Liptako Speaks: History from Oral Tradition in Africa [Course Book ed.] 9781400855513

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LIPTAKO SPEAKS HISTORY FROM ORAL TRADITION IN AFRICA

LIPTAKO SPEAKS HISTORY FROM ORAL TRADITION IN AFRICA

PAUL IRWIN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1981 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

FOR MARGARET

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XL

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTION 1. THE CHARACTERS

XV

xvii XIX

3

2. TRANSMITTING MEMORY DOWN THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

22

3. A WORLD OF LINEAGES

42

4. RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

67

5. THEJIHAD

90

6. THE STYLE OF POLITICS CONCLUSION NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

133 162 165 203 219

LIST OF MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES

MAPS 1. Liptako's Precolonial Villages 2. Liptako's Regional Setting

6 11

FIGURES 1. a. 3· 45· 6. 7· 8.

The Village Heads of N'Diomga: List One The Village Heads of N'Diomga: List Two The Village Heads of N'Diomga: List Three The Emirs of Liptako The Village Heads of Katchirga The Precolonial Village Heads of Beybaye The Precolonial Feroo6e of Dori and Katchirga The Normative Order of Succession to Office

57 58 59 76 86 138 142 152

TABLES 1. Liptako's Kinglists 2. Lists of the Eighteenth-century Kings of Koala

84 95

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WHEN OUR RESEARCH PLANS clashed briefly in 1969, William Allen Brown, then of Harvard University, suggested that material from the history of nineteenth-century Liptako might satisfy my appetite for problems of political integra­ tion fully as well as the history of the area where he wanted to work, and I was soon convinced that he was right. A few months later the United States Office of Education offered me a Fulbright-Hays Graduate Fellowship to fund my fieldwork, and I spent sixteen months in Upper Volta and France in 1970, 1971, and 1972 gathering oral, archival, and manuscript data for my dissertation, "An Emirate of the Niger Bend: A Political History of Liptako in the Nineteenth Century." After 1973, when I finished the dissertation, I became more and more caught up in methodological issues, particularly the question of how much history one can learn from oral tradition. I decided to build on the work I had already done rather than embark on a study of another society, and in 1976 the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Stan­ ford University's African Studies Program jointly funded four months of additional research in Upper Volta, France, and Niger that allowed me to explore intellectual avenues I had not thought to explore before. Generous support from Stanford University and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Foundation gave me six months of freedom from other tasks to devote to full-time writing in 1976 and 1977. William Brown and these various institutions are just a few among the many individuals and institutions whose help, sympathy, and kindness made my plans a reality and my work a joy. My entire graduate career was spent at the University of Wisconsin—Madison; and Philip D. Curtin,

xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

my advisor, and Jan Vansina, both of the Department of History, stimulated my work by their sustained, critical, and friendly interest in it and by their models of commit­ ment to disciplined and far-ranging scholarship. So too did many other friends and teachers at Wisconsin, especially Myron Echenberg, Steven Feierman, David Henige, Joseph Lauer, Paul Lovejoy, Joseph Miller, Neil Skinner, and Tom Spear. David Henige's interest in my work has been particularly keen. Between 1970 and 1978 he read countless drafts of my various projects and commented on them in detail. His comments have been precious, and so has his friendship. Kennell Jackson and Alasdair Macphail of Stanford University consistently took lively interest in my ideas, and their comments pushed me on to new in­ sights. Don Baldwin, Laurentia Irwin, and Joseph Irwin read much of the manuscript, always with care, and saved me from countless egregious errors. Betty Eldon, Martha Ripple, and Jean Shimoguchi typed countless drafts with unfailing good cheer. All these friends deserve more thanks than I can adequately convey. Michel Izard, then Director of the Centre Voltaique de la Recherche Scientifique at Ouagadougou, encouraged me to undertake the project when I applied for research clear­ ance in 1969; and his successor, Marcel Poussi, lent his support throughout both my trips to Upper Volta. This cordial, helpful reception was typical of that which I found among Voltan civil servants at every level. The same was true of the situation I found in Niger during brief trips in 1972 and 1976. Dioulde Laya, Director of the Institut de Recherche en Sciences Humaines at Niamey, was always generous in his support of my plans. Cordiality and helpfulness were also typical of my recep­ tion in Liptako. The names of many traditionists appear in the text and in the notes, but this is only a small sample of the many men and women who taught me about Liptako in formal interviews and casual conversations in their homes and in the streets. No list of names, however complete, could ever convey any sense at all of the kindness and

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

friendship the people of Liptako lavishly extended to me and my family. My memories of them and my various obli­ gations to them are too many and varied to describe here, but I do wish particularly to thank Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, the last emir of Liptako, who again and again took time out from more pressing tasks to teach me about the ways and history of his subjects. The family of the imams of the Friday mosque at Dori were extraordinarily hospitable even by Liptako's high standards, and they became special friends. The late imam, Muusa Hammadu Aliiyu, his father's brother, Haamidu Allu, and his brother's son and present imam, Nassuru Limam, all number history among their interests, and they were liberal with their advice on where and how to get information I needed. Sometimes they were able to persuade reluctant traditionists to share their knowledge with me. Often they suggested ap­ proaches I had not thought of. I doubt they would approve of the way I have gone about presenting their society's history—divergences between their approach and mine will be clear in the following pages—and I know they would differ with me on specific points of detail and inter­ pretation, but I hope they would sympathize with the spirit in which I have worked. Three other persons need special mention here. Father L. Bidaud of Dori's Roman Catholic mission gave me first lessons in Liptako Fulfulde, explained many aspects of local culture, and, most important of all, gave me and my family friendly support at a time when Liptako was still new and often incomprehensible to us. Dicko Harouna Moussa of Baraboulle came to work for me as in inter­ preter in 1971. He soon became a valued colleague and a dear friend. Daniele Kintz of the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie at Nanterre had begun work in Liptako before I arrived in the field. She, too, became a person whose thinking and friendship I value deeply. My preoccupation with Liptako's past has given my wife and children much to put up with. Their responses to the demands my work inevitably put on them were never stoi-

XlV

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

cal or begrudging; they took it as a family project to which they all enthusiastically contributed in their own ways. My wife, Margaret, followed the project in detail from its ear­ liest moments, and her critical, questioning mind saved me from many traps and suggested new intellectual avenues. The love and understanding of them all have made good times more joyful and bad times more bearable. To them I am most grateful of all.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ANOM

Archives Nationaies, section outre-mer, Paris

ARN

Archives de la Republique du Niger, Niamey

AS

Archives du Senegal, Dakar

CHEAM Centre des Hautes Etudes Administratives sur l'Afrique et l'Asie Modernes, Paris, formerly the Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l'Afrique Musulmane CVRS

Centre Voltaique de la Recherche Scientifique, Ouagadougou

IC

Irwin Collection of Arabic and Fulfulde Manuscripts preserved at the Centre Volta'ique de la Recherche Scientifique, Ouagadougou, and at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences Humaines, Niamey

JAH

Journal of African History

A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

FULFULDE is the language of oral tradition in Liptako, and where individual words and phrases from that language and the personal names of Fulfulde speakers are written here, it is in the system established at Bamako in 1966 by the Congres pour !'unification des alphabets des langues nationales de I'Ouest africain. Readers unfamiliar with the language should recall the following points as they try to say Fulfulde words for themselves. Its five vowels (a, e, i, 0, u) may be long or short; if they are long, they are doubled as in the name Abdullaahi. The glottal stop is indicated by an apostrophe when it occurs in the middle or at the end of a word like al'aada. This last word is pronounced with an initial glottal stop as well, which should make it 'al'aada, but the stop is simply understood and not written when it stands before an initial vowel. The letter c is pronounced like the ch in "chuck"; g is hard, as in "go"; and g is roughly like the ng in "sing." The three implosives f>, d, andy have no English equivalents. For fuller discussions of Fulfulde phonetics set within the Bamako system, see such works as Christiane Seydou's introduction to her edition of Tinguidji'sSilamaka & Poullori (Paris, 1972), pp. 65-66; with special reference to the Gombe dialect, D. W. Arnott's The Nominal and Verbal Systems of Fula (Oxford, 1970), pp. 41-61; and, with special reference to the Adamawa dialect, Leslie H. Stennes's A Reference Grammar of Adamawa Fulani, Michigan State University African Studies Center, African Language Monograph No. 8 (East Lansing, 1967), pp. 1-33. However, the spelling of place names here does not fol­ low the Bamako system but rather the one current in Upper Volta's administration. Wuro ToorooSe is more exact than Ouro Torobe, but the latter is what appears on maps and in governmental records, and insistence on the former would likely introduce more confusion than phonetic clar­ ity is worth.

INTRODUCTION In this land where for millennia only the wise had the right to speak, where oral tradition had the rigor of the most sacred writings, the word became God. To the extent that black Africa lacked a practical system of writing, it conserved a fundamental reverence for speech, for the "fertile word." Amadou Hampate Ba and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar: Le Sage de Bandiagara Don't believe everything you hear. All FulBe are liars. No one will ever tell you the truth about what hap­ pened long ago. Most Fulbe don't even know the truth themselves. Nduroo' Ali, Diobbou, 13 December 1971 "Before the white man came" is a nostalgia-laden phrase that recurs again and again in the stories of Liptako's traditionists. It takes their listeners back to the days when Liptako was an emirate, an independent state, not the col­ onized cercle of Dori that the emirate's French conquerers made it in 1897 or the decolonized sous-prefecture of Dori that is now part of Upper Volta. The new terminology of government has never caught on in Liptako, where, as one crusty aristocrat put it, "Liptako is still Liptako no matter what other people call it." The persistence of the old name and the continued popularity of stories of precolonial Lip­ tako's pious clerics and conniving politicians, great war­ riors and simple herders, upright emirs and not so upright emirs—all are evidence of widespread affection for a time when Liptako's citizens were committed to other ideals than the secular, modernizing, republican ones that the Voltan government now stands for. Traditions of "before the white man came" are the sub­ ject of this book. Its intellectual concerns grew directly out of an experience in early March 1971, when I got together my recorder and tapes, my pens and notebook, and went

XX

INTRODUCTION

out to record traditions for the first time. By then I had spent about four months at Dori, the small Sahelian town that was Liptako's capital in the old days. I had been busy setting up a household, making friends and learning who was who, getting a feel for Dori and the surrounding coun­ tryside, finding a research assistant, and working away at Fulfulde, the local language. By March the time seemed ripe to push ahead toward the heart of the work I had come to do: collecting data for a study of the emirate's political history. Although I had arrived in Dori with the assumption that Arabic manuscripts would tell me most of the story of Liptako's past, it was now clear I had been wrong. Manuscripts were few and often not very illuminat­ ing. I would have to rely on oral tradition, this society's primary vehicle for history, if I were to learn anything much at all. So I began casting about for names of traditionists. Al­ most all my new friends had names to suggest. The tone in which the imam of the Friday mosque made his recom­ mendations characterized also a host of others. He claimed to know some real experts. They could tell me precisely and truthfully just what life was like in the old days. They would not varnish the truth. If they did not know an an­ swer to a question, they would say so. They would never invent fanciful stories that, while preserving their reputa­ tions as all-knowing authorities, would also lead me down false byways. Nor would they toady to the country's rich and powerful with flattering tales that might win them in­ fluential friends but also twist reality out of shape. Not all traditionists were so scrupulous, the imam warned. I should beware. I decided to start with a man on the imam's list, a man whom several other friends had also recommended in glowing terms and one whom I had already met several times in Dori as he chatted with his friends in the shade of a tree outside the Friday mosque or as he strolled through the town market.1 He was then in his late sixties, a tall, im­ posing, white-gowned, white-turbaned patrician who ruled

INTRODUCTION

XXl

one of Liptako's most powerful and prestigious villages. He was soft-spoken and reticent, but when he spoke, he used tones of authority, and people listened with obvious re­ spect and deference. Everyone said his skills as a traditionist lay in recounting the history of his ancestors. They were an illustrious lot, and I could hear pride in the old man's voice as he began our conversation by reciting the genealogy of his forefathers who had founded the village and ruled it for generations. Then, using the genealogy as a sort of outline, he began to tell me what some of these men had achieved. His tales were full of life and detail and, when he tired after an hour or so, I went back to Dori feel­ ing that my research was off to a roaring start. But it was not. My tape recording of our talk was nearly inaudible, spoiled by amateurish recording techniques, and so a few days later I found myself and my recorder back in the old man's reception house, going over the same material again. Once again he recited the list of the village heads and began to tell me what they had done. This time the tape was fine. That was encouraging progress, but comparing the tape with my notes on the first interview was dishear­ tening: the two lists were not identical. The same names figured in both, but the bonds of kinship that tied them to­ gether into a single genealogy differed. A cousin in the first list was a brother in the second. Two of the village heads of the traditionist's first list were not village heads in the sec­ ond; they were just ordinary links in a genealogical pyramid in which other men stood out by virtue of their office. Furthermore, the order of the officeholders varied. Village heads three and four in the first list switched posi­ tions in the second.2 I thought this was a miserable, depressing beginning. I would rather have had two problem-free testimonies, ones I could have typed up and filed away without being made to worry how I would ever sort out the mess of contradic­ tory detail into a reliable list that would tell me at a glance the names of the village heads, the order they held office, and the blood ties among them. I hoped that my interviews

xxii

INTRODUCTION

would quickly take a turn for the better, but they did not—or at least so long as I measured their value by the coherency of their evidence. The evidence of the more than two hundred formal in­ terviews and the countless chats on history in which I par­ ticipated during fourteen months in 1971, 1972, and 1976 was full of difficulties. Some traditionists, like the old man, told me one thing at one interview and something else at another. When the knowledge of different traditionists converged on the same subject, their accounts almost al­ ways differed, sometimes in small ways, sometimes radi­ cally. From my point of view some of the differences were trivial. It did not matter much to me whether Ukba, a figure who looms large in local mythology, was the son of Yasir or the son of 'Amir, but it mattered very much to some traditionists, whose squabbles were full of clues as to how they looked at history. The significance of some dif­ ferences seemed explicable in terms of competing political allegiances or differing intellectual commitments, both of which suggested visions of how the past ought to have been and required that it be reworked to suit them. Clearly, Liptako tradition did not have "the rigor of the most sacred writings." The spoken word was far too fluid and "fertile" for that.3 Liptako people know that their traditions are full of problems: Nduroo' Ali's warning that I should never be quick to believe tradition or indeed anything people said was stock advice I heard all over the emirate. Similar judg­ ments come from other times and places. Long ago Thucydides concluded "that one cannot rely on every de­ tail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an un­ critical way." Not only "stories of ancient times" stimulated his skepticism. He found that eyewitnesses to the Peloponnesian War gave "different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories," thereby making his job of his­ torical reconstruction a hard one.4

INTRODUCTION

XXlll

Many other, later writers have been as skeptical of oral traditions' evidential worth as Thucydides, but in the 1950s and 1960s some historians began to think that tradition might be able to tell more about the past than conventional wisdom allowed. This coincided with the development of interest in the history of nonliterate peoples and social groups, whose past clearly could never be known in any de­ tail if the spoken word were inadmissible evidence. But here historians ran into a methological roadblock: the tra­ ditional skills of the profession centered on the analysis of the written word, not the spoken one. The publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition orale in 1961 promised to show Africanists the way through the barrier. Vansina argued "that oral tradition is not necessarily untrustworthy as a historical source, but, on the contrary, merits a certain amount of credence within certain limits," and he then ad­ vised historians on just how to collect and use traditions to produce trustworthy results.5 The book opened up a myriad of intellectual possibilities to historians of precolonial Africa: if Vansina was right, a past that was unretrievable by tried-and-true methods became recoverable by new ones. And most Africanists agreed that Vansina was right indeed. The book became a staple of graduate reading lists in the field, and dotted the footnotes to the increasing number of articles and books devoted to applying the les­ sons of Vansina. But not all scholars shared the wave of optimistic en­ thusiasm. The anthropologist T. O. Beidelman was its severest critic. He thought the new breed of oral historians worried all too little about whether the events which tradi­ tions reported "actually occurred as recorded or whether these simply should have occurred in order for the past to conform with the society as it exists today—or, at least, how it is thought to exist by those within it." He sharply criticized Vansina's work, and he thought that many of those who tried to write oral history demonstrated a lack of "competence in social theory, much less any sophistication in the analysis of kinship, genealogies or symbolism"—a

XXlV

INTRODUCTION

sorry state of affairs that in Beidelman's opinion was cura­ ble only by a substantial dose of anthropological training.® Recently Vansina himself has worried in print about the work of his fellow oral historians. Many of them are guilty, he wrote, of "merely restating what a society says, thinks and feels about itself' rather than critically searching out and examining the "subtle biases" that pervade and shape traditionists' testimonies.7 Liptako's oral traditions are full of "subtle biases." Like the Kuba stories of genesis that Vansina studied, they bear testimony to "the impact of pervasive cultural imprints."8 The object of this book is to lay bare some of the imprints and biases, to consider how they have affected the content of traditions, and to see how much historians can learn from them about Liptako's precolonial past.

LIPTAKO SPEAKS HISTORY FROM ORAL TRADITION IN AFRICA

CHAPTER 1 THE CHARACTERS All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell, Animal Farm I am an invisible man. . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. . . . That in­ visibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

ABDUSSALAAMI USMAAN was what Liptako people call a "wise old man"—old because he was well into his seventies, wise because he knew his traditions like few other men, young or old. I had heard about him for months by the time I went to Bani to see him in late 1971. He had heard about me too, and as we settled down on grass mats laid in the shade of a tree in a quiet courtyard off the Bani mar­ ket, he launched right into his stories without the usual pre­ liminary hesitancies of other wise old men trying to make up their minds how best to deal with a prying foreigner. His stories ranged in time from the era of the Prophet Muhammad to the present, and in space from Bani and Liptako to Diagourou, Hombori, and even distant Fuuta Tooro almost 1,500 kilometers away. Bani, Liptako, Diagourou, Hombori, Fuuta Tooro— these names and those of the people that live there and in neighboring places are household words in Liptako. They are part of everyday geography. To foreigners searching out these names on maps they have no special value. They

4

THE CHARACTERS

are just labels pinned on places. To the people of Liptako these names are not neutral: they call up associations, they carry values. These reflect historical experience; they also affect traditionists' judgments on what in historical experi­ ence is important enough to remember for the future. From their point of view the histories of some peoples and places are more worth knowing than others. Here is the first of the "subtle biases" that permeate their thinking. The wise old men think Liptako history is worth know­ ing. Even though many of them know smatterings of his­ tories from the world beyond Liptako, and some know a great deal, Liptako's borders nonetheless define the terri­ tory within which most of the events that traditions de­ scribe took place. All the country's present-day inhabitants say their ancestors came from somewhere else, mostly from Mali and other parts of Upper Volta in the course of the nineteenth century. They must have arrived in Liptako with memories of generations spent in other places, but these memories are dim now, and current traditions leave the impression that history started up as the migrants set foot across the border. Abdussalaami Usmaan recalled the names of four generations of his PissilaaBe ancestors who founded his village, Bani Kallo, but most traditionists could go no further than the names of the migrant ancestor. Abdussalaami could even remember the details of a crisis in PissilaaBe history that occurred well before they moved on to Liptako; very few traditionists could do the same. Events in pre-Liptako history were generally forgotten as people chose to use their energies for remembering their Liptako past instead. The migrants swelled Liptako's population and pushed its boundaries outward during the nineteenth century. The emirate that was founded about 1810 was a tiny state of only a few villages—just twelve, aver the traditionists— and all but one of them lay within fifteen kilometers of the Yaayre, a large pond spreading west and north of Dori. By the time of the French conquest of 1897, the number of vil­ lages had more than quadrupled. In 1904, the year of the

THE CHARACTERS

5

emirate's first census, the colonial administration counted 37,700 people, probably fewer than actually lived there.1 Some of the nineteenth-century migrants had joined the first settlers in the core area around the Yaayre, but others had founded new villages outside it, particularly to the east, south, and west where agricultural and pasture land was more readily available. In 1897 Katchirga, seventeen kilometers from Dori, was the easternmost settlement, and Diobbou, thirty-five kilometers away, was the westernmost. The country between them is a sandy, sparsely vegetated plain.2 The people who founded villages south of Dori moved into a different sort of terrain, the increasingly lateritic or clayey, often hilly country that stretches from about M'Bamga to Bani and beyond. Bani, which lay about forty kilometers from Dori, was the southernmost village. The region north of Dori was less favorable for settlement. A large sand dune rises along the north side of the Yaayre within sight of Dori. Villages were built on the dune even before the emirate existed, but expansion beyond it was discouraged by the decreasing quantity and reliability of rainfall to the north and especially by the danger of Tuareg raids. The colonial peace put an end to the Tuareg danger and some new villages were founded north of the dune. But most colonial and post-colonial settlement has continued to take place in the more favorable physical en­ vironment east, south, and west of Dori. By 1968 Liptako included 129 officially recognized villages occupied by 74,073 people.3 Despite its growth, Liptako was still sparsely populated, only 8.2 persons to the square kilome­ ter, to be compared within Upper Volta to the average density of 51 in the rural areas around the capital of Ouagadougou some 250 kilometers to the southwest and 5 in the bordering Oudalan to the north.4 The decreasing density of population as one moves within Upper Volta from Ouagadougou to Liptako to the Oudalan correlates with decreasing rainfall. At Ouaga­ dougou rainfall averages 854 millimeters annually; at Dori, 567; at Gorom-Gorom, in the Oudalan, 459.5 Dori's 567

6

THE

CHARACTERS

MAP I puts Liptako within the Sahel, a climatic zone lying south of the Sahara and stretching east-west across West Africa that is defined in terms of rainfall as land receiving between 100 and 600 millimeters per year. 6 If only every year were an average year, 567 millimeters would be enough for the crops Liptako farmers favor, but, as is typically the case in the Sahel, all too many years deviate from the average. In the fifty-three years between 1 9 2 1 and 1 9 7 3 annual rainfalls ranged from a low of 245 millimeters in 1926 to a high of 783 in 1 9 5 3 . A n d even if the total quantity of rain is

THE CHARACTERS

7

adequate, its distribution in space and time is frequently inadequate. Most of the annual rain usually falls between the middle of June and the middle of September. 7 Farmers plant immediately after the first large rain, but sometimes the first is not followed quickly enough by a second, so the seed is lost. Or the rains may fail in the midst of the grow­ ing season, and then once-healthy plants shrivel in the sun and yield nothing at all or not enough to feed their owners for the coming year. While some villages enjoy sufficient rainfall, well-distributed over the growing season, others may not. Localized drought, crop failure, and famine are yearly occurrences in Liptako. Sometimes, as in the early 1970s, when natural disaster brought the Sahel to the at­ tention of the non-African world as it had never been be­ fore, they devastate the whole country. Like rainfall, drinking water is a scarce resource. Liptako's first villages were located near the Yaayre, where, once the pond had filled during the rains, abundant sur­ face water could be found for the villagers and their ani­ mals. Even if the pond dried up during the long rainless months, and sometimes it did not, its bed was a favorable place for digging waterholes. Away from the Yaayre water was often hard to find until quite recently. Now Liptako has an increasing number of deep, concrete-lined, machine-drilled wells that assure a fairly regular water supply for many villages. The shallower, hand-dug wells and waterholes that were once the primary source of water were less reliable. They kept some of the villages that had them through the dry months, but the inhabitants of less fortunate villages sometimes had to go long distances to find drinking water, which they hauled home in skin bags slung across donkeys' backs. In the dry season cattlemen often have to drive their herds far from home in search of water, sometimes even out of Liptako to Mossi and Gourmantche country to the south where water is generally more plentiful. In 1904, H.C.E. Bouverot, one of the first in the long series of Frenchmen who administered the cercle of Dori from the 1897 conquest until Upper Volta's in-

8

THE CHARACTERS

dependence in i960, asserted that "lack of water is the real stumbling block that will always block any major develop­ ment of the natural riches of the country."8 Modern ob­ servers still agree. Many Westerners have thought Liptako unpromising. Heinrich Barth, the great German traveler, was the first European to visit the country. He passed through on his way from Sokoto to Timbuktu in July 1853, a time of year when the rains are usually well under way and Liptako is green with crops and grass. But 1853 was a year of "ex­ traordinary drought," and even in July vegetation was sparse. As Barth approached Dori, he saw an "immense plain, which was scarcely broken by a single tree, with the exception of a few stunted monkey-bread-trees [baobabs]." Everything "bore ... the character of extreme drought and barrenness." All in all, Barth thought Liptako "an ex­ tremely dry and uncomfortable place." Parfait Louis Monteil, who was there in 1891, was no more favorably im­ pressed. He wrote feelingly of "the monotony of the thorny, grey bush," "monotony" being a word that Barth had used to describe Liptako's landscape almost forty years before and that Bouverot, some years later, was to use again, qualified and intensified as "heartbreaking mo­ notony."8 The people of Liptako do not see the landscape around them as either monotonous or heartbreaking; they see it with the eyes of a culture that finds beauty and variety in the plains. They would agree that Liptako is very dry: I often heard people wish water and rain were more plenti­ ful and crops and forage more abundant. Nonetheless, they think Liptako not at all an "uncomfortable place," and their migrant ancestors must have thought the same, or they would never have come and stayed in such numbers. As one man told the king who ruled Liptako before the emirate was founded: "This land is a land of sandy plains, a land of streams, a land for cattle. It is a land for [us]."10 According to the census of 1904, the settlers had

THE CHARACTERS

9

founded fifty-four villages, ranging in size from 44 inhabi­ tants to 4,400 and averaging 696.11 Today most of their houses are round, built of mud-brick walls topped with conical straw roofs, but in precolonial times most were made entirely of straw. Then, as now, each family had a number of houses grouped together in a compound fenced with millet stalks. Agricultural land surrounded the village, and during the growing season the crops were protected from wandering, hungry animals by low fences of thorns that were taken down once the crops were in so animals could graze on the stubble and fertilize the fields with their manure for another growing season. Millet was the preferred grain, and the cow the preferred animal, al­ though the villagers also grew other crops, such as beans, peppers, and maize, and kept other animals, particularly sheep, goats, donkeys, and horses. Nowadays Dori looks very different from the villages. It has broad thoroughfares and the flat-roofed, rectangular, high-walled, mud-brick houses characteristic of urban architecture in the Western Sudan, to say nothing of elec­ tric-light poles, telegraph lines, gas stations, bars, concrete-block government offices, and assorted other vis­ ual reminders that Dori is an administrative and commer­ cial center at the hub of culture change in northeast Upper Volta. But the town has not always looked this way. Dori's precolonial architecture earned it the Hausa nickname of Birnin Bukka, "the city of straw houses." Its streets were narrow paths that tortuously wound their way among the family compounds, just as village paths still do. Shortly after the occupation the French cut the first motor road straight through the town. Late in the colonial period urban planners embarked on a more ambitious venture. They laid out wide, straight streets, intersecting, for the most part, in square corners that the French, if not the res­ idents of Dori, thought orderly and attractive. Then the administration sent in bulldozers to push down walls and houses which stood in the way of achieving the grand de-

10

THE CHARACTERS

sign, thereby producing a sense of achievement in the over­ lords but adding to their subjects' already long and bitter list of grievances. In 1968 Dori had 5,235 residents, making it the most populous place in Liptako. In 1904 it had 3,031, 42 per­ cent fewer, and both Bani, with 4,400 inhabitants, and M'Bamga, with 3,080, were larger.12 But populousness is not the only thing that makes a town. Neither Bani nor M'Bamga had Dori's status. Dori was Liptako's only town, a fact that a late-nineteenth-century traveler would have ap­ preciated at the sight of the high, mud-brick wall, now long since fallen and crumbled, which surrounded and fortified Dori and which had its like nowhere in the region.13 The emir and his court were at Dori for most of the nineteenth century, and messengers moving back and forth between the capital and the villages provided the communicative links that bound the periphery to the center. Thejudge to whom the emir delegated his judicial powers lived at Dori too, and disputants came from throughout the emirate to solicit his judgments on cases too knotty or contentious to settle at home. Liptako's only Friday mosque was in the capital, so then, as now, pious Muslims streamed to Dori every Friday to worship. Dori had special economic importance as well. Now there are many periodic markets in Liptako, but before the French came the Dori market was the only one. The French later moved it from its old location southwest of town beside the pond that still is called Ngayka Luumo, "the pond of the market," to a new location north of the main residential area, and, once again exhibiting a penchant for remaking Africa in a European image, they laid out the stalls in neat rows which must have satisfied their sense of order more than the casual twists and turns of the old mar­ ket. Despite its lack of symmetry, however, the old market did a thriving business. In the nineteenth century Dori was the major commercial center in the east and central Niger bend. According to one observer, the value of its transac­ tions outstripped Say, Ouagadougou, Gao, and Bobo-

THE CHARACTERS

11

Liptako's Regional Setting

Timbuktu

300 Km. 5

Gao Menaka

Hombori

Oudalanι

\S>-

Aribinda

Djibo

Liptako

Djelgodji

l ^ori

Diagourou (untile. 1876/77))

n

Koalac -

Jera —V— ο \ Diagourou \ (since c 1876/77)

Sokoto

Yaga

Boussouma

Niamey

ο Sebba

Say,

Boulsa Fada N'Gourma

Gwandu

'Ouagadougou

Approximate boundaries of modern states

MAP 2

Dioulasso even if it could not match Timbuktu, and it at­ tracted traders and goods from great distances.14 Moors led salt caravans from Taodeni in the Sahara; Hausa brought Kano cloth and other goods from the east; Mossi transported cloth, kola, and slaves; Tuareg and Fulbe brought blankets. Dori itself manufactured cloth and blan­ kets for export. Dori's importance as a center of interna­ tional trade gave it importance well beyond its borders. Georges Mathieu Destenave, the French officer who mas­ terminded the conquest of this part of the Niger bend,

12

THE CHARACTERS

judged that the town "possesses political, religious, and commercial authority [that is] considerable and much more extensive than the smallness of its territory would seem to indicate." Destenave's next words perhaps tell as much about how he saw the significance of his exploits and hoped others would judge them as they do about Liptako: "Dori is the key to the north and the east of the Niger bend. He who rules Dori, says tradition, holds the Tuareg and all the lands to Say, and can rule the left bank of the Niger to the gates of Sokoto."15 Liptako's involvement in regional affairs is reflected in the traditions, which often range beyond the emirate's frontiers. But most of what the traditionists know of other states is nonetheless Liptako-centric: it focuses on points of intersection between the history of the emirate and the his­ tories of surrounding polities. For instance, just south of Liptako lay Koala, a small kingdom ruled and inhabited by Gourmantche. In the eighteenth century Koala's ruling dynasty ruled Liptako; in the nineteenth the new emirate was in frequent conflict with Koala. In both centuries the people of Liptako must have known a good bit about these Gourmantche, but by now Liptako's traditionists recall only crisis points in their relationships. They have almost noth­ ing at all to say about Koala history as a thing of impor­ tance in itself, irrespective of whether or not Liptako in­ teracted with it. Geography is not the only factor that determines how the traditionists view the history of the Gourmantche and other peoples: an ethnic factor also plays a role. Most of the central characters in the traditions are Ful6e (singular: Pullo). For example, all but a few of the genealogies and narratives Abdussalaami Usmaan told were those of Ful&e. He is himself a Pullo, and the language he speaks is Fulfulde, the language of the Ful6e. Ful6e are the most widely dispersed ethnic group in West Africa. Several million of them live in communities scattered across the savanna and Sahel all the way from Senegal to Chad, the Central Afri­ can Republic, and even the Sudan. The non-Ful&e among

THE CHARACTERS

13

whom FulBe settled have called them by various names that influenced the nomenclature which Europeans adopted as they came into contact with Ful&e groups. The French "Peul" came from Wolof; the Nigerian English "Fulani" from Hausa; the Gambian and Sierra Leonean English "Fula" from Malinke. But despite the eccentricities of out­ siders' usages, FulBe is everywhere the name by which members of the group call themselves—a sm;-ll sign of a persistent FulBe conviction that they form a group, dis­ persed and diverse though it is. Even though there would not seem to be much that, say, FulBe herders in Chad would have in common with FulBe townspeople in Guinea-Conakry, they share with one another and with other FulBe similar kinship practices, the same language, traditions of a nomadic, cattle-owning past, legends of common origin, and, most importantly, pride in being Fulbe.16 In Liptako an indicator of the FulBe sense of mem­ bership in a larger ethnic community transcending the political boundaries of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times is their interest in the affairs and history of distant FulBe groups. None of the people I knew had ever been to Guinea-Conakry, but in 1976 rumors circulated that FulBe there were in trouble with Sekou Toure's gov­ ernment, which was said to be actively persecuting them, and I heard discussion after worried discussion of where this might lead. The history of foreign FulBe would seem to have no more immediate relevance to Liptako than the tribulations of the FulBe of Guinea-Conakry, but several times I heard my friends question FulBe travelers passing through Dori on the history of the lands from which they came. Their Liptako audiences listened eagerly to the vis­ itors' stocks of genealogies and anecdotes, and the stran­ gers listened equally eagerly to what Liptako people re­ counted in return. Travelers are not Liptako's only source of traditions of other parts of the FulBe world. Many Liptako traditionists know them too, and they can recite genealogies and recount narratives from the histories of

14

THE CHARACTERS

Ful6e living elsewhere in Upper Volta as well as in Niger, Nigeria, and Mali. Even though Liptako's traditionists think the history of other Fulbe, sometimes even very distant Ful&e, interest­ ing and to some extent even worth learning, they do not have the same high opinion of peoples like the nearby Gourmantche of Koala. The Gourmantche fit in a general category of peoples the FulBe term Haa6e (singular: Kaatfo)—black Africans.17 Ful&e think Haa6e inherently inferior to themselves. This conviction was particularly clear in one man's explanation of why his fellow FulBe were opposed to marrying Haabe: "We Fulbe are de­ scended from Arabs. We are whites, not blacks, and we marry only other whites—Fulbe, Tuareg, Europeans, and Arabs—but never Haabe. We made blacks our slaves in the old days, and their women our concubines! We never took Haabe wives!" Fulbe described the physical characteristics they take to be typically Haabe in terms that would get a sympathetic hearing from Western negrophobes, and they contrasted them with the thin lips, aquiline noses, straight or wavy hair, and copper-colored skins that they deem beautiful and characteristic of themselves. Fulbe assertions of their superiority did not stop with physical externals. No Kaado was a match for even the most slow-witted Pullo, I was told again and again. One man boasted that "no one in the whole world, not even you smart Europeans, is as smart as the smartest Fulbe, and no one is as dumb as a dumb Kaacfo!" Haabe culture came in for criticism too. "If you ever see a boy running after a lizard, he is a Kaacfo," one disgusted Pullo assured me, "and you know he is going to catch it and take it home and cook it over a fire and eat it. We Fulbe never eat unclean things like that."18 The one domain where Fulbe conceded Haabe superiority was in that of physical strength. But this was a double-edged compliment: physical strength implied to Fulbe that Haabe must be good at agricultural labor, which Fulbe abhored, and by extension that Haabe were ideally suited for en­ slavement by weaker but wilier Fulbe.

THE CHARACTERS

15

These racist convictions have influenced traditionists' judgments of what is worth remembering from the history of Liptako's foreign affairs and its domestic history alike. The precolonial emirate was bordered by other HaaBe be­ sides the Gourmantche. To the southwest lived Mossi, or­ ganized in principalities that were at least nominally subject to the overlordship of the Mogho Naba, the emperor at Ouagadougou. Liptako carried on relations, sometimes peaceable, sometimes warlike, with Boulsa, Boussouma, and Tougouri. West of Liptako lay the Kurumba-ruled state of Aribinda. To the east were the Songhay, who di­ vided their allegiances among several small states, one of which, Tera, had much to do with Liptako. Traditionists can recall many points of contact with all these HaaBeruled states, but, as in the Koala case, none can recount a more general, non-Liptako-centered history of any of them. By contrast a number of traditionists know king lists and narratives from the history of Liptako's non-Haa&e neighbors, particularly the Ful&e of the emirate of Yaga to the southeast and the Tuareg of the Oudalan to the north. The traditions of Liptako itself are also Ful&e-centered, although FulBe do not make up a majority of the popula­ tion. The 1904 census reported 16,642 Ful&e, about 44 percent of the total population of 37,700.19 Minority though they were, the Ful6e nonetheless dominated Lip­ tako then as they do today, making it "Ful&e country" in the eyes of Ful&e and non-Ful&e alike. In political terms, Ful&e dominance was reflected in the fact that all the emirs, the holders of the country's highest office, have been Ful&e. Ful&e controlled most secondary leadership positions as well, all but half a dozen of the approximately fifty village headships that existed at the time of the French conquest.20 Ful&e culture was also dominant. Fulfulde was the language of the country then, as it still is, and most non-Ful&e have gradually adopted it as their own along with the whole complex of FulBe values and customs, even while retaining designations of non-Ful&e origin. Non-Ful&e had a variety of different statuses. Some were

16

THE CHARACTERS

free persons (rim6e; singular: dimo). Trade brought small numbers of Moors and Tuareg to Dori. As fellow whites, they were allowable marriage partners, but Moors and Tuareg were so few that intermarriages were infrequent. In precolonial times there seem to have been no marriages between FulBe and members of the small groups of free Haa&e: the Kurumba, the Songhay, and the Hausa. Kurumba ruled Diobbou, the westernmost village in the precolonial emirate. Others lived at Bani, where they were subject to Ful&e. At Dori, the capital, there was a sizable settlement of Songhay who had come as a group from Hombori, today in Mali. They settled in their own quarter of town, the Homborire, where they followed the leader­ ship of the Homborikoy, "the king of Hombori," who claimed descent from a long line of Hombori kings and, ul­ timately, from the great Askia Muhammad of Gao (ruled 1493-1528). The Hausa who came to Dori to trade also had their own quarter, the Haussankore, with its own "head of the quarter," the Mai Unguwa. Lower in status than the free Kurumba, Songhay, and Hausa but still free were the members of endogamous occupational groups like the praise singers, leather workers, and blacksmiths. FulBe claim never to have intermarried with them. All these free persons had higher status than the slaves, the jeyaaBe (singular: jeyaado), "those who are possessed," who in 1904 numbered about 16,065, on Iy 600 fewer than the Ful&e.21 The legal status of slavery no longer exists in Liptako or anywhere else in West Africa: legal and ad­ ministrative pressures emanating from the colonial re­ gimes combined with changes in the colonial economies led to the gradual emancipation of slaves in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. Nonetheless, the Ful&e of Liptako continue to insist ada­ mantly that all the descendants of slaves in the male line are slaves no matter what French and Voltan law have de­ creed, and "slaves" still suffer social disabilities. However, times have changed sufficiently so that the two broad categories the Fulbe once distinguished within the slave

THE CHARACTERS

17

body are no longer socially significant, and even though the terminology of the two categories persists, usages vary somewhat from one speaker to the next, making it hard to discern precisely where the dividing line between them once lay. The two categories are those of maccudo (plural: maccube) and ditmaajo (plural: riimaayBe). The key determi­ nant of whether a slave was one or the other was appar­ ently the length of time he and his ancestors had been slaves. "The diimaajo has been here since the jihad was fought [early in the nineteenth century], since Liptako was nothing but twelve villages," one man explained. "It is the maccudo who has come more recently."22 Maccube were bought from traders or taken prisoner in raids or warfare, and their masters could sell them. Riimaaybe and their an­ cestors had been slaves for generations, and they could not be sold. In both cases slaves were of Haa6e origin. The FulBe thought it wrong to enslave other Ful&e, Arabs, or Tuareg. Ful&e males might make their female slaves their concubines, and their children were considered Ful6e, but slave males were forbidden to marry any but slave women. (The prohibition against marriages between "slave" males and "free" women persists, even though such marriages now sometimes occur, much to the indignation of most FulBe I knew.) All slaves, men and women, maecube and riimaaybe, had to perform designated services for their masters, especially, and of the greatest economic impor­ tance, agricultural labor, an activity Ful6e disdained as unfitting to their status. Slaveholders did not dare treat their slaves any more harshly than local customs would al­ low, for an aggrieved slave was typically quick to flee to a new, potentially kinder master, who was not obliged by law or custom to return him to his former owner. Many runa­ way slaves left Liptako entirely. Tera, Diagourou, and Koala were favorite places of refuge in the nineteenth cen­ tury. The movement of slaves was not one-way; Liptako was a place of refuge in its own right. During the nineteenth cen­ tury several groups of slaves fled from their masters in

18

THE CHARACTERS

neighboring countries and made their way to Liptako, where they sought and obtained the emirs' protection and founded communities of their own. The Malle&e of Mallere, who ran from the Tuareg in the Oudalan, and the BargareBe or BargaBe of Bargare, who fled from the SilIuBe of Barga in northeast Mossi country, came to Liptako in this way. More numerous than either were the Bella&e, who had been Tuareg slaves. They came to Liptako from the Oudalan in many different groups and founded the vil­ lages of Kouri, Oulo, and Sounkoum, where they had their own leaders, and separate quarters of several Ful6e-ruled villages, including Dantchadi, Koria, and Malbo. Some say that their migration and their acceptance of Islam made the BargareBe, the MalleBe, and the BellaBe free; others deny it. In any event they could not be bought and sold by the emirs, who were their protectors, or by anyone else. They performed services for the emirs and brought them goods, but whether these were presents freely given in gratitude for royal protection or exactions paid on demand is unclear. Members of all these social categories, free and slave, FulBe and non-Ful&e, generally remember something about their ancestors, especially those in the male line, and the first step in reconstructing the deeds of nineteenthcentury personages is to hunt down their twentiethcentury descendants to find out what they know. For the history of the BellaBe of Kouri, for instance, one has to go to Kouri. Or for the history of the judges, to the present judge, who recalls far more about the family's past than anyone else. But neither in Liptako nor anywhere else does everyone care equally about history: some take the trouble to learn everything they can, others do not bother. When I approached one village head for assistance in working out his village's history, he was eager to help—he delicately suggested that this might win him favor among the powers that be in the emir's court and in the administration, with which he somehow wrongly assumed I had influence—and

THE CHARACTERS

19

he called all the local elders together to tell me what they knew. Their spokesman recited a genealogy of the village heads; the others told a few anecdotes; and then their very shallow well of memories ran dry. The spokesman ex­ plained that their village's "wise old man" had died the year before, that no one had paid much attention to him while he was alive, that most of what he knew had died with him. I heard this sort of story several times. Usually it was a po­ lite way of evading questions, a means of letting me know that villagers were unsure of what I was about, and as I got to know them better and word spread that I could be trusted, information which had supposedly been lost forever gradually came to light. But in this particular case the spokesman's explanation was not an evasion: the better I knew the village, the more it was clear that no one actually did know anything much about its history. What saves situations like this for the historian is that his­ tory in Liptako is not strictly a family affair. Even if a man's descendants do not remember much about him, someone else may. Many people's memories take in other families and groups besides their own, especially but not exclusively ones they know personally. Thus Abdussalaami Usmaan knows not only the history of his own Bani Kallo but also, even if less fully, the history of the other twelve nearby vil­ lages that make up Bani. And his knowledge does not stop there. He is also well informed on, among other subjects, the history of the imams of the Friday mosque at Dori, one of whom was his teacher, and the Hombori6e, some of whom have been his good friends ever since his school days at Dori some sixty years ago. Sa'iidu Hammadun is another expert on Hombori6e history. He is not Songhay—he is a Jaawanndo, a member of a non-Ful&e but nonetheless Fulfulde-speaking group—but his grandfather lived at Hombori with the Songhay, left there when they did, and settled in their quarter at Dori. Even though Sa'iidu Hammadun's and Abdussalaami Usmaan's memories overlap, their contents are different. Nor do any of the other ver-

20

THE CHARACTERS

sions of Homboribe history exactly match theirs or one another, and so the comparative study of Homboribe tra­ dition becomes possible. The memory of a man's name tends to have a longer life than other sorts of memories: genealogies are so inextrica­ bly bound up with notions of personal identity that no one neglects them entirely. After those who knew him die, he is likely to become just another name in the interminable lists the traditionists reel off unless he "did something" later generations valued. Most traditionists did not make this explicit, but their traditions showed in fact that people who "did nothing" were forgotten in all but name. One person who did explain the situation was a village head who, like most traditionists, opened our interview by reciting his genealogy. He described the careers of his father and grandfather, both of whom he had known personally, and then he skipped back several generations to the ancestor who migrated to Liptako. "And what about the people in between?" I asked. "They did nothing at all," he answered. "They were not warriors or great men. They were just farmers and herders." He knew only their names; no one else I met knew more. In precolonial times the people who "did things," the people who became the great warriors, officeholders, and clerics of today's traditions, were mostly free persons, espe­ cially Ful6e. The lowly roles allowed to slaves made them less likely to be memorable achievers, and I heard about slaves only occasionally. The one slave who made a career for himself that many traditionists think worth remember­ ing was Yobi Katar, who early in the nineteenth century demanded his freedom on the grounds of a promise that Ful6e had made him; he was denied it, then fled Liptako, and repeatedly and destructively raided the country from his bases beyond its frontiers with the help of runaway slaves like himself. The emir could not stop the raiding, and in the end he implored Yo6i to stop and come home, a free man. Even though Fulbe normally expect cowardice and deference from their slaves, Yobi Katar's valor and

THE CHARACTERS

21

defiance of unjust authority are virtues Fulbe admire in themselves and celebrate in their traditions. YoBi Katar's story was too good an exemplar to be forgotten. 23 Women have no YoBi Katar at all. They figure even less frequently in the traditions than slaves, and, when they do, it is always in the passive roles of wife and mother to which Liptako assigns its women. Amadou Hampate Ba once remarked that "every old man who dies is a library that burns." 24 True enough, but clearly much is lost to history even before that, lost because of pervasive notions that some men and their deeds are more worth remembering than others. Without oral tradi­ tion, very little of Liptako's precolonial past could be re­ constructed; even with it, only a portion of the past is re­ coverable. The rest, including much of the story of the country's "invisible" people, its women, slaves, and ordi­ nary men, is gone forever.

CHAPTER 2

TRANSMITTING MEMORY DOWN THROUGH THE GENERATIONS "I think I should understand that better," Alice said very politely, "if I had it written down: but I ca'n't quite follow it as you say it." Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland DURING MY MONTHS of fieldwork,

I went systematically

from one village to the next, searching out "wise old men" and recording what they had to say; and when I was not collecting data, I spent much of my time worrying over what I already had and calculating how best to get more. The traditionists' pursuit of the past is less engrossing, single-minded, and organized. They do not do fieldwork or go to school in Liptako history. They learn casually, gradually absorbing information and elaborating their ideas during lifetimes of conversations that sometimes turn to history but never make it their set, exclusive subject, as it is in the tightly scheduled, carefully organized lectures and seminars which are the main forums for Western talk about history. Late one afternoon, my friends began to discuss water and grazing rights, a subject close to the hearts of people who have many animals but not much water. One old man began to hold forth on the iniquities of the people of Ouro Torobe, a village whose name he said with a sneer punctuated by a spit of derision, prompting a younger man to ask just why he despised them. The elder's long explana­ tion of why nobody from Ouro Torobe can ever be trusted was set in a narrative of events that took place more than 160 years before, at the time of the jihad, when people there turned tail and ran rather than fight the Gourmantche. Once the old man's venom was spent and the

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

23

young man's curiosity satisfied, discussion drifted away from history and back to grumbling about the trials of too little land and too little water. An attentive listener can learn a lot this way, especially if he skillfully plants questions designed to nudge old men's memories toward themes that interest him. But no one, not even the best informed traditionist, makes an effort to sur­ vey all his fellows on any question after the manner of Western historians bent on living up to their discipline's in­ junction to exhaust all the sources. Many people noted that my urge toward exhaustiveness made me different from their traditionists; they remarked that I must know more history than the traditionists simply because I had talked to so many of them for so long. But no matter how farreaching their hunt for data, neither Liptako's historians nor its traditionists can live up to another rule of the field: to work especially from primary sources. This is because there are very few. Instead of eyewitness accounts there are stories mediated through many tellers. Oral tradition, as Vansina tells us, is a "chain of testimonies" binding past and present, but only the link that lies in the present is ac­ cessible; the rest are hidden and unattainable. 1 Only if tra­ ditions are carefully and accurately transmitted from one teller to the next can the historian rest assured that his tra­ ditions, like ancient documents, portray past events through the eyes of those who lived through them, uncontaminated by later accretions and deletions and shifts of emphasis. It is on the transmitting of traditions that this chapter focuses. People turn to wise old men to learn about the past, not to young men or to women. Wisdom is presumed to come with age; and only by the time a man is fifty or so is he thought old enough to have possibly gleaned enough knowledge from a lifetime of listening to his own elders to be worth listening to in turn. Young men, old men told me, do not know anything, and most young men seem to accept this judgment on their proficiency in tradition—or at least those I knew usually told me to see their elders for defini-

24

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

tive answers to historical problems. I collected very few traditions from young men who were not clerics, a group whose special status will be discussed later. I collected even fewer from women. In theory a mawdo anndudo, a "wise old man," might be a woman—mawdo ("elder") is not sexspecific—but in fact people assume that this is a man, an assumption deriving from the stereotype that, as my male friends often repeated, "Women do not know anything." Perhaps most women fit the model—I do not know enough about Liptako's women to judge with much confidence— but clearly some women are better versed in tradition than most males give them credit for. Early in my research an elder volunteered his willingness to talk about the history of his family and social group, which, he boasted, he knew far better than anyone else, but when time came to talk, he always found a reason to put me off, insisting all the while that any other time would do beautifully. His two wives, both very old women, watched his coy advances and hasty withdrawals over several months and finally, with a dis­ gusted "If you won't talk, we will," showed me into the compound, sat me down, and began to talk, in two hours telling me far more about the group than anyone else had before or since. Their husband, mortified by the turn of events, gradually edged into the interview, but by then it was already clear that the household had two "wise old women" but no men. I became acquainted with a few other outspoken women like these, though none was as willing as they to show their independence from their husbands. Local social norms made it difficult for me to consult women or for them to talk freely without offending their menfolk, who, on those rare occasions when a woman came forward to speak, tended to adopt the mien of indulgent adults letting a not very skilled child say its single, mediocre piece. Once it was said, the embarrassed woman usually beat a hasty retreat while the men began to expound at length on the same subject. Ful6e think some old men are no more likely to be wise than women. They all say that "slaves don't know

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

25

anything"—a characterization consistent with Fulbe stereotypes of HaaBe, from among whom Ful&e took their slaves. But, like women, at least some people of slave de­ scent know more than many of their one-time masters ad­ mit. Despite my Ful6e friends' repeated insistences that the traditions recounted by one sprightly, loquacious, sev­ enty-five-year-old "slave" amounted to no more than old man's chatter, full of words but lacking substance, he be­ came one of my most valued informants, and some other "slaves" told me important things too, although generally I found far fewer traditionists in this group than might have been expected from its numerical significance in the total population. When I asked "slaves" to recommend au­ thorities, they typically suggested Fulbe or other free people. Fulbe are less sweeping and negative in their judgments on free persons of low status, such as members of endogamous occupational groups like blacksmiths and leather workers, and the Sillube (singular: Cillo), descend­ ants of Malinke (thus Haabe) who, in Liptako if not always elsewhere, have long since adopted Fulfulde and the whole complex of Fulbe customs.2 Nonetheless, Fulbe recom­ mended few traditionists among these groups, and persist­ ent inquiry did not turn up many more, although some I worked with were very knowledgeable indeed. From the example of other African groups, one might have anticipated that Liptako's praise singers would have a solid reputation as guardians of tradition. As a praise singer from another West African society conceived it, the role of the praise singer is a lofty one: "Without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations. . . . I teach kings the history of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example, for the world is old, but the future springs from the past." Fur­ thermore, the griot went on: "My word is pure and free of all untruth; it is the word of my father; it is the word of my father's father. I will give you my father's words just as I

26

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

received them; royal griots do not know what lying is."3 Many Ful6e think that Liptako's griots know all too well "what lying is," that they are unprincipled, venal syco­ phants who cluster around the rich and powerful and sell their facility with words to the highest bidder. "Praise sin­ gers lie," people told me repeatedly. "Don't believe a word they say." The only one I was often urged to see was Abdurramaani Maabo of Katchirga, who, his advocates ex­ plained, was more like a Pullo than a praise singer and was thus to be believed. It was typically foreigners to Liptako, not local people, who gave me the names of other praise singers and suggested that much could be learned from them.4 In Liptako, therefore, the best-known traditionists are Ful6e. Within days of arriving in Dori I heard about three men who were said to know the region like no one else. Two were Allu Siddiiki of Petecinde and Maamuudu Sewooma of Peoukoye, both Ful6e, both members of nonroyal offshoots of the emirs' line. The third was Abdurramaani Maabo, who was "like a Pullo." All three proved worth visiting again and again. I got to know only one other person whose grasp of history was as sweeping and encyclopedic as theirs. He was AlkadriJibayru of Katchari. I met him on a chance visit to his village; no one outside Katchari ever mentioned him to me; no one seemed to rec­ ognize his name. He is a Cillo, one of the low-status Sillu&e. He has none of the connections with Liptako's elite that have helped a man like Abdurramaani Maabo make a name for himself, and so he has never won the wide repu­ tation and high regard that his skills warrant. Men and women like him point to the fallacy of picking informants by breadth of reputation alone. But even if reputation is a flawed mirror of knowledge, its reflections do not com­ pletely distort the situation. The higher one's social stand­ ing, the more about history one is likely to know. Thus Fulbe generally know more about the past than other people. In consequence more of my informants were Ful6e than people of any other group.

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

27

This is not to say that all Fulbe know their history. Many know not much at all—and this may make trouble for them when their age and status suggest to people that they ought to be knowledgeable. The longer I was in Liptako, the more people asked me to pronounce on historical ques­ tions—requests that I avoided satisfying when I could, the better not to muddy tradition's already murky waters with a foreigner's impressions. Two of my more persistent vis­ itors were FerooBe (singular: Pereejo), who are members of the emirs' lineage and thus enjoy very high status, and both men were active competitors for the royal turban. Both were also in their early fifties, entering the ripe old age when Fulbe think a man ready to pronounce authorita­ tively on how things were and are and ought to be. Both wanted me to teach them the genealogies of Liptako's great families that they had never had the patience to learn when they were young. They said they had come to me for help because I was better informed than anyone else. I suspect the truth had more to do with my outsider's status. For men of their considerable years and standing to approach a local authority for the sort of basic information they wanted would have been a shameful thing, damaging to their pretensions. Talking to me was safer—particularly since they always chose to drop in on quiet afternoons when no other visitors were around. That these two elderly aspirants to wisdom waited until their fifties to learn their genealogies is indicative of a casualness in transmitting tradition that is characteristic of Lip­ tako. Even though the society values historical knowledge and honors at least some of those who are proficient in it, no one must learn history. Learning is a matter of individ­ ual choice. Some men take the trouble to learn little more than the names of their ancestors, the list of the emirs, and a few historical anecdotes. There are very few men like Alkadri Jibayru, whose broad interests in Liptako history, persistence in collecting data, and powers of memory are so great that he can speak knowledgeably on an enormous range of subjects, although, like most traditionists, the sub-

28

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

jects he knows best are drawn from the history of groups with which he has lived in close contact all his life: the Sillu&e, his own group; the Tooroo6e, a Ful6e clan with which the SilluBe have formalized joking relationships; and the Feroo6e, one branch of which rules his village. Liptako is simply lucky to have its few Alkadri Jibayrus, for it has not developed institutions that would systematically train and reward them. This makes Liptako a very differ­ ent place than, say, Rwanda, where less was left to chance and where particular groups of specialists were responsible for the preservation of specified classes of tradition. Dynas­ tic poetry, for instance, was transmitted primarily by the descendants of the poems' composers, who schooled their children rigorously and systematically in the words of the ancestors so that not one would be forgotten. The royal court encouraged their labor by granting the reciters cer­ tain privileges and by rewarding recitals with gifts. That the variants in these poems are few and insignificant is an index of the system's success.5 Since the reciters' schooling was formal, it seems likely that for years afterward they would have recalled who taught them which poems under what circumstances. This is usually not the case in Liptako. The traditionists I met could seldom remember just who had told them a given story, and only very infrequently did they know where their source had learned it. None of them tried to imitate the early reciters of the traditions of the Prophet M Λhammad. These reciters prefaced each tradition with its full chain of transmission, the series of eminent, pious names acting as a signal to the faithful that here was a story to be believed. The following opening is characteristic: " 'AbdalIah b. Yusuf related to us, saying: al-Laith related to us, say­ ing: Ibn al-Had related to me from 'Abdallah b. Khabbab, from Abu Sa'id, that he heard the Prophet—upon whom be Allah's blessing and peace—say... ."6 No one in Liptako can match this. One ought not imitate the tendency of Muslim students

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

29

of the Prophet's traditions to assume that a story buttressed by an intellectual genealogy of weighty authorities is more trustworthy than a story without one. The key issue is whether traditionists, known or long forgotten, famous or obscure, have passed on just what they were told, adding nothing, subtracting nothing. The efforts by the reciters of Rwanda's dynastic poetry to memorize scrupulously every word inspire confidence in the exactness of their repro­ ductions. Liptako's traditionists put less store in preserv­ ing exact words from the past. Most of their traditions are not fixed texts; they are lists and stories of no set wording.7 The lists are mostly genealogies. The interest my two el­ derly visitors took in genealogies is indicative of a predilec­ tion the entire society shares. Any wise old man worth his salt has learned by heart long lists of names that he can re­ cite, perhaps with a wealth of embellishments, perhaps with none, sometimes moving backwards through time (he is the son of so-and-so, who was the son of so-and-so, who was the son of so-and-so . . .), sometimes forwards (he was the father of so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so . . .), sometimes branching out horizon­ tally from the main vertical stem (he had children named so-and-so by so-and-so, and they had children named . . .). Many offices are family monopolies, so lists of those who held them are partial genealogies.8 These lists are invalu­ able to historians and traditionists alike. For both, they are a structure reaching across time from which to hang ac­ counts of the events that preoccupied past generations. Whether or not a wise old man chooses to embroider his genealogies with extra detail, he has to memorize the names at their core. Some people take great pains to learn them exactly. A few times I heard young men drilling one another in lists of names; I saw traditionists literate in French or Arabic pore over written lists, murmuring each name just as they also murmur Qur'anic verses the better to commit them to memory. Genealogies sometimes vary from one authority to the next (more on this later), but

30 TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

they still vary less than do another sort of tradition, the kabaruuji (singular: kabaaru) or stories, that no one takes the trouble to memorize. These stories are more significant to Westerners trying to piece together a narrative of the country's past than are bare lists of names, but the casualness with which these are transmitted makes the probability of distortion very high. This was particularly clear on those rare occasions when I could compare two consecutive links in a given story's chain of transmission. In every case the first link was forged at one of my interviews. These were rarely held tete-a-tete. Men and boys would crowd around, listening intently to what the wise old man had to say, plainly taking advantage of the situation to absorb what they could. 9 The second rendering came sometime later, when one of the listeners at the first telling turned traditionist in his own right and, in my presence, recounted the story to some third person. Some renditions were remarkably exact, but others were confused, abbreviated, or elaborated with in­ formation drawn from other versions of the same story, general cultural knowledge, and fertile imaginations. And so variants have grown. Many faults in the transmission of tradition doubtless occur spontaneously and unconsciously. A name is dropped out of a genealogy, or a relationship is altered, or two stories are made to blend into one without anyone will­ ing that this should happen. But traditionists are not human tape recorders, unthinkingly absorbing whatever comes, altering it only in response to inexplicable mental quirks roughly analogous to the mechanical failures that any operator of tape recorders knows all too well. Liptako's wise old men also respond consciously to traditions, testing them against the wisdom of their different experiences and the dictates of their various interests, accepting some of what they hear and rejecting some, gradually building up their ideas about the past. Take reactions to the story of Shehu Usuman, the egg, and the stone as an example. Shehu Usuman dan Fodiyo

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

31

was a Muslim revivalist whom Liptako's traditionists re­ member as Seeku Usmaan or Seeku Baa Bello (that is, "the Shaykh, the father of Bello"). He was the pivotal figure in the wars that established the Sokoto Caliphate, centered in what is now northwestern Nigeria, wars that changed the political map of much of the savanna and Sahel from northeastern Upper Volta to Cameroon early in the nineteenth century. He conceived his cause as a jihad, a holy war, a crusade fought to advance the cause of Islam, and he called on believers to fight for the faith.10 The Ful6e of Liptako were among the groups that rallied to his call, and it was the success of their jihad that allowed the founding of the emirate. Typically the leaders of jihads vis­ ited Shehu Usuman to ask his blessing, and Braahima Seydu, who led Liptako's jihad and became its first emir, was apparently no exception. The usual story is that Shehu Usuman gave Braahima Seydu a flag in sign of his ap­ proval. But according to one traditionist Shehu Usuman gave the first emir an egg and a stone. The FulBe should throw them into the deepest part of the Yaayre, the Shehu said. If the egg floated and the stone sank, it was not yet time to go to war. But if the egg sank and the stone floated, then the time for war had come. Braahima Seydu did just as he was told. The egg sank and the stone floated. The jihad was fought and won.11 Someone told a cleric I had heard this story, and when we next met, he quickly turned the conversation to it. Ac­ cording to him, it contained not a grain of truth. Even though some men had the power to make eggs sink and stones float, they were sorcerers, not pious Muslims, and Shehu Usuman was clearly not the former even if very much the latter. The story of Shehu Usuman, the egg, and the stone was the invention of superstitious, credulous people, and I would best forget it—all this said to approv­ ing noises from the crowd of listening clerics and Qur'anic students. The second reaction to the story came from a noncleric who was at the original interview. I remarked I doubted that a stone could float. It could, he answered.

32

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"You whites are the masters of the physical sciences, but we blacks are masters of the occult, and we can break your physical laws with it." To illustrate his point he recounted a number of anecdotes describing great works of magic, some performed by clerics, some by nonclerics. The clincher was a tale of his own father who, at a stormy pe­ riod in his life, consulted a cleric to seek a way out of his problems. The cleric made a way by magic. He wrote Arabic words on a stone, gave it to the man, and told him that, in proof of the efficacy of his work, the stone would float on water. It did, and the father's troubles passed. So, my friend concluded, the tale of Shehu Usuman, the egg, and the stone was not at all unbelievable. Quite the con­ trary. It was proof of what a powerful man the Shehu was. That the story had won my friend's personal stamp of ap­ proval was demonstrated several days later by his transmit­ ting it to another PulIo as part of a larger account of the jihad. I had heard him talk about the jihad before without any mention at all of eggs or stones, either floating or sink­ ing. Out of his judgment on the believability of this story he had created a new variant on jihad tradition. This traditionist is by no means unique. According to a lifelong friend of Alkadri Jibayru, he has done much the same: "He listened to his father and all the wise old men when he was young. He heard some of the truth here, some of it there. He remembered everything and put it all together."12 The result is what Vansina has called a "per­ sonal vision" of history. He has warned researchers that one "type of informant to be avoided—and the worst of the lot!—is the man who has derived his information from a number of different sources in order to get to know the history of his society. He creates a personal vision of this history in which all the contradictions of the sources he has used are obliterated, and to which he has added his own interpretations. His testimony is quite worthless, because it is second-hand, and it is necessary to go back to all the tra­ ditions he has used in order to be able to evaluate it."13 Worthless or not, personal visions of history can scarcely be

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

33

avoided in Liptako. Unless the transmission of traditions was once less casual than it is now—a proposition for which there is no evidence at all—Liptako has probably always had its Alkadri Jibayrus. It has always had men like my friend who contributed to the growth of jihad tradition by amalgamating the story of Shehu Usuman, the stone, and the egg with another variant. Men like these transmitted their personal visions to their listeners, who in turn passed them on to others, perhaps faithfully, perhaps uncon­ sciously distorted, perhaps amalgamated with other tradi­ tions into new interpretations shaped by their ideas about the present and the past. Even if particular living traditionists cannot be suspected of imposing their personal views on what they have been told, it is likely that in the long chains of transmission lying behind their stories there are those who have done just that. Western historians also create personal visions of history. As Ε. H. Carr put it in his lecture, "The Historian and His Facts," "history means interpretation." Further, "the rela­ tion between the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-and-take. As any working historian knows . . . , the historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts." 14 Historiographers of literate societies can illumi­ nate this "continuous process" by studying a historian's sources. These sources, for the most part, are fixed forever in writing and remain available to later generations. But in a preliterate society like Liptako the "continuous process" of interaction between a traditionist and his sources must always remain obscure, for even if we can occasionally ob­ serve how living traditionists use their sources, we can never discern precisely how dead ones did. Neither their own testimonies nor those of their informants any longer exist; none of the links in the chain of testimony can be re­ constituted, to say nothing of the eyewitness account at its origin. Perhaps some traditionists tell stories not much different from those the initial informant told, but this is very unlikely. 15 The informal, random means on which

34

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

Liptako depends for the transmission of its history makes the probability of distortion very high. People esteem the wise old men for what they know. After an expert traditionist had finished reciting a long and complex genealogy or recounting a particularly stir­ ring story, his listeners often turned to me with pleased, admiring smiles to say: "He really knows, doesn't he?" Nonetheless, the same people often expressed dubiousness about the reliability of particular traditions or even of oral tradition generally. I was warned repeatedly that many old men's memories were faltering and liable to muddle what they had once been able to communicate with clarity and accuracy. I was warned that certain informants tended to invent data to hide their ignorance or forgetfulness and that others slanted their testimonies to show some groups in a good light and others in a bad one. The strong, sweep­ ing, skeptical opinion of the Pullo traditionist Nduroo' Ali is worth quoting here again: "Don't believe everything you hear. All Fulbe are liars. No one will ever tell you the truth about what happened long ago. Most Fulbe don't even know the truth themselves." 16 The written word has a better reputation than the spo­ ken one. Again and again people suggested that I see the imam of the Friday mosque and other clerics for answers to my questions, for "they have writings," and writings, they insisted, preserved a more full, perfect, and immutable record of the past than human memory could. Liptako's clerics are called moodi66e or moodibaaSe (singular: moodibbo), a word that, like the status it denotes, can be traced ultimately to the Arabs. Although my scholarship was in a different tradition than the clerics', people per­ ceived enough similarity between our two activities to iden­ tify me with that class. They often addressed me as moodibbo, and they sometimes referred to a French woman anthropologist who was also doing research in the region as a "female cleric"—an unlikely combination of words for Liptako, where maleness is an unspoken but still primary qualification for a scholar.

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

35

Another, more explicit qualification is that the moodibbo must be literate in Arabic, and some clerics have turned their talents at writing to keeping records. Abdussalaami Usmaan, the wise old man of the last chapter, is one of these. He carried with him a bundle of papers to which he frequently resorted for a name or a date. In 1976 one con­ versation ground to a half-hour's halt while he hunted high and low for a list of the Pissilaabe leaders who have ruled his village. The paper was not to be found. He was reluc­ tant to recite the names without it—"Telling is difficult. That is why writing is better"—and when he finally gave up the search and agreed to speak for the tape recorder any­ way, he warned me that the spoken list would probably contain errors the written list would have let him avoid. And if one takes the written list as a standard of accuracy, the oral list certainly did err. It differed in several respects from the list he had read to me from the paper in 1971. 17 Few other clerics are as assiduous record keepers as Abdussalaami Usmaan. He may well have learned the habit from the imam of the Friday mosque with whom he studied as a boy. Members of the imams' lineage keep more and better records than anyone else, and they serve as an example of how literacy can affect one's perspective on space and time. As Fulbe moved from place to place, they typically lost track of kinsfolk who did not join the migra­ tion to Liptako or left it for other parts. The imams are a notable exception. Some of their kinsmen live in the emir­ ate of Yaga to the south of Liptako. These are the descend­ ants of Usmaan Allu, a son of the first imam of the Dori mosque and a younger brother of the second. He left Lip­ tako in the 1860s and settled in Yaga, where he made his name as a great scholar and a pious man. Despite the ap­ proximately ninety kilometers separating the two families and their involvement in two different political systems, they have remained close. During more than a century of separation they have continued to intermarry, to send both written and oral messages back and forth, and to visit one another frequently. The imams of Dori are well versed in

36

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

the history of their Yaga kinsmen, and, using notes hand­ written in Arabic, they can explain the various matrilineal and patrilineal relations among themselves and other kinsmen in a profusion of intricate detail that few other Ful&e depending on memory alone can match.18 Literacy has also given the imams access to Arabic manuscript and printed books on the history of other parts of the Muslim world, especially in West Africa, and the present imam, Nassuru Limam, who is an enthusiastic and well-informed historian, draws on his wide reading when he talks about the early days of the Caliphates of Sokoto and Hamdullaahi and the conquests of Samori Ture and al-hajj 'Umar. Many nonliterate Ful6e know these names, but the great events that go with them are often vague in their minds.19 People who duplicate the skills, interests, and perseverence of Abdussalaami Usmaan and Nassuru Limam are few now and apparently have always been few. At any rate the documents that would have been the fruit of regular record-keeping and dedicated history-writing are lamen­ tably few. I went to Liptako expecting to unearth libraries of Arabic manuscripts like those that have been such a boon to the historians of Sokoto and Masina, but these hopes were disappointed. The only examples of precolonial state papers I found were four letters; what few other precolonial manuscripts people possessed were written outside Liptako and had nothing directly to do with it. The few local histories and the great many lists of various officeholders that I collected were all of recent composi­ tion. More nineteenth-century documents certainly once existed: neglect, fire, and ants have all taken their toll. It is also unlikely that I saw all the manuscripts there are to see: the owners of documents guard them carefully and are typically reluctant to lend them out or to allow them to be photographed.20 Nevertheless, it is doubtful that manu­ scripts were ever so abundant as in great Islamic centers like Sokoto and Timbuktu. When S. A. Balogun recently visited all the Sokoto Caliphate's western emirates, includ­ ing Liptako, looking for documents from which to write a

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

37

general history of the area, he found they were rare everywhere. 21 Some of the general approbation my work received arose from an appreciation that it would produce a per­ manent record of historical traditions that does not now exist. I was often told that it was especially important to tape record and write down traditions now, for young per­ sons' interest in the past was much less avid than previous generations', and in consequence traditions were dying along with their bearers. On my first field trip people knew that I was going to deposit a record of what they said for others to use and that I planned to write a book. When I went back to Dori in 1976, I learned that a Peace Corps Volunteer had shown my dissertation around town and that some young men had gone to the Centre Voltai'que de la Recherche Scientifique at Ouagadougou to see what I had deposited there. News of this spread, and a number of people greeted me with expressions of pleasure at what I had written, even though none of them had been able to read it. But it was good I had come back, people added, for they had more to tell, enough for still another volume and even more. And tell they did. The traditions I collected in 1976 were generally far fuller and more detailed than what I had found before, a circumstance that is perhaps partly, if by no means entirely, due to traditionists' satisfaction that they were speaking for future generations to read. In some African societies written histories like mine have produced what David Henige has termed "feedback," "the process of incorporating written or printed materials into oral accounts." Henige supplies both African and nonAfrican examples to document how feedback occurs. It be­ gins when a society's literate members consult written sources on their society's past. They pass on their learning to their nonliterate brethren, among whom its grounding in the written word tends to lend superior authority to the versions of history it supports. Feedback may thus drive out accounts that tan appeal only to oral authority. 22 Liptako already feels the respect for the written word

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TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

that makes feedback possible. At an early age children learn that writing is the vehicle for God's message to the world. When they are about seven, most boys and some girls are sent to a teacher for an introduction to the Qur'an. Almost every day groups of them are to be seen squatting in the sand around their teacher, studying Arabic verses laboriously written in black ink on long wooden slates, and chanting them aloud, not in unison but each to himself, thereby producing a monotonous babble likely to grate on the ears of Westerners brought up with the rule that, in schoolrooms, only one person speaks at a time.23 This ex­ perience does not produce many literate adults: very few pupils emulate their masters and undertake the years of extra training and study that it takes to become a moodibbo, and most men I knew had only a vague memory of how to write a few Arabic letters. Nonetheless, the respect for writ­ ing remains and is reinforced by adult experiences. The legal foundations for the community rest, at least in theory, on ancient works of Islamic scholarship to which the clerics refer for rulings on specific cases. Writing is also funda­ mental to techniques employed to understand and manip­ ulate the future. Divination systems and amulets both use writing, and popular potions are compounded of water and the ink of certain Qur'anic verses washed off the slate where they were written. Despite the powers people see in writing, feedback has not yet occurred. Arabic histories are too rare and their data too scanty to serve as a general model. The English of my dissertation has put it out of the reach of local readers. French-language histories are far more abundant, but they have been little consulted. I was never put in the unhappy position of some fieldworkers in Africa who have gone in search of oral tradition, only to be sent by local people to some earlier work with the assurance that it had already said all there was to say.24 A few men, mostly elderly or middle-aged civil servants, had seen or heard about "Dans la boucle du Niger: Dori, ville peule" by Paul Delmond, whom many of them had known personally. Many more,

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

39

including numerous members of the younger generation, were well acquainted with Bonbou Hama's work, a result not only of the natural interest people take in histories of their own society but also of a longstanding affection and awe for Boubou Hama, who went to school in Dori from 1918 to 1924 and returned there to teach in the 1940s, in the days when Liptako was part of Niger. Boubou Hama's subsequent rise to the presidency of Niger's National As­ sembly and his international standing as a scholar have made him an object of local pride that has persisted despite Liptako's withdrawal from Niger and inclusion in Upper Volta and despite Boubou Hama's fall from power in Niger's 1974 coup d'etat; he is still an almost home-town boy made good. Local pride notwithstanding, the traditionists, almost all illiterate and universally disinclined to take the demeaning step of asking their literate juniors exactly what Boubou Hama's books contain, told me again and again not to believe what I read there. "We just lied to him and the fieldworkers he sent," confided one old man, making me wonder if I was getting the same treatment. These old men told me not to trust anything any French­ man had written either, for no foreigners had ever proved capable of understanding Liptako. But as these old men die and as younger, literate men reach an age when people will turn to them for guidance, the likelihood of feedback will surely increase. I saw it be­ ginning. One young Pullo of very high status owned a copy of Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou's "Histoire du royauine du Liptako," a short thesis presented to Upper Volta's Na­ tional School of Administration in 1975. Before he em­ barked on his career in the civil service, Nassuru, as the au­ thor is universally known, was Liptako's emir, a position he lost in 1963 but still harbors hopes of regaining. Nassuru's portrayal of royal power is perhaps the most striking part of the thesis, striking because it differs completely in thrust and detail from what all the traditionists told me. Accord­ ing to Nassuru, until the arrival of the French "the power of the emirs of Liptako was absolute and autocratic," and

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not just in theory but in practice too. Among the instru­ ments of autocracy were slaves the emirs appointed to each village "to control and keep an eye on" village heads, a situ­ ation that sometimes produced "differences . . . between the two authorities in the village" that were then "brought before the king" for settlement.25 When I asked the book's owner what he thought of these sweeping claims for royal authority and of the passage on these slave officials in par­ ticular, he replied that he had never before heard that the precolonial emirs were so strong or that they had these means of control, but that this must all have been so or it would not have been written down. Here are the seeds of feedback. I wonder what kinds of stories the little group of men who sat listening to us now tell. If written material were more abundant than it is, the potential for feedback would probably increase, but so too would the historian's ability to discern just where the tradi­ tions have gone awry. Traditionists say, for example, that even though Liptako frequently went to war with places like Tera and Koala, "Liptako and Yaga never fought."26 These statements are consistent with generalizations about how relations were and ought to be among fellow Muslims like the subjects of the two emirates, on the one hand, and between Muslims and non-Muslims like those of neighbor­ ing Tera and Koala, on the other. But sound documentary evidence shows that all was not so neat as tradition would have it. In the 1830s or 1840s Ibraahiima Bunti, the emir of Yaga, wrote Sori Hamma, his counterpart at Dori, to complain that Liptako horsemen had come raiding for cattle in his territory. He reminded Sori Hamma that it is unlawful for Muslims to raid other Muslims, and he de­ manded that the cattle be returned.27 This was not an iso­ lated incident, nor was Yaga always the victim and Liptako the attacker. When Barth came to Liptako in 1853, he ob­ served that "even with the inhabitants of Yagha, so nearly related to themselves by origin and interest, there were serious dissensions; and during my stay in the place the Iat-

TRANSMITTING MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS

41

ter drove away all the cattle belonging to the village of Koria." 28 Incidents like these have been forgotten, and the stereotype of perpetual peace prevails. Like Alice, we should all understand Liptako's history better if more of it had been written down.

CHAPTER 3

A WORLD OF LINEAGES You are seeing the last of the real Fulbe. The young people of today have no sense of lineage. They see everybody as the same. But we elders cannot accept this. For us it is important to understand the differ­ ences that divide men. Nassuru Limam, Dori, 9 August 1976

IN THE EARLY 1960s the government of Upper Volta dis­

missed the eleventh emir and decreed that no others would succeed him, but this decision sits badly with the people, and whenever the last holder of the title comes to Dori, he is received with all the honors due a monarch. The people flock to his palace, and the praise singers gather to shout out his genealogy: "You are the descendant of Hamma Saalu Hamma! You are the descendant of Sambo Saalu Hamma! You are the descendant of Seeku Saalu Hamma! You are the descendant of Jumbalo Saalu Hamma! You are the descendant of Duramaani Saalu Hamma!" And so the listing goes on and on as the praise singers range over generations of kinsmen on both his father's side and his mother's. They name not only the emir's father and mother, his grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers but all their brothers and sisters as well. As the praise singers build this great verbal web of kinship, the emir and the people listen with delight, their lips murmuring to the beat of the names. In Liptako to name a person's ancestors conveys a sense of his place and identity in history. The praise singers' recitals reflect Liptako's passion for genealogies, and the genealogies in turn reflect a funda­ mental feature of social organization—lineages. Lineages are sometimes small, sometimes large groups of persons claiming descent from a common ancestor. They are there-

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

43

fore rooted in both past and present, and they serve Liptako's people as a model for understanding both. They also offer the historian a way into the conceptual world that shapes the traditionists' visions of history. But by approach­ ing history through the lineage door the historian is by the very nature of the entry compelled to deal with the present as much as the past. Here the two are bound together, and the historian must face the burden of trying to separate them. Liptako's pervasive preoccupation with lineage and kin­ ship also shows itself in the way personal relationships are defined. 1 For instance, FulBe look with special favor on marriages between persons related in certain ways. Offices typically are lineage monopolies, and when an officeholder dies, certain kinsmen, by virtue of the nature of their kin­ ship with the dead man, have a stronger claim on the office than others. Kinsfolk are also expected to conform to pat­ terns of behavior appropriate to their relationships. Listen to one Pullo's bitter complaint about another: "I am his uncle on both his father's side and his mother's side, and I am his father-in-law as well, but he just won't treat me with the respect a son owes his father!" Whole groups similarly explain the character of their interrelationships in kinship terms. Thus FulBe say their antipathy for Sillu&e is a right and natural response to the fact that Sillu&e stem from Malinke, who are HaaBe and so inferior to the Arabs to whom the FulBe trace their own ancestry. A social calculus based on kinship requires people to know their genealogies. Few Westerners can match either the scope or the volume of an ordinary Pullo's genealogical knowledge. No Pullo would ever be so casual about his an­ cestry as a European like Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, who in his memoirs had something to say about his parents and grandparents but, with one exception, nothing at all about his more distant ancestors. Only a great soldier stood out enough from "the great mass of those who live quiet, unnotable lives" to merit naming. 2 FulBe cherish the memories of the great men in their pasts too, but they do

44

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

not neglect their "quiet, unnotable" ancestors either. A Pullo would surely begin his autobiography by reciting his genealogy for as many generations as he could. Many in­ formants introduced themselves to me this way. One of them was Abdussalaami Usmaan: "I am Abdussalaami, son of Usmaan called Tongude, son of Hammadi, son of Jamdikko, son of Hammadu, son of Barke, son of Umaru, son of Gallo." This genealogy is a patrilineal one. It is from the father that a child inherits social status, and a Pullo, like an Arab, shows his filiation by appending his father's name to his own. Thus the old man above is usually known as Abdus­ salaami Usmaan.3 He could also call himself Abdussalaami Baa, the second name being the patronymic of the Ba'aa&e, one of the great Ful6e clans whose membership extends far beyond Liptako. Other, similar clans are the ToorooBe ("Torobe," in French works) and the Jallu6e (French: "Dialloube"), each of which has its own patronymic (in this case, Li and Jallo, respectively), which a person inherits along with clan membership from his father, just as he in­ herits other elements in his social status. People know their mothers' ancestry, too, and they can usually recite their genealogies, but it is the genealogy of the patrilineage that people know in depth and cite with special pride. Here again Speer's approach to the past is in contrast. Both the one great ancestor he names and the grandfather whose career is the first that Speer describes in detail are among his mother's forefathers. If Speer had been a Pullo, he would have begun with the story of his father's family. In this lineage-conscious society, an old man must know his genealogies if he wants to be wise. Traditionists typi­ cally opened our interviews by reciting the genealogies of their families or patrons or village heads, and they were very often surprised when I asked for something more. From their point of view they had already given me the es­ sence of the past. From mine the "something more" in­ cluded information bearing on past events and processes I

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

45

thought more significant than the mere listing of passing generations. My American experience was poor preparation for cop­ ing with the idiom and intricacies of kinship, but my Liptako friends found it equally difficult to conceive of a world without lineages. For them a person without a lineage (a bastard, for example) is a person without identity, without roots. I was often asked to recite my genealogy just as my friends recited their genealogies for me, and they were al­ ways shocked to hear that my list spanned no more than three generations. They could hardly believe there could be whole nations of people whose mastery of the par­ ticularities of their descent was often as scanty as mine. When one day a woman asked "Who are the Americans?" a friend burst in with a reply: "I'll tell you about the Ameri­ cans. Some people came from here, some people came from there, some people came from somewhere else, and they married whomever they pleased. Those are the Americans. They haven't any lineages at all." "Is this true?" everyone asked. My affirmative reply evoked the silence of people pondering the barely comprehensible. Questions about the lineages and the kinship relationships of the West were put to me again and again, often by people who had heard me go over the same ground before—an indi­ cator of how puzzling they found the existence of a lineageless world. The Ful6e look at the whole world in terms of the lineage structures that pervade their own society. They see peoples as descent groups, all of them finding their ulti­ mate origin in Adam. The latter notion derives from Is­ lamic teaching, and the Fulfulde phrase bibbe Aadama, "sons of Adam," denoting "mankind," is a translation of the Arabic banu Adam. Ful6e ideas of relationships among men might be modeled in conventional anthropological fashion as a great, world-encompassing pyramid of kinship within which nests a multitude of larger and smaller pyramids, each one representing a descent group. At the

46

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

top of the pyramid stands Adam; at each significant point of segmentation within the great pyramid stands an ances­ tor who so distinguished himself from his kinsmen that his descendants saw themselves as separate and distinct from the parent group. The Ful6e of Liptako agree that the origin of their own particular segment of mankind is to be laid to an Arab sol­ dier named Ukba (or, in Arabic, 'Uqba), a ubiquitous char­ acter in the legends of the savanna and Sahel. One traditionist asserted that, in addition to the Ful6e, Ukba had fathered a clerical group of the Oudalan by a Tuareg woman, and the ancestor of the Mawri of central Niger by a daughter of the king of Borno.4 The Kunta of Timbuktu also reckon 'Uqba as their progenitor, and so do the Awlad 'Uqba, one of the constituents of the Kababish Arabs of the Sudan and a group that is conscious of a "traditional con­ nection" between themselves and the FulBe deriving from common ancestry.5 The Fulbe of Liptako are not generally acquainted with all the details of Ukba's far-ranging and prolific career, but like their brethren elsewhere in West Africa, they do tell those of Ukba's adventures which concern themselves in a multitude of variants that have been written down many times in Arabic and in European languages. Here is a fairly full and detailed Liptako version that Abdussalaami Usmaan told: When 'Umar b. al-Khattab was caliph at Medina, he raised an army and ordered it to set out, following the [Mediterranean] sea, following it all the way to the west, and there to preach to the people until they con­ verted to Islam. He told 'Amr b. al-'As, the leader of the army: "Follow the sea. Go there." The army went all the way to the west. When they got to Fuuta [Tooro, in modern Senegal], they stopped. They preached and preached and preached until the people converted, until they did just as they were told. Then the army wanted to return home. But the ruler of the converted

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

47

people said: "You came here. You preached until we converted, until we found happiness. If you depart now without leaving someone behind, we shall go back to our old ways." 'Amr agreed. He said: "Choose among us whom you want." They said they wanted Ukba, and he stayed. The army followed the sea and returned home. The ruler gave Ukba his daughter Bajji Ma'o. He married her. She bore the Ful6e—all of them. 6 Most storytellers went no further, but some, like Abdussalaami, added an explanation of how Fulfulde originated, a phenomenon that, like the origin of the FulBe them­ selves, is conceptualized as a discreet event: First she bore one child and then a second. One day their mother went out and left the children alone. The older child comforted the younger: uDeyyu. Deyyu. Deyyu fa inna ma warra. Deyyu fa inna ma warn." ["Hush. Hush. Hush until your mother comes. Hush until your mother comes."] The people of Fuuta didn't understand. The Arabs didn't understand. That was the beginning of Fulfulde. Those children originated ¥n\iu\de"Deyyu fa inna ma warn. Deyyu fa inna ma warn." When their mother came home, she heard what the child was saying and wondered. She told her hus­ band, and he said: "Ah, yes, it is they of whom it was said that a new people would be born: the Ful6e." 7 The story of Ukba places the origin of the Fulbe in the golden age of Islamic history. 'Umar b. al-Khattab (d. 644) was one of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad and the second of the four great Caliphs. It was he who presided over the expansion of the desert Arabs out of the Arabian Peninsula and the organizing of the early Islamic empire, and 'Amr b. al-'As (d. 663) was his general respon­ sible for the conquest of Egypt. However, chronicles of the Arabs do not record that 'Amr or any of his armies ever ventured to such a distant land as Fuuta Tooro. Different

48

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

Ful&e cited different filiations for Ukba—Nafi', Yasir, and 'Amir were the three commonest—and all these names were borne by actual historical figures, but none of them seems ever to have been in West Africa. 8 I know no traditionist who would agree with me that this tradition is myth, not literal truth. I heard Fulbe squabble over whether Ukba was the son of Yasir or the son of 'Amir; I never heard anyone express the least doubt that the Arab Ukba actually begot the Ful6e—"all of them." The firmness and unanimity of FulBe conviction suggest that the story is not a garden-variety historical statement but something more. It is both history and ideology; it fur­ nishes historical grounding for FulBe visions of themselves. It supports the conviction that FulBe are different from HaaBe, who, as we have seen, are neighboring African peoples like the Gourmantche, Songhay, Mossi, and Kurumba. Put in juxtaposition, "Ful&e" and "Haa&e" con­ jure up a broad spectrum of diadic oppositions, such as whites: blacks; masters: slaves; cattlekeepers: agricul­ turists; intelligent: slow-witted. Or, in short, superiors: inferiors—a state of affairs that some traditionists ex­ plained as the inevitable consequence of a combination of ancient history and descent. Whereas the FulBe could trace their ancestry through the Arabs to Noah's son Shem, the Haa&e were the descendants of Ham, and Ham bore Noah's curse. The traditionists were here drawing on a story with deep roots in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tra­ dition. The Book of Genesis is the source of the version that Western racists have used again and again to explain black "inferiority," a version that concludes with Noah acclaiming: "Cursed be Canaan [son of Ham]; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers. . . . Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. God enlarge Japheth [Noah's third son], and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave" (Gen. 9:25-27). 9 Whatever the truth in Ful&e claims to white ancestry—to add still more pages to the fruitless hundreds purporting to solve once and for all the mystery of Ful6e origins is not

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

49

my object here 10 —their accounts of Arab ancestry find parallels in the oral traditions of other West African groups. The rulers of the seven early Hausa states are said to descend from Bayajidda, the son of a king of Baghdad. The dynasty that ruled Borno for nearly a millennium be­ fore its downfall in the mid-nineteenth century traced its line to the Arab hero Sayf b. DhI Yazan. The first king of Songhay reportedly came from Yemen. 11 It is often argued that these stories more accurately reflect the universal human urge for an illustrious pedigree than they do any historical reality. Probably the same is true of the story of Ukba. An irrefutable argument for this would require docu­ mentary evidence for the story's intellectual history that does not exist: here again we run up against the major bar­ rier that the oral transmission of historical data sets in the way of historiographical studies! But a comparison of the Liptako FulBe with the Wodaa6e, the nomadic Ful6e of Niger, suggests that a changing society and a deepening involvement with Islam may have conditioned the de­ velopment of Fulbe tales of origin. The culture of the pastoral Wocfaabe is less profoundly Islamized than Liptako's. Some Wocfaabe trace Fulbe origins to an Arab, but not all do. Here is a story of the latter sort: Once there were two orphans, a boy and his younger sister. They lived beside a river, and every evening they lit a fire and camped on the bank. One day a cow came out of the water; then the next morning about four o'clock she returned to it. The orphans lit their fire a little further from the water. Then a large herd came out of the river and up to the fire. The children tried to milk the cows as the calves nursed, and they succeeded. About four in the morning the cows re­ turned to the water. On the third day the children lit their fire still further away. The cows came out of the river again and gathered around the fire. The chil­ dren milked the cows when the calves were through

50

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

nursing. Then the next morning the children led the herd away with them. The boy was named Fu, but the name of his younger sister is unknown. They married one another and had two children. The first was the ancestor of the Fulbe.12 Stories like this one have no currency in Liptako. When I related them to my friends, they denied there was any truth in them. However, in other contexts the Liptako Ful6e pointed to the WocfaaBe and other nomadic groups as living models of their forefathers' culture. They admit­ ted that in the distant past their ancestors were not Mus­ lims. As FulBe were Islamized and as their knowledge and experience of the world beyond the cattle camps and the little villages widened over time, they very likely adjusted older explanations of their place in the world to harmonize with Islam's universal historical scheme, a scheme whose emphasis on lineage was in any event compatible with FulBe social structure. The story of Ukba with its linkages to the prestigious Arabs and great events gave the FulBe an honored place among the "sons of Adam"; it also ex­ plained why FulBe were a distinct people and not Arabs by ascribing their maternal ancestry to an African princess. In places like Liptako where Islam was firmly rooted and nomadism a distant tradition, stories like those still told by the WocfaaBe gradually, and completely, disappeared. The story of Ukba suggests that conceptions of social status shape the content of stories of origin; conflicting ac­ counts of the origin of the JaawamBe suggest the same. The JaawamBe (singular: Jaawanndo) are a people who live in close association with FulBe in Liptako and else­ where in West Africa. They are unquestionably free and are not to be confused with slaves or with members of occupational castes like praise singers, blacksmiths, and leather workers. But like them, the JaawamBe are of in­ ferior social status to the FulBe who, at least in former times, would not marry JaawamBe. The FulBe story of JaawamBe origin encapsulates an explanation for this status:

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

51

Ukba bore four sons and a daughter. He grew old and decided to leave for home. He told his wife: "I am leav­ ing. If you want to remarry, climb up on top of the house very early in the morning, look to see who goes furthest away [from the village] to defecate, and then marry him." Ukba's slave overheard this, and he waited for the right moment to come. He went far, far away to defecate. When the woman went up on top of her house early in the morning, it was he she saw. Fi­ nally she said to him: "It is you who will marry me." "It is I you will marry?" "Yes, it is you." He married her and begot the JaawamBe. That is how the Jaawam6e originated. 13 The story at once suggests why FulBe and JaawamBe should be very alike and live closely associated with one another and yet why JaawamBe should be inferior. On the one hand likeness springs from kinship (their ancestors were half brothers) and also from participation in a com­ mon way of life (by going far from his village to defecate the ancestor of the JaawamBe exemplified FulBe notions of good conduct). On the other hand JaawamBe inferiority is the inescapable consequence of being fathered by a slave. One might suppose JaawamBe would dispute this story. I collected just two JaawamBe accounts of their origins, and these differed substantially from one another. The first was much the same as the story of slave parentage current among Ful&e. But this similarity perhaps better reflected the circumstances of the story's telling than it did its teller's conviction in its truth. The teller was a middle-aged cleric who spoke to me amidst a crowd of listening Ful&e, some of them of very high status and all of them sure to protest anything that varied from what they took for gospel. He did not turn the subject of the interview to JaawamBe ori­ gins of his own accord; he spoke about them because I asked him to, and his face and tone let me know he was unhappy with the position into which I had forced him. My second Jaawanndo informant spoke about his people's past in happier circumstances: no FulBe were

52

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

there to dispute his testimony. His account agreed that Ukba was the father of the FulBe and that FulBe and JaawamBe were children of the same mother; it denied that a slave fathered the Jaawam&e. On the contrary their progenitor, like Ukba, was an Arab, "one of the Banu Himyar, a descent group that surpassed all other Arabs in eloquence [a trait all agree is also characteristic of JaawamBe]. . . . This man and Ukba were together [in Fuuta Tooro] until Ukba left. Ukba said he wanted to depart for the east, but he would leave the other behind. IfUkba were not seen again for four years, the other should marry his wife. [Finally] he married her, and that is how the Jaawambe began. So the FulBe and the Jaawam6e have the same mother. Their fathers were of the same race—one from the Banu Himyar, one from the Banu Hashim." This story was consistent with the man's characterization of FulBe-JaawamBe relationships. According to him these are not those of superior and inferior, as most FulBe would have it, but those of older brother and younger brother performing different social functions in a common milieu. In particular, FulBe have the prerogative of rule and Jaawam&e that of administration, a division of labor that meant, this race-proud Jaawanndo opined, that it was Jaawam&e who really ran things.14 Arguments like that over JaawamBe origins find paral­ lels in arguments over the origins of other groups and in­ dividuals. After one traditionist recited me a genealogy that showed his village head was the most senior member of the ruling lineage, the village head's opponents came to me in Dori to recite a second genealogy meant to convince me that the man was not a member of the lineage at all and was thus an illegitimate holder of the office. Similarly, almost all the traditionists I knew asserted that the Fulantamuu&e (singular: Fulantamuujo), who now occupy scat­ tered villages mostly in eastern Liptako, are the descend­ ants of a slave who rebelled against the emir in the second decade of the nineteenth century; and they claimed the reb­ el's birth is reflected in the group's name, "Fulan-

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

53

tamuu6e" being a Fulfulde pluralization of a Songhay phrase meaning "Pullo's slave." 15 But a Fulantamuujo traditionist stoutly maintained his ancestor was a free man, a Pullo Barijo whose family settled in Liptako even before the emirs' line. 16 FulBe who heard him tell this story were convinced its purpose was a self-serving one: to elevate his and his kinsmen's low social standing. I often heard people refer to FulantamuuBe origins with a sneer: "They are re­ ally just slaves. Whether you make porridge with sorghum or millet, it is still the same thing." 17 The conviction that FulantamuuBe are slaves no matter what they do is indicative of a broader certainty that de­ scent, not environmental conditioning or individual striv­ ing, is the primary determinant of social status as well as many individual traits of character. To place a claim to office a man must first of all possess the proper genealogi­ cal credentials; any other qualifications come second. The informant who traced JaawamBe origins to Arab parentage would surely argue that JaawamBe are masterful talkers because their ancestor was one of the Banu Himyar who "surpassed all other Arabs in eloquence," not because JaawamBe tend to conform to popular expectations for their behavior. So long as the people of Liptako persist in this sort of lineage reasoning (and only those who have been exposed to the different stock of ideas that both the West and the government of Upper Volta represent show signs of modifying these deeply rooted attitudes), argu­ ments over the origins of groups will continue, for within this conceptual framework it is only by modifying the story of one's origins that a person can escape the limitations and opportunities inherent in one social category for those of another. Even if being a Pullo implies descent from Ukba, no one is expected to be able to prove it with a recital of all the links in the genealogical chain. Only one traditionist I knew tried this, and in fourteen generations at that—a feat that would require nearly century-long generations to preserve a chronology consistent with the time Ukba supposedly

54

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

lived! Most people were more modest. The next longest genealogy I collected spanned eleven generations, without attempting to link up with Ukba, and most were much shorter. This situation contrasts with that of groups like the Tiv of Nigeria. Like the Ful6e, the Tiv say a single man fathered them all; but unlike the Fulbe, the Tiv recite genealogies that reputedly go all the way back to the first Tiv. However, this does not mean that all the links in the genealogical chain are complete. The Tiv prune their fam­ ily trees of all those who lived after the generations of the founding fathers but before the most recent, socially rele­ vant generations, thereby bringing the distant past and re­ cent times into direct genealogical relationship and also keeping the quantity of names and relationships to man­ ageable size.18 The contrast between the elaborate, nationwide genea­ logical system of the Tiv and the incoherence and incom­ pleteness of Ful 6e genealogies is probably to be explained by the groups' different histories of movement and pat­ terns of settlement. Paul Bohannan divides Tiv movement into two categories. The first is "expansion," which "refers to that type of movement which leads to the enlargement in area of a lineage's territory. It may eventually lead to a change in geographical location of the lineage territory; it does not affect the overall juxtaposition of lineage areas." Thus as neighboring lineages A, B, and C gradually ex­ pand and occupy new land, they move in such a way that they remain neighbors; no new groups come between them and disturb old patterns. Bohannan contrasts "expansion" with "disjunction," which "characteristically brings about a separation of groups in space and affects not only the geo­ graphical position of a lineage territory, but also the jux­ taposition of lineage territories." In this case A, B, and C cease to be neighbors as they go their separate ways; they find new neighbors in their new homes. Although the fre­ quency of disjunctive migration is now increasing in Tiv country, slow expansion that preserves congruence of spa­ tial and genealogical relations among descent groups has

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

55

apparently been the more usual sort of movement. Bohannan suggests that before 1925 the Tiv were expanding southward at the rate of three or four miles each genera­ tion. 19 The vast areas of West Africa where FulBe live scattered among a multitude of different ethnic groups and the very much smaller and more compact territory occupied by Tiv indicates the larger scale of Fulbe movement. The Fulbe typically have practiced some degree of pastoralism, and the needs of their herds have required them to move over much greater distances than Tiv agriculturists. This movement was typically disjunctive. As groups segmented and dispersed, migrants often put great distances and many intervening groups between themselves and kinsmen who had chosen not to move or to move in another direc­ tion. 20 The story of Kirti, the first Pullo to settle at Lerbou, illustrates the way in which migration might separate kins­ folk: Long ago, before the jihad had been fought here in Liptako, four brothers of the same father and the same mother left the region of Boni [in Mali] and started eastward. They were Kirti Gallo, Gagge Gallo, Aliiyu Gallo, and Paate Gallo. A magician had told them they must leave Boni and go to a land called Lip­ tako, where they would separate and each would go his own way. The magician came with the four to show them the way, and eventually they arrived at Yoodaga, a mountain which is located west of Peoukoye [in west­ ern Liptako], There the four separated. Kirti went to Lerbou; Gagge to the region around Gao [in Mali]; Aliiyu to the region around Pissila [in Mossi country]; and Paate, the youngest, back to Boni. 21 This listing of the names and destinations of Kirti's brothers is unusual. Most traditionists have forgotten the names of their ancestors' kinsfolk who went their separate ways. Even this exceptionally well-informed traditionist did not know the history of Kirti's brothers and their descend­ ants once they had settled at Boni, Gao, and Pissila.

56

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

Present-day informants also typically know very little about the fate of people who once were their neighbors in Liptako but then left it. As we have seen in Chapter 2, this is in part a result of available technology: without writing it is difficult to keep in touch with faraway places. But choices of what to learn and remember and what to forget or neg­ lect are also influenced by the information's immediate rel­ evance: whereas people need to know something about their neighbors and about Liptako in general to get along, the need is less pressing to know the histories of distant kinsfolk with whom paths seldom or never cross. In this situation genealogical completeness can be neither pre­ served nor invented. The FulBe cannot pretend the Tiv fiction that genealogies are "both known—by someone, somewhere—and knowable."22 The comparatively short genealogies that people do know are not always known in the same way. Those I col­ lected varied from one speaker to the next and even among different recitals by the same speaker. The lists of the village heads of N'Diomga exemplify the mire the his­ torian can wade into. In 1976 one traditionist recited three different lists in two sittings. Figure 1 sums up the data of the first. This recital took place during desultory lateafternoon conversation over tea, and when it was done, the traditionist stared pensively into space as the rest of us moved on to other topics. Sometime later he broke into our talk, then dwelling on whose millet was doing best and why, and said he had muddled the first list, which I should cross out and forget. Figure 2 represents the new version. It is very different from the first: Buubu became Belko's brother rather than his son, Umaru Kariimu disappeared, a new village head, Seydu, was introduced, Paate was listed as an officeholder whereas Belko was not. But this change was only a start. Two days later the old man showed up again at our tea-drinking circle and announced he had another list that further reflection and friendly discussion with other traditionists had convinced him should be ac­ cepted instead of its two predecessors. For this list see Fig­ ure 3. Here Buubu once more became Belko's son but also

^

I (3) B U U B U

N O T E : The names of village heads are in capitals.

(10) B O K A R Tongooga (12) HAMMADU I

Arfu

(5) B R A A H 1 M A

I

I Aamadu

(1) A L J U M M A

,

1 Paate

'

(2)BELKO

,

I

I

1

(9)JIBRIILA

Haamidu

Hammadu

Umaru

1 (4) K A R I I M U

(7) B U R G O ( 1 1 ) S A M B O (8) B O N K A N O

1 — ' — 1 (6) IISA Kadri

Yamcfi 1

T h e Village Heads of N'Diomga: List Three

FIGURE 1

BOKAR

Tongooga

(8) BURGO

(13) HAMMADU

Arfu

I (7) USA

I (a)BUUBU

N O T E : T h e names of village heads are in capitals.

(,1)

I Aamadu

(6) B R A A H I M A

I (i) A L J U M M A

FIGURE 2

1 Kadri

(12) SAMBO

1 (4) P A A T E

Yamcfi 1 Belko

I (9) B O N K A N O

(5)

1 SEYDU

(IO)JIBRIILA

1 Haamidu

(3) K A R I I M U I Hammadu

T h e Village Heads of N'Diomga: List Three

,

^

HAMMADU

I Tongooga

N O T E : The names of village heads are in capitals.

(13)

I (11) BOKAR

(8) B U R G O

Arfu

,

(7) USA

'

I Buubu

(6) B R A A H I M A

I

1 Aamadu

(1) A L J UMMA

FIGURE 3

Kadri

,

(12) S A M B O

1

1 (4) P A A T E

1

Yamcfi

,

(9) B O N K A N O

rJ

Haamidu

,

1 (5) S E Y D L

(IO)JIBRIILA

'

I (3) K A R I I M U

I Hammadu

'

(2) B E L K O

T h e Village Heads of N'Diomga: List T h r e e

60

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

lost the village head's title while Belko gained it. By this time my fellow listeners were becoming restive at these re­ visions, and one of them, one of the most prominent clerics in the emirate, pulled out a battered school notebook to check through the list of N'Diomga's village heads that someone had given him. Comparison showed, he con­ cluded, that his list and the old man's third list agreed completely. Then he read the list aloud to demonstrate this, and the old man agreed it was so. The two men gave one another the satisfied nods of people who had settled a difficult question once and for all, and the conversation drifted into nonhistorical paths, in my presence never again to return to N'Diomga's history. However, the cleric's list and the traditionist's third list were not in fact identical. The cleric had reintroduced Umaru, son of Kariimu and father of Hammadu, who had dropped out since the first list. He thereby lengthened one branch of this family tree by a generation. Why did the old man accept this change in the third list he had thought authoritative? Perhaps out of deference to the cleric, a man of very high status and great power who was also his patron. Or perhaps the old man did not notice the change at all. Even Ful6e who are well attuned to genealogical reckoning have difficulty grasping every detail of rapidly recited lists of names. Traditionists often know very little about the persons whose names they recite, particularly when those persons lived more than three or four generations ago. The details of their lives are forgotten, and thus the likelihood in­ creases that sooner or later their names will be forgotten too. In the N'Diomga lists I saw a family tree in the midst of pruning. Note that Aljumma Yamcfi is listed as the village's first ruler on lists one through three. The old man called my attention to this; he said that no one but himself and his patron cleric would list Aljumma Yamcfi, and indeed the other lists I collected did not.23 A few days earlier, the old man said, he had talked over the problem of Aljumma Yamcfi with a fellow traditionist, who asserted that Aljumma could never have been village head, for "He never

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

61

did anything," thereby prompting my old man to the counterassertion that "doing something" was not a reliable indi­ cator of whether or not a person ever lived or held office. The old man's reasoning is admirable. His opponent's ar­ gument is however a better indicator of the forces that shape the content of historical memory. Men who have done nothing which the present judges significant are prime candidates for oblivion. Aljumma Yamcfi is more likely to be forgotton than either Buubu or Belko because he had no sons, only daughters, and in this patrilineal society it is sons and their sons, FulBe frequently reminded me, who carry a man's name down through the generations. A daughter's chil­ dren will count themselves among their father's line and take less interest in their mother's ancestry than their father's. Childless women fade quickly from memory for a similar reason. I tried collecting the names and origins of the wives of prominent officeholders for a study of mar­ riage patterns, but I quickly learned that oral data gen­ erally left out childless women. Informants often let me know this when, after reciting the names of a man's wives and the children he had by each, they added a statement something like this: "He had more wives, but they had no children, and I cannot remember their names anymore." In Liptako, having children, and especially male children, is part of "doing something" that wins one a place in his­ tory. Aljumma Yamcfi, my old man said, was like the first emir Braahima Seydu in his sonlessness. But Braahima Seydu, quite unlike Aljumma Yamcfi, is not forgotten, certainly because he "did something" even more important than sire sons: he helped found an emirate. His name looms large in most of the traditions of the time. So far neither the colo­ nial regime nor the government of Upper Volta has been able to displace the emirate as the primary focus of popular allegiance. So long as this continues, neither the events of the early nineteenth century that established the country's constitution nor the name of the man at the center of them

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is likely to be forgotten. By contrast, memory of Aljumma Yamcfi's name may well not outlast my old man's lifetime. In fact all the emirs are better remembered than N'Diomga's village heads. I was able to collect only seven genealogies of these village heads and getting them took some probing. I heard dozens and dozens of recitals of the country's king list, and most of these performances were spontaneous ones. In all these lists I found not a single var­ iant in names or relationships, and I never had reason to suspect that this consistency reflected anything but accu­ racy. Although more recent emirs' reigns are recalled more fully than distant ones, something is remembered about them all, and much like Britons who class their country's statutes by the reign when they were issued, Liptako's traditionists use the succession of their sovereigns as a com­ mon point of historical reference. "Gaani Siddiri and Allu Paate came here fto Beybaye] during the reign of Emir Saalu Hamma, but by the time Bukari Alfuki settled here, Sori Hamma was emir," averred a traditionist from Beybaye.24 Or, for another characteristic statement: "Seeku Saalu was ruling when Liptako went to war with Diagourou-Alanaaji."25 As long as events like these retain some importance to living men, and as long as traditionists continue to use reigns as a series of chronological pigeon­ holes, the names of the emirs will be remembered and tra­ ditionists will carefully memorize the country's king list. The genealogy of the first emir's ancestors, however, is as poorly remembered as that of N'Diomga's first village heads. Before the nineteenth century there were no emirs, and the emirs' ancestors were apparently not especially prominent among the FulBe who lived in Liptako in the centuries of Kurumba and Gourmantche domination. I heard no one use their names as points of reference for the dimly recalled events of those times. Very few traditionists would even attempt to arrange the scattered names they could recall in a genealogy, and if arranged, the finished products varied, just as the names and relationships of the early village heads of N'Diomga varied from list to list.

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

63

When traditionists differ in their listings of long-dead men, the historian has the task of figuring out where truth lies. When a man like my traditionist of N'Diomga is un­ sure whether Aljumma Yamcfi really ruled or whether Buubu was the son of Belko or actually his brother, he has only his memory and those of others to rely on. And memories, as Liptako traditionists never tired of repeating, are fallible; they play strange tricks on their owners. With­ out contemporary documentation there is no way my old man can ever be as confident of the decisions he makes on these data as America historians can be sure that George Washington and not, say, Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated first president of the United States, and that in 1789, not in any other year. Sometimes, though not always, variants seem to be suspi­ ciously congruent with special interests. When some N'Diomga traditionists aver that their village heads repre­ sent a distant branch of the emirs' line and others poohpooh the claim with the counterassertion that these are so­ cial climbers' lies, and when the first group counterattacks with the charge that those who deny the lineage's royal connections are simply out to sully reputations for the political advantage this would bring them, the historian is strengthened in the skepticism that is his professional credo. Although he understands the motives of the pur­ veyors of history somewhat better than before, for lack of contemporary evidence he has no way of distinguishing be­ tween truth and falsity in these claims and counterclaims. Compare the position of the historian of Liptako with that of Marcus Cunliffe, the British student of George Washington. Cunliffe subtitled his biography of Washing­ ton Man and Monument—an apt choice, for one of the most difficult jobs he faced was scraping away the layers of legendary accretions that have shaped the popular monu­ ment of the first president, a monument that on the one hand captivated American imaginations but on the other obscured the man for historians. For example, Cunliffe was able to follow the development of the famous but

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apocryphal cherry-tree myth—"I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet"— through the various editions of Parson Weems' early biog­ raphy to the McGuffey readers and thence into popular legend. Cunliffe's fine detective work depended on the availability of documentation. Suppose he had had only oral tradition of the 1950s to work from. Sorting out man from monument would have been impossible. 26 The case of George Washington is a reminder that popu­ lar consensus is a poor guide to truth. In attacking the pious legends that surround the man, Cunliffe was run­ ning against the popular grain. In Liptako consistency is no more surely reliable than in the United States. Lists one through three as well as all the lists of the N'Diomga village heads, save one, agree wholeheartedly on the names and relationships of those who ruled the village during the last four generations. The maverick in the lot lists a certain Biiko Dunna after Jibriila Haamidu and before Bokar Arfu. The traditionist, who was not an N'Diomga man, ex­ plained that Biiko Dunna was not from N'Diomga's ruling line; he was a slave appointed by the French colonial ad­ ministration. 27 I went to ask other traditionists about Biiko Dunna. Two denied that what I heard was true. A third agreed that Biiko Dunna had held power for a time, but argued that since he lacked the genealogical credentials re­ quired to hold office in Liptako, he was not really a village head. I should ignore him. 28 But for the historian who must respect but nonetheless not be overwhelmed by Fulbe concepts of legitimacy, Biiko Dunna cannot be ignored if the history of N'Diomga is to be worked out. No records exist to tell us whether Aljumma Yamcfi re­ ally ruled or not, but Biiko Dunna is a different matter. The French kept and preserved records of officeholders far more carefully and systematically than the precolonial emirs, and the archives of the sous-prefecture that has suc­ ceeded to the colonial cercle of Dori would surely tell us something about Biiko Dunna's position at N'Diomga. I twice applied for permission to use the archives to make

A WORLD OF LINEAGES

65

comparisons between administrators' records and oral tra­ dition, and permission was twice denied. On the second oc­ casion the official who replied to my request expressed his opinion that in any event oral tradition would furnish a "more exact version of history" than the archives. Clearly not too much is to be hoped from the documents: reports on Liptako I consulted in Niamey and Paris were charac­ teristically less concerned with the political and social life of the emirate than I would have liked, and much of what I read was infuriatingly imperceptive rather than illuminat­ ing. Nonetheless, the records would provide at least limited means of working through some of the problems that oral tradition presents and in the end reconstructing a "more exact version of history" than is possible from oral tradition alone. As things stand, the historian of precolonial Liptako is in the position of Marcus Cunliffe without his docu­ ments, and separating the truth from the monument is an awesome and often impossible task. I collected more traditions of N'Diomga than I did of most persons, places, and events, and they were particu­ larly rich. Few other informants were as obviously reveal­ ing as this N'Diomga traditionist. Most wise old men reeled off genealogies with no second thoughts—hesitation is thought to indicate a traditionist does not know his material—and those who sat listening nodded their ap­ proval and the interview moved smoothly on to other topics. Not once did anyone interrupt with an alternate genealogy. But every so often friends told me that my leav­ ing a village after an interview was the sign for argument over a testimony to begin. Twice people approached me in Dori to tell me stories and recite genealogies meant to cor­ rect errors they perceived in what others had told me. I discovered most variants by asking for the same tradition at several places, and they tended to confirm what I had seen at N'Diomga: that ancestors who did nothing remarkable are most likely to be forgotten, that the likelihood of var­ iants increases as generational distance increases between traditionists and the persons whose names they recite, that

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genealogies are sometimes shaped to make particular cases. And out of these sets of variants, like those of N'Diomga, I saw no sure way to reconstruct true gene­ alogies. I do not have variants for most of the genealogies I collected, usually because a second, independent traditionist willing to go over the same ground as the first was not to be found. I recorded disputed and undisputed genealogies alike on tape and paper and deposited them in Upper Volta's archives for future historians. Perhaps I should have left them with a warning to beware: the genealogical backbone of Liptako tradition is less sturdy than it seems.

CHAPTER 4

RECKONING TIME'S PASSING About a tousand or two tousand year ago, me cannot tell to a year or two, as can neider write nor read, there was . . . The King of the Gypsies, in Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones Of course I know when the Friday mosque at Dori was rebuilt. That was 108 years ago, in the third year of the reign of Seeku Saalu. Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye, 19 December 1971

IN LIPTAKO a well-versed traditionist has got to know his dates. "Look. He's a fine old man, and he knows a lot of stories," one friend confided about another, his tone then shifting from grudging praise to mild disdain, "but he does not know when any of those events happened." Western historians are no less disdainful of their colleagues who are careless with their chronologies, for negligence is a sign they have given too little heed to one of the profession's fundamental convictions that, in Moses Finley's words, "dates and a coherent dating scheme are as essential to his­ tory as exact measurement is to physics." Or as the Africanist Yves Person put it more bluntly: "No chronology, no history." 1 No Western book of history comes without a buttresswork of dates. Nor do Liptako's traditions. Ali, for in­ stance, "became Liptako's first judge just after the jihad that established the emirate for eighty-seven years until it was occupied by the French." 2 "It is now 155 years since the HomboriBe left Hombori and 148 years since they settled in Liptako." 3 Aadaajo Muusa, a village head of Bouloye, "died at the age of sixty-six. That was sixty-two years ago, before the war against the Tuareg." 4

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Precise statements like these are apt to surprise Africanists, who in recent years have seen one author after another come to the conclusion that oral tradition and chronological exactitude seldom go together. D. H. Jones opened his fine introduction to a special number of The Journal of African History devoted to chronology with the sobering assertion that "the historian of precolonial Africa south of the Sahara is in the main concerned with cultures which took no interest in the exact mensuration of time. The professional story-tellers and the official custodians of state histories, who provide most of the oral sources, usu­ ally have only a very hazy and erroneous idea of the abso­ lute chronology of the events they relate." John Mbiti's opinion is still more sweeping and pessimistic: "Oral his­ tory has no dates to be remembered."5 Suggesting why Liptako's traditionists have developed attitudes toward dates different from those apparently characteristic of subSaharan Africa and estimating the accuracy of their meas­ ures are the purpose of this chapter. The answers to both problems depend on working out the conceptual framework that shapes the traditionists' chronologies. A first clue lies in the way two of the men above dated events in terms of elapsed time. "It is now 155 years since . . . ," "That was sixty-two years ago. . . ." Both the Christian and the Muslim calendars are built on a base point from which their users number passing years. The Liptako calendar also has its base point, but unlike the Christian and Muslim base points immutably fixed in the stable past at Christ's birth or Muhammad's migration, the FulBe base point is in the ever-moving present. The base is "this year" (hikka). Past events may have happened last year (rawaani) or the year before last (rawtaani) or so many years ago. Despite their allegiance to Islam, Liptako people prefer their own calendar to the Muslim one for historical pur­ poses. Informants rarely cited Muslim dates, and these were primarily in reference to events outside the emirate. I more often, but still rarely, heard references to Muslim

RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

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months. "Emir Usmaan died during Dhu al-hijja eleven years ago," for instance. 6 All Ful6e know what Muslim month it is, but few recall the number of the year. Knowl­ edge of months is necessary for the proper performance of Muslim rituals; knowledge of the year is not. Christian dates seldom figured in the traditions, and when they did, it was always with reference to events since the French oc­ cupation. The Liptako term seize, for instance, is drawn from the French dix-neuf cent seize, 1916, the year that stands out in local memory as the time the Tuareg rose against the French. 7 I often heard people say that events happened so many years before or after seize. A so-many-years-ago system requires that the historian keep a clear head, for every year he must update his chronological references. Liptako's traditionists do not seem to find this a difficult task. In late 1971 Maccucfo Yigo Gela told me: "Aamadu Iisa went to war against Koala for the last time eighty-four years ago." When we talked about the war again five years later, he remembered it happened eighty-nine years before. 8 Other informants did exactly the same, and so the dates I collected in 1971, 1972 and 1976 were generally consistent with one another. They were also generally consistent with the chronological data of oral tradition recorded early in the colonial period, showing that in Liptako, unlike those African societies where dateconsciousness seems to have arisen in response to Euro­ peans' demands for chronological precision, the habit of measuring the years' passing clearly antedates European influence. At least since the early nineteenth century, the limit of traditional chronologies, the Ful6e have been deal­ ing with dates in their own way. A so-many-years-ago system appears dismayingly diffi­ cult to Westerners accustomed to a neat and unchanging progression of numbered years: if we had a system like the Fulbe's, trying to keep the so-many-years-agos straight and up to date on all the paper that surrounds us would surely contribute less to chronological accuracy and clarity than to nightmarish confusion and a failing sense of when things

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happened. But in Liptako, a society unencumbered by masses of paper, updating is less difficult than it might ap­ pear. The traditionists seem to update systematically only a few important dates that they can unhesitatingly cite to the enquirer, such as the year of the jihad, the year of the French occupation, seize, or the year of Upper Volta's in­ dependence. They recall other events as occurring so many years before or after the base dates. When they want to know other dates, they have to calculate. When I asked Allu Siddiiki when his ancestor came to Katchirga, he paused, and then he said: "One hundred sixty-two years [the time of the jihad] minus seven years. That leaves 155 years—right?—since he arrived at Katchirga."9 Sometimes the calculations of Liptako traditionists lead them into the same pitfalls that plague Western chronographers. One man tried to figure out if two officeholders were contemporaries by calculating from chronological data in the traditions. His method was impeccable, but his arithmetic was wrong and so his synchronism was wrong too. Or sometimes traditionists mount calculations on faulty chronological data, producing answers and then hypotheses just as questionable as those resulting from poor arithmetic. One of the prime sources of dates is the lists of kings, im­ ams, and village heads that traditionists eagerly memorize and recite. Almost always portions of these lists are sup­ plemented by statements of how many years men held office, statements that, by calculation, can be translated into dates on a linear time scale. These statements are more frequent for recent officeholders than for ancient ones; the longer ago an officeholder lived, the less likely it is that anyone remembers how long he served. Even though the tenures of minor nineteenth-century officeholders are generally forgotten, the regnal lengths of all the emirs are widely remembered, and with remarkable consistency. I collected only a single, minor variant in the regnal lengths attributed to precolonial rulers and not many more for the time since, the slight increase in var-

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71

iants for this period probably being a reflection of a politi­ cal situation that the FulBe perceive as confused and diffi­ cult and that included three depositions and at least one long interregnum. For Liptako, as for many other African societies, study­ ing the king list becomes a way of working out the whole country's chronology, since the king list serves as a basic frame of reference within which people frequently date events. The village head of Bargare, for instance, remem­ bered that his ancestors arrived in Liptako from Barga in Mossi country during the reign of Emir Sori Hamma. 10 Person has warned Africanists not to trust too much in regnal lengths as a base on which to build chronologies·. "Without proof to the contrary I consider the regnal lengths drawn from oral tradition to be absolutely worth­ less." 11 Now it remains to be seen if the traditionists' chronologies are as exceptional in their reliability as they apparently are in their precision, or if their precision hides a basic worthlessness. Nassuru Limam's king list represents the opinion of most of the traditionists I knew. 12 It is a written version, and in this it differs from most lists current in Liptako, but nonetheless its style, like its content, is true to the oral tra­ dition on which its author drew: Braahima Seydu was made emir after the war, and he was emir for seven years. His successor was Saalu Hamma Seydu, who ruled for sixteen years. His suc­ cessor was Sori for twenty-eight years. His successor was Seeku Saalu, who was emir for twenty-six years. His successor was Aamadu Iisa, who was emir for four years. His successor was Bokari Sori, the father of Birgi, who had been emir for six years at the European occupation. He was emir under them for twenty years. His total reign was twenty-six years. His successor was Bokari Aamadu Iisa, called Baaba Gedal, who ruled for two years. His successor was Emir Abdurramaani Aamadu Iisa, the father of Maamuudu, who was

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emir for thirteen years. His successor was Abdullaahi Faaruuku, called Sandu, who ruled for twenty-five years. His successor was Usmaan Amiiru, who ruled for three years. His successor was his son Abdulaahi, called Nassuru, who ruled for three years. 13 Arabic is the language of this list, a reminder that Liptako is part of the Muslim world, but the underlying con­ ceptualization of how passing time ought to be divided up is no more a Muslim one than is the so-many-years-ago sys­ tem. It is Fulbe. In this king list and in all his other histori­ cal works, Nassuru Limam used the Arabic word sana (plural: sinun) to designate the units of time each man ruled. "Year" is the usual translation of sana, but the mean­ ings of "year" and sana are not precisely congruent, since sana is a lunar measurement and "year" a solar one, mak­ ing the former about eleven days shorter than the latter. Nassuru Limam used sana to translate the Fulfulde world nduungu (plural: duuBi), but the semantic fit between them is no more perfect than that between sana and "year." Nduungu falls into a category of measurement that Ε. E. Evans-Pritchard has aptly termed "oecological time," for it reflects Fulbe "relations to environment." 14 Nduungu is the word for "rainy season" as well as "year." The coming of the rains is the most dramatic time in the annual climatic cycle. The rains break the scorching heat of the dry season and transform Liptako from a sandy, barren desert to a relatively cool and green country of luxuriantly growing plants. People greet the rains with joy—little children run naked in the first showers, splashing and laughing with exuberance, and farmers rush to their fields—and life be­ comes more animated with the release from the hot sea­ son's oppressiveness. This is an appropriate time to signal a year's passing, and the Ful6e are by no means the only West African group living in this sort of environment to think of years in terms of rains. The rains usually last from sometime in June to mid- to late September or perhaps even early October, and this is

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the season of planting and cultivation. After the harvest in October comes dabbunde, the cold season, which continues until the nights are no longer cold and the days are burn­ ing hot, about the middle of February. Then ceedu, the hot season, sets in. It in turn gives way to nduungu, the new rainy season and a new year. The limits of the season vary and, with them, the length of the year itself. On the aver­ age it equals the length of the solar year, but some years are somewhat longer and others somewhat shorter than the average. 15 Since both the FulBe year and the Christian year are solar years, converting dates in one system to dates in the other is easy. When a Pullo says an event happened so many years ago, the Westerner first subtracts the figure from the number of the Christian year in which they are talking and then makes allowance for the season. In Octo­ ber 1971, for example, I was told that the whites occupied Liptako seventy-five years before. 16 In terms of the Chris­ tian calendar this means the event took place after the be­ ginning of the rains of 1896 but before the rains of 1897. The French conquerors reported they marched into Dori on 30 April 1897. 17 The two dates agree. Since the FulBe year spans parts of two Christian years, I shall write dates based on oral tradition with a slash. Thus the date of the French occupation will be written as 1896/ 97. Remember that dates given in this form refer to a specific year running from rainy season to rainy season, roughly from June to June. The oral evidence is seldom full enough to allow pinpointing dates within that span. The French 30 April 1897 ls m ore exact than the Fulbe 1896/97, and the differing ways Westerners and FulBe go about reckoning a person's age or tenure in office show similar differences in ideas of how exact measurements of time ought to be. Americans usually count a man's years in age or in office from the precise day he was born or gained his position. A man born on 12 June 1938 is not thirty until 12 June 1968. Ifhe dies on 11 June 1968, he is dead at age twenty-nine. People may say he was "almost thirty," but they

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will not say he was thirty. Children often try to advance their ages before their birthdays arrive, and if they are caught at it, their friends tease them. The people of Liptako are less particular. Except for those few whose educa­ tion inclines them to adopt Western standards of exactness, they make no effort to remember the day or month when a person is born, to say nothing of the hour and the minute that time-possessed Americans record on birth records. In Liptako all the people add a year to their ages at the same time—when the rains start. Then a child born just a week before becomes just as much one year old as a child born several months earlier. People count years in office in the same way. A man is said to have ruled for one year at the beginning of the rains following his accession. Even though his predecessor may have ruled for some or even most of the year before the man took office, regnal lengths credit the successor with the whole year and the predecessor with none of it, thereby making a chronology that is less precise than punctilious Westerners would like it but one that nonetheless does not deviate from reality by more than a few months at most. Since the months and days that are si­ lently added to the successor's reign are consistently sub­ tracted from the predecessor's, these adjustments affect only the chronology of individual years. They do not push over into the other years and set off a bumper-car effect that skews the chronology of the whole run of office­ holders. 18 The Liptako traditionists' consistent approach to figur­ ing regnal lengths makes it possible to turn them into dates in two operations: first one must fix a base date for any of the successions from contemporary, written evidence ex­ ternal to the society; then one calculates other dates from it. The Dori archives surely contain dates for all the chronological markers in Nassuru Limam's king list from the colonial conquest to the present, any of which would make a base for calculation, but even without benefit of the archives there are three base dates to choose from. First, there is the year of the French occupation: 1896/97. Then

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75

there is the year Emir Abdurramaan was deposed and Sandu Faaruuku acceded to the turban: 1931/32. And finally there is the date when Emir Usmaan Bokari Sori died in Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage: 1959/60. 19 Happily, none of these dates is inconsistent with the others, and cal­ culating from any of them produces the set of dates ac­ companying the genealogical chart of the emirs in Figure 4· It would be easy to check the dates for the colonial pe­ riod if only the archives were open. Checking the dates for precolonial times is more difficult. The people who ruled Liptako in the nineteenth century lacked the passion for record-keeping that characterized their twentieth-century overlords. Few of those hardy European travelers whose writings have been a boon to historians of other African societies passed through Liptako, and none of them stayed very long or had much to say about what he saw and heard. Nonetheless, a scattering of nineteenth-century evidence provides Person with his "proof to the contrary" and suggests that the chronologies of Liptako tradition are by no means "worthless." In the 1820s the Englishman Hugh Clapperton made two trips to West Africa to gather information on a part of the world about which Europeans then knew very little. One place he visited was Sokoto, the capital of the caliphate of which Liptako was a part, and in 1827 he learned that "Saleh" was its ruler. "Saleh" is a rendering of the Muslim name the Ful&e have made into Saalu, and 1827 indeed falls within the reign calculated for Emir Saalu Hamma. 20 It was almost thirty years until the first European saw Lip­ tako for himself. He was Heinrich Barth, the great German traveler the British sponsored during the five years he spent moving about and living in various parts of the Sa­ hara and the West African Sahel. He passed through Dori in 1853 on t ^e way to Timbuktu, and "Ibrahima" was the emir he found. Liptako traditionists usually remember Ibraahiima under his nickname Sori, and Barth's informa­ tion confirms that he ruled during at least part of the pe-

1

I (8) A B D U R R A M A A N (1918/191931/32)

'

N O T E : T h e names of emirs are in capitals.

I (7) B O K A R I (1916/171918/19)

(5) Aamadu (1886/871890/91)

Iisa

(4) S E E K U (1860/611886/87)

1

1 (2) S A A L U (1816/17-1832/33) I

(n)NASSURU (1959/601962/63)

1

1 (1) B R A A H I M A (1809/10-1816/17)

'

(9) SANDU (1931/321956/57)

Faaruuku

1

1 (3) SORI (1823/33-1860/61)

Seydu

(6) B O K A R I (1809/911916/17 I (10) USMANN (1956/571959/60)

I Hamma

T h e Emirs of Liptako

FIGURE 4

RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

77

riod when the traditionists say he did. 21 The name of Sori Hamma's successor, Seeku Saalu, appears in a letter he re­ ceived from Malik b. Muhammad, the emir of Gwandu. The letter is undated, as is most of the correspondence that circulated within the caliphate, but its contents show it was written shortly after Malik came to power, an event that different historians have dated between 1876 and 1879 but that in any case falls within the period Seeku Saalu is said to have ruled. 22 The second European to visit Liptako was the French­ man Parfait Louis Monteil. None of the three bits of evi­ dence above is likely to keep Liptako's historians worrying late at night, but Monteil's evidence is a different matter, for it implies that Nassuru Limam's king list distorts the past and papers over uncomfortable events in the country's history. Barth was a traveler whose long, detailed Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa was of more inter­ est to geographers than politicans, but by Monteil's time the scramble for Africa was in full swing, and even though his reports won him a hero's welcome, a banquet, and a Grande medaille d'or from the Societe de Geographie on his return, the purpose and impact of his travels were more political than geographical. He was sent in late 1890 to reconnoiter the newly established line that delimited the French and British spheres of influence between the east­ ern limit of the Niger bend and Lake Chad, a line that eventually evolved into the present boundary between Nigeria and Niger. As Monteil moved eastward across what is now Mali, Upper Volta, Niger, and Nigeria, he tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to make treaties with one African potentate after another, placing them under the protection of France. 23 Monteil came into Dori in May 1891. He found the pre­ vious emir had died—Monteil failed to record either his name or the exact date of his death—and Liptako in the midst of a succession struggle so fierce and divisive that he thought the whole country "in anarchy." The two main competitors were "Boubakar-Amirou" and "Boari." The

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names, the date, and the circumstances all match those in the traditions. The emir whose death set off the succession struggle was Aamadu Iisa, and the year he died was 1890/ 91, the same year Monteil arrived. Monteil's "BoubakarAmirou" was Bokari Sori; his "Boari" was Buhaari Iisa, a younger brother of Aamadu Iisa. Monteil spent ten un­ happy days at Dori: almost all his animals died, provisions were hard to find, he and his men fell ill. He was "delighted to leave" the town when the time came. But despite his hardships, Monteil went away with what he had come for: a treaty. That Liptako lacked a sovereign made negotiating a treaty a difficult and risky proposition. Monteil thought Buhaari Iisa more likely to win the disputed succession, and, so he persuaded Buhaari's son to commit Liptako to France's protection on behalf of his father, whom Monteil apparently never even saw. Monteil left Liptako hoping that he would win his wager on the future and his treaty would be valid. He recorded his satisfied relief when he heard several weeks later that Buhaari was emir.24 But Monteil's information was wrong—or at least that was the conclusion of Georges Mathieu Destenave, another French officer who made his way to Dori in 1895. Des­ tenave was then his country's administrator at Bandiagara, now in Mali, at that time the easternmost center in the rapidly growing empire the French were building in the Western Sudan. Destenave was sent to what is today Upper Volta to remind African rulers there of their various treaty obligations to France and so to ensure that they would not gravitate toward either the Germans or the British, France's competitors for West African empire. In Liptako Destenave found that Bokari Sori was emir and that Buhaari Iisa was dead, "probably poisoned." Buhaari Iisa had never been able to make good his claims to the turban, asserted Destenave, and thus Monteil's treaty was of doubt­ ful validity. Destenave thereupon drew up a second Franco-Liptako treaty in which Bokari Sori promised "in his name and in that of his successors" to put "his kingdom under the protectorate of France."25

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If the historian follows Destenave, Buhaari Iisa must be excluded from Liptako's king list. Severin Abbatucci, H.C.E. Bouverot, and Franfois de Coutouly do this; their works list Bokari Sori as Aamadu Iisa's successor. 26 But if the historian follows Monteil, then Buhaari Iisa must be in­ cluded. This was the view of Paul Delmond, who agreed that Buhaari Iisa became emir after Monteil's departure. "Several months after Monteil's visit, the son of Emir Sori [Bokari Sori] succeeded in having the Emir [Buhaari lisa] deposed by the notables, and he assumed the turban." 27 My informants often told the story of the succession struggle. Their testimonies varied considerably in detail, but the main thrust of their characterizations of Buhaari Iisa was clear: he was an unsuccessful contender for office. Everyone agreed that both Bokari Sori and Buhaari Iisa were powerful men who attracted large followings. Each man styled himself emir and each had a tubal, a drum that in Liptako symbolizes royal authority. The two men and their supporters jockeyed for supremacy for quite some time—most informants said simply that the succession struggle lasted "a long time"; one claimed it lasted six months—but gradually Bokari Sori got more and stronger support than his competitor could muster and finally Bokari Sori's tubal beat alone. Buhaari Iisa died not long thereafter. The evidence of present-day oral tradition thus concurs with the view of Destenave, not with that of Monteil and Delmond. If Monteil and Delmond are right, then Lip­ tako's traditionists have swept an emir under the rug of lost memories, thereby telescoping the king list. This has often been the fate oral tradition has meted out to men their societies have come to regard as usurpers, men "whose claim to office was, or was retrospectively held to be, in­ ferior and illegitimate." 28 This sort of judgment has sometimes shaped Liptako's traditions—the Biiko Dunna case of the last chapter is just one such instance among others—but in the case of the 1890/91 succession oral tradition is almost certainly not

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guilty of selective forgetfulness. It is more accurate than either Delmond or Monteil. The question of whether Biiko Dunna ever ruled colonial N'Diomga interests few people outside the village, and the man's slave status ensures that Fulbe will think him a usurper worthy of historical obliv­ ion. The emirs are a different matter. Their importance to the whole emirate combined with local patterns of political competition mean that more attention is paid to Buhaari Iisa than to Biiko Dunna. The emirs' lineage is divided into two "houses" or cuudi (singular: sutidu), the house of Sori and the house of Iisa. They take their names from Sori Hamma and from Iisa Saalu Hamma, an uncle and his nephew who bitterly disputed the succession in 1832/33. The two houses of their descendants have been the nuclei of emirate-wide political competition ever since. Some members of both saw me as a vehicle for getting their house's particular versions of the past into print, thereby lending them an air of unimpeachable veracity. Each house tried to discredit the other with heated stories permeated with the rancor of ancient grievances. Buhaari Iisa and Bokari Sori were sons of the houses' founders. If the house of Sori had actually succeeded in deposing one of the house of Iisa, surely its members and supporters would have told me the story as evidence of their political acu­ men. And surely the followers of the house of Iisa would have told the story as proof of the perfidy of the house of Sori. But no one told such stories. Buhaari Iisa most likely never ruled. Monteil's conclusion that Buhaari Iisa became the un­ disputed emir was based on hearsay. That what Monteil was told coincided with his own interests perhaps inclined him to easy acceptance: after all, he had a treaty at stake. Monteil had signed the treaty with Buhaari Iisa's son be­ cause he was convinced the man's position was stronger than Bokari Sori's. But Monteil's capacity to make a sound judgment on this is questionable. He did not speak Fulfulde or any other West African language, and he lacked the driving urge of a man like Barth to understand African

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cultures. The detail and perceptiveness of Barth's Travels have made the book a classic of explorer literature and a gold mine of information for West Africanists, whereas Monteil's less full and less insightful work is quite rightly much less read. Furthermore, Monteil's stay in Liptako was brief, only a little more than a week, and most of it was at Dori, the center of Buhaari Iisa's strength, whereas Bokari Sori's power lay in the countryside. Monteil's account of his stay at Dori is not very detailed, but it appears he associated primarily with Buhaari's partisans. Monteil's personality, abilities, and associations all make the accuracy of his ob­ servations suspect. They are poor evidence on which to build a case. But Delmond also thought Buhaari Iisa ruled Liptako for a time, and his opinion deserves to be taken seriously. He knew Liptako well from service there as a commandant du cercle in the 1940s, and many people who knew him then assured me he understood what he saw and heard far bet­ ter than the usual run of colonial administrators, an opin­ ion the quality of his book generally confirms. The histori­ cal sections of "Dans la boucle du Niger: Dori, ville peule" are based primarily on oral tradition, but he also used published works, Monteil's among them. The particular combination of oral tradition, Monteil's account, and con­ jecture that shaped Delmond's reconstruction of the suc­ cession struggle is by no means clear, but my guess is that he followed Monteil on Buhaari Iisa's appointment and then interpreted oral traditions of the succession struggle's end as evidence for Buhaari's deposition. Although Nassuru Limam's history correctly lists Bokari Sori as Aamadu Iisa's successor, the chronology is probably off by a year. Monteil was in Dorijust before the rains, that is, just before the end of 1890/91, and it is unlikely that Bokari Sori could have made good his claim to the turban before the year was out. The more likely date is 1891/92, and the traditionists have accounted for the interregnum by tacking its duration onto Bokari Sori's reign. This small amount of contemporary evidence from a let-

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ter and from the accounts of travelers and empire-builders does not prove Nassuru Limam's chronology is correct. It only shows that some of the precolonial emirs really were ruling at times Nassuru Limam said they were. It also sets limits to possible variations in the chronology. Seeku Saalu, for example, could not have come to power until after Barth's departure from Liptako for Timbuktu on 21 July 1853. 29 A lower limit for the establishment of the emirate can be inferred from oral tradition. Braahima Seydu and the other founding fathers took their lead from the preachings and actions of the Muslim revivalist Shehu Usuman dan Fodiyo, whose life is far better documented than those of his Liptako contemporaries. In 1804 his community's wars with the Hausa started, and he began to grant flags of the jihad to those who wanted to emulate him in their home countries. Nassuru Limam's date of 1809/10 for the jihad and Braahima Seydu's accession falls within a period when jihads were being fought and won and emirs appointed throughout the lands that came to make up the caliphate. 30 Nassuru Limam's 1809/10 is echoed in works of Euro­ pean writers who have dated the emirate's founding to 1809 or 1810. A nineteenth-century Arabic history also a second, undated Arabic supplies the date of 1809. 31 manuscript lays out an entirely different chronology and sequence of events. Its author was "Nouha, son of Diogol, son of El-hadj, son of Baouligo," a Pullo who came to Dori from Hausa country. A French officer collected the manu­ script at Dori early in the colonial period and passed it on to Maurice Delafosse, whose three-page sketch of Liptako history in his monumental Haut-Senegal-Niger sums it up. According to Nouha (and also, by extension, to Delafosse, who did not question the history's veracity), in 1690 the Ful&e, led by Braahima Seydu, fought the Gourmantche, and established a new state. Nouha listed Braahima Seydu's eighteenth-century successors, and they bear the same names and succeed in the same order as the rulers other writers have dated to the nineteenth century—with one ex-

RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

83

ception. That is Hamma-Taoua (1784-1803). "Toward the end of his reign Liptako was incorporated in the Sokoto empire, recently created by Shehu Usuman." 32 This turns the usual accounts on their heads. Here Shehu Usuman's revolution supposedly led to the end of Liptako's inde­ pendence, not its beginning. Despite the utility of some of this history's information, its chronology is unacceptable. The same bits of contempo­ rary data that serve to confirm Nassuru Limam's king list invalidate Nouha's. Sori Hamma, for instance, could not have ruled from 1730 to 1758 if Barth met him in 1853. Although Delafosse tells us Nouha gathered his information from "various docteurs and savants of Liptako, Hausa coun­ try, Songhay country, and elsewhere," either these docteurs and savants did not know their history or Nouha misun­ derstood them. Delafosse's faulty chronology aside, none of the other recorded precolonial chronologies contradicts either Nassuru Limam's chronology or the very small core of clearly reliable dates for the country's nineteenth-century history. Table 1 sums up these dates and compares them with the major king lists, arranged in the order of their composi­ tion. Lists that are clearly derived from earlier ones are excluded. The lists are remarkably similar. Sometimes historical data do not vary from one work to another because their authors have just rewritten what their predecessors had to say. This creates the illusion of a comfortable consensus of scholars coming independently to the same conclusions that actually is imputable to a chain of authority sometimes leading to a source less respectable than the company of historians who make up the chain. 36 Liptako's written king lists have not fed on one another in this way. The colonial officials who wrote lists 2-5 seem not to have had recourse to Arabic chronicles, and certainly not to Malam Guidado's history, which was published only recently. Even though there are hints that the colonial writers consulted their European forerunners in the field, if not their African

84

RECKONING TIME'S

PASSING

TABLE 1 Liptako's King Lists Emirs

Recorded Dates of Accession ' 2 3 4 5

Braahima Saalu Sori Seeku Amadu Bokari

1810 1817 1832 ....

1809 1818 .... i860

1809 1818 1832 1861 1887

1810 1810 1817 1817 l8 3 3 1832 1861 1861 1887 1887 1891 1892

Reliable Dates 6

1809/10 1816/17 1832/33 1860/61 1886/87 1890/91

1804 1827 1853 1876-79 1891 1895 1897

Key to the Recorded Dates of Accession:

1. Malam Guidado, " L e s Rois d u Liptako" (nineteenth-century). 2. Abbatucci, " P o u r servir a l'histoire de la boucle d u N i g e r " ( 1 8 9 7 ) . 3 3 3. Bouverot, "Residence de Dori. M o n o g r a p h i c " (1904). 4 . De Coutouly, " U n e ville soudanaise de la Haute-Volta: D o r i " ( 1 9 2 6 ) . 3 4 5. Delmond, " D a n s la boucle du Niger: Dori, ville peule" ( 1 9 4 7 ) . 3 5 6. Nassuru Limam,

1804:

Qabilatu FerooBe

(1963).

Key to the Reliable Dates:

T h e year when Shehu Usuman's jihad began, and therefore the lower limit for the establishment o f the emirate.

1827:

Clapperton at Sokoto, where he was given the name of Liptako's emir.

1853:

Barth at Dori.

1 8 7 6 - 7 9 : Malik, the emir o f G w a n d u , announces his accession in a letter to the emir of Liptako. 1891:

Monteil at Dori, then in the midst of an interregnum.

1895:

Destenave at Dori.

1897:

French occupation of Liptako.

ones, little differences in their chronologies and much bigger ones in their general accounts show that all of them depended primarily on oral tradition for their histories, oral tradition that, at least on questions of chronology, has been fairly consistent over time. Liptako's king lists are not only consistent among themselves and with contemporary written evidence; they are also consistent with the country's village traditions and with the oral traditions of the surrounding region. Village

RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

85

traditions are less fully and precisely dated than state tradi­ tions, but they still bear the stamp oi an "interest in the exact mensuration of time." Katchirga is a village whose chronology is exceptionally full and precise. Before the Europeans came it was a large and prosperous village, the emirate's easternmost settlement of any size. Its large population was attracted by a succession of powerful and ambitious rulers whose exploits on the battlefield are still recounted as models of how men behaved in the days when men were men, and whose political strength and acumen were so great they made emirs think twice before they set a course contrary to Katchirga's desires. The traditionists dolefully shake their heads when they look around Katchirga and see the quiet, agricultural village it has become, but perhaps partly in protest against changing times their stories keep memories of the glorious past alive, and they nostalgically recite the names of the men who have ruled the village. Figure 5 sums up the genealogical and chrono­ logical information of their recitals. The twentieth-century dates are consistent with scattered written information. 37 The precolonial dates are also entirely consistent with Nassuru Limam's king list, the two lists being linked together by numerous synchronisms. For instance, Sori Hamma (1832/33-1860/61) was emir when Jibriila Siddiiki became Katchirga's first village head in 1833/34, anc ^ both men were still ruling at the time of the battle of Katchirga in 1840/41. When AlhadriJika became village head in 1890/ 91, Aamadu Iisa (1886/87-1890/91) was still alive. When the emir died, AlhadriJika played a key role in determin­ ing that Bokari Sori won the hard-fought struggle over the succession. 38 Liptako tradition is also rich in synchronisms for its neighbors' history, just as the written traditions of groups like the Tuareg of the Oudalan, the Songhay of Tera, the Gourmantche of Koala, and the Mossi of Boulsa also refer to Liptako. 39 These tie-ins make possible checking one group's chronology against other chronologies, and work­ ing out a chronology for one group has implications for the

FIGURE 5 T h e Village Heads of Katchirga

Siddiiki

I

(i)JIBRIILA (1833/341848/49)

| (3)JIKA (1855/561863/64)

'

1

(a)BELKO (1848/491855/56)

I (4) A B A (1863/641890/91)

Jamdikko

I

(5) A L H A D R I (1890/911919/20)

(6) A L H A A J I (igig/2o)

(9) A T I I K U (1942/43J975)

(8) UMARU (1927/281942/43)

N O T E : T h e names of village heads are in capitals.

1

(7) HAAMIDU (1919/201927/28)

RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

87

development of regional history. The traditionists of both Tera and Liptako remember, for example, that Jika Jibriila of Katchirga died on a raid into Songhay country. Liptako traditionists date this to 1863/64, a date that may someday prove useful to a historian trying to bring order out of the mass of confusion and contradiction characteristic of much of what has been written about Tera so far. 40 Similar pos­ sibilities lie in a Liptako traditionist's statement that Wanjeeji Wandaka led the Tuareg Logomaten of the Tera re­ gion when they attacked Katchirga in 1840/41. This is surely Yves Urvoy's "Ouandiedou," a man about whom Urvoy has nothing more to say than that he "seems to have ruled a very short time." 41 If the traditionist is correct, he has added a valuable bit to the store of easily accessible knowledge about the Logomaten, a group that has yet to attract its historian. But the traditionist may well be wrong. Another man asserted Wanjeeji's son Helo was Katchirga's attacker, and evidence is lacking for a decision on which of the two is right. 42 In the eastern Niger bend, many basic facts about who ruled where and when, facts of the sort that historians of Europe and America in the same period take for granted, are either not available or are dubiously reliable. Working out a regional history and putting it into a sound chronological framework will be a long, slow task. Some of the disagreements over basic facts that run all through the traditions are major: the way the historian de­ cides among them affects his interpretation of Liptako's past. But differences in traditional chronologies are mostly minor and, without more data contemporary with events, unresolvable. The combination of the traditions' high degree of internal chronological consistency and their compatibility with both regional traditions and written evi­ dence suggests that these oral chronologies are fairly accu­ rate for the more than 160 years over which their tellers' memories range. The traditionists are thus exceptions to Jones's rule that "the professional story-tellers and the cus­ todians of state histories . . . usually have only a very hazy and erroneous idea of the absolute chronology of the events they relate." 43

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RECKONING TIME'S PASSING

Perhaps Liptako culture's "interest in the exact mensura­ tion of time" is attributable to Islam's influence. The FulBe say their ancestors have been Muslims for many genera­ tions and that there were clerics among them long before they came to Liptako. Thejihad was at least in part an ex­ pression of Muslim sentiment, and in the emirate the jihadists constituted in obedience to Islamic law, Muslim institutions like mosques and Quranic schools proliferated and intercourse with foreign Islamic centers like Sokoto and Timbuktu became more frequent. Dating by lunar years from the Prophet's flight from Mecca to Medina is part of the Islamic legacy that West African scholars car­ ried on—it is the dates nineteenth-century Sokoto authors carefully recorded that made possible Murray Last's chronologically precise reconstruction of the caliphate's history—and the clerics of precolonial Liptako must have been acquainted with this system too, as indeed they are today. In some parts of West Africa, Muslim notions of time have become part of traditionists' conceptual frame­ works. At Kano, one of Sokoto's Nigerian emirates, tradi­ tionists sometimes date events by the Muslim calendar,44 and when M. G. Smith went to collect the oral histories of Zazzau, south of Kano, he found that "some elders could say how many Muhammadan years individuals had held their offices."45 That this is not the case in Liptako, that Liptako's traditionists prefer another system, does not rule out the possibility that it developed from an Islamic stimulus. There is no necessary connection between a sense that it is important to measure time's passing and a particu­ lar system of measures. Once the people of Liptako had come to think chronological reckoning was something to be valued, then the concept of nduungu, which was probably used at first for counting up ages and for referring to events within the recent past, could be put to use for dating events over a longer run. This explanation of Liptako's concern for dating in terms of Muslim influence is speculative. Certainly the Sereer of Saalum, a kingdom now incorporated in Senegal,

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89

have been far less influenced by Islam than the FulBe of Liptako—they vigorously resisted Maa Baa's jihad in the 1860s, and the great advance of Islam there has occurred only since the French occupation—yet recently their ruler gave a French researcher a king list supplied with regnal lengths expressed in terms of rainy seasons that appears to be fairly accurate over a span of more than four and a half centuries. 46 Fully understanding the factors that have made for chronological accuracy in Liptako and Saalum depends on getting to know them both better. Indeed the time concepts and traditional chronologies of most West African groups are poorly known, and not until they have been more thoroughly studied will it be clear how excep­ tional Liptako and Saalum really are or will it be possible to develop very sound generalizations on how different his­ torical experiences in different settings condition varying attitudes toward "the exact mensuration of time."

CHAPTER 5 THE JIHAD "Have you never heard," Mr. Viscond said, "that beer is much more intoxicating drunk through a straw?" "Surely that is only a legend." "There speaks a Protestant," Mr. Visconti said, "Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints." Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt EVERY TRADITIONIST has his specialties. Some specialize in

the history of certain villages or lineages; others delight in tales .of palace intrigue; still others recount great warriors' exploits; some like to dwell on the miracles and pious deeds of long-dead clerics. But whatever the little piece of Liptako history the traditionist counts his own, one story he is sure to know is the story of the jihad, the war the FulBe fought against the Gourmantche early in the nineteenth century. Here is Nduroo' Ali's version: The Ful6e were under Gourmantche rule when they decided to fight their rulers and establish a state of their own. Hamma Seydu, the elder brother of Braahima Seydu, went alone to Sokoto to get a flag of thejihad from Seeku Baa Bello [Usuman dan Fodiyo], who gave it to him, and then he returned here to Liptako. Braahima Seydu wanted to declare war on the Gourmantche immediately, but Hamma Seydu wanted to wait. Hamma Seydu was the elder brother, so they waited. But then Hamma Seydu died during the year after his return from Sokoto. He had nothing to do with thejihad itself. At the time of the jihad, the ruler of the Gourmantche was Jaari Pamba. It was the custom in Lip-

THE JIHAD

tako that when a Pullo died, all his goods except a single cow became the property of the Gourmantche king. One day when a Pullo died at Selbo, Jaari Pamba sent his men to take his goods and bring them to him at Koala [the Gourmantche capital]. But when the Gourmantche arrived at Selbo, the Pullo's family re­ fused to let them take the dead man's belongings. The Gourmantche then returned to Koala and told their king what had happened. The ruler sent his men to Selbo four times, and each time the FulBe there re­ fused to give up the dead man's property. FinallyJaari Pamba sent his son, Umaru Jaari, who then lived at Tonga. When Umaru Jaari arrived at Selbo with his men, he found the Ful&e waiting. A Pullo woman was there, milking her cow, and her calabash of milk was close by. A dog belonging to one of the Gourmantche went up and drank out of the calabash. When the woman saw this, she left her cow, ran to the dog, and beat it. Then the Gourmantche ran after the woman to beat her. When a young Pullo saw this, he ran up to the Gourmantche and killed one of them with his lance. Then the Gourmantche left Selbo. When Jaari Pamba heard what had happened, he sent a group of men to Selbo to punish the people. The Fulbe were ready to fight, and people came from Dori to help them. The Fulbe knew the Gourmantche were coming when they heard the bell hung around the neck of one of their horses. The Fulbe attacked the Gourmantche and killed all of them except that horse's rider, who was able to return to Koala. This happened on a Friday, and then both the Fulbe and the Gourmantche prepared for battle the next Friday. When the Gourmantche left Koala [on their way to the battle], they went as far as Dangade before night fell and camped there for the night. Haamidu Hamma Kariimu Maana, the leader of the [Fulbe] Aadaabe of Diobbou, had followed them. He had fourteen horsemen in all. While the Gourmantche

91

92

THE JIHAD

slept, he and his men went on to Dani and burned down the houses of the Gourmantche who lived there. The next day was Friday, and the battle between the Gourmantche and the FulBe took place at Dori. The Gourmantche were defeated, and they fled south to Gurma. They passed through Pempendiangou, and there Jaari Pamba fell from his horse and hurt him­ self. The Gourmantche took him with them to Bani, and he died there from his injuries. None of the Gourmantche remained in Liptako, and the FulBe burned all their houses. It is now 162 years since the Gourmantche fled here for Gurma.1 Jihad stories vary, but that all the traditionists can tell one reflects a universal judgment on the importance of the event: it changed the course of Liptako history. It let a congeries of lineages found a state of their own; it made Liptako "FulBe country." According to most traditionists, the country was not even called Liptako before the jihad. It got its name from the man who inspired the FulBe to fight, Shehu Usuman, who coined it from a negative form of the Fulfulde verb Ii 6a, "to knock down." "Liptako" thus sug­ gests something that cannot be knocked down or subdued, something that is indomitable. On the two occasions I heard traditionists suggest that "Liptako" was an older, Gourmantche name, partisans of the majority etymology rose to its defense and told it all the more insistently.2 Perhaps Shehu Usuman actually gave Liptako its name, perhaps not. In any event the story indicates the tradi­ tionists' sense of the jihad as a time of new beginnings, as a boundary between periods akin to a Dark Age of alien domination and a Golden Age of emirate self-rule. Their sentimental attachment to the second and their pleasure in the passing of the first influence how they recall the past. Examining stories of the jihad and of the old order that produced it throws still more light on how the traditionists approach history.

T H E JIHAD

93

THE OLD ORDER

Dark Ages are hardly worth remembering. Here is how one wise old man summed up the whole sweep of Liptako history: "The first rulers of Liptako were the Dogon, who ruled the land for eighty-one years. Then came the Kurumba, who drove out the Dogon and ruled for eightyone years. Then the Gourmantche came. They too ruled for eighty-one years. Then the Ful&e fought the jihad and ruled for eighty-seven years until the whites conquered us." 3 This tradition is representative of a set form that many traditionists employed to summarize the past. The Gourrnantche-Ful&e-whites progression was invariable, but different men plugged different names and different numbers into earlier portions of the paradigm. I heard the names of the Bambara, the Bisa, the Mossi, and the Songhay in addition to those of the Dogon and the Kurumba, all in a variety of orders. Whereas some traditionists as­ signed them eighty-one-year reigns, others opted for eighty or ninety-nine or an even hundred, in any case the numbers differed from the eighty-seven that was regularly and probably correctly cited for the emirate's lifetime—a small sign of the conceptual boundary the jihad marks be­ tween an era fit for stereotyping and one deserving exact­ ness. No one could tell me much more than what is in the paradigm about the Mossi, Bambara, Songhay, Bisa, Do­ gon, and Kurumba epochs. 4 The Gourmantche were a different matter. They were not only the most recent rep­ resentatives of the old order; they were also those who dominated the country when the Ful6e "decided to fight their rulers and establish a state of their own." 5 They are not likely to be entirely forgotten so long as the jihad is re­ membered. Butjust what is remembered about them, their Fulbe subjects, and the relations between the two reflects the character of later times as much as it does the character of the Gourmantche period itself.

94

THE JIHAD

The Gourmantche are one of Upper Volta's largest ethnic groups. A modern map of ethnic distribution shows the Gourmantche zone stopping south of Liptako.6 Within Liptako only a few, scattered Gourmantche villages exist today, and all of them have been settled since the late colo­ nial period. A late-eighteenth-century ethnic map would show a different state of affairs. Then Liptako was Gour­ mantche country. The Gourmantche ruled it and lived there in greater numbers than they do now. Evidence from which to estimate the size of their presence does not exist. Evidence for their distribution over the territory is better but still too scanty for drawing an ethnic map. The most obvious vestiges of Gourmantche settlement are place names like Kampiti, Katchari, Koria, Pempendiangou, and Tobidioga—and perhaps even Liptako. Their capital was Koala, not the Koala some seventy-five kilometers south of Dori that today, as in the nineteenth century, is the north­ ernmost Gourmantche town of any size and significance, but another Koala that lay just west of Oulo, in western Liptako. This Koala was sacked and burned during the jihad, and its inhabitants fled south out of the new emirate and founded the Koala of present-day maps. Eighteenth-century Koala, like its nineteenth-century successor, was one of the complex of Gourmantche states paying allegiance to the imperial capital of Nungu, which in the colonial period and since has been better known by the name Hausa traders gave it—Fada N'Gourma ("the court of the Gurma"). According to the colonial adminis­ trator P. Davy, whose "Histoire du pays Gourmantche" is still the best overview of an area trained historians have sadly neglected,7 the kings of Koala are an offshoot of the imperial lineage, and eight of them ruled in Liptako. The eighth died fighting the Fulbe rebels, and his son led the flight south.8 I heard much the same story from my single Gourmantche informant, Yenbuaru, who is one of the small number of recent migrants into Liptako, and as Table 2 shows, his king list is similar to Davy's, if not quite identical to it. Both differ from the published lists of

TABLE

2

~Alpha

Koro-B~lbegaOurntarnbiri

Yernbir~ Kirnparnba~

SOURCES: Yenbuaru, Kounsama, 24 March 1971, Davy, "Histoire du pays gourmantche," pp. 72-73; Nouha, quoted Haul-Senegal-Niger, 3:366; Delmond, "Don, ville peule," p, 25; Nduroo' Ali, Diobbou, 1 January 1972.

NOTE: The solid lines indicate hkely equivalencies between names m the hst. The dotted lines mdicate po;,;,lble ont',

Badindiye "'__ Y1ernbrirna Lansongi - - - - Balidengue Yentjari Yentiabri

Nduroo' All

III

Delafosse,

Koro Belbaga Ouontarnbcri Alfakoro ~ Mossogo~Farnba---------Parnba Farnaba Moussougou Alia Diari Diari Alta Jaari

parnb~ Koalo ~Alfakir

Koro_

Delmond

Belba-Galferrni _______________ Gueligal-Farrna ~Balbaga Dier-Galferrni Belbagal Farrna

Nouha

Balibahe ./' Badindre

Davy

Yenbuaru

Balbage Alfa ______

Liptako Lists

Gourrnantche Lists

Lists of the Eighteenth-century Kings of Koala

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THE JIHAD

Nouha and Delmond, which are themselves different from one another. Delmond's list even comes complete with regnal dates. His sources and Nouha's were probably Liptako people, but by the 1970s Nduroo' Ali was the only traditionist I met who even claimed to know the names of all the Gourmantche rulers—they were just three, according to him, not the eight of the four other lists—and neither he nor anyone else ventured dates for any of them. 9 Most traditionists attempted no more than the name of the last king, variously Jaari, Jaari Alfaa, and Jaari Pamba; some did not know the name of any Gourmantche at all. Perhaps the Gourmantche of Koala, where I did not work, have the evidence for an authoritative eighteenth-century list, but there is no way to work one out from what is now available in Liptako, where people have for long had little reason to take an interest in those long-ago kings. Liptako people understandably take more interest in the Gourmantche's Ful6e subjects. By the time of the jihad the FulBe had built twelve villages, most people say. Not everyone who remembered there were twelve could name them all—a failing put down to faulty memory—and those who could did not always name the same twelve. Thus eight lists included nineteen different names. 10 Comparing these lists with village traditions suggests that twelve is not a number in which to trust and that Ful6e then may have lived in fourteen or more, the names of which are indi­ cated on Map 1. 11 One name all the lists omit is Ouro Torobe, whose inhabitants took flight with their herds when war broke out and returned only when it was done. The bad reputation this gained Ouro Torobe lasts until this day—its occupants are often sneeringly called ToorooBe pawli ("Tooroo&e of the calabashes"), that is, ToorooBe who take their calabashes and run—and this is why they are never named among the twelve. Whether they partici­ pated in the jihad or not, all these villages except Diobbou were within a fifteen-kilometer radius of Dori, where the Yaayre provided a dependable water supply for animals.

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Their population probably totaled no more than several thousand. 12 The story of how the FulBe came to Liptako and settled these twelve or however many villages is obscure. The laconism of the following statement is characteristic: "!Viy ancestor came to Lerbou from the west. When he arrived here, he found the Gourmantche ruling. When he asked them for permission to settle, they agreed." 13 Similar bits of information on pre-jihad times communicate a picture of little Fulbe groups coming into Liptako with their herds; settling down, sometimes alone, sometimes alongside another lineage or two; sometimes staying put as these Fulbe of Lerbou have stayed; sometimes moving on. The tradition of the Cirgaabe tells a typical story of movement and dispersion. The Cirgaabe were named after the place they lived in southern Liptako after their exodus from Mossi country: From Kirga the CirgaaBe moved to Bilesaba, which was located between Dori and Kampiti. They arrived there about the same time as the Wakambe. I do not know from where the Wakambe came. Dori had been founded by this time, and men from Dori often went out to Bilesaba to flirt with the women, who were known for their beauty. Eventually the men from Dori and the men from Bilesaba fought. After the fight a cleric took a herder's forked staff and wrote on it in Arabic. He then grasped each handle of the fork and pulled until the staff split down the middle. He did this to make the people of Bilesaba disperse and so end the trouble. The Wakambe then went to Kampiti, where they still live; and the Cirgaabe went to Tibilindi, Bouloye, Koria, and Petekole. 14 The village head of Kampiti also reported that his Wakambe ancestors once lived at Bilesaba, 15 but few other people do. Most talked as though the Wakambe had been at Kampiti since time immemorial. Some informants also

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claimed that Bilesaba was the seat of the first emirs,16 but most recalled that Dori was always the capital. The minori­ ty's memories of Bilesaba may well be correct. There is a strong association between the place people live and the focus of their remembrances. When they move on, tradi­ tions of the old home tend to fade. Thus most people have forgotten their ancestors' reasons for migrating to Liptako as well as most of their pre-Liptako history. To forget that now uninhabited Bilesaba was once the home of the WakamBe and later the home of the emirs would be consis­ tent with this tendency. Other villages of pre-jihad times, since abandoned, may well also have been forgotten. No one remembered how many years ago the CirgaaBe and the WakamBe settled at Bilesaba. Perhaps they lived there for only a few years, perhaps for decades—the tradi­ tions do not tell us—but one cannot make much of a start at writing Bilesaba's history without this information. The same is true for Liptako's pre-jihad history generally, and the dates and synchronisms in the traditions of this period are typically just as scarce as they are in the histories of the CirgaaBe and WakamBe. One exception was the village head of Wendou's assertion that his ancestor settled the place 774 years before, when the pharaohs still ruled Egypt.17 His talk of 774 years and the pharaohs lent a gloss of supporting detail to something most people believe anyway: that Wendou is Liptako's oldest FulBe village. Whether they are right or not, the old man's details make poor facts—the FulBe surely came to Wendou far more re­ cently than 774 years ago and in any case centuries and centuries after the pharaohs had lost their power!—but the claim's very extravagance makes it an accurate indicator of how fuzzy and indistinct pre-jihad chronologies are. FulBe had settled in Songhay at least by the time of Sonni Ali (1464-92), who persecuted them, and they were in HausaIand and Borno in the same period.18 Surely some of their fellow FulBe would have settled between Songhay and Hausaland wherever prospects were good, and Liptako's good pastures, relatively abundant water, and salt licks

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would have made it an attractive place. But the fifteenth century, like all those centuries before and after it until the jihad, falls within a sphere of traditional memory that is nearly timeless in its quality, a field of memory populated by a multitude of small groups that moved back and forth across Liptako but whose dimly remembered individual histories never seem to build into bigger histories that can be set within an absolute time-scale. Without better infor­ mation than we have, we shall never know the identities of the first FulBe to set foot on Liptako soil or when or whence they came, nor will we be able to write a very de­ tailed history of those who followed them before the nineteenth century. This is so even of the emirs' ancestors, for whom the evi­ dence is much fuller than for other pre-jihad families. The emirs are among the descendants of Birmaari Saala Paate, all of whom are called Feroobe (singular: Pereejo), "mi­ grants." 19 Birmaari was the migrant of the line. He came to Liptako from Masina in modern Mali, said many traditionists; others just recalled that he came from the west. According to what Delmond heard in the 1940s, Birmaari and some two hundred followers traced a path laid out for them by a bull all the way from Masina to Liptako, a dis­ tance of more than five hundred kilometers as the crow flies. In choosing a bull for his guide, Birmaari was acting out the instructions of a cleric: " 'Always follow that animal. Where it lies down, you can stop, for there you will be happy all your life.' And an interminable journey began: the bull never seemed to tire and he never lay down. After about two months, as the nomads came near Wendou on the left bank of the Yaayre, the bull stopped and stretched out on the ground. Birmali built an enclosure around the animal and went to ask protection from the Gourmantche king." 20 Birmaari's trust in the cleric's prophecy reflects a wide­ spread conviction that the future can be foretold. Like Birmaari, most people turn to clerics for predictions, and those who gain a reputation for accuracy attract streams of

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visitors. Faith in the predictability of events often shades over into a belief that they can be manipulated. Thus a childless woman does not just inquire if she is destined to be childless all her life; she demands that something be done to ensure her a child. The traditions provide evi­ dence to the faithful that such demands are not futile. For instance, a variant on the story of Birmaari Saala Paate above recounts that when the Feroo6e "were about to leave Masina, a cleric met them and asked where they were go­ ing. They said: 'Our patrilineage is large. All of us cannot live off the chieftaincy because our patrilineage is so large. . . . We want you to make us a charm so that wherever we go to settle, we shall rule.' He said he would do that. They gave him many animals."21 He made the charm, hung it around the neck of a black bull, and told them to follow it until it stopped for good, "for there they would rule." And so things worked out. In Liptako stories like this are taken at face value. In the West destiny figures in our histories only when we have to describe the convictions of groups like the Puritans, who in 1620 were convinced that it was "the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries there­ of . . ."22 or the American expansionists of the 1840s, who argued that the country's claim to Oregon was by "the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us."23 Congenial as statements like these were to earlier worldviews, now they are likely to be interpreted as means to convince people that what was already done was both in­ evitable and right and that what had yet to be done was too. Delmond's story of Birmaari Saala Paate and the bull that led him to Liptako is probably the work of Feroo&e who envision their lineage's rise to power as inevitable and right and who want others to think the same. Delmond, like many early collectors of oral tradition, neglects to tell us just who told him this particular story. But the two "gra­ cious informants" he thanked in his dedication for "the in-

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valuable help they gave us" were both Feroobe, and one of them was Usmaan Amiiru, then the reigning emir's righthand man and the real power behind the thrown. 24 What Usmaan did both before and after he became emir in his own right in 1956/57 gained him the reputation of a "bull." The bull is an animal whose power and temper people fear, respect, and admire, and the stories I heard of how Usmaan planned and brought off one coup after another and made and broke careers of local Africans and French administrators alike reflected these same emotions, whose vividness Usmaan's death in i960 and passing time seem to have done little to diminish. 25 Usmaan's current reputation as a freewheeling autocrat is surely exaggerated, but equally surely he was a man who was extraordinarily adept at maneuvering within the colonial situation to turn events in his favor. The formal authority of the French comman­ dants du cercle far exceeded the emirs', a fact of which two depositions, forced labor, the emancipation of slaves, and a host of other perceived indignities were a constant re­ minder. Nonetheless, governing the emirate on a day-today basis required that Dori's commandants, like colonial administrators elsewhere in Africa, strike up smooth work­ ing relationships with local dignitaries, relationships in which the latter were often able to exercise more real power than French colonial theory would allow. 26 In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s the many commandants who came and served their few months or years at Dori and then went on again had to deal with the entrenched power of Usmaan and his followers, and for Delmond to have turned to Usmaan for help in questions of local history and ethnography was a natural extension of an established way of doing governmental business, just as it would also have been natural for Usmaan to have ensured that Delmond learned a tale of Birmaari Saala Paate's migration that was heavily laden with fateful overtones flattering to Feroo&e. Indeed Usmaan seems to have been the sort of man who was fully conscious of the potential uses of history. Shortly after I settled at Dori in 1970 a new friend mused that I

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would never have been able to wander up and down the country collecting traditions in Usmaan's time: "He would have given you some informants and they would have told you just what he wanted them to. Nobody else would have told you a thing unless Usmaan said he should." Suspicion that Delmond's story of Birmaari Saala Paate's bull-led migration is a FerooBe one is strengthened by the fact that all the variants of this tradition that I was told and that others have published since Delmond can be traced to FerooBe or their hangers-on.27 The little about Birmaari that non-FerooBe informants had to say to me did not imply that the man was anything out of the ordinary, that he was anything more than just another Pullo moving with his family and dependants in search of lands to graze and farm. Nor do non-Feroo6e informants confirm other elements of Delmond's story—that Birmaari came from Masina with about two hundred followers; that he was a Muslim whose missionary zeal gained him a host of converts and a wide reputation; and that he married a daughter of the village head of Wendou, to whose position he succeeded and whose disappointed, angry sons thereupon left Liptako for Yaga, where they sired an emirs' line. It is easier to find reasons why FerooBe might garnish their traditions with such assertions than to find other evidence to support them. Mass, long-distance migrations like that which Delmond described are rare in FulBe history, even if by no means unheard of. Over one hundred WodaaBe house­ holds protesting against vigorous collection of the cattletax migrated with their herds some 160 kilometers out of Borno during less than a month in 1944, for instance.28 Treks like this one are hard on animals and humans alike, and it seems unlikely that all Liptako's traditionists except the one that informed Delmond would have forgotten such a dramatic event and the crisis that precipitated it if it had really happened. A more likely explanation for the story is a functional one: ascribing Birmaari a mass following who were willing to trek with him across enormous distances is a

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way of showing that he was a man of great substance and authority and so a fit ancestor of a royal line. And, simi­ larly, portraying him as a zealous Muslim and converter of the heathen gives him virtues appropriate to the ancestor of the founder of a theocracy. Then there is the claim that Birmaari became village head of Wendou, thereby displacing the previous office­ holder's sons, who migrated to Yaga. The Yaga traditions available to me do not confirm the story from that end. 29 Nor do the traditions of Wendou confirm it from the other. 30 Very likely Birmaari was never village head of Wendou; probably the story better reflects post-jihad at­ titudes than pre-jihad realities. Wendou is thought to be Liptako's oldest village. A powerful and prestigious Tooroobe lineage has ruled it since time immemorial, and they and the Feroo&e have a long history of jealous compe­ tition. Elderly Tooroo&e often took me aside to explain that one of their number really ought to rule the emirate, for they were the first Fulbe to occupy the land. After the jihad, several people recounted, some Tooroobe went all the way to Sokoto to try to convince the caliph that they should be emirs, but he turned them down with a pointed question meant to remind them that Feroobe, not Tooroobe, had led the Fulbe against the Gourmantche: Does not he who clears a field own it? Their inferior status did not cease to gall the Tooroobe, however, and some of them adopted the custom of refusing to eat or drink at the seat of Feroobe power in Dori, a custom that still persists among some of the more proud and adamantly resentful Tooroobe, but one that most of their hungry and thirsty fellow clansmen have by now ceased to observe. Some Tooroobe also demonstrated their conviction that Feroobe are socially inferior to themselves with the assertion that Feroobe were unfit to marry Tooroobe, but genealogies show that in fact tensions have not always been so acute as to prevent intermarriages at least occasionally in both this century and the last. Feroobe are well aware of Tooroobe sentiments, 31 and claiming that Birmaari Saala Paate was

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once village head of Wendou probably projects into prejihad circumstances the idea of Feroo6e superiority to Tooroo6e in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like other elements in Delmond's story, it is a way of impressing Feroo&e power and authority on the present. The occasional claim that Birmaari Saala Paate's de­ scendants became the senior of all the FulBe leaders (mawdo jooroobe) and hence representative of all the FulBe to the Gourmantche may be a similar projection of a later state of affairs to an earlier one. Most traditionists did not imply that the FerooBe stood out among their fellows. At any rate they are as poorly remembered as most men of the time. Like the lists of N'Diomga's village heads, the lists of the Feroo&e leaders between Birmaari Saala Paate and Braahima Seydu varied from one authority to the next. 32 Some traditionists recalled that the Feroo&e lived at one place; others, at another: Wendou, Bayel, Bilesaba, and Dori were all named. Some traditionists admitted they were not sure where the early Feroo&e lived. Only from the time of the jihad does the history of the Feroo&e, like the other Ful6e, begin to have much substance. The history of pre-jihad Fulfte-Gourmantche relations is also obscure. The dominant theme in the Ful&e traditions is conflict, conflict usually triggered by opposing defini­ tions of property rights. Nduroo' Ali's story of the jihad tells us that the Gourmantche made regular demands on the Ful&e: "It was the custom ... that when a Pullo died, all his property except a single cow became the property of the Gourmantche ruler." But other traditionists did not cite this rule. From what they remembered it is not possible to reconstruct the Gourmantche system of taxation, nor can one reconstruct the workings of Gourmantche gov­ ernment generally. Indeed many of the traditions leave the impression that Gourmantche demands on the Ful&e were capricious and irregular, that there was no system in them at all. "They just took what they wanted" was a common claim. Prescribed by a system or not, Gourmantche de-

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mands were unjust, the Fulbe agreed, a judgment they substantiated with traditions like this Lerbou one: My ancestor came to Lerbou from the west. When he arrived here, he found the Gourmantche ruling. When he asked them for permission to settle, they agreed, but they also said that all the Fulbe who settled here lost their rights over their animals. He proposed that whenever the Gourmantche wanted one of his cattle they should ask him first and then he would give it to them. They agreed to this, and the Fulbe and the Gourmantche lived together for a long time. My an­ cestor built a mosque at the site of the present one, and he was its muezzin. People told the Gourmantche about this, and they replied a Pullo would not dare do that. Two years later a Gourmantche killed my ances­ tor's cow. When my ancestor was told what had hap­ pened, he took his lance and stabbed the Gourmantche to death. When the father of the dead Gourmantche heard about this, he went to fight with my ancestor. Butjust then the Gourmantche's house took fire, and he had to return home to put it out. A year later the Gourmantche went to attack my ancestor again, and the Pullo got his people together to fight. But once more the Gourmantche's house caught fire, and he had to go back home. They did not fight that day. But a third time, when God so willed, the Gourmantche and the Fulbe met at Lerbou. Then the Pullo cried out [magical words] at the Gourmantche: Naange non! And the Gourmantche and his followers fled for home. 33 Even though Fulbe success in staving off the Gourmantche is here explained in magical terms—stories of efficacious spells run all through the traditions—most ex­ planations for how the Fulbe dealt with conflict situations like the Lerbou one were cast in natural terms whose effec­ tiveness is more readily comprehensible than magic. Con-

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sider this story of Braahima Seydou, the jihadist and first emir. He had been to Sokoto but had not yet reached the point of declaring the jihad when the Gourmantche king caught wind of what was brewing. He summoned Braahima Seydu and his companions. He said: "I understand you went to get a charm so that you could come here and ruin me." "We did not ask for a charm to ruin you. We wanted to learn to pray." He said: "No, no. Tell me the truth." "That is God's truth. Now we are going to tell you something. If you accept what we have said, then we can live together. But if you do not accept what we have said, then we Ful&e are going to leave. We shall go where there are other Ful6e. We shall leave you your land." So then the Gourmantche's younger brother said to the king: "Hey now! You know they are right. What they are saying is the truth." Braahima Seydu's group said: "You have got to tell us who told you [that story]. If you do not tell us who told you, we are going to leave. We shall leave this land altogether. This land is a land of sandy plains, a land of streams, a land of animals. It is a land for Ful&e. Ful&e have a lot to give a ruler." The Gourmantche replied: "That is so. But a man who has been told a secret, a leader who was told something, cannot open his mouth to say it was soand-so who told." But then his younger brother said: "Look here. They say they will leave if you do not tell. No one can do anything by himself. A cow is not driven out to pasture by itself. A cow follows cattle. If they depart, leaving you alone with your country, that will do you no good at all." So the ruler said: "It was the [Ful&e] Bambaa&e who told me that."

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When he said that it was the BambaaBe, Braahima Seydu replied: "Unless they are hooted down, unless the children jeer at them and hoot at them, we are going to leave. But if you have them hooted at and jeered at, then we shall not leave. We shall make a sa­ cred pact." So the Gourmantche told the children to hoot at them. Those were the BambaaBe. They are the people of Yakouta, and that is the source of their curse. 34 Braahima Seydu's sacred cause and the curse that BambaaBe treachery brought on them set this story somewhat apart from more run-of-the-mill stories of conflict between Ful6e and their rulers. But like the tale of Lerbou's worker of powerful spells, it lets us know that the Fulbe had means of defending themselves against Gourmantche demands they thought extreme, of maintaining a balance of power they could live with. This made crises like these important events in the lives of the pre-jihad Fulbe. But the crises are nonetheless only part of the story of FulBe-Gourmantche relations. These could not have made a tale of such unre­ lenting woe as many traditionists now would have it, for then large numbers of FulBe—enough FulBe to overturn the Gourmantche—would never have settled in Liptako at all. Daily life before the jihad was surely more peaceful and less conflict-ridden than the traditions imply. That traditionists of the 1970s have forgotten the details of day-to-day, humdrum interethnic transactions and have remembered something of the crises reflects an implicit judgment on their relative significance. What the tradi­ tionists now perceive as the central conflict in Liptako his­ tory toppled the balance the Ful6e and their rulers had worked out over generations. Within the context of the jihad, the balance seemed less significant than the crises, and so most of the details of earlier intergroup relation­ ships were ignored, forgotten, and forever lost to twen­ tieth-century historians trying to make sense of what eighteenth-century Liptako was really like.

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THE OVERTHROW OF THE OLD ORDER

In the dry season of 1809/10 the Fulbe and the Gourmantche went to war. Some of Shehu Usuman's followers had to fight many long and terrible battles before they were sure of victory. It took from 1804 to 1808 for the Shehu's own forces to defeat the kingdom of Gobir, for in­ stance. But in Liptako there was just one major battle, in the dry bed of the Yaayre not far northwest of Dori's pres­ ent outskirts. "On that day the Shehu cursed the Gourmantche," recalled one traditionist, "and everything went wrong for them. Their guns would not fire; their bows snapped; their bowstrings broke. The Gourmantche tried to make war, but it was no use. The Ful6e fought until they entered Koala, and then the Gourmantche ruler mounted his horse and fled."35 The rest of the Gourmantche fled with their king, who apparently died of wounds he re­ ceived in battle, and eventually the refugees established the new capital and kingdom of Koala some seventy kilometers south of Dori. Different traditionists told different tales of the battle in the Yaayre. Some of the variants could be made to illus­ trate themes we have already discussed: thus the way the traditionists above traced Gourmantche failure to the Shehu's curse is reminiscent of a general tendency to find destiny at work shaping the outcome of human events. Other variants hint at themes yet to be taken up, such as attitudes toward kinship. But the variants in the battle scenes are neither so numerous nor so problematical as variants in the story of how FulBe-Gourmantche relations reached the point of war. It is they that reflect differing interpretations of the battle's meaning for Liptako history. Before war broke out, Nduroo' Ali recounted, the Fulbe had initiated relations with Shehu Usuman, and one Fulbe village had come to blows with the Gourmantche over a local issue. These two episodes recur in other jihad tradi­ tions.36 Both also play on broader themes in West African and Islamic history.

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The first episode—the establishment of relations be­ tween Liptako and the Shehu—sets Liptako's jihad in the immediate context of all the other jihads that Fulfee fought in response to Shehu Usuman's urging. The jihads that produced the Sokoto Caliphate fit within the still larger con­ text of the countless jihads Muslims have fought against non-Muslims elsewhere in Africa, Asia, and Europe. 37 They all drew on a basic characteristic of classical Muslim thought that saw the world in terms of two spheres, the "abode of Islam" and the "abode of war." 38 The first is gov­ erned by Muslims according to God's law, the sharl'a\ the second, by non-Muslims according to principles abhorent to believers. Jihad is the means of converting the "abode of war" into the "abode ot Islam." Even though the jurists did not understand jihad in terms of violence alone, popular usage in Arabic and other languages, including Fulfulde and English, has tended to narrow the broad semantic field of classical legal usage to focus on jihad as holy war—a nat­ ural emphasis, given the historical importance of warfare in spreading Islam out of the Hejaz where Muhammad's message found its first adherents to the far-flung lands and many peoples that have become Muslim. None of these jihads, including those that were such a dramatic and important phenomenon in West African his­ tory from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, can be adequately explained within the narrow confines of the classical framework. The urge to expand the "abode of Islam" combined with other motives to animate them. Nonetheless, Muslim militants understood their actions at least partly in classical terms. In his preaching and writing Shehu Usuman interpreted his experiences in pre-jihad Hausaland from this conceptual vantage point. He con­ trasted the practices of Hausa governments with those pre­ scribed for Muslims. "The intention of the unbelievers in their governments is only the fulfilling of their lusts," he wrote, "for they are like the beasts." On the other hand, "the purpose of the Muslims in their governments is to strip evil things from religious and temporal affairs, and

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introduce reforms into religious and temporal affairs." For Shehu Usuman, evil was deviation from Muslim law, whereas rulers who obeyed Muslim law were followers of "the way of Paradise, which is the straight way."39 After example and exhortation had failed to put Hausa govern­ ments on "the straight way," Shehu Usuman called on Mus­ lims to fight. "Know then, my Brethren . . . that the waging of Holy War is obligatory" against non-Muslims, apostates, and backsliders.40 Shehu Usuman's message spread along with news of his army's triumphs, and Muslim leaders, most of them Ful6e like himself, came from great distances to ask his counsel and blessing for jihads they planned to fight at home. To those he favored he gave a flag to symbolize their mission. For example, when the Ful6e of Adamawa, an area now partly in Cameroon, partly in Nigeria, heard what the Shehu had done in the west, a number of their leaders traveled to him. "They gathered around Shehu Usuman dan Fodiyo. He told them to choose one among them to be their ruler. They unanimously chose the cleric Adama from Yola. Then Shehu Usuman granted Adama the flag of the jihad." Adama and his companions returned home and declared war. They defeated their opponents, Adama became emir, and the new polity was called Adamawa after him.41 The story of Adama fits into a large corpus of simi­ lar stories told throughout the caliphate, and so does Nduroo' Ali's story of how a Liptako Pullo went for a flag. The next core episode in Nduroo' Ali's account—the fight between Fulbe and Gourmantche at Selbo—is rem­ iniscent of quite another body of Ful6e tradition that does not necessarily have anything at all to do with either Islam or jihads: traditions of subject-ruler conflict. Traditions like those of Lerbou's worker of powerful spells and of Braahima Seydu, the Gourmantche king, and the Bambaa&e are characteristic of this genre. So is the story of Raamaani Jooro: RaamaaniJooro was the first settler at Bani Mango [in southern Liptako]. He was a Tooroodo. He left the

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region of Ouahigouya [in northern Mossi country] and went to settle at Magansi in the kingdom of Boulsa [in eastern Mossi country]. I do not know just why he left Ouahigouya to go to Boulsa. They were herders who moved about with their cattle. If they came to a place where they could come to an agreement with the inhabitants, they stayed. Ifthey could not, they moved on. When Raamaani Jooro was at Boulsa, he fell into disagreement with Naba Wobogo [a local titleholder]. Raamaani Jooro owned a dog that he had trained to work with cattle. Naba Wobogo demanded that Raamaani give him the dog. Raamaani said he could not do that, for the dog guarded the cattle of the Ful6e. Naba Wobogo said that if Raamaani did not give him the dog, Raamaani could not continue to live there. But Raamaani still said he could not give away the dog. He gave Naba Wobogo seven cattle. He asked Naba Wobogo to leave the dog alone, for it belonged to all the Ful6e. Naba Wobogo said no. He refused. The dog was the only thing he wanted. So then Raamaani offered the Naba three slaves in addition to the seven cattle to leave the dog alone. Naba Wobogo refused. Raamaani Jooro went to talk to the Fulbe. He brought them together, and he told them: "The ruler said we must give him the dog. If we do not give him the dog, we cannot stay here. I gave him seven cattle. I gave him three slaves. He refused them. Now we must go back to talk to him." They went to talk to him, but the Naba insisted that he had to have the dog. They could not agree. When it was night, everyone gath­ ered, took the cattle, and left. That is what brought them here to Bani. 42 Conflicts like this one arose as cattle-keeping FulBe and agriculturalist Haabe settled side by side in many parts of the savanna and Sahel. Often they worked out mutually advantageous terms for coexistence. Cooperation followed naturally from the possibilities for mutual profit that lay in

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peaceful exchanges of goods and services deriving from their different economic specializations. The FulBe cattle that HaaBe let pasture in the stubble of their harvested fields were better fed for it, and farmers' yields were better for the manuring the cattle gave the fields. Exchanges of grain for dairy products worked to both groups' dietary advantage. But competition and conflict might also grow from these differing specializations. Both farmers and herders require land, sometimes the same land. A multitude of recorded cases from recent times illustrates how jockeying for land can escalate into bitter, open hostilities, and probably the same was true in earlier times. The likelihood of agriculturalist-pastoralist conflict is especially high during the rains, when straying cattle all too often evade their keepers and break into fields of growing millet and guinea-corn— acts that animate oppositions which sometimes are settled in court, sometimes in bloody fights.43 When states were HaaBe-ruled and FulBe were an alien minority, FulBe made an obvious prey. Some HaaBe leaders apparently de­ spised FulBe as much as some FulBe despised HaaBe. When Sonni Ali ruled Songhay in the late fifteenth cen­ tury, a chronicler recorded, "he had no enemies he hated as strongly as the FulBe, and he could not see a Pullo with­ out killing him no matter who he was, whether a cleric or an unlearned person, a man or a woman. He would not have a single learned Pullo in the administration or the judiciary. He decimated the tribe of the Sangare and left alive only a tiny group, all of which could have sheltered in the shadow of a single tree."44 FulBe were sensitive to the problems in their position. Like Raamaani Jooro, "if they came to a place where they could come to an agreement with the inhabitants, they stayed. If they could not, they moved on." The Naba Wobogo with whom Raamaani Jooro had to deal did not value the FulBe enough to moderate his demands, and so the FulBe moved on. But other rulers, like Braahima Seydu's Gourmantche adversary, backed down when the

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FulBe threatened to leave. They valued the wealth the Fulbe and their herds represented, and they disliked the prospect that they might go to swell the resources of their neighbors. This tactic for Fulbe self-defense is age-old. They have used it again and again, and not only against Haabe. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the Liptako Fulbe employed it against emirs they thought overbearing and unjust, and as often as not it was the subjects, not the rul­ ers, who got their way. Nduroo' Ali's story of the Fulbe and the Gourmantche at Selbo closely resembles these stories of ruler-subject con­ flict. What sets it apart from them is its ending: here a local crisis expanded into general warfare that resolved conflict by making one-time subjects into rulers and removing the old masters from the local political scene. Accounts of how the Fulbe set up relations with Shehu Usuman and of how they fell into dispute with the Gourmantche varied considerably in detail, just as stories of the war itself also varied. For instance, people did not agree on who went to see the Shehu. No one but Nduroo' Ali said it was Hamma Seydu; most said it was Braahima Seydu, who according to some authorities traveled alone, according to others, with companions. Some claimed that no Feroobe made the trip at all. Almost everyone said the initial con­ frontation with the Gourmantche was at Selbo, but one of the emirate's most esteemed traditionists peremptorily dismissed this as sheer fabrication and asserted instead that no one knows for sure just where the first blows were ex­ changed. If he is right, then other minority opinions that Dori or Kampiti was the place would be equally questiona­ ble. Many traditionists recounted that it was a Gourmantche dog's attempt to drink from a Pullo woman's calabash that set off the troubles, but other informants were sure the fight centered on a pony or a cow. Some people cited the woman's name, but not all the names were the same, no more than were the various names attributed to the Pullo man (sometimes the woman's husband, some­ times her husband's brother, sometimes neither) who

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killed one Gourmantche or perhaps more. But then some accounts did not relate that any Gourmantche at all were killed. Many informants remembered, as did Nduroo' Ali, that the Ful6e of Diobbou pursued guerilla tactics against the Gourmantche as tensions were escalating into full­ blown warfare, but all except Nduroo' Ali thought it was Koala they burned, not Dani. The number of variants grows still larger when we take into account the jihad traditions that European historians have collected. Abbatucci's 1897 description of how "the Fulbe threw off the yoke and drove the Gourmantche out of Liptako" made no mention of a trip to Sokoto or even of Liptako's post-jihad Sokoto connection, although he did remark, seemingly gratuitously, that Liptako traditions were more clear when they had to do with times after the Shehu's "conquest of Sokoto" than when they focused on the period before it. Abbatucci portrayed the war—he did not term it a jihad—as a purely local phenomenon. It was made up of "a series of successive contests," not just one big battle, as current tradition would have it. He also men­ tioned a Gourmantche leader from Koria that no one I met remembered.45 The tradition de Coma collected two years later, in 1899, had a different thrust. According to him, the opponents of the FulBe were Kurumba, not Gourmantche, and the Ful6e fought because they "wanted freely to pur­ sue the practices of their religion"—Islam. Sokoto had a role to play in this. Braahima Seydu had fallen under the influence of a certain Alfaa Umaru, a local cleric who had studied with the Shehu. Alfaa Umaru persuaded Braahima Seydu "to build a mosque, even if the pagan Kurumba op­ posed it. To spread his ideas he [Alfaa Umaru] began to preach among the Fulbe and succeeded in gathering a large number of followers. In those days the Ful6e wore their hair long like the Moors; so that his followers would be recognized, he had his disciple, Brahima Tai'a, who also had studied at Sokoto, shave their heads." The construc­ tion of the mosque aroused Kurumba opposition. "As a matter of fact, whenever a Pullo did his prayers, the

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Kurumba forced him to carry away the earth from the place where he had prayed." Finally the two took to arms, and the FulBe drove the Kurumba out of the country. 46 Bouverot's report of 1904 also focused on the construction of a mosque as an event of central importance. Braahima Seydu undertook this "on advice received from Sokoto." 47 The story of the mosque does not reappear elsewhere in works on Liptako, nor did any of my informants tell it to me. It was many years until another European tried to syn­ thesize Liptako history. He was Delmond, whose "Dans la boucle du Niger: Dori, ville peule" is the most ambitious of the lot. The traditions he collected in the 1940s produced an account that is longer, more detailed, and more similar to traditions I collected than any of the earlier works. Like Nduroo' Ali, Delmond recounted how FulBe sought and gained a flag from the Sheh u, how FulBe and Gourmantche came to blows at Selbo, and how the scale of conflict then broadened and deepened into open, general warfare. His informants, like mine, called the war a jihad. Unlike my informants or those of earlier writers, Delmond's told him that contacts between the Liptako FulBe and Shehu Usuman began even before 1804, when the lat­ ter declared his jihad. Then, wrote Delmond, Liptako FulBe went to fight for the Shehu. 48 There is a single African history of the jihad that is older than any of these European accounts: Malam Guidado's. He was a Sokoto man, a foreigner to Liptako, which appar­ ently he did not know at first hand, but he learned enough about it to write, in Arabic in the nineteenth century, that, having learned about the advent of Ousman Dan Fodio, he [Ibrahim, that is, Braahima] sent a delega­ tion led by Ali Maoundi, his nephew, directly to Sokoto to recognize Sokoto's suzerainty; he gave his nephew twelve horses and twelve young slave women for Dan Fodio. The delegation left for Sokoto in 1809. Dan Fodio

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promised to send a delegation to Liptako the next year (1810) to consecrate his suzerainty over Liptako. The delegation found that Ibrahim was dead. On Sokoto's behalf it named a chief entitled Amirou (emir). Some think that this emir was named Ibrahim and others say that he was named Sa'ibou. This first emir or amirou ascended to the throne of Liptako in 1810. He reigned until 1817. The establishment of the emirate apparently did not in­ volve a war or a jihad—or at least Malam Guidado did not mention one. In fact, if Malam Guidado is to be believed, the FulBe were not establishing a new state at all but were just changing the form of an old one, which by 1810 had existed for more than seventy years. Recurrent difficulties with the neighboring Songhay and Tuareg had made Liptako's history a troubled one, and it was with a conviction "that it was impossible to govern in face of the dual oppo­ sition of the Songhay and the Tuareg"—note that the Gourmantche do not figure here at all—that Ibrahim turned toward Sokoto in 1809.49 Malam Guidado set his history in writing; he wrote in the nineteenth century; he was from Sokoto, where some people ought to have known how Liptako became part of the caliphate. These facts make it tempting to conclude that his history is more reliable than twentieth-century oral tradition. But on some counts Malam Guidado was surely wrong and oral tradition correct. If FulBe and not Gourmantche had actually ruled eighteenth-century Liptako, if Gourmantche were not the primary adversaries of the Fulbe, and if it had not taken a war for the Ful&e to drive out the Gourmantche, it is improbable that Liptako tradi­ tion would unanimously assert the contrary. Koala tradi­ tion comes to the support of FulBe tradition on these points too. Nor does Ful&e tradition recall that one Ib­ rahim died in 1809 or 1810 to be replaced by a second Ib­ rahim or a Sai'bou. Probably both the first Ibrahim and the second were the same man, Braahima Seydu, whose

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father's name was corrupted to Sai'bou by Malam Guidado, his informant, a careless copyist, or the manuscript's trans­ lator. These errors are not surprising, for Malam Guidado, even though he lived in the nineteenth century, was not describing events he had witnessed. He wrote no sooner than the 186os, 50 and his source was a chronicle by another foreigner to Liptako, "Abdoul-Kader," whom he identified as the first judge of Liptako's neighboring emirate of Yaga. Where Abdoul-Kader got his information we cannot know: perhaps from local traditionists, perhaps from Liptako people traveling through Yaga, perhaps from some now lost manuscript. Sometimes, as in the case of Malam Guidado's history, the comparative evidence of oral tradition is so strong that errors and omissions in the variants are obvious. De Coma was also clearly mistaken when he reported that pre-jihad Liptako was Kurumba-ruled. Abbatucci did not record that Liptako was ever part of the Sokoto Caliphate, but it was. However, usually the errors and omissions are not obvious; there is no way to be sure which variants in detail are accu­ rate and which false. If only contemporary and nearcontemporary written evidence for the jihad were avail­ able, as it is at Sokoto, it might be possible to sort out the wheat from the chaff and to compose an authoritative ac­ count of what took place. I could then write with confi­ dence that Braahima Seydu (not his brother or his nephew or some other Pullo) went to consult Shehu Usuman, and that the Gourmantche and the FulBe clashed at Selbo (not Kampiti or Dori) over a pony (not a dog or a cow, or perhaps even a sheep or a goat, for that matter). Unless hidden documents someday come to light, we shall never know these things as facts, only as possible facts. Even if there is no written evidence from jihad times, there is at least one piece of material evidence—the flag the FulBe reportedly sought from Shehu Usuman and brought back to Liptako. It was given as a symbol of the jihadists' commitment to Islam and the Shehu's leadership, and ever since it has been handed down from one emir to the next.

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The emir who displayed it to me in 1971 did so with the reverent air of a man handling a sacred object. The populace at large shares his attitude, which is reinforced by a belief that the flag has inherent powers deriving from the Shehu's blessing. I was told that it was a talisman that en­ sured victory in war. Some men confided that it was so powerful that it was dangerous to women, who became barren if they were ever so unlucky as to see it. They thought that other, similar flags were just as powerful. One I heard about was Hamma Fune's. Hamma Fune was one of the great FulBe warriors of the Djelgodji, west of Liptako, and he is said, probably apocryphally, to have made the pilgrimage to Shehu Usuman at the same time as Braahima Seydu. Like Braahima Seydu, he took the flag. Unlike Braahima Seydu, he decided during the long ride home that he wanted nothing to do with the Shehu's cause. He threw away the flag, and where it fell, there sprang up a pond of water that has been an efficacious cure for illness of all sorts from that day to this. 51 Liptako's flag is called Hlilal (plural: iilile) or deesewal (plural: deeseeje), common nouns that are usually translated as "flag," but despite the name, this "flag" hardly looks like one. It is not a piece of cloth meant to be hung up or car­ ried. It is made of paper cut and folded like a large, circu­ lar, Chinese fan and covered with writing in Arabic, all of which make it a very different object from Western flags. 52 It also does not look much like Shehu Usuman's flags, which, according to Abdullahi Smith, "are rectangular pieces of (usually) white cloth on which are written a few words from the Qur'an, and . . . look much the same as a European flag." To him the Liptako flag "looks . . . like a Sufistic chart or protective talisman, which may of course have been used in battle, but not as a flag. And certainly the Shehu Usuman did not issue things like this as flags." 53 To make this murky situation still murkier, Liptako has two flags, not just one. The emirs' flag is generally known. Few people know about the second one that a WakamBe lineage keeps. It looks much like the emirs', if considerably

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more fragile and tattered. It is the original of the two, the lineage head explained. Shehu Usuman gave it to the jihadists, and the Wakam&e, who played an important role in the jihad and after it assumed the ritual task of installing the emirs, preserved it and brought it out when their sovereigns got their turbans of office. Only many years after the jihad did ajealous Sori Hama (1832/33-1860/61) have made a flag of his own that was a copy of the Wakam&e's. This meant the emirs' flag was "altogether new," the lineage head said disdainfully. 34 It is hardly sur­ prising that the FerooBe claimed their own flag was the original and the flag of the Wakam&e, when they knew about it at all, a copy. As if two flags that do not look like flags are not already enough, there was once a third, claimed the imam of the Friday mosque, this one being the property of Liptako's clerics until the rulers' fears of the clerics' power and prestige inspired the Feroo6e to take it away and destroy it. 55 What shall we make of all this? Examination of the paper, the handwriting, and the construction of Liptako's two extant flags ought to determine approximately when and where they were made, and Sokoto traditions of flaggiving might also help solve the puzzle—something that Liptako traditions alone cannot do. For the moment we are left with more questions than answers. Did Shehu Usuman occasionally symbolize his blessing with things other than flags, or with "flags" that did not resemble the flags that we know or that Abdullahi Smith has seen? 56 Did the Shehu sometimes grant more than one flag to the same territory? Or did Liptako perhaps never get a flag before the war against the Gourmantche, and sometime after it try to bring its history into line with that of other emirates by as­ similating non-flags to the category of flags? To what ex­ tent are the stories that some W'akam&e, Feroo&e, and clerics tell the products of post-jihad rivalries in which each group attempts to manipulate a central symbol of the emirate's legitimacy to its own advantage? Suspicion that some of the flag traditions may owe as

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much or more of their contents to experiences after the jihad as during it is strengthened by similar tendencies in other jihad stories. Consider the stories of Braahima Seydu. He is a curiously shadowy figure for the founder of a state. The traditions focus on his role in the jihad itself; they mention next to nothing about his life before it—not his place of birth, not his birthdate, not his upbringing and education. 57 Many said he was a village head for seven years before the jihad was fought and he became emir, but not everyone said this, and those who did were not in agreement on what village he led. 58 Braahima Seydu bursts full-blown on the scene as the war's organizer, winning the turban for his efforts. Or at least this is the majority view. The situations that some traditionists described are more problematical. One man recounted that Braahima Seydu was just one of three Ful6e who made the journey to con­ sult the Shehu in the days before the jihad. The other two were a Tooroodo and a Bakano, both members of two of Liptako's oldest and strongest clans, the Tooroo&e and the Wakam be. Braahima Seydu was the only one of the three who had had a religious education, so the Shehu thought him the proper man to get the flag. This decision must have rankled in the minds of the Tooroodo and the Bakano, for after the jihad all three were back in Sokoto, where the Tooroodo and the Bakano announced to the Shehu that they had "not come so that the religious man of whom you spoke [Braahima Seydu] should rule. We came so we ourselves should rule." Despite Shehu Usuman's opinion that "no one but a religious man should rule," he said that he would appoint whomever God designated, and to ascertain God's will he had the three draw lots. Braahima Seydu won, and then the Tooroodo and the Bakano swore that "if it was he whom God has appointed, then we shall follow him." However, out of their loss the Tooroobo and the WakamBe won the right to choose and install the future emirs from among the Feroobe—a right they have had ever since. 59 So on the one hand we have a Braahima Seydu whose

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leadership and right to rule were clear and undisputed. On the other hand we have a Braahima Seydu who was emir only because Sokoto supported him. Neither story seems inherently improbable. If indeed Braahima Seydu organ­ ized and led the jihad and in the process developed the popular backing that made him emir, than the Wakam6e and the ToorooBe would have needed an excuse for why they were not in Braahima Seydu's place, for they, as the country's oldest and hitherto most prestigious inhabitants, would have normally expected to be its rulers, just as the lineage that settles an uninhabited place typically furnishes the village heads of the community that grows up around it. The story of Braahima Seydu contested salvages ToorooBe and WakamBe reputations by ascribing them an honorable role in the jihad at the same time that it also ex­ plains that they are second to FerooBe because God willed it so—an explanation with which FulBe, who are prone to find God actively at work in all their human affairs, can scarcely quarrel. But it is also easy to imagine that Braahima Seydu's leadership may actually have been dis­ puted and that Sokoto took a role in resolving disagree­ ments. Sokoto did so in other emirates, and some Liptako traditions suggest that Sokoto may have taken an active role in Liptako affairs too. In this case the majority tradi­ tions of Braahima Seydu uncontested may be nothing more than a projection of post-jihad FerooBe supremacy to earlier times. Once the FerooBe were emirs, dwelling on earlier disagreements would have been pointless for most people. Some groups have remodeled the past to suit themselves. This much the stories of the flag and of Braahima Seydu make clear, even if the evidence is lacking to demonstrate precisely which details of the stories are untrue. Other cases do not suggest so much that history has been trans­ formed for private interests as that people have seen it selectively. For example, Hamma Aamadu told a story that included the second core episode (the fight between the Gourmantche and the FulBe) but omitted the first (the es-

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tablishment of relations between Liptako and Sokoto). Be­ fore the jihad the Gourmantche "simply took what they wanted from the Ful Be, such as cattle and horses." When the FulBe tried to convince the Gourmantche to redress their grievances, the Gourmantche rebuffed their over­ tures and stepped up their harassment, which led first to the confrontation at Selbo and then to war. Hamma Aamadu termed the war a jihad, but for him the word was apparently just a conventional label for this particular war rather than a term laden with religious significance. He denied, in response to a direct question, that religious dif­ ferences had anything to do with problems between the Ful 6e and the Gourmantche: "The Gourmantche did not interfere with the practice of Islam." This is consistent with Hamma Aamadu's omission of Sokoto, a trip to consult the Shehu, or the granting of a flag.60 Garba Hamma's story reversed this emphasis, entirely omitting any account of local differences and instead focus­ ing on the jihad as a response to Shehu Usuman. Accord­ ing to him, Braahima Seydu went to see Shehu Usuman at the same time as a number of other FulBe from the west. When it came time to eat, Shehu Usuman ate first, and then the remains were served to the visitors. Three of them stood on their dignity and refused to eat another's left­ overs. Two of them, Braahima Seydu and a Pullo from Yaga, did eat, and to them the Shehu granted flags. The prideful three went away empty-handed, and no jihads were fought in their home countries of Tera, the Djelgodji, and Kourgou (in Upper Volta). In Liptako and Yaga events took another course. "After the Liptako Pullo re­ turned home, the FulBe fought the Gourmantche, and they fled to Koala."61 Garba Hamma's portrayal of the jihad is consistent with his personal values. He is a cleric, and so are the other two men who told jihad stories that closely resembled his. All three have devoted much of their lives to studying books of theology and law, including those that Shehu Usuman wrote in FuIfulde and Arabic. For them Shehu Usuman is a

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culture hero who changed the course of history in the Western Sudan by leading an assault on an old, heathen way of life that gave way to a new one characterized by men's commitment to live according to God's will and Mus­ lim law. At different times all three men, like many other clerics, told me that they wished they had lived in the days when caliphs and emirs still ruled. One man pondered whether he ought to migrate to Saudi Arabia, where he an­ ticipated that life might be led in more perfect accordance with the law than in West Africa, where he saw unbelievers' values advancing at the expense of Muslim ones. Another cleric of the three has recurrent dreams of personally reenacting Shehu Usuman's career, of leading a jihad and restoring righteous government to Liptako and its neigh­ bors. That all three men should understand the past in Is­ lamic terms is consistent with their devotion to a way of life they hold up as a standard for the present. By contrast Hamma Aamadu is not a cleric but a village head immersed in local politics, and his tradition of the jihad as the culmination of local, material differences be­ tween the Ful6e and their rulers reflects another wide­ spread way of thinking—a localist vision. It is less elaborate and less formal than the Islamic worldview. It has pro­ duced no scholarship, if one excludes the works of foreign students of Ful6e culture, and hence localists, un­ like clerics, have no books to which to turn for reassurance that their views are right. But localist ways of thinking are no less pervasive and forcefully articulated for that. They draw on a long tradition of Fulbejealously guarding their independence against all comers. "Don't tread on me!" the pugnacious motto of some American revolutionary flags, would make a good motto for them. Their culture heroes are men like Raamaani Jooro, who left Boulsa for good rather than give up his dog. RaamaaniJooro's migration to Liptako did not imply that he and others like him had abandoned their old ideals of personal independence for submission to the Islamic ideals the emirate formally rep­ resented. As we shall see in the next chapter, emirate gov-

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ernment did not and could not operate as Islamic political theory prescribed. Liptako's many Raamaani Jooros too vigorously defended their independence for that. Liptako as a whole never had very close connections with its caliphal overlords. The French conquest broke the formal political links, and the development of new political, social, and economic patterns during and following the colonial period gradually made centers like Ouagadougou, Niamey, Dakar, Abidjan, and Accra more important to Liptako than Sokoto. In consequence, memories of how the caliphate was run have faded. For example, few people other than clerics recalled that Gwandu was Liptako's im­ mediate suzerain within the caliphal hierarchy. Most people talked instead as though Liptako were always di­ rectly under Sokoto, which as the imperial capital and the Shehu's burial place has retained a religious and sentimen­ tal significance that Gwandu, now a tiny town where emirs no longer live, has not. Hiimma Aamadu's localist tradition of the jihad is therefore consistent with an important trend in Liptako history. Hamma Aamadu to the contrary, however, events in Sokoto were clearly important to the course of Liptako his­ tory. With the Shehu's accomplishments before them, it was natural that the FulEie should have initiated connec­ tions with his movement and founded an emirate. By then the Niger bend was a different place than it had been in the previous century when the Ful6e of the nearby Djelgodji founded a state. Their state-building antedated the era of the great jihads in this part of West Africa, which meant that they, unlike the Liptako Ful 6e, had no model of a great Muslim state immediately before them. Little wonder that they did not formally commit the Djelgodji to Muslim law and that their leader was not an emir but a kaananke, a "king" or a "ruler."62 But this is not to say that the Liptakojihad ought to be interpreted in Garba Hamma's Islamic terms either. The form of most traditions indicates the possibility for the merging of different causes. Few traditions focus so nar-

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rowly on local differences as Hamma Aamadu's or so thor­ oughly on the Sokoto connection as Garba Hamma's. Most, like Nduroo' Ali's, combine the two, thereby suggesting that they were not mutually exclusive, that the jihad was a working out of a combination of various internal and ex­ ternal stimuli to change. Liptako's parent jihad in Sokoto certainly was the result of a merging of different causes. There "latent hostilities and cleavages between Muslim and heathen, pastoralist and farmer, immigrant and native people, Fulani [Fulbe] and Hausa, all poured themselves into this conflict." The ability of the jihad to activate these "latent hostilities and cleavages" and so to attract a broad following was essential to its success. However, the variety of causes its followers looked to it to satisfy also tended to obscure "the critical principles for which the Shehu stood." 63 The jihad's lead­ ers were afraid of this; they knew very well that many of their followers lacked their zeal. For example, the Shehu's brother Abdullahi was distressed in 1807 by "what I had seen of the changing times, and (my) brothers, and their inclination towards the world, and their squabbling over its possession, and its wealth, and its regard, together with their abandoning the upkeep of the mosques and the schools, and other things besides that." He was upset enough to desert the Muslim army on the eve of a crucial battle and to head eastwards toward Mecca, a goal he never reached before turning back to lead the jihad again. But before he returned, he wrote a bitter poem about the new community of "liars" the jihad had established, Who say that which they do not do, and follow their desires, And follow avarice in everything incumbent upon them, And who have no knowledge and who do not ask for it, And each one of whom delights in his own interpretations concerning beliefs, And who has broken with his own people and scorned knowledge,

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And who has preferred the crowd of rabble to his own relations, Whose purpose is not the affairs of the mosques, Nor the schools of learning, nor even the affairs of the Qur'an schools, But whose purpose is the ruling of the countries and their people In order to obtain delights and acquire rank, According to the custom of the unbelievers, and the titles of their sovereignty, And the appointing of ignorant persons to the highest offices, And the collecting of concubines, and fine clothes And horses that gallop in the towns, not on the battlefields, And the devouring of the gifts of sanctity, and booty and bribery, And lutes, and flutes, and the beating of drums.64 The complexity of the alliance that the jihad movement in Sokoto represented has spawned a variety of inter­ pretations, not only historians' interpretations but traditionists' as well.65 For Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and the leader of the northern Nigerian tradi­ tionalists at the time of his assassination in the 1966 coup d'etat, his great-great-grandfather Shehu Usuman was not only a leader but a great preacher and a man of the utmost piety. . . . He was among a people who were nominally Muhammadan: I say nominally, for the religion had become very corrupt and many pagan practices had crept in and had taken a firm hold even in the highest quarters. The Shehu Usuman declared a Holy War against the polluters of the faith. In 1804 he started by attack­ ing the Chief of Gobir, one of the worst offenders, in whose territory he was living. This local war went on for some time. . . . Meanwhile, to cleanse the religion, the Shehu had organized revolts in all the great Hausa

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states: the Fulani living in them rose and overthrew the Hausa kings. 66 This tradition's Islamic emphasis is roughly parallel to Garba Hamma's. Hamma Aamadu's description of the Liptako jihad in terms of local, material differences has its counterpart in a tradition told in the 1870s or early 1880s by a Pullo at Lokoja, now in Nigeria. This is what made them [my ancestors] fight until they were masters of the country. A son of the king of Gobir seized many of their cows. The Ful6e said noth­ ing. He came again and took their cows. The FulBe said they ought to retaliate. But the king of Gobir got their cows and took them to the Fulbe. He said: "Let there be peace between us. Leave here and come settle near me." They said they would not come; they re­ fused. In the morning he brought an army of a thousand horsemen to capture the Fulbe, but the Fulbe routed it. After that he did not bring his army again. Instead he brought poison and put it in the wa­ ter; everyone who drank it died. Then the Fulbe made war on him. They killed his men, they captured many slaves, and so it was the Fulbe captured Gobir. The Fulbe sent their men all over Hausaland and fought the pagans. They sent them to Kano, Katsina, Daura, Zazzau, Rano, and Borno. The Fulbe succeeded whenever they made war on them [the pagans]. This is how the Ful6e drove them off. They gathered up the towns they had conquered. Now it is seventy-three years since they began to reign. 67 Historians of Sokoto have a wealth of contemporary documents to help them sort out divergent traditions like these, but Liptako had no one like Shehu Usuman, Abdullahi, or the Shehu's son Muhammadu Bello to record per­ ceptions of the jihad at the time it happened; or if it did, his writings have disappeared. In consequence, it is impossible to know precisely what particular combinations of goals

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THE JIHAD

appealed to what particular groups. Nevertheless, it is clear that the jihad was a more complex event than most of the traditions imply. Consider the question of ethnic solidarity. Thejihad was led and fought by Ful6e; their opponents were Gourmantche. What most traditionists say about the jihad would allow the conclusion that members of the two ethnic groups lined up solidly behind their respective lead­ ers. I had been in Liptako a long time before I learned that the situation was not so clear-cut. A chance remark in­ formed me that the Tooroo6e of Ouro Torobe fled rather than fight. The village head of Ouro Torobe agreed this was true when I asked him. This was not information that he volunteered; he and his fellow villagers are not proud of what their ancestors did. He said his ancestors drove their cattle south out of Liptako because "we had many animals and we were afraid we might lose them in a war. The rea­ son that the Tooroobe of Wendou and the FerooBe were willing to fight the Gourmantche was that they were poor in cattle and had nothing to lose." 68 When these cautious Tooroo6e heard the war was over, they made their way back to Ouro Torobe and gave the new emir cattle to soothe his anger. The other Ful6e did not turn on these Tooroo&e for their defection, but it was not forgotten either. They still have a bad reputation, and several times I heard sneering remarks like those of the wise old man of Chapter 2. However, once when a man began to recount how Ouro Torobe had reacted during the jihad, another broke in, berating him for betraying one of Liptako's "se­ crets" to a foreigner. Why this was a secret to be kept he did not explain. Perhaps he had some personal connection with Ouro Torobe that made him anxious to improve its reputation. Perhaps he was merely concerned that I re­ ceive and transmit to my readers a picture of happy unanimity among the Ful&e. At any rate the others in the conversation overruled him. One argued to their general satisfaction that truth was truth and ought not to be hid. Then the storyteller took up the tale where he had left off while the objector stared at the ground in disgruntled si-

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lence. It may well be, however, that in some instances truth has lost out. There may have been other defections besides Ouro Torobe's that have been more generally forgotten. I heard that the Fulbe of Ouro Longa also fled and that the Ful6e of N'Diomga refused to fight, but these claims were not confirmed at Ouro Longa or N'Diomga. 69 It is impossi­ ble to judge if these stories have some truth in them, if they are the products of confusion, or if they are simply their tellers' means of dirtying the two villages' names. After the jihad at least one Pullo seems to have felt more loyalty to the Gourmantche than the usual traditions would allow. Delo Paate, the ancestor of the village heads of Debere Talata, had a Pullo father and a Gourmantche mother. When his maternal kinsfolk fled south, he resolved to go with them, but Braahima Seydu eventually persuaded him to stay. 70 Apparently not all the Gourmantche were implacably opposed to the Fulbe either. According to one traditionist, the Gourmantche of the region were divided into two groups, one centered at Koala and the other at Seytenga, which in those days was apparently not an area of Ful6e habitation, even though it is now. When the Fulbe began to make ready for war, they "persuaded the Gourmantche of Seytenga not to aid the Gourmantche of Koala. . . . In re­ turn the Fulbe promised the ruler of Seytenga to leave his kingdom in peace." In the reign of Saalu Hamma the peace broke down, and in the 1830s Liptako attacked and de­ stroyed Seytenga. 71 Within Liptako itself, not all the Gourmantche were so hostile to the Ful Be that they felt they had to flee. For a time one Gourmantche family stayed on at Tobidioga, only sixteen kilometers from Dori. Another family may have continued to live at Bouloye, which was even closer. 72 The positions of the Gourmantehe of Seytenga and the FulBe of Ouro Torobe show that there were breaks in the ethnic blocs, that Fulbe and Gourmantche might define their positions by more than ethnic allegiances, important as these probably were. Nonetheless, ethnic differences

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THE JIHAD

were central to the earliest European interpretation of the jihad, which was Abbatucci's. He asserted that the Fulbe were preparing for war long before the jihad took place. "Meek and docile at the beginning, as is their way, the Fulbe succeeded in insinuating themselves little by little into the midst of naive black peoples, whose confidence they gradually gained." Abbatucci had nothing to say about religious or any other differences that might have led to war.73 Bouverot reported Fulbe-Gourmantche differences arising from Fulbe construction of a mosque, but, he ex­ plained, "this was the indirect cause of conflict, for it is cer­ tain that the Fulbe had long had the intention to take power as they had done in Sokoto, the Djelgodji, etc. The construction of the mosque was just a pretext."74 None of my sources described the pre-jihad years in terms of a slowly brewing anti-Gourmantche plot. Neither Abbatucci nor Bouverot specified their sources. There is no way to know how much of their accounts was based di­ rectly on what informants told them, and how much on their own readings of events, but I suspect that they gave their preconceptions free rein and interpreted jihad tradi­ tions in terms of assumptions about Fulbe that were wide­ spread in their day, assumptions that in many respects echoed Fulbe visions of themselves. Monteil's description of the Fulbe is typical. A Pullo had a "subtle, shrewd, sharp mind," was apt to surprise his enemies with "ruses and in­ sidious traps," and typically showed great tenacity and en­ durance in pursuing his goals. Furthermore, "the instinct for domination appears in his slightest acts; although he also knows how to bend to necessity, how to make himself humble and cringing to gain his ends."75 Many Europeans of the period regarded Fulbe as fellow whites, often ra­ cially mixed by intermarriage with blacks, to be sure, but still fundamentally whites; and one writer after another concocted elaborate explanations for how these whites should have ended up in West Africa. Stereotypes like Monteil's certainly owe more to racist assumptions that as-

T H E JIHAD

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cribe great intelligence and ruling capability to whites and little to nonwhites than to careful observation of Fulbe. 76 The Liptakojihad was not just an ethnic conflict. As ten­ sions grew in the time just before the war, different groups and individuals had to decide what to do on the basis of their beliefs and perceived interests. Thus the Tooroo&e of Ouro Torobe fled to save their animals, and the Gourmantche of Seytenga stayed out of the conflict in hopes of future peace. The Fulbe who fought probably were influ­ enced by a variety of concerns: by a sense that Ful&e should stick together with fellow Fulbe, by a conviction that the Gourmantche ruled unjustly, by a desire to broaden the "abode of Islam." And probably a multitude of other con­ cerns entered in too. In Liptako, as in Shehu Usuman's jihad, the mix of complaints and desires that Fulbe hoped the jihad would satisfy certainly varied from one individual and group to another. Here a pious Muslim concerned for the preservation and spread of Islam was the natural ally of a Pullo concerned to secure his property against Gourmantche exactions. In the long run they might clash; in the short run they could combine forces to fight their common enemy. The stories told by people who lived through these dif­ ficult and complex times surely differed, reflecting their varying interests and degrees of knowledge. As succeeding generations of traditionists built on this base, sometimes telling just what they had heard and no more nor less, sometimes choosing just part of it to pass on, sometimes adding more, legend entered in, legend that "has the same value and effect as the truth." 77 The traditionists I knew were well aware of this. They shook their heads in mild disdain or occasionally even anger over instances they knew—from other people's traditions. They were confi­ dent in the Tightness of their own stories. But even if a traditionist can be sure in his own mind that the Fulbe skir­ mished with the Gourmantche at Selbo, or that the Feroobe possess the one true flag given by Shehu Usuman,

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or that Braahima Seydu became emir at the draw of a lot, the historian has no reason to be sure of any of this. To know that the traditions contain a good portion of legend mixed in with truth smothers hasty reconstructions, and that is a good thing. But without written data that we do not now and perhaps may never have, it is difficult to imag­ ine that the tangled mass of truth and legend will ever be very satisfactorily sorted out and that the reconstruction of jihad history will ever match in detail, depth, and sophisti­ cation that of similar, roughly contemporary events in the history of literate societies, such as the American and French revolutions. In Liptako we must rest content with a much barer history.

CHAPTER 6

THE STYLE OF POLITICS Government—God created it. . . . Whoever says government is evil is not a Muslim. Whoever says gov­ ernment is evil is a pagan. God created government. Government was made to lead the people. Without government, would commoners have property? If they went out with their cattle, with their money, would they ever tome back home with them? Yes, we really like government. Maccudo Yigo Gela, Dori, 3 J u l Y '976 A Pullo does not like to lollow anyone. Sa'iidu Hammadun, Dori, 5 July 1976 IF MEMORIES of how things were before the jihad was fought and won have faded, memories of the good old days that came after it are still alive. The traditionists have lots to tell. They recite the genealogies of the country's great men. They recount a wealth of stories of long-ago events, sometimes in skimpy outline, sometimes in vivid language and rich detail that give their characters reality and presence for those who crowd around to hear master storytellers at work. Traditionists also generalize as readily as any Western historian with an analytical bent; they draw sweeping portraits of precolonial political relationships and institutions. But all these genealogies and narratives and generalizations do not make the neat whole that the Western historian would like them to: they differ in their detail, they show different understandings of what pre­ colonial politics was like. Digging truth out of them is frustrating work. Out of the welter of contradictory testimony that con­ fronts the historian, one area of agreement stands out: the

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THE STYLE OF POLITICS

governmental context of precolonial political life. Liptako was an emirate. It was not an independent state; it was part of a much larger imperial system, the Sokoto Caliphate.1 All the states that made up the caliphate, like Liptako, had their origins in the spate of jihads fought in response to Shehu Usuman's exhortations. Once the jihadists had beat back the boundaries of the "abode of war" and firmly estab­ lished the "abode of Islam," they had to govern it. Shehu Usuman's vision of what the new government ought to be was unequivocal: it must be a caliphate. "Know then, my Brethren . . . that the appointment of the Commander of the Faithful [caliph] is obligatory."2 The caliph's subordi­ nates in the states were to be emirs: "Know then, my Breth­ ren . . . that the appointment of Emirs in the States is ob­ ligatory."3 Early on in the caliphate's history the emirates were divided into two groups, one directly under Sokoto, the other under Gwandu, a city that lay some eighty kilo­ meters southwest of Sokoto. The Gwandu emirates were those of the south and west, Liptako among them.4 Gwandu appointed their emirs in the caliph's name, and they sent annual tributes to Gwandu in token of their al­ legiance. Just as the caliphs appointed the emirs of Gwandu and the emirs of Gwandu in turn appointed the rulers of cer­ tain emirates, so those emirs appointed officials of their own. One of these was a judge. The Shehu had prescribed this appointment—"Know then, my Brethren . . . that the appointment of judges is obligatory"5—and Braahima Seydu duly appointed a prominent local scholar his alkaali (ultimately from the Arabic al-qadt, "judge"). Hisjob was to hear cases brought from all around the emirate and to rule on them according to Muslim law. At first this man was also imam (limam, ultimately from the Arabic al-imam) of the capital's Friday mosque, where he led Friday prayers and gave the weekly sermon. But being imam and judge at once was a heavy charge for a single man, so during the reign of Saalu Hamma, the second emir, the jobs were separated, the judge's duties remaining in the family of the first

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officeholder, which still is responsible for them, and the imam's tasks being delegated to another scholar, whose de­ scendants have likewise monopolized the office. 6 The judges and imams have all been schooled in theology and law, and the emirs frequently turned to them for advice, but this was not required by either law or custom, and emirs did not always do so. They sought advice when and from whom they saw fit. There was no state council in Liptako. All the emirates had their emirs, judges, and imams, offices that bore the linguistic and conceptual stamp of Is­ lam. Many other offices did not and were better reflections of local precedents than Muslim example. For instance, the Sokoto titles of wazir and sa'i came from Arabic; they are evidence of the commitment to Islamic government. But Sokoto also had its galadima and magajin gari, titles of Hausa origin that reflected the persistent influence of prejihad ways of doing things. Other emirates had their own particular pre-jihad pasts to deal with too, and attempts to apply the Islamic model in differing local circumstances produced organizations and terminologies of government that varied from one emirate to the next. 7 Many emirates had officials permanently charged with questions of defense, but Liptako did not. Its armies were raised for specific campaigns and led by a commander, the wangaare, who held his position only so long as the particu­ lar campaign lasted. The wangaare might be an emir— Aamadu Iisa led at least one campaign while he was in office and a great many more during his regency for Seeku Saalu, and Braahima Seydu may also have been an active campaigner—but most emirs had given up personal par­ ticipation in battle by the time they came to office and in­ stead delegated military leadership to others. If the pro­ posal for a campaign originated at court, the emir usually named one of his close associates to lead it. If it came from outside, the emir frequently made its proposer the com­ mander. In either case, the man had to raise his own troops, for the emirate had no standing army.

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Many other state functions were carried out by the emirs' courtiers, the sogoneBe (singular: sogone). The term came from More, the language of the Mossi, in which soghone (plural: soghondamba) designated a "young, royal servant." 8 The courtiers of Liptako, if not always young, shared their Mossi counterparts' dependence on their sovereign. While the titles of judges, imams, and commanders implied their obligations to do certain tasks, to be a sogone simply implied the obligation to do the king's will, whatever that might be, whether counseling him on matters of state policy or col­ lecting the market tax or carrying the royal parasol on state occasions. Whatever their jobs, and jobs were myriad, the courtiers did not have more specialized titles, nor were they formally ranked or divided into subcategories by their performance of specific duties. Ranking and specialization tended to develop informally, as some courtiers proved more adept at winning emirs' ears and confidence than others and as different men proved more proficient at different jobs. But internal differentiation was always tem­ porary and shifting as emirs moved their men from one task to another and as they rose and fell in royal esteem. This, then, was the organization of the national level of Liptako government, an organization that was much sim­ pler than that of many other emirates. 9 Local government was equally simple in organization. It was left to the village heads, the jooroobe (singular: jooro), each of whom oversaw the affairs of one or more lineages and their dependents. 10 At the time of the jihad there were a dozen or so jooroobe. As the population increased, their number increased, too, to about thirty by mid-century and to about fifty by cen­ tury's end. 11 A line of village heads—note that this office, like the emir's, the judge's, and the imam's, was typically a lineage monopoly—usually traced its founding to the first settler in a given area. For example, Beybaye, a few kilome­ ters south of Dori, was settled by Gaani Siddiri, a Jaawanndo who led his family out of Mossi country to Lip­ tako during Saalu Hamma's reign. 12 When he and his kin arrived in the emirate, he went directly to the emir to

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pledge his allegiance and to ask for a place to settle—the first step every migrant had to take in a country where the emir was "the master of the land of his kingdom, of its in­ habitants, the plants that grow, the rivers that run, and the animals that live there." 13 The emir sent Gaani to Beybaye, which had been deserted ever since the Gourmantche fled it, and Gaani became itsjooro. 14 As time went on, his little group was joined by others, to whom the availability of good farm land and a dependable water supply in the nearby Yaayre made Beybaye attractive. The first new­ comers were Allu Paate and his Jallu&e kinsfolk, and the place Gaani gave them to build their homes was called Wuro Allu, "the community of Allu." Later came Wuro Bukari and Wuro Baga, both of them, like Wuro Allu, tak­ ing their names from those of men who led migrations to Beybaye. Other villages grew up in a similar fashion, some larger, some smaller, some settled by several lineages, some by just one. However, that they all developed out of territorial nu­ clei does not imply that thejooro's jurisdiction was subject to the same territorial bounds that limit his American coun­ terparts. The mayor's authority stops at the city limits. When an American moves from one city to another, he changes one mayor for another. Liptako villages have their physical boundaries too, but when a Liptako man moves out of his home village he need not change village heads. He need not break the tie of personal allegiance between himself and his jooro. Beybaye history again provides an apposite example. Umaru, one of Gaani's sons, left Beybaye for Diouga, twenty-five kilometers to the south, while his brother Ngesa was village head. (See Figure 6.) Umaru went because he hoped for better farming. He was one of countless FulBe who, during both the nineteenth century and the twentieth, have moved south out of crowded central Liptako around the Yaayre. Even though southern Liptako is rocky, clayey, and sometimes hilly, quite different from the sandy plains of the north that Liptako Ful6e prefer, and even though water is often scarce,

138

THE STYLE OF POLITICS FIGURE 6

The Precolonial Village Heads of Beybaye Siddiri

ι

(ι)GAANI

I (a) MUUSA

1 (3) NGESA

1

Usmaan

l

H

(4) BUUBAKAR

1 (5) UMARU

I

(6) Usmaan

NOTE: Umaru Gaani was village head of Beybaye and Diouga at the co­ lonial occupation. When he died, the French split the village headship and made Usmaan Buubakar village head of Beybaye and Usmaan Ngesa vil­ lage head of Diouga. The names of precolonial village heads are cap­ italized.

land is at least more available. If Umaru had fought with his brother, he would certainly have broken his ties to him, but he did not, so Umaru and all the other Beybaye people who moved to Diouga continued to count themselves among the subjects of first Ngesa Gaani and then Buubakar Gaani. When Buubakar died, Umaru succeeded him, and he ruled Beybaye from Diougajust as his elder brother had ruled Diouga from Beybaye.15 This situation is not at all anomalous to Ful6e, but it was just that to their French overlords, whose notions of ter­ ritorial organization demanded that every village had to have its own separate leader. When Umaru Gaani died not long after the conquest, the French seized the opportunity to bring European "order" out of African "confusion" by splitting the village headship in two, putting Diouga under Usmaan Ngesa and Beybaye under Usmaan Buubakar. This "rationalization" of local government contributed to the multiplication of village headships during the colonial period, but never at a rate fast enough to keep pace with the multiplication of new settlements. Not long after the French took over, many people left Diouga for Kirga, some twenty kilometers still further to the south, once more in

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search of fertile farm land. The village heads of Diouga went along, and they continued to look after the affairs of both Diouga and Kirgajust as their ancestors took charge of both Diouga and Beybaye. No matter how many people he ruled or where they lived, the village head was the emir's appointee, the lowest level in the pyramid of officialdom that had its apex in the caliph. For Shehu Usuman and those who shared his commitments, the tasks of all these officials, at whatever level, were conceptualized in theocratic terms, that is, offi­ cials were to ensure that men lived in accordance with God's will. For Muslims that is expressed in the law, the shari'a, "an all-embracing body of religious duties, the total­ ity of Allah's commands that regulate the life of every Mus­ lim in all its aspects." 16 Since Muslims had to obey the law, and since the theocracy's officials, from the caliph on down, had the task of upholding the law, it followed that subjects must obey their rulers. "Know then, my Breth­ ren . . . ," wrote the Shehu, "that obedience to him [the caliph] and to all his deputies is obligatory." 17 Shehu Usuman's statement is cast in prescriptive terms; it tells the faithful how they ought to live. In that, it differs from the characterization of Liptako government by Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, the country's last emir, who as­ serted that obedience to the emir was actually a fact of precolonial political life. "Until the arrival of the French, the sovereign exercised autocratic power. He was political and religious head and commander in chief of the armies." Similarly, "the power of the emirs of Liptako was absolute and autocratic. . . . He was responsible for his acts only be­ fore God." 18 The ex-emir is understandably nostalgic for the way things were. So are his subjects. They waxed sentimental when they talked about emirate government. For them it was part and parcel of the good old days, times better than either the Gourmantche period, when there was no emir, or the periods of colonial domination and Voltan inde-

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THE STYLE OF POLITICS

pendence, when emirs have had to rule to suit the whims of powerful and overbearing masters. Since the early 1960s Liptako has had no emir at all—a fact which implies to some citizens that Liptako has no government. In conse­ quence, complained one disgruntled old man, all the chil­ dren born since then are bastards, wives insult their hus­ bands, slaves are uppity, no one knows his place, everyone does just as he pleases, nothing worth doing gets done. I heard again and again that the great drought and famine of the early 1970s would never have happened if the coun­ try had had its emir. Without him, all can never be right with the world. Nonetheless, despite their affection for emirs and the good old days, most traditionists understood the nature of precolonial political relationships differently than did the emir. The traditions are rich in tales of men who rejected and contested the royal will, sometimes unsuccessfully, to be sure, but sometimes very successfully indeed. Alhadri Jika was a successful contestant. In 1890/91 he made a bid for the village headship of Katchirga, a move that Emir Aamadu Iisa resisted. One of Katchirga's praise singers explained that the villagers were set on Alhadri, but the emir refused to approve the popular choice because Alhadri's "uncle was still alive. So then Alhadri asked why Aamadu ruled when his own uncle Bokari Sori was alive"—a pointed reminder that if Alhadri's genealogical qualifications for office were inferior to his uncle's, Aamadu Iisa too had an uncle who should have been emir if kinship were all that counted in determining successions. But Alhadri's repartee did not sway the emir, who con­ tinued to resist the appointment. Then, according to Alhadri's octogenarian daughter, taking up the story from the praise singer, a new character entered the dispute— Helo Wanjeeji, Alhadri's friend and the leader of the Logomaten Tuareg. Helo got up a band of warriors, and they rode into Liptako from their homes in Songhay coun­ try to the east. They rode to M'Bamga, where Aamadu Iisa made his capital during the last years of his reign. Helo's

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men hid outside town while their leader went in alone. He told the emir that if he did not make Alhadri village head, the Tuareg would attack. Aamadu Iisa backed down, and Alhadri got the office. 19 This tradition confirms the conclusion that although emirs may have claimed to have "absolute and autocratic" power, they did not have it in fact. This is no surprise: ab­ solute rulers everywhere have had to compromise their pretensions to suit the fact that other political actors have power and use it. When Aamadu Iisa took on Katchirga, he took on a particularly formidable opponent. It was a strong village, one of the largest in Liptako. Like the emirs, its vil­ lage heads were FerooBe. (Figure 7 lays out the genealogies of the two related families.) Alhadri Jika's grandfather, Jibriila Siddiiki, went to Katchirga to live about 1833/34. He was not its first occupant; a number of Ful&e groups had settled there before him. Katchirga apparently had no village head at the time: one wise old man claimed the settlers once had had one, another that they had not. In any event Jibriila put himself forward for the position. The emir reportedly backed an opposition candidate; but local support for the opposition was weaker than Jibriila's fol­ lowing, which included his non-Feroo&e maternal kins­ men, the sons of Maamuudu Nyegu (whose relationship is shown in Figure 7), as well as a local Pereejo, and in the end Jibriila, like Alhadri some fifty years later, got the office he coveted despite the emir's opposition. 20 Despite the village heads' continuing troubles with the emirs, Katchirga grew and prospered. For the most part Jibriila Siddiiki's succes­ sors were as distinguished for their leadership, force of character, and military prowess as he had been, and, like other villages ruled by men of similar stature, Katchirga at­ tracted settlement by small, weak groups looking for pro­ tection. The GaoBe who came in Jika Jibriila's time "chose to come to Katchirga because they had heard of Jika Jib­ riila, who was a famous warrior, and they knew that he could give them protection. They would not have gone to a village like Debere Talata, for the village head there would

1 1

(5) Alhadri (1890/911919/20)

'855/561863/64)

I Jamdikko

1 (4) Aba 1863/641890/91)

1

1 (2) Belko (1848/49 1855/56)

I (i)Jibrtila (1833/341848/49)

Hawwa 1

X

1 Umaru I Abdullaahi I Siddnki 1

Nyegu. T h e full list of the emirs is presented in Figure 4, and the full list of the village heads of Katchirga in Figure 5.

N O T E : T h e emirs' names are in capitals. T h e village heads' names are in italics. X = a woman from the family of M a a m u u d u

, Buhaari

(6) B O K A R 1 (1890/911916/17)

, (1) B R A A H I M A (1809/10-1816/18) I ' (3) SORI (1832/331860/61) I

(4) S E E K U (1860/611886/87)

1 (5)AAMADU (1886/871890/91)

Iisa

, Hamma 1 ^ (2) S A A L U (1816/171832/33) , ' ~ 1

1 Seydu

Jamdikko

T h e Precolonial FerooBe of Dori and Katchirga

FIGURE 7

THE STYLE OF POLITICS

143

have not been able to provide them with the protection they needed." 21 Runaway slaves also sought powerful pro­ tectors, from whom their previous masters evidently did not have the right to reclaim them. 22 Settling under a great warrior like Jika had another advantage too. His subjects had frequent opportunities to follow him to war and to share in his prestige and booty. Village heads always welcomed new settlers, for in­ creases in the size of their followings magnified their power. Often they tried to cemetit their alliances with stra­ tegically calculated marriages. Thus once Jibriila Siddiiki had taken office, he took wives from three of the lineages that had been at Katchirga before him. 23 His assump­ tion—or at least his hope—was surely that his new kinsfolk would support him in future crises just as his maternal kinsfolk had supported him in his bid for the village head­ ship. And this tactic may well have worked. Wise old men told a wealth of stories to show that men often acted as they did because they had a certain sort of family relationship. Why did W T endou support Sori Hama in the succession struggle of 1832/33? Because his mother was a local Tooroodo; people always support a sister's son. Why did Faaruuku Sori support Bokari Sori in the succession strug­ gle of 1890/91? Because Bokari and Faaruuku were brothers; brothers always stick together. Why did Hamma Saalu refuse to back his brother Iisa for emir in 1832/33? Because Hamma and Iisa were Saalu's sons by different women; sons of co-wives never get along. The last two gen­ eralizations are inconsistent: either brothers always stick together or they do not. Inconsistency here and in similar instances bespeaks a variability of action within kinship structures that cannot be summed up or predicted in a series of simple generalizations, whether traditionists' or historians'. Liptako history and recent politics alike furnish examples of full brothers and half brothers sometimes sticking together and sometimes not, of people sometimes rushing to the aid of a sister's son and sometimes not, of a wife's kinsfolk sometimes proving reliable allies and some­ times not.

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Whether bolstered by marriage links or not, alliances sometimes crumbled, and then the two groups usually moved apart. For instance, when Seydu Kare and Hamman Fune quarreled over which of them should be village head of Bani Kallo, Hamman and his followers finally moved out and founded a new village nearby that Hamman and his line have ruled ever since, just as Seydu Kare and his kin have ruled Bani Kallo. 24 No great economic obstacles lay in the way of dispersion, whether it was moti­ vated by a crisis of relationships or just the search for a bet­ ter environment. Unoccupied land was plentiful, and mov­ able property was owned individually, not communally. Nor were there ritual impediments to the division of groups. Just as groups divided and moved from place to place within Liptako in search of good land, plentiful water, and tranquillity, so groups moved in and out of the emirate. Ful6e were attracted by the knowledge that Liptako was "Ful6e country" where they could live free of Haa&e rule. The country's organization as a Muslim state excited the imaginations of pious Muslims. Non-Ful&e, many of slave origin, saw Liptako as a place of refuge from oppressive masters. 25 Migration continued throughout the century and increased the size of the emirate's population. The emirs welcomed this movement as a means to increase the power of the state. But movement was not all one-way: people moved out too. They might be lured away by hopes of a better physical environment or pushed out by family crises. Or some­ times—and these are the cases that interest us here—migrations were acts of political protest. As one traditionist explained, "people who were in conflict with the emir left the country and went to another ruler" 26 —the classic Fulbe response to injustice emanating from any ruler, whether Pullo or not. The consequence to the state as a whole might be no more than a slight population loss, but occasionally the effects were more severe. This was so when angry dis­ sidents took revenge by raiding their homeland from bases

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outside the country, especially Koala and Diagourou where FulBe and slaves on the run were always welcome and where attacks on Liptako were usually interpreted as acts in the national interest. The emirs' response to this situa­ tion was equally customary: to beg the dissidents to come home, their grievances assuaged and their trespasses for­ given. When Gaari Hoka of Bani had trouble with the emir, he "left Liptako and went to Diagourou. The emir was afraid that he might lead troops from Diagourou back into Liptako, so he called on the man's friends to go to Diagourou and to persuade him to return." 27 When in another instance some Ful6e refused to give the slave Yobi Katar the freedom they had promised him, he left the emirate and raided it again and again with the help of kinsmen and other renegades until the emir of the day im­ plored him to stop the raiding and return home, a free man. 28 When another emir killed a prominent Tooroodo to put an end to his defiance of royal authority, his angry kinsmen fled for Koala. The emir feared they would help the Gourmantche raid Liptako—some said they actually did—so, true to form, he invited the Tooroo6e to return and settle where they liked. 29 Emirs did not have overwhelming means of force at their immediate beck and call with which to compel dissidents to do the royal will. Firearms were never as available in Lip­ tako as they were in other parts of the Sokoto Caliphate where ambitious emirs sought to increase royal power by arming slave corps with the most modern weapons they could obtain. 30 To pursue their policies by force, Liptako's emirs depended on the readiness with which local cavalry and infantry armed with bows and arrows, spears, knives, and swords responded to their calls to arms. The quality of the response depended on the subjects' fundamental agreement with the particular emir's aims. When agree­ ment existed, Liptako's armies proved able defenders of the state against both local upheavals and foreign enemies. But when agreement did not exist, an emir's best-laid plans collapsed. In 1887/88 Aamadu Iisa determined to crush

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the country's old enemy Koala once and for all, but his army, which lacked sympathy for his ambitions, deserted him.31 The emirs did not use force to deal with Gaari Hoka and Yo6i Katar—or at least the traditionists did not recall that they did so. One wise old man recounted that in the Tooroo&e case the emir contracted with a Tuareg group to attack them, but the attack failed miserably, and the emir called the Tooroobe home.32 Note that here the emir turned to outsiders for help, not to his own subjects, prob­ ably because in both this case and the other two, emirs sensed that their people were not to be relied upon. Popu­ lar sympathies lay with the dissidents, not their royal op­ ponents. From the subjects' point of view, dissensions like these performed the valuable social function of forcing the emirs to recognize that even though Liptako people may in theory have owed "their emir respect, obedience, and submission," as one emir-proud member of the royal line put it, in fact there were limits on all three.33 Liptako people could be pushed only so far. Butjust where did the limits of "respect, obedience, and submission" lie? Clearly they varied from time to time and place to place. Not every Liptako man was as willing to tilt with emirs as these dissidents were. Not every village head was an Alhadri Jika; not every village was a Katchirga. "There are villages where the emir can do what he wants because the people are afraid of him. There are villages that are weak and cannot resist the ruler."34 Even in places like these there must have been limits to what emirs could do before they ran the risk of resistance, but it is hard to work them out from the traditions. Consider the question of precolonial justice. Most informants described it in sweeping terms meant to characterize the whole country during the entire emirate period. Muslim law was the law of the land. Local scholars applied it at the local level to rel­ atively uncomplicated questions of marriage, divorce, suc­ cession, and land rights. If they proved too difficult to set­ tle, they were sent on to Dori. Cases of murder and theft were always taken directly to Dori. When disputants ar-

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rived at the capital, they went first to the emir, who re­ ferred them to the judge, the alkaali. The latter, wrote Bouverot in 1904, settled by himself and usually in his house little dis­ agreements between natives concerning succession, marriage, etc. More important cases, misdemeanors or felonies of some seriousness, were judged in the mosque by the judge aided by two or several other scholars in the presence of eminent persons, the fam­ ily of the injured party, and the family of the accused. The two parties could produce as many witnesses as they wanted. The sentence was pronounced by the judge after consultation with his assessors and in compliance with the instructions of the Qur'an. The sentence was exe­ cuted immediately. 35 Bouverot thought the punishments "generally barbaric" —a thief might lose a hand or an eye; a murderer would be put to death unless the victim's family would accept pay­ ment instead—but the people of Liptako accepted them as right and normal. The accounts of two traditionists suggested that the workings of this system were not as regular as these gen­ eralizations make it seem. The first tradition has to do with those dissident Tooroobe who fled for Koala and whom a worried emir entreated to return. They would return, they said, but only if the emir gave them the right to adjudicate all their own disputes except murder. The emir did as they asked, and back to Liptako they came. 36 The second story had to do with the villages of Torodi, Wendou, and Lerbou, three of the oldest and strongest villages in the emir­ ate. A Torodi man said the first emir gave the three the right to try and then execute judgments on all categories of cases that arose there. "If a thief were caught at Wendou, he would be taken to GangaJiga for judgment. GangaJiga is located near Torodi. GangaJiga is a tree on which vul­ tures always sat, and it marked the place where the court

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was held. The village heads, imams, and scholars of the three villages gathered to pass judgment on the thief ac­ cording to Islamic law. The thief would be punished ac­ cording to the judgment of his guilt. Neither the emir nor the judge had the right to say or do anything about the case." Why did the emir grant the three this right? "Be­ cause of their great strength," the traditionist replied.37 Because other villages and groups besides these also pos­ sessed "great strength," it is likely that local competence in judicial matters was sometimes greater than the usual gen­ eralizations would allow, that there were many more ir­ regularities than these two. The usual, monochrome vision of the country's judicial past is probably a poorer reflection of precolonial reality than it is of experience with judicial centralization and uniformity in the colonial period com­ bined with knowledge of how justice ought to be adminis­ tered in a Muslim state. Just how situations varied from time to time and place to place we cannot know, nor is there evidence for a judgment on how closely legal deci­ sions, whether taken by judges or by villagers, conformed to the letter of Islamic law. No one could tell me the details of specific cases, and the travelers do not provide any. Traditionists' descriptions of precolonial taxation pose much the same sort of problem as their descriptions of the judiciary. Farmers were obliged to pay an annual levy on grain, thejakka, whose name and concept derived from the Islamic zakat, the alms tax. The harvested millet was tied into sheaves. The owner of thirty sheaves or more owed one-tenth of them to the state. If he had fewer, he owed nothing.38 Almost all the traditionists I knew spoke as though men actually lived according to this rule, which is drawn directly from the law books. The one exception re­ cited the general rule but then added that "the jakka often was not regularly collected before the time of the whites. People paid what they could, and that was all. The emir never tried to force people to pay."39 The evidence is too thin to tell us just how scrupulously farmers paid their taxes, but irregular payment is surely

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more consistent with the existence of powerful, inde­ pendent-minded local groups than is punctilious observa­ tion of the injunction. The generalizations of most traditionists are probably shaped less by traditions of the precolonial past than by acquaintance with the legal principles for the payment of the tax and by their experi­ ences with the tax's regular collection early in the colonial period. The power of the emirs then was bolstered by their connection with the French administration, which had means to force popular obedience that precolonial emirs never possessed, and the emirs were able to collect thejakka with great strictness. They sent their men to the villages to make sure everyone paid in full. This method of collection probably deviated from precolonial practice, when the job apparently was left to the village heads. "Did the village head of Lerbou collect th ejakka or did the emir send a man here from Dori to collect it?" I asked one man. "It was the village head of Lerbou who collected thejakka," he replied, "because neither the emir's men nor the emir himself can do anything to a Lerbou man, for a Lerbou man is a real man!" 40 The village head subtracted a share of the jakka, I was told, and sent the remainder on to Dori. Or at least that was what people usually told me. One man claimed that all Tooroobe were exempt by virtue of their common clanship with Shehu Usuman and the caliphs. 41 Another asserted that if a close kinsman of a Pereejo village head held the emir's office, then the village head had the right not to send the millet on to Dori but to dispose of it himself. This privilege lasted beyond the lifetimes of the village head and the emir who began it. Their successors also observed it. 42 Islamic law provided that cattle and other animals were subject to zakat ]ust as millet was, but no traditionist claimed that the emirs ever tried to collect it. 43 Noncollection was prudent policy, law or no law. Fulbe attachment to their animals, particularly their cattle, is proverbial, as are also their efforts to evade taxation on them. Demands for pay­ ment would have been wasted words, and an attempt to

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give teeth to the law would have invited emigration or even rebellion. The appointments of village heads also showed the abil­ ity of local power blocs to defend their independence against central control. Almost all the traditionists I knew insisted that it was villagers who appointed their own lead­ ers. The elders chose their new leader shortly after the death of his predecessor. Then they forwarded his name to the emir, who made the formal appointment and sent his new official his insignia of office, a white turban to be wound about his head at the installation ceremony. Not long thereafter, the village head sent the emir presents. My informants agreed that a village head had both to be freely chosen by his subjects and to be named by the emir. The popular choice was not village head until the emir con­ firmed him; the emir could not name a village head until the villagers had nominated their choice.44 But, most tradi­ tionists asserted, it was the people's choice that really counted; the emir's act of appointment just put a rubber stamp on what had already been done. The emir did not have the right to refuse the popular nominee, to impose his own man on a village, or to depose a village head he did not like. One traditionist cited the story above of Aamadu lisa's abortive attempt to deny a village headship to AlhadriJika after Katchirga people had already settled on him as the only case of its kind in Liptako history.45 Other tradi­ tionists, including the minority who claimed that the emirs had the formal right to veto the popular nominee, could not think of any case when an emir had actually tried to do this, much less succeeded. The last emir told a different story. Consistent with his description of precolonial government in autocratic terms, he portrayed the emir as the key man in the appointment process. Whenever it was time to appoint a new village head, "the king invited the pretenders to make themselves known." He reviewed their qualifications and, his mind once made up, sent a messenger to the village to announce his decision. "All the notables were brought together; the

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king's envoy made known the chosen candidate and asked the village notables to ratify this choice. After having ex­ plained the king's decision, the envoy then publicly gave the chosen candidate a white turban." 46 The book from which this description comes was not yet widely known when I was in Liptako in 1976—it was written just the year before, and its French makes it inaccessible to all but a small elite—but one person who had read it with care and was well aware that what it had to say differed from what most traditionists averred was a young Pereejo, a junior member of the royal lineage, who argued that the emir's portrayal was correct and majority opinion mistaken. One consequence of the colonial occupation, he said, was that the emirs lost power while village heads gained it. Ap­ pointments that were once within the emirs' grasp escaped it, and traditionists who claimed that villages chose their own leaders in precolonial times were projecting a later state of affairs to an earlier period of quite a different character. And, the Pereejo argued further, this projection was not at all an innocent one: villagers wanted me and everybody else to think that these appointments had never been among the emirs' prerogatives in order to guard their present independence against some future reassertion of royal control. But of course it may also be that the former emir and his young kinsman are no less guilty of purveying self-interested history shaped by a perception that the way historians and traditionists describe the past can affect the development of the future. That the latter is probably the case, that the emir and his kinsman are thinking wishfully rather than factually, is suggested by the scantiness of the emirs' resources with which to counter the independence of their subjects. Traditionists often described successions in terms of genealogical inevitability. When I asked why so-and-so came to office, their reply was frequently a simple "Because it was his turn." When Aamadu Iisa rebuked AlhadriJika for trying to become Katchirga's village head while his uncle was still alive, and when Alhadri retorted with the

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reminder that the emir had done just the same when he came to office, both were referring to a local system of priorities, one of which was that among members of a line­ age monopolizing an office, men of the older generation should have precedence over the younger. The former are "fathers"; the latter, "sons." "If both the father and the son want an office, the father will be chosen." 47 In terms of Figure 8, which schematizes succession norms, 4 is not eligFIGURE 8

The Normative Order of Succession to Office

1— 10

-1 11

-1 12

13

r~ 14

15

NOTE : The persons for whom these numbers stand are all males, since in Liptako only they are considered eligible for office. An older brother is always positioned to the left of a younger one. For simplicity's sake this chart attributes only two sons to each father, but it could easily be ex­ panded to account for more, always ranking them in order of birth from left to right.

ible for office until his "father" 3 has vacated it, and 8 must wait until all his "fathers" 4, 5, 6, and 7 have died. Figure 8 also shows the preferred order of succession within gener­ ations. Brothers are positioned by age, the elder to the left of the younger. Thus 2 is older than 3. In Liptako this im­ plies that 2 ought to succeed before 3 to the title of their father 1. In the third and fourth generations sets of paral­ lel cousins are also positioned from left to right in order of their seniority, which in this case is determined by seniority in the preceding generation, not by chronological age. Cousin 6 might be older in years than 4, but 4 should nonetheless come to office before 6 because 4's father was senior to 6's. 48 The genealogies of many officeholders show that these

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norms were practiced, not just preached. For example, in the Beybaye case laid out in Figure 6, Gaani's eldest son, Muusa, succeeded his father in office. When Muusa died, it was the turn of Ngesa, the next oldest, and so on until the generation was exhausted. Only then did members of the next generation take their turns to rule. However, some­ times successions deviated from this norm. Alhadri Jika came to power despite his uncle, but this did not make him a usurper. Traditionists made it clear that this succession system was only a statement of preferences; it was not the expression of ironclad rules meant to apply to every single case. Those who chose officeholders took other factors into account besides a man's birth, such as his demonstrated ca­ pacity for leadership, the strength of his following, his in­ telligence, his character, and his wealth. If two candidates' nongenealogical qualifications were roughly equal, the senior was preferred. But if the junior man was clearly the stronger, he had a good chance to the office. This was also true of successions to the emir's office, where the same system of preferences applied. Braahima Seydu had no sons, only daughters, so when he died the title passed to the eldest son of his older brother, just as the succession system said it should. (See Figure 4 or 7 for the genealogical structure of the royal line.) The succession of Saalu's younger brother Sori was equally predictable, and so was that of Seeku Saalu, the eldest surviving member of the next generation. But when Seeku died in 1886/87, events took a different turn. By then Aamadu Iisa was al­ ready the dominating personality in Liptako politics. Seeku went blind not many years after becoming emir in 1860/61, and Aamadu, already his closest confidant, quickly became emir in all but name. He proved a stronger man than Seeku or any other of the precolonial emirs—or at least the traditionists remember him that way. "While he ruled, not a single hyena dared take an animal." "If a man lost a needle on a road, no one would take it. It would lie just where it was until its owner came to pick it up, even if that were years later." After Seeku's death, Aamadu should

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have given way to his "father" Bokari Sori if he intended to live by the rules. Then he would have had to outlive Bokari and Bokari's younger brothers before he could claim the title for his own—a doubtful circumstance, given that Aamadu was already much older than his "father."49 But Aamadu had no intention of biding his time. Many people called him Naba, after a title the Mossi give to important officeholders. "When Seeku Saalu died, people came to greet Aamadu Iisa. 'Naba, good morning,' they said. 'Good morning,' he replied—and then added that he would never again have to say 'Good morning' to an emir."50 And he never did. Aamadu lisa's determination to have the office, his reputation as a man not to be crossed, his powerful backing, and his experience and achievements as Seeku's regent ensured him the turban despite Bokari Sori's protests. Aamadu Iisa died in the dry season of 1890/91, and Bokari Sori once more put forth a claim to the emir's title, but he found Aamadu lisa's younger brother Buhaari no more willing than Aamadu had been to accede the rights of the "father" as superior to those of the "son."51 Bokari and Buhaari both mobilized their supporters. Predictably, Aamadu lisa's sons, who were warriors of wide reputa­ tions, rallied to their uncle Buhaari. The Feroo6e of Katchari also backed Buhaari, who was their village head's mother's brother.52 The Feroo&e of Fetombaga oppor­ tunistically split their alliegances in hopes that they would not lose too much whoever lost.53 The FerooBe of Katchirga also divided, but not by calculated agreement as at Fetombaga. Alhadri Jika had been the enemy of Aamadu Iisa and, by extension, of all his kin, so he and his followers backed Bokari Sori. Aamadu Iisa had supported Jamdikko Belko against Alhadri Jika in the struggle for the village headship, and it followed that Jamdikko and the house of Belko should support Buhaari Iisa.54 The Tooroobe had a long history of alliance with the house of Sori—Sori Hamma's mother was a Tooroodo from Wendou—and they gave their support to Bokari Sori. Bani did the same. Many

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of the people who lived there were MossiBe, that is, FulBe who came to Liptako from Mossi country. Bokari Sori's mother was one of them, and this contributed to their par­ tiality for his candidacy. Further more, Bokari Sori's full brother Faaruuku lived at Bani. Both birth and a long re­ cord of difficulties with Aamadu Iisa repelled him from Buhaari Iisa, and Faaruuku helped drum up local backing for Bokari. 55 Similar ties of kinship, memories of past rivalries, and hopes for future advantage drew people to one candidate or the other. 56 At first the two parties seem to have been fairly evenly matched. Buhaari Iisa had the edge at Dori, but Bokari Sori was stronger in the villages. The outcome was still uncertain when Menteil arrived in Dori, but he guessed that Buhaari was going to be the winner, drew up a treaty making Liptako a French protectorate, and per­ suaded Buhaari Iisa's son to sign it on his father's behalf. Monteil's guess was bad. When the long struggle was over, Bokari was the winner. 57 Buhaari Iisa lost valuable support when two of his close kin fell ill. One went mad, and the other lost an arm to paralysis. Then it began to be whis­ pered about that these were the awful results of Bokari Sori's magic, and "everyone saw it was best to support him," concluded one wise old man. 58 At about the same time Alhadri Jika of Katchirga reportedly took a crucial step in Bokari Sori's favor. Bokari Sori's opponent was Buhaari Iisa, the brother of Aamadu Iisa by the same father and the same mother. The brothers lived in the same house at Dori, and thus Buhaari Iisa had the royal drum when Aamadu died. Unless Bokari Sori and his supporters could get it away from Buhaari Iisa, the latter would be emir. Alhadri Jika then called all the slaves in Katchirga to Dori, and they came with their clubs. Alhadri led the attack on Buhaari Iisa's house. He himself broke down its wall with his horse, and the slaves entered and took the drum by force from

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Buhaari Iisa's men. AlhadriJika took it to Bokari Sori, who became emir. The people did not choose who be­ came emir; force did.59 These explanations of Bokari Sori's victory in terms of local events differ from the two I heard that ascribed it to outside influence, that of Liptako's suzerain. Gwandu ruled in Bokari Sori's favor, and, when Buhaari heard the news, he abandoned his candidacy and turned the royal drum over to his opponent.60 Even if Gwandu did in fact issue its opinion on the matter, local opinion and local ac­ tion were surely more decisive determinants of the out­ come. Gwandu was more than five hundred kilometers of difficult road away, too far for it to keep close touch with the development of Liptako affairs or to exercise much in­ fluence there. It never could play the significant role in de­ ciding Liptako successions that it did at least for a time in Nupe or that Sokoto did on occasion in Zazzau, Fombina, Kano, and Katsina.61 Traditionists told me that only after the new emir had taken office was the news reported to Gwandu. Then Gwandu replied with a blessing for the new emir's reign. In 1853 Barth reported that Gwandu's effec­ tive supremacy was "a perfect nullity," and that is probably a good summary of the situation at other periods too.62 Even if the imperial connection was loose, it still existed. Liptako had no reason to break it, given a distant, noninterfering suzerain. Indeed maintenance of it conferred legitimacy on the state. Thus throughout the emirate's precolonial history and perhaps even for a few years after the colonial occupation, Liptako, like other emirates, sent presents to Gwandu. These presents were called gaisuwa, from the Hausa word for "a present; offering to a su­ perior."63 In principle Gwandu's representative, Xhesamna, made the rounds of Liptako and the other emirates after the harvest to collect his master's annual dues; whether or not he in fact did this every single year is unverifiable. Two men told me the emir always had ten slaves, ten horses, ten cattle, ten sheep, and ten goats for the samna,64 but other

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traditionists left the impression that what Liptako gave was not a fixed amount. The samna got "cattle, donkeys, cloth, and slaves. It was the emir who gave the samna the tribute. Everybody brought what he had to give, and it was all put together for the samna. Every village head in Liptako gave something, a cow or a slave." 6 ' Tradition does not recall that other gifts were sent to Sokoto or Gwandu, but in one of the few pieces of interemirate correspondence to survive the vicissitudes of Liptako's history, Malik b. Muhammad, who ruled Gwandu in the 1870s and 1880s, thanked Seeku Saalu for the gift and the message of condolences that he sent when Malik's predecessor died. 66 Some emirates regularly sent gifts when a new suzerain was turbanned, and perhaps Liptako did the same. Its emirs may also have customarily sent gifts when they came to office; at least this was the practice in other emirates. Just as the caliphate endured even if an emirate like Liptako pursued a relatively independent existence, so did Liptako also endure despite the considerable independ­ ence from centralized control of the many groups that lived within it. It was no "anarchy," the opinions of Barth and Monteil to the contrary. In 1853 Barth perceived Liptako as a land in which "the disorder and anarchy were such as to make it appear as if there were no government at all. There were so many different factions that one paralyzed the other." As for Sori Hamma, who was emir, "his mild disposition and advanced age had left him scarcely any power at all." In consequence, "there being so many factions and no strong government whatever . .., no certain line of policy can be pursued." The situation was bad enough so that travelers could not be sure of their safety. "On the 16th," he reported, "a party of these people [Tuareg], who supplied the market with the article [grain] which all the people were in want of, were plundered of the whole of their property." As Barth left "the turbulent town of Dore, a great many armed people accompanied me, much against my inclination, and their conduct was so

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suspicious that we were obliged to make a halt and send them about their business, for the inhabitants of this place, not long before, had robbed and killed in a similar manner a wealthy sherif, whom they pretended to escort on his way from Sansandi."67 Monteil's opinion of Liptako was no bet­ ter. He too used the word "anarchy" to describe what he saw, and he was "delighted" to leave the country when he could.68 Nonetheless, anarchy, if it ever existed, must have been short-lived. Despite domestic turmoil and repeated atten­ tions from acquisitive and frequently hostile neighbors, Liptako survived for eighty-odd years—something that would never have happened if the state lacked a funda­ mental political order which suited most people who lived there. Even if emirs were not always as "feared and wellobeyed" as perhaps they wished they were,69 and even if Liptako's citizens were jealous of their independence and suspicious of royal intentions, those same citizens rallied to the emir when he had to cope with situations that might have brought about the state's collapse or radically have changed its character. The long history of Seeku Diagourou is a case in point.70 The "shaykh of Diagourou" was the ruler of a community that lay beyond the emirate's frontiers, but he was Liptako-born and Liptako-bred, and so were many of his subjects. As one informant after another insisted, Diagourou was just Liptako. Seeku Diagourou was a cleric and a religious leader of great standing: the title seeku is the Fulfulde equivalent of the English "shaykh" or the Hausa shehu. His reputation for learning and piety, for the power to do miracles, and for the ability to foretell the future began to attract him followers even as a young man. As the years passed, his following grew, and with it the apprehen­ sions of Seeku Saalu, who was then emir. 71 A descendant of one of Seeku Diagourou's followers recounted that the emir's friends said people were giving the cleric so much that they had less than usual to give the emir. "The ruler said that if his share was being diminished, then the shaykh

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should get no more than a sheaf of millet or a goat or a strip of cotton cloth. But then the shaykh told him that worldly goods were not what he wanted. What he wanted was more than that." 72 What the shaykh wanted, I was often told, was a Liptako where Muslim law was more per­ fectly observed. He reportedly was convinced that jihad was the only way this would ever come about, and it was here that he parted company with most of his fellow clerics. One of the most prominent of these was HammaruJibriila of Beybaye. One day he met the shaykh, and "Seeku Diagourou told Hammaru that 'the gown was dirty,' by which he meant that Liptako was an evil place. Hammaru answered: 'If your gown is dirty, do you wash it or tear it up?' Seeku Diagourou replied: 'You wash it.' Hammaru said that Liptako was like that; people were to be brought to religion by 'washing,' not by war." 73 Perhaps pro­ fessional jealousies stimulated the scholars' opposition to the shaykh as much as did differences over tactics to bring about religious change. Some traditionists hinted that the scholars disliked him because he was more learned and popular than they. Other traditionists argued that Seeku Diagourou's motives were less noble, that he was a powerhungry politican who wanted nothing less than to rule Liptako himself. Two French colonial officials of a similar mind called him "ambitious and avid for power." 74 Colo­ nial authors dubbed him and his followers "looters," "vagabonds," and "scoundrels"—judgments that reflected imperial exasperation that Diagourou, unlike Liptako, re­ fused to be intimidated by the French advance and instead put up a vigorous, bloody resistance to the colonial army. Whether Seeku Diagourou actually harbored hopes of ruling Liptako or not, relations between him and the emir became increasingly tense, and finally the shaykh made the classic response of Fulbe in difficulty with an emir: he fled the emirate. He fled to Gourmantche country, and not far from Koala he founded a town of his own, Diagourou. He promised slaves their freedom if they would join him, and many did, as did numerous Ful6e as well. As the town's

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population increased, its potential to challenge Liptako in­ creased too, and Diagourou made increasingly effective raids into the emirate, the most spectacular of which burned Tibilindi to the ground before the raiders were in­ tercepted. 75 Liptako sent raids against Diagourou too, and in one of them Aamadu lisa's brother Abdu lost his life. Finally Aamadu Iisa, acting for the blind emir Seeku Saalu, determined to crush Diagourou once and for all. He prepared a massive campaign with himself at his head, and his call for war brought warriors streaming in from all over the emirate to the expedition's gathering point, while clerics did their best to ensure victory for his efforts with a host of magical preparations. The battle took place in 1876/77 just outside Diagourou itself. The Liptako army routed its opponents, burned Diagourou to the ground, and took many captives, including some of the shaykh's family. The shaykh fled with his remaining followers to Songhay country, where the king of Tera granted him a place to settle. This town also took the name of Diagourou. From then until the French occupation new Diagourou, like the old, acted as a magnet for Liptako's discontented, and the shaykh's warriors continued to raid the old enemy, but apparently with less frequency and less success than they once had. Seeku Diagourou's appeal was considerable, to be sure, but he never gained a following that was large enough so he could stay in Liptako on his own terms or defend his community successfully against full-scale Liptako attack. Most Liptako people rejected him and defended the status quo. If the shaykh simply wanted power and position for himself, as some traditionists asserted, that was hardly a platform conducive to winning an enthusiastic mass follow­ ing. But if he was actually working for a new sort of Liptako that would more closely fit the mold of the ideal Is­ lamic state, popular failure to follow him is also readily comprehensible, for his success would have implied in­ creasing centralization and royal control, both of which

THE STYLE OF POLITICS

161

Liptako people stoutly resisted. Liptako suited most of its citizens very well the way it was. It was worth defending. Not to have the evidence to decide whether Seeku Diagourou was trying to emulate the lives of great Muslim reformers or was just a shrewd but unprincipled aspirant to power is representative of the frustrating roadblocks to knowledge the historian of Liptako runs up against time and again. But even if all the stories of dissidents, succes­ sions, the gathering and crumbling of alliances, the work­ ings of the judicial system, and the like that have been our preoccupation here make shakier evidence than historians would like, tradition has taught us something about what P. D. Curtin would call the "style" of Liptako history, the "limited uniformities of pattern" in this society's nine­ teenth-century political culture. 76 This is less than his­ torians usually want to know about their subjects, but that does not mean that what we can learn is insignificant. Liptako tradition has history to teach.

CONCLUSION Nobody knows all about the past. Everybody knows just a little part of it. If you go around from one per­ son to the next asking for what they know, each will tell you something different. Butjust keep on asking. Sooner or later you will understand what really hap­ pened. Nassuru Limam, Dori, 18 July 1976 What are recollections but fiction, products of a heated imagination? I mean, how can one truly vouch (or the truth of a past sequence of events? Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood ONE MAN who read this book in manuscript considered it an attempt to sabotage the strongest thrust of methodolog­ ical innovation in Africanist history—the reconstruction of the past from oral tradition. The book's lesson, as he saw it, was that oral tradition has little history to teach. This was, he thought, wrong and dangerous. If historians were to take it to heart, the whole field would take a backward step to the old days when only the written word was fit food for thought. This represents a misreading of the book's intent. I hope it is also a misreading of the book's effect. The book's mes­ sage is not that we cannot learn much history from Liptako tradition; it is that we must appreciate limitations in its po­ tential as a historical source. These limitations are deter­ mined by a variety of factors—by the fact, for instance, that Liptako's traditionists choose not to memorize most traditions—but one central factor which must be under­ lined here is that oral tradition has strong roots in the pres­ ent as well as in the past. Tradition is told and remembered because people prize it, because it says things the present thinks important. Not everything from the past is equally valued. Some is forgotten, some remembered. Since Lip-

CONCLUSION

163

tako people think the lives of powerful titleholders inspir­ ing, they are remembered, but lives of the poor and lowly, and of women, are forgotten. Since clerics are intellectually and emotionally committed to Islam, they tend to see the past in its terms, ignoring and forgetting what does not suit it. And so on. The book provides many examples of traditionists' selectivity. That traditionists see the past selectively is no surprise: we all do, historians and nonhistorians, Westerners and non-Westerners alike. Where the situation of historians of Western cultures differs radically from that of the tradi­ tionists is in the character of the sources from which they pick and choose as they elaborate visions of the past. Most sources for Western history are set in writing. They take their readers backward in time. They can show their readers the past as previous generations saw it. And these sources remain fixed, immutable, despite the interpre­ tations that historians draw from them. The two have dis­ crete existences. The Liptako situation is more complex. A traditionist's sources are not documents transmitted across the generations. He cannot see the past through the eyes of earlier observers. His sources are his contemporaries. He picks and chooses from what they say as he works out his ideas about the past. In turn his interpretations become sources for the traditionists who listen to him. Old men die and sources are lost in this process of continual interpreta­ tion and reinterpretation. Tradition grows and changes. Tradition does not merely transmit the past; it creates it. 1 And the historian is hard put to know, without sources ex­ ternal to tradition, just how much reliable record of the past remains in what he hears. To say that it is hard to learn history from oral tradition is not to argue that we cannot learn much history from it. This study does not support the latter conclusion. Indeed the last chapter on politics was meant to show that we can learn a great deal. Even if many details of traditions of par­ ticular events are suspect, and even if the events themselves can be reconstructed in little more than bare outline, the

164

CONCLUSION

historian can reconstruct the style of nineteenth-century political life. Some historians will probably argue that we have actually learned precious little about Liptako's precolonial politics. This judgment would be based on false expectations con­ ditioned by experience in writing the histories of Western societies, and their misguided application to a nonliterate society. Westerners are accustomed to the ready availability of vast quantities of reliable data. Modern technology provides access to ever more detailed information on their world. As historians dig deeper and deeper into the re­ cords of the Western past with increasingly sophisticated methods, more and more is learned about it too. But note that this voracious appetite for data is fed by the develop­ ment of an extraordinary technology of record-keeping—a technology Liptako and other preliterate societies never developed. To assume consciously or unconsciously that oral tradition can furnish data of the same sort and reliabil­ ity as written records is wrong. Confronting worlds like those of Liptako requires not only that historians steep themselves in local geographies, ways, languages, cate­ gories of thought—everyone recognizes this is essential to serious historical and anthropological study—but also that they must come to terms with the limitations of the sources these worlds offer. Clearly the sources vary from one soci­ ety to the next. What one can learn from the traditions of, say, Rwaanda or Polynesian New Zealand is different from what is possible in Liptako. Each body of traditions has its own potentialities together with its inherent limitations, and these must be traced out. In the process, one must not simply assume that "sooner or later you will understand what really happened." Instead one must worry if he can "truly vouch for the truth of a past sequence of events."

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

ι. I have made this old man more anonymous than the sources of historical data usually should be, for fear that the following account of our conversations might cause him and his family embarrassment if any of his fellowcountrymen were to read it or hear about it, and I have done the same elsewhere in the book when particular situa­ tions seemed to demand it. Cases like these are excep­ tional; most of the time I cite the names of my informants in the customary fashion. Almost all the traditionists with whom I worked expected that what they told me would be publicly attributed to them. They knew that my notes and recordings would be accessible to other students of Liptako's past, and they knew I planned to w rite a book. Many of them expressed pleasure at the prospect of their names and tales appearing in print. Only very infrequently did someone ask that I keep his name a secret, and still more infrequently was I told things on condition that they never be repeated at all, under any conditions. I have respected these requests. 2. In 1976 I went out to the old man's village to hear him recite the list of his village-head ancestors for still another time, and this third list differed from both the products of 1971. By 1976 I was ready for differences in a way I was not five years before, and this addition to my huge catalog of contradictory testimony confirmed what by then I tended ruefully to expect. It caused no intellectual shock at all. 3. Amadou Hampate Ba and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar: Le Sage de Bandiagara (Paris, 1957), p. 71 · 4. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1954), pp. 23, 24.

166

NOTES, PAGES xxiii-5

5. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Meth­ odology, trans. Η. M. Wright (London, 1965), p. 1. Recently Vansina has summarized and, in part, amended his views in his "Once Upon a Time: Oral Traditions as History in Africa," Daedalus 100(1971): 442-68. 6. T. O. Beidelman, "Myth, Legend and Oral History: A Kaguru Traditional Text," Anthropos 65 (1970): 75, 95. 7. Jan Vansina, "Traditions of Genesis," JAH 15 (1974): 317, 321. For recent statements on African oral tradition, see Kennell A. Jackson, Jr., "Oral Traditions Past, Oral History Future,"Journal of African Studies 4 (1977): 319-43; Joseph C. Miller, "The Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Af­ rica," in Fonti orali: Antropologia e storia, ed. Bernardo Bernardi, C. Poni, and A. Triulzi (Milano, 1978), pp. 75-101; and Joseph C. Miller, "Listening for the African Past," in his The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and His­ tory (Folkestone, England, forthcoming). 8. Vansina, "Traditions of Genesis," p. 322. CHAPTER 1

1. H.C.E. Bouverot, "Residence de Dori: Monographic," Dori, 21 March 1904, 1 G 306, AS, p. 26. 2. For general sketches of Liptako geography see Lucien Marc, "La Region de Dori," La Geographie 22 (1910): 24751; Paul Delmond, "Esquisse geographique du Gourma central: Le Cercle de Dori (Haute-Volta)," Notes africaines, no. 42 (1949), PP- 57-6O; no. 43 (1949), pp. 86-89; Paul Delmond, "Dans la boucle du Niger: Dori, ville peule," in Melanges ethnologiques, Memoires de l'lnstitut Franpais d'Afrique Noire, no. 23 (Dakar, 1953), pp. 15-19· 3. Calculated from Idrissa Savadogo, "Cercle de Dori: Liste des villages," Dori, 8July 1968, Dori Archives. 4. These estimates for 1969 are drawn from Le Guid'Ouest Africain, 7970-/97/ (Paris, n.d.), pp. 330, 342, 353. The figure for the cercle of Ouagadougou excludes the population of the capital. If that were included, the aver­ age population density for the area would obviously be very much higher.

167

NOTES, PAGES 5-7

5. These averages are calculated from data for 19611972 in Yves Peron and Victoire Zalacain, eds., Atlas de la Haute-Volta (Paris, 1975), p. 14. This twelve-year average for Dori is higher than a fifty-three-year one of 530 mil­ limeters calculated from tabulations of monthly rainfall in the period 1921-1973 that Sharon Nicholson of the Na­ tional Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Col­ orado, generously and graciously agreed to share with me. Her figures were drawn from the records of the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique d'Outre Mer at Paris. They are also the source of the following figures on low and high annual rainfalls. 6. This is the definition of the UNESCO Programme on Man and the Biosphere's Regional Meeting on Integrated Ecological Research and Training Needs in the Sahehan Region: Final Report, MAB Report Series, no. 18 (Paris, 1975), p. 10. The Report further defines the "Sahelian environment" as "an ecosystem characterized by a short rainy season (2-3 months); high variability of rainfall in time and space; pre­ dominantly sandy soils; plant cover of annual grasses with thorny shrubs and trees (Acacias) interspersed at various densities; low and extremely variable production from an area suitable for grazing only; a carrying capacity in ani­ mals (and consequently in humans) which is very low and extremely variable in space and time, leading to the de­ velopment of nomadic societies which represent man's way of adapting to this harsh environment" (p. 18). Most of Liptako's population is settled, not nomadic, but in all other respects these regional characteristics fit Liptako. 7. This table presents a profile of an average year's rainfall broken down by month. The averages are calcu­ lated from Nicholson's figures for a fifty-three-year period. month

January Februaiy March April May June

millimeters

o.g 0.6 1.1 4.4 25.1 63.8

month

July August September October November December

millimeters

138.6 184.4 92.0 17.5 i.a 0.2

168

NOTES, PAGES 8-10

8. Bouverot, "Monographic," p. 12. 9. Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 3 vols. (New York, 1859), 3: 200-201, 204, 208; Parfait Louis Monteil, De Saint-Louis a Tripolipar Ie lac Tchad (Paris, 1895), p. 160; Bouverot, "Monographic," p. 10. 10. Maccucfo Yigo Gela, Dori, 3 July 1976. References to oral testimony will always follow the same pattern as this one: the name of the traditionist, his place of residence, the date of the interview. Resumes of most of the traditions I collected are deposited at CVRS, where tapes of those in­ terviews I recorded are also to be found. Copies of both the resumes and the tapes are also held by the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, Bloomington, In­ diana. At both places this material is available for public consultation. Two accounts by Africans who are more sus­ ceptible to Liptako's beauty than most Europeans are Fily Dabo Sissoko's La Savane rouge (Paris, 1962) and Boubou Hama's L'Aventure extraordinarie de Bi Kado, fils de noir (Paris, 1971), pp. 321-505. Neither man was from Liptako. Both came to Dori in connection with the school the colo­ nial regime established there, the first as a teacher, the sec­ ond as a pupil and later as a teacher. 11. H.C.E. Bouverot, "Residence de Dori: Etat nominatif des villages," Dori, 21 March 1904, 1 G 306, AS. 12. Savadogo, "Liste des villages"; Bouverot, "Etat nom­ inatif des villages." 13. The wall the traditionists remember was built in the mid-1890s during the reign of Emir Bokari Sori, who hoped it would deter the expanding ambitions of the in­ creasingly active Tuareg Iullemmeden raiders then operat­ ing against Liptako from the Oudalan. But this wall must have had at least one predecessor, for in his Travels Barth mentioned "the wall by which it [Dori] had been formerly surrounded being nothing but a disgusting heap of rub­ bish" (3: 201). Boubou Hama has reported a tradition that "immediately after his enthronement, Boura'ima Sai'dou [Braahima Seydu, Liptako's first emir from 1809/10 to

NOTES, PAGES 11-15

169

1816/17] had built a high, thick wall to surround the town of Dori" (Bi Kado, pp. 348, 352). 14. Emile Baillaud, Sur Ies routes du Soudan (Toulouse, 1 Q 02 )' PP- 214-18. In a "Carte economique des pays franpais du Niger" at the end of the book, Baillaud located principal trade routes, indicated the ethnic identities of carriers along them, and estimated the value of trade goods carried over each as well as the value of commercial transactions taking place at major centers. 15. Georges Mathieu Destenave, "L'Occupation et !'or­ ganisation de la boucle du Niger," Renseignements coloniaux, no. g (1898), p. 218. 16. Anthropological studies of different Ful&e groups are legion. Among the better recent works are Marguerite Dupire's Peuls nomades: Etude descriptive des Wodaabe du Sahel Nigerien (Paris, 1962) and her Organisation sociale des peul (Paris, 1970); C. Edward Hopen's The Pastoral Fulbe Family in Guiandu (London, 1958); Paul Riesman's Societe et hberte chez Ies Peul Djelgobe de Haute-Volta (Paris, 1974); and Derrick J. Stenning's Savannah Nomads: A Study of the WodaaBe Pastoral Fulani of Western Bornu Province, Northern Region, Nigeria (London, 1959). Bibliographies in these works provide a guide to further literature, as does also Christiane Seydou's Bibliographie generale du monde peul, Etudes Nigeriennes, no. 43 (Niamey, 1977). 17. In some contexts "Haa&e" is also used to denote Songhay or non-Muslims generally. 18. Stereotypes like these are widespread among Ful&e outside Liptako as well as inside, and they seem to have existed for a very long time. In 1795, for example, the Brit­ ish traveler Mungo Park observed in Bundu, now in Senegal and about 1,400 kilometers from Liptako, that the local Fulbe "evidently consider all the Negro natives as their inferiors; and when talking of different nations, al­ ways rank themselves among the white people" (Travels, ed. Ronald Miller, Everyman's Library, no. 205 [London, i960], p. 44). 19. Bouverot, "Monographic," p. 26.

170

NOTES, PAGES 15-28

20. Non-Fulbe villages at the time of the French occupa­ tion included the Barga6e village of Bargare; the Kurumba village of Diobbou; the Mallebe village of Mallere; and the BellaBe villages of Oulo, Kouri, and Sounkoum. 21. Bouverot, "Monographic," p. 26. 22. Maccucio Yigo Gela, Dori, 17 December 1971. 23. Yo6i Katar was the ancestor of the Fulantamu&e, on whom see Chapter 3. 24. Quoted by J. P. Olivier de Sardan, Quand nos peres etaient captifs . . . : Recits paysans du Niger (Paris, 1976), p. 21. CHAPTER 2

1. Vansina, Oral Tradition, p. 19. The second chapter of the book is entitled "Tradition as a Chain of Testimonies," and Vansina uses the metaphor repeatedly. He has also of­ fered nonmetaphorical definitions, such as, "oral tradition is: oral testimony transmitted verbally, from one generation to the next one or more" ("Once Upon a Time," p. 444). 2. On the SilluBe see Alkadri Jibayru, Katchari, 12 June 1971; and Paul Delmond, "Essai de classification des Peuls du cercle de Dori," in Conferencia internacional dos africanistas ocidentais; 2. a conferencia, Bissau, /947, 5 vols. (Lisbon, 1950-52),5:35. 3. Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, introducing his recital of the Sundiata epic in D. T. Niane's edition of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (London, 1965), p. 1. 4. For an illuminating discussion of Fulfulde-speaking praise singers, see Christiane Seydou's introduction to Tinguidji's Silamaka & Poullbri, Classiques africains, no. 13 (Paris, 1972), pp. 9-64. 5. Alexis Kagame, Bref aperfu sur la Poesie Dynastique du Rwanda (Brussels [1949?]); Alexis Kagame, Introduction aux grands genres lyriques de I'ancien Rwanda (Butare, 1969), pp. 151-244. 6. From a text drawn from the Sahih of al-Bukhari in­ cluded in Arthur Jeffery's A Reader on Islam: Passages from Standard Arabic Writings Illustrative of the Beliefs and Practices

NOTES, PAGES 29-30

171

of Muslims (The Hague, 1962), p. 111. For introductions to the traditions of the Prophet see H.A.R. Gibb, Moham­ medanism: An Historical Survey, 2d ed. (London, 1962), pp. 72-87; and Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed., s.v. "Hadith," by J. Robson. 7. This should not be taken to mean that the people of Liptako compose and memorize no poems or that no his­ tory is to be learned from them. Songs are composed about important persons and events, but those I heard bore mostly on the recent past, not on the comparatively distant past that concerns us here. Three songs bearing on precolonial times have been collected and published by Franpois de Coutouly in his "Les Populations du cercle de Dori (Haute-Volta)," Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de I'A.O.F. (1923), pp. 284-87, and they illustrate how useful this sort of material could be if only more of it were available. Religious poems are also sung in Liptako, but almost none of them were composed there. Most are by the great Muslim revivalist Shehu Usuman dan Fodiyo. They are an important and almost untapped source for Shehu Usuman's vision of the world and for the ideals of the pious people who still sing them, but they say nothing directly about Liptako. Recordings and photocopies of poems I found are housed in the archives of CVRS. There is a large manuscript collection of Shehu Usuman's poems made at Dori early in the colonial period that is now held by the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire in Dakar. On them see Thierno Diallo, et al., Catalogue des manuscrits de 1'I.F.A.N., Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Cata­ logues et documents, no. 20 (Dakar, 1966), pp. 90-91. 8. Imams are chosen for their merit, not their genealogi­ cal credentials, and hence the lists of imams often name one unrelated person after another. But sometimes par­ ticular imams are able to pass their religious skills on to their descendants, and in such cases the office may stay within the family. That is the case of the imams of the Fri­ day mosque at Dori, for example, who have come from two closely linked families of religious specialists. 9. Even though my interviews often attracted groups,

172

NOTES, PAGES 31-33

they were not group interviews of the sort that many collec­ tors of oral tradition have had to conduct in other societies. In such cases a number of traditionists gather to decide on a testimony that represents the group. This, as Vansina points out, "often leads to a situation of compromise among several authors" ("Once Upon a Time," p. 445). Liptako's wise old men doubtless adjust their traditions to suit others' opinions too, but this occurs less obviously than in group interviews. The people I interviewed spoke with­ out consulting others on the general content of testimony, although they sometimes turned to listeners for an elusive name or date. I never saw a listener interrupt a testimony or follow it with a contradictory one. But this does not mean that the group shared a silent consensus as appar­ ently unanimous as ones the traditionists who participate in group interviews hammer out. It may only indicate that the village is keeping up a front of unanimity against the out­ sider. In several instances my departure signaled the sur­ facing of disagreement over a traditionist's testimony, dis­ agreements that I heard about later. It seems probable that many similar cases never reached my ears. 10. For an introduction to Shehu Usuman, who is one of the major figures in nineteenth-century West African his­ tory, see Mervyn Hiskett's The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio (London, 1973). 11. Maccucfo Yigo Gela, Dori, 3 July 1976. Hammadu Braahima of N'Diomga told a similar story (17 August 1976). I also recorded a third variant of this tradition that made a stone and a piece of pith cut from a millet stalk its central symbols (Aamadu Maabo, Dori, 21 July 1976). For more on stories of the jihad, see Chapter 4. 12. The muezzin of the mosque of Cuucfi SilluBe, Katchari, 27 July 1976. 13. Vansina,Oral Tradition, pp. 191-92. 14. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1961), pp. 23, 29. 15. Vansina has come to much the same conclusion about tradition in general. The following passage, one of

NOTES, PAGES 34-37

173

the finest in his Oral Tradition (p. 76), deserves quotation at length: A testimony is no more than a mirage of the reality it describes. The initial informant in an oral tradition gives, either consciously or unconsciously, a distorted account of what has really happened, because he sees only some aspects of it, and places his own interpreta­ tion on what he has seen. His testimony is stamped by his personality, coloured by his private interests, and set within the f ramework of reference provided by the cultural values of the society he belongs to. The initial testimony then undergoes alterations and distortions at the hands of all the other informants in the chain of transmission, down to and including the very last one, all of them being influenced by the same factors as the first: their private interests and the interests of the so­ ciety they belong to, the cultural values of that society, and their own individual personalities. 16. Nduroo' All, Diobbou, 13 December 1971. 17. Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 20 October 1971, 12 July 1976. 18. Nassuru Limam, Dori, 11 July 1971, 13 July 1971; Haamidu Allu, Dori, 17 July 1971. 19. For stimulating thoughts on the way literacy affects intellectual life, see Jack Goody and Ian Watt, "The Conse­ quences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and His­ tory 5 (1962-63): 304-45. 20. In his Bi Kado, pp. 341-42, 344-45, 366-67, 368-71, Boubou Hama in part quotes and in part summarizes some Arabic manuscript histories found in Liptako that I have not seen in their originals. 21. Saka Adegbite Balogun, "Gwandu Emirates in the Nineteenth Century with Special Reference to Political Re­ lations: 1817-1903" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Ibadan, 1971), pp. 479-85. 22. David P. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974), pp. 12, 95-120. See also

174

NOTES, PAGES 38-41

his "Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition: Four Exam­ ples from the Fante Coastlands,"JAH 14 (1973): 223-35, and "Kingship in Elmina before 1869: A Study in 'Feed­ back' and the Traditional Idealization of the Past," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 14 (1975): 499-520. 23. Despite its idealization, the novelist Cheikh Hamidou Kane's portrayal of a West African Qur'anic school conveys its atmosphere far better than social scientists' dry descrip­ tions. Kane's characterization of attitudes toward the Qur'an fits Liptako: "This word was not like other words. It was a word which demanded suffering, it was a word come from God, it was a miracle, it was as God Himself had ut­ tered it. . . . The Word which comes from God, must be spoken exactly as it has pleased Him to fashion it. Whoever defaces it deserves to die" (Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods [New York, 1969], p. 4). 24. In Borno, for example, Ronald Cohen found that H. R. Palmer's work "has had a very strong influence on the older men . . . who are interested in oral traditions. In­ deed, my own copy of Bornu Sahara and Sudan was obtained from a district head's follower in rural Bornu. Others in the capital told me that Palmer was the man to consult if I wanted to know anything about Kanuri history. This means that the oral traditions have been affected by the work of Palmer, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover the exact nature of these distortions" (Cohen, "The Bornu King Lists," in Boston University Papers on Af­ rica, vol. 2: African History, ed. Jeffrey Butler [Boston, 1966], pp. 47-48). 25. Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, "Histoire du royaume du Liptako (des origines a la fin de la periode coloniale)" (Memoire, Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Ouagadou­ gou, 1975), pp. 12-13. 26. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 December 1971. 27. Ibraahiima Bunti to Ibraahiima Hamma Seydu, un­ dated, IC. 28. Barth, Travels, 3: 205.

NOTES, PAGES 43-47

175

CHAPTER 3

1. On Ful6e kinship structures generally, Marguerite Dupire's Organisation sociale des peul is especially important. There is no modern overview of this subject for Liptako. Among the useful older works are Francois de Coutouly, "La famille, Ies fian^ailles et Ie mariage chez Ies Peuls du Liptako (Haute-Volta," Revue d'ethnographic et des traditions populaires ( 1 9 2 3 ) , pp. 2 5 9 - 7 0 ; de Coutouly, "Les Popula­ tions du Cercle de Dori," pp. 2 8 7 - 9 5 ; and R. de Gaalon, "Coutume Peul (Cercle de Dori)," in Coutumiers jundiques de I'A.O.F., 3 vols. (Paris, 1 9 3 9 ) , 3 : 2 3 9 - 6 0 . 2 . Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York, 1 9 7 0 ) , p. 2 9 . 3 . In "Dori, ville peule," Delmond frequently inserts "Bi" (that is, c Bii, "child of") between the person's given name and that of his or her father to indicate filiation. Thus he would write Abdussalaami Usmaan as Abdussalaami Bi Usmaan. This is formally correct, but it deviates from common usage, which Omits 1 Bn and simply understands a filial relationship from the ordering of the names. 4 . Alkadri Jibayru, Katchari, 2 4 June 1 9 7 1 . 5 . On the Kunta: see Barth, Travels , 3 : 6 4 9 . On the Awlad 'Uqba: see H. A. MacMichael 1 A History of the Arabs in the Sudan, 2 vols. (London, 1 9 2 2 ) , 2 : 4 9 , and H. A. MacMichael, The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan (Cam­ bridge, 1912), pp. 1 7 8 - 8 0 . 6 . Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bam Kallo, 12 July 1 9 7 6 . For a sample of published versions of this story see Muhammadu Bello ,Injaq al-maysur, ed. C.E.J. Whitting as Infakul Maisuri (London, 1 9 5 7 ) , pp. 2 0 8 - 9 ; Charles Monteil, "Notice sur l'origine des peuls," Revue Africaine 5 5 ( 1 9 1 1 ) : 2 5 0 - 5 3 ; a n d Dupire, Peuls nomades, pp. 3 2 - 3 3 . 7 . For an amusing commentary on this tradition, which has wide currency among FulBe, see M.D.W. Jeffreys' "Speculative Origins of the Fulani Language," Africa 1 7 ( 1 9 4 7 ) : 4 7 - 5 3 . His assertion that "there may be some sub-

176

NOTES, PAGES 48-50

stratum of truth in the story" is surely intended as tonguein-cheek humor, but his conclusion that this explanation for the development of Fulfulde stands up better than the existing stock of alternative hypotheses is meant seriously. This is a sad and accurate commentary on the flimsiness and intellectual extravagance of the propositions advanced by many early European writers on the language. 8. For sketches of the careers of 'Umar b. al-Khattab, 'Amr b. al-'As, and 'Uqba b. Nah' see the articles that bear their names in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. Data on the men named 'Uqba b. 'Amir and 'Uqba b. Yasir are frag­ mentary and scattered. 9. For an examination of this story in a Western context, see Thomas Virgil Peterson's Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen, N.J., 1978). Bernard Lewis explores Muslim attitudes toward blacks in his fine revisionist work Race and Color in Islam (New York, 1971). 10. For summaries of the literature on Fulbe origins see Louis Tauxier, Moeurs et histoire des peuls (Paris, 1937), pp. 27-115; and Thierno Diallo, "Origine et migration des Peuls avant Ie XIXe siecle," Annales de la Faculte des lettres et sciences humaines (Dakar) 2 (1972): 121-93. For an explana­ tion of Fulbe origins and dispersion from Senegambia across the West African savanna and Sahel that is more reasonable and recent than the arguments discussed in the works above, see Philip D. Curtin's Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, 2 vols. (Madison, Wise., 1975), 1: 19-22. 11. On Bayajidda and the Hausa see W.K.R. Hallam, "The Bayajida Legend in Hausa Folklore," JAH 7 (1966): 47-59; on Sayf b. DhI Yazan in Borno, Abdullahi Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" in History of West Africa, ed. J.F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, 2 vols. (New York, 1972-74), 1: 165-66; on the Songhay, 'Abd alRahman al-Sa'di, Ta'rikh al-Sudan, ed. O. Houdas as Tarikh Es-Soudan (Paris, 1964), text pp. 4-5, translation pp. 6-9. 12. A Bocfaado njaptojo nomad quoted in Dupire, Peuls nomades, pp. 29-30.

NOTES, PAGES 51-62

177

13. Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 12 July 1976. 14. Sa'iidu Hammadun, Dori, 5 July 1976. Traditions of Jaawambe origin recorded outside Liptako seem to show parallel differences. On the one hand traditions collected in Mali by Amadou Hampate Ba trace the ancestry of both Fulbe and Jaawambe to the Near East (Traditions historiques des Peul JaawamSe [Niamey, n.d.], p. 6). On the other hand the various traditions noted by Robert Pageard all "attri­ bute to the Jaawambe socially inferior or shameful origins" ("Note sur Ies Diawambe ou Diokorame," Journal de la Societe des Ajricanistes 29 [1959]: 251). 15. Cf. Andre Prost, La Langue soiiay et ses dialeetes (Dakar, 1956), pp. 355, 535. In Songhay fulan means "Pullo" and tarn, "slave"; in Fulfulde the-5e suffix indicates a plural noun referring to persons. 16. Braahima Abdullaahi, Soffokel, 15 December 1971. 17. Delmond mentions the Fulantamuube briefly in his "Essai de classification des Peuls," p. 34. The "FulanisTamobes" of western Niger whose history Yves Ur\oy de­ scribes are apparently distinct from the Liptako group (Histoire des populations du Soudan central [Colonie du Niger] [Paris, 1936], pp. 73-74). 18. Laura Bohannan, "A Genealogical Charter," Africa 22 (1952): 301-15. ig. Paul Bohannan, "The Migration and Expansion of the Τι\·," Africa 24 (1954): 2, 9-10. 20. On the scale and patterns of pastoral Fulbe move­ ment see especially two fine works by D. J. Stenning: Savan­ nah Nomads, pp. 206-33 and "Trans-humance, MigratoryDrift, Migration: Patterns of Pastoral Fulani Nomadism," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 87 (1957): 57-73. 21. Hamma Rawa, Lerbou, 3 August 1971. 22. Bohannan, "Genealogical Charter," p. 314. 23. A tradition collected at N'Diomga in 1937 asserted the village's founder was "Aldiouma Lira" ("Casier sanitaire des villages, Cercle: Dori. Subdivision: Dori. Can­ ton: Liptako," Dori, 14 June 1937, Archives du dispensaire, Dori). 24. Abdullaahi Hammadu, Beybaye, 18 July 1971.

178

NOTES, PAGES 62-69

25. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 March 1971. 26. Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monu­ ment (New York, 1958), especially pp. 13-29. 27. Despite the historians' stereotype that classifies the French as direct rulers governing without regard for the customs of their subjects, in Liptako, at least, they generally respected precolonial modes of succession. However, at times administrative necessity dictated a different course of action, as it also did elsewhere in French West Africa, where French reliance on the remnants of precolonial political systems was rather greater than one might imag­ ine from some of the literature on the subject. 28. I heard similar explanations for omissions from the lists of the village heads of Wendou and Banga and of the judges at Dori. In all three cases, like the N'Diomga one, I was told about the gaps by traditionists who had no connec­ tion with the lines of officeholders. They had no personal interest in perpetuating the vision of an unbroken line; they could recite the names of "usurpers" without loss of face.

CHAPTER 4

1. Μ. I. Finley, "Myth, Memory, and History," Hutoryand Theory 4 (1965): 285; Yves Person, "Tradition orale et chronologie," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 2 (1962): 463. 2. Bello Kadri, Dori, 10 April 1971. 3. Sa'iidu Hammadun, Dori, 30 August 1976. 4. Naafiya Haamidu, Bouloye, 15 March 1971. 5. D. H. Jones, "Problems of African Chronology," JAH 11 (1970): 161; John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philoso­ phy (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), p. 30. 6. Pathe Alhamdou, Dori, 1 February 1971. 7. However, the traditionists' seize is not precisely the same as the colonizers' seize. To use the terminology to be introduced shortly, the traditionists' seize is 1915/16, that is, the year running from earlyjune igi5to early June 1916. French accounts record that the Tuareg rising was crushed

NOTES, PAGES 69-74

179

by early June 1916. The traditionists' dating of the rising is therefore correct. 8. Maccucfo Yigo Gela, Dori, 11 November 1971, 19 Au­ gust 1976. 9. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 15 December 1971. to. Aamadu Haamidu, Bargare, 11 November 1971. 11. Person, "Tradition orale et chronologie," p. 467. 12. The single variant precolonial chronology was Maccucfo Yigo Gela's (Dori, 10 April 1971), which attributed reigns of seventeen years to Saalu Hamma and twentyseven years to Seeku Saalu. On several other occasions, however, I heard him recite the same regnal lengths as Nassuru Limam and my other informants, thereby suggesting that the variant was nothing more than a slip of the tongue. 13. Nassuru Limam, Qabtlatu Feroo&e, Dori, 1963, IC. 14. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), p.

94· 15. Considerable variation from year to year in the onset of the rains and, thereafter, in their quantity and regularity curses the life of the Liptako farmer. The records of the meteorological station at Dori show that between 1962 and 1971 the first large rains that signal the start of a new year occurred as early as 1 May (in 1963) and as late as 16 July (in 1970). 16. Umaru Bokar, Boureye, 29 October 1971. 17. Destenave, "L'Occupation et !organisation de laboucle du Niger," p. 219. 18. There is an important exception to this method of reckoning age and reigns. This occurs when a child is born or a man gains office during the rains. A child born then is called nduunguujo, and he is said to be one year old at the end of the rainy season of his birth. Similarly, a man who takes office during the rains is said to have ruled a year at the end of the season. If Liptako's traditionists simply added a year every time this occurred, this would radically skew the chronology of a list of officeholders. Instead they subtract a year from the number attributed to the previous

180

NOTES, PAGES 75-79

officeholder, thereby making up for the year credited to his successor. Although this may skew the chronologies of individual reigns, the whole chronology will be fairly accu­ rate. 19. According to the 1932 "Rapport annuel" for the Cercle de Dori, Abdurramaan was dismissed on 3 June 1932. Sandu Faaruuku was not officially appointed until Sep­ tember 1932, but he had been acting emir for some time before that (R. de Gaalon, "Rapport annuel," Dori, 13 Jan­ uary 1933, 47 [22] ARN). Usmaan Bokari Sori died during Dhu al-hijja of 1379 A.H. 20. Hugh Clapperton ,Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa (London, 1829), pp. 329-33. 21. Barth, Travels, 3: 205. 22. Malik b. Muhammad to Seeku Saalu, undated, IC. The date for Malik b. Muhammad's succession and other information on the man are to be found in the following works: Balogun, "Gwandu Emirates," p. 399, n. 1; S. J. Hogben and A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, The Emirates of Northern Nigeria (London, 1966), p. 427; H.A.S. Johnston, The FuIani Empire of Sokoto (London, 1967), p. 271; Olive Temple, Notes on the Tribes, Provinces, Emirates and States of the North­ ern Provinces of Nigeria (London, 1965), p. 556. 23. Monteil reported on his trip in his De Saint-Louis a Tripoli par Ie lac Tchad. Further relevant material is to be found in the French archives, especially at ANOM, where the two dossiers Missions 4 and Afrique III, dossier 13, are particularly important. Henri Labouret describes Monteil's entire career in his authorized, adulatory biography Monteil: Explorateur et soldat (Paris, 1937). 24. Monteil 1 De Saint-Louis a Tripoli, pp. 152-63, 175-78; "Traite entre la France et Ie Liptako," 23 May 1891, Mis­ sions 4, ANOM. 25. G. M. Destenave to Louis Edgard de Trentinian, 18 October 1895, 1 G 211, AS; "Traite entre la France et Ie Chef de Dori et du Liptako," 4 October 1895, 1 G 211, AS. 26. Severin Abbatucci, "Pour servir a I'histoire de la boucle du Niger,"L'Ethnographie, n.s., 35-36 (1938): 10; H.C.E. Bouverot, "Residence de Dori"; Frangois de Coutouly,

NOTES, PAGES 79-83

181

"Une ville soudanaise de la Haute-Volta: Dori," Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et SuenUfiques de I'A.O.F. (1926), p. 488. 27. Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," p. 36. 28. Henige, Chronology of Oral Tradition, p. 28. 29. A word about one piece of contemporary evidence I consider unreliable: information gathered by E. Caron at Bandiagara in 1887 that "Alpha Moussa" ruled Liptako (De Saint-Louis au port de Tombouktou, 3d ed. [Paris, 1892], p. 209). Nowhere in the traditions I have seen is there any reference to an emir or a member of the emirs' lineage who bore this name. Alfaa is a title given to a cleric of consider­ able learning, and perhaps this Alfaa Muusa is Muusa Hammadu Aliiyu, the imam of the Friday mosque at Dori from 1863/64 to 1910/11 whom traditionists remember as Limam Mawcfo, "the Great Imam." 30. D. M. Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (London, 1967), pp. 23-60. This argument proceeds on the assumption that present-day traditions of thejihad and the emirate's found­ ing are substantially true—an assumption to be examined in Chapter 5. 31. This is "Les rois du Liptako" by Malam Guidado, which Boubou Hama summarizes and quotes at length in hisHistoire des Songhay (Paris, 1968), pp. 193-97; his Ccmtribution a la connaissance de I'histoire des Peul (Paris, 1968), pp. 306-10; and in his β; Kado, pp. InBi Kado (pp. 344-47, 368-71) Boubou Hama also quotes from a second Arabic history to which he assigns neither author, title, nor date, and perhaps from other manuscripts as well. Until their originals are printed with complete and careful trans­ lations as well as thorough studies of their authorship, it is difficult to assess their worth. They also cite the date of 1809. 32. Maurice Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger (Soudan FranQais), 3 vols. (Paris, 1912), 2: 366-68. I have been unable to locate the Arabic manuscript from which Delafosse worked. I can find no other reference to a Hamma-Taoua in the traditions. The date here attributed to the end of his reign, 1803, deviates from the caliphate's chronology, for

182

NOTES, PAGES 83-85

by then Shehu Usuman's jihad had not yet begun. Thus Liptako could not then have been "incorporated in the Sokoto empire." 33. Although "Pour servir a I'histoire de la boucle du Niger" was published in 1938, it was almost identical to the author's "Contribution a I'histoire des Kouroume'i ou Sonrai, des Foulbe du Liptako et du Yagha, des Touareg de l'Oudala et du Logomata," 10 September 1897, 1 G 228, AS, which he composed just after the French occupation. 34. De Coutouly supplies regnal lengths for the emirs (pp. 488-89). The dates in the table are calculated from 1810, the year he cites for the jihad. He writes the third emir's name as "Dori Saliou," which I take to be Sori Hamma. "Dori" is probably a misprint for Sori. Further­ more, Dori was the "brother" of Saalu Hamma, reported de Coutouly, so Dori's father must have been Hamma too, not Saliou. 35. Delmond's "Dori, ville peule" appeared first as a thesis presented in 1947 for a diploma from CHEAM (Memoire 1282). 36. For an example that deserves to become classic, see Philip Curtin's analysis of the figures for the Atlantic slave trade, figures built on "an impressive tower of authority" that conveyed the impression of a "vast consensus [that] turns out to be nothing but a vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstan­ tial guesswork" (The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census [Madi­ son, Wise., 1969], pp. 3-13). 37. For Alhadri Jika: H.H.A. de Coma, "Rapport politique. Mois de juin 1898," Dori, 1898, 15 G 185, AS, p. 3; Bouverot, "Residence de Dori. Etat nominatif des vil­ lages. . . ," Dori, 21 March 1904, 1 G 306, AS. For Umaru Alhaaji: Gamier, "Rapport de tournee," Dori, 25 October 1933, 47 (19), ARN; "Casier sanitaire des villages," Dori, 2 1 May 1936. 38. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 23 March 1971, 7 May 1971, 19 October 1971; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 March 1971, 3 June 1971, 2 December 1971. When Iwas

NOTES, PAGES 85-92

183

in Liptako in 1976, the administration had not yet ap­ pointed a successor to Atiku, who died in 1975. 39. For instance, Georges Cheron, "Contribution a I'his­ toire du Mossi: Traditions relatives au cercle de Kaya.," Bul­ letin du Comite d'Etudes Histonques et Scientifiques de I'A.O.F. (1924), pp. 658-59; M. Larve, "Notes sur la formation et I'histoire des etats songhays du nord Dendi" (Memoire 1982, CHEAM, 1952), pp. 21, 25; Bongat, "Les Touareg de l'Oudalan" (Memoire 2664, CHEAM, 1957), pp. 15-17; P. Davy, "Histoire du pays gourmantche" (Memoire 1964, CHEAM, 1952), pp. 70-73. 40. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 March 1971; Boubou Hama, Histoire des Songhay, p. 314; Boubou Hama,Enquete sur les fondements et la genese de I'unite afncaine (Paris, 1966), pp. 251, 254; Larve, "Etats songhay du nord Dendi," p. 21. 41. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 March 1971; Yves Urvoy, Populations du Soudan central, p. 8g. 42. Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye, 19 May 1971. Urvoy says Helo (or "Kelaw" or "El-Eou," as he writes the name) ruled toward the middle of the century. His succes­ sor took office about 1885 (Populations du Soudan central, p. 89). Also see Paul Marty and Mangeot, "Les Touareg de la boucle du Niger," Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de I'A.O.F. (1918), pp. 283-87. 43. Jones, "Problems of African Chronology," p. 161. 44. Philip Shea, personal communication, 1972. 45. Michael G. Smith, "Field Histories among the Hausa,"JAH 2 (1961): 93. 46. The list is presented in Felix Brigaud's Histoire traditionnelle du Senegal (Saint Louis du Senegal, 1962), pp. 161-62 and analyzed in Jean Boulegue's "Contribution a la chronologie du royaume du Saloum," Bulletin de I'Institut Fondamental de ΓAfnque Noire, ser. B, 28 (1966): 657-62. CHAPTER 5

1. Nduroo' Ali, Diobbou, 1 January 1972. 2. Alphonse Chantoux, an authority on the Gour-

184

NOTES, PAGES 93-94

mantche, also thinks "Liptako" comes from their language, where it "means 'hippopotamus bush' (from libo-libi: hip­ popotamus, and from tugu: bush)" ("Aux origines du Lip­ tako," Ti dogu [Fada N'Gourma] 21 [1964]: 9-10). For other traditions and opinions on the name, see Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," p. 25; and Hama,BiKado, pp. 339-40, 345- 369· 3. Maamuudu Braahima, Dori, 8 January 1971. 4. People have more to tell about the Kurumba than the others. See Nduroo' Ali, Diobbou, 1 January 1972; and Bouverot, "Residence de Dori," pp. 3-4. 5. Only one authority disagreed. That was H.H.A. de Coma, who asserted Kurumba ruled Liptako before the Ful6e ("L'Islamisme dans la residence de Dori," Dori, 31 July 1899, 15 G 186, AS). He was surely mistaken. 6. See, for instance, the map in Peron and Zalacain,Atlas de la Haute-Volta, pp. 28-29. On the Gourmantche gener­ ally, see Maubert and Henri Menjaud, "Documents ethnographiques sur Ie Gourma," Journal de la Societe des Africamstes 2 (1932): 35 -47; Alphonse Chantoux, Histoire du pays Gourma: Traditions orales (Fada N'Gourma, n.d.); Georges Yenouyaba Madiega, "Rapports entre !'adminis­ tration coloniale franpaise et Ies autorites traditionnelles du cercle de Fada N'Gourma (Haute-Volta), 1895-1932" (Memoire de maitrise, Universite de Paris VII, 1973-1974); and the sources cited there. 7. The dissertations in progress by William Eaton of the University of California at Los Angeles and by Georges Madiega of the University of Paris promise to help fill this important gap in historical studies of West Africa. 8. P. Davy, "Histoire du pays gourmantche," pp. 70-75. He lists nine Gourmantche kings of Liptako, the last two of which bear the same name, Yentiabri. I suspect Davy has simply listed the same name twice, thereby making eight kings into nine. Fieldwork at Koala itself ought to produce evidence to show whether this is so or not. Davy also dates the Liptakojihad to 1801, on what evidence he does not say.

NOTES, PAGES 96-97

185

g. Nassuru Limam's list of the Gourmantthe kings and the dates of their reigns proved to be a transliteration of Delmond's list rather than independent evidence (Guriimankdbe, Dori, 1971, IC). Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou's "Histoire du royaume du Liptako" also reproduces the bulk of Delmond's list (p. 5). (One name, the last, is omit­ ted, but perhaps this is a copying error.) Delmond's dates are included, but without the question marks with which he indicated his uncertainty about two of the earliest ones. Delmond's "1712?" thus became a flat "1712" in Dicko's version, thereby lending the chronology an air of indispu­ tability its original author did not intend for it. Perhaps Dicko's and Nassuru Limam's works will prove to be ave­ nues for feeding Delmond's list and chronology back into oral tradition. 10. Hamma Abdurramaan, Selbo, 1 June 1971; Hamma Rawa, Lerbou, 3 August 1971; Iisa Hanafi, Wendou, 24 March, 1971; Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 8 July 1971; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 March 1971; Aamadu Umaru, Torodi, 9 July 1971; Bello Kadri, Dori, 10 April 1971; NassuruLimam,TarJkhmulk Feroo6e, Dori, 1971, IC. Two identical lists of twelve villages, all of which appear among the names in the lists above, are in Boubou Hama's Bi Kado, pp. 347, 370. Delmond mentions sixteen villages, some of them surely founded after the jihad ("Dori, ville peule," pp. 28-29). 11. These include Selbo, Wendou, Torodi, Kampiti, Ouro Torobe, Lerbou, N'Diomga, Dani, Diobbou 1 Koria, Boudounguel, Bouloye, Banga, and Mamassiol, and perhaps also Dori, Debere Talata, Petekole, and Bilesaba. 12. In 1904, not long after the French conquest, the av­ erage size of a Liptako village was 696 persons—a figure calculated from population data in Bouverot's "Etat nominatif des villages." Ifthis average held for villages that existed at the time of the jihad, Liptako's FulBe popula­ tion then would have been at least 9,700. But note the problematic assumptions on which this calculation is based—we cannot be sure Bouverot's 1904 census was

186

NOTES, PAGES 97-100

adequate or that early nineteenth-century villages were of the same average size as early twentieth-century ones—so take this figure with a grain of salt. There is no substitute for a good census. 13. Sa'iidu Abdullaahi, Lerbou, 19 August 1976. 14. Haamiidu Hammadu Sinder, Petekole, 9 June 1971. This story also appears in a very slightly different version in the man's Tarikh Petekole, Petekole, 1971, IC. 15. Hamma Aamadu, Kampiti, 20 March 1971, 16 June !97116. Hamma Rawa, Lerbou, 11 August 1971; and Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye, 27 September 1971. Delmond reported the same ("Dori, ville peule," pp. 31, 40). The three differ, however, on when the move from Bilesaba to Dori took place, Delmond dating it to Saalu Hamma's reign, Hamma Rawa to Sori Hamma's, and Maamuudu Sewooma to Seeku Saalu's. The third dating is clearly mistaken, for Barth found Seeku Saalu's predeces­ sor, Sori Hamma, ruling at Dori when he passed through. 17. Iisa Hanafi, Wendou, 24 March 1971, 26 March 1971, 8 July 1976. 18. Mahmud Ka'ti, Ta'rikh al-fittash, trans, and ed. O. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse as Tarikh-el-Fettach (Paris, 1964), text p. 44, translation pp. 83-84; H. R. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs, 3 vols. (London, 1928), 3: 111; H. R. Palmer, The Bornu Sahara and Sudan (London, 1936), pp. 36-37. 19. FerooBe comes from the verbfera, "to flee" or "to mi­ grate." Feroo&e now use the patronymic Dikko, which they usually spell Dicko. It was apparently never used in precolonial times and only became current after its adoption by Emir Abdurramaan (1918/19-1931/32). 20. Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," pp. 26-27. 21. Aamadu Maabo, Dori, 21 July 1976. 22. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1952), p. 61. Ken­ neth B. Murdock has well summed up the Puritan notion of "providences" in his "William Hubbard and the

NOTES, PAGLS 100-102

187

Providential Interpretation of History," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 52 (1942): 17-24. Many thanks to Alasdair Macphail of Stanford University for this refer­ ence. 23. Unsigned editorial in the New York Morning News, 27 December 1845, quoted in Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (Baltimore, 1935), p. 145. See Ernest Lee Tuveson's Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968) for an interpretation of this theme in American history. 24. Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," p. 11. 25. For a recorded example of these stories, see Aamadu Maabo, Dori, 21 July 1976. 26. The exchange between Hubert Deschamps and Michael Crowder is still a good introduction to the general subject (Deschamps, "Et Maintenant, Lord LugardT' Africa 33 [1963]: 293-305; and Crowder, "Indirect Rule—French and British Style," Africa 34 [1964]: 197-205). 27. Aamadu Maabo, Dori, 21 July 1976; Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, "Histoire du royaume du Liptako," p. 8; Dicko Welende Belladjo, quoted in Amadou Bokoum, "Textes de tradition orale peule du Liptako," n.p., n.d. (1968 or 1969), pp. 13-15, CVRS archives. Aamadu Maabo, who is the head of Liptako's praise singers, is closely associated with the court. The second and third are both FerooBe, and Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou was emir for a time. There is another, similar account attributed to Dicko Welende Belladjo in Hama's Bi Kado, pp. 343-44· His accounts are unspecified mixtures of data from oral tradition and a manuscript that belonged to a former imam of Dori's Friday mosque. This manuscript, the original of which I have not seen, is apparently that from which Hama quotes at length later in Bi Kado, pp. 368-70. The name of its author is not given. That it was owned by an imam does not imply that it was written by him or one of his ancestors or that it represents the family's opinion. Neither the pres­ ent imam, Nassuru Limam, nor his predecessor, Muusa Hammadu Aliiyu, both of whom I knew well, told me that

188

NOTES, PAGES 102-103

Birmaari Saala Paate had trailed a bull from Masina to Liptako. 28. Stenning, Savannah Nomads, pp. 222-24. 29. Almost nothing has been published on the history of Yaga. For brief accounts of the origins of the Yaga Tooroobe see Hama, Histoire des Peul, p. 312. 30. On the early history of Wendou, see particularly Alkadri Jibayru, Katchari, 15 June 1971; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 3 June 1971; and Iisa Hanafi, 18 March 1971. Recent assertions that Birmaari Saala Paate became village head of Wendou can all be traced to Feroo6e: Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, "Histoire du royaume du Liptako," p. 9, who is here, as on so many subjects, simply elaborating on Delmond, and Dicko Welende Belladjo as quoted in Bokoum, "Textes de tradition orale peule," pp. 15-17, and in Hama, Bi Kado, p. 344. On this question Dicko Welende Belladjo is clearly deviating from the imam's manuscript, which elsewhere he frequently follows nearly word for word. The manuscript states that "in 1709, seeing that he could no longer get on with the Ferobe, Nene Abdou Sai'dou [the Tooroodo village head of Wendou] asked the Gourmantche chief of Koala to remove the Ferobe from Wendou. In this way the Ferobe were kept away from the Torobe. Dori, which means 'island' in Gourmantche, was founded by Birmari Sala Pathe and his Ferobe companions in 1709" (Hama, Si Kado, p. 368). Aamadu Maabo, who is another of the sources for the story of the bull-led Feroobe, did not remember any Feroo6e-ToorooBe differ­ ences at all. According to him, the groups got along well together until the jihad (Dori, 21 July 1976). 31. For example, Maamuudu Sewooma, the Pereejo vil­ lage head of Peoukoye, explained that "the Tooroo6e were the first Ful&e to arrive here in Liptako, and they feel that they, as the first arrivals, ought to rule. But it was not the Tooroo6e who went to Sokoto to get the flag and returned to make the jihad. It was the Feroo&e. The Tooroo&e had always simply obeyed the Gourmantche and given them

N O T E S , P A G E S 104-109

189

what they wanted. T h e y did not resist. We changed all that, and that is why we rule" (4 Dec ember 1 9 7 1 ) . 32. On the pre-jihad Feroo&e leaders, see Hama, Bi Kado, pp. 329, 344-45; Abbatucci, " L a Boucle du Niger," p. 8; Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," pp. 28, 39; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 30 May 1 9 7 1 , 3 June 1 9 7 1 , 2 December 1 9 7 1 ; N o u h a in Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger, 2: 3 6 7 ; A a m a d u Maabo, Dori, 21 J u l y 1976; M a a m u u d u Sewooma, Peoukoye, 27 September 1 9 7 1 ; Nassuru Limam, Ta'rikh mulk Ferroobe, p. 1; H a m m a d u Braahima, N'Diomga, 17 August 1 9 7 6 ; A b d u r r a m a a n i Maabo, Katchirga, 23 March 33. Sa'iidu Abdullaahi, Lerbou, 19 August 1976. 34. Maccucfo Y i g o Gela, Dori, 3 J u l y 1976. 35. H a m m a d u Braahima, N'Diomga, 1 7 August 1976. 36. For a sample of j i h a d traditions, see A a m a d u Maabo, Dori, 21 J u l y 1 9 7 6 ; A b d u r r a m a a n i Maabo, Katchirga, 12 August 1 9 7 1 ; Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 20 October 1 9 7 1 , 27 December 1 9 7 1 ; Alkadri J i b a y r u , 1 5 J u l y 1976; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 1 6 March 1 9 7 1 , 2 December 1 9 7 1 , 1 5 December 1 9 7 1 ; Bello Kadri, Dori, 10 April 1 9 7 1 ; Garba H a m m a , Katchirga, 27 August 1 9 7 1 ; Hama Alou, Dori, 8 August 1976; H a m m a A b d u r r a m a a n , Selbo, 1 J u n e 1 9 7 1 ; H a m m a A a m a d u , Kampiti, 20 Marc h 1 9 7 1 ; H a m m a Rawa, Lerbou, 3 August 1 9 7 1 ; H a m m a d u Braahima, N'Diomga, 1 7 August 1 9 7 6 ; Maccucfo Y i g o Gela, Dori, 1 0 April 1 9 7 1 , 3 j u l y 1976; Sa'iidu H a m m a d u , Dori, 25 J a n u ary 1 9 7 2 ; M a a m u u d u Sewooma, Peoukoye, 26 December 1

97 1

37. On the West A f r i c a n jihads, see particularly the summary articles by Philip D. Curtin, " J i h a d in West A f rica: Early Phases and Inter-relations in Mauritania and S e n e g a l , " / A / / 1 2 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 1 1 - 2 4 ; by D. M. Last, " R e f o r m in West A f r i c a : T l i e J i h a d Movements in the Nineteenth Century," in Ajayi and C r o w d e r , History of West Africa (New Y o r k , 1974), 2: 1-29; and by Mervyn Hiskett, " T h e Nineteenth-Century J i h a d s in Wrest A f r i c a , " in The Cam-

190

NOTES, PAGES 109-115

bridge History of Africa, vol. 4: From c. 1 J 9 0 to c. I 8 J O , ed. John E. Flint (Cambridge, England, 1976), pp. 125-69. 38. For a brief discussion of the doctrine see Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed., s.v. "Djihad" by E. Tyan. 39. Usuman cfan Fodiyo, Kitab al-farq, ed. and trans. Mervyn Hiskett as ii Kitab al-farq\ A Work on the Habe Kingdoms Attributed to 'Uthman dan Fodio ,"Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 23 (ig6o): 567, 569-70. 40. Usuman cfan Fodiyo, Wathiqat ahl al-sudan, ed. and trans. A.D.H. Bivar as "The Wathiqat ahl al-sudan: A Man­ ifesto of the Fulani Jihad," JAH 2 (1961): 239-40. For dis­ cussion of the concept of jihad in the West African context see Muhammad Al-Hajj, "The Fulani Concept of Jihad," Odu 1 (1964): 45-58; and John Ralph Willis, ''Jihad fi sabil Allah—Its Doctrinal Basis in Islam and Some Aspects of its Evolution in Nineteenth-Century West Africa," JAH 8 (1967): 395-415· 41. Hammadou Bassoro, Khabaru ard Gharwa wa ta'rikhihi (Garoua, 1964), ed. and trans. E. Mohamadou as "Un manscrit peul sur l'histoire de Garoua," Abbia 8 (1965): 65-66. 42. Aamadu More, Bani Mango, 20 December 1971. 43. The nature of Ful6e-non-Ful6e relations is a fre­ quent theme in works on the Ful&e. For two recent exam­ ples, see Souleyman Diarra's "Les problemes de contact entre les pasteurs peul et les agriculteurs dans Ie Niger cen­ tral," in Pastorahsm in Tropical Africa, ed. Theodore Monod (London, 1975), pp. 284-97; and Michael M. Horowitz's "Herdsman and Husbandman in Niger: Values and Strat­ egies," in Pastoralism in Tropical Africa, pp. 387-405. Other essays in the book are illuminating on the general problem of pastoralist-agriculturist relations. 44. Mahmud Ka'ti, Ta'rikh al-fittash, text p. 44, translation pp. 83-84. 45. Abbatucci, "La Boucle du Niger," pp. 4, 8-9. 46. De Coma, "L'Islamisme dans la residence de Dori," pp. 3-4. 47. Bouverot, "Residence de Dori," pp. 4-5.

NOTES, PAGES 115-120

191

48. Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," pp. 29-30. 49. Boubou Hama has published translations of Malam Guidado's history oi Liptako, which apparently is in two manuscripts, in his Histoire des Songhay (pp. 193-97), ^' s Histoire des Peul (pp. 306-10), and in his Bi Kado (pp. 32731, 336-39). I have not seen the Arabic originals, which presumably are in Hama's collection at Niamey. 50. We know this because he was alive to describe events in the reign of Seeku Saalu, who became emir in 1860/61. Thus Malam Guidado could not ha\e been Gidado dan Laima, who was a prolific writer and the vizier hrst to Muhammadu Bello and then to Abubakar Atiku, for he died in 1851. On him see Lzst t Sokoto Caliphate, pp. 149-57· 51. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 3 June 1971, 15 December 1 97 1 ·

52. There is a photograph of this flag in Boubou Hama's Bi Kado between pages 312-13. 53. Abdullahi Smith, personal communication, 25 November 1976. Last describes Sokoto flags in his Sokoto Caliphate, p. 53, n. 39. 54. Hama Alou, Dori, 8 August 1976. 55. Nassuru Limam, Dori, 3 July 1976. 56. Some traditionists asserted that Shehu Usuman gave the jihadists other items in addition to or instead of the flag. These included a stone, an egg, a piece of pith cut from a millet stalk, and a lance. 57. Dicko Welinde Belladio ga\e answers to some of these questions in a tradition he told to Boubou Hama (Bi Kado, p. 348). The traditionists I knew could not be as pre­ cise. 58. Bayel, Bilesaba, and Dori were all mentioned. Some who said that Braahima Seydu was a \illage head added that they did not know what \ illage he ruled. This is consis­ tent with the differences of opinion on the place or places of settlement of the entire Feroo&e line in the pre-jihad period, on which see above. 59. Aamadu Maabo, Dori, 21 July 1976. Other stories portraying Braahima Seydu's accession to power as the re-

192

NOTES, PAGES 122-127

suit of drawing lots were told by Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 27 December 1971; Hama Alou, Dori, 8 Au­ gust 1976; and an anonymous source quoted in Hama, Bi Kado, pp. 370-71. 60. HammaAamadu, Kampiti, 20 March 1971. 61. Garba Hamma, Katchirga, 27 August 1971. 62. Information on Djelgodji history is hard to come by. Considerable data are summarized with references to the available literature in Michel Izard, Introduction a I'histoire des royaumes mossi, Recherches voltaiques, nos. 12-13, 2 vols. (Paris, 1970), 2: 328, 332-44. 63. Michael Garfield Smith, "The Jihad of Shehu Dan Fodio: Some Problems," in Islam in Tropical Africa, ed. I. M. Lewis (London, 1966), p. 418. 64. 'Abdullah b. Muhammad, Tazyin al-waraqat, ed. and trans. Mervyn Hiskett (Ibadan, 1963), pp. 120-22. 65. The range of interpretations is laid out in the follow­ ing recent essays: Abdullahi [H.F.C.] Smith, "A Neglected Theme of West African History: The Islamic Revolutions of the 19th Century," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2 (1961): 169-85; Marilyn Robinson Waldman, "The FulaniJihad'. A Reassessment," JAH 6 (1965): 333-55; Marilyn Robinson Waldman, "A Note on the Ethnic Inter­ pretation of the Fulani Jihad," Africa 26 (1966): 286-91; Michael G. Smith, "The Jihad of Shehu Dan Fodio"; Peter Waterman, "The Jihad in Hausaland as an Episode in Af­ rican History: Some Concepts, Theories and Hypotheses," Kroniek van Afrika 2 (1975): 141-52; and Martin R. Doornbus, "The Shehu and the Mullah: The Jihads of Usuman dan Fodio and Muhammad Abd-Allah Hassan in Comparative Perspective," Geneve-Afrique 14 (1975): 7-31. 66. Ahmadu Bello, My Life (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 10-11. 67. This story was told by Hashimu, son of Abdu; col­ lected by J. C.John, a "native minister" at Lokoja; and pub­ lished in its Hausa original by James Frederick Schon, the missionary and pioneer of Hausa studies, in his Magana Hausa (London, 1885), pp. 260-61. Schon recorded noth-

NOTES, PAGES 128-134

193

ing about the date and circumstances of the collecting. He published an English translation in his African Proverbs, Tales and Historical Fragments (London, 1886), pp. 180-81. However, the translation here is not his but my own, cor­ rected by Steven Baier of Boston University. 68. Umaru Aijo, Ouro Torobe, 6 June 1971. 69. On Ouro Longa: Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 8 July 1971; Alkadri Jibaayru, Katchari, 27 July 1976; and Usmaan Haamidu, Ouro Longa, 30 October 1971. On N'Diomga: Bello Kadri, Dori, 20 May 1971; Hamma Tongooga, N'Diomga, 14 June 1971; Hamma Abdurramaan, Selbo, 1 June 1971; and Maccucio Yigo Gela, Dori, 3 July !97670. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 30 May 1971. 71. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 12 August 1971. Bello Beldal told a somewhat similar story of a split in the Gourmantche ranks (Dori, 24 December 1971). 72. Wiidi Belko, Tobidioga, 31 October 1971. Nafiya Haamidu and an anonymous Bouloye elder disagreed on whether a Gourmantche family actually stayed on there after the jihad or not (Bouloye, 15 March 1971, 22 Sep­ tember 1971). 73. Abbatucci, "La Boucle du Niger," p. 8. 74. Bouverot, "Residence de Dori," p. 5. 75. Monteil 1 De Saint-Louis a Tripoli, pp. 244-45. 76. Waldman's "A Note on the Ethnic Interpretation of the Fulani Jihad" takes up this same issue in the context of Sokoto history. 77. Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt (New York, 1969), p. 241.

CHAPTER 6 1. This is not always recognized in English-language his­ tories of the caliphate, which tend to be northern-Nigeriaoriented and so to neglect the western emirates that fell within the French colonial sphere and eventually became parts of Upper Volta and Niger. Johnston's map of "The

194

NOTES, PAGE 134

Fulani Empires of Sokoto and Gwandu at Their Greatest Extent" includes Liptako, but the state is not mentioned in the text (Fulani Empire of Sokoto, opposite p. 97). R. A. Adeleye listed Liptako as an area that was "never firmly held," a dubious assertion, and his map of the caliphate lo­ cates its westernmost boundary just beyond Say, thereby excluding Liptako (Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804-1()06: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies [London, 1971], pp. 66-67). A work as recent as Joseph P. Smaldone's Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate: Historical and Sociolog­ ical Perspectives (Cambridge, England, 1977), p. 55, has reinforced this view of nineteenth-century West African political geography, but other scholars are now beginning to give the west its due. See, for example, Balogun, "Gwandu Emirates"; C. C. Stewart, "Frontier Disputes and Problems of Legitimation: Sokoto-Masina Relations 18171837,"JAH 17 (1976): 497-514; and Paul Lovejoy, "Planta­ tions in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate," JAH 19 (1978): 345. 2. Usuman dan Fodiyo, Wathiqat ahl al-sudan, pp. 239-40. For a brief, general discussion of Muslim thinking about the caliphate, see Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed., s.v. "Khalifa" by T. W. Arnold. 3. Usuman dan Fodiyo, Wathiqat ahl al-sudan, pp. 239-40. According to Malam Guidado, Liptako's heads of state called themselves "emir al-moumina" after 1810 (Hama, Histoire des Songhay, p. 193). Awir al mu'minin, "Commander of the Faithful," was one of the titles of the caliph, and its assumption by one of his subordinates would have been improper. None of my oral sources confirmed that the emirs used the title, and, of the other written sources, only Delmond hints that the emirs may have borne it ("Dori, ville peule," p. 69). 4. On the division of administrative responsibilities, see Last, Sokoto Caliphate, pp. 40-45; Balogun, "Gwandu Emir­ ates," pp. 316-21. 5. Usuman cfan Fodiyo, Wathiqat ahl al-sudan, pp. 239-40.

NOTES, PACKS 135-137

195

6. On both the judges and the imams, see my "Chronique du Liptako precolonial," Notes et documents voltaiques (Ouagadougou) 9 (1975-76): 38-40, n. 23, and the sources listed there. 7. Last, Sokoto Caliphate, pp. 46-57, 90-102, 145-49. Sa'ad Abubakar has discussed variants in emirate organization in his "The Emirate-type of Government in the Sokoto Caliphate," Journal oj the Historical Society of Nigeria 7 (1974): 219-20. 8. Izard, Histoire des royaumes mossi, 2: 422. Dominique Zahan defined the soghondamba of Yatenga as "pages with access to the inner palace" ("The Mossi Kingdoms," in West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century, ed. D. Forde and P. M. Kaberry [London, 1967], p. 170). In Liptako asogone might also be called a batta, but this was less commonly used than the former. 9. For a detailed description of another emirate's more elaborate bureaucracy, see M. G. Smith's fine study of GovernmentinZazzau (London, i960), pp. 73-136. 10. Jooro is a contraction of jom wuro, "master of the community." For a fine discussion of the concept of wuro in the thinking of the Ful6e of the neighboring Djelgodji, see Riesman, Societe et liberie, pp. 39-41. 11. On villages at the time of the emirate's founding, see Chapter 5 above. On villages at mid-century, see my "An Emirate of the Niger Bend: A Political History of Liptako in the Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1973), p. 146, n. 13. For a list of villages in 1904, seven years after the French occupation, see Bouverot, "Etat nominatif des villages." 12. The information that follows on Beybaye, Diouga, and Kirga comes from traditions told by Abdullaahi Hammadu, Beybaye, 18 July 1971, 1 August 1971; and Haamidu Sa'iidu, Beybaye, 8 July 1976. 13. Welinde Belladio, quoted in Hama,Bi Kado, p. 377. 14. Apparently not all Ful6e migrants were as amenable to emirs' suggestions as these JaawamBe. For example,

196

NOTES, PAGES 138-141

when Braahima Seydu suggested that a group of Pissilaa&e settle at Mamassiol, they refused and went to Fetombaga instead (Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 20 October 197l) · 15. This was an unexceptional situation. Sometimes nonrelated groups might settle closely together—in a vil­ lage, from a European point of view—without establishing common leadership for the territory as a whole. To cite the Beybaye case once again, Ngesa Gaani regularly farmed at M'Bamga, about twelve kilometers south of Beybaye, and from the start of the rains until the harvest he and other Beybaye people lived at a quarter that came to be called Wuro Ngesa. A nearby area of M'Bamga was settled by people from Lerbou; that was called Wuro Lerbuu6e. The residents of both quarters looked to their home villages for leadership (Abdullaahi Hammadu, Beybaye, 10 July 1971, 22 August 1971). M'Bamga, I was told, had no Jooro of its own until after the French occupation, although one M'Bamga traditionist disputed this (Sambo Alanoma, M'Bamga, 25 September 1971). 16. Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Ox­ ford, 1964), p. 1. 17. Usuman dan Fodiyo, Wathiqat ahl al-sudan, pp. 23940. 18. Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, "Histoire du royaume du Liptako," pp. 13, 22. 19. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 19 October 1971; Hindatu Alhadri Jika, Katchirga, 19 October 1971. Other traditions of this succession dispute were told by Abdul­ laahi Hammadu, Beybaye, 28 November 1971; and Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 2 December 1971. Although neither the Logomaten Tuareg nor the Oudalan Tuareg who lived to the north of the emirate were the scourge to Liptako that the Logomaten were to the Songhay, the FulBe thought them redoubtable enemies best kept at a distance, and they gave them presents to leave the country in peace. For an emir to retreat before a Tuareg threat would have

NO'IIS, PAGES 141-145

197

been good tactics i n a case l i k e this one. On the Logomaten Tuareg, see especially Urvoy, Populations du soudan central, pp. 86-92; Marty and Mangeot, "Touareg de la boucle du Niger," pp. 283-87. On the Oudalan Tuareg, see especially Bongat, "Les Touaregs de l'Oudalan": R. de Gaalon, "Coutume

Touareg

(Gertie

jundiques de I'A.O.F., 3:

de

217-37;

Dori),"

in Couturmers

Mangeot and

Marty,

"Touareg de la boucle du Niger," pp. 276-83. 20. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 23 March 1971, 5 December 1971; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 16 March 1971, 2 December 1971, 15 December 1971. 21. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 8 July 1971. 22. The ease with which slaves could change masters within Liptako or even leave the country entirely to put themselves under the protection of men like Seeku Diagourou, the king of Tera, or the king of Koala tended to improve their standing with their masters. Masters who hoped to keep their slaves dared not be too harsh, for then they risked waking up one morning to find their slaves gone. On the position of slaves, see especially Maccudo Yigo

Gela,

Dori,

17

December

1971;

Abdurramaani

Maabo, Katchirga, 19 October 1971. 23. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 30 July 1971, 26 September 1971. 24. Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 20 October 1971. 25. Note that there was also a substantial current of nonfree migration into Liptako throughout the century. These were slaves, some of them captured by Liptako's soldiers in the course of warfare, others of them bought from mer­ chants. In 1904 Bouverot found that there were nearly as many slaves as free people ("Monographie," p. 26). 26. Abdussalaami Usumaan, Bani Kallo, 27 December !97 1 27. Ibid. 28. On

this

slave

and

his

descendants,

see

my

"Chronique du Liptako precolonial," pp. 15-17 and the sources listed there.

198

NOTES, PAGES 145-150

29. On the rebel Hamma Aamadu and the Tooroobe, see my "Chronique du Liptako precolonial," pp. 19-20 and the sources listed there. 30. On the firearms revolution, see Smaldone, Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate, pp. 94-124, 132-37. 31. On the Koala incident, see my "Chronique du Liptako precolonial," p. 29 and the sources listed there. 32. Alkadri Jibayru, Katchari, 30 November 1971. 33. Dicko Welinde Belladio, quoted in Hama, Bi Kado, P- 378· 34. Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 27 December !97135. Bouverot, "Monographie," pp. 9-10. 36. Alkadri Jibayru, Katchari, 30 November 1971. 37. Hamma Aamadu, Torodi, 30 July 1971. 38. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 23 March 1971; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 2 December 1971, 16 December 1971; Bello Kadri, Dori, 15 August 1971, 6 September 1971, 20 September 1971; Hamma Aamadu, Kampiti, 23 June 1971; Hamma Bajara, Gorouol Kole, 14 November 1971; Hamma Umaru, Dangade, 24 October 1971; Maccucfo Yigo Gela, Dori, 17 December 1971; Muhammadu Abdullaahi, Dori, 19 August 1971; Usmaan Haamidu, Ouro Longa, 30 October 1971. Onzakat in general, see En­ cyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed., s.v. "Zakat," by Joseph Schacht. 39. Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye, 8 April 1971. 40. Hamma Rawa, Lerbou, 1 September 1971. 41. Hamma Aamadu, Torodi, 30 July 1971. 42. Maamadu Sewooma, 8 April 1971. 43. Delmond described a cattle tax, however ("Dori, ville peule," p. 69). 44. The following traditionists described how village heads were chosen: Abdullaahi Saalu, Mamassiol, 9 June 1971; Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 27 December 1971; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 2 December 1971; Barka Haamidu, Debere Talata, 30 March 1971; Hamma Abdurramaani, Selbo, 29 May 1971; Hamma Aamadu, Kampiti, 23 June 1971; Hamma Aamadu, Torodi, 30 July 1971;

NOTES, PAGES

150-154

199

H a m m a Bajara, Gorouol Kole, 14 November 1 9 7 1 ; H a m m a Rawa, Lerbou, 1 September 1 9 7 1 ; Nafiya Haamidu, Bouloye, 1 5 March 1 9 7 1 ; U m a r u Aijo, Ouro T o r o b e , 6 J u n e 1 9 7 1 ; Usmaan Haamidu, O u r o Longa, 30 October i97i45. Abdullaahi H a m m a d u , Beybaye, 28 November 1 9 7 1 . 46. Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, "Histoire du royaume du Liptako," p. 1 3 . 47. Alkadri J i b a y r u , Katchari, 14 December 1 9 7 1 . 48. H a m m a A a m a d u , T o r o d i , 30 J u l y 1 9 7 1 and Belko A a m a d u , Dani, 2 J u n e 1 9 7 1 provided general explanations of this succession system. 49. According to Welinde Belladio, A a m a d u Iisa was born about 1829, and Bokari S o n , about 1842 (quoted in Hama, Bi Kado, pp. 348-49). If this is so, A a m a d u Iisa would have been about fifty-seven when Seeku Saalu died, and Bokari Sori, about forty-four. According to figures supplied by M a a m u u d u Sewooma, A a m a d u Iisa was then sixty-eight, and Bokari Sori, forty-six (Peoukoye, 19 October 1 9 7 1 ) . Destenave thought that Bokari Sori was about forty when he met him in 1895, which would have made him about thirty-one m 1886/87 ("Note provisoire sur le Liptako," p. 5). 50. Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 2 December 1 9 7 1 . On A a m a d u Iisa's regency and then reign, see my "Chronique du Liptako precolonial," pp. 25-29 and the sources listed there. 5 1 . Traditions of this succession dispute were told by A b d u r r a m a a n i Maabo, Katchirga, 7 May 1 9 7 1 , 5 December 1 9 7 1 ; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 3 J u n e 1 9 7 1 ; Haamidu H a m m a d u Sow, Bani Mango, 20 December 1971; M a a m u u d u Sewooma, Peoukoye, 27 September 1 9 7 1 , 19 December 1 9 7 1 , 26 December 1 9 7 1 ; Nafiya Haamidu, Bouloye, 29 N o \ e m b e r 1 9 7 1 . T h e dispute was also described by Monteil, De Samt-Louis a Tripoli, pp. 1 5 2 - 6 3 , 175-78, who was an eyewitness, and by Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," pp. 35-37. 52. Alkadri J i b a y r u , Katchari, 14 December 1 9 7 1 .

200 53.

NOTES, PAGES 154-156

Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye,

19

December

1971· Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 5 December 1 9 7 1 . Abdussalaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 2 0 October 1 9 7 1 , 27 December 1 9 7 1 ; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 1 6 March 1 9 7 1 ; A a m a d u More, Bani Mango, 2 0 December 1 9 7 1 ; H a a m i d u F a a r u u k u Sori, Dori, 2 1 December 1 9 7 1 ; Haamidu Hammadu Sow, Bani Mango, 2 0 December 1971; M a a m u u d u Sewooma, Peoukoye, 6 May 1 9 7 1 , 1 9 December 1 9 7 1 . 5 6 . Monteil mentioned a third candidate, Aamadu Seeku (De Saint-Louis a Tripoli, p. 152), and, perhaps drawing on Monteil, so did Delmond ("Dori, ville peule," p. 35), who added the additional information that he was Seeku Saalu's son. His name does not figure in the traditions I collected, either as a contender for the turban or as a son of the emir. 5 7 . Destenave considered that this invalidated Monteil's treaty, so he persuaded emir Bokari Sori to sign a new one o n 4 O c t o b e r 1 8 9 5 (Destenave t o d e T r e n t i n i a n , Djibo, 1 8 October 1 895, 1 G 211, AS). A copy of Monteil's treaty is in Missions 4, ANOM; of Destenave's, in 1 G 2 1 1 , AS, and Traites, Carton 5 , Dossier 5 4 9 , ANOM. 5 8 . Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 3 June 1 9 7 1 . 5 9 . Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 5 December 1 9 7 1 . 6 0 . Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye, 2 7 September 1 9 7 1 ; Nafiya H a a m i d u , Bouloye, 2 9 N o v e m b e r 1 9 7 1 . 6 1 . Smith, Government in Zazzau, pp. 74-75; Richard M. Hull, "The Impact of the Fulani Jihad on Inter-state Rela­ tions in the Central Sudan Katsina Emirate: A Case Study," in Boston University Papers on Africa, vol. 5: Aspects of West Af­ rican Islam, ed. D. F. McCall and N. R. Bennett (Boston, 1971), pp. 9 3 , 9 6 ; Sa'ad Abubakar, "Emirate-type of Gov­ ernment," p. 217, n. 6; Hogben and Kirk-Greene, Emirates of Northern Nigeria, p p . 2 6 9 - 7 6 . 6 2 . Barth, Travels, 3 : 2 0 5 . 6 3 . P. Bargery, A Hausa-English Dictionary and EnglishHausa Vocabulary ( L o n d o n , 1 9 5 7 ) , p . 3 4 6 . 6 4 . Garba Hamma, Katchirga, 2 7 August 1 9 7 1 ; Nassuru Limam, Dori, 1 2 J a n u a r y 1 9 7 2 . 54.

55.

NOTES, PAGES 157-158

201

6 5 . Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 1 5 December 1971. 66. Malik b. Muhammad to Seeku Saalu, undated, IC. 6 7 . Barth, Travels , 3 : 2 0 4 - 5 , 2 0 7 . 68. Monteil to an unnamed friend, Kano, 6 January 1 8 9 2 , repri n t e d in Bulletin d u Comite de I'Afrique Franfaise 2 ( J u n e 1 8 9 2 ) : 7 ; M o n t e i l 1 D e Saint-Louis a T r i p o l i , p . 1 7 8 . 6 9 . The phrase comes from Destenave's characterization of the emir Bokari Sori, whom he met in 1 8 9 5 . He "ap­ pears to rule with a certain authority; he is feared and well-obeyed"—an impression that was doubtlessly fostered at least in part by a letter Destenave received from one of the emir's adversaries stating that he did not dare come to Dori to greet the Frenchman because the emir "would put him to death for fear that he had come to make intrigues against him" (Destenave to de Trentinian, Djibo, 1 8 Octo­ ber 1 8 9 5 , 1 G 2 1 i, AS; Destenave, "Note provisoire sur Ie Liptako," 1 8 9 5 , p. 4 , ι G 2 1 1 , AS). Two years later Jean Louis Menvielle, Dori's first French resident, was less im­ pressed by Bokari Sori's ability to command popular obedience: "If they [the people] do not yet punctiliously execute the emir's orders, that has to do with the character and customs of these Ful&e, who until now have known scarcely any authority" ("Cercle de Dori. Bulletin politique. Mois dejuin 1 8 9 7 , " Dori, 1 July 1 8 9 7 , 1 5 G 1 8 7 , AS). 7 0 . Seeku Diagourou was born Abdullaahi Abdulkadri Buubu, according to one of his descendants, Muktaara Hammadu Bari, Diagourou (Niger), 12 September 1 9 7 6 . In Liptako he is universally known simply as Seeku Diagourou. Traditionists were hard put to think of his name, and the names they cited differed, as do those that have appeared in print. There is a wealth of oral traditions and written accounts on him: Abbatucci, "Boucle du Niger," p. 1 0 ; Abdullaahi Hammadu, Beybaye, 1 5 June !97 1 ' 5 September 1 9 7 1 ; Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 5 December ) 9 7 1 ; AbdussaIaami Usmaan, Bani Kallo, 2 7 December 1 9 7 1 ; Alkadri Jibayru, Katchari, 1 9 July 1 9 7 1 , if) August 1 9 7 1 ; Allu Siddiiki, Petecinde, 1 6 March 1971, 15 December 1971, 1 6 December 1971; A a m a d u A b d u l l a a h i Kaliilu, D e m n i , 1 2 D e c e m b e r 1 9 7 1 , 1 9

202

NOTES, PAGES 158-163

December 1971; Aamadu Paate, Karga, 23 September 1971; Bouverot, "Monographic," p. 6; de Coma, "L'lslamisme," pp. 9-13; Delmond, "Dori, ville peule," p. 35; Haamiidu Aliiyu, Dori, 17 July 1971; Hama, Bi Kado, p. 349; Maccucfo Yigo Gela, Dori, 3 May 1971, 17 December 1971; Maamuudu Sewooma, Peoukoye, 1 June 1971; Muktaara Hammadu Bari, Diagourou (Niger), 12 September 1976; Nafiya Haamiidu, Bouloye, 15 March 1971; Nassuru Limam, Dori, 11 July 1971, 16 September 1971, 19 Sep­ tember 1971; Marc Perret, "Rapport sur Ie recensement du canton de Diagourou," Tera, 10 August 1954, 155/10, ARN; Sa'iidu Hammadu, Dori, 25 January 1972; Sumaa'iila Hammadu, Tera (Niger), 11 September 1976; Umaru Bokar, Boureye, 29 October 1971. 71. Note that in Liptako the word seeku may be either a title or a personal name. In Seeku Diagourou's case it was the former; in Seeku Saalu's case, the latter. 72. Muktaara Hammadu Bari, Diagourou (Niger), 12 September 1976. 73. Abdurramaani Maabo, Katchirga, 5 December 1971. 74. Abbatucci, "La Boucle du Niger," p. 10; Bouverot, "Monographic," p. 6. Abbatucci told in detail the story of the French conquest of Diagourou in his Le Parfum de la longue route (Paris, n.d.), pp. 60-71. 75. De Coutouly collected a Liptako song about Diagourou's raid on Tibilindi and published it in Fulfulde together with a French translation in his "Populations du cercle de Dori," pp. 284-85. 76. Curtin,Economic Change in Precolonial Africa, 1: xix. CONCLUSION

1. This is a close paraphrase of Μ. I. Finley's charac­ terization of ancient Greek tradition: " 'Tradition' did not merely transmit the past, it created it" ("Myth, Memory, and History," p. 295).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ORAL TRADITION

The oral traditions that are the focus of this book were col­ lected during two field trips to Upper Volta, one from No­ vember 1970 through January 1972, a second from July through September 1976. Full records of more than two hundred formal interviews, some of them recorded on tape, all of them recorded on paper as transcripts or re­ sumes, are deposited for public consultation in the archives of the Centre Volta'fque de la Recherche Scientifique at Ouagadougou and also in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. Casual chats in people's homes and in the streets suggested many insights. Data from conversations were recorded in field notes in my pos­ session. Other collections of Liptako tradition are available in various forms in the works listed in the categories below. I had little chance to compare Liptako traditionists' vi­ sions of the past against those of traditionists from neigh­ boring regions. I worked briefly in Tera and Diagourou, in western Niger, in September 1976—only long enough to let me know how fruitful such comparisons could be. The traditions of Tera and Diagourou, like those of the Oudalan, the Djelgodji, Yaga, and Koala have yet to be collected and studied in much depth. It is hoped that historians will turn their attention to these places soon. ARABIC MANUSCRIPTS

I went to Liptako in 1970 hoping to unearth rich libraries of Arabic documents like those D. M. Last found at Sokoto and William Allen Brown at Timbuktu and Masina. These hopes were disappointed; manuscripts were few and hard to find. Those I found were of two sorts: versions of cur-

204

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rent oral tradition recently committed to paper, and precolonial documents. Nassuru Limam's works are repre­ sentative of the first category. He is now imam of Dori's Friday mosque and the emirate's foremost Arabist. He is also an assiduous collector of oral tradition. He has been writing down local genealogies, lists of titleholders, and narratives for years with the intention of someday compos­ ing a complete history of his country. His readiness to share the results of his collecting with me is characteristic of the friendly generosity of Liptako's scholars. As for the second category of manuscripts, precolonial documents, four pieces of state correspondence were all I found. These included two letters from Ibraahiima Bunti, a midcentury emir of Yaga, to his counterpart at Dori; one from Emir Malik b. Muhammad of Gwandu to Emir Seeku Saalu; and one from a certain Sulaymaan to Emir Sori Hamma. Photocopies of all the manuscripts of both categories are available, with full inventories, at CVRS and at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences Humaines at the University of Niamey. Note that my collection also includes Arabic materials which do not bear directly on Liptako. These manuscripts, none of them rare, were authored in what is now Mali and northern Nigeria, for the most part during the nineteenth century. Among them are a large number of manuscripts of Fulfulde poems written in Arabic script by Shehu Usuman cfan Fodiyo. Tape re­ cordings of this poetry being read are in the Archives Sonores at CVRS. This relatively small collection by no means exhausts the available store of Arabic writings on Liptako. Early in this century Georges de Gironcourt's expedition collected two documents having to do with Liptako, which are now part of the large collection bearing his name at the Institut de France in Paris. These include item 199, "Sur Ie Liptako, Dori, etc.," which is a letter addressed to Abdullahi cfan Fodiyo, and item 134, "Les Peuls de Dori et du Djelgodji," which is a written version of oral tradition dictated by a Tuareg of the Kel es-Souk. Note that item 201, "Les

BIBLIOGRAPHY

205

guerres du Liptako," does not deal with the subject its title promises. Other Liptako material is in Boubou Hama's personal collection of manuscripts at Niamey—he quotes and paraphrases from it in his various books—but it was not available to me. Still more documents are probably to be found in manuscript collections in Nigeria, but I was unable to consult them. And then there are surely more documents hidden away in Liptako itself. The emirate's scholars are cautious with their manuscripts. At first many of them claimed to have no manuscripts at all; they sug­ gested I see someone else. Only as I got to know them bet­ ter did they begin to bring out their treasures, usually with the remark that this was all they had. But was it? I suspect more documents will gradually come to light. However more documents are not likely to add up to many docu­ ments. Historians of Liptako and other small West African Muslim states ought not to expect them to yield the docu­ mentary riches of the great imperial centers.

ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Archives relating to Liptako are available in Paris, Dakar, Niamey, Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Liptako itself. The Paris materials are located at the Archives Nationales and at the ANOM. The first holds the journal that Parfait Louis Monteil kept during his travels of 1890-1891 (Papiers Monteil, 66 AP 2), but it adds nothing to what Monteil published on Liptako in 1895 in De Saint-Louis a Tnpolipar Ie lac Tchad. More on the Monteil mission can be found at ANOM (Missions 4; Afrique III, dossier 13). Also at ANOM are records of the Destenave missions of 1895 (Soudan III, dossier 3; Soudan IV, dossier 3) and 1897 (Soudan IV, dossier 5). The 1895 Franco-Liptako treaty is in the collection of Traites, carton V, 549. Henri Gaden was in Liptako with Destenave in 1895, and the letters he wrote his father during the trip are also held by ANOM (Papiers Gaden, AP 15, carton XVI), but they tell us disap­ pointingly little about the emirate although they do offer

206

BIBLIOGRAPHY

important insights into the characters and ideas of both Destenave and Gaden. Gaden mentions having written other reports on the expedition, but I have not seen them. The Senegalese archives at Dakar contain further re­ cords of the periods of colonial exploration, conquest, and rule of French West Africa—records which also are avail­ able on microfilm at the Depot des Archives d'Outre-Mer at Aix-en-Provence, where I used them. The following files were particularly useful: ι G 165

1 G 179 1 G 211

L'occupation et !'organisation de la Boucle du Niger. Creation de la region Est et Macina. Re­ sume des Operations par M. Ie Chef de BatailIon Destenave (1897). Mission Monteil dans Ie Mossi (1891). Mission Capitaine Destenave dans Ie Yatenga

(1895)· 1 G 228

Docteur Abbatucci: "Contribution a l'Histoire Kouroumei ou Sonrai, des Foulbe du Liptako et du Yagha, des Touareg de FOudala et du Logomata" (1897). 1 G 306 Monographie de la residence de Dori, par Ie Lieutenant Bouverot, resident (1904). 15 G 185 Residence de Dori (partie de la region Est et Macina) (1897-1898). 15 G 186 Residence de Dori (partie de la Region NordEst). Rapports politiques, correspondance, copie du registre n 0 2, affaires musulmanes (1899)15 G 187 Region Nord-Est (chef-lieu Dori). Corre­ spondance, telegrammes, rapports politiques, liste des archives (1899). Niger's archives contain records for the years when Liptako was part of that country. The archives were being rearranged when I was in Niamey in 1976, and I was able to use only scattered files. Moussa Niakate's Archives Nationales du Mali: Repertoire, 1855-1954, vol. 1 (Bamako, 1974) suggests that much valuable information is to be

BIBLIOGRAPHY

207

found in Mali, but I was not granted authorization to work there. The same problem—lack of research clearance— arose in Upper Volta itself, where I was twice refused per­ mission to use Dori's archives, established by the French just after the 1897 conquest. Material there will presum­ ably be fuller and more valuable than the monthly colonial reports for the cercle of Dori stored at CVRS, which I did see. UNPUBLISHED WORKS

This list includes only those works cited in the notes. Balogun, Saka Adegbite. "Gwandu Emirates in the Nineteenth Century with Special Reference to Political Relations: 1817-1903." Ph.D. dissertation, University ofIbadan, 1971. Bongat. "Ues Touaregs de l'Oudalan." Memoire 2664, Centre des Hautes Etudes sur TAfrique Musulmane, Pans, 1957. Davy, P. "Histoire du pays gourmantche." Memoire 1964, Centre des Hautes Etudes sur I'Afrique Musulmane, Paris, 1952. Delmond, Paul. "Dori, Ville Peuhle." Memoire 1282, Centre des Hautes Etudes sur I'Afrique Musulmane, Paris, 1947. Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou. "Histoire du royaume du Liptako (des origines a la hn de la periode coloniale)." Memoire, Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Ouaga­ dougou, 1975. Irwin, Joseph Paul. "An Emirate of the Niger Bend: A Political History of Liptako in the Nineteenth Cen­ tury." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin— Madison, 1973. Larve, M. "Notes sur la formation et l'histoire des etats songhavs du nord Dendi." Memoire 1982, Centre des Hautes Etudes sur I'Afrique Musulmane. Paris, 1952. Madiega, Georges Yenouyaba. "Rapports entre !'adminis­ tration coloniale francaise et Ies autorites tradi-

208

BIBLIOGRAPHY

tionnelles du cercle de Fada N'Gourma (Haute-Volta), 1895-1932." Memoire de maitrise, Universite de Paris VII > 1 973" 1 974·

PUBLISHED WORKS

This list includes only those works cited in the notes. Abbatucci, Severin. Le Parfum de la longue route. Paris: Fournier, n.d. [c. 1927]. . "Pour servir a l'histoire de la boucle du Niger." L'Ethnographie, n.s., 35-36 (1938): 3-13. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di. Ta'rikh al-suddn. Edited and trans­ lated by O. Houdas as Tarikh Es-Soudan. Collection U.N.E.S.C.O. d'oeuvres representatives serie africaine. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964. 'Abdullah b. Muhammad. Tazyin al-waraqat. Edited and translated by Mervyn Hiskett. Ibadan: Ibadan Univer­ sity Press, 1963. Adeleye, Roland A. Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804-1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies. Lon­ don: Longmans, 1971. Ahmadu Bello. My Life. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962. Arnott, D. W. The Nominal and Verbal Systems of Fula. Ox­ ford: Clarendon, 1970. Ba, Amadou Hampate. Traditions Historiques des Peul Jaawambe. Niamey: Centre Regional de Documenta­ tion pour la Tradition Orale, n.d. Ba, Amadou Hampate, and Cardaire, Marcel. Tiemo Bokar: Le Sage de Bandiagara. Paris: PresenceAfricaine, 1957. Baillaud, Emile. Sur Ies routes du Soudan. Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1902. Bargery, G. P. A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary. London: Oxford University Press, 1957. Barth, Heinrich. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Bros., 1859. Beidelman, T. O. "Myth, Legend and Oral History: A Kaguru Traditional Text Γ Anthropos 65 (1970): 74-97.

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Bohannan, Laura, "A Genealogical Charter." Africa 22 (!952):301-15. Bohannan, Paul. "The Migration and Expansion of the Ti v." Africa 24 (1954): 2-16. Boulegue, Jean. "Contribution a la chronologie du royaume du Saloum." Bulletin de I'lnstitut Fondamental de ΓAfnque Noire, ser. B, 28 (1966): 657-62. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-164']. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. Brigaud, Felix. Histoire traditionnelle du Senegal. Saint Louis du Senegal: CRDS, 1962. Caron, E. De Saint-Louis au port de Tombouktou. 3d ed. Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1892. Carr, Edward Hallett. What Is History? Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961. Chantoux, Alphonse. "Aux origines du Liptako." Ti Dogu (Fada N'Gourma) 21 (1964): 9-10. . Histoire du pays gourma: Traditions orales. Fada N'Gourma: Editions Ti Dogu, n.d. Cheron, Georges. "Contribution a l'histoire du Mossi: Traditions relatives au cercle de Kaya." Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de IA.O.F. (1924), pp. 635-91. Clapperton, Hugh.Journal of a Second Expedition into the In­ terior of Africa. London: J. Murray, 1829. Cohen, Ronald. "The Bornu King Lists." In Boston Univer­ sity Papers on Africa. Vol. 2: African History, pp. 39-83. Edited by Jeffrey Butler. Boston: Boston University Press, 1966. Crowder, Michael. "Indirect Rule—French and British Style." Africa 34 (1964): 197-205. Cunliffe, Marcus. George Washington: Man and Monument. New York: New American Library, 1958. Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madi­ son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. . Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. 2 vols. Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1975.

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. "Jihad in West Africa: Early Phases and Interrelations in Mauritania and Senegal. "Journal of African History 1 2 ( 1 9 7 1 ) : 11-24. de Coutouly, Franfois. "La famille, les fian^ailles et le mariage chez les Peuls du Liptako (Haute-Volta)." Revue d'ethnographic et des traditions populaires (1923), PP- 2 59"7°. "Les Populations du Cercle de Dori (HauteVolta)." Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifques de I'A.O.F. (1923), pp. 269-301, 471-96, 637-71. . "Une ville soudanaise de la Haute-Volta: Dori." Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de I'A.O.F. (1926), pp. 487-97. de Gaalon, R. "Coutume Peul (Cercle de Dori)." In Coutumiers jundiques de I'A.O.F., 3: 239-60. 3 vols. Paris: Larose, 1939. . "Coutume Touareg (Cercle de Dori)." In Coutumiers juridiques de I'A.O.F., 3: 217-37. 3 vols. Paris: Larose, 1939. Delafosse, Maurice. Haut-Senegal-Niger (Soudan Franfais). 3 vols. Paris: Larose, 1912. Delmond, Paul. "Dans la boucle du Niger: Dori, ville peule." In Melanges ethnologiques, pp. 9-109. Memoires de l'lnstitut Franpais d'Afrique Noire, no. 23. Dakar: I FAN, 1953. . "Esquisse geographique du Gourma central: Le Cercle de Dori (Haute-Volta)." Notes africaines, no. 42 (i949). PP- 57-6°; n o - 43 (i949). PP- 86-89. . "Essai de classification des Peuls du cercle de Dori." In Conferencia internacional dos africanistas ocidentais: 2. a conferencia, Bissau, 1947, 5: 29-52. 5 vols. Lisbon, i95 0 -52Deschamps, Hubert. "Et maintenant, Lord Lugard7" Africa 33 (1963): 293-305. Destenave, Georges Mathieu. "L'Occupation et l'organisation de la boucle du Niger." Renseignements coloniaux, no. 9 (1898), pp. 213-24. Diallo, Thierno. "Origine et migration des Peuls avant le

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XIX 1 ' siecle." Annates de la Faculte des lettres et sciences humaines (Dakar) 2 (1972): 121-93. Diallo, Thierno; M'Backe, Mame Bara; Trifkovic, Mirjana; and Barry, Boubacar. Catalogue des manuscnts de Γ I.F.A.N. Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Cata­ logues et documents, no 20. Dakar: IFAN, 1966. Diarra, Souleyman. "Les problemes de contact entre Ies pasteurs peul et les agriculteurs dans Ie Niger central." In Pastoralism in Tropical Africa, pp. 284-97. Edited by Theodore Monod. London: Oxford University Press,

!975Doornbus, Martin R. "The Shehu and the Mullah: The Jihads of Usuman dan Fodio and Muhammed AbdAllah Hassan in Comparative Perspective." GeneveAfnque 14 (1975): 7-31. Dupire, Marguerite. Organisation sociale des Peul: Etude d'ethnographie comparee. Paris: Plon, 1970. . Peuls nomades: Etude descriptive des Wodaabe du Sahel Nigenen. Universite de Paris, Travaux et Memoires de l'lnstitut d'Ethnologie, no. 64. Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie, 1962. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed. S.v. "Khalifa," by T. W. Arnold. . S.v. " 'Okba b. Nah'," by C. Brockelmann. . S.v. " 'Omar ibn at-Khattab," by G. Levi Delia Vida. . S.v. "Zakat," by Joseph Schacht. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. S.v. " 'Amr b. al-'As," by A. J. Wensinck. . S.v. "Djihad," by E. Tyan. . S.v. "Hadlth," by J. Robson. Evans-Pritchard, Ε. E. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Ox­ ford: Clarendon Press, 1940. Finley, Μ. I. "Myth, Memory, and History." History and Theory 4 (1965): 281-302. Gibb, H.A.R. Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey. 2d ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Goody, Jack, and Watt, Ian. "The Consequences of Liter­ acy." Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (196263): 304-45.

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Greene, Graham. Travels with My Aunt. New York: Viking, 1969Le Guid'Ouest Africain, iyjo-iyji. Paris: Diloutremer, n.d. Hallam, W.K.R. "The Bayajida Legend in Hausa Folklore." Journal of African History 7 (1966): 47-59. Hama, Boubou. L'Aventure extraordinaire de Bi Kado, fils de noir. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1 9 7 1 . . Contribution a la connaissance de I'histoire des Peul. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1968. . Enquete sur les fondements et la genese de I'unite africaine. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1966. . Histoire des Songhay. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1968. Hammadou Bassoro. Khabaru ard Gharwa wa ta'rikhihi. Edited and translated by Eldridge Mohamadou as "Un manuscrit peul sur I'histoire de Garoua." Abbia 8

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Henige, David P. The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Questfor a Chimera. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. "Kingship in Elmina before 1869: A Study in 'Feedback' and the Traditional Idealization of the Past." Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 1 4 ( 1 9 7 5 ) : 499-520. . "The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition: Four Examples from the Fante Coastlands." Journal of African History 1 4 ( 1 9 7 3 ) : 223-35. Hiskett, Mervyn. "The Nineteenth-Century Jihads in West Africa." In The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 4: From c. 1790 to c. 1870, pp. 125-69. Edited by John E. Flint. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1976. . The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio. London: Oxford University Press, 1

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Hogben, S. J., and Kirk-Greene, A.H.M. The Emirates of Northern Nigeria. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Hopen, C. Edward. The Pastoral Fulbe Family in Gwandu. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1958.

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Horowitz, Michael M. "Herdsman and Husbandman in Niger: Values and Strategies." In Paitoralism in Tropi­ cal Africa, pp. 387-405. Edited by Theodore Monod. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hull, Richard M. "The Impact of the Fulani Jihad on Inter-state Relations in the Central Sudan Katsina Emirate: A Case Study." In Boston University Papers on Africa. Vol. 5: Aspects of West African Islam, pp. 87-100. Edited by D. F. McCall and N. R. Bennett. Boston: Boston University Press, 1971. Irwin, Joseph Paul. "Chronique du Liptako precolonial." Notes et documents voltdiques (Ouagadougou) 9 (197576): 3-47. Izard, Michel. Introduction a I'histoire des royaumes mossi. Recherches volta'iques, nos. 12-13. 2 vols. Paris: Central National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1970. Jackson, Kennell A., Jr. "Oral Traditions Past, Oral His­ tory Future." Journal of African Studies 4 (1977): 3 19-

43· Jeffery, Arthur, ed. A Reader on Islam: Passages from Stand­ ard Writings Illustrative of the Beliefs and Practices of Mus­ lims. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962. Jeffreys. M.D.W. "Speculative Origins of the Fulani Lan­ guage." Africa 17 (1947): 47-53. Johnston, H.A.S. The Fulani Empire of Sokoto. London: Ox­ ford University Press, 1967. Jones, D. H. "Problems of African Chronology."Journal of African History 11 (1970): 161-76. Kagame, Alexis. Bref aper(u sur la Poesie Dynastique du Rwanda, Brussels: Editions Universitaires [1949?]. . Introduction aux grands genres lynques de I'anaen Rwanda. Universite Nationale du Rwanda, Collection "Muntu," vol. 1. Butare: Editions Universitaires du Rwanda, 1969. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. Ambiguous Adventure. Translated by Katherine Woods. New York: Collier Books, 1969. Labouret, Henri. Monteil: Explorateur et soldat. Paris: Edi­ tions Berger-Levrault, 1937.

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Last, D. Μ. "Reform in West Africa: TheJihad Movements of the Nineteenth Century." In History of West Africa, 2: 1-29. Edited by J.F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972-74. . The Sokoto Caliphate. Ibadan History Series. Lon­ don: Longmans, 1967. Lewis, Bernard. Race and Color in Islam. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Lovejoy, Paul. "Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate." Journal of African History 19 (1978): 341-68. MacMichael, H. A. A History of the Arabs in the Sudan. 2 vols. Cambridge: The University Press, 1922. . The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan. Cam­ bridge: The University Press, 1912. Mahmud Ka'ti. Ta'rikh al-fiHash. Edited and translated by O. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse as Tarikh el-Fettach. Collection U.N.E.S.C.O. d'oeuvres representatives serie africaine. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964. Marc, Lucien. "La Region de Dori." La Geographie 22 (1910): 247-51. Marty, Paul; and Mangeot. "Les Touareg de la boucle du Niger." Bulletin du Comite d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de I'A.O.F. (1918), pp. 87-136, 257-88, 432-75. Maubert, and Menjaud, Henri. "Documents ethnographiques sur Ie Gourma." fournal de la Societe des Africanistes 2 (1932); 35-47· Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969. Miller, Joseph C. "The Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Af­ rica." In Fonti Orali. Antropologia et storia, pp. 75-101. Edited by Bernardo Bernardi, C. Poni, and A. Triulzi. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1978. . "Listening for the African Past." In The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Edited by Joseph C. Miller. Folkestone, England: Dawson, forth­ coming. Monteil, Charles. "Notice sur l'origine des peuls." Revue Af­ ricaine 55 (igi 1): 249-54.

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INDEX

A a m a d u Iisa, 69, 8 5 , 1 4 0 - 4 1 , 1 4 5 46, 1 5 3 - 5 4 , 1 6 0 Abbatucti, Severin, 114, 1 1 7 , 130 A b d u l l a h i cfan F o d i y o , 1 2 5 - 2 6 A b d u r r a m a a n A a m a d u Iisa, 7 5 , 180, 1 8 6

colonial domination, 9-10, 101, 1 3 8 , 149, 1 5 1 ; e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f ,

73. 74, 7 7 - 7 . 5 9 8

1

Coma, H . H . A . de, 1 14-15, 1 1 7 C u n l i f f e , Marcus, 63-64 Curtin, Philip D , 161, 182

A h m a d u Bello, 126-27 A l h a d r i j i k a , 85, 140-41, 154-56 A r a b i c m a n u s c r i p t s , see m a n u scripts.

dates, 6 7 - 7 5 Debere Talata, 129 Delafosse, Maurice, 82-83, 181-82

A r a b s , 14, 4 6 - 5 3 archives, 64-65, 205-7

D e l m o n d , Paul, 3 8 , 7 9 - 8 1 , 9 9 - 1 0 4 ,

H5 Destenave, Georges Mathieu, 1 1 - 1 2 , 78

B a m b a r a , 93 B a n i , 4, 5, 1 0 , 1 6 , 1 5 4 - 5 5 B a r t h , H e i n r i c h , 8, 40, 7 5 - 7 6 , 80,

157-58 B e i d e l m a n , T h o m a s O., x x m - x x i v Beila&e, 1 8 Beybaye, 136-39, 153, 159, 196 Bilesaba, 97-98 B i r m a a n S a a l a Paate, 9 9 - 1 0 4

D i a g o u r o u , 1 7 , 1 4 5 , 1 5 9 - 6 0 . S^f also S e e k u D i a g o u r o u . Dicko Abdoulaye Nassourou, 39-40, 1 5 0 - 5 1 D i o b b o u , 5, 1 6 Diouga, 137-39 Djelgodji, 1 1 8 Dogon, 93 D o r i , 5, 9 - 1 2 , 9 8

Bisa, 93 B o h a n n a n , Paul, 5 4 - 5 5 B o k a n S o n , 7 8 - 8 0 , 85, 1 4 0 - 4 1 , 143. 1 5 4 - 5 6 . 201 Bouloye, 67

B o u v e r o t , H . C . E . , 7, 8, 1 3 0 B r a a h i m a S e y d u , 3 1 , 6 1 , 82, 90, 106-7,

3>

power and authority, 39-40, E\ans-Pritchard, E.E., 72

Boussouma, 15

11

83-84, ancestry, 42, 99-104;

139-41

Boulsa, 15, 109

n

e m i r s : lists, 6 1 - 6 2 , 7 1 - 7 2 , 76,

4> 120-21, 153,

168 B u h a a n Iisa, 78-80, 1 5 4 - 5 6

Faaruuku Son, 143, 155 F e r o o b e , 2 7 , 99, 1 0 3 - 4 , 1 2 0 - 2 1 , 186 Fetombaga, 154 F m l e y , M o s e s , 67 flag o f t h e j i h a d , 1 1 7 - 1 9

Carr, E.H., 33

F r e n c h , see colonial d o m i n a t i o n .

chronology, 62, 67-89

Fulam,see Fulbe.

C l a p p e r t o n , H u g h , 7 5 , 84

F u l a n t a m u u & e , 5 2 - 5 3 . See also Y o b i

clerics (Muslim), 3 4 - 3 8 , 1 2 2 - 2 3

Katar.

220

INDEX

Ful6e, 1 2 - 1 5 , 1 1 1 - 1 3 , 1 6 9 ; origins,

Koala, 1 2 , 1 4 , 1 7 , 69, 94, 1 4 5 - 4 6 K u r u m b a , 16, 9 3

46-50, 175-76 Garba H a m m a , 1 2 2 - 2 3

law, 1 0 9 - 1 0 , 1 3 9 , 1 4 6 - 5 0

genealogies, xxi-xxii, 2 8 - 3 0 , 4 2 - 6 5

Lerbou, 5 5 , 1 0 5

geography, 3 - 1 2

lineages, 4 2 - 4 5

Gourmantche (Gurmance), 1 2 , 1 4 ,

Liptako: geography, 3 - 1 2 ; origin o f the name, 9 2

93-96, 104-8, 1 2 8 - 2 9

lists of rulers, 7 0 - 7 1 , 1 7 9 - 8 0 ; o f

government, 1 3 3 - 6 1 gnots, see

emirs, 6 1 - 6 2 , 7 1 - 7 2 , 76, 8 3 - 8 4 ;

praise singers.

Gurmance, see

of village heads, xxi, 8 4 - 8 5

Gourmantche.

Gwandu, 77, 1 3 4 , 1 5 6 - 5 7

Logomaten T u a r e g , 8 7 , 1 4 0 - 4 1

Haabe, 1 4 , 48, 1 1 1 - 1 3 , 1 7 1

magic, 3 2 , 100, 1 0 5 , 1 5 5

Hama, Boubou, 3 9

Malam Guidado, 8 3 , 1 1 5 - 1 7 , 1 8 1 ,

'91

Hamma Aamadu, 1 2 1 - 2 4 H a m m a Seydu, 90

Malik b. M u h a m m a d , 7 7 , 1 5 7

Hausa, 1 1 , 1 6

manuscripts, xx, 3 5 - 3 7 , 1 8 1 , 2 0 3 - 5

Henige, David P., 3 7

M ' B a m g a , 5, 10, 1 9 6

Homboribe, 16, 1 9 - 2 0 , 6 7

Mbiti, J o h n , 6 8 migrations, see

Monteil, Parfait Louis, 8, 7 7 - 8 1 ,

imams, 3 5 - 3 6 , 1 3 4 - 3 5 , 1 7 1 , 1 8 1 interviews, xix-xxi, 3, 1 8 - 1 9 , 2 2 - 2 3 , 30-32, 1 7 1 - 7 2 Islam, 3 4 - 3 8 , 4 5 - 5 0 , 7 2 , 88-89, 120, 1 2 2 - 2 3 ,

1

population: move-

ments.

Iisa Saalu H a m m a , 8o, 1 4 3

11

4'

13°. 5 5 [

Moors, 1 1 , 1 6 Mossi, 1 1 , 1 5 , 9 3

31

Iullemmeden T u a r e g , 1 6 8

Nassuru Limam, 36, 7 1 - 7 2 N'Diomga, 56-65, 1 2 9

Jaawambe, 50-52, 1 7 7 Jibnila Siddiiki, 1 4 1 - 4 3

O u a g a d o u g o u , 5, 10, 1 5

jihad, 1 0 9 ; in Liptako, 2 2 , 3 0 - 3 2 ,

Oudalan, 1 5 , 8 5

9 0 - 9 2 , 1 0 8 - 3 2 ; in Sokoto, 1 0 9 -

Oulliminden, see

10, 1 2 5 - 2 7

O u r o Longa, 1 2 9

J i k a Jibriila, 8 7

Iullemmeden.

O u r o T o r o b e , 2 2 - 2 3 , 96, 1 2 8 - 2 9

J o n e s , D . H . , 68, 8 7 judges, 6 7 , 1 3 4 - 3 5 , 1 4 6 - 4 7

Person, Yves, 6 7 , 7 1

justice, 1 4 6 - 4 8

population, 5 - 1 0 , 1 5 , 1 8 5 - 8 6 ; movements, 4-5, 1 7 - 1 8 , 5 4 - 5 5 ,

Kampiti, 9 7 Katchari, 1 5 4

97-99. 144-45. ' 9 7

praise singers, 2 5 - 2 6 , 4 2

Katchirga, 5, 70, 8 5 - 8 7 , 1 4 0 - 4 3 ,

154-5 6 kinglist, see lists of rulers, kinship, 4 2 - 6 6 , 1 4 3 - 4 4

rainfall, 5 - 7 , 7 2 - 7 3 , 1 6 7 - 6 8 , 1 7 9 Saalu H a m m a , 7 5

221

INDEX Sandu Faaruuku, 75, 180

medan; Oudalan; and Logoma-

Say, 1 0

ten.

Seeku Diagourou, 158-61, 201 Seeku Saalu, 77, 1 5 3 , 157, 158-60 Selbo, 1 1 3 S e r e e r of S a a l u m , 88-89 S h e h u U s u m a n d a n F o d i y o , see U s u m a n dan Fodiyo. SilluBe, 1 8 , 2 5 , 26, 28, 4 3 slaves, 1 4 , 1 6 - 1 8 , 2 4 - 2 5 . 5 2 - 5 3 ,

144-45. ' 9 7 Smith, Abdullahi,

118

Sokoto caliphate, 1 0 9 - 1 0 , 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 120-28, 134-35 Songhay, 15, 16, 93, 196 S o n H a m m a , 40, 7 5 , 7 7 , 80, 8 5 , X

43> ! 5 7

succession to o f f i c e , 1 5 0 - 5 6 taxation, 1 4 8 - 5 0

Ukba, 46-52 U s m a a n B o k a r i S o n ( A m n r u ) , 69, 73, 101-2 U s u m a n dan Fodiyo, 3 0 - 3 1 , 82, 109-10, 118-19,

1

34-35. !39

Vansma, J a n , xxm-xxiv, 23, 32, 168, 1 7 2 - 7 3 villages, 8 - g , d i s t r i b u t i o n , 4 - 5 ; sett l e m e n t , 96-98, 1 3 6 - 3 9 ; o r g a n i zation, 1 9 6 ; l e a d e r s , 1 3 6 - 3 9 , 1

5°-53

Wakambe. 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 120-21 warfare, 40-41, 135, 145-46 water, 5-8

T e r a , 15, 17

VVendou, 98, 1 0 3 - 4 , 1 4 3 , 1 8 8

Timbuktu, 11

women, 21, 23-24, 61

Tiv, 54-56

w i l t i n g , attitudes t o w a r d , 3 4 - 4 0

T o o r o o b e , 44, 1 0 3 - 4 , 1 2 0 - 2 1 , 1 5 4 , 188-89

Yaga, 15, 40-41, 103

trade, 1 0 - 1 2

Yakouta, 106-7

traditionists, x x , 2 3 - 2 6 , 3 2 - 3 3 , 6 5 ,

y e a r , 68, 7 2 - 7 4 , 88

67, 90 T u a r e g , 5, 1 1 , 1 6 See also I u l l e m -

Y o b i K a t a r , 2 0 - 2 1 , 1 4 5 - 4 6 . See also Fulantamuube.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Irwin, Paul, 1 9 4 0 Liptako speaks. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1.

Liptako, U p p e r Volta—History.

History.

3.

Fulahs—History.

2. 4.

Fulah E m p i r e —

Oral tradition.

I. Title. DT553.U79L564 ISBN 0-691-05309-X

966'.2501

80-7531