Friday Discourse: Fula and their Problems in Nigeria (1)
By
Dr. Aliyu Tilde
The number of their cattle is fast dwindling. Their language is diminishing by the day. More insidious cultures are taking over their hitherto esteemed habits and values. They are the least beneficiaries of public social services. In recent ethno-religious crisis that started with the debut of this administration, they have become easy targets in the middle and Southwestern part of the country. In many parts of the Northwest and the Northeast, where they would have easily found succor, they have been fighting with farmers over grazing areas for decades now. To crown their catalogue of problems, they have been stigmatised as feudalists and colonialists, fit, according to some, for elimination through a nationwide genocide. They are the most endangered human 'genus' in Nigeria.
My dear reader, you are welcome to a series that examines the life and problems of the Fula, or Fulani, as we know them in this country. If my discourse will make a single member of their genus to become aware of the problems facing his people, or make someone among others to sympathize with them, then my objective is fulfilled. Furthermore, if another would take practical steps to ameliorate their predicament, it would be a bonus I never hoped to earn.
To begin with, I think a clarification is necessary. I am afraid that I will be accused of raising the banner of ethnicity. That is not my intention. Islam strongly condemns tribalism, though it recognizes tribal differences as natural traits among human species. Yet, it does not deny us an objective examination of our problems in their proper contexts. There are problems we share globally with citizens of other nations; others are limited to our country, region, tribe or even area. What is paramount, in my view, is that our examination must be for the purpose of finding solutions that will bring us together. This is the spirit in which this essay was written. If my style and humor will offend any of my readers, please let him accept my sincere apology.
Also, without any prior permission from anthropologists, I have found it necessary, for the purpose of our discussion at least, to divide the Fulani into two: Fula naturalis, representing the Fulani who are largely nomadic or semi-sedentary and who have maintained both the traditional culture of the Fulbe in language and cattle keeping; and Fula domesticus, who have completely transformed from the natural nomadic state into that of sedentary cosmopolitan life, grabbing its opportunities, facing its challenges and suffering from its problems. Their cattle have divorced them, or they have divorced their cattle, just as they did with their language in most cases.
Language
I will start with the language because it is the most crucial factor in the continuity of culture. Some would say its disappearance is as threatening to its people as genocide. Fulfulde, the language of the Fula, is fast disappearing due to three principal factors that we will now consider individually.
The first is marriage. There is a strong correlation between genetic adulteration and the survival of a language. Like other nomads, the Fula have avoided this as much as possible in their history. It appears that their migration into the farthest region of sub-Saharan Africa in the 10th century AD (or much earlier) and their intermarriage with tribes like Jolof and Wolof has not affected the language because it once enjoyed the status of lingua franca in the Senegambian region, something like what we have in Guinea even today and in Adamawa province of Nigeria. That has helped to make many other tribes adopt it as a language and get assimilated into the genus to jointly participate later in their eastward migration through ancient Mali and down to where we find them now in Central and Southern African countries today.
In contrast, where fulfulde remained a minority language, any intermarriage with other people decreases its chances of its survival. In Hausaland, for example, the introduction of a single non- Fulani wife has in most cases put an end to its usage in many houses.
The Fulani are less concerned with marrying out their daughters to outsiders than allowing their sons to take wives from non-Fulani. Without the faintest knowledge of Mendelian genetics or the liguistic analysis of Chomsky, they have understood that importation of a foreign gene into a genetic pool is more catastrophic to the continuity of language than its exportation, though the latter too has its effect. In fact, one of the factors that contributed to their political and social protection is that their genetic pool has continued to quench the thirst of many non-Fulani (I will not call them habe, for now) who are attracted by one of their Berber features which they notice on some of their females. Where such features become exceptional, a competition for them ensues usually between a poor insider and a rich outsider. More often, the battle is won over by the outsider. The girl will then relocate from the environment of her Fula naturalis parents to the spacious palace of a prince, or the grandiose mansion a bourgeois or the modest house of a middle class Romeo. The copy of that gene is thus gone. And if it were not for the polygamous nature of the genus and the high fertility of the African female, the Berber features of the Fula would have been completely exhausted through this artificial selection.
Nevertheless, it is really gladdening to see how the copies of the Fula genes are gradually gaining dominance, through the above- described method of artificial selection, over others in the composition of the elite DNA throughout Hausaland. At the same time we regret the recent discovery of these genes by the western capitalist fashion and movie industry. M-Net for example has just whisked away a fifteen-year old (just imagine this kind of child labour!) Senegalese Fulani girl - Fatimatoulaye Diallo - for a sponsored carrier in the United States.
The second factor is their involvement in administration. It is one of the ways that transformed many a naturalis into a domesticus in Hausaland. The Hausa are as notorious as the Egyptians. Their language and culture is pervasive. Like their Egyptian counterparts, any conqueror is allowed one choice, as rightfully noticed by the late Taha Husein in his Hadithul Arbi'aa: it is either assimilation or annihilation. Where the conqueror intermarried with the indigenes, his rule remains as long as his astuteness could afford; otherwise, if he plays the game of the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, the French and finally the English in Egypt by alienating himself from the fellaheen, his regime becomes short-lived and very soon none of his progeny will taste the sweet water of the Nile.
The Fulani leaders of the 19th century Jihad in Hausaland have wisely preferred assimilation, though unlike the Arabs, they did not attempt to superimpose their language on the Egyptians. If anything, the Fulani rulers preferred Arabic and Hausa in their official communication, using Fulfulde only for personal interaction among themselves. Thus, though Danfodio and his brothers were fluent in fulfulde, barely two centuries later, I doubt if the occupant of his seat, the present sultan, would understand jam bandu na?
I doubt also if there is anyone that could understand fulfulde among any Northern Fulani Emirs in the Northwest or the near Northeast. They have become the best samples of Fula domesticus. Exceptions to this are the fulbe fombina, the domesticus of the far Northeast and northern Cameroon, who have benefited from the lingua franca status of the language in the region. The palaces of Adamawa nd Gombe emirates, for example, have remained enviable for retaining their fulfulde. They only need to contend with the third factor: urbanization.
Anytime the Fulani and his cattle part ways he leaves behind him the shell of nomadic life that limited his interaction with other people. For every minute that his children will speak with others in Hausa or other languages, their fluency in fulfulde is dropping from the standard threshold of the naturalis. In most cases, at the gate of the city, the language seems to tell him what Khidr told Moses: "this is our point of departure."
Nature is sometimes the facilitator. Whenever hit by a catastrophic loss of his cattle to disease, like the rinderpest epidemic of the early eighties where millions of cattle were lost in few months, nature offers the Fula naturalis only a choice between two extremes: abandon the bush and come to civilization or remain there to rear the few cattle that remained for others. Most of them threw away their shepherd's stick and said goodbye to the bush, forever.
Sometimes it is the sheer demands of life that would finish his cattle. If he has attempted to buy the luxuries of urban life such as education, cars, urban dishes and wives, then, coupled with growing lack of grazing areas, the number of his cattle will dwindle annually.
Finally, today, if the Fulani does not go to the town, the town will come to the Fulani. It will trek to meet him in a settlement that has been exclusively his. A highway may pass through the settlement and that is enough to trigger a chain reaction. First, it will attract other people from the hinterland. If the surrounding land is fertile, that will attract farmers, just as a river will also attract fishermen and dry season farmers from Kano and other distant places. The basis for future conflicts between cattle rearers and farmers is thus conceived at this embryonic state.
Then as the population of the settlement increases, the kilometre- wide plots that separated one Fula family from another for the purposes of privacy, farming and grazing would gradually become filled up with houses of other peoples, few of them Fula, many of them whom I can now readily call habe. The local government would find it economical to establish a market, then a well, then a primary school, then a police station, then a clinic, then a secondary school, then electricity, then tap water, then an area court, and then, finally, a prison.
As these developments take place, the Fula is gradually introduced to a life in which he will depend on the skills and products of other people with whom he shares the town. By now his cattle have been pushed many kilometres away from the fast developing town. He will visit them weekly at the beginning. Later, it becomes monthly, then annually, before the cattle finally decide to leave him. His children and grandchildren are now a different Fula. They attend schools and universities; others becoming drivers, civil servants, merchants, politicians, police, magistrates and, worse of all, taking habe wives. The town has transformed him, in situ, into a Fula domesticus. If the Fula naturalis would see him one day and ask him about his cattle, or his staff, or fulfulde, all he will reply with would be laughter. The naturalis, who will notice the morphological features of the genus in him, may only reply in regret, saying, Allah wadan naka ya lalace, wai karen dawa ya ga na gida.
I will leave my reader to think of the various factors contributing to the diminishing status of Fulfulde among town dwellers. It has earlier happened to them under the Songhai Empire, but our concern here is that sedentary life is becoming more inescapable now than in the past, as we saw in the above illustration. The Fula cannot afford to miss the opportunities of urbanization like education, modern health care, transportation, roads, and even modern methods of animal husbandry. There just aren't enough cattle to sponsor the luxury of nomadic life to all their children. So they must learn and practice other trades. As they do that, they should explore means of keeping the language alive even if they were to live in the heart of New York.
Solutions
Now let us turn to solutions for the remaining part of the article. First, the most important thing to note is that it is an act of sheer negligence and disservice to humanity and religion to take any measure that will contribute to the death of any language. Language is a creation of God, to serve the purpose of speech, identification and understanding among the human family. That is why I am worried at hearing other tribes around speaking Hausa in their homes.
As we always appreciate the role Hausa is playing, as a lingua franca, in occupying the identity vacuum of the post-Sardauna North, we should not be afraid to submit that it should not be allowed to wipe out other languages. The Hausa, majority of whom are Muslim, would themselves not like that. Hausa is subtle and conquering. It will use any slight opportunity it is allowed to oust any language in a home. For this reason, some families have banned it completely from their homes. And it worked beautifully.
The second suggestion is for every member of the Fula genus to exercise care in the selection of his marriage partner, as another nomadic tribe did elsewhere. The risk of genetic adulteration that will contribute to the loss of the language is highest among those that have attended schools of western education or those who see Islam as endorsing a singularity of culture, contrary to the diversity we witness in nature. The first wives, in particular, if not all, must come from the genus. If you are looking for piety, the Fula are not destitute of some, to borrow from Gibbon's favourite 18th century diction. The advantage here is that you are likely to return with beauty and many more qualities in addition. Boy, what luck!
But if a Fula naturalis will find his friend irresistible, like my Mary, and at the same time he would wish to maintain the language in his house, then he has no option other than taking all necessary steps to naturalize her. If she is sufficiently intelligent and especially with the persistence of the husband, she will quickly pick the language from other family members and relations. This too has worked in many families.
To those Fula domesticus who have lost the language long ago but would like to restore it, I will prescribe the strong pill of the late Wazirin Sokoto, Dr. Junaidu, if they have enough zeal, courage and time. He was disturbed with his deficiency in Fulfulde because it limited his access to the literature left behind by his ancestors. So one day, at the age of forty, he set out to learn the language by abandoning Sokoto and living among the naturalis. And he succeeded.
Another suggestion to the domesticus who have lost the language is that they and their children, again where it is not too late, should take wives and husbands from the naturalis. The results may be fantastic even from the first generation. We will be delighted if the Fulani ruling houses in the Northwest and Northeast will adopt this strategy. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Hassan Attu Bungudu, Isyaku Dikko and all my blue-blooded domesticus friends must obey this rule next time they are taking partners. Expounding the theory of pulaaku in a newspaper is not enough. I will make fulfulde a precondition for their enthronement whenever the seats in Kano, Bungudu or Katsina become vacant. Their oath of office will be served in fulfulde and henceforth the court itself will adopt it as its only official language. What a crime!
Apart from the home-based suggestions given above, Fulani and other languages need to explore the opportunities that civilization offers. First, I see no reason why any two of them would meet and shy away from speaking the language, of course, without courting unnecessary apprehension from other people.
They need to intensify efforts in teaching fulfulde orthography and speech through various centres and media. I am yet to come across a fulfulde newsletter even in Yola or Gombe or Bauchi in which I will maintain a column. Hey Fulbe, what is happening?
I am yet to see an Alliance Fulanaise in Sokoto, Gusau, Katsina, Zaria, Kaduna, Jos, Maiduguri and other cities, classes where evening lessons are offered the children of domesticus, like those of the late Dr. Junaidu, Shagari, Buhari and Ado Bayero. They may not be opportune to leave Sokoto, Daura or Kano to live among the naturalis in order to recover the language.
I am yet to be invited by any of our universities offering fulfulde to deliver a lecture or recite a poem in the language; or by an association calling itself kaural fulbe, holding a week of campaign for the understanding of their heritage and its contribution to the society. If next time any naturalis sends me an email in English or Hausa, I will return it, saying, "forget it, use ni."
All I am saying here is that there are a thousand ways today that we can promote fulfulde beyond the reta saa'a fulbe in stations like BRC Bauchi. While legitimately becoming worried that Fulani are butchered in various parts of the country, we must recognise the fact that the greatest threat to the culture of a people is the disappearance of their language, as I said earlier.
While I sit down to explore ways of solving other problems facing the Fula genus in Nigeria for your consumption next week, kindly help us by proffering suggestions, as we attempted doing in this discourse, on how their rich language will be saved from the contagion of extinction. I will be glad to receive it at info@fridaydiscourse.com. Meanwhile, I have started my tutorial by learning that in the pleasant fombina dialect, 'jam bandu?' means 'how are you?' and 'jam waala' means 'good night.'
My dear reader, jam waala.