ถ้อยคำกรีกรี (gris-gris)gris-gris

The trade route came first. Travellers through the Volta Basin, in what is now Ghana, reported Mande speakers such as the Dyula as central to making and distributing Islamic charms, which they called gris-gris. From them the practice spread to other Muslim groups — the Dagomba, who wrote extensive Arabic manuscripts 'with magic formulae and prescriptions for preparing amulets'. The sacks held Qur'an verses on paper with herbs, worn at the neck. Sometimes the written charm alone counted, carried by priests. Non-Muslims in the region wore them too, under the name saffis.

The makers are named. Among Mande Muslims, scholars of the mystical division called siri, 'path', are marabouts, and they are the ones who produce gris-gris; scholars of seli, 'prayer', are karamokos, who study Qur'anic law. Some cross over. The whole practice is Karamokobara.

In the United States the word turned. Enslaved people used gris-gris against their owners, and the word came to name harm done to a target; some were found in burials; there are period reports of people cutting, drowning or otherwise handling somebody else's gris-gris to injure them. New Orleans court cases in 1773 convicted enslaved people of using gris-gris to kill enslavers — among the earliest legal mentions of Louisiana's tradition. Enslaved conjure women made gris-gris to start rebellions, and the bags were held to guide people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. By the 1800s the word was used in Louisiana to mean both bewitch and the object itself. In October 1849 authorities arrested an enslaved man carrying a human finger wrapped in flannel that he held brought good luck; people in New Orleans sought human remains from tombs for conjure and gris-gris, and gravesites were disturbed for it. In Cajun communities the word reads as harm and ill-fortune. In the Louisiana Creole community, Gris-Gris doctors have worked for centuries and are looked on favourably by the Black community at large.

In Haiti, on the same account, the word kept its West African sense: an amulet with good intentions. In Hoodoo a gris-gris is taken to represent the self.

It is also current and ordinary. A 1982 survey put gris-gris among the top three methods of contraception known to women in Senegal, alongside abstinence and roots and herbs; over sixty per cent of women reported knowing such traditional methods, against a little over forty per cent for the pill. They are worn, in the article's own words, 'from wrestlers to soldiers to housewives, and can feature anything from monkey to snake to mouse.'