About This Project

Can art and ritual be political infrastructure, not decoration? I study how devotional poetry, chanted remembrance, sacred images and amulets worked in resistance in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. I hypothesise that if they carried real political force, users will describe concrete effects (courage, protection, solidarity) and colonial authorities will have recorded them as threats. I will test this in Lisbon’s colonial archives and with its Bissau-Guinean community, a history my family shares.

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What is the context of this research?

Across West Africa, resistance has often drawn on spiritual and artistic practice: devotional poetry, chanted remembrance, sacred images, protective amulets. In Senegal, Cheikh Amadou Bamba resisted French rule not with arms but by refusing the company of rulers and writing poetry, and Wolof kings had long traded land for the “mystical protection” of clerics (Babou 2007). In Guinea-Bissau, Cabral described fighters who “have the Koran but an amulet on their arm”.

Yet Cabral also warned against mistaking material reality for “a spiritual creation” (Cabral 1970), and historians often treat religion as “a dependent variable” of politics. Murids today describe their faith as an “embodied spiritual force” (Kaag 2023).

I hypothesise that spiritual force, carried through song, image and protective objects, is not decoration on top of politics but a mechanism that makes resistance possible, and that whether it serves or resists power depends on what it is directed towards.

What is the significance of this project?

Anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Cabral put culture at the centre of liberation, but read the spiritual as psychology or as a tool of other interests. Historians of African Islam have often done the same. Few studies ask, from participants’ own accounts, whether spiritual practice itself produced political force, and Lusophone Guinea-Bissau and Francophone Senegal are rarely studied together.

This project fills that gap. It brings sensory ethnography to political history, recovering a form of political knowledge (oral, ritual, sensory) that both colonial and postcolonial scholarship have dismissed as folklore rather than infrastructure.

It is personal too. Working in museums, I watched African spiritual objects filed as relics rather than repositories of knowledge. This work is part of reclaiming knowledge that colonialism interrupted in my own family history.

What are the goals of the project?

This project brings something genuinely underexplored to African Studies: a rigorous comparison between Francophone Senegal and Lusophone Guinea-Bissau, regions rarely studied together, treating art and ritual as real political infrastructure rather than symbolism layered on top of "proper" politics. Most scholarship analyses religion institutionally or art formally, without asking what spiritual elements mean, politically, to the people living them. My phenomenological approach centres participants' own voices.

My immediate goals cover the first months of the PhD: developing working proficiency in Kriolo, Wolof and French for direct fieldwork, an early in-person visit to my Leiden supervisor, and building the archival groundwork this comparison depends on, while easing financial pressure until longer-term funding arrives.

Longer-term, I'm applying separately for fieldwork-specific funding in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.