Special Investigation: The Fulani ‘Doomed to a bleak future?’

They are one of the last great nomadic peoples of the planet, a community of some 35 million people scattered across 15 countries in West Africa, from the dusty Sahel down to the lush rainforests. They are the Fulani: Pastoral herders who migrate with their cattle, following the pendulum swing of the seasons. A few […]

They are one of the last great nomadic peoples of the planet, a community of some 35 million people scattered across 15 countries in West Africa, from the dusty Sahel down to the lush rainforests. They are the Fulani: Pastoral herders who migrate with their cattle, following the pendulum swing of the seasons. A few years ago, the Fulani, also called the Peul, pursued their ancient lifestyle largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. All that has changed. Old conflicts have flared anew between herders and sedentary farmers in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

Thousands of people have died in a cycle of violence that jihadists have manipulated and inflamed. The economic impact is in the tens of billions of dollars. Governance in many of these afflicted regions is breaking down, turning swathes of land into vast zones of lawlessness. The clashes have occurred on West Africa’s historic Muslim-Christian faultline. Yet the conflict goes beyond religion, bringing into focus issues that are crucially relevant for the wider world. They include the roles of population growth and climate change in fuelling disputes over land use, and the part that colonial-legacy divisions play in stoking violence.

The crisis has also turned a sudden, stark spotlight on Fulanis and their gruelling but timeless way of living. Today, despite their millennia of history, the Fulani people find themselves assailed by stigma, political pressures and a shifting economy, their traditions so often out of kilter with the demands of modern societies. Many Fulani, struggling to adapt, say their people have no choice but to fight to survive — or otherwise fade away. In a special investigation, AFP sent a team of reporters across Nigeria. In these exceptional reports, we explore the Fulani’s complex social and economic world, and we raise the question: Is this timeless people doomed to a bleak future?

The long read: Nigeria’s War of the Land

“Move! Move!” The herders cry, the packed crowd divides, and a vast column of cattle charges through the swirling dust, their long sharp horns swaying like a forest. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of beasts push their way forward, trampling the ground strewn with plastic bags. It is mid-morning but already the heat is blistering. The buyers have arrived, and the hard bargaining can begin.

The scene is Agege market in Lagos — the largest livestock trading hub in West Africa. Here, each day, 50 truckloads of livestock are disgorged into its maw to supply the 20 million inhabitants of Africa’s biggest city. Nigeria has nearly 200 million mouths to feed, a figure expected to grow to almost 400 million by 2050.

Going hand-in-hand with this population boom is a vast, expanding market for meat and milk.  And that demand, in turn, is having invisible, but wrenching, repercussions on Africa’s most populous country.

 

– The long trek –

Agege is, literally, terminus for the animals. They have been raised and fattened by nomadic Fulani herders many hundreds of kilometres away, sold at rural markets and ultimately brought to the mega-city. Some cattle, exhausted by the journey and weak from disease, collapse on arrival.

Lying on their sides, panting with protruding ribs, they seem like they are preparing to give up without a fight. These are not worth a great deal, their flanks too thin for much cash. But most, fattened up with grain and fodder, show a shiny coat and have the thick thighs of good health. All have come over vast distances: walking at first, then packed into large cattle trucks for the final leg to Lagos.

Today, their journey is almost over. Just a short walk away lie the city’s giant slaughterhouses. In a grubby car park, refrigerated vans are already waiting to load the meat. Aisha Maila is one of the few women in the organised chaos of the sprawling market. The elderly lady is marrying off her daughter in a few days and wants the celebrations to be something special. She is not rich, so she has come to buy the wedding dinner direct from the source. “How much for that big white bull there?” she asks, but the thousand dollar price-tag is too high.

“Too expensive,” Maila says, scouting out a more modest cow that she can afford. Maila’s shopping is small stuff. The big business is done between dealers and major butchers. Gambo Usman has found a potential buyer for his batch of fat-humped, long-horned cows, which have come all the way from neighbouring Chad.

“Yauwa, yauwa,” Usman says in the Hausa language of northern Nigeria, his phone clamped to his ear. “OK, good.”

He explains the terms of the deal to his boss, a wealthy businessman in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. Usman is only the go-between.  Twice a month, he crosses Nigeria by plane from north to south, travelling nearly a thousand kilometres (600 miles) between Kano and Lagos to sell the animals sent down south.

“The demand is getting bigger, and we sometimes have trouble meeting it,” said Usman, dressed in ripped jeans and muddy boots.

“There are shortages because of violence with farmers. Many herds have been decimated up there.”

“Up there” is Nigeria’s north. The majority of animals coming to the big cities of the south come from the borderlands of Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

– Cattle and conflict –

There, in the dry lands of the Sahel, the ancient way of life of herding is practised by the Fulani, a predominantly Muslim people with long traditions of nomadism. But the lifestyle is under pressure as never before. Big herds and big money are at stake: around 120 million cattle, sheep and goats.

Every November, when the dry season begins, the farmers and their animals move south searching for fresh pastures, to where the Niger and Benue rivers water the fertile plains in central Nigeria.

Once, there used to be room for everyone in the “Middle Belt”, the zone where a Muslim-dominated north rubs alongside a largely Christian south. Each complemented the other: milk was traded for corn, leftover hay from harvests fed the livestock, and dung from cows fertilised the soil.

Tensions could arise, especially when a herd ate or trampled a farmer’s field of crops — but traditional chiefs still had the power to keep the peace between rivals. Times have changed. In the north, the tough droughts seem to have been growing ever harder, while the brutal insurgency of Boko Haram has forced tens of thousands of people to flee the lands around Lake Chad.

Meanwhile, parasites that once plagued livestock have declined, opening up the land for cattle. So the Fulani people are shifting south — often, if they can, for good.

With the dizzying speed of population growth in Nigeria in the late 20th century, land has become the subject of fierce competition. Step by step, conflicts over crops, water and livestock have grown.

The village of Angwan Aku, in the centre of Nigeria’s north, is now at the heart of a war in which more people have died than in battles against Boko Haram. The village, once home to settled farmers, a Christian community of the Adara people, was left in ruins in April. Monica Gabriel, lying on an old mattress on the floor of a nearby clinic covered in a thin red sheet, is a survivor.

A week after the killings, the 48-year-old farmer is still in shock, staring silently into space, the bullets that smashed into both her legs remain stuck inside. Her shaved head is crossed by a long scar. On her left wrist, a homemade bandage covers where the assailants hacked her with machetes.

Two nurses wave off the flies which come to feast on the wounds. Were it not for a small cough that moves her chest, an observer might think she was already dead.

 

– Massacres –

It was just after dawn and Gabriel had been cooking millet porridge for breakfast when a crackle of automatic rifles rang out in Angwan Aku.

“Someone shouted a warning, but we didn’t hear,” said her husband Dauda, his voice trembling as he recalled the moment.

“My mother was killed on the doorstep. My wife tried to run away — but they caught her.”  He has not left his wife’s bedside since.

“We do not know why they attacked us,” he said. “We didn’t do anything to them.”

The gunmen went from house to house, shooting or hacking to death anyone they encountered — men and women, old and young.

In less than two hours, in this village of some 2,000 people, 27 were slaughtered and 16 seriously wounded.

Survivors claim that the attackers were “Fulani”: they say gunmen spoke the Fulani language and had lighter skin and high cheekbones, the stereotyped look of their group. But beyond that, there is no consensus.

Where did they come from, and what was their motive? Was it robbery? Were they another gang of bandits, in a country with so many already?

Or was it for revenge? Some blame a court decision on a land dispute, that ruled in favour of the villagers. Others claimed it was an argument over a woman.

As is so often the case, no one knows the truth, for there are as many stories as there are people in these tough lands.

The only certainty is that the terrible spiral of violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt has been given another twist. In the past five years, the conflict has claimed at least 7,000 lives, and the economic cost is running at $13 billion (11.57 billion euros) annually, according to the NGO Mercy Corps.

Settled farmers, mainly Christian but hailing from several different ethnic groups, boast of ancestral ties to the land, buttressing their claim to own it. But such claims have been indirectly encouraged by an official policy: the government is throwing its support behind agriculture to diversify Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy.

 

– Torched homes – 

Month after month of violence has turned swathes of the rural Middle Belt into a wasteland.

You can drive down long dirt tracks for hours, snaking through scenes of devastation, from burned villages of the Adara ethnic group to hamlets abandoned by the Fulani. In some places, smoke rises from the ruins of houses torched a few days earlier. Flames have reduced motorbikes to skeletons. Piles of corrugated sheets are all that remain of collapsed roofs. Only the yowls of frightened dogs break the silence.

The dead are speedily buried without a coffin and with the briefest of funerals — laid together in mass graves hastily dug by villagers before scavengers come to rip at their remains. At the village of Dogon Noma, where 71 people were killed and around 250 houses burned in March, each grave was dug to hold 10 bodies. The lines looked like a freshly ploughed field. The aftermath of these attacks is invariably a grim ritual, and one that inevitably drips more poison into this conflict.

Police typically arrive days after the attack. Their investigations lead nowhere. In the absence of justice, frustration metastasises into hatred. So those who call for peace face a challenge.

On a Sunday morning, preacher Yohanna Buru arrives at the evangelist church in the one-horse town of Mararaban. The crowds, those forced from their homes from the fighting, have come to communion for the sacrament and bags of food aid that go with it.

“Trust the Lord, only He can save you,” the pastor tells the congregation, wearing big black sunglasses and jeans.

“Do not seek revenge, but pray for your enemies and the salvation of their souls.” There are murmurs of surprise among those at prayer: this is not the usual vengeful rhetoric of their chiefs and political leaders, whose speeches of anger divide people by ethnicity and religion.

Skeptics say that leaders find casting blame on scapegoats easier than talking about poverty, crippling hunger and unemployment — especially in an election year, like 2019. Buru the preacher insists: “Fulani are not terrorists”.

In his home in Kaduna — where Islamic Sharia is the law — he invites Muslim preachers to celebrate Christmas and Easter alongside him, and repeats to anyone who wants to hear: “Dialogue is the only way out.”

His voice has became famous in this region, broadcast every Sunday on his own local radio show.

“I am a peacemaker,” Buru says. “But I know that not everyone likes it. I have received threats, intimidation… I am asked why I speak with the enemies of Christians.” He sighs. “It’s understandable,” he says after a while. “The land is their only wealth, all they have is to farm it. If we take that away, they have nothing left.”

– Cycle of revenge – 

Oyama Kwanaki is one of those who have already lost everything. Lying on a hospital bed with a bullet wound, he is a tough man with staring eyes. They flash with anger.

“What I saw that night, I will never forget,” Kwanaki said. “If my path crosses with that of a Fulani, he will pay. I am not able to forgive.”

Revenge is taken communally, not against the men directly responsible. So now the countryside is full of young men, organised into militia gangs, armed with homemade rifles or bows and arrows, to defend their villages.

“They have AK-47s,” Kwanaki said. “You have to defend yourself.”

The Fulani have come here for countless generations. But because they moved with their animals, they were never seen as settling — and all are often considered “invaders”. Some 30 to 40 million Fulani people are spread over 15 countries, from the West African coastal state of Senegal to the Central African Republic in the heart of the continent.

Lines on the map of national borders mean little to them; the preservation of the herds are what their lives depend on. The fact that they have suffered from the violence just as much is largely ignored: such as in February, when 130 of them were massacred in southern Kaduna state in one night alone. Blamed and then attacked for crimes committed by others, the Fulani families gathered their animals, packed up one after the other, and set off on their way.

To be continued

 

An AFP special report by Celia Lebur, Florian Plaucheur & Luis Tato