to teach me Pulaar. As I knew that I would learn a lot faster in an environment that was 100% Pulaar, I moved there in February 2007.
The bush-taxi dropped me off in Mboumba in the dark, where I had arranged to meet my teacher. From there we continued our journey to Bito – through Mboumba down to the river on a horse-cart, crossing the river in a narrow canoe in the dark and then on to another horse-cart, which took us across the Ile Amorphile for another hour to Bito. Although I had travelled through regions without electricity before, my senses were unaccustomed to the dark. When we arrived in Harouna’s home at midnight we ate meat from a bowl with the family under the stars. I was exhausted.
The next weeks were spent learning Pulaar grammar every morning from nine till lunch-time. People came to greet me at length and neighbours sent bowls of food to welcome me to the village. Some had never seen a white person close up. Children were screaming and following me wherever I went; they laughed at my gestures, imitated my movements, ridiculing my sense of dress, which I tried to balance between dressing appropriately to meet people’s expectations while being unable to bear the heat in these long cloths and gowns. I learned the greetings in Pulaar quickly but apart from that I could hardly communicate with anyone, because very few people spoke French. As soon as the children got used to me, they came into my room and started asking me things I could not understand. When I tried out the new words I had
just learned, they looked at me with big eyes and said: Mbiy-ɗaa? (What did you say?) I suddenly understood that they had conjugated the verb to say wiyde in its reflexive form to ask a question. As I had no other choice I learned the basics fast.
Images 11 Left: Children playing wildly at dusk – they followed me everywhere. Right: The compound of my host family in Bito.
Images 12. Left: Women at wedding in Bito a few days after my arrival. Right: Women preparing food.
Language was not the only challenge but also being taken seriously as a person. Initially I was not allowed to go out by myself in case something happened to me. My hands were as soft as a baby’s, the women remarked and I was not allowed to help fetch water, or do any other physical work. My feet were softer than the children’s hands, I was told – I was not allowed to go searching for firewood with the older children. There were snakes and scorpions in the bush under the branches and a bite can be fatal. Eventually I gained more autonomy and spent the late afternoons by the
river with the children or the three schoolteachers, who soon became my closest friends as I could communicate with them in French, not the child-like language I was forced to speak with my family. My family, however, objected to me seeing them after dusk. After all I was an unmarried woman and it was not appropriate for me to go out at night. They were my guardians and I was their guest – my behaviour reflected on their honour, they explained. Once I had a conversation with a woman in which I talked about boyfriends. Afterwards I was asked if I was not ashamed to talk openly about these things. Did I want to represent myself as a shameless woman?
As Bito borders Mauritania, the mobile phone network was terrible. At times it was only possible to make phone calls in the afternoon. When the battery was empty the phone had to be sent to someone else’s house to be charged with solar power, which took two days. There was no internet – I had to travel 150km to Ourosogui to check my emails. There was nothing to buy in Bito apart from dried biscuits and no mineral water – I got used to the well-water very quickly. Batteries for my torch were sent from Mboumba. There was no fruit to purchase either. Every so often I crossed the river with the children and walked for 3 miles along the river Senegal to a mango plantation, where we spent all afternoon in the shady forest feasting on the fruit and took as much home as we could carry. No matter how much we brought back, the 20 members of the household and the many neighbours who had been so generous tome made them vanish very quickly. It was so hot that candles bent side-ways when I tried to write in my room in the dark. I therefore did most of my writing in the mornings before my lessons.
Although being a complete alien may seem a disadvantage, it also had its benefits. Beside the linguistic skills, I was taught codes of behaviour, morality and honour. People were not intimidated by me as a ‘researcher’, most women did not even understand what ‘research’ (wittooji) was. I was an unmarried girl (mboomri) who had come to stay for a long time to learn Pulaar and write a book about ‘Futanke customs’. I was constantly instructed on how to do things correctly and told why they needed to be done a certain way. This process of learning, observing and listening carefully was invaluable to my understanding of conceptions of purity, honour and shame, gender roles and gendered spaces. It was a process of embodied learning of sociability, boundaries and moral codes of behaviour.
Images 13: Women in Bito dressed up in ‘traditional dress’ (Cosaan) for wedding.
My Pulaar teacher occasionally went to Radio Pete to read his poetry on a popular Pulaar-language radio programme called Finaa tawaa Fulɓe (literally ‘What the Fulɓe find when they wake up’)10 or ‘Pulaar traditions’. We decided that when I was able to read Pulaar correctly and communicate enough I should accompany him to read some poetry. In May 2007 we therefore took a horse-cart to cross the Ile Amorphile for Pete. I was going to read a poem called Mbayniigu – which means ‘separation’ or ‘goodbye’. Radio presenter Geelel Jigo introduced me as Saara Sy, a tuubaako (white person) who has come to learn Pulaar language and customs with Harouna Sy from Bito. After I read the poem Geelel asked me in Pulaar to read it again. Afterwards people from all over the Ile Amorphile called to tell me how pleased they were that I had come all the way to Fouta to learn about their way of life. One man promised to give me a horse and horse-cart if I came to visit him in his village. When we returned to Bito the following day people cheered wherever we passed: Saara Sy min mbeltiima (Sarah Sy we are so pleased). Some laughed and joked, imitating my pronunciation; others congratulated me and told me I was brave. Some people from neighbouring villages walked to Bito for hours to come and see me. I became known as the white person who had come to live in Fouta to learn about their culture.
10
As I knew that no NGO had been to Bito to raise awareness about FGC, I initially did not try to discuss excision or the governmental ban with people. This was first of all because I was not able to have a complex conversation with women in Pulaar and, second, for ethical reasons and for my personal safety. I felt that I needed to understand how people felt about the practice before asking questions in a region that has vehemently opposed the ban. I therefore focused on collecting data about everyday habits, things that were important to my informants and the boundaries I kept accidentally crossing out of ignorance of their social and moral codes of behaviour.
I occasionally left Bito to do research elsewhere. I found out what kinds of activities relevant to my research interests were going on at the Tostan Ourosogui co- ordination. In May 2007 researchers of the Sigrid Rausing project were staying at the Tostan co-ordination to type up the data from questionnaires that I had helped to design before going to the field. I was able to discuss excision, why people practised it and refused to comply with the NGOs and the governmental ban with these researchers, as well as the Tostan staff in Ourosogui, more openly. These discussions provided me with different data about excision. The Tostan Fouta staff were all local men and women who had stopped practising excision out of personal conviction. However, despite being on the side of the government, most of their families and relatives continued with the practice and they were deeply aware of how important excision was to them and why it was immensely hard to take the decision to stop practising in one’s family. Long conversations with the Tostan supervisors and facilitators of different ‘caste’ backgrounds (Tooroɓɓe, Fulɓe, Subalɓe, Galluŋkooɓe/Maccuɓe, Maabuɓe), some of whom I became very close to, also provided me with data about the ‘opposition to the law and the NGOs’. They frequently told me about their everyday struggles at work and their encounters with marabouts and village chiefs, whose tolerance of the NGO they had to negotiate. Most of the data collected among the Tostan staff was through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, some of which were recorded.
In May 2007 a public declaration of the abandonment of excision was to take place but it failed, because the village demanded £5000 from UNICEF to pay the costs. I
interviewed people in the villages that were to declare for ten days, with the help of a research assistant who was a Tostan facilitator and had been trained to collect data for the Sigrid Rausing project,11 as well as having already participated in other research projects. We wanted to find out how people felt about the fact that their declaration had failed. I had designed questionnaires for members of the management committee, village chiefs, marabouts, school teachers, as well as people who had nothing to do with the declaration. We undertook interviews as well as focus groups.
In December 2007 I interviewed villagers who had participated at the public declaration of Semme. This was six months after the public declaration had taken place. I also conducted interviews in Seedo Abass in February 2008. (For a chronological overview, see table of events of opposition at the end of chapter 2.) Most of these interviews were recorded or noted down in great detail with the help of a research assistant. I also interviewed 18 excisers and ex-excisers between December 2007 and February 2008 in different places (Semme, Ndouloumadji, Thilogne, Mboumba, Bito, etc.). I waited until the end of my fieldwork so that my grasp of Pulaar was good enough to communicate with them myself to some extent, or to understand how the translator interpreted what had been said. I knew some but not all of the excisers before the interview. In January 2008 I interviewed four members of the ex-exciser association in Thilogne and the president of this association in Ngouloumadji. This was also done with the help of a research assistant.
I also collaborated with researchers in Dakar. One of them was the Senegalese sociologist Abibou Camara, who was undertaking a WHO (World Health Organization) funded research project on excision in Fouta Toro. There were also other researchers from universities in South Africa, France and the UK.
In between these research trips I went back to Bito. My informants there were hardly aware of what I did when I left Bito. One thing however did change my status completely in Bito and during other interviews I did in Fouta Toro. After seven months of living in Fouta I became religiously attached (humaneede) to a Pulaar man
11
Enquiring into the reasons for practising excision in the regions with the highest prevalence of excision in Senegal. See: Etude sur les pratiques d’excision dans les regions Ziguinchor, Kolda, Tambacounda, Matam. Abandons et résistances (Tostan, financed by Sigrid Rausing, 2007).
with whom I had been working. He was a Cubballo like my host family in Bito and they were distantly related. Besides making me free to come and go as I wished without causing any scandals and discontent, this meant I was no longer addressed like a child but as a woman. This, however, also brought disadvantages. People expected me to behave like a married woman. They explained what duties I had towards my husband and local women made a great effort to explain to me and help me with the customary preparations of the bedroom and the household. The fact that my husband did not expect me to do any of this and in fact helped me with the work caused confusion. Many women worried and were very critical at times. Although this was immensely confusing for me on a psychological level, it gave me a deeper understanding of women’s roles in the household and their expectations.
Although I became friends with people from different status groups, I came to know the Subalɓe (fishermen) more intimately, because the Sy family I stayed with in Bito, and my husband, were Cubballo. Outsiders also associated me with the Subalɓe and my views of inter-caste relationships are biased by the things I learned living with them.