In the 1990s a nationwide crime wave overtook Cote d Ivoire. The Ivoirian police failed to control the situation, so a group of poor, politically marginalized, and mostly Muslim men took on the role of the people s protectors as part of a movement they called Benkadi. These men were "dozos" hunters skilled in ritual sacrifice and they applied their hunting and occult expertise, along with the ethical principles implicit in both forms of knowledge, to the tracking and capturing of thieves. Meanwhile, as Benkadi emerged, so too did the ethnic, regional, and religious divisions that would...