Fulbe Religion

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FULBE RELIGION

FULBE RELIGION . The Fulbe are groups of pastoralists, semipastoralists, farmers, and city dwellers who constitute large minorities in the Sahelian countries stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea (Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Sudan). Also called Fulani, Fellata, and Peul, these people (with an estimated population in the early twentieth century of around twenty-five million) have played a significant role in West African history and attracted the attention of European observers of African societies. While a majority had become Muslims from the eighteenth century, they possess a strong cattle-herding tradition that antedates their Islamic allegiance.

The Fulbe speak Fulfulde (also called Pulār), a language of the West Atlantic branch of Niger-Congo languages. The northern section of the West Atlantic branch includes Wolof, Serer, and Fulfulde, which are the dominant languages of Senegal but were in earlier times spoken farther north, in today's Mauritania. The early Fulbe probably left some of the rock paintings of cattle and herders in the area that gradually became the Sahara. In the last millennium largely nomadic Fulbe have progressively migrated from this location to the east, as far as Cameroon and Chad. In recent centuries they have spread into the Sudan. Until the eighteenth century most of these Fulbe maintained a pastoral lifestyle and had relatively little attachment to Islam.

The intensive Islamization of the Fulbe since the eighteenth century makes it difficult to recapture pre-Islamic Fulbe religion. However, the Malian Fulbe intellectual Amadou Hampaté Ba and the French ethnographer Germaine Dieterlen, who recorded an initiation text from a Senegalese informant and made a French translation and commentary titled Koumen, have provided a very suggestive statement. Koumen, the initiation ceremony, consists of twelve chapters, or clearings, in which the first human herder acquires knowledge of cattle and the world. The world is governed by the eternal and all-powerful God. God designates Canaba, who usually takes the form of a serpent, to be the guardian of cattle, and Koumen to be Canaba's herder. It is Koumen, often in the form of a child, and his wife Foroforondu who actually provide instruction to the novice Sile (a local variation of Sulayman or Solomon). At the end of the story Sile becomes the first silatigi, master of the bush and pastoral life. The story reveals the close ties among men, cattle, land, and vegetation—the trees, vines, and creeping plants that supply the staffs, cords, calabashes, and other vital instruments, as well as the shrines where Sile must demonstrate his attachment to God and the numerous spirits that populate the universe. A rich symbolism of color and number runs throughout the text. Yellow, red, black, and white correlate respectively with fire, air, water, and earth; with east, west, south, and north; and finally with the four original lineages of the Fulbe: Jal or Jallo, Bâ, Sō, and Bari. Sile gradually learns to read the symbolism and to use the configuration of cattle of different coats to divine the proper course of action.

While the Koumen ritual is quite specific to the Fulbe, many of its features recall the religious beliefs and practices of other people living in the region of Senegal and Mali. The silatigi resembles a priest-king. His progress in understanding parallels the learning process that takes place in other initiations. The serpent Canaba recalls the importance of serpents in Soninke and Mandinka symbolism, and his path down the Niger River repeats the trajectory of Mande creation myths. The story also suggests the importance of military leadership, the social stratification characteristic of the Western Sudan, and through the evocation of Solomon, the influence of the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian heritage. A blacksmith who is a member of an artisan caste aids Sile in his initiation. Sile is expected to demonstrate pulaaku, the Fulbe code of honor, shame, and restraint. This code is often defined in contrast to the behavior of slaves, who do not have an affinity for cattle and do not know how to act in general. The slave is seen to be crude, naive, irresponsible, and dark in color; he or she resembles the other black, non-Fulbe populations of West Africa. Pulaaku resembles the codes of a number of other stratified societies in West Africa who distinguish sharply between the conduct that one may expect of the noble and free strata and the behavior that one must tolerate from slaves and the people of caste—the hereditary corporations of blacksmiths and other trades. In general, pulaaku and the whole ritual of Koumen are consistent with pastoral Fulbe custom across the Sahelian zone. In the present state of knowledge they can be considered representative of pre-Islamic Fulbe beliefs and practices.

Until the eighteenth century the Fulbe were not in the forefront of forming states or practicing Islam in the western and central Sudanic region. The Timbuktu scholars who wrote the chronicles called the Taʾrīkh al-Fattāsh and Taʾrīkh al-Sudān in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarded some Fulbe as the enemies of Islam, agriculture, commerce, and cities. Beginning in the eighteenth century Fulbe in several locations took the lead in establishing specifically Islamic states and societies. They used the process of jihād, or war against unbelievers, to reverse regimes that they considered pagan or nominally Muslim, appoint leaders who were knowledgeable in the faith, and erect educational and judicial systems in which Islamic law would be learned and practiced. While they failed to implement all of their ideal, they did spur, for the first time, the permanent development of an Islamic culture in the countryside outside of the capitals and commercial centers. The leaders in this process were scholars and sedentary Fulbe who were already at some distance from the predominantly pastoral pre-Islamic tradition. Over time they developed new genealogies where the four original Fulbe lineages were all descended from ʿUqba, usually identified with ʿUqba ibn Nāfiʿ, the Arab conqueror of much of North Africa in the seventh century ce. This origin is widely accepted by Fulbe of all persuasions today.

The first two of these Islamic revolutions occurred in the eighteenth century in the two Fūtas, regions fairly close to the Atlantic Ocean. The leaders in Fūta Jalon, the mountainous zone of Guinea, created an elaborate system of Islamic instruction in Fulfulde as well as Arabic. The Fulfulde system, based on a modified Arabic alphabet, was designed to reach the women, pastoralists, and others who were unlikely to acquire the ability to read and write for themselves. The people of Fūta Tōro, the middle valley of the Senegal River, became known as the Tokolor, a word that served to distinguish them from the Fulbe who were less committed to the establishment of an Islamic state and culture.

The most important revolution occurred in Hausaland, or northern Nigeria. In the early 1800s Usuman (also called Uthman or Usman) dan Fodio, his brother ʿAbdullāh, and his son Muhammadu Bello launched the jihād against the ruling class of the Hausa state of Gobir. Dan Fodio's students and allies then carried the campaign against other states and established new settlements beyond Hausaland. By 1812 a vast new confederation had emerged with its principal center at Sokoto, in northwest Nigeria. Dan Fodio and his associates wrote a large number of influential treatises that became the standard texts for the practice and spread of the faith in the western and central Sudan. The last revolution occurred in the middle delta of the Niger River, between the towns of Segu and Timbuktu and created the caliphate of Hamdullāhi around 1820. The movement led by ʿUmar Tāl put an end to this regime in 1862.

Fulbe scholars also played an important role in spreading the Qādirīyah and Tijānīyah Islamic orders, which could be practiced in the countryside, away from the large mosques, schools, and courts of the towns. One can say that the Fulbe supplied the most important agents of Islamization in West Africa in the nineteenth century.

Many Fulbe have remained relatively marginal to these processes of state formation and Islamization. Despite devastating droughts in the 1980s, they have tried to sustain their pastoral economy and lifestyle in the regions of West Africa that are more suited to grazing than to agriculture. For all public purposes they are Muslim; they observe the obligations incumbent on all members of the faith. In their family life and relationship to cattle, they observe the customs and values reflected in the Koumen ceremony.

Bibliography

The classic statement of Fulbe values is in Amadou Hampaté Ba and Germaine Dieterlen's Koumen: Texte initiatique des pasteur peul (Paris, 1961). A useful English statement on the Fulbe is Paul Riesman's Freedom in Fulani Social Life: An Introspective Ethnography (Chicago, 1977). Marguerite Dupire provided a detailed study of the social organization of the pastoral Fulbe in Organisation sociale des Peul: Étude d'ethnographie comparée (Paris, 1970). The dualism of many contemporary Fulbe is well described in Derrick J. Stenning's Savannah Nomads (London, 1959), while the similarities of myth and ritual in the western Sudan are explicated in two articles by Germaine Dieterlen in the Journal de la Société des Africanistes, "Myth et organisation sociale au Soudan Français," vol. 25, nos. 1–2 (1955): 39–76, and "Mythe et organisation sociale en Afrique occidentale," vol. 29, nos. 1–2 (1959): 119–138. For a useful summary of the Fulbe's role in the state-formation process of recent centuries, see David Robinson's The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1985), esp. chap. 2.