‘My novel gives context to the Fulani herdsmen crisis’

The setting was purely coincidental. In search of a quiet place to talk, we somehow ended up by the poolside of the Transcorp Hilton, at a bar called ‘Fulani’. It was a curious coincidence since Dr. Munzali Ahmadu Dantata and I, were going to talk about his debut novel Tammunnde, which chronicles the life of […]

The setting was purely coincidental. In search of a quiet place to talk, we somehow ended up by the poolside of the Transcorp Hilton, at a bar called ‘Fulani’. It was a curious coincidence since Dr. Munzali Ahmadu Dantata and I, were going to talk about his debut novel Tammunnde, which chronicles the life of three generations of a Fulani family. I did not think the author even noticed this.

Dantata, 59, looks every inch a typical Fulani man. Fair skinned and curly hair but he calls himself a typical “Hausa-Fulani” man referring to his dual heritage. His mother is from a Fulani clan in Katsina State, his father is from Kano, the heartland of Hausa land.

But for Dantata, there has always been a fascination with the Fulani, right from when he was young, on visits to his mother’s Fulani village in Katsina.

“I have these memories. Sometime I mix with the herd even if I don’t follow them far,” he said, tucking his white babban riga under him as he sat down and ordered a glass of water. As he spoke, he took off his matching white cap and kept it on the table beside him. “Sometimes I mix with the cattle, or watch them return even though I never followed them far.”

Despite his fascination with his mother’s people, he never quite learned to speak Fulfulde and the road to writing about this people turned out to be a lengthy one for him, one for which he would inadvertently prepare himself for in the decades to come.

After studying law at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Dantata veered into the culture and tourism industry where he spent some twenty years, the last eight at the helm of the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism. But his interest in culture and tribes never waned as he took broad interest in different ethnic groups and their co-existence. 

Increasing inter-tribal conflicts inspired him to return to school and get a PhD in law with a thesis on “An Assessment of the Legal and Institutional Framework for the Prevention and Mitigation of Ethno-Religious Conflict in Nigeria.”

Dantata has written three non-fiction books before but two years ago something shifted, something made him develop an interest in writing a novel that he now hopes will be his “signature.” 

“I hope this novel will become my signature. I am a lawyer by training and have been in tourism for most of my career but I hope I will be remembered for this novel,” he said, taking a sip of water.

But what pushed him into fiction writing, what did he want to say that his articles or essays suddenly seemed inadequate to address?

“The defining moment came two years ago when the Fulani came into the news for the wrong reasons, not only in Nigeria but across West Africa. They were expelled from Ghana, with the Ghanaian government claiming there is no indigenous Fulani population in the country. There were problems with the Fulani extending to Senegal and then the problem exploded in Nigeria,” he said. 

His novel ‘Tammunnde’ chronicles the struggles of a Fulani family in changing times. Baffa, a Fulani man, has followed the his herd to Okitipupa village in South West Nigeria where he lived for two decades.  His desire for his two sons Bappa and Jodo to continue the Fulani way is threatened by Bappa’s desire to pursue a different life for himself, undermining everything his father and brother aspire to. It is a novel set in contemporary times, of a family with centuries-old traditions that they must find new ways of navigating social changes.

“Though it is fiction, there is a message behind it. I want the Fulani to read about themselves and for the people to read about them and understand their culture and ideas. I want the world to understand the Fulani and I want the Fulani to understand the world. My work is a contribution to that dialogue,” Dantata said.

“When I was young, the Fulani were romanticized, the Fulani milk maid, the Fulani dances. For years they have been romanticized but when did these depiction change from Fulani the romantic to Fulani the terrorist? The whole transformation took place within the last two years and the media played a part in that,” he explained.

His determination to pass a message through fiction became imperative following increase in clashes between Fulani herdsmen, a now dreaded term in Nigeria, and pastoralist communities that have claimed thousands of lives across Nigeria.

One thing that is glaring while interviewing Dantata is his desire to correct perceptions about the Fulani, but he is also very clear that the Fulani need to make changes to their ways, something he hopes they will realize when they read his novel.

“I think the Fulani are now being profiled in a certain manner, not that I am holding brief for them, because I think they have their own faults too, but now things are getting out of hand and they are being profiled as if every herder is a terrorist. Most of them are not. They are just going on with their lives as they have been doing for centuries,” he said. “I am not trying to launder their image, I am trying to tell a good story.”

For Dantata, that refusal to change in itself is a problem. He talks extensively about change and people’s resistance to it.  It is not only the Fulani he picks a bone with for resisting change but just about everyone else.

“Kano is my homeland but it has failed to modernize. It is a trading center like Dubai but has refused to modernize. In some parts of Kano, there are narrow alleys that even bicycles can’t access because people won’t let their houses be demolished to make way for development,” he said, the passion echoing in his voice.

“Can the Fulani modernize and somehow retain their cattle? Can the Yoruba and Hausa and Igbo modernize? We talk about some countries that have modernized overnight and we wonder if this is applicable to us,” Dantata said.

This is the fundamental crust of his novel as he explains. “The father and his two sons, he is trying to inculcate the Fulani values in them. One of them, Jodo, is receptive to the ideas but the other is not; he wants to live in a city and have an education. So the book is about this struggle, the father and his two sons. That is the struggle going on today among the nomadic Fulani.”

And when he speaks of the Fulani in these times, Dantata is a bit insistent. “They have refused to change and have kept doing things the way their forefathers have been doing them,” he said again.

For the largest nomadic group in the world to be so ambivalent to change in these times will definitely lead to conflict.

“They are the largest nomadic group in the world with a population of 20 million with half of that number in Nigeria,” Dantata said.

But what does Tammunnde mean, I asked him.

“The title means hope, expectation. It [the novel] is about a boy always looking towards the horizon, but he never reaches it. For me the horizon represents peace and tranquility and these were the things he aspired to,” he said.

 But it is not only his characters that have tammunnde in their hearts. It is obvious that Dantata too does. 

“The future of Africa lies between the herdsmen and the pastoralist. It is a continent-wide problem and once you solve this, then you are set to take off,” he said.

It is this hope that these two groups will someday come to co-exist peacefully that is the real reason behind Dantata writing his first novel on the eve of his 60th birthday.

And he has big hopes for this novel. He invested his time and resources writing it. Two years, he said, and countless hours of research.

“This book is me,” he said.

But perhaps his biggest hope or expectation is for his book to achieve the success that his literary role model achieved with his. Several times during the interview, Dantata made references to Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’.

“When you read ‘Things Fall Apart’, you come away with the sense that you know the Igbo man and his culture. I want those who read ‘Tammunnde’ to come away with the sense that they understand the Fulani and their culture in the same way,” he said.

He makes reference to Okonkwo’s resistance to change over a hundred years ago and how the same applies to Bappa in his novel, only in his case, it is contemporary, it deals with the here and now, so much so that some of the scenes that played out in the novel were replicated or inspired by real life events that were reported in newspapers.

“As I was writing, some of the scenes pop up in the newspaper with reports of cattle rustling or clashes here and there,” he said.

But that is not all he hopes for, Dantata would like to see a big screen adaption of his novel and the possibility of getting it on the syllabus so that it could reach as many people as possible. He wants this story to be read and consumed by just about everyone.

Perhaps a few years from now, people might look back at Dantata’s novel as the definitive work on the Fulani, the often romanticized people whose reality Dantata tried to capture in his debut novel.