History Time!

I recently finished a book on the history of Timbuktu, and in it was an interesting description of the Fulani people - the majority ethnic group in my village. This pertains to them before the Islamic conquest and their conversion to Islam, so says little about their culture today, but it is still fascinating history. The excerpt below is from Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle (Walker Publishing Co: New York, 2007), p. 47-49.

"The Fulani, or Fulbe, or Peul, are an interesting people who have spread throughout the African savanna, and late in Timbuktu's life had a more or less disastrous effect on its politics. Their origins are in Senegal-Gambia, the product of admixture between native Wolof and incoming Berbers, yielding a modern people who are dark of skin with Arab or European features; indeed, newborn Fulani are often white, though they quickly turn dark. Throughout history the prickly Fulani were notorious for their fanatical views on their own racial purity and their insistence on their own beauty, even to the extent that an ordinary-looking Fulani man would encourage his wife to give birth to sons of better-looking men so as to improve the race. This fanaticism was later transferred to religion, and when the Fulani adopted Islam in later centuries their zeal gave rise to waves of jihadist warfare that roiled Timbuktu and its region for generations. About seven million Fulani are now spread out across a dozen countries.

"On the Niger, they settled somewhere around 1400 in Masina, west of Timbuktu; the Tarikh of al-Sa'adi often referred to the Masinakoi, or sultans of Masina. For reasons unknown they drew the unyielding hatred of the Songhai tyrant Sonni Ali and later, in 1498, became the unwilling subjects of the Songhai, when Askia Mohamed defeated them in battle, but they resisted to the last and maintained their own unrelenting hostility to their conquerors until after the Moroccan invasions of 1590.

"The pre-Islamic Fulani had a complicated cosmology. Most African societies, though animist, believed in some sort of supreme being, but the Fulani were more explicit than most; making them fairly easy converts when Muslim proselytizers came through in the centuries after Muhammad. They also had a creation myth that speaks eloquently, if rather cynically, of resurrection and redemption.

At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk,
Then Doondari came and created stone.
Then stone created iron;
And iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.
Then Doondari descended a second time.
And he took the five elements
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud.
Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep and sleep defeated blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry and worry defeated sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death, and death defeated worry;
But when death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time
And he came as Gueno the eternal one,
And Gueno defeated death."