Quick thoughts on criminalisation and stereotyping of the Fulani ethnicity
Considering the herdsmen-farmer clashes and killings in Nigeria in recent years, some concerned citizens have cautioned the national news media on the need to stop giving an ethnic tinge in their description of killer herdsmen by referring to them as Fulani herdsmen; a description that dangerously criminalises the entire ethnic group. It is true that […]
Considering the herdsmen-farmer clashes and killings in Nigeria in recent years, some concerned citizens have cautioned the national news media on the need to stop giving an ethnic tinge in their description of killer herdsmen by referring to them as Fulani herdsmen; a description that dangerously criminalises the entire ethnic group. It is true that other ethnicities in Nigeria too have within them people who could be criminals, yet the Nigerian news media do not refer to such criminals from an ethnic viewpoint. Several reasons may exist on why the herdsmen are described by an ethnic moniker, but I think a bit differently from the dominant narratives already presented. By describing the herdsmen as Fulani herdsmen, I believe that the Nigerian news media is not engaging in a deliberately unfair campaign against the Fulani ethnic group; but their description is rather a subconscious one that is influenced by the Fulani’s own highly distinctive sociocultural and socioeconomic monomorphism.
Unlike other ethnic groups in Nigeria, the Fulani cattle herders do not have the advantage of ‘colour polymorphism’ to allow them dissolve unrecognisably into the larger Nigerian population to enhance their preservation instinct. Ecologists believe, for example, that colour polymorphism of organisms within an ecological system can protect such organisms from predation (read: ethnic colouration). We are raised to believe (and perhaps rightly so) that only the Fulani are custodians of cattle in Nigeria. Beyond their cows the Fulani seem to have distinctive features of morphology, speech, culture, transhumance, etc., that readily and almost instantly gives them away for who they are. Other ethnic groups in Nigeria are not easily identified by their own sociocultural and socioeconomic distinctiveness unless they deliberately flaunt it. The Masai of Kenya and Tanzania, for example, herd cattle, and I believe that when they engage in criminal activities, the Kenyan and the Tanzanian news media will subconsciously involve their ethnicity in describing them. The ‘colour monomorphism’ of the Fulani is so distinct that when Fulani people engage in armed robberies on Nigerian highways, travellers who were robbed by them come back home to say they were robbed by the Fulani people. But when other people who are non-Fulani steal from travellers on the highway, the passengers can hardly describe the ethnicity of the robbers for there could be no easy giveaway cues.
Most importantly, it is human nature, globally, to describe an event or process from a perspective that represents that event or process at its lowest definitional order especially if there is a clue that leads you to arrive at that lowest order. If the Fulani are the only ethnic group in Nigeria that herd cattle in large numbers, and in a transhumance fashion, if any one farmer in Nigeria comes to his farm in the morning to see it vandalised by cattle, he doesn’t need to have seen the cattle (that did the vandalism) or the person (who led the cattle into his farm) to conclude that his farm was vandalised by Fulani people who herd cattle. The same farmer will not have been able to use the word Fulani to qualify the herdsman if there were several or many other ethnic groups in Nigeria who herd cattle in the manner the Fulani people currently do. This is just how human beings all over the world function: by spotting the difference that you embody to either value or devalue you.
In the study of classification of things across all fields of knowledge where classification is conducted, human beings categorise things based on shared and/or distinctive features. So, the Fulani as the herdsman will continue to remain in the subconsciousness of Nigerians until a day comes when several other ethnic groups engage themselves in the cattle herding trade. Just last year, a Nigerian friend (in the UK) invited me and my family to his house for dinner. On seeing me, his mother-in-law (who came to visit from Nigeria) concluded that I was Fulani. When I asked her why she thought I was Fulani she replied: “the hair and the height.” This is identification by morphology, and I am not sure that the same woman could identify other non-Fulani people in Nigeria by their “hair and height.” If I had committed a crime in the house I visited, the woman would perhaps use my non-European skin colour and my non-British accent to identify that I was African, but she will even take her definition of me to the lowest possible order by also saying that I was Fulani. This will help the police to go out in search for an African and a Fulani. So, while other people with the same skin colour and accent as mine could escape being identified by their ethnicity from this Nigerian woman (who is even from the southern part of Nigeria and has never lived in the north), I do not seem to have the advantage of dissolution, to allow me dissolve unrecognisably into ‘African’ and/or ‘Nigerian’ identities at the most; so that I could be a little bit more preserved.
But the distinctive features of the Fulani in the wake of the farmer-herder crisis (prominent amongst these is the fact that they are the only known ethnic group that carry cattle around the place) that gives them away for media profiling must be campaigned against in order not to criminalise an entire ethnic group. One way of achieving this campaign effectively is for the Fulani people to demonstrate to other Nigerians on the absurdity of attaching the ethnicity of all criminals to their crimes. When you demonstrate to Nigerians that a criminal is a criminal, not Hausa criminal, Yoruba criminal, or Igbo criminal, then the profiling of the Fulani might stop immediately. However, before we castigate the media by labelling them haters of the Fulani ethnic group (rightly or wrongly), we must not forget that the main cause of the media profiling has its roots in the ‘giveaway clue/cue’ that the Fulani people embody. The situation is the same as you have in racism. All rational human beings condemn racism and there is even a hypothesis that shows that people are not born to discriminate against themselves on the reason of variations in skin colour. However, whether we believe that racism is a natural or an acquired instinct, the first clue that gives you away to racism is your difference - those distinctive cultural, religious, morphologic features, etc., that stands you out within a larger group whose members have the advantage of featural (to lend Geoffrey Sampson’s term) dissolution.
February 23, 2019