The Sahel possesses an outstanding history as an arena of social, political, economic, cultural, and interethnic interrelations and conflicts. These have produced, among various other results, intercultural manifestations visible in oral arts such as foundation narratives, folktales, and popular songs. These productions in turn contain and articulate social commentary, political strategies and cultural contradictions which are often imbricated.
Dating the fashionable concept of hybridity and topical discussions of globalizations, these interrelations remain visible through a variety of themes and motifs such as those referred to in the title of this paper: “ancestors from the East,” on the one hand, and “spirits from the West,” on the other. Though these two cultural phenomena have a number of points of juncture, as we will see, they in no wise exhaust the numerous instances of external influence on and domination of Sahelian societies. Nor do they downplay the efforts of these socie...
