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Title Strangers and Pastoralists: Fulbe Migrants and the State in West Africa
Full text http://www.iuo.unina.it/22/
Date 2008
Author(s) Dzivenu, Setri
Abstract The Fulbe, one of West Africa's major ethnic groups live in areas corresponding mainly to the Sahel. The Sahel region, from where the majority of the Fulbe people hail, has been described by many as one of the most unstable and harsh environments in the world. And as a result of the uncertain climatic conditions coupled with their age-old vocation as cattle herders, the Fulbe have earned for themselves a transhumant lifestyle eventhough most of them also engage in other economic activities like agriculture. Since the twentieth century, the Fulbe pastoralists have used migration into other part of the West African sub-region as main strategy for securing their traditional vocation and livelihood. The Fulbe usually settle among populations where rainfall patterns are favourable for herding as well as for other economic activities. The Fulbe pastoralist movements, often, transcending national borders in West Africa, have not only contributed immensely to the economies of their hosts but have also resulted in scores of conflicts with the indigenes. This paper examines how governments have responded to these conflicts and its impacts and implication on Fulbe and the host communities. Doing this, the paper discusses the relations between the Fulbe and their hosts and the impact on development. Here, the paper argued that the major interaction between Fulbe and host groups has been on the economic front with greater benefits for the host communities in particular and the receiving state in general. But this relation is not entirely beneficial, it is also destructive and violent sometimes causing the state to intervene. Meanwhile, as would be argued, the state's intervention in arresting the tensions and hostilities between the Fulbe and the local communities has neither enhanced productivity nor even promoted environmental and social harmony in these communities. It has rather increased animosity in Fulbe-host relations, threatened socio-economic development, whipped ethnic consciousness and made conflicts even more difficult to mediate.
Subject(s) SPS/13 STORIA E ISTITUZIONI DELL'AFRICA
Relation http://www.iuo.unina.it/22/01/AEGIS%5FCortona%5FSummer%5FSchool%5FDzivenu.pdf
Type of publication Documento relativo ad una Conferenza o altro Evento; NonPeerReviewed
Format application/pdf
Repository Naples - University of Naples
Added to C-A: 2008-12-22;03:47:20