The Garifuna, an Afro-Amerindian group forcibly displaced from Saint Vincent to Central America in 1797, practice Dugu, a religion in which traumatic collective memory is embodied. Ancestors appear in dreams and hallucinatory visions, causing misfortune, and spirits possess living descendants. Through initiation, individuals move from being afflicted patients to living bearers of historical legacy.
In Niger, mass possession incidents among schoolgirls have increased over the past decade, with vengeful spirits voicing grievances tied to women's education. During exorcisms, spirits recount losing their homes when trees were cut to build schools, reflecting a sacred landscape disrupted by farmland expansion, private property, and urban growth. This essay examines narratives of loss, displacement, and appropriation, arguing that possession events serve as temporal tactics—subversive ways to retrieve forgotten histories and reframe the present and future in relation to an evolving past. Schools become sites for historical reckoning, where memory work challenges dominant accounts.