2. ANÁLISIS DE LOS RESULTADOS
3.10. DESARROLLO DE ACTIVIDADES
3.10.1. GESTIÓN DE INVENTARIO
Wuro Mango has two major parts that are both enclosed by walls: The ward of slave
descendants (FF: Wuro Maccuɓe) and the royal court (FF: Galbal). Wuro Maccuɓe is
63 For the role of religious scholars in the application of Koranic law, see Chapter 5. 64 For more on the role of religious scholars in marriage ceremonies, see Chapter 3. 65 For literature on Islam and the Ful
ɓe in Mali: see Soares (2005) on Fulɓe in Nioro du Sahel and Berndt (2008) who describes the careers of slave-descending Fulɓe in religious education in the Guimballa region. For Islamic education practised by pastoralist Fulɓe in the Haayre region, see de Bruijn & van Dijk (1995: 169-194; 2009: 116-127).
one of the most densely populated parts of Dalla and the many houses, granaries and small alleyways between them give the bewildering impression of a dense labyrinth. The best way to get around is to ask children for a specific family compound. From
November 2001 to April 2002, I lived in Wuro Maccuɓe with my interpreter Umu
Sangare and her baby in the house of Kodo, a young man with a stigmatized position in a family of slave descendants. It was a public secret that Kodo was a bastard but we were allowed to live in his house because it was empty during his seasonal migration and it was also conveniently situated next to the home of my main hosts, Suleymane and his wife Hadiata.
Wuro Maccuɓe is separated from the royal court by a path and a wall, built by King
Yerowal after the Second World War, runs between the two wards (De Bruijn & van
Dijk 1995a: 80). Yerowal needed the political support of the Riimaayɓe during the first
organized elections and the wall physically separated the domestic slaves from the royal
compound, symbolically demonstrating the emancipation of the house slaves vis-à-vis
the royal court. Some informants suggested that it was the French who insisted on this wall to underline the physical separation between the two groups.
When asking a villager of slave descent where he lives, most slave descendants
prefer to use the euphemism of the ‘global ward’ (FF: Wuro Mango) rather than the
name of the sub-ward Wuro Maccuɓe (ward of captured slaves) with its pejorative
connotations.66 The families in this ward are predominantly former domestic slaves of
the political elite (FF: Weheeɓe). As a result of virilocal settlement,67 some of the king’s
domestic slave women have moved out. The male descendants of royal domestic slaves
over time married slave women belonging to other elite families.68
Wuro Galbal, the ward of the royal court, is the political heart of the village and
hosts a large number of Weheeɓe. It is a public secret that a different branch of the
Dicko family had political power first but at the beginning of the twentieth century
another branch successfully forced them out of power.69 Since this particular royal
Weheeɓe family is central to my network of informants, I will distinguish them from the
other Weheeɓe families in Dalla by calling them the Dicko family. So although several
other Weheeɓe families in Dalla use the patronym Dicko, when I refer to the Dicko
family in this thesis I am referring to the family that lives in the royal compound in Wuro Galbal.
The royal family is no longer as rich as it used to be and only has two horses left. Nevertheless, it is still one of the wealthiest in the village and the one to which clients
from surrounding Riimaayɓe villages defer, for example by visiting and passing by on
66 It is the Weheeɓe who use the name Wuro Maccu
ɓe much more. Wuro Mango is the larger unit in which Wuro Maccuɓe is situated and the inhabitants of Wuro Maccuɓe prefer to use the name Wuro Mango (big ward).
67 Virilocal settlement means women move in with their husbands and settle in his village after marriage. 68 Although their slave ancestors were not allowed to marry other masters’ slaves, the slave descendants of the royal elite married wives formerly belonging to other masters, for example, Jaawamɓe of Wuro Ferro (wife of Amadun Dauda), Wuro Gaanare (Altinee of Hamma) or pastoralist Jalluuɓe from the surrounding Haayre villages (Dikellayya).
69 Interview in Dalla {2002} with hair-plaiter Kumba Yero, a slave-descending Maccudo from Wuro Taan.
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market days. The royal court has a hall to receive visitors, which ensures privacy for the compounds inside the royal palace. My neighbour Dikoore explained that this is a way of preventing curious visitors from setting eyes on the beautiful noble wives. The area has many other functions too and during my stay, I observed female chairpersons of local NGO projects counting out their monthly savings there and taxmen calculating and discussing the levying of taxes.
The internal organization of the royal compound reflects social hierarchies through spatial arrangements. Each of the king’s wives had her own chamber with a personal kitchen and although the king’s slave concubines also live in the royal compound, they did not enjoy the same privileges. They had the smallest houses and did not have slaves cooking or cleaning for them.
Although I spent time with the freeborn Weheeɓe women who weave their coloured
straw mats all day long, it was more difficult to interact with them than with the
Riimaayɓe women in the ward of Wuro Maccuɓe where I was staying. Since the royal
women of the Dicko family were expected to respect shame (FF: Yaage)70 and nobility
(FF: Ndimu) as described above, interactions with them were more complex. Some
Weheeɓe (both men and women) initially refused to talk to me and my female inter-
preter, feeling more senior and higher in status and thus in a position to refuse to answer
questions.71 While living in Dalla, my loyalties were ultimately closer to ‘their’ Mac-
cuɓe than to them and later, when I was hosted in Bamako by one of the Dicko family
members, I became much closer to the Dicko family.
Wuro Mango has a total of eight sub-wards,72 most of which had close ties with the
royal court in the past. The ward of Suudu Baa Bunti, for example, hosted the craftsmen
and bards (FF: Ŋeeŋɓe/Maabuuɓe) of old who were attached to the royal court and sang
the praises of the ancestors of the royal court. Bard Baa Digi, who passed away at the start of this century, used to live here and it was his son, Hama Amba, who became my research assistant in 2002.
Wuro Mango is the geographical centre of Dalla and boasts the only two shops (FF:
Bitiki)73 and tailors in town. The mosque is officially part of Wuro Mango rather than the main ward of the religious scholars called Wuro Burram. East of Wuro Mango are some small gardens, an empty square where youngsters play football at dusk and the chief’s millet fields, one of which is used during the collective prayers for Tabaski. Just prior to the 2002 elections, Dalla received a motorized mill to pound millet from presidential candidate Amadou Toumani Toure. The chief negotiated for this mill to be
70 De Bruijn &van Dijk (1995; 212) emphasize that Yaage can only be felt among people of the same social group.
71 Riesman (1992: 199)71 claims that ‘Not only do Fulɓe usually restrain themselves in the way they express emotions, but they also hold back in the very expression of meaning itself. In general, they do not like to make things explicit.’
72 The wards are Wuro Taan (trading Jaawamɓe and their Maccuɓe), Wuro Misside72 (Weheeɓe, differ- ent lineage as current chief), Wuro Sokkara (trading Jaawamɓe and Riimaayɓe (Maccuɓe no longer attached to them), Gunu Ganaari (Weheeɓe, different lineage as current chief and their Maccuɓe), Suudu Baa Bunti (iron and leather artisans called Ŋeeŋɓe, Maabuuɓe), Guntu Ganta (Weheeɓe, differ- ent lineage as current chief) and Wuro Buli (Jaawamɓe and Riimaayɓe). See Map 6.
73 From the French term boutique and assimilated into Fulfulde as bitiki. It literally means ‘shop’, often a small part of a house where luxury products such as cigarettes, tea, sugar and petrol are sold.
installed near his compound in Wuro Mango. Amadou Toumani Toure won the elect- ions and remained popular in Dalla through his connections with some of the Dicko family members living in Bamako. When I visited Dalla in 2006, the mill was no longer functioning and some inhabitants said it was better this way as there had been too many quarrels about who was allowed to use it. Personally I was happy that the engine’s noise no longer disturbed the otherwise peaceful and quiet village.
Cattle have remained important for sedentarized former pastoralists. The royal elite and religious scholars still have a daily diet based on milk and, if there is money, meat too. The cows that provide this milk are never far away from the big compounds of the
important sedentary Weheeɓe and Moodibaaɓe families in Wuro Mango and Wuro
Burram. Near the royal compound is the main water hole where the animals drink and their dung turns the muddy surroundings green and encourages mosquitoes and flies. One thing is certain, Dalla, in all aspects of its lived reality and with its corresponding smells, dust, noise and disease, was sometimes impossible to compare with the stereo- typical postcard-perfect images of rural Mali. However, thanks to its people and their gradual acceptance of me over time, my walks through Dalla village at specific times of the day even exceeded the idealistic postcard stereotypes.
Setting the scene: The cast of informants
The walk continues but now in the form of social encounters. Having mapped the region
of Haayre, its various interrelated Fulɓe strongholds and the lived spatial organization of
the village of Dalla, this section casts some of my main informants from the network of people central to this thesis. The majority of my informants live in Wuro Mango where freeborn informants are the royal descendants of King Yerowal. Most of the slave descendants living here are the descendants of a common royal domestic slave called Kau who was captured somewhere south of Bandiagara. I made a genealogy of Kau’s family from his generation through to the present (Image 2) and my main informants are
descendants of Kau’s son Dauda and mostly live in the sub-ward of Wuro Maccuɓe.
They are the descendants of the domestic slaves at the royal court who never left their masters, did not flee during the 1913-1914 droughts, and did not move elsewhere after the abolition of slavery or following independence. A lot of them take pride in their relationship with the royal court and in the prestige of the ruling elite, who used to be their masters.
Although I lived in the slave ward, my relationship with the royal family was very good. Both the chief and the mayor were cooperative and welcomed my research. It was
Mayor Musa Dicko who made sure I was hosted in the ward of Wuro Maccuɓein 2001,
as requested by my supervisor Prof. de Bruijn.74 Living among slave descendants, I
certainly gained their sympathy and had easy access to the confidences of most of the people in the ward. However, my close ties with them meant that contacts with other
74 On my arrival in 2001 in Dalla, I presented a letter from my supervisor de Bruijn to then-Mayor Musa Dicko, explicitly asking him to host me in Wuro Maccuɓe. This letter was important and prevented him from hosting me with his own family. He was surprised that I would prefer to live in the dirty and chaotic compound of their slave descendants rather than in the more luxurious royal compound but when I explained my research was about this group, he agreed and appointed one of his most loyal assistants, Suleymane Dauda, as my host.
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slave groups were closed off.75 As Derman (1973: 257) writing on Fulɓe in Fuuta
Djallon (Guinea) indicated:
If I had been living in the Fulbe village, they would have classed me with all the other whites who hobnobbed with the chiefs and would have assumed I would adopt the attitude of the Fulbe towards them. By living in a former serf village I avoided those problems. However, it did not close off the world of the Fulbe to me … due ... to the Fulbe’s desire to indicate that they knew more about the history and religion … than did their former serfs.
During my first stay in Dalla (2001-2002), my interpreter Umu Sangare insisted from the start that we should go and greet the royal family each morning. We never missed this ritual, bringing our personal morning greetings to the royal Dicko family, and the chief in particular. At first I considered it a waste of time as these greetings took up a lot of time because of their ritualized lengthiness with a series of questions about family, work, health and the weather, which are not expected to be answered truthfully. Greet- ings are a formalized way of establishing communication, which is why my interpreter and I invariably went to greet the royal family and our informants each morning, a group that increased in size considerably over time and by the end of my stay it took up the first hour and a half of each day. Interpreter Umu explained that doing so would significantly increase the quality of our future interviews as the process contributed to our respectability.
Umu Sangare was born in 1975 in Mopti but had been living in Douentza for quite
some time and her surname, Sangare, identifies her as part of the Fulɓe community
associated with southern Mali (Wassoulou region). Since she is from a different Fulɓe
clan, she was considered ‘neutral’ in many ways in Dalla. Umu became a good friend and I admire the way she has always managed to get paid jobs as a teacher somewhere. In 2006 she travelled with her baby all the way to Mondoro on the border with Burkina Faso to teach during the week. Umu took her six-month-old baby with her during the week when we lived and worked in Dalla. Returning to Douentza at weekends gave me the opportunity to write up interviews, and for Umu it was important to take care of her husband, her oldest son and the household. She always joked how the weeks in Dalla were a holiday for her compared to her busy weekends.
Rokiatu Dicko was how I was baptized by my research assistant Burra Yero Cisse on arriving in Douentza in 2007. Burra proposed the name Rokiatu because of the similar
‘o’ sound (as in Lotte-Rokiatu), which is not very common in Fulɓe names. He con-
vinced me to take the patronym Dicko if I was to work in the Dicko network of Dalla. This white researcher posed a real challenge for some in Dalla. What should they think of someone who looked like a woman but was not married and did nor have children, and on top of that sometimes behaved like a man by wearing trousers and a wristwatch,
75 Examples are descendants of slaves who formerly belonged to the trading Jaawamɓe. The head of a women’s association in the ward of Wuro Ferro from the outset outrightly refused to allow women from her association to talk to me. Slave descendants living in the hamlets on the plateaus (FF: Riimaayɓe Haayre) who had bad memories of being harassed by the royal slaves of the Kau family also only talked to me when I was not accompanied by a member of the Kau family. This was the reason for my four-day trip visiting villages on the Gandamia Plateau accompanied by my partner and by Hassane who was a slave descendant from Dalla’s imam family and Burra Yero Cisse, a slave descendant from Douentza.
smoking and being constantly on the move? Such a peculiar species was definitely worth spying on for the local children. Fortunately, ‘our’ house was right at the back and one had to cross many other compounds to get there. Umu and I were thus rela-
tively well shielded from curious passers-by, although the radio trottoir did not prevent
curious visitors from coming to see for themselves. We were the best theatre for years and living together as two women with one baby, we came closer to being a comedy duo than anything else.
Also in interviewing people, our strange ways were awkward. Asking individuals
personal questions is often delegated to specific groups in Fulɓe society. Asking ques-
tions more generally is thus considered inappropriate in the first place, let alone when two young women set out to interview an older man in his own house. Since Umu tried hard but never felt comfortable about this, I started working with bard and ironworker
(FF: Ŋeeŋo) Hama Amba if he was around. With Hama, I was able to interview the
imam and other respected elders because, being a bard, it was his duty to keep himself informed and so people expected him to ask questions.
Most of Dalla’s inhabitants (FF: Dallanke) were charmed by Umu: She (and her
baby Najoum) had the ability to win people’s trust in a very natural way and, with Umu, I interviewed 35 inhabitants of Wuro Mango and conducted a total of 81 interviews in six months in 2001-2002, usually in their own compounds. In general, we first made an exploratory visit, which could last from ten minutes to several hours and only in a second visit did I ask whether I could note things down. We mostly worked with semi- structured interviews and recorded some conversations that I transcribed verbatim at weekends in Douentza. From these transcriptions I extracted new questions that emerged for each individual informant. Over time we learned about strategic moments that would allow us to speak with them in private. Maman Abidjan, who could not walk anymore, was often lonely in the early morning, but not on market days because her house was full of visitors then. However, privacy during interviews remained a chal- lenge: There were always people and children who continued to ‘assist’ in our activities,