My Peulh Post

So I was planning on putting up some pictures of my house, but my connection right now isn’t quite strong enough to upload pictures. Not a whole lot of excitement over the last week. The well is still dry, still hit or miss on finding help to bring water back. It’s been cooling down a little bit lately, starting to get more cloud cover in the sky.

I’ve been meaning to write a little bit about the Peulh and some of the diversity in my area for a while, so here goes nothing.

First off, there is the matter of what name to call them. In English we tend to use the word Fulani or some variant thereof, but here I’ve only ever heard of people refer to them as the Peulh, so that is what I’ll use. It’s kind of like the Yoruba, who are typically called the Nago here.

Anyways, in my experience a lot of volunteers have some sort of romantic idealization of the Peulh. My feelings aren’t exactly the same, but they are fairly interesting to think about and shed some light on life here (that is, after all, why I’m writing about them).

The Peulh are semi-nomadic pastoralists who live in small bands throughout West Africa, herding their cattle. So in a way they are like cowboys (explains why some people romanticize about them). My village is pretty close to the southern limit of where they live.

They tend to have large flocks have cattle, although they don’t own all of them. Typically up to half of their cattle are actually owned by wealthier members of the community, who then have the Peulh look after them. In exchange, the Peulh receive the first born calf.

The interesting thing about the Peulh, however, is that there is very little interaction between them and other groups in society. They are a fairly insulated trust network, in part by choice and in part because people generally either dislike or are ambivalent about the Peulh.

Why do they dislike them, you may ask. Well, a couple of reasons. Sure, some of it is that people don’t understand or interact with them, so they keep the Peulh at arms length. Linguistically there is no similarity between their language and the other languages in the area, so interaction is admittedly difficult.

But, remember, these are people who are primarily cattle herders. Most days are spent on foot, moving their cattle around for grazing. Often times they their cattle tramples on people crops.

Similarly, they are a semi-nomadic people, choosing to live in isolated communities in the bush. They periodically move these villages throughout the year in an effort to find grazing grounds for their cattle. Sometimes they build their houses on someone’s farmland.

The last reason I’ve heard for why people don’t like the Peulh is because, I’ve been told, most highway bandits are Peulh. I’m admittedly not sure if this is true, or if they are serving as a scapegoat, but it sort of makes sense. They are rather shut out from most traditional avenues for upward mobility for linguistic and education reasons (Peulh kids don’t really go to public schools, sometimes they go to Koranic schools). Also, most bandits operate in the bush in rural spots of the road, the same kinds of places the Peulh typically inhabit.

Where I live is supposedly bandit central in the country (bandits captured the President on the road in between my village and the paved road a few years ago), so banditry is admittedly an issue at least in the back of a lot of people’s minds around here.

Ethnic diversity, at least around my village, is what I’d call vertical rather than horizontal (no idea if that is a real term). What I mean by this is that Benin is a very diverse country if you look at the statistics, but that diversity is rather well defined and confined. Where I live everyone is Mahi, but if you go 10-15 miles to the east you will find no Mahi, instead everyone is Yoruba (Nago).

I would say only one ethnic group populates most villages, towns and cities are more diverse and may have a few ethnic groups, but even many are dominated by one group.

Also, I recently realized why my village was founded. I knew that settlers who left the Dahomey kingdom founded it in the early 1800’s. I had been told that the settlers left because of some type of unnamed persecution, I now know what that persecution was. The Mahi were a target of slave raids by Dahomey leadership, they left kingdom and settled here to escape their reach.

So that’s all I’ve got for now, probably won’t post anymore updates until I get to a better connection and can put up some pictures.