p. 12 Excavations at Djenne-Djenno have revealed bones of domesticated cattle and goats and sheep that date back to the beginning of the first millenium AD. Oumarou’s forefathers may have passed through already then. The Fulani thrust inland in the 12th and 13th centuries. Many of them were Muslim … the Fulani were embraced for “the manure their cattle provided on the fields and for the milk and butter which could be exchanged for agricultural products. That arrangement never has changed…… in the early 19th century,a Fulani scholar, cleric and trilingual poet named Uthman dan Fodio launched one of West Africa’s earliest jihads. Hurtling camelback and horseback, dan Folio and his followers delivered Sufi Islam to the most animist rural savannah on the tips of their spears and broadswords. In the floodplains of the Inner Niger Delta, one of dan Fodio’s disciples.. led an Islamic uprising and created the theocratic empire of Massina. 21st century Fulani remember and revere him by his preacher sobriquet, Sekou Amadou Sheikh Muhammad. Sekou Amadou made his first capital at the village of Senossa.. he banned tobacco and alcohol, established purdah, set up social welfare for widows and orphans, and regularised land use, drawing up seasonal timetables that distributed pastures and rivers among Bozo fishermen, Songhai traders, Mandinka and Bambara farmers and Fulani herders. He favoured the cattlemen; the nomads thrived. Amost 200 years later the amplitudes of Oumarou’s migration still abided by the transhumance schedules Sekou Amadou had drawn up in 1818.
p. 13 By the beginning of the 21st century an estimated 30 to 40 million nomads roved the world, herding cattle, deer, goats, sheep, yak, camel, horses. Some 20 million of them were Fulani.
p. 96 The Petrie Museum and the British Museum in London carried elaborate bronze branding irons from ancient Egypt that dated back to the 2nd millennia BC, the brands themselves cartouches bearing human and animal shapes and the names of pharoahs, but the Diakayates’ simple footlong pieces of hooked metal etched into the skin of their cows stories that may have been older even than that. Each line spelled a lineage. A brother who cut his cows out of a family hed added a symbol to the existing family brand – a stroke, a crossbar, a serif. If you could unravel the ideograms, decode the stems and the necks, you could trace the gebealogy of a herd to the owner’s ancestors, to some of the first branding irons ever to seer a zebu hide. When you placed your hand on a cow’s flank the whole history of pastoralist Africa pulsed under your palm.
p. 116 Now the rimaibe were free by law and had a subsistence economy of their own, their own cattle and chickens and rice fields, but their deference towards the Fulani Koitas remained. And it was hard to tell whether their emancipation, enshrined in Mali’s constitution, had been total. Some of the Fulani families in Djenne told me they owned slaves. In the second quarter of the 21st century at least a quarter of a million Malians who were in bondage to Kel Tamashek had advocates championing their freedom in Mali and internationally. The rimaibe had none. .. Nor was their any punishment for slaveholding.
p. 125 Fulfulde had no word for snow. “Galaas,” I said: ice, a loanword from the French. I said that in the place where I was born there were entire months that were so cold that ice fell from the sky instead of rain, every day, and stayed on the ground for weeks at a time, sometimes knee-deep. For once I had told a story the Diakayetes’ anthology of the world could not accommodate. Everybody laughed. Impossible! Then I worked it out: my hosts were picturing the only ice they knew, the scarlet and orange frozen sluches of hibiscus and ginger and baobab juice they sometimes bought in the Monday market in Djenne. … And I laughed with them.
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