Fulani origins remain a mystery, shrouded by a largely unwritten culture. Their physical characteristics – slim and sinewy with long oval faces (the technical term is dolichocephalous), small lips, almond-shaped eyes and copper-brown skin – invite comparison with East Africans. But their language, Fulfulde, shares roots with Wolof and other West African tongues. Different theories, swinging in and out of fashion, have suggested ancestry from the Prophet Jacob,fn1 Aramaic-speaking Syrians, Berbers, Indians and even (according to the nineteenth-century French ethnologist Gustave d’Eichthal) Polynesians from the race of Phout. The most intriguing clue is a cave painting in Tassili N’Ajjer, in southern Algeria: a crowd of herdsmen roam among their cattle, their elongated silhouettes and the lyre-shaped horns of their cattle suggesting a proto-Fulani presence dating back to the fourth millennium BC.
Their own mythology, as revealing as the Dogon’s, derives creation from a single drop of milk. But history furnishes few particulars until the sixteenth century. Five years after Leo Africanus’s visit to Timbuktu, a Fulani chief called Tenguella revolted against Mohammed Askiya, the Songhay king. Tenguella was slain in battle but many other chiefs rose in his wake, seizing land, power and grazing rights throughout the precolonial period.
‘The most dramatic political development in the Sahel after the Moroccan invasion of the Niger Bend’, writes historian Bruce S Hall, ‘was the rise of Fulbe Muslim reformist movements beginning in the 18th century.’ One of the most famous of these was led by Osman dan Fodio, who preached jihad against the Hausa Kings of Nigeria and founded the Caliphate of Sokoto, which lasted for a century until it was absorbed by the British in 1903. In Mali, the most iconic of Fulani leaders was Sekou Amadou, a theocratic warrior-king of the early nineteenth century, who established a kingdom between Djenné and Timbuktu, spanning the Niger’s northern crook. Underlining his religious credentials, he named it Hamdullahi, or ‘thanks to God’.
A strict Muslim who banned alcohol and tobacco, but also set up social welfare for widows, Amadou prioritised religion over race. His ruling system, known as Diina, or ‘faith’, is described by Katherine Homewood as a ‘theocratic natural resource management system’, which ‘established a detailed record of resource use, listing fish dams, transhumance routes, village grazing grounds and markets within the (Niger) Delta’. For many Fulani his epoch was a golden age (and he is still remembered with affection in the Fulani community at large), but it wasn’t the pastoralist paradise it has been painted by nostalgia. ‘It subjected everybody, Fulbe and non-Fulbe, nobles and non-nobles, to the same unitary power’, writes Han Van Dijk, ‘and made everybody part of the same social project, under the guidance of a sedentary, preferably religious, Fulbe, elite.’ The feudal system instituted by Sekou Amadou had far-reaching effects, not least in the divisions it sowed between the ethnic groups of Central Mali, encouraging an atmosphere of mutual distrust that facilitated French colonialism, much like the Northern crisis of 2012 that led to the latest French intervention. Another of Ibn Khaldun’s timeless drops of water.
Contacts in the UK had given me an introduction. After a night in Bandiagara, I was picked up by a rusty 4x4 and carried on the bouncy journey to the plain, along with a carton of bottled water and a sack of spuds in case I didn’t take to the distinctive Fulani diet. Considering the wear and tear it had to suffer, the 4x4 was surprisingly robust. At least, it made the journey without conking out.
The first part of the trip rattled us along the cliff, the Dogon plateau where sandstone smothers the soil, leaving precious little space to plough. Dogon farmers were bending over the arable patches, using long hoses to divert stream water onto onions and rice paddies. Balanites twisted out of fissures in the rock, their branches fiery with the hooks of hornbills; hawks and other birds of prey glided blackly over the cliffs. We tilted between ironstone ridges and tumbled down runnels in the sandstone, rocking about like a ship in a tempest, until a gorge bottlenecked us to the scarp and, for a breathless moment, we hovered in mid-air. The rockface peeled back behind us and the plain of Séno-Gondo yawned below, 100 metres down. An abyss, a pit, the bottom of the barrel. After the bumpy ride along the escarpment, the change was abrupt: an eerie flatness, running all the way to Burkina Faso.
The high broad mass of the cliff surged behind us like a wave. Hump-backed eolic dunes floated on either side. Encased in tawny membranes of dust, the villages had the faded tones of old sepia photographs. They were widely spaced, so low slung you only noticed them when you were almost upon them, like scenery flats rolled on stage just in time. Many were stamped with the marks of Dogon culture – carved wooden figures, pendulous of beard and breast, holding up the roofs of the togunas (meeting places for Dogon elders, low ceilinged so no one could stand up in anger), the thatched millet-stalk granaries raised on mud-brick stilts. But the Fulani presence was equally conspicuous in the sandy plains between the villages: hemispherical huts matted in millet stalks, men resting on their staffs, shielded from the sun by their pointy hats; women with inky mouths and nose-rings, their braids half-concealed by calabashes of milk.
My fixed point was Djoungiani, a mixed village at the edge of the bush. Mud-brick Dogon huts crowded the northern side, near a water tower and the Friday mosque; Fulani tents bubbled to the south, ringed in thorn-bush stockades. At the village’s fringe, women were drawing water from a well, tugging at the ropes like bell chimers ringing the hours. We crossed the Dogon side to the edge of the Fulani neighbourhood, and pulled in beside a mud-brick house with a cane mat slung across the doorway. Chickens were clucking around a solar panel, led by an imperious speckled hen, and a couple of sparrows were chirping in the branches of a neem. Underneath them, hunched over a bowl of rice, was a local herd owner in traditional homespun. Small eyes beamed in an owlish face lashed by the elements.
‘Now listen, Boureima,’ he was told. ‘Nicholas is your responsibility. We’ve heard about the bandits in the bush, so you better take care.’
The prospect of being bandit fodder was raised again when Boureima took me on a tour of the village to make the necessary introductions. After we had salaamed the mayor, the schoolmistress and the local rep for the Ministry of Water and Forests, we sat down in front of the office of the sous-préfet, the local administrator.
‘Oh, you’re safe here in the village.’ He rocked on a plastic chair, wrapped in purple cloaks, hands steepled under his lips. ‘But don’t go into the bush on Thursdays. Or Fridays. Actually, I’d be very careful about going into the bush at all. You see, there’s a group of bandits operating in the area at the moment and we haven’t been able to catch them. They’re particularly active on market days.’
Swallowing down a bubble of panic, I tried to think of the most practical questions: ‘So … are they armed?’
‘Of course. They are probably from the MNLA. So if you do meet them, I would advise you not to resist.’
Given that I was hoping to move between the villages and explore the bush, this wasn’t quite the welcome I had been hoping for. I was anaesthetised by the introductory rounds: passing from one millet-stalk hut to the next, trying out the greeting phrases Boureima taught me, which drew merry, toothless laughs and gleaming welcomes from women with wrinkles as deep as the ceremonial scars around their eyes and mouths. It was a warm introduction to Fulani society, although there were too many for me to absorb their stories in detail. But the next day, the ‘real talk’ would begin in earnest, with a visit to the village chief.
‘Life used to be easy,’ said Ali Hajji, ‘but now everything is hard!’
Top dog in the hierarchy of Djoungiani’s Fulani, he was sitting on a stool beside his mud-brick house. He leaned forward, stroking a spade-shaped beard, while his tattoo-mouthed daughter worked a millet pestle in the yard.
‘The water is very deep,’ he said, ‘so we can only reach it if the foreigners come with their equipment and pumps. The taps keep breaking down and there are too many people using the wells.’
It was a far cry from the paradise of his youth. Growing up, he was used to a land of plenty, with fruit available all around.
‘There were jujubes, and plenty of baobab fruits. If you took your animals into the bush you didn’t need to bring any food with you. You could find a guineafowl, a partridge or wild goat. There was always something to cook.’
Rhapsodies on life in the old days were a recurring theme. On my first night in Djoungiani, Boureima’s 86-year-old mother waxed lyrical to the same strain, her eyes bright and timid in deep hollows of bone. ‘We used to pick fruit from the bushes and trees,’ said Khadija, ‘we collected wild honey and helped ourselves to the jujubes.’ Among the elders I met, two major causes were cited for the decline: the Great Drought of the 1970sfn2 and the arrival of the Dogon farmers.
‘The plain used to be for the cattle breeders’, said Ali Hajji, ‘and the farmers were up on the cliff. Even when they first started coming down, they only farmed a small area, so it didn’t affect our passageways very much. But now they have carts to carry their tools, camels to draw the water, new techniques to cultivate large areas of land. So their fields have become much bigger than before and there isn’t as much space for us.’
This was the Fulani point of view. An NGO worker later told me that many Dogon had been brought to the plain as slaves for the herders, and Islamic preachers certainly counted them among the peoples it was lawful to raid; but after Malian independence, their success in cultivation, and the government’s prioritisation of agriculture over pastoral husbandry, had contributed to the eminence many Dogon now enjoyed on the plain. For the Fulani, the loss of pasture and access to the best water sources had drastically reduced the productivity of their animals. Boureima’s mother pointed out that it was rare to squeeze much milk out of the cows these days.
‘In my youth, you could feed three people for a whole day from a single cow, but they can’t do that any more. They don’t eat enough grass.’
It was hard to tally the dry landscape around us with the technicolor Eden of the remembered past. Even more so when the elders talked about the plain’s most fearsome visitor – because the bush may have been generous, but in those days of plenty it wasn’t always kind.
‘One good thing’, said chief Ali Hajji, ‘is we don’t get attacked by lions any longer. When I was young, we had to protect our herds all the time. If you were out in the bush you lit a fire and kept it burning all night, and stayed awake watching out for them.’
‘Did they eat your cattle?’ I asked.
‘Not just the cattle! Many people were maimed by the lions and we didn’t have much medicine in those days, so we had to treat the wounds with cooked cow butter. I remember one lion, a really big fellow, this was in 1973. He came into our area and caused a lot of damage. You know how many cows I lost? Twelve! All over the village, people were talking about their losses, so we decided something had to be done.’
There was a famous hunter in Burkina Faso at this time, known as Bi Biga. He was invited to stay in the neighbourhood of Djoungiani, waiting four months until the beast let down his guard.
‘One night,’ explained the chief, ‘we hung up cow meat on a tree and Bi Biga climbed up the tree next to it. Well, when the lion came to eat the meat, he snapped a twig and the lion looked up. That’s what Bi Biga wanted – his rifle was ready and he shot him in the shoulder. But the lion was big and one shot wasn’t enough. He ran into the forest, and in the morning when it was light, we all went in there with our guns and stakes. We knew where the lion was, so we set a fire around him and when the lion tried to escape, that’s when Bi Biga shot him again. Can you imagine the celebration? It lasted two days, as long as a marriage feast! We danced, ate, celebrated. The lion’s skin was brought to the district chief and we hung it from the wall of the sous-préfet’s office.’
The Fulani never call a lion by its name. They use nicknames such as mawdou ladde, ‘big one of the bush’, or laddeeru, ‘bush dweller’. The lion is too powerful to be addressed directly – a god of the bush, a dark talisman of a mightier, more abundant world.
‘Now we don’t have lions to worry about,’ said the chief, ‘but we do have bandits.’
‘Which is more dangerous?’ I asked.
‘Well, lions were dangerous for our animals, but for people the bandits are more dangerous, because they have guns and if you resist they will probably shoot you.’
19
Cowboys and Animists
BOUREIMA WAS IN HIS 40S, A CHILD OF THE GREAT DROUGHT, SO FOR HIM the elders’ stories belonged to a historical idyll, just out of reach of his own experience.
Highbrowed, with a tuft of beard, he had pointy front teeth that made me think of a merry beaver when he laughed. He took it as a point of pride to show me every aspect of his culture, and answered all my questions, even when they were incessant or intrusive. Every morning, he parked his Sanya motorcycle outside my hut, and pelted greetings through the cane-mat door.
‘Djumwali! Arasele? Koori basa walla? Good morning! How are you? Is everything OK?’
‘Mirasele! Ooru ma na sele? Basi fu walla! I’m fine. How’s your family? Everything’s OK.’
Fulani greetings are wonderful, generously elasticated, full of operatic vowels; and much to my delight, people in Djoungiani never seemed to tire of hearing their language assaulted by an idiot.
Boureima had been appointed to look after me because he was one of the few Fulani on the plain who spoke good French. Although he had grown up in the bush, he had been sent to Koro, the chief town of the plain, for schooling. This was a rare opportunity for a nomadic Fulani, which he was unable to extend to his own children.
‘We were in charge of the herd when my children were growing up,’ he explained one night. He stoked the brazier with a twig, his face glowing to a coppery mask. ‘So I had to stay with the herd and keep my sons with me. Sometimes I think they would have a better life if I sent them to school. You’ll meet them when we go to the camp – my son Iman, he’s the one who does the herding. He’s got a brightness in his eyes, but unfortunately he doesn’t have any schooling.’
Thanks to his education, Boureima was aware of what lay beyond. But career opportunities were rare on the plain. I wondered if he had ever thought of migrating.
‘Oh no,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m Fulani! I come from the plain. My mother and father are here, my children are here.’
Like so many of the Fulani I met, Boureima was rooted in his culture. He taught me the code of pulaaku, which emphasises the importance of self-restraint and maintaining dignity. A good Fulani should never give public utterance to discomfort, should make no show of grief, and should always drink his milk by holding the calabash in both hands. Boureima talked proudly of these traditions, as of the many festivals, and complained (without, of course, showing undue passion) that so many of his neighbours had to miss the celebrations.
‘We used to have many people during Eid and Tabaski,’ he said. ‘When I was a child, we all gathered round, eating buttered rice, listening to the recitals of the griots, dancing to the tam-tam. But now everyone’s looking for pasture, so the village is empty.’
Wandering between the millet-stalk huts with Boureima, I could see what he meant. Few voices piped around us. It had the atmosphere of a retirement village, populated by those too long in the tooth to live on the hoof.
I was keen to visit Boureima’s camp, to meet his family and see the life of the bush. We decided to take the slow path. We would visit some of the other villages along the way, so that I could learn about the conflict over land and the narrowing of the pasture trails, which was forcing so many of Boureima’s people to travel so deep into the bush. These problems are rooted in the particularities of the plain, but they are linked to the wider nomadic experience across the region.
In December 2012, when the Malian state was in tatters and jihadists were threatening to push even deeper into the country, something terrible happened in a village called Sari, 9 miles from the bor
der with Burkina Faso.
‘There was a Fulani thief’, said Boureima’s friend Abdullai, ‘who stole a Dogon’s herd and disappeared. They say the Dogon community caught him, but they never released a body. There had been tensions between the Dogon and the Fulani in that area for a while. They were like a tent with no pole: it was just a matter of time before everything collapsed.’
In the early hours one morning, before the watering of the animals, a gang of Dogon farmers fell on the Fulani camp at the edge of their village. They were armed with iron-barrelled hunting rifles. Most of their victims could only defend themselves with the knives at the end of their goads.
‘The chief did his best to defend the community,’ narrated Abdullai. ‘He only had a few balls in his gun so he couldn’t do a lot. But he refused to run away, that would be shameful, so he and his family died fighting.’
Around 30 casualties were recorded. The rest of the Fulani community fled into the bush and made their way to the border, seeking refuge in Burkina Faso. They were unlikely to return any time soon.
The story of Sari sat at the heart of the Dogon–Fulani conflict, a battle for land control that had troubled the plain, with increasing intensity, since the Dogon started coming down from the cliffs in the 1950s. Not every conflict was a straightforward inter-racial dust-up. There have been fights pitting Dogon against Dogon, and Fulani against Fulani, for it is the resources that are at stake more than identity. But the stories I heard during my stay shed some light on the devious ways in which identity politics wheedles its way into the desperate plight of people scrambling for survival. I wanted to learn about the substance of these conflicts, which drilled to the core of the modern-day nomadic challenge: the difficulty of movement when so much land is fixed. So, one morning I put my feet on the steel footrests of Boureima’s Sanya and wrapped my arms around his hips.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 23