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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2013
Between Prayers: The Life of a West
African Muslim
Dianna Bell
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
BETWEEN PRAYERS:
THE LIFE OF A WEST AFRICAN MUSLIM
By
DIANNA BELL
A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of Religion
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2013
Dianna Bell defended this dissertation on March 1, 2013.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Joseph Hellweg
Professor Directing Dissertation
Michael Uzendoski
University Representative
Adam Gaiser
Committee Member
Peter Garretson
Committee Member
The Graduate school has verified and approved the above-named committee members,
and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university policy.
ii
For Hamidou Samaké
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Carrying out ethnographic research depends on the kindness and support of an
array of people at different stages of the project. I offer my deepest gratitude to Joseph
Hellweg for his unfaltering guidance and encouragement through each stage. Joseph
oversaw the early design of this research, read and edited funding proposals, counseled
me before my move to Mali, visited me in Ouélessébougou during my fieldwork, and
closely guided me through the writing process after my return to the United States.
Profound thanks also goes to my other committee members, Adam Gaiser, Michael
Uzendoski, and Peter Garretson for offering their time, interest, and input to this project.
I extend my gratitude to Bourama Samaké and Kadja Ballo and all of their
somɔgɔw, especially Yirigoi and Djègèni, for their hospitality and full inclusion in their
lives and family. Special thanks to J’aime, who tirelessly transcribed my interviews by
hand in Bamanankan and Miriam for washing my clothes each week, as well as those
who worked near Amadou and me, namely Koniba, Lamine, Fulabougouni Dugutigi,
Sedou, Karimou, and Miriam, for the friendship and tea. Also, my appreciation to Joe for
breaking from his own research demands to visit me in Mali.
I am very lucky to have family and friends who have encouraged me to pursue my
educational goals. I thank my parents and sister, Shannon, for their personal support and
for helping me manage my affairs while in the field. I especially thank my father, Jim,
for voluntarily reading and editing drafts of each chapter and for his enthusiasm for my
research in Mali. Thank you to Yeah and Marissa Samaké for their friendship and
support during my time in Mali. I also wish to thank Susan Stetson, Susan Minnerly, Jon
iv
Bridges, and Andrew Watson for their administrative assistance, especially during the
fieldwork phase of this project.
The Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University
financially supported preliminary field research for this project in 2010. Thank you to
Terry Coonan, the executive director of the Center, for encouraging the research. I am
grateful for the International Dissertation Fellowship Program at Florida State University,
which provided financial support for my fieldwork in 2011.
Lastly, my love and thanks to Amadou, for trusting me with his past and including
me in his present and future.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... vii ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................................. 1 Understanding Religious Life and Baraji through Life History ..................................... 9 Fula and Mande Ethnicity in Ouélessébougou.............................................................. 21 Orthography .................................................................................................................. 29 Project Methodology ..................................................................................................... 30 Project Outline............................................................................................................... 47 CHAPTER TWO .............................................................................................................. 49 Early Fula Conversion................................................................................................... 50 Nineteenth Century Fula Jihads .................................................................................... 52 Islam in Ouélessébougou .............................................................................................. 59 Religious Leadership among Muslims in Ouélessébougou .......................................... 65 Currents of Islam in Ouélessébougou ........................................................................... 71 Doctrine of Baraji among Muslims in West Africa...................................................... 76 CHAPTER THREE .......................................................................................................... 85 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 127 CHAPTER FOUR........................................................................................................... 128 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 176 CHAPTER FIVE ............................................................................................................ 178 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 217 CHAPTER SIX............................................................................................................... 219 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 255 CHAPTER SEVEN ........................................................................................................ 258 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 264 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 281 vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Amadou Diallo crafting a rope at his usual workplace ....................................... 2 Figure 2: Koniba Doumbia works repairing watering cans for a community garden ........ 7 Figure 3: Location of Ouélessébougou ............................................................................. 22 Figure 4: Yirigoi washes her young grandson with an elixir she prepared to instill courage
in him......................................................................................................................... 35 Figure 5: Amadou Diallo’s home and courtyard .............................................................. 38 Figure 6: Fula jihad states in West Africa, c. 1830........................................................... 56 Figure 7: Exterior of the largest mosque (misiriba) in Ouélessébougou .......................... 64 Figure 8: Yacouba Traoré consulting an Arabic text during an interview ....................... 78 Figure 9: Artistic depiction of a subaga (Drawing by Laye Doumbia)............................ 99 Figure 10: Mosque located in the center of Npièbougou’s Fula district......................... 103 Figure 11: Amadou Diallo and me visiting Amadou’s favorite childhood swimming hole
in Npièbougou ......................................................................................................... 107 Figure 12: In 2011 Amadou visited Npièbougou and examined his family’s herd, which
was then cared for by Daramani’s grandsons.......................................................... 135 Figure 13: The various forms of West African amulets ................................................. 145 Figure 14: (L –R) Koniba, Amadou and me during a typical workday in 2011............. 162 Figure 15: Amadou picks berries from fruit tree he formerly frequented while herding in
Ouélessébougou’s forest as a young man................................................................ 174 Figure 16: Amadou’s wife, Nouhouba Bagayoko, in 2011 ............................................ 188 Figure 17: The 1,127-kilometer one-way route Amadou routinely walked from Bamako
to Monrovia ............................................................................................................. 193 Figure 18: The interior of Fousseyni’s eclectic shop...................................................... 224 vii
Figure 19: Amadou (center) sitting among town elders and Muslim leaders and studying
the Qur’an during a posthumous sacrifice............................................................... 231 Figure 20: Amadou demonstrates raising his hands to his ears for a call to prayer ....... 235 Figure 21: A group of slender cattle enter a forest on the outskirts Ouélessébougou for
grazing ..................................................................................................................... 247 Figure 22: Muslim women in Ouélessébougou participate in a special prayer meeting at
the mosque to pray for rain...................................................................................... 253 Figure 23: Amadou in 2011 ............................................................................................ 257 viii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: The Bamanankan alphabet.................................................................................. 30 ix
ABSTRACT
Muslims in the West African state of Mali use the concept of baraji—which
translates from the vernacular as “divine reward” or “recompense”—as a framework for
understanding proper religious practice and the role of Islam in daily matters. In order to
understand the various ways through which Muslims in West Africa seek measurable
units of baraji, this work presents the life history of Amadou Diallo, an elderly Fula man
and former cattle herder living in the town of Ouélessébougou in southwestern Mali.
Drawing from ethnographic research, I show how Muslims in West Africa use
baraji to find religious relevance in everyday and ritual life by exploring the practices,
experiences, and feelings that have driven Amadou’s lifelong aim to acquire the
unspecified amount of baraji that God requires for a person to gain salvation and
admission into paradise. Amadou’s personal narrative unfolds the lived experience of
Islam in everyday life in West Africa by revealing the intricate ways that Muslims search
out baraji. I explore baraji as a form of value through which West African Muslims
discern the different religious practices and daily choices that they employ during their
lifetime while highlighting how the acquisition of baraji changes with age and
circumstance, revealing Islam as dynamically embedded in the life cycle.
x
CHAPTER ONE
PROJECT INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY
It is odd to think back to the day that first I met Amadou Diallo and realize that
we were once strangers. Our unlikely relationship began because vendors in the open-air
marketplace in Ouélessébougou, a town in the southwest corner of the West African state
of Mali, would not sell their customers a single banana. Instead, sellers carefully
organized their fresh produce into loose, small piles to vend as a group. During the
summer of 2010, while living in Ouélessébougou and conducting preliminary field
research for my dissertation, I spent my mornings walking around the marketplace in an
attempt to improve my language abilities and better understand life in Mali. Each
morning, on my way into the central market, I purchased a small bunch of bananas from a
woman who sold fruit on the quiet edge of the marketplace. A single piece of fruit
always satiated me, and I faced the daily dilemma of where to place the additional
bananas that marketplace norm had required me to purchase. I found that giving the
bananas to people inside the crowded market brought me unwanted attention, as those
who witnessed the exchange would shout and ask me, sometimes in good humor and
other times in earnest confrontation, where their banana was.
I soon developed a routine in which I would buy a pile of bananas, eat one, and
retrace my steps by about one hundred meters in order to give the remaining bananas to
an old man who made rope by hand near the market. I passed the old man every morning
on my way into the market from my home, and his familiar voice and pleasant shout of “i
ni sɔgɔma!” which means “good morning” in the Bamanankan language, brought me
1
daily cheer. I found that the man happily took the bananas I presented him with an easy
smile that revealed the wrinkles in his aging but handsome face and crooked front teeth,
which were among the few remaining in his mouth, and a polite thank you. I would
acknowledge his expression of gratitude by briefly replying “nse,” the proper female
response to a greeting in Bamanankan, before returning to the market.
Figure 1: Amadou Diallo crafting a rope at his usual workplace
One morning, while sitting on a bench in the market and sipping a coffee that had
been overly flavored with sweetened condensed milk, I visited with a small group of
people who were also enjoying their morning perk. We spoke lightheartedly of our
origins, interests, and plans for the day.
“Where are you from?” I asked the man sitting next to me.
2
“I’m traveling from south of here, the city of Sikasso. I drive a sotrama,” he
explained and gestured toward the main road to a van used for public transportation in
Mali.
Suddenly a middle-aged man approached the bench and shouted for everyone to
stop talking. He pointed at me and told the people that I was a spy (kolajɛba) and would
undoubtedly use whatever information they told me to further oppress Africans. I
watched with flabbergasted humiliation as my conversation partners looked at my
accuser with confusion and then slowly turned their eyes to me with suspicious glares. I
lamely and timidly muttered, “It’s not true” (tinɛ tɛ) before rising from the bench and
leaving. I strode around the market feeling embarrassed and dejected for several minutes
before I decided to go home for the remainder of the morning.
On my return from the market, the idea to go visit with the old man to whom I
gave my bananas to each morning suddenly caught my mind. I walked to the old man’s
workplace, where I found him crafting a rope and visiting with the welder who worked
next to him. I gave a shallow obsequious bow and introduced myself to the two men
using my Bamana name, Mai’i Samaké. The welder shook my hand and immediately
invited me to sit with them, producing a metal-frame chair with rubber webbing for seat
and back support. The old man I shared my bananas with introduced himself as Amadou
Diallo and told me that his friend who welded next to him was named Koniba Doumbia.
Silence set in shortly after the three of us exchanged basic greetings and introductions.
For several minutes I watched, mesmerized, as Amadou’s hands moved like a
choreographed dance as he plaited rope. I broke the pause by asking Amadou whether
his work was difficult. He said that making a good rope was challenging and offered to
3
teach me the basics of his craft. Amadou reached into an old grain sack sitting next to
him and pulled out a slender stick that had been cut from a tree. He quickly began to
twist plastic strings into a cord, which he soon after wound around the wooden stick. He
handed me the stick along with an organized assembly of white plastic strings from used
rice sacks that had already been divided and tied together into discrete sections, and
instructed me to continue the motions of winding the cable while adding new groups of
string into the cord. I worked on the rope in Amadou and Koniba’s company for the
remainder of the morning and slowly felt myself recover from the uncomfortable
confrontation that had happened earlier in the market. Two hours later I told Amadou
and Koniba that I needed to return home for lunch but asked if I could join them again the
next morning.
I continued to make rope with Amadou every morning for the remainder of my
2010 field stay. My primary aim was to integrate into everyday life in Ouélessébougou,
and I found that the more time I spent making rope the more the town’s populace began
to accept my peculiar presence. Amadou gradually taught me all the steps for his style of
handmade rope construction. The process began by cutting the seams of a grain sack to
turn it into a flat sheet. Next, I learned to tear apart the sack by individual strands that
were then tied into groups of approximately eight to twelve strands. These sets of tied
strands were subsequently wound one by one, introducing others at any moment
depending on the desired diameter, into a long cord that eventually measured twice the
length of the desired finished rope size. Once the cord was finished I divided it into two
separate spools, and Amadou instructed me to hold tension on each line by and begin
plaiting them together into a two-stranded braid. Some rope makers in Mali sold two-
4
strand ropes, but Amadou insisted on always fortifying his rope by crafting a third cord
that he lastly wound between the grooves of the previously plaited two-strands. Amadou
demanded that I uphold his reputation for making beautiful and high-standard ropes and,
when I first started studying under him, he often told me to redo my work when my rope
had too many loose fibers sticking out or had asymmetrical elements in its diameter or
plaiting.
Amadou was a respected town elder and by closely associating myself with him I
suddenly found myself receiving an unprecedented level of regard from townspeople.
Rather than staring or namelessly shouting “tubabuni!” (little white person) at me in the
market, women began to address me by name and asked me questions about my new
occupation: Did I sell my rope? For how much? How many meters? When would I
finish my next rope? These conversations helped me realize the importance of rope in
Ouélessébougou. Amadou’s job may at first seem a simple occupation for a poor African
man, but residents used rope to fetch water from their wells, secure cargo when traveling,
and tie their livestock. People in Mali would face life-threatening problems without
dependable rope. As I learned about Amadou’s life and his understanding of Islam, I
came to find it especially fitting and profound that Amadou made rope as his professional
occupation. During my fieldwork we both continually employed analogies, shared
throughout this work, between Islam and rope making to clarify the nature of the
relationship between strengthening religious devotion, practice, and understanding to the
craft of making strong and reliable rope.
As time went on, I took further notice of Amadou’s work environment and the
details of his appearance. Amadou stood only five and a half feet tall with a medium
5
build, and commented that he blamed his mother for his short height. His hair had turned
white with age, but several black whiskers remained in his cream-colored beard.
Amadou’s wrinkles highlighted his smile, which was the most striking feature of his face.
He smiled often, even when there was ostensibly nothing to smile about. When Amadou
laughed his whole face expressed his amusement, tipping his head back when he found a
joke particularly funny while his eyes shined with happiness. I loved Amadou’s sharp
sense of humor and noticed that he entertained everyone who worked near us with his
stories, short jokes, and deadpan wit. He excelled at physical comedy and dramatized
each sneeze and cough while repeatedly accusing his best friend Koniba of practicing
sorcery that had caused him to become sick.
Everyday Amadou wore a kufi, a brimless and rounded cap worn by old men
throughout West Africa, and dressed in a flowing cotton robe (boubou) with long sleeves
and matching pants. Amadou loved white, tan, and light blue and typically selected
clothes in these muted colors. His cell phone hung from a lanyard attached to a padded
case around his neck, which Amadou typically placed in his chest pocket to keep from
swinging in front of him while he worked. He also stored a small black leather address
book in his pocket in which he wrote the phone numbers of his friends and family in
French numerals while his contacts’ names were transliterated using the Arabic alphabet.
His body bore the visible signs of a life spent working in the sun. Small black freckles
dotted his cheeks and temples, and his feet and hands bore cracks and calluses alongside
jagged and broken nails. The joints on both of his second toes stuck up, making his toes
point permanently in a right angle. He told me the warped shape of his toes did not come
from any sudden injury but was rather the result of walking too much during his lifetime.
6
He enjoyed perfect sight from his right eye but complained of blurred vision in his left
and said that is was difficult to find a pair of glasses that would adequately correct his
ocular problems. Amadou owned two pairs of eyeglasses, one with thick black rims and
a second pair with thin gold frames. He unsatisfactorily rotated between the two during
the day.
Figure 2: Koniba Doumbia works repairing watering cans for a community garden
Amadou and I worked on a raised platform of cement that stood about two feet
high from the sandy road in front of us. Conical thatch and square metal roofed homes,
passing motorcycles, donkey-pulled carts, and a cacophony of nearby conversations and
radios surrounded us each day. Amadou sat on small leather cowhide with a rice sack
placed upon it for additional padding. Every evening Amadou conspicuously stored the
leather hide in the low rafters of the aluminum sunshade that covered our workspace from
the bright daylight. He told me he did not worry about thieves taking the hide because it
7
was too small to be worth anything to anyone but him. Despite our combined efforts to
keep the workspace cleared and organized, each day we found ourselves surrounded by
the frayed rice sacks and constantly looking for the knife and scabbard that we shared.
Koniba Doumbia, Amadou’s friend, worked next to us, and the three of us sat together
and talked whenever Koniba was not welding. People in Ouélessébougou normally used
their possessions until the objects became exhausted and beyond repair. Koniba served
residents by welding their broken motorcycles, chairs, tables, kettles, sunshades, cups,
and bicycles.
During the summer of 2010 Koniba, Amadou, and I became friends and they
incorporated me into their daily lives. I often thought of Koniba and Amadou after I
returned to the United States at the end of my research trip. I had conducted research on
religious practices in Ouélessébougou for five months in 2007 and one month in 2009 but
had not felt a strong connection with any informants until I met Amadou and Koniba in
2010. After I left Mali that year, I stayed in touch with Koniba and Amadou through
regular telephone calls, and they would always ask me when I planned to return to see
them again. I selected Amadou in my mind as someone with whom I wanted to work
extensively when I returned to Ouélessébougou for my dissertation fieldwork. Amadou
was a talented speaker and storyteller with a quick wit and sense of humor, and I knew
that I could rely on him to answer the questions I had been formulating about practices,
culture, and daily life in Mali. I did not, however, realize the full role he would take in
my research until I returned to Ouélessébougou the following year to formally begin my
dissertation research.
8
Understanding Religious Life and Baraji through Life History
After my return to Ouélessébougou in 2011 I spent several weeks adjusting to life
in the town by establishing a daily routine, which included making rope daily with
Amadou. As I began to ask questions about Amadou’s past, his stories and personal
experiences began to fascinate me and I found myself wanting to learn more about key
events that had led him up to the moment when we happened to meet. Amadou was
talkative by nature, had a gift for vividly describing his experiences, and spoke fully of
the subjects that interested me—especially the role his Muslim beliefs had played
throughout his life. The clear connection between Islam and Amadou’s experiences
came into obvious focus as he frequently recalled memories from the various jobs—
which included cattle herding, gold mining, farming, and trading—that he had held
during his lifetime. Amadou, like most Malians, found it difficult throughout his life to
earn enough income to support his family and lived under the stress of perpetual poverty.
As one of the poorest countries in the world, Malians in 2011 faced economic
inopportunity as a major problem that I observed during my research. Unfortunately,
things did not improve for Amadou and other Malians in the years following my
research, and fighting between the south and Islamic militants in the north continued to
threaten the physical and economic security of Malians. Amadou said that he never had
the chance to earn a lot of money, but he consoled himself during moments of special
hardship by saying that his hard work had religious worth and had earned him baraji.
I noticed during my conversations with Amadou that he often focused on
explaining how his experiences and decisions had generated baraji. I questioned other
residents about the meaning of the word and soon realized that that the concept of baraji,
9
which loosely translates from the vernacular as “divine reward” or “recompense” (see
Bailleul 2007: 31; Soares 2005: 166-167, 1996: 744), offered a framework for
understanding Islam in daily life in West Africa.1 My preliminary research in
Ouélessébougou taught me that, as religious diversity had increased in Mali, the meaning
behind an affiliation such as “Muslim” become increasingly complex. I noted that
Muslims in the region approached their religious lives and decisions primarily in terms of
baraji, as informants uniformly emphasized that they hoped to acquire units of baraji
through various religious practices and daily pursuits. In questioning people further
about the meaning of the word, I learned that the organizing principle of baraji
represented a value that Muslims in West Africa attributed to the range of religious rituals
and other practices associated with Islam.
Here, I argue that baraji works as a symbolic representation of virtuous behavior
wherein a person applies his or her understanding of Islam to everyday life and pragmatic
activities to acquire an eventual reward. I also document how baraji works to extend and
maintain ties between both living and deceased kin. As such, ideas regarding which
actions could potentially generate baraji directed what practitioners considered proper
behavior between one another and in the world. The anthropological concept of “value”
offers a framework for understanding this state of affairs, specifically how people in
Ouélessébougou incorporated Islam into daily life through baraji as an outcome for
inspired behavior. Scholars have used the concept of value to understand how people
differentiate each other in terms of merit and discriminate physical objects from each
1
A definite etymology for baraji eludes researchers. Some linguists believe Fulfulde speakers originally
adopted the term baraji from the Arabic word baraka, which means blessing (Smeltzer 2005: 47; Vydrin
1999: 96).
10
other in terms of their allure (Barthes 1967; Baudrillard 1968; Graeber 2001; Gregory
1997; Sahlins 1976).
Cultural anthropologists have expanded understandings of the economic sense of
value and used the word to describe value in terms of the merit and promise of societal
prosperity that certain events and actions carry (Buggenhagen 2011: 714-732; 2001: 373401; Evans-Pritchard 1950: 120; Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 150-151; Stanner 1985: 113125). Value, according to Radcliffe-Brown, indicates the manner through which people
endow attachment to their and other’s participation in cultural services, practices, rituals,
and exchanges. The common associations and significance that bind two or more persons
together through culturally sanctioned behavior expresses significance, or social value,
that members of social groups depend on to maintain themselves (Radcliffe-Brown 1952:
150-151; Stanner 1985: 113-125).
Value, in this study, connotes the way that people in Ouélessébougou ranked
various religious and daily practices in terms of their desirability and potential to access
baraji. It describes the meaningful differences and worth that persons and collective
groups in Ouélessébougou applied to the array of religious affiliations and variations in
practice that existed in the town as Muslims organized their lives around the moral
concept of baraji (see Dumont 1983; Graeber 2001; Gregory 1997; Otto 1958: 52-59;
Piot 1999; Wilk & Cliggett 2007; Wilson 1971). I observed that Muslims developed,
displayed, and defended their religious beliefs and practices as expressions of value in
terms of their potential to earn baraji. Thus, baraji represents a system for valuing all
things in relation to Islam and God. This project explores value and the notion of baraji
11
as the primary means through which West African Muslims discerned the different
religious practices and daily choices that they employed during their lifetimes.
I observed that baraji, as a form of value, inspired specific conduct in Muslims’
ritual lives and social interactions. I understand value, in this context, through Gregory
(1997) as the “invisible chains,” or ropes, that linked people to varying degrees to a range
of ritual practices, relationships, and daily activities (12). Just as Amadou produced
ropes with varying widths and tensile strengths, the imaginary ropes that attached
Muslims in Ouélessébougou to an array of ritual activities, relationships, and everyday
matters also varied in their strength and dispensability. Using this imagery, for example,
an exceptionally strong rope connected Muslims to the practice of praying fives times per
day, as prayers remained an inextricable generator of baraji. Eating peanuts between
meals, in contrast, could be understood as connected to Islam through a very tenuous
rope. A person could earn baraji while eating peanuts if they generously shared the
snack with their friends, but the practice alone was not viewed as essential in obtaining
the baraji needed for salvation. It is worth noting that, for some practices, people in
Ouélessébougou could articulate the numerical sum of baraji that the action brought. But
most practices were deemed immeasurable in terms of the exact number of baraji they
produced. For instance, Amadou reported that reciting the Arabic greeting, bismi-l-laahi
earned a Muslim seventy baraji, while similarly noting that attending a funeral amassed
an unidentified number of baraji.2
The value of earning baraji was taught to children in Mali from a young age. But
as people aged and moved through life, their understanding and practice of Islam and
2
A popular expression that is commonly translated from Arabic into English as, “In the name of God.”
12
methods for earning baraji changed. Accordingly, Amadou’s life history highlights the
ways he actively and continually broke, retied, reinforced, and built new ropes between
himself and the practices that he believed furthered his acquisition of baraji. Amadou,
like other Muslims, reckoned behavior in terms of its contribution or detriment to earning
baraji and reaching paradise in the afterlife and making up for sinful behaviors that put
him in debt to God and bore negatively on his attempts to ensure his salvation and
admission into paradise (lahara or alijɛnɛ) in the afterlife.3
The practice of ascribing varying levels of baraji to a range of practices formed
Muslim consciousness and ideals in Ouélessébougou. Hence, baraji acted as a
“paramount value,” or value that principally governed Muslim behavior in everyday
dealings (see Dumont 1983: 215-216). As a value system, Malians used baraji to posit
equivalences between different overtly Islamic practices, indigenous ritual, and local
culture. For example, fasting during Ramadan was commonly recognized for its potential
to produce baraji, as was burning incense in the evening to protect children from sorcerer
attacks. Accordingly, the notion of baraji reflected local understandings of the way a
diverse range of Islamic and indigenous practices were encouraged by Muslims with
reference to their potential to generate baraji. Through baraji, Muslims in Mali built a
value system that prized and converted everyday actions, indigenous rituals, and Islamic
practices into the common currency of baraji. Baraji, thus, represented a personcentered economy through which an array of practices became functionally valued and
related to one another through their conversion to baraji (see Piot 1999: 71-75).
3
Amadou indiscriminately rotated between using the words lahara and alijɛnɛ in his references to paradise
in the afterlife.
13
As a paramount value, baraji stood in contrast to and was even threatened by
other value spheres (see Weber 1946: 323; Bohannan 1955, 1959). Although Dumont
credits paramount values for creating and determining social order, Robbins (2004)
rightly highlights that it is when paramount values change that real cultural change takes
place (12). In the twenty-first century, Amadou, like many other Muslims elders, placed
baraji and money in a struggle against one another for the position of paramount value in
Mali. Amadou granted that money, if used properly, could complement rather than
compete with baraji. Similarly, Piot (1999) points out that money often finances ritual
systems (73). For Malian Muslims, money could maximize baraji, and many used their
means to purchase sacrificial animals and kola nuts in order to hold naming and marriage
ceremonies, celebrate Muslim holidays, hold posthumous sacrifices, and participate in
gift-giving relationships. But as Amadou watched an increasing number of Muslims
place material greed and the pursuit of wealth over their pursuit of baraji, he grew
increasingly nervous about the future of Islam. Accordingly, Amadou’s life history
shows the various ways that he sought to uphold his understanding of the importance of
and methods for earning baraji in a changing world. This in-depth study of baraji also
reveals the intricate ways that West Africans connect their beliefs to everyday life by
appraising practical actions in terms of baraji.
Because Muslims in Mali appraised their practice of Islam primarily in terms of
baraji, it was easy for me to investigate how people in Ouélessébougou understood the
concept as a framework for everyday life. Informants explained that all of life was
centered on baraji, and the concept served as a social substance that connected Islam to
seemingly pragmatic activities, such as providing food for one’s family or participating in
14
gift giving relationships. Despite twentieth-century prophesies that Muslim societies
would soon drift away from their innately religious roots, this work adds to efforts to
show the degree to which Islam remains embedded in everyday life and discourse in
twenty-first century Africa (see Brenner 1993: 1-20; Lewis 1968). Accordingly, Muslim
residents in Ouélessébougou incorporated Islam into their quotidian lives and believed
they would obtain baraji through participation in practices that were evidently Islamic
(such as prayer and fasting) and by behaving with honor in their private lives (such as by
carrying out domestic chores and daily vocations with integrity). Baraji represents an
image of proper religious expression and holds a definite worth. Muslims in Mali speak
of baraji using the same vocabulary that they employ when discussing money. For
example, people can search for (nini) and find (sɔrɔ) baraji and, when receiving a gift, it
is customary for recipients to ask God to repay (sara) the donor with baraji.
This work further advances understandings of the principles and practices that
guided daily life in West Africa, especially by detailing Amadou’s insight on the doctrine
of baraji. Scholars researching religion in West Africa have so far paid negligible
attention to the concept of baraji and the personal, cultural, and theological lenses
through which it is understood. Passing references to baraji in the existing literature
focus primarily on describing baraji through economic undertakings, as researchers
explain that Muslims in West Africa commonly give material gifts to religious leaders
and elderly people with the expectation they will receive spiritual merit, or baraji, in
return (see Hanretta 2008: 290; Schulz 2006: 219; Soares 2005: 166-167, 1996: 739-753).
Minor mentions of baraji in writings on Islam in West Africa reveal that the concept of
baraji extends throughout West African countries and Mande and Fula groups. Yet there
15
is a clear lacuna between how often Malians reference baraji as an instructive component
in their religious and daily lives, and how seldom scholars use the concept in their
attempts to explain religious ideology among West African Muslims. Susan Smeltzer
(2005), a field researcher for Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International, a
Christian nonprofit organization that studies, develops, and documents language, has
produced the most comprehensive and sophisticated overview of baraji in West Africa to
date. Smeltzer argues that Soninke Muslims seek to earn baraji to benefit themselves in
the afterlife primarily by observing the five pillars of Islam (jɔsenw duuru) during their
earthly existence (6, 48-55). Muslims may also acquire what Smeltzer terms
“supplementary baraji,” which practitioners earn through pious deeds viewed as
supererogatory (farida) and which complement the effects of baraji earned by observing
the principal five pillars (57).4
My project grew out of the desire to address omissions in the literature on baraji
and to advance scholarly understandings of the topic by presenting the life history and
personal perspectives of Amadou Diallo, with a detailed focus on how he has understood
and applied the concept of baraji to his life. His life history narrates how Muslims
acquire baraji through the five pillars of Islam alongside the innovative supplementary
actions Amadou has used to earn further baraji for his Day of Judgment (faraɲɔgɔnna
don). This ethnography shows how Muslims in West Africa use baraji to find religious
relevance and comfort in everyday life by exploring the practices, experiences, and
human feelings that have driven Amadou’s lifelong aim to acquire the unspecified
4
Consistent with the widespread tenet, Amadou identified the five basic pillars of Islam as (1) belief
(dannaya), (2) prayer (seli), (3) offerings (sarakati), (4) fasting (sun), and (5) pilgrimage to Mecca (hiji).
16
amount of baraji that God requires for a person to enter paradise in the afterlife (lahara
or alijɛnɛ).
My use of life history as a primary research method adds to assertions that
analyzing religious beliefs and practices of Muslims on an individual scale constitutes a
reasonable, valid, and significant way of contributing to studies on Islam in Africa (see
Launay 1992: 1). Amadou’s personal narrative reveals the intricate ways that baraji is
pursued during a single lifetime and shows how the acquisition of baraji changes with
age and circumstance, promoting an understanding of the dynamic nature of religion in
the life cycle (see Vásquez 2001: 231-232). Other studies on the relationship between
religion and the life cycle tend to focus on Judaism, Christianity, and indigenous religion
and provide explanations on how elaborate rituals complement the stages of human
development (see Cresser 2007; Dieterlen 1941; Fuller 1988; Griaule 1970). My
research contributes to the study of religion in the life cycle by, first, taking account of
Islam and, second, offering a more delicate approach to understanding religion and the
life cycle by featuring the subtle changes that led Amadou to understand, practice, and
experience Islam differently throughout his lifetime. Amadou’s history demonstrates that
there is no static understanding of how Muslims understand and acquire baraji, and that
views about baraji dynamically change as people move through various life stages,
learning new ways and acquiring new capacities for earning baraji as they advance in
age.
Twentieth-century anthropologist Monica Wilson deeply impacted my approach
to fieldwork and ethnography. In the 1930s and 40s, when most anthropologists were
focusing on African societies as static examples of tradition, Monica Wilson spearheaded
17
new and more sophisticated understandings of religion and social change in Africa. She
set an example for anthropologists to follow during her fieldwork among the Pondo of
South Africa and Nyakyusa in southwest Tanzania, advocating extended time in the field,
linguistic competence, and detailed ethnography. Wilson avoids major dogmatic and
theoretical conclusions in her writing, and rather lets the people she worked with speak so
that their actions and values can be understood through their own interpretations
(Brokensha 1983: 84-87). Wilson drew attention to the unsaid “first step” in Victor
Turner’s (1967) popularly used theory of analysis in which, “The outsider guesses and
tells his reader what he supposes the participants mean” (1971: 55). Instead of trying to
theoretically classify what she experienced, Wilson sought to understand the local
meaning and significance of the things she saw and heard. In keeping with Monica
Wilson’s methodology and understanding of religious life in Africa (see 1971; 1965;
1957), this writing seeks to limit participation in the guesswork that characterizes the
over-theorization in anthropology that Wilson criticizes as damaging ethnographers’
interpretations of other people and rather focuses on the expressed purposes and ends that
Amadou and other Muslim informants achieved through their practice of Islam and
pursuit of baraji (see 1971: 55; 1957: 6-7).
The literature on Islam in West Africa often suffers from the same type of esoteric
theoretical arguments and over-theorization that Wilson criticizes, and the absence of indepth explorations of baraji shows researchers’ reluctance to listen to the ways African
Muslims define, understand, and practice Islam in their own unique terms. Wilson’s
characterizations of African cultures gave voice to community-wide interpretations of
religious life while arguing that small-scale societies foster conformity among its
18
populace. I, conversely to Wilson, researched in a town with thousands of inhabitants
and found it difficult in my investigation on Islam in Ouélessébougou to discover
identical explanations for religious practices and understandings of baraji between
informants. Since 2007 I spent a combined fifteen months living in Ouélessébougou and
found that as my knowledge of town history, culture, and language improved, my
confusion concerning Islam increased. Within a single Muslim congregation, for
instance, I documented continual disagreement between members’ convictions about
what constituted unadulterated Islam. I chose to use life history as a primary research
method when I realized that I could not, as Monica Wilson had confidently done, offer a
unified interpretation of religious experience, understanding, and beliefs related to baraji
in Ouélessébougou. Documenting Amadou’s life history offered an opportunity to fairly
portray aspects of Islam, West African culture, and baraji through the case of a single
individual’s narrative (see Marcus & Fischer 1986: 57-58). This work shows the
significant importance of Islam and baraji in shaping Amadou’s life, specifically how his
experiences became permanently conjoined with his religious feelings and beliefs,
throughout his life. Amadou’s personal history demonstrates a lifelong effort to act in
ways that he deemed appropriate and in accordance with his virtues and goal to earn
baraji, and shows how life experiences deepened the convictions of his thoughts.
This ethnography unfolds the lived synthesis of Islam and everyday life in West
Africa by investigating religious life, history, and culture in Mali through Amadou
Diallo, a single individual who spent his entire life outside of the powerful and elite in
West Africa. The work relates Amadou’s memories by presenting stories from his
childhood, adolescence, adult life, and elderhood and connects his experiences with the
19
traditions and practices of Malian culture, especially detailing how Amadou has
continually acquired baraji amidst the historical, political, and environmental changes he
has faced in his lifetime. As such, this style of research supports recent subaltern turns in
African studies (see Feierman 1990). Subaltern studies grew primarily from the concern
that modern historiography and ethnography in of South Asia promoted a selective
understanding of daily life by focusing on the presence and decisions of colonial powers,
the privileged upper class, and others with material advantages (see Asad 1993: 1-14;
Bhabha 2004: 79-84; Guha 2002: 1-3). Subaltern historians, in reply to such accounts
that focus on the points of view of kings, heroes, military leaders, sovereigns, and
nobility, have argued that scholars must change the subject of their observations to the
majority of the population to find the greatest possibility for understanding human history
and culture. In keeping with the goal of subaltern studies to recover repressed histories
and recognize the experiences and personal idiosyncrasies of the underrepresented
masses, this ethnography works to give credence to a single African life while exploring
issues related to Islam in Mali. Though Amadou did not live in affluent circumstances or
become a commanding leader, this writing shows how a simple and modest man
nevertheless lived as a great historical figure. In this spirit, Amadou’s life shows how an
individual can speak to historical processes even when living outside the urban and
upper-class echelons of society (see Kessler-Harris 2009: 625). This work specifically
contributes to ethnographic turns in religious studies and the study of “lived religion” by
demonstrating how working-class civilians in Mali support, drive, and challenge daily
life and culture through the pursuit of baraji and in tandem with their Muslim beliefs and
20
practices (see explain how Islam is understood and practiced in everyday life in West
Africa (see McGuire 2008).
Fula and Mande Ethnicity in Ouélessébougou
I arrived in the town of Ouélessébougou for eight months of research in May
2011. Ouélessébougou is located eighty kilometers southeast of Bamako, the capital of
Mali. The town lies in the administrative area (cercle) of Kati in the larger Koulikoro
region of southwestern Mali and was historically part of the Jitumu chiefdom. The
mayor during the time of my research, Yéh Samaké, estimated that the town had
approximately 7,000 inhabitants, ninety percent of whom, he said, identified as Muslim.
Since the sixteenth century various Sufi orders have taken root in West Africa (see
Levtzion & Pouwels 2000: 6-9; Soares 1996, 2005), however Muslims in
Ouélessébougou did not identify with any particular Sufi group and simply identified
themselves using the broad term, “Muslim” (silamɛ). 5 There were eleven mosques in
Ouélessébougou and two Christian churches, which served the growing but minority
Christian population.
As a growing town astride both rural communities and near Mali’s sprawling
capital of Bamako, I often felt that living in Ouélessébougou offered me unique insight
into both rural and urban ways of life. For instance, I rented a room in a family
compound with electricity and enjoyed the benefits of electrical lighting in my two-room
home and the ability to easily recharge my telephone and computer batteries. Employees
with Mali’s Department of Energy operated a solar panel farm within town limits to
5
A great number of Sufi orders exist throughout the Islamic world. These orders and suborders are
traditionally associated with mystical traditions in Islam, and each rely on a particular set of practices and
rituals designed to help practitioners aspire to higher levels of righteousness and religious understanding
(see Ernst 1997).
21
produce electricity for residents, yet eighty-four percent of people in Ouélessébougou
continued to live without electricity. Most people lived outside of the few neighborhoods
in which electricity was available or said that the cost of installing the needed wiring and
subsequent monthly bills made the technology too expensive.
Figure 3: Location of Ouélessébougou
The town of Ouélessébougou lies in the Guinea Savannah in an ecosystem
positioned between the semi-arid north and the wet southern forested savannahs and rain
forests of West Africa. Plains of short, discontinuous, wiry grasses that are primarily
used for grazing cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys, permeate the outskirts of
Ouélessébougou (see Adebayo 1991: 12-13). There are no longer any permanent rivers
in Ouélessébougou, but a large aquifer beneath the town gives inhabitants dependable
access to open well and hand-pump water. Bamanankan speakers identify three main
22
annual seasons: a rainy season (samiya), hot season (futeni), and cold season (nɛnɛma).
The mean elevation is about 1,100 feet above sea level, and temperatures range from
50°F during the cold season to above 100°F in the hot season. June, July, and August are
typically the rainiest months of the year in Ouélessébougou, with August ranking as the
wettest. Yearly rainfall typically varies from thirty to forty inches. A cold and dry
season lasts from November until February, followed by a three-month hot dry period
from March through May.
People in Ouélessébougou told me that historically their town had expanded while
nearby villages remained small because of the wise leadership of their village chiefs
(dugutigiw) and the populace’s general acceptance of strangers and visitors. A local
legend recounted that at the turn of the twentieth century the chief of Ouélessébougou,
Niankòrò Samaké, sought the counsel of a ritual expert (soma) for guidance on how to
ensure that his village would peacefully grow and develop. The priest gave Niankòrò
three specific instructions. First, he told Niankòrò to sprinkle fini, a fine cereal crop used
for making couscous, around the boarders of Ouélessébougou. Upon fulfilling this task,
Niankòrò was instructed to sacrifice a cow within the village limits. Lastly, the ritual
expert forbade Niankòrò and his progeny from raising sheep. Niankòrò observed all of
the priest’s advice and further held a family meeting in which he addressed the people in
his lineage and commanded them to welcome strangers who passed through
Ouélessébougou. The residents of Ouélessébougou quickly developed a reputation for
their tolerance, and over the last century people from a range of ethnic groups and West
African countries have immigrated to live and work in the town.
23
Like many permanent inhabitants in the town, Amadou moved to Ouélessébougou
during his adulthood. Amadou was born into a Fula and religiously Muslim family
during the 1940s in Npièbougou, a small village situated approximately six kilometers
south of Markala, a city in Mali’s central Ségou region. Fula people are recognized for
lives that center on cattle ownership and herding, and Amadou moved to Ouélessébougou
in 1968 upon hearing that cattle owners in the region regularly hired experienced Fula
men to care for their animals. Although when I met him in 2010 he had lived in
Ouélessébougou for more than forty years, most residents still vaguely referred to
Amadou as “Fula man” (fulakɛ) when speaking with or about him. One day I asked
Amadou if this epithet bothered him. Amadou said that he loved his nickname and that
the moniker was his neighbors’ way of acknowledging and honoring the differences
between themselves and Amadou.
Most of the people in Ouélessébougou identified as Bamana, and Amadou
enjoyed explaining his perceptions on the dissimilarities between Fula people and the
Bamana majority he lived among. Researchers have long been in contact with Fula
people and scholars refer to the group in literature under a variety of names, including
Fulani, Fulbe, Peul, Fulan, Abore, Haalpulaar, Felaata, etc. (de Bruihn & van Dijk 2003:
288; Stenning 1959: 4). When questioned where Fula people currently lived, Amadou
first stated that some reside in the Republic of Turkey, drawing attention to Fula
participation in intercontinental migration in the African diaspora. Most Fula people,
however, continued to live primarily as minority groups along the savanna belt of West
Africa spanning to the edges of North Central Africa and Sudanese North Africa (de
Bruihn & van Dijk 2003: 285-287). The degree to which Fula had assimilated into the
24
predominant culture and language they lived among varied. For example, many Fula
living in Hausaland, located primarily in present-day northern Nigeria and Niger, had
from the thirteenth century onward adopted Hausa language and practices. Records
reveal high rates of marriage between self-identified Hausa and Fula people, and the
practices that once differentiated Fula from their Hausa neighbors became “completely
swallowed up by the Hausas” (Ibrahim 1966: 171). However, some Fula in Hausaland
consciously chose to intermarry, raise cattle, speak Fulfulde, and live in accordance with
conventional Fula culture and physically apart from the Hausa majority. These people
made up a group that eventually became distinguished in the region as Bororo, meaning
“bush” or “cow Fula” (171-176).
Fula people typically claimed an eastern origin, saying that their early ancestors
migrated from Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Fertile Crescent to West Africa
(Adebayo 1991: 3; Wilson-Haffenden 1967: 96). Amadou specifically recounted that his
Fula ancestors wandered (yaala) from Ethiopia to West Africa with their cattle in order to
help Bamana people, who were traditionally occupied in agricultural activities and
possessed no herding skills or access to coveted milk products. Conversely, some oral
traditions ignore eastern ancestral claims. Linguistic analyses of Fulfulde, the Fula
language, is classified as belonging to the Atlantic (Senegambian) branch of the NigerCongo language family, and some scholars contend that Fula people originally migrated
west to east from the Senegal River Valley that encompasses present-day northern
Senegal and southern Mauritania (Adebayo 1991: 3-11; Hopen 1958: 6).
More significantly than understandings of their origins, Muslim identity governs
the life of many Fula people. Riesman (1958: 96) rightly notes, “the fact of being
25
Muslim is inseparable from the fact of being Fula” and elsewhere it has been argued that
Fula identity is more of a cultural-religious identity than an “ethnic” one per se (see
Azarya 1993: 53). As fervent Muslims, Fula use their Muslim beliefs to understand and
navigate the natural world around them. Fula people traditionally worked as seminomadic herders and traders, and for centuries Islamic principles have guided Fula
behavior as they have migrated across West Africa. Historically, Fula were responsible
for the significant propagation of Islam throughout the Niger Delta region, especially
through participation in religious wars, or jihads. Important Muslim figures in West
African history, such as ‘Uthman dan Fodio, Ahmadu Lobbo, and ‘Umar Tal all
identified as Fula and helped expand Islam by leading jihads across West Africa during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Brenner 2000; Hiskett 1973; Hopen 1958;
Levtzion 1986; Sanneh 1997; Trimingham 1959).
In addition to their dedicated practice of Islam, Fula people are recognized for the
close and gentle relationship they share with their cattle.6 A.G. Adebayo (1991: 2)
writes, “It is difficult for a non-pastoralist to understand what cattle mean to the Fula …
they are a measure of wealth, a unit of account, a treasure, and a property.”7 I once asked
Amadou why Fula people love cattle so much. “Ah!” he yelled with affection at the very
thought of the beloved animal, “A cow (misi) is everything!” In consideration of cattle
survival and prosperity, Fula pastoralists have walked and settled all over West Africa in
search of increased rainfall and better vegetation for their herds, while also carefully
6
Marguerite Dupire shows that the degree to which Fula identify with both Islam and cattle husbandry
varies depending on a variety of factors, most importantly whether the group is sedentary or nomadic. She
argues that sedentarized Fula have historically been more highly Islamic and less interested in cattle
ownership than nomadic Fula (1996: 29-32).
7
Fula in southern Mali selectively raise Zebu cows (gonga) because of their resistance to ticks and ability
to withstand severe heat.
26
evaluating the presence of bovine diseases and availability of markets before each
migration (Adebayo 1991: 2; Dupire 1996: 24-27; Stenning 1959: 4). In response to the
drying climate in the West African Sahel, it became common in the 1960s for rural Fula
in the northern zones of Mali to migrate to rural regions in the south in search of
improved environmental security and employment possibilities in cattle husbandry (de
Bruijn & van Dijk 2003:286).
Amadou was among many Fula men who migrated to Ouélessébougou and
nearby villages in the mid-twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, drought and deteriorating environmental conditions led Fula communities
to migrate and break down more than ever (Tonah 2006: 152-153; see also Frantz 1990;
Schneider 1997; Stenning 1959). Fula people have thus become increasingly intertwined
with the dominant cultures that surround them, and this project seeks to detail Amadou’s
personal reflections on this trend. Amadou’s life history adds to efforts to balance and
unite the characteristically separate bodies of literature in Mande and Fula studies (see
Amselle 1998) by describing how a Muslim man who strongly identified with his Fula
heritage lived while encountering considerable Mande cultural influences.
Like most Fula speakers in Mali, Amadou learned the Bamana language, called
Bamanankan by Bamana speakers, as a second language during his childhood. Along
with French, Bamanankan has, in effect, become the interethnic lingua franca of Mali
(Amselle 1998: 55). 8 I have not studied Fulfulde, and Amadou and I spoke only
Bamanankan with each other in all of our interactions. Even decades after his arrival,
Amadou continued to point out and joke about the physical differences between Fula
8
Bamanankan is a member of the Niger-Congo family of languages and is primarily spoken in Mali. It is
also spoken to a lesser extent throughout West Africa, particularly in Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Ghana, and
the Ivory Coast (Bird et at. 1977: 2).
27
migrants in Ouélessébougou and Bamana people, whom he deemed indigenous to the
region. Fula people typically have fairer skin than Mande descendants, and the name
“Fula” is derived from a Berber root “ful” meaning “the red men” (Wilson-Haffenden
1967: 7). In addition to their light skin, Amadou noted that Fula people stereotypically
had longer and fuller eyelashes, thinner lips, higher cheekbones, straighter and narrower
noses, and less coarse hair than Mande people (see also Amselle 1998: 44; Dupire 1952:
1-16; Wilson-Haffenden 1967: 96).
Most people in Ouélessébougou during my research identified as Bamana or from
another source of related Mande ancestry. Mande people depended largely on agriculture
for their livelihood and are reputed by some West Africans as weakly Islamized in
comparison to Fula Muslims (Amselle 1998: 50). Similar to the Fula, Mande people
were spread across a discontinuous area in West Africa and there were no encompassing
or centralized political or social systems for those indentifying as Mande or Fula (Bird &
Kendall 1980: 13; Dieterlen 1950: 124). Mande and Fula people in West Africa
historically lived integrated with one another, and although people in Ouélessébougou
actively identified with disparate ethnic groups, all residents shared cultural ideas that
defined kinship, politics, and economic life in their town (see Amselle 1998: 43-57)9.
In 2011 most Mande inhabitants in Ouélessébougou worked as farmers, most
commonly cultivating cotton and peanuts, while Fula people in the town continued to
earn income through livestock husbandry. However, many residents in Ouélessébougou
9
Amselle’s uses the concept of mestizo logics to show that language, culture, and religious practices
among disparately identified ethnic groups are not entirely fixed nor isolated from one another. Using this
premise, his work considers the contemporarily designated Fulani, Bambara, and Malinke ethnic groups in
West Africa and traces their practices to show a historical and cultural coexistence. For example, defined
codes of honor that are referenced using the variable terms “pulaaku” and “mɔgɔya” in Fula and Mande
languages, respectively, are comparable in detail.
28
explained that their earnings as farmers and herders were less reliable due to drought and
an overall worsening environment, and people either migrated to cities in search of work
or found low-paying jobs as laborers in town. This work will show that, at every stage in
his life, Amadou’s vocations have profoundly linked him and his family’s welfare to
Mali’s environment. During our interviews, Amadou repeatedly offered detailed
reflections on the ecological transformations he has witnessed in West Africa. He noted
the rising temperatures, the drying rivers, and the difficulties these changes present for
sedentary farmers and cattle herders in Mali. Amadou’s account of climate change in
Mali prompted me to interview other people in Ouélessébougou about their experiences
and perceptions of the worsening environment. I gathered sobering stories, shared in this
ethnography, that offer detailed descriptions of climate change in southern Mali while
also describing the religious practices that Amadou and other Muslims in
Ouélessébougou used in an effort to safeguard their environment, assess which behaviors,
acquire baraji while working outside, and ultimately return to the temperate climate of
the past.
Orthography
Bamanankan terms and phrases appear italicized throughout this work. The chart
below serves to familiarize readers with the Bamanankan alphabet and offers a guide for
proper pronunciation of the Bamanankan language (adapted from Bird et al. 1977: 3-7). I
have written the names of towns and cities using French accents because most maps of
and writings about the region feature such spellings. I have also used French accents
rather than Bamanankan vowels in my spelling of personal and family names, as most of
29
the literate informants with whom I worked with on this project preferred to spell their
names using such accents.
Table 1: The Bamanankan alphabet
LETTERS
a
b
c
d
e
ɛ or è
f
g
h
i
k
l
m
n
ENGLISH APPROXIMATE
father
big
church
dog
bate
bet
fool
gull
here
beat
canvas
log
man
note
annual
sing
boat
bought
pile
There is no true English equivalent. The
Bamanankan /r/ is a tapped sound that sounds
similar to a /d/ to an English speaker.
saw
shoe
top
boot
woman
youth
zebra
ɲ
ɲ
o
ɔ or ò
p
r
s
sh
t
u
w
y
z
Project Methodology
Soon after my arrival in Ouélessébougou I asked Amadou’s permission to collect
and use his life history for my dissertation. Using life history seemed crucial for
exploring something as complex as baraji, and I supposed that scholars interested in
religion in West Africa could gain a focused and replete understanding of baraji through
the lens of a single individual’s life course. I explained my hopes for the research project
30
and proposed that he help me to document the feelings and factors that he felt were
important to his religious life and attainment of baraji while discussing his whereabouts
and opinions during major historical events and environmental changes that had occurred
during his lifetime. Amadou agreed to the project, and we quickly developed a schedule
in which we would sit beside each other and talk about his life while making rope. From
the beginning Amadou appreciated the starting point of our project: that not all West
African Muslims agree on matters of religion or share the same experiences and
motivations. We agreed to record his experiences and thoughts on a range of topics,
starting with his earliest childhood memories and ultimately concluding with what it was
like to be an old man (cɛkɔrɔba) in Mali.
A Bamana proverb which counsels that “a single visit does not create relations”
(sìnɛ kelen tɛ tɔgɔ ncɔ) shaped the approach I took to my fieldwork and informant
relationships. I found that my research improved by spending extended periods of time
with my research collaborators, especially Amadou. As part of my research, I
interviewed Amadou’s family and friends as well as political and Islamic leaders in
Ouélessébougou. I used these interviews, which flowed more as guided conversations
than according to any set protocol, to corroborate Amadou’s life experiences and hear
varied perspectives on community and religious life in Ouélessébougou. My schedule
often changed to accommodate my appointments with these participants, but Amadou
never complained when external interviews drew me away from my time with him.
When possible and appropriate, I arranged to spend additional time with my
informants outside of the interview setting. Paying social visits to informants helped me
to improve my Bamanankan and clued me into the subtle details of life in Mali that I
31
would have otherwise missed. For example, Amadou often arranged for me to prepare
lunches with his wife, Nouhouba. Of all the activities I carried out with residents, I
especially enjoyed these cooking appointments. During these meetings Nouhouba treated
me very delicately and restricted the chores she permitted me to do. I pleaded with her
several times to let me chop firewood or stir the sauce while it boiled, but she always
insisted that the ax was too heavy or that ashes would fly into my eyes if I sat near the
fire. I eventually accepted that Nouhouba’s hospitality would never allow me to carry
out certain tasks in her home but enjoyed our time together nevertheless. Nouhouba told
me fantastic stories from her life during these visits and helped me to understand the
daily domestic chores that keep a compound functioning, all the while also teaching me
how to prepare authentic Malian cuisine.
My informants each treated me with respect and I gave them each modest
presents, typically tea, sugar, kola nuts, or fresh milk, to mark my appreciation for his or
her participation in interviews. Gift giving is a vital custom in West Africa, and in
Ouélessébougou friends, family, and neighbors continually exchanged reciprocal gifts
with one another to express their love, loyalty, and friendship. Both Amadou and Koniba
played central roles in my research, and my gifts to them were consequently more
extravagant than those I gave to other participants. I regularly purchased large sacks of
rice and housewares for Koniba and Amadou and formally praised them for their help
and support upon presentation of these presents. I wanted to keep these exchanges
private to avoid drawing vulgar attention from residents to my comparative wealth, but
the town’s culture did not support this wish. People in Ouélessébougou always
remembered and publically drew attention to those who gave them gifts, and recipients
32
continued to laud those who gave them presents long after the time of the initial offering.
In his book, The Gift (1923), French sociologist Marcel Mauss argues that gifts create
social bonds between the giver and recipient and that material gifts are never free and
carry an expectation of return. Supporting Mauss’s argument, I noticed that the people in
Ouélessébougou dutifully repaid gifts. Inhabitants said that neglecting to return on a gift
made them look like a chicken that keeps its beak to the ground and never turns to see
where its feed comes from. Nearly every day Koniba and Amadou purchased for me
bowls of porridge (siri) or steamed bean patties (farin) as a late afternoon snack. I
obviously did not expect Amadou and Koniba to match the monetary value of my
presents to them in their reciprocation, but I truly appreciated the good-hearted generosity
they extended when buying food gifts for me.
I enjoyed living in Ouélessébougou, especially because my work making rope
structured my days and gave me a recognized position in the town. I quickly came to
understand that to explore someone’s entire life takes a lot of time and effort, and
consequently I spent most days with Amadou. On a typical day I arrived at work to make
rope at nine in the morning and broke only at midday for lunch. I always went to the
market before work in the morning to buy Amadou, Koniba, and me fried sweet bread
and a small plastic pouch of potable water for each of us. Amadou maintained that
caffeine made him sit straighter throughout the day, and we always started the morning
by sharing our latest news while drinking small, concentrated doses of gunpowder green
tea with mint and sugar.
I used the early hours of the afternoon to eat lunch and briefly visit with my host
family, who lived a short walking distance from my workspace. During each of my visits
33
to Ouélessébougou I stayed in the residential compound (du) of Bourama Samaké.
Bourama and his wife Kadia shared the spacious compound with their seven children,
who ranged from sixteen years to nine months old. In 2011, Bourama was forty years old
and taught math and physics and worked as headmaster at a school in a nearby village
called Taamala while Kadia sold flavored ice in the town market. I learned from
observing who lived in family compounds throughout my neighborhood that membership
in residential compounds frequently changed, and decisions regarding who was eligible
to live in a compound rarely conformed to strict patrilineal and patrilocal schemes that
scholars have described as prevailing in West Africa (see Cissé 1970: 159; Leynaud &
Cissé 1978: 203-223). As such, two teenage boys whom Bourama classified in the
French as his “nephews” (neveux), but to whom he had no clear biological relation to
lived in the compound because there were no opportunities for formal education in their
rural hometowns. Like many Muslim men in Ouélessébougou, Bourama’s deceased
father, Tiekòròfin, had married three wives in his lifetime.10 Bourama’s birth mother
passed away in 2005, but Yirigoi, his father’s second wife, lived in Bourama’s compound
and Bourama unquestioningly cared for her. In 2011 Tiekòròfin’s younger sister who
was in her late seventies, Djègèni, also came to live with Bourama.
10
Surah 4, verse 3 of the Qur’an deals directly with the topic of polygymy. The passage states, “…marry
those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then
[marry only] one or those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline [to
injustice].” Most Muslim men in Ouélessébougou understood this section as express permission to take up
to four wives, provided they treated each wife with equal emotional, physical, and material consideration.
34
Figure 4: Yirigoi washes her young grandson with an elixir she prepared to instill courage in him.
Yirigoi, who everyone in the compound called “grandmother” (momuso),
impressed me from the first time I met her in 2007. She spent the bulk of her time
making medicines and visiting sick elderly friends within town limits. Bourama’s
children habitually teased Yirigoi about her preoccupation with health and remedies, and
she laughingly defended herself by yelling insults. She lamented that her grandchildren
were animals (dantanfɛn) and baboons (gɔnw), and made fun of the shape of their noses.
The children always got the last word in during these playful arguments by lifting their
arms and quickly snapping them down against the side of their body to show their
contempt. Despite the ongoing jokes, whenever anyone in the compound became ill or
injured, they always first summoned Yirigoi for treatment and comfort.
35
I originally considered concurrently gathering both Yirigoi and Amadou’s life
histories to use for my dissertation research. Two reservations stopped me from taking
this approach. First, I had practical worries about time and knew that I could not
adequately collect two complete life histories in the space of eight months. Second, I
decided that I wanted to keep my relationship with Yirigoi personal and our
conversations ultimately private. In many ways, however, Yirigoi helped to advance my
research and understanding of Islam. She always invited me to attend Friday prayer
services in the mosque with her and gladly introduced me to her friends who also prayed
there. The relationship between Yirigoi and me was quite different from the one I shared
with Amadou. I met Yirigoi when I was a young woman and we spoke to each other
with an uplifting and familiar closeness about marriage, housekeeping, health, sexual
relationships, work, and childbirth. I often felt it was impossible to ever fully stop
working when living in Mali for fieldwork. I consciously tried to use my time with
Yirigoi as a needed break from the constant stream of records I otherwise felt compelled
to keep.
I mindfully reserved my evenings and early afternoons for my host family, but
otherwise happily spent my time with Amadou. Within one month of regularly working
together, Amadou deemed that the rope I produced was of a high enough quality to sell to
the public. Given that I did not need the income, I originally felt reluctant about putting
my rope up for sale. Amadou, however, pointed out that I would ruin his market if I
began distributing rope for free and we ultimately agreed to sell our rope for the same
36
price, 200 francs (about $0.40) per arms-length.11 On a productive day, Amadou could
make 500 francs, while my slower hands typically earned me around 100 francs per day.
He typically worked steadily throughout the day, though he sometimes complained of the
strain that a full life of physical labor had on his aged frame and allowed himself the
indulgence of a short nap. Amadou usually deemed it time for us to stop working
sometime during the five o’clock hour. The two of us always rode home from work
together on our bicycles. Amadou owned a rickety, black bike that he frequently paid to
have repaired, as it needed maintenance and new parts. We would pass my house first,
and he always blessed me to spend the night peacefully (ka su hɛrɛ caya) as he continued
pedaling out of sight down the dirt road to his home.
Amadou lived in a half-acre family compound in the residential center of
Ouélessébougou. As the property owner and oldest man living in the unit, Amadou
served as the head of the compound (dutigi) and oversaw and settled all major domestic
matters. Many family compounds in Ouélessébougou had twenty or more residents
living together, and Amadou’s compound population was relatively small compared to
those of his neighbors. Only six members of Amadou’s kin group lived permanently in
his compound: his wife, Nouhouba Bagayoko; their 30-year-old son, Modibo, whose
mental retardation kept him from marriage or employment in town; Amadi, their 27-yearold son who worked as a motorcycle mechanic; Amadi’s wife, Binta; and two young
grandchildren. As was the convention in Ouélessébougou, a member of Amadou’s
compound stayed home at all times in order to protect their property and receive visitors.
11
The West Africa CFA franc, a common currency throughout Francophone West Africa, Guinea-Bissau,
and Equatorial Guinea, was freely convertible during the time of my research into Euros at a fixed rate of 1
Euro = 655 CFA francs (Clément 1996: 1-3).
37
Figure 5: Amadou Diallo’s home and courtyard
The compound had three disconnected mud homes used primarily for sleeping
and storing personal possessions. Amadou and Nouhouba occupied separate private
bedrooms in the compound’s largest quarters, an arrangement that many young and
newly married couples in twenty-first century Mali chose not to observe but that
Nouhouba insisted was necessary in order to keep secrets (gundo). Amadi, Binta, and
their two children lived in an adjacent two-room home, and Modibo inhabited a singleroom dwelling. A small structure used to store household cooking supplies, pit latrine,
animal corral, garden, and water well rested on the various sides of the square compound.
A short, mud brick fence surrounded the property limits and each night Amadou closed
the wide entrance to his compound with a gate made from gridded tree branches. Family
and communal life took place primarily outside in the compound’s sizable courtyard.
Three large mango trees spaced in a triangle stood in the middle of the compound.
38
Amadou’s wife had opportunely tied a clothes wire between each of the trees’ heavy
limbs. The trees’ shadows stretched across the courtyard during the day, allowing family
members to carry out their chores in the shade. Amadou’s family, like most of the
populace in Ouélessébougou, lived without electricity. Every evening the family built a
small fire and sat together near Amadou and Nouhouba’s house. Amadou’s family
otherwise depended on moonbeams and starlight from the lucid night sky, jocularly
called by townspeople, “the big unpickable cotton field” (foroba kɔɔri jɛli bɔbaga t’a la),
to see their way around the compound at after dark.
Amadou’s compound reflected his love for all animals. Cows were his favorite,
although he did not have any cattle at the juncture of his life in which I met him. But I
noticed that the mood of his voice changed and a childlike smile came across his face
whenever he talked about his cows and reflected on far-away memories of herding.
When I met him, Amadou owned a four-year-old dog called Louie, a cat named Mòsh,
three sheep, one goat, and five chickens. He also built a small ground-level birdbath out
of cement near the door to his home to draw birds to his compound. Every evening
Amadou’s son, Modibo, swept the dirty water from the small pool with a coarse hand
broom and replaced it with fresh water drawn from the family’s well. I only saw
Amadou lose his temper once during the course of my research. On this occasion, a
group of school children amused themselves by throwing rocks at a lizard on the road in
front of our workspace. Amadou shouted angrily for them to stop, calling them “cursed”
(danga) and “children of hell” (jahanama denw). The children laughed at Amadou and
continued to abuse the small animal. Provoked, Amadou rose from his work and stepped
directly onto the dirt road, without pausing to put on his sandals. He chased the children
39
away, picked up the lizard, and walked barefoot down the street until he found a bush to
place the frightened reptile. Amadou continually told his elderly friends that he hoped to
die from a lion attack, opining that becoming a meal for a hungry animal would procure
him an honorable death.
Amadou insisted on taking Fridays off from our work in order to explore the
market, visit with friends, and attend prayer services at the mosque. Amadou volunteered
as the muezzin at the town’s largest mosque (misiriba). As muezzin, he was responsible
for calling residents to obligatory prayers five times per day and for alerting congregants
to attend an additional formal sermon and prayer meeting each Friday at noon. Amadou
devoted significant time to his muezzin duties. Muslims participate in five required
prayers each day that are timed according to the position of the sun: a prayer at dawn
(fitiri), near midday (selifana), in the afternoon (lansara), before dusk (safo), and at
nightfall (fajiri). On Fridays Amado arrived at the mosque to begin to call to Friday
services (jumaseli) at eleven o’clock and did not leave until after the sermon had
concluded, usually around one o’clock in the afternoon. On regular workdays Amadou
broke from his work to perform the lansara and selifana calls to prayer at the mosque,
which was providentially located directly next to our workspace. He always wore a
metal digital wristwatch, which softly beeped twice at the top of every hour. He told me
that a working watch was needed to keep his calls to prayer punctual but said he often felt
ridiculous about wearing a timepiece because God had put such a reliable clock in the sky
in the form of the sun. Amadou began his repeated calls between forty and thirty minutes
before the prayer was scheduled to began. He said that an early reminder of prayer gave
40
Muslims plenty of time to momentarily put aside their work, travel to the mosque, and
ritually wash before conducting their prayers.
During the day, we spoke mainly about Amadou’s life and opinions. I found that
Amadou was also keenly interested in learning about my life in America. As much as
Amadou enjoyed discovering our differences, he particularly liked to ask me creative
questions designed to show the similarities between Africans and Americans.
One afternoon Amadou broke a period of comfortable silence between us by
inquiring, “Is George Bush’s grandfather alive?”
I responded that I was not completely certain, but that I assumed his grandfather
had passed away.
Amadou’s eyes danced, and he assumed a posture of playful superiority when he
realized that I did not immediately see the point to his question. “Oh!” Amadou shouted
in delight, “The most powerful man in the world, yet his grandfather is dead! Just like
mine!”
Koniba, who overall had a milder and less emphatic personality than Amadou,
beamed and laughed loudly at Amadou’s message. The entire scene sent me into my own
fit of laughter.
Amadou needed little guidance during formal interviews and informal
conversations and spoke easily and at length about each of the topics and life stages that I
prompted him to discuss. In addition to chronicling his life story, Amadou and I had
topical interviews in which he explained his thoughts on an array of subjects including
politics, Islamic history, and climate change in West Africa. Some informants acted
nervous and needed reassurance during interviews, but Amadou always remained his
41
natural self and seemed comfortable sharing his personal experiences and thoughts with
me. I regularly arranged times to formally record my conversations with Amadou.
Amadou originally resisted having his voice recorded. As an old man with a gregarious
reputation, Amadou loved observing the daily bustles and cares of the dirt road in front of
his workstation and greeting the people who moved about on the street. He felt that the
visible and bizarre presence of my digital voice recorder alienated him from his friends
and passersby. I argued that recorded interviews were essential for the project because of
my imperfect Bamanankan, saying that voice recordings allowed me to listen to our
interviews repeatedly until I understood the complete details of the memories and stories
he related. Amadou agreed to let me record him, and I showed my concern for his
hesitation by always asking permission to conduct a recorded interview with him at least
one day beforehand.
Amadou’s interest in recorded interviews began to degenerate four months into
my research. I worried about the fate of the project when Amadou began to make
excuses for postponing interviews to another day. At this same time, I had started
passing the warm evenings listening to Yirigoi and Djègèni recount folktales to one
another in our family compound. These elderly women criticized me for sitting quietly
while they spoke, and taught me how to properly listen to a story by Malian standards.
They encouraged me to repeat phrases from the tale, clap my hands, laugh loudly, and
forcefully interpose expressions such as, “What’s next?” (naamu?), and, “I don’t believe
it!” (n’dalen tɛ!), and even interrupt the speaker when I thought that I could predict what
would happen next. I started applying these listening principles to my interviews with
42
Amadou and found that by doing so his enthusiasm for the research and recorded
interviews returned.
Most days I worked without a voice recorder and I made continual and rapid
jottings in a small moleskin notebook to preserve experiences from each day. A single
page of my notebook contained collections of stories, folk tales, overheard dialogues,
descriptive scenes, Bamana proverbs and expressions, new vocabulary, and overall
feelings from throughout the day. Each night I typed the contents into more ordered and
organized fieldnotes. Amadou loved to watch me write, and at times he even reminded
me to record certain moments and pieces of information in my notebook. One day he
complimented me for the ease with which I wrote, saying that he never grew tired of
watching me scribble. Upon hearing Amadou’s admiration, my mind drifted to the
literature on the fetishization of writing in Africa, which argues that historically, West
Africans attributed magical qualities to writing and saw literacy as a mysterious ability
that was valued for its capacity to mediate between the natural and supernatural worlds
(see Goody 1971: 455-466, 1987: 125-126; Masquelier 2009: 96; Mommersteeg 1990:
63-76; Niezen 1991: 226-229).
But Amadou interrupted my arrogant thoughts saying, “When I watch you write it
reminds me of the way French settlers reacted when they watched us Fula people milk
our cows—they would praise me!”
Although the literature is quite one-sided on the issue, I instantly realized that the
fetishization of foreign abilities occurs by both parties.
I believe that I owe the success of my research to Amadou’s and my shared
admiration and curiosity about one other. Amadou and I got along well with each other
43
for the entirety of the project. It seems remarkable that, even with the vast differences
between our ages, gender, and cultural backgrounds, we never encountered any major
troubles or misunderstandings. Our close friendship changed to kinship over the course
of my fieldwork, and by the time I returned to the States in January of 2012 Amadou
affectionately called me his grandchild (mɔden) and I referred to him as my grandfather
(mɔkɛ). Some people in Ouélessébougou laughed at our “imaginary” kinship, but our
time together left us with a bond thicker than blood. I treasured the experience of
recording the full tale of Amadou’s life and know that he found a similar enjoyment.
Amadou commented many times that he saw my chronicling his life and insights in
writing as an effective preservation of his experiences and as a way for his progeny to
know him. Amadou said that younger generations in Mali knew comparatively less about
their ancestors than the people of his generation, recalling that as a child his grandmother
used to tell him stories about their relatives every night until he fell asleep. Children in
the twenty-first century, Amadou complained, preferred to listen to televisions and radios
to the voices of their grandparents. Amadou often felt uneasy about the cultural,
political, environmental, and material changes he had witnessed since his childhood and
continually questioned his place in the contemporary world.
“I’m a person of the past” (n ye fɔlɔfɔlɔ mɔgɔ ye), Amadou constantly reminded
me as he guided me through his life story.
I continually complimented Amadou for his fascinating life and personality and
told him that he was the ideal protagonist for my project. Amadou dismissed these
remarks and insisted he was everyman and often extrapolated his unique experiences and
opinions as common to all people. For instance, I once asked him to share his earliest
44
memory, and he told me that all people have the same first memory of eating their
favorite food for the first time. Despite Amadou’s regular inferences that he, as a single
person, could explain the whole of humankind, it is important in reading this work to
remember that Amadou’s life narrative represents the experiences and perspectives of
one individual. To an extent, however, Amadou was right that his life story offers a
relatable experience. Paul Riesman has written ethnographies on Fula life that promote a
more sensitive and humanistic understanding of culture, arguing that as humans we are
all made of the same “human material” and encounter shared experiences and feelings
(see Riesman 1992: 1-7). I related to Amadou during our conversations, and his life story
gives a touching expression of the joys and misfortunes that mark every person. This is
not to suggest that his life course reflects wholly universal concerns; when Amadou made
personal choices and interpreted events he acted largely within the elements of the
cultures that he inherited. As such, the integration of the Fula and Mande cultures that
Jean-Loup Amselle (1998) posits features prominently in Amadou’s life story and is
illustrated through his actual experiences and behavior.
This ethnography demonstrates the principles of culture in Mali by relating the
thoughts, actions, and circumstances of one individual. The work gives a purposeful
account of Amadou’s life story, with special focus on Islam and his achievement of
baraji, while considering the impact that West African history and politics,
environmental changes, and culture have had on him as a Muslim man. The project is a
mindful effort to deviate from cultural anthropology’s usual emphasis on the group,
which comes at the expense of depicting individuals as passive carriers of tradition (c.f.
Benedict 1934: 46-48; Sapir 1949: 509-512). Edward Sapir famously chastised cultural
45
anthropologists for systematically showing little concern for informants, pointing out that
anthropologists paradoxically rely primarily on the personal accounts of informants to
manufacture impersonal ethnographies that conventionally extrapolate individual
accounts as shared by a homogenous cultural group (Sapir 1949: 569, 593).
In Continuities in Cultural Evolution, Margaret Mead complements Sapir’s case
and adds that researchers typically understand culture by discerning what members of a
society have in common. Yet, “Much of culture is not common to all members of
society,” and Mead warns that the familiar concept of culture can lead anthropologists to
homogenize groups and ignore or exclude alternative points of view (Mead 1999: 33). At
times in this work, the reader may have cause to disagree with Amadou’s experiences and
opinions and feel warranted in consequently dismissing his life narrative altogether. In
the seminal essay “Why Cultural Anthropology Needs the Psychiatrist,” Edward Sapir
illustrates why scholars should take Amadou’s version of the world seriously, even when
Amadou’s accounts contradict more prevalent beliefs, practices, and sensibilities
elsewhere documented in West Africa. Sapir tells the story of American ethnologist J. O.
Dorsey’s informant named Two Crows, whom Dorsey described as a mercurial and
influential member of the Omaha tribe. Two Crows denied Dorsey’s understanding of
how many clans there were in Omaha society, alleging that there were only seven when
most informants had reported eight (Sapir 1949: 570-571). Sapir reproaches Dorsey for
relegating Two Crows to a footnote. Deviants, Sapir writes, are never absolutely wrong
and should not be dismissed: “If we get enough Two Crows to agree we have what we
call a new tradition, or a new dogma, or a new theory, or a new procedure, in the
handling of that particular pattern of culture” (571). In light of this potential, Sapir
46
encourages us to allow for Amadou’s account, recognizing his life history as an
illustration of the freedom and creative participation that people have in their culture and
community (316-321).
Project Outline
I collected Amadou’s life history over eight months of daily interviews, which
have been edited and reordered to put his narrative in a flowing and chronological order
that illuminates his religious life and attainment of baraji (see Atkinson 1998: 24-26;
Marcus & Fischer 1986: 57-59). I translated my notes and interviews from Bamanankan
to English with minimal outside input or assistance and have tried to keep my writing in
the words of Amadou according to these translations. To retell Amadou’s life story, I
have organized this ethnographic account into seven chapters that concentrate on how
Islam has mattered to Amadou during his lifetime and on his acquirement of baraji amid
various vocations, circumstances, and environmental conditions. Although the five
required Muslim prayers have shaped Amadou’s daily schedule throughout his life, the
goal of this research is to show Amadou’s vision of the world and how he has understood
and practiced Islam between his participation in prayers and other overtly Muslim
practices. This project explicitly aims to understand how Amadou’s understanding of
Islam and conception of reality became plaited together, like a finely made rope, to bring
shape and understanding to his everyday life since childhood. As such, the work focuses
on Islam in the way in which Amadou has understood it as a tool and in relation to baraji.
I begin my exploration of Amadou’s life with a chapter on the emergence of Islam
in Mali, with a specific focus of Amadou’s understanding of the historical spread of
Islam throughout West Africa and the prominent doctrine of baraji. From here, chapter
47
three explores Amadou’s childhood in Mali’s Ségou region and shares his early
experiences with herding, Fula family life, and Islamic education. This chapter
documents Amadou’s childhood fears and perceived tensions over the ethnic and
religious differences he encountered in Npièbougou and how he worked to resolve these
fears through his understanding of Islam. Chapter four details Amadou’s adolescence
and early adulthood at the turn of Mali’s independence from French colonial powers and
considers how Amadou balanced his concern for obtaining baraji with an interest in
material wealth in the newly independent Republic of Mali during the early 1960s. The
chapter focuses on Islam and early Malian politics while describing Amadou’s maturity
alongside his first travel and work experiences outside of Ségou. Next, chapter five
discusses kinship, Islam, and the onset of Amadou’s adult life as a migrant in southern
Mali and reveals how Amadou relied on his understanding of the acquisition of baraji
during adulthood to accept family responsibilities at the expense of his formerly
independent lifestyle. The chapter argues that researchers interested in kinship in West
Africa will find it more useful to understand kinship in West Africa in terms of value,
Islam, and baraji—as baraji represents a kind of shared substance that joins kin—rather
than encoded biological ties. Chapter six discusses aging, funeral practices in Mali,
changes in the environment and politics that Amadou has observed in his lifetime, and
details on Amadou’s life as muezzin and an acknowledged elder in Ouélessébougou. The
chapter examines how Amadou reconciled his preference and longing for the past with
his present circumstances as an elderly man in the early twenty-first century. I lastly
conclude with a brief review of the insights that Amadou’s life brings to understanding
Islam, culture, history, baraji and daily life in West Africa.
48
CHAPTER TWO
ISLAM AND BARAJI IN WEST AFRICA
“In the past, nothing made nothing. Then God built everything in six days,”
Amadou told me.
In detailing the earth’s creation, Amadou said that God next made an agreement
with humankind: if people fasted and prayed, He would record their baraji and reward
them with paradise (àlìjinɛ) in the afterlife. In this paradise everyone lives in a wellappointed home without the daily worries of sickness, excretion, aging, and work that
plague earthly existence. During the seventh century God explained the full details of
this arrangement to His final prophet, Muhammad, who compiled these revelations into
the Qur’an (Kuranɛ). As Amadou explained it, after Muhammad’s death, Arab Muslims
continued to proselytize Islam to unbelievers (kafiri) throughout the Middle East, North
Africa, and West Africa.
Amadou recognized that Islam has played a major role in the historical
transformation of Saharan and sub-Saharan societies throughout Africa and his account
of the spread of Islam in West Africa largely matched those of professional historians.
Drawing on historical monographs as well as interviews with Amadou and other
Ouélessébougou residents, this chapter will introduce the chronological spread and
contemporary practice of Islam in West Africa in order to show how historical
circumstances and the religious milieu in twenty-first century Ouélessébougou shaped
Amadou’s personal religious faith.
49
Because this research focuses on Amadou’s practice of Islam throughout various
regions and countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in West Africa, a
brief explanation of the historical spread of Islam to the areas and ethnic groups pertinent
to this work is needed. This chapter shows that Amadou recognized himself as a Muslim
within the context of an extensive history of Islam in West Africa by describing Fula and
Muslim history as the background for his religious convictions. The chapter begins by
describing the first instances of Fula conversion to Islam. The history of Fula Muslims
cannot be understood independently from their participation in military jihads throughout
West Africa. Therefore, I recount Fula participation in jihads to explain the spread of
Islam to remote Fula groups and Mande people. This section begins by sharing
Amadou’s knowledge of jihads in West Africa and their connection to baraji and then
offers a more detailed focus on the jihads of ‘Uthman dan Fodio, Ahmadu Lobbo, and
‘Umar Tal. Next, I explain the conversion of the Bamana majority in Ouélessébougou to
Islam during the early twentieth century and the impact this change had on French
colonization. The chapter then turns to a description of the different currents of Islam in
Mali and Ouélessébougou and the activities of local Muslim religious leaders. Lastly, I
examine the details of the concept of baraji in order to advance a more careful
understanding of the concept in relation to how people in West Africa evaluated the
historical spread of Islam in West Africa alongside their other ritual practices and moral
choices.
Early Fula Conversion
Beginning in the eighth century, after the conquest of Muslim North Africa, transSaharan trade encouraged Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa to expand
50
commerce in West Africa, and, with them, Islam soon after began to influence ritual and
economic life in the area (see Sanneh 1997). The Prophet Muhammad reportedly said,
“The trader is God’s favorite,” and merchants (who were often also Muslim jurists)
slowly spread their transcendent beliefs to Africans (Martin 1986: 100). Islam initially
attracted only a modest number of converts, most of whom were rulers, government
officials, fellow merchants, or members of royal lineages (Warms 1992: 485). On the
whole, early Muslim proselytizing in sub-Saharan Africa was largely informal and
limited in scope, especially in comparison to later Christian missionary efforts (Hodgson
1974: 407). Traders were originally the best candidates for conversion to Islam, as
frequent travel and the need for networking with Berber and Arab contacts in the area
made membership in a shared, universal religion appealing (Bravmann 1974: 8; Levtzion
2006: 21; Martin 1986: 100; Sanneh 1997: 12; Trimingham 1959: 54). Some historians
have argued that Africans were predisposed to receive Islam because of the degree of
similarity between African and Muslim practices, specifically that both allowed polygyny
and taught cosmologies that acknowledge a multiplicity of spirits (Hopen 1958: 144;
Owasa-Ansah 2000: 480; see also Horton 1971; Lewis 1968). History indicates that nonMuslims in Africa were curious and intrigued by Islam and rarely behaved with hostility
toward Muslim practitioners (Blakely et al. 1994: 8). Islam slowly spread into the
countryside and, by the time of European colonization, Islam was the most powerful
religious ideology functioning in North and West Africa, as well as within minority
groups in East and Southern Africa (Brenner 1993: 20; Harrison 1988: 10-27; Warms
1992: 486).
51
Fula people were among the first West Africans to convert to Islam during the
fourteenth century and are highly associated with the continuation and propagation of
Islam in West African history. Fula can be found across the Western Sudan, from
Senegal to northern Cameroon, and their shared Muslim practice has historically united
the Fula people. During the onset of Islam among those who identified as Fula, many
Fula men learned Arabic and acted as scribes. Most of these scribes also continued their
occupations as pastoralists and traders, which required continual roving between large
towns and throughout the countryside. Early Fula Muslims used their travels to develop
knowledge of Islam and gain converts throughout the wide regions of Fula habitation
(50). As Amadou tells it, as growing numbers of his Fula ancestors converted to Islam,
they noticed that their neighbors did not worship or respect God. Fula witnessed their
neighbors’ sins (jurumu or haramuya) and felt burdened that these unbelievers (kafiri)
were certainly not earning enough baraji to gain salvation and enter paradise. Their
response was jihad. The next section will describe how in the nineteenth century many
Fula Muslims spread Islam through intensive participation in jihads that took place
throughout West Africa.
Nineteenth Century Fula Jihads
According to Amadou, God instructed Fula Muslims to spread Islam and establish
unbelievers to God’s favor by the sword (npanmuru). During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Amadou recounted Fula people participated in major jihads that are
credited with significantly spreading Islam to non-Muslim groups throughout West
Africa. Amadou particularly highlighted the importance of Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo and
‘Umar Tal’s jihads in spreading Islam in Mali’s present-day Mopti and Ségou regions.
52
Amadou expressed profound respect for these men and maintained that they fought solely
because of God (Ala kama), although researchers note that West African jihads were
more than religious revivals; these jihads were also grounded in gaining political
domination and control of regional commerce and slavery (see Searing 1993: 88).
Regardless of their motivations, Amadou identified these jihads as key historical
moments that shaped the social landscape in which he lived and practiced Islam during
the twentieth and twenty-first century in Mali.
Jihadists criticized periodic lapses into paganism among Fula Muslims and
aimed to purify Islam among Fula while extending Islam to non-Muslim ethnic groups in
Africa (Hopen 1958: 7). ‘Uthman dan Fodio, a renowned Fula Muslim scholar and
author born in Gobir in 1754 to a religiously Muslim family, is most recognized for his
role as the leader of a jihad during the first decade of the nineteenth century in presentday northern Nigeria. ‘Uthman’s jihad transformed the political, social, and religious
atmosphere in the region and resulted in the overthrow of Hausa hegemony in the region.
‘Uthman changed the name of the city of Gobir to Sokoto and founded the Sokoto
Caliphate in present-day Nigeria, which was modeled after what ‘Uthman saw as an ideal
form of a Muslim polity (Brenner 2000: 145). ‘Uthman’s use of militarism signified a
radical departure from earlier patterns of nonviolent Muslim practice and conversion in
West Africa (Levtzion 1986: 22).
During his childhood ‘Uthman was educated in Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, and
Islamic law and history and extensively studied with his father, relatives, and numerous
influential scholars. ‘Uthman was literate, and writing in the region was especially
associated with Islam. Literate Muslim preachers, such as ‘Uthman, who traveled and
53
taught the non-literate majority about Islam, benefitted Muslims in West Africa by
familiarizing illiterate groups with scriptural sources to which they would ordinarily have
had no access (Goody 1971: 454, 464). ‘Uthman, an initiate of a Sufi brotherhood, also
used his writing to detail mystic experiences.12 His most significant vision occurred in
1794 in which great Sufi scholar Adb al-Qadir al-Jilani and the Prophet Muhammad
appeared and appointed him “Imam (alimami) of the Saints,” endowing him with the
“Sword of Truth” and compelling him to turn from a career of pacifism to militancy
(Levtzion & Voll 1987: 34-35). Aiming to rid the region of pagan practices, ‘Uthman
began preparing for a jihad against both unbelievers and non-practicing Muslims. The
incorporation of African ritual and cultural practices into Islam became a political issue
for ‘Uthman, and he sought to “purify” Islam in Africa of these practices. The boundary
between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” in West Africa was extremely unstable in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ‘Uthman roused Fula Muslims to wage war on
both local non-Fula unbelievers and Fula seen as feeble in either their practice or
understanding of Islam (Şaul 2006: 20; Hiskett 1973: 63, 81).
By 1804, tensions between ‘Uthman and the state of Gobir had worsened, and
‘Uthman and his crowds of followers moved to the countryside. Once safely in a remote
location with his followers, ‘Uthman’s migration gave way to a widespread military jihad
(Levtzion 2006: 25; Brenner 1987: 48; Hiskett 1973). During the jihad ‘Uthman aimed
to organize his army according to Muslim principles. Although he did not take an active
12
The Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya orders are the two most important Sufi brotherhoods associated with
military jihads in West Africa (Launay 1992: 179). ‘Uthman belonged to the Qadiriyya order, the older of
the two. The Qadiriyya lineage has been traced back to twelfth century Baghdad (Miles 2000: 213-214).
‘Umar Tal, a nineteenth century jihad leader in Senegal and Mali, associated with the Tijaniyya order. The
Tijaniyya brotherhood began in North Africa by Ahmad al-Tijani who claimed to have received a direct
revelation from the Prophet Muhammad to propagate the order (Robinson 1985: 93; Vikør 2000: 450-451).
54
part in battles, ‘Uthman planned strategies, organized infantries, identified goals and
objectives, and appointed military commanders and, after the jihad, he served as the first
imam of Sokoto (Hiskett 1973: 102-104). The transition from military role to an
administrative was difficult, as ‘Uthman had no experience running an Islamic state and
held idealized notions on how the Sokoto Caliphate should function based from readings
of Islamic law and jurisprudence (Trimingham 1959: 142). ‘Uthman envisioned a
centralized caliphate with the primacy of shari’a, as exemplified in the Qur’an and by the
life of the Prophet. He constantly dealt with groups informally splitting off from his
territory, as peasants continued to recognize the political power of former chiefs, and he
circulated letters to leaders within Sokoto asking for oaths of allegiance from such
dissenters (Last 1967: 36, 69; Trimingham 1959: 136). Despite its problems and
setbacks, ‘Uthman’s reform of Hausa society changed the political, religious, and social
practices of the people living in the area and Fula clerical leaders became a ruling and
aristocratic class in the region (Sanneh 1997: 23).
‘Uthman’s jihad still stands as one of the important events in the historical spread
of Islam across West Africa; his revolt introduced the political ascendancy of Islam in
West Africa and inspired subsequent Fula men to lead jihads in nearby regions (Levtzion
2006: 21-22). Between the years 1818 and 1820 Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo successfully
incited Fula herdsmen in the present-day Mopti region in Mali to violently seize religious
and clerical control over the non-Fula and non-Muslim populace along the inner-Niger
Delta upstream from Timbuktu. By 1820 Ahmadu established the Masina Caliphate and
founded Hamdullahi as its capital. Although Lobbo had less education and community
veneration than ‘Uthman, historians credit Lobbo for effecting more religious reform, and
55
he more firmly established a state grounded in Islamic law (Bohannan & Curtin 1988:
326).
Figure 6: Fula jihad states in West Africa, c. 1830
A generation after Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo’s jihad in Masina, the combative
practices of Fula Muslim ‘Umar Tal further established Islam in West Africa,
purposefully spreading Islam to non-believers in what is today Mali. ‘Al-hajj ‘Umar was
born in 1797 in Futa Toro (Hanson 1996: 29), located in present-day northern Senegal.
Like ‘Uthman, ‘Umar was the son of a Muslim scholar. ‘Umar spent most of his youth
studying Islam in Futa Jalon, in the mountains of present-day Guinea, and successfully
made the hajj to Mecca during his early adulthood (Hanson 1996: 29). While in the
Middle East, ‘Umar joined a Sufi order, and before he returned to Africa the leaders in
56
the Sufi brotherhood commissioned him to clear paganism from the West African
countryside (Vikør 2000: 451).
Upon arriving in northern Guinea, he established a secluded sanctuary through
which he gathered apostles. During this time, ‘Umar steadily exchanged slaves for
firearms, which suggests that he conceived of the importance of jihads through warfare
and planned to eventually take military action against non-believers (Djata 1997: 30). In
the 1840s he finally began to articulate the objectives of his military jihad, arguing that
armed measures were needed to conquer both Muslim and non-Muslim societies and to
convert all West Africans to his particular Sufi brotherhood (Sanneh 1979: 2). ‘Umar
secured local obedience and was successful in controlling Futa Toro in the beginning of
his military efforts. French colonizers eventually overthrew ‘Umar from his moment of
political control and pushed ‘Umar east and out of Senegal. ‘Umar consequently turned
his efforts to the Bamana Empire along the Niger basin in Ségou and made preparations
to attack it (Hanson 1996: 19; Robinson 1985: 16-32).
‘Umar’s jihad in the western Sudan required extensive and constant military
recruitment from Guinea and Senegal. To gain civilian support, ‘Umar argued that
French occupation and domination over Africans polluted Senegal and made migration
into the eastern Sudan obligatory (Hanson 1996: 32), specifically saying, “Leave, your
country is no longer your own. It belongs to the European and life with him will never be
good” (quoted in Robinson 1985: 225). Inordinate numbers of young men migrated to
join ‘Umar (Hanson 1996: 44-79; Robinson 1985 126-8, 217-9). Bamana leaders in
nineteenth century Ségou had established an empire supported by extensive commercial
trading and a professional military, and rulers in Ségou originally employed armed
57
defenses against ‘Umar (Djata 1997: 10). Nevertheless, ‘Umar and his disciples
ultimately weakened and defeated the Ségou Empire. After victory, ‘Umar claimed
enormous spoils, destroyed temples, and burned all amulets he could find. Most of the
Bamana population of Ségou initially refused to convert to Islam, but the rural
populations of Ségou readily converted, and urban inhabitants slowly began to associate
with Islam (Robinson 1985: 252-273). ‘Umar Tal’s jihad accomplished widespread
Islamization in West Africa, but historians consider his legacy controversial in West
Africa. For Fula and people in Senegal and northern Guinea, ‘Umar is a local hero
committed to the spread of Islam in West Africa. However, many West Africans
remember ‘Umar as an imperialist who used Islam to justify his greed for resources and
power (374-5). Regardless of ‘Umar’s divisive motives and legacy, the Ségou region, in
which Amadou was born in the 1940s, rapidly became one of the most deeply Muslim
areas in Mali.
After ‘Umar’s armed jihad in Ségou, the type of jihads exercised in Mali changed.
The doctrine of jihad in Islam has been debated and discussed since the death of the
Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, and deliberations about the principle have given way to
an array of interpretations and protocols. The word “jihad” literally means to strive or
struggle but, in a religious context, it suggests an internal spiritual war as one struggle
against evil or exerts oneself for the sake of Islam (see Bonner 2006; Kelsay 2007; Peters
1996). For instance, Muslims can apply themselves as participants in jihad by peacefully
converting nonbelievers or bettering the Muslim community (umma), and such peaceful
actions are frequently referred to as the “greater jihad” (Bonner 2006: 22; Levtzion &
58
Voll 1987: 34). When I questioned Amadou about jihad in present-day Africa he
answered that the nature of jihads in Mali had changed during his lifetime.
“In the past, we cut the throats of anyone who would not convert. Nowadays we
don’t use swords and we don’t use sticks. We don’t kill and we don’t hit. We use our
tongues now.”
Amadou said that Muslims in modern-day Mali remained involved in personal
jihads and Muslims in Mali continued to spread their religious convictions through their
speech (kuma) and righteous example after military and armed jihads ended.
Islam in Ouélessébougou
The jihads of Ahmadu Lobbo, and ‘Umar Tal never reached far enough
southward to have impacted the religious lives of the people in Ouélessébougou. By the
end of the nineteenth century most Bamana inhabitants in south Koulikoro, a region to
the immediate west of Ségou, remained unbelievers (kafiri). In fact, in the Mande word
bamana etymologically means “refuser” and references Bamana historical reluctance to
accept Islam (Launay 1992: 55). During the last decades of the 1800s a Jula and Muslim
leader named Samori Touré established control throughout Guinea, northern Côte
d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and southern Mali (Person 1975; Wilks 2000: 107-108). People
in Ouélessébougou told me that Samori and his forces traveled through the area during
the 1880s searching for slaves and soldiers. Most informants maintained that Samori had
uncharacteristically peaceful relations with the people of Ouélessébougou, and residents
believed that Samori Touré ordered his forces to retreat from Ouélessébougou because
the leaders of the town held the praise name (jamu) Samaké, which denotes that they
59
came from the same ancestral line as Samori Touré himself.13 The chief of the compound
I lived in, Bourama Samaké, said that Samori respected the ritual power of descendants
from the ancient Jitumu chiefdom, adding that Touré consulted a local ritual expert
(soma) when he passed through Ouélessébougou.
Only one informant, Famori Bagayoko, noted that Samori Touré created trouble
for the populace of Ouélessébougou. Famori belonged to the local association (donsotɔn)
of initiated hunters (donsow). According to local donsow lore, donsow guarded the
perimeter of the local forest whenever Samori Touré or his soldiers were believed to be
nearby. The armed men stood daily on the edge of the forest in order to protect local
farmers while working in the wooded outskirts of the town. According to Famori,
Samori’s presence in southern Mali terrorized the region, and farmers felt afraid to travel
and work in their fields lest they fall victim to an ambush and capture by Samori’s troops.
Inhabitants in Ouélessébougou relied chiefly on locally produced food, and farmers’
reluctance to tend to their crops provoked fears of an imminent food shortage. The
donsow took command and announced that they would serve as official guards for
anyone who worked within the local forest. Farmers trusted that the donsow could
successfully defend against Samori’s superior forces and returned to their daily work in
their fields.
Although I heard many claims that people in Ouélessébougou had successfully
staved off Samori Touré, it is essential to acknowledge Touré’s achievements in order to
understand the historical spread of Islam throughout the southern regions of Mali.
13
Samaké residents in Ouélessébougou explained that some West African languages (such as Maninka and
Songhay) change the Samaké praise name (jamu) to Touré, connoting that both names represent the same
lineage.
60
Historians argue that Samori sought to implement radical social and religious reform in
the towns he attacked, converting the conquered to Islam, building mosques and Qur’anic
schools, introducing Islamic law to his subjects, and working to unite West Africans
against the French through Islam (see Person 1975; Wilks 2000).
Amadou held a different memory of Samori Touré. He recognized Samori as a
Muslim but maintained that, unlike Ahmadu Lobbo and ‘Umar Tal, Samori was a man of
low morals. When I asked whether Samori had led a jihad, Amadou thought for a bit and
decided that Samori’s efforts did not qualify as a jihad because he was merely an invader
motivated by commercial greed and power. Although accounts given by historians argue
that Fula jihadists similarly sought wealth and political control through their efforts,
Amadou unhesitatingly labeled non-Fula military endeavors as unreligious and defended
the intentions of his Fula ancestors as entirely religious. Interestingly, many Bamana
residents in Ouélessébougou also echoed Amadou’s claim that Samori’s efforts were
nonreligious, saying that he did little to convert people in their town or teach them
Muslim practices. I learned from interviews on the history of Islam in Ouélessébougou
that only a few families in Ouélessébougou identified as Muslim by the time the French
apprehended Samori in 1898.
When I asked inhabitants in Ouélessébougou to tell me how Islam originally came
to their town, everyone directed me to speak with Mori Doumbia to learn the complete
history. During my research, Mori Doumbia served the community as the imam
(alamami) of the largest mosque in the village. I knew Mori Doumbia and greeted him
nearly everyday when he passed by my workspace on his way to lead prayers in the
mosque, but to have asked him outright for an interview myself would have been crass.
61
People in Mali typically arrange to meet formally with an unfamiliar person through an
intermediary (sababu). Amadou knew the imam well and I asked him to act as my
sababu. I told Amadou that I wanted to interview the imam about his family and the
history of Islam in the town. Amadou privately asked Mori to consider participating in a
recorded interview with me. Days later Mori consented and Amadou arranged for us to
meet at ten o’clock the following morning. On the day of the interview Amadou
accompanied me to Mori’s home to introduce Mori and me to one another.
My interview with Mori Doumbia furthers awareness of the expansion of Islam
in southern Mali through the contributions of “faceless and nameless” civilians (see
Gramsci 1971: 54; Gillen & Ghosh 2007: 124). According to Mori, his ancestors spread
Islam throughout Ouélessébougou and effected lasting religious change in the area. Mori
told me that his family had lived in Ouélessébougou for four generations, and his greatgrandfather was a diligent Muslim and moved to Mali from Guinea and found that there
was no mosque in Ouélessébougou. He had lived in Ouélessébougou for two years
before he asked the town elders’ permission to build the first mosque in the town and
serve as the town’s imam. The elders agreed, and people in the town began to call Mori’s
great-grandfather “teacher” (karamɔgɔ). According to Mori, before Islam, the people in
Ouélessébougou subscribed to their “bamana-ness” (bamanaya) as a ritual system and
relied on power objects and sacrifice to communicate with their ancestors and invisible
forces (see also Leynaud and Cisse 1978: 85; Cissé 1970). There was no sudden moment
when people in the town accepted Islam. The conversion of townspeople happened
slowly through a jihad of the tongue, wherein Mori’s ancestors and other Muslim
residents patiently proselytized through their speech and example.
62
Mori told me that more than half of the families in Ouélessébougou identified as
Muslim by the time of his birth in 1947. Yet still no Muslim school (medersa) for
studying Arabic and the precepts of the Qur’an had been founded in the town. To ensure
adequate Muslim leadership in Ouélessébougou, Mori’s parents sent him when he was
eleven years old to study at a medersa in Touba, a town located in Futa Jalon in the Labé
region of northern Guinea.
“I would be ungrateful if I didn’t say that Touba was an amazing place! I stayed
for four years,” Mori remembered.
Mori studied the Qur’an, the words and deeds of the prophet (hadith), and the
Arabic language while living at the medersa. These subjects were difficult to Mori, and
he identified thoroughly Arabic and Islam as an endless endeavor. Even so, Mori
returned to Ouélessébougou at the age of fifteen. Upon his return, adult Muslims in
Ouélessébougou acknowledged Mori for his education and deferred to him as a religious
leader. Mori said that in 1997 the townspeople asked him to serve them as imam at the
town’s largest mosque (misiriba), which was located close to Ouélessébougou’s central
market. The mosque had the highest rates of attendance for daily congregational prayers
and exclusively provided Friday afternoon and holiday sermons (wajuu) for
Ouélessébougou’s entire Muslim populace. Mori originally felt apprehensive about the
position and told his petitioners that the profession was too great for him. However, the
village chief (dugutigi) summoned Mori and privately persuaded him to accept the
position as “big imam” (alimamiba). Mori finally agreed to the appointment and had
continually served as alimamiba for Ouélessébougou’s Muslim population for fourteen
years at the time of our interview.
63
“The work is fine because God insists that I do it,” Mori replied with a careworn
face when I asked him whether he enjoys his many responsibilities.
Figure 7: Exterior of the largest mosque (misiriba) in Ouélessébougou
Mori led five prayers daily in the mosque, which was located about a ten-minute
walk away from his compound. He also prepared sermons in a combination of Arabic
and Bamanankan for Friday services each week, officiated at marriage ceremonies,
presided over naming ceremonies for newborn children (den kun di), and regularly
attended sacrifices held for deceased town members. During Mori’s lifetime many
people in Ouélessébougou converted to Islam, and first and second generation Muslims
accordingly needed detailed instructions on how to properly practice and live in accord
with Islam. Mori made himself available at his home to visitors with questions about
Islam and regularly resolved religious disputes and clarified proper Muslim practices for
64
town congregants. He received minimal compensation for performing his duties as
imam. The tithes (jaka) collected at prayer services were used primarily to pay the
monthly electric bill for the mosque and other maintenance projects.14 Mori and his
family sold bundles of firewood outside their home to supplement his meager income.
In 2011 there were eleven mosques, strategically situated to serve every section of
the town, in Ouélessébougou. Most people prayed in the mosque that was closest to their
home for morning and evening prayers and attended whichever mosque was nearest their
work place in the afternoon. People typically prayed in a mosque whenever possible.
Amadou commented that prayers done in the mosque earned each worshipper twentyseven baraji while a prayer performed alone at home earned only one. Every mosque
had a different imam who served his local community. Imams were primarily
responsible for leading prayers and other rituals, such as circumcision, naming
ceremonies, and burial rites (Berliner 2005: 581; Trimingham 1959: 69).
Religious Leadership among Muslims in Ouélessébougou
Muslim inhabitants in Ouélessébougou routinely sought the guidance of imams
for assistance in their daily lives and ritual practices. Although Amadou and many other
Fula residents in Ouélessébougou reported that they came from long lines of Muslims
and had a strong sense of Muslim practice and history, most of Amadou’s Mande friends
in the town were only first or second-generation Muslims and often asked for guidance
on how to properly practice Islam and understand its history. For example, Koniba
Doumbia, Amadou’s close friend and the welder who worked by us, explained to me that
14
Mori said that electricity was necessary to broadcast calls to prayer and Friday sermons over an
intercom, run ceiling fans while the mosque was in use on hot days, and light the inside and exterior of the
mosque for early morning and late evening prayers.
65
he moved as a child to Ouélessébougou during the 1950s from a small village named
Falajé located thirty kilometers west of Ouélessébougou. During Koniba’s early
childhood his father became ill, and Koniba’s parents decided that he would have better
access to Western medicines and medical care in a larger town. He chose to relocate to
Ouélessébougou. Koniba’s father converted to Islam shortly after his family’s arrival in
Ouélessébougou, but Koniba recalled that his mother remained an “unbeliever” and never
took interest in Islam.
“She was without God,” he said, “and it really bothered me.”
As a child, Koniba respected his father’s Muslim faith because he felt they would
lead to his father’s salvation, and he wished that his mother would share these
convictions. Koniba also alluded that his family felt an element of social pressure in
Ouélessébougou to conform to town values that had become tied to Islam. When I
questioned him further about his mother, Koniba’s tone became more sympathetic to his
mother’s decision to remain an unbeliever.
“Islam was not widespread during her youth and early adulthood. She didn’t
understand why she needed to change.”
Koniba’s father took exclusive responsibility for Koniba’s religious upbringing
and showed him how to live as a good Muslim man. However, because Koniba’s parents
did not share the same outlook, Koniba said he did not truly belong to Islam during his
childhood years. At the age of twenty-five Koniba unhesitatingly decided that he agreed
with the precepts of Islam and joined the faith by reciting the shahada and additionally
informing religious leaders in the town of his conversion.
66
As a convert to Islam, Koniba regularly asked Amadou questions about Muslim
practices and the history of Islam. I observed that Fula men in Ouélessébougou were
revered for their historical allegiance to Islam, and townspeople often sought blessings
(dubaw) and advice from elderly Fula men in addition to town imams. People in
Ouélessébougou also regularly asked local holy men (moriw) for counsel and spoken
blessings.
I interviewed Yacouba Touré, the director of a popular Muslim school (medersa)
in Ouélessébougou on the history and role of holy men in Mali. Yacouba was born in
Ouélessébougou and studied as a child at the same medersa that he oversaw when I met
him in 2011. The medersa stood across the dirt road from Amadou’s and my workplace.
Youcouba often joined us throughout the day for tea and short visits. He had a notable
ability to turn everyday conversations into discussions about God and Islam. Given his
overt regard for and commitment to Islam, I often asked Yacouba to expound his views
about matters pertaining to Islam and its history in Ouélessébougou.
Yacouba explained that at the outset of Islam’s expansion in Ouélessébougou,
people in the town only understood the sinful (jurumukɛla) Bamana rituals of their
ancestors. Confusion and disagreement concerning religion became commonplace in the
town as conversion rates to Islam increased. Holy men helped to relieve this phase of
religious instability by serving as guides (yiramɔgɔw) who taught converts the proper
precepts of Islam and made judgments on whether or not practices were in accord with
Islam. Originally this group of holy men consisted exclusively of elders who came from
reputable Muslim families and had studied in medersas in childhood. Yet, as Islam grew
in popularity in Ouélessébougou so did the number of males who identified as holy men,
67
and the qualifications for distinguishing oneself as a holy man soon became fewer and
vague. Suddenly self-purported and illiterate “holy men” who knew little about Qur’anic
injunctions, the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, or Muslim history worked throughout
the town.15 Yacouba called these men charlatans in French, saying that they monetized
their status by eliciting cash payments from the populace in exchange for offering
religious counsel or performing healing and divinatory rites.
Yacouba considered himself one of the few legitimate holy men in town
explaining, “I say a blessing, not a price, when someone tells me they need help.”
Yacouba taught me that the methodology and tasks holy men utilize in their work
varies between individuals. Holy men in West Africa often restrict themselves to certain
specializations and may select one area of expertise, such as divination, amulet
construction, or teaching Arabic and the Qur’an as their sole focus (Mommersteeg 2012:
30-31).
As an educated Muslim and town elder, Amadou desired to take part in the
activities of holy men. He had learned many practices used to access supernatural
powers, and many people in Ouélessébougou called him a holy man. Identification as a
Muslim, Amadou reported, necessitates that a person fasts and prays regularly.
Assuming the role of an authentic holy man was a more consuming endeavor.
“Do you think a holy man sleeps? No! Holy men stay awake and study all
night.”
15
Many Muslims in Ouélessébougou, as is the case throughout West Africa, acknowledged the authority of
moriw who could not speak, write, or read Arabic and instead relied on oral traditions (see Amselle 1987:
83; Trimingham 1959: 68). Both categorizations of literate and illiterate holy men played a role in the
historical spread of Islam in Africa and were mutually acknowledged for transmitting specialized
knowledge of Muslim practices and prohibitions (Bravmann 1974: 10; Launay 1992: 67).
68
Amadou next implicitly denigrated his aptitude by reporting that he slept every
night, but he nevertheless admitted that he studied the matters of holy men (moriya) by
reading, reciting, and copying verses from the Qur’an into a private notebook each
evening before bed. He also said that he hoped to master more practices in the coming
years.
The key to becoming a holy man, Amadou stated, was associating oneself with an
eminent teacher (karamɔgɔ) qualified to teach an orthodox and pure (gɛrɛgɛrɛ) version of
Muslim history, beliefs, and rituals. Amadou was straightforward in his criticism of
alleged holy men who practiced un-Islamic customs without any basis in the Qur’an,
warning that many men in West Africa posed as holy men but were in actuality sorcerers
(soma). In order to fully understand Islam in West Africa, it is necessary to examine
practices that Muslims deemed wholly African (farafinna) and contrary to the precepts of
Islam.
In Ouélessébougou I heard varying opinions from Muslims on the status of
sorcerers ranging from classifying them as heretics, who did not earn baraji, to helpers
who God rewarded with baraji. Discussions on sorcerers often organically led to debates
about who qualified as a sorcerer and who acted as a holy man. The Bamanankan
language clearly distinguishes between the two categories of holy men (moriw) and
sorcerers (soma), but marking a definite point of distinction between them was difficult.
For example, many Muslim holy men in Ouélessébougou summoned spirits (jinɛ) by
lighting fires and burning incense (wusulan). The holy men would write the wishes of
their clients down on scraps of paper, throw the pieces into a fire, and pledge that their
requests would soon come to fruition. Amadou classified this particular practice as un69
Islamic and said that neither the holy man nor client earned baraji for participating in the
ritual. Thus, engaging in sorcery could damage a person’s chances for paradise.
Amadou sympathetically recognized the difficulty inherent in defining the boundary
between a sorcerer and holy man.
Amadou acknowledged the ambiguity that characterized life by joking, “It’s a bat!
The head of a dog and the wings of a bird!” He frequently relied on this imagery by
discussing how challenging it can be to determine whether a person is a holy man or a
sorcerer.
Amadou declared that Ouélessébougou was full of “bats,” men whose work lay in
the nebulous area between pure Islam and African witchcraft. But some inhabitants in
Ouélessébougou considered sorcerers useful members of their community. For instance
Koniba maintained that sorcerers often healed those suffering from illness and injury but
who could not afford Western medicine or other professional treatments. Sorcerers
accessed baraji through such philanthropic practices, Koniba claimed. Amadou did not
recognize the worth of sorcerers and said that he never sought their help, even when he
faced critical problems. Rather, he regularly asked local holy men for their counsel and
to fabricate amulets and elixirs that offered security. Amadou only directly encountered a
sorcerer on one occasion, and, like several other residents I questioned, he admitted that
he anonymously went to a sorcerer’s house once out of curiosity. The sorcerer showed
Amadou the essentials of how he predicted the future by deciphering sand markings and
prepared traditional medicines. Amadou observed with interest but recalled that he
resisted asking questions out of fear that he would appear to be a sorcerer himself. In
interviews Amadou maintained that he had no need for sorcerers’ services and relied on
70
Islam for support. Although the majority of people in Ouélessébougou identified as
Muslim (silamɛ), the next section will show that people did not necessarily assumption
about how to worship and live as adult Muslims.
Currents of Islam in Ouélessébougou
The history of jihads in West African shows that contestation over religious
orthodoxy has long been a feature of West African Islam. I documented in my fieldwork
frequent disagreements between self-identified Muslims about what constituted
membership and normative practice within Wahhabi and more mainstream Muslim
groups. This section introduces the types of religious diversity that differentiates
Muslims from each other in Ouélessébougou and explains how people in town defended
their personal religious standpoints.
Wahhabism, a conservative Muslim group founded in Saudi Arabia during the
eighteenth century, was the most significant religious movements among Muslims in
Ouélessébougou at the time of my field research. Wahhabism in Mali began to increase
in popularity during the 1940s when an increasing number of Malian Muslims either
made the pilgrimage to Mecca or completed university studies in the Middle East
(Amselle 1987: 80; Piga 2003: 15-18). Well-educated and traveled West Africans
frequently returned to West Africa with anti-marabout and anti-Sufi viewpoints.16 Many
16
In the literature on Islam in Africa, Muslim leaders are typically referenced as “clerks” or “clerics.”
French colonizers in West Africa, moreover, broadly applied to word “marabout” to any Muslim leader
(Trimingham 1959:68), although the title “marabout” is esoterically associated with the cult of saints
among the Moors in North Africa (68,89) and forms of “magical Islam” in sub-Saharan Africa (Warms
1992). Scholars who distinguish clerks from marabouts usually differentiate between the two types on the
basis that clerics are literate in Arabic while marabouts do not speak or read Arabic and rely on orality for
communication (Trimingham 1959:68; Amselle 1987:83). Both kinds of leader played a role in the spread
of Islam in Africa and are mutually acknowledged for transmitting specialized knowledge of Islamic
practices and prohibitions (Launay 1992:67; Bravmann 1974:10). In my research, informants did not
distinguish between clerks and marabouts and broadly used the term “holy man” (mori) to reference all
71
were eager to expose marabout men as “lazy and ignorant,” debasing marabout on the
basis that they were illiterate and do not speak Arabic (83). Wahhabi Muslims in Mali
also stressed the importance of secular work, arguing that Muslims cannot live by Islam
alone. As Wahhabis gained a reputation as merchants in West Africa, they attained
bourgeois status (Amselle 1987: 83-84). In order to delegitimize local holy men,
Wahhabi men organized debates with local holy men on Islam, through which urban
Wahhabi scholars attracted many supporters by publicly outclassing and out-thinking
their holy men opponents (80).
In the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Muslims involved in the Wahhabi
movement in Mali have worked to identify and overturn practices deemed “African”
from a reformist perspective, and Wahhabi actions had the potential to split Muslim
communities in Mali (Launay 1992: 77-89). Amselle (1987), in his study on Wahhabism
in southern Mali, describes the struggle between Wahhabi Muslims and majority
Muslims who also engage in “pagan” practices, identified as amulet use, singing,
dancing, ostentatious gift giving, drumming, praise songs, revering non-Muslim
ancestors, and scarification with Islam. The Wahhabi in Ouélessébougou practiced an
austere form of Islam and showed extra discipline in their daily lives, but they had not
uncompromisingly divided themselves from other Muslim residents. Few women in the
town wore burqas, and those who did nearly all belonged to Wahhabi families. The
majority of Wahhabis in town lived together in a common neighborhood, which had a
reputation for public cleanliness. Piles of uncollected trash and cinders lined every dirt
road in Ouélessébougou, but I noticed less litter whenever I visited the Wahhabi quarter.
Muslim leaders associated with Muslim pedagogy, healing, divination, and making amulets and potions
(see Austen 1999:14).
72
Women in the area were also required to remove their shoes, a practice unique to this
neighborhood, when using the communal hand pump to prevent the cement platform
surrounding the water source from becoming filthy with mud.
Overall, mainstream Muslims in Ouélessébougou spoke respectfully of the
Wahhabi Muslims in their town. People especially recognized a Wahhabi doctor, Oumar
Bagayoko, who directed a private medical clinic in the town, with esteem for his nondiscriminatory policies, quality healthcare, comforting bedside manner, and fair prices on
medicines and medical procedures. Like other Wahhabi men in the town, Dr. Bagayoko
and his primarily Wahhabi male staff wore long beards. People in Ouélessébougou often
drew attention to religious differences between townspeople through jokes that made
their dissimilarities funny rather than frightening. Koniba blithely told me, when I asked
why Wahhabi men wear untrimmed beards, that the Wahhabi think that upon their death
God will reach down, grab them by the beard, and throw them into paradise (lahara).
Wahhabi prayed and attended services in the same mosques as other Muslims in
Ouélessébougou. Mosque attendees noted differences in the manner Wahhabis prayed,
most notably that Wahhabi held the wrist of their left hand with their right hand while
standing during prayer. Wahhabi in Ouélessébougou defended this practice by claiming
that this is how the Prophet Muhammad prayed, according to a hadith narrated by Wa’il
ibn Hajr that states: “Once when I prayed with the Prophet, upon whom be peace, he
placed his right hand over his left upon his chest” (Sābiq 1991: 132). Some Muslim
residents countered that this hadith was recorded on a particular day when the Prophet
had hurt his left had, which required him to cradle his injury during prayer. Because the
Prophet only prayed with his hands folded across his chest in one abnormal instance,
73
Muslims should stand with their hands at their side during prayer, as the Prophet
normally did. The Wahhabi fashion of praying prompted some Muslims in
Ouélessébougou to accept the Wahhabi style of prayer without otherwise affiliating with
Wahhabis. These Muslims self-identified as “hand takers” (bolo minɛ) as opposed to
“hand descenders” (bolo jigin), who placed their arms freely at their sides while praying.
Some “hand takers” accepted the hadith that the Prophet Muhammad prayed with his
arms clasped. Others said it was a moot issue and that Muslims should pray in whatever
manner was physically comfortable to them.17
Koniba and Amadou prayed differently in the mosque. Koniba took up his hands
when he prayed while Amadou left his at his side. Amadou contrasted their styles of
prayer through playful jest. One day Amadou showed me how he prayed by standing
straight and with focus while his arms rested at his side.
Amadou maintained the religious traditions of his Muslim kin through this
posture, and he commented, “This is how my father also prayed.”
Amadou next gave an exaggerated demonstration of how Koniba looked in the
mosque by standing hunched and shivering with his arms folded together.
He turned to address Koniba, who was smiling and wagging his head to
communicate his mirth, and wondered, “Are you a Wahhabi or just cold?”
“Wahhabi?” Koniba retorted. Do you see a beard on my face? It’s comfortable to
pray with my hands clasped.”
Amadou ended the exchange with a short laugh and a blunt, “It looks ridiculous!”
17
Worldwide, most modern-day Sunni Muslims hold their hands during prayers and cite the sunna of the
Prophet for this posture, saying that Muhammad regularly led prayers in this style (Dutton 1996: 13-40).
74
Given that Sufi philosophies played a significant role in the jihads that spread
Islam through rural West Africa, I found it surprising that residents in Ouélessébougou
did not overtly identify with Sufi dimensions of Islam. Many residents were also
unfamiliar with the division between Sunni and Shi’a denominations in the larger Muslim
world. Although it has been argued that the concept of Sufism is largely a scholarly
innovation (see Ernest 1997), the term had some practical use in Mali. Amadou reported
that numerous Sufi Muslims lived in Mali but that most had migrated from Senegal and
spoke Wolof. He classified Sufis as Muslim, just like him, but noted that members of the
Sufi order cultivated different physical and personality styles. Sufi men grew their hair
long and styled it in dreadlocks, wore ragged clothing, and obsessively listen to of reggae
music, such as Bob Marley (who, according to Amadou, came from Fula ancestry).
Amadou presumed Sufi adherents dressed and lived in eccentric styles because their
teacher (karamɔgɔ) had these predilections, although he saw no problem in venerating
teachers and religious leaders through imitation.
Although I witnessed an overall cooperation between the various Muslim
communities in southern Mali, this does not, however, mean that practitioners held a
uniform view on how to properly practice Islam. Among Muslims in Ouélessébougou I
noted that ideas on how to acquire baraji led to fine points of religious diversity between
townspeople. For example, many Muslims in Ouélessébougou stated that Wahhabi
residents did not earn comparable baraji to them because Wahhabi did not hold elaborate
naming ceremonies (den kun di) for their children. Amadou joked that a Wahhabi den
kun di cost less than 500 West African francs, while other Muslims spent more than
75
50,000 francs to mark the rite.18 West Africans, Amadou said, are obliged to hold den
kun di services for the newborn children of their family members and neighbors, and
hosts should serve attendees bread and beans to eat and coffee to drink. In Amadou’s
mind, financially investing in a costly den kun di was a good spiritual investment. The
ritual generated baraji for both host and guest, but most importantly it brought about
initial baraji for the newborn baby. Neither parent, participant, nor progeny acquired
baraji by taking part in modest den kun di ceremonies. Thus, some residents who could
not afford to buy refreshments for attendees skipped holding a naming ceremony for
newborn children all together. Despite the prevalent attitude in Ouélessébougou that den
kun di celebrations produced large amounts of baraji, Wahhabi Muslims refused to
acknowledge the ceremonies as essential for salvation in the afterlife, insisting that
Muslims who abjured the rite and still succeed in earning adequate baraji to gain
paradise. Dissent over how to successfully earn the required amount of baraji to cross
the threshold to paradise motivated religious differences between Muslim residents in
Ouélessébougou and yet gave people a common “currency” for articulating their
differences. The following section will consider the doctrinal foundation of baraji in
Islam and will advance efforts to understand how the concept represents a form of value
that directs currents of religious life and fosters pluralism across a range of religious
groups in West Africa.
Doctrine of Baraji among Muslims in West Africa
The concept of baraji plays a vital role in West Africans Islam (see Smeltzer
2005: 46). During my field research I learned that Muslims in southern Mali placed a
18
About $100.00 USD.
76
unique and particular emphasis on baraji in their daily speech and conduct, and I
discovered that the basis of their understanding lay soundly in the original Arabic content
of the Qur’an.19 Surah 9:100 nicely illustrates the desirable consequences of acquiring
baraji. The verse references the recognized helpers (ansar) of Medina who first pledged
their allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad and describes the “first forerunners [in Islam]
among the Muhajireen and the Ansar and those who followed them with good conduct—
Allah is pleased with them and they are pleased with Him, and He has prepared for them
gardens beneath which rivers flow, wherein they will abide forever. That is the great
attainment.” This single passage nicely depicts the series of suppositions that righteous
Muslims in West Africa tied to their actions; by behaving with good conduct they would
please God and attain paradise. The doctrine of baraji figures prominently in these
expectations. Malians believed that God kept a meticulous record of all of the good
deeds performed in their lifetime. One acquired varying amounts of baraji from God
with each good deed and through an invariable accounting of baraji, God would fairly
calculate and determine on an individual basis those who could enter paradise.
Yacouba Touré, the director of the medersa located near the spot where Amadou
and I made rope each day, had studied Arabic for over thirty years at the time of our
interview. He offered with total profundity four translations of Arabic words used in the
Qur’an that expressed the persistent theme and united concept of baraji. First, and most
significantly, he translated baraji into Arabic as adjr, meaning “reward,” “payment,”
“recompense,” or “wages.” Various forms of the word adjr occur in both religious and
legal senses in a great number of passages throughout the Qur’an. Qur’anic passages
19
Yusuf Ali translation
77
wherein adjr takes on religious significance specify that fulfilling religious and moral
obligations entitle the person participating in the event to a divine reward (Schacht 2001).
For example, surah 16:41 uses the idiom adjr to indicate that “the reward of the Hereafter
is greater” and surah 39:74 similarly promises, “excellent is the reward of [righteous]
workers” (emphases added). Surah 95:6 teaches that human beings will live outside the
company of God in the afterlife, “Except for those who believe and do righteous deeds,
for they will have a reward uninterrupted” (emphasis added). Yacouba uniformly
interpreted the reward promised in these verses, and in other uses of adjr throughout the
Qur’an, as baraji in the Bamanankan language.
Figure 8: Yacouba Traoré consulting an Arabic text during an interview
78
Yacouba next translated baraji as jazā’ and thawāb in Arabic. Akin to adjr, jazā
appears repeatedly throughout the Qur’an as a form of divine “reward” or
“compensation” that worshippers can expect when God assesses their life on the Day of
Judgment. Surah 2:48 reveals, “And fear a Day when no soul will suffice for another
soul at all, nor will intercession be accepted from it, nor will compensation be taken from
it, nor will they be aided,” and 29:7 similarly promises that God will “reward them
according to the best of what they used to do” (emphases added). Thawāb similarly
appears in the Qur’an, although less heavily than adjr and jazā, to refer to godly
“remuneration.” Surah 3:148 gives a poetic guarantee of “repayment” for good deeds,
affirming twice with the word thawāb: “So Allah gave them the reward of this world and
the good reward of the Hereafter. And Allah loves the doers of good” (emphases added).
Yacouba listed baraka as the final word used in the Qur’an to reference baraji.
Baraka varies slightly in meaning from adjr, jazā’, and thawāb. It expresses both
blessings sent to humans by God and a beneficent force of divine origin (see Colin 2001).
Surah 7:96 relates, “And if only the people of the cities had believed and feared Allah,
We would have opened upon them blessings from the paradise and the earth” (emphasis
added). In 3:44 baraka appears to describe how the sacred revelations contained in the
Qur’an were transmitted: “on a blessed night,” and 40:64 declares, “blessed is Allah,
Lord of the worlds” (emphases added). In Islamic tradition, baraka also commonly
refers to the human possession of divine powers or spiritual influence. Informants
commented that exemplars of virtue, typically holy men (moriw), have the sacred power
of baraka in them, but ordinary believers can also attain portions of baraka through
physical and proximal contact with holders. Thus, Muslim followers in Ouélessébougou
79
often interacted with religious leaders in order to have access to their symbolic capital, or
baraka (see Soares 2005: 33, 40; 1996: 746-747). In Mali, the word baraka was
incorporated into the vernacular and occurred in everyday speech to express strength and
spiritual power. Some ethnographic research suggests that baraka differs from baraji in
that people can use the power of baraka during their earthly existence while baraji is
reserved exclusively for the afterlife (Smeltzer 2005: 46). However, Yacouba argued
baraka could potentially also be used interchangeably with the more prevalently
employed word baraji.
The topic of baraji featured regularly in conversations I had with Amadou. He
cared about the number of baraji credited to him, and his daily life reflected an obvious
effort to accumulate more through supererogatory actions (farida). Amadou said that he
did not know the exact number of baraji he had earned over his lifetime; no one does.
This uncertainty did not bother him, and Amadou trusted God’s method for keeping a
clear and precise register. Amadou explained that God commissioned angels (mɛlɛkɛ) to
sit on the right and left shoulders of every human being. The angel on the right shoulder
marks all good deeds and the angel on the left chronicles sinful acts. This imagery comes
from surah 50:17-18: “When the two receivers receive, seated on the right and on the left.
Man does not utter any word except that with him is an observer prepared [to record].”
This passage reveals that “observers,” which Amadou deemed angels, only made note of
readily observable acts. Amadou stated that God, however, hears the deepest thoughts of
all people and keeps an additional record of moral and immoral thinking. God also
potentially deducted baraji from the seemingly moral actions that angels recorded if God
determined that the actor performed the deed to gain the attention or praise of others.
80
Amadou explained that, because of the merciful (hinɛ) nature of God, ten good deeds are
credited per each ethical accomplishment while every evil deed counts as only one
demerit. The Qur’an 6:160 corroborates this system and accordingly details, “Whoever
comes [on the Day of Judgment] with a good deed will have ten times the like thereof [to
his credit], and whoever comes with an evil deed will not be recompensed except the like
thereof; and they will not be wronged.”
Amadou bestowed his understanding of baraji upon his six children and his oldest
son, Mohamadou Diallo, explained to me that non-Muslims could earn baraji for good
deeds and an upright disposition with the same ease as Muslims.20 The mayor of
Ouélessébougou estimated that five percent of the people in Ouélessébougou identified as
Christian during my fieldwork with one Evangelical Protestant church and one Roman
Catholic church in the town. Beyond this small population of Christians, a smaller
minority of people lived in the town who said they were either unreligious or practiced
what they considered exclusively African forms of ritual practice. Most of the populace
in the town recognized that all people, regardless of their religion, possessed baraji. The
salutation “baraji be with you!” (i ni baraji!), or more dynamically translated as, “May
you receive baraji for what you have done,” was one of the most common greetings used
between adults (see Smeltzer 2005: 51). Friends and neighbors uttered the greeting in
friendly earnest, regardless of any religious differences between speaker and listener.
The importance of eternal reward also resonated for Christians in
Ouélessébougou, and Bamanankan translations of the Bible use the word baraji
20
Mohamadou died after I left Mali, on the evening September 8, 2012, after a long and terrible bout of
illness that Malian doctors could not identify or treat because of their insufficient training.
81
throughout the text of the Old and New Testaments.21 One can broadly understand the
role of baraji in both Islam and Christianity by turning to the terms Bamanankan
speakers in Ouélessébougou used to describe religion. Bamanankan idioms for religion
include: road (sira), road to God (Ala sira), character (diinɛ), and road to character (diinɛ
sira). Thus, religion references a moral model for behaving in the world. People in
Ouélessébougou fused this model for reality with models of reality that determined
behavior. Baraji served as the ultimate measure of the value of a person’s character.
Although all people possessed baraji by virtue of honorable works and humility, Amadou
commented that orthopraxis and the recitation of Muslim prayers five times per day and
fasting during Ramadan generated the copious amounts of baraji needed to enter paradise
after death. Ergo, Amadou and his children doubted that a non-Muslim could ever
manage to earn the needed amount of baraji to access paradise, although it might be
possible, Amadou admitted.22
Amadou’s life history explores how the concept of baraji is subject to individual
interpretation by considering how such a value system regulated Amadou’s quest for
baraji throughout his lifetime. Because people in Mali attain baraji in varying ways
throughout their life stages, my effort to gain a general understanding of baraji in West
21
The published (1987) Bamanankan version of the Old Testament (Layidu Kɔrɔ) employs the idiom
baraji in Genesis 15:1; Ruth 2:12; 2 Chronicles 15:7; Psalms 127:3; Proverbs 11:18; 13:13; 25:22;
Ecclesiastes 9:5; Isaiah 40:10; 49: 4; 62:11. The Hebrew Old Testament uses the words shākār and shalem,
meaning “repayment” in the places where the Bamanankan and English translations employ the terms
“baraji” and “reward.” The New Testament (Layidu Kura) references baraji in Matthew 5:12, 46; 6:1, 4,
6, 18; 10:42; Mark 9:41; Luke 6:23, 35; 1 Corinthians 3:14; 9: 17, 18; Colossians 3:24; and Hebrews 10:
35. The original Greek version of the New Testament uses various words (apodidomi, atapodosis, and
misthapodosia) to reference what is unanimously translated as “reward” and “baraji” in English and
Bamanankan versions, respectively.
22
Amadou never pressured me to convert to Islam. He said it made him happy to see me at Friday services
at the mosque and he also complimented my clothing whenever I wore the long dress, head wrap, and
shawl that Muslim women in West Africa donned to prayer services, naming ceremonies, sacrifices and
funerals, and Muslim holidays. When Amadou spoke of the afterlife, he often included me in his
description of Paradise.
82
Africa requires the study of a single life in depth. Amadou’s story shows that, as a child,
he relied on his parents and siblings to unify Islam and daily life into a coherent system,
and he learned how to acquire baraji by observing and participating in an array of
religious practices and rituals with members of his kin group. During his late childhood
and adolescence, Amadou’s independent relocation to Bamako and work as a cattle
herder required him to develop an individual interest and sense of accountability for his
acquisition of baraji. In adulthood, as a husband and father, Amadou’s attention returned
to the connection between Islam and kinship as he became responsible for the religious
lives and accumulation of baraji in his family. My final chapter explains how elderhood
gave Amadou a chance to earn baraji at an unprecedented rate while being recognized by
his community as an asset of wisdom and experience.
In this chapter I have illustrated that Amadou connected his religious convictions
to a long history of Muslim convictions among Fula people in West Africa, and that Fula
Muslims attempted to purify their practice of Islam and spread their beliefs to other
ethnic groups through military jihads. As more people in West Africa accepted Islam, the
number of religious currents in the region began to increase, and the Wahhabi branch of
Islam was the most prominent divergence from normative rural Islam in twenty-first
century Ouélessébougou. Yet despite disparate religious affiliations, the chapter argues
that people in Mali rely on the principle of baraji in order to understand and evaluate
their religious lives and moral conduct. Amid such diversity, I now turn to Amadou’s
vivid childhood memories and his upbringing as a Fula and Muslim child in central Mali.
Amadou’s early life experiences reveal the moments, relationships, and factors that led to
the initial integration of his Muslim moral values and experiences, especially his
83
conception that opportunities to act righteously and acquire baraji lie in everyday
dealings and associations.
84
CHAPTER THREE
CHILDHOOD
“My mother used to say that she made me short, but God made me a coward,”
Amadou told me while recalling memories from his childhood.
Indeed, an element of fear marked most of his early recollections. Amadou spent
the first years of his life intensely afraid of wild animals, noise, the ire of volatile adults,
people who spoke other languages, death, witches, violence, and the mysterious French
settlers who lived near his village.
This chapter examines Amadou’s upbringing in order to understand the
foundations and resolutions of his fears in conjunction with the formative moments of his
boyhood and specifically how Amadou’s growing knowledge of Islam and baraji helped
settle his emotional fears of impending harm. I reveal that the fears Amadou felt as a
child were linked to a set of moral standards about people, situations, and behavior that
he deemed dangerous and contrary to the principles of Islam. The writing pays special
attention to vignettes that exemplify Amadou’s early religious life and education and the
experiences that shaped his understanding of baraji, human moral character, and family
relationships while soothing his anxieties during the first approximate eleven years of his
life.
Amadou’s upbringing yields rich information about how West African children
comprehend Islam and the complex concept of baraji. This chapter deepens
understanding of baraji by showing how Amadou’s understanding of baraji and his
tactics for acquiring it changed throughout his life. Accordingly, Amadou’s relationship
85
to Islam and baraji presents religion as a personal accomplishment and not something
that can be wholly understood by attention to public rituals, doctrines, and history.
Amadou’s memories show that from a young age he understood baraji as a way to
evaluate the deeds of his everyday life and ritual practices. To begin, the chapter
describes Amadou’s birth and the early ritual experiences and relationships that he said
established his character and personality. Then I explain Amadou’s initial friendships,
domestic responsibilities, and interactions with non-Fula and non-Muslim people. I
relate Amadou’s first encounters with illness and death as a child and finally review
Amadou’s experiences of formal Muslim education and of spending extended time away
from his home in Npièbougou. This chapter shows that just as strong rope breaks
withstands use, Amadou fortified an understanding of Islam that he relied on throughout
his life through a dedicated course of study and devotion that began in his early
childhood days.
☰
☰
☰
Amadou’s mother, Ina Diallo, gave quiet and untroubled birth to Amadou at home
with the sole help of an elderly woman (tinminɛmusokɔrɔ) who lived nearby. The
women I met in Mali downplayed the pain and danger that North American women
associated with labor and classified childbirth as a peaceful experience in which God
sends two angels to fan both sides of the woman giving birth. Amadou’s parents had
eight children together, one of whom had died shortly before Amadou’s birth. As Ina’s
last-born child, Amadou occupied the special status of lagare in his family. I learned
from interviews and observations during my fieldwork that youngest children in Mali
regularly receive overt parental favoritism. As such, Amadou was especially pampered
86
by his mother and grew up with total confidence that he was his parents’ favorite child.
Studies on sibling relationships within Fula families indicate that such favoritism is
normally counter-balanced by comparatively harsh treatment by one’s elder siblings (see
Hopen 1958: 102 n.). On the contrary, Amadou reminisced that his older siblings never
cursed or beat him and treated him with the same level of love and tender affection as his
mother. When I met Amadou in 2010 he was the only living member of his immediate
family. He forlornly described this situation by saying, “That which is good to God is
often bad to people.”
Amadou’s parents scrupulously observed Fula early childcare practices.
Amadou’s life as a Fula Muslim formally began at his naming ceremony, which took
place in the early morning one week after his birth. Immediately following Amadou’s
delivery, his father, Hamadi, summoned all of his neighbors, friends, and relatives to
meet his new child the following week. Ina spent the next week caring for her baby and
making preparations for Amadou’s imminent naming ceremony. Fula naming
ceremonies involve ritually washing the infant, shaving its head, performing a sacrifice,
and publicly pronouncing the child’s name (see Riesman 1992: 111). On the morning of
the ceremony, the town imam whispered the call to prayer in Amadou’s small ear and
Hamadi next announced his son’s name in the midst of a crowd of family and friends.23
The name his father chose came from a variation of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s
many blessed names, and Amadou attached great significance to his first name.24 Hamadi
23
This portion of naming ceremonies traces back to and directly imitates the Prophet Muhammad, as the
Prophet reportedly spoke the words of the call to prayer into his son’s ear before pronouncing his name
(Lings 2006: 177).
24
Everyone called Amadou in conversation by his patronym, Amadou Hamadi, while he was growing up.
This designation is traditionally applied to all Fula names, and follows the Arab naming pattern of
combining a person’s given name with their father’s name in order to indicate paternal lineage (Duprire
87
also sacrificed an adult sheep on behalf of his newborn son and distributed cola nuts,
lamb, and millet to attendees of the ceremony. Fula people were typically disinclined to
eat their livestock but voluntarily killed their sheep and cattle to mark naming
ceremonies, weddings, and funerals (Franz 1978: 105). Participants repaid Amadou’s
parents for these gifts by pronouncing spoken blessings for Amadou’s future welfare.25
According to Amadou, his father made these offerings (sarati) to relatives and neighbors
to establish Amadou’s place in the community, generate the first counts of baraji on his
son’s behalf, and ensure that Amadou would grow up to become a moral and serious man
(see Riesman 1977: 58-63).
Shortly after Amadou’s naming ceremony, Hamadi arranged for a specialist to
come to his home to make short, vertical incisions on the temples next to Amadou’s eyes
as an additional birth rite. The permanent scars such cuts leave are considered beautiful
in West Africa and many ethnic groups deliberately scar the skin by their eyes. For
Hamadi, the cuts protected Amadou’s future personality and ensured that his son would
grow up to become a peaceful and diplomatic person. The man who made the incisions
rinsed Amadou’s small eyes with the blood from the cuts. Amadou believed that the
early act of washing his eyes with his own blood instilled compassion (hinɛ) in him,
noting that the practice him from feeling murderous rage (maafaala) during conflicts in
his later adult life. Amadou’s mother further guaranteed his future character through her
own Muslim and ethical proclivities, as Fula believe that people imbibe their adult
character from the milk they drink from their mother’s breast as infants (see DeLoache &
1996: 223-231). People typically did not invoke Amadou’s clan name, Diallo, when addressing him
casually.
25
In Bamanankan suitable blessings for a newborn child include “May God grant the baby a long life” (Ala
ka den balo), “May their destiny be bright” (Ala ka nakan diya), and “May s/he become a Muslim” (Ala k’a
kɛ silame ye).
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Gottlieb 2000: 193-196; Riesman 1992: 181-182). Amadou’s parents earned baraji for
themselves and Amadou through their understanding of the rituals and practices that
build moral character during early childhood.
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Amadou spent the first seven years of his boyhood living in Npièbougou, a small
village in Mali’s central Ségou region. As an old man, Amadou expressed loyal devotion
to his hometown (faso) and language (fasokan), and expressed regret that Npièbougou’s
weak economy and worsening environment prevented him from living in the village as a
married adult. Npièbougou first became a popular settlement for Fula herders during the
early nineteenth century. Amadou recounted that Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo of Massina
blessed Npièbougou to become a prosperous village while passing through the area on his
way north.26 Amadou explained that his ancestors had historically lived in Diafarabé, a
town north of Npièbougou in Mali’s Mopti region, and that his grandparents were the
first of his relatives to settle in the Ségou region.
Amadou offered vibrant, descriptive, and engaging tales of his hometown during
our conversations about his childhood. Npièbougou was divided into two neighborhood
districts (sokala) that were separated by nearly two kilometers of empty landscape.
Amadou said that all Fula lived in the western neighborhood, and Bamana people lived
together in the district to the east. Physical distance aside, Amadou said that differences
in ethnic culture, religion, and occupation separated Bamana and Fula people in the
village. Fula men earned their living strictly through cattle herding or by working as
26
Although Amadou said that Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo merely blessed Npièbougou and did not oblige
Amadou’s ancestors to settle there, Azarya (1993: 50) argues that Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo forced
sedentarization by requiring Fula families to have a fixed residence. The edict regarding sedentarization
was made for political, military, taxation, and religious reasons as well as to raise the proportion of Fula
families in areas inhabited primarily by Bamana and Tuareg people.
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Muslim scholars (karamɔgɔw). Bamana men worked as farmers (sɛnɛkɛla), blacksmiths
(numuw), and sorcerers (somaw), and very few Bamana identified as Muslim.27
Amadou stayed exclusively within the Fula neighborhood of Npièbougou for the
first several years of his life. Many families in the Fula district spoke only dialects of
Bamanankan rather than Fulfulde and, even within the Fula quarter, Amadou grew up
with many Fula children who spoke only Bamanankan. Ina and Hamadi spoke Fulfulde
exclusively with all of their children and Amadou grew up learning two languages with
equal competence. Like many bilingual children, Amadou could not always separate the
two languages and often used Bamanankan words or expressions during Fulfulde
conversations with his mother. Amadou remembered that this truly upset his mother, and
she would swat at him whenever he spoke Bamanankan in her presence. Amadou hated
disappointing his mother and said he quickly learned to distinguish between the two
tongues.
Amadou’s experience growing up speaking two languages illustrates what
Amselle terms the common “oscillation” West Africans experience between the ethnic
identities that West Africans observe and use to order themselves (Amselle 1998: 44).
According to Amselle, ethnic identities are not fixed. By speaking each other’s
languages, learning each other’s crafts and subsistence practices, and living with one
another, West Africans can “convert ethnically” to become members of different cultural
and ethnic entities (45). Amadou resists this argument, and I respect Amadou’s own
conception of his “pure” (gɛrɛgɛrɛ) Fula ethnicity (siya). Amadou spoke Bamanankan,
27
Amadou said that the few Bamana who had converted to Islam during his childhood traveled daily to
Npièbougou in order to pray and study with Fula Muslim scholars.
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had practiced Bamana farming techniques, and married a Bamana woman in his later life.
Yet despite his thorough understanding of Bamana language and ways of life (kɛcogo),
Amadou fervently denied that he had “become Bamana” (kɛra Bamana) in any sense.
Amadou, rather, understood what Amselle views as evidence of “ethnic conversion” and
“oscillation” as signs of peaceful cooperation (ɲɔgɔdɛmɛ) between discrete ethnic groups
living in diverse (ɲagami) communities.
Amadou taught me that being in trouble with his parents as a young boy did not
threaten his spiritual security. Amadou’s mother taught him that all children are born
sinless and that those who pass away before reaching puberty were automatically
destined for heaven without passing through the Day of Judgment (faraɲɔgɔnna don).
As such, Amadou said his accumulated baraji would not have been weighed against his
offenses or otherwise factored into his salvation if he had died young. Yet throughout his
naturally innocent childhood, Amadou’s parents cautiously prepared him to properly
practice Islam and earn baraji so that he could live as a Muslim upon reaching an age of
accountability.
Ina allowed young Amadou to leave his family compound and play nearby with
other neighborhood children during his early upbringing. However, until Amadou was
about five years old he preferred to spend most of his time at home and by his mother’s
side. Amadou remembered that from a young age he keenly observed his family’s ritual
practices, especially those of his mother. He learned the basics of prayer and fasting by
watching Ina, but more importantly his mother taught him to see the ubiquity of Islam in
everyday events. It stood out to Amadou that whenever Ina made future plans or
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discussed goals with friends and family she included the phrase “God willing”
(Insha’Allah) to mark her acknowledgement that all plans depended on the wishes of God
for her. Amadou told me other stories about his mother’s devotion to Islam, specifically
how she perceived the presence of God in everyday life. For example, one day Amadou
sat outside in the sunshine and watched his mother complete her daily chores when the
sky suddenly turned black. Ina fixed her eyes on the darkened sky and addressed
Amadou with total confidence.
“Amadou, God is testing us,” she said.
Although it was daytime, Ina instructed Amadou that they needed to act as though
it were night to show God their dedication to Islam and gain baraji. Amadou and Ina
rapidly returned home and put themselves to bed.
“Go to sleep,” Ina instructed Amadou.
Meanwhile Amadou listened to piteous cries of confusion from outside and told
his mother in a frightened voice, “But I’m not tired.”
“Then close your eyes, and pretend to be asleep,” his mother directed.
Less than half an hour later daylight returned and his mother permitted Amadou
to rise from bed and resume his afternoon activities. As an old man, Amadou beamed
and told me that he now understood that he had witnessed a total solar eclipse: the moon
had passed between the earth and sun and temporarily blocked the sun’s rays. Amadou
identified this memory as an influential moment in his childhood, and Ina’s reaction to
the eclipse and her immediate attribution of the event as a demonstration of God’s
supremacy strengthened his impression of his mother as a devout Muslim who saw the
potential to show her devotion to God and earn baraji in daily events.
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Amadou relied primarily on his mother to explain how to act appropriately and
make proper moral choices within their Fula community, which, Amadou reflected, faced
increased exposure to outside diversity and foreign influence. Amadou’s parents used
their Muslim practices as means for explaining the difference between Amadou and his
Bamana and French neighbors. Amadou was born in the middle of the French
colonization of Mali, which lasted sixty-eight years from 1892 until 1960.28 Amadou’s
parents often expressed their contempt for the French to their children and taught
Amadou to keep his loyalty with fellow Africans.
Ina reminded him on many occasions, “If you become powerful because of the
French, hate them. If you stay powerless because the French, hate them” (Ni se b’i ye, i
t’u fe. Ni se t’i ye, i t’u fe).
His mother also told him about Catholic priests, whom she called “white holy
men” (tubabu moriw) and said that Amadou should never allow anyone to take him to a
church, as it would constitute a sin so big that it would outweigh all of his baraji on his
Day of Judgment.
Historians accept that French colonizers originally treated Islam as a fierce
adversary but argue that by the 1930s European settlers had built strong alliances with
Muslim communities on whom the French had become reliant for economic and political
support (see Harrison 1998: 97-202; Manning 2004: 170-172; Robinson 1999: 105-127).
28
It was difficult for me to ascertain Amadou’s exact age. He had no paper record of his birth and did not
know his birthday. A medical identification card that a public health clinic in Ouélessébougou issued to
him indicated that he was born in 1946, although Amadou did not know on what basis the clinic chose this
year. A 1946 birth year would have put his age at 64 upon our first meeting in 2010. In 2011 Amadou
typically told people he was 76-years-old, although at times he said that he thought he might be in his
eighties. NASA records indicate that a total solar eclipse that reached greatest visibly near the borders of
Mali and Mauritania occurred on September 1, 1951 at 12:51:20.1 UT. Because Amadou remembers that
he was a young boy at the time of the eclipse, I believe that the clinic’s estimation of Amadou’s age was
quite accurate and that he was born sometime during the mid- to late 1940s.
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Amadou’s life history offers a case in which rural Muslims remained uneasy
toward French settlers throughout the colonial era. The mutually beneficial relationship
that French colonizers cultivated with urban Muslims, including Muslim leaders on their
payrolls, did not extend to Muslim populations in Npièbougou (Harrison 1988: 197).
Amadou’s parents expressed dissatisfaction with France’s lingering presence in West
Africa and adamantly insisted that Christians should not govern Muslims.
In 2011 Amadou continued to advance his parents’ view and said, “I have taught
my children the importance of electing Muslim leaders to lead majority Muslim
populations.”
Amadou often denounced Laurent Gbagbo, the evangelical president of Côte
d’Ivoire from 2000 until his 2011 who was arrested and, as of this writing, is being tried
at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for committing crimes against
humanity: the instructive example of what may ensue when an unbeliever (kafiri) governs
Muslims. Amadou said that he would never vote for a Christian political candidate since
a non-Muslim would not encourage or appreciate the Muslim virtues and practices that
led to the acquisition of baraji in daily life. Given the warnings that Amadou’s parents
gave him against the French, it is not surprising that Amadou developed fear and
revulsion for French people long before he ever had direct contact with colonizers in the
region. Amadou remembered that many French settlers lived in Markala, most of whom
were primarily involved in a major project from 1933 to 1949 to build a road bridge
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across the Niger and an irrigation dam (barrage de Markala) that diverted water into
networks of man-made canals (Marie et al. 2007: 35).29
Apart from his parents’ aversion to colonial rule, Amadou heard harrowing stories
about the French from other neighborhood children. One friend told him that a callous
Frenchman who lived nearly would buy peanuts in bulk and hire African children to shell
them. The man watched his young employees all day with obvious contempt. If he
noticed anyone eating even a single peanut the Frenchman would accuse the children of
stealing and refuse to pay them. At noon, instead of feeding his young employees, he
would offer them only water. Out of spite he said that they could not enjoy an actual
drink and ordered them to only swish the water in their mouths and then spit it out.
Amadou also grew up afraid that the French could damn his soul. Amadou’s parents
cultivated Muslim habits in him from an early age, especially by encouraging him to
participate in daily prayers. In Amadou’s mind, French colonization threatened his
Muslim beliefs and sensibilities. He heard stories of the French nabbing children and
forcing them into French schools (lɛkoli).
“My neighbors told me that Europeans studied everything except God in their
classrooms,” Amadou recalled. From a young age he reasoned that studying this type of
curriculum would undoubtedly stunt his acquisition of baraji and send him to hell
(jahanama).
Although Amadou rarely left the Fula quarter of Npièbougou during the first
several years of his life, he nevertheless found various types of people and situations to
29
The 1945 colonial census record for the Ségou region details that 243 Europeans were stationed in the
administrative area (cercle), eighty-five of whom lived in Markala.
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fear even in his small neighborhood. Amadou said that he abhorred hearing people fight
and grew up with a hypersensitivity to overt conflict.
Even as an adult, he continued to hate violence and cautioned those around him
against fighting by reciting a favorite proverb, “Visiting doesn’t interrupt work, but
making a fist does” (Baro tɛ baara tiɲɛ nka a bɛ bolokulu bɔ o bɛ baara tiɲɛ).
Ina found Amadou’s distaste for conflict especially disconcerting and
problematic. Fula people may deliberately fight in public when settling disputes between
themselves and family members and neighbors. Aggressors view public arguments as a
way to defend their honor and interests while relying on public reactions to ensure that
the fight does not escalate (Riesman 1977: 163-165). Thus, Fula typically view it as a
social obligation to observe and mediate the fights that break out around them. Amadou
cried and hid, typically inside his house, whenever he heard shouting or saw aggressive
behavior. Ina sought to correct Amadou’s failure to mediate during fights, telling him
that shirking his moral duty to arbitrate was dishonorable and that observing an
altercation did not put him in danger and presented a chance for him to earn baraji by
acting as a peaceful mediator.
Amadou doubted that he, as a young child, could successfully resolve a quarrel
between adult neighbors and left that responsibility to adult men and women in the
village. Amadou grew up with a profound respect for elders (mɔgɔkɔrɔba). He saw the
worth in growing old, as a long life presented many opportunities to earn baraji by
pursuing good deeds (kɛwale ɲumanw), participating in daily prayers, and fasting during
Ramadan. As a consequence of the respect that comes with old age, Amadou especially
admired that elderly men and women had earned more baraji than anyone else in town.
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During his boyhood many elders in Npièbougou, according to Amadou, lived for over
two hundred years in full health, but poverty and deteriorating living conditions in Africa
(Farafinna) made such longevity in the twenty-first century impossible.
As a child, Amadou showed reverence for his elders’ knowledge and experience
by hiding whenever he saw an old person approaching. He ducked behind mud fences or
climbed trees to watch in quiet awe whenever a town elder passed by and felt ashamed
whenever elderly people took notice of him. Fula advocate this type of shame—
semtennde in Fulfulde—as requisite for their children. A strong sense of shame is
believed to guide children to a life of fortitude and self-control that thereby leads to
ample attainment of baraji (Hopen 1958: 76-77; Riesman 1992: 17, 23-26; Stenning
1959: 59). Although Amselle (1998) observed that Mande groups in West Africa have
also stress the importance of shame (or maloya in Bamanankan), especially in their
children, Fula believe that their finer bloodline enables them to understand better the
implications of shame and achieve morally superiority in relation to outsiders (VerEecke
1995: 72). As a Muslim searching for baraji, Amadou attached value to the shame he felt
in his early life. Shame stood as an important factor in developing honor and character,
qualities that Amadou saw as crucial to the acquirement of baraji through exemplary
conduct as an adult.
Although Amadou felt angst during fights and cowered at the sight of his elders,
his exaggerated fear of witches (subaga) tormented him the most as a child. Both Mande
and Fula informants during my fieldwork expressed concerns over the menacing
characteristics and activities of these witches, specifically that they could kill local
children. A subaga is a mysterious sorcerer who does evil things that violate societal
97
norms and ethics. They are most notably interested in the abduction and secret
cannibalism of children (Cashion 1984: 99, 152). The subaga figure provides an
archetype of what Lucy Mair terms a “nightmare witch,” a figure that embodies what is
considered the antithesis of the good, through vile and perverted qualities and actions
(Brain 1975: 188; Mair 1968: 38).30 Mande and Fula people similarly believed that
subaga roam and engage in sinister activities primarily at night while flouting the cultural
rules that govern the affairs of daily life (see Mair 1968: 36-37). As a type of nightmare
witch, subaga witches demonstrated the antithesis of expected human behavior. Their
deviant behavior mocked the Muslim virtues that earn one baraji and that Amadou
valued. Amadou claimed that subaga had extraordinary powers that released them from
the physical world. They walked quickly on their hands and had devised ways to travel
“faster than airplanes,” often visiting multiple distant towns in the course of a single
night.
According to Amadou, subaga preferred a diet of human flesh and especially
favored the fresh meat of young children. Hamadi and Ina relied on a number of
techniques to preserve their young and vulnerable children from subaga attacks. Most
effectively, Amadou remembered that his mother would wash him in leaf-based elixirs
meant to combat the subaga. As an extra precaution, Ina lit perfumed incense in the
doorway of the hut Amadou slept in each evening before he went to bed. Every night she
assured Amadou that the smoke from the burning embers (wusulan) created a screen that
30
E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1976) laid the basic foundations for anthropologically understanding the
distinction between witches and sorcerers. He argues that sorcerers deliberately engage in magical
practices and activities deemed immoral by their communities while witches psychically emanate thoughts
that are believed to cause injury to others (226-227). Both embody oppositional qualities and violate social
norms. Lucy Mair notes the same distinction between sorcerers and witches as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, but
she calls the two “nightmare witches” and “everyday witches,” respectively (Mair 1969: 36-39).
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prevented subaga from entering his sleeping quarters, a practice that Amadou used to
calm his own children’s fear of subaga later in his adult life. Whenever young Amadou
had problems sleeping he called for his paternal grandmother, who lived in his
compound, to come into his room and tell him stories. His grandmother recounted events
involving Amadou’s ancestors and folktales until he fell into an untroubled sleep.
Figure 9: Artistic depiction of a subaga (Drawing by Laye Doumbia)
West African folklore offers numerous accounts of what ensues when a subaga
abducts an ill-fated person. These tales describe the deformed appearance of subaga
alongside the ordeals and trials that witches inflict upon their captives. In 2010 I hired an
artist named Laye Doumbia living in Ouélessébougou to draw me a picture of a subaga.
The portrait depicts the abnormal appearance of a witch along with other widely held
99
ideas about subaga. A lush garden appears in the upper-left corner of the drawing,
alluding to a popular belief that subaga could grow gardens without water. The black
crow in the tree reminds the viewer that subaga often used birds as familiars to help with
their malicious plots against hapless victims. People thought that subaga could transform
themselves into cats to wander around towns observing humans or sent ravens and crows
to spy on the goings-on of townspeople. The subaga pictured above also sits next to a
wooden mortar and pestle that subaga reportedly use for mysterious ends, rather than for
the conventional purpose of crushing grains and spices. Informants told me that victims
of subaga learn the purpose of the mortar and pestle only shortly before their death. The
artist also included three stacked pots (dagaw) in the lower right corner. Subaga often
made cruel agreements with their victims: if the victims could accurately guess what was
inside each of the three pots, the subaga would set them free.
“This is an impossible challenge,” one friend in Ouélessébougou assured me. “A
pot could hold water, grain, or a could be empty altogether! No one, except another
subaga, could correctly guess the contents of all three.”
As an old man, Amadou worried considerably less about subaga than he did as a
child. The waning of his concern shows the dynamic nature of life histories. Amadou’s
belief in the witches had not diminished, but his relationship to the witches had changed.
“A subaga would never search for the meat of an elderly person,” he said.
Despite Amadou’s fears during his childhood, he enjoyed growing up in
Npièbougou, especially once he reached an age at which he could wander the entire town
and nearby forest.
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Amadou recollected many memories from the age of five to seven, and as an old
man he discussed this period of his childhood with joy and nostalgia. Once Amadou
turned five, Ina encouraged her son to play and do chores for the family outside of their
residential compound in order to become more independent. Amadou’s neighbor and
age-mate (tɔɲɔgɔn), Kaou Tamboura, became his closest friend as soon as Amadou was
old enough to spend prolonged periods of time away from home. Amadou enjoyed his
new autonomy. He and Kaou spent the majority of their time playing, talking, eating,
and drinking fresh milk from the cattle that belonged to Amadou’s family. As a
Tamboura, Kauo’s last name revealed his family’s status as descendents of Fula-owned
slaves. Amadou said his grandfather had owned Kaou’s ancestors but that French
colonial authorities had freed all persons enslaved in their territories in the early twentieth
century. Although Amadou’s family and other freeborn Fula in Npièbougou observed
the French ban on slavery, former slave-owners in Npièbougou did not easily adapt to
viewing Tambouras as equals. Amadou regularly joked with Kaou about his family’s
status.
“I used to shout ‘slave!’ in a joking manner when I called for Kaou,” Amadou
recalled.
His time-honored joking relationship with Kaou never strained their
relationship.31 The time they spent together as children bound him and Kaou together as
lifelong friends while developing their character in the process.
Amadou’s childhood friendships built his moral qualities in ways that benefitted
him in his adult life. Kaou often defeated Amadou when they competed in games against
31
See chapter four for a detailed description of Fula and Mande joking relationships.
101
each other, which Amadou said distressed him as a child. As a favorite game, Kaou and
Amadou would bury a soft, small cushion in the shallow sand that filled their village.
The two boys them took turns trying to pierce the cushion by quickly throwing nails into
the sand. Winning required focus, aim, strength, and luck, and Amadou often lost
matches against Kaou. Amadou confessed that he would run away to cry in private after
each defeat. Amadou recalled that Kaou would similarly disappear whenever Amadou
won, and concluded that Kaou also left to weep after each loss. Amadou and Kaou
learned to restrain themselves from crying and losing self-control in front of one another.
Fula children develop a sense of honor primarily in the company of their age-mates
(Riesman 1977: 205). A child’s friends act as the first judges of pulaaku, a Fula virtue in
Fulfulde that encompasses honor, intelligence, dignity, and control over one’s public
actions and emotions (see Dupire 1962: 273; Riesman 1977: 108-109, 127-129, 205;
Stenning 1959: 55-59). Bamana speakers similarly rely on the concept of mɔgɔya as a
code of comportment that expresses honor in human nature and social relations (Amselle
1998: 44). But, as Muslims, Amadou’s family and neighbors saw their understandings of
honor and virtue as superior to those of nearby Bamana people.
Amadou’s childhood friends contributed to his character and helped expand his
worldview by providing him with his first exposure to non-Fula people and culture.
Amadou and Kaou often ventured, with their parents’ permission, to the Bamana
neighborhood to play with children there.
On my initiative, in 2011, Amadou and I traveled to Npièbougou for a short visit
with his family members who still lived in the area. The traditional Fula and Bamana
quarters remained separated by a vast landscape covered by shades of pale orange sand,
102
millet fields, and intermittent acacia trees and bushes.32 Within both districts, circular
mud homes with conical, thatched roofs lined narrow dirt roads. Bamana residential
compounds were smaller than those in the Fula district, as Fula homes had large corrals
for holding cattle.
Amadou had fond memories of playing with Bamana children during his
childhood, but he uneasily noted the absence of a mosque in the Bamana neighborhood.
Figure 10: Mosque located in the center of Npièbougou’s Fula district
32
Despite the separation between neighborhoods, Amadou observed on our visit that neither the Fula nor
Bamana districts remained the ethnic enclaves of yesteryear. Both housed diverse populations, and
Bamanankan reigned as the most commonly spoken language to facilitate inter-ethnic communication. In
2011 few people in Npièbougou, including Amadou’s young relatives, could competently speak Fulfulde as
they once could.
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“Kaou and I wondered about the dangers of spending time with unbelievers,”
Amadou said, “and we convinced each other that Bamana sorcerers (soma) would capture
us if we stayed in the Bamana district past dark.”
In Amadou and Kaou’s imagination, sorcerers would eat their young flesh
alongside servings of dog meat, and their devastated mothers would never find a trace of
their dismembered bodies. Amadou found comfort in being with other Muslims and a
level of mystery surrounded non-Muslims, so the two friends always returned rapidly to
the safety and familiarity of their Fula neighborhood before sunset.
Ina occasionally gave Amadou money when he went to the Bamana quarter and
instructed him to buy peanuts or grain from their farmer neighbors. Slowly Amadou
assumed more responsibility for household chores and errands. He also began spending
more time with his father than mother. As a child, Amadou continued his family’s
history of cattle herding; they relied exclusively on cattle husbandry for their income.
His father, Hamadi, showed confidence in Amadou’s pastoral abilities by giving him
occasional responsibilities to aid in caring for his family’s livestock, such as instructing
Amadou to keep the calves away from the family’s grain storage and tying up calves in
the evening (see Hopen 1958: 24). Young children, Amadou explained, earn baraji
primarily through obedience to their parents, and he felt proud when his parents asked
him to perform chores.
In my fieldwork in Ouélessébougou I noted that the children in my host
compound similarly reported that they received baraji by accomplishing chores assigned
by their parents. The residents in my host compound identified themselves as Bamana
and used the Bamana language exclusively while Amadou’s Fula family spoke Fulfulde.
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This continuity between families supports understanding baraji as a pervasive transethnic and linguistic concept in West Africa.
Five-year-old Amadou drew water up from ground wells for the cattle, learned to
milk cows, and tended to the young calves in his family’s herd. By assuming such
responsibilities, Amadou also began to spend time in the forests surrounding
Npièbougou.
“I didn’t like the forest as a child,” he explained, “I felt scared a lion would eat
me. I’m sure it nearly happened many times, but I ran fast and escaped!”
Hamadi also taught Amadou how to make rope as part of managing the family’s
calves. As an old man, Amadou continued to make rope using the same technique his
father had taught him during his boyhood.33 All work held value for Amadou. Even
though his family did not sell the rope he made as a child to generate income, Amadou’s
balance of baraji grew as he became a contributing member of his household.
Through domestic chores Amadou also experienced his first contact with the
French settlers he had grown up fearing. Ina had arranged to sell one liter of fresh milk
for twenty-five francs each morning to each of several French families living in
Markala.34 Amadou often walked the nearly four-mile distance to Markala to deliver the
milk to his mother’s customers. Nervous at the prospect of meeting a French settler, the
French people in Markala surprised Amadou when they received him with kindness and
appreciation for the long journey Amadou had made on their behalf.
33
Although his technique had not changed during his lifetime, Amadou originally learned to make rope
using the strong fibers cut from baobab tree bark. In 2011 Amadou still preferred using tree bark to
construct rope but said his customers favored ropes made from plastic. Amadou consequently relied on
shredded grain bags as his primary material for rope.
34
About $0.05 USD.
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“Most days the French women gave me an extra francs and told me to buy a piece
of candy or cookie to eat on my walk back to Npièbougou,” Amadou recalled.
Amadou was curious about the differences in skin tone between him and the
French and jokingly dubbed the sun “the French moon” (tubabu kalo) because its
effulgent rays emulated the brightness of European skin. Yet during these visits to
Markala, Amadou realized that the primary divergence between him and the Europeans
lay not in their marked physical differences but in their access to wealth and opportunity
in comparison to Africans. On many occasions, after delivering the milk, Amadou sat on
the banks of the Niger in Markala and waited to watch as seaplanes full of rich Europeans
gracefully landed on the river. He strained to see insides of these aircraft and
daydreamed that someday he would board one bound for Mecca and would amass the
large sum of baraji ascribed to those who make this pilgrimage.
Amadou often found ways to mix his responsibilities with children’s pursuits.
Amadou and his friends taught themselves to swim in the man-made irrigation canals that
surrounded their village, which were linked to the nearby Niger River. Occasionally
Hamadi permitted Amadou to take cattle with him on his daytime swims. Cattle are
natural swimmers, Amadou recalled, and the animals often had more endurance than his
young body. Amadou swam alongside them and once he became tired he would grab
hold of a nearby tail and lazily float downstream. Amadou protected his herd and kept a
careful eye out for crocodiles and the rare hippopotamus and quickly evacuated his cattle
from the water upon seeing any threatening animals. On days when his cows did not go
swimming with him, Amadou and his friends happily made small boats for themselves
from discarded metal barrels and spent the day floating and splashing in the cool water.
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Figure 11: Amadou Diallo and me visiting Amadou’s favorite childhood swimming hole in Npièbougou
One late afternoon, when Amadou was six-years-old, he wandered alone from his
house to his favorite swimming hole without telling anyone of his plan to take a short dip
before dark. Amadou’s father, Hamadi, grew worried that Amadou was missing as dusk
descended on the village and began searching nearby compounds and asking neighbors
whether they had seen his young son. Hamadi and Ina’s terror culminated when a
woman told them that she had seen Amadou playing alone near the water several hours
earlier.
Amadou found his mother crying in their family compound when he finally
returned home shortly after dark. His mother rejoiced upon seeing Amadou and
whispered, “I thought you had drowned,” in Amadou’s ear while she hugged him with all
her might.
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Hamadi then seized Amadou from his mother’s embrace and smacked him for the
panic he had caused the family. Amadou identified this as the only time he had ever been
beaten as a child. Hamadi next verbally reprimanded Amadou. He reminded his son that
Amadou’s older brother had suddenly died as an infant from an illness shortly before
Amadou’s own birth. Hamadi explained that he and Ina could not bare the sorrow of
another child’s loss and chastised Amadou for his inconsiderate stupidity. He shouted
that Amadou was too old to continue living a frivolous and unaccountable life and
announced that the time had come for Amadou to become a serious (sɛbɛ) Muslim.
Hamadi ended his lecture by saying that he would make arrangements in the coming year
for Amadou to move to study in a medersa in another village.
The idea of leaving Npièbougou and his family terrified young Amadou, but
Amadou told me that there was no space for children to express their will (sago) in
making such decisions.
☰
☰
☰
Hamadi himself became suddenly and gravely ill shortly after making his decision
to send Amadou to a medersa. Within a week of the onset of his illness, he had died.
Amadou was terribly confused by his father’s passing. In his short seven years of life he
had never known anyone close to him who had died. Amadou described Hamadi’s
funeral rites as brief. Elderly men in the village ritually washed Hamadi’s body, dressed
him in white, and buried his body outside Npièbougou within hours of his passing. On
the morning following his father’s death, Amadou left his compound to go for a walk by
himself. While aimlessly meandering down sandy roads Amadou became gripped by
sadness and looked up at the trees with tears swimming in his eyes.
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“I thought of my friends and their fathers,” he explained, “and realized that I was
the only child in the world without a father.”
Amadou and his father stayed linked together after Hamadi’s death through
baraji. Amadou’s family arranged to sacrifice a white bull on Hamadi’s behalf forty
days after his death. The family distributed the meat to an immense crowd of neighbors
and relatives. The sacrifice was designed to ensure that Hamadi received enough baraji
to enter paradise. Following this sacrifice, Ina explained to Amadou at the formative age
of seven, that Amadou and his siblings now had the responsibility to earn additional
baraji for their father. Amadou explained that, according to the Qur’an, family members
were not judged by God for one another’s sins.35 However, God did allow descendents to
benefit their ancestors by earning baraji on their forebears’ behalf.
Among West African Muslims, the deceased rely on their children to confer
blessings on their behalf and add to their baraji through personal sacrifices and spoken
blessings (Smeltzer 2005: 55-56). Accordingly, the relationship between children and
parents takes on new significance after a parent dies. Fula and Mande Muslims in
Ouélessébougou explained that they wanted to continually remember and respect dead
ancestors and believed that the deceased especially appreciated gifts, such as food.
People worried that their deceased relatives felt hungry or thirsty in the afterlife and
believed that the living earned baraji by offering food gifts to their ancestors. People
blessed their food by speaking the short blessing, “baraji be with you” (i ni baraji) on
behalf of their ancestors before sharing meals. In Ouélessébougou I typically observed
that people spoke blessings before consuming large meals, but Amadou was especially
35
Sura 35:18 of the Qur’an teaches, “And no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another.”
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mindful of his father. Amadou consistently sacrificed small snacks and drinks of water
by saying “i ni baraji” in confidence that the refreshments would likewise satisfy Hamadi
while accumulating baraji for both Amadou and his father. Even mere nourishment, if
approached properly, became associated with ancestors and Islam as it carried the
potential to maintain kin relations between the living and the dead when understood
through baraji.
With the sudden death of her husband, Ina focused on keeping her family’s
physical and emotional well being in tact while she completed four months and ten days
of customary mourning (furuja or filiya). In speaking about death, Amadou deemed it
unacceptable to cry publically for more than one day after someone close had died, and
he credited his mother as a praiseworthy example in managing the emotions around
death.
“After my father died I walked in on my mother crying privately in the house,”
Amadou said, but he made it clear that Ina never knowingly cried in front of her children.
Amadou explained that during his mother’s mourning period, which he described
as a Muslim practice (laada), Ina stayed in the confines of her compound and did not
receive male guests. The period determined with certainty that Ina was not pregnant
when Hamadi passed away. Had she found herself pregnant, abstaining from contact
with males would have satisfactorily established the unborn child as Hamadi’s.
During her period of mourning, Ina relied primarily on Amadou’s paternal
grandmother, Fatou, to help her solve daily problems. Amadou remembered that he
caused the first major challenge that Ina and Fatou faced after his father’s death. One day
after playing in his neighborhood, Amadou returned home with two large lacerations on
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the side of his belly. Amadou could not remember which rambunctious activity had
caused the wound, but in 2011 the lower left side of his abdomen still bore two large
scars from the accident. Amadou’s grandmother advised Ina not to worry and
volunteered to perform an incantation (kilisi) to heal her wounded grandson. Amadou
described his grandmother as an expert in kilisi healing practices, a power inherited
privately by Fatou from her mother.
“The people of Npièbougou brought their sick children, animals, spouses, and
parents to have my grandmother heal them,” Amadou recalled.
Fatou would massage the afflicted areas on her patients while softly uttering
select passages from the Qur’an and lightly blowing and spitting her speech onto the sick
person. Oftentimes people were too sick to travel to Amadou’s compound to see Fatou
and would rather send raw medicinal leaves to Fatou on which she pronounced blessings.
Fatou would recite the Qur’an, spit on the leaves, and instruct the courier to go home,
boil the leaves in water, and wash the injured person or animal with the infusion. Fatou
did not expect financial payment for her services. Patrons showed their respect and
appreciation by offering her kola nuts and assured her that she had earned baraji by
performing her incantations.
In 2011 the grandmother of the compound I lived in, Yirigoi, was similarly
regarded in Ouélessébougou as a kilisi expert. Yirigoi refused all forms of material
compensation from her patients and told me that the baraji she earned was adequate
compensation. Young wives who worried about their fertility regularly visited Yirigoi
for homemade medicines and kilisi. Yirigoi also memorably helped in healing a fouryear-old boy, named Issa, who lived in a neighboring compound when he fell twenty feet
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when climbing a tree. For two weeks following the severe accident, Issa’s mother
brought him to Yirigoi every evening for her to perform kilisi while massaging Issa’s
swollen body. Issa screamed in pain as Yirigoi rubbed his sore muscles with shea butter,
but Yirigoi ignored Issa’s cries for her to stop. She smiled softly and continued to
whisper blessings to Issa while forcefully kneading his back, arms, and legs.
Fatou similarly applied shea butter regularly to Amadou’s wound and performed
daily kilisi on his injured abdomen. Fatou promised Ina and Amadou that the cuts would
close and begin to heal in a matter days. Unfortunately, the wounds split further open
with time and Amadou developed a festering infection. Ina became inconsolable.
Amadou overheard her share with her female friends and relatives her fear that the
infection might kill Amadou.
“My paternal aunt (tɛnɛmuso) decided on her own to seek the counsel of a
sorcerer (soma) from the Bamana district,” Amadou recounted.
The sorcerer told Amadou’s aunt to place gold on Amadou’s wound and wrap the
infected area with a fresh cloth. Ina followed the sorcerer’s advice and broke two small
pieces of gold off from a pair of earrings and placed the yellow metal on Amadou’s two
infected cuts. His cuts healed thereafter, but permanent scars remained as a reminder of
the crisis Amadou caused his family following his father’s death. When Koniba,
Amadou’s close friend who welded near us, overheard Amadou recount this story to me
in 2011, he insisted when I asked that the sorcerer had earned baraji by healing Amadou.
Amadou disagreed that sorcerers could earn baraji but said he nevertheless felt grateful
(waleɲumandɔn) for the sorcerer’s help.
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Following Hamadi’s death, Amadou’s mother and grandmother often told
Amadou stories about his father. Throughout Amadou’s entire life, memories and stories
of his father often mingled with Amadou’s dreams. Amadou interpreted dreams that
featured his father as a reward for the baraji he had earned for him. Amadou noticed that
dreams of his father increased when he acted in practical matters with a particular focus
on his Muslim virtues, especially during Ramadan. I asked Amadou if he would narrate a
dream that included his father, and he told me he preferred to keep the details of these
dreams private. He did explain, however, that during these dreams Hamadi supplied
Amadou with moral advice originating from heaven, and these experiences provided
Amadou with a visual confirmation of his father’s immortality along with other insights.
Amadou slept with a notebook next to his bed for the express purpose of recording the
contents of these dreams immediately after he woke up. Through dreams and pursuing
baraji on behalf of Hamadi, Amadou successfully preserved his relationship with his
father beyond death. Even as Amadou’s family adjusted their lives after Hamadi’s death,
Amadou relied on Muslim beliefs and practices to maintain his relationship with his
father.
☰
☰
☰
In keeping with the common practice of the levirate in West Africa, Ina remarried
after the end of her mourning period to her deceased husband’s younger brother
(Riesman 1998: 209; see also Wilson-Haffenden 1930: 106). Amadou’s uncle, Hamidou,
already had one wife upon his compulsory marriage to Ina, and Amadou and Ina moved
into Hamidou’s already established compound together after the marriage. The
compound was just a short walk from Amadou’s original childhood home. According to
Amadou, his mother got along naturally well with her new husband and co-wife
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(sinamuso). His uncle was now responsible for Ina in terms of providing her and
Amadou with food, clothes, and shelter, but Amadou did not spend much time living in
Hamidou’s compound as Ina carried out her late husband’s wish that Amadou begin
studying in a medersa. Ina completed arrangements for Amadou to leave for Diafarabé, a
village in the northern Mopti region of Mali, to live and study full-time with Amadou’s
older cousin, a Muslim scholar named Abdoulaye Diallo who had learned as a child to
recite the entire Qur’an from memory and operated a medersa.36
From the ages of eight to eleven years old, Amadou studied for approximately ten
months per year at Abdoulaye’s medersa. He recalled that he left Npièbougou before the
hot season began in early February and stayed in Diafarabé through the rainy period and
shortly into the cold season, typically returning home to Npièbougou for a two-month
visit in late November. Amadou was housed in Abdoulaye’s compound, along with other
pupils who had similarly traveled from distant regions to learn to read Arabic and recite
the Qur’an with Abdoulaye. The majority of Abdoulaye’s students, however, lived with
their families locally in Diafarabé and traveled daily to Abdoulaye’s school to study.
Amadou estimated that one hundred children, both male and female, studied at
Abdoulaye’s school on any given day.
In 2011 Muslims in Mali continued to esteem and favor Qur’anic education for its
value, and many parents entrusted their children to medersas over public primary schools
modeled on the French education system. Teachers in Qur’anic schools went on strike
considerably less often than instructors in public schools, and parents rightly felt that this
consistency was more conducive to successful learning. Education at Qur’anic schools
36
Amadou classified Abdoulaye as his father’s older brother’s son (n fa kɔrɔkɛ denkɛ).
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also offered opportunities to learn Muslim principles, scripture, and history, helping
children to grow into adults who could earn sufficient baraji for themselves and for their
deceased kin by performing sacrifices and living in overall accordance with the precepts
of Islam.
Because of his kin relationship with Abdoulaye, Amadou did not pay any tuition
or living fees for his education, but he recalled that other students paid to study at
Abdoulaye’s renowned medersa. However, as happens everywhere in Muslim West
Africa, Amadou supported his teacher (karamɔgɔ) by helping extensively with
Abdoulaye’s farming affairs and other household tasks (see Mommersteeg 2012: 36, 44).
Living at a medersa required Amadou to devote his time exclusively to chores and
classroom studies, and Amadou said he abruptly stopped participating in childhood trifles
such as singing, dancing, and playing sports upon his arrival in Diafarabé.
Amadou remembered that he had a basic understanding of Islam before he arrived
at Abdoulaye’s medersa, but during his career as a student the separate strands of
doctrine and Muslim history he learned in Npièbougou intertwined and gained strength
that Amadou would rely on for life. While developing his understanding of Islam in
Diafarabé, Amadou learned to focus on the value inherent in completing daily chores and
assignments. To Amadou’s younger self, prayer and fasting represented the primary
ways to earn baraji, and Amadou’s studies made him cognizant of the potential to
acquire baraji through ordinary affairs and feelings. During his studies Amadou learned
the supererogatory (farida) aspects of Islam and techniques for earning superfluous
baraji external to observance of the five pillars of Islam to ensure his salvation. For
example, Abdoulaye taught Amadou that responsibility, vigor, and hard work produced
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baraji and that commitment to honest work was as essential to salvation as observing the
five pillars of Islam.
Amadou had a basic understanding of Muslim doctrines, rituals, and baraji before
he began his studies, but he credited Abdoulaye for sharpening his knowledge. Amadou
developed manifold skills during the years he spent at Abdoulaye’s medersa including
the ability to read and write in Arabic, transliterate Bamanankan and Fulfulde using the
Arabic script, recite the Qur’an, recount Muslim history, and how to correctly perform
rituals and live daily life as a good Muslim. Although Amadou changed his external
habits and lifestyle upon his arrival at Abdoulaye’s medersa, inside he remained
preoccupied by various fears. Amadou told me that he loved and admired Abdoulaye,
but that with this respect came a tremendous amount of trepidation and shame (maloya or
semtennde in Fulfulde) that he might disappoint or make a mistake in front of Abdoulaye
that would cause Abdoulaye to beat young Amadou.
Children receiving elementary education in medersas ordinarily focus on copying
from the Qur’an in Arabic, although they may not understand the meaning of what they
are writing, and memorizing portions of the Qur’an by heart for recitation (Mommersteeg
2102: 36-40). Amadou similarly described these processes and the stress Abdoulaye
placed on memory in his recollections of classroom activities and behavior at his
medersa. Abdoulaye told his students to memorize large passages from the Qur’an by
heart, and Amadou’s fear of being chosen by Abdoulaye to reproduce this material in
front of other schoolchildren motivated young Amadou to work diligently on his writings
and memorizations. Abdoulaye regularly called on select students to recite or write
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assigned portions of the Qur’an and would interrupt, correct, and strike his pupils
whenever they made a mistake.
Amadou remembered, “I would stand in front of my teacher and say in a soft
voice: ‘Bismi Allahi arrahmani arraheem Alhamdu lillahi rabbi alAAalameen …’ and as
I began to forget what came next I would brace myself to be whipped. Then WHACK!”
Living in fear of such beatings motivated Amadou to study seriously and to
internalize his studies.
☰
☰
☰
Although scholars researching Islam in Africa have produced contemporary
studies on West African Qur’anic schools (see Brenner 1985, 1993, 2001; Cissé 1992,
Gérard 1992; Lange & Diarra 1999; Mommersteeg 2012; Weyer 2011), understanding of
curriculum and policy in medersas also comes from reports commissioned by
international developmental agencies, such as the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, and
U.S. Agency for International Development (Boyle 2004: 18). Such studies typically
yield one-sided characterizations that diminish the educational merit of medersas,
qualifying the schools’ focus on memorization as mindless and obsessive, a rote exercise
used to indoctrinate children (18-28).
Ethnographic studies of Qur’anic schools in West Africa counter such reports and
argue that teachers in medersas design early memorization of the Qur’an as a first step in
a lifelong attempt to more deeply embed the content of the Qur’an in the mind by
studying its meaning and history (see Boyle 2004; Mommersteeg 2012). Ibn Khaldoun,
the fourteenth-century Muslim historian, purportedly wrote that instructors in Qur’anic
schools use children’s submissiveness in order to impress the Qur’an in students’
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consciousness for use and understanding later in life (Bouzoubaa 1998: 3; Boyle 2004:
85).
In 2011 residents in Ouélessébougou similarly stated that children made the best
candidates to learn the Qur’an, as they easily recalled the contents of the Qur’an
verbatim. Parents often referenced the complete Bamanankan proverb, “Children are like
fresh mud, one should work them before they dry” (Denmisɛn ye bɔgɔ kɛnɛ ye, a ka kan
ka baara san’a ka ja), in speaking of how they encouraged their children to memorize the
Qur’an from a young age.
Amadou substantiated this stance, claiming that he memorized portions of the
Qur’an with ease, especially in comparison with what he had successfully learned in his
adult life. He also remembered that a number of old men and married women attended
Abdoulaye’s medersa, and these older students faced considerably more difficulty
completing assigned memorization and learning to read Arabic than Amadou and other
young schoolchildren.
Abdoulaye encouraged all of his students by expounding on the value of their
studies and ensured Amadou that Muslims earn copious baraji by reciting, copying, and
memorizing the Qur’an. This potential to acquire baraji led Amadou to a lifelong
interest in Qur’anic studies. Abdoulaye bestowed on Amadou a detailed understanding
of how to acquire baraji on which Amadou drew throughout his life. Abdoulaye even
stated a definite numerical sum of baraji that certain tasks achieved. For instance,
Abdoulaye taught that reciting the first surah of the Qur’an carried the potential to earn
the speaker 490 baraji, as each verse in the seven-verse surah was worth seventy baraji.37
37
Reading and reciting other portions of the Qur’an amassed baraji in unknown quantities.
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During his studies in Diafarabé, Amadou became accustomed to living away from
his mother and siblings. Amadou told me that he remained grateful that he had the
chance to study as a child and that most of his friends never had such an opportunity. In
addition to its value in enhancing Amadou’s understanding of baraji and Islam, studying
at a medersa benefitted Amadou with writing skills he relied on throughout his life. Most
notably, Amadou retained and used his knowledge of Arabic to write in Fulfulde and
Bamanankan using ajami, a conventional writing system wherein a modified Arabic
script is used to write indigenous African languages (see Hassane 2008: 109-122;
Na’allah 2010: 39-51).
Owing to his knowledge of ajami, Amadou was able to accomplish many useful
tasks in his adolescence and adult life such as keeping personal vaccination records for
his cattle, documenting memories and dreams, and organizing phone numbers. In 2011
Amadou remained supportive and respectful toward medersas in Ouélessébougou, and he
encouraged me to spend time observing classes at local medersas in order to gain insight
into his childhood schooldays. I asked Yacouba Touré, the director of the town’s largest
medersa whom I had previously interviewed about the details of baraji, for permission to
watch him work with his students. Yacouba welcomed this request and extended an open
invitation for me to visit his classroom.
☰
☰
☰
During Ramadan, which in 2011 lasted from August 1 until August 30, Yacouba’s
school offered an extracurricular afternoon summer school for schoolchildren in
Ouélessébougou for 1000 francs for the month.38 Most of the children, who ranged from
three to twelve-years-old, were still too young to fast, but Yacouba ran the program on
38
About $2.00 USD.
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the principle that they were mature enough to the use the month to deepen their
understanding of and commitment to Islam.
I regularly sat in on Yacouba’s classes, which lasted for two hours and began at
two o’clock in the afternoon, during the month and watched him teach dozens of students
portions of the Qur’an, the precepts of Islam, and proper procedures for prayer. The
medersa consisted of three classrooms lined up in a simple block building, not wired for
electricity, with cement walls and floors and a corrugated metal roof. For me, enduring
the heat of the cement classroom presented the biggest challenge in getting through
Yacouba’s lessons. The stuffy air and high temperatures seemed to go unnoticed by the
children as they sat hip-to-hip with their friends on handmade wooden benches in front of
rows of long desks that faced the front of the classroom. Rainstorms often passed over
Ouélessébougou during August, but these breaks in heat and sunshine made the
classroom no more physically comfortable. Large drops of rain splashed through holes in
the school’s metal roof and disrupted studies as children scattered to find bowls and pans
to catch the drip. Humidity saturated the town after each rainstorm, and the moistureladen air made the classroom warm and steamy. I had a difficult time tolerating these
discomforts, but the children always seemed contented.
Like public schools in Mali, the boys and girls sat in separate sections from one
another. The girls covered their hair while in the classroom with headscarves of bright
and varying colors. Most of the girls did not wear head coverings outside of school, but
obediently observed Yacouba’s request that they do so while in the classroom. These
cloths often slid off the girls’ heads because they were not accustomed to wearing the
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scarves, causing young girlfriends to quietly laugh and help one another resituate their
head coverings while trying to not disrupt the other students.
As the most common classroom exercise, Yacouba instructed his students to stand
and repeat sections from the Qur’an in unison while he pointed to the written Arabic on
the blackboard with a long, thin tree branch. Following rounds of group recitation,
Yacouba individually called on students to recite alone. Children expressed a willingness
to recite by waving their hands and snapping to get Yacouba’s attention, and Yacouba
rotated between selecting overly zealous and obviously reluctant students for individual
recitation. While students recited, Yacouba closed his eyes and voiced a rhythmic
“Ohon!” as he listened to faultless recitations and softly said “Eh?” with wide eyes to
indicate a mistake. Yacouba told me that physical punishment remains commonplace in
medersas throughout West Africa, but he said that he does not endorse the practice in his
school on the basis that he finds any type of violence contrary to the teachings of Islam.39
After recitation Yacouba typically expounded in Bamanankan on the content of
what his students had just memorized from the Qur’an. He purposefully designed such
explanations to help students to develop an understanding of the doctrines and history of
Islam. School during Ramadan ended after students performed the third prayer (fitiri) in
the mid-afternoon. Every afternoon Yacouba reminded the students how to ritually
prepare for prayers by washing his face, arms, head, feet, and ankles in order three times
each in front of his pupils. Oftentimes Yacouba would intentionally only wash an area
39
Indeed, I never observed physical mistreatment of students when observing Yacouba or his staff working
with schoolchildren. One female instructor, as a form of physical punishment, had girl students repeat
squats while holding both earlobes with their arms crossed over their chest whenever they “failed in their
studies” (dɛsɛra ka kalan na) and punished boys by having them do prolonged handstands against the wall.
From my perspective, the children found these punishments to be amusing and smiled and laughed while
carrying them out. The instructor also always fought a slight smile while she watched.
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twice and the students would loudly shout to correct his error. Next, the students went
outside to wash themselves using a limited number of plastic kettles (tasali) supplied by
the school. Small fights over who got to use the kettle next typically erupted while the
students washed themselves.
After washing, the students lined up, ready for prayer, on old plastic mats that had
been spread out in the medersa’s courtyard. The girls stood in a line behind the
schoolboys, and Yacouba meticulously inspected his students before leading the prayer.
He checked that the students stood with straight posture in an orderly line and often
pulled boys out of their position to button their shirts. Preparing the students for prayer
was a painfully long process, and even as an observer I often felt impatient with the
children; yet Yacouba always kept a kind composure when dealing with students and
managing his school. Yacouba expressed his willingness to integrate secular subjects
into his school’s core curriculum. He proudly showed me classroom materials for
teaching French and mathematics that had been donated to him by U.S. Agency for
International Development and that he used to assist him in teaching these topics.
☰
☰
☰
Amadou’s experience at Abdoulaye’s medersa varied from the education that
twenty-first century medersa students received, and Amadou explained that he did not
study French or any other secular topics during his time as a formal student. Amadou
spent a typical school day studying the Arabic alphabet, memorizing portions of the
Qur’an, examining the life of the Prophet Muhammad, learning Muslim rites, such as
proper procedures for prayer and fasting, and theology. In addition to these studies and
the regular chores that Amadou accomplished in Abdoulaye’s compound, Amadou also
worked as a child beggar (garibu) on behalf of his teacher. As such, Amadou and
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Abdoulaye’s other pupils walked around neighborhoods in Diafarabé three times a day, at
mealtimes, carrying a hollowed gourd as a bowl and reciting passages from the Qur’an in
exchange for money or food donations (see Mommersteeg 2012: 44-46). Begging was
difficult and humbling (majigin) work. According to Amadou, some residents in
Diafarabé mistreated beggars by ignoring or harassing them. Most people, however, saw
beggars as an opportunity to serve both others and their own interests. As charitable
donors handed Amadou coins or placed food in his bowl, the angel on their right shoulder
recorded the moment as an action deserving baraji. Amadou also earned baraji from his
effort by reciting the Qur’an in Arabic and pronouncing benedictions while soliciting
donations.
At the time of my research, the common practice of begging in predominately
Muslim countries in West Africa had become controversial, as many Africans along with
European and North American interlocutors found the system exploitative (Dickinson
2006). Critics classified the practice as dangerous and questioned the wisdom behind
sending young children out alone to beg. In urban West African cities, moreover,
beggars stood at busy intersections and recited the Qur’an in Arabic while minding their
safety amid fast-paced traffic (Dickinson 2006; Sengupta 2004). As population growth in
West African countries increased, the number of child beggars also rose. Many Muslims
in Mali vehemently complained that the recent increase in begging children from
medersas had ruined the region’s image and made it impossible to travel in towns in
peace.
People who criticized begging normally spoke with compassion for the children
but harshly condemned the medersa teachers who profited and even became wealthy by
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taking advantage of young students. I recall that one afternoon I had lunch with a
German friend of mine who lived in Bamako. Beggars swarmed my friend’s car at every
intersection where we stopped while en route to the restaurant.
My friend said that begging presented an insoluble moral problem for Bamako
residents: “If we don’t give the beggars money, their teachers beat them for returning
empty-handed. Yet if we give them money, it ensures they’ll be back out on the streets
tomorrow.”
Despite these harsh reviews, in 2011 the practice endured, and even the critics I
spoke with recognized a level of value in the principles the begging perpetuated, namely
that it instilled the desired qualities of modesty and humility in children and offered a
chance for adults to help the unfortunate. Both parties also acquired baraji. As an old
man, Amadou complained less about the exploitative dimensions of begging than other
residents in Ouélessébougou. Amadou looked upon beggars with commiseration and
gave alms (saraka or sarati) to them whenever he could afford to. He sought to treat
beggars in Ouélessébougou with the type of compassion and generosity he admired in
adults when he similarly toiled as a child beggar in Diafarabé.
Amadou’s schedule at the medersa filled his days with chores, studies, and
begging obligations. Yet Amadou managed to develop friendships with the other
students who similarly lived at the school during fleeting moments of spare time over the
three-year period he spent at Abdoulaye’s medersa. The students that Abdoulaye
boarded slept in a common quarters in his family’s residential compound and often
stayed up late joking and telling each other stories. Late one night Amadou awoke from
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his sleep and heard screams for help coming from a friend, Lamine, who was sleeping
next to him.
Amadou dramatically remembered, “I heard Lamine crying and yelling that a
subaga was trying to capture him.”
Amadou briefly opened his eyes and glimpsed at a large black shadow wrestling
against Lamine, who was erratically kicking his legs and waving his arms. Seized by fear
and panic, Amadou closed his eyes and pretended to sleep while reciting the Qur’an in
his mind, reasoning that if the witch noticed his young flesh it would violently set upon
him too. The following morning Amadou woke up and saw Lamine safely asleep on his
bedroll. Amadou and Lamine discussed the subaga attack later that day, and both
credited the leaf-based elixirs in which their mothers had washed them for repelling the
subaga and preventing the attack from reaching a fatal end. This harrowing experience
strengthened Amadou’s conception of life, especially verifying that the physical world
was filled with a multiplicity of non-human entities with whom he had to deal directly
and from whom he had to protect himself through his Muslim faith (limaniya) and
practice.
By the time Amadou turned eleven he had found happiness in Diafarabé and
mused less about returning to Npièbougou than he had in the early years of his studies.
One afternoon Amadou was surprised by the unexpected arrival of his older sister,
Fatouma, at his medersa. Amadou immediately noticed a mournful expression on
Fatouma’s face as she approached him, and his sister suddenly burst into tears and fell to
the feet of her younger brother.
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Fatouma recounted that she had traveled north from Ségou to Diafarabé with her
three-year-old son, Amadou’s young nephew, in order to visit Amadou and other family
relatives in the area. As was typical at the time, Fatouma and her son endeavored to
make the over one hundred mile trip by sailing up the Niger in a small canoe (kurun) that
was built and captained by a Bozo fisherman. Near the end of their voyage the canoe that
Fatouma and her son had traveled in inexplicably flipped over and fell out of sight.
Nearby fishermen noticed the accident and frantically paddled their small boats over to
save the passengers and haul them ashore. Between tears and strangled gasps of anguish,
Fatouma explained to Amadou that his nephew had drowned and died in the disaster.
Abdoulaye planned for Amadou and him to accompany Fatouma back to
Npièbougou as soon as he heard the terrible news.
“I assumed I would return to Diafarabé with my teacher after passing the
mourning period with my family,” Amadou recalled.
However, Amadou’s mother surprised everyone by deciding that Amadou needed
to stay in Npièbougou and help with the family’s cattle herding. Once the time arrived
for Abdoulaye to return to his medersa in Diafarabé, Amadou dutifully escorted
Abdoulaye along to road out of Npièbougou toward Markala. When the time came to
part paths, Abdoulaye, full of emotion, blessed Amadou and swiftly walked away.
Amadou stood alone on the road for a long moment and contemplated his future,
realizing that he was nearly twelve years old, no longer a child, and about to enter the
next phase of his life.
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Conclusion
In this chapter I have reviewed the experiences, thoughts, and emotions that
characterized Amadou’s childhood from birth until he reached approximately twelve
years of age. The selection of memories illuminate the fears, joys, and relationships that
emerged as Amadou, from a young age, formed a moral ethos grounded in his
understanding of Fula practices and Islam alongside his experiences in Npièbougou,
Markala, and Diafarabé. Amadou’s childhood shows the ways Muslim children in West
Africa learned to understand Islam and baraji. I have shown that Amadou slowly
absorbed an understanding of human character and relationships and began to understand
how the ways these dealings lead to the acquisition of baraji, through which one
eventually merits salvation.
This chapter has used Amadou’s life history to depict the ways Amadou acquired
baraji as a young boy. I argue that the tactics Muslims in West Africa use to acquire
baraji change depending on their age and circumstances. As such, as Amadou developed
and matured, so did his techniques for earning baraji.
His life narrative now moves us into his adolescence and early adulthood. The
next chapter continues to describe how his moral ideals, especially his goal to steadily
earn baraji through practical pursuits, contended with his growing consciousness and first
vocations. Amadou’s adolescent memories provide further examples of the ways West
Africans discern and apply the value of baraji in daily deeds and Muslim practices.
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CHAPTER FOUR
ADOLECENCE
One afternoon in 2011 I accompanied Amadou to the local Orange Corporation
office. Orange was the mobile brand of France Telecom, and a local office was located
about a kilometer south of the main market on the only paved road (gidron) in
Ouélessébougou. Amadou’s cell phone had been having problems, and he suspected he
needed a new SIM card. On our arrival Amadou and I found that the only employee at
the Orange office was busy helping another customer, so we sat down to wait for
Amadou’s turn.
I felt self-conscious about speaking Bamanankan throughout my fieldwork in
Mali, and Amadou took our time in the waiting area as an opportunity to counsel me on
the issue. He recounted several disparaging remarks I had made about my language
abilities and wondered why I had said such things. I explained that I felt embarrassed
when people laughed at my accent and that often times I wanted to give up on my
language study.
“And what if I had stopped learning once I left the medersa?” Amadou canted his
head to the left and asked with a sidelong smile.
I sat calmly, contemplatively, and did not answer.
Amadou continued, “Courage always overtakes difficulty.” He concluded that I
should maintain my effort to master Bamanankan, just has he had persevered in studying
Islam. He cited the oft-quoted proverb, “Little by little the bird builds its nest” (Dɔɔnindɔɔnin kɔnɔnin bɛ a ɲaa da).
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Chapter three showed that Amadou relied on his immediate family and
Abdoulaye for religious instruction and to earn baraji during the first twelve years of his
life. This chapter discusses how Amadou took personal responsibility for enhancing his
knowledge of Islam and acquiring baraji after completing his formal education at
Abdoulaye’s medersa. I also explain how Amadou balanced his concern for obtaining
baraji with an interest in earning money in the newly independent Republic of Mali
during the early 1960s. In this chapter I show the dynamic utility of baraji in Amadou’s
life, as the methods he used for acquiring baraji changed according to his age,
occupation, and historical circumstances. The ways that Amadou adapted his practice of
Islam and means for earning baraji throughout his lifetime adds to arguments that
Muslims in West Africa, especially when individual life histories and personal
viewpoints are considered, cannot be viewed as modeled on a static, unchanging, and
monolithic Muslim tradition, but should rather be recognized for their dynamic, active,
and flexible appropriation of Islam (see Amselle 1998: 25-42; Brenner 2001: 85-130;
Masquelier 2009: 152-153; Piga 2003: 8-9; Sanneh 1997: 12). Moreover, Amadou’s
adolescence and adulthood shows how he understood politics, religion and culture at the
turn of Mali’s independence, while giving insight into the larger cultural, social, and
political processes during the 1950s and 60s in West Africa (see Kessler-Harris 2009:
625-627).
I continue Amadou’s life story by recounting his daily life after he completed his
studies and returned to Npièbougou and how he used his new religious education to
interpret events in his village while learning to tend cattle with his older brothers. This
chapter traces Amadou’s migration south to Ségou and then to Bamako in search of
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employment and how his practice of Islam changed with his new knowledge and
circumstances. I then narrate Amadou’s return from Bamako to Npièbougou and the
economic and environmental conditions that prompted him to move permanently south
from the Ségou region in 1969 to Ouélessébougou.
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Although surprised by his mother’s choice to keep Amadou in Npièbougou when
he came from the medersa in Diafarabé for his nephew’s funeral, Amadou was overjoyed
when Ina announced that Amadou could remain in his hometown.
“If I am not in Npièbougou, I am planning my return to Npièbougou,” Amadou
concisely explained of his lifelong devotion to his birthplace (faso).
As he settled back into life in his village, he noticed that his religious education
made him keenly aware of how his daily choices and actions either encouraged or
dissuaded him in the achievement of baraji. For example, at the medersa, Amadou
learned that each prayer performed in the mosque earns a Muslim twenty-seven baraji
while prayers made outside the mosque amass only one. As such, Amadou endeavored to
pray in the village mosque whenever possible, but he found that his new responsibility of
caring for his family’s cattle often prevented him from doing so. Praying in the forest
brought on pangs of dismay as Amadou reflected on the extra twenty-six baraji he would
have earned if he had been in closer proximity to the mosque.
Amadou also found himself paying more attention to village events and found
himself interpreting them through his newfound understanding of Islam. Shortly after
Amadou’s return to Npièbougou, his family’s neighbor, Hassana Diallo, unexpectedly
hanged himself and died. Though Fula typically accept the Muslim doctrine that
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classifies suicide as a sin against God, they also regard a suicidal disposition as honorable
because it expresses extreme sorrow and injury while demonstrating courage (see Hopen
1958: 76-77). Those who knew Hassana understood his motivations for suicide
(yɛrɛfaga). Amadou explained that Hassana’s wife continually humiliated Hassana by
ignoring her domestic responsibilities in favor of wandering around Npièbougou and
visiting with her friends. Her lackadaisical attitude compelled Hassana to carry out
women’s chores in his compound, such as cooking and washing clothes—a shameful
fate.
Amadou, along with Npièbougou’s Fula community, mourned Hassana’s
untimely death. Amadou’s neighbors consoled each other by sharing their memories of
Hassana and expressing sympathy for the circumstances that they presumed provoked his
suicide. The empathy they showed for Hassana and the laudatory remarks they made
about his bravery made little sense to Amadou. Although Amadou was shattered by
Hassana’s suicide, his thoughts became absorbed in what surviving friends and family
refused to say outright: Hassana had definitely gone to hell (jahanama)—a place of
unending torment, flames, and isolation. Abdoulaye had expressly taught Amadou that
surah 4:29-30 of the Qur’an forbids suicide: “And do not kill yourselves. Indeed, Allah
is to you ever merciful. And whoever does that in aggression and injustice—then We
will drive him into a Fire. And that, for Allah, is easy.” In accordance with these verses,
Amadou learned at the medersa that those who commit suicide forfeit all their baraji
upon their self-inflicted death and are sent to hell as a result. Hassana’s death helped
Amadou understand the value of perseverance (muɲu) that Abdoulaye taught him,
specifically that God honors endurance and patience, despite earthly adversity, by
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bestowing baraji on the sufferer. Amadou and other Muslims in Ouélessébougou with
whom I spoke during my fieldwork emphasized that thinking of the baraji they had
secured over their lifetime due to their hardships helped console them during moments of
special difficulty as they lived under the chronic stress of poverty.
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Amadou learned to herd in the same manner in which he originally learned to
practice Islam and earn baraji—in intimate familial contexts. While contemplating the
importance of Islam and its place in daily life, Amadou filled his days rearing his
family’s cattle with his two elder brothers, Daramani and Mamadou.40 Daramani,
Amadou’s oldest brother, had also studied at Abdoulaye’s medersa as a child. Mamadou
never formally attended school as a child but had been continuously herding his family’s
cattle since his seventh birthday. Yet Amadou thought Mamadou was the more
intelligent sibling. Amadou proudly told me that Mamadou sought out adult literacy
programs in the Ségou region in his later adulthood and successfully learned to read and
write Arabic, French, Fulfulde, and Bamanankan using N’ko, a script developed by
Souleymane Kanté in 1949 for writing Mande languages (Oyler 2005: 117-128).
Mamadou’s intelligence was especially apparent in the domain of cattle herding.
“Mamadou paid careful attention to the forest and his cattle and taught me to do
the same,” Amadou said about his experience, learning that herding, like living as a good
Muslim, required continual dedication and careful attention.
40
The precise number of cattle the Diallo family owned fluctuated, but Amadou estimated his family had
between forty to fifty head of cattle at any given time during his teenage years. He classified this as a
moderate herd size and reported that some Fula families in Npièbougou owned more than one hundred
cattle. Although herd size often reflects monetary wealth, according to Stenning (1958), Fula families also
seek to attain an equilibrium between owning a herd large enough to feed their family and a herd size that
allows Fula cattle owners the time to accomplish other necessary tasks, such as caring for infants, selling
milk, and finding adequate pasturage (92-119; see also Riesman 1977: 41-42).
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Amadou spent everyday apprenticing with Daramani and Mamadou in the forest
and did not herd alone after his return to Npièbougou. Npièbougou’s forest rested in
Mali’s central Sudan savannah belt, a region recognized for diverse flora, an abundance
of pasture and water, and an absence of tsetse flies that challenge herders in the West
Africa’s southern rain forests (Adebayo 1991: 12-16). Amadou’s early childhood
instilled a love for cattle in him, and he relished learning the Fula system for raising and
herding livestock. Although he had never managed a herd, Amadou understood from a
young age the important role cattle played in his family’s prosperity and felt intimately
tied to them (see Riesman 1977: 38-39). Even so, moments of sadness marked Amadou’s
emotions during his herding education.
Amadou forlornly explained, “My father had taught Daramani and Mamadou how
to herd, but he died before we had the chance to go into the forest together.”
Amadou’s description of his training in terms of learning cattle calls, driving up
his herd, studying his herd’s genealogy, and memorizing the layout of the local forest is
consistent with other ethnographies on Fula rearing methods and practices (see Dupire
1996; Hopen 1958; Riesman 1977; Stenning 1959). Everyday Amadou deepened his
familiarity of the local forest’s layout and added to his knowledge about cattle tending
through prolonged observation and imitation of Daramani, Mamadou, and the other
herders he encountered. Amadou understood early on that Fula methods for herd
management were specifically adapted to the local environment (Riesman 1977: 38). He
learned the location of various perennial waterholes and pastures, the variable qualities of
soil throughout the forest, which areas could sustain a heavy concentration of cattle, and
what types of grass and foliage most appealed to cattle and met their dietary needs
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(Hopen 1958: 25; Riesman 1977:38). With a knack for detail, Mamadou and Daramani
taught Amadou to notice the varying quality of pastures within different parts of a single
field. Near pastures and watering places, Amadou’s brothers showed him where to find
edible fruit trees for occasional snacks for themselves. These fruits barely satiated
Amadou’s hunger, as most days he and his brothers left for the forest in the early
morning and did not return home to eat a full meal until five or six o’clock in the
evening. Several months after the end of each rainy season, grass gradually became
scarce in the pastures in Npièbougou’s local forest. Amadou and his brothers often
walked far into the forest and passed multiple nights in a row in search of watering holes
and pastures for their herd. They sustained themselves during these trips by milking their
cows each evening and sharing a bowl of milk with each other. Amadou and his brothers
showed their capacity for self-control, one of the most important aspects of the Fula code
of behavior (pulaaku), and never spoke of their thirst or hunger while working (Riesman
1974: 116-141).
As an assistant to his brothers, Amadou was initially responsible for driving up
straggling cattle that had fallen behind the herd (Hopen 1958: 24-25). Amadou’s brothers
explained to him the history of the herd and the different needs and characteristics of
each individual animal while their cattle grazed.41 Amadou memorized the individual
names for each cattle in the herd to which each always responded when called (Riesman
1977: 256). Amadou learned to make his own sandals using cowhide and practiced
elaborate Fula cattle calls each day, which required considerable skill and vocal agility
(Hopen 1958: 25; Riesman 1977: 15-16). Amadou demonstrated a range of such calls for
41
Like the other Fula herders in Npièbougou, Amadou’s family selectively raised Zebu cattle (gonga)
because of their resistance to ticks and ability to withstand severe heat (Wagenaar 1986: 14).
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me, and loudly pronounced long measures of, “Hiiiiiiii! Heeeeeeee! Hoooooooo!” in a
superb and unstrained voice although he had not used them in decades.
Figure 12: In 2011 Amadou visited Npièbougou and examined his family’s herd, which was then cared for
by Daramani’s grandsons
Amadou initially had misgivings about the toll that spending extended time in the
forest would take on his accumulation of baraji. As a child Amadou had earned baraji
primarily by praying in the mosque, successfully fasting during Ramadan, begging in
Diafarabé, and acting obediently toward his parents and Abdoulaye. Working in the
forest presented a different series of circumstances. But, because of the dynamic nature
of Islam, Amadou learned to assert his Muslim identity and earn baraji in his this new
setting. Amadou completed obligatory prayers with his brothers and learned other ways
to acquire baraji in his savanna surroundings. For example, he learned how to beat
snakes to death with a stick after Fula herders assured him that he would earn
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supplementary baraji for killing snakes. Venomous snakes often struck cattle in the head
while they grazed, and their bites posed a fatal threat to Fula herders and others who
passed through the forest. Amadou loved all animals with the exception of snakes.
“The snake is Satan, and killing snakes pleases God,” Amadou explained.
In fact, multiple hadiths substantiated Amadou’s viewpoint, describing snakes as
cursed and as disguised evil spirits (jinn).42 Even when Amadou occasionally killed
snakes, he knew he lacked baraji because he was unable to pray in the mosque or fast
while herding in the forest. And although his brothers rigorously observed Ramadan
while herding, they forbade him from fasting during the Muslim sacred month.
“We fought,” Amadou remembered, “and I told them that I fasted everyday
during Ramadan at Abdoulaye’s medersa.”
But his brothers countered that Amadou’s body was still too young to handle the
demands of herding while foregoing food and drink during the day. Amadou submitted
to his brothers’ demands and did not fully participate in Ramadan until he turned
eighteen.
Learning to herd and practice Islam in the forest held Amadou’s attention for
more than two years after he returned to Npièbougou and he proved himself to be a
competent herder alongside his older brothers. In spite of their overall success in
managing their cattle, Amadou and his brothers realized the limits to their knowledge and
42
The Prophet Muhammad reportedly said, “Some snakes are jinn; so when anyone sees one of them in his
house, he should give it a warning three times. If it returns (after that), he should kill it, for it is a devil”
(Kitab Al-Adab 41: 5286). On a separate occasion the Prophet revealed that some Medina jinn, often
disguised as snakes, had accepted Islam and accordingly instructed Muslims, “so when you see any
[snake], pronounce a warning to it for three days, and if it appears before you after that, then kill it for that
is a devil” (Kitab Al-Salam 26: 5557).
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abilities as herders and relied on two primary resources to help them in the forest: dogs
and dalilu, a type of specialized knowledge used to protect herders and cattle.43
Amadou said that dogs accompanied him and his brothers into the forest and
played a vital role in herding. Amadou and his brothers owned and trained dogs to run in
front of the herd and bark if they saw other people or groups of cattle ahead of them. He
explained that Fula try to give one another space when herding, and his dogs often
warned him and his brothers to steer their cattle in a different direction.
Amadou individually named each of his dogs but joked, “I’m an old man now and
I have long since forgotten the names of all my dogs. But I do remember that they all
loved fresh milk as much as me!”
Dogs guarded the brothers’ camp in the evening, and at night in the forest, and
altered the brothers through long howls and frantic barking to predators or approaching
travelers. Striped hyenas (suruku), in particular, lurked in the forest at night and
threatened cattle.
“In the past, hyenas abounded in the forest. I would see their shadowy figures
passing everywhere around me at dusk,” Amadou remembered.
Hyenas were the most problematic wild predator Amadou encountered while
herding, but Amadou reported that their number had decreased during in his lifetime.
Fula herders planted poison, carried rifles, and built traps to ensnare hyenas to prevent
losing cows and dogs to the animal, and had drastically reduced the hyena population as a
result.
43
Amadou and I discussed cattle dalilu (misiw dalilu) in particular, but dalilu in West Africa can broadly
be understood as a secret power (sometimes procured from the supernatural) and “a form of articulation
that draws knowledge into the realm of useful endeavor” (Conrad 2004: 198; Hoffman 2000: 151;
McNaughton 1988: 43). Thus, dalilu experts in West Africa each have an individual focus coming from a
range of specialties including hunting, blacksmithing, weather manipulation, and healing.
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In addition to dogs, Amadou, like other Fula herders also relied on local
specialized knowledge (dalilu) to heal and protect his cattle. Numerous masters of cattle
dalilu lived in Npièbougou. Herders counted on these men to provide their herd with
longevity and a better quality of life. For instance, Amadou’s herd at one point included
a small calf that refused to suckle its mother’s teat. Amadou took the young animal to a
dalilu specialist who healed the calf through incantations (kilisi) and a specially prepared
elixir. Amadou and his brothers also obtained elixirs made from bark, leaves, and wood
from dalilu experts and periodically washed themselves in these concoctions to ensure
their safety and prosperity in the forest. Dalilu experts charged minimal prices to their
patrons in order to cover the expense for raw materials. Otherwise they trusted that God
would pay them for their work with baraji. Amadou viewed cattle dalilu as an
occupation. He did not deem dalilu practices un-Muslim or belonging to the world of
sorcery so long as practitioners did not rely on power objects (jow) to enhance their
power and success. In the same vein, any occupation (farming, herding, trading, etc.) had
the potential to become satanic (sitanɛya) if workers used power objects to improve their
labor and profits.44
Amadou considered cattle dalilu in Ouélessébougou as “broken” (tiɲɛ) and
complained that “knowledge about actual dalilu has been replaced with schemes for how
to make money from dalilu.”
44
Dalilu has Muslim associations for Bamanankan speakers as well. The word dalilu is used in
Bamanankan versions of the Qur’an and oral sermons on Qur’anic exegesis that I heard during my
fieldwork to reference “evidence” and “proof.” For example, surah Al-Bayyinah (The Clear Proof) is
translated into Bamanakan as “Dalilu Kɛnɛman.”
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In 2011, purported dalilu experts in southern Mali often charged substantial sums
for their services. Amadou linked the high costs to ineptitude. One quiet afternoon in a
not unusual moment of social clumsiness, I asked Amadou if he had ever studied cattle
dalilu. He sat impassively for a moment and then abruptly stood up and excused himself
from our conversation without answering my question. Amadou’s close friend, Koniba,
overheard my question and gently altered me to my blunder.
“A true dalilu expert,” he said, “never speaks openly about his ability in
conversation.”
I felt horrible that my question had offended Amadou, and this incident reminded
me that regardless of the close relationship Amadou and I had built with each other that I
still needed to consider the delicacy of the topics we discussed beforehand. Amadou
returned soon after to our workplace and resumed quietly his work plaiting a rope.
After several minutes of sitting beneath noisy, chirping birds, he leaned close to
me and vaguely explained in a doleful tone, “Since I came to Ouélessébougou I only met
one Fula man who genuinely knew cattle dalilu. He died last year. There are no real
cattle dalilu experts in Ouélessébougou anymore.”
Herding opportunities for Fula men and access to dalilu waned in twenty-first
century Ouélessébougou. But Amadou recalled that as a young man in Npièbougou
during the late 1950s, tending cattle held endless prospects for him and the promise of a
prosperous and happy life. He became a competent herder after spending several years of
herding with his brothers. His mother, Ina, eventually decided it was unwise to send all
three of her sons to work a herd that was easily managed by two. She heard that many
wealthy cattle owners in Ségou, a sizeable city more than forty kilometers south of
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Npièbougou, hired Fula boys to tend their herds. She decided to send one of her sons to
seek this type of work and promptly selected Amadou, her energetic, spry, and youngest
son, to work in Ségou on the family’s behalf.
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Ina arranged for Amadou to live with a newlywed female cousin at her in-law’s
compound upon his arrival in Ségou while he looked for permanent work herding cattle.
Amadou grew homesick immediately and tried to distract himself by taking long walks
around the town. Since his childhood Amadou had exclusively worn what he termed
“African clothing” (farafinna finiw) and everyday dressed in a shirt or flowing robe
(boubou) and pants sewn by neighborhood tailors from local loom-woven cotton, sandals
made from cowhide, and a large cone-shaped woven straw hat (dibiri) to shield his face
from the sun while herding (see Riesman 1992: 16; 1977: 64-65). In Ségou, Amadou
was amazed to see African men wearing French fashions. He walked by teenage boys
wearing neckties and collared dress shirts tucked into European-style trousers that were
held up by wide leather belts. This avant-garde attire immediately appealed to Amadou.
He resolved to earn enough money to send some to his mother in Npièbougou while also
replacing his homespun clothing with new clothes modeled after French fashions. For
the first time in his life, Amadou seriously considered the prospect of escaping from
poverty and rising to a position of affluence.
Amadou performed household tasks and errands for his host family to show
gratitude for his accommodations while he searched for work in Ségou. One afternoon
his cousin’s husband, Saliya Diaw, gave Amadou money to buy him a list of items from
the market. But when Amadou arrived in Ségou’s marketplace he noticed that all of the
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money had fallen through a hole in the seam of his pocket. Confronted with his bad
fortune, Amadou sat near the edge of the market to suppress his tears and ponder his
alternatives. Amadou’s family in Npièbougou had given him a small amount of cash
before he left for Ségou, but he had been carefully saving it in the hopes of buying a new,
European-style shirt in the coming weeks. He thought of two solutions. First of all, he
could tell Saliya that he had lost his money while traveling to the market and not offer to
replace the funds. No one in Ségou knew that Amadou had any cash, and Amadou could
keep his money hidden and buy himself clothes as soon as he moved out of Saliya’s
compound. Amadou knew that this choice cheated Saliya and was inherently sinful,
selfish, and at odds with Islam. Alternatively, he could replace Saliya’s money from his
own savings and buy the items Saliya had requested. This choice had the advantage of
earning baraji but left Amadou no money for new clothes.
Amadou ultimately chose to replace Saliya’s money with his own and bought the
items Saliya had requested without anyone learning that he had lost the original money.
Several days later, while walking through the forest on the outskirts of Ségou, Amadou
noticed several coins scattered beside a trail. Amadou looked around for a potential
owner but quickly intuited that the money was intended for him.
“God always rewards with baraji, but sometimes God also rewards with money,”
Amadou said of his fate on that day, smiling.
This experience joined Amadou’s Muslim convictions with his immediate reality
and prompted him to make a lifelong promise (layidu) to God that he would always favor
baraji over material wealth.
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Soon Amadou found a herding job working for a wealthy Ségou man named
Zoumana. Zoumana had earned a personal fortune over his lifetime by farming and
selling peanuts for export to France, and had used a large portion of his wealth to
purchase cattle and hired numerous Fula boys to maintain his herds. Historically,
impoverished cattle owners across West Africa often sold their animals to urban investors
like Zoumana during droughts and at other times of special financial hardship (see
Wagenaar et al. 1986: 50). Zoumana broke his herd into multiple, smaller, more
manageable groups, which were scattered in villages away from town and similarly cared
for by Fula boys. Wealthy men who owned large herds in West Africa commonly hired
Fula to manage them in order to tend to more lucrative endeavors and ensure that their
wives had ample time for social pursuits and supervising domestic chores inside the
residential compound (see Hopen 1958: 158). Zoumana hired Amadou to tend to cattle
he kept in his compound in Ségou, and Amadou immediately moved into a small
servant’s quarters in the compound to begin his new job.
Amadou eased into the job with natural confidence. His brothers had taught him
how to recognize the needs of cattle and care for them. Yet Amadou’s qualifications
extended beyond his actual experience. As a Fula boy descended from ancestors who
may have tended cattle for centuries, Amadou felt inherently qualified to look after an
entire herd on his own. During his first several weeks of working for Zoumana,
Amadou’s new boss showed little recognition of Amadou within the residential
compound that they now shared while the two spoke little to each other.
Despite the relationship with Zoumana taking time to grow, Amadou felt an
immediately strongly attachment to Zoumana’s herd and enjoyed tending to their needs.
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On some mornings Amadou discovered that Zoumana secretly followed Amadou into the
forest to observe Amadou’s work ethic and monitor how he treated the cattle. Zoumana
never found Amadou sleeping, beating the cattle, or feeding the herd in dry fields with
coarse and wiry grass.45
Zoumana always announced himself to Amadou at the conclusion of these
surprise assessments by shouting, “I watched you, Fula boy!”
Amadou broke into a broad smile whenever he heard these shouts of tacit support
from his employer and recognized that Zoumana approved of the quality of his herding.
In addition to the benefit of a small salary and accommodations in Zoumana’s
compound, Amadou approached his herding as an opportunity to earn God’s esteem and
obtain baraji for himself and his father. He had learned to recognize work as a means of
creating baraji at Abdoulaye’s medersa in Diafarabé, where Abdoulaye had instructed
Amadou that lazy people lose God’s favor. This possibility horrified Amadou as a child
and continued to worry him in his later youth. He approached his work with ambition
and determination, and he measured its value in both economic and ritual terms. Amadou
and other Muslims in southern Mali explained that although their various occupations
might barely produce enough income to support their families, that hard work always
netted baraji and therefore held an indisputable worth. Cattle herding, like other
vocations, accomplished both temporal and religious goals.
45
In 2011 I spent several days herding sheep with Amadou’s second son, Modibo Diallo. Amadou had
taught his son how to herd animals, and Modibo labored with perceptible focus, ethics, and acumen. He
fully credited Amadou for showing him how to tend to cattle and sheep and told me, “My father taught me
that hard work makes a person noble. When I was young I used to cry because I wanted take a break and
rest during the workday. My father told me that our clan, the Diallo, sleep when it’s dark, not during the
light of day. He completely turned his focus to his animals and the forest when herding.”
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With financial and Muslim incentives to herd to his fullest ability, Amadou
challenged himself to memorize the topography of the dense and unfamiliar forests
around Ségou because he realized that his lack of experience in Ségou’s forests could
potentially damage the quality of his herding. Everyday he ventured onto unexplored
paths with his herd and led them under the lacy shadows of baobab and acacia trees in
search of clean water and fresh grass. He always managed to find adequate pasturage but
often lost his way.
He remembered, “Cattle have a perfect sense of direction. I would shout ‘Let’s
go home!’ at the end of the day and they would lead me back to Ségou.”
During my fieldwork I passed several afternoons herding sheep with Amadou’s
youngest son, Modibo, and I similarly noted that his flock was endowed with a good
sense of direction and always led themselves home at the end of the day while we
followed behind on the confusing network of paths in Ouélessébougou’s forest.
Amadou could depend on his cattle to help him whenever he became lost, but the
forest presented other problems that he had to solve on his own.
“When God created the world,” he said dogmatically, “He placed people in
villages and spirits in the forests.”
While herding cattle deep in the forest, Fula men had to confront and deal with
spirits, called jinn, whose existence and characteristics are described in the Qur’an.
Amadou explained that, like humans, jinn have a degree of choice as to whether they act
for good or evil. Though Amadou recognized the existence of good jinn, he, like many
Muslims in West Africa, understood jinn primarily to be spiritual beings whose malice
threatens the living (see Baba & Smith 1954: 155; Mommersteeg 2012: 97-116).
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Muslims in West Africa commonly rely on amulets to protect themselves and ward off
evil jinn who may cause severe illness and provoke bad behavior. Most amulets contain
Qur’anic verses (haya), Arabic characters, or cabalistic symbols written onto parchment
and then sewn into leather cases, further contained in cloth pouches or wrapped in spun
cotton and leaves (Bravmann 1974: 134; Mommersteeg 2012: 97-116, 1990: 67; Sanneh
1979: 209). As an alternative to material amulets, some West Africans wrote the first
four verses of surah al-jinn from the Qur’an onto a slate with chalk or paper with
fountain ink and then rinse the writing surfaces, collecting the liquid mixture to wash on
themselves or others or to ingest for the purposes of healing or protecting from jinn
(Sanneh 1979: 210; Masquelier 2009: 89).
Figure 13: The various forms of West African amulets
Amadou relied on Islam to conceive and deal with the world he encountered
while herding, and carried amulets while herding and periodically washed himself in or
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ingested elixirs to protect him further from evil jinn in the forest. Despite these
measures, he still constantly noticed the presence of jinn while traveling through Ségou’s
forest with his cattle. Almost everyday, he passed through waves of especially hot and
stagnant air, which his brothers indicated that these places were haunted (jinɛmayɔrɔ) by
jinn. Amadou noted the location of each of the masses of warm air and strove to avoid
passing near them in the future. On one afternoon, Amadou noticed a man with his back
turned to him wearing bright white clothing standing across from him the forest.
Amadou shouted a greeting to the stranger. When the man did not turn to acknowledge
Amadou, Amadou realized he had encountered a jinn in human form. Amadou relied on
his Muslim beliefs to manage his fear and dropped to his knees, closed his eyes, and
began to recite portions of the Qur’an aloud. After several minutes of recitation, Amadou
stood and saw that the jinn had disappeared.
“It was a good jinn,” Amadou concluded, “It vanished once it realized I was
frightened and did not harm me.”
As Amadou saw it, his success at banishing jinn by reciting the Qur’an offered
evidence that the word of God was stronger than the spirits that populated the forest.
This experience prompted him habitually to recite the Qur’an while leading his cattle
through the forest, thereby earning baraji for himself while protecting the cattle he
tended. He took care to complete all five of Islam’s compulsory prayers at their proper
times and often performed additional petitionary prayers in which he asked God for
success in herding and to protect his family and himself from misfortune. Whenever the
month of Ramadan arrived, Amadou tried his best to observe protocols for fasting. He
remembered that his elder brothers had warned him that fasting for the entire month
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would compromise his physical abilities in the face of his herding responsibilities, so
Amadou observed Ramadan while living in Ségou by fasting on alternate days.46 I found
it laudable that Amadou fasted while herding. I fasted twice during Ramadan and found
it difficult to accomplish my responsibilities making rope and writing fieldnotes while
also behaving civilly toward my host family and friends.
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French settlements in Mali during the colonial phase were largely confined to
towns, and it troubled Amadou to observe that many Malians in Ségou were subject to
forced labor and taxation that left his family in Npièbougou and other rural masses
remained largely untouched (see Fanon 2004: 75). In 1960, while Amadou continued to
live as a cattle herder in Ségou, a Malian socialist politician named Modibo Keïta and his
political party, the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (US-RDA),
successfully negotiated Mali’s political independence (yɛrɛmahɔrɔnya) from France
(Bingen 2000: 245).
Amadou had recently bought a new bicycle and celebrated the announcement of
Mali’s independence by putting on his finest clothes and riding through Ségou’s
countryside rejoicing, visiting, and talking with others about his country’s newfound
freedom. In the years leading up to Mali’s independence, Amadou had followed the US-
46
Amadou, like many other Muslims I spoke with in Mali, carefully counted the number of days he did not
fast during Ramadan and made them up by fasting on discrete days throughout the year. Surah 2: 184-185
offers support for this decision to fast according to physical ability, “[Fasting for] a limited number of days.
So whoever among you is ill or on a journey [during them]—then an equal number of days [are to be made
up]. And upon those who are able [to fast, but with hardship]—a ransom [as substitute] of feeding a poor
person [each day]. And whoever volunteers excess - it is better for him. But to fast is best for you, if you
only knew. The month of Ramadan [is that] in which was revealed the Qur'an, a guidance for the people
and clear proofs of guidance and criterion. So whoever sights [the new moon of] the month, let him fast it;
and whoever is ill or on a journey—then an equal number of other days. Allah intends for you ease and
does not intend for you hardship and [wants] for you to complete the period and to glorify Allah for that
[to] which He has guided you; and perhaps you will be grateful.”
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RDA’s efforts at economic decolonization from French commercial monopolies by
listening to radio newscasts (see Clark 2000: 251-264). Amadou had considered the USRDA’s original leader, Mamadou Konaté, as Mali’s most competent political figure. But
when Konaté died of liver cancer in 1956, Amadou doubted that his successor, Modibo
Keïta, could win independence for Mali (see Imperato 1989: 54). But in 1960 Amadou
gladly stood corrected. He told me that the festivities marking Mali’s independence
lasted for days in Ségou, as singers gave impromptu performances, citizens danced and
sang in the streets, and women cooked elaborate meals for their families—naturally
earning baraji for their hard work preparing celebratory feasts.
Rumors of new economic opportunities in the nascent republic circulated
throughout Ségou following independence. Amadou listened to these reports with
interest. With his bicycle and new clothing—which he owed to his herding—Amadou
had won for himself the outward appearance of prestige and wealth and hoped to earn
more money by finding a more profitable job. As an old man, Amadou laughed and
recalled that during his youth he enjoyed his gallant appearance as an opulent and
libertine man (kamalenba).
“I liked being a kamalenba,” Amadou sentimentally recalled, “but internally I
have always mistrusted money.”
Even as a teenager, Amadou saw moral harm in riches and associated money with
greed and other damning qualities, but he eased these compunctions by resolving to attain
wealth for the purpose of making his pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca. In the strength of his
goal to visit Mecca and acquire the massive amounts of baraji that come from completing
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the pilgrimage, Amadou’s moral and economic motivations translated into an ambition
for finding new and lucrative job opportunities.
When he heard that work was available for young men in Mali’s capital city,
Bamako, he began to consider abandoning his work as a herder. The choice was not
entirely grounded in financial incentives. Amadou had worried ever since Mali’s
independence about his safety in the forest and now began to wonder whether Malians
had romanticized pre-colonial Mali. He remembered that his father had credited the
French with making the forests safer for cattle herders. Cattle herding, his father had
once explained to him, was dangerous work before colonization. Fula men were often
raided by fellow Africans, captured, and sold as slaves.
“Now that the French had left Mali,” Amadou explained, “I panicked that the
forests would return to the dangerous conditions of the past.”
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Untrammeled and still a teenager, Amadou quit his job herding for Zoumana and
used his modest savings to purchase passage south to Bamako.
“I carried little money and had no immediate kin in Bamako,” Amadou explained.
He felt fortunate to find work quickly as a domestic servant (baaraden) for a
wealthy Fula family from Senegal after his arrival in Bamako. Amadou suspected that
the compound chief (dutigi), Sidi Diallo, originally felt compelled to hire him because
they both shared the same surname and were therefore considered themselves distant kin.
Sidi offered Amadou a monthly salary, meals, and rent-free lodging in the servants’
shelter located in his sizable residential compound. Amadou accepted Sidi’s offer and
immediately moved into his compound. Every day Amadou washed clothes and dishes,
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swept the compound’s courtyard, made trips to the market, and helped Sidi’s wife
prepare meals for her family.
Sidi let Amadou take breaks from his work at prayer times to pray in the nearby
neighborhood mosque. Amadou measured the worth of his choice to move to Bamako in
terms of both the extra money and baraji he earned as a result. The prayers Amadou
performed privately in the forest while herding amassed one baraji each, but prayers
carried out in the mosque earned 27 baraji per prayer. Amadou accumulated 130
additional baraji each day for both himself and his deceased father by performing all five
required prayers in the mosque. Amadou also encountered beggars (garibu) from
Qur’anic schools along the street on his way to the mosque and regularly offered alms
(jaka). These offerings reflected Amadou’s humility and integrity while earning him
additional baraji and reminding him of the times he spent begging in Diafarabé while
living at Abdoulaye’s medersa as a child.
Sidi also told Amadou to take evenings and Sundays off from work. On most
nights Amadou left Sidi’s compound to explore Bamako’s neighborhoods. A pleasurable
sense of independence filled Amadou as he walked the darkened roads lined by
nondescript shadows and makeshift stalls used for daytime petty commerce. Amadou
quickly made friends with a group of teenage boys who were similarly living away from
their families while working in Bamako. One acquaintance told Amadou that many
schools in Bamako had started offering free French courses to the public in the evenings.
Amadou carefully considered this opportunity. Since arriving in Bamako he had begun
to understand the intransience of the French language in Mali. Malian politicians had
retained French as the country’s official language, and Amadou noticed the language’s
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popularity among Africans living in Bamako. As a child, he had grown up afraid that
learning French or studying in a French school would betray his Fula identity and damage
his soul by stunting his acquisition of baraji. But, as a teenager, Amadou decided that his
fears had been irrational and that learning French would improve his economic and social
opportunities.
For several months he regularly attended French classes in the evening at a school
near Sidi’s compound. He was grateful to receive free lessons and that studying French
was no longer the exclusive privilege of well-to-do Africans.
“I only knew ‘Bonjour! Ça va?’ when I began my French lessons,” Amadou said,
“so my teacher started by teaching me numbers.”
Motivated by a work ethic cultivated since early childhood, Amadou earnestly
practiced writing, reading, and counting in French. After mastering French numbers, he
began to study the French alphabet. Learning the alphabet was a more difficult and
frustrating process for Amadou than studying numbers, and he often chose to skip his
French lessons in order to relax and socialize with friends.47 Amadou retained his
knowledge of French numbers throughout his life although he stopped studying the
French language early on. When I met Amadou, his elderly friends esteemed his ability
to read and write numbers and relied on Amadou to help them place phone calls and tell
them the time.
In 2011 he smiled while recalling himself as a young man wandering Bamako
with his new friends. As a favorite weekend and evening pastime, he and his friends
47
In 2011 Amadou said he did not regret stopping his French lessons, and he disliked that French remained
Mali’s national language. Fulfulde remained his favorite language, but he enjoyed speaking Bamanankan
too. “I love listening to Arabic and English, but French is the language of liars (kalabaanci). The French
tricked and betrayed Africans time and again,” he said.
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attended an open-air cinema managed at a soccer field in the city. Amadou loved
watching movies and paid the seventy-five franc entrance fee without a qualm.48 He
cared little that all the films were in foreign languages incomprehensible to him and
became engrossed in watching the types of people and situations about which that he had
heard but had never been able to wholly visualize.
“I saw snow!” he excitedly told me while describing one particularly memorable
film in which he watched snowflakes dust a European landscape.
Amadou and his friends watched American westerns, French romances, Chinese
action films, Indian musicals, and many other kinds of films.
When I asked him to identify his favorite type of movie, he recalled, “I loved the
way Indians sang and danced. Abdoulaye forbade dancing and singing at the medersa so
I never learned how to do either. I watched Indian films in amazement!”
Abdoulaye thought that dancing was indulgent and detracted Muslims from
earning baraji. As an old man, Amadou opined that dancing was neither sinful nor
meritorious, but did not dance during celebrations himself. He refused to dance on two
grounds: first, he considered himself too old and, secondly, he said that he only liked Fula
dance forms, which were characterized by slow, smooth movements of the arms and
body alongside a rhythmic stamping of the feet. I attended a number of weddings during
my fieldwork and, indeed, never saw a Fula dance using this style that Amadou preferred.
In 2011 the Fula and Bamana youth in Ouélessébougou, rather, danced primarily using
contemporary movements they learned from watching pan-African, North American, and
European music videos on television.
48
About $0.15 USD.
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It is against the background of Amadou’s various jobs, friendships, and pastimes
that his religious sensitivities continued to develop. He worked as Sidi’s domestic
servant for nearly six months before he found more gainful employment as a hired hand
at a large garden on Bamako’s city limits. He graciously left his job with Sidi, moved
into a friend’s home, and began his new responsibilities sowing, watering, and harvesting
vegetables and herbs.
While working as a gardener, Amadou befriended a boy whose brother worked
for a local electric company. Amadou then found a job as an errand boy for the
company. This job became the most profitable one he found during the two years he
spent in Bamako, earning him 1250 francs for a six-day workweek.49 Although Amadou
had trouble finding steady and satisfying work and changed occupations frequently in
Bamako, he never went without work and held a job at all times. Through Amadou’s
lifelong effort to earn the unspecified amount of baraji that God requires to enter paradise
in the afterlife, he demonstrated a keen ability to merge his economic and religious goals.
“Work is an obligation for Muslims,” he said, “If you don’t have money it forces
you to live against the standards of Islam. You’ll beguile others and live without dignity.
One must work hard to be a good Muslim.”
Amadou’s employment at the electric company during the 1960s enabled him to
meet foreigners whom he would never have encountered had he continued to herd cattle
in Ségou.
“My boss came from China,” he recalled, “and he introduced me to his family and
other Chinese friends.”
49
About $2.50 USD per week.
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In Bamako, Amadou formed his first prolonged relationships with non-Muslims.
At first he approached these relationships with distance and unease, but he eventually
realized that unbelievers (kafiri) could also acquire baraji by leading honorable lives.
Through these friendships Amadou developed a position that he continued to maintain
when I met in him in 2010 that non-Muslims could even reach paradise after death.
While Amadou’s tolerance for religious plurality deepened, he also enhanced his personal
commitment to Islam. Now approaching his twenties, he began to abstain completely
from food and drink during daylight hours throughout the entire month of Ramadan in
Bamako. Fasting, to Amadou’s mind, was of inestimable value, and he decided he was
now physically mature enough to participate fully in the 30-day fast to earn baraji. He
had several friends in Bamako who also claimed to fast during Ramadan but who secretly
drank water and ate throughout the day.
“Fasting is about what God sees, and God sees everything. If you cheat, you
don’t earn any baraji for the day,” Amadou explained.
Even as his devotion to Islam intensified, he learned to accept Bamako’s diverse
population and enjoyed socializing with the foreign and non-Muslim groups who
surrounded him. Amadou’s tolerance was in keeping with official governmental policy
in Mali during my fieldwork, as the country’s constitution explicitly banned religiously
based political parties and provided for freedom of religion for all citizens (see American
Foreign Policy Council 2011; Lipton 2002: 93). Despite an overall history of religious
tolerance and pluralism in southern Mali, during my fieldwork the thinly populated and
federally governed northern deserts played host to Islamic group Ansar Dine and the alQaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) which raised continual
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concerns about the rise of extremism in Mali (see Cisse 2011; Cowell & Mekhennet
2009; Nossiter 2012; Polgreen 2012; Schmitt 2008; Schmitt & Mekhennet 2009; Simons
& Goodman 2012; Soares 2012; Vogol 2011). Amadou criticized the members of these
groups and classified them as unbelievers (kafiri), saying that Islam does not condone the
violent acts they perpetuated against civilians.
Amadou noted that Chinese and Soviet expatriates abounded in Bamako during
the early 1960s. He appreciated the way their economic pursuits helped Malians to
enhance their lives. Both China and the Soviet Union expanded their economic relations
with Mali following the country’s independence from France (Legvold 1970: 151-152).
Russian and Chinese entrepreneurs moved to Mali for this purpose and China quickly
became Mali’s most important socialist trading partner, while France remained the most
important overall (Legvold 1970: 151-152, 216-217). China and the Soviet Union also
advocated for the socialist transformation of Mali. During the 1960s the Soviet Union
and China considered that political and economic conditions in Africa made the continent
propitious for socialism (333, 338). Chinese and Russians thought that Mali, a country,
“hundreds of kilometers from the sea, deprived of significant mineral reserves, with a
population nine tenths peasant . . . where at the moment of independence not a single
capitalist enterprise existed,” would benefit from pursuing a non-capitalistic path
(Tarasov 1967: 5; see also Legvold 1970: 298).
In principle, Amadou looked back with nostalgia to socialist ideals and their
potential to transform Mali into a country wrapped in equality for all citizens. Amadou
explained that the socialist policies enacted during the 1960s improved access to
education and medical care for Malians, but he condemned the ensuing over-taxation of
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poor urban and rural households. He regretted that most of the money he sent home to
his mother during the 1960s went toward paying her taxes and that Ina was not able to
use the funds as a boon to her own way of life.
Although socialism had failed in Mali in Amadou’s opinion, as an old man he
praised the Soviet Union and China for the aid they extended to West Africa in and after
the 1960s.
Amadou especially exalted China: “The Chinese built us new radio stations and
medical clinics and when we asked, ‘How much?’ they answered, ‘Zero! It’s a gift!’”
Although in recent years North American and European reporters have begun to
carefully cover the dealings of Chinese entrepreneurs and government in West Africa
(see French and Polgreen 2007; Grammaticas 2012; Vourloumis 2009), Amadou insisted
that the Chinese had continually invested in the region and worked to carefully fortify a
good reputation for themselves in Mali since the country’s independence in 1960.
In 2011 Amadou continued to observe China’s generosity and credited Chinese
for fully financing many beneficial projects. In the twenty-first century, for example,
Amadou said that Chinese engineers were using Chinese government funds to design and
construct a two-lane bridge, named the China Mali Friendship Bridge (Pont de l'amitié
sino-malienne), across the Niger River in Bamako. The bridge has been heralded as the
“greatest gift” China had offered a West African country, and had significantly reduced
traffic jams on the city’s other two bridges upon its opening in late 2011 (Ahmed 2011).
Jeune Afrique reporter Baba Ahmed (2011) writes that although Chinese officials
classified the bridge as unrequited assistance, “nobody is really fooled” (personne n’est
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vraiment dupe). He alleges that the bridge will facilitate China’s attempts to exploit
uranium and phosphate mines in Mali in an unspoken quid pro quo.
Amadou likewise praised Russians during the 1960s for extending educational
opportunities to Malian civilians. For example, one afternoon Amadou heard a radio
announcement explaining that an annular solar eclipse would be visible to Bamako
residents the following week on July 31, 1962.50 The broadcaster announced the
conditions that would lead to the eclipse, explaining that the moon would pass between
the sun and the earth and would block most of the sun’s light. While Amadou listened,
his mind returned to his enigmatic early childhood memory of Npièbougou where he
watched the sun become blocked and transform into ring of fire. The announcer said that
Russian scientists would be visiting Bamako to study the eclipse and would make a
telescope at their observation site available to the public. In the weeks before the eclipse,
researchers from the Soviet Department of Radio Astronomy (a division of USSR’s
Scientific Council) arrived in Mali and positioned their equipment along the banks of the
Niger River (see Kaidanovskii 2012: 129-130).
On the morning of July 31, Amadou walked across Bamako’s Martyrs Bridge
(pɔn kɔrɔ) to the Badalabougou district where he found crowds of Malians surrounding
the Soviet observation site. He ignored the summer heat and his urge to eat and drink as
lunchtime came and went, and stood excitedly in line waiting for his chance to use a
telescope to view the eclipse. When his turn came, a Russian man guided him to the
telescope and helped him place his eye into the scope’s viewfinder. Amadou squinted
50
NASA records corroborate that an annular solar eclipse reached greatest visibility in Bamako on July 31,
1962 at 12:24:53.3 UT. Amadou described himself a “young man” (kamalen) when the eclipse happened.
A 1946 birth year (as his medical identification card indicated) would have made him sixteen years old at
the time.
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and waited for his sight to adjust, and after several seconds, focused his eyes on a golden
ring of sunrays that shot out from behind the boarders of the moon’s obstruction.
He told me that he was immediately struck with awe for the power of God, “Only
God can organize such a moment. A person with black skin would fail; a person with
white skin would fail. Only God.”
Although Amadou left the observatory with a clear understanding of the empirical
conditions that led to the eclipse, he also remembered the profundity of his mother’s
initial explanation. As a child, Ina told Amadou that God was testing humans and
demonstrating his power when the eclipse passed over Npièbougou.
“I looked into the telescope to view the sun, but I saw God’s strength instead,”
Amadou eloquently said.51
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Amadou spent two years in Bamako and said that, while there, he learned the
advantage of using conventional joking relationships called senengu (denɗiraagu in
Fulfulde) to build the type of rapport that turned acquaintances into intimate friends.
West Africans (including Mande, Dogon, Fula, Wolof, Serer, and Songhai speakers)
participated in a wide range of joking behaviors between kin members, disparate
generations, and allied clans and other groups (see Conrad 1995: 105; Hopkins 1971:
101; Labouret 1929: 224-254; Leynaud & Cisse 1978: 99; McNaughton 1993: 10-11;
Riesman 1974: 77-79, 124-125; Whitehouse 2012: 236). Joking relationships in West
51
During my fieldwork various informants, including Amadou, emphasized that God exclusively
influences eclipses and other cosmic events. Conversations on this topic often led to expressions of disdain
for the new era of space exploration as an example of humans “testing God” (Ala kɔrɔbɔ). Interestingly, as
discussed in further detail in chapter six, people attributed space exploration as one of the leading causes
for harmful changes to their local environment, specifically listing the physical exploration of outer space
as a primary reason for why the local forest had dried out and why there was little rain in the region.
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Africa brought humor and a vivid tone to daily life, and were characterized by a stylized
and sanctioned insolence in behavior and speech between senengu (McNaughton 1993:
10). Such interactions strengthened my personal relationships as a researcher while
affirming my participation in time-honored alliances. Amadou first learned how to joke
during his early childhood with a range of friends and relatives who were allied as his
joking partners. Like other Fula, Amadou grew up classifying his cross-cousins of the
same or different sex as his senengu and they ridiculed each other with great familiarity
(Cissé 1970: 123; Dieterlen 1973: 473; Riesman 1977: 124). Amadou and his age-mates
also insulted each other as joking partners. Senengu in West Africa also extended
between generational lines, and accordingly elderly men and women habitually teased
Amadou and the other children in Npièbougou (see Riesman 1977: 124-125).
Amadou affectionately remembered, “My grandmother always yelled at me,
‘You’re lazy and ugly! You’re worthless and stupid!’ and I would laugh and respond,
‘Shut your mouth, grandma!’”
In 2011 Amadou loved joking with children in Ouélessébougou. Especially
during the onset of my fieldwork, my peculiar presence at Amadou’s workspace attracted
children who would stare at me while whispering with one another about my hair texture
and freckles. Amadou shooed these young gawkers with a fast string of insults that I
quickly memorized: “Go away, cursed child! Little short nose! Savage! Child of hell!
Fula slave!” (Bɔ yen, danga den! Nunkuruni! Sauwashi! Jahanama den! Fula jɔn!).
The children always ran away from us, squealing in delight. By the end of my research I
sensed that children feigned interest in me in order to elicit the classic reaction from
Amadou that they had come to love.
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West Africans recounted that ancestral pacts between people of different praise
names (jamu) led to stabilizing their interactions by entering into permanent senengu
alliances (Hopkins 1971: 101).52 Senengu relationships typically reduced tension in
stressful situations, and Amadou claimed that the institution especially benefitted the
historically semi-nomadic Fula by ameliorating their otherwise precarious reputation
among sedentary West African populations as drifting strangers. Amadou said that he
could not fully list all his senengu because they were too numerous. But, as a Diallo, he
noted that all people with a Tamaro, Ballo, Kanté, Sumaru, or Doumbia praise name were
among his many joking partners.
I noticed that West Africans often said, “You eat beans” (i bɛ sho dun) as a classic
opening move in a dialogue between two senengu, implying that one’s joking partners
can neither afford the preferred diet of rice nor control their flatulence (see Roth 2008:
18). In fact, when Amadou Toumani Touré (who served as President of Mali from 2002
to 2012) visited Ouélessébougou for the inauguration of a solar panel field in the town in
2010, his senengu attended the ceremony with pots full of beans to playfully offer him.
Amadou was an exceptionally skilled joker with a sharp sense of humor, and I
never heard him use hackneyed jokes about beans with his joking partners. Instead he
regularly and jovially questioned one’s devotion to Islam, claimed Fula superiority over
Bamana people, and challenged a person’s age and kinship position in order to
subordinate them to himself. Amadou’s closest and most special joking partner during
the time I spent with him was Koniba Doumbia, the welder who worked next to Amadou
and me. Koniba, as his Doumbia praise name indicates, belonged to the occupational
52
In Bamanankan, one’s jamu carries great significance and the word means both “family name” and “to
praise (Innes 1974: 108). People in Ouélessébougou were often greeted and called by their family name.
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status group of blacksmiths (numu) and, as a result, could joke with impunity with Fula
people.53 A Malinke story recounts a pact between Fula and blacksmiths, claiming that
their blood once mixed during a circumcision ceremony. The Fula and blacksmiths
swore an oath of friendship afterward and vowed that they would never again quarrel
(Tengnæus 1952: 144).54 Amadou and Koniba enacted this alliance every day, talking
and laughing with loyalty and confidence.
Amadou described his repartee with Koniba as the kind that he has used his entire
life. I could fill volumes with the jokes Amadou and Koniba told in my presence. Here I
will offer a glimpse into their constant banter to give a sense of its character. Nearly
everyday Amadou alleged that Koniba was an impious Muslim and accused Koniba of
committing an array of sins, especially dabbling in nighttime sorcery. Amadou accused
Koniba, as a blacksmith, of belonging to the occult kɔma association that uses wooden
masks, drumming, and power objects (jow) to prognosticate and draw on spiritual forces
53
Mande have historically inherited their main occupation through their kin network, and Mande social
organization categorizes members as freeborn nobles (hɔrɔnw), skilled artists (nyamakalaw), or captive
slaves (jɔnw) (Keita 1998: 97; Zobel 1998: 35). Each occupational group is reputed for its secrets that
define the parameters between members of the occupational groups and outsiders (Hoffman 1998: 93; see
also McNaughton 1988). Despite measures used to reinforce group boundaries through endogamy, the
system has shown itself to be dynamic, and history reveals many instances in which individuals and kin
groups have been allowed to transfer identity (Keita 1998: 97-98). Scholars have further argued that there
has never been a completely separate distinction between the hɔrɔnw and nyamakalaw, and the two groups
have continuously oscillated between urban and rural occupations and identities (Zobel 1998: 39-41; see
also Amselle 1985; Bazin 1995; Hoffman 1990). Despite moments of flexibility and malleability, the
nyamakalaw are noticeably working-class citizens in comparison to the hɔrɔnw, and the term
“nyamakalaw” has strong and offensive connotations in Mande languages (Conrad and Frank 1995:10-13;
Bird et al. 1995: 28).
54
Germaine Dieterlen likewise recounts West African stories that tell of various Bambara, Bozo, Somono,
and Dogon joking partners who periodically sealed their friendship by opening veins and smearing blood
on one another’s wounds (Dieterlen 1951: 83; see also Tengnæus 1952: 144).
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to combat sorcerers (see Charry 2000: 208; Hellweg 2001: 119; McNaughton 1993: 19,
194).
Koniba denied any involvement with kɔma, but Amadou facetiously maintained,
“Blacksmiths are a kɔma factory (izini),” and blamed Koniba for any illness or
misfortune that befell Amadou.
Figure 14: (L –R) Koniba, Amadou and me during a typical workday in 2011
Amadou also mocked Koniba’s general appearance and intelligence, as he did to
all of his senengu. Amadou often compared Koniba’s dark complexion and physical
features to those of a baboon (gɔn). Koniba countered that Amadou, with his lighter
complexion, looked and acted like a patas monkey (warabilen), known in the region for
their white faces and reddish fur. Once, Koniba encouraged me to check Amadou’s
medical identification card, assuring me that it stated “patas monkey” in the name field.
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Amadou ignored Koniba’s joke, but I watched the corners of Amadou’s mouth flutter as
he valiantly fought the urge to smile. Amadou, in turn, regularly alleged that Koniba,
like all Doumbias, was badly educated, ignorant, and stupid. One afternoon Amadou told
me the following tale as though a wall separated us from Koniba, who sat within earshot,
hearing every word:
A long time ago, a Doumbia man from a rural community traveled to
Bamako to buy bread for people in his village. He bought loads and loads of
bread and began to walk home. He came upon a river and crossed it by foot and
lacked the sense to lift the bread above his head. He hauled the bread through the
water, ruining it. This dumb man was a typical Doumbia.
In addition to insulting Koniba’s intelligence and looks, Amadou told tales that
depicted Fula as superior in comparison to Bamana people. Amadou claimed that God
created Fula people who, in turn, built the Doumbia clan from mud. Amadou also
fabricated kinship schemes that placed Koniba in an inferior age and position in relation
to Amadou. West Africans practice avoidance and show respect for certain categories of
kin (ɲɛmɔgɔ), especially older siblings, parents, cousins, and in-laws, and Amadou
regularly put Koniba into an avoidance relationship with him. The fun for Amadou came
from merely trying to establish a position himself in terms of age and genealogy as
superior to Koniba, and Amadou never actually followed through on these schemes by
telling Koniba to move away from him or behave more deferentially. One day, for
instance, I heard the following exchange:
“You’re my older brother’s child, Koniba!” Amadou shouted unprovoked one
morning.
“I’m not his child. I’m old like you,” Koniba replied.
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Amadou removed his brimless hat (kufi) and said, “You’re not old! Look at all
my white hair.”
Koniba removed his cap and showed some light hairs, although he was not
entirely gray like Amadou, and responded, “I also have white hair! It’s real hair too.
Your white hair comes from washing yourself with chalk!”55
“You’re my older brother’s child!” Amadou insisted in delight.
“You’re from a village that is behind Ségou and I’m from here. It’s too far!”
“You’re my older brother’s child!” Amadou cried again, scarcely controlling his
laughter.
“My father was Bamana. You’re a Fula and a liar!” Koniba answered in an
agitated tone and folded his arms in discouragement.
“Our fathers were friends,” Amadou said as a final effort, “And my father was
older than your father. You’re my father’s younger friend’s child!”
“Our fathers never saw each other in their lives!” Koniba countered hotly and
looked away.
Amadou gave a carefree laugh and stopped the exchange. During this particular
installment of conversation Amadou used meaningful age tropes to achieve an explicit
purpose. Growing old in West Africa is a rare and revered experience and people defer
to age as a source of wisdom and dignity that calls for unwavering respect, and elders are
accordingly among the most powerful and respected people in West African societies
(Doumbia & Doumbia 2004: 107-110). Although elders may play and joke with those
55
Here Koniba referred to the fact that some West African Muslims write verses from the Qur’an onto
slates with chalk, rinse the surfaces, collect the liquid mixture, and wash themselves in it for the purposes
of healing or protection (see Sanneh 1979: 210). Koniba often teased Amadou that his hair was white with
chalk residue.
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younger than they, as Amadou regularly did with the children who passed by his
workspace, Amadou told me that children and youth should ultimately regard themselves
as subject to the instruction of their seniors.
“Unfortunately, the world is changing,” Amadou said. “In the past, old people
were the most revered members of a community. But our old practices (laada) are
broken, and people live without shame (malo), fear (siran), or respect (bonya). Now
young people think that no one is better than they.”
Amadou attributed the negative changes in how Malian elders were treated to the
influence that youth-obsessed European and North American countries had in West
Africa. When Amadou said this, it immediately called to my mind Mudimbe (1988),
who, citing Foucault, compares development efforts in former colonies to the painting of
a portrait. Mudimbe argues that Africa has become a canvas that, in the end, will only
celebrate and resemble the North American and European people who painted on it (2-6).
I shared Mudimbe’s concern with Amadou and asked him what he thought of it. Amadou
told me that the argument reminded him of a story he had heard as a child:
A lion’s wife gave birth. The lion called for all the animals in the forest to
come to a naming ceremony for his new child. All the animals came to the
ceremony to meet the child, visit one another, and celebrate. The ostrich started
dancing. The animals started to clap and watch the ostrich’s dance: it was the best
dance they’d ever seen! All the animals felt happy to see the ostrich dance.
Suddenly the hyena announced in the excitement: “This ostrich is my kin
because my sister is an ostrich!”
The dancing intensified and the ostrich accidently stomped on the
newborn lion cub’s head, breaking its neck and killing it.
The animals all became angry and started to chase after the ostrich. But
the ostrich was too fast and they couldn’t catch it. So they turned to the hyena
and said, “If we can’t catch the ostrich, we’ll punish you: its kin.”
“Ridiculous! (Patisakana!)” yelled the hyena, “You can’t take me in place
of the ostrich. How can something with wings and feathers be related to
something with fur?”
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For Amadou, this tale perfectly illustrated the danger in the amalgamation of
European and African practices. Amadou derided new conventions in Africa that often
tried to take the good without the bad. Much like the hyena that claimed a kin relation
with the ostrich because it found the ostrich’s dancing appealing, he explained, young
Africans aligned themselves with the European and North American practices that they
found pleasing and rejected those that were not pleasing to them on account of their
African identity.
“Youth wear jeans and imitate other things they like about the French. Amadou
said. But, if I tell the youth that I know that the French study hard and work after school
and don’t wander around their villages with their friends, they’ll respond, ‘Oh! But I’m
not French! Look at my black skin!’ because they don’t want to study.”
Similarly, Amadou claimed, each new generation in West Africa increasingly
disrespected and ignored elders on the basis that the high level of regard that seniors
received was an outdated African practice and, rather, placed young adults at the center
of society.
Both Koniba and Amadou agreed that elders deserved respect, but they never
reached a definite decision in their joking conversations on which of them was older than
the other.56 Despite Amadou’s undeniable wish to decisively subordinate Koniba to
himself by proving that he was older than Koniba, I learned from listening to Amadou
tease Koniba for months that riling Koniba up was Amadou’s foremost aim; and he had a
knack for it. Amadou had a gift for humor and said that he used this talent to acquire
friends throughout his life.
56
In seriousness, Koniba admitted to me that Amadou was older than he by, he guessed, about ten years.
166
“Whenever I introduce myself to a new person, I hope that they will turn out to be
my joking partner,” Amadou told me.
Although Amadou loved joking, he was always mindful of the serious aspects of
senengu. Joking partners are also obliged to function as mediators if they notice their
senengu engaged in a quarrel, and they should expect each other to provide economic
support when possible (Hopkins 1971: 101; McNaughton 1993: 10). Amadou accepted
these responsibilities and often gave his senengu small gifts as marks of respect,
counseled them on their difficulties, and trusted that God would compensate him with
baraji for his efforts.
When I asked Amadou for an example of acting as an intermediary he explained
that while living in Bamako in his youth, he temporarily lived with a short-tempered man
named Bakari Ballo who was Amadou’s senengu. Bakari and his wife frequently fought
with each other, and Amadou grew to feel uneasy about these disputes. As Bakari’s
senengu, Amadou felt obliged to bring calm to the situation. Amadou prepared his
counsel for his senengu and one day privately advised Bakari that one loses all sense of
decency during fights and that his constant quarrelling with his wife needed to stop.
Bakari became exasperated and responded defensively, telling Amadou with that he was
older than Amadou and that it was inappropriate for Amadou to counsel his elders.
According to Amadou, senengu are not obliged to unyieldingly observe ritual
avoidance between adjacent generations, “I reminded Bakari that I was a Diallo and that I
spoke to him as his senengu.”
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With Amadou’s reference to their relationship as senengu, Bakari accepted
Amadou’s advice. “I never heard Bakari and his wife fight again for the remainder of my
stay in their compound,” Amadou said.
It was in Bamako, Amadou remembered, that he recognized the full value of
senengu friendships. From then on, Amadou relied with renewed confidence on the
institution to smile, joke, and face the challenges that he encountered during his adult life.
⋲
⋲
⋲
After Amadou had spent two years in Bamako and the preceding year in Ségou,
these cities lost their initial appeal and Amadou longed again to spend time in the forest
with his cattle and he decided to return home to his family in Npièbougou. He worked to
pay for his return and in time had enough money to buy a bus ticket back north to
Npièbougou. Amadou’s mother, Ina, received Amadou’s unanticipated homecoming
with delight and urged her youngest son to describe his experiences and achievements
from the last several years to her. Amadou spent several days visiting with his family,
friends, neighbors, and circulating around Npièbougou to observe what had changed and
what had stayed the same since his departure. Since Amadou had left Npièbougou most
of his childhood friends had lost their grandparents, married, and celebrated the births of
their first children. Amadou noticed that many of the houses he remembered from his
upbringing had fallen down from severe rainstorms and new mud dwellings had been
built in their place.
But even with these changes, Amadou noted that “the smell of the air had stayed
the same.”
Npièbougou remained his unmistakable home.
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Amadou resumed rearing cattle in the forest with his brothers soon after his
return. He compared the autonomy he experienced while herding with the jobs he had
held in Bamako and felt that he had regained his freedom. “I had no boss and there was
no one to berate (kɔrɔfɔ) me in the forest. Cattle herding is truly the greatest
occupation,” Amadou said.
He noticed as he returned to herding that the number of Fula men who had started
smoking and chewing tobacco had vastly increased. One quiet, warm morning while
routing his cattle into the forest Amadou bought three cigarettes and several matches
from a street vendor.
“I was curious,” he explained.
He placed two cigarettes in his pocket and clenched the remaining cigarette in his
front teeth while gathering the nerve to light it. He said that he liked everything about
cigarettes from his first inhalation—their soothing effect, portability, the soft glow of the
cigarette’s tip, rich flavor, the way they occupied his hands—and he quickly developed a
smoking habit that lasted for decades. He estimated that smoking was neither sinful nor
meritorious, but the hold that nicotine had over Amadou made him feel an eventual loss
of self-control (yɛrɛminɛli), which he knew displeased God. The fact that Amadou
adopted an ethos in adulthood that valued the principles of self-control and restraint is
unsurprising in consideration of the broader emphasis that Fula and Mande groups place
on practicing a code of behavior that requires people to have full command over the way
they express their emotions and urges (see Amselle 1998: 43-49; Riesman 1977: 116141). In 2005 Amadou abruptly resolved to quit smoking and successfully ended his
habit on his first try.
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Amadou felt strong and healthy while living in Bamako and Ségou but said that
God balanced this fortune by supplying him with several sudden injuries shortly after his
return to Npièbougou. One afternoon, while herding in the forest, Amadou’s older
brother, Mamadou, attempted to tie a rope around the ankle of a bull when the animal
became aggravated and the bull charged toward Amadou, who was standing across the
pasture. Mamadou shouted a warning but Amadou did not have time to move out of the
way. The bull’s horn hit the center of Amadou’s face and tore the skin from the bridge of
Amadou’s nose down to his right nostril in half. Afterward, Amadou sat motionless in
shock while Mamadou removed his own shirt and carefully tied it around his younger
brother’s nose. Amadou staggered back to Npièbougou alone and in pain while
Mamadou gathered the herd.
Amadou’s family unanimously decided that Amadou should rest from his herding
duties and stay at home until he had recuperated from his injury. I met many people
during my fieldwork who considered loneliness to be the most painful part of being sick
or injured. In Ouélessébougou I observed that residents often moved their beds outside
or rested on plastic mats in shady areas of their compounds when they were in poor
health in order to maintain their involvement in daily matters. During his convalescence,
Amadou often left his compound at night to spend time with his friends in order to satisfy
his craving for social interactions. One evening, while riding home in a donkey-pulled
wagon, Amadou fell from the cart and a metal wheel rolled completely over the left side
of his head.
Ina upbraided Amadou and finally forbade him from leaving their compound until
he had fully recovered from both his nose and head injuries. Amadou agreed but
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inwardly agonized over the loneliness his isolation would bring him. Meanwhile the
news spread that Amadou had survived two dangerous, consecutive accidents, and
Amadou found himself receiving a steady flow of guests. Visitors greeted him, sang him
songs, praised his bravery, and recited benedictions asking God to grant Amadou a quick
and full recovery.57 These visits lifted Amadou’s spirits and improved the visitors’
spiritual welfare as well.
“One earns baraji by visiting sick and elderly people,” Amadou explained.
Earning baraji for acts like visiting the sick made baraji a practice in which
motivation for social relations was reinforced by the promise of an eternal reward. In this
sense, baraji and reciting benedictions held social and religious utility for West Africans.
Riesman (1977) rightly explains that West Africans realize that God's wishes surpassed
their own and consequently people did not believe in the full efficacy of their
benedictions (189-190). But I noted that trying to achieve one’s will is not the entire
point of reciting benedictions. These benedictions earn baraji for both the speaker and
listener, and in that case they are quite efficacious.
Amadou said that he quickly recovered his health and energy after his injuries, but
as an old man a long scar stretched across his nose, and the left portion of his skull
continued to dent inward. Amadou nonetheless smiled and told me that his scars
positively guided his conduct, and every morning, he greeted at least two enfeebled
townspeople before he began to make rope.
⋲
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57
⋲
In Bamanankan suitable blessings for an ill or injured person include “May God lessen the pain” (Ala
ka tɔɔrɔ dɔgɔya), and, “May God offer relief” (Ala ka nɔgɔya kɛ).
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Amadou estimated that he stayed in Npièbougou to herd cattle for three years
before deciding to move south to Ouélessébougou in 1969.58 In the 1960s Fula men in
Npièbougou grew increasingly worried that periods of drought and irregular rainfall
threatened the future of pastoralism in the region. Many of Amadou’s friends reacted to
these changes either by migrating south to Bamako in search of work or by finding lowpaying jobs as laborers in nearby Markala. Such movements grew into a larger trend in
postcolonial West Africa in the second half of the twentieth century wherein uneven
economic development, deteriorating environmental conditions, and the penetration of a
cash economy prompted Fula groups from the interior savannah region to migrate into
southern forest zones and urban areas (de Bruijn & van Dijk 2003: 285-286, 289-290).
When I asked Amadou why the climate in Npièbougou had changed, he said that
since the creation of the world, God had continually involved Himself in the affairs of
people by periodically altering their environments and that people can earn baraji by
peacefully responding and adapting to these changes. God provided ample rain in a good
year, but in subsequent years, in order to balance out things, God might replace
precipitation with a prolonged period of dry and cold weather. Amadou asserted that
people should always anticipate such changes while remaining mindful that God never
allows the world to stay for too long in one condition. I asked Amadou where he learned
about the divine cause of environmental change. He replied that God’s role in designing
and altering the world was self-evident—no one had taught him. Amadou then shook his
head and asked a question in turn: how had I failed to notice God’s work? Without
58
Amadou, like most of my informants, did not give numerical dates when I asked him when certain events
occurred. Rather, he indicated which presidential administration held power at the time of an experience.
In 1969 junior military officers removed Mali’s first president, Modibo Keïta, from power in a bloodless
coup d’état, and Amadou remembered that he moved south to Ouélessébougou during “the year that
Modibo was captured” (san Modibo minɛ).
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pausing for my response, he reminded me that during my fieldwork in 2010 the grass in
Ouélessébougou’s forests had been shorter than it was in 2011. Amadou confidently
attributed this change to God.
As a young man Amadou resolved to avoid feeling upset about the changes God
made to his local environment. He consequently described the climate change and the
desertification of the Sahel that he observed as “God’s work” (Ala ka baara). He added
that all cultures would become mindless and empty without the regular need to adapt to
new conditions. When West Africans faced warmer years, they looked for new ways to
care for their crops and animals on which they depended against the heat. Rather than
ruing the severe climate in Npièbougou in the late 1960s, Amadou understood the
challenge as an opportunity to improve himself and secure baraji by peacefully adapting
to ecological changes. For example, Amadou and his brothers extended their knowledge
of Npièbougou’s forests by searching in unfamiliar regions for new pastures and water
sources.
It became apparent to Amadou and his family that climate change in the region
could permanently impact their livelihood. Given that Amadou did not yet have a wife or
children, his family encouraged him to seek financial security for himself in the south.
He considered cattle herding the most honorable occupation and had no desire to return to
Bamako or any other city where he could not live as a pastoralist. But when reports
began to spread in Npièbougou that many young Fula men had found profitable work
herding cattle for wealthy landowners in southern Mali, a southward migration suddenly
seemed the most obvious and practical choice for Amadou. Accordingly, Amadou
traveled more than three hundred kilometers south to the town of Ouélessébougou. He
173
decided to settle in Ouélessébougou when he discovered that he could easily find work
contracting himself out to cattle owners in both Ouélessébougou and neighboring
villages. Amadou quickly found Fula friends and Bamana joking partners and soon felt
welcome and at ease in the area. He did not foresee at the time that he would remain
there for the rest of his life.
Figure 15: Amadou picks berries from fruit tree he formerly frequented while herding in Ouélessébougou’s
forest as a young man.
Amadou loved rearing cattle through Ouélessébougou’s forests and often found
lucrative herding opportunities outside the region as well. His reputation as a responsible
and talented herder spread throughout the area, and cattle owners in Ouélessébougou
often arranged for him to transport herds of varying sizes to southern regions, both in and
beyond Mali, where the animals sold for a higher price than they did in Ouélessébougou.
After Amadou had been busy for a year in Ouélessébougou, a cattle owner there asked
174
him to transport his herd to a market in northern Côte d’Ivoire. Amadou felt
apprehensive at first about crossing Mali’s border for the first time. He had heard stories
that depicted the people in Côte d’Ivoire as unprincipled non-Muslims (kafiri) whose
lives were characterized by perpetual violence.
Amadou finally accepted the job and traveled south to Côte d’Ivoire—with
caution. Soon after his arrival, his entire herd began to grow listless and then became
sick with severe diarrhea. Amadou was unsure as to how to treat the cattle in his care
until a fellow Fula herder whom Amadou had met in the forest suggested that Amadou
send the cattle’s owner a telegram from a nearby post office. Amadou ran urgently to the
post office and dictated a long telegram explaining everything he knew about the cattle’s
condition.
Then the, “postmaster laughed and said, ‘Slow down! You pay by the word!’”
Amadou sought advice from strangers at the post office on how to make the
message more succinct and settled on the message, “cattle sick” (misiw man kɛnɛ).
Several hours later, he received a response from his boss instructing Amadou to stay with
the cattle and that help was on its way. While waiting for assistance, Amadou visited
with people around him and was surprised to meet many fellow Muslims in Côte d’Ivoire
with whom he shared many similarities. After two days an employee of the cattle owner
arrived with vaccinations and medicines and, to Amadou’s astonishment, all the cattle
survived their bout of illness. After selling the cattle and finishing his job in Côte
d’Ivoire, Amadou began the journey back north to Ouélessébougou. Amadou knew he
would easily find other herding opportunities upon his return and decided to stay in
Ouélessébougou as long as the work remained plentiful. Amadou was now ready to
175
contemplate the next stage of his life. Many of his friends teased him because he had not
yet married, but he always dismissed these remarks on the grounds that he moved too
much to have a wife and children. Having now found stable work in Ouélessébougou, he
stood on the edge of adulthood, considering, for the first time, the possibility of marriage,
purchasing property, and having a family.
Conclusion
This chapter has detailed how Amadou’s social and occupational practices, family
relationships, and responsibilities changed as he reached full adulthood in postcolonial
West Africa. As Amadou strove to situate himself in a rapidly changing world, he
recounted that during his adolescence he had ridden in cars, listened to radios, studied
French, befriended non-Muslim foreigners, watched films from around the world, and
sent and received telegrams. Muslim practices and earning baraji retained an overriding
importance in this stage of his life while he also fostered an interest in accruing wealth.
But, as an adult, Amadou’s youthful daydreams of procuring a fortune for himself and
owing stylish clothing and other markers of modernity now seemed futile to him. He
decided that he was no longer interested in a life rooted in material pleasures as he
contemplated marriage and children.
Amadou’s childhood and adolescent experiences show that his approach to Islam
had changed drastically throughout his early life. His childhood recollections revealed
that Amadou depended primarily on his family to practice Islam and earn baraji, while
during his adolescence his endeavor to amass baraji became an individual enterprise.
Amadou’s narrative gives insight into how a West African Muslim’s approach to Islam
and baraji changed throughout his life. Scholars are right in their recognition of Islam in
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West Africa as inherently dynamic and that social groups constantly adapt Islam to
reflect change. Amadou’s life story shows how individual Muslim practitioners
spearhead this dynamism. Although Amadou had changed as a Muslim, his submission
to Islam had remained a constant point of orientation for him while he experienced a
rapidly changing world. Amid relocations and career changes, Amadou consistently
devoted himself to Islam and his pursuit of supererogatory baraji to complement the
baraji he earned from observing principle acts of worship, such as prayer and fasting.
Meanwhile, his pursuit of baraji constantly changed as well.
As a young adult, Amadou considered saving for marriage and children and
resolved that any money he might save would go toward his pilgrimage to Mecca.
Marriage offered the practical opportunity for mutual care and provision but would also
ensure that Amadou had children to continue earning baraji on his behalf after he died.
The next chapter reveals how Amadou’s understanding of and techniques for pursuing
baraji changed again during adulthood as he came to approach baraji as a joint effort
between kin. The following chapter traces Amadou’s friendships, occupations,
achievements, and travels alongside the challenges he surmounted, as Amadou became a
husband and father.
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CHAPTER FIVE
ADULTHOOD
Amadou’s childhood and adolescent experiences offer insight into the ways that
he learned about and tried to earn baraji in his early life. As Amadou entered adulthood,
he began to wonder who would earn baraji for him once he died and began to consider
the prospect of marriage and children. As Amadou explained it, the baraji he amassed
also benefitted his deceased relatives in the afterlife.
“God gives all the baraji I earn to my father, too,” he told me one morning while
we casually visited at work making rope.
“And what about your mother?” I asked. “Does she also get some of that baraji?”
“Yes! Of course!”
“And your brothers and sisters?”
“Yes, all of them earn baraji through me too,” Amadou said with confidence.
I decided to probe further. “Can your grandparents earn baraji because of you as
well?”
“Yes!”
“What about your grandparents’ grandparents?”
Amadou quickly saw how endless my questions might become and presented me
with a larger and unforeseen point: “Every deceased Muslim gets baraji when a living
Muslim earns baraji.”
Baraji continued to hold value after death, according to Amadou, as the deceased
became dependent on the living to ensure their security by earning baraji. Although all
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deceased Muslims benefited from the living’s pursuit of baraji, Amadou wanted his
experience of amassing baraji in the afterlife to be personal. In order to ensure that
someone continued to earn baraji with him specifically in mind, Amadou accepted that
he needed to have a family. He viewed finding a wife and having children as moral
duties that were necessary to ensure that he and other Muslims prospered and continued
to earn baraji in the afterlife. But aside from the perceived benefit, Amadou said that he
had no desire to marry.
This chapter addresses Amadou’s middle-aged, adult life and focuses on his
eventual marriage and experience caring for and teaching his six children about Islam and
the significance of baraji in their lives. The stories in this chapter show how Amadou
found happiness and satisfaction in becoming a husband and father, which were both
roles he at first feared would lead to the loss of his independence. I show in this chapter
how his conception of baraji shifted once he was married with a family. Previously,
Amadou saw baraji as essentially a private endeavor that concerned him and his
deceased father. But once he had children of his own he came to understand baraji as a
form of shared substance—a kind of consanguinity—that joined him to his kin, friends,
and neighbors through a value system that ranked various rituals and daily practices in
terms of their desirability and potential to access baraji, especially when various jobs
caused him to pass extended periods away from Ouélessébougou (see Mckinnon 1991:
212; Schneider 1968: 92; Weston 2001: 153). When Amadou was able to spend time at
home in Ouélessébougou, this chapter explains, he refined his children’s understanding
of Islam and baraji through the Muslim practices they performed and reflected upon.
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Above all, this chapter expands understanding of baraji by emphasizing the role
of baraji and Islam with respect to kinship and the way that notions of baraji shape local
kinship ideology. I therefore explore Amadou’s personal experiences and understanding
of kinship in order to understand the affective impact that principles of kinship have had
in Amadou’s life and their connection to his Muslim thought and practice. To that end, I
survey Amadou and his friends’ and family’s explanation of their personal kin
relationships to consider the flexibility of local kinship principles. I observed kinship in
Mali to be far more flexible and negotiable than scholars of kinship in West Africa have
classically observed (see Leynaud & Cisse 1978; Cissé 1970). This chapter presents
examples that highlight the importance of understanding kinship in West Africa in terms
of ritual, practices, Islam, and baraji and the meaningful social relationships that these
practices and doctrines create. As such, this chapter contributes to growing efforts to
show that kinship, through the rituals that create, structure, and extend it, is a creative,
malleable, and active practice that people “do” rather than a passive state of belonging to
a static “religious,” “ethnic,” or “genetic” group (see Bourdieu 1977; Riesman 1974; Şaul
1992; Thompson 2001).
I resume telling Amadou’s life story by recounting the jobs he held throughout
West Africa to earn a living to support his family. Amadou said that he used the
economic pressures he faced as an opportunity to model the importance of perseverance
and industriousness to his children by striving for baraji. This chapter includes memories
and points of view that Amadou’s wife and children shared with me during interviews I
conducted with them. Their anecdotes and opinions exemplify how Amadou aimed to
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raise a family that lived in accordance with the tenets of Islam and who similarly
recognized and valued the pursuit of baraji in their lives.
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One day while Amadou was explaining his reluctance to find a wife as a young
man he asked me, “Have I ever told you a story about me that included a female friend?”
I surveyed our many conversations for a moment and realized that he had not.
“No,” I replied. “Why is that?”
“Women used to bother me!”
“Bother you?” I repeated and laughed. “Why?”
“I used to refuse to even sit in the same place as women,” Amadou explained. “If
they were here, I was there. Women mocked me and called me crazy. But listening to
women talk made me feel sad.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. My mind must have been broken!”
Apart from his unwillingness to socialize with women, Amadou viewed himself
as self-sufficient and felt that he did not need a wife to help him perform domestic
chores. He had learned to cook, clean, and wash his own clothes while studying at
Abdoulaye’s medersa and working in Bamako as a youth.
“A lot of my friends could not do or refused to do chores, so they married,” he
said.
But Amadou explained that having a wedding in order to have a maid was a
wanton reason to marry. Indeed, I had a number of close female friends during my
fieldwork in Mali who complained to me that their husbands treated them like servants.
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They explained that their husbands led idle lives while they performed an exceptional
amount of domestic work. Women I knew in Ouélessébougou woke up at sunrise every
morning and worked until nearly midnight, filling their days with gathering and chopping
wood for cooking fires, preparing meals, drawing and hauling water from wells, washing
clothes and dishes, caring for animals, rearing children, and making trips to the market.
These women reminded one another of their worth by retelling a popular folktale that
imagines how a village without women would operate. My friend Kadja Ballo
particularly loved this story and allowed me to record her telling of the tale. She prefaced
it by saying, “In Mali, the men see women as nothings. They say to us, ‘You’re nothing!
You have no role here!’ We don’t count.” The story went as follows:
A new bride disliked her husband and refused to have children with him.
The husband felt frustrated with his disobliging wife and sought the counsel of the
village chief. He explained his marital troubles to the chief, who told the man to
bring his wife to him. The woman arrived at the chief’s house and the chief
loudly scolded her and told her to obey her husband, saying, “In my village,
women have no role! Your role is limited to the position of your two feet!”
The woman decided that, given their meaninglessness, it should not matter
if the women in the village gathered together and left. She organized all her
female friends and convinced them to cross the river with her and leave their
husbands and children for three days.
Within hours of the women’s departure, children began to cry to their
fathers, “I’m hungry!” The men called for their wives and soon realized that they
had all left. So the men tried to prepare food themselves. They added too much
salt to the sauce, they couldn’t crush the pepper, and they ruined the rice. The
men asked the village chief to cook for them, but he couldn’t. The village chief
asked his son to cook and he said, “My father! I don’t know how.”
The village chief decided to cross the river and beg the women to come
return. But the women would not agree. They told the men to kill a cow and
sheep and organize a festival for the women. The men agreed and held a party for
their wives. The men played the drums while the women ate and danced until
they did not feel mad at their husbands anymore.
So men might still say, “Women’s role is limited to the position of their
two feet” (muso jɔyɔrɔ bɛ dan u sen jɔyɔrɔ ye), but we have seen that’s not true.
Women hold a principle role in society, and that’s why men want to marry us.59
59
The 1997 film Taafe Fanga (Skirt Power), set in the Malian countryside, tells a similar story.
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Some husbands were dramatically dismissive when they heard their wives repeat
this story, but Amadou acknowledged the veracity of the tale and that women perform
vital tasks for their families. But he reiterated that the moral of the story was not relevant
to him as a young adult man because he did not mind cooking and cleaning for himself.
In fact, Amadou told me that his desire to have children preceded any want for a wife.60
Amadou worked for several years after settling in Ouélessébougou as a cattle
herder in southern Mali and northern Côte d’Ivoire, occasionally taking temporary jobs as
a laborer on the various cotton farms in the region. He saw herding and traveling as a
way to assert his personal freedom as a single man (cɛganan) and resisted people’s
criticisms of his unmarried state, arguing against the notion that all men should marry.
Amadou sensibly put aside money each month and after several years had saved enough
to buy land and build a personal compound in Ouélessébougou. Amadou’s friends in
Ouélessébougou irreverently assailed him for not having a wife and in moments of
seriousness advised him that it would be prudent to marry before he invested his savings
in property.
“My friends told me how they enjoyed having a wife and assured me that my life
would not be too different after marriage,” Amadou remembered.
Amadou eventually came to find his attitude toward marriage problematic. His
parents had always stressed the moral value of marriage as a Muslim obligation and the
basis of a household (see Leynaud & Cisse 1978: 185-189; Riesman 1977: 81-83).
60
Although the question crossed my mind, I never felt comfortable asking whether or not Amadou was
celibate during this phase in his early adulthood. Our differences in age and gender made the question
seem inappropriate in my view.
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Amadou told me, “God insists on marriage. Men and women each earn big baraji
(barajiba) for marrying one another.”
As Amadou reflected more on the possibility of finding a wife, he decided to visit
a holy man (mori) in Ouélessébougou to relieve his aversion to marriage. Upon hearing
Amadou’s concerns, the holy man offered to make an amulet inscribed with a passage
from the Qur’an about marriage for Amadou to carry with him.61 Amadou felt his
attitude toward marriage change within weeks of receiving the amulet.
“I realized that I, like many other Fula men, could continue to herd cattle and
work in other countries even after taking a wife,” he explained.
Eventually Amadou grew to feel happy about the prospect of having a wife. He
asked his friends if they knew any young women without husbands and one acquaintance
offered to introduce him to a female neighbor named Nouhouba Bagayoko.
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Nouhouba was born to a Muslim Bamana family in a rural village, Kèmògòla,
located in the northwestern portion of Mali’s Sikasso region. Her parents sent her as a
young girl to live with her father’s sister (tɛnɛmuso) in Ouélessébougou.
The practice of allowing children to be raised (den lamɔ) by friends or relatives
pervaded in Ouélessébougou during my research in 2011. People explained that this
practice offered a solution for couples facing infertility problems. In contrast, informants
commonly considered the prospect of adopting a stranger’s child from an orphanage
unthinkable because they would have no information about the child’s parents or social
61
In 2011, Amadou no longer had this amulet and could not remember exactly which Qur’anic verses it
contained.
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background. Many overwhelmed young mothers also explained that they had asked a
sibling to send them one of their slightly older daughters in order to have someone to help
with their daily chores. I also heard of several instances in which relatives or a friend felt
an overpowering fondness toward an infant’s disposition and accordingly entreated the
child’s biological parents to allow them to raise the child once it was weaned.62
Numerous parents in Ouélessébougou stoically told me that they felt it an obligation
(wajibi) to accept such requests, and only one mother candidly admitted that she would
turn down a friend or relative who asked to bring up one of her children. Muslim
informants explained that they would not question a close friend or relative who wanted
to raise their child on the condition that they knew that the person making the request was
a good Muslim.
The chief of the compound where I lived during my fieldwork, Bourama, assured
me when we discussed the topic that, “It would not be difficult for me to give my child
away as long as I know that he or she will learn to pray, fast, and earn baraji, just as I
would have taught my son or daughter.”
Such arrangements did not break kin bonds but rather extended them. Amadou,
like other residents of Ouélessébougou with whom I spoke, readily associated baraji with
kinship and residence. Residential compounds in Mali represented a social setting akin to
what anthropologists reference in the phrase, “house societies,” a concept first formulated
by Lévi-Strauss (1987) and subsequently developed by numerous other researchers in
order to characterize societies that use residence to determine kinship (see Carsten 2004a,
2004b; Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995; Gillespie 2000). In a house society, kin may live
62
Mothers in Ouélessébougou typically weaned their children between the ages of two and three-years-old.
185
together as a corporate group devoid of any biological ties (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 174, 186).
Lévi-Strauss’s research demonstrates that residential groups in house societies act as
moral entities while living in a shared estate, and individuals primarily define themselves
by their roles and relationships to others in the house (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 174-186; see
also Gillespie 2000: 29). People in house societies are not confined by rules of biological
descent, and members share “material and immaterial wealth” as the house propagates
itself through mutual cooperation—whether economic, social, or ritual—between
members. Rights and obligations between house members may be modeled after “ties of
blood,” but members need not share biological descent (Lévi Strauss 1987: 176, 187;
Gillespie 2000: 32). In Mali, membership in a compound effectively secured residence in
a social system. Relations were perpetuated through shared participation in household
life rather than through consanguinity alone, and people counted on one another to
cooperate and participate in a range of pursuits, including (in Muslim compounds)
performing Muslim rituals and other practices to obtain baraji together, for the living and
the dead.
Following Lévi-Strauss’s approach to house societies, I noted that children in
Mali who lived away from their biological parents often called both their adoptive and
biological parents by the terms “mother” and “father” and classified both the children
living in their caretakers’ compound and their biological cognates as siblings (balimaw).
In other cases, I observed children who called their caretakers “aunt” (tɛnɛmuso for
father’s sister, or bɛmamuso for mother’s sister) and “uncle” (fakɛ for father’s brother, or
bɛnkɛ for mother’s brother) while allowing these persons to assume fully the roles and
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responsibilities of parents.63 Amadou deemed that biological parents, adoptive parents,
and children cooperated in raising each other’s children and, as such, earned baraji
equally. Biological parents showed their selflessness and humility (majigin); adoptive
caretakers expressed kindness and generosity (bololabilalen); and children learned
obedience (sagokɛla)—all ideals that God rewards with baraji.
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Amadou’s future wife, Nouhouba, was party to such an agreement as a child. She
said that she permanently moved to Ouélessébougou at the age of eight in order to help
her father’s sister cook and take care of her younger children. Nouhouba lived with her
aunt for nearly ten years. When she was seventeen years old, Nouhouba’s aunt and uncle
told her that they had arranged for her to marry a man named Madou Doumbia.
Nouhouba soon after married Madou and moved into his family’s nearby compound.
I asked Nouhouba for more details about her first marriage and, after a long
silence, her eyes met mine with a steady gaze, and she told me with expressionless poise
about those tumultuous times: “Madou beat me everyday for ten years. I delivered four
children. Two of them died. He never beat our children, but he got me everyday. He’d
whack me around at night and then the next day people would talk about me and stare at
my injuries. Finally my paternal aunt (tɛnɛmuso) told me to seek a divorce.”
Nouhouba went to the mayor’s office in Ouélessébougou to inquire about divorce
proceedings and learned that it cost a fee, regardless of the extreme violence that
Nouhouba said she was undergoing. Nouhouba would not consider asking anyone to
63
I recorded that children who were raised by a biologically unrelated friend of their biological family
usually called their caretakers by the terms for “father’s sister” (tɛnɛmuso) and “father’s brother” (fakɛ).
187
loan her the money but felt determined to divorce her husband. She started gathering
wood in the forest and sold bundles of firewood to her friends and neighbors. It took
over a year to build her savings, but she eventually obtained a legal divorce from Madou,
which Madou’s family accepted without contest owing to their understanding of Madou’s
temper, and Nouhouba returned with her two children to her aunt’s compound where she
became eligible to remarry.
Figure 16: Amadou’s wife, Nouhouba Bagayoko, in 2011
Nouhouba remembered that a neighbor brought Amadou to her compound and
introduced them to each other the year after she had ended her marriage to Madou.
“We visited, and I thought he was nice,” she simply remembered of the first time
she met Amadou.
Amadou immediately liked Nouhouba’s comportment (jogo) and decided of his
own accord to ask her uncle for consent to marry Nouhouba. I asked Amadou if
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marrying a Fula woman had been an initial priority for him. He shook his head and
responded that finding a woman devoted to Islam was his primary concern and that
Nouhouba came from a family with a reputation as devout Muslims. Finding a good
Muslim wife ensured that Amadou would raise Muslim children who could provide for
him and his ancestors by earning them baraji on their account.
Amadou formally met with Nouhouba’s uncle and agreed to present him with
25,000 francs and two cows in exchange for taking Nouhouba as his wife.64 The day set
for their marriage quickly arrived, and Amadou remembered that he, Nouhouba, and all
their guests earned an inestimable sum of baraji for participating in their wedding
ceremony and the modest festivities that followed. Although Amadou had no family in
the region to attend his wedding, his “people” (mɔgɔw) went to his marriage ceremonies
at the mayor’s office and in the mosque.65 In the absence of formal kin ties, Amadou said
he had become incorporated into a kin group of Fula families living in Ouélessébougou.
He recalled that he had bonded quickly with these people primarily on the basis of their
shared language, commitment to Islam, and experience in cattle husbandry.
Nouhouba’s situation, wherein her paternal aunt (tɛnɛmuso) and uncle acted as
her parents, and Amadou’s support from Fula families in Ouélessébougou as his kin,
offer two instructive examples of how kinship in West Africa is a flexible convention.
Amselle applies the term “fundamentalism” to describe the rigid descriptions of cultural
64
About $50.00 USD.
Muslim couples in Mali performed a legal marriage at the local mayor’s office and a second Muslim rite
in the mosque. Typically these two procedures were performed on the same day, and during my research
most people married on either a Thursday or a Saturday. The bride and groom did not attend services held
in the mosque, but rather their mothers and fathers stood proxy for them as the imam announced the
marriage and pronounced blessings on the couple. Amadou asked an elderly Fula man living in
Ouélessébougou to attend the marriage rite at the mosque on his behalf.
65
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groups and their activities that anthropologists often perpetuate (Amselle 1998: 39). To
avoid this misstep, Amselle reminds us that West Africans continually debate and
negotiate their practices and identity (40). Encouraged by Amselle’s misgivings, I noted
that Amadou and Nouhouba’s experiences revealed kin kinship relations as far more
intricate and flexible than scholars tend to concede (see Leynaud & Cisse 1978; Cissé
1970). I learned during my fieldwork that Muslims consider Islam and baraji as forms of
shared substance, or consanguinity, that join kin, friends, and neighbors. Studies in the
anthropology of kinship demonstrate that people identify kin fundamentally through
assessments of behavior and sentiments and use metaphors of blood and biology to
express feelings of closeness (Hagen 1990: 187; see also Barnard & Good 1984;
Needham 1971; Schneider 1984). Thus Muslim residents in southern Mali commonly
referred to each other as “brother,” “sister,” “grandparent,” and other kin terms, even
when no clear biological ties existed between them, thereby acknowledging the power of
their personal relationships and shared practice of Islam (see Wooten 2009: 46-47).
This correlation between Islam and kinship in Ouélessébougou is, in large part,
unsurprising. Social anthropologists who study kinship have long grounded kin relations
in a host of other cultural systems and practices, such as economics, gender, politics,
social change, transnationalism, as well as ritual and cosmology (see Barnard and Good
1984: 15; Brokensha 1983; Peletz 1995; Schneider 1984; Schweitzer 2000; Whitehouse
2012; Wilson 1971). While some anthropologists observe that conversion to Islam or
Christianity may lead to the rupture of kinship ideologies, others suggest that people
respond to such shifts by fitting new ideas into existing cultural categories (Robbins
2001: 902; see also Englund & Leach 2000). For instance, according to Riesman (1974),
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the arrival of Islam led to tighter bonds between Fula kin. His research shows that
Muslim leaders emphasized the importance of group prayer, which led to a deeper
unification of kin groups and communities (96-98). During my fieldwork, I personally
noted in the compound I lived in how starting and breaking our fast during Ramadan and
walking to and from the mosque as a family enhanced the amount of time we spent with
one another while strengthening our awareness of and support for one another’s lives.
Returning to Amadou’s life, with a focus on his marriage and experiences as a father, the
impact of Muslim practice on kin relations becomes clear. The following section shows
how, according to Amadou, kin earned baraji on one another’s behalf, and how Amadou
moreover found the widespread practice of allowing others to raise one’s children
acceptable on the basis of a shared commitment to Islam.
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Shortly after Amadou’s wedding in the mid-1970s, Amadou purchased half an
acre of land, on which he was still living when I met him, in the residential center of
Ouélessébougou. In 2011, his neighborhood was among the most densely populated and
expensive in terms of land value in the town. But Amadou remembered that when he
initially bought his property, the area was sparsely populated and had few residential
dwellings and no small shops (butigi). He built a mud house and separate kitchen hearth
for his new family and commissioned experts to dig a well. Then Amadou, Nouhouba,
and her two children from her first marriage promptly moved into their new home.
Amadou earned a good reputation (tɔgɔ) for himself in his new neighborhood.
One day during lunch my host (jatigi) and chief of the compound I lived in, Bourama,
told me about Amadou’s longstanding reputation in the area. Bourama said that Amadou
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was regarded as one of the most pious Muslims in Ouélessébougou and added, “Everyone
knows that Amadou has more baraji than them.” I asked Bourama what Amadou had
particularly done to deserve this good reputation. He said that Amadou’s participation in
Muslim practices was unmatched: Amadou was always at prayer in the mosque, attended
every marriage ceremony, fasted outside of Ramadan, and acted with sincere kindness
toward his neighbors.
Amadou likewise cared for Nouhouba’s children, but they moved between
Amadou and Nouhouba’s compound and their biological father’s home, often staying
with Madou for months at a time. After two years, Nouhouba bore Amadou a daughter
named Sira and soon after a son they named Mohamadou. Amadou and Nouhouba both
earned baraji for having children and more for their resolve in raising them as Muslims.
When I asked Amadou whether or not he enjoyed becoming a father he teased me for
asking such a naïve and axiomatic question.
“Everyone and everything loves children!” he declared. “It’s not only humans—
notice the way donkeys and sheep care for and play with their brood.”
“Did you also play with your children?” I asked.
“Of course! I would hold their hands while they straddled my feet, bounce them,
and sing nonsense ‘ne-ne-ne-ne-ne,’” he remembered with a grin. “But children really
exhaust (sɛgɛn) their fathers because they’re so expensive.”
Amadou felt new pressure with a growing family to find the most profitable cattle
herding opportunities available in order to earn money to support Nouhouba and their
children. In the mid-1970s, Fula friends who similarly worked in animal husbandry told
Amadou that wealthy cattle owners would amply pay small groups of Fula herders to
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walk their cattle to Liberia, where cattle sold in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, for a
considerably higher price. The one-way trip covered over 1,000 kilometers of rough
terrain and took a little over five months to complete. Given Amadou’s experience
herding cattle, and as a Fula man, he easily found a position leading herds of sixty to 100
head of cattle from Bamako to Monrovia. Since Nouhouba had not yet met Amadou’s
family, Amadou arranged for Nouhouba and their two children to travel to Npièbougou
for six months to pay a visit to his mother, Ina, before he left on his first expedition to
Liberia. Amadou explained, “I wanted my wife and children to see my hometown (faso)
and know my mother and older siblings.”
Figure 17: The 1,127-kilometer one-way route Amadou routinely walked from Bamako to Monrovia
(Map data ©2013 Google)
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Once Nouhouba and his children were safely on the road to Npièbougou, Amadou
set out for Liberia. He recalled that this was the first of what would become many trips
to Monrovia with four to five other Fula herders. The most experienced herder always
served as the leader and traveled slightly ahead of the convoy in order to arrange meals
and buy provisions while the other men followed a short distance behind with the herd.
On his first trip, Amadou worked as a regular herder, but he said that he acted as the
leader for all subsequent expeditions to Monrovia. The route he traveled cut across the
rural corners of Mali and Côte d’Ivoire, along the boarder of Guinea, and through
Liberia’s central countryside. Amadou loved spending days on end in West African
forests and insisted that the heat, which was relieved only with occasional downpours,
did not bother him. Dusk and dawn were his favorite times of day as a fresh, tonic scent
filled the countryside. Sunrays and travelers kicking up dust gradually burnt off the clear,
aromatic mist, but Amadou called the smell as a “gift from God” (cadeau de Dieu) for
those who slept in the African backwoods.
Amadou met, prayed, and earned baraji with fellow Muslims when passing
through rural towns and urban areas and through these encounters developed an
impression of Islam outside of Mali. As an old man, he told me that he acknowledged
that Muslims submitted to the same religion as part of an international community with
negligible differences among members. He said that the practices he observed, such as
fasting and praying in conjunction with supererogatory efforts to gain baraji, did not
differ among the Muslim populations of the world.
For Amadou, differences among Muslims rested not in practice but in the attitude
they held toward one another. One afternoon in 2011 I sat working with Amadou when
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an Algerian researcher studying vegetation in the region passed by us and struck up a
conversation with me in French. Amadou understood and spoke some French and
immediately comprehended when the loquacious Algerian stranger sweepingly described
life in Mali as “horrible.” Amadou abruptly contradicted the man, saying, “La vie est
bonne ici!” The man turned to Amadou, gave an affected smile, and continued his
journey down the road.
After the stranger left I told Amadou that I thought the man had been incredibly
rude.
“He is an Algerian Arab and thinks he’s better than black Africans,” Amadou said
and waved his hand to dismiss the encounter.
“Why do Arabs think they’re better than Africans?” I asked.
“Many Arabs think they’re the only real Muslims in the world,” Amadou
answered.
I immediately understood Amadou’s point and sympathized with him as we
continued our conversation about foreign perceptions of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa,
remembering that both Western and Arab civilizations have long and complicated
histories of dismissing Muslims in Africa as inferior practitioners of Islam (see Daniel
1960; Harrison 1988; Hunwick 2005). Amadou continued, explaining that Arab Muslims
were mistaken in their religious chauvinism, as Islam was suited to any person,
irrespective of nationality, language, or skin color. According to Amadou, God held all
Muslims in equal favor so long as they lived in agreement with the precepts of Islam. In
Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Liberia, Amadou met Muslims from an array of
backgrounds but perceived no major differences between foreign Muslims and himself.
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He concluded that their adherence to a shared relationship with God through Muslim
principles, practices, and the pursuit of baraji created unbreakable and meaningful bonds
within an international Muslim community (umma). Amadou classified Muslims from
around the world as brothers and sisters (balimaw). His perception of his kinship with
fellow Muslims was unsurprising, as scholars have long argued that kinship everywhere
is constituted by shared moral outlooks and obligations (see Durkheim & Mauss 1963;
Hagen 1999; Launay 2004; Schneider 1984). Thus, Amadou identified kin based on
assessments of behavior and sentiments, and deliberately used metaphors of blood and
biology to affiliate himself with those who lived according to his conception of Islam
when traveling outside of Mali (see Barnard & Good 1984; Hagen 1999; Needham 1971;
Schneider 1984).
Amadou said that he steadily earned baraji during his excursions to Monrovia
by performing obligatory prayers and through modest cash donations to the poor and
beggars he passed along the way. Participating in Muslim practices and amassing baraji
helped to connect Amadou to his friends and family in Mali who he trusted were
similarly gaining baraji through shared Muslim practice. Amadou also earned baraji
through the peaceful relationships he had with the people he met along the way. Many of
the Fula men Amadou worked with carried firearms and encouraged Amadou to do the
same. His partners were most afraid of passing men who had been initiated in hunter
associations (donsow). Such hunters, Amadou explained, had a mixed reputation in West
Africa. Although hunters had protected West African citizens from crime by guarding
forests and patrolling residential neighborhoods during moments of political and civil
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unrest, some hunters had also abused their authority by assaulting civilians (see Hellweg
2011; Hagberg 1998).
“The hunters (donsow) wore shirts made of jaguar and lion skins and the Fula
men I worked with thought they would kill us if we didn’t give the hunters all of our
valuables and money,” Amadou said.
I asked Amadou if he felt scared or intimidated when he encountered hunters, and
he responded, “Death doesn’t scare me so a hunter certainly doesn’t either! When I was
young it bothered me that a man could make tea in the morning and be in his grave in the
evening. But if you’re afraid of death, you die. If you’re not afraid of death, you die.66
All things, except God, die and there’s a reason behind every death.”67
Amadou carried only a stick (bere) to protect himself from thieves, hunters, and
wild animals while traveling to Liberia but reported that neither he nor his partners ever
had a brush with bandits, hunters, or predatory animals during their travels, and Amadou
only used his stick to lightly beat his cattle when their pace slowed.
Amadou never had any seriously dangerous encounters with hunters, bandits, or
wild animals in the forest, and he always thanked God for his safely by reciting
benedictions as he passed from rural towns to urban settlements. Amadou noticed that
economic and living conditions steadily improved as he and his cattle neared the green,
lush coast of Monrovia. As he approached his destination he also found it more difficult
to converse with the people he met on the road. Along the way, he remembered that he
had little problem meeting people who spoke either Fulfulde or a mutually intelligible
66
Here Amadou appealed to a popular Bamanankan proverb, “N’i siranna i bɛ sa, n’i ma siran i bɛ sa.”
Amadou’s remark and courageous attitude about death was altogether unsurprising to me. The topic of
death is explored in further detail in chapter six, but I found that old men and women often spoke about
their own death without any outward trace of fear. Such poise served as a sign of their commitment to
Islam as well as their trust that they had likely earned enough baraji to obtain salvation in the afterlife.
67
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dialect of a Mande language, such as Mandinka or Julakan. English is the official
language of Liberia, but Amadou said he managed to get by without speaking any. I
interviewed other Fula men in Mali who had similarly herded cattle to Monrovia during
the 1970s and 80s, although not in the same caravans as Amadou. Most of these men
also had no desire and made no serious attempt to learn English while traveling in
Liberia.
One elderly Fula man had memorized an eclectic group of phrases including, “No
visa. I go?” and “Hey you, give me a match,” which he still remembered during our
conversations about his time in Monrovia.
Whenever a person addressed Amadou in English he reacted by producing a set of
legal documents prepared in Bamako. Although Amadou could not read his papers, he
knew that they gave him permission to pass through Liberia with livestock. Some people
examined the documents while others realized he could not understand English and
walked away from him. Amadou said that knowing some English would have been a
great advantage to him in Monrovia and that such a pursuit would have pleased God and
been rewarded with baraji. He added that many of the questions he had about the city
went unanswered because he could not communicate with residents.
“Liberia was very different from Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, but I liked the country
because it was peaceful even through it was strange to me,” Amadou said.
The calm atmosphere in Monrovia especially surprised Amadou as he toured the
city’s streets and found that firearms were widely available to civilians.
“The shopkeepers sold guns and the children on the streets sold bullets,” Amadou
remembered.
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I asked if Amadou ever saw someone in Monrovia use a weapon, and he laughed,
“No, I didn’t. All the men carried guns, but no one actually used them!”
Amadou generally only stayed in Monrovia for three or four days. Cattle owners
would fly or drive private cars from Mali down to Monrovia and meet Amadou, and
Amadou said that handing the cattle over to their owner was always a smooth transaction.
“I would meet the owner in the evening, he would inspect and sell the cattle that
night, and the next morning I would receive my pay and start looking for a bus to take me
back to Mali.” Amadou always made a point to view the briny coastline of Liberia
before returning home.
The ocean astounded him: “I was amazed by the way the waves crashed on the
shores and I could not believe that African children had the courage to splash and play in
them and dance near the water along the coast.”
Expeditions to Monrovia offered steady wages that Amadou used to support his
family. But after nearly three years and five consecutive trips to Liberia, Amadou’s feet
began to throb at the simple thought of making the trek again.68 In addition to his
physical exhaustion, Amadou missed his children during these travels and wanted to rest
in Ouélessébougou and build stronger bonds with his family. He suspected that his
extensive time herding away from home also wore on his wife and children and
compromised their ability to act as a kin group and earn baraji with one another in mind.
68
Amadou said the system of paying Fula men to herd cattle to Monrovia ended about five years after he
stopped doing the job. In 1989 a civil war in Liberia destroyed the country’s economy and made its forests
too dangerous to traverse. Amadou lamented that Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who was
convicted by International Criminal Court for abetting brutal rebel movements, had “broken” (tiɲɛ) the
country he once admired (see Simons & Goodman 2012). In 2011 cattle trucks did most long-distance
transportation of cattle herds in West Africa.
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Amadou’s oldest son, Mohamadou, remembered during an interview, “I used to
cry that I missed my father when he made trips to Liberia. But once he returned I would
also cry because he was a stranger to me.”
Amadou earned baraji by taking an active role in raising his children to be
steadfast Muslims. Each of his six children recalled that their father always taught them
to take Islam seriously. For example, most Muslims in Ouélessébougou did not expect
their children to observe the five formal prayers each day. Amadou, on the other hand,
woke his children up from a young age at dawn to perform the first prayer of the day and
encouraged them to complete each prayer thereafter.
In addition to the baraji they earned from rearing Muslim children, Nouhouba and
Amadou won baraji by satisfying their children’s physical needs. Amadou’s children
remembered that although they grew up very poor, they always had enough food to eat at
every meal. Amadou and Nouhouba eventually had six children altogether, three boys
and three girls. Amadou particularly taught his children the importance of pursuing
baraji and how baraji was intertwined with kin relations. Amadou emphasized the
importance of acting peacefully in their relationships with each other. He instructed them
not to shout or cry during arguments and that they would earn baraji for managing their
heated emotions. Amadou’s oldest daughter, Sira, told me that she knew from a young
age that crying “broke [her] father’s heart” and displeased God. Amadou moreover
taught his children ways to earn baraji daily by appropriately managing their
relationships with others in the community.
Amadou’s second son, Hamadi (named for Amadou’s father), remembered, “My
father taught me that I gained baraji by greeting and treating my adult neighbors with
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respect. He also encouraged me to be the first to make amends when I fought with my
friends and explained that apologies reflect a person’s humility, which earns baraji.”
Amadou, like other civilians in Ouélessébougou, recognized that sharing
residence, participating in Muslim practices, and sharing in the pursuit of baraji acted to
build and consolidate kin ties among people. Thus, when a female family friend, in
Ouélessébougou, who was unable to have children asked Amadou and Nouhouba for
permission to raise their second daughter, Fatim, Amadou and Nouhouba agreed.69
Amadou felt confident that Fatim would be easily integrated into her new family, and that
their friend was a good Muslim woman and would raise Fatim according to the same
principles and practices that he and Nouhouba stressed in their home.
Although Fatim had no consanguinal or affinal ties to her caregivers, she grew up
with kin by virtue of the fact that in Ouélessébougou typically long-term members of a
shared compound are viewed as kin. In fact, the term that has been translated from
Bamanankan to French and English for family (somɔgɔw) is etymologically interpreted as
“house people” (so meaning house, mɔgɔw meaning people) (Bailleul 2006: 122; Bird et
al. 1977: 294; Hellweg 2011: 56-61). Fatim also remained closely attached to Nouhouba,
Amadou, and her siblings and visited their compound nearly every day throughout her
childhood and adult life.
I noted during my fieldwork that most compounds in southern Mali had at least
one member living in the compound under circumstances that challenge the rigidity of
patrilineal and patrilocal kinship organization (cf. Leynaud & Cisse 1978; Cissé 1970).
The ease with which kin groups incorporated outsiders into their household kinship
69
Amadou was vague in describing this woman’s fertility problems and did not know what her exact issues
had been when I pressed for more information. In Mali, childlessness was a source of severe stress and
anxiety for couples, and, typically, the woman was blamed (Hörbst 2008: 118-137).
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networks showed that Malians understood kinship as fluid and based on more than shared
genetic makeup. Muslim compound members easily integrated non-biological kin into
their compounds, typically with no demands that they break ties with their previous kin
networks to align with the new compound but with the anticipation that new members
would earn baraji together through their shared commitment to Islam. The regularity of
such arrangements offered evidence that Malians could concurrently identify with
multiple, seemingly disparate kin groups with little disruption to their lives or to the
groups with which they identified.
Compounds in Ouélessébougou, in keeping with Lévi-Strauss’s description of
house societies, represented a central point of reference for kinship. As such, residents
saw compounds as domains where people who “belonged” together could reside
alongside each other. It has elsewhere been argued that outsiders enjoyed full
assimilation into compounds, but their origin as “stranger” (dunan) was never entirely
forgotten (Hopkins 1971:102). But my project does not substantiate this claim. During
my fieldwork people in Ouélessébougou explained that residents counted on the people
living in their compound to act as kin while perpetuating and upholding the moral values
of the compound. In Muslim compounds in Ouélessébougou these expectations for
residents’ social lives and obligations were primarily articulated through a shared
submission to Islam in the form of pursuing baraji, and Muslim residents looked to
kinship to create and find a social group through which they could articulate and sustain
their beliefs and practices.
Amadou and Nouhouba viewed their compound as a key site in which to promote
the practice of Islam. As parents, they strove to bequeath an understanding and
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dedication to Islam to each of their children, especially through the group performance of
daily prayers and requisite fasting during Ramadan. Ultimately, however, they believed
that children should be allowed to make their own personal decisions on how to practice
Islam and earn baraji. For example, Amadou encouraged his daughters to style their
natural hair without using extensions, weaves, or chemicals. In Mali, as throughout
Africa, women emulated European standards of beauty often associated with pale skin
and straight hair. As such, skin bleaches, synthetic hair extensions and braids, and wigs
were widely advertised and sold in Mali. Many parents and grandparents in
Ouélessébougou tried to dissuade their children from buying these products. One night
Yirigoi Konaté, the grandmother of the compound I lived in during my fieldwork, told
her grandchildren the following tale to try to deter them from altering their appearance to
look European:
One day a donkey went to visit a lion in the forest. The donkey said, “Oh
lion! You’re so pretty and I want to look like you!”
The lion replied, “You have long ears. You can’t look like me.”
The donkey went home and cut his ears. The next day he went back to the
lion and said, “Look! I cut my ears in order to look like you.”
The lion sighed and told the donkey, “You still don’t look like me, and
now you don’t look like you either.”
Even though many people in Mali found skin bleaches and hair extensions
repellent, plenty of women chose to use them. Women who used synthetic hair products
avoided getting their hair wet in order to preserve their hairstyles, and Amadou found this
unacceptable because the full ablution required for prayer and participation in other
Muslim practices calls for Muslims to wash their head three times. On one occasion
Amadou’s youngest daughter, Tènè, went against her father’s counsel to avoid artificial
hair and asked a friend to braid her short, natural hair with synthetic extensions.
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“When my father saw me he didn’t act angry,” Tènè recalled. “But he reminded
me that I could not properly do my ablutions if I had to avoid putting water over my
head. It was my own choice, and I decided on my own to take the fake hair out.”
Amadou remembered this incident and recalled the event as an instructive
moment in which he realized that as his children became adults they would uphold the
Muslim principles he had taught them and would successfully earn baraji for him after
his death.
⟆
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Soon after Amadou stopped herding cattle to Monrovia he discovered that he
could not earn enough income to support his family by herding for cattle owners in the
Ouélessébougou area, and he began to consider other occupations.
“At the time, rural villages in southern Mali and northern Guinea did not have
shops (butigi) for residents to buy things like shoes, cigarettes, sugar, tea, cloth, and
candy,” he said.
Given the familiarity Amadou had with the geography of the region, which he had
cultivated through years of herding cattle, he decided in the mid-1980s to purchase a
bicycle, strap it high and wide with as many sellable products as possible, and ride
through villages selling otherwise inaccessible goods to the rural populace. Amadou
would leave his family for several weeks at a time, which still made commerce better
than herding in terms of time away from his family. The days came and went as Amadou
pedaled his heavy, fixed-gear bicycle down unchartered trails and into small villages. He
rode the same route on each of his trips, beginning in Ouélessébougou and ending in
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Balandougouba in the northeast corner of Guinea by way of Dalabala, Sélingué, Kobada,
Samaya, and their surrounding hamlets.
Because his earnings depended on having those items that interested people on
hand, Amadou remembered that he often fastened too many goods to his bike to be sure
that he always had an inventory that attracted customers.
“I strapped everything I sold to my bicycle using long, rubber straps, but no
matter how I tied them, things were always falling from my bike. I constantly had to
stop, collect the items, and retie my haul!” he remembered.
Most days at lunchtime the families to whom Amadou sold items would invite
him to eat lunch with them and relax in their compound during the heat of the day. In the
evenings, Amadou could similarly expect that at least one of his customers would insist
that he eat dinner and sleep in his or her compound. Bamanankan speakers have an
expression, “The stranger is like the dew” (Dunan ye ngomi ye). Hosts recognized that
the time they would spend with Amadou would be fleeting, but they nevertheless
extended their hospitality and heartfelt kindness to him at their own personal cost,
knowing they would ultimately be repaid for their generosity with baraji.
“Why did these unfamiliar hosts trust you?” I asked Amadou. “You could have
been a thief! And why did you trust them not to mistreat you?”
“We are all children of Adam (hadamadenw),” Amadou responded.
“And what is the significance of that?” I asked.
“People are all siblings (balimaw),” he elaborated, “and we earn baraji by caring
for each other.”
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Amadou explained that strangers welcomed him into their homes on the premise
that they were distant kin and due to the sense of obligation this relationship evoked. I
learned from Amadou that the hospitality he relied on from strangers became an
expression of the state of social relationships in Mali, particularly the degree to which
West Africans agreed that all people should treat one another as siblings even though
time and distance had attenuated bonds of kinship. Amadou believed that the assumption
that all people were siblings had diminished in recent years. He said that ways of
thinking about and treating visitors had become “mixed up” (ɲagami) in twenty-first
century Mali. Amadou regularly complained that people had become more suspicious
and less trusting of each another and were, consequently, disinclined to treat each other
with the same hospitality that they would extend to recognized kin. Although Amadou
regretted these developments, he recognized that during his adult life he had also grown
increasingly suspicious of acting too generously toward people he did not know.
Amadou had experiences while working as a salesman that led him to distrust
many of the people he met, and he gradually began to approach most of his customers as
distant strangers, rather than kin, in order to protect himself from those who might cheat
him. For example, he recounted that one day a woman in Sélingué, a town sixty
kilometers southwest of Bamako, asked him to lend her ten kilograms of sugar so she
could make flavored ice to sell. She promised Amadou she would pay him back as soon
as she had sold her product. Amadou trusted her and gave her his sugar. Several weeks
passed without Amadou seeing his debtor when he rode through Sélingué on his bicycle
and began to ask residents about her whereabouts. He learned that she had moved to
Mopti, a city more than 750 kilometers north of Sélingué. Amadou identified this type of
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deceit—which he noted had become endemic in West Africa—as a cause for the
increasing reserve and lack of trust between people.70
In addition to becoming more suspicious of strangers while working as a traveling
merchant, Amadou also came to perceive the forest as being more dangerous than he had
in the past. Although years of herding had accustomed Amadou to working in forests, he
felt vulnerable and insecure about traveling alone and without the company of a herd of
cattle. He purchased a rifle and carried it slung over his shoulder to protect himself.
Amadou did not like having a gun, but as he had heard stories about the frequency of
robberies and wild animal attacks on humans in the backcountry, he came to see owning
a weapon as necessary.
Amadou drew his weapon on only one occasion. One morning, while riding his
bicycle down a narrow dirt path in the forest, he heard a rustling in the thicket. His
muscles tightened, and his mind snapped to attention when suddenly a large baboon (gɔn)
appeared on the trail.
“It was the largest baboon I’d ever seen!” Amadou recalled. “I stopped my
bike, and the baboon and I began to stare at each other. Suddenly the baboon started
moving toward me and I realized that it wasn’t afraid of me. This wasn’t an ordinary
70
Although Amadou said that the inclination to treat strangers as kin had cooled in 2011 in comparison to
the familiarity and confidence with which people had dealt with each other in the past, addressing groups
and audiences as “my siblings” (n’ balimaw) remained a popular salutation in Mali, especially for public
speakers. For example, newscasters for Mali’s national radio and television broadcasting service for
ORTM (Office de radiodiffusion et de télévision du Mali), often greeted their viewers for their weekly
newscast (dogokun kibaru) in the Bambara language as “my siblings.” Likewise during the March 2012
coup d’état in Mali political and resistance leaders both appealed to Mali’s populace in their speeches by
addressing their audience as “my siblings.” For instance, Dr. Adama Traoré, the vice-president for
Coordination of Mali's Patriotic Organizations (COPAM), a pro-coup d’état group, drew on ties of kinship
as well as the pervasive tenet of baraji in his official declaration on the coup by beginning his speech with
“my siblings,” and concluding by saying, “May baraji be with you all” (Aw ni baraji). The interim Prime
Minister of Mali, Dr. Cheick Modibo Diarra, also addressed Malians as “siblings” in his appeal for peace
following the coup.
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baboon! I drew my rifle and pointed it at his face. Our eyes met for a moment and then
it turned quickly and moved off the trail. I was glad I had a gun that day!”
When off the road and out of the forest, Amadou had more time together with
his wife, children, and friends in Ouélessébougou. He recounted that one of the most
important decisions that Nouhouba and he had made during their children’s early lives
concerned whether or not to enroll them in school. During my fieldwork I regularly met
parents who choose not to send their children to school and instead educated them in the
family’s profession, such as herding or farming. This decision seemed sensible given
that the chances of finding employment after having gone through the public education
system were slim. When their children were young, Amadou and Nouhouba could
scarcely see the worth in sending their children to school. Amadou perceived that quality
education in Mali was reserved for the rich, who paid for private schools and then went
abroad for higher education.
Amadou and Nouhouba ultimately made different choices for each of their six
children regarding their education. All of Amadou’s children, except his youngest son,
Modibo, received at least one year of education from both the local public school and
medersa. Modibo was born mentally retarded, a condition that Amadou deemed came
from God. Amadou assessed that Modibo would not do well in school, and so Amadou
focused on teaching Modibo how to herd and practice Islam so that he could successfully
work and earn baraji. During my fieldwork, Modibo was in his thirties and continued to
live with Amadou and Nouhouba. He contributed to the compound by caring for his
family’s small flock of sheep, and he helped his mother by making occasional trips to the
market. Like his father, Modibo preferred the open space and freedom of the forest to
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crowded public places and detested when Nouhouba sent him to the market and
complained to me about it on several occasions. On one particular morning, when I
passed Modibo, he was fuming while on his way to the market. He uncharacteristically
greeted me by letting off an exaggerated sigh and quickening his pace. Despite these rare
moments of defiance toward his parents and chores, Modibo was the most pious of
Amadou’s children in Amadou’s eyes. Amadou told me, for instance, me that Modibo
had insisted on fasting during Ramadan since childhood, prayed in the mosque for every
prayer from a young age, and acted with notable kindness, obedience, industry, and
honesty in his daily life.
Although Modibo was largely self-disciplined from an early age, Amadou’s other
children required closer attention and occasional punishment. Amadou and Nouhouba
assumed responsibility for their children’s conduct and tried to instruct them on how to
live as honorable Muslims and earn adequate baraji. Amadou’s own father had beat
Amadou on one occasion during his childhood, and Amadou found it unsavory as a father
to hit his children if and when severe offenses demanded it.
“It’s not a sin to beat a child. If you don’t hit your children, they won’t know
much as adults,” he opined.
Yet Amadou had always abhorred violent behavior and conflict. Fortunately for
him, he only found one instance in his experience that warranted beating one of his
children. One afternoon Amadou’s neighbor told him that she had seen Amadou’s oldest
son, Mohamadou, collecting mangoes with his friends in the forest when he should have
been at school.
“I asked Mohamadou where he had been when he finally came home at the end of
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the day,” Amadou recounted. “He told a lie and said he’d spent the day at school. I
grabbed him in anger and raised my arm to hit his back, but he stood up and tried to break
free at the same moment that my forearm came down on him. WHACK! I broke my arm
bone cleanly in half against his head.”
Amadou was in need of a healer. He told me that men from the Coulibaly clan
possessed a secret and specialized knowledge (dalilu) for healing broken bones. But, as
with other forms of dalilu, people seeking to commercialize and profit from their occult
abilities had compromised their expertise. With his broken arm aching and hanging
limply from a homemade sling, Amadou asked friends in Ouélessébougou if they knew a
reputable Coulibaly man who could heal him. He learned that the nearest Coulibaly with
such aptitude lived in Mana, a town about four kilometers directly north of
Ouélessébougou. Amadou recalled that he broke his arm during Ramadan. He walked,
as a result, everyday for weeks on an empty stomach to this man’s home in Mana for
treatment. Each day the Coulibaly man massaged Amadou’s arm, washed it in specially
prepared elixirs, and recited incantations (kilisi) and benedictions (dubaw) for Amadou.
Amadou did not pay money for these treatments, but the man healed on the
understanding that the he would one day be repaid by God with baraji for helping injured
members of his community. Within weeks Amadou’s arm was rehabilitated, and he was
able to ride a bicycle again and return to work.
Life was good for Amadou, but his finances were difficult. He found that he had
just enough money to buy rice, sauce condiments (nasɔngɔ), medicine, and clothing for
his family during the years he worked as a traveling salesman. But it was difficult for
him to save money once he had met his family’s basic needs. Living hand-to-mouth
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made Amadou feel increasingly nervous. He began to ask friends if they knew of any
lucrative job opportunities in the region and several people told him they had heard that
men could make significant money working in the gold mines in Guinea. Amadou
initially dismissed the prospect. He liked spending as much time as possible in
Ouélessébougou, where he could manage his responsibilities as compound chief (dutigi)
in his family residence and ensure that all members of his household upheld the behaviors
and Muslim practices that he valued. But without other appealing possibilities, he
weighed the prospect of financial security that mining gold might bring him against the
isolation of living far from his home and family and decided to travel to Guinea and seek
work in a gold mine.
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In the late 1980s Amadou left his family in Ouélessébougou and relocated to
Fatoya, a village known for its alluvial gold deposits in northwest Guinea, to begin work
at an artisanal gold mine. Artisanal mining operations are considered especially
dangerous, as miners are exposed to dangerous levels of mercury exposure though direct
contact with the skin and the inhalation of mercury vapor (Hilson 2003: 164, 240).
Moreover, because panners are typically unregulated, self-employed, and paid according
to the weight of how much gold they extract, they consequently overwork themselves and
become victims of fatigue-related accidents (see Hilson 2003). Amadou dealt with poor
health and exhaustion during the several years he lived and worked as a miner in Fatoya
and classified mining as the most difficult job he had worked in his lifetime.
In addition to the physical stresses to his health, Amadou felt emotionally vexed
and was often involved in fights with the other men who mined in the area. Wealthy
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businessmen from Bamako, Amadou said, paid him and other miners according to the
gross weight of gold they extracted. These wealthy men then employed jewelers to
fashion expensive necklaces, earrings, beads, bracelets, and other gold-incised
accessories from the gold. On several occasions Amadou went weeks without earning
significant wages and felt compelled to confront his co-workers for their laziness
(salabaatɔya), an indulgence that Amadou found immoral.
“A single person cannot mine gold!” Amadou exclaimed. “I needed help, but
every afternoon the other men would want to nap or play cards instead of working.”
If he worked consistently everyday, Amadou remembered that he and the other
miners could typically collect enough gold to sell every three days. I wondered about the
security of the gold that Amadou extracted during the days that passed between sales.
“Didn’t you worry that one of the men you worked with would steal the gold from
the group before you sold it?” I asked.
“Gold is bad! Everyone knows that.” Amadou told me. “If a person steals gold,
the gold will kill them and their entire family.”
Amadou recalled that he had heard stories throughout his life about compounds in
which all residents had suddenly and mysteriously died after one member of the
compound stole gold, a good example of how the moral decisions an individual makes
can impact his or her entire family. He added that, in the past, all power objects (jɔ) were
comprised simply of small nuggets of gold or silver stored in cloth pouches. Owners
merely whispered their desires to the precious metals and their wishes were soon
actualized.
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“Gold has too much power for a single person to handle it in large quantities,”
Amadou said. “All the miners knew that.”
Although regular conflicts developed between miners over one another’s’ work
ethic, Amadou said that the majority of the men he worked with were Muslim and that
they encouraged one another’s practice of Islam. They stopped their work whenever
possible for prayers, fasted together throughout Ramadan, and encouraged each other to
save a portion of their income to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Amadou had dreamed
of visiting Mecca as a child, but reality had a way of wiping out his childhood wishes,
and he knew he would likely never be able to save enough to visit Mecca and also
provide for his family. Amadou thought about his family constantly while in Guinea. He
missed them and grew especially melancholy spending the end of Ramadan and Tabaski
without his wife and children. He and the men he worked with took holidays off from
their work in order to feast, pray, and celebrate with one another, but he longed to see his
family and observe Muslim holidays with them in Ouélessébougou. Amadou explained
that practicing Islam and earning baraji while mining helped him to feel connected to his
family.
After several years working in Guinea, Amadou decided it was time to return to
Ouélessébougou. He had built up a modest savings working as a miner, but he felt too
tired and lonely to remain in Guinea. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he returned
to Ouélessébougou determined to find permanent work in the area to provide for his
household.
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Amadou knew when he decided to return to Ouélessébougou from Guinea that he
could not fully support his family by herding in the area. He realized that he needed to
add further income to what herding would generate and knew that farming would give
him the greatest prospect of extra income. Amadou was originally reluctant to farm.
Like many other Fula men, he approached farming with contempt and considered cattle
husbandry a superior profession (see Hopen 1958: 29-30). In the end, he put his family’s
welfare above his personal preferences and began to farm.
Upon returning to Ouélessébougou, Amadou contacted a landowner he knew
through friends to inquire about using one of his fields to grow peanuts. The landowner
gave Amadou permission to use the land without charge. For the rest of his adulthood,
Amadou owned and herded occasional cattle and sheep but farmed as his primary
profession. Amadou had learned to farm in his childhood while working at Abdoulaye’s
medersa, and his farming pursuits in Ouélessébougou prospered with the help of his
children. Each of Amadou’s children remembered that their father woke them at sunrise
every morning, and, after a modest porridge (seri) breakfast, they would walk out to
Amadou’s field together and begin their daily farming routine, which involved planting,
tilling, and harvesting peanuts, on the dusty outskirts of town. Spending prolonged
periods in the field fostered cohesion between Amadou and his children, which made
Amadou especially content given that his previous work in herding, trading, and mining
had required him to pass extended periods of time away from home. Amadou passed the
time in their field by telling his children stories from his varied life experiences and
explaining the important role that Islam had played in his life. All of Amadou’s children
said that Amadou’s dedication to Islam and strong work ethic were the attributes they
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most admired most in their father. Like Amadou, they similarly valued work as a means
to gain baraji.
Even while living happily as a husband and father, Amadou thought often of his
mother, siblings, and memories from his childhood in Npièbougou. Every few years
Amadou would arrange for his aging mother, Ina, to travel from Npièbougou to
Ouélessébougou to visit him and his family.
“On her final visit to Ouélessébougou, I begged her to stay with me and not return
to Npièbougou. She had become very old and I wanted us to be together. I promised her
that I could take good care of her,” Amadou said sadly. But Ina interrupted Amadou’s
invitation and immediately refused, “She told me that a mother should not live with her
youngest child if her older children are alive to care for her.”
Shortly after Ina returned home to Npièbougou from Ouélessébougou, Amadou
received news that his mother had died. Filled with grief, Amadou solemnly arranged to
travel immediately to Npièbougou to attend a sacrifice held in Ina’s honor. As the years
continued to pass, Amadou made six more trips to Npièbougou after the death of each of
his siblings.
Amadou saw it as his duty as a Muslim to overcome the emotional distress that
accompanied the death of each of his family members. He believed that he would see his
mother and siblings after his own death and relied on the tenet of baraji to keep his
connection to deceased kin active during the rest of his earthly life. Bonds of kinship in
West Africa did not rupture after death and continued to require effort and time to
maintain. Amadou moved through his adult life and advancing years thinking often of
his deceased family and feeling confident that the baraji he had earned pleased,
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benefitted, and continually connected him to his grandparents, parents, and siblings. In
essence, kinship in West Africa encompassed Islam. In West Africa, Muslims
reconfigured their practice of Islam and understanding of baraji throughout their lives to
adapt to new conditions and social dynamics, such as kin relations. Amadou,
accordingly, grew to understand and evaluate his kin relationships through baraji. His
deceased and living kin inspired him as he felt an expectation to earn baraji in all the
intricate ways his kin group had taught him during his childhood and adolescence.
The dissolution and expansion of kin relationships was common in West Africa,
and Amadou’s adult life demonstrates how his kin group changed and expanded through
experiences with birth, maturity, frequent relocations, marriage, and death. To ensure the
prosperity of his kin group, Amadou similarly instructed members of his household in
practices he had adopted for earning baraji. Amadou, like other Muslims in West Africa,
formalized, strengthened, and sustained his relationships with kin through his own efforts
to earn baraji and by supporting his family’s practice of Islam.
Amadou worked alongside his family as a farmer and part-time herder for the
remainder of his middle-aged adult life. As the seasons changed and years passed, the
changes he noticed in himself and in his children compelled him to realize that he was
becoming an old man (cɛkɔrɔba), and he began to contemplate the implications of
entering the final stage of his life. His children began to speak of marriage, moving away
from Ouélessébougou in search of work, and they openly mused about having children of
their own. Every time Amadou looked in the mirror he noticed more gray hairs, white
whiskers, and the lines in his face deepening. Amadou welcomed these changes and the
process of aging, knowing that old age was the most dignified time of one’s life and
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feeling appreciative that God had permitted him to have the experience of leading his
household and community as an elder.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have presented Amadou’s experiences as a middle-aged husband
and father. I have argued that Islam and efforts to acquire baraji in West Africa must be
understood in terms of residential affiliation and of the collaborative pursuit of baraji by
kin groups, which benefits both living and deceased Muslims. As Amadou pursued his
various occupations, which included cattle herding, commerce, gold mining, and farming,
he was obliged to travel and live throughout West Africa. Yet he remained connected to
his kin through his practice of Islam, which in turn enabled him to perceive the Muslims
he met on his various journeys as distant kin and siblings (balimaw). As members of a
vast, extended kin network, Muslims in West Africa worked to attain baraji in order to
enter paradise and continue their familial relationships in the afterlife. They operated on
the understanding that the baraji they earned stood to benefit both themselves and those
who had died before them. Amadou’s experiences showed that Islam in West Africa
serves as a key idiom by which people evaluated and organized kin relationships and
membership in residential compounds and that kin actively evaluated the people with
whom they shared a residence in terms of their mutual willingness to cooperate in the
practice of Islam.
Throughout Amadou’s adulthood, he viewed his marriage with his wife and his
relationships with his children and deceased relatives as responsibilities that motivated
his practice of Islam and vice versa. In the next chapter, I show how aging allowed
Amadou to spend an unprecedented amount of time pursuing baraji by participating in
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funeral rites and sacrifices, which I describe, and by serving as muezzin for
Ouélessébougou’s largest mosque. In his advancing years, Amadou also spent more time
reflecting on his life and the implications of changes he had endured since his early
childhood in Npièbougou. When I met Amadou as an old man, he often described
himself to me as a “sad” (dusukasi) and “troubled” (kɔnɔganko) man. Amadou had also
noticed throughout his lifetime drastic and detrimental changes to Mali’s environment,
which he directly attributed to God, and he worried about the security of future
generations. Chapter six will examine how Amadou reconciled his preference and
longing for the past with his present circumstances as an elderly man in early twentyfirst-century Ouélessébougou.
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CHAPTER SIX
GROWING OLD
Bamanankan speakers have a saying, “Good care of oneself leads to a good old
age” (Jantoyɛrɛla, kɔrɔko ka ɲi). Amadou had enjoyed good health during his childhood
and adult life, but he started to consider ways to better preserve his physical condition as
he became keenly aware that he was aging. He wanted to honor the experience of
looking, feeling, and growing older, as he had looked forward to the prospect of
becoming an old man since childhood. He viewed the opportunity to grow old as a
scarce and important opportunity that God only granted to select persons. Indeed, life
expectancy at birth in early twenty-first century West Africa was only forty-six, and most
people died before reaching their senior years from malnutrition, infectious and parasitic
diseases, or injuries sustained in accidents (World Bank 2006: 13). Amadou revered
elderhood as the most respectable phase that a person could reach in the course of one’s
lifetime and looked forward to becoming a recognized elder in his community. In this
chapter I show how elderhood, as the final stage in the life cycle, offered elderly West
African Muslims a special opportunity to earn baraji at an unprecedented rate by
participating in rituals and serving their kin groups and communities. Amadou accepted
these opportunities with solemnity and publically served his community as a town elder
while also privately reflecting on the future of the world, especially given the poor state
of its environment and corrupt political leadership.
Amadou first made changes to his outward appearance to mark his aging process.
During his years as a middle-aged adult, he typically wore used trousers and short219
sleeved shirts that had been sent to West Africa from European and North American
countries, but this attire did not seem appropriate to him as an elder.
“An old man wearing second-hand clothing (yuguyugu)?” Amadou imagined.
“Everyone would laugh at him!”
Amadou gave his imported knit polo shirts and cotton pants to younger friends
and began to dress in homespun, baggy trousers paired with matching, loose, flowing
robes with long sleeves (boubou) and covered his head with a small cap (kufi). Most
days he wore a grey t-shirt underneath his robe, explaining that old age caused him to feel
cold easily and necessitated the extra layer. He grew a short beard that displayed his
white whiskers as the wrinkles in Amadou’s face expanded, testifying to a lifetime of
laughter, worry, and long days spent working under the sun. He slowly lost all but his
top front teeth and one lower molar, which limited the foods he could enjoy. Amadou
gave up eating meat because his remaining teeth were in too poor a condition to chew.
He relied on fish as a principle, but rare, source of protein. Like other elderly men and
women in Mali, he stopped eating salt at night in a stated effort to regulate his blood
pressure. Amadou, moreover, eventually changed his daily schedule and occupation to
mark his status as an old man (cɛkɔrɔba). His slim frame became tired and frail, and he
decided to stop farming in an effort to preserve his health and lead his life in accord with
what he viewed as the responsibilities of a cɛkɔrɔba. Old men and women enjoyed high
levels of social, political, religious, and familial power in West Africa, and elders used
age and seniority to justify the power that they had over their communities and family
(see Riesman 177: 35). Amadou also regarded old age as a time reserved for intense
devotion to Islam, the focused pursuit of baraji, and an intense involvement in his
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community. Accordingly, he felt obliged to spend his days working within town limits
and in close proximity to Ouélessébougou’s central mosque.
This last chapter in Amadou’s life story brings my inquiry into his personal
history to a close. Amadou’s experiences and perspectives as an elder continue to reveal
the ways he practiced Islam and earned baraji while reflected his reputation as an asset to
his community for his dignity, authority, and sagacity. In 1967 Margaret Clark
classically observed that, judging from anthropological accounts, “the span of years
between the achievement of adult status and one’s funerary rites is either an ethnographic
vacuum or a vast monotonous plateau of invariable behavior” (55; see also Cohen 1994:
137). Shortly after Clark’s observation an abundance of ethnographic literature emerged,
mostly with Euro-American focus on aging, to fill this void and create a subfield of geroanthropology (see Amoss & Harrell 1981; Bernardi 1985; Fortes & Evans-Pritchard
1940; Fry 1980; Kaufman 1986; Kertzer & Keith 1984; Kugelmass 1986; Lock 1993;
Luborsky & Sankar 1993; Myerhoff 1978; Sokolovsky 1990). To extend these efforts by
adding an account of an elder West African man, this chapter reveals that aging prompted
striking changes in Amadou’s daily life. I argue that elderhood represented the most
crucial and distinctive point of his lifetime. As such, this phase in Amadou’s life story
contributes to anthropological understandings of old age, baraji, and the dynamic nature
of Islam in Mali by paying systematic attention to the role Amadou played in his town as
a recognized Muslim elder.
The chapter illuminates the main events and viewpoints that Amadou encountered
during his time as a cɛkɔrɔba in Ouélessébougou. I show the essential role that elders
played in daily and ritual life in West Africa and how Amadou valued and used his
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position as a cɛkɔrɔba to participate in Muslim practices that allowed him to earn baraji
at an unparalleled rate. In this way, I pay special attention to the ways in which Amadou
earned substantial amounts of baraji as an old man who was willing and available to
attend and participate in newborn naming ceremonies, wedding celebrations, funerals,
and sacrifices. I also detail how Amadou amassed baraji by serving as muezzin at the
town’s largest mosque and overseeing the mosque’s security and basic maintenance.
Amadou also viewed old age as a time for extended reflection on the changes a person
had experienced over his or her lifespan. He talked about his own life without a shadow
of disappointment but was critical of the world he lived in and that he would leave behind
for his descendants. Like other residents of Ouélessébougou, Amadou often spoke of the
way Mali’s climate had become increasingly inhospitable. This chapter, therefore,
concludes with ethnographic vignettes about the environmental changes that Amadou and
other people in Ouélessébougou have witnessed during their lifetimes. I also relate how
Amadou and other people in Ouélessébougou managed and assessed the causes of
climate change in Muslim terms.
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Amadou continued to farm on his small field on the outskirts of Ouélessébougou
until shortly after the turn of the new millennium. In 2001 he began to feel continually
winded and experienced sharp pains when he tried to catch his breath while farming.
Alongside his breathing problems, he developed a case of chronic coughing and fatigue
that eventually prompted him to seek treatment from the public clinic near his home in
Ouélessébougou. Amadou’s doctor diagnosed him with pneumonia and prescribed a
course of numerous medicines that Amadou described as “expensive” (gɛlɛn) and
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“ineffective” (fu). Amadou ultimately gave up on medicinal treatments for his case of
pneumonia and remembered that he spent nearly two years resting in bed in order to
recover from his sickness. During this time Amadou deemed himself incapable of fasting
and refrained from participating in Ramadan for the first time since his young adulthood.
He said that fasting was not compulsory if a Muslim was in poor health. Although
skipping Ramadan did not weigh as a sin because of his sickness, Amadou regretfully
forfeited the baraji that he would have otherwise earned.
After Amadou recovered from his two-year bout of pneumonia he began to
consider returning to full-time work. Although I knew many old men in Ouélessébougou
who farmed well into their senior years, Amadou thought farming was too physically
intense for his old age and decided to earn his living by making and selling rope to
Ouélessébougou residents. Still he worried less about money the older he became
knowing that he, like other elders in West Africa, could rely on his growing children to
find jobs and begin contributing to his subsistence. For instance, by the time Amadou
became an old man, Amadou’s oldest child, Mohamadou, had moved south in search of
labor in Côte d’Ivoire’s towns, and Mohamadou sent money to his father whenever he
could afford to do so. Having children offered parents invaluable experiences for earning
baraji during and after their mortal lifetime, but West Africans also considered
parenthood necessary to ensure that they be properly cared for during their senior years.
I celebrated my thirtieth birthday during my fieldwork in 2011, and my age
prompted people in Ouélessébougou to ask me why I did not have any children. I
explained that, as a student, I felt that I could not afford to raise a child. My response
perplexed my friends, especially the grandmother of the compound where I lived, Yirigoi
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Konaté. Yirigoi regularly asked me in both public and private how I could not afford to
have children and wondered who would care for me when I grew old. She was appalled
when I explained that most adult children in America did not invite their parents to live
with them. In West Africa, Yirigoi told me, siblings fight for the privilege of caring for
an aging parent, and middle-aged adults earned baraji by supporting the elderly and
consequently displaying their selfless generosity to God.
Figure 18: The interior of Fousseyni’s eclectic shop
Although Amadou could depend on his children to give him extra money to
support himself, Amadou liked to work. He made rope to earn extra income for him and
his wife, Nouhouba. Amadou used the techniques that his father, Hamadi, had taught
him during childhood to make rope needed for such daily matters as drawing water from
the well, tying livestock, and securing cargo for transportation. Amadou wanted a
reserved workspace for his new venture. He asked Fousseyni Soumaré, a shopkeeper
who ran a boutique next to the spot where Amadou’s closest friend, Koniba Doumbia,
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worked as a welder, if he could make rope on the cement platform in front of Fousseyni’s
shop. Fousseyni farmed in addition to retailing. He sold an array of goods, from farm
tools to wooden boards for writing the Qur’an (walan), but most weeks he only opened
his shop on Friday for Ouélessébougou’s market day. Fousseyni welcomed Amadou to
work in front of his boutique, and the two men agreed that Amadou would take Fridays
off from his work so that Fousseyni would have the space he needed to open his shop on
market days.
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Amadou enjoyed making rope, but he daydreamed in his old age about resuming
his work as cattle herder. As a Fula man, Amadou considered cattle herding his natural
occupation. When I met Amadou, he said he wanted to travel to the United States. His
wish to visit the U.S. was not uncommon, and most people I met told me that they hoped
to move to America, learn English, and earn a university degree. Always a free spirit,
Amadou had no interest in pursuing any such hackneyed schemes. He imagined America
instead as a place where he could herd cattle again. Dreams came true in the serene lands
of America, and, in Amadou’s mind, the country could reenergize and offer an elderly
man the chance to return to an exhausting occupation.
Too tired in his old age to herd cattle in West Africa, Amadou made the best of
his circumstances—as he always had. He used working in town and his status as a
cɛkɔrɔba elder to immerse himself in Ouélessébougou’s public and ritual life. As an
elderly man, his presence at rites of passage such as naming ceremonies (den kun di),
weddings (furusiri), funerals (jɛnɛja), and posthumous sacrifices (saraka) was highly
recognized, sought after, and honored. During the time I spent working with Amadou,
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almost everyday at least one townsperson stopped by his workspace to notify him of the
day, time, and place of an imminent ritual and to request his attendance along with other
cɛkɔrɔbaw who worked and socialized nearby.
Amadou earned an inestimable sum of baraji by attending these events and
enjoyed being the preferred guest at festivities that marked births and marriages in his
friends’ and neighbors’ compounds. He and the other old men and women
(musokɔrɔbaw) enjoyed special treatment and were offered coveted chairs and the first
servings of highly anticipated refreshments. But his obligation to attend funerals and
posthumous sacrifices always dampened Amadou’s otherwise joyful disposition.
“Learning how to feel sad and not cry is a necessary part of becoming an old
man,” Amadou told me of his ability to always outwardly control, at least in public, his
sorrow.
Amadou had ample opportunity to master his response to loss and sadness.
Living in Mali, he was already overly familiar with illness and death. When loved ones
died, families assured that funerary and burial practices took place within one day of the
death. Families normally preserved deceased old men and women until the morning
following their passing so that word of the death could spread, and the townspeople could
arrange to attend the funeral. Children, on the other hand, were typically buried within
hours of their death and in less elaborate services.
I clearly remember the first funeral for a child that I attended in Mali. On
September 3, 2011, during the day's third prayer (fitiri), I sat in the stale afternoon heat
making a rope by myself while Amadou prayed in the mosque. I looked up from my
work and noticed my great-aunt (tɛnɛmuso), Djègèni, walking toward me carrying a child
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on her back. Because old women in Mali rarely transported children, I immediately took
alarm and stood up. As she came near I noticed that she had completely covered the
child with a headscarf.
“What's the matter?” I asked.
“My granddaughter is dead,” Djègèni responded and continued walking.
A man sitting nearby who overheard our brief conversation immediately climbed
on his motorcycle and went after Djègèni to offer her a ride the rest of the way home. I
followed on foot.
When I arrived at home I found a small group of women calmly laying down
plastic mats in Djègèni’s house. They placed Djègèni’s dead granddaughter, named
Mouli, in the center of the largest mat and wrapped her loosely in two used headscarves
while I stood uselessly in the doorway.
One woman noticed my overwhelmed eyes and approached me saying, “Silence
yourself (i makun),” over and over again.
“I feel like I need to do something,” I replied.
The woman told me that Mouli’s mother had spent all her money on medicine.
“She needs soap to wash her daughter and a white cloth to bury her in. Give her money if
you can.”
“Of course. How much?”
“500.”71
I pulled 1000 CFA from my wallet and went back into the house.
71
About $1.00 USD.
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While Bourama, the chief of my compound, dug a hole for Mouli’s grave at the
public cemetery, Amadou arrived at my compound. He and another old man walked
rapidly across our courtyard and into Djègèni’s house and soon after walked back out
carrying Mouli’s body and headed directly toward our latrine area. Four other men
followed behind carrying buckets of hot water that Bourama’s wife, Kadja, had
purposefully heated over the fire. More than twenty minutes elapsed before the men
returned carrying a small bundle. Mouli had been washed, wrapped in white, and rolled
into a new, plastic mat. They laid Mouli’s body down near the compound's gate and put
a large rock in front of it to prevent it from rolling down the subtle slope. The men
quickly washed to prepare to pray.
Amadou led the prayer. The people in Ouélessébougou habitually look into one
another's compounds as they pass by their neighbors’ homes, and every man who walked
by during the prayer stopped and joined the prayer. Bourama’s wife, Kadja, and I sat
together at the side and watched. Kadja’s three-year-old daughter decided that this was
an opportune time to throw a loud tantrum over the night’s dinner menu of to, a starchy
dish of finely compressed millet and sauce that we ate several times per week.
“Do you have a head? Shut your mouth (Kunkolo b’i la? I da bɔ na),” I sharply
whispered to her to get her to quiet down.
The men left to perform the burial after the prayer. They returned thirty minutes
later and sat in a circle while Amadou led a discussion about Islam and death that I could
scarcely overhear. Amadou next walked over to address us women. He eloquently told
us how God’s wishes often surpassed the wishes of humankind.
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“Sometimes God gives us children and sometimes He takes them away. When we
cry, we show God that we are ungrateful.”
Not yet an old woman capable of controlling my tears, I wept through Amadou’s
entire address.
The mourners began to depart after Amadou’s speech. Then Kadja said she
needed to start dinner and reminded me to make a trip to the pharmacy to buy her
youngest an antibiotic for his ear infection. My family could not afford to stop their
chores and responsibilities to grieve by sitting together for a prolonged period, and our
lives resumed with a somber tone. I, like the other members of my compound, talked
about Mouli often in the days following her death. We received a stream of guests who
came to offer condolences and recite benedictions on young Mouli’s behalf.
Mouli’s death upset me, and Amadou privately assured me that, because she had
died as a child, God guaranteed her a place in paradise. Amid the shredded grain sacks
we used to make rope, Amadou also told me that Mouli would be resurrected (lakunun)
someday.
“Look at us!” he said. “We know how to make rope and we know how to break
rope. We start our work, end it, and resume it again. God makes people, kills people,
and will resurrect people.”
Because of children’s guaranteed resurrection and salvation, Muslim parents in
Ouélessébougou typically only made modest sacrificial gestures in memory of a dead
child. For example, mothers and fathers often offered dates to their deceased child’s
friends but avoided organizing the kinds of extravagant posthumous sacrifices offered on
behalf of deceased adults.
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“Children can only earn baraji (emphasis mine),” Amadou explained. “Their sins
don’t count against them.”
Adults who passed away, on the other hand, were in a far more precarious
position. Facilitating their passage to paradise required more attention and effort.
Accordingly, after adults in Ouélessébougou died, surviving friends and family often
discussed the quantity of baraji that the deceased possessed. In order to promote the
deceased’s spiritual well-being, living kin organized sacrifices (saraka) that took place
three, four, seven, and/or forty days after death, depending on the family’s schedule and
ability to promptly design and finance the event. Such sacrifices were crucial and
represented a concerted effort to earn baraji for departed kin so that the deceased would
have the baraji needed to join their Muslim ancestors in paradise. Posthumous sacrifices
in Mali required a lot of money, and some elderly people saved money during their
lifetimes so that the funds for their sacrifice would be in place after their death. Other
families required over a month to pool the cash and resources needed to pay for a
posthumous sacrifice. Riesman (1977) rightly notes that ceremonies in West Africa, such
as the posthumous sacrifices that I studied are, “a sort of compromise between the
various notions of what a ceremony ought to be and between the consensus and the real
availability of persons and things” (178). I similarly documented that although surviving
family members cooperated to hold elaborate and well-attended sacrifices, they nearly
always came up short in funds, and sacrifices often missed key kin from the deceased’s
life who lived in regions from which it was too far to travel.
I attended many posthumous sacrifices during my fieldwork. Most memorably, I
went to a sacrifice with Amadou’s wife, Nouhouba, following the death of her first
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husband, Madou Doumbia. Madou had died in his seventies, and his long life warranted
a massive affair. Nouhouba and I arrived at the sacrifice together, held in Madou’s
compound, at nine o’clock on a rainy Sunday morning in September 2011. To
accommodate the crowd of attendees, Madou’s family had rented hundreds of metal
chairs, benches, and pavilion tents that filled the courtyard of the compound. Men and
women had organized themselves into separate sections, and Nouhouba and I found two
empty chairs and sat down among the woman attendees. As more and more people
arrived, adherence to seating oneself according to gender began to loosen, and
participants accepted seating wherever they could find it.
Figure 19: Amadou (center) sitting among town elders and Muslim leaders and studying the Qur’an during
a posthumous sacrifice
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A group of Muslim leaders and holy men (moriw), including Amadou, sat on a
large and colorful mat centered in the midst of the chairs and benches. As seated friends
and neighbors greeted, recited benedictions, and visited with one another, these men each
read individually from the Qur’an, seemingly undistracted from the pockets of activity
and conversation surrounding them. A griot (jeli) finally stood, microphone in hand, next
to the group of men studying religious texts and began to preside over the affair. Male
members of the crowd stood, expressed their condolences and, recited benedictions on
Madou’s behalf.72 The griot invited men and elderly women to stand and deliver short
speeches and offer money on Madou’s behalf. The griot advanced these speeches in a
louder voice and affirmed that the speaker was heard by steadily responding “Even so!”
(Hali!), “Amen!” (Amiina!), and “Yes!” (Naamu!) during each address and often
amplified the speaker’s thoughts after they returned to their seat.
I never knew Madou, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable as the sacrifice
progressed and the praises of his character intensified. I sat next to Nouhouba, Madou’s
ex-wife and Amadou’s current spouse, who had told me in conversations about the
violence and cruelty that typified her marriage to Madou.
I turned to Nouhouba and asked, “How are you feeling?”
Nouhouba whispered back, “Madou and I had children together, and now their
father is dead. I’m sad for my children.”
Unable to think of a response that seemed appropriate, I turned my attention back
to the sacrifice.
72
In Bamanankan suitable blessings for a posthumous sacrifice include, “May God have pity on the
deceased” (Ala k’a hinɛ su), “May s/he become a deceased Muslim” (Ala k’a kɛ silame su ye), “May God
accept their baraji” (Ala k’a baraji minɛ), and “May God cool their resting place” (Ala k’a dayɔrɔ sumaya).
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The speeches and benedictions soon tapered off, and Madou’s female kin next
distributed beans, coffee, and bread to the guests. Madou’s male kin had killed a cow
earlier that morning, and the men handed out portions of raw meat to Madou’s close
friends and family. Madou’s young grandchildren had dressed in Madou’s clothing to
remind us that Madou lived on through his kin. They circulated throughout the crowd
while people ate, and attendees offered them pieces of candy and coins. Participants
deemed that the grouping of public benedictions, intent study of the Qur’an, and generous
distribution of food to a large crowd had earned much baraji on Madou’s behalf.
Participants left knowing that they had received a nominal amount of baraji for attending,
but Amadou told me that most of the baraji earned that morning had gone to Madou.
I mentioned to Amadou that his participation in Madou’s posthumous sacrifice
took my by surprise, telling him that in the United States first and second husbands
typically do not get along with one another.
“And what do these men accomplish by fighting?” Amadou asked.
“Nothing,” I admitted. “I suppose it’s a matter of pride (yada).”
“Pride is a poor reason to hate someone,” Amadou opined.
Amadou dutifully attended services that marked the births, marriages, and deaths
of Ouélessébougou’s ever changing population and, partly by doing so, established
himself as an influential town elder and secured baraji for himself at an unmatched rate.
Most elderly people in Mali had scant idea how old they were in years, and Amadou
understood that recognizing the arrival of elderhood involved self-awareness and physical
changes in the body rather than reaching a certain age. By accepting these changes in
himself and altering his role in town affairs, Amadou successfully refashioned himself in
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Ouélessébougou as a cɛkɔrɔba and was accordingly recognized as such for his authority
and knowledge.
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Amadou’s status as a well-known cɛkɔrɔba wove him anew into his community,
and attending celebrations and ceremonies became a regular part of Amadou’s life. In
addition to these engagements, carrying out calls to prayer gave structure to his days.
Amadou assumed his permanent responsibility as muezzin after the death of his close
friend, Sidiki Kamara. Sidiki had served as muezzin at the large mosque next to
Amadou’s workspace for years and asked Amadou to substitute for him when he became
debilitated with an unspecified illness in 2009. Amadou respectfully performed the call
to prayer on Sidiki’s behalf for over two years before Sidiki died, and Amadou formally
inherited the position.
Amadou set the alarm on his metal, digital wristwatch to wake him up every
morning before dawn. He had no appetite at this early hour. He quickly dressed, quietly
left his compound without any breakfast or drink, and rode down the dirt road that ran
between his compound and the mosque on his bicycle. He said that the dark, empty
streets made him feel nervous, but his fears always subsided once he arrived safely at the
mosque. Before preparing himself for the call to prayer, he switched on the mosque’s
outside lights, unlocked the separate edifices in which men and women respectively
prayed, and turned on the microphone and loudspeaker used to broadcast the call to
prayer. He then stepped outside and washed his hands, mouth, inner nose, face, arms,
head, the inside and outside of his ears, and his feet as required for all Muslims before
prayer. Amadou’s multiple calls began to float through the town at least thirty minutes
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before the prayer was scheduled to begin. People slowly made their way to the mosque
once Amadou’s calls began. Old men and women typically attended mosque prayers.
Aging was associated in Ouélessébougou with more intensive prayer and acquisition of
baraji. Without formal jobs, domestic chores, or children of their own to rear, elderly
people had the freedom they needed to travel back and forth to the mosque throughout
the day. Because Amadou was always the first person to arrive for prayers and stayed
after each prayer until everyone had left the mosque, I estimated that he devoted about six
hours of his day to his responsibilities as muezzin.
Figure 20: Amadou demonstrates raising his hands to his ears for a call to prayer
In addition to performing the calls to prayer, Amadou oversaw the basic upkeep
of the mosque. He monitored the water level in the mosque’s well and during the dry
cold, and hot seasons, which, combined, lasted from November until May, he often
broadcast that the mosque’s well had run dry and asked members of nearby compounds
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to bring buckets of water to the mosque for people to use to wash before prayers. God
compensated the donors with baraji. Amadou also periodically made new rope for
drawing water from the mosque’s well, as water was drawn so often that the ropes
attached to metal handles of the soft, rubber pails quickly became ragged from use.
Amadou and I often had customers come to our workspace and request ropes of a
specified length and thickness. We kept one another apprised of the assignments we
were working on, and one afternoon Amadou smiled and told me the recipient for his
latest rope.
“Do you know who this is for?” he asked, holding up one of his flawless,
handmade ropes.
“Who?”
“God!” Amadou answered. “Do you know how God will pay me?”
“How?”
“Baraji!” Amadou told me, further clarifying that God rewarded all work put
toward the mosque’s upkeep with baraji.
Although Amadou did not receive cash wages for any of the work he did for the
mosque, he took his responsibilities seriously and found joy in the position all the same.
He told me that he assumed the role of muezzin because he loved God and Islam, wanted
to help Ouélessébougou’s Muslims, and trusted that he earned baraji from such service.
Amadou’s age and position as muezzin in the town’s largest mosque placed him at the
moral center of Ouélessébougou’s vast Muslim community. Muslims realized the time
that Amadou devoted to keeping their prayers punctual and the mosque in order and often
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found it appropriate to give Amadou gifts, such as rice, small cash donations, live
chickens, and kola nuts to show their gratefulness.
Koniba once told me, “The muezzins at the other mosques start their calls to
prayer only ten minutes before prayer time. It’s not enough notice! Whenever Amadou
is sick [and someone else does the call] everyone in Ouélessébougou ends up late for
prayer!”73
Many adults in town also deemed Amadou the ideal recipient of small, personal
sacrifices. Muslims in Ouélessébougou commonly performed personal sacrifices in order
to find solutions and overcome their private concerns and problems. Informants listed
domesticated animals as preferred sacrificial objects, although income restraints
prevented their use in most cases. Consequently, people typically bought either milk or
beans to offer God in sacrifice. To consecrate sacrificial offerings, residents would pray
privately with the object before dispensing it to individuals within their social and
religious communities. Prayers were used to explain to God why the sacrifice was being
offered and the outcome that the sacrificer would like to obtain from the offering. Some
people reported that their sacrificial prayers expressed the impossibility of their request
that could only come to fruition by the generosity of God. Following prayer, the person
making the sacrifice would visit select friends and neighbors to distribute the sacrificed
item. People understood that, in addition to serving as a potential means for resolving
personal hardships, sacrifices necessitated reward from God, and both the sacrificer and
beneficiary received baraji for their participation.
73
I had to take Koniba at his word that Amadou’s absence from the mosque led to frenzy around prayer
time. Amadou only missed performing the call to pray on two occasions during the entire time I spent in
Ouélessébougou: first, on the day we traveled to his hometown, Npièbougou, and, second, on the afternoon
he spent keeping me company while I was treated for malaria at a medical clinic in Ouélessébougou.
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I sat working with Amadou on numerous occasions when people came to him, at
various times of the day to give him sacrificial offerings and explain their troubles to him.
For example, late one afternoon, as Amadou and I organized our materials and prepared
to leave work for the day, a middle-aged Fula woman approached Amadou carrying two
liters of fresh milk, Amadou’s favorite food. She handed one liter of milk to Amadou
and said that she was offering it to him in sacrifice. She then gave Amadou the additional
liter and requested that Amadou give to it the town’s main imam (alimamiba), who led
prayer in the mosque where Amadou served.
“I have a son,” the Fula woman explained, “but he’s stupid and never did well in
school.74 This month I ended his studies and sent him to Senegal to find work. My
family’s welfare depends on his success in Senegal, and I want God to bless him.”
As Amadou listened to the woman explain her situation, he signaled his interest in
her problems by offering well-timed expressions of, “Ɔ hon” as she spoke. People in
Mali interpreted total silence during conversation as disinterest, and listeners were rarely
completely quiet when listening to a story. Several moments of silence eventually did set
in after the woman had finished telling Amadou about her affairs. Amadou broke the
pause and offered a long round of benedictions on the woman’s behalf, specifically
asking God to help her son find work (Ala k’a baara ɲini), ease her worries (Ala k’i hami
nɔgɔya), and strengthen her son’s health (Ala k’a kɛnɛya sabati).
74
Parents in Mali gave very frank evaluations of their children’s intelligence and abilities, even in front of
the child in question. I knew many parents who never sent a particular child to school or who stopped a
child’s studies early because they doubted he or she would ever succeed in academics. These parents
prudently arranged for other opportunities for their child to learn and prepare for adulthood, like
apprenticing at jobs involving manual labor.
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Amadou next offered counsel to reassure the woman that her son would likely
enjoy safety and success in Senegal, and he affirmed that God was omnipotent and
capable of offering solutions to seemingly unmanageable problems. “You’re right to
offer a sacrifice,” he assured her. “Worshipping (bato) and begging (deli) God for
compassion (hinɛ) are the only acts that will help you in this situation.”
Amadou then blessed the woman and her son one final time, saying, “God help
you all” (Ala k’aw dɛmɛ), and assured the woman that he would give the second liter of
milk to the imam and notify him of her troubles. The woman thanked Amadou and left.
As an old man, Amadou regularly found himself acting as a recipient for personal
sacrifices. People used sacrifices as an opportunity to manage their affairs and earn
baraji by showing their deference to God. Amadou also sought baraji for himself and
relieved his neighbors’ concerns by giving them advice and reciting benedictions.
Amadou explained that, by receiving personal sacrifices, attending posthumous sacrifices
and other life passage rites, serving as muezzin, and praying in the mosque, his daily life
and role in his community significantly changed as a cɛkɔrɔba in comparison to his
earlier adulthood. Amadou’s responsibilities to his community took precedence over
personal and material pursuits, and on many days he was unable to work or earn money
from crafting rope because attending ceremonies and calling the community to prayer
filled his schedule.
On most nights, Amadou passed the hours at home with his family. Very few
homes or businesses in Ouélessébougou had access to electricity in 2011, and Amadou
was accustomed to lighting his home using lanterns and flashlights and entertaining his
family without electronics. Like most West Africans, Amadou enjoyed watching
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professional soccer, and on some nights he came to my compound, which had electricity
and a large television, to watch championship matches. Otherwise Amadou reserved the
nighttime for long visits with his family and moments of private reflection on his life and
the world.
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Many mornings, when I asked Amadou how he had slept, he reported that he slept
poorly the night before and that thoughts about the troubled state of the world had kept
him awake late into the night. Amadou expressed special worry that the climate in West
Africa had become inhospitable in his lifetime and worried how environmental
conditions would impact future generations. I kept a record of Amadou’s frequent
complaints about the climate during the early months of my fieldwork in
Ouélessébougou, but I did not initially pursue the topic as a research interest.
Then one memorable evening when, while I was sitting in the courtyard of the
compound I lived in, I listened as Djègèni, the great-aunt of the residence, and Yirigoi,
the grandmother, loudly scheduled a fishing trip for the following afternoon. The two
women agreed they would leave after the day’s third prayer, which would give them
enough time to net their fish and return home before the fourth prayer. Adja, a twentyyear-old girl who also lived in the household, begged the two old women to forego their
plans. Djègèni and Yirigoi deliberately ignored Adja’s pleas, and their preparations
culminated as they brought their fishing nets outside for inspection. Upon seeing their
equipment, Adja began to cry and continued to plead to them not to go fishing.
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I finally asked Adja to explain her objection, and she told me, “People will see
them! Then they will tease me, saying my family is so poor that we send our old women
out to find food!”
Suddenly, Djègèni and Yirigoi began to laugh and assured Adja they had no real
plans to go fishing. Their preparations had been a joke to provoke her for having acted so
shallow about the importance of money in recent months.
As the women laughed together, I considered the inadequate protein intake in our
compound and decided that a fishing trip would, in fact, be beneficial to our diets.
I interrupted their amusement and asked, “Why don’t we go fishing? We haven’t
eaten fish for weeks, and we only eat beef in small portions. Let’s fish! I’ll go too!”
The joke turned, and Yirigoi and Djègèni now directed their laughter at me.
“Fish? Where?” they asked.
I thought about the geography of Ouélessébougou and realized that although we
were in the midst of the rainy season, no water flowed under any of the town’s bridges.
“We would love to fish,” the old women assured me and pointed at their unused
fishing gear as evidence of their desire, “but the river dried up more than ten years ago.”
At this point in the conversation, I thought about Amadou’s frequent concern
about the environment, and especially about the fact that the hot season had intensified in
temperature and duration while the rainy and cold seasons had progressively shortened.
Curiously, my desire to understand climate change in Mali led me back to my interest in
Islam and ritual practices. Amadou and other residents in Ouélessébougou pursued
sedentary farming and nomadic pastoralism, which made them vulnerable to hostile
environmental changes. Interestingly, they interpreted these changes, as well as how
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people managed and assessed them, primarily through Islam. In southern Mali, residents’
Muslim beliefs and practices played a central role in shaping interpretations of what has
caused climate change, and Muslims in Mali commonly used rituals to cope with climate
problems. I also learned that climate change impacted how Amadou and other Muslims
in Mali participated in politics and judged their leaders.
As Amadou explained climate problems in Mali, I also began to worry about the
fate of the environment in West Africa and turned to ecological and anthropological
studies of environment and resource management to better understand the issue. Hardin
(1968) has studied the fate of individuals , such as the residents of Ouélessébougou, who
consume and depend finite resources held in common. The “commons” such as the
forest where they grazed domesticated animals, gathered wood, hunted, picked fruit, and
farmed. Hardin offers a dooming prediction for the “commons,” and forecasts that
shared and ungoverned resources are destined for ruin, as people inevitably overuse them
in pursuit of their interests (1968: 1243-1245; see also Ostrom 1990: 2-3). Hardin has
called for increased, centralized governmental control over, or the privatization of, the
commons in order to preserve and determine who, when, and how people can access
shared resources (1968: 1245-1248; see also Ostrom 9-10). Hardin and other ecologists
have prescribed increased control over environmental resources, and, as environmental
consciousness has increased in the twentieth century, governments worldwide have taken
ostensible initiatives to protect and control their resources. In Mali, the Ministry of the
Environment and Sanitation (Le ministre de l'Environnement et de l'Assainissement) has
promoted the sustainable use of Mali’s resources. But I found that governmental
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regulations pertaining to the forest were weakly enforced and largely dismissed, and most
residents assigned authority over the commons to God.
This connection between Islam, the environment, and politics was
anthropologically unsurprising. In the late twentieth century Rappaport (1979, 1984)
spearheaded anthropological examinations of the power of ritual in conceiving and
dealing with ecological issues. Anthropologists have since drawn on Rappaport to focus
on ecology and ritual in understanding how civilians address and manage environmental
changes in their community (see Fairhead & Leach 1996; Messer & Lambek 2001;
Moran & Brondizio 2001; Wooten 2009).
My fieldwork further refines understandings of environmental changes in Mali by
explicating connections between Islam, politics, and the environment. Specifically,
Amadou said that communities could manage the conditions of the forest and the
abundance of resources together through their moral behavior and the acquisition of
baraji. As residents observed the tenets of Islam and earned baraji, God typically
perpetuated their earthly prosperity. God may occasionally choose to send a drought (ja)
or famine (kɔnɔgoba) in order to challenge and test the obedience of humans, but,
overall, He awarded righteous behavior by sustaining, or even improving, living
conditions in West Africa. Amadou lamented that, even if state authority had been able
to enforce their control over the environment and resources, it would have made little
difference and that depraved conduct had led God to negatively and permanently alter the
local environment.
Amadou and other town residents claimed that their environment had changed
drastically over their lifetime and detailed the disruptions these shifts had had on their
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welfare. For example, Amadou’s best friend, Koniba, had grown up in Ouélessébougou
and sentimentally described what used to occur in the nearby river and on its shores. As
a child, Koniba and his friends took refreshing swims during the hot season. The river
was reliably full all year-round. Koniba recalled that he kept watch for freshwater
crocodiles while swimming, which were known to float in the slow-moving currents of
the river. The river was also full of large fish, which his parents caught for the family.
Similarly, as a young woman, Yirigoi Konaté, who was in her seventies during
my research, used to fish at the river by casting a net into the water from its banks. While
fishing, she would visit with her neighbors who were washing clothes, taking a restful dip
in the water, or similarly fishing by the river. She recalled that pulling up a net with a
fish led to merriment, and onlookers would cheerfully sing to the successful angler,
“Jɛgɛba filɛ! Jɛgɛba filɛ! I ye jɛgɛba minɛ koyi!” (“Look at the big fish! Look at the big
fish! You really caught a big fish!”).
During the presidency of Modibo Keïta, Mali’s first president from 1960-1968,
residents in Ouélessébougou reported that they began to notice lower amounts of
precipitation causing the river’s level to recede. The river had entirely dried out by the
turn of the century. People took the loss personally. My compound’s grandmother,
Yirigoi, anthropomorphized the event, recollecting that the river had “run away” (bolila)
from the people of Ouélessébougou, as though it had stood up and relocated to a more
deserving group. With the river’s disappearance, the population lost their principal
source of protein: free fish. Residents’ diets were consequently filled with more
carbohydrate staples and less animal protein. Women from outlying villages with rivers
regularly traveled to Ouélessébougou’s market to sell their catch to residents. Fresh fish
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were priced at between 2,000 and 2,500 francs CFA per kilogram—a cost well beyond
the budgets of most residents, who typically earned less than 1,000 francs per day.75
Although Amadou loved fresh fish, he could scarcely afford to buy half a kilogram to eat
with his family more than once per week.
The slow desiccation of Ouélessébougou’s environment has also had negative
consequences beyond the dried riverbed. During interviews, elderly informants
concluded that farming and herding had become more difficult and less dependable and
profitable during their lifetimes. Farmers in the region, who normally harvested millet,
corn, and peanuts, had long worked without sprinkler irrigation systems. Yielding a
successful crop depended solely on ample rainfall, but in the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, high heat and humidity alongside infrequent rainstorms damaged the
quality and quantity of their harvests. The people in Ouélessébougou primarily ate
locally produced food, so the problems farmers faced concerned the entire town, as
Koniba reminded me. He echoed the fears of other informants when he said that people
in Ouélessébougou might die at any time from thirst or hunger. Anxieties about
residents’ uncertain future and susceptibility to the environment arose in every interview
I conducted about local ecology in Ouélessébougou. People readily recalled deceased
friends and family members whose deaths had been attributed to undernourishment or
dehydration during famines. They especially noted that malnutrition made people more
susceptible to developing fatal cases of malaria.
Many people in Ouélessébougou owned and herded domestic animals as their
primary occupation, but many had abandoned or scaled back their work because the
75
About $2.00 USD per day.
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drying pastures around Ouélessébougou made their income dangerously undependable.
Herders reported that less fresh grass was available and that their stock grazed in dry
pastures filled with coarse wild grass with low nutritional value. Finding water in
Ouélessébougou’s neighboring forest had also become difficult. On the days that I
accompanied Amadou’s son, Modibo, and his cattle into the forest, I learned that
typically neither animal nor owner had access to water until they returned home. Weary
animals ran to drink at the first sight of water upon arriving in town. One day on our way
back to town I helped Modibo pull his thirsty sheep away from a puddle of stale run-off
water from a latrine that Modibo recognized as dangerous. It took our combined strength
to move the obstinate rams.
Because of the changes in the environment, farmers and herders in Mali adjusted
their techniques in order to continue their pursuits (see Wooten 2009). For example,
fresh water for animals had once abounded in Mali’s forests but had now disappeared.
So, to supply fresh water, herders drew it by hand from wells for their stock. One Zebu
cow (gonga), could drink more than 40 gallons of water per day. Those responsible for
large herds regularly overused their wells, which temporarily dried out. When this
happened, people first relied on their neighbors’ wells. As a second option, residents
made use of freshwater hand pump wells installed by the municipal government in recent
years throughout the town. But, depending on the location of one’s compound, the
pumps could be more than two kilometers away. Using the pumps required time and
preparation. Wives gathered all the buckets and water containers in their household that
they could and rented a handcart before leaving. Then they waited for a turn at the pump
once they arrived before pushing the heavy handcarts filled with water back home.
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Herders reported that Mali’s desiccation had increased the number of livestock deaths,
and animals that did survive grew less than cattle formerly did. Because of poor
nourishment, the brindled cows in southern Mali produced less milk with lower
nutritional quality, and butchered animals yielded meat that was tough and stringy
(International Livestock Centre for Africa 1979: 71-74).
Figure 21: A group of slender cattle enter a forest on the outskirts Ouélessébougou for grazing
Wooten (2009) has highlighted the ways that Malians reflected on and negotiated
their livelihood and subsistence, and I observed that people in Ouélessébougou similarly
made changes to their lives in response to the drying environment while reflecting on its
causes (xiii-xiv). As residents in Ouélessébougou saw that their earnings dwindled from
farming and herding, many either migrated to cities for work or found low-paying jobs as
laborers in town. Meanwhile, the nights in Ouélessébougou were no cooler than the
days. Amadou often had difficulty sleeping because of the sultry heat. So did his two247
year-old grandson, for whom Amadou and his wife had assumed the responsibility of
raising. He would often stay up late at night during hot spells and cry because he was too
uncomfortable to fall asleep. Amadou and Nouhouba took turns manually fanning their
grandson until he fell asleep. The young boy often woke up several times in a single
night calling to be cooled again. Exhausted by restless nights, Amadou often found ropemaking too tiring. Like many others who worked near him, Amadou regularly stopped
his work to take short naps and complained about the excessive heat and “broken world”
(diɲɛ tiɲɛ) that Malians now inhabited.
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If the world had been broken, as Amadou claimed, I wondered what, or who, was
responsible for its ruin. I learned that many people in Mali believed that God had
changed the climate. Amadou thought that since God created the world He also
periodically altered it, and that humans had the chance to earn baraji by responding to its
changes. He further said that degenerate locals had provoked these changes through their
immorality. Amadou and other residents in Ouélessébougou also blamed international
political conflicts, corrupt world leaders, and warfare.
Amadou resented Ouélessébougou’s difficult environment and described the
changes as a consequence, inflicted by God, for immoral human behavior stemming from
the pursuit of material gratification over Islam and baraji. Many residents claimed that
their neighbors had committed sins that led to ecological changes, listing stealing and
lying as the most prevalent and problematic sins (jurumuw) in their community. Without
condoning the misdeeds of their neighbors, Amadou and other townspeople also told me
that the conduct of high-ranking politicians had prompted God to change the earth’s
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climate. One afternoon, while shopping in Ouélessébougou’s local market, I overheard
two farmers commiserating with each other that the lack of rain had decimated their
harvest. I looked up from choosing tomatoes and offered the men a sympathetic smile.
The farmers drew me into their conversation, and one exclaimed with frustration,
“George Bush and Barack Obama are breaking the world!” (“George Bush ani Barack
Obama bɛ diɲɛ tiɲɛ!”), while sweeping both arms across the front of his body like a
referee signaling an unsuccessful goal.
From a Malian perspective, leaders in Europe and North America had unlimited
money at their disposal but used it selfishly. Some residents testified that God saw the
United States government’s use of its power and wealth for wars against poorer countries
as unforgivable, resulting in a change in the earth’s climate. Muslims in Ouélessébougou
also accused militant Islamist organizations of threatening world security, placing the
responsibility for climate change on these organizations’ attacks on civilians. During
field research in 2009, I noticed that a t-shirt with images of George Bush and Osama bin
Laden and the ungrammatical English message, “World Need Peace,” had become
popular attire for young men. It came as no surprise to me to learn that Muslims in
Ouélessébougou ascribed blame for climate change to any person or group who
threatened world peace.
Most of the time, when discussing the impacts of foreign social, political, and
military issues on the local environment, residents focused on the world’s major
economies, but African countries were also occasionally criticized for their fighting. One
morning while working with Amadou I listened to Fousseyni Soumaré, the shopkeeper
and farmer who owned the boutique next to which Amadou and I worked, speak with the
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director of a local Qur’anic school. Fousseyni singled out Libya and Sudan as the most
violent countries in Africa. The school director reminded Fousseyni in a measured voice
not to ignore Mali’s southern neighbor Côte d’Ivoire, saying that the country’s 2010 postelection political crisis—in which President Laurent Gbagbo and opposition candidate
Alassane Ouattera both claimed victory—and the country’s subsequent civil war had
upset God. Fousseyni nodded and, after a long pause, noted the lingering violence in
Côte d’Ivoire, adding that these reflections gave him a clearer idea as to why his field
was so dry in 2010 and 2011.
Amadou, along with many other residents, associated politics with the greed,
deceit, and violence that led to negative environmental changes. Some responded to
desertification by paying attention to local politics and considering the merits of
candidates before casting their votes in each election, hoping that their candidate would
represent their morals and interests after the election. Other Malians lamented the actions
of national and provincial politicians, whom they said abandoned their supporters for
their own interests after winning the election. Numerous Malians told me that voting was
worthless and that they had vowed to no longer vote or otherwise participate in politics.
Amadou had voted in every election since independence in 1960 but said he would not
take part in the country’s upcoming presidential election.76 For Amadou, politicians had
contributed to the slow drying of Ouélessébougou and its surrounding villages and
jeopardized the spiritual security and baraji of Muslim voters. Amadou warned residents
against the danger of voting for politicians who acted unethically, saying that voters
could lose their baraji based on the conduct of the politicians for whom they voted.
76
A presidential election for April 2012 was scheduled during my fieldwork in 2011. On March 21, 2012,
fifty-eight days after I left Mali, Malian soldiers overthrew the administration of Amadou Toumani Touré.
The coup d’état led to an indefinite postponement of presidential elections.
250
Islam informed Amadou’s political viewpoints, and he paid close attention to the morals
of the politicians he supported. Amadou taught people in the town that God, in the
afterlife, would hold voters responsible for the innermost sins of the politicians they
supported. Such condemnation made political involvement too risky for Amadou, who
consequently curbed his interest in local and national politics.
Amadou and other Muslims in Ouélessébougou routinely blamed everyone from
sinful neighbors to corrupt politicians for environmental degradation. Only one
informant indicated that everyone in Ouélessébougou was responsible for local
environmental damage. Women in Mali prepared every meal over open fires, and one
woman I knew expressed concern that the wood and charcoal this practice required
damaged the ecosystem and caused savanna animals, such as elephants and lions, to
move south to the purportedly lush grasslands in Côte d’Ivoire. She also sensed that the
rate at which women cut and collected firewood on Ouélessébougou’s outskirts had made
the local forests less availing to herders and farmers in recent years. This woman’s
perceptions stood uniquely against the accounts of her neighbors, most of whom believed
that only God could generate significant changes to their climate. Accordingly, Muslims
in Ouélessébougou expressed concern for the climate by participating in religious
practices to earn baraji while appealing to God for a better environment.
☪
☪
☪
People participated in Muslim rituals to earn baraji and to plead to God to have
mercy and deliver them from their hard climate. The summer months of June, July, and
August are typically the rainiest of the year in Ouélessébougou, with August ranking as
the wettest, but August of 2011 brought terrible heat and humidity and little rain. As the
251
month ended, I listened as Amadou and other residents worried over the inadequate
rainfall. On the evening of Sunday, September 2, the town imams from the eleven
mosques in Ouélessébougou and holy men (moriw), including Amadou, organized a
special prayer meeting for the next day in which they would appeal to God for rain as a
group. The men assembled in the mosque on Monday morning, earning baraji together
by praying, reciting benedictions, and listening while the town’s imam read from the
Qur’an. The assembly lasted for over an hour. Although women were not invited, the
meeting was broadcast over the mosque’s sound system so that everyone near the mosque
could hear it.
Monday and Tuesday went by with the same blue skies, sunshine, and sultry air
that had tormented residents during earlier summer months. Muslim leaders scheduled a
second prayer meeting for Wednesday morning. This time they invited the women to
come. The meeting concluded at eleven o’clock, and by one o’clock storm clouds began
to gather over Ouélessébougou. It rained lightly all afternoon and at dusk the storm
intensified. Rather than visiting with friends and neighbors, families passed the night at
home listening as the rain rattled against their tin roofs. It was one of the biggest storms
of the wet season. The following morning the skies cleared, and women left their
compounds to walk about town and greet each other. They were overjoyed, taking public
credit for the sudden rainfall; after all, God had only supplied rain once women had been
included in the prayers. On Thursday morning, they returned to the mosque, deliberately
coordinated in white dresses and headscarves, to offer formal thanks to God through
prayer.
252
Figure 22: Muslim women in Ouélessébougou participate in a special prayer meeting at the mosque to pray
for rain.
Some men in Ouélessébougou resented that the women attributed the storm to
their prayers. The chief of the compound I lived in, Bourama, told me that religious
rituals had not brought rain in this particular case. In 2011 the Malian government
subsidized cloud seeding operations to create rain, and Bourama pointed out that a cloud
seeding aircraft had flown over Ouélessébougou two days before the storm. The rain
created a momentary feeling that the local climate was fixed, but the rejoicing subsided
shortly thereafter. Residents agreed that a single storm could not end the drought.
Meanwhile, elderly informants said that droughts had become less fatal than in the past,
largely because imported food and water are now more readily available. As the sixth
poorest country in the world, Mali received myriad international aid and food donations.
Some Malians welcomed the assistance, but others had misgivings about consuming food
from overseas. Amadou personally preferred only to eat food grown in Ouélessébougou
and was suspicious about international products. He told me that malaria had become
253
more deadly in his lifetime and theorized that the Maggi bouillon cubes that women in
Ouélessébougou used daily to flavor the sauces they served with rice were to blame.
One day Amadou asked several friends where Maggi products were produced.
“Hong Kong? Germany?” he asked rhetorically. “How can we eat something that we
know nothing about? It is making us sick!”
Amadou was among the many Ouélessébougou residents who preferred food
grown in their home region, making the drying climate a particularly frustrating and
complicated problem. Those who preferred eating local food or who depended on local
food production for their livelihood often turned to making personal sacrifices (saraka) to
seek rain, cooler temperatures, and baraji. Numerous farmers and herders in
Ouélessébougou reported that they had used personal sacrifices before and during the
rainy season to try to ensure good harvests and to petition God for better weather. Many
residents reported the efforts as ineffective, but they also stated that unsuccessful prayers
and sacrifices did not lessen their commitment to Islam. They said that God’s refusal to
provide them with a better environment deepened their understanding of the impiety that
had caused local climate change.
Amadou and other Ouélessébougou Muslims used Islam as a key source for
theorizing about the causes of climate change. Although they appealed for a better
climate, many people, including Amadou, ultimately accepted that they lived in a harder
environment than their ancestors. As an old man, Amadou understood his current
circumstances in relation to a relatively distant past. He sentimentally and idealistically
remembered that food and water resources had abounded in Mali during his childhood,
254
and he worried about the world his adult children and grandchildren would live in and
their chances for prosperity.
Conclusion
The transition from adulthood to elderhood involved substantial changes to
Amadou’s pursuits and routine. This chapter has shown that concern for making money
slowed as Amadou aged and was replaced with an interest in religious activity and
pursuing baraji, which reinforced his role as a valued elder in his community. Amadou
regularly attended rites to mark the births, marriages, and deaths of his neighbors, which
shaped his daily schedule between making calls to prayer in the mosque. Amadou
savored his position as an elder and reminded me that growing old had been his earliest
aspiration. Amadou had survived the difficult physical, environmental, and economic
conditions that racked twentieth and twenty-first century West Africa, and his age,
knowledge, and experience testified that he had finally become a cɛkɔrɔba.
My examination of Amadou’s senior years highlights how his life’s practices
changed over time, revealing a man deeply committed to Islam, baraji, and his
community. By focusing on Muslim practices and town affairs, Amadou achieved a high
public profile. Nonetheless, Amadou constantly worried about the state of the world and
the value that others placed on earning baraji and acting honorably in their daily lives.
Amadou’s fondness for the past intensified as his concerns over the future grew.
He told me countless times, “I’m a person of the past” (n ye fɔlɔfɔlɔ mɔgɔ ye),
preferring to spend his free time with fellow elders and sharing memories and reminisces
with them.
255
Elders in Ouélessébougou came from an array of regions, occupations, and
languages, but their age and mutual esteem for the past gave them common ground.
Unsettled by the present, Amadou spoke about his own death with ease. I often told him
how much the thought upset me. He always replied that he would happily live for as
many more years as God allowed but assured me that he had completed his life. He had
studied, traveled, married, worked, raised children, lived to see himself as a cɛkɔrɔba,
and placed his pursuit of baraji at the center of each of these experiences. People in
Ouélessébougou often commented on one another’s baraji, but Amadou dismissed their
comments about his plentiful stock. Only God could determine whether Amadou had
done enough on earth to enter paradise. He hoped that he had but unassumingly
continued to approach each day as a fresh chance to acquire more baraji. In doing so, he
became an exemplar of integrity, devotion, wisdom, and dignity, standing as an example
for his children, friends, neighbors, and me.
256
Figure 23: Amadou in 2011
257
CHAPTER SEVEN
CONCLUSION
What is the significance of Amadou’s life history?
Amadou was not a caliph, Sufi saint, sheik, or imam. He did not have a television
show and never spoke on the radio. Like most Malians, Amadou spent the bulk of his
life living in and passing through the rural expanses of West Africa and never kept
company with the elite members of African society. Nor did he aspire for money or
power. Amadou quietly lived his roles as a son, friend, husband, neighbor, and father far
from the limelight. Yet this study has a contribution to make to understanding life in subSaharan Africa, as it documents aspects of culture, history, and Islam in West Africa in a
personal context. Amadou’s life story, especially the expression of his Muslim beliefs,
features the full voice of a Muslim practitioner, and his unique life advances
understandings of Islam in both colonial and postcolonial West Africa. His narrative
offers insight into how Muslims in twentieth and twenty-first century Mali expressed
their devotion to Islam in their daily lives through the pursuit of baraji.
I was struck throughout my fieldwork by how frequently the topic of baraji arose
in conversations that I had with Amadou and other residents of Ouélessébougou. People
used various phrases that contained the word baraji in order to thank one another,
recognize each other’s merits, and to acknowledge their blessings. Those who have spent
significant time in West Africa have undoubtedly heard and used the word “baraji”
themselves, likely without realizing the full cultural and religious significance of the
term. When I questioned Muslims about their religious lives, informants again invoked
258
the idiom of baraji in order to explain how they discerned among and applied value to the
different ritual practices and daily choices that they employed. People explained that
they trusted that God would repay them for both their meritorious dealings and ritual
commitment to Islam with baraji upon their final judgment and that baraji would help
them in attaining salvation in the afterlife.
This work proposes understanding baraji in West Africa as a system of value
through which Muslims appraise the religious rituals and other practices associated with
Islam. I have used the term “value” in this study to connote how people in West Africa
ranked various practices in terms of their potential to generate baraji. As an inclusive
value system, baraji influenced not only ritual behavior but also inspired specific conduct
in Muslims’ personal lives and social interactions. People evaluated their behavior and
relationships in terms of their potential to earn the needed amount of baraji that would
ensure their salvation and admission to paradise in the afterlife. As such, baraji
represented a form of value that governed Muslim behavior in a range of cultural
domains. This study of baraji reveals the intricate ways that West Africans connected
their Muslim practices to everyday life by evaluating practical actions in terms of their
potential to generate baraji.
In turning to anthropological efforts to understand Islam across West Africa, a
noticeable discrepancy emerges between how often I documented Muslims in Mali
mentioning baraji as an instructive component in their daily practice of Islam and how
seldom scholars have referenced baraji in their attempts to understand Islam in West
Africa. Owing to the dearth of literature on the subject of baraji, I found life history as
the most productive way to comprehensively explore the topic of baraji as a value system
259
that informs daily life and pursuits. Bringing forth Amadou’s life history seemed an
appropriate first step in making baraji a prominent part of the discussions on Islam in
West Africa. Amadou’s narrative clearly displays the doctrinal context of the tenet of
baraji, the subtle ways that Muslims acquire baraji, and how a person’s understanding of
baraji and actions for attaining it change as their life progresses. Amadou’s life history
presents more than a snapshot of his Muslim identity and practice at the time when I met
him. By juxtaposing vignettes from his lifespan, I trace how his personal cultural and
ritual sensibilities changed according to his development and life experiences.
Amadou’s childhood shows that he grew up understanding and accepting that
God required humans to earn baraji in order to gain salvation, and from an early age
earning baraji became a crucial component of his life. The unfamiliar natural world and
people that surrounded Amadou’s small village of Npièbougou originally intimidated
Amadou, and his parents calmed his fears and prepared him to encounter and manage
difference by teaching him the importance of his Muslim identity in relation to nonMuslims. When Amadou’s father unexpectedly died while Amadou was still a child,
Amadou’s mother ensured that Amadou would maintain his relationship with his father
by tasking him with the duty to earn baraji on his deceased father’s behalf. While
studying in a medersa in Diafarabé, Amadou’s teacher bestowed in him a more explicit
understanding of the precepts of Islam by teaching Amadou multiple of ways of earning
baraji through positive relationships and attitudes in his daily activities.
With an enhanced understanding of baraji, Amadou entered his adolescence. At
his mother’s insistence, Amadou ended his studies and returned to Npièbougou in order
to learn how to heard cattle from his brothers. Amadou originally felt uneasy that full-
260
time and exhaustive work in the forest prevented him from praying in the mosque and
perfectly observing the rules for fasting during Ramadan. Yet Amadou’s anxiety was
soothed as he learned unexpected methods for earning supererogatory baraji from his
brothers and fellow herders by protecting his cattle and the environment and observing
Islam together while working in the forest. When Amadou moved away from his family
to Ségou for work and later to Bamako, his efforts to earn baraji evolved as something he
approached as a personal effort that primarily concerned only himself and his late father.
On the verge of entering adulthood and while herding cattle in southern Mali and
northern Côte d’Ivoire, Amadou reassessed this understanding and concluded that he
needed a wife and children to ensure that someone continually earned baraji on his behalf
after his death.
Once he became a husband and a father, Amadou began to appreciate Islam and
the acquisition of baraji as a collaborative effort that bound all kin and Muslims to one
another. This tightly entwined connection between kin who concerned themselves with
earning baraji for one another became especially meaningful to Amadou as he spent long
stretches of time away from his home and family in Ouélessébougou while laboring as a
cattle herder in Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Liberia; a gold miner in Guinea; and a
traveling trader and salesman in Mali and Guinea. His practice and understanding of
Islam as an adult nicely illuminates how Islam in West Africa serves as a key site on
which people evaluated and organized kin relationships based on one another’s
willingness to cooperate in the mutual pursuit of Islam.
I had the good fortune to meet Amadou during his elderhood. As an elder,
Amadou reverently reserved the majority of his time for serving his community and a
261
devoutly practicing Islam. Amadou had admired his elders since childhood. Aging
brought him satisfaction and he felt fortunate that God had permitted him to pass through
this final and treasured phase in life. He served as muezzin at the largest mosque in
Ouélessébougou and attended as many naming ceremonies, weddings, funerals, and
posthumous sacrifices as his schedule allowed. As he mindfully served his community
and strove to set an example for his children to follow, he worried about the state of the
world that he would leave behind. Amadou and his friends spoke often about the
worsening climate and political conditions in Mali, and he saw the environmental
problems that Malians faced as punishment inflicted by God for depraved human
behavior upon the world, especially in response to terrorist groups and corrupt world
leaders. In spite of the serious problems that Malians faced, Amadou smiled, laughed,
and enjoyed practicing Islam and spending his time surrounded by his family and friends.
Even so, he made regular, open, and relaxed references to his unavoidable death. But he
trusted that Muslims from around the world would continue to practice Islam and earn
baraji on his behalf once he had passed into the next life.
Throughout this work I have emphasized the importance of baraji in Amadou’s
life span. In addition to recounting his life and the role of baraji in it, I have worked to
convey the depth and dynamic agency freedom that Muslims in West Africa have in
understanding and practicing their religion and demonstrates how Amadou understood
and bridged the various ways that Muslims observed Islam—all in terms of baraji.
Amadou continually evaluated which practices were profitable in terms of earning baraji
and which were futile or detrimental to his salvation. He propagated his particular
understanding of Islam by instructing his family and friends on the actions and qualities
262
that he believed could further one’s quantity of baraji. But, naturally, everyone in
Amadou’s kin and social network had their own opinions and experiences that
contributed to their different understandings of Islam and the pursuit of baraji. Every life
story varies and carries the potential to add to a growing understanding of social and
ritual life in West Africa. An effort to document these life histories would paint a more
complete portrait, of which Amadou’s narrative is only a single brushstroke, that would,
together, reflect the complex and textured patterns of daily life, history, culture, and
Islam in West Africa.
263
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280
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Dianna Bell
Education
Brigham Young University
Anthropology
B.A. 2003
University of Idaho
Anthropology
M.A. 2008
Florida State University
Religious Studies
Ph.D. 2013
Positions Held
2009- 2013
Instructor in Religious Studies (Anthropology and Religion; Islamic
Traditions; Religion in Africa) Florida State University
2012- 2013
Instructor for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (Introduction to Islam)
Florida State University
2009- 2011
Teaching Assistant in Anthropology (Introduction to Cultural
Anthropology) Florida State University
2009- 2010
Tutor in Anthropology and Religious Studies, Athletic Academic Support
Florida State University
2009
Research Assistant to Dr. Joseph Hellweg, Religious Studies
Florida State University
2008- 2010
Teaching Assistant in Religious Studies (Introduction to World Religions;
Islam in the Modern World) Florida State University
2008
Instructor in Anthropology (Introduction to Anthropology)
University of Idaho
2007
Research Assistant to Dr. Fenella Cannell, Anthropology
London School of Economics
2006
Research Assistant to Dr. John Mihelich, Anthropology
University of Idaho
281
Grants and Awards
2011
International Dissertation Semester Research Fellow
Florida State University
2010
Research Grant (for preliminary dissertation fieldwork in Mali)
Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, Florida State University
2008- 2012
Travel grants for conference travel
Florida State University
2007
Research Grant (for thesis fieldwork in Mali)
Student Grant Program, University of Idaho
2007
Travel grants for conference travel
University of Idaho
2002- 2003
Dean’s List, Brigham Young University
Publications
2013
Review of Harri Englund (ed.), Christianity and Public Culture in Africa. HNet.
2011
"The Formation of the Sokoto Caliphate.” In ABC-CLIO Encyclopedia of
World History, edited by Alfred J. Andrea. Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO.
2010
Review of Daphne Lamothe, Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture,
and Ethnography. Western Folklore.
2007
Review of Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson (eds.), Limits of Meaning:
Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity. Journal of Folklore
Research.
Conference Papers and Research Presentations
2013
“May God Repay Us: Islam and Baraji in West Africa,” Florida State
University Center for the Humanities and Society Series on Culture, Politics,
and Society in Contemporary Africa, Tallahassee, January 31.
2012
“Understanding a ‘Broken World’: Islam and Climate Change in Mali, West
Africa,” American Academy of Religion, Chicago, Illinois, November 20.
2012
“Islam and Climate Change in Mali, West Africa,” Florida State University
Religion Graduate Symposium, Tallahassee, February 18.
282
2010
“Creating Communitas: Understanding Muslim Participation in Christian
Services in Mali, West Africa,” American Academy of Religion, Atlanta,
Georgia, October 30.
2010
“Employing Ethnography in Religious Studies,” Florida State University
Dialogues Conference, Tallahassee, March 22.
2010
“Albert B. Lord’s Oral Formulaic Theory and Qur’anic Recitation,” Florida
State University Religion Graduate Symposium, Tallahassee, February 21.
2009
“Prayer, Social Order, and Communitas,” Across the Threshold: Creativity,
Being and Healing Conference, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,
March 20.
2009
“Disregarding Kin and Other Complications in Converting from Islam to
Christianity in Mali, West Africa,” Florida State University Religion
Graduate Symposium, Tallahassee, Florida, February 22.
2008
“Beyond Baptism: Complications in Converting to Christianity in
Ouélessébougou, Mali,” Northwest Anthropology Conference, Victoria B.C.,
April 24.
2007
“Examining Muslim and Christian Relations in Mali, West Africa,” Poster
presented at the American Anthropological Association Conference,
Washington, D.C, November 29.
Service
2012-
Secretary-Treasurer, Mande Studies Association (MANSA)
2012-
Steering Committee, The African Association for the Study of Religions,
American Academy of Religion
2010-2011 Grievance Committee, Graduate Students United, Florida State University
2010-2011 Florida State University Union Steward for Religion Department, Graduate
Students United
2009
Tutor for K-12 foster children, Children’s Home Society of Florida
2007
Senate Speaker, University of Idaho Graduate and Professional Student
Association
2007
Graduate Student Representative, University of Idaho Student Fees
Committee
283
2006
Bylaws and Constitution Committee, University of Idaho Graduate and
Professional Student Association
2002
Museum Volunteer, BYU Museum of Peoples and Cultures, Brigham Young
University
284