IN HIS 1927 description of the power association known as Komo, French colonial administrator Louis Tauxier reproduced lyrics of several Komo songs, including this selection: “Komo came today to entertain people in the village. It did not come to look for problems.” The text follows with “This is said to reassure folks, at least in principle (because people in the village know what to expect from Komo ceremonies). So, the Komo did not come this evening to track down and kill malicious sorcerers. Komo came simply to joke around and entertain people” (1927, 285).

If Komo performers sought to reassure people, joke around, or entertain audiences, as the song intimates, then they operated with their audiences in mind and anticipated certain reactions. Writing more than fifty years later, Patrick McNaughton explained, “The Komo [dancer] wants his audience to know that he is being honest” (1979a, 38). Indeed, Komo members, like members of other power associations, have long designed performances to engage disparate audiences. As we have seen, the 1950 photograph attributed to Père Germain Nadal shows performers who look out at the photographer and thus at us (fig. intro. 8). They hold their onlookers’ attention. As much as power association events vary from chapter to chapter and occasion to occasion, performer-audience exchanges in any place are integral to the events. Performers acknowledge their audiences and demand mutual recognition.

Power association leaders I interviewed repeatedly demonstrated full attention to onlookers and audiences, including the foreign, female researcher. As he worked to harness tangible materials and intangible energies in order to contribute metaphysically to the smooth delivery of a pregnant woman’s baby and the healing of another person’s broken arm, Karfa Coulibaly occasionally peered at my camera. A sequence of photographs from a daytime event shows Coulibaly holding a chameleon early in the process and then pouring beer and drinking it. He looks at my lens and toward people he may have imagined would see the images of him (figs. 3.1–3.5). After Coulibaly finished his work, which had also involved handling a chicken, he removed an almost-new bar of soap from a box and washed his hands. Weeks earlier, I had presented him with the box of soap as a gift, and we had discussed the handwashing recommendations issued in light of international concern regarding the spread of avian influenza. When he carefully and deliberately showed me the soap and washed his hands after having handled a chicken, I understood Coulibaly’s actions as a micro-performance designed for me within the context of our prior conversation. He had not previously nor has he since so deliberately washed his hands with a bar of soap in front of me.

Performer-Audience Interactions

I have repeatedly heard community members across the three-corner region praise power association performers who captured audiences’ attention. People who shared stories with me talked about masqueraders who danced with fast steps or who twirled without falling or causing helmet masks to tumble to the ground. They recalled performers who convincingly identified challenges, whether existing or potential, that individuals or groups faced and recommended remedies. During the overnight phase of power association performances that I attended or people described to me, performers commented on actual or possible situations in a town.¹ At one event that Karfa Coulibaly hosted in Sokouraba, power association leaders visiting from another town announced that a snake recently bit a woman in Sokouraba because the woman’s father had not fulfilled an obligation. The visiting specialists also reported to the audience that another woman in the town died from a tree fall because she had tried to harm her husband. A snake had bitten a woman in Sokouraba the previous day, and a woman died after falling from a shea nut tree several weeks before the performance. My research associate, Dahaba Ouattara, suggested that because the specialists who made the pronouncements did not live in Sokouraba, the audience in Sokouraba might have found the specialists’ assertions especially credible.²

FIGURE 3.1. Power association leader Karfa Coulibaly at work, peering at the camera lens and twirling a chameleon by its tail. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, April 8, 2006. Fieldwork image: 2006–1222. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

FIGURE 3.2. Power association leader Karfa Coulibaly drinking locally brewed beer from a gourd. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, April 8, 2006. Fieldwork image: 2006–1226. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

FIGURE 3.3. Power association leader Karfa Coulibaly expectorating locally brewed beer over an installation of power objects. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, April 8, 2006. Fieldwork image: 2006–1228. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

FIGURE 3.4. Power association leader Karfa Coulibaly at work with a chicken in his right hand and a knife in his left hand. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, April 8, 2006. Fieldwork image: 2006–1238. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

FIGURE 3.5. Power association leader Karfa Coulibaly looking at the camera lens as he pours locally brewed beer from a plastic container into a gourd. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, April 8, 2006. Fieldwork image: 2006–1250. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

Whether they dance masks or wield fire during an overnight event, power association performers often identify certain spectators to pull away from a crowd for impromptu consultations conducted in private. People told me that when they have attended performances as general audience members, they have eagerly awaited selection for private counsel. Somewhat contradictorily, they also said that as individuals they had rarely, if ever, actually been selected from the crowd. Perhaps the infrequency conferred value and induced expectation. A woman who was from one family of power association leaders and had married into another emphasized that receiving personal guidance from a Komo or Kono leader was a rare happenstance in any person’s life, and some people might only receive such instruction once in an entire lifetime.³

Dahaba Ouattara garnered advice from a Wara performer at one nighttime event in March 2006 and a Kono performer at another nighttime event nearly a year later. Ouattara sat next to me during the fire-wielding Wara performance. One of the performers approached us, pointed at Ouattara, and escorted him away from the crowd. Ouattara returned to my side several minutes later. As he and I walked back to my house later that night, Ouattara told me the performer had provided him with two sets of instructions, one designed to help him avoid future health complications and the other designed to help him achieve personal goals. To maintain his health, he received instructions to fill a gourd with fresh milk and seven white kola nuts before placing the gourd on an anthill. Ouattara also learned that to realize his goals, he should catch a live swallow, announce his desires to the bird, and then release the bird from a pile of sweepings of household debris. The Wara performer gave Ouattara explicit permission to insult the performer if Ouattara found the recommendations misguided. The invitation to scorn the performer in the future seemed to encourage Ouattara to have confidence in the prescriptions.⁴ Komo and Kono performers reportedly operate in similar ways. After he attended an overnight Kono performance the following March, Ouattara told me that one of the masqueraders had selected him from the crowd to offer advice about a dream and money.⁵ An account of Komo performances published in 1929 suggests that for nearly a century, if not longer, power association performers may have endeavored to offer their audiences insights into their lives and prescriptions for their well-being. The text refers to an audience’s attentive listening to a Komo performer who offered news from the local area and broader region and provided certain recommendations (Travélé 1929, 137–143).

Skillful power association performers observe their surroundings and sustain audiences’ attention as they attempt to bolster their claims to knowledge, power, and authority. Some six miles southwest of Sokouraba sits Bougoula, the hometown of national politician and international diplomat Mélégué Traoré. He and his brothers also served as leaders of the town’s Kono chapter in the early 2000s. When Ouattara traveled there for a Kono performance in April 2006, I asked him to deliver a note to Traoré, whom I had met briefly at the opening of the Centre de Recherche pour la Promotion et la Sauvegarde de la Culture Sénoufo in Bobo-Dioulasso one month prior. My note, which was a reintroduction and an interview request, apparently became part of the masquerade. Ouattara told me that when he arrived in Bougoula, he informed Karfa Coulibaly of the note for Traoré. Ouattara and Coulibaly approached a man who worked as an assistant for the Traoré family Kono chapter. Although the assistant advised the men to hold on to the note because the leaders of the chapter were busy, Ouattara noticed that a little while later, the assistant called Coulibaly to the Traoré Kono building. Then, after the performance began, Mélégué Traoré’s brother, who donned a Kono mask, announced to the crowd that someone had brought a note for Mélégué Traoré to the performance but had not yet given it to him. Mélégué Traoré’s brother twice repeated that the person with the note needed to present it to Traoré—or, if the person did not present the note, he, Traoré’s brother, would reveal to the audience the identity of the person who carried the note. Ouattara told me that after Traoré’s brother made the announcements, Coulibaly approached Traoré’s brother and handed him something, presumably the note I had written. Traoré’s brother then presented the note to Traoré in front of the crowd, thus confirming the accuracy of his announcements and demonstrating his authority.⁶

Performer-audience exchange as a central feature of performance design has been a subject of study in other contexts, as well. For example, twentieth-century avant-garde performers and audiences in Europe and North America often explored the interactive dimension of theater productions. Drawing on Max Herrmann’s early twentieth-century theorizations of performance, Erika Fischer-Lichte explains that “the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators enables and constitutes performance” (2008, 32).⁷ She characterizes such interactions as part of “a self-referential and ever-changing feedback loop” (2008, 38). Thus, she focuses attention on the back-and-forth between actors and spectators that unfolds during an event to shape it and give it meaning. A performance that takes place at one moment necessarily differs from a performance that takes place at another moment because the performer-audience interactions are specific to each instance.

“Bodily co-presences” and “self-referential and ever-changing feedback loops” are critical features of power association events, but twentieth-century European and Euro-American understandings of African performances diminished observers’ attention to such details; the specific concerns and discourses that give rise to the events often escaped foreign assessments. Studies of performances in Africa have frequently, although not always, foregrounded group responses rather than individual experiences or interactions. When Ladislas Segy highlighted “communal need” and “homogeneous mass consciousness” (1976, 12) in African masquerades, his view discounted individual experiences. Throughout the whole of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, writers have focused on collective identity and group response in African masquerades and other arts (see also Monroe 2018, 57–58, 59).⁸ Charting a different orientation, I emphasize the role of specific individuals and particular contexts in the shaping of each performance.⁹

My approach draws on the generative work of Margaret Thompson Drewal, who, in the early 1990s, urged scholars of performance across the African continent to examine the specificity of individual events as well as the particular people involved in them. “Since what performers do reflects their assessments of the moment,” she explains, “it would be naïve and reductionistic to think of their performances as a preformulated enactment or re-enactment of some authoritative past—or even as a reproduction of society’s norms and conventions” (Drewal 1991, 44, emphasis in the original; see also Drewal 1989, 29). A masquerade reflects more than the repetition of actions rooted in a mythical past or grounded in a bounded cultural or ethnic group identity. Historian John Thabiti Willis (2014) examines the late nineteenth-century instance of a woman who brought an Egungun masquerade to “Otta” (Ota), a town in present-day Nigeria. The woman’s senior co-wife sponsored the first performance of the masquerade. By tracing the inheritance of, transfer of, and investment in a particular Egungun masquerade in a single town, Willis attends to complexities of the practice. The author also points at the fact that masquerades reflect personalities and negotiations particular to time and place.

A masquerade, like other performances in Africa and elsewhere, depends on audience members’ interactions with performers. In his meta-analysis of masquerade and other forms of what he defines as public secrecy, or “knowing what not to know,” Michael Taussig (1999) considers differences between just and unjust revelations. Following from his own childhood response to a masquerade as a member of its audience, Taussig concludes that “just revelation” or “unmasking” maintains rather than destroys a secret (1999, 2). The secret—or the public secret, the thing one knows not to know—is the human wearer of a mask. Taussig’s framing of masquerade as a public secret hints at the centrality of masquerade audiences—the people who must know what not to know—to the events.¹⁰ As anthropologist Elizabeth Tonkin observes, “Every Mask [or masked performer] is part of an event, which can only be intelligible when understood as a performance with complex interactions between Masks and non-maskers” (1979, 243; see also Cole 1985, 22).

Perhaps unclear boundaries between performers and audiences during events once made it difficult for scholars to focus on the reception of masquerades (Drewal 1991, 36), or perhaps an emphasis on authorship in European and Euro-American modernist scholarship has resulted in a lack of critical attention to the role of audiences in some studies of masquerade (Strother 1998, 268; see also Einstein [1915] 2004). Yet disparate audiences participate in, respond to, shape, evaluate, and are affected by masquerades (e.g., Arnoldi 1995, 120–130; Lamp 1996, 171–176; Förster 1997, 559–564; McNaughton 2008, 55, 145–147; Bouttiaux 2009; Gagliardi 2013; Fenton 2022); they experience events phenomenologically (e.g., Lifschitz 1988; Argenti 2007, 205–210; Homann 2014/2015); and they engage in controversies in interpretation (e.g., Homann 2018, 2020). Dancers in audiences may reflect on performances they have witnessed as they contribute to new masquerade designs (e.g., Strother 1998). Audiences and their responses to performances are not uniform or even necessarily predictable. A single person’s or particular group’s understanding of a certain mask or event may at times reframe or invert intended meanings (e.g., Strother 1998, 267–281).

Performers may expect, and even demand, certain behavior from their audiences. Personal interaction taught me, as an audience member, etiquette for attending power association performances in western Burkina Faso. During a spring 2006 performance in Sokouraba, I stood with my arms crossed at my chest. As masqueraders from the hunters’ association chapter of the nearby town of Kangala danced, a hunter from Kangala summoned Dahaba Ouattara, who was standing next to me. Ouattara talked to the hunter and then returned to where I was standing. The hunter had asked Ouattara to tell me to drop my arms. I complied. Performers, Ouattara explained, may perceive such a posture as threatening.¹¹ During subsequent interviews with two hunters familiar with the mechanics of their respective chapters’ masquerades, the men confirmed that hunters consider certain stances suspicious. The positions suggest a person may be attempting to launch an invisible weapon at a masquerader to undermine the event or otherwise harm the performer (see also Veirman 2002, 110).¹² Standing with one’s arms crossed at the chest was one such posture, and standing with one’s back to a tree was another one. Attendance at performances, observation of other attendees, interactions with performers, and instructions received from someone else teach audience members how to play their role in power association events.

Specificity of Performance

Individual accounts recorded between the late nineteenth century and the present day may have contributed to an impression that power associations’ activities are uniform across space and time. Yet the accounts also signal the specificity of each event. When French military officer Joseph-Simon Gallieni (1885, 324–334), in one of the earliest known published accounts of a power association performance, wrote about the “Koumou” (presumably Komo) event he encountered in the town of Sibi sometime between 1879 and 1881, he described men who sacrificed chickens, drank beer, and assembled in a grove. He also reported dancing. Animal sacrifice, beer consumption, the gathering of people in a restricted space, and dancing were certainly common elements of power association performances I attended or people in western Burkina Faso described to me. But rather than stage performances that repeat an unchanging prototype, power association leaders create dynamic events that shape and are shaped by performance-audience interactions specific to individual people and places.

Gallieni also explained that the events of more than a century ago took place in towns where people brought animals or other offerings to temples in sacred groves in order to seek assistance in finding spouses, determine if they should proceed into battle, request assistance with their crops, or offer thanks for successful harvests (1885, 328). Western Burkinabe power association leaders I observed routinely met with clients to help them address similar problems, but while Gallieni said such activities took place at temples in sacred groves, the consultations I observed took place in specialists’ courtyards, in structures repurposed to serve as their workrooms, or in buildings erected specifically for the specialists’ activities. I noticed that the same specialist met with clients in different types of space depending on the nature of the consultations; however, most power association chapters maintained a separate building dedicated to it and its activities, and power association leaders told me that overnight construction of a building for a chapter marked the last major step in the process of establishing a new chapter in a town.¹³ Some power association houses I saw appeared in groves separate from more populated areas (fig. 3.6). Other power association buildings stood among everyday houses, women’s kitchens, and other neighborhood structures (fig. 3.7). Siting of power association houses appeared to depend on such factors as the land or other resources available to a particular chapter, the chapter’s age, and its standing within a neighborhood or town.

From a distance, power association operations may seem similar from place to place and from time to time. At close-up, it is clear that the organizations’ performances and other activities depend on the exact people and circumstances involved in a particular event.¹⁴ Gallieni’s text hints at the specificity of a single performance that he came across in Sibi. His version is inseparable from his position as a French military officer who sought to bring Sibi and surrounding areas under French control and who later wrote about his campaign for French- and travelogue-reading audiences. The conditions of his travels through Sibi must have shaped Gallieni’s interactions with people in the town, his understanding of what he perceived, and his approach to writing about the event. Yet—unsurprisingly given when and for whom he was writing—Gallieni offers little insight into how Komo in Sibi differed from Komo in other places.

Gallieni does report that the townspeople’s initial reactions to the entourage reflected their discomfort with the group’s arrival at the time of the Komo ceremony (1885, 328). Evidently, townspeople made up their own minds, and with considerable individuality. At one point, an elderly man reportedly said to the crowd, “Consider that this white man is the first one to come to this country, and also notice that instead of arriving on an ordinary day, he appeared in the midst of Komo” (Gallieni 1885, 328–329). The elderly man further suggested the convergence of events was no mere coincidence, but rather reflected the power of forces linked to Komo. The man’s comments seemed to have alleviated some of the tension between the officer’s entourage and people in Sibi. Gallieni goes on to explain that the officer presented gifts to the town’s elders, prompting one elder to remark on the memorability of the particular Komo event (1885, 329).

FIGURE 3.6. Komo power association house located in a grove on the edge of a neighborhood. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, July 21, 2007. Fieldwork image 2007–10244. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

In the description of the event that follows, Gallieni writes that men danced in the grove and additional festivities ensued before inebriated men approached Gallieni and his entourage (1885, 330–334). At some point, the hubbub apparently exasperated the officer, leading him to grab his gun and ask his interpreter to explain to the crowd that he, Gallieni, would kill the first person who touched a member of the entourage (1885, 333). Additional commotion followed before calm returned. Whether or not Gallieni’s account accurately describes events in Sibi, the narrative does signal that people in the town recognized and engaged with an unfamiliar and potentially hostile audience. Whatever transpired, if Gallieni and his entourage in fact witnessed a power association event, then the specific circumstances surrounding it must have distinguished it from other power association activities that took place in the town or in other locales in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

FIGURE 3.7. Wara power association house located in a neighborhood. Kangala, Burkina Faso, April 30, 2007. Detail of fieldwork image: 2007–7344. Photo: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi.

More than 120 years after Gallieni’s encounter with Komo and in an area located several hundreds of miles east of Sibi, I started attending power association performances and asking leaders and other community members about the events. My reasons for traveling to the area as well as my frameworks for understanding power associations and their activities differed from Gallieni’s. As I considered the events I witnessed or listened to people describe events to me, I began to see that the meaning of each event depended on the confluence of context, participants, and moment. Consequently, even performances coordinated by the same power association leader varied from occasion to occasion. For example, Karfa Coulibaly organized public overnight performances in Sokouraba in the spring of 2006 and the following spring to recognize work he and his apprentices accomplished during each preceding year. He invited colleagues familiar with Wara to both events, and they coached Coulibaly and his apprentices in working with fire. In the spring of 2007, Coulibaly hosted another public event with fire-wielding performers to honor that year’s death of Kakoni Traoré, a master hunter who had lived in Coulibaly’s neighborhood.¹⁵ Down to the reasons for each event’s inception, the contours seem more situational than boilerplate.

Variability—in size, location, and configuration—also characterized the performances I witnessed or about which I was otherwise informed. A fire-wielding performance that Coulibaly sponsored in the spring of 2006 happened in a clearing beneath a tree just beyond the perimeter of his neighborhood, whereas an event he sponsored the following spring took place in his courtyard. The performance Coulibaly hosted to honor the deceased Kakoni Traoré occurred in a similar space on the other side of the neighborhood, closer to Traoré’s courtyard. And when a Wara chapter in the town of Kangala performed in that town in March 2007, the chapter held its overnight event in a public meeting space bordered by walls of houses in the neighborhood.

Every performance—singular, specific—seemed to demand considerable time and resources to plan. In some cases, I observed western Burkinabe power association leaders and their apprentices begin preparing for an event days or even weeks before it took place. For power association leaders hosting an event, preparations were often especially intense. The hosts procured materials to fortify their assemblages and installations, fine-tuned skills, worked with their apprentices, arranged with women in their families or their neighborhoods to provide food for guests, and ordered beverages from vendors, including women who brewed local beer. A power association leader whose income derived from consultations with clients as well as any agricultural activities in which he engaged may have spent a significant portion of a year’s income on a single performance. Some power association leaders had access to other funds. Do Ouattara reported that his deceased father, Touba Ouattara, received a pension from the French military for his service during the Second World War. According to the younger Ouattara, his father, one of Sokouraba’s most renowned power association leaders, spent nearly his entire pension on maintaining the family’s Komo chapter.¹⁶ In the early 2000s, Mélégué Traoré, the national politician and international diplomat who, with his brothers, has led a Kono chapter in Bougoula, presumably had access to significant resources, and the Traoré family’s expenditures for any single Kono event likely surpassed expenses for other chapters’ performances. During the prelude to a Kono performance that the brothers hosted and I was invited to watch, I observed Traoré bestow clean bills worth 1,000 West African CFA francs and handfuls of cowries with ease on musicians who performed in front of the politician to animate the evening.¹⁷

An ideal may be for each power association leader to sponsor a major event each year in order to honor the chapter and its members’ accomplishments during the year. But western Burkinabe power association leaders said that if they found costs for an annual performance prohibitive or encountered other challenges, they delayed the event for a year or more.¹⁸ Some chapters thus did not always hold annual performances. The decision to host a power association performance in honor of a recently deceased distinguished elder likewise appeared to hinge on the ability of an association leader or the deceased’s family to shoulder an event’s costs. Hunters’ and healers’ association chapters staged masquerades at political events or on occasions when Mélégué Traoré or other people commissioned them to do so (see also Gagliardi 2013). A fuller understanding of any power association performance requires careful attention to the circumstances that gave rise to it and the individuals involved in the planning, execution, and recollections of a single event.

The scheduling of performances I attended or heard about depended on human, situational, and environmental factors. During one of my first meetings with him, Karfa Coulibaly indicated that Komo or Kono performances held during the rainy season would yield disastrous results. He explained that if a performance took place at the height of the rainy season or before the big harvest, the event would prompt big winds that would destroy crops. Komo leader Yaya Bangali and Kono leader Moukanitien Traoré echoed Coulibaly’s statement. Power association leader Ibrahim Traoré offered a different explanation. Traoré said that one could bring Komo or Kono outside during the rainy season, but only if one first stopped the rain. Yet he also acknowledged that stopping the rain would interfere with growing crops. Concerns about holding a performance during the rainy season did not appear consistent across all power associations. Hunter Zanga Traoré did not insist on similar restrictions on the timing of hunters’ association masquerades.¹⁹ Nevertheless, most people in rural towns of western Burkina Faso engaged in agricultural labor in the early 2000s. They worked in fields during the rainy season and consequently had less time at that moment in the year to perform, watch, or otherwise participate in performances. Most of the power association performances I heard about or attended took place in the months of March, April, and May, as the dry season began to give way to the rainy season.

I repeatedly found that actual practice diverged from general statements about what should happen. While I was in western Burkina Faso, several Komo and Kono performances took place after the rainy season had started. As I often encountered such discrepancies, I realized that I learned more when I probed for information about specific events instead of settling on generalities. Bangali’s Komo chapter hosted a performance in June 2006, after the rains had started, to honor Bangali’s then recently deceased father, the former leader of the family’s Komo chapter. Dahaba Ouattara reported to me that heavy rain had delayed the performance’s start, but sometime after midnight, the rain stopped, and the event began.²⁰ Two weeks later, Karfa Coulibaly shared with me that he had attended the Komo performance to honor Bangali’s father. Coulibaly said a lot of rain fell that night. Wondering if the widespread destruction of crops had followed from the rainy season performance, as I had been told would happen, I asked Coulibaly if the event had caused any problems. Coulibaly said it had prompted strong winds, but he did not talk about specific crop destruction. He then added that Komo performances should not take place during the rainy season but that Kono performances could, especially if the events coincided with a work party in the fields or if someone in the city requested a performance. Coulibaly’s statement may have in part reflected the fact that at the time, the Traoré Kono chapter in Bougoula was planning to host a performance after a group of people labored in the fields.²¹

Some performances lasted several days, with staging and audiences changing as each performance progressed and certain phases of the event taking place away from public view. The first public or quasi-public activities usually started within a few hours of midnight and took place in a public gathering space within a town or on the outskirts of a town. After darkness fell, eager audience members started to gather in the performance area to claim spots and wait for the event to begin. Fluorescent lights often illuminated the space, adding more appeal. By the early 2000s, electric lights impressed audiences in towns not on an electric grid, in part because the lights signaled that the event organizers had sufficient resources to provide for costly generators and fuel to run them.²² Performers subsequently entered the performance space. They played music, danced, masqueraded, or performed with fire (e.g., fig. 2.32) until sometime around sunrise, when the audience size dwindled or performers’ energy dissipated.

The second public phase of the performances I witnessed usually began late in the morning following the overnight phase. A crowd again gathered. Women and children prohibited from attending the first phase of an event were on some occasions allowed to attend the second phase. During the second phase, specialists sacrificed fowl and livestock (e.g., fig. 2.33). The previously cited 1929 account of Komo performances refers to a similar phase the morning after a night of dancing, drinking, and eating (Travélé 1929, 137–142). In western Burkina Faso, I learned that the animals offered to a power association chapter during the second phase commonly reflect work the chapter was undertaking or had accomplished. After the chapter’s leader or another member of the chapter slit an offered animal’s throat, he applied the animal’s blood, feathers, or fur to some of the chapter’s power objects. Repeated applications accumulated on the objects’ surfaces, creating a material archive of the chapter’s activities. Renowned leaders and the chapters under their command earned distinguished standing when they received scores of animals to sacrifice.

The above-described two-part pattern notwithstanding, on some occasions, masqueraders and their attendants paraded through a neighborhood or town to greet important community members during a performance with a single public phase. The timing could also vary. For example, when masqueraders from the Kangala hunters’ association chapter performed in Kangala in the spring of 2007, they proceeded through the town throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. Nearly two dozen hunters accompanied the three masqueraders. The performers and their entourage stopped in courtyards of important elders and outside houses established for prominent power association chapters. Each time they stopped, the masqueraders and hunters took turns dancing as they paid their respects to important people and sites (fig. intro. 3). Men, women, and children from the town gathered to watch the performers. Some people returned to their work, while others joined the procession. The circumstances, timing, and spacing of the event affected the audience experience (see also Gagliardi 2013).

Performers evaluate and respond to their audiences each time they perform. A masquerader in the Kangala hunters’ association chapter told me that when he wears the porcupine mask, he looks for ways to animate the event and make the audience laugh. He offered an example framed in the context of our interview, which he noted lacked the liveliness of a masquerade. He spied my water bottle and explained that if he were performing, he would grab my bottle and run in anticipation of the audience’s cheer (see also Gagliardi 2013, 56). The successful execution of the porcupine masquerade demands constant alertness to one’s surroundings and sensitivity to timing so that the audience is eager to know what will happen next.²³

A performer’s attention to the audience at times leads the person to thwart or attempt to thwart perceived threats from someone in attendance. During a Wara performance that Dahaba Ouattara, his wife, Massoun Traoré, and I attended, we saw a man in a tree. Traoré, who had opted to sit with other people and had been positioned nearer the tree than Ouattara and I had been, said she thought the man in the tree had endeavored to capture a woman he had spied there. According to Ouattara, the woman reportedly seen in the tree had previously earned a reputation in Sokouraba for her scandalous work. In fact, Ouattara had often referred to her as a woman who had earned a doctorate in sorcery, a statement that reflected his thought that she excelled in wielding resources to harm other people for her own gain rather than his acknowledgment of her attainment of an actual advanced university degree. When I later asked Karfa Coulibaly about the episode at the event, which he had hosted, he told me the man had scaled the tree in order to chase after a person in the audience who had reportedly tried to test the knowledge and capacities of the Wara performers.²⁴ Specialists perceive direct challenges to their authority as hostile actions of criminal sorcerers, individuals who, like power association leaders and other specialists, learn to harness tangible materials and intangible energies to effect change. Yet criminal sorcerers work with malicious intent and use their knowledge to cause harm.²⁵ Whether they aim to make audiences laugh or chase sorcerers, deft performers assess individuals in the crowds around them and react based on their observations. They participate in a feedback loop, characterized by individual performers and individual audience members constantly responding to each other and shaping each event.

Stories That Circulate

In recent years, as in the further past, audience experiences of specific events and other power association activities reverberate through stories people tell others. People exchange accounts when they greet friends or family in markets or courtyards, on paths or roads, or in the fields, where many people in rural towns of western Burkina Faso and across the three-corner region have labored for more than a century. People recall events they witnessed and anecdotes they heard other people tell. Rumors of a power association leader’s inappropriate comportment can spread by word of mouth and, according to Sarah Brett-Smith, may diminish the energy the specialist had concentrated in his power objects over time (Brett-Smith 2001, 124). Histories of individual power objects, details of the acquisition of certain materials obtained to assemble an object, or accounts of work an expert accomplished in conjunction with a particular power object or set of objects he created circulate and contribute to people’s assessments of the success of a specialist (see also Henry 1910, 127; Bazin 1986, 260–261). Tales of individual performances or their outcomes contribute to understandings and expectations of a performer or his chapter (see also Travélé 1929, 146–150; Jespers 2001, 53). In places where the extent of experts’ knowledge is concealed from public view rather than announced on the wall in framed diplomas or through other official declarations of achievement, the abilities of power association leaders and other experts are measured by stories that circulate about them.

Lamissa Bangali—the man who introduced me to Sokouraba, the cousin of Komo leader Yaya Bangali, and himself a leader of the Bangali Komo chapter in Sokouraba—told me that stories about power association activities sway support for or distrust of a particular chapter or specialist. What is said about a local chapter and the work it accomplishes shapes perceptions of the chapter’s effectiveness, namely, the ability of its leader or other members to address everyday concerns and community-wide problems with competence. Stories bolster or undermine the standing of power association leaders and other experts. Bangali likened the reputations of Komo and Kono leaders’ treatments to the standings of medical doctors’ procedures in the United States. He explained that reports of successful interventions augment Komo and Kono leaders’ status and draw crowds, just as accounts of successful therapies boost medical doctors’ reputations and attract clients.²⁶ The reputations of power association leaders and other specialists, including individuals whose work is viewed as sorcery of the criminal type, depend on arts they maintain, performances they stage, and stories told about them. Beyond the three-corner region, in southern Nigeria, evaluations of performances in the 1970s and 1980s led performance scholar Drewal to observe, “The talk about ritual is as important as what people actually do” (1989, 41).

In western Burkina Faso, power association leaders’ and other specialists’ reputations have grown and diminished as recollections of the specialists’ successes and tales of their failures have spread. Strong reputations often beget stronger reputations, and specialists who promote themselves and their work through performances and stories told about them have typically attracted larger audiences and more clients from near and far places. Dahaba Ouattara relayed to me a gripping tale that came to him via his brother: a helmet mask that Kono leader Zan Traoré wore during a performance once started to shift to one side as he danced. Concerned that someone was trying to challenge his skill with an invisible weapon that would cause the helmet mask he wore to plunge to the ground, Traoré left the performance area and stood behind the audience. The helmet mask, likened to an airplane in the story Ouattara told, then lifted itself from Traoré’s head and hovered silently above the crowd. Traoré moved beneath the helmet mask, and the helmet mask gently lowered itself back onto his head. Traoré resumed his dance and even rolled in the sand, but the helmet mask never fell from his head.²⁷ The account highlights Traoré’s expertise and his ability to curb a perceived challenge to his authority. The comparison of a power association helmet mask to an airplane in Ouattara’s story further hints at the specialist’s capacity to construct a powerful device that allows him to travel between realms and across vast distances.

Power association leaders also talk among themselves and evaluate the skills of their colleagues. Days before leaving western Burkina Faso after a nineteen-month stay in the area, I walked with Dahaba Ouattara to Karfa Coulibaly’s courtyard to greet him. Other men, including Komo leader Yaya Bangali, were gathered in Coulibaly’s courtyard when Ouattara and I arrived. Bangali expressed concern about collaborating with Komo leaders from another town. According to Bangali, some people suspected that the other Komo leaders were responsible for a recent death, and he wanted to avoid becoming entangled in the accusations. The conversation then turned to the importance of animal sacrifices and power objects before Bangali addressed me specifically. Bangali said he could send me home on a noisy plane made from human bones, adding that I would not have to pay for the transport. Coulibaly laughed and told another story. Kono leader Navon Traoré once fell from a plane for sorcerers; according to Coulibaly, someone had threatened Traoré, causing him to fall from the plane and break many bones. People worried that Traoré might not live, but he healed well.²⁸ Neither Bangali nor Coulibaly directly mentioned Komo or Kono helmet masks. However, their stories echo the story Ouattara had previously told me, further implying parallels between power association helmet masks and airplanes. Helmet masks, like airplanes, facilitate travel. They require expertise to manipulate and control, and they fascinate.

By the early twenty-first century, the political career of Drissa Traoré’s brother, Mélégué Traoré, contributed to the international reach and success of the family’s Kono chapter in Bougoula. Clients from proximate towns and foreign cities regularly traveled to Bougoula for private consultation with the chapter’s leaders. When it staged performances, the Kono chapter in Bougoula attracted international audiences and connected it to the political scene. Community members I interviewed in and near Bougoula told stories about the former president of Gabon’s national assembly traveling to the small town to attend a Kono performance. One person recalled that the foreign official presented the chapter with chickens and a cow to sacrifice.²⁹ Mélégué Traoré confirmed this information and told me he had invited presidents of other national assemblies to Bougoula for other Kono events.³⁰ The specific negotiations and outcomes of political meetings at Kono performances in Bougoula may be as difficult to pinpoint as negotiations and outcomes of high-level political meetings that take place off the record elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, the meetings indicate the far-reaching influence of Mélégué Traoré and his family’s Kono chapter. When people of high stature travel far distances to attend Kono events in Bougoula, the foreigners’ presence at and participation in the events alert people to the importance of the Traoré Kono chapter and its leaders. Foreigners also witness local support for the national and international politician. This interface with local, national, and international affairs suggests that power associations are potentially responsive to a wide range of contemporary realities.³¹

Power association leaders and other specialists may size up their competition even after a specialist renounces his connection to a particular association. One instance of specialists vying for authority is reflected in an incident Dahaba Ouattara described to me during two May 2015 telephone conversations as well as a recording of Kono leader Drissa Traoré that Ouattara first heard and then sought to play for me.³² In the recording, Traoré discussed local matters during a public balafon concert that took place after the death of someone in Bougoula. Traoré addressed the crowd in Jula, the regional lingua franca, and spoke about Do Ouattara, the son of Touba Ouattara, Sokouraba’s famed Komo leader who reportedly used his military pension to support his work with Komo and who reputedly died in a vicious battle with a colleague-turned-competitor. After the father’s death, Do Ouattara was positioned to lead his family’s Komo chapter. By the time I met him in 2006, the younger Ouattara had become concerned that people might try to harm him in response to work his father had initiated decades earlier. Consequently, Do Ouattara decided not to take on a leadership role in the chapter. With support from American missionary Gene Heacock, Do Ouattara studied at a local Catholic church, moved to Côte d’Ivoire to study at an evangelical Christian school, and later returned to Sokouraba to build an evangelical Christian community. By August 2013, the church drew crowds from towns near and far, including towns in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali.³³ Do Ouattara had distinguished himself as a Christian evangelist who worked to help people overcome misfortune, achieve success, and combat sorcery. He encouraged people to abandon their power objects in a pile behind his church. During services he led, he focused on finding what he called demons and chasing demons from afflicted followers in order to help his followers secure well-being. The process often caused his followers to fall down and writhe on the ground.

Drissa Traoré publicly questioned Do Ouattara’s methods and abilities to heal people, suggesting that Do Ouattara himself, and not his manipulation of potent medicines, caused people to fall during the services he led. Traoré accused Do Ouattara of being an imposter and acknowledged that a month prior to the address, he, Traoré, had coordinated the imprisonment of Do Ouattara and forty-four other people. As Traoré’s account went, lawyers subsequently contacted another Kono leader at the request of Do Ouattara. Traoré said that he, Traoré, told the lawyers, “It is me who imprisoned the men, and it is me who can release them.” Traoré explained that followers of Do Ouattara’s church wanted to take Traoré’s own power objects as well as the power objects of two other Kono leaders. Traoré continued, “Is that possible? . . . It is only someone who is already dead who has ideas like that. One cannot seize the power objects of my brothers. And one cannot even begin to talk about taking my objects.” Standing before an audience in his hometown, Drissa Traoré told a story to amplify his own position and authority.³⁴

The Kono leader also reminded the crowd of objects they may not have been able to see. Power association leaders aim to engage their audiences and promote their work through different strategies, including careful management of what disparate audiences can and cannot see. The Komo lyrics published in 1927 and the 1950 photograph attributed to Nadal point at the fact that power association members have long worked with their audiences in mind. Performers offer advice that recipients heed with seriousness, and they impress audiences with knowledge of current events or stories of their authority. While individual power association chapters operate within specific local contexts, their leaders and audiences are not disconnected from national, regional, or international spheres. As the more recent references to power association objects as planes imply, power association leaders invest in tools that assist in their movement between different realms and allow them to transcend spheres. Their audiences notice.

Prohibitive Performances

Some power associations prohibit certain people from viewing their performances, but even people who cannot see the events may constitute audiences for them. Observers have noted prohibitions against viewing since at least the end of the nineteenth century. Descriptions of Komo and Kono published since then have also characterized the organizations as male-dominated. They often refer specifically to injunctions that bar women from seeing the groups’ arts. Observers explain that distinctive sounds alert women and children to masqueraders’ emergence. The sounds reportedly frighten women and children, who, upon hearing the sounds, flee into their houses, shut the windows and doors, and stay inside for the duration of an event. Limiting audience access to performances may seem to contradict efforts to engage audiences. Yet as I demonstrate in the next chapter, the denial of visual access does not on its own translate into a lack of engagement.

Komo and Kono leaders in western Burkina Faso today prohibit most women and children from viewing the objects, installations, and performances that the organizations create and maintain. As an art historian who is a woman, I study arts that I am not permitted to see. Western Burkinabe power association leaders have determined that even as a foreign woman, I may not see Komo or Kono events, and I respect the restriction. But other power associations do not restrict their audiences based on gender. Wara performers in western Burkina Faso in the early 2000s manipulated fire rather than dancing masks, and women watched the events.³⁵ The performances drew crowds eager to witness specialists address individual and community-wide concerns. The organizations’ leaders and their apprentices also took advantage of the opportunities to advertise their skills and promote their chapters. When Dahaba Ouattara told me that Wara performances are similar to Komo, Kono, and other power association events, I realized that I could learn something about Komo and Kono performances through my attendance at Wara events. I also continued to listen carefully to how people talked about specific organizations, chapters, and performances during formal interviews and in casual conversations in order to gain insight into what happens at events I am not allowed to see.

I aimed to ask questions that would allow me to discern details of the performances unseen by me. I considered the fact that a person permitted to see a Komo and Kono masquerade—like a person who attends any other power association performance—experiences the phenomenon only partially. Even a performer only participates in the event from a single vantage point. Any record of a performance contrasts with the ephemerality of the event and cannot capture the event in its entirety (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 75). My position as a woman not allowed to see Komo and Kono masquerades made me acutely aware of the inability to experience or document every aspect of an event due to the nature of performance. The recognition intensified my efforts not to take any bit of information for granted. The task for me, then, was to participate in Komo and Kono masquerades as well as other power association performances as my western Burkinabe colleagues allowed me to do, to discuss the performances with other people who experienced the events in a variety of ways, and to evaluate the distinct accounts. My attendance at masquerades that I could not see and my conversations with other people about such events led me to realize that women constitute important unseeing audiences of Komo and Kono. Performers negotiate many dynamics, including gender and visual access, in order to find success.