Sacrifice and Security in the Hunters' Movement of Côte d'Ivoire

Joseph Hellweg

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In the absence of adequate police protection in Côte d'Ivoire during the 1990s, hunters began patrolling communities against crime. Worried government ministers portrayed hunters as traditionalists out of place in the modern world and capable of destabilizing it. Officials appealed to distinctions between civil and customary law to repress the hunters' movement in the country's more prosperous areas, but they approved hunters' patrols in peripheral zones, recreating the indirect, customary rule through which French colonizers once regulated hunters. Hunters recognized the contradictions inherent in this compromise and took advantage of them, creating security procedures and networks grounded in their sacrificial hunting ethos and organizational hierarchy. In this way, they encompassed the domain of state security within their hunting roles to stabilize, rather than subvert, the nation-state.

Nyama, Alms, and Crime

In 1996 in the Ivoirian port city of San-Pédro, hunter Dramane Doumbia used a surprising analogy to explain why he and other Jula and Senufo hunters, called dozos,¹ had become urban security agents across Côte d'Ivoire (CI) in the 1990s.² He said that dozos living in towns had begun to worry about the growth of crime as much as dozos living in villages worried about the danger of a vindictive soul-force called nyama.³ Dozos believe that nyama lurks in the bodies of the game they kill.⁴ Unless they repel it with incantations and medicinal plants, nyama will sicken those who consume the meat, preventing dozos from distributing it to family, neighbors, and other dozos as a sacrifice (saraka, in Jula).⁵

In this article, based on three years of fieldwork among Ivoirian dozos, I argue that dozos reconciled their hunting ethos and security work through the hierarchical logic and practice of sacrifice.⁶ Dozos not only encompassed both their new hunting activities and security tasks within their sacrificial logic, but their very status as dozos--whether as hunters or security agents--depended upon their participation in sacrifices of various kinds. If hierarchy amounts to "the encompassing of the contrary," as Louis Dumont has argued, then the dozo security movement was a hierarchical venture, integrating as it did dozos' historical hunting practices and contemporary security initiatives within a unifying sacrificial idiom (Dumont 1980:243).