Naming powers: Hausa tsafi and Tiv tsav

Hausa and Tiv words for occult power, tsafi and tsav, look very similar; is this coincidental, or is there a historical reason? If there is some historical connection, then did one people borrow the root from the other directly, or has something more complex occurred for which a resemblance between tsav and tsafi provides only part of the evidence? Reasoning from wide comparisons and from the grammatical and phonological structures of Hausa and Tiv, we suggest that while tsafi can be added to previously recognized early loans – notably ‘fire’, ‘meat’ and ‘two’ – from Benue-Congo languages to an ancestor of Hausa, the loan was not necessarily from an ancestor of Tiv, and could have been made from another language that had undergone erosion of its noun classes in the same way as Tiv. What kind of transcultural event might have occasioned the borrowing of a term for occult power? Because the loan occurred in the distant past, a specific response to this question is difficult. Hausa and Tiv reportedly conceptualize the powers they call tsafi or tsav differently: as inherent in things and the practices associated with them, in the Hausa case, and as embodied in people, in the Tiv case. Both Hausa and Tiv ethnic identities have undergone exceptional expansion, and these differing senses of tsav and tsafi fit what we know about their recent circumstances closely. Tiv tsav is an intensification of practices local to the region from which Tiv migrated; while the Hausa tsafi has reported senses consistent with the overt disapproval of occult channels in Muslim societies. Any cognates of the term still in use in other central Nigerian languages, which have not expanded like Hausa and Tiv, might both contribute to the reconstruction of a broad original Benue-Congo meaning and show a current range of meaning variation, but not provide us with direct insight into the precise senses of the term in the contact situation. We can make a case, however, that there may have been a general propensity for terms denoting occult powers to circulate particularly readily between languages, and these words themselves may remain as evidence of this after their meanings have altered. A large-scale sampling would be needed to demonstrate empirically whether such terms indeed were borrowed more frequently than hitherto assumed. We also speculate that one reason for borrowing of terms for occult powers may be that the distinction between powers based in persons and powers based in things (sometimes glossed by earlier anthropologists as that between witchcraft and sorcery) is contentious, unstable and variable in African experience and, hence, has always been the subject of discourses and practices into which terms are drawn to guide argument, understanding and practical action.