Friday, July 5, 2013

Home on the range - Fulani Style

What follows is a description of home life that has served and pleased Fulani herders and families for years–no, for centuries. Read it not with amazement at what they put up with but with appreciation for the home life they love and want so desperately to keep.

First of all one notices its cleanliness. Dirt is everywhere and throughout, but dirt that is swept clean.

The camp where I visited comprised about twenty homes. That would be twenty families. Just outside the door of their huts would be a fireplace. This would be used for cooking, for preparing milk, and for many other uses. The fireplace is small, but then, so are the chores.

All around the huts and fires are the children. Too many to count because of their playfulness. I had heard that the bishop's wife had spent a day learning their numbers and teaching the English numbers. As an experiment when I was around several of the children, I said, "Seven!" to which two or three of them replied with, "Eight!". One of them went all the way to 15.

The huts resemble igloos, with the substitution of straw for ice blocks. They stand about four feet high and are maybe ten feet in circumference. Inside, judging from a brief glance, is one bed and a few scattered articles. My surmise is that the entire family sleeps on the bed, but they may well have different and better arrangements.

The twenty or so huts stretched about one hundred yards from one end to the other. The delineation by family seems to be invisible for the play of the children went everywhere. I checked with the bishop who said that, yes, this probably was the children's first encounter with a figure from outer space whose skin was white.


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