THE PEOPLE WHO ‘STAND UP’ FOR PULAAR: ACTIVISM AND LANGUAGE

LOYALTY POLITICS IN SENEGAL AND MAURITANIA

By

JOHN JOSEPH HAMES

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2017

© 2017 John Joseph Hames

To Buduk, and all the “Jaaga naaɓe”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I made my first trip to Gainesville, Florida in March 2009 and arrived late in the evening

courtesy of the shuttle from the Jacksonville airport. Abdoulaye Kane, who, months later, would

become my committee chair, came to pick me up. Looking for him, I gave him a call and a few

seconds into the conversation he realized he was walking up behind me. Over the past eight

years, his mentorship and friendship, as well as that of his wife, Aisse, have been the constants

upon which I have been most able to rely. Dr. Kane gave me the space to experiment with my

writing, learn some of the hard lessons of doctoral research, as well as to sort out some personal

challenges. The doors to his office and home were always open for long conversations about my

work, family or politics. I will always savor the memories of long nights watching Pulaar films

and spending time with him, Aisse and their fast-growing (soon to be adult) children Mamadou

and Malick. Dr. Kane also knew when to push me and it is thanks to his insistent calls for me to

overcome my fears about trying to publish that I have successfully done so. I am grateful to have

shared the experience of Dr. Kane’s mentorship with Ben Burgen and Jamie Fuller, with whom I

have exchanged many good-natured stories about the process.

Dr. Kane’s guidance was complemented by that of my other committee members, whose

advice proved invaluable. Dr. Brenda Chalfin’s feedback consistently brought the best out of my

writing and her advice and encouragement in my effort to make the transition from graduate

student to professional scholar restored my confidence and investment in the process when it was

desperately needed.

From the beginning, Fiona McLaughlin challenged me to think beyond some of the

preconceived notions I brought to my research. It is thanks to her that I believe I came up with an

ethnography that avoids many of the essentializing conceptions of language and linguistic

correctness that I initially brought to graduate school. She and Dr. Leo Villalon graciously

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welcomed me to their home on numerous occasions and our conversations about Senegal and

West Africa remind me of how lucky I am to have personal connections to that region.

Maria Stoilkova has been a valued teacher, mentor and friend and extremely generous

with both her time and energy as I have worked through the many challenges of ethnographic

writing. Her patience with me is greatly appreciated. More than once, she welcomed me into her

home for lively, long nights of discussion with her and her husband Lucho.

The network of researchers and scholars associated with the Sahel Research Group and

the Center for African Studies, including Leo Villalon, Abe Goldman, Todd Leedy, Renata

Serra, Hunt Davis, Dan Reboussin and Alioune Sow made UF a welcoming environment at

which to study. Luise White’s courses on Colonialism in Africa were among the best seminars I

took as a graduate student, and forced me to be brave enough to learn to write concisely, even if

that lesson is not always apparent in this dissertation.

Thanks to Mum and Dad for your friendship, discipline (when it has been needed), and

for giving me the space and resources I needed to make this dissertation project possible. They

absorbed extensive financial costs associated with my attendance at Suffolk University, the

undergraduate college of my choice (as opposed to one in New Hampshire), and mercifully

honored my monthly non-federal debt service obligations during my time in the Peace Corps.

They regularly inspire me with their ability to survive and flourish both personally and as a team

despite major life changes that have occurred over the past decade. It is jarring to consider that

when they were at my current age I was preparing to graduate from high school. Thanks to

brothers Eddie and Billy and their partners Ashley Weaverling and Ashley Hames- and niece

Penelope- for their support and for their ability to comedically snuff out any pretension to

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academic self-importance on my part. I have been proud to see how both of my brothers packed

up and moved across the country, successfully building entirely new lives.

Whenever I flew back north, the home of my grandparents was always my first stop.

Meema, my grandmother, has gracefully hoed a tough row (all the way from Ashton-in-

Makerfield), and having raised six children and helped guide a few of her grandchildren (namely,

myself) in their transitons to adulthood, she has more than earned these years of retirement,

including the occasional trips “south.” Had she not opened her home to me during my years of

undergraduate study, allowing me to finish my BA without worrying about coming up with rent

money, I would not be writing this. Peepa, her “lesser half” (he is allocated 49% of the vote in

their household decisions), was known as “The Greek” among old friends in the Massachusetts

Department of Welfare (later to be named the Department of Transitional Assistance). In fact, his

father fought for Greece in the early 1920s against an army of Ataturk’s forces, sheltering

himself pragmatically within his unit’s trench as he held his rifle high above his head, yanking

the trigger as he aimed the gun towards where he imagined the enemy to be positioned. Our

weekly or, sometimes, twice weekly phone calls to talk about sports or to do “shtick” on fellow

family members have been a big part of my getting through the past eight years.

My late Auntie Annie allowed me to stay with her for two different periods during my

college years, once while I was interning at the Massachusetts State House and again as I was

applying to the Peace Corps and desperately trying to finish my degree and Senior Thesis. I wish

she was still around but am confident she is in spirit. Many “happy returns” to Uncle Fuzzy (also

known to his adoring public as Fuzoobie, Uncle Fester, “B.E.F.,” “The Beffah” or John), Auntie

Kayte, Uncle John (“Hamster,” “Stick” or “Dipes”) and Shirley, Auntie Chrissy, cousins Annie

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Kate and Charlie, as well as many other members of the Hames, Makridakis, Pizzuto and

Cardarelli families.

There are others whose roles in my life previous to graduate school were essential to

making the journey possible. Suffolk University provided the kind of both urban and close-knit

academic environment in which I confirmed, for the first time, my longstanding suspicion that I

could succeed academically if only I made the effort. David Gallant’s recruitment of me into the

InterFuture program that sent me to Spain and South Africa to conduct independent research

foreshadowed my later career in Anthropology. Sebastian Royo helped sparked my interest in

International Affairs and inspired me to imagine pursuing a scholarly career. Without either of

them, I would never have made it to UF.

My Peace Corps service began just three months after I graduated from Suffolk. I write

about this in some detail in the Foreword, but it is necessary to acknowledge those in the village

of Buduk and around the Nianija District, as well as in the agency itself, who made possible the

experiences and language skills that paved the way for my dissertation research. The people of

Buduk are in my thoughts and they include the following: Ebrima “Ndura” York, Fatouƴel York,

Salla Ndorel, Souleymane (or “Maasaani”), Hurai Njie, Ina Fatou (or “Taggere”), Haruna Gosi,

Ablie Fatou Gune, Gibbi Haja, Oumou Penda, Khadija Penda, Hawa Khadija, Ustas Dawda

York, Hassassa, Musa Bah, Dawda Laaw, Hassana Njama, Ousman Njama, Buba Amie, the

brothers Alasan Naffi and Buba Naffi, Kumba Koreja, Alhaji Musa, Samba Fatou Gune, Bakary

Njie, Demba Oumou, Hulay Penda Jallow, Syballo, Alasan the “Doctor,” Helen Bah, the Alkali

Gibbi York and his wife Kumba, Dawda Amie Cham, Mamadou Lobbe and his wife Binta,

Ousman Bah from “galle saakuuji,” Alasan “Ŋuuñaali” and Omar Ceesay.

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Those are just a few I of those I could have named from Buduk itself. Other “Jaaga

naaɓe” who are not forgotten include Saidou Amie Jallow, former MP Dawda Bah, Gibbi Wally

Sow, my Pulaar gurus Yero Taay and Abba Sabally, Habdou Hawa Camara, Dawda Camara,

Haja Kani Toure and her husband Mod Sow, Ustas Ablie Ceesay, Modou Mame Ceesay, Farba

Jallow, Alasan Davis Cham, Adama Gullo, Alasan Jobe, Bekay Jobe, Penda Jobe, Sellou Jaw,

Mbombe Mbaye, Demba Mbaye, Sadr Mbaye, Leila Bah, Musa Penda and Modou Penda, Yahya

Jallow and his wife Sira Cham, Papa Jobe, Alhajji Modou Sallah, Yero Jallow from Sinchu

Baadu, Fatou Bah, Mari Njie, Gibbi Sonko, Samba Njie from Daru, Pa Ceesay from Sinchu

Maka and many others. May Allah bestow mercy and forgiveness upon those from Buduk and

around Nianija who passed away during and after my service, including (but not limited to)

Dawda Gullo York, Jaba Taggere York, Mamadou Lolly from Nioro, Ina Salamata Njie, Babou

Gassama, Maimouna Njie, Ma Sow, Maama Alasan Sonko, Ina Lobbe Cham, Ina Sankare,

Demba “Ɗaɓel” Camara, Pa Haruna, Alhouseyni and Aliou Bah, Dawda Deɓɓo-Deɓɓo and

Aliou Kumalaa.

Thanks are due, as well, to my original Peace Corps Pulaar teachers Muhammadu Bah

and Sarjo Dumbuya, my former supervisor and Associate Peace Corps Director Gibril Sumbunu,

as well as Fatou Sowe. My adjustment to life and work in Nianija would not have been so easy

(nor as fun) had it not been for the public school teachers and civil servants who were posted in

the area as part of the local Multidisciplinary Facilitation Team, or the “MDFT.” They included

Musa Kebbeh, Ansu Tarawally, Modou Jallow, Modou Cham, Serigne Sow, Sainey Mendy,

Mariama Jatta, Yero Bah, Gibril Jarju, Sainey Camara and the hilarious Dr. Musa Jallow.

Fellow PCV Dan Neumann and I spent our entire staging and training together, both

learned Pulaar and we jointly punctuated our service with overland trips to Mauritania, Guinea-

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Conakry and, at the end of our service, through Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, all the way to

Ghana. We have since lived, I suspect, vicariously through one another as he later ventured off to

do documentary film work for an NGO in Uganda and I eventually made my interest in Pulaar

the basis for a dissertation project. We will surely cross paths again soon.

Since 2010, when I began research for this dissertation, dozens of people from Senegal,

Mauritania and the Pulaar-speaking Diaspora in the US and France have generously given their

time and opened their homes to me as I proceeded with my fieldwork. In the United States, the

Brooklyn-based Pulaar Speaking Association (PSA) graciously invited me to several of their

meetings and more than once put me up when I attended their General Assemblies in

Philadelphia, New York, Columbus and Cincinnati. PSA friends include Muhammadou Bah

from Feralla, Mauritania, Abou Seck from PSA’s Boston branch, Cheikh Fall, Alex Bassoum,

Aliou Ngaido, Youssouf Athie and Abou Diom. Allah have mercy on Adama Sarr of Ndulumaaji

Demɓe, who hosted me in Columbus, Ohio when I visited there in 2010. People I met in the

Baltimore-DC area whose hospitality and help were essential to getting my research started are

Hame Watt and his wife Kadia Kane, as well as Oumar Tokosel Bah, whose efforts to connect

me with the Lewlewal Group in Dakar were instrumental to getting my research off to a fast

start.

Many others who played a direct role in making this project happen appear throughout

the dissertation, but I should mention them here. I am deeply indebted to those I met through the

Lewlewal Group in Dakar. Foremost among them is Abou Gaye, who was one of the single most

important people to the success of this project and who introduced me to many who participated.

Since 2011, he has hosted me at his apartment in Parcelles Assainies whenever I come to town.

Though his public- I dare say, national- profile has increased during the past several years,

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Hamet Amadou Ly remained generous with his time and acted, in a way, as an academic adviser

in addressing some of the questions and doubts that inevitably arose during my fieldwork.

Ousman Makka Ly was also there from the beginning and he introduced me to many helpful

research contacts and welcomed me to his home on numerous occasions. Mariama Sow and

Moussa Sy are two other longtime Lewlewal staff. Both are good friends and often among the

first faces I see when I arrive at their offices at the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye (ex-Bopp).

Some special thanks, as well, to my Senegalese Pulaar teacher and dear friend Oumoul

Sow, who was always available, whether at her office or her home, for personal advice, as well

as questions about the language or my research. She also patiently suffered my anxiety and self-

consciousness about my stuttering.

Other friends and participants in this project include the following:

In Dakar: Deffa Wane, Ramatoulaye Sy and her sister Hawa, Amadou Moctar Thiam,

author Amadou Tidiane Kane, Sam Faatoy Kah and all of Penngal Mammadu Alasaan Bah,

Abou Sy, Baidy Ndiaye, Acca Legnane, Tidiane Watt, Yaay Tokosel Legnane, Thierno Wade,

Diewo Sall, Mamadou Alassane Bah, Safoura Sow, Hady Gadio, Ngaari Laaw, Demba Sow and

the Lawɓe of Rue G, Kadia Waar, Yahya Diallo, and the actor Ibrahima Gueye. Thanks to those

at the NGO Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED), including

Mamadou Amadou Ly, Seyni Sall and Awa Kah and others for so generously offering their time

and office space. Rest in Peace, Mamadou Birane “Samba” Wane, who was among my hosts

during my first summer of fieldwork in 2010. Others around Senegal who deserve my thanks

include Tidiane Kasse and his family in Medina Gounasse, Oumar Diallo in Tambacounda,

Ceerno Moussa Abou Niang of the Programme Intégré de Podor and his wife Mame Penda and

Bintou Dieng in Guédé Chantier.

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During my travels to Northern Senegal, many friends made time for interviews and

offered me places to stay as I researched my chapter on Futa Tooro’s community radio stations.

They include Abdoulaye Kane’s family members in Thilogne, such as his older brother Amadou

Tidiane Kane, his wife Aissata Sow and their eight children, as well as the rest of the family over

at their siñcaan compound, including Fama, Nene, Mamadou Malick and their parents. Their

father, Malick Kane, recently passed away. May Allah forgive and have mercy on him. Others in

and around Thilogne and Radio Salndu Fuuta that I cannot forget to mention include Fat Sileye

Sall, Abou Kolya Dia, DJ Choy, Abou Diallo, Mamadou Bass, Ndoumbe Diop, Moussa Sy, Sidi

Kaawoori Dia, Ibrahim “Katante Leñol” Kane, Jinndaa Dem and, of course, the legendary Cliff

Thiam, among others.

When I conducted my research on the stations Fuuta FM and Pete FM, gracious friends

and hosts included Nene Guisse, Faati Gacko, Amadou Abou Thiam, Abou Thiam of Pete FM,

Idi Gaye, Cheikh Amadou Kane, Gaacol Diallo, Ousmane Anne, Ibrahima Anne, Yero Sarr,

Abou Niasse and Demba “Jalel.” In Mboumba, a special thanks to Modi Thiam and family for

the fun afternoons of conversation and exchanges of proverbs. During my research on Timtimol

FM in Ouro Sogui I was hosted by the families of radio personalities Alassane Dia and Kummba

Bah. Others who warmly welcomed me there include Samba Kudi Bah, Haby Sow, Ousmane

Thiam, Abou Bah and Bocar Seck, who graciously accompanied me by minibus and horsecart to

the border village of Sadel, where I interviewed local celebrity and regular radio show caller, the

“Barogal Barooɗe.” In Cascas, which sits along the Senegal River across from Mauritania, I was

graciously hosted by the family of Moussa Loum and enjoyed visiting with Cascas FM staff,

including Mamoudou Yahya Thiam and Ibrahima Sarr.

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Across the river in Mauritania I benefitted from the friendship of many who sacrificed

their time and energy to see that my research went as planned. Almost directly across the river

from Cascas is its sister village of Haayre Mbaara, Mauritania, where in 2013 I stayed with the

family of Mayram Moussa Wone, who also hosted me at her Paris apartment in 2012. Others in

Haayre Mbaara who helped with this project include Sall Djibril and Bowaa Sy. Saidou Nourou

Diallo from Bagodine became a close friend and helped make possible many of the interviews I

conducted in Mauritania. He, his mother, his wife “Bundaw,” his relatives and neighbors

Hammadi and Boido and his extended relatives in Nouakchott, including Modou Diallo, treated

me like family. Special thanks to those in Nouakchott who gave their time and contributed their

knowledge and insights, including Ndiaye Saidou Amadou, Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, Souleymane

Kane, Bocar Amadou Ba and the entire yiilirde of Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar, Gelongal Bah, Dooro

Gueye (also known as “Boobo Loonde”) and Tabara Bah. It was a pleasure getting the chance to

meet with the hip-hop artists Mar Ba and Ousmane from the group Diam min Teky, as well as

the rapper Raasin Jah, also known as “RJ” or “Ngaal Pullal.”

In Southern Mauritania, or the “Fuutaaji,” thank yous to the family of Seybani Aw and

“Mori” Aw in Boghe, Abou Gaye’s family in nearby Wocci and Kayya Diop in Mbagne. The

large, bustling market town of Kaedi was another annual stop of mine. Ba Hamadou Adama

continues to sell old cassettes, Pulaar books and newspapers and sweetened sour milk from his

stall and consistenly invites me in for some milk or water when I need a quick rest from the

brutal heat that envelops their central market during much of the year. He introduced me to many

people in Kaedi, considerably easing my research there. One of them is Ceerno Abdoulaye

Mamadou Ly, who on more than one occasion allowed me to stay at his compound, giving me

the best sleeping place possible during the hot, dry season in Fuuta Tooro: a breezy rooftop. I

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will always remember how much fun I had staying with the bambaaɗo Samba Jommolo Bah and

his family, as we relaxed and conversed on his rooftop and entertained a string of interesting

guests, including some well-known musicians and a Mauritanian National Assembly member.

The staff at Kaedi’s Gorgol FM, the local affiliate of Mauritania’s national radio chain, including

Ba Samba Harouna and Cheikh Kane, taught me a lot about their working conditions. Special

thanks are due, as well, to the family of the late Ceerno Sow Mohamed El Kebir, particularly his

daughters Aicha and Habibetou, who were the first people to welcome me to Mauritania when I

began my research.

During my several months’ stay in Paris, Mayram Moussa Wone Wade, my host in the

9ème arrondissement, became something of an older sister to me. Her apartment was a relaxing,

welcoming place to stay and the stress of balancing daily French courses with my research

efforts was eased thanks to the laughter with Mayram, Faama Mbuubu, Neneyel Bah, Moussa

Mayram and Sally “bébé” (who by now is no baby) and a large network of good friends and

political allies whose regular visits meant that one was never lonely. Mayram’s uncle Dr.

Ibrahima Abou Sall, who I had previously met at a PSA meeting in Cincinnati, deserves thanks

for introducing me to Mayram and for taking some time to show me around the city.

Other fond memories in France include those of actor and media personality Mamadou

Amadou Ly, Saidou Bah of KJPF, receiving valuable research material and recommendations

from Aliou Mouhamadou and Melanie Bourlet at INALCO, Elimane Sadc Sy, Dembel Sall,

Cheikh Guiro, Demba Guiro, Oumar Dia in Massy-Palaiseau, Haby Koundoul, the poet Cheikh

Oumar Ba, Abbas Diallo, Samba Cooyel Ba, nights on the town with the linguist Abou Aziz

Faty, conversing with the linguist Oumar Ndiaye and visits with Mamadou Sow of FLAM. I

appreciate Haby Zakaria Konte for being generous with her time and advice and for the

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memorable lunch and dinner gatherings to which she invited me. Thanks also to Oumar Gallo

Diallo in Rouen for hosting me on multiple occasions and to Ibrahima Malal Sarr for organizing

our interesting public discussion panel in Havre about my research and the development of

Pulaar on the Internet.

Back in Gainesville, the crew from local real estate player Marilyn Wetherington’s 102

NW 9th Terrace- where I lived from 2010 to 2014- were valued shipmates in this journey. Leif

Jackson-Bullock helped inspire my return to jogging, showed me new, innovative household

uses for apples and I hope that his marriage and life in China are as exciting and happy as they

look. Noah Sims joined us that first year at 102. He is a brother and comrade and without him the

celebrations these past few years would not have been as fun and the tough times would have

been twice the hell. For awhile, we basically ran a commune- and if neither of us have settled

down in a few years maybe we should go join Leif and recreate it in Shanghai. I still celebrate

our crowning achievement of successfully convincing a certain high-ranking university

administrator to attend a party in our furnitureless apartment. As it turns out, Noah’s leaving with

his M.A. (all puns intended) was a beginning, not an end. Let’s just say he went off and found a

better field school.

Michael Gennaro’s reign (no hyperbole) at 102 spanned most of my time there and he

joined Noah and me in 2011. Mike, another brother and comrade, was our informal life coach

(when he assumes the role, it can be very entertaining). He has been missed here in Gainesville

but I am glad we are in touch. He and his now wife Alana came through for me during a, shall

we say, difficult period. The historian Brandon “Brando” Jett stayed with Mike and me from

2012-2013, and my Anthro department colleague Erik Timmons spent a few months with us

during the latter part of 2013 as he prepared for his qualifying exams. It was a lot of fun living

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with them both and I am glad we are in the process of seeing our way to the end- even if what

follows for some of us remains unclear. I am also glad Brandon got to witness one of the most

popular of my graduate school-era rants.

Among my departmental comrades in Anthropology, I benefitted from the solidarity and

valuable conversation of many who passed through the graduate program, whether over drinks,

spontaneous bull sessions at the library, during office hours, dissertation writing sessions or-

during the earlier years- over lunch at Ruby’s. These people include, but are not limited to, folks

like Ed “The Yeti” and Diana Gonzalez-Tennant, Justin Dunnavant, Justin Hosbey, Crystal

Felima, Ryan Morini, June Carrington, Timoteo Mesh, Alissa Jordan, Maia Bass, Jessica-Jean

Casler, Kate Kolpan, Noelle Sullivan, Rachel Ianelli and Ann Laffey. I also greatly appreciated

the fun times spent with colleagues in the Political Science and History and English departments,

including Oumar Ba (ngaari mawndi!), Lina Benabdallah, Mamadou Bodian, Mandisa Haarhoff

and others. Rolda Darlington had an important role in the journey and continues to be a valued

friend. Some additional thanks are due Amrita Bandopadhyay for her friendship.

Rahmi Cemen was a great roommate this past year, and our late night watchings of The

Sopranos, The Wire and Friday Night Lights over cheap beer and wine were a necessary

diversion as this graduate school adventure began reaching its chaotic end. Thanks to Jadon

Marianetti for giving us a sweet deal while we stayed there and for his advice about the job

market.

I must also acknowledge others whose friendships were important to me over the years:

Liz Kazungu, Diana Price McCarley, Michelle Adejumo and Jacqui Fernandez. Jeremiah Roiko

has been there for me for twenty years and sooner or later I promise to get to LA to visit him.

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Thanks to all the brothers and sisters at Graduate Assistants United with whom I worked

to assert the dignity of academic labor and politicize the terms that dictate our working

conditions. The trends that make academia such a challenging domain of work and have resulted

in our nightmarish job searches and low-paid adjuncting roles are not abstract “currents” or

“facts of life.” This “real world” is a product of human decisions made by administrators and

politicians under the influence of donors and business interests. We have a responsibility to use

our collective power to both secure the decent jobs and living conditions we all deserve and to

make our campuses spaces where corporate power is challenged.

Those with whom I worked and agitated in this effort include but are not limited to Kevin

Funk, Mauro Caraccioli, Luis Caraballos-Burgos, Emily McCann, Mary Roca, Lia Merivaki,

Ioannis Ziogas, Alec Dinnin, Diana Moreno, Eunice Yarney, Taylor Polvadore, Sebastian

Sclofsky, C.G. Shields, Ginger Jacobson, Bobby Mermer, our United Faculty of Florida

representative Candi Churchill and faculty union members Susan Hegeman and John Leavey.

As a very intelligent person once told me, “You saw-r-a good game.”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................19

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................................20

ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................22

CHAPTER

1 FOREWORD ..............................................................................................................................24

2 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................37

Demographics, Nomenclature and “Unity” ............................................................................37 The Practice of Transnational and Transborder Language Activism .....................................46

3 CONDUCT OF THE STUDY ....................................................................................................60

4 HISTORICAL EMERGENCE OF THE PULAAR MOVEMENT ...........................................81

Narratives of an Origin Story .................................................................................................81 Emergence from the Aftermath of Partition ...........................................................................87

1980s: Cultural and Linguistic Activism along the Border ....................................................95 The Events ............................................................................................................................104

Pulaar/Fulfulde in Regional Context ....................................................................................109 Pulaar Language Activism in a Changing Global Landscape ..............................................111

5 ‘A RIVER IS NOT A BOUNDARY’: TRANS-BORDER ITINERARIES AND THE

QUESTION OF CITIZENSHIP ...........................................................................................115

The Political Life of a Mauritanian-born Senegalese Civil Servant .....................................115

A Mauritanian Born in Senegal: The Trans-Border Itinerary of Ibrahima Moctar Sarr ......119 Broadcasting and the Transborder Legacy of Elhadj Tidiane Anne (1955-2001) ................124 ‘Baaba’ Leñol ngol (The Father of the “Lenyol”): The Trans-border Legend of

‘Murtuɗo’ Samba Diop (1942-2009) ................................................................................129

6 WHAT IS A ‘NGENNDIYAŊKE?’: NATIONHOOD AND LOYALTY IN THE

PULAAR MOVEMENT ......................................................................................................139

An Evening with Language Loyalists ...................................................................................139

Social Crisis and the Public Need for ‘Ngenndiyaŋkooɓe’...................................................152 The Political Evolution of the ‘Ngenndiyaŋke’ ....................................................................157 Broadcasting the “Ngenndi”- An Interview in Pete, Senegal ...............................................172

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The Modernization of Ngenndiyaŋkaagal ............................................................................175

Ngenndiyaŋkaagal as Civic Duty? .......................................................................................177

7 PULAAR MILITANCY AS LIVELIHOOD AND SOCIAL MOBILITY ..............................181

Language Activism’s Return on Distinction ........................................................................186 The Practice of Language Activism as a Challenge to Social Norms ..................................191 “Hol ko Janngi Pulaar?”: Why Pulaar Literacy? .................................................................194 The Benefits and Limits of a Career in Pulaar Militancy .....................................................198 The Right to the Spoils of Linguistic Militancy ...................................................................213

8 LANGUAGE ACTIVISM ON THE AIRWAVES: PULAAR COMMUNITY RADIO

BROADCASTING IN THE SENEGAL RIVER VALLEY ................................................221

The River Valley’s Community Radios in Context ..............................................................225

Language Activism on the Airwaves ....................................................................................230

Practicing Linguistic Struggle on the Air .............................................................................236 Workaday Engagements with Pulaar ....................................................................................243

Community Radio in a Changing Mediascape .....................................................................256

9 CONCLUSION .........................................................................................................................259

LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................266

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................275

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

7-1 Abou Gaye at the Lewlewal office at the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye in Dakar,

Senegal .............................................................................................................................220

7-2 Front from L to R, image of author Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Jinndaa Dem and Deffa

Wane from the documentary footage of Jinnda’s “dédicace.” .......................................220

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ADOS Ardèche Drome Ouro Sogui Sénégal

ARED Associated in Education and Research for Development

ARP Association pour la Renaissance du Pulaar

ARP-RIM Associaton pour la Renaissance du Pulaar- Republique Islamique de

Mauritanie

CCFS Cours de la Civilisation Franҫaise de la Sorbonne

CESTI Centre d'études des sciences et techniques de l'information

DEKALEM Dental Kaaldigal e Leƴƴi Moritani

ILN Institut des Langues Nationales

FLAM Forces de Libération des Africains de la Mauritanie

FPCJ Fedde Pinal e Coftal Ɓalli Jowol

KJPF Kawtal Janngooɓe Pulaar Fulfulde

PAI Parti Africaine de l’Independence

PAPA Projet d’Appui au Plan d’Action en matière d’éducation non formelle

PAPF Programme d’Alphabétisation Priorité Femme

PIP Programme Intégré de Podor

PKM Party Kadim de la Mauritanie

PRODAM Projet de Développement Agricole de Matam

PSA Pulaar Speaking Association of America

RTS Radio et Télévision Sénégalise

TAD Thilogne Association Développement

TPI Tabbital Pulaaku International

USE Union pour le Solidarité et l’Entraide

21

WEC Worldwide Evangelical Crusade

22

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School

of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE PEOPLE WHO ‘STAND UP’ FOR PULAAR: ACTIVISM AND LANGUAGE

LOYALTY POLITICS IN SENEGAL AND MAURITANIA

By

John Joseph Hames

August 2017

Chair: Abdoulaye Kane

Major: Anthropology

This dissertation looks at a network of activists from Senegal and Mauritania devoted to

promoting their language, known as Pulaar, and how they adapt to circumstances in which the

nation-state is often an unreliable guarantor of minority claims and interests. The project entailed

ethnographic research focusing on writers, politicians, theater performers, journalists and literacy

teachers with ties to the Fuuta Tooro region of Northern Senegal and Southern Mauritania.

Through their work, they seek to expand the presence of their language in their respective

national public spheres. Though Pulaar speakers (known as Haalpulaar’en) number up to 25

million throughout West Africa, they are not a majority in any country. In Senegal, French is the

official language and Wolof is the lingua franca of the city and of popular culture, while

Mauritania has seen political struggles centered on the so-called “National Question.” This

pertains to the distribution of power in a country where Arabization policies threaten to

disempower Black African ethnic groups. Within these national contexts, popular practices of

cultural production in the form of literacy classes, poetry, music and broadcasting offer

participants the vision of a linguistic modernity in which all ethnolinguistic groups share equally

in what it means to be Senegalese and Mauritanian. The gap between this vision and the reality,

however, prompts strong critiques of the dominant nation-building projects of the two countries.

23

For example, Pulaar language activists have expressed political and cultural grievances about

such issues as the lack of air time devoted to programming in Pulaar and other minority

languages in the two countries. Despite the absence of significant public and private capital

available for the purpose, Pulaar activists have managed to construct a transnational mediascape

consisting of programming on NGO-funded community radio stations, online radios, some

limited airtime on large public and private radio and TV stations, book publishers and some print

and online news operations. Through these media, Senegalese and Mauritanian language

activists draw on a shared, linguistic citizenship in promoting a politics of language loyalty that

valorizes demonstrations of selfless commitment in the name of promoting Pulaar.

24

CHAPTER 1

FOREWORD

When in 2005 I began learning the Pulaar language as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a tiny

Gambian village, I probably would not have been able to tell you what Anthropologists do or

what Anthropology is at all. My introduction to the discipline emerged from my need to answer

questions that arose during my Peace Corps service, and that lingered with me after my return to

the United States: What are the social and political consequences when trans-border ethnic

groups share linguistic and cultural loyalties that transcend their respective official nationalities?

How do people come to accept linguistic hierarchies as a natural consequence of the modernity

of some languages and the backwardness of others? Why is it that some people appear to submit

to linguistic domination, while others organize resistance against it?

In April 2005, I spent my first week as a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, a tiny

country with about 1.5 million inhabitants at the time. We were training at a boarding house on

Kairaba Avenue in Serrekunda, a major economic hub and growing urban area near Banjul.

During those first few days in country, us newly-minted Peace Corps trainees, mostly white

recent college graduates, learned what our language assignments would be. When we met to

receive the announcements, I arrived at the training center’s cafeteria and written in red marker,

on a piece of poster paper our trainers had taped to the wall I saw my name listed among the

trainees who would be learning “Pulaar.” I had never heard of the language, though later that day

learned that Pulaar refers to a dialect of what is known to many in the English-speaking world as

Fulani, which I had indeed heard of through an undergraduate course I had taken in Africna

Politics.

Less than a week later, I was in a tiny village in central Gambia known as Kundoŋ Fula

Kunda, surrounded by largely Mandinka-speaking communities on the country’s south bank. I

25

was assigned there for a month and a half of cultural and language training with the two other

volunteers in our cohort who would be learning Pulaar.

I have vivid memories of the hot, lazy afternoon I arrived in that village. A small bus

operated by the Peace Corps had dropped us off into the hottest temperature I had ever

experienced. Fula Kunda rests a few hundred yards down a slope leading north from the main

southern road, which at the time was riddled treacherously with large potholes. Vans, buses and

trucks, often packed with weary passengers, usually followed the sandy shoulders instead of the

road itself and would tilt dangerously to one side or another as they travelled. Fula Kunda

(which, in Mandinka, means home of the Fula, or Fulɓe), had around six compounds at the time.

Along the path from the road to the village the first compound appeared on the left-hand side,

separate from the other compounds. Beyond that compound, one approached a large tree on the

left-hand side below which cows and oxen would occasionally gobble up mangoes that fell from

its branches. Near that tree was the pump at which Fula Kunda residents, mainly the women,

would come to fetch water and which was very often visited by what seemed like hundreds of

bees.

My assigned hut was on the left fifty yards or so beyond the pump, just as the downward

slope began to level off slightly. My gracious hosts were led by a man either in his late 20s or

early 30s, as his father (who would have been my host father) had passed away some years

before. However, a woman who was probably about my age (though maybe a little older) and

who went by the nickname “Beso” took the lead in coaching me through my early stumbles as a

Peace Corps trainee. Beso spoke just enough English to help me out when my then twenty to

thirty-word Pulaar vocabulary was not enough to understand what was happening around me.

One evening after the sun had set and I was done bathing I emerged from inside of my hut and

26

sat down in the dark on the tiny porch outside of my hut’s door when Beso chided me in English

for making the mistake of not greeting the members of my host family who were gathered

nearby.

That hut was where I had begun to contemplate exactly what I had signed up for when I

had accepted my Peace Corps assignment a little over two months earlier. On that first day, after

the bus dropped off us three trainees, along with our Pulaar teacher Muhammadou Bah, and we

had greeted our host families, I unlocked the door to my hut and opened it. The first thing I

noticed was a large gecko on the far wall, which scrambled its way up into the thatch. The

thought of sharing a hut with such creatures made me shudder, and I worried that it might find its

way through my mosquito net and into my bed at night. A few minutes later, I stepped out on to

the porch. The harsh, blazing hot sunlight had chased everyone into the shade. I leaned slightly

forward to be able to look out into the wide, shared sandy common area. A lonely, white cow

trudged languidly- its tin-sounding bell ringing- in the direction of the main road. I was a long

way from home.

A personal transformation had begun and would not be limited to the social experience

and cultural immersion that comes with serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I would undergo a

name change, as well. Several days after our arrival, the village held a ceremony at which my

fellow trainees and I would receive new names, adopting the family names of our respective

hosts. The three of us sat side by side on a mat as man from the village successively swiped a

razor blade a few inches above each of our heads, imitating the shaving ritual that takes place

during the ceremonial naming of week-old babies. For the remainder of my time in Fula Kunda, I

would be known as Ousmane Bah. Just weeks later, this last name would be changed to “York”

upon my moving to my two-year Peace Corps assignment in the village of Buduk, located at the

27

center of the county’s predominantly Pulaar-speaking Nianija District. Located off the main road

on the north bank of the The Gambia in the Central River Region, Nianija’s ethnolinguistic

landscape differs than that of much of the rest of the country. The majority of residents of

Nianija’s 30-plus villages speak Pulaar as a first language and many others, particularly Wolofs,

speak Pulaar well. Many Pulaarophones in Nianija can speak Wolof, though most cannot speak

Mandinka, which is spoken only in enclaves in the far east and west of the district, respectively.

In these respects, Nianija more resembles many parts of rural Senegal than it does the rest of

Gambia. Even the ecological landscape, much less wooded and more arid than on Gambia’s

south bank, resembles that of Central Senegal.

My introduction to the York family in 2005 began in early June when I arrived there for a

preliminary host stay accompanied by a Peace Corps staffer. I strained to impress my two new

host fathers, including the eldest of them, Dawda York, who maintained a dignified detachment

from district politics and village gossip and appeared occupied with overseeing the family farms,

cattle, sheep and goats. His younger brother Ebrima, known more widely as “Ndura,” served as a

local police official for the Nianija district chief. Much more of a conversationalist, gossip and

politicker than his older brother, it was Ndura who led us around to several compounds where I

was introduced to Buduk’s imam and “Alkalo,” or chief. During those first few days, I stumbled

through incomprehensible half-sentences, and found my vocabulary corrected, as the Pulaar

dialect spoken in Nianija differed from those of southern Gambia or southern Senegal. In certain

ways, it more closely resembles that of the Fuuta Tooro region of northern Senegal and Southern

Mauritania. Life in the York compound turned upside down upon Dawda’s death in September

2005, three months into my service. Two of his wives would leave our compound and return to

28

their home villages, Ndura became head of the household and I was among those to whom

family members who had previously relied on Dawda turned for support.

For me, as with the poets, broadcast journalists, literacy teachers, novelists, movie actors

and political dissidents I have interviewed for this project, learning and mastering Pulaar became

a cause. On a personal level, this cause had two aspects. One of these was the triumph of

mastering a language other than the one I grew up speaking. Like many members of the United

States’ white, Anglo majority, I had lived the first twenty-three years of my life largely as a

monolingual, notwithstanding some exposure to French and Spanish in high school and college.

My two-year assignment in the village of Buduk, located in Gambia’s Nianija District,

posed many challenges that made proficiency in Pulaar a necessity. It was the classic Peace

Corps assignment: An off-the-main-road rural village with no electricity or running water and a

palm-roofed hut where, despite Gambia being an “Anglophone” country, many do not speak

English. Securing my basic needs, making friends and even doing some of the official work the

Peace Corps had assignmed me required picking up the language quickly. This became an

obsession. I gained many friends with whom I would occasionally spend long evenings as they

taught me proverbs, heroic tales, incantations and many new vocabulary words. By the end of

my service, I had accumulated hundreds of proverbs and riddles, as well as a list of two or three

thousand vocabulary words, on top of the basic vocabulary that I needed not write down.

I prided myself on the strong friendships I created within my host family and small

villages around the Nianija District. To pass my time, I also kept careful track of the weddings,

naming ceremonies and funerals taking place in the area, often planning my weeks around them.

Numerous friends and acquaintainces, many of them quite young, passed away during my years

there and this was the most difficult, shocking and unanticipated challenge of my service.

29

Among fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, I began to gain a reputation as “Fula-centric,” as

my friend and fellow PCV Dan Neumann called me or “au village,” which is what a friend

serving in Guinea once labelled me. At times, such perceptions of my cultural immersion

evoked colonial ideologies of “going native,” which I would only fully realize later. Two fellow

volunteers once spent a day visiting me, having traveled by bicycle from a village on the main

road 11km away from where I was living. They were acquaintances who were genuinely curious

to learn more about my living situation. I gave them a tour of Buduk and several surrounding

villages. A couple of months later, I was visiting the Peace Corps office in Banjul and saw that in

one of our newsletters the two of them had written a humorous, spoof account of their visit to me

based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. They specifically mentioned my bringing them to the top

of a rocky hill known as “Perlel Buuba Hawaa” where, as they wrote, “(John) showed us the

land over which he holds sway” (Author’s recollection, 2007).

My interest in Pulaar took other forms besides simply learning the language. The second

aspect of my taking up the cause of Pulaar was my growing interest about the Pulaar language’s

presence around West Africa. I met many Pulaar speakers around the Gambia, as well as

neighboring countries to which I managed to travel, including Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea.

At the end of my service, Dan Neumann and I made a nearly eight-week backpacking trip that

included numerous stops in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. One of the questions that I

began forming was how Fulɓe (or Haalpulaar’en, as some Gambian Pulaar speakers called

themselves) living in these many countries saw themselves as similar or different from one

another. Also, why had the large numbers of Pulaar speakers around West Africa not resulted in

their language attaining lingua franca status in any single country? My growing Pulaar skills

were something I took with me as I moved about West Africa and I soon learned the breadth and

30

limits of the horizons that speaking Pulaar opens for a non-French-speaking visitor to the region.

It became clear that those limits stem partly from regimes of linguistic domination with their

origins during the colonial period but which continued after the countries of West Africa gained

independence.

When I travelled to Banjul or Dakar, I found that Wolof was, with some exceptions, the

first language of choice in markets and on the street. Gambia’s national radio offered only

occasional airtime in Pulaar and the same was the case with the FM radio stations accessible

from across the nearby Senegalese border. Young Fulɓe and Haalpulaar’en who had spent time

in the Senegalese or Gambian capitals took pride in their command of Wolof and sometimes

even spoke it among themselves. The bulk of major pop cultural and entertainment products and

radio broadcast content was delivered in a Wolof or, in the Gambian case, a Mandinka idiom.

Gambia’s most famous national music icon was Jaliba, an artist who sang in Mandinka;

meanwhile, Senegal’s national music hero is Youssou Ndour, who sings in Wolof. Baaba Maal,

who performs all over the world, sings in Pulaar and seemed to be more regarded as a

specifically Haalpulaar icon.

My Peace Corps service offered other examples of Pulaar’s marginality from the

“commanding heights” (to use that oft-borrowed term of Lenin’s) of linguistic power. Among

the civil servants posted to Buduk and the nearby village of Chamen, the entrance of one non-

Pulaar speaker into a conversation shifted the medium of the conversation from Pulaar to Wolof.

Sometimes, I would hear cheerful references to Wolof as “our national language.” I began to

wonder if there was a relationship between the political and economic status of my host

community and its surrounding district (the only Pulaar-majority district in The Gambia) and the

Pulaar language’s low status nationally compared to Wolof. More broadly, I started questioning

31

my original assumption that the speaking of languages like Pulaar and Wolof constituted a

developmental void that needed to be filled by English or French.

From early in my service, I was eager to hang out socially with people involved in adult

Pulaar literacy classes, which the Gambian government sponsored at the time. I shared their

enthusiasm for learning the language and they were often ready to indulge in my incessant

questions asking for new vocabulary words or proverbs. I got to know several people who read

and wrote in Pulaar well and observed the satisfaction they derived from using the written word.

A few of them possessed small collections of books and other printed material in Pulaar, many of

which had been published in Senegal. Several of these friends of mine recalled a civil service

extension worker, who was based in Nianija in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a little before the

opening of the local primary school, known as Buduk Lower Basic School. All of them

happened to have been students in his Pulaar literacy classes, and still took pride in the skills

they had developed in the process.

I wondered why I had not heard of more initiatives that made literacy in Pulaar, Wolof

and other National Languages a central part of their work. One of my informal Peace Corps

initiatives was to bring back to some of my Pulaar enthusiast friends in Nianija written material

in the language. During one trip to the Peace Corps office in Banjul, I printed several copies of a

Pulaar-language translation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I told some of my fellow

Peace Corps Volunteers who were at the office that it might generate some interesting political

discussions. Such debates were not easy to have, as then-President Yahya Jammeh was

consolidating his power in the wake of a coup attempt that had occurred in March 2006. The risk

of encountering someone snooping on behalf of Jammeh’s National Intelligence Agency was

very real. My Peace Corps colleagues found my idea quixotic, and did not see the point. When I

32

brought the copies of the Declaration to Nianija, my friends quickly became engrossed in it. On

one occasion, I brought the papers to a naming ceremony that I knew several of them would

attend. A group of us gathered under the shade in the compound where the ceremony was taking

place and I distributed loose pages among them, and they proceeded to pore over the

Declaration’s various articles. They took great satisfaction in their ability to understand the

document, with one of them exclaiming, “this is even written in our dialect” (Author’s

recollection, 2006).

As I would find to be the case in Senegal and Mauritania, the Pulaar literacy initiatives

that I heard about in The Gambia were sponsored by government entities, as well as NGOs,

including Christian mission groups from Europe and the United States. Around the Senegambia

Region, many personal book collections, not to mention the book stacks lining the market stalls

of used book sellers, contain material with messages promoting Christianity. During my service,

the The Worldwide Evangelical Crusade ran a dispensary in Chamen, Nianija and they along

with state-employed medical staff run regular clinics around the district, including in Buduk.

WEC staff and volunteers are often quite proficient in Pulaar, having been taught using the

alphabet whose creation by Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar militants in the 1950s and 1960s

I discuss in Chapter 3. Though in Nianija WEC always appeared to emphasize its medical work

and did not seem to openly proselytize, there was a rumor during my service that a few locals,

including a person from a three or four-compound hamlet known as Sinchu Saidy, had taken an

interest in Christianity and were quietly holding Bible study sessions with WEC.

In 2006, around the halfway point of my Peace Corps service, my growing interest in the

promotion of Pulaar took a major turn. In this case, it was through my habit of practicing the

language by listening to audio cassette tapes I borrowed from friends or purchased at weekly

33

markets in the area. One evening, I decided to spend some time with the owner of one of three

small shops in Buduk. This specific shop is located at the village square (dingiral in Pulaar),

where major events are held, usually during the big holidays like Tabaski or Korité, when young

people gather there to dance to music. The shop owner is originally from Senegal but has lived in

Buduk for many years. Though identifying as a Mandinka, he speaks Pulaar fluently. On this

particular evening, he played a cassette on his battery-powered radio that aired multiple singing

voices and what sounded like a melancholy guitar and hoddu, a stringed instrument vaguely

resembling a banjo or a guitar. The voices were interspersed with that of a narrator who

somberly described the life of a hero who had passed away.

My friend the shopkeeper explained to me and another man sitting with us that the

cassette was made as a tribute to Elhadj Tidiane Anne, who had died in a car crash several years

earlier. As I would find out, Anne was a Senegalese Pulaar-language broadcast journalist known

as an advocate for the language in his country. The shopkeeper characterized Anne’s death as a

great loss, as he was a hero to many Fulɓe and Haalpulaar’en, especially in Senegal, adding, I

recall, that “the Pulaar of Fuuta Tooro is clearer than the Pulaar spoken here.” As I would

discover years later, the group that produced this tribute cassette is known as Fedde Pinal e

Ɓamtaare, which could be translated as the Organization for Culture and Prosperity. The

Senegalese theater troupe is well-known for their movies, many of which have been sold on VHS

and DVD in Diaspora communities in Europe and the United States. As the three of us listened

on, the cassette played what sounded like an excerpt from a radio broadcast. An urgent, strident

voice spoke as a hoddu played in the background. At the time, I could barely understand the

words of the speaker, but the shopkeeper informed me that that was the voice of Tidiane Anne.

34

In the process of learning the language, I had become something of an aspiring Pulaar

partisan, and enjoyed practicing the language by listening to cassettes featuring orators and

storytellers. In hopes of finding some of Anne’s cassettes, the following week I made the 7km

journey by bicycle and pirogue ferry to Panchang, whose Saturday luumo (or weekly market)

attracts many Gambians and Senegalese. Part of the community, known as “Panchang

Français,” is located on the Senegalese side of the border, and the luumo is divided into so-

called Gambian and Senegalese sections. In the mid-2000s, memory cards and USB drives were

still largely unavailable in the informal media markets of the Sahel Region, so I looked for audio

cassettes. In Panchang, Gambia, which was the more bustling side of the bi-national luumo, a

cassette seller had set up a large rack of tapes containing a wide range of music and religious

sermons. When I asked him if he had anything with Tidiane Anne available, he furnished five or

six cassettes, a few of which he played for me.

That evening, I played the cassettes I had selected on a small tape deck I kept in my hut

in Buduk. One of the cassettes contained a discussion in which Tidiane Anne was giving the

interview. I could tell the interview was conducted during the run up to the Senegalese

Presidential Election of 2000, the year before Anne died in a bloody car accident near the

northern Senegalese community of Wuro Maadiyu, along the road to the old French colonial

outpost town of Podor on the Senegal River. On the cassette, Anne answered questions about

several Senegalese politicians, including Abdoulaye Wade, who at the time of Anne’s interview

was an opposition candidate for Senegalese President.

I became intrigued as I listened on and began hearing something my fellow Pulaar

students in the Peace Corps had joked might exist: Tidiane Anne was making an explicit call for

action to defend and promote the Pulaar language! In fact, the interview included the very

35

statement that Fedde Pinal e Ɓamtaare had excerpted in its hommage to the radio broadcaster.

That statement, which I write about in Chapter 6, is specifically a call for unity among members

of the Pulaar-speaking leñol. In the interview Anne spells out of his goal of creating a radio

station spanning the countries of West Africa:

When each year we celebrate Senegal’s Independence Day we need to be ready for

combat. Whether (the day) is meant to include us or not, let’s assert ourselves.

Where we would have merely begged or appealed for sympathy let’s engage in

seizure. Up to this point we have been doled out only a part of what we know is our

share of this country. If we “mbiy-mi1” people in this country sit around until we

are told to come and be given our share, we will never get it. Our share, we must

simply take it. . . . We can set up an organization, an organization that will include

all African journalists, that is, Fulɓe. A group of us met in December 1998 in

Ouagadougou, including representatives of 78 radio stations from 36 countries.

When we reached the point of officially creating the organization, thanks to Allah,

everyone agreed to have the Senegalese representatives take the lead. . . . We are

looking to start a radio station that will originate in Dakar and cover West Africa,

Central Africa, and serve the Diaspora- those in Europe and the US- who will all be

listening, and Pulaar will be the only language broadcasted. “Mbiy-mi, wiy-mi e

wiy-ma-mi noon,” what does that mean? It means that Fulfulde, Pular and Pulaar2,

they are meat off the same bone; each is in conversation with the other. It is not

only speakers in Senegal who share the language. No, because if a big radio station

is placed in Dakar, new affiliated radios will be put in twelve other countries. If we

start with four, and add twelve later on, that makes 16 countries with radio stations

affiliated with one another, that’s where our project is heading, with each country

having an exclusively Pulaar-language radio station. (Diallo 2000)

This interview is known as Tidiane Anne’s Eeraango, which roughly translates as a “call

to action” and it circulates online, Mp3 files and cassettes in Pulaar-speaking Diaspora

communities in France and the United States, as well as in markets throughout Senegal,

Mauritania and Gambia. I have even met a few Senegalese and Mauritanians who use that

interview as a cell phone ringtone, and it is probably the most famous recorded statement by

1 “Mbiy-mi,” literally “I say,” “I said,” or “I’m saying,” often prefaces statements in the Pulaar language, including

when the speaker aims to make a specific point or argument.

2 Here, Anne refers to the names of different groups of Pulaar dialects spoken around West Africa (see Chapter 2).

36

Tidiane Anne. My listening to Tidiane Anne’s Eeraango cassette in 2006 was my first encounter

with the arguments of those involved in organized efforts to promote the Pulaar language in

Senegal and Mauritania. At the end of my Peace Corps service, I took the cassette home with me

to the United States. It became my starting point for formulating my look at how a small network

of almost quixotically committed people drove the creation of a significant body of cultural

production in a widely-spoken yet geopolitically marginalized language.

37

CHAPTER 2

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is based on a total of over a year of fieldwork in Senegal, Mauritania

and France during which I interviewed and lived with poets, novelists, broadcast and print

journalists, political dissidents, movie actors and musicians. They constitute a tight-knit network

of people devoted to promoting the Pulaar language, which is spoken by significant minorities in

both Senegal and Mauritania, as well as around West Africa. I regard them as language activists

(Urla 2012) because they are concerned with expanding, on an organized basis, the presence of

the Pulaar language in the public sphere. Their efforts and opinions about the status of their

language may only reflect those of a certain segment of Pulaar speakers from their countries.

However, their work has been instrumental in creating domains of cultural production that are

robust for such a geopolitically marginalized language that is neither used officially in public

institutions nor as a national lingua franca in any one country. The people with whom the reader

will become familiar in this chapter and those that follow have driven the creation of Pulaar-

language books, newspapers, movies, literacy classes and radio and TV programs that have been

accessed by millions of people.

Demographics, Nomenclature and “Unity”

If the name Pulaar seems unfamiliar, you might recognize the terms “Fulani,” “Fula” or

“Peul.” These are the ethnonyms by which Pulaar-speakers, who live in countries throughout the

Sahel Region, are most widely known to the rest of the world. Depending on where you are in

West Africa and the dialect people are speaking, Pulaar can also go by the names “Pular” or

“Fulfulde.” Those dialects spoken in the western part of the Sahel Region, namely, Senegal,

Gambia, Mauritania, Guinea Bissau and Western Mali, are known as “Pulaar.” “Pular” refers to

dialects spoken in Guinea-Conakry, as well as parts of Sierra Leone and the Kedougou Region of

38

Southeastern Senegal. Fulfulde refers to those dialects spoken in the Malian region of Maasina

eastward, including in parts of Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria. Fulfulde speakers reside as far

east as Sudan, where the descendants of religious pilgrims who took up residence along the route

to Mecca speak a heavily Arabized form of the language (Abu-Manga 1986).

One cannot necessarily draw clear cartographic boundaries between these groups of

dialects. Many Pular speakers from Guinea-Conakry, known colloquially as “Fulɓe Fuuta,” have

lived for decades in neighboring countries such as Gambia, Senegal and Mauritania, where their

dialects and those of local Fulɓe communities influence one another. In the Gambian Pulaar-

speaking community where I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, many parents send one or more

of their sons to study at Quranic schools, many of them in Fuuta Tooro. These young men find

their Gambian, Ñaaniŋke dialect of Pulaar easily adaptable those dialects native to Fuuta. Years

later, upon returning, these Quranic scholars impress their Gambian friends and family with their

command of “Fuutaŋkoore” (literally, “the language of Fuuta Tooro”), which is received in such

instances as something of a prestige dialect.

The number of Pulaar speakers throughout the African continent is difficult to calculate.

Niang (1997) and Levinson (1995), for example, both quote figures asserting that they number

up to 25 million around West Africa, while other scholars give such estimates as “at least ten

million” (McLaughlin 1995) or “several millions” (Azarya et al 1999). Throughout this

dissertation, I refer to Pulaar speakers using the ethnonyms “Fuutaŋke,” “Haalpulaar” (pl.,

Haalpulaar’en) or “Fulɓe.” Though those terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are

very important distinctions between them. “Fuutaŋke” refers to an inhabitant of the Fuuta Tooro

region of Northern Senegal and Southern Mauritania, which is located in the middle Senegal

River Valley. Though the term is often reserved for Pulaar speakers, some of them assert that

39

members of other ethnic groups living in Fuuta are also Fuutaŋkooɓe. I once encountered this

when asking a retired police officer who lives in the city of Boghe, Mauritania what he thought

distinguished the political and racial attitudes of Haratine Moors living in Nouakchott from those

based in the Senegal River Valley. Those in the valley, he said, “are simply Fuutaŋkooɓe.”

“Haalpulaar” (literally, “speak Pulaar”) is a term that, like “Fuutaŋke,” can also

specifically refer to Pulaar speakers from the Senegal River Valley, while the term “Fulɓe” is the

ethnonym with which most Pulaar and Fulfulde speakers in West Africa identify. The origins of

the term Haalpulaar are a matter of some speculation, with some arguing that it came about in a

context where many people of differing ethnolinguistic origins became integrated into

predominantly Pulaar-speaking polities. In Fuuta Tooro, legend has it, many of these people

came as refugees from other parts of the Senegambia region, or were held in various forms of

bondage as maccuɓe, or slaves. As such, they were not dignified with the term Fulɓe. In many

West African contexts, identification as a “Pullo” (pl. Fulɓe) not only marks someone as a Pulaar

or Fulfulde speaker, but often connotates noble lineage. Moreover, the prestige of Fulɓe families

is often expressed through wealth possessed in cattle, sheep, goats, as well as horses for

transportation. Those integrated into Pulaar-speaking communities in Fuuta Tooro not

distinguished by Fulɓe rank, so the story goes, became known as the Haalpulaar’en. Others claim

that the term “Haalpulaar” came about in the process of these newcomers or captives of Fuuta

Tooro being ordered to “speak Pulaar.”

The term has a long, documented history, alongside that of the ethnonym “Tukulor” or

“Toucouleur” that French colonialists and coastal Wolofs have used to refer to Haalpulaar’en for

centuries. In his 1875 book Essaies sur la Langue Poul, published after his retirement from the

French colonial administration, Louis Faidherbe distinguished between the different

40

Pulaarophone populations of Fuuta, implying that the cattle herding Fulɓe are “pure Peuls,”

while depicting sedentary “Toucouleurs” (Tukulors) (or the Haalpulaar’en) as products of

“métissage.”

The blacks of our colony, and later the French, gave to them this same name

(Tekrouri), which became in their mouths Tokoror, Tokolor, or Toukouleur, and

they applied this name to those Pouls who had mixed with Blacks, to the exclusion

of Poul tribes remaining pure among them, so that for the Senegalese today

Toucouleur means Poul crossed with Black. When referring to themsleves, the

Toucouleurs of Fuuta Senegal neither give themselves the name Fulbe, reserved for

pure Peul, nor that of Tokolor; they refer to themselves as Al Poular (Haalpulaar).

(1875, p.15-16)

In the 21st Century, the question of how to collectively name those who speak the Pulaar

language remains the subject of many debates among those who devote themselves to promoting

the Pulaar language in Senegal and Mauritania. Their arguments about whether to collectively

adopt the ethnonyms “Fulɓe” or “Haalpulaar” derive from a concern with rendering the millions

of Pulaar speakers in Senegal, Mauritania and around West Africa legible as a definable entity

capable of accessing institutions of power. Sometimes, these debates are characterized by

assertions of a Fulɓe exceptionalism that echoes the colonial racial mythology-alluded to in

Faidherbe’s claim- regarding Fulɓe as racially superior to their neighbors. As Faidherbe’s

ruminations on the “Tokolor,” “Poul” and “Al Poular” suggest, state-building processes

sometimes classify population groups almost as a fait accompli. Though the word “Toucouleur”

does not usually appear in daily Pulaar speech (except when making reference to how Wolofs

use the term), it remains in widespread use, particularly in Dakar.

The Senegalese census has in the past distinguished between “Peul” (Fulɓe),

“Toucouleur” (Haalpulaar) and “Lawɓe,” the latter referring to an occupational caste of wood

carvers who, depending on the family and location, can be either Wolof or Pulaar speaking.

Pulaar language activists have cited this fact in many conversations, and some attribute it to the

41

Senegalese government’s perceived motivation to deliberately underestimate the numbers of

Pulaarophones living in the country. More than once, I have encountered claims that the

Senegalese government has suppressed data indicating that Fulɓe comprise a majority of

Senegalese. One person I interviewed recalled airing broadcasts urging listeners to tell census

workers that they are “Haalpulaar” and to refuse to be classified as “Toucouleurs.”

Beginning in 1988, the Senegalese census abandoned the categories “Peul,”

“Toucouleur” and “Lawɓe,” in favor of the catch-all term “Pulaar.” Both McLaughlin (1995) and

Faty (2011) analyze processes in which the consolidation of a unitary “Haalpulaar” identity has

taken shape in the Senegalese context. They both cite Pulaar-language musician Baaba Maal’s

song Agouyadji, in which the singer gives a series of shoutouts to the the many African countries

in which Pulaar is spoken. Similarly, Rénovation de Ndioum, a cultural organization that in the

1970s made songs devoted to themes of Pulaar linguistic pride, women’s rights and

anticolonialism, produced a song in which the chorus repeated lyrics about Pulaar being studied

from “Somalie to Mali.” Dialects of Pulaar are indeed spoken by millions of people across many

African countries. However, as Faty points out, the claims made in the songs produced by Maal

and Rénovation de Ndioum constitute a form of “erasure” (Irvine and Gal 2000) that elides

differences between dialects of Pulaar and Fulfulde, as well as the diverse local and regional

histories and cultures that exist among Fulɓe (or Haalpulaar) communities.

Sometimes, use of the term “Haalpulaar” is strongly opposed. A number of participants

in this project favored the term Fulɓe, arguing that it is the ethnonym with which most Pulaar

speakers in West Africa identify. This perspective appeared in an angry speech titled “Yiyannde

e ngool Leñol” (Perspective on this ethnic community), by a man named Muhammadu Fadel

Bah. In his opinion, the Fulɓe people have accepted their language’s marginal status not only by

42

embracing the Wolof language but also by accepting names that are “not names.” He objects to

the term “Haalpulaar,” arguing that Fulɓe is the proper ethnonym of all who speak the language.

Today, we have education, wealth and political power. Why can’t Fulɓe sit down

together and pick a spokesperson, a leader for the Fulɓe who when speaking people

listen and pay attention, so that when people sit down together they can work and

so that whatever they work on is done properly, the way it is supposed to be? But

the Fulɓe have not sat down together. All that has happened is people dividing

themselves and accepting their division. . . . Look at Senegal, where you are called

“Tukulor bi.” Here you are answering to a foul name, to a name that is not a name,

a name, that does not represent any ethnicity. It means nothing. You are also

referred to as a “Haalpulaar.” Here, you are answering to someone else’s label, the

name of a dominated person. If you look at Senegalese TV, anyone who shows up

is told they must speak in Wolof. We are labelled the Haalpulaar today, tomorrow

we will be known as the Haalwolof’en because that is what’s happening here in

Senegal. . . .Your proper identity is as a Pullo who speaks Pulaar, like any other

ethnicity, where the leñol and language are referred to as “such and such.” The

Serers speak Serer, Wolof speakers are Wolofs, Mandinkas are “Mandinka,”

Manjagos are “Manjagos.” “Sarahules” are here, they are known as “Soninke.” We

have Bambaras who are known as “Bambara.” But even hearing all that, you the

Pullo from Senegal to Mauritania to Mali, still don’t comprehend it and want to be

called a Tukulor! (Ba, Date Unknown)

Throughout the recording, Muhammadu Fadel Bah offers a strident, clearly distilled

account of many of the factors that Pulaar militants blame for the fact that their language has

“regressed.” These include the perceived failure of government officials, businesspeople,

intellectuals and wealthy diasporans to contribute to efforts aimed at promoting the language.

Demographic statistics in the form of linguistic population measurements within nation-

states serve to legitimize or undermine political claims based on language. Statistical

interventions for measuring characteristics of the body politic are among the instruments of

“governmentality” (Foucault 1991) that have the depoliticizing effect of producing “facts” that

make the distribution of power and influence appear impartial. This did not seem lost on some of

those I met during my fieldwork. In a group interview with members of one organization, a

person asked me my view on the numbers of Fulɓe living in countries like Senegal, Mali,

Burkina Faso and other countries around West Africa. Do they number 40 million, as some

43

think? I found that hard to believe but I did not want to disappoint them or view me as

unsympathetic to their demographic claims. I dodged the question by saying that we have no way

of knowing because you cannot trust governments to come up with reliable statistics. Everyone

nodded in agreement. This was not the first time I had encountered concern over this issue.

Before my graduate career even began, an activist involved with the organization Tabbital

Pulaaku International responded to my doctoral research proposal by writing, “Please check the

population of Fulbe. I have heard much greater numbers” (Personal Communication, November

7, 2008).

In both Senegal and Mauritania, decades-old ethnolinguistic demographic figures are

sometimes repeated as if they represent physical characteristics of the countries’ landscapes. In

Mauritania, overviews of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup recycle as established fact that

“Beydane” or “White Moors” comprise 30% of the country’s population, “Haratines,” or “Black

Moors,” make up 40%, while so-called “Black Africans,” or “Negro-Africans,” make up an

additional 30%. However, this break down is based on decades-old figures and does not account

for the actual sociolinguistic diversity of the country.

When it comes to language, the Mauritanian census does not make distinctions between

who among the so-called “Negro-Africans” speaks Wolof, Pulaar or Soninke. It is commonly

asserted that Pulaar speakers (both Fulɓe cattle herders, known as “aynaaɓe,” and the so-called

Haalpulaar’en) make up a majority of non-Moorish Mauritanians, but it is truly difficult to get an

accurate picture of how many Mauritanians speak Pulaar and estimates vary, as they do for

speakers of Wolof and Soninke. The Mauritanian census, subject in recent years to vigorous

contestation by such movements as Touche pas à ma Nationalité, conducts its own act of

linguistic erasure making possible the presentation of an unblemished Hassanophone or

44

Arabophone face to the rest of the world. One does not have to travel very far outside of

Mauritaniana’s borders to see the effects. Many Senegalese, whose country neighbors

Mauritania, often ask how I could possible get around the latter country without speaking

Hassaniya, unaware that it is not uncommon to meet Mauritanian Haalpulaar who cannot speak

the language.

In 2011, the Mauritanian government stoked popular anger when census officials in

Nouakchott and in the south began questioning the citizenship of Black Mauritanians, including

Haalpulaar’en. The practices stirred painful memories of the late 1980s, when soldiers,

gendarmes or armed bands would show up at the doorsteps of members of so-called

“Senegalese” ethnic groups such as Fulɓe/Haalpulaar, Wolofs and Soninke looking for a reason

to kick them off their property. One man who lives in Arafat, a popular quarter of Nouakchott,

recalled that his family was forced to move to that neighborhood after being expelled from their

previous home in 1989. One of the pretexts for that expulsion was a picture hanging on a wall of

their home displaying the image of a Senegalese religious cleric.

Discussions about the ways in which Black Mauritanians are denied citizenship papers

capture many of the quotidian ways in which so-called “Negro-Africans” are Otherized by

Mauritanian’s dominant nation-building project. Fuutaŋke elders and others with a shaky

command of Hassaniya are told there is no way a true Mauritanian would be incapable of

speaking that language. Sometimes, these practices can produce absurd results. One man I

interviewed discussed how he and his wife both have Mauritanian citizenship papers yet their

son, born and raised in the country, has been unable to obtain them. A frequent topic of

conversation among people I met in Arafat in 2015 was the rounding up of youth who were

arrested in attempts to clandestinely travel to Europe by boat. Rumor had it that the Mauritanian

45

authorities were not distinguishing between the nationalities of those they detained, deporting

everyone to Senegal including many likely Mauritanians. Amidst such bureaucratic attempts to

cast Black Mauritanians as Senegalese infiltrators, protests were held in 2011 by organizations

such as Touche pas à ma Nationalité, as captured in music videos by Pulaar hip-hop groups like

Soldier Hems and Diam min Teky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-rquj5Rac8).

Beyond specific national context, efforts to forge a common identity among Pulaar

speakers reached a turning point with the establishment in 2002 of Tabbital Pulaaku International

(TPI) at a conference in Bamako, Mali. TPI asserts a pan-Fulɓe identity, purportedly shared by

Pulaar/Fulfulde speakers around West Africa. Tabbital inherited some of the infrastructure laid

through decades of Pulaar militancy on the part of Fuutaŋkooɓe. However, many of those with

influence in TPI are intellectuals, political dignitaries and businesspeople from West African

countries such as Guinea and Nigeria without a personal connection to the years of work in

literacy, theater or journalism that made up the backbone of the Fuuta Tooro brand of Pulaar

cultural and linguistic militancy. Some Senegalese and Mauritanians who have participated in

TPI conferences have told me of their surprise at what they see as the relative lack of emphasis

on language among organization members from other parts of West Africa. Some of those other

West African TPI members, witnesses recalled, are more concerned with rallying around a

notion of cultural heritage shared among members of the leñol1 rather than around the issues of

language policy and representation that motivate activists with ties to Fuuta Tooro.

1 Leñol (pl. leƴƴi) may be translated in specific contexts as “race” or “ethnicity” and is often a term referring to a

group of people sharing a significant, socially salient cultural characteristic such as language. This is not the same

thing as saying that the word literally means race or ethnicity, as Americans and Europeans understand these

concepts. I have also heard the word leñol used to refer to types of leaves (leƴƴi haako) or fish. It may be that the

word refers to shared-trait categories within types of living organisms.

46

The Practice of Transnational and Transborder Language Activism

Urla (2012) argues convincingly that language activism is, at its heart, an effort to render

taken-for-granted aspects of linguistic hierarchies the subject of political contestation. She

appropriates the Comaroffs’ (1991) analysis of social transformation as a process in which

regimes of knowledge exist on a spectrum between the hegemonic and the ideological. When

certain attitudes about language are hegemonic, that means they are unquestioned and

operationalized without open reflection and debate. The contestation of such attitudes raises

questions about how they came to be, whether they are useful and who the attitudes or

assumptions favor or disfavor, thus moving them into the realm of the ideological.

What does this mean in concrete terms? Pulaar language activists challenge the assumed

roles that are assigned to certain languages in Senegalese and Mauritanian societies. In Senegal,

even people who speak other languages in the home often unthinkingly speak Wolof in Dakar

marketplaces or in public transit. The same might go for Hassaniya in many domains of

Mauritanian life. Pulaar language loyalists sometimes try to break with the conventions

associated with the language hierarchies in the two countries. These can take forms that are

jarring in their defiance of expectations. One of the chapters in this dissertation includes the story

of how Tidiane Anne drew controversy by one morning opening the national radio speaking

Pulaar instead of Wolof. In both Senegal and Mauritania, politicians have transgressed linguistic

expectation by speaking Pulaar during sessions of the countries’ respective National Assemblies.

Such acts constitute attempts to proclaim of Pulaar’s modernity, and are declarations of the

language’s relevance to the countries’ political futures.

Several years ago, Deputy Sy Samba’s speech in Pulaar from the floor of Mauritania’s

National Assembly drew attempts to get him to stop. A clip of this speech, which aired on

Mauritanian national television, also appears on YouTube

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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCb2G0eVoTw). His speech related to a debate on

Mauritania’s foreign affairs but he began by stating that he was not speaking with the Minister of

Foreign Affairs, but with those in the TV audience who can understand Pulaar.

Salaam aleekum, my friends. They say that whenever you spot a piece of meat, it

means something has died. We have come here to work at a hall of respect that has

become a hall of shame because, here, lies cover up the truth. Friends, I am not

addressing the Minister of Foreign Affairs . . . (Sy 2012)

At this point, someone began pounding a gavel, attempting to quiet him. But he

continued:

I am addressing you, my friends who say “mbiy-mi,” to give you all a sense of how

things work here, of the workings of this house, so that we all share a common

understanding and you can all be your own judges. My friends, let me plainly state

today that the government does not do any of the things it says it will do or that it

needs to do (Sy 2012).

There followed a commotion in the chamber. A voice cut him off, saying, in French, “Eh,

Samba, n’y a pas de traduction, ah. Vous parlez en francais!” Samba responded, “Je ne parle,

monsieur le President! Monsieur le President, s’il vous plait, mais chers collegues, je ne

m’addresse pas aux deputes ni aux ministers. Je m’addresse aux peuples mauritaniennes dans la

langue de mon choix” (Sy 2012). Having responded in French, Samba Sy resumes his speech in

Pulaar, criticizing, among other things, the Mauritanian government’s relations with its

neighbors, particularly Algeria. He also ridiculed the work of unqualified diplomats with whom

the Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffs Mauritania’s embassies, saying that those in positions of

influence replace trained officials with incompetent cronies. Finally, he ends by invoking the

justification many partisans of African language promotion make to argue for the use of minority

languages within institutions of power.

So, finally what is left to say is that since you are marginalized and you do not

know what gets said here and are never made aware of what is planned here, I

commit myself to telling you anything that goes on, whether it is something secret

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or out in the open. Since the country is shared among many people, the truth must

be told. A lie always give way to the truth (Sy 2012).

Sy’s statement repeats an argument that proponents of languages other than French,

English or Portuguese in Africa often make. That is, communicating with people using the

languages they speak in their homes and on the street promotes an informed and engaged

citizenry. His was also a single act of what language activists aspire to do on an organized,

systematic basis. That is, a significant part of language activists’ attempts to render subject to

ideological contestation hegemonic practices of language involve the kind of norm-transgression

the likes of which Sy practiced. Among Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar language loyalists,

similar stories circulate about situations in which, faced with opposition, they insisted on

speaking Pulaar in a public or official setting.

This was dramatized in another story that involed a woman from Senegal’s Jola minority.

A friend of mine once came home to his flat and recalled an incident that he witnessed on one of

Dakar’s Tata buses earlier that afternoon. One of the passengers, the Jola woman, had spoken

French in her attempt to pay her fare. Several passengers complained about her using French,

wondering why she would not speak in Wolof. “I am a Jola,” she responded, “Wolof is not my

language, and I am as much a part of this country as you are.” As she attempted to get her

change, other passengers began arguing, some taking the side of the woman, and others siding

with the people insisting she speak Wolof. My friend said the argument came to blows, with

Wolofs siding against the woman while people who do not identify as Wolofs sided with her. I

finally asked him, “who was in the right?” “Why, the Jola woman,” he said smiling (Author’s

field notes, July 2011).

The linguistic street politics exemplified by this incident evoke longing for an

ethnopluralist reimagining of the Senegalese nation. Such a reimagining challenges both a

49

separatist paradigm that has existed among Jolas in the Casamance Region, as well as what has

been regarded as the dominant Islamo-Wolof model (Smith 2006). According to this pluralist

narrative, Senegal’s minority groups are the guardians of the nation’s local cultures and ethno-

histories. The ethno-pluralist imaginary does not necessarily contradict Wolofization as such, but

serves up an alternative way of viewing Senegalese cultural nation-building. I have attended

Haalpulaar cultural festivals that implicitly invoke this narrative, occasionally hearing speeches

mentioning the need for collaboration with other minority groups, such as the Mandinka, Serer

and Joola. A similar ethnopluralist reminagining occurs among Mauritanian Pulaar language

activists, who assert that their efforts are part of a larger project for recognition of the cultural

and linguistic claims of Soninke and Wolofs, as well.

The respective ethnopluralist imaginaries that Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar

language activists present circulate through networks that are both “transborder” and

“transnational” in character. In her overview of the Pulaar movement’s diverse history of media

engagements, Barro (2010, p.68) refers to their having created a “transnational public sphere.”

When I refer to Pulaar language activism as a trans-national movement, I locate it within an

experiential world of migration linking cultural, religious, educational and commercial circuits

that for the Haalpulaar’en have include cities such as Brazzaville, Paris, Mantes-la-Jolie

(France), Cairo, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, as well as Dakar and Nouakchott. Anthropologists have

long accounted for how amidst such global circuits migrants maintain ties with “home” even as

they assume new roles as economic and racialized subjects, particularly in Euro-American

contexts (Basch et al 1994; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001)

examine the practice of “transnational nationalism,” whereby Hatian migrants living in the

United States transnationalize their home country’s body politic by participating in Hatian civic

50

and political life from abroad. Benedict Anderson (1998) described “transnational nationalism”

as the expression of ethnonational grievance involving the Diasporic networks of communities

that are marginalized or minoritized within their countries of origin.

Neither of these conceptions of transnational nationalism capture the complicated

questions of citizenship and belonging that are bound up in a “transnational social field” (Levitt

and Glick Schiller 2004) whose “home” or “sending” area is itself divided by an international

boundary. “Trans-state” mobilities linking present-day Senegal and Mauritania are longstanding

and not only involve the Haalpulaar’en; they are multi-ethnic and encompass areas near the

border, as well as major cities and towns such as Dakar, Nouakchott and Nouadhibou (Choplin

and Lombard 2014). For Senegalese and Mauritania Pulaarophones with ties to Fuuta Tooro,

linguistic, kinship, cultural and commercial relationships criss-cross that border even as it

demarcates their political experiences in profound ways.

This dissertation analyzes the significance of these specifically trans-border aspects of the

“Pulaar movement” (Humery 2012). What is to be made of Pulaar activists’ collaborations and

discourses that seemingly challenge the cultural nation-building projects of Senegal and

Mauritania even as it is to those very states that they appeal with their grievances? Fresia’s

(2009) ethnography on Mauritanian Haalpulaar refugees in Northern Senegal identified a form of

“local citizenship” based on language, culture, kinship, as well as land rights that tied them to

their Senegalese host communities. However, in many cases Mauritanian refugees experienced

their time in Senegal as outsiders- even among Pulaar-speaking Senegalese- and desired to return

“home” (Fresia 2009; Kane 2012).

Capturing the significance of the Pulaar movement’s transborder character requires

moving beyond the literature on transnationalism to an engagement with the concept of linguistic

51

citizenship. Through their collaboration, Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar language activists

form the practices and arguments with which they politicize and question the status of their

language in their respective countries. Stroud (2001) argues that linguistic citizenship

denotes the situation where speakers themselves exercise control over their

language, deciding what languages are, and what they may mean, and where

language issues (especially in educational sites) are discursively tied to a range of

social issues – policy issues and questions of equity (2001, p. 353).

Stroud’s definition captures the essence of what Pulaar language activists do; their

practices and discourses are part of an effort to control the terms and means by which they are

defined as linguistic and cultural citizens within contemporary Senegal and Mauritania. I prefer

the frame of linguistic citizenship to that of linguistic human rights because while the latter

concept may be valuable for diagnosing the spheres of linguistic domination, linguistic

citizenship offers an understanding of how linguistic minorities operationalize their own attempts

to challenge it (See Rumbagumya et al 2011). As a trans-border movement, Pulaar language

activism involves an interplay of linguistic and official citizenship, in which the former infuses

the latter with critiques of the respective cultural nation-building projects of Senegal and

Mauritania.

Access to this transnational/transborder public sphere, as well as the ability to influence

arguments taking place within it, reflect ideologies and hierarchies existing among the

Haalpulaar’en. This recognition avoids the traps set by longstanding, Western ideas about the

public sphere as an arena for rational, textual debate that elide the power dynamics that

predetermine the outcomes of debates or political struggles (Bauman and Briggs 2003).

Processes of colonialism and other forms of institutionalized oppression based on economic

relationships, race, gender or caste can render completely absent from the public sphere entire

classes of people.

52

Dominant classes wielding economic and political power have the ability to both directly

and indirectly engage in knowledge gatekeeping by legitimizing particular cultural

epistemologies as relevant while rendering others outmoded. I am cautious about appropriating

the concept of “counter-public,” as it has been covered by Fraser (1990), Warner (2002) and

Hirschkind (2006). Their work characterizes counter-public spheres as both emerging in reponse

to the marginalization processes of dominant public spheres and as zones of diverse forms of

visual, oral, aural and embodied performance. They are counterpublics in that they are sites for

the germination of performances and discourses that in either style or ideological content would

upend hegemonies underpinning the larger public spheres shaping the rest of the world around

them.

Hirschkind’s description of Egyptian listeners of Islamic cassette sermons and how they

attain a new “ethical discipline” through their engagement with the sermons (2006, p. 8) does

find some echoes in the Pulaar movement. Pulaar language activists do, in many senses,

comprise a moral community for which revitalizing their language and manifesting its presence

in various public domains addresses anxiety over the social changes that are associated with

language shift. If you are a Haalpulaar or Pullo parent raising children in Dakar who only speak

Wolof and French, those children are regarded as lost to grandparents, aunts or uncles in Fuuta

Tooro who either do not speak Wolof or do not speak it well. They are also supposedly lost as

torchbearers of their shared histories, cultural references, inside jokes and moral preoccupations.

These are the stuff of “cultural intimacy,” what Herzfeld (2005[1997]) refers to as those shared,

essentialized characteristics and behaviors that might be the source of embarrassment to

outsiders but form the basis of mutual recognition and common sociality among insiders.

53

The concept of “cultural intimacy” may be useful for understanding the degree of anxiety

about language shift existing among Pulaar language loyalists. A basic question the reader might

ask is why language has become such a powerful index of group and kin loyalty rather than, say,

a taste for historically popular dishes in Fuuta Tooro such as haako or ñiiri bunaa (though

expressing a preference for such dishes is not uncommon among language loyalists). The late

Pular-language novelist Yero Dooro Diallo once declared in a speech, the recording of which

still circulates in West Africa, that any group of people sharing the same language shares the

same leñol and if the language dies the leñol dies with it. If one asks, however, what it means to

be a part of the Haalpulaar or Fulɓe leñol in the context of Fuuta Tooro, what is the answer? Is it

a checklist of items that, to invoke Crapanzano’s (1986) description of the associations

Afrikaners he interviewed made between racial groups and cultural traits, exist in people’s

imaginations like artifacts in a museum? Proficiency in Pulaar, membership in a caste,

participation in a fedde initiation group, a certain level of basic training in the Koran, a love for

the tea known as attaya, membership in a Tijjani religious branch (particularly those of the Taal

family or Madina Gounasse) and loyal fandom of the musician Baaba Maal are all signifiers that

many West Africans would agree indicate that one is a Pullo or Haalpulaar.

However, such a laundry list of traits only says so much about how membership in the

leñol is experienced. The concern about language shift, I believe, becomes more understandable

if we regard the leñol as a set of experiences remembered and refracted in people’s daily lives in

the form of shared stories and narratives that form the basis of common sociality even if they are

left unstated. They may relate to common encounters with beloved (or hated) Koranic teachers,

shared fears about swimming across the Senegal River, experiencing the reputed financial

stinginess of people in Matam, recollections of meeting one’s favorite hoɗdu-playing

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storytellers, the difficulties of tilling farmland in lowlying waalo areas versus the jeeri high

ground, the repellant snootiness of certain Toorooɗo nobles or the occasionally insufferable

solicitations of Awluɓe griots.

Accessing the common socialities associated with these experiences is often predicated

upon proficiency in the Pulaar language. The shared memories of sermons by religious clerics or

an unforgettable exercising of discipline by a shouting, angry parent are events that in the context

of Fuuta Tooro occur most often in the Pulaar language. They represent an experiential world of

tales passed down from elders and interaction with the physical and ecological landscape

occurring in an idiom-Pulaar- whose lexicon is tailored to that specific context. I am not about to

make an argument for linguistic relativity; anything that can be expressed in Pulaar can certainly

be expressed in Wolof, Hassaniya or English. However, political and economic histories, the

speaking of different languages across different regions and the forms of linguistic domination

that emerge with the nation-state and late global capitalism make it more likely that certain kinds

of memories and socialities- the stuff of cultural intimacy- will occur in some languages and not

others.

The threat that language shift from Pulaar to other languages poses is precisely an erosion

of the social domains in which certain forms of cultural intimacy among Pulaar speakers may be

expressed. Moreover, when the experiential world of Wolof speakers is infused with the implicit

claim that their world is the one through which people recognize one another as fellow

Senegalese, such a manifestation of cultural nation-making does not merely exclude other

languages. It can delegitimize the very crucibles in which speakers of other languages perceive

themselves as having been socialized into the world. The protectiveness over such domains,

which house the collective socialities built on the kinds of mutual recognition I have mentioned

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here, is at the heart of why the defense and promotion of Pulaar and not the defense of haako has

become the main, organizing basis for cultural revivalism among the Fulɓe of Fuuta Tooro.

Among the network of language activists I met during the course of this project, the

linguistic boundary between Pulaar and its neighboring languages is often framed as a moral one.

For some Pulaar speakers in Senegal and Mauritania, the very act of speaking Pulaar carries a

moral weight that they are careful not to desecrate with the use of profanity. While on a drive

through Nouakchott, some friends of mine once explained to me their habit of using Wolof terms

or phrases when speaking on coarse or lewd subject matters. Pulaar, they said, is “heavy” or

“weighty” and they feel a sense of shame when speaking crudely in their own language.

Notwithstanding the fact that many Pulaarophones have and do speak profanely in their

language, my friends’ perspective does reflect an existing if not universally held association of

urban speech, particularly in Wolof, with immorality and cultural rootlessness.

In other words, language shift is rendered a metaphor for moral decline rooted in Fuuta

Tooro’s own economic and ecological decline in favor of urbanization in far-away cities. Years

of drought, economic austerity, deforestation, outmigration, the neglect of prized farmland and

periods of political violence have added to Fuuta Tooro’s status as a periphery within Senegal

and Mauritania. This marginal status has its origins in French conquest and the growth of the

colonial state and peanut economy in Western Senegal. Pulaar-language poets such as the

Mauritanians Ndiaye Saidou Amadou and Gelongal Bah have recited many verses contrasting

what they see as Fuuta’s desolate present with a supposedly culturally vibrant past. Such poems

portray a current uprootedness, aridity, stagnation and social alienation while lamenting a bygone

era of reciprocal social relationships, prosperity, lushness and bountiful harvests. These forms of

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what Herzfeld (2005 [1997]) calls “structural nostalgia,” infuse the Pulaar movement with a set

moral and aspirational contents.

Pulaar language loyalists circulate ideas about the proper means of language promotion

that imply a code of ethical discipline for those who wish to be recognized as distinguished

activists. Those regarded as “ngenndiyaŋkooɓe” (sing., ngenndiyaŋke), a term meaning “patriots”

or “nationalists,” must meet certain criteria such as an ability to speak Pulaar perceived as free of

loan words, regular attendance at public events related to language promotion, the wearing of

clothing thought to signify Fuutaŋke authenticity and an air of selfless commitment to the cause.

Within the public sphere in which Pulaar language activists write, speak, dance, perform theater

and debate questions of language loyalty, performing the signifiers of ethical discipline make up

an important marker of legitimacy. In Chapter 6, I examine what I call a politics of language

loyalty that valorizes an ethos of sacrifice in the name of promoting the language while shaming

those who fail to carry their weight. The latter are often identified as those people in positions of

relative privilege or power who do not use their positions to help efforts aimed at language

revivalism. Those who do their valiant part are hailed as “daraniiɓe Pulaar,” or people who

“stand up” for Pulaar.

Pulaar language activists and loyalists who have contributed to promoting the language

over the past several decades make up a dispersed yet small and tight-knit network of militants

and language loyalists that spans Senegal, Mauritania, Central Africa, Europe and North

America. They range from academics to politicians, NGO workers, farmers, herders, fishermen,

businesspeople, journalists and migrants working blue-collar day jobs. Their experiences do not

necessarily reflect those of most Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaarophones. What is striking,

however, is their centrality to efforts rendering Pulaar a language that is publicly visible and

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aurally present in the mass media, in educational projects, book publishing and amidst the low-

budget Senegalese and Mauritanian films that circulate online or on DVD. These domains of

cultural production have touched in profound and subtle ways the lives of millions of Pulaar

speakers, many of whom may care little about or have barely heard of someone like Elhadj

Tidiane Anne. They have achieved this despite limited investment in Pulaar by the state,

corporate or international development entities when compared to African lingua francas such as

Hausa, Bamanankan or Kiswahili.

One sphere in which Pulaar language activists have played a very important role is that of

radio, which has been an important domain for the legitimation of new Pulaar lexica and speech

forms, perhaps, out of necsssity. Peterson’s (1997) account of Navajo broadcasting in the

Southwestern US observed changes in that language with respect to its use on air. However,

unlike “Broadcast Navajo,” which involved simplifying the language and the insertion of loan

words, many Pulaar broadcasters will attempt to use Pulaar words whenever possible, even for

recently-introduced forms of technology for which there has never been a Pulaar word. One

example is the word “ngaandiire” instead of “ordinateur,” or computer. In this case, the Pulaar

word for computer is derived from ngaandi, the term for “brain,” perhaps a reference to the

memory functions computers have. Command of the type of “broadcast Pulaar” that certain radio

personalities have popularized carries with it a degree of symbolic capital, affording those

possessing it what Bourdieu (1991) calls a “profit of distinction.” In Chapter 7, I describe how

the profits of distinction that come with embodying the ideals associated with the ngenndiyaŋke,

which include speaking a prestige variety of Pulaar, afford some people social connections that

come in handy amidst a context of widespread poverty and unemployment.

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Since the 1960s, numerous projects have involved attempts to codify Pulaar. More

recently, efforts to create a standard, written Pulaar grammar and lexicon for use across West

Africa has evoked Tabbital’s romantic dreams of a pan-Fulɓe cultural awakening. However,

progress has been limited, partly because of a lack of resources, as well as concern about how

best to proceed. From which dialect or dialects does one draw when selecting grammar and

vocabulary? If one dialect appears to be favored, will speakers of other dialects support the

project? Some have asked if it would not be more practical to create a Pulaar-language dictionary

comparing respective Pulaar/Fulfulde vocabularies.

Throughout this dissertation, the terms Fulɓe, Haalpulaar and “Pulaar speaker” appear

often. I use them acknowledging the great diversity in lifestyle, culture and dialect among the

people to whom the terms often refer. However, there is one further complication that must be

acknowledged. These terms of ethnolinguistic identification may seem self-explanatory, but the

experiences of people to whom they apply when it comes to their relationship to the Pulaar

language vary greatly. This is especially true of children of Pulaar speaking parents growing up

in multilingual environments where Pulaar is not the dominant language. Consider a family I

know in Dakar that is similiar to many I have encountered over the years. While the parents

speak Pulaar fluently, as does the oldest son, who has spent considerable time in Fuuta, the

younger children struggle in the language and the youngest of them all speaks only Wolof and

French. While the parents would almost certainly identify as Haalpulaar, what of the children?

Why label the oldest son a “Pulaar speaker” (even though he speaks the language well) if he is

just as proficient in Wolof or French? Is the youngest child “Wolof” because that is her first

language or does she identify as a Pullo or Haalpulaar through her ancestry?

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These questions illuminate the varied experiences that get so easily swallowed by the

ethnonomenclature through which many of us are conditioned to read our surrounding cultural

landscapes. Thus, I acknowledge the imperfection of the terms Fulɓe, Haalpulaar and “Pulaar

speaker” (or “Pulaarophones”) as devices for understanding the layered ties and forms of cultural

membership that the people who contributed to this study in fact practice.

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CHAPTER 3

CONDUCT OF THE STUDY

My fieldwork is best summarized as a set of memories and sensations experienced in

terms that were not only multi-sited in the sense that, like almost all work in Cultural

Anthropology these days, it occurred at more than one locale. Reaching during relatively short

fieldwork trips the cities and towns where I met the participants in this study meant that road

trips make up a significant part of my memories of the field. These include long, overnight or

daylong public transit rides over hundreds of kilometers in large, cramped buses or the Peugot

station wagons known as “sept places” (because they hold seven passengers), which mask those

sitting in the rear from the sunlight with cumbersome and annoyingly-placed window curtains.

Or there are the Mercedes sedans in Mauritania that shuttle passengers between the

country’s major commercial centers, and which require two passengers to share the front with

the driver, forcing the unlucky soul in the middle to be careful lest his or her rear end knock the

gear shift out of place. How about the pickup trucks whose rear beds are covered by makeshift

roofs and arranged with wooden benches for passengers to sit on either side? These are the trucks

that navigate the bumpy roads between market towns in Fuuta and communities off the main

road. Rides on these different vehicles often generate camaraderie among you and your fellow

passengers, especially if a poor driving performance, a long wait for a vehicle to depart or its

breaking down gives all of you the chance to share in the shaming of the person responsible. If

you hit it off with your fellow passengers, you just might be invited to share a table or meal with

them when an overnight bus stops in places like Kebemer, the hometown of former Senegalese

President Abdoulaye Wade and where many Fuuta-bound vehicles from Dakar stop for dinner

and the nighttime prayer.

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Such tiring trips meant that my fieldwork was punctuated with periods of exhaustion and

physical recovery, which occurred as I engaged in effort after effort to ingratiate myself with

new host families. Throughout the duration of my fieldwork, gracious hosts made space for me

in their homes even when it was clear my presence was an inconvenience. Hosts in Senegal and

Mauritania accommodated me despite already housing their own children, extended relatives or

young people boarding while they attended public school, Koranic school or worked as day

laborers. In France, Mayram Moussa Wone, originally from Haayre Mbaara, Mauritania, offered

me a much-coveted bedroom in a Parisian context where West African migrants often struggle to

find decent, affordable housing.

On multiple occasions, I contacted my host in Dakar Abou Gaye after long periods of

silence to inform him on short notice that I would soon be arriving. My struggle to regularly

communicate with my West African hosts in between fieldwork trips was a source of shame and

this feeling of shame compounded the lack of communication. On one occasion, I waited until I

arrived at the Dakar airport to call Abou because I had been too embarrassed leading up to the

trip to ask whether I could stay with him. I had spent the night on the plance from JFK

wondering where the hell I would stay in Dakar, considering as an emergency measure taking a

taxi from the airport directly to where I could find a bus to Fuuta Tooro (anywhere from 450 to

650km from Dakar, depending on the town to which you plan to travel). When I reached, Abou,

seemed pleased to hear from me and though he himself was vacationing in Fuuta, he had left a

key at the shop across from his apartment building, which I could obtain from the Guinean Fulɓe

working there.

The experiential smells, sounds, mental exercise and physical strain of fieldwork

ultimately leaves a gap between what I formally conceived as “methodology” and the actual

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experience of fieldwork itself. I often wondered if methodology was just something I wrote for

grant applications, in which I detailed the kinds of “semi-structured” interviews and participant-

observation I would conduct, appropriating, of course, the language of respectable social science.

Fieldwork was something I simply did in the process of confronting the challenging task

of learning enough about the Pulaar movement in the total of six fieldwork trips I made to

Senegal, Mauritania and France to conduct the research. My fieldwork was felt in a series of

nervous, stuttering phone calls to people I sought to interview, the awkard humility that came

with being introduced as a “ngenndiyaŋke” at public events, the severe anxiety that preceded and

immediately followed interviews on Senegalese national TV, long, hot, sweaty, cramped

overnight bus rides from Dakar to Fuuta Tooro, the wet griminess in my shoes after crossing the

Senegal-Mauritania border by pirogue, long, bumpy horse cart rides in the hot sun that led to

embarrassingly conspicuous sunburn, the celebration that came after a successful interview, the

nirvana of a long, informal conversation with groups of men over attaya at a “grand place,” the

fear that braced me when I was interrogated by Senegalese gendarmes conducting a sweep for

jihadists escaping from Mali in 2013, my walking gingerly up to pit latrines after nightfall as I

inspected them for their ubiquitous cockroaches, the bouts of food poisoning, the asthma attacks

that struck after my inhaling dust on a long trip or from imbibing too much of Dakar’s choking

air pollution and, how could I forget those lovely nights spent on the floor that were unbearably

hot under the sheets but left you to be eaten alive by mosquitoes if you did not cover yourself?

These are what Herzfeld might call the culturally intimate memories of ethnographic

research, the rewarding nuisances that are the sensory scaffolding of the Western researcher’s

privileged nostalgia for one’s months or years spent pursuing doctoral fieldwork. They are the

subject of embarrassing yet cherished jokes shared not only by anthropologists themselves, but

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between myself and hosts or participants in this research. My well-known inability to maintain a

squat around a shared food bowl, irrational fear of dogs and squeamishness around roaches are

all taken by my Haalpulaar friends as humorous signs that I not a “jaambaar,” or one who has

attained what is regarded as courageous manhood.

All told, my fieldwork added up to over a year and even more if one counts the many

hours I spent accessing Pulaar-language archival material from my computer at the University of

Florida. The archival material took the form of stacks of Pulaar newspapers, books, as well as

recorded radio broadcasts, speeches and poems that I have been collecting since my days in the

Peace Corps. I took five trips to Senegal between 2010 and 2016, and on four of those occasions

travelled to Mauritania, where I spent time conducting interviews and visiting with families and

activists based in the southern part of the country. In 2010 and 2015 I managed to visit

Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, where I had access to many Pulaar militants who could

speak to the movement in the context of Mauritania’s history of political repression.

During the summer of 2012, I spent nearly three months in France thanks to a Foreign

Language and Area Studies fellowship to learn French at the Cours de la Civilisation Franҫaise

de la Sorbonne (CCFS). In addition to my studying French, living with a Mauritanian Haalpulaar

family in Paris’s 9ème arrondissement well positioned me to connect with Pulaar language

activists and loyalists who lived in and outside of the city. I regularly made the walk to the

nearby Château Rouge neighborhood, whose diverse population includes many West Africans.

At the time, Rue Doudeauville housed several Haalpulaar-owned shops, including two operated

by well-known Pulaar-language movie producers. In addition, I travelled to spend time with

Pulaar militants and attend cultural festivals in Elbeuf, Rouen, Le Havre, Les Mureaux and

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Mantes-la-Jolie, home to the leadership of the Pulaar literacy and cultural revivalist organization

Kawtal Janngooɓe Pulaar Fulfulde (KJPF).

The fact that my fieldwork in Senegal, Mauritania and France was broken up into six

trips ranging in length from three weeks to three and a half months posed some challenges and

advantages. Though the generous funding I received from University of Florida-based and

external organizations enabled me to annually refresh my connections with many of the various

field sites at which I spent time, I have yet to pursue a sustained, long-term ethnographic

engagement looking at the social life of one single Pulaar activist organization. Pulaar literacy or

cultural revival operations taking place regularly in Dakar, Nouakchott or in the religious city of

Medina Gounasse in eastern Senegal merit further attention, particularly in how their associative

cultures influence the life prospects and self-perceptions of their young members.

The fieldwork I managed to conduct involving such associations was a piecing together

of narratives about language loyalty, biographical stories about what inspires involvement in the

movement, as well as the arguments and debates that appear across the different nodes along the

network I followed through three countries. In-depth biographical interviews with writers, actors,

broadcast journalists, literacy teachers and political dissidents with ties to the movement had the

benefit of sketching its relationship to major political and economic transformations that have

occurred in the Sahel region over the past several decades. Our long, recorded discussions give

many clues regarding how Pulaar language activism has benefitted from various forms of state-

building, labor migration, as well as the tendency of NGOs and development agencies to assume

state-like functions in a crisis-stricken Sahel region (Mann 2015). Among Mauritanian

participants in this study, those old enough to remember the Events of 1989 offered powerful

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accounts of their memories regarding the political repression that led up to them, as well as the

traumatic experiences they endured as the racial pogroms unfolded.

My longest fieldwork trip occurred over a three-and-a-half-month period from December

2012 to the end of March 2013. That research formed the basis of Chapter 7, where I focus on

the role of several community radio stations located in Northern Senegal. Though established

with the help of NGOs and development agencies with the aim of improving local health,

fishing, farming and herding sectors, much of their content deals with themes of linguistic pride,

loyalty and purity. My fieldwork looked specifically at the ways in which language loyalty

politics are debated and discussed at those radio stations, as well how programming themes are

fitted to address matters that have long been of concern to Pulaar language activists.

The following timeline details broadly the dates and the main locations of my fieldwork.

2010. May 24- August 13.

Senegal: Dakar, Thilogne, Agnam Yeroyabe.

Mauritania: Kaedi, Bagodine, Sori Male, Nouakchott.

2011. June 27- August 11.

Senegal: Dakar, Medina Gounasse, Tambacounda, Ndioum, Thilogne, Guede Chantiers.

Mauritania: Boghe, Wocci, Bagodine, Kaedi.

2012. May 24- August 15.

France: Paris, Elbeuf, Rouen, Le Havre, Mantes-la-Jolie, Les Mureaux.

2012-2013. December 15- March 28.

Senegal: Dakar, Thilogne, Pete, Ouro Sogui, Kaskas, Ngouye, Dioude Diabe.

Mauritania: Haayre Mbaara, Boghe, Bagodine, Kaedi.

2015. May 14- June 22.

Senegal: Dakar, Thilogne.

Mauritania: Nouakchott, Bagodine, Mbagne, Kaedi.

2016. May 30- June 18.

Senegal: Dakar, Thilogne, Pete, Ouro Sogui.

One of the major logistical challenges in following this transborder research itinerary is

the political sensitivity of my research in Mauritania. The main roads I travel between cities and

towns such as Rosso, Nouakchott, Boghe and Kaedi are often subject to surveillance by the

national Police and Gendarmerie, respectively. On the main road between the border town of

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Rosso and the capital Nouakchott, as well as on the highway running along the Senegal River

Valley, I have been subject to repeated questioning about my reasons for visiting the country.

Though in Senegal I moved about freely, largely without fear of questioning by law

enforcement or security forces, in Mauritania I was accompanied by my research assistant and

dear friend Saidou Nourou Diallo. Saidou is from Bagodine, a village located about 30km west

of the city of Kaedi. Bagodine is overlooked by a large, rocky hill that locals know as the

“Haayre Dekle” which can be seen from far in the distance as one approaches the community

along the main southern road. The village is also the site of one of the regular Gendarme posts

along that highway. On my first fieldwork visit to Mauritania, Saidou and I sent the Gendarmes

there into a frenzy when we failed to report there despite having gone through a police

checkpoint further east. Instead, we had the taxi we were in make a shortcut directly to his

family’s compound. The Police we had seen called the Gendarmes asking if an American had

passed through accompanied by a local Haalpulaar. When the answer was no, they panicked,

even calling the Regional Commandant in Mbagne. When Saidou and I appeared at the

Gendarme post the next day they were furious and I was fearful they might discover what had

brought me to the country.

Just a few weeks earlier, I had interviewed on a TV show in Senegal titled Ndee Ladde

(“this neck of the woods”), speaking Pulaar and paying tribute to the great Mauritanian Pulaar

language activists who had defied one or another of the country’s authoritarian governments. At

the time, the show was widely watched in Nouakchott and when I gave my phone number on the

air Saidou Nourou called and introduced himself. Mauritania is not Senegal. You will need

someone to guide you through the country. He also knew some famous Pulaar militants,

including the poet Ndiaye Saidou Amadou. At the time, Saidou Nourou was studying Economics

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at the University of Nouakchott and had been involved in protests that came in response to the

Minister of Culture’s statement at a press conference that National Languages such as Pulaar

retard Mauritania’s development as an “Arab” country. He met me in Kaedi several weeks later,

as I was accompanied by another friend who had met me thanks to my TV appearance. During

that first fieldwork trip to Mauritania, questions about how Saidou and I met made me very

nervous. We eventually made up a cover story: my doctoral adviser is a Haalpulaar from nearby

Thilogne, Senegal (this much was true) and he introduced me to Saidou with the aim of exposing

me to a Pulaar learning experience in Mauritania (not quite so true).

I had to plan my trips to Mauritania carefully and it was not easy to spend extended

periods of time there. My stays in the country were made possible with one-month tourist visas

obtained at the Mauritanian Embassy in Dakar, where I would enter a Nouakchott address that

another friend permitted me to use. I declared that my intention was to get a little “R and R” as a

break from my work in Senegal, which I was never asked to describe. Usually during my trips to

the field, I would spend weeks or a couple of months in Senegal, before setting aside specific

periods of two or three weeks in Mauritania, planning my interviews ahead of time.

By 2015, Mauritanian visas were obtainable at the Rosso border post for a fee of 120

Euros. This was hardly a convenience, as Saidou and I sat for over an hour before the

“responsable” tasked with processing visas emerged, cigarette hanging from his mouth, from an

office in which it appeared he had been napping the whole time. I was grateful that I had refused

Saidou’s insistent pleas for us to just leave without the visa when on the ride to Nouakchott we

were stopped at at least four different checkpoints. Now married and with a young daughter,

Saidou’s efforts were essential to the Mauritanian portion of this study, and he was present at

several of the interviews cited below.

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There were numerous advantages to breaking up the fieldwork into six trips, including

the fact that it allowed me to observe changes involving both the Pulaar movement and some of

its key players. When I began my fieldwork in 2010, Hamet Amadou Ly, a friend as well as a

helpful contact of mine, was an upcoming radio broadcaster with Senegal’s Radio Nationale and

had earned some recognition for his poetry and writing. Currently, his face is recognizable

throughout Senegal, Mauritania and the Diaspora as the face of the Pulaar news broadcast on the

private TV station 2sTV. In addition, Hamet Ly hosts a weekly Pulaar-language talk show

known as “Ngalu” (wealth, or treasure) on which he invites policymakers, politicians,

entertainment celebrities and, of course, Pulaar language activists. Returning to the field almost

annually during my years of graduate research allowed me to build longterm friendships with

numerous host families and research contacts. In addition to observing the evolution of their

careers, I also saw many changes in their personal lives, as has been the case with Saidou

Nourou Diallo. Finally, the repeated trips to the field gave me the chance see rivalries play out in

several of the important Pulaar activist organizations, as well as observe the proliferation of new

media outlets, particularly community radio stations.

Though my fieldwork involved brief and extended stays at many locations, including

Dakar, Nouakchott and at least twenty other communities around Senegal and Mauritania,

several friends and contacts were particularly essential to my networking efforts. When I began

this research, friends in the US-based Diaspora connected me with host families and Senegal-

based activists who proved invaluable throughout the duration of this project. Oumar Tokosel

Bah, who at the time was living in Baltimore, put me in touch with Abou Gaye, a lifelong Pulaar

militant living in Dakar but originally from the tiny riverine village of Wocci, Mauritania. Bah

and Gaye were collaborating on an online Pulaar news initiative, known as Lewlewal

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(moonlight) Group. Though Oumar Tokosel is no longer involved in the project and is now

employed by the Senegalese government, Abou Gaye still runs the Pulaar news organization,

which now goes by the name Lewlewal Communication. Since 2011, Abou has hosted me during

every trip I have made to Senegal and has provided me with many valuable contacts in both

Senegal and Mauritania.

Another very important contact in Dakar was Deffa Wane, a language activist, respected

socialite and descendant of one of the old dynastic families of Fuuta Tooro. I came to know her

through her half brother Hamet Watt, who I met in the United States before I began my graduate

studies. Herself active in the organization Tabbital Pulaaku International, she helped arrange a

couple of my interviews in Dakar, as well as my home stay in Kaskas, where I conducted some

interviews with broadcasters at that village’s community radio station. It is also through Deffa

that I met TV personality Diewo Sall, who later interviewed me on Ndee Ladde.

Though, prior to my research, I had spent considerable time learning Pulaar and living in

West Africa, I had barely visited Fuuta Tooro. As I was very unclear where to begin touring the

Fuuta region, the town of Thilogne was selected as an ethnographic beachhead. Initially, this was

a matter of convenience, as it is my dissertation adviser’s hometown. I knew I would be able to

stay with his family and was aware that Thilognese are enmeshed in the sort of transational labor

migration networks that made possible much of the Pulaar language activism that has occurred in

the Diaspora. For example, one son of Thilogne, Amadou Moudo Diallo, was President of the

Brooklyn-based Pulaar Speaking Association from 2005-2009. In Thilogne, these connections

are manifested in many forms of cultural revivalism, including the ñaldi pinal, or cultural

festivals, that the migrant association Thilogne Association Developpment has organized over

the years.

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I had the privilege of attending Thilogne’s cultural festivals on two occasions, in 2010

and 2012, and in the latter instance got to see concerts by famous Pulaarophopne musicians

Baaba Maal and Abou Diouba Deh. Thilogne’s ñalɗi pinal (literally “days of culture”) feature

the performance of numerous aadaaji (ritual practices) associated with specific social or caste

groups, such as blacksmiths (wayluɓe), woodcarvers (lawɓe), or griots (awluɓe). Thilogne’s

ñalɗi pinal fit within a genre of sociocultural mobilization that has become a popular among

youth organizations, Pulaar activist associations and other entities throughout the Senegal River

Valley. Colloquially, such events are often known by the French term “soixante douze heures,”

referring to their usually three-day length. I have attended many such events throughout the

River Valley, and in addition to the popular concerts and performances by locally-trained groups

of youth and women, they also feature speeches by local, regional and sometimes national

government officials.

At the cultural festivals I have attended in Thilogne, government ministers have appeared

and given speeches, congratulating the organizers, including TAD. These political rituals of

accommodation amount to a mutual cooptation involving migrant associations like TAD and the

Senegalese government. TAD’s development and infrastructural projects have filled a vacuum

left by the retreat of the state (and have also enabled the state in its abdication of the provision of

public services). However, the appearance of political officials at the ñalɗi pinal legitimizes

TAD and its Diaspora-based members as a political force. For its part, the Senegalese

government has a political incentive to associate itself with the economic and social development

initiatives that groups like TAD launch. Behaving like a willing partner with such associations

can result in votes from the influential Senegalese Diaspora in favor of whichever political party

happens to be in power.

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One of the most significant breaks early in my fieldwork came during my first visit to

Thilogne. I was staying- I write this partly for the purposes of full disclosure- in the compound of

my dissertation adviser’s older brother, Amadou Tidiane Kane. For years, “ATK,” as he is

sometimes known, has led the Comité de Gestion that oversees the work of Radio Salndu Fuuta,

a community radio station that has operated in Thilogne since the mid-2000s. Kane’s voice is

known to listeners in Thilogne, as well as nearby communities on both the Senegalese and

Mauritanian sides of the Senegal River, which is not quite 20km to the northeast of the town.

When I first begin visiting the radio station in 2010, I discovered that many of those employed

there had backgrounds in Pulaar literacy and other forms of language activism. In addition, many

of the program themes air concerns about maintaining Pulaar language loyalty in a Fuuta region

that is undergoing many economic and cultural changes. One program, known as Helmere

Pulaar, consists of a competition between callers and the host to see who can speak Pulaar

without using a loan word (or at least what is perceived to be one).

During my early fieldwork trips, I learned that there were several radio stations in other

River Valley towns such as Kaskas, Pete and Outo Sogui. All of the radio stations, including

Radio Salndu Fuuta, boasted significant listenerships on the Mauritanian side of the border. I

became aware of this fact during that first year of fieldwork upon crossing the border from

Thilogne to Kaedi, where in the evening my hosts turned on their radio and I immediately heard

Amadou Tidiane Kane’s voice reading the news. The community radio stations in northern

Senegal owe their emergence to the kinds of alliances between stakeholders that characterize the

role of organizations like TAD. These include a range of NGOs and development agencies,

hometown associations, agreements between local and regional governments in Europe and the

Senegal River Valley, the national government, as well as associations involved in cultural or

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linguistic activism. Through Amadou Tidiane Kane, I met helpful contacts and host families in

towns where those other radio stations are located.

Conducting Fieldwork as an Apotheosis of the “Magical Tuubaako”: There is a genre

of storytelling and mythmaking- what we in the US might refer to as the creation of urban

legend- that occurs in West Africa, in which outsiders to the region (usually Europeans or

Americans) are portrayed as surprising or dazzling people with their skills in one or another local

language. The typical format goes something like this:

White Person X enters a public transit vehicle and takes his or her seat, planning to travel

from Town A to Town B. Sitting near (usually behind) White Person X is Senegalese Person Y,

who in (West African language A) turns to a fellow passenger, Senegalese Person Z, and says of

White Person X, “where does this Red Monkey think they are going? I hope they can afford the

fare.” White Person X remains still, appearing predictably oblivious until the arrival of the fare

collector, to whom White Person X states in (West African language A) that they will not only

pay for his or her own fare but, gesturing to Senegalese Person Y, also that of the “Black

Monkey.” The passengers are left stunned, most of all Senegalese Person Y, who spends the

journey in embarrassed silence.

Stories like these are recycled with some variation throughout the Sahel Region, and

might have their roots in a context in which the outsider visiting from the metropole came to be

imagined as a huckster, who one must approach with caution. Other stories in this narrative

genre serve to highlight the limits of what outsiders can achieve with respect to their

understanding of local knowledge. For example, I have heard several versions of the story about

the Frenchman in Kaedi, Mauritania with incredible Pulaar skills and who became so confident

in his Pulaar that he declared no one in the town could possibly say a word or phrase in Pulaar

73

that he did not understand. According to most versions of the story, the Frenchman offered a sum

of money to anyone who stumped him until someone finally succeeded. In one version, a man

even quizzes the Frenchman on whether he recognizes the meaning of a particular paralinguistic

verbal sound, to which the Frenchman has no response.

While living in the Senegambia region as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later as an

anthropologist, hosts, friends and acqaintances compared my Pulaar skills to those of a long line

of White Pulaar speakers they had met over the years. Very often, if I was communicating with

more than one person they would debate in front of me (but not addressing me) about one or

another tuubaako (white person) virtuoso known to speak excellent Pulaar. The stories are often

introduced in the following way: “Look here, one tuubaako was in our village in ’87 or ’88. My

God! What she knew in Pulaar, my friend, you don’t even know it! If you just heard her talk, you

would have had no idea she was a tuubaako!”

All of the attitudes that underpin the narrative genres I have just mentioned affected the

course of this research. Among many Pulaar speakers, particularly the language activists I spent

time with during my fieldwork trips, I was praised for selecting Pulaar from among all of the

languages I could have chosen to learn. “The languages are many,” I have often heard people

comment, “but Allah saw to it that John Hames, or Ousman York, selected Pulaar.”

My first encounter with Diewo Sall occurred through my host, Deffa Wane, who was an

upcoming guest on Diewo’s TV show, Ndee Ladde. Several days before the broadcast, Diewo

appeared at Deffa’s salon for lunch and to discuss what they would talk about on the air. Once I

appeared and introduced myself, Diewo and I spoke for several minutes and she invited me to

appear on the show at some point during the summer. I hesitated, but she insisted. But what did I

74

really have to say to the audience? My appearing on the show, Diewo asserted, would send a

message to Pulaar-speaking youth that their language is worth defending.

Several weeks after the broadcast I was purchasing a drink at a shop in Richard Toll, in

northwestern Senegal, having just arrived from Nouakchott with Saidou Nourou Diallo. Before I

could leave after completing the purchase, the proprietor told me to wait and produced his cell

phone. On the screen was an image of me on television that he captured during the Ndee Ladde

broadcast. Recordings of some of my subsequent TV appearances circulate on YouTube and in

people’s external hard drives, phones and computers. In June 2015, Saidou Nourou and I were on

our way to Bagodine from Nouakchott when the vehicle we were riding in, along with all others

on the road, was forced to pull over and park in the town of Ouad Naga, about 50km outside of

the capital. We looked on sitting at a storefront as Gendarmes ran a checkpoint they had just

formed on the road, ordering all vehicles to make way for the entourage of Mauritanian President

Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who was returning from a tour of the Senegal River Valley1.

Crowds of his supporters had gathered in the sunbaked town, where the President was expected

to briefly visit on his way back to Nouakchott. While Saidou and I were chatting by the shop a

young man bound for Kaedi chimed in and asked if he had seen me on TV speaking during a

1 President Aziz’s tour of the River Valley was a major topic of conversation among customers when, during the

previous two weeks, Saidou and I were operating his cousin’s shop in Nouakchott. Saidou believed that the tour was

a cynical attempt to coopt political elites and power brokers in Fuuta, to the detriment of those who own land plots

near the Senegal River. Mayor Ba Bocar Souleye of Bagodine, an Aziz supporter, had attempted to burnish his

profile by getting Aziz to stop in Bagodine. He was strongly opposed by a faction in the village that Bocar Souleye

and his allies labeled with the term “Boko Haram.” In the end, the “terrorists” won. Despite promises from Aziz

lieutenants that they would make the visit, they never showed up. A contemptuous rumor claimed that a prominent

Aziz supporter in Bagodine fainted upon learning the visit would not come to pass.

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tribute to the late telegriot Farba Sally Seck. It had indeed been me. He replied that he still had

the recording saved in his computer and had watched it recently.

Encounters like this have occurred frequently throughout my fieldwork. The attention

that comes with the minor celebrity (or, more problematically, White Savior) status that I enjoy

among many consumers of Pulaar media adds excitement to my trips to the field. The chance to

bask in the recognition and, sometimes, adulation of those who profess to be fans of mine has

been one of the memorable aspects of my fieldwork experience. But it is fair to ask what these

“fans” who greet me cheering me for. Do Pulaarophones see my interest in their language as a

validator of its importance? To what extent do those who meet or host me perceive my role as

that of someone capable of bringing in resources to establish a Pulaar literacy class or radio

station? Or am I merely viewed as a ngenndiyaŋke in the same mold as some of the charismatic

luminaries who are famous to many Pulaar language loyalists? Regardless of the exact answers

to these questions, the perception of me as a Pulaar enthusiast, even activist, attaches

expectations that are impossible to meet. The very public profile and minor celebrity that wins

me momentary adulation and opens doors to new research contacts raises also questions about

how my apparent influence has not been matched by concrete actions to help the movement.

Many Westerners have spent time living in West Africa and learning the countless

languages spoken by those who call the region home. Over the past several decades, hundreds,

perhaps thousands, of young Americans and Europeans have descended upon Sahelian countries

to learn Pulaar and other languages as Peace Corps Volunteers, USAID employees, NGO

workers and missionaries. Some of them become quite proficient in speaking, reading and

writing Pulaar, though only a small minority of them sustain a long-term engagement with the

language. However, some names occasionally resurface in conversations with those who are

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impressed by my own Pulaar. Do I know the American man who spent years living with Fulɓe

herders in the Djoloff Region, who speaks Pulaar like a true gaynaako (herder)? How about

“Mamadou Anne,” a now middle-aged Frenchman who moved to Pete in the late ‘70s or early

‘80s to construct a forage for the community, who speaks Pulaar like a son of the village and

lives with his Pete-born Pullo wife in Dakar?

I am not the only direct supporter of Pulaar activist efforts to come from the United

States. Sonja Fagerberg-Diallo, a linguist from the US, followed her doctoral studies by working

to promote Pulaar-language literacy and book publishing in Senegal. During a period in which

Senegal’s Association pour la Renaissance du Pulaar (ARP) was very active running Pulaar

literacy classes around the country, Sonja founded Associates in Research and Education for

Development (ARED), an NGO devoted to the publication of learning manuals and works of

literature in National Languages, but mainly Pulaar. Many of Sonja’s ARED colleagues were

veteran Pulaar militants from both Senegal and Mauritania with extensive connections in the

movement. Sonja herself had close friendships with Pulaar language activists such as Yero

Dooro Diallo, a novelist and literacy teacher who contributed to greatly expanding ARP’s

influence during the ‘80s and early ’90s. Sadly, Fagerberg-Diallo passed away in 2006, though

as recently as 2015 Pulaar language activists gathered in Dakar to hold a public discussion forum

event in her memory.

Long before the Peace Corps Volunteers and NGO workers, French “soldier-

ethnographer” Henri Gaden (1867-1939) compiled a well-known list of maxims and proverbs in

the Pulaar language (See Gaden 1931). Writing Pulaar using an improvised, French-based

orthography, Gaden’s work on the language predated by decades the Pulaar orthography that

Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar militants created in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One

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Pulaar-language author who has finished an as-yet unpublished biography of the famous

Mauritanian poet and political dissident Mamadou Samba Diop offered what to me was a

surprisingly glowing view of Gaden’s place in the history of Pulaar language promotion:

Gaden researched the language extensively. He wasn’t about just researching it for

the sake of crafting religious poems, as the Islamic scholars had done. Gaden

compiled many meaningful phrases and translated them into French and expanded

on their meaning. . . . Gaden put together over 1,000 proverbs, discussing their

meaning and origin, and also wrote a Pulaar grammar manual. One might say that

Gaden worked for Pulaar more than any Pullo living amongst us currently. This is

why when it comes to the cultivation of knowledge in Pulaar we cannot have the

mindset that “so and so is of Pullo roots, so he has a monopoly over the language”

(Interview with Amadou Tidiane Kane, May 20, 2015)

Such jarring praise of a colonial functionary like Gaden contrasts oddly with the role that

anti-colonial, leftist political activists played in the Pulaar movement’s early going. However,

Gaden’s lengthy book of proverbs does make fun reading for any Pulaar enthusiast, and I have

consulted it numerous times during my years of graduate study. Moreover, Pulaar language

activism has persisted in Senegal and Mauritania thanks to a number of unexpected ideological

and political developments, including the emergence of leftist political movements, widespread

NGOization, bureaucratic and political decentralization and World Bank loan policies.

Gaden and countless others who have come to the Senegambia region from the

metropole or the West in general contributed, whether they desired it or not, to a myth of what I

call the “Magical Toubab.” Derived from the term “toubab” (in Pulaar, it is known as tuubaako),

which in the Senegambia region refers to a foreigner (usually white and of European or

American origin), the Magical Toubab is narrated in the popular imagination as a stock character

who displays virtuosity in cultural immersion, high proficiency in one or another National

Language and generosity of spirit. Arriving in a variety of permutations, the Magical Toubab

appears as that Peace Corps Volunteer who surprises people at markets or in buses with their

Wolof or Pulaar skills, the well-adjusted missionary who eats with their hands out of the same

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food bowl as their hosts or the European doctor generous with their compassion and their

distribution of medicine.

The combination of my own Pulaar skills, networking among media personalities and

command of the kind of rhetoric used by many Pulaar language activists conspired to make me

perhaps the first instant Magical Toubab media celebrity. The extent of my visibility on social

media, on the radio and TV lent itself to a degree of scrutiny and expectation that was difficult to

navigate. Knowing this, combined with the severe anxiety that comes with being a lifelong

stutterer, resulted in my wasting a lot of energy during fieldwork trips agonizing over media

appearances, how to publicly present myself, how not to offend audiences and how to dodge

questions, such as those dealing with female circumcision or my belief (such as it may or may

not be) in God. During periods in which I received a lot of media exposure one of my persistent

fears was that it would result in something of a Ousman York fatigue. In June 2016, when I was

staying with Abou Gaye during a conference I attended in Dakar, he posted an announcement on

his Facebook feed alerting his followers that I would be a guest on his online radio show and

would talk about the nature of my conference presentation. Though most responses were

positive, some questioned the benefit of it all and one wrote that I had done “nothing” for the

“leñol” and would die from my own charlatanry.

In addition to the challenges to my fieldwork stemming from public appearances, there is

one more worth mentioning. The specific alignments of political and national histories in the

region occasionally serve to problematize some of my long-held views. My own ideological

loyalties as an American citizen who has been strongly critical of my country’s foreign policy

have been put to the test in unexpected ways. Because of their experience during the ‘80s and

‘90s under the regime of Maaouya Sid’Ahmed Ould Taya, many politically-minded Mauritanian

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Haalpulaar I have met associate Arab nationalism, particularly Ba’athism, with their own racial

oppression and exclusion. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime supported Maaouya

and I have on several occasions heard allegations that Iraqi troops participated in the pogroms of

1989. One person claims to have heard that Saddam advised Maaouya to eradicate the

Haalpulaar problem by expelling Fuutaŋke communities and forcing them eastward where they

would have no escape. Otherwise, if they took refuge across the Senegal River to the south, the

survivors would come back to haunt him. Whether or not such a diabolical exchange ever

occurred, it speaks devastating volumes about how those who believe in it perceive the regime’s

feelings towards them.

This history makes for political conversations that awkwardly pit my critical views of

American politicians against my deep sympathy for the Pulaar movement. Whether as a

reference to George Herbert Walker or George W., “Bush” is, by certain people old enough to

remember the racial pogroms of 1989, known as “the Events,” regarded as the hero who took

down Maoouya’s patron, Saddam. It is widely perceived that Iraq’s withdrawal of its military

and financial support from Mauritania that was necessistated by the Gulf War led to an end to the

Events and subsequent political reforms. When, in 2003, the US invasion of Iraq led to the

toppling of Saddam’s regime there was schadenfreude among some Pulaar language activists

who remembered his support for Maoouya.

During the summer of 2015, I was riding in a crowded Mercedes sedan taxi in

Nouakchott when a Haalpulaar woman who learned I was an American began praising “Bush.”

Disturbed that she would say anything positive about anyone with that last name, I dismissively

replied that Bush was a “worthless” leader, assuming she had meant George W. (though I might

have easily said the same thing about the father). Bush, she replied (referring, as it turned out, to

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Bush Sr.), helped the Fuutaŋkooɓe by defeating Saddam and by extension weakening Maaouya.

Slightly embarrassed, I told her that though I am no fan of the Bush family I do not blame her for

viewing the situation the way she does. Several years before, I had also been visiting

Nouakchott, on that occasion staying with the poet Ndiaye Saidou Amadou at the apartment he

then rented in the 6ème neighborhood. One night he decided to entertain me with a movie series,

House of Saddam, a cinematic account of Saddam’s brutal reign, overthrow and trial. Though

agreeing to watch, I tempered enthusiasm for the movie by stating that I had opposed the

Americans’ war, to which Ndiaye Saidou replied that he understood. Everyone, he said

forgivingly, has views shaped by their own local circumstances.

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CHAPTER 4

HISTORICAL EMERGENCE OF THE PULAAR MOVEMENT

Narratives of an Origin Story

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly where and when Pulaar language activism originated.

However, a key moment is the so-called 1962 “Congress” of Mbagne, at which students and

intellectuals from Senegal and Mauritania met to debate the creation of a Pulaar alphabet.

Bourlet (2009) and Humery (2012) have cited this meeting as a significant part of the process in

the forming of the Pulaar orthography that several West African countries would adopt at the

UNESCO Bamako Conference of 1966.

The Mbagne congress’s symbolism to the Pulaar movement derives partly from the

location of the village itself. Mbagne is located right on the north bank of the Senegal River, and

as a result provides a convenient meeting point for Senegalese and Mauritanian Fuutaŋkooɓe.

The village’s cache with the Pulaar movement is due significantly to the fact that it is the

hometown of perhaps the most famous Pulaar language activist, the late Mamadou Samba Diop,

more widely-known as Murtuɗo (“the rebel”). Though aspects of his biography will be discussed

throughout this dissertation, it is appropriate to begin by stating that among those with an interest

in Pulaar language loyalism a cult of celebrity surrounds him. Throughout my fieldwork, I

encountered many personal tales recalling his great knowledge of politics, languages, religion

and astronomy, much of which he is said to have acquired as a student in the Soviet Union and

France. Murtuɗo earned a PhD in Political Science at the University of Paris and continued his

studies further. In fact, he was studying under the famed Egyptologist and world-reknown

intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop when the latter passed away in 1986.

For many years, Murtuɗo and his brother Abdoulaye- better known as “Kayya”- travelled

around Mauritania, Senegal and other West African countries, often attempting to organize

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Pulaar literacy classes. Murtuɗo held public lectures and meetings to talk politics or religion,

often making pointed arguments about the benefits of literacy in Africans’ mother tongues. One

of Murtuɗo’s famous refrains was his arguing that a language is not “suckled,” as Pulaar

speakers often refer to the native acquisition of their language, but must be studied. During his

many tours, descriptions of which characterize him as something of an ascetic, wandering

prophet, he referred to a West African who is literate in French but cannot read and write in their

own language as a “ganɗo humambinne,” basically an “educated fool.”

When Murtuɗo passed away in 2009, family members, friends, Pulaar language activists,

members of the Senegalese and Mauritanian media and political figures (including the

Mauritanian President Mohamed ould Abdelaziz) converged on Mbagne. The community has

continued as a site of pilgrimage for those seeking to honor Murtuɗo’s memory. Today, Mbagne

is one of only four Mauritanian communities in the middle Senegal River Valley that has

electricity, along with Kaedi, Bababe and Boghe. It has a population of several thousand and sits

at the end of a newly-paved road that runs from Niabina, a small town located along the main

highway serving southern Mauritania. Mbagne is also the administrative center of the

Département de Mbagne, within Mauritania’s Brakna Region. Nearby communities include

Haymedaat, Mbahe, Feralla and Bagodine. The nearest Senegalese communities include Mboolo

Biraan, Mboolo Aali, Tufnde Gande and Galoya, whose Friday market, or luumo, attracts many

vendors and customers from Mbagne and other nearby Mauritanian villages.

Mbagne’s positioning at the border between so-called “Fuuta Senegaal” and “Fuuta

Muritani” and as a landmark in the history of the Pulaar movement lends truth to the Pulaar

phrase “maayo wonaa keerol,” or “a river is not a boundary.” I met Kayya in 2015, traveling

there with Saidou Nourou Diallo, whose home village of Bagodine lies just a few miles to the

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northeast. We rode in on a Mercedes taxi from Niabina, crammed into the front seat. The road is

smooth and took us through Mbahe and Haymedaat, the names of which I had heard many times

but had never seen. Mbagne has some of the immediate feel of a town- as opposed to a small

village- partly because its central neighborhoods with their one-on-top-of-the-other compounds

converge right at the edges of the paved road. Murtuɗo’s family home is located down a narrow

walking path just west of the town’s main street.

When we arrived, Kayya’s family welcomed Saidou Nourou and me to sit down on a

large mat in the middle of the compound. It was not a wealthy person’s compound. Though

aging and appearing very thin, Kayya is very active physically and in the community. After he

arrived and introduced himself I watched him get up from our mat and march over to a horse cart

and help someone remove a large sack of rice that had just been delivered, not bothering to put

shoes over the socks he was wearing. Kayya plays the guitar and sometimes he is invited to

participate in musical and theatrical performances in villages around Fuuta. In the days before

Saidou Nourou arrived he had been in Diowol, which is also located right on the north bank of

the Senegal River, though about 50km to the east. Kayya mentors those involved in Goomu Pinal

Mbaañ, an association that also organizes theater, poetry and musical performances in his

village. A number of them gathered in his compound the night we stayed there and performed for

us, singing songs to Kayya’s guitar and discussing why each of them became involved in the

group. An extremely dusty windstorm ultimately broke up the gathering, sending us all to bed.

During the interview, Kayya explained his version of what took place leading up to and

during the Mbagne conference of 1962. Kayya’s account made clear that Mbagne’s tradition of

producing political militants did not begin with his and his brother’s generation:

Allah kept me alive through 1962, when students from the University of Dakar, as

well as students from various lycées and colleges from Senegal and Mauritania

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came together for a workshop here in our village, Mbagne. They conducted a

seminar, and it was here that the Pulaar alphabet was created. What I recall is that

when word got here about the meeting the government said it would not happen.

My father was the head of the village at the time, and he called a meeting, saying

basically that something important has been brought to our community by our

children, both Senegalese and Mauritanian. What they are doing is beyond our

level of understanding, but they say that our language is now being studied and that

they have the ability to create a new alphabet for it. Among our village elders . . . if

they agree on something all of Mbagne falls into line, and those leaders have never

feuded. If they hold a meeting whatever those three say goes. The rest of those

involved are nothing but militeeruuji. So, they met and said that since what the

students are doing is significant and promotes our community let them have their

meeting. Mbagne has fought against governments for a long time, not the

government, but governments in general, since they began coming here. Since the

elders holding those positions have always been pledged to one another and are

united, Allah helps them with whatever course of action they take. They decided

that the students may proceed with their conference and resolved to see what would

come of the government’s words. The meeting went on and the government did not

make a move. Allah provided his discretion (Interview with Kayya Diop, June 9,

2015).

Kayya affirmed that the Pulaar orthography that the Mbagne participants agreed upon

would eventually form the basis for the orthography that several West African nations adopted at

the 1966 UNESCO Bamako conference. Confirming the role of Kayya’s father, El Hadj Samba

Boudel Diop, is a man named Oumar Ndiaye, who posted in his blog Bababe Looti in 2010

about the “Congress of Mbagne,” which he wrote “marked a turn in the structural thinking of the

Peul intellectual and cultural revolution.”

The 1962 congress of Peul intellectuals in Mbagne, Mauritania at the initiative of

Amadou Malick Gaye and presided over by the late Professor Oumar Ba, formerly

the pillar of the Institut des Langues Nationales and first translator of the Koran

into Pulaar, marked a turn in the structural thinking of the Peul intellectual and

cultural revolution. Henceforth, orality- hitherto the guardian of Peul memory-

would be reinforced by writing in Pulaar thanks to the adoption of its alphabet and

its transcription, this despite the reservations of the Mauritanian authorities, who

did not view positively the awaking of Peul- let alone Black- consciousness. The

village of Mbagne, under the leadership of its chief at the time, El Hadj Samba

Boudel Diop, defied the Mauritanian authorities’ ban on the holding of the

congress, mobilizing Peul notables, decisionmakers and intellectuals in order to

establish the structural thinking of the Peul cultural revolution. Thus, to honor this

village, the point of departure of this awakening of the Peul consciousness, we

attach its name to the alphabet known as the “Alkule Mbagne” (Ndiaye 2009).

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The Mbagne meeting is the subject of a historical research project for the Pulaar-

language author and literacy teacher Amadou Tidiane Kane, who is from the nearby Senegalese

village of Galoya. When he was a child, Kane once fled to Mbagne from a Koranic teacher in

Thilogne with whom his parents had sent him to live. On his way to Mbagne, he and a friend hid

amidst the lowlying, alluvial waalo farms near Galoya, and were discovered by a relative.

Nevertheless, Kane and his friend managed to cross the river and reach Mbagne, where they took

refuge in the compound of his father’s brother, one “Ceerno Mammadaa,” who was teaching the

Koran there. When someone from Galoya arrived to retrieve him, he ran yet again, this time to a

grandmother of his named Dadde, who protected him and refused entry to anyone with the

intention of taking the young one back to Senegal. He remained in Mbagne for a time and

studied under Ceerno Mammadaa, ultimately returning with him to Galoya (Interview with

Amadou Tidiane Kane, May 20, 2015).

Kane has written a book manuscript on the life of Murtuɗo Diop, as well as the changes

that appeared in the late Pulaar language activist’s political thought during the course of his life.

At a June 2015 meeting devoted to explaining to members of the public a project that introduces

Pulaar and Wolof instruction to select primary schools around the country, Kane began with an

account of the 1962 Mbagne Conference. He told the crowd that the movement forefathers were

to initially hold the conference in a village called Temegut, on the Senegalese side of the border.

However, concerned local officials informed Senegalese President Senghor, who refused to

allow the meeting, labeling those involved as political radicals.

Allegedly, Senghor placed a personal phone call to Mauritanian President Moctar Ould

Daddah telling him to follow suit. As it turned out, Ould Daddah did not stop the meeting, but-

according to Amadou Tidiane Kane- sent soldiers to intimidate the students and activists in

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attendance. The participants’ plan, according to Amadou Tidiane Kane, was to agree on the

characters that would form the basis of the Pulaar orthography, then create a manual that would

help people understand the new alphabet. The mythologizing of the 1962 Mbagne conference

gives the Pulaar movement’s history a clear, seminal foundational event, made all the more

poignant because, according to Amadou Tidiane Kane, it also produced the movement’s first

martyr. This was 25-year-old Almaami Baaba Ly Sire, a young man with roots in the Senegalese

towns of Galoya, Ndulumaaji and Ogo, who drowned in the river as he was attempting to cross

back into Senegal (Amadou Tidiane Kane, Author’s Personal Recording, June 14, 2015).

The Mauritanian poet, journalist and political dissident Ibrahima Moctar Sarr also paid

tribute to the Mbagne conference participants. Though Sarr was just a youth at the time and did

not participate in the famous meeting, many of those who did became his comrades. In 2010,

Sarr released a CD featuring a biography of Nelson Mandela that Sarr himself narrated in Pulaar.

At the beginning of the CD, Sarr begins by discussing the history of the Pulaar movement,

including the 1962 Mbagne conference:

Let us remember here each of our friends, such as the group at Dabe near Mbagne,

and those a part of it, Amadou Malick Gaye, who was head civil administrator in

Senegal, Dr. Oumar Ba, Mamadou Samba Diop, who was a kid at the time but he

was there. It was the Mbagne group who created the alphabet that became that of

Cairo, Egypt where there was an association of people learning Pulaar. They are the

ones who wrote, ‘Sammba e Kummba’, ‘Doosɗe Celluka’, Ndikkiri Jom Moolo

written by Yero Doro Diallo. People like Djigo Tafsirou, Abou Ousman Ba,

Dembel Mboj, Souleymane Kane, Ali Barro, they were all part of that organization

in Cairo (Saar 2010).

As Sarr’s statement implies, the Pulaar militants in Senegal and Mauritania at that time

were in contact with Pulaarophone university students then based in Cairo. A number of them

began operating Pulaar literacy classes and through their efforts an orthography for the language

was taking shape. Yero Dooro Diallo, Souleymane Kane and Djigo Tafsirou were key members

of this group. Yero Dooro Diallo was from the Senegalese Ferlo highlands, a region of

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predominantly Fulɓe cattle herders that flanks Fuuta to the south and southwest. Djigo and

Souleymane Kane were Mauritanians and both were Fuutaŋkooɓe. Each would have a significant

role to play in their country’s Pulaar movement. In 1988, Djigo would die in military detention,

two years after his arrest by Mauritanian authorities in a crackdown on political opposition that

caught many Pulaar language activists in its dragnet.

During their years in Cairo, these three Pulaar language activists were among many more

that were involved in what became known as Kawtal Janngooɓe Pulaar/Fulfulde. The decision

by members of Kawtal, which was based in Cairo, to adopt a Latin-based orthography may

appear a strange one. After all, each of them had come from Senegal, Mauritania and other West

African countries to attend Cairo University, where Arabic was the medium of instruction.

Scholars on the Pulaar literacy movement such as Bourlet (2009), as well as participants in this

project, attest to the resentment of the Cairo group towards the racially exclusionary nature of

Arab nationalism. Though inspired by the example of Arab nationalism, the Cairo Pulaar

language activists wanted their literacy teaching activities to be free of Arab cultural hegemony,

hence their decision to select a Latin-based orthography. Their collaboration with Pulaar

language activists back home was part of a collective process resulting in the creation of the

Alkule Keer, or the Cairo orthography, as some argue the “Mbagne orthography” is more

properly known.

Emergence from the Aftermath of Partition

The dual transnational and trans-border character of the Pulaar movement must be

understood in the context of the creation of the modern Senegal River Valley as an economically

marginalized and politically dependent region. This socio-politically arid present is often

contrasted in historical narrative by memories of the Islamic regime that ruled Fuuta before

French colonialism.

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For centuries, the Senegal River has been a source of livelihood for those who live on or

near its banks. It provides the annual flooding that has made possible much of north and south

bank agriculture in the low-lying “waalo” areas. Among other things, the river also provides

drinking water for livestock, as well as the fish pursued by the “subalɓe” caste of fishermen

whose genre of poetry dealing with knowledge of the river, known as “pekaan,” is a deeply-

valued part of the River Valley’s cultural repertoire. On the other hand, the Senegal River has

played, in addition to the role of boundary between nation-states, the role of a geographical

barrier behind which Haalpulaar and others fled raids by Hassani groups from the north during

the 18th and 19th Centuries. This history inspired the Pulaar proverb “rewo roŋkaa nde worgo

hoɗaa.” Roughly translated, it means that “it is when things are bad in the north that the south is

occupied.” Its general meaning is that regardless of one’s wish to live in a certain place,

circumstances may force them to move elsewhere.

In 1776, a group of Muslim clerics (Toorooɓe) seized power in Fuuta Tooro, creating a

political regime that would last until the French conquest of the area, which occurred

successively from 1878 to 1891 (Kane 1987). Geographically, the regime’s domain ran east to

west along the Senegal River Valley, from near the Senegalese town of Dagana to just west of

the present-day Senegalese town of Bakel, an area the length of 400km. Fuutaŋke society was

(and still is) characterized by a system of social hierarchy, or caste system, that can generally be

divided into nobles (rimbe) (including the Toorooɓe), artisans (ñeeñɓe) and slaves, or “owned”

people (maccuɓe) (Wane 1969; Dilley 2004).

As the French presence in the Senegambia region accelerated during the 19th Century,

Fuuta Tooro was portrayed by colonial figures such as Governor-General Louis Faidherbe as

hostile to French commercial interests (Pondopoulo 1996:288). From the middle of the 19th

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Century to World War I, a number of traumatic events would rip into Fuuta’s social fabric,

including the warfare that would lead to the final French conquest (Robinson 1985). Earlier than

this, however, were battles between French forces and those of Cheikh Oumar Tall. The latter’s

defeat led to his orchestration of disastrous mass migrations (fergooji) from Fuuta to present day

Mali. These events were followed by the 1905 banning of the slave trade implemented to target

France’s enemies (Kane 134), the partition of Fuuta along the Senegal River in 1904, and the

1914 famines caused by French economic policies, all of which contributed to Fuuta’s marginal

status vis-à-vis the booming peanut growing regions in Western Senegal (Kane 422).

In these circumstances, migration became a feature of Fuutaŋke life. By World War I,

Fuutaŋke migration to the peanut basin or out of the colony was an essential option for acquiring

the means of survival, as well as meeting onerous French tax demands (Kane 422). Fifty years

after these events, Diop (1965) observed in his early post-colonial study on Fuutaŋke migration

from the Senegal River Valley to Dakar that the Valley

(A)ppears as a disinherited region . . . (due to) the regression of its economy at the

same moment when the peanut-growing regions were seeing relatively intense

economic activity . . . and at the very moment where arising in those regions and on

the coast were urban centers, of which Dakar is the most important (36).

In Mauritania, so-called Negro-Africans, including Haalpulaar, Soninke and Wolof,

comprised the large majority of students in colonial schools and, by extension, would make up

the majority of “administrative subalterns” until independence (Jourde 2002, 132). France saw

French-language schools in Senegal and Mauritania as filling a “cultural void” existing among

Haalpulaar, Wolof and Soninké. Meanwhile, the Beydan Moorish nobility, who the French saw

as representing an “Arab-Islamic” civilization superior to that of Black Mauritanians, learned

French and Arabic at madrasas established in Moorish strongholds like Boutilimit, Atar and

Kiffa (Sall 2007, 675). This differential access to French and Arabic-based schooling provided

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the historical backdrop for the post-colonial government’s Arabization policies that started in the

1960s.

After the independence of Senegal and Mauritania in 1960, Fuutaŋke elites’ status as

political brokers was dependent on their engagement with elite politics in Dakar and Nouakchott.

One way of understanding the role of these political brokers is through Bayart’s (1993) study on

what he calls the “politics of the belly.” Bayart argues that the role of the bourgeoisie in post-

colonial African contexts is characterized not mainly by labor exploitation, but through their

control of “contracts, licenses, and public jobs provided by the entrepot state” (87).

Beck’s analysis of Senegalese Fuutaŋke elites as “dependent brokers” and Jourde’s

(2002, 2004) work on political accommodation between elites from Mauritania’s different

ethnicized and racialized groups offers some insight into how such processes took hold in post-

colonial, post-partition Fuuta. In Senegal, the mainly Toorooɗo political elites maintained

influence through control over the ruling Parti Socialiste’s voting lists and the continuing of land

tenure practices that had long underpinned maintenance of Fuuta’s system of social hierarchy.

The composition of the Fuutaŋke elite has changed, due to such factors as the role of migrants

living abroad and, at least for a time, irrigation projects implemented to help farmers (Beck 130-

141). However, the importance of the Fuutaŋke elite’s dependence on resources from the “Wolof

state” (Beck 118) for understanding the particular nature of the Pulaar movement’s trans-border

and trans-national character cannot be underestimated. I argue this was a major reason why there

has been relatively advocacy for an independent Senegal River Republic.

From a linguistic standpoint, Wolof has emerged as Senegal’s urban lingua franca, a

process that for decades has taken shape in the fast-paced, gritty crucible of Metro Dakar

(McLaughlin 2001). The oft-assumed connection between Wolof and Senegalese national

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identity has been aided by what Cruise O’Brien (1997) calls a “shadow politics of neglect” by

the state, in which the spread of Wolof continued apace as the question of whether to favor a

single national language went unaddressed. More recently, Smith (2010) has argued that the

influence of Wolof in Senegal has come as part of a “bottom-up” nationalism that operates

neither against the state nor as a product of deliberate state policy. In this context, some Pulaar

language activists perceive a crisis regarding “language shift” (See Fishman 1991) towards

Wolof at the expense of Pulaar and other minority languages.

Fuutaŋke political elites in Mauritania weighed similar considerations to their

Senegalese counterparts as they compromised with elites from other groups during the run-up to

independence. Drawing on the 1958 Aleg conference as one of his examples, Jourde (2002)

argues that the portrayal of post-colonial Mauritania as a country divided by racial conflict

obscures intra-ethnic struggles that occur in Mauritanian politics. One example would be

disagreements during the 1950s between Fuutaŋkooɓe who argued that Fuuta should have a

special administrative status or enjoy a rattachment with Senegal, and those with a political

investment in the spoils associated with the establishment of a Mauritanian state with its border

at the Senegal River (2004:74-80).

Nevertheless, a very real ethnicization/racialization of Mauritanian politics took place,

rendering the so-called “National Question” central to the country’s politics. While at

independence Fuutaŋkooɓe made up a disproportionate number of those educated in French, the

colonial regime had sided with the Beydan Moorish political elite in the immediately preceding

years (Sall 2007). After independence, the Fuutaŋke educated classes were deeply threatened by

the efforts of the regime of Moctar Ould Daddah to Beydanize the state bureaucracy, which

provoked riots on the part of Haalpulaar and other Black (or “Negro-African”) students in

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Nouakchott in 1966. The catalyst for this event was a 1965 law making Arabic a requirement at

the “premier” and the “second degree” education levels (Baduel 1989).

The “National Question,” as framed by certain Black Mauritanian intellectuals, addresses

the contradiction between Mauritania’s putative Arabo-Moorish character and the country’s

actual diversity. While a majority of the country speaks Hassaniya, a dialect of Arabic, this

population consists of both so-called Beydan “White Moors” and Haratines (“Black Moors”), the

latter of which are descendants of slaves. The remaining third of the population, known as

“Negro-Africans,” speak Pulaar, Soninké, Wolof and Bambara, with Pulaar the majority.

Haratine activists have opposed discrimination against them and the continued practice of

slavery, but have been less sympathetic to Pulaar activists and Negro-African opponents of

Arabization. Some Haratines resent what they see as Haalpulaar hypocrisy on the slavery issue,

given the latter’s caste and hierarchical social system. Many Haalpulaar accuse Haratines of

failing to take theirs and other Negro-Africans’ side during moments of political conflict, and

allege that it was Haratines who carried out many of the expulsions and murders of Wolof,

Haalpulaar and Soninké that took place in 1989 and 1990.

In the decades since the independence of the two countries in 1960, Pulaar language

activism has been influenced by several major developments. First, the spread of grassroots

literacy organizations like the Association pour la Renaissance du Pulaar (or Fedde Ɓamtoore

Pulaar) helped create a public that Pulaar language activists in both Senegal and Mauritania

could reach through their published poetry, dissemination of recorded cassettes and by

conducting tours at which they held discussions about politics and culture. Other important

organizations included ARP’s sister organization in Mauritania, Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar, or

ARP-RIM (ARP-République Islamique de Mauritanie), and the Institut des Langues Nationales

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(ILN). During the 1980s, the ILN, a creation of the Mauritanian government, began assigning

teachers of Pulaar and other languages to public schools around the country. This was part of a

pilot program to introduce national languages into primary education, though it would be shelved

after a few years, a fact which some cynically attribute to the program’s success.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Senegalese organizations such as Rénovation de

Ndioum, Bilbassi Matam, Fedde Ɓural Ciloñ and a similar group in Ndulumaaji began teaching

Pulaar literacy and organzing singing and theatrical performances that dramatized controversial

social and political problems. The vanguard of these cultural associations was comprised of

radical high school and university students based in Dakar and Saint-Louis, who organized

summertime vacances citoyennes with the aim of bringing their political messages to their home

towns in Fuuta. Many of them were Maoists who identified with the political party And-Jëf,

which was then active in Senegal. Their efforts did not result in political success for the left in

Fuuta or, for that matter, throughout Senegal. However, they had a significant cultural influence

through their helping build an infrastructure of Pulaar literacy, organizing meetings addressing

social and generational divisions and their helping pioneer the type of cultural festival known as

the “soixante douze heures”. Radical songs such as Rénovation’s “Mor oo Politik” (“Down with

this kind of politics!”) remain popular and can still be heard today on radio stations in Senegal

and Mauritania.

The second major development was the emergence of charismatic radio announcers,

particularly Tidiane Anne, who used his position on Senegal’s Radio Nationale to promote

cultural and linguistic pride among Pulaarophones across the Senegambia region. The third

major development was the political crisis in Mauritania during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A coup d’état by Colonel Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya in 1985 led to a renewed crackdown

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on Black African (or “Negro-African”), particularly Haalpulaar opposition to the government’s

Arabization policies. Political imprisonments and crackdowns followed the publication of the

Manifesto of the Oppressed Black Mauritanian (La Manifeste du Negro Mauritanien Opprimé),

which detailed a list of grievances when it came to Moorish domination of the state bureaucracy,

as well as the lack of representation afforded national languages. The Manifeste also alleged that

the state was attempting to steal the land of farmers in the River Valley. The government’s

response was to arrest all Negro-African (mostly Haalpulaar) intellectuals they saw as

sympathetic to the ideas that the Manifeste expressed. It was in the 1986 crackdown in response

to the Manifeste that Ibrahima Sarr, Tene Youssouf Gueye, Health Minister and respected Pulaar

language activist Djigo Tafsirou and many others were arrested. Gueye and Djigo died after two

years in detention, much of which they had spent in the notorious Oualata prison. Sarr, who was

incarcerated with them at Oualata, survived the ordeal and was released in 1990.

In 1987, several Haalpulaar military officers attempted a coup. In response, Maaouya’s

regime apprehended and executed the plotters and banned the Forces de Liberation Africaines de

Mauritanie (FLAM). Founded in 1983, FLAM emerged as the Negro-African political party

most militantly opposed to what was regarded as the “Beydanization” of the Mauritanian state.

Things would only escalate from there. In 1989, a skirmish along the Senegal-Mauritania border

led to racial pogroms, known as “the Events,” in both countries, and the Mauritanian authorities

used the opportunity to, among other things, crush its Haalpulaar opponents and encouraged

armed- often Haratine- militias to raid and even occupy Negro-African villages and farmland in

the Senegal River Valley. Over 100,000 Black Mauritanians (Park et al 1991:2-3; Marchesin

1992:16) were killed or expelled from the country. A number of Mauritanian Pulaar militants

who had taken refuge in Senegal began participating in language activism in that country.

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1980s: Cultural and Linguistic Activism along the Border

During the 1980s, several factors contributed to the expressions of cross-border cultural

and linguistic militancy that solidified Pulaar language activism as a trans-border movement.

These included an infrastructure of language activism provided by the assignment of Pulaar

teachers to Southern Mauritania by the ILN. Some of them were assigned to communities near

the border, such as Mbagne, and could not resist the temptation to take trips to Pulaar-speaking

villages on the Senegalese side of the river. These activists and language teachers saw fit to show

that that political border does not correspond to boundaries of language, culture and kinship. In

this case, the separate projects of state-building in Senegal and Mauritania created opportunities

for the expression of cross-border linguistic and cultural militancy.

Ndiaye Saidou Amadou is a poet well-known to many Senegalese and Mauritanian

Pulaar speakers. For many years, he has worked as a Pulaar teacher for the ILN. He is nearing

retirement and lives in a compound with his wife in children in Nouakchott’s Arafat

neighborhood. His circumstances have changed somewhat since a few years prior. When I first

met him in 2010, his family was based in Fuuta but now they live with him in the much nicer

place in which he now resides. The compound has a small garden where he grows crops

traditionally farmed in Fuuta and towards the back of the open yard next to the house is a

blackboard facing an area with enough space to fit a class of a dozen or more Pulaar students.

The last time I had seen him had been four years earlier in Fuuta in the village of Bagodine at the

compound of Amadou Harane Ba, who also goes by the name “nebam bonnaani folleere” (“a

little oil never ruined the sorrel”). “Ndiaye,” as he is known, still wears his trademark “Cote

d’Ivoire” hat with a zig-zag design and a small pom-pom at the top and still enjoys holding court

with stories about his life’s travels.

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Ndiaye and Amadou Harane1 taught together for the ILN in the 1980s and both were

responsible for helping villages on both sides of the border establish regular Pulaar literacy

classes. As Ndiaye recalls, Amadou Harane had a horse and cart with which they would conduct

their tours. Some of these tours took them to Senegalese villages such as Hoore Foonde, where

Ndiaye recalls finding people deeply committed to Pulaar literacy. He justifies his and Amadou

Harane’s forays into Senegal with an explanation of his view on the role of the river as a

boundary.

We came to Hoore Foonde and we asked if there were people who are literate in

Pulaar or anything like that. They introduced us to people that we would be

interested in speaking with. At that point, when we had our first public discussions,

people responded, many organizations responded. (They said) “We want this but

are unable to get it” “We want to study (Pulaar) but we are unable to get someone

to teach us.” “We want to study but we are unable to obtain books.” “We want to

study but are unable to find skilled people.” ‘We want to study but we have

nowhere to base our efforts.” If you see that we crossed from Mauritania and went

to Senegal, it means that between north (rewo) and south (worgo) there is no

border. Northern Senegal and Southern Mauritania make up one household (galle).

No river can divide it, no hostile government can divide it, nothing can divide it. It

is only Allah . . . who can undo it. So, the language, it has no boundary. If you

want, be in the south; if you want, be in the north, we will eventually come back

together when it comes to language (Interview with Ndiaye Saidou Amadou, May

31, 2015).

Ndiaye’s statement reflects a strong belief in the unity of Fuutaŋkooɓe on both sides of

the border when it comes to language, though he does not appear to be challenging the

legitimacy of the nation-states of Senegal and Mauritania as such. Rather, he is asserting that the

sovereignty of the two nation-states does not trump the exercise of Pulaar linguistic citizenship.

These two apparenty contradictory factors conspired to make certain forms of Pulaar language

1 When I met him, Amadou Harane Bah told me of his involvement in Senegal’s ARP after he left Mauritania. He

recalled attending a meeting where Murtuɗo criticized an ARP leader- who was then in a power struggle- for

unauthorized personal expenditures with the organization’s money. This occured a few years later when a number of

Mauritanian refugees who were also Pulaar language activists found roles in Pulaar literacy activities in Senegal.

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activism possible. Ndiaye and Amadou Harane’s training as language teachers and their

opportunity to cross the river and organize Pulaar classes in Senegal was made possible by a

Mauritanian state institution- the ILN.

It was during this time that Ndiaye Saidou met one of Senegal’s more well-known Pulaar

language activists, Ibrahima “Katante Leñol” Kane, or the “leñol’s militant.” A poet and author,

Katante regularly appears at events and performances celebrating Pulaar, both in France (where

he lives most of the time) and in Senegal. When I first met him in 2010, Katante insisted that he

did not give himself the title, but that Ndiaye Saidou, visiting on a tour from Mauritania in the

1980s, had given him the name. In separate interviews, the two of them recall the story of how

they met. During the late 1980s, Ndiaye Saidou- still officially posted in Mbagne, Mauritania,

was touring villages on the Senegalese side of Fuuta conducting research for what would become

his book Aspects of the History of Fuuta Tooro. Having heard of Katante (then simply known as

Ibrahima Kane), he decided to visit him in his village, Aañam Yeroyaaɓe, about 12km east of

Hoore Foonde, where Ndiaye was doing some of his research.

As Ndiaye headed to Aañam Yeroyaaɓe, a messenger found Katante at the dispensary in

nearby Aañam Coɗay, where Katante had taken his apparently ailing wife, informing him that

Ndiaye Saidou was set to pay him a visit. When Katante heard Ndiaye was looking for him he

left his wife at the dispensary and ultimately spotted Ndiaye near another village, Aañam Godo,

where Ndiaye (according to his recollection) had just conducted an interview with a 105- year-

old man2. Both recall it as a very happy meeting between two Pulaar devotees. They immediately

went to spend the day in Katante’s village and later met up back in Hoore Foonde, where Ndiaye

2 Explaining his reason for stopping to conduct the interview in Aañam Godo, Ndiaye quoted Amadou Hampate’s

Bah’s famous declaration that the death of an African elder is like a library’s worth of knowledge burning down.

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had been trying to help organize Pulaar classes. It was in the context of these events that Ndiaye

gave Ibrahima Kane the name “Katante Leñol.” Ndiaye likened the Katante to his ILN comrade

Amadou Harane Bah, essentially referring to the former as the Senegalese version of the latter.

Both of them share a love for the leñol so strong, Ndiaye says, that anyone who would try to

outdo them in their commitment would die in the process.

As of 1989, the efforts by Ndiaye and Amadou Harane to organize Pulaar literacy classes

had apparently paid off. According to Ndiaye, he and Amadou Harane would leave a village

with, say, ten or so people involved and when they would come back they would find that five

more people had joined the original ten. The literacy campaign involved teaching people the

Pulaar alphabet and how to read and write in the language. Once a person learned, he or she

could teach many others.

One of Ndiaye’s intended goals was the establishment of an organization encompassing

villages on the north and south banks, and a meeting was to take place with the aim of launching

it. People from Hoore Foonde, as well as other villages in the area- both in Senegal and

Mauritania- had apparently committed themselves to the project. The “between north and south”

initiative involved the communities of Hoore Foonde (Senegal), Mbagne (Mauritania) and

Wendiŋ (Mauritania).

Because of the Events of 1989, this would never materialize.

The Hoore Foonde-Mbagne initiative was not the first to propose a federation of literacy

and cultural associations from both sides of the border. Jaalo-Waali was one such federation.

Jaalo-Waali3 was active in the mid-1980s and had its stronghold in the Mauritanian village of

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Diowol Rewo (or “Diowol North”) in Mauritania, just across from its Senegalese sister village

Diowol Worgo (or Diowol South). The organization involved young people, many of them

students, who would conduct public forums and theatrical performances aimed at raising public

consciousness about political and environmental issues, as well as Pulaar literacy.

Diowol was home to a very active association, known as Fedde Pinal e Coftal Ɓalli

Jowol (FPCJ-The Diowol Cultural and Athletic Association). The organization grew out of a

vibrant atmosphere of linguistic and cultural militancy, in which Pulaar literacy played a central

part. Its leaders had clashed with the head of an older youth organization, which- I am told- was

more concerned with things like organizing village cleanups. The youth in Diowol created their

“Fedde” (association) in the late 1970s, according to a former member I call SC. Its members

were among the earliest village-level organizations, along with Rénovation de Ndioum and a

similar organization in Ngidjilogne, Senegal that combined Pulaar literacy training with public

forums and performances laced with messages aimed at “combating lies and refusing

oppression.” In the 1980s, members of FPCJ came to believe that their mission would be better

served by working with like-minded groups around Fuuta united by sub-regional historical

experiences shared by people on either side of the border.

“We got the idea, we said this battle of ours, let’s examine this battle with the aim of

expanding it,” the FPCJ member told me. “Have it expand it so that it can transcend different

regions. For, you know that if you come to Fuuta, ah, all of Fuuta is one land- north and south-

one land” (Interview with SC, July 26, 2012). However, he adds that there are specific clusters of

3 According to Oumar Kane (2004), Jaalo Waali is also the name of a village at the entrance of Dagana, Senegal. It

was the site of a battle in 1821 in which fought a then 121-year old warrior named Hamme Juulɗo Kan, who lost his

son in the battle. It is not clear if the organization Jaalo Waali took its name from this bit of history.

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communities that have closer interactions with one another. For example, he says, villages facing

each other from across the Senegal River- also the border- interact more closely

That’s why we had the idea, let’s look to expand our battle. What is our battle? It

was to wage a region-wide battle. To make Pulaar a global Pulaar, that’s too much,

too big, too big for us, but let’s begin on the ground. Then, it was at the village

level. Let’s take it beyond the village to multiple villages. Let’s work together with

Gijilon and see if it we can create one association for the riverbank. That’s why we

built a relationship with places like Gijilon. We called on places like Ali Woury, all

of them are between us on the riverbank. Teccaan also is near us on the north bank.

We called upon each other and we created an association called Jaalo-Waali

(Interview with SC, July 26, 2012).

Planning meetings would involve four delegates from each member village from both the

Senegalese and Mauritanian sides of the border. When the plans for conducting a Jaalo-Waali

event were decided the representatives would return home and organize their communities’

contributions to the gathering. Jaalo-Waali activities included such activities as teaching people

how to build cooking hearths for their compounds. In addition, in villages where Jaalo-Waali

was active, members would assist people in need of help weeding their farms, including sick

people whose inability to tend to their fields threatened their annual crop yields. For these and

other activities, such as helping people rebuild their damaged houses, representatives from

several Jaalo-Waali member villages would share in the work.

One of Jaalo-Waali’s main priorities was raising public consciousness regarding the

effects of the dam construction that would greatly affect those who depend for food and cash

crops on farms in the waalo floodplains around the Senegal River. Jaalo-Waali’s theatrical

performances addressed concerns about how the dam closures would change agricultural

practices and the illnesses that would befall Fuuta as a result of the dam-induced slowness of the

current. Performers conveyed that the money generated by the project would benefit only

politicians or would go to servicing debts owed the dam project’s donor nations. SC reflected on

how these performances portrayed feared attempts by rich outsiders to gobble up Fuuta’s

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farmland. Implied is an idea of Fuuta Tooro as a uniquely Fuutaŋke homeland, to which

members of other ethnic groups are rendered outsiders (See Faty 2011).

Also, another thing (we told them): rich folks are bound to come from the south-

we portrayed here the Wolofs. They come down to the riverbank (of the Senegal)

with their great wealth. They come and find you, Usmaan Yook, a simple poor

person but who possesses all kinds of land, that is, in Fuuta. So, they come and as

soon as they show you bundles of money, you see it and are tempted. They buy and

clean you out of your land. Someday, you will have a grandchild and in future

generations he will go to farm there every morning. Except, where he goes to farm

each morning he finds there “Hamme the Moor” or “Doudou the Wolof”- and it is

he who actually owns the land. Then, he (your grandson) will say “oh my! (haa

gore) The land where I farm every morning for which I am being chased for rent, I

can’t even make a living (from it). And this was my grandfather’s land!” This is

what we (in our performances) would do. . . . At that time we were experiencing

things just after the dam closures. I was then playing the role (in the performances)

of a rich Sarahule, for we did not dare to say “Moor” (Capaato). If we said “Moor,”

it could be a problem. Same if we said “Wolof.” So this is why we played

Sarahules. Me, I played the role of a Sarahule- a “patron” strutting in and buying

up other people’s land (Interview with SC, July 26, 2012).

In Mauritania, the land issue had generated tremedous anxiety among Haalpulaar and the

the so-called “Negro-African” political opposition more generally. SONADER, the Mauritanian

agency tasked with modernizing agricultural practices after the dam closures, attempted to

promote land reform in the River Valley. According to Marchesin (1992), the agency tried to

reallocate land to peasants who then were locked into a feudal system of land tenure known in

Pulaar as rem-peccen (basically sharecropping). SONADER’s idea, at least in theory, was “land

to the tiller”- giving the land to those who farm it.

Strong opposition to this came from landowning families who were threatened by the

proposed changes, this opposition coming under the guise of ethno-national solidarity; the new

policies were portrayed as an attempt by Beydane Moors to seize control of Mauritania’s most

fertile area from Negro-Africans, in this case Haalpulaar’en. Though Fuutaŋke landowners, in

their opposition, may have obscured how social hierarchies in their own community shaped land

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use, their portrayals of the Beydane elite’s intentions were not without basis4. The land issue

featured prominently in the Le Manifeste du Négro-Mauritanien Opprimé, the wholesale critique

of what FLAM viewed as a political project to “Beydanize (or Arabize)” the country politically,

economically and culturally. The sections pertaining to the land question charged that the

country’s land reform law of 1983 was one of several aspects of Mauritanian policy that sought

to seize land from Black Mauritanians, putting it in the hands of Moors. These concerns

dovetailed with the organizing efforts of Jaalo-Waali.

In early September 1986 Maaouya’s government launched a campaign of arrests of Black

Mauritanian political activists and their suspected sympathizers. The arrests constituted a

painfully seminal event in Black Mauritanian politics and are recalled through poems by

numerous bards of the Pulaar movement, including Ibrahima Moctar Sarr in his well-known

poem “Nayi Jeenayi” (4th of September) (Bourlet 2009). Jaalo-Waali members and allies were

caught up in the arrests of ’86. Amadou Alpha Ba, who was then head of the organization, was

sought by the police. He had been sent to Kaedi, Mauritania where a weeklong Pulaar cultural

festival was to take place and to which Pulaar luminaries such as the well-known historian and

activist Saidou Kane had been invited. Ba had been selected as part of a small delegation of

Jaalo-Waali members to attend the Kaedi event while, further upriver, Jaalo-Waali was holding

an event in the border village of Sadel, Senegal (Ba Date Unknown).

4 An example: On a bus ride between Ouro Sogui and Thilogne, Senegal in 2013, I encountered a man who I had

met three years earlier in his home village of Garlol, Mauritania, where Saidou Nourou Diallo and I had passed

through looking for a horse cart to ride to another village. During the bus ride, the man and I got to talking politics

and the expulsions of Garlol residents during the 1989 pogroms. He complained bitterly that tracts of his

community’s farmland was given to a bourgeois Beydane Moor based in Noaukchott. As of 2013, Garlol residents

were still fighting in the courts against the Beydane man for recognition of their ownership of that land.

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As it turned out, the Mauritanian authorities prevented the Kaedi meeting from taking

place and it is suggested that spies within the ranks of Jaalo-Waali had reported the content of

SC’s theatrical performances to the authorities. After the events of early September, SC and his

comrades in Diowol refused to cease their public performances even as the government was

regularly making arrests. He would finally be arrested in late October (Interview with SC, July

26, 2012). It is not clear whether Jaalo-Waali remained active during subsequent years, however

the Events of 1989 would deal crushing blows to the infrastructure of cultural militancy existing

in the northern Senegal River Valley.

In an interview conducted recently on a private radio station in Nouakchott, Amadou

Alpha Ba recalled the crackdown of 1986, when as the government pursued him he more than

once crossed the river into Senegal to avoid arrest. During the interview5, he also explains his

understanding of what became of the historian Saidou Kane and Murtuɗo Diop. Both had been in

the Kaedi-Diowol area during the unleashing of the arrest campaign, that is, the time period of

the planned cultural fesitval in Kaedi and the Jaalo-Waali event in Sadel, Senegal. According to

Amadou Alpha Ba, Saidou Kane and Murtuɗo crossed into Senegal and found their way via

Senegal’s main northern highway to twin cities of Rosso, Senegal and Rosso, Mauritania, which

share the main river crossing between the two countries. While Saidou Kane was arrested upon

their arrival at Mauritanian border security, Murtuɗo was supposedly able to escape, after which

he “disappeared” from public view for a period of several years6 (Bah, Date Unknown).

5 Friends of mine who gave me a recorded version of the broadcast told me that the airing of such topics on private

radios in Nouakchott has been a reason that some of these radio stations have been taken off the air, or the removal

of certain individual broadcasters.

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The Events

The Events of 1989 appear as a cruel replay of the Senegal River’s historical role as a

buffer behind which people must flee in order to escape danger. This horrible moment in the

recent history of Senegal, Mauritania, the Senegal River Valley began April, which that year

happened to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan. Memories of the Events have been

recounted to me at length during interviews. They also sometimes emerge surprisingly over tea,

or other more informal settings where politics are being discussed. A close friend of mine was

sitting on a living room couch as he recalled the day during Ramadan in 1989 when militiamen

entered his neighbors’ compound in Nouakchott. “A pregnant woman I knew lived next door. I

heard the men go in there and I instinctively moved to do something. I began climbing the wall

to go help her but was physically restrained by friends and family” (Author’s recollections, June

2010). They probably saved his life. The woman next door, however, was not saved and she was

later found dead.

This is just one of the harrowing stories repeated by those who were unfortunate enough

to be in Nouakchott when the Events began. Many Mauritanians, as well as Senegalese-born

residents who had spent most of their lives in Mauritania, were deported. This was nearly the fate

of a Pulaar literacy activist I once visited for dinner in Kaedi. He is from a family of aynaaɓe and

did not have the benefit of entering school at an early age. When he finally did so he performed

very well and in addition to his formal schooling he became involved in Pulaar militancy, which

became a lifelong commitment. In 1989, he was living in Nouakchott. He wore his hair, he told

6 Murtuɗo’s disappearance, during which he was in hiding amidst the turmoil of the late 1980s is a significant theme

discussed by his admirers. Recollections of his time in hiding take on the air of legend. One version has it that

Murtuɗo escaped the Mauritanian authorities because the security services only knew the poet by his nom de guerre

and failed to inform operatives of his real name, Mamadou Samba Diop. When I met his brother, who knows of

Murtudo’s whereabouts at the time, he politely refused to reveal the mystery of where Murtuɗo had been hiding.

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me, like a “Rasta” which was one of many grounds for deportation, as locks were regarded as a

“Senegalese” trait. He was arrested at a Nouakchott checkpoint and escorted to the airport where

he was to board a plane for Senegal. Fortuntely, a Gendarme who knew him from their school

days saw him and vouched that he was indeed a Mauritanian.

Other survivors I spoke with had less luck. One of them, who was also based in

Nouakchott was forced, after learning of his deportation, to travel on foot from Nouakchott to the

border town of Rosso. His home village, also on the Mauritanian side of the border, no longer

exists. He has barely set foot in Mauritania since.

It was not long before news of the Events reached Fuuta. A woman from a village east of

Kaedi, a lifelong Pulaar literacy activist, was involved in student strikes protesting the pogroms

they heard were taking place in Nouakchott.

In 1989 I became the first woman to head the Youth Association of our collège. I

was not yet 15 years old. That was also the year the Events. The day they began,

we youth at the collège held a strike. We heard people saying “in Nouakchott,

Moors are carrying out attacks and people are being killed.” We knew people were

being deported, because my older sister, the oldest child of my father, had been

deported. She, her husband and their whole family. Their belongings were

confiscated. We in Fuuta found out about this, not to mention that the same thing

was happening to others. Finally, as people were waking up on the morning of the

Korité feast, at compounds like the home of Samba Aliou Sire, entire households

were being rounded up. They were taken to Kaedi.

Two days later, anyone with the last name Diacko was deported, those with the last

name Sarr were deported. Finally, we the youth became outraged and held a huge

strike. Many students were arrested, mayors were arrested, others were arrested. At

the time I was also sought after for arrest. I am a woman, and almuuɓe (Koranic

students) were living in our compound studying, they were among my older

siblings from Senegal in Boosoyaa. At one point, when many people were on their

way to the mosque, and since the authorities are after me, I used the opportunity to

make my run for it. I went to Senegal. That’s when I crossed the river during the

Events of ’89. The rest of the youth, all the men, all of them were arrested and

locked up the next morning. The remainder, those born in Senegal like Oumar

Anne- may Allah have mercy on him- Wodobere- they were deported. Ultimately,

it was as if the village- was as if it had been smashed. I was in Senegal until my

grandmother and some of my relatives found me and brought me back (Interview

with anonymous participant, July 2012).

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The Events turned lives upside down. Many Pulaar language activists left Mauritania

either temporarily or permanently, settling in Senegal, Mali, Europe and the United States, where

many of them attained refugee status. Those living outside of Mauritania and those who

remained (or returned) retain vivid memories of what happened. Pulaar language activists have

found many ways to memorialize this devastating period in the history of their movement and

their home country. On his own personal initiative, Ndiaye Saidou Amadou conducted extensive

fieldwork in the Senegal River Valley after the Events. He spoke with people who witnessed

killings and expulsions of River Valley communities, learning the names of many of the dead

and the compounds and villages that Moorish militias had seized.

During my first fieldwork trip to Mauritania, in 2010, Ndiaye showed me a notebook

where he had logged a list of villages that were wiped off the map in 1989. Haratine

communities now occupy many of those expelled villages, and in many cases now bear

Hassaniya names. Ndiaye is proud of the heartbreaking work he accomplished documenting the

Events for posterity. When I saw him, for the third time, in 2015, he claimed that many officials

reporting on the aftermath of the Events had found him a valuable source. One of Ndiaye’s

better-known contributions to the movement’s collective memory is a cassette he recorded in the

early 1990s memorializing both murdered pogrom victims from the River Valley, as well as

Haalpulaar’en serving in the Mauritanian Army who were killed on the orders of their

treacherous comrades. Supposedly, the cassette was banned in Mauritania. It is also difficult for

some survivors to listen to. One afternoon in 2013, when I inquired after the recording at a music

and electronics shop in Ouro Sogui, Senegal, the seller, a refugee from Mauritania, said he did

not carry it because it brought back painful memories.

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The Events are subject to a particular historical interpretation on the part of many Pulaar

militants I have met. Among scholars and commentators, what happened in 1989 and 1990 is

often understood as something of a conflict between Mauritania and Senegal, between Blacks

and Arabo-Berbers, between Northern, “Arab” Africa and “Black” Africa. Often cited are what

one might regard as tit-for-tat racial pogroms, in which Senegalese were expelled from

Mauritania, while Moors were expelled from Senegal. This captures an important part of the

story, of course, and there were many instances in which Senegalese, including Fuutaŋkooɓe,

participated in anti-Moorish pogroms. During many conversations with participants in this

research, I have encountered references to Haratine neighborhoods that once existed on Fuuta’s

south bank. Many of these Haratine communities were chased off to Mauritania during the

Events. Nevertheless, in Senegal, the state opposed the anti-Moorish progroms that occurred in

Metro Dakar and such Senegal River Valley towns as Matam. The government even actively

made efforts to provide Mauritanian nationals with protection and safe passage back to their

country.

In contrast, the Mauritania government openly backed the expulsion and dispossession of

thousands of households, including those of Senegalese nationals and Negro-African

Mauritanians. While the Events began in Nouakchott, the violence soon spread to the Senegal

River Valley-Fuuta- where Haalpulaar and Haratine communities had lived near one another for

many years. Witnesses allege that many Haratine communities in the River Valley saw the

pogroms as an opportunity to acquire the property of their Haalpulaar neighbors. A native of the

largely Haalpulaar village of Lexeiba, located along the main road about 40km east of Kaedi,

recalled his community’s preparations as the Events descended on their part of the country. His

story resembles similar ones recalled by residents of communities in the River Valley.

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Many people from our village were taken or deported. The village is a significant

hub. I don’t know if you know Lexeiba, but it’s by a major road junction. Where

the village sits, it overlooks its large stretches of lowlying farmland. It’s a very

significant and proud village on the north side . . . an important village for farming

and many other things. That’s why the Moors had decided that if members of the

village were to be transferred, the entire community needed to go. Also, it was a

large village that they knew had strong, courageous people, many warriors. This is

why they wanted the people in the community moved. We began hearing rumblings

of their plans among the Haratines who lived in the community. Their

neighborhood was literally called “the New Neighborhood,” that was the name for

it in Hassaniya. There were mostly Haratines living there . . . at that point, word on

the street was that they wanted to get rid of the whole village. . . . (Some of the)

Haratines, our very neighbors, who were from the village, were sizing up our

compounds, the way they did in other communities (during the Events), saying

“this compound here, when the occupants leave I’m taking this one.” These people

claim a compound, those people claim another. It happened all around the village.

And these people had been our neighbors for many years and they knew the village

very well.

Finally, the rest of us got together and had a meeting, saying that if we don’t stand

up the entire community will be deported. A nearby community called Sam Pale

had just been deported, as well as some Fulɓe communities from up in the

highlands, where they also began deportations. All of our elders came together and

we reached to the conclusion that we would soon be picked off one by one. When

we finally came together as a single knot, it was decided that if we see anyone enter

the village and show up at one of our compounds, whether someone sent by the

government or any other person, scream for help. When the rest of us hear the

scream for help, not one of us should remain behind, everyone must come with

their weapons and fight for the person who calling for help (Interview with

anonymous participant, August 10, 2012).

In addition to the pillaging of land and property, the pogroms were also a chance for the

Mauritanian government to crush Black African intellectual opponents of Maaaoya’s regime,

including many Pulaar militants. It is not uncommon to hear claims from some Mauritanian

Fuutaŋkooɓe that what happened in 1989 was not a conflict between Mauritania and Senegal, but

one between Moors and the Fulɓe. Pulaar language activism in Mauritania, though still vibrant in

some respects, never regained the vitality it possessed during the 1980s. Though after 1989,

Mauritanian activists infused the Senegalese movement with militancy, the infrastructure of

Pulaar literacy activism would suffer there, as well, for reasons I discuss in Chapter 7.

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Pulaar/Fulfulde in Regional Context

Alongside the Fuuta Tooro-centric, language based activism that has occurred in Senegal

and Mauritania, a pan-Fulɓe imaginary has proved an important basis for organizing, particularly

among intellectuals and elites from Fulɓe communities around West Africa. One of the principle

motivators of this is the combination of the fact that Fulɓe/Haalpulaar’en comprise a large

(though diverse) ethnolinguistic collective whose numbers around West Africa belie what is a

lack of linguistic influence in politics, mass media, entertainment and commerce.

There are exceptions to this, of course. In Guinea-Conakry, “Pular,” as the language’s

dialects are known there, is the first language of up to 40% of the population and likely the

second and third language of many more. Known colloquially as “Fulɓe Fuuta,” a Guinean Fulɓe

bourgeoisie wields considerable influence in their country’s economy. This influence is

complemented by the success many Fulɓe Fuuta have enjoyed as commerçants in neighboring

countries such as Senegal, Gambia, Mali and Mauritania, as well as Europe and North America.

However, Fuuta Jallon, from which many Fulɓe Fuuta hail, is far away from the capital city of

Conakry. In addition, Guinean Fulɓe have been viewed collectively with suspicion by successive

post-independence political regimes that have occasionally fanned anti-Fulɓe ethnic prejudice for

political gain. None of Guinea’s post independence leaders- Sekou Toure, Lansana Conte,

Moussa Dadis Camara, Sekouba Konate, Alpha Conde- have been Fulɓe.

In other nearby countries, including Senegal and Mauritania (the locus of this study), one

can find many speakers of Pulaar/Fulfulde dialects, but the language is a lingua franca only in

specific contexts. These include such regions as Fuuta Tooro (Senegal/Mauritania), Ñooro

(Mali), Maasina (Mali), Fuladu (Gambia/Southern Senegal), Bundu (Eastern Senegal) and

Nianija (Gambia). Cities and towns around the Western Sahel in which Pulaar/Fulfulde dialects

are something of a lingua franca include Kaedi, Boghe and Selibaby (Mauritania), Ouro Sogui,

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Matam, Podor, Tambacounda, Medina Gounasse and Kolda (Senegal), Basse Santa Su (Gambia),

Nioro, Djenne, Mopti, Tenenkou and Diafarabe (Mali). Though not a lingua franca in any West

African capital, one would have no trouble finding at least some Pulaar speakers on any block in

Dakar, Nouakchott, Banjul, Conakry or Bamako.

All this said, the exercise of linguistic citizenship among Pulaar-speaking populations in

West Africa occurs with the support of neither dominat state institutions nor with overwhelming

visibility in the mass media or national culture. Where Fulɓe or Haalpulaar imagery does appear

in, for example, urban Senegalese public spaces on billboards or TV advertising it is often as

something of a museum relic, invoking a romantic, yet bygone culture. In such cases, cultural

pratices of Fulɓe herders are honored as “traditions” in a way that hives them off from things

relevant to Senegal’s sociopolitical present and future. This is precisely what Herzfeld

(2005[1997], p. 204) referred to as the “isolating pedestal” to which nation-states relegate

minoritized, “traditional” cultures.

So far, I have distinguished between what I call the Senegalo-Mauritanian “Pulaar

movement” on the one hand and the Pan-Fulɓe movement on the other. The activities of Tabbital

Pulaaku branches around West and Central Africa, as well as Europe and North America, are,

notwithstanding the organization’s varied concerns, exercises in a form of transnational linguistic

citizenship. They are a collective effort to redefine the meaning of Fulɓe ethnicity and the

relationship of Pulaar/Fulfulde dialects with daily life, culture and the varied national contexts

that Fulɓe communities inhabit. Some of the questions stemming from the increased pan-Fulɓe

consciousness have to do with what Pulaar speakers from Fuuta Tooro should call themselves:

Fulɓe or Haalpulaar? Where does the name Haalpulaar originate? Does distinguishing between

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Fulɓe and Haalpulaar’en, as well as between people of different social categories “divide” the

leñol or does it highlight its rich diversity?

The Senegalo-Mauritanian Pulaar movement and pan-Fulɓe organizing converge with

respect to how they at times go around the nation-state and appeal for legitimacy to

intergovernmental institutions such as UNESCO and the African Union (See Duchene and Heller

2008). An obvious example is the previously-mentioned Bamako conference of 1966. Among

the attendees were the Malian Pullo intellectual Amadou Hampate Ba, who chaired the

conference’s “Fulani” working group, and the Mauritanian historian Oumar Ba. Several African

countries, including Senegal, adopted the Pulaar alphabet produced by the earlier, collective

efforts of the Cairo-based activists, as well as those who attended previous conferences such as

the one held in Mbagne in 1962. However, as will be demonstrate throughout this dissertation,

such efforts do not mean that the Pulaar movement viewed individual governments as

unimportant with respect to their ethnolinguistic claims.

Pulaar Language Activism in a Changing Global Landscape

The drawing of Africa’s national boundaries by the former colonial powers left many

communities that were tied to one another economically, linguistically and through kinship on

opposite sides of political boundaries. As Nugent (1993) famously commented, Africans neither

helplessly acquiesced to these borders nor happily continued living as if they did not exist. The

careers of Amadou Malick Gaye and others I have discussed above suggest that people’s

engagements with these borders were multi-layered and trans-border ethnolinguistic solidarities

sometimes took shape away from the borders themselves. People like Elhadj Tidiane Anne and

Murtuɗo had personal and biographical connections to a region that sustains- across a national

border- cultural and linguistic ties that long preceded the existence of that border. Nevertheless,

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as I discuss in Chapter 5, their stature was owed partly to personal engagements- such as

government employment- with the Senegalese and Mauritanian states.

In Senegal, the 2012 election of Macky Sall as the first Haalpulaar President was greeted

with enthusiasm by many Pulaar language activists. In 2016, President Sall even hosted a

delegation from Tabbital Pulaaku, remarking on the need to promote Pulaar and other African

languages (“Président Macky Sall reçoit Tabital Pulaaku International,” 2016). Though many

Senegalese Pulaar language activists support Sall and look positively on the election of a

Haalpulaar President their opinions of him are nuanced. Many activists I speak with believe that

they have to limit their expectations regarding how he might favor their cause, as doing so could

result in political backlash from Senegalese who suspect the influence on Sall of a “lobby

Pulaar.”

For scholars interested in African Border Anthropology, it appears that migration is

blurring the ethnographic “here” and “there” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). For example, the

Pulaar Speaking Association of America is a mutual aid society with its national headquarters in

Brooklyn, New York. The organization has several thousand members in branches around the

US, most of whom are Senegalese and Mauritanian Haalpulaar. Pulaar Speaking headquarters

has played host to a number of events constituting exercises of Mauritanian or Senegalese

citizenship. The space has served as a polling place for expatriate Senegalese voters (Beck 2008)

and as a site for memorializing the victims of the 1989 Events in Mauritania. However, Pulaar

Speaking’s daily functions, as well as the cultural festivals it organizes, elide differences of

national origin in favor of an emphasis on the language and culture that its members share.

There is an opening for scholars on the Sahel and ethnographers in general to look at how

people’s encounters with the state influence the mobilities and ideologies of cross-border

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networks. With respect to Pulaar language activism, Bourlet’s (2009) excellent work on the

literature that the movement has produced identifies the Events of 1989 as a crucial breaking

point for the movement politically. Analyzing the corpus of Pulaar-language literature, she

argues that from 1960 to 1989 Pulaar literature had an explicitly political and nationalist

character that after the Events gave way to more diverse writing dealing with questions of

identity and cultural change in the context of migration and mass unemployment (119-120).

The Events were one of several important political events and shifts that have influenced

the Pulaar movement in recent decades. In Mauritania, Pulaar-speaking politicians, literacy

activists and, now, hip-hop artists continue to make the connection between politics and the

language question. In this regard, as in others, there appears to be some divergence between the

Senegalese and Mauritanian contexts. In Senegal, the connection between politics and the

language question is less politically volatile and NGOs and international agencies have been

increasingly involved with literacy in Pulaar and other languages as part of educational and

development projects. As of 2016, for example, ARED is proceeding with a pilot project that

introduces Pulaar and Wolof literacy in Senegalese primary schools. However, there have been

occurrences of this in Mauritania, as well.

Some of the people I interviewed believe that the involvement of NGOs and aid agencies

risks sapping the Senegalese Pulaar movement of its militancy. A few of them cite a World Bank

loan made during the 1990s (See Chapter 7), which did create new opportunities for people to

acquire paid employment teaching national languages. However, when it came to Pulaar, many

veteran militants who for years had taught the language for little or no pay looked on with

resentment as newcomers without knowledge of or commitment to the movement got many of

the jobs. Many veteran Pulaar language activists identify this as the moment when the

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volunteerism associated with Pulaar militancy in Senegal began to wane. Finally, NGOs and

international agencies have had a direct role in shaping the trans-border component of Pulaar

language activism. Community radio stations in Northern Senegal, near the border with

Mauritania, operate with help from organizations such as USAID. As I discuss in Chapter 8,

many of the community radios’ programs are devoted to themes of Pulaar linguistic pride and

those who call in include both Senegalese and Mauritanians. Such developments reflect an

urgent need to understand how alternative forms of citizenships are implicated in changing

modes of governance in which the power of states, NGOs and international agencies are

interwoven.

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CHAPTER 5

‘A RIVER IS NOT A BOUNDARY’: TRANS-BORDER ITINERARIES AND THE

QUESTION OF CITIZENSHIP

The Political Life of a Mauritanian-born Senegalese Civil Servant

During the 1960s, Amadou Malick Gaye was a member of the Marxist-Leninist Parti

Africain de l’Independence (PAI), and was arrested multiple times in Senegal for his political

activities. The PAI, which supported the teaching of literacy in African languages, was banned

by the Senegalese government in 1960. However, Gaye soon enjoyed the beginnings of a

magnificent career in government. In fact, he had attended the prestigious École Nationale de la

France d'Outre-Mer, where France trained functionaries to serve in various parts of its empire.

By 1965, Gaye was working as an adviser to the Senegalese Minister of Commerce and in 1968

he joined Senghor’s Parti Socialiste (PS) (Sillaa 2010). Eventually, he would even serve as a

counselor to the Senegalese Supreme Court.

In a letter dated April 29, 1966, Amadou Malick Gaye wrote to Mauritanian President

Moctar Ould Daddah from the Camp Pénal de Dakar, where he was then imprisoned. In the

letter, which was published decades later by the Mauritanian newspaper Tahalil Hebdo (Gaye,

“Un document historique inédit,” 2007), Gaye addressed the political situation in that country.

Mauritanian university students, many of them from Gaye’s own ethnic group- the

Haalpulaar’en- had recently protested and rioted against policies to make literacy in Arabic a

requirement in primary and secondary education. Amadou Malick Gaye also complained of Ould

Daddah’s collaboration in one of his earlier arrests. In 1962, wanted by Senegalese authorities,

Gaye had fled to the Mauritanian capital where he planned to board a flight to a further

destination. However, he was arrested by the Mauritanians and sent back to Senegal.

Gaye had worked for the Mauritanian government years before and the letter addressed his

reasons for quitting. Having been employed as a fonctionnaire for the French government, Gaye

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helped create Mauritania’s new statistics bureau before Ould Daddah placed him in Mauritania’s

Ministry of Education. Gaye wrote that he left the latter job because the Minister marginalized

him in favor of a crony who had previously been the Minister’s superior in another ministry.

Gaye addressed his 1962 arrest and the accusation made at the time that it was he who had been

unwilling to work in the government of Ould Daddah. In addition, as if to underscore the

sincerity of his intentions, he referenced in the letter his birth and family ties to Mauritania.

When I was being held in custody in Nouakchott, I received reports to the effect

that you had said you always wanted to work with me and that it is I who did not

accept. You are probably not the only one to make such comments. But I believe,

Mr. President, that I did all I could to go to Mauritania and stay there. For, even if it

is documented that I was born in Dakar on the 11th of July 1931, this does not alter

the fact that I was in actuality born on the Friday morning of July 10, 1931 in

Dounguel Rewo in the Boghé district of Mauritania. That is where my parents

come from, for the first ones to inhabit Mauritania and West Africa were our

grandparents for a long period before the arrival of the Berbers and Arabs (Gaye,

“Un document historique inédit,” 2007).

After he left his job in Mauritania for Senegal, Amadou Malick Gaye became- in addition

to a career civil servant- one of the Pulaar movement’s most celebrated figures. In 1959, he was

among the founders of the Association des Jeunes Pulaar, an organization of Pulaar-speaking

students based in France (Humery 2012). He later played a role in the creation of the Latinized

Pulaar orthography adopted at the 1966 Bamako Conference, as well as the founding of the

Association pour la Renaissance du Pulaar (ARP, or Fedde Ɓamtoore Pulaar), which was

officially recognized by the Senegalese government in 1964. Perhaps Gaye’s crowning

achievement was the establishment of his NGO, the Union pour le Solidarité et l’Entraide

(USE). Since the 1970s, USE’s Programme Intégré de Podor (PIP) has organized literacy

classes in Pulaar and other languages in the Senegal River Valley along with a range of

educational and development projects. Amadou Malick Gaye died in 1989 during a trip from the

Senegalese capital, Dakar, to the Senegal River Valley along the border with Mauritania. This

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fateful trip, which is recounted by a narrator in the song “Gaye Amadou Malick” by the

Senegalese musician Acca Welle, was part of an effort to help refugees who had fled or been

expelled from Mauritania during the “Events,” which began in April of that year.

This chapter analyzes the Pulaar movement as a trans-border phenomenon inextricably

linked to political developments in both Senegal and Mauritania over the past fifty years. The

Pulaar movement’s profoundly transnational roots involving key participants in far-away places

such as Cairo and several cities in France have been well-documented (Barro 2010; Bourlet

2009; Humery 2012). However, I set out to understand the specifically local, trans-border nature

of the Pulaar movement. This, I believe, provides insight into questions of citizenship that may

arise in transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004) whose very symbolic

homelands are divided by international boundaries. For the Pulaar movement, the symbolic

homeland in question is the Middle Senegal River Valley, or “Fuuta Tooro,” which Faty (2011)

observed in his ethnography of “Haalpulaarisation” as having been iconized as the culturally

pure Pulaar-speaking territory “par excellence” (217). Though Pulaar militants operate in two

distinct “national political arenas” (Jourde 2004), they have collaborated and supported one

another with matters pertaining to language promotion, literacy and culture. Throughout my

fieldwork, I have encountered the slogan “a river is not a boundary” (maayo wonaa keerol). This

refers to the idea that the Senegal-Mauritania border cannot sever the cultural, kinship and

linguistic ties that bind each side of the river to the other.

This chapter fleshes out how the sentiment behind this slogan operates among Pulaar

language activists. What do they mean when they assert that the Senegal River is not a

boundary? One answer may be the way Senegalese and Mauritanian activists sometimes appear

to make a critical distinction between politics and culture. It seems that while an individual

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activist’s politics stops at his or her own national borders, language promotion activities are open

for trans-border participation. The distinction is implicit in a comment made by a Senegalese

poet I once interviewed:

When it comes to “a river is not a boundary,” it is not to say the river is not a

boundary between Senegal and Mauritania. Rather, the river is not a boundary

between “Fulɓe.” Between Senegal and Mauritania (laughs), if it is decided

Senegal is here and Mauritania is there, then let them draw their border wherever

they want. They can use a fish for the boundary if they would like and say “here is

where Mauritania ends.” Or if they want they can put a rock here and say “here is

where Senegal ends.” This is not the concern of the Pulaagu1 community

(Interview with Katante Leñol, July 13, 2012).

As implied here, this discursive distinction- slippery though it may seem- between the

cultural and the political is an important part of what I call an interplay of citizenships that lies at

the heart of the biographies I discuss below. The role of linguistic citizenship within this

interplay is not so much a challenge to the legitimacy of national citizenship; it is in fact a

product of the Senegal-Mauritania border and the political projects that surround the border’s

existence. Itself a consequence of a politically partitioned Senegal River Valley, the trans-border

linguistic citizenship practiced by Pulaar language activists and Pulaar speakers in general is a

resource they use to construct arguments about the relationship between language and national

identity in their respective countries.

Pulaar language activism, with its roots in linguistic, cultural and kinship ties spanning

the Senegal-Mauritania border cannot be merely labeled as an expression of local resistance

against processes of state-building and boundary-making imposed from outside. As Amadou

Malick Gaye’s story suggests, Pulaar language activism has taken advantage of opportunities

presented by forms of state-building, including the formation of political and educational

1 In this context, Pulaagu appears to refer to both the Fulɓe people and those collective linguistic and cultural

practices that they valorize and see as distinguishing them from their neighbors. Breedveld and De Bruijn (1996)

provide a helpful, critical review of the concept.

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networks that, as the historian Gregory Mann (2015) observes, owe their genesis to the late

colonial period. Building on the historical vignette about Amadou Malick Gaye that I introduced

above, this article examines several key biographical itineraries. These include that of the late

Senegalese radio broadcaster Elhadj Tidiane Anne, Mauritanian political dissident Ibrahima

Moctar Sarr and the legendary Mauritanian poet and Pulaar language activist Mamadou Samba

Diop, widely known as “Murtuɗo2.”

A Mauritanian Born in Senegal: The Trans-Border Itinerary of Ibrahima Moctar Sarr

In 1969, Amadou Malick Gaye made a public speech at the “Centre Bopp,” a community

and recreation center located in Dakar3. Gaye’s speech was titled, “Min Ngonaa Tukuloor’en, ko

min Haalpulaar’en” (“We are not Tukulors, we are Haalpulaar”). Amadou Malick Gaye’s

speech was a public attempt to claim, on behalf of his fellow Pulaar speakers, the power to

decide the name attached to their ethnicity. This effort continued during subsequent decades,

when some Pulaar language activists in Senegal expressed their opposition to the Senegalese

census’s division of Pulaar speakers into “Toucouleur,” “Peulhs” and “Lawɓe.” A high school

student named Ibrahima Moctar Sarr was among those who attended Amadou Malick Gaye’s

speech. While Gaye was a Senegalese born in Mauritania, Sarr was a Mauritanian born in the

Senegalese village of Ɓoki, on the south bank of the Senegal River. On more than one occasion,

Sarr has told me that witnessing Gaye’s speech inspired him to devote his life to the promotion

of Pulaar. Within the next year, Sarr contacted Amadou Malick Gaye and presented him at his

2 Literal translation, “one who has rebelled.” Many assume it was a nom de guerre associated with his oppositional

politics in Mauritania, however some believe it might have to do with his supposed renunciation of Islam during his

days as a Marxist.

3 The Centre Bopp is now known as the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye.

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office with a manuscript for a book in Pulaar, titled Miijo am Ruttiima e Daande Maayo (My

Thoughts Have Gone Back to the River Valley). Upon looking over the manuscript, Sarr recalls,

Amadou Malick Gaye handed it to his secretaries and told them to type it up. This was Ibrahima

Moctar Sarr’s first written work published in Pulaar (Interview with Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, June

3, 2015).

Soon after, Sarr returned to Mauritania and dove head-first into political, cultural and

linguistic militancy. He joined the Parti Mauritanienne du Travail, a “revolutionary party,”

which merged with the Moor-dominated Mauritanian Communist Party to form the Parti Kadim

de la Mauritanie (PKM) (Marchesin 1992). Increasingly, Sarr saw the valorization of the

languages and cultures of all of Mauritania’s ethnic groups-particularly “Negro-Africans”- as

central to the country’s political future. His political work in Mauritania, as well as that of his

comrades, involved cultural events and teaching people to read and write in Pulaar. In one

instance, this was enough to get him and some of his fellow activists arrested.

I joined the party in 1972. As members of the organization, we were persecuted.

We were engaging in cultural activities and were writing in the language (Pulaar).

So, on we went until 1974, then we were arrested. It was nighttime, we had been

studying our language and we were arrested and taken to jail. The police found us

in the process of studying, seized us and took us to jail because at that time such

activities were looked upon with disdain, were disfavored as something that would

be destabilizing. They would say “these are revolutionaries, destructive people.”

So, we went to jail and spent a week there until the “Juge d’Instruction” came and

said “these people here have done nothing, release them” (Interview with Ibrahima

Moctar Sarr, June 3, 2015).

For Ibrahima Sarr, these experiences were part of the formation of a lifelong commitment

to both political change in Mauritania and how to resolve what would become known as the

“National Question.” In his view, this meant changing the character of the Mauritanian state

from one based on Moorish supremacy to one that recognized and valorized the ethno-national

identities of all of its citizens. During the late 1970s, Sarr formed political alliances with many of

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the people who would be his fellow travelers during the coming decades, including Ibrahima

Abou Sall, Mamadou Samba Diop and Saidou Kane, who headed the Union Démocratique

Mauritanienne, which formed after the breakup of the PKM. Sarr’s cultural and literacy

activities continued and sometimes he even played the guitar at cultural events he and his allies

organized.

By the late 1970s, the Associaton pour la Renaissance du Pulaar- Republique Islamique

de Mauritanie (ARP-RIM; hereinafter Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar), an association devoted to

teaching people how to read and write in Pulaar, had been recognized by the government.

Thanks to its branches around Mauritania, the organization was able to teach countless

Haalpulaar’en how to read and write in their language and many Mauritanian activists I have

interviewed recall getting their start through the organization. Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar still

teaches Pulaar literacy and continues to publish its monthly newspaper, Fooyre Bamtaare. By

the end of the decade, the organization had a Pulaar-language program on Mauritania’s national

radio. Ibrahima Sarr had himself been working at the radio station since 1975, though he was

mainly assigned French-language broadcasts. However, Sarr began contributing to Fedde

Bamtaare Pulaar’s broadcasts in Pulaar and was also responsible for delivering the Pulaar-

language segment on a show sponsored by Mauritania’s Conseil Supérieure des Jeunes.

The coup d’etat that overthrew Moctar Ould Daddah in 1978 ushered in a new military

regime that was interested in promoting the country’s various national languages. Recognizing

Sarr’s successful forays into Pulaar broadcasting, the new directors of Mauritania’s national

radio made him head of its National Language Service, responsible for Pulaar, Soninke and

Wolof. The programs he and comrades such as Saidou Kane and Ly Djibril Hamet introduced,

including “Lobbugel Haaliyaŋkooɓe” (the “Speaker’s Corner”) increased the radio’s popularity.

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“Anyone who did not have a radio went out and bought one,” he said, “because our Pulaar

programs were better than any of the others” (Interview Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, June 3, 2015).

Having enjoyed these successes, Ibrahima Moctar Sarr was presented with a chance to

return to Senegal. He entered a scholarship contest that would give the winner a chance to further

their education. He won the contest and in 1980 enrolled at the Centre d'études des sciences et

techniques de l'information (CESTI), the University of Dakar’s respected journalism school,

where he would spend the next year. Before he left Nouakchott for Dakar the head of

Mauritania’s national radio, a “Moorish soldier,” wrote Ibrahima Sarr a letter congratulating him

for his work. “He said that the radio had never had a period as successful as this when it came to

the National Languages,” Sarr recalled. “He gave me a hearty congratulations, and I still have the

letter saved” (Interview with Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, June 3, 2015).

Ibrahima Moktarr Sarr came to Dakar on a mission. Motivated by his years of Pulaar

advocacy, the young journalist insisted in his classes that the Western epistemologies taught by

CESTI’s faculty were not applicable to the journalistic work he and his colleagues needed to be

doing. He spoke until he was blue in the face about the necessity of promoting journalism-

particularly radio broadcasting- in African languages. He finally paid a visit to RTS (Radio et

Télévision Sénégalaise) and shared his ideas, having been frustrated by the refusal of his

professors and fellow students to listen to his views about the need for serious broadcasting in

African languages.

That is what made me go to Radio Senegal. I said, I will show everyone what I am

trying to say, because even the young people who were studying there, what I was

saying was not penetrating their minds.(In their view) a person does not come to

study at a school like this only to speak Pulaar when they leave. They cannot

understand why someone would do that. (A journalist) speaking Pulaar and Wolof?

No, what was respected is someone who comes out speaking French, a big person

reporting and whatever. But to go around speaking Wolof or Pulaar? It is those

(broadcasters) who are uneducated who are given responsibility for such

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programming, not educated people. Someone in possession of a “diplôme

supérieur” in journalism speaking in Pulaar or Wolof? It’s not right, people say.

Anyway, I argued that programs airing in French or English, programs like that can

be done in Pulaar, the Wolof language or in Soninke. So, I went to Radio Senegal,

at that time a director was there, his name was Pape Racine Sy and he worked with

the director of programs named Mansour Sow . . . I said to them, “me, I want to

show that journalism, with new technology, can be conducted in Pulaar, Wolof and

Soninke.” They asked, “is it possible?” I said, “That is what we want, I will do a

show that will speak about culture, speak about social issues and that is up with the

times.” They said, “that is exactly what we want,” and that is how I came up with

the show “Anndu so a Anndi Anndin” (Interview with Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, June

3, 2015).

Anndu so a Anndii Anndin, roughly translated, means “Know that if you know to let

others know.” Sarr coined the title himself, and the show still airs on Senegal’s Radio Nationale.

As he prepared to make his return to Mauritania, his collaborators on the Anndu show, including

Senegalese radio personality and then-CESTI student Siley Ndiaye, moved to other programs.

Sarr himself was busy concluding his tenure at CESTI by taking a seminar in TV reporting in

anticipation of the Mauritanian government’s plans to open a national TV channel. It was time to

find someone to take the reins of the new program. A young radio personality named Tidiane

Anne had proven his worth, having already filled in for several months. A native of Gamadji in

Northern Senegal, Anne had quit his university studies by 1980 and was working as a research

assistant at the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noir. Meanwhile, he awaited an opportunity he

had been promised to host his own radio show at RTS. Though that initial opportunity did not

pan out, Ibrahima Sarr was impressed by Tidiane Anne and was interested in giving him a

chance with Anndu so a Anndii Anndin. “I understood first of all that he likes radio. He really

likes radio and he is a good speaker. At that point I said, ‘this person, if he is handed the program

he should be able to make it a success’” (Interview with Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, June 3, 2015).”

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Broadcasting and the Transborder Legacy of Elhadj Tidiane Anne (1955-2001)

Under Tidiane Anne’s stewardship, the Anndu show took off and he hosted the program

until his death in a 2001 car accident. His fans credit him with urging Pulaar speakers to wear

their linguistic and cultural identities with pride. This was particularly important for Pulaar

speakers in Dakar, which was the hotbed of the “bottom-up” nationalism (Smith 2010) through

which Wolof, in the view of many, was increasingly becoming tied to Senegalese national

identity. For many of his broadcasts, Tidiane Anne would invite performers, some of them from

the caste of so-called “wambaaɓe,” to play the hoɗdu as an accompaniment to his discussion of

topics that often had to do with national, regional and world events. In an interview he gave to a

Pulaar-language newspaper not long before his death, Anne recalled how he began noticing his

show’s popularity. “It turned out that when I would wander in the markets, I would be able to

listen to the program I had just done, or programs I had done in the past,” he said. “I would go

inside the markets see that my past broadcasts are being sold on cassette. Everywhere I went I

would see that, and I realized definitely that my show had taken hold among the people

(Ɓamtaare newspaper, July/August 2001).”

Tidiane Anne’s influence reaches Mauritania, as well. Ndiaye Saidou Amadou was a

good friend of his and wrote a book about the late broadcaster. Pictures of Tidiane Anne still

hang on walls in shops and homes owned by some of my research contacts in Mauritania. When,

in 2015, I visited the house of one of my hosts, a taxi driver in Nouakchott, I noticed hanging on

his wall a poster of Tidiane Anne, which was identical to one I had saved in my house in the US.

The poster originally came free with the June 2001 edition of the newspaper Jaaynde Bamtaare,

the in-house publication of the Programme Intégré de Podor. During that same visit to

Nouakchott, I spent a very hot midmorning listening to some old Tidiane Anne broadcasts with a

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group of friends. During our listening and tea drinking session, one of them suddenly

commented, “listening to this gives you courage, gives you the ideas of a warrior” (Author’s

fieldnotes, May 2015).

Schulz (2012) describes a period during which Islamic preachers in Mali gained access to

national airwaves and constructed moral communities in support of Islamic reformism. The

public spheres created therein were not simply oppositional ‘counterpublics’ (See Warner 2002;

Hirschkind 2006) but were forged from “mutual attempts at co-optation” on the part of civil

servants and Muslim leaders. In Senegal, Pulaar language activists have at times been implicated

in a similar dynamic as employees of institutions that overwhelmingly (if informally) favored

Wolofization. Tidiane Anne’s influence was likely an unintended consequence of the Senegalese

state’s granting of limited yet valuable space for programs and policies giving public visibility to

promoters of minority ethnolinguistic identities. He was neither the sole nor necessarily the

starkest example of this. In the 1970s, the Abbé Augustin Diamacoune Senghor earned fame for

his children’s program Papa Kulimpi (“he who sports a beard” or, colloquially, “the sage”), as

well as a religious program that began airing during the ‘60s (Marut 2010, 96). Senghor would

go on to lead the Jola-dominated separatist Mouvement des forces démocratiques de Casamance.

Within the offices and broadcast booths of RTS, Tidiane Anne used his position as a

broadcaster to assert a more robust role for Pulaar in the national media. His arguments about

language politics in Senegal were framed as that of a citizen committed to upholding the law. He

characterized his conflicts with his employers at RTS as stemming from an effort to honor the

Senegalese state’s obligation to respect all ‘langues nationales.’ In a lengthy interview he gave

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to a France-based Pulaar-language newspaper4, he recalled two noteworthy incidents. The

first of these involved his editorializing during a live reading of national news headlines. One

report, from the Senegalese newspaper Soleil, mentioned census figures from 1976 stating that

Wolofs make up 43% of the country’s population, while so-called “Toucouleurs” and “Peulhs”

were at 12% and 11%, respectively. During this part of his Pulaar-language newscast, Tidiane

Anne broke from script, declaring the figures to be a lie, and asserted that “no one is more

numerous than we are!” (Ɓamtaare newspaper, July-August 2001). The second act of defiance

he recalls is his opening up- on two occasions- the Radio Nationale in Pulaar instead of Wolof,

as was the norm. He gives a detailed account of his run-in with the chef de services after

repeating this offence. When asked how he justified his actions, he invoked the laws of the

Republic of Senegal.

I said “Yes, it is true that I opened the radio in Pulaar.” They said, “where do you

base this action?” I said, “Where don’t I base this?” They asked, “what reason do

you have for this?” I said, “on May 25 1971, a Presidential Decree5 declared that

six national languages are in Senegal, and Pulaar is one of them. Pulaar is a

national language, and not a single one is placed ahead and named the premier one.

All of them represent teeth on a donkey. They are all equal. I have come, I am a

Haalpulaar- you bet I opened Radio Senegal in Pulaar! They said, ‘it has never

been done before.’ I said, ‘a Haalpulaar has never opened the radio!’ They said,

‘really?’ I said ‘Really!’ Then, they said, ‘so just because a Haalpulaar has never

opened the radio your doing so gives you the right to open the radio in Pulaar? I

4 The full interview was republished several months after Anne’s death in a special issue of Bamtaare, which was

published by the Programme Integre de Podor in Ndioum, Senegal (the same program founded by Amadou Malick

Gaye’s NGO). Recordings of the interview, which were somehow made public, circulate widely on cassettes,

memory cards and USB drives. I originally purchased a recorded cassette version and converted it to Mp3 years

later.

5 Tidiane Anne was referring to Presidential Decree 71-566 “Relative to the Transcription of National Languages”

which was actually dated May 21, 1971, not the 25th. The decree, modifying an earlier one, recognized Wolof,

Serer, Pulaar, Mandinka/Malinke, Jola and Soninke as the country’s six principal national languages (See Dumont

1983).

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said, ‘it is this language I suckled, and it’s a national language, c’est une langue

nationale comme les autres (Ɓamtaare newspaper, July/August 2001).

Such appeals to Senegalese law within Tidiane Anne’s politics of recognition (Taylor

1994) provides an essential glimpse into the interplay of linguistic and national citizenship that

characterizes the Pulaar movement. Pulaar language activists on either side of the border make

appeals to the respective states to which they owe allegiance, yet work together and draw

inspiration from one another. In the late 1980s, as the repression of Black political opposition in

Mauritania continued apace, Tidiane Anne aired an episode of Anndu so a Anndii Anndin in

which he explained to his listeners the historical and political context for the what became

known as the Events of 1989. In the broadcast, he refers to Haalpulaar martyrs of Mauritanian

military dictator Maaouya’s crackdown and asked about the whereabouts of Murtuɗo Diop, who

had disappeared and who many presumed dead. He praises the “warriors” who had the courage

to publish the Manifeste de la Negro-Mauritanien Opprimé of 1986 and invokes the memories of

those who died in Maaouya’s prisons.

Without a doubt we remember Tene Youssouf Gueye, he who is a great thinker,

writer, who accomplished things of great value in his life. People like Djigo

Tafsirou, like Bah Alassane Oumar, Bah Abdoul Kouddous- there are many of

them but we can leave it at that. . . . Who is able to say today the whereabouts of

Mamadou Samba Diop Murtuɗo? If someone out there knows, please tell us! We

can say that life is extremely bitter in the “North Country” (Dowla Rewo). The

Black, Haalpulaar’en, who refuse indignity and are willing to die and refused

compromise, worked to defeat the government of Maaouya and his lies, but did not

succeed6 (Anne, date unknown).

Tene Youssouf Gueye, Djigo Tafsirou, Bah Alassane Oumar and Bah Abdoul Kouddous

died in political detention in the years after the arrests of 1986. They are widely viewed as

martyrs of the political struggle on the part of Negro-Africans in Mauritania to solve the

6 This may have been a reference to the coup attempt of 1987, or it may have been a more general reference to the

spirit of cultural and political resistance that existed in Mauritania during the years leading up to the Events.

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“National Question.” The deaths of Tene Youssouf Gueye and Djigo Tafsirou in the notorious

Oualata detention center are often cited in political discussions with Pulaar language activists

and Mauritanian political activists. Their pictures can easily be found on Web Sites

memorializing the victims of Mauritanian political repression between 1986 and 1990, and I

remember seeing photos of them both in 2011 when I paid a visit to a FLAM office in Senegal.

Both Tene and Djigo were ministers in the Mauritanian government but were arrested for

their suspected involvement in the creation and distribution of the Manifeste. Djigo was among

the Cairo students who were teaching, reading and writing Pulaar and who helped provide many

of the written books and manuals that were important to the movement’s early going. After

returning to Mauritania in the 1970s, Djigo frequently taught Pulaar classes, and some people

interviewed for this project claim him among their teachers. A specialist in agriculture, Djigo

taught classes on the topic in Pulaar. One of his concerns was raising public awareness among

farmers in the River Valley about the importance of agriculture and land reforms then being

attempted by the government (One person I know argues that this is why the government

targeted him).

At the time of this broadcast, Tidiane Anne probably knew some of the Mauritanians he

mentioned, so there may have been personal motivations into why he offered such a tribute.

However, also entailed is an implicit assumption about with whom, exactly, Tidiane Anne’s

listeners should identify when it came to the Events of 1989. Many Pulaarophone listeners in

Senegal likely had biographical and kinship ties to Mauritania- in addition to those rooted in

language and culture. As it would turn out, when Murtuɗo began to emerge from hiding his

connections with Tidiane Anne would come in handy.

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‘Baaba’ Leñol ngol (The Father of the “Lenyol”): The Trans-border Legend of ‘Murtuɗo’

Samba Diop (1942-2009)

Tidiane Anne’s plea for information on the whereabouts of Murtuɗo Diop was answered

in 1992. He was living in the city of Saint-Louis, also known as Ndar, located on Senegal’s

northwestern coast when he received a call from someone that needed a favor. It was the younger

brother of Murtuɗo Diop, Abdoulaye Samba Diop, better known as Kayya. He had helped

protect Murtuɗo’s cover during what had, for the latter, been several years of hiding. Murtuɗo

had started his reemergence in 1991 as the conflict in Mauritania began to cool off. As he

surveyed the Pulaar language activist scene in Mauritania, he saw that there were still people

attempting to support Pulaar literacy efforts in the country. Souleymane Kane, longtime leader of

Institut des Languages Nationales, had made efforts to keep the ILN open through the Events

and offered help to any Pulaar militant who needed it. In 1991, when Murtuɗo and Kayya began

attempting to open Pulaar classes around Nouakchott, they named one of them after Souleymane

Kane, then went to the man for support. Kayya recalled their meeting:

Souleymane Kane- have you heard about the “Duɗal” Souleymane Kane in

Nouakchott? We are the ones who opened it in 1991. We went to Souleymane

Kane and told him we have opened a “duɗal”7 and named it after him. He said, “for

me, you could not have done anything to make me happier than I am for what you

have done. From my end, the Institute of National Languages is at your disposal.

Any books you need so that in classes the learning can be done properly, I will fill

a car up with them. Whatever you want, I will bring over and give to you”. Back

then, Souleymane Kane was associated with us. Wherever we opened a ‘duɗal’, he

would start his car and fill it up with books- he would bring books for all learning

levels- and deliver them to us. We would then distribute them and people would

study them (Interview with Kayya Diop, June 9, 2015).

There was an atmosphere of danger in the air because the Events had only concluded the

year before. When Murtuɗo initially suggested coming out and publicly mobilizing Pulaar

7 This is a Pulaar word which historically referred to the nighttime Koranic study area illuminated by a small bonfire

at its center. The word has been adapted and can refer to any learning area or school.

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language activists, he was warned by those close to him, including a friend in the gendarmerie,

that anyone rabble-rousing in the country would be quickly stopped. Murtuɗo responded by

reminding Kayya and others of the difficulties faced by such revolutionaries as Mao Zedong and

Gandhi in their efforts to liberate their countries. According to Kayya, through the rest of 1991

and into 1992 they were in Nouakchott opening Pulaar schools. Though he recalls some

successes, Pulaar language activism in Mauritania remained decimated by the deportations,

arrests, murders and overall fear ushered in by the Events. Maaouya’s regime had “killed the

language politically” and destroyed the ILN, he told me. The time had come, in Murtuɗo’s view,

to “give Senegal a hand.” Murtuɗo told Kayya that, in his view, “the trunk of the Pulaar tree

stands in Senegal, what has come to Mauritania merely consists of the branches.” Murtuɗo

suggested that he and Kayya “go water the tree in Senegal” because strengthening the movement

in that country would bring it back to life in Mauritania (Interview with Kayya Diop, June 9,

2015).

As Kayya recalls it, their trip to Senegal coincided with a major religious event in the

eastern Senegalese city of Madina Gounasse, known as the Daakaa. The border between Senegal

and Mauritania had recently been reopened and Murtuɗo and Kayya organized a group to attend.

Apparently, those in Senegal who had wondered if he was dead or alive, were still unaware of

his re-emergence. Kayya, Murtuɗo and the group they had organized crossed from Rosso,

Mauritania to Rosso, Senegal. Upon reaching the Senegalese side of the river, Senegalese

customs held up their entourage of six cars. Though they arrived in Rosso just after the late

afternoon prayers, they remained there until after 1am. Neither the entreaties of Murtuɗo nor

those of the head of their delegation, a marabout named Amadou Neere Bah, had any effect on

the officials. Murtuɗo finally had himself an idea. He found a phone line and called Amadou

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Tidiane Bah, the head religious figure in Madina Gounasse, who in turn dialed up contacts he

had within the Senegalese customs service. Eventually, the news travelled to the regional head of

the Service des Douanes, who denied authorizing his people in Rosso to hold up the convoy.

Meanwhile, Amadou Tidiane Bah had given Murtuɗo Tidiane Anne’s number. It is possible that

Kayya had actually made the first phone call, as Murtuɗo had hearing problems that plagued him

to various degrees throughout much of his life. He told Kayya to make a call to Tidiane:

I was the one who spoke with Tidiane, because Murtuɗo could not hear. He said,

“Kayya here is Tidiane’s number, speak with him. So, I called Tidiane and he

asked, ‘who am I speaking with?” And I said, “Me? You don’t know me, my name

is Abdoulaye Samba Diop, better known as Kayya Diop, younger brother of

Mamadou Samba Diop Murtuɗo.” He asked, “Mamadou is alive?” I said, “yup,

Mamadou is alive.” Tidiane broke down and was crying. He said again, “he is

alive?” and I said again “he is alive.” He asked “can you pass him to me so we can

speak?” I took the telephone and passed it to Murtuɗo. He said, “yes, Tidiane, it’s

me Mamadou Samba Diop better known as Murtuɗo.” Tidiane heard Murtuɗo’s

voice and was crying. For, at that time he had assumed Murtuɗo had been

murdered. For four years no one had known where Murtuɗo was and he (Tidiane)

took to offering rewards on the radio, saying “anyone who knows the whereabouts

of Mamadou Samba Diop Murtudo please let us know” (Interview with Kayya

Diop, June 9, 2015).

The air of mystery surrounding Murtuɗo’s disappearance pervaded among Pulaar

militants on both sides of the border. A Mauritanian woman who during the ‘80s and ‘90s was

involved in student organizing and Pulaar literacy recalled Murtuɗo’s re-emergence in the

context of Mauritania’s 1992 election campaign.

Now, in the late ‘80s, during these times (from the ‘86 crackdown through the

Events), Murtuɗo disappeared- a long disappearance. ‘Murtuɗo has disappeared’,

‘Murtuɗo is dead’- seemed to be the only song of the people who speak our

language. Until, thanks to Allah, Murtuɗo appeared, returned to Mauritania and

was holding discussions and nighttime rallies and opening up Pulaar classes. Mind

you, at this time there was basically no food, nothing to drink, there was nothing

(Interview with anonymous participant, July 30, 2012).

Despite his continued interest in Mauritanian politics, Murtuɗo’s re-emergence marked

the beginning of a ten-year period, much of which he would spend in Senegal. His trans-border

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biographical itinerary was yet another that was profoundly shaped by post-colonial state-building

and politics, and his period in hiding is a key moment in a personal journey that led him through

several countries. In his twenties, Murtuɗo was a member of the leftist PAI, where he interacted

with Amadou Malick Gaye and such figures as the Senegalese politician Majhemout Diop. He

also attained a high-ranking position in Mauritania’s service de douanes and was the head of the

syndicate which represented douanes in the county. Even at this early stage, Murtuɗo found

himself under the scrutiny of the Mauritanian authorities. One retired Mauritanian police officer

once told me how, while posted in one Mauritanian town, he secretly tipped off Murtuɗo that he

and fellow officers were supposed to raid his flat later that day. When the officers finally arrived,

Murtuɗo had fled. Murtuɗo nevertheless had carved for himself a privileged position within

Mauritania’s civil service and had achieved the rank of brigadier within the service des douanes.

Murtuɗo finally reached a point where, according to those close to him, he came to

believe that Mauritania’s racial and ethnic politics would come back to haunt it. In the 1960s, his

superiors granted Murtuɗo leave- not for the last time- and he went to study in the Soviet Union

and at one point, according to his brother, was enrolled in Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba

University. At one point during his studies, which led him to Kiev and eventually to a Doctorate

in Political Science at the Sorbonne, Murtuɗo became, in Kayya’s words, a “frightening”

Marxist. Murtuɗo became interested in the concept of the “National Question,” which had been

debated by such earlier 20th Century figures as Joseph Stalin (1913). One person interviewed for

this project argued that during his studies in the Soviet Union, Murtuɗo came to believe that

Marxism-Leninism did not adequately answer the National Question, particularly as he had

witnessed it play out in Mauritania.

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Murtuɗo’s own definition of the National Question as it relates to Mauritania helped

inspire the politicization of the Pulaar word “ngenndiyaŋke,” a word that can be translated as

“nationalist,” “patriot,” or “citizen.” Ngenndiyaŋke (pl., ngenndiyaŋkooɓe) derives from the word

“ngenndi,” which roughly translates as “nation” and can, depending on the situation, refer to

Fuuta or to any country or homeland. However, the word “ngenndiyaŋke” is often understood to

specifically refer to Pulaar militants who distinguish themselves by the demonstration of

sacrifice and commitment.

With his brother Kayya at his side, Murtuɗo burnished his reputation as a trans-border

ngenndiyaŋke, crisscrossing Senegal during the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to the creation of

Pulaar schools throughout the country. Many Senegalese Pulaar language activists have profound

memories of his influence on them. One of them, a Pulaar movie actor who eventually had a

radio show in France, recalled Murtuɗo’s efforts to help him and his friends organize Pulaar

classes in the coastal city of Rufisque.

Back then, what Murtuɗo achieved, what he initiated, his contributions, the state-

recognized diplomas he made possible in Senegal in his time there, nobody else

ever did that in his or her life . . . Murtuɗo’s month is worth more than three years

of our work. . . . Someone can claim to you something like, “I love Pulaar,” “I am

standing up for it,” and so on and so on, but there is something they will be

withholding, not showing you. But Murtuɗo showed nothing but love, belief,

commitment, nothing but belief in his actions. A person can believe in theory while

not being a true believer through his or her actions. Murtuɗo was a true believer.

He helped us with Pulaar. From when we began learning through 1991, if it was not

for him nothing would have been achieved in Senegal. He wrote about equality in

the radios and TV stations in Senegal, he went to protests- “Pulaar broadcasts must

be brought back to life” and things like that. Anything lacking in the leñol when it

came to its livelihood, culture and literacy- Murtuɗo brought it to life in Senegal.

(Interview with Mamadou Amadou Ly, July 24, 2012)

The “Pulaar diplomas” were actually part of a larger effort inspired by Murtuɗo’s

collaboration with Mamadou Ndoye, then the Senegalese Minister of Basic Education and

National Languages. This collaboration highlights the ways in which state institutions in Senegal

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and Mauritania provided opportunities for popular mobilization by transborder Pulaar language

activists. Their connection began after several weeks during which Murtuɗo and Kayya had

conducted an upper-level Pulaar literacy training at the University of Dakar. Murtuɗo had sought

out the Minister and invited him to attend one of their sessions. The Minister was impressed and

on several occasions, when Murtuɗo and Kayya concluded Pulaar literacy trainings, Ndoye and

his staff would supply them with diplomas to be distributed to their students. The Minister had

been a major figure in Senegal’s teachers’ union movement and was also a key member of the

Ligue Démocratique/Mouvement pour le Parti du Travail (LD/MPT), which had split from the

PAI in the early 1970s (Union Syndicale Solidaires 2010). However, it is unclear whether he and

Murtuɗo had a personal connection stemming from their respective backgrounds in leftist

politics.

During these years, Murtuɗo and Kayya had a hand in some important developments

within Senegalese Pulaar language activism. At the time, a number of Mauritanian refugees who

had- at least temporarily- established themselves in Senegal took an interest in Senegalese

associations such as ARP, unofficially the sister organization of Mauritania’s Fedde Ɓamtaare

Pulaar. In fact, an NGO had been established that, building on years of previous work among

Pulaarophone scholars, was dedicated to the publication of novels and other kinds of books in

Pulaar. This NGO, known as Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED)

was founded by an American woman, Sonja Fagerberg-Diallo. ARED also supported literacy

teaching activities, often in conjunction with ARP. Certain Mauritanian political refugees with an

interest in promoting Pulaar worked for both ARP and ARED. This growing Mauritanian

involvement in Senegalese Pulaar language activism, borne of the Events, is documented as

having infused Senegalese activists with a renewed sense of militancy (Fagerberg-Diallo 2001).

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A number of them were active participants in ARP when leaders of the organization sought

Murtuɗo’s help in mediating a dispute.

There had been a major feud in ARP, which is still recalled by many longtime Pulaar

language activists. The main protagonists were, on the one hand, Mamadou Saidou Anne and

Yero Dooro Diallo, both of whom had been heads of the organization and, on the other, Cheikh

Fadel Kane. The organization was divided into two broad factions still referred to today as

“Cheikh Fadel Kane’s people” or “Yero Dooro Diallo’s people,” respectively. Murtuɗo and

Kayya spent considerable time in their effort to resolve the issue. Without discussing the specific

grievances involved, it is safe to say that this role put a strain on both of them. Murtuɗo had to

repeatedly refuse gifts and favors offered by members of the respective factions and took pains

to organize living arrangements that would not beholden him to either side. One friend of mine,

who owns a small business in Dakar publishing books in Senegal’s national languages, including

Pulaar, recalled that Murtuɗo used his house as a hiding place from members of the two factions,

who were constantly hounding him (Author’s fieldnotes, June 2010).

Murtuɗo drew criticism when he insisted that any party to the dispute, as well as anyone

from ARP’s previous slate of leaders, should not be allowed to maintain a leadership position. A

staunch supporter of one faction got up on stage at a meeting, Kayya recalls, and cut off

Murtuɗo’s microphone connection with a machete. To the Mauritanians in the room, this was a

major provocation but fortunately Murtuɗo, Kayya and others prevented the situation from

escalating. Eventually, a settlement was reached when Murtuɗo threatened to go on the radio and

reveal the secrets of each side until everyone directly involved in the dispute gave up power

(Interview with Kayya Diop, June 9, 2015).

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According to Kayya, he and Murtuɗo played an important role in the development of

Pulaar classes in the city of Madina Gounasse. Located in Eastern Senegal, the holy city is home

to a significant branch of Tijjaani Islam. The lineage of marabouts and clerics who preside over

this branch comprise a Fulɓe family that takes great pride in promoting the Pulaar language. Jalal

al-Din Ba, son of Amadou Tidiane Ba, the branch’s religious leader, has taken the lead on Pulaar

literacy in Madina and in collaboration with his publishing house, Goomu Caafal, has published

religious books in Pulaar. The role of Pulaar literacy in Madina Gounasse has something of a

spiritual origin story. Legend has it that the renowned writer and intellectual Amadou Hampate

Ba paid a visit there in the 1930s advising Ceerno Mamadou Saidou Bah, the religious leader in

place at the time, to teach Pulaar literacy using the ajami script. The Ceerno agreed but

supposedly prophesied that in the future others would come better equipped to help the people of

Madina Gounasse teach and study Pulaar.

When I visited Madina Gounasse in 2011, I stayed at the compound of the man who

oversaw Pulaar literacy around the city. Through him, I met dozens of committed Pulaar literacy

activists who teach at neighborhood classes, which meet in the evening throughout the town.

Pulaar classes are an important means through which literacy skills are acquired in Madina, as

community leaders have prevented the establishment there of a French-language school. The

‘duɗe’ (sing., duɗal) were in some cases named after important religious figures and Pulaar

language activists. Unsurprisingly, one Pulaar class I visited was named after Murtuɗo Diop.

Some of the individuals I met in Madina had nicknames reflecting their commitment to

Pulaar, such as “Naange Leñol,” or the “Sun of the Leñol.” During my stay there, which lasted

several days, some recalled with nostalgia visits Murtuɗo had made to the community, which

were aimed at urging people to read and write in Pulaar. Kayya recalled that Murtuɗo was the

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inspirational celebrity who sparked people’s interest in the movement, while Kayya did much of

the literacy teaching.

When we got there in 1992, with the blessing of the Ceerno Amadou Tidiane (Ba),

we conducted an evaluation. We evaluated those who had claimed some previous

involvement with Pulaar, we looked at their levels of competency. When they saw

where they stood they went and requested the Ceerno to grant them permission to

receive instruction up to a higher level. The Ceerno gave the permission. We were

there for two months, with men teaching men and women teaching women,

because they apply ‘sunna’ there. So, I brought my wife, who had trained at the

ILN in Mauritania. We were there on the permission of the Ceerno and there it was

“women must teach women,” so my wife went and was training the women of

Madina. We were all there training men and women, including Ceerno Jalal and

others and others. We were there two months and taught even upper-level Pulaar

focusing on many issues, including the word of Allah. (Interview with Kayya Diop,

June 9, 2015)

Despite these extensive efforts in Senegal, Mamadou Samba Diop retained in interest in

Mauritanian Pulaar language activism and politics until the end of his life. At the time of his

death in 2009, he was promoting his political party, which he founded and which was known as

DEKALEM, a Pulaar acronym that stands for “Dental Kaaldigal e Leƴƴi Moritani,” or the

Union for Mutual Dialogue between Mauritania’s Ethnic Groups. DEKALEM and its members

believe in a peaceful solution to Mauritania’s National Question. According to his brother,

Murtuɗo himself might have eventually been DEKALEM’s candidate in Mauritania’s national

elections, yet he passed away on June 11, 2009.

The biographical itineraries described here capture in essential ways the interplay

between the trans-border linguistic citizenship practiced by Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar

language activists and the official, national citizenship rooted in the nation-building projects of

those two countries. My focus on the lives of Amadou Malick Gaye, Ibrahim Moctar Sarr,

Tidiane Anne and Murtuɗo Diop shows how longstanding linguistic and cultural ties that

preceded the existence of the two states gave them the sense of sharing a cultural homeland. This

was the case even as they accommodated the existence of the two post-colonial nation-states. As

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their engagements with state institutions such as national radios, the Mauritanian ILN and the

Senegalese Minister for National Languages and Basic Education suggest, state-building in

Senegal and Mauritania influenced many of the Pulaar movement’s cross-border engagements.

The next important issue, considering the strong identification with a sense of shared culture and

language on the part of Fuutaŋkooɓe, is understanding the extent to which the Pulaar movement

claims to be “nationalist.” This necessitates further interrogation of the term “ngenndiyaŋke.”

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CHAPTER 6

WHAT IS A ‘NGENNDIYAŊKE?’: NATIONHOOD AND LOYALTY IN THE PULAAR

MOVEMENT

An Evening with Language Loyalists

May 2015: In Dakar, I know a group of intellectuals, journalists, Pulaar literacy activists

and religious scholars that periodically convenes over dinner. They conduct what is referred to as

a tummbundu, which requires that they take turns playing host. It is clearly a fun chance for this

group of male comrades to enjoy a nice meal in each other’s company. When they are done

eating, however, the evenings do not end. Their gatherings are also a chance to informally yet

expansively debate intellectual and political issues that are of interest to them. In 2015, I had the

privilege of being invited to one of these small dinner parties. Earlier that day, Abou Gaye spoke

with a friend of his over the phone, who he referred to as “Ceerno Harouna.” Abou laughed as he

told his friend that he best be prepared for a guest who really likes haako, as that’s what was on

the menu for dinner that night. Abou was referring to me, but he should have included himself.

Whenever on a social occasion Abou and I share with hosts and other friends a large serving of

the delicious, leafy stew and the accompanying finely-prepared millet grain known as lacciri, I

am usually the second to last person to get up from the bowl- with him being the last. Lacciri e

haako, as it is often called, is the dish that the hosts of these periodic gatherings of intellectuals

usually serve.

Abou and I left the Lewlewal office at the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye and got a taxi, a

process that took several minutes because of his hard-driving fare negotiation. When you step

out of the Centre Bopp onto the Rue G, it does not take long to find a taxi passing by. They will

often attempt to get your attention with a honk, and I am quite sure the sight of my pale skin

raises their hopes for a lucrative fare. Abou refused to pay any more than 1500 FCFA, even

though almost every driver asked for around 3000 FCFA. It being Dakar, Abou addressed nearly

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all of them in Wolof. Occasionally, however, he would begin by speaking Pulaar. I have watched

Abou negotiate taxi fares many times, and in the instances where he addresses taxi drivers in

Pulaar they almost always can respond in the language, even though a only minority of Dakarois

(albeit a fairly significant minority) can speak Pulaar. I asked him how he can tell when a driver

he encounters is Haalpulaar or a Pullo. His reply was simply that he could see “Fulɓe blood.”

The dutiful sociolinguist or anthropologist may point out here that the connection between

physical features and language is always ideologically constructed. Abou clarified that many

people of supposedly Fulɓe blood do in fact speak Pulaar, but also turn out to be Serer or a

member of some other ethnic group. It’s a mixed bag, he said, using the colloquial Pulaar term

faandu almuuɗo, which literally refers to the alms bucket of a Koranic student, which invariably

contains a mish-mash of donated coins, bread, rice, corn, millet, among other items.

The traffic was terrible, with both the back and main streets slowed to a crawling mass of

personally-owned sedans, sedan taxis, minicar taxis, buses and trucks. At one point, we drove

over a median strip to make a detour when we realized we were not getting anywhere with our

previous route. Dakar’s exhaust smell, which hits you as soon as you step out of the plane upon

arrival in country1, had caused my asthma to flare up. It had grown dark, and I completely lost

track of where we were until I noticed a familiar landmark, a cross elevated and illuminated like

a neon sign. It was the Eglise of Grand Yoff, a densely-populated quarter of Dakar. Abou got on

his phone and told someone we were approaching them. It could have only been one person. As I

had guessed, Amadou Moctar Thiam walked up to our car, got in and sat next to me. In the

1 I am not the only one who feels this way. A Fuutaŋke migrant I rode a public transportation vehicle with in the

Summer 2016 had the same experience. He was based in Congo-Brazzaville but was on his way home to the town of

Pete to pay his respects over the recent passing of a relative. From the moment he stepped off his plane, he could not

believe how bad the exhaust fumes in the city had become.

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previous few days I had gone to his forge and smith shop, right across the side street flanking the

southern part of the church compound. It is one of my favorite stops in Dakar and I have often

passed hours hanging around on the bench at the entrance to his place, watching Amadou

Moctar’s interactions with passers-by. Amadou Moctar Thiam is from Galoya, Senegal and is a

celebrity in the renndo (society/community). Among our mutual friends and acquaintances, he is

generally known as a charismatic, humorous person, admired for his proficiency in Pulaar.

Amadou Moctar Thiam is a member of Fedde Pinal e Ɓamtaare, the same singing, poetry

and cinema troupe that created the Tidiane Anne “hommage” that I first listened to as a Peace

Corps Volunteer in The Gambia. Among his cinematic roles, Amadou Moctar Thiam played the

father of a young woman who he betrothed to a much older Koranic teacher in the movie Ceerno

Demmba. In 2012, I was visiting the Château-Rouge district in the 18ème arrondissement in

Paris, speaking with Samba Ngangue, who has played a major role in the Pulaar film market over

the past few decades. We were speaking informally about his role as a Pulaar movie DVD

vendor and his business relationship with Fedde Pinal e Ɓamtaare when he compared Amadou

Moctar Thiam’s Pulaar to that of another well-known member of the troupe. Speaking of the

latter, Ngangue said, “he really wants to show that he speaks Pulaar eloquently, but he just

doesn’t have it.” Samba Ngangue contrasted that person with Amadou Moctar Thiam of who he

said, “Now, Amadou speaks excellent Pulaar. He is excellent in Pulaar, carrément” (Author’s

field notes, July 2012).

In addition to his role in Fedde Pinal e Ɓamtaare, Amadou Moctar Thiam also serves as

something of an elder statesman for the Pulaar movement, occasionally weighing in on pressing

social issues. During several of our encounters at his forge, a central topic of conversation was

his preparations for meetings to which he had been invited as a guest speaker. One of these was a

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public forum in the village of Agnam Goly on the effects of migration on that communitry. In

2013, Amadou Moctar Thiam and then TV personality Diewo Sall invited me to the Mauritanian

city of Nouadhibou, where they would be featured guests at a special event that the city’s

Tidiane Anne fan club had planned. Much to my regret, I could not go, as I had conflicting

fieldwork obligations in another part of Mauritania. By day, Amadou Moctar Thiam works as a

blacksmith. He is in fact, a “baylo,” which is a member of the wayluɓe caste of blacksmiths. In

addition to the other roles I have just described, Amadou Moctar Thiam also writes poetry and is

in the process of writing a book in Pulaar. I last stopped at his smith shop in June 2016 and found

him working on the manuscript from a computer that he installed since I had last visited the year

before.

Before Amadou Moctar got to the car, Abou called the customer service line of Orange,

one of Senegal’s cell phone and telecommunications giants. Just days before, I had purchased a

new cell phone, called a “Klif,” and Abou himself had also recently purchased one. The Klif is

an Orange product, and its attraction for a Pulaar language loyalist like Abou and a researcher on

Pulaar language activism like myself is the fact that the phone has a Pulaar mode. A well-known

France-based Pulaar language activist named Ibrahima Malal Sarr had done the work of creating

the Pulaar terminology for the various cell phone options in collaboration with Firefox and

Orange. He also helped them create a Wolof mode and their arrangement nearly fell through

when the company antagonized Sarr by initially saying it actually only wanted the Wolof

version.

Abou wanted to know why his Klif was neither getting free Internet service nor

functioning as a wireless port, even though we had heard these services would be complementary

for the first three months after purchase. Abou conversed on his phone with an Orange

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representative, speaking angrily in Wolof. At one point, Amadou Moctar took the phone from

him and spoke to the representative in French. On the way to Ceerno Harouna’s, Abou, Amadou

Moctar and I stopped in Abou’s (and my) neighborhood, Parcelles Unité 12, to grab something

in Abou’s flat. On our way back to the taxi (the driver had graciously agreed to wait for us), they

came up with an idea. They would call back Orange and Abou would simply speak Pulaar and

insist that he could not speak Wolof and so would need to talk with a Pulaar-speaking

representative. It worked, at least to an extent. The representative clarified that the deal for the

free three months of Internet had expired. However, Abou did get to speak with a fellow

Fuutaŋke, and the conversation proceeded affably, with Abou asking the representative at the

end where in Fuuta he was from. Amadou Moctar commented that he had previously tried the

same method in his dealings with Orange.

A couple of days later, Abou and I were sitting in his flat and he spoke with Orange

again, applying the same strategy he and Amadou Moctar had come up with during our trip to

Ceerno Harouna’s. When he got off the phone, Abou grinned and used the terms “new plan” and

“new wind” (henndu hesuru) to refer to his approach of insisting that he knew no Wolof and

demanding that Orange representatives connect him with a Pulaar speaker.

Ceerno Harouna’s home was a nicely-furnished, second-floor apartment in Parcelles

Assainies, a large section of Dakar consisting of numerous densely-populated quarters. Abou,

Amadou Moctar and I found the door open, the entrance blocked only by a curtain. The three of

us walked in quietly. The entrance to the apartment led directly into a living room with couches.

The apartment was dark and several men were praying. I quietly sat down, exchanging polite,

muted greetings with several women who were seated on the couches, as Abou joined the men in

prayer. The men continued praying as I did some scanning around the room. What was Abou’s

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connection to Ceerno Harouna, I wondered? The faces of the men were difficult to make out in

relative darkness of the room. I soon recognized one of them. It was the TV personality Hamet

Amadou Ly. Several other faces became recognizable, including that of Sam Faatoy Kah, a well-

known Pulaar book vendor who runs his business out of a market stall in Thiaroye, outside of

Dakar. Kah also is President of an association that trains young Haalpulaar in Thiaroye how to

read and write in Pulaar and to perform poetry and theater in the language.

When the group was done praying, us men convened in the adjacent salon, seated around

the room, with some of us on couches others on the floor. Soon, we were treated to one of the

best batches of haako I have ever tasted, and, as is often the case, Abou and I were the last to

leave the shared food bowl.

What followed was an after-dinner discussion that began when one of the people in the

room, a Ceerno originally from Ndioum but now based in Nouakchott, threw a question at the

group: “There is something that has bugged me. What is a ngenndiyaŋke?2” He had heard Hamet

and I discussing the topic and wanted to know our thoughts.

I jumped in, explaining that I thought the origins of this term, which one might translate

as nationalism or patriotism, were in Mauritanian politics but that among Pulaar speakers from

both Senegal and Mauritania it is now often used to refer to the activities of Pulaar militants. My

statement set the table for a lengthy discussion on what it means to be a ngenndiyaŋke- or what it

does not mean to be one. Almost everyone in the room had taught Pulaar before or could read

and write in the language and they shared a dissatisfaction at how the term “ngenndiyaŋke” has

2 This question has been debated on many occasions among Pulaar language activists and it seemed evident that

everyone present at this dinner meeting has thought about well before we met. I do wonder, however, if Abou set up

this whole event for my benefit.

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been popularized- or bastardized- by Pulaar language activists. Hamet Ly has argued during the

years I have known him that the word has been overused to the point of meaninglessness.

One perspective that those in the room shared was that currently many who appear to be

ngenndiyaŋkooɓe are mere pretenders because they do not demonstrate the same level of

commitment and sacrifice as those of an earlier generation. Abou reminisced about a tour he took

with Murtuɗo through Northern Senegal in the years before the latter’s death.

I once met up with Murtuɗo in Dimat. He had come from Nouakchott and travelled

through Mbagne because he was then campaigning for his political party

DEKALEM. When me and Mad Kane met him in Dimat he had only one shirt with

him. Mad Kane gave him two more shirts. Me, Murtuɗo and Mad Kane, we went

(on tour) from Dimat all the way to Ouro Sogui. On our way, Murtuɗo gave away

the shirts Mad Kane had given him. When we came to Pete he gave away one of

them. The other one, when we got to Ouro Sogui he gave that away. Now me, I

would never do that! (Author’s fieldnotes, May 21, 2015)

Amadou Moctar Thiam argued that people need to consider the meaning of the term

ngenndi, which in his view refers to a piece of territory, or the place where your parents,

grandparents and great grandparents were born, where you have a longstanding connection. The

ngenndiyaŋke, he argued, is one who stands up for that place, like a soldier would. Later in the

conversation, another person commented that people like Amadou Moctar Thiam who question

what it means to be a ngenndiyaŋke are too often ignored in favor of those who use the “title” to

make a name for themselves.

One of the religious figures in the room finally reflected on his perception that certain

language activists had dumbed down the concept of ngenndiyaŋkaagal (nationalism, or

nationhood) to cheap public performances signifying language loyalty. In his words, such

activists had “cherrypicked what is easiest and disregarded what would be more painful or

challenging, all in their search for recogition” (Author’s field notes, May 21, 2015). Others in the

room noticed what they saw as a resemblance between publicity-seeking Pulaar language

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activists and charismatic preachers who attempt to promote themselves through the release of

cassette sermons and the holding of pious gatherings.

An occasional source of ridicule during any conversation about the Pulaar movement is

the self-awarding of grandiose nicknames on the part of some eager militants. Some veteran

Pulaar language activists enjoy making wisecracks about those bestowing themselves with such

titles as “Fooyre Ngenndi” (“The Nation’s Guiding Light”). This came also came up at our after-

dinner conversation when one of the men seated near me offered an example from his own

family: “So, one of my younger relatives- I won’t say his name- is an example where if you are

going to give yourself some big name, calling yourself the “such and such” of Fuuta, you better

be able to write well.” Amadou Moctar Thiam immediately laughed in response, offering his

own guess at who he might have been talking about.

I included this lengthy narration of a day and evening spent with language activists

because I believe it displays some of the ways in which ethnolinguistic boundaries are identified

and are rendered the basis for common sociality or exclusion. This especially applies to Abou’s

interactions with the taxi drivers and his and Amadou Moctar’s “new wind” of a plan to feign

ignorance of any language besides Pulaar. I wished I had challenged Abou by asking him why he

thought he would receive better service from a Pulaar-speaking Orange employee.

The rest of this chapter explores what I call the politics of language loyalty. For Pulaar

language activists, the politics of language loyalty often play out in the form of an expectation

that those able do so will demonstrate a prefential willingness to help their fellow Fulɓe or

Haalpulaar’en, including when it comes to the promotion of Pulaaar linguistic and cultural

promotion activities. Those in positions of perceived power and influence who fail to carry their

weight are unfavorably contrasted with the examples of valiant commitment exemplified by the

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likes of Tidiane Anne and Murtuɗo, whose careers were discussed in the previous chapter.

Perhaps even worse are those who present themselves as warriors for the Pulaar cause but are

seen as having an ulterior motive, like the acquisition of political power or the cultivation of

fame. Even Ibrahima Moctar Sarr has drawn criticism in recent years because, because despite

his continued role as a Mauritanian opposition figure through his party Alliance pour la Justice

et la Démocratie/Mouvement pour la Rénovation (AJD/MR) some regard him as profiting from

the legitimization of a corrupt political process. Some of these accusations appeared in the late

2000s, when he ran in the elections following the 2008 coup d’etat that brought Mauritanian

President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz to power. Despite questions about his motives and political

judgment, Sarr does remain influential among Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar language

activists. In fact, he still occasionally appears on Pulaar-language TV shows, including in

Senegal, where he played a role in the creation of Hamet Ly’s show Ngalu.

The Pulaar movement’s politics of language loyalty often revolve around the question of

who is and who is not a ngenndiyaŋke. As suggested by my dinnertime conversation at Ceerno

Harouna’s, many Pulaar language loyalists and activists object to the way the term ngenndiyaŋke

has come to be associated with the wearing of certain clothing or speaking a high-flown register

of Pulaar. The objections sometimes rest on different foundations, however. On the one hand, are

those who believe that true ngenndiyaŋkaagal requires a standard of sacrifice and commitment

that one can maintain only at great personal cost. This is the ngenndiyaŋke ideal with which

many debates about the concept grapple. On the other hand, some argue for a different and

broader view of the concept more closely tied to a sense of civic nationalism. As I discuss below,

this perspective on what it means to be a ngenndiyaŋke holds that while the promotion of Pulaar

can be characteristic of what a ngenndiyaŋke does, it should be inclusive of any activity that aids

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the well-bring of one’s community. Yet another perspective is that the association of the figure

of the ngenndiyaŋke with cultural and linguistic purity projects a rustic, outdated image that

harms the Pulaar cause. To address this problem, some Pulaar language activists suggest that

they should present themselves in a more cosmopolitan, urbane way that markets the Pulaar

movement as relevant to the future.

Popularizations of the “Ngenndiyaŋke” Concept via the Media

August, 2012: The TV in the living room of my dissertation adviser’s in-laws in

Compiegne, France displayed a Pulaar-language program airing on Senegal’s 2sTV. The

channel, along with many others based in Francophone Africa, is offered on subscription to

viewers throughout France. The program, called Haalanam (“Tell Me”), was hosted by Salif

Diallo- also known as Dono Sam Pathe- who during his career has also worked with Senegal’s

Radio Nationale. Having met Dono personally, I knew he is recognized for his proficiency in

spoken and written Pulaar and has traveled around West Africa making historical inquiries about

the Fulɓe leñol. To his right were seated two men, one of whom played a guitar while the other

played a hoɗdu. In this episode of Haalanam, Dono, donning a large golden boubou, carried

forth about the history of the Fulɓe as it relates to the spread of Islam in West Africa. As a group

of us sat on the living room floor watching the program, I became particularly interested as Dono

began to define the meaning of the term “ngenndi.”

By way of context, the suffix of ngenndi, “ndi,” locates the word within the so-called

“ndi” noun class that the word ngenndi shares with leydi, which can mean land, soil or country.

Ngenndi translates more specifically as a “country,” “nation,” “land” or “homeland” to which

one owes loyalty politically or through kinship. The term has specific implications with respect

to people’s connection to and reliance on the land. Combining the root “gen”- the same root

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appearing in the word Geno (the God, the Creator)- with the noun-classed suffix “ndi,” ngenndi

is the land that one is made with, or to which one belongs. In the Haalanam episode to which I

refer, Dono gives the following definition of ngenndi, distinguishing it from the word wuro, or

village:

When researchers have looked at the Islamic roots of the Fulɓe, they found that the

Fulɓe had a special knowledge of the Creator (Geno), reflected in the fact that they

had a term for the concept- they knew there was something called a God (Geno). . .

. A person belonging to his creator, the place where he comes from is known as his

ngenndi. . . . the ngenndi is the place that claims you, to which you belong. Your

owner (jeyɗo) is your Creator (Geno), while the place you are from is known as the

ngenndi and you who stands up for the cause of your land and who fights for the

things that belong to you, you are known as a “ngenndiyaŋke” (Diallo 2012).

Engaging with debates over the words ngenndi and ngenndiyanke help situate the Pulaar

movement as a 20th and 21st Century form of linguistic nationalism. Over at least the past twenty-

five years, usages of the word ngenndi have often rendered it an apparently literal translation of

the word “nation” as it appears in European languages. During the same period, a ngenndiyaŋke

has come to be known as something akin to a “patriot” or “nationalist” who has earned his or her

distinction through sacrifice and commitment.

My many interviews, field notes and informal discussions elicit a “synoptic illusion”

(Cole 2010) in which the ngenndiyaŋke appears as an ascetic, wealth-shunning, self-sacrificing

Pulaar language activist. Criteria associated with ngenndiyaŋke status include speaking Pulaar

without using loan words from Wolof or French and wearing clothes thought to be distinct to

Fuuta Tooro and the Fulɓe. My use of the term “synoptic illusion”- inspired by Cole’s study of

so-called “jeunes” in Madagascar- is intended to emphasize the influence of certain ideas of what

it means to be a ngenndiyaŋke. Not all committed Pulaar language activists fit the criteria I have

just mentioned- though many identify with them.

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While the word ngenndi has arguably long held the meaning Dono attributes to it, the

concept of the ngenndiyanke appears to be a product of political events over the past few

decades. One radio broadcaster, originally from Mauritania but based in Senegal, told me that he

never heard the term ngenndiyaŋke until around the time of the Events of 1989. As I will discuss

below, the word emerged in the crucible of post-independence Mauritanian politics and the

concern among Black or Negro-African intellectuals with the National Question. The earliest

documentary evidence I possess that involves use of the word bears this out. One of these is a

recording of a speech Murtuɗo Diop gave in 1992 in the village of Haymedaat, Mauritania. In

that speech, which I look at later in this chapter, he details for his audience the National Question

and its stakes for Mauritania, which was then just in the wake of the 1989-1990 pogroms. An

earlier, printed source is an edition of Fooyre Ɓamtaare, which Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar had

published in 1986 in celebration of the organization’s ten-year aniversary. Given to me as a gift

by the paper’s editor in 2015, the copy- still in good condition- was type-written on the front and

back of 8 ½” by 11 ½” pieces of paper bound with staples. On Page 2, the paper contained a

summary of the efforts made to create the organization in the face of hostility on the part of

Mauritanian authorities:

Establishing the Organization

Very early on, there were people who stood up to fight for the teaching of their

languages in Mauritania, for their cultures to be treated as among the national

cultures in a spirit of good faith and equality so their existence can really bear fruit

within the nation. Here we recall the stance all of our ngenndiyaŋkooɓe took in

defending the rights of their brethren, as well as the role of the students who were

studying in France and those studying Arabic in Egypt . . . the battle has been long

and has many aspects; many meetings have been held; there was a time when

saying you are studying Pulaar was looked upon as a bad thing. Many of our young

ngenndiyaŋkooɓe were locked up, beaten or harassed for it. Others had their careers

or educations destroyed. However, it is said that “truth may leave for the evening

but will always return home before sunrise.” It is with this knowledge that the

people carried on with the struggle in hiding, with Pulaar classes taking place in

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bedrooms and meetings being held in compounds (Fooyre Ɓamtaare newspaper

1986).

In this passage one can discern many of the characteristics that Pulaar language activists

associate with a ngenndiyaŋke. These traits include a commitment to promoting the cause of

education and literacy in Pulaar, as well as a willingness to make sacrifices for that cause. In the

Mauritanian context, making such sacrifices involves enduring the hostile reaction of a

politically-oppressive regime. Both sacrifice and an implied virtuosity in literacy and orality

separate the ngenndiyaŋke from simply any Pulaar speaker with a degree of interest in language

activism. A ngenndiyaŋke must actively engage the cause and, if possible, endure an ordeal (or

series of ordeals) that demonstrates their commitment and a degree of selflessness. This

commitment is further confirmed by ability to read and write in Pulaar, as well as effectively

communicate in Pulaar in a public setting. The approbation afforded charismatic Pulaar orators

such as Tidiane Anne, who are perceived as speaking Pulaar in a pure way stems, I believe, from

the implied recognition that such virtuosity in public speaking (to take that example) is acquired

through a long-term commitment.

There is another implied characteristic about the tribute to ngenndiyaŋkooɓe that Fooyre

Ɓamtaare published on its organization’s tenth anniversary. In Pulaar, the concept of

ngenndiyaŋkaagal was connected to the Question Nationale, as defined by Negro-African

(Haalpulaar, Soninke and Wolof) intellectuals and their allies. Demanding both the recognition

and resources necessary to asserting the centrality of all Black African languages and cultures to

Mauritania’s collective national identity was a very important part of this project. However, it

would just so happen that Pulaar speakers were a majority among this oppositional segment of

Negro-African Mauritanians. As a result, Pulaar language activism would become a popular

stand-in for ngenndiyaŋkaagal in the eyes of many sympathizers.

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In recent years, the appearance of the ngenndiyaŋke as a self-abnegating, heroic figure

who shuns the accumulation of wealth speaks to anxieties many Fuutaŋkoobe have with respect

to the perception of their cultural decline and language shift, which is connected to the political

and economic circumstances that have unfolded during recent decades in Fuuta Tooro. Perhaps

the ideals associated with the ngenndiyanke speak to ambivalent attitudes towards wealth as both

the objective of people’s intense personal desires and a divisive source of inequality and social

discord.

Social Crisis and the Public Need for ‘Ngenndiyaŋkooɓe’

Pulaar language activism has produced a group of heroes with whom the title

ngenndiyaŋke is often associated. They are seen as “daraniiɓe3 Pulaar,” or people who have

stood up for the Pulaar-speaking leñol in Senegal and Mauritania. Though pretty much all of

them have participated in Pulaar literacy activities and could read and write in Pulaar, they also

have shared a number of public outreach practices. Public perceptions of those regarded as

ngenndiyaŋkooɓe are profoundly shaped by the rural village and urban neighborhood tours that

they conduct. Moreover, their poetry and recorded radio and TV broadcasts and speeches

circulate on DVDs, Mp3s and cassettes in markets throughout West Africa and the Diasporas.

Considerable symbolic capital is afforded media personalities in the Pulaar movement, and

Schulz (2012) argues that people throughout the Sahel region place a high value in the “touching

sound” of the voice, through with which radio personalities attain “charismatic authority” (217-

219).

3 Ciaovallela (2012) also used this word, which he translated as “those who rise up to stop,” referring to Fulɓe

herders who after the 1989-1991 prgroms avenged the previous theft of their cattle by Moorish communities (14).

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Throughout my fieldwork, I encountered numerous examples of the way the media

legitimizes figures such as Dono Sam Pathe as defenders of the language. I have asked many

participants in this dissertation project why they think members of radio and TV audiences

anoint Pulaar media personalities as “ngenndiyaŋkooɓe.” In many informal settings where I have

heard Haalpulaar’en discussing the merit of Pulaar media programs, one or the other journalist or

broadcaster is referred to as a ngenndiyaŋke, or Pulaariyaŋke.” What is it about one’s mere

presence in the media that bestows upon them these particular distinctions? Ibrahima Moctar

Sarr once explained to me that “the people understand that Pulaar is in a war. So, when they see

someone standing up publicly talking about promoting Pulaar those people get recognized as the

soldiers of the language” (Interview with Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, August 9, 2010). One way of

looking at this is that many Pulaarophones instinctively recognize the presence of their own

language in the media as transgressive of linguistic hegemonies that have disfavored them. As a

result, the mere presence of a Pulaar-language program where it may not be expected is enough

for audiences to regard the host as a defender of the language.

Some celebrity Pulaar language activists attempt to elicit among audiences a sense of

cultural and moral crisis that is connected to the perceived decline of Pulaar. For example,

through public events and interviews, Elhadj Tidiane Anne often expressed concern with the

failure of the leñol to unify. He discusses this in his famous “Eeraango” (“Call”), made during

an interview he gave at the station Diamano FM. Distributed on the Internet, replayed on radio

broadcasts and sold at market stalls in Mp3 and cassette form, Anne’s “call” lays out the stakes

of unity in the following way:

At this point, there are people sleeping who refuse to wake up. . . . It is you we

speak with! The leñol needs its children, the leñol needs its blood, the leñol needs

all its parts (terɗe). The wisemen of the leñol, the wealthy of the leñol, the leñol’s

celebrities and the leñol’s poor people, let them understand: If we are not united,

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we will not be feared, we will not be respected. And let us understand, we do not

say unite and grab our guns, we do not say let’s unite and fight, we do not say let’s

unite and seek to destroy, we do not say let’s unite and hate anyone! Absolutely

not. We say, “unite and assert our rights, let’s get what we must get.” We do not

say that in this country we must be given that which we don’t deserve. We are not

telling ourselves that we must get special treatment. None of that. However . . . the

people must come through and unite. They must persevere and help one another

and have sympathy with one another. Those who have must take along those who

do not have. Let them also know, one must be willing to seize one’s fair share. If

you sit in this country and wait to be given your share you will get nothing. Any

rights we must enjoy, we will seize them. This seizure, however, will not take place

through warfare but through planning (Diallo 2000).

Implied here is a sense of moral anxiety about a lack of unity which is supposedly to

blame for the position the leñol’s minority status in Senegal. Debates about the concept of the

ngenndi and ngenndiyaŋke center on this anxiety, which has roots in collective memories of

social disruption, violence and defeat. These stem from the relegation of the middle and upper

Senegal valleys to political and economic backwater status during colonialism and since the

independence of Senegal and Mauritania. The veneration of figures associated with the Pulaar

cause mirrors that of colonial and pre-colonial era heroes who are regarded as having defended

Fuuta Tooro from outside invaders. In fact, West African oral histories are filled with intrepid,

ascetic warriors who were regarded for their valor on the battlefield. Among the Fulɓe, examples

range from Bokar Hamadoune Farna’s account of Oumarel Sammba Donde’s martyrdom in

battle against the French at Bandiagara to the infinite number of cassettes sold at market stalls

describing the exploits of Cheikh Oumar Tall. Born in the 18th Century in the village of Halwar,

Senegal, near Podor, Cheikh Oumar Tall led a holy war against non-believers in present-day

Senegal, Guinea and Mali and died in battle against the French in 1857. Other stories contain the

myths of Samba Gueladio Diegi, a Fulɓe warrior who reigned in Fuuta Tooro and whose

memory, captured not least in a well-known song by Baaba Maal, recalls a nostalgic time of

cultural purity existing before the arrival of Islam (Belcher 1994).

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Belcher (1994) observes that the continued resonance of the Samba Gueladio Diegi epics

has to do with the effort to maintain “Fulɓe” or Haalpulaar ethnolinguistic identity in post-

colonial Senegal and Mauritania. He also argues that the circulation of heroic epics is rooted in a

public need to endow communities like those of the Fuutaŋkooɓe with a national narrative.

These stories are also the proud armor that shields an inner space of collective anxiety associated

with decline, conquest by the French, as well as cultural and linguistic minoritization post-

independence. Like other societies characterized by “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005[1997]),

Fuutaŋkooɓe combine a sense of insecurity and bravado in the way they identify linguistically

and culturally. In this context, the anxiety of decline sits alongside pride rooted in the history of

Fuuta’s pre-colonial political regimes and the transnational nature of Pulaar/Fulfulde.

For those concerned with maintaining the linguistic and cultural identities of Pulaar

speakers in Senegal and Mauritania, the heroes of the Pulaar movement are an essential part of

this cultural armor. Their roles as defenders of Pulaar are valued for reasons that are similar to

the ones for which the epics of previous generations are valued: They appear as proud, selfless

defenders of the leñol and the Pulaar language, exemplary figures who stand out in a moment of

uncertainty. Fascination with the exploits of heroic figures (as opposed to less glamorous topics)

was encountered in the dissertation research of the late historian Moustapha Kane. His questions

about the French protectorate in Fuuta surprised his informants, because his topic was not about

“heroic history” (1987:18-19). One informant told him that he was not studying real tarikh

(history), such as the wars of Elhadj Oumar. Kane wrote that his informants “may consider the

humiliating return from Nioro and the era of colonial oppression, as sequences that do not stand

comparison with the glorious debuts of the Umarian saga, or the fluctuating relations between

the Almamate and Saint-Louis” (1987:19). The current sense of crisis regarding Fuuta’s

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economic and ecological plight and questions about survival of Pulaar exist simultaneously with

heroic tales about the language’s great defenders.

For those who see the concept of ngenndiyaŋkaagal as entailing selfless commitment to

Pulaar, Murtuɗo Diop is often held up as its archetypal figure. Around Senegal and Mauritania,

stories about Murtuɗo’s sacrifices and salt-of-the-earth character are repeated not only by

staunchly-committed Pulaar language activists but even those not necessarily well-known to the

movement. One woman recalls him visiting her at her home village in Senegal. No sooner had he

dropped off his bags than he was out roaming compound to compound, speaking with people.

She did not see him for two or three days. Many, including a group of hip-hop artists I

interviewed, refer with amazement to the fact that Murtuɗo, despite his educational and career

opportunities, never built his own home, as he put all of his energy and intellect into the Pulaar

movement. His family’s humble compound in Mbagne, Mauritania still attests to this.

In an interview with the online radio station operated by the Pulaar Speaking Association

of America, Abou Gaye lauded Murtuɗo’s sacrifices for Pulaar with comments resembling those

he made at our dinner party several years later:

If you look at Murtuɗo, it’s amazing because Murtuɗo had no interest in a nice shirt

made of “ganilaa” fabric that shines and sparkles. No, that’s not what Murtuɗo was

about. You won’t see him with combed back hair, slicked with oil until it’s shiny,

no, that wasn’t Murtuɗo. You won’t see Murtudo with his own home. You won’t

see Murtuɗo with a nice living room. Or a ram- even the smallest chicken Murtuɗo

lacked. Anything he got, he poured it into the leñol (Fall 2012).

These accounts are the stuff of legend among those who knew Murtuɗo. Murtuɗo’s fame

and public recognition was not limited to Haalpulaar’en, or Fulɓe. In 2015, sitting in Murtuɗo’s

humble family compound with his brother and other relatives, Kayya brought us a large stack of

photographs. I was fascinated by the historical fragments of Pulaar language activism captured in

the photos, including images of a younger Kayya and Murtuɗo attending meetings and teaching

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Pulaar. In some of the photos were people I knew from my several trips to conduct fieldwork in

Senegal, Mauritania and France over the past several years. One of the photos also contained the

image of Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz with Kayya at Murtuɗo’s funeral in

2009, which was attended by Pulaar activists and many dignitaries from around Mauritania and

Senegal. So, even the head of state had gone to pay his respects!

Before Aziz took power in a 2008 coup, Mauritania was headed by President Sidi Ould

Abdallahi, who, according to one Mauritanian I know, offered Murtuɗo a job in his government.

Sidi had been elected in 2007, a couple of years after the coup that overthrew Maaouya. Sidi had

been perceived as sympathetic to the plight of “Negro-African” refugees living in Senegal.

Murtuɗo refused, reportedly saying that he would not “step in the shit of Maaouya only to wash

it off with the piss of Sidi” (Interview with anonymous participant, June 2, 2015). Whether the

incident is true or not, it perpetuates the trans-border legend of Murtuɗo as a selfless crusader for

Pulaar.

Celebrity Pulaar language activists like Murtuɗo and Tidiane Anne are often the subject

of stories attesting to their sacrifices in the name of the leñol, their magnanimity, their generosity

and personal charisma. These traits have become important to how people define what is a

ngenndiyaŋke. To understand how the concept of “ngenndi” came to be associated with the

Pulaar movement, Mauritania’s National Question since independence is an essential contextual

element. The politicization of “ngenndiyaŋkaagal,” as it is known, has its roots in Mauritanian

racial politics, even if it is now used by Senegalese Pulaar language activists in a way that is

removed from that original context.

The Political Evolution of the ‘Ngenndiyaŋke’

For much of this research project, I hoped to uncover some deep historical mystery, a

smoking gun of sorts that would enable me to connect Pulaar language activism with a long

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history of Fuutaŋke, or Haalpulaar nationalism. In his historical account of the French conquest

and administration of southern Mauritania, I.A. Sall (2007) makes several references to a “parti

nationaliste Fuutaŋke” that was present in Fuuta Tooro’s politics. Though that label may

plausibly characterize the behavior of some Fuutaŋke political operators at the time, is there

actual linguistic evidence they thought of themselves as nationalists in the way commonly

understood today? One long time Pulaar activist, named KI, told me that the term ngenndiyaŋke

originated from the battles of Fuuta Tooro’s founding, telling me, “I always thought the original

ngenndiyaŋkoobe were those who were dying for Cheikh Souleymane Ball in 1775 and 1776,

when he declared an end to the tribute (muudo hormo) previously paid to the Moors.”

Taken at face value, the idea hints tantalizingly at something like a Fuutaŋke national

identity that stretches back over a century before the final French conquest of Fuuta in 1891.

Moreover, the century-plus political hegemony of the Fuuta Tooro aristocracy appeared to foster

something like what today would be considered a national identity. They need not have called

themselves ‘nationalists’, or “ngenndiyaŋkooɓe” for this to be the case. This observation does

beg another question, however: If the claim that the original ngendiyaŋkooɓe were those who

fought with Souleymane Ball is merely a projection into the past of what it currently means to be

a ngenndiyaŋke, under what political circumstances did that current meaning emerge?

Pulaar language political discourse as it relates to Mauritania has literally translated the

concept of the “National Question” into Pulaar as the Naamndal Ngenndiwal (or

Ngenndiyaŋkeewal). The National Question was that of how political power was to be shared

among Black African ethnic groups and white (Beydane) and black (Haratine) Moors. Murtuɗo

Diop was among those who promoted the National Question’s translation into Pulaar. He is not

the only one to present Mauritania’s politics through the frame of the National Question, as some

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of the scholarly literature on Mauritania’s politics does so as well (See, for example, Marchesin

1992). However, Murtuɗo Diop’s framing of the “nation” and what it means to be a

“ngenndiyaŋke” is often cited by Pulaar language activists weighing in on the issue.

In 1992, Murtuɗo gave a political speech in Haymedaat, Mauritania for the Parti pour la

Liberté, Egalite et la Justice. Maaouya’s government had organized national elections, the first

in Mauritania’s history and just three years after the Events began. Though in 1992 opposition to

Maaouya in Fuuta was strong, he would eventually reconsolidate his power through a form of

“mutual accommodation” that had long existed between the Beydan and certain Black elites.

(See Jourde 2005). In his speech, however, Murtuɗo openly and loudly mocked Maaouya,

referring to him as “maa o woya,” or “he’ll wind up crying.” Drawing considerable cheering and

applause, he discussed Mauritania’s National Question and some of the key linguistic issues

wrapped up in it:

First off, the Naamndal Ngenndiyaŋkeewal (National Question), what does it

mean(?). . . . I am saying to you, a ngenndi is language, a ngenndi is culture, a

ngenndi is history, a ngenndi is economy, a ngenndi is a territory! Look at those

five things. In Mauritania, what among them is really a ngenndi and what among

them is not a ngenndi? With respect to any of them that you look at you will find

that Blacks in Mauritania, without exception, whether educated or illiterate, rich or

poor, to this very day they are slaves. No one go pounding their chests saying I am

a Laawaŋke, a freedman or whatever else! There is no freedom! That is, until the

Blacks of Mauritania are equal. What caused this? When it comes to language,

once Mauritania gained its independence Moctar Ould Daddah understood that the

Blacks of Mauritania were positioned ahead, and he wanted to put them behind and

his people ahead instead. He drowned the French language and brought Arabic. I’m

telling you!

We do not hate Arabic, what we hate is the Arabic language being used as the knife

for killing Pulaar, killing Wolof and killing Soninke. Allah does not make one leñol

superior to another, one language superior to another. Why doesn’t Allah permit

this kind of superiority? Allah does not permit it, lest a dead animal like Moctar

Ould Daddah try doing it to people. Meanwhile, Allah says all people are molded

from the clay of Mother Hawa and Father Adama, so we share the same mother and

father. Allah says, “your languages and the colors of your skin are signs of Allah!”

So, given that Allah created all languages, Allah does not favor any language over

another, who would dare say Allah does not speak Pulaar? Especially given that

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Allah created Pulaar, my good friends (cheering and clapping)? Who would dare

say that Arabic is the only language spoken in heaven? (Diop 1992)

This statement attacks the politicization of Islam to legitimize racially-exclusionary

Arabization policies in Mauritania. Moreover, Murtuɗo discusses the ngenndi as it relates to

Mauritanian politics. Though he identifies territory or land as an essential characteristic of what

constitutes a ngenndi, the concept is not reducible to land. For, Murtuɗo appears to frame the

ngenndi as a set of attributes that are actualized through access to power within the post-colonial

nation-state. He specifically identifies language as a terrain of political struggle in Mauritania, on

which Moctar Ould Daddah (and his succesors) pursued the favoritism towards White, Beydan

Moors in the highest reaches of the country’s government.

Murtuɗo made his appeal to an audience that probably included many who were

dispossessed or brutalized during the Events of 1989. During the years of political repression that

led to the Events, the language issue was an important part of the context marking the arrests and

deaths of Black African political opposition figures in the country. Their martyrdom strikes a

chord with many I have met who survived the violence of those years. In his Haymedaat

campaign speech, Murtuɗo memorializes those who died in the Events and their links to Pulaar

language activism. The latter existed in Mauritania, he stated, thanks to its protagonists’

tremendous sacrifices.

If you see that Pulaar is being taught in Mauritania, it is not due to the kindness of

the authorities, but rather is thanks to the struggle waged by Fedde Ɓamtaare

Pulaar, as well as political struggle. What remains is for you the distinguished

people of Haymedaat, the distinguished people of Mauritania and distinguished

people of Senegal who are present to come and learn Pulaar! Know that twenty

years ago in Mauritania anyone caught with a book in Pulaar would be locked up.

Know that twenty years ago Pulaar meetings were held in cemeteries or in our cars.

We would get in and drive around town and talk about Pulaar. Similar to how the

dirt poor occupy their holes, that’s how we slipped into the dark while we were

advocating for Pulaar to be studied, for Pulaar to be written. We were

misunderstood. Then people like Souleymane Kane returned from the Arab

countries. We stood with them and others- Allah and his Prophet are my witnesses-

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we were persecuted until Cheikh Saad Bou Kane became Interior Minister. Only

then did people openly study Pulaar. The organization (Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar)

was born in 1976. It was then that we came out from the dark! (Diop 1992).

One of a pantheon of figures revered by Pulaar language activists, Murtuɗo has literacy

associations, theater troupes and major events named and held in his honor. I attended one such

event in 2011 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the “Days of Culture” (Ñalɗi Pinal) held as a tribute to

the late Murtuɗo Diop by the Pulaar Speaking Association featured debates about whether the

movement had been successful, as well as about efforts to digitize Pulaar. Murtuɗo’s speech in

Haymedaat makes a direct link between the National Question in Mauritania and the apparent

sacrifices in the name of Pulaar for which he and others are celebrated. In more recent years,

attempts to define the term ngenndiyaŋke have relied on Murtuɗo’s framing of the National

Question in Mauritania. Though the term ngenndiyaŋke may not have originated with Murtuɗo,

he is in my observation the most frequently cited authority when people attempt to define it. This

is not only the case with respect to how Murtuɗo explained the concept but also when it comes to

the frequency with which people cite him as the archetype of what a ngenndiyaŋke is supposed to

be.

In 2009, an essay titled “What is a Fulani Ngenndiyaŋke?” appeared in the online Pulaar

newsletter Pulaagu.com. The author, Pulaar language activist poet Ibrahima “Katante Leñol”

Kane (Kan 2009a) addressed the question of how a person must behave in order to be able to

rightfully accept the title ngenndiyaŋke writing, “Ceerno Murtuɗo Diop said: the word ngenndi

must have 500 meanings, but the most important are religion, language, culture and territory.”

Katante also reflected that “(Murtuɗo) stood up to preserve those pillars (religion, language, etc)

and did so in good faith as a ngenndiyaŋke who measured up to expectations.” Underscoring the

importance of sacrifice and commitment as characteristics of a ngenndiyaŋke, Katante

distinguished the concept from that of “lonngereyanke” (literally, one who seeks a mouthful of

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food), one whose language or cultural activism hides a hidden, self-serving agenda. Katante also

warns of the “enɗiyanke” as a person who at one time stood tall as ngenndiyaŋke but whose

commitment has waned despite continuing to benefit from the distinction of ngenndiyaŋke status.

Having met Katante on numerous occasions, I can attest that he seems to eat, sleep and

breathe Pulaar language activism. During our interviews, he has described at length his

introduction to Pulaar literacy in the early 1980s during his Koranic studies in Thilogne, Senegal.

He recalls with emotion his early attempts to write and record poetry in his home village of

Agnam Yeroyaabe, Senegal, as well as his deceased wife Haby Niang, who he met when she

became his first ever Pulaar teacher. His head always carries the style of tengaade hat that has

long protected cattle herders from Fuuta’s brutal sun. He turns family parties, such as a wedding

I attended at his compound in 2013, into venues for language activists to perform poetry and

theater. He seems to never miss a major Pulaar activist event. I have personally witnessed him

turn up for cultural festivals and language activist meetings in the Senegalese cities and towns of

Dakar, Thilogne and Agnam Godo, as well as in Elboeuf, Havre, Noisy-le-sec and Paris, France.

He never fails to take the microphone for at least a few minutes, always wearing a large boubou

shirt and speaking Pulaar that, at least apparently, lacks any hint of a loan word.

Katante is an embodiment of the ngenndiyaŋke synoptic illusion. Among Pulaar language

activists in Senegal and Mauritania, he is widely respected even if mildly or implicitly criticized

for representing an image of the ngenndiyaŋke that prioritizes pomp and circumstance over

concrete achievements. Such criticism may be unfair for someone who has devoted as much time

and money to the cause as Katante, who has succeeded in building a Pulaar school in his village.

Yet, when it comes to the perception that being a ngenndiyaŋke requires sacrifice, there are many

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opinions about who actually lives up to this standard. I listed some views (including those of

Katante) on the matter in my field notes during my trip to West Africa in 2010:

A good ngenndiyaŋke will recognize the importance of using Pulaar in contexts that

confirm its social and political relevance, such as in journalism, or on the Internet (This

attitude is expressed by radio personality Abou Gaye).

“The ngenndiyaŋkooɓe are a caste,” mocked 2sTV personality Hamet Amadou Ly.

“(Pulaar author) Yero Doro Diallo wasn’t a ngenndiyaŋke, he was a novelist profiting

from his work.” – A Pulaar film producer and actor.

Murtuɗo Diop was great because he didn’t seek out profit, in Mbagne, he never lived in a

house other than the one his parents built (This opinion was expressed by Hadi Gadio,

Abou Gaye, Njaay Saydu Aamadu and the Mauritanian rap group Diam min Teky).

“If you’re not using Pulaar in a clear, pure way, that’s fine, but don’t go calling yourself a

ngenndiyaŋke of the Pulaar language – France-based Pulaar activist Katante Leñol Kane.

“Ngenndiyaŋkaagal is not about wearing a tengaade and talking big in Pulaar, it’s about

work!” – Journalist Ousmane Makka Ly

“How come only it’s only the guys who have the microphone and show up at the

international conferences that are recognized as big-time ngenndiyaŋkooɓe?” –Seydou

Nourou Ndiaye, a Pulaar and Wolof language book publisher based in Dakar.

Implicit in these statements about ngenndiyaŋkaagal is a sense that some Pulaar language

activists generate undue publicity by presenting themselves as spokespeople for the movement.

My fieldwork elicited numerous conversations in which those I met identified others who they

perceived as impostors. Sometimes, being labelled as such comes with the territory of public

recognition and media exposure. There will always be people who question the motives of even

the most widely venerated Pulaar militants and even I have been publicly called out as a fake.

Katante’s characterization of lonngeriyaŋkooɓe (those who pretend to defend Pulaar but have

ulterior motives) and enɗiyaŋkooɓe (once committed militants who have betrayed the cause)

reflect the two manifestations of language disloyalty accusations. These can result in loud

choruses of public shaming or gossip about prominent activists behind closed doors. Tidiane

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Anne’s enemies at RTS, some of themselves fellow Fuutaŋkoobe, referred to him as “Gawlel

Gammaaji” or the little griot from Gamadji. This insulting nickname was based on the

accusation that Tidiane Anne used his radio show to brown-nose wealthy patrons who paid him

for praising them on air. Others have accused Tidiane Anne of having been womanizer.

Even perhaps the greatest Pulaar-speaking icon of all, Baaba Maal, has not escaped

criticism. The world-renown musician is beloved for both his pop-style and folkloric music, the

lyrics of which sometimes draw on heroic epics and historical themes well-known to generations

of Fuutaŋkooɓe. His band, known as Daande Leñol, has been in existence for an impressive 32

years and celebrated its 30th anniversary with a series of major performances in 2015. Maal and

his band, whose members are chosen so as to represent the diversity of Fulɓe populations around

West Africa, are venerated for different reasons by a variety of fan bases. While they have built a

loyal following among some bourgeois Western audiences who long for the sounds of “African”

music, many Fuutaŋke fans of Daande Leñol appreciate that aspects of their own cultural and

historical narratives are represented on such a major canvas. Many are also proud to see one of

their own attain the status of pop-cultural icon.

Like many of the major Pulaar language activists whose life stories are discussed

throughout this dissertation, Maal’s life itinerary and influence span both sides of the Senegal-

Mauritania border. Originally from Podor, an old colonial fortress town on the Senegalese bank

of the Senegal River, he developed some of his singing skills and historical knowledge,

according to some who knew him in his youth, through involvement in the leftist cultural

association Rénovation de Ndioum. In the late 1980s, Daande Leñol released “Ɗemngal am”

(my language), which remains one of their most famous songs among loyal fans. The lyrics,

some of which I will show the reader just below, were adapted from a poem by Ibrahima Moctar

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Sarr, who at the time had been incarcerated at Mauritania’s Oualata prison for three years due to

his staunch opposition to Maouya’s regime.

Allah gave me a language,

and Pulaar is a real language!

Allah gave me knowledge,

and Pulaar stores our knowledge!

Allah gave me a language,

gave us what brought about our language!

Someone gets up to say they will make a well pail out of me,

I will refuse until it dries me out! (Maal 1989)

Unsurprisingly, the song “Ɗemngal am” was banned in Mauritania, as was, supposedly,

Baaba Maal himself. In fact, some witnesses who have documented the atrocities committed

leading up to and during the Events of 1989 state that professing knowledge of Baaba Maal and

his music was sometimes grounds for the confiscation of property or the deportation of Black

Mauritanians. However, in conversations about who is and who is not a ngenndiyaŋke, Baaba

Maal’s name sometimes does not even come up. Some people, including even those who admire

him, assert that he is just an entertainer.

It is possible that this perspective has something to do with the cultural ambivalence

towards musical and theatrical performance and other forms of public entertainment in much of

the Senegal River Valley. Certain performances involving singing, dancing, poetry or theater are

the object of cultural pride, celebration and nostalgia among many people from Fuuta Tooro.

Different social groups have what one friend of mine referred to as their “hymnes nationales,”

such as the “fantaŋ,” a kind of arrangement played using the stringed hoɗdu that a casted group

of performers known as wambaaɓe play as a tribute to prestigious Fulɓe cattle-owning lineages.

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The corollary to this, however is that performances are regarded as the property of specific

groups who are socially permitted to solicit patrons using their talents. If one is from a noble

caste, particularly the Toorooɓe, performing music or dancing may be taboo. Such activities,

including the solicitation that comes with them, are regarded as unbecoming and beneath the

dignity of those with noble origins. Maal, a member of the fisherman’s caste, known as the

subalɓe, a social group that is part of Fuuta’s nobility, was likely frowned upon by some family

members when he began pursuing his interest in music. This ambivalent attitude towards artistic

performance and the indignity associated with it, particularly when it is accompanied by

solicitation, may also be one factor in why the ngenndiyaŋke ideal discourages the seeking of

profit and publicity.

Baaba Maal has not been immune to other kinds of accusations, including betrayal of the

kind of linguistic and cultural pride for which many of his songs are anthems. One Mauritanian

hip-hop artist complained that Baaba Maal doesn’t live according to the image that he projects to

many Fuutaŋkooɓe. For one thing, says this critic, Maal helped organize a concert of hip-hop

artists in France, and supposedly the largely Mauritanian audience was disappointed when most

of those performing were from Senegal and sang in Wolof, instead of Pulaar. Why couldn’t

Baaba Maal involve artists from Mauritania, where Pulaar hip-hop, unlike in Dakar, is very

popular and influential among urban and rural youth? According to the person who told me this

story, “Baaba Maal will show he loves Pulaar on the outside, but he is not really committed to

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Pulaar. He and his associates even go around speaking Wolof to one another” (Author’s field

notes, June 6, 2015).

One well-known, outspoken Pulaar broadcast journalist based in Nouakchott expressed

particular anger at Baaba Maal for “paying respect” to Mauritanian President Abdel Aziz in the

context of one of Maal’s performance in Nouakchott.

When Baaba Maal performed here for the 30th anniversary of Daande Leñol, he

paid tribute to Aziz! Tell me, does that make sense? It should not be! You call

yourself Daande Leñol, the voice of the Fulɓe people! You love the leñol! you are a

ngenndiyaŋke of the leñol! So, you come here and find this person who you know

very well is its enemy! He is in fact marginalizing your people and there are people

he has put in prison for standing up for the rights of the leñol. If you pay tribute to

this enemy of your people, it means that you and him are morally the same with

respect to the leñol (Interview with anonymous participant, June 5, 2015).

According to this person, Maal made a grave mistake by appearing to tolerate a man who

back in the 1980s played a hand in the racial pogroms that killed some of the musician’s own

relatives on the Mauritanian side of the border.

Baaba Maal’s grandfather founded the village of Podor Rewo, Mauritania. Podor

Rewo was nothing but Haalpulaar compounds, down to a tap of the ring! The

grandfather and father were there, and now the village has been completely

deported and left for the Haratines. Baaba Maal has ties to Donaye, through both

his mother and father. Well, today if someone in Donaye dies they get buried in

Senegal. Baaba Maal is not ignorant of what is happening in Mauritania. Baaba

Maal has ties to Ngawle. When the Events started, practically the first Mauritanian

villagers to get shot were those in Ngawle. All kinds of African singers down to the

tap of a ring have passed through here. Youssou Ndour has come here and others

and others and others. But Baaba Maal was the only one to have been banned from

Mauritania. Ten years he was barred from entering! Why was this? Because he is

one of those who say “mbiy-mi.” If such a person now comes to deliver respect to

Aziz, a man who had humiliated his people, what is he called (Interview with

anonymous participant, June 5, 2015)?

To be fair to Baaba Maal, I ran this viewpoint by many others I interviewed and met

informally and most of them, including people who are harsh critics of Aziz, disagreed with the

assessment. Some of them were surprised by the perspective and had not even given it a second

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thought. This might be due to the particular way in which Baaba Maal is viewed as a performer,

a naalaŋke (musician) whose perceived social role is to entertain hosts, patrons and fans.

A much more public row that dramatized the threat to Pulaar, this involving Wolofization

in Senegal, occurred in 2009 during my first year of graduate study. Samba Dioulde Thiam, a

Deputy in the Senegalese National Assembly, floated a proposal that would have radically

changed Senegal’s language-in-education policy. He argued that all students in Senegalese

public schools should first learn how to read and write in their own languages, or at least the

languages that are most widely spoken in the respective regions of the country. However, he also

proposed that every student must learn an additional national language and that that language

should be Wolof for those who did not study it initially.

His proposal shocked many people, particularly those who, like Thiam, identify as Fulɓe

or Haalpulaar’en. Thiam had long been reputed as a defender of their language, and according to

him and several witnesses, the first ever book to be published by participants in the movement- a

Syllabaire Pulaar – was printed in his home. One admirer told me that Samba Dioulde Thiam

had stood out as a lonely, staunch defender of Pulaar in Senegal’s National Assembly. Thiam

himself told me of how during a debate in the National Assembly he proudly displayed a copy of

the Koran with both Pulaar and French translations of the text.

The reaction among many Pulaar language loyalists to Thiam’s proposal was harsh. On

one radio show, which at the time aired online and via an FM radio station in Trappes, France,

the host calmed listeners who threatened to respond in such ways as burning Thiam’s car.

One of Thiam’s most strident critics was the Katante Leñol, who lives in France but

travels home to Senegal frequently. His essay “Samba Dioulde Thiam has Lit a Fire” appeared

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on several Pulaar-language Web Sites soon afterward. Among his withering criticisms was the

following statement:

(Samba Dioulde’s own mother) never let her children play with Wolof kids. When

she was asked why that is, she replied that she preferred seeing her child play with

a white person and speaking French to seeing him with a Wolof, and added that, if

my child is found on the street speaking French it may be tough to swallow but at

least he will never be confused with a Frenchman. But Wolofs resemble us in the

skin, and anyone who enters among them will be completely lost. That is the view

of the mother of Samba, the man who has borrowed the Wolof sword and is using it

to slaughter the Pulaar language in Senegal (Kan 2009b).

Katante’s essay captures the sense of panic surrounding language shift in Senegal. It

reflects a sense that losing Pulaar speakers means losing people who can contribute to the

maintenance of a moral community, with shared heroes and connections to ancestors. Not

everyone agreed with Katante’s harsh reaction. Even many who opposed Thiam’s position

respected what he had contributed to Senegal politically as well as his defense of Pulaar in the

National Assembly. One ultra language loyalist responded with a tone of annoyance when I

mentioned the attacks against Samba Dioulde Thiam, despite his disagreement with the deputy’s

proposal. “For years and years,” he said, “Samba Dioulde Thiam was defending Pulaar and our

National Languages with nobody standing by him, now all those who were quiet then are piling

on him now because of his proposal” (Author’s fieldnotes, 2010).

The Pulaar movement’s politics of language loyalty valorizes examples of people who

persist in learning, speaking, writing or promoting Pulaar in the face of perceived obstacles. One

manifestation of this is the valorization of children raised in the Diaspora who learn to speak

good Pulaar despite living in societies where French or English is the dominant language. Even

the loyalty of those living in the heart of Wolophone Dakar are praised for their language loyalty.

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Many who know Diewo Sall express respect for her ability to speak Pulaar like someone born

and raised in Fuuta, despite the fact that she spent much of her childhood in Dakar.

One example of Diasporic language loyalty promoted as an example for audience

members appeared on Radio Haayre Laaw, an online radio station created in the mid-2000s by

migrants from the Senegalese village of Haayre Laaw. Headquartered on Halsey Street in

Bedford-Stuyvesant, the radio station offers a range of talk and entertainment programming, with

guests calling in from the United States, Europe and Senegal and Mauritania. On the particular

program in question, a young woman named Aissata Diallo led a conversation centered on two

themes. The first is her personal journey as a Pulaar speaker living much of her youth and

adolescence in the United States. She recalls that after a number of years in the US, her Pulaar

had grown considerably rusty. Eventually, she made an effort to get better, watching the Pulaar

DVD movies that are sold in parts of the Diaspora, and visiting Web Sites like Radio Haayre

Laaw and Radio Fondou. She talked about the embarrassment one feels when they cannot

answer questions about their heritage. One of the reasons it was important for her to brush up on

her Pulaar was that “if you cannot speak your own language, even if you learn other languages,

you are like a lost person” (A. Diallo 2012). The second theme had to do with the role of parents

in making sure their children speak Pulaar, an issue which Aissata Diallo addressed with the

following statement:

I can only advise that those parents teaching their children Pulaar should definitely

continue what they are doing. Those who have not been doing so should get up and

teach their children because a language is easy to speak- but your own language is a

problem when you are in the Diaspora. That’s the one you want to (focus on) above

all, because it’s quick to forget it. You the parents, use your power and help out the

children so we will be able to avoid forgetting your languages. How will you do it?

Consider how you will be able to sit down- if you are off from work, for example-

and sit down with your children. Please really help them (A. Diallo 2012).

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In contrast to the loyalty that Aissata Diallo exemplified, parents who are perceived as

failing to teach their kids Pulaar are sometimes criticized. During a late-night conversation in

Bagodine, Mauritania one of Saidou Nourou Diallo’s relatives commented on the state of Pulaar

in Senegal, arguing that the expansion of Wolof should be blamed on the Haalpulaar themselves.

“Mi felaani jolfuɓe ɓe- I don’t blame the Wolofs for the fact that Pulaar is losing influence in

Senegal or that kids in Dakar aren’t speaking Pulaar,” she said. “I blame the Pulaar community

and the parents there for not being more vigilant with it.”

How did the so-called Naamndal Ngenndiyaŋkeewal (National Question) and the concept

of the ngenndiyaŋke, both of which appear to have originated in Mauritania, also become matters

of concern for Senegalese Pulaar language activists? One factor, without a doubt is the large

number of Mauritanian Haalpulaar migrants and refugees who entered Senegal, especially after

1989. Many language activists from Mauritania took up the cause in Senegal and brought

Mauritania’s National Question into Senegalese Pulaar language activist discourse. At the same

time, Haalpulaar in Northern Senegal had long maintained ties with their Mauritanian brethren

and Pulaar-language programming on Mauritania’s national radio was for decades the most

accessible media outlet for Senegalese Haalpulaar’en based in Fuuta. Moreover, a number of

left-wing, youth-led movements involved high school students returning to Fuuta from the city

and organizing cultural associations that practiced literacy training and theater during summer

vacations.

During the late 1970s and through the 1980s, such associations emerged in Senegalese

villages such as Ndioum, Thilogne and Ndulumaaji Demɓe. These associations accessed poetry

and literature written by Mauritanian Pulaar language activists and openly sympathized with

their fellow militants from across the border. One veteran of the Cultural Committee of

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Ndulumaaji, who was active during the period, readily identified with Murtuɗo’s charisma and

the ideal of ngenndiyaŋkaagal he represented. “A ngenndiyaŋke,” he said, “will forget him or

herself and will live for the leñol or whatever cause they stand for.” About Murtuɗo, he added,

“wherever he (Murtuɗo) went, he would be treated like royalty and welcomed, for he truly was

like a king or chief. Everyone would put aside whatever they were doing, go to him and listen to

him. He was the kind of person who whenever you sat with him you learned something.”

Broadcasting the “Ngenndi”- An Interview in Pete, Senegal

Tuesday, January 29, 2013. I was visiting the compound of the radio station Fuuta FM

(90.7) in Pete, Senegal. Fuuta FM is a privately owned radio station, owned and bankrolled by

the mayor of Pete, Djiby Mbaye. Publicly motivated by the desire to address a supposed dearth

of hard news and political debate on the part of its rivals, Fuuta FM’s founding was widely

viewed as a political maneuver by the mayor. I will not go over the details here, except to say

that Fuuta FM was created after its earlier founded rival, Pete FM, passed to the control of the

Communauté Rurale in nearby Ɓoki Jalluɓe. In addition, several broadcasters that Fuuta FM had

hired, including its President, Idi Gaye, had been victims of an alleged political purge within Pete

FM in 2010, in which the station was said to have fired opponents of the then ruling Parti

Democratique Senegalaise4.

Having evenly divided my participant-observation time between Pete FM and Fuuta FM

(in the hopes of avoiding the appearance of favoring one or the other station), I had set aside that

Tuesday for participant-observation at Fuuta FM. Abou Niasse, one of their broadcasters and a

veteran of Senegalese radio who had previously worked at a station in the city of Tambacounda,

4 I should note that staff at Pete FM strongly deny this allegation and that the Fuuta FM people likewise deny their

station’s goal is payback for the alleged political machinations at Pete FM.

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noticed me sitting in the front yard asked if I would join him for a recording. He planned to

interview Kalidou Boubou Mangane, another Fuuta FM personality who occasionally fielded

questions for what in Pulaar is known as a “loowdi” program. These are essentially Dear Abby

shows in which the host, sometimes with the help of callers, addresses a question presented by an

audience member. Abou planned on pre-recording this particular edition of his show, Caali

Jakkaa, on Tuesday evening as he would be away during its usual Wednesday evening air time.

I was very happy to have the chance at witnessing the recording for participant-

observation purposes. I loaned Abou my digital recorder for the occasion and he, Kalidou and

myself exited the Fuuta FM compound, making our way towards the mayor’s three-story

compound. Abou rented a room on the first floor of the compound and was confident the

building would have a space to record, though I forget why we did not just go to his room. We

finally settled on the roof as a recording spot. During our walk over, I had enjoyed speaking with

Kalidou, a completely illiterate older man who wore a long, greenish kaftan and a round, black

hat with gold embroidery. As Abou Niasse prepared to begin recording, he asked me if I would

be willing to act as more than just an observer. Would I participate in the recording by asking

Kalidou the question he was to answer for the audience? Why sure! Abou Niasse told me that

once we were recording, I would ask Kalidou to distinguish between a “haaliyaŋkaagal”

(charismatic verbal communication), ngenndiyaŋkaagal and “katantaagal” (militancy). Once we

sat down on chairs we had brought to the roof of the mayor’s house, Abou turned on the digital

voice recorder. He introduced himself to the audience then handed the recorder to Kalidou, upon

which the elder introduced himself. That’s when Abou revealed his surprise to the eventual

listeners:

So, elder Kalidou, what do you say we introduce our guest now so he can greet our

friends the listeners? But, brothers and sisters, before we pass him the mic for him

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to greet you let me tell you that this person’s name is John Hames, as he is known

in America, his country. He is a child of America, but he is the American most

sympathetic to the leñol Fulbe, who believes in us. He, John Hames, we here in

Senegal know him as Ousmane York. He is our special guest today, he will chat

with us today because what we do is of great interest to him. . . . He is someone

who is very familiar with our community (Niasse 2013).

I introduced myself and asked Kalidou the question. In my experience, the terms

haaliyaŋkaagal, ngenndiyaŋkaagal and katantaagal had in a sense been conflated due to the

media visibility of militant personalities among public figures associated with the movement.

However, Kalidou Boubou argued that neither the ability to communicate charismatically

(haaliyaŋkaagal) nor the display of militancy (katantaagal) amounted to ngenndiyaŋkaagal in

the absence of a sustained commitment. Within his discussion of ngenndiyaŋkaagal, however,

there was for me a surprising twist: Kalidou made a semantic distinction between what he called

a “ngenndiŋke,” a word I had never heard and “ngenndiyaŋke.” The former, in Kalidou’s view, is

someone committed to the welfare of his or her surrounding community while the latter are those

whose commitment to a particular cause will lead them to go anywhere in the world to fight for

it. Speaking into my digital recorder, Kalidou described what makes him a ngenndiŋke and made

a telling characterization of what constitutes a ngenndi:

Me, Kalidou, I am from here in Pete, here, here in Pete is where I am from. It’s

here that all of my being is located, it’s here where I have gotten everything I have,

and it’s here that all of my existence lies. Here is my ngenndi. It is a place, it is my

ngenndi. My ngenndi. Anything that benefits it and improves it, with respect to

preserving its cultural past, the way it was with respect to its elders and everything

else- including its culture and all of its issues and its situation- I am about nothing

but serving and benefitting it. I am willing to do anything- I am a ngenndiŋke.

Ngenndiŋke- because I stand up only for Pete (Niasse 2013).

In contrast, someone like Murtuɗo or, as Kalidou believes, myself, are ngenndiyaŋkooɓe

because we are willing “to wander to anywhere Pulaar is in the world” in order to promote it. For

Kalidou, the ngenndi, ngenndinke and ngenndiyaŋke concepts reveal an idea of the ngenndi that

is rooted in territory. In Kalidou’s interview, the ngenndi ultimately appears similar to the

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concepts of heimat and patria as cited by (Anderson 1998). Anderson identifies patria as a

“wonderful Iberian word that can gently stretch from ‘home-village’, through ‘home-town’ and

‘home region’, on to home country” (1998:60). Though one might question the usefulness of his

distinction between “ngenndiyaŋke” and “ngenndiŋke,” Kalidou’s loowdi interview provides a

very straightforward example where media engagements become a domain for defining the

ngenndi’s variable characteristics and how it is to be represented.

The Modernization of Ngenndiyaŋkaagal

Scholars on language and ideology have long identified how movements attempt to

modernize and normalize language through lexical, orthographic and grammatical

standardization, as well as the promotion of literacy (Briggs and Bauman 2003; Urla 2012). Less

understood is how language movements themselves debate how to brand themselves as modern

as they seek legitimacy and support. Former journalist Aliou Bassoum is among a group of

Pulaar activists who believe that Pulaar language activists need to change the image of

ngenndiyaŋkaagal. He believes Pulaar speakers get an insultingly raw deal when urban TV

audiences are presented with rustic images of Fulɓe and Haalpulaar’en that are inevitably

juxtaposed with those of a dynamic, Wolophone pop-culture. Often, these rustic images are

produced by the Pulaar community itself. I was reminded of this- admittedly to my

disappointment- upon watching a TV commercial purchased by Thilogne’s hometown

association promoting the community’s annual cultural festival, on which a voice announced the

names of Fuuta’s castes in a way oddly resembling those hawking vehicle models in an

American car dealership ad.

“If you look at public events and images related to Pulaar, usually the image projected is

one of ‘yesterday’ (the past),” Aliou Bassoum said, addressing this phenomenon, “what needs to

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be shown is that a ngenndiyaŋke can be someone youthful, professional, charismatic and

wealthy, not just an old poor person” (Interview with Aliou Bassoum, July 8, 2010).

Oumar Tokosel Ba, born in the Mauritanian and raised in Bakel, Senegal, believes what

he sees as an archetype of a middle-aged, poor ngenndiyaŋke who selflessly serves the Pulaar

cause is counterproductive. “I admired Murtuɗo Diop,” he told me as we drove through

Baltimore in 2010, “but when he died his empire died with him, because he did not establish a

way for his activism to sustain itself as a money-making enterprise” (Author’s fieldnotes, August

15, 2010). Oumar Tokosel’s career took him from the broadcast booth as DJ for a small-town

radio station in Eastern Senegal to the United States. His Pulaar-language podcast, “Gite e

Ñoorgo,” aired on Pete FM from 2009 to 2011. After Macky Sall’s election victory in 2012, he

returned to Senegal to work in the government.

Through his involvement with Lewlewal Group, Oumar saw the potential to work with

his Dakar-based staff to create a media company that can reach what he sees as an untapped

demand for news and entertainment in languages other than French and Wolof, especially in

Pulaar. Oumar groaned at the ideological nature of the efforts of his staffers and those of other

Pulaar media outlets. “We are not an association of ngenndiyankooɓe,” he said, “we are a

business that uses the Pulaar language as our medium of communication because there’s a

market for it!” Oumar seemed to be attempting to send this message when, on a promotional tour

in Fuuta Tooro for Lewlewal in early 2010, he appeared in every photograph uploaded to

Lewlewal’s Hi5 account wearing a fancy suit and tie, his cell phone’s ear piece firmly in place5.

5 After the election of Macky Sall as President of Senegal in 2012, Oumar returned to Senegal and served as a

political adviser to one of President Sall’s cabinet ministers. I last saw him in June 2015, running a meeting at which

members of an association of cattle herders affiliated with Sall’s party had convened in Dakar.

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In contrast to Oumar Tokosel Ba and Aliou Bassoum, language activists such as the

Mauritanian poet Ndiaye Saidou Amadou argue for a more traditionalist type of cultural

activism. When it comes to instilling the children of Pulaar speakers with a sense of connection

to their ancestors in Fuuta Tooro, wearing shoes, clothing and hats thought to be distinct to Fuuta

is, according to Ndiaye, as important as the language itself. Ndiaye made his views clear during a

discussion in his apartment in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, in 2010. Members of the

Mauritanian hip-hop group Jam min Tekki were sitting in Ndiaye’s living room. Though wearing

hip-hop style clothing and speaking the loan word-laced Pulaar characteristic of an urban setting,

the rappers had often praised Pulaar language activists like Ndiaye Saidou and Tidiane Anne in

their music. Though supportive and friendly, Ndiaye chided them for not being more

knowledgeable with respect to forms of recreation and entertainment viewed as indigenous to

Fuuta (ganni).

When Haalpulaar traditionalists (Ndiaye Saidou) and cosmopolitans (Oumar Tokosel Ba)

debate on which cultural style most befits a ngenndiyaŋke, they are debating the value of styles

honed through difficulty, over long periods of time and all of which are eminently modern in that

they are strategies for engaging with contemporary circumstances (Ferguson 1999:91-100). The

ability to perform cosmopolitan and localist styles carry are forms of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu

1986) whose value varies depending on whose compound and which village one is visiting.

Pulaar language activist debates about the cultural styles befitting a ngenndiyaŋke are in a sense

struggles to determine who legitimately represents the movement.

Ngenndiyaŋkaagal as Civic Duty?

During a nighttime interview held in the frontyard of Timtimol FM, a community radio

station in Ouro Sogui, Senegal, I asked a radio personality named KS how he defined what a

“ngenndiyaŋke” is. He responded by citing a conversation he had with the Mauritanian poet and

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Pulaar language activist Ndiaye Saidou Amadou, who advised that one must begin by

considering what a “ngenndi” is. KS had always believed that a ngenndiyaŋke is a distinguished

Pulaar activist. “I would always hear people say, ‘that person is a ngenndiyaŋke’,” he recalled,

“and thought that a ngenndiyaŋke is someone who can write Pulaar, who can speak Pulaar

without any French words, who ultimately only wears his own (people’s) clothing and things like

that.

(However), for me this was a point of confusion. I asked Ndiaye Saidou. I said,

“Ndiaye,” he said “yes.” I said, “what’s a ngenndiyaŋke?” Ndiaye said to me, “A

ngenndiyaŋke. Well, first off, a ngenndi is the place you are from. The land, the

territory, the territory of the land- like if we lived in the USA, with its territorial

limits and borders- you understand?” That’s called a nation (ngenndi). Senegal is

drawn up as a ngenndi. A ngenndi is a place, a ngenndi is a country? You

understand? Now, that’s what I will be (with respect to my ngenndi), I will be

Senegalese. Understand? (Interview with KS, February 20, 2013)

For KS, the ngenndiyaŋke is characterized by his or her commitment to making their

country or society a better place. Pulaar language activism, as he discussed elsewhere in our

interview, is certainly not inconsistent with this aim. However, someone exclusively concerned

with promoting the Pulaar language is merely a “Pulaariyaŋke.” KS’s view also somewhat

echoes the way Kalidou Boubou Mangane framed the concepts of “ngenndiŋke” and

“ngennndiyaŋke” as entailing commitments to the duty of making one’s community or society a

better place, or by commitment to a specific cause. However, he specifically identifies and

challenges what he perceives as the common view that being a ngenndiyaŋke is something

unique to Pulaar language activists.

BS, another radio broadcaster employed at Radio Timtimol, echoes this view. During our

interview, he makes several references to the “ngennndiyaŋkooɓe Pulaar,” mentioning

individuals such as Tidiane Anne and Murtuɗo. However, BS also directly challenged the idea

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that Pulaar militants have a monopoly on being ngenndiyaŋkooɓe. Citing Murtuɗo, he stated that

there are many types of ngenndiyaŋke, and defined the concept similarly to KS:

Well, for me a ngenndiyaŋke, Mamadou Samba Diop Murtuɗo (may Allah keep

him in Peace) said that a ngenndiyaŋke can come in many types. But, in my view,

with respect to ngennndiyaŋkaagal, it does not simply mean standing up for Pulaar

or just for Wolof, or just Serer or only Soninke, or just this or that. If you would

like to be a ngenndiyaŋke it means that it is necessary for you to embrace

everything to do with the area you inhabit and the society you live in. This

community, embrace it as your own. It is necessary for you to interact with your

neighbors, for all of you share in the work you do. For, it is important to recognize

he or she- even if one Bambara lives in the region to recognize that Bambara as

your neighbor. Recognize that Bambara, for you are together (in this community),

recognize the Serer and the Mandinka, for you are together. Recognize that you

share everything with all of your neighbors, you share peace and you share conflict.

No one is better than another, no one is worth less than another- you share all!”

(Interview with BS, February 14, 2013)

The two participants I have just mentioned both have a long-term commitment to Pulaar

language activism that originated with involvement in efforts to learn how to read and write in

Pulaar and teach it to others. However, like many broadcasters employed at radio stations I

visited in the Senegal River Valley, they tend to combine a deep commitment to Pulaar language

activism with a desire to do right by all audience members regardless of ethnicity. Ultimately,

their explicit argument that ngenndiyaŋkaagal may include the promotion Pulaar but is not

synonymous with it may have something to do with the politics of how the community radio

stations were created. The radios have emerged as parties serving a political agenda of

decentralization and have enjoyed the technical and financial support of NGOs, western

governmental entities and international agencies. I discuss at greater length in Chapter 8 the

radio stations and their role as an important domain for the practice of Pulaar language activism.

Pulaar language activists use the term ngenndi in a way that asserts loyalty to their

language, fellow Fuutaŋkooɓe, as well as their home countries. As the arguments of those like

Kalidou Boubou suggest, the ngenndi is the land around you, the land you come from, the land

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with which you are created. If you are living near the Senegal-Mauritania border in Fuuta Tooro,

participating loyally in the political life of the country whose side of the border you are on and

engaging in trans-border language activism are not contradictory activities. They all help make

the ngenndi you inhabit a better place. The political importance of the ngenndi concept for the

Pulaar movement is consistent both with activists’ negotiation of multiple forms of citizenship in

their daily lives and their commitment to language promotion.

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CHAPTER 7

PULAAR MILITANCY AS LIVELIHOOD AND SOCIAL MOBILITY

Abou Gaye lives in a one-room flat in a tenement house in Parcelles Assaines, where he

graciously hosts me when I come to Dakar. His neighborhood, which is located in Parcelles’

“Unité 12” is easy to get to. Not only is a major bus and public transportation terminal around

the corner from his building, but the nearby “Église” and “Sapeur Pompier” are well-known

landmarks to Dakar taxi drivers. “Parcelles, Sapeur Pompier” is about all I need to say to any

driver I need to take me to Abou’s, after which the driver normally asks about the “Église” to

verify that he (it is always a he) has the right place in mind. The neighborhood is a sandwiching

of multi-story apartment blocks that rarely have space between them. The main, paved streets are

crowded with public buses, taxis, motorcycles, cars rapides and the sandy thick sidewalks are

filled with vendors, restaurants and busy storefronts. The side streets also consist of thick sand

and become a maze that takes you through the dense collection of buildings that are high enough

that you can easily lose your way if you do not know the area. It is a good neighborhood, I am

told, “because the people in it are the kind who get up and go to work in the morning.”

Abou’s one-room flat is on the second floor of a tenement building a block away from

the main street in the neighborhood, across which the terminus lies. The building is owned by the

family of a Haalpulaar man from Kanel in Fuuta Tooro, who is now deceased. As of my last stay

to the building in 2015, I was told a part of the ceiling on the upper floor had collapsed. Abou

told me there was debate about whether to flatten the building altogether or renovate it floor by

floor, shuffling around its tenants. Abou’s neighbors are of various backgrounds, and include a

“Portugais” (who I believe is from Cabo Verde), who lives in a large room at the end of the hall,

and who has been a nemesis of Abou’s within the building. Paterne, a university student and Jola

from the Casamance Region has lived in the room right next to Abou’s for several years. When I

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briefly returned to Senegal in 2016, I stayed with Abou in a bedroom he had impressively set up

in the back of an office, as he along with his fellow tenants were asked to temporarily vacate the

tenement house so it could finally be fixed. The “Portugais,” a neighbor told me, was defiantly

remaining in his apartment. As for Abou’s wife and children, they live with family members in

his home village of Wocci, Mauritania. The village shares strong kinship and land ties to its

neighboring village of Waalalde, Senegal, which appears as Abou’s hometown on his Senegalese

national ID card.

Abou received a Francophone education in Mauritania’s government schools during his

childhood, but he did not complete high school. He is literate in French but I have rarely heard

him speak it and he usually writes in Pulaar. His living arrangement is bare-boned; his one room

flat in the tenement house includes a small gas stove that he uses to heat tea and occasionally

cook meals, though he often buys meals from neighborhood food vendors. His room has a bed

and a floor mat, on which guests (including myself) sleep. Near one of the corners of the room,

by the front door, he keeps a large yellow bidoŋ of water along with two additional water

buckets. One of those buckets, always covered, contains water for drinking, dishwashing and

cooking. The other bucket contains bathing water. When it runs low, Abou uses the large bidoŋ

to refill it. Abou and whoever his guest happens to be refill the bidoŋ at a robinet located at the

end of the hall.

Abou’s door overlooks the common area of the family living in the compound on the first

floor. Like many such apartment buildings in Metro Dakar, the upper floor hallways run along

the side of the building like balconies, which, as you walk along them have the doors to homes or

rooms on one side and overlook the bottom floor common area on the other. Abou shares the

second-floor bathroom and bathing area with the rest of the second-floor residents. The

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cleanliness level of the bathing chamber and bathroom is sometimes a bone of contention

between them, and the Portugais has alleged that Abou’s annual white guest (yours truly)

doesn’t clean up the messes he leaves. I assure the reader that this is a baseless accusation.

Access to the robinet, the faucet from which the residents fetch their water, is restricted. The

landlord often locks it and Abou and his neighbors know that water can only be fetched late at

night. Refilling the bidoŋ is often one of Abou’s last tasks before going to bed.

Amidst the hustle of Dakar, Senegal Abou Gaye is one of many residents who cobble

together livelihoods by calling upon a variety of social networks and patrons in order to secure

the means of survival. Such “worldliness” (Simone 2001), is an essential part of how people get

by in cities throughout Africa. Whether in Dakar, Bamako, Kinshasa or Johannesburg, people in

African cities navigate situations in which opportunities to make a living quickly come and go,

and those that are secured cannot necessarily be counted upon for long. African city-dwellers are

forced to externalize and call upon multiple networks- family, religious, professional, ethnic- in

order to get by, and there is often no question of the state providing help. The state, having

abdicated any post-independence socioeconomic contract it had with its citizens, is merely one of

many resources in the “worlded” (Simone 2001) African city that residents access within the so-

called “système D” (McLaughlin 2001; Murphy 2015).

Through years of experience promoting Pulaar, Abou has accumulated skills in

photography, radio broadcasting, film and public speaking. He also possesses extensive

professional and social contacts. Both of these assets give Abou work opportunities that grant

him a degree of public exposure that belies his apparently marginal socioeconomic status. When

one of Senegal’s most respected Pulaar TV personalities wanted to cover a major cultural event

in the village of Ndulumaaji Demɓe in Fuuta Tooro but could not make it, he loaned Abou the

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necessary equipment and dispatched him to do the job. In 2015, Abou was one of the featured

speakers at an event in Thiaroye the goal of which was to explain to the audience the

implications of the NGO ARED’s pilot project to introduce Pulaar and Wolof instruction to

selected primary schools. Abou was also one of the main organizers of a special event

welcoming to Senegal a prominent France-based Pulaar language activist. This activist, Ibrahima

Malal Sarr, has been responsible for the creation of a Pulaar version of Mozilla Firefox, as well

as convincing one of Senegal’s major cell phone providers to introduce the Klif, the phone that

has Pulaar as a language option. Abou also serves as a news correspondent for the Pulaar

Speaking Association (PSA), a migrant association consisting of several thousand mainly

Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar speakers based in the United States. Two or three times a

week, Abou provides listeners of PSA’s online radio station with news updates from Senegal and

Mauritania pertaining to current events, politics and culture.

Abou has honed his radio voice for years. He worked as a broadcaster without formal pay

for a radio station known as Diamano FM in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Among the investors

in Diamano FM was the world-renown musician Baaba Maal, and the Dakar-based station

offered predominantly Pulaar-language broadcasting. Many media personalities I have met with

or interviewed for this project worked at Diamano FM and several of them- despite the station’s

ultimate demise- state that many activists came to know each other through their association with

the radio. Sitting with a group of friends one night, Abou recalled the incredible support he and

his colleagues received from Pulaarophone listeners, who in Wolof-dominated Dakar had few

other options when it came to finding radio programming in their language.

My time at Diamano FM taught me about the ways in which ngenndiyaŋkooɓe are

elevated by the public. In fact, it was when I was at Diamano that I saw for the first

time attaya being heated on a gas burner. Before that I had never used gas burners

as a cooking tool. At Diamano FM, people would come and bring you chickens, or

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they would come and introduce you to beautiful women and that sort of thing

(Author’s field notes, May 21, 2015).

It seems his years in radio broadcasting and experience making public appearances

helped land Abou a role as something of a PR and media person for the Tijjaani religious figure,

Ceerno Madani Taal, the great, great, great grandson of Cheikh Oumar Tall al-Fuutiyu. The two

are good friends, and the Ceerno invites Abou to accompany him when he embarks on tours to

rally and inspire his followers. One night in 2015, after sharing a dinner of fried chicken and

salad with Abou that we purchased from a delicious restaurant near the École Dior in Parcelles,

he received a call from Ceerno Madani. It was past 1AM and we had just finished eating in

Abou’s flat, where we had brought the meal. He left the room and headed to the robinet when his

phone rang. When he arrived back a few minutes later, I let him know there had been a call. He

looked curiously at his phone and sat on his bed. Very excitedly, smilingly and with his eyes

widened, he whispered, “It’s Ceerno Madani!”

I listened as Abou spoke with the Ceerno. The latter wanted to know if Abou could meet

him at his place. He would be on his way. Abou hung up the phone. I was stunned. Abou was

beaming with excitement. “You seem real happy,” I said to him. “When someone like Ceerno

Madani remembers you,” he said, “it’ll make you happy.”

“What is this about?”

“I’m off to Halwar,” he said, “I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

And just like that he was off. I was a bit jealous. Halwar is the ancestral home of the Tall

lineage and Cheikh Oumar Tall is its most famous forefather. The annual Ziyara in the old

Cheikh’s honor was to take place the next day and his distinguished descendant had held a place

for Abou in his entourage. Abou himself commented that he had known the Ziyara was coming

and had been anticipating an invitation.

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During such events, Abou sometimes performs public outreach services for the Ceerno,

taking pictures at his important religious gatherings and coordinating with other members of the

media who cover his events. In early 2013, as Ceerno Madani and his people were planning a

major Mawluud in Dakar, Abou was the contact person for community radio broadcasters who

came from Fuuta to report on it. The Ceerno sometimes dispatches Abou as a PR person to the

Radio Nationale and other media outlets. In preparation for that same Mawluud, Abou appeared

on a nighttime Pulaar-language radio program hosted by longtime radio personality Boubacar

Ba, who hails from Tidiane Anne’s hometown of Gamadji. Abou used the opportunity to

promote the event, as well as to discuss other issues, including the living conditions in the remote

“Hakkunde Maaje” area of Fuuta Tooro.

Language Activism’s Return on Distinction

Abou Gaye has positioned himself quite distinctly amidst the bustling uncertainties of

Dakar as he summons a variety of social networks in order to make ends meet, pay his rent and

take care of his family back in Fuuta. For Abou, his years of experience in Pulaar language

activism and the talents he has developed in the process appear to be a significant source of

financial support, freelance work opportunities, and a degree of minor celebrity. His experience,

like numerous others I describe in this chapter, shows one of the important social dimensions of

language activism in the uncertain socioeconomic context I describe: Commitment to linguistic

militancy offers a “profit of distinction” (Bourdieu 1991) granting one access to valuable

resources, social capital in the form of personal connections and even some fame.

In many Western contexts, the commodification of language (Duchene and Heller 2012;

Heller 2010) has rendered linguistic competency a form of added-value in job markets, and made

cultural authenticity a tool in the branding of products and services, particularly tourism

(Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). However, Blackledge and Creese (2012) explain that the

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demonstration of linguistic pride in the context of a movement or a language promotion effort

offers its own kinds of returns. Abou Gaye and a number of other Pulaar language activists,

though in most cases socioeconomically vulnerable, profit from the distinction that comes with a

successfully demonstrated commitment to Pulaar language activism.

Those like Abou who enjoy such a “profit of distinction” achieve it by successfully

performing a commitment to activities that promote Pulaar. This involves demonstrating

particular skills, including the ability to write in Pulaar and a talent for Pulaar oration in which

the use of loan words is limited or non-existent, at least according to audiences. Many virtuosos

like Abou, as well as a number of other of men and women involved in Pulaar literacy or

broadcasting, access external networks in the context urban milieus like Dakar or Nouakchott.

However, the modes of “worldliness” that Simone (2001) identifies as being characteristic of the

African city extend beyond urban areas. While Simone points out that cultural practices thought

to be rural re-emerge in the city in a hyper form, the shifting external networks that residents of

the African city create in order to survive also reach and affect rural areas such as the Senegal

River Valley. Many Senegalese, Mauritanians and other Africans are constantly moving about

between urban and rural areas, making resources emanating from urban economies increasingly

important to rural folk. Meanwhile, rural Africans, who perhaps can count on the state even less

that urban Africans have, externalize in ways similar to those described with respect to urban

dwellers.

The rest of this chapter covers the different ways in which the Pulaar movement has

created work and networking opportunities for men and women in socioeconomic circumstances

similar to those of Abou Gaye. The profit of distinction that comes with demonstrated

commitment to promoting the language is an important, if not the only dynamic involved in this

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process. I also examine how issues of caste and social hierarchy influence access to the Pulaar

movement, while also looking at the ideological work that went into legitimizing Pulaar literacy

in a context where French and Arabic literacy commanded the most symbolic capital.

The path to positioning oneself as a committed Pulaar militant is found in the acquiring

of skills in writing, oration, poetry or other performance genres through which many activists

have over the years been socialized into the movement. One organization that has taught such

skills to its members is Penngal1 Mammadu Alasaan Ba2, which is based in Thiaroye, a crowded

municipality outside Dakar with a reputation for high crime3. Over the years, the Penngal has

maintained, to varying degrees, committed cohorts of Pulaar teachers, students and its members

occasionally organize to perform sketches, poems and songs at public events.

The first of these I ever witnessed was at the École Souleymane Ball, located in

Guediawaye, another densely populated area that adjoins Dakar. It was 2010, the year of my first

graduate fieldwork in Senegal and the school grounds were packed with well-dressed attendees,

a number of them wearing clothing or other items that are symbolic of Fulɓe authenticity. Chief

among these is the conical tenngaade hat that protects cattle herders from the sun. Penngal

Mammadu Alasaan Bah and a similar organization, Penngal Kisal Jammagel, organized the

1 Translated, thsis word could literally mean “organization,” but in Pulaar it’s meaning is more specific than that of

the more commonly used “fedde.” Penngal can refer to a subset of a regional or city-wide branch of a larger

organization.

2 This refers to Mamadou Alassane Bah, who has spent much of his life in Pulaar literacy and journalistic activities

in both Senegal and France. He also spent many years as head of ARP.

3 I have visited Thiaroye many times and have never had a problem. However, I have many times been warned of

Thiaroye’s dangers. Once, while visiting the head of Penngal Mammadu Alasaan Ba at his market stall in the

Thiaroye Gare Market, he noticed me not holding my backpack carefully and said, “Hey, don’t leave your bag there,

this is Thiaroye!”

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large gathering. The event was intended to be a so-called “yeewtere dinngiral” or public forum

about the relationship between the “music of yesterday” and “the music of today” (naalaŋkaagal

haŋki e naalaŋkaagal hannde). Abou Gaye and then-RTS radio personality (now TV anchor on

2sTV) Hamet Amadou Ly were the moderators. In addition to the discussion, young men and

women- and some children- from the two Peŋɗe performed poems and songs. One of the songs

was dedicated to Ly, and hailed him as a great ngenndiyaŋke. They also gave several theater

performances, one of which conveyed a message about the importance of maintaining the Pulaar

language and began with a scene of an older man lamenting the younger generation’s fascination

with Wolof. In that scene, the man mocked Wolof speech, repeating “mone-mone-mone-mone-

mone,” the Wolof words for “I am saying.”

Many of the young male and female singers and performers were present when the

President of Penngal Mammadu Alasaan Bah, the Pulaar book vendor named Sam Faatoy Kah,

hosted me at his compound a few weeks later. On the way to his home, we stopped at a

neighborhood mosque where the Penngal conducted regular Pulaar classes. I sat at a desk,

behind the students- many of whom were young girls- as their instructor taught them about their

language’s system of noun classes, known in Pulaar as “pelle innɗe4.” I was both excited and

curious. As a Pulaar enthusiast since my Peace Corps days in The Gambia, I felt like I had come

home. However, I wondered, where did this all lead? How could the talent fostered in Pulaar

poetry, theater and literacy skills find a place in a country where French and, increasingly, Wolof

are the languages primarily tied to political and economic power?

4 Some Pulaar dialects use over 20 noun classes.

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Throughout the discussion we conducted at Sam Faatoy’s home, several of the young

women spoke about what they saw as the personal benefits they accrued from Pulaar literacy.

One of them discussed how she was happy to have learned Pulaar, as she had never had formal

schooling. In fact, her knowledge of the Latinized Pulaar orthography even enabled her to

understand and write texts in basic French. As I was conversing with the men and women who

attended, another young woman, probably in her early teens (or so I guessed), grabbed my

notebook and began writing in it. I was too preoccupied with making sure the meeting would go

well to bother finding out what she was writing. When I looked in the book after returning to my

host family’s compound, here is what I found in beautifully-written Pulaar:

Penngal Mammadu Alasaan Bah was founded on March 13, 1993 here in Thiaroye

Gare. Its goal is the learning and teaching of the Pulaar language, through writing

and research and other such things. Since then until today we are doing what we

can, falling and getting back up again. But not being a powerful organization has

not prevented us from time and again putting on events that promote social and

cultural awareness, like the event you attended at the Ecole Souleymane Ball.

Things like that. To sum up, Pulaar welcomes you to the Penngal. (Author’s Field

Notebook, July 2010)

Humery (2013) has conducted impressive ethnographic and survey research into the

significance Pulaar literacy has had for many women in the Senegal River Valley, and a number

of them state that the experience provides them with an “awakening” (See also Fagerberg-Diallo

2001). Many also use the written Pulaar they learn to monitor personal matters like business

transactions, as the woman who wrote me that welcome message would certainly be capable of

doing. However, when I asked the group what their frustrations were, Sam Faatoy Kah lamented,

“Wolof has been promoted by educated and wealthy people while Pulaar has been promoted by

ignorant, poor people.” This alludes to the reality that, in Senegal, minority languages like Pulaar

offer economic and political power in only limited circumstances. The comment can also be read

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as an implicit criticism of Haalpulaar political and economic elites who activists perceive as not

pulling their weight in promoting their language.

The Practice of Language Activism as a Challenge to Social Norms

As the Pulaar movement spread in urban and rural areas, cultural anxieties could be a

challenge for some who wanted to participate. For example, a number of veteran Pulaar militants

report that when they began participating in the movement as young people they first had to

overcome the suspicion of parents and other elders. In addition, the public events organized by

pelle pinal (cultural organizations) at times created liminal performative spaces in which young

people and elders appeared as equals. This aspect of the Pulaar movement was implied in a

discussion with the well-known Senegalese Pulaar-language poet Ibrahima Kane, also known as

the Katante Leñol. Interviewing him in a Paris apartment, I asked him what he thought the

benefits of ngenndiyaŋkaagal had been and his answer evoked the transformative effects the

Pulaar movement had with respect to longstanding social hierarchies.

Ngenndiyaŋkaagal made it so that in African countries today anyone can become

leader (laamaade). Anyone can lead an organization. Before it was, “he is a little

kid, he cannot lead” or “anyone not wealthy cannot be the leader” . . . like with

castes, “that one cannot be leader.” Ngenndiyaŋkaagal changed this.

Ngenndiyankaagal brought a new mindset, to the point where during a village

meeting a child will be given the chance to make a statement and an elder who

would like to chime in will have to face the child and say “I am requesting

permission to speak.” Ngenndiyaŋkaagal brought this. Ngenndiyaŋkaagal brought

about the fact that today there are fewer conflicts. Different people have begun to

interact, work together and intermarry. (Interview with Katante Leñol, July 13,

2012)

Though there is truth to this claim, Katante also well knows that the movement is not

uninfluenced by social and caste divisions, as well as entrenched gender hierarchies, even if it

has provided openings to challenging them. Most high-profile Pulaar language activists come

from one of the rimɓe, or “noble” social groups, which include the Toorooɓe, Jaawanɓe

(courtiers), Seɓɓe (warriors) and Subalɓe (fishermen; sing. cuballo). While I have met many

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people from the artisan caste groups, as well as descendants of slaves (maccuɓe) who are

involved in the promotion of Pulaar, few of them count among the most prominent figures of

Pulaar militancy5. Women have also benefitted from the profit of distinction that can come with

participation in literacy or theater, yet they also are hard to find among the movement’s most

public faces.

Both issues of gender and caste emerge repeatedly in activists’ accounts of how they

became involved in the promotion of Pulaar, and these are often linked to the question of

approval by parents or elders. In some cases, people involved in Pulaar theater or literacy groups

snuck off and engaged in these activities without their parents’ knowledge, as activities like

singing or dancing were taboo for some members of social groups like the Toorooɓe. One well-

known Dakar-based Pulaar literacy teacher addressed this dynamic as he told me of his and his

friends’ effort to create a Pulaar literacy and cultural association. “When we were getting

started,” he said, “those of us who were involved knew that we had to demonstrate that we would

promote our culture and help the neighborhood, otherwise our elders would think we were just

up to no good. You know, that we were just a bunch of boys and girls here to fool around with

one another” (Interview with anonymous participant, May 22, 2015).

With their social status associated with religious piety and reserved personal conduct,

many Toorooɗo parents forbade their children from participating in public gatherings that

5 Fuuta’s social class and caste system contained a category of castes consisting of artisans, who were viewed as

having a monopoly on certain forms of knowledge and performance genres. Dilley (2004) and Wane (1969) wrote

two important works on Fuuta Tooro’s social caste and class structure, which consist of rimɓe nobles, ñeeñɓe (who

are the artisans), and so-called maccuɓe or jeyaaɓe (literally, “the owned”). The latter are a nominal underclass

descending from people who lived in various forms of bondage throughout the Senegal River Valley’s history. A

more politically correct term for maccuɓe in Fuuta is galuŋkooɓe.

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involved singing, dancing and other performative displays. More broadly, engaging in behavior

thought to be the cultural property of another social group can bring disapproval, if not outright

sanction. Special permission can be required when a person wishes to learn and master an art

form thought to belong to a different caste. Guelel Sanghott, a member of the tanners’ caste

known as the sakeeɓe (sing., sakke), is a well-known performer of Pekaan, a poetry form

associated with the caste of fishermen (subalɓe). He supposedly had to obtain the blessings of

subalɓe elders before performing Pekaan publicly.

In addition to caste, religious concerns also played a role in whether parents permitted

their children to participate. Since the arrival of the Islamic regime that took power in Fuuta in

the late 18th Century, religious conservatives have often cast a wary eye at some aspects of Fulɓe

culture they view as at odds with Islamic teachings. For instance, one Pulaar language activist, a

cuballo from a small fishing village on the south bank of the Senegal River, remembered that at

first he was restricted to listening from his compound to singing taking place in a nearby public

square (dinngiral).

My father was a religious teacher and scholar (ceerno), he is the one who taught me

the Koran. He forbade us from going to the square (dinngiral) to play with the

other kids. However, as it turned out, there happened to be a smaller public square

right by the front door to our compound. The young girls often gathered there to

play before proceeding to our village’s larger square. I would listen and memorize

all of their songs. Therefore, even if I was not going to the dinngiral I was able to

listen as they sang (Interview with anonymous participant, June 8, 2015).

This example implies the tension existing between religion (diine) and culture (pinal)

within Fuuta Tooro’s historical narrative. While Pulaar language activists celebrate Fuuta both

for its crucial role in the spread of Islam in West Africa and as the cradle of Haalpulaar or Fulɓe

culture and tradition, these two features occasionally clash. There are numerous examples, in

addition to the one I have just cited of religiously pious parents being reluctant or opposed to

allowing their children to play in the dinngiral. For some, this prohibition extended to Pulaar

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literacy activities. One Mauritanian activist began taking Pulaar classes by sneaking off without

her parents’ permission. As she tells it, she first heard of Pulaar literacy through her uncle who

had visited her village representing the Institut des Langues Nationales with the goal of

encouraging people in the community to organize and participate in Pulaar classes. Her village

often held nighttime events involving theater performances and public discussions, some of them

having to do with Pulaar literacy. However, her father was a respected ceerno in her village and

he forbade her from participating in any such activities until she took matters into her own hands.

One evening, when my mother wasn’t watching- maybe she had left our

compound, I forget exactly how that part of it went- I snuck off and went to the

school, École 2. It was summer vacation and they were using the school for Pulaar

meetings and performances. When I arrived, I saw they were teaching Pulaar. I

joined the class as they were teaching an exercise that dealt with a written version

of the story about “The Battle of the Monkey and the Dog.” The moral of the story

was that, when hunger is widespread, people accustomed to fighting one another

must forget their mutual conflicts. I sat in on their presentation of the written story

until they were done. I returned home a little later and saw my mother, who told me

I was as good as dead. Worse, she would tell my father. I was terrified (Interview

with anonymous participant, July 30, 2012).

Such childhood stories of interest in Pulaar, cultural activism and issues of parental

approval (or opposition) capture a significant aspect of what made the movement transformative

for many Senegalese and Mauritanians who were involved. Despite the movement’s reflection of

broader social hierarchies, Pulaar literacy teaching and the various cultural activities that

accompanied it have entailed the mobilization of many young people independent of institutions

and figures that were historically powerful, such as elders, religious figures or public schools.

“Hol ko Janngi Pulaar?”: Why Pulaar Literacy?

As Humery (2011) explains, the Pulaar movement introduced a new form of literacy to a

cultural context in which existing forms of literacy- namely, in French and Arabic- come with

powerful, albeit different forms of prestige. Promoting Pulaar as a language suitable for the fields

of education, politics and the media not only required challenging long-held ideas about the

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status of African languages. It also clashed with the interests of people who had enjoyed social

prestige and power thanks to their command of French or Arabic. As Humery suggested, the role

of the Arabic-literate religious figure is less indispensable if men and women are able to use the

Pulaar alphabet to take their own notes on what they learn from them. Francophone political

elites in Senegal and Mauritania may also see their power threatened. One man, who worked for

decades at Mauritania’s Institut des Langues Nationales, told me that much of the resistance to

his efforts to introduce National Languages into primary schooling came from civil servants,

including Haalpulaar bureaucratic cadres.

While national language literacy posed a political threat to certain groups, many just

thought studying Pulaar to be silly. Many language activists regularly received the Pulaar insult,

“on ngalaa haaju!” This literally translates as “you all have nothing going on,” but in English the

colloquial equivalent might be “you need to get a life.” Why this reaction? As Pulaar literacy

efforts gained visibility throughout Senegal, some though the idea of Pulaar as a written

language and- by extension- a language of educational instruction to be ridiculous. Given the

association of French in West Africa with economic and political power, introducing Pulaar

literacy can even come across as a way of duping the population by offering second-rate

education (More than one person I have spoken with has reported encountering this claim). Even

many who were more sympathetic often expressed surprise at the idea of Pulaar as a written,

publishable language. Sam Faatoy Kah, who for years has made a living selling Pulaar books in

Dakar fondly recalled the reaction he got when, early in his bookselling days, he appeared at a

so-called “lammba Fulɓe,” a wrestling tournament in Dakar with a largely Pulaarophone

audience.

The best thing about going to sell books at the stadium that night is that people

would see the books and go ‘Wow, has Pulaar really reached this level? You mean,

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there are actually important-looking books like this in Pulaar being made?’ This

showed people that even though there were many out there not involved, there were

also committed people working hard for Pulaar. Allah helped me and that night I

sold every book I had brought with me to the stadium. (Interview with Sam Faatoy

Kah, June 19, 2015)

Often, people had reactions that were more skeptical. A radio broadcaster who lives in

Ouro Sogui, Senegal recalled the embarrassment and ridicule he suffered at the hands of critical

neighbors when he began learning how to read and write in Pulaar.

At that time, if you were someone studying Pulaar here and seen with your

notebook on your way to class it was almost embarrassing. Why would it be

embarrassing for you? Well, people from my age group, if you passed by them at

their hangout spot on your way and they knew you were studying Pulaar they

would be like, “why are you studying Pulaar, is the language you are speaking not

Pulaar?” Then they would ridicule you and say something like “you people are a

joke, you shouldn’t be doing what you are doing.” And so on and so on, back and

forth and back and forth. There was no way you could respond, and soon all this

would give you a complex. It made people so insecure at times that they would stop

socializing with their friends at their old hangouts. (Interview with BS, February,

2013)

In Senegal and Mauritania where- for different reasons- literacy in French and Arabic

contained significant prestige, it was difficult for many people to wrap their minds around the

idea of Pulaar as a medium of educational instruction, let alone a language the command of

which would bring personal advancement. Pulaar was something one just knew and to get ahead

a person had to become literate in French or Arabic.

Through my ethnographic research experiences in Senegal, Mauritania and France, I have

encountered signs of the ideological work in which Pulaar language activists engaged in order to

challenge these perceptions. A common example of this can be found in the slogan, “Pulaar

muynetaake, janngete,” or “Pulaar is not something that is suckled, it is to be studied.” The idea

behind this notion is that Pulaar is a language that merits scholarly study on a level equal to that

of Arabic or any European language. A refrain of Saidou Nourou Ndiaye, a Senegalese book

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publisher and disciple of Cheikh Anta Diop, is that “any concept that can be written about in

French or English can be written in Pulaar or any other African language.”

Over the years, Pulaar militants have exhorted audiences at meetings, through broadcasts

and by pen to become literate in Pulaar. Just speaking Pulaar, they argued, does not mean you

know the language. Murtuɗo Diop challenged the idea that French-educated elites in West Africa

who did not learn how to read and write in their first languages were educated at all. In a lecture

he delivered during his years in Senegal, he explained to his audience the concept of the “gannɗo

humambinne,” which essentially means “educated fool.” Linguistically, the concept derives from

the verb “anndude” which means “to know” and the noun “humambinne,” which refers to a

person who is uneducated or illiterate. Murtuɗo’s lecture gave several examples of what he

viewed as the gannɗo humambinne, including Abdou Diouf who at the time was President of

Senegal. Abdou Diouf, he stressed, was not truly educated, for he was literate in French but not

literate in Serer, a dialect of which was his native language.

Here, Murtuɗo played into a theme that challenges the hierarchy of literacies existing in

Senegal and Mauritania, where written French and Arabic offer more life prospects than learning

Pulaar. A major recurring theme among men and women supporters and participants in literacy

initiatives is the impetus to rid themselves of illiteracy (riiwtude humambinaagu). The need to

achieve this through literacy in Pulaar and other national languages is motivated by the fact that

the French-based, public education system has failed to deliver a quality education to a large part

of the population. In addition, by creating public spaces and domains in which written and oral

expression in Pulaar are requirements of participation, Pulaar language activism upset

ideological views about the socioeconomic roles played by the various languages spoken in

Senegal and Mauritania.

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Such ideological work is the essence of language activism. As Jacqueline Urla (2012)

writes in her rich ethnographic work on the Basque movement, language activism approaches

assumptions about linguistic practices that are hegemonic and renders them ideological. As I

discuss in earlier chapters, Pulaar language activists question certain hegemonic ideas about

language that are prevalent in Senegal and Mauritania. These include the idea that French (and,

in Senegal, increasingly Wolof) is the language suitable for official government or commerce or

the fact that, in Dakar, Wolof is the default language on the street, in markets or on public

transportation.

The Benefits and Limits of a Career in Pulaar Militancy

My multiple fieldwork trips to Senegal, Mauritania as well as another fieldwork trip to

France, involved many personal encounters with people for whom their participation in Pulaar

language literacy and performance was a major part of their lives. Their involvement in Pulaar

language activism offers them social connections that can be valuable in situations of personal

economic instability and where steady employment is hard to come by. Some of them acquire a

significant public profile, even local celebrity, as a result of their Pulaar militancy. As is the case

with Abou Gaye, Pulaar-related activities are an important part of activists’ externalized

networks as they attempt to make ends meet (See Simone 2001).

For many of the people whose experiences I characterize here, their work is not steady

but derives from specific initiatives and projects. However, some individuals have been able to

attain full-time work based on their involvement in Pulaar literacy and other activities. My own

Pulaar teacher in Dakar received her start in language teaching through ARP. Raised by her

mother and other relatives in the Senegalese city of Thies, she taught Pulaar classes there through

the organization. She also became involved in the Association Universitaire pour la Promotion

de la Langue Pulaar (AUPELP) during her years of study at the University of Dakar, where she

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met such famous militants as Tidiane Anne, Saidou Kane and Murtuɗo Diop. While she was a

student at UCAD, she managed to land an internship at RTS. She recalls that Tidiane Anne

befriended her, giving her the nickname “kaŋŋe Fulɓe,” literally “Fulɓe gold.” This woman now

has steady employment teaching both Pulaar and Wolof with a language institute in Dakar.

There are other examples, as well. The current head of the NGO ARED, which is now

involved in a pilot project to introduce Wolof and Pulaar into a selected set of primary schools in

Senegal, began his career as a Pulaar literacy teacher. He is one of a number of Pulaar literacy

teachers I have met who have found work with NGOs, as well as national and international

development agencies. A famous example of a Pulaar writer and literacy activist who parlayed

his Pulaar skills into a successful career is Hamet Amadou Ly. A native of the village of

Mbooyo, author of multiple books and poetry albums, Ly regularly makes appearances at public

events and festivals that promote linguistic and cultural pride among Pulaar speakers. After years

working as a broadcaster for Diamano FM then Senegal’s Radio Nationale, Ly currently is a TV

host on the private channel 2sTV.

Though the Pulaar movement has provided some militants with tue pathway to a

relatively stable career, the experiences of such individuals are exceptional, as the chances of

finding work that demands the use of Pulaar are narrower than for French, Wolof or, in the case

of Mauritania, Hassaniya. In fact, a number of Senegalese Pulaar speakers who throughout their

lives have promoted their language have periodically taken jobs performing in Wolof-language

films or teaching Wolof literacy, because those decisions offered the greater possibility of

earning an income. In addition, one cannot forget the many Senegalese Pulaar speakers working

in the media who write and broadcast in French or Wolof.

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Though most of the Pulaar movement’s prominent figures are men, many rank-and-file

literacy students and teachers have been women. Humery (2013), using her impressive survey

work in the “Hakkunde Maaje” area of Fuuta Tooro (known to outsiders as the “'île à Morphil”),

observes that women made up the backbone of support for Pulaar literacy projects. In 2001, she

writes, over 11,000 women reported to have studied Pulaar literacy through PIP. Here, I turn to

several ethnographic examples involving women for whom their connections to Pulaar militancy

have profoundly shaped their life prospects.

Dieynaba Boubou Sow is a middle-aged woman who has been involved in Pulaar literacy

teaching for many years. She has been an important figure in ARP and she described to me many

years of challenging work, often for little if any compensation, as a Pulaar literacy teacher.

Though my meeting with her in 2010 took place in Senegal, where she has lived for most of her

life, she originally came from a family of Fulɓe herders in a village known as Deysarak, in

Mauritania. In her home, which is located in Sicap Mbao, just outside of Dakar, I noticed

laminated posters featuring images of celebrity Pulaar language activists, including Saidou Kane.

During a long, somewhat informal discussion of her experiences, she spoke about a trip she

made several years before to Germany and France. The main objective of the trip was to attend

the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair, to which writers from a variety of countries, including Brazil and

India, were invited. A book of hers, titled The Role and Upbringing of the Woman in Fulɓe

Society, was part of the exhibition. She had published it through ARED, the Senegalese NGO,

which- among its other roles- publishes books in in Pulaar. The Fair’s organizers had contacted

ARED asking if they could recommend someone to represent Senegal, and they picked Dieynaba

Boubou.

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My conversation with Dieynaba had occurred on the recommendation of my one of my

hosts in Dakar, Deffa Wane. Deffa is well connected in Pulaar activist circles and over the years

has played something of an elder stateswoman’s role in ARP-Tabbital Pulaaku. Finding myself

throughout that first summer of fieldwork at a loss for who to meet and attempt to interview,

Deffa had enthusiastically recommended Dieynaba Boubou Sow. Along with our interview,

Dieynaba wound up giving me a great souvenir. As we spoke, she located a copy of a newspaper

from 2007. The text of the newspaper, titled Ndoogu, was entirely in Pulaar. For several years

the publisher Mass Diack almost singlehandedly produced the now out-of-print broadsheet,

which often featured interesting long-form- though highly editorialized- pieces, often having to

do with issues of interest to the Pulaar movement. This particular issue of Ndoogu contained an

article detailing news of Dieynaba Boubou Sow’s trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which I quote

here in its near entirety:

Dieynaba Boubou Sow, who is currently 43 years old has never studied in public

schools (French or otherwise), but today she is a living example or image of the

written literature in National Languages. She has only studied Pulaar, is a teacher,

trainer, and writer and is also a representative and consultant for the

implementation of various types of projects. With the publication of her first book

called, The Role and Upbringing of the Woman in Fulɓe Society, by ARED in

2005, she was selected to represent her Senegalese publisher and all of Africa at the

International Book Fair held in Frankfurt, Germany from the 4th to the 8th of this

past October.

In a conversation she held with journalists when she returned, which was also

attended by leaders in promoting the culture and language . . . she summarized the

highlights of her trip. She spoke about the people she met, the connections she

made in Germany and France, all the places she passed through. In her words,

“even if English was the language most spoken at the fair, all the languages

represented there were given visibility, and were dignified and respected there. It

was very different than the gatherings we often encounter in Senegal where a few

languages are favored over the rest.” In the words of Awa Ka, Director of

Publishing for ARED, “when we received the invitation to the Frankfurt Book Fair,

given that this year’s focus was on the education of adults in National Languages,

our minds immediately went to Dieynaba Boubou Sow.” According to the head of

ARED, the American woman turned Senegalese Sonia Fagerberg-Diallo, “the goal

of the Book Fair this year was to strengthen ties between experts and organizations

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or entities working in the area of education in National Languages so that an

exchange of ideas develops among them.” With this in mind, four organizations

coming from Brazil, Germany, India along with ARED were called upon to share

the strategies they use in the struggle against illiteracy and to discuss the

experiences they have gained. Though Dieynaba Boubou’s counterparts from

Germany, Brazil and India have work in the area of public education or in other

professions like journalism, she does not yet have a place to work. Her situation in

Africa is considerably different from that of her counterparts, even if her presence

was significant to the cause of National Languages. In the words of Sonia,

“Dieynaba Boubou Sow is today among the leaders that have come together in the

movement that stands for getting rid of illiteracy in all of Africa, especially in

Senegal, by way of National Languages.”

It was not for nothing that Dieynaba Boubou Sow was selected. She was a worthy

pick because of the road she took over her 43 years to reach this point. Dieynaba

was born in Mauritania in a village called Deysarak in a household of cattle herders

(aynaaɓe wammiyaŋkooɓe) where household chores were regarded as the main role

for women. She was married (naatiri suudu fenaande) at age 11, and Allah gave

her a husband who understands her very well, and who has helped her to form the

plans and the courage to do what is good for her. In 1985, at 23 years old, she wrote

while at the Pulaar school at l‘École Souleymane Ball in Guediawaye, Dakar:

“I have never parted with my desire to study writing and reading comprehension, I

just did not have the chance. Due to my being a Pullo (Fulani) woman from a

religious household, I met with many challenges during the course of my studies,

both when it came to the means (proper venue, transit fares, etc.) and my

relationships (being misunderstood, resented)”. . . . As part of completing 300

hours of training, she and 70 others studied at lectures (hirjinooji) and received

training in writing. “Each of us would make contributions so that we could pay our

teacher. I was the only woman in the class.” That was the reason for the resentment

that many relatives felt towards her. “They spared me absolutely no form of

slander. If it wasn’t for my husband’s strength of character, my in-laws would have

removed me from my studies.” It was in 1992 that she obtained for the first time a

copy of a book, which ARED had published. Because of her efforts, she herself

became a role model for Pulaar. Within a year, she became a teacher-trainer. It was

then that she began to teach (pro bono- on a volunteer basis) for Fedde Ɓamtoore

Pulaar (ARP). This is an organization that she (Dieynaba) never ceases to promote

and celebrate. In her neighborhood, she went compound to compound in order to

teach her neighbors, and was active promoting cultural and social awareness.

Beyond that, she has worked with NGOs that need women like her as they travel

around the country. Currently, she has a significant role in the Senegalese national

branch of the large global organization ARP/Tabbital Pulaaku. In addition; she is

involved in small projects associated with social wellbeing, and helps organizations

that are seeking local collaborators. She also helps certain associations with their

income-generating projects, and works to create microfinance organizations. She

organizes a variety of public forums having to do with such issues as behavior

(among young people), education and HIV/AIDS. She has indicated that such

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activities have benefited her greatly, particularly in her family life, due to her being

a mother. “This is what has motivated me to pursue passionately my children’s

education and watch over our household finances” (Dia 2007).

As told by Demba Sileye Dia, the article’s author, Dieynaba Boubou Sow’s story hints at

many of the themes I discuss throughout this dissertation. Her story is one of perseverance and

sacrifice in the face of difficult odds, precisely the ethic of commitment emblematized by the

likes of Murtuɗo Diop. Her struggles with things like finding a venue for organizing Pulaar

classes or obtaining the fare necessary for where she needed to travel are common in personal

accounts or testimonials that emphasize yarlitaare, or volunteerism, in promoting the Pulaar

language. She also faced some of the same hostility and discouragement to her involvement in

Pulaar language activism that appears in some of the childhood recollections I discussed earlier

in this chapter. While many people’s recollections about their early interest in Pulaar address the

question of parental approval, here the article notes Dieynaba’s spousal support. Though Demba

Sileye Dia (and presumably Dieynaba herself) portrays the husband as supportive, the mention of

this support is noteworthy. In Dieynaba Boubou Sow’s case, her husband’s support provided her

with needed protection from the hostility of her in-laws, who were opposed to her enrollment in

Pulaar classes. Like some other women who I met and who had attained a degree of public

notoriety thanks to their participation in Pulaar literacy, theater or broadcasting, it seems that

Dieynaba had to deal with the kind of social pressure and anxiety that is often directed at women

who defy gender norms.

Dieynaba’s experience shows the possibilities that Pulaar language activism has held for

people who are able to parlay their involvement into a broad range of social contacts, as well as

work opportunities. Though never educated in public schools and coming from a family of

aynaaɓe herders in rural Mauritania, Dieynaba Boubou Sow’s participation in Pulaar language

activism earned her a degree of publicly recognized accomplishment that would have once been

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unimaginable to her. In addition, it seems her experience teaching Pulaar classes and literacy in

the language created other opportunities for her, as well, such as her role in aiding microfinance

and other income-generating projects. However, the feature article written about her in Ndoogu

also points out that, despite her record of accomplishment, her skills have not afforded her a

regular place to work. Steady, decently paying employment is hard to come by in West Africa,

including for many people educated in politically and economically dominant languages such as

French. Dieynaba Boubou Sow’s experience highlights the fact that in only limited instances has

there been investment in making written or spoken Pulaar (or other national languages, for that

matter) a viable language in the workplace. I should note that this is changing for the Wolof

language in Senegal. The status of Wolof in Senegal within government offices, political

institutions, commerce and the media has reached a point where it is challenging the role of

French as a language of power, though French remains dominant in many respects, particularly

in the education system.

Ramatoulaye Sy, who is a lifelong Pulaar language activist, told me of her experiences

with the real yet limited benefits of literacy in Pulaar in a context where Wolof and French

command significantly more influence and prestige. Though her family is originally from Diatar

in Fuuta Tooro (near Podor), she was raised in the eastern Senegalese city of Tambacounda.

Ramatoulaye dropped out of school at a young age and recalls that she soon found herself

rendered something of a mbindan (maid) in her compound. Eventually, she began attending

Pulaar classes through the city’s ARP branch and not too long after was teaching her own

classes. Ramatoulaye Sy has had a long-term and varied role related to Pulaar language activism.

She has periodically served as a radio broadcaster for at least one small radio station in Metro

Dakar. She also wrote for the Pulaar and Wolof-language newspaper Lasli-Njeelben, which

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appeared in Dakar and various parts of Senegal for a number of years but as of now is out of

print. One of Ramatoulaye’s regrets is never learning how to read and write in French. “It would

have helped,” she told me in 2010, “because I would have been able to access more knowledge

that I could then translate into Pulaar.”

A number of women I know use written Pulaar in their personal lives and in business

transactions. A woman I once met in a town located in Fuuta Tooro used written Pulaar in

conducting her daily business at the clothing store she owned and operated in her town. This

same woman also had her own show on a nearby community radio station, which consisted of a

loowdi program, a live, participatory on-air Dear Abby column. This woman will privately seek

out a friend or listener who is dealing with a personal or moral dilemma, which she will later

describe to the audience, making the changes in names and details necessary to protect

confidentiality. Once the broadcaster explains the moral quandary to the audience, listeners can

call in to the show and offer their opinions on the matter.

Another woman who has enjoyed success as a radio broadcaster is Jinndaa Dem, who I

met in 2010 and 2013. The first time we met each other she was sitting on a large cement

platform that extends from one of the houses in Katante Leñol’s compound. I had arrived in

Aañam Yeroyaaɓe from Thilogne, just a few miles away. It is not a difficult walk from Thilogne,

but I would learn during my 2013 visit that making it is not a particularly good idea, especially if

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it is clear that you are not a local6. I had briefly met Katante at an event earlier in 2010, at the

École Souleymane Ball. We had exchanged phone numbers and I had been excited to sit down

with him. Jinndaa had heard about my plans to visit and wanted to be there to greet me. Jinndaa’s

father, Yero Dem, had held a high position in Fedde Ɓamtoore Pulaar (or ARP) and he is

referred to on the back cover of one of his daughter’s books as “having been among the early

soldiers of the language” (Dem 1991). Jinndaa, whose legal name is Hapsatou Yero, has

established her own reputation as both a writer and broadcaster. She has published five books,

two of which I have in my possession. At our first meeting, she gave me a copy of one of them,

titled, Darnde Deɓɓo Pullo e Ɓamtaare (2009). The other book was published in 1991 by Binndi

Pulaar, a small Pulaar-language publishing outfit that was based in France. That book was titled

Uddooji Maayo Senegaal, or “The Closures of the Senegal River,” which explained to readers

both the positive and negative consequences of the Manantali Dam Project. As its title suggests,

Deɓɓo Pullo e Ɓamtaare (this literally translates as “the Fulani Woman and Development”) is an

overview of issues Jinndaa believes require women’s involvement, including education, politics,

commerce and migration. Jinndaa dedicates the book to other women who have been involved in

the Pulaar movement, including Mauritanian poet Haby Zakaria Konte and Kummba Kudi Bah,

who is a Pulaar language activist based in France. Near the end of the book, the reader finds

6 In February 2013, I decided to walk from Aañam to Thilogne the morning after attending a wedding party for the

Katante’s son. I had just passed the village of Barga when a truckload of armed gendarmes passed me headed in the

opposite direction. Their truck immediately turned around and I knew this was not going to be a routine exchange of

pleasantries. I awkwardly shook all of their hands and was interrogated on the side of the road by a man named

“Seck,” who spoke Pulaar and appeared to be their commander. Thank God I had my Passport with me. Why had I

travelled to Mauritania in the past? What about Gambia? I am studying Pulaar, I said. Of course, my phone was dead

so I could not corroborate any of this. He briefly spoke with Tidiane Kane, my host in Thilogne, but my battery did

not give him time to explain everything to Seck, who told me he did not have a basis for arresting me but assured me

I would be found if he eventually had one. Why would I walk alone when there are bandits or criminals around?

Seck and his fellow gendarmes left me to walk the rest of the way.

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several short poems and messages, some of which Jinndaa wrote more than twenty years ago. I

have translated one of them here:

To my African Sister,

Listen to what I have to say!

My sister, come and learn about who you are!

My sister, broaden your culture’s horizons!

You better know that it is time for you to take a stand!

Come show your determination!

Stand with courage!

Until you assume your rightful place!

Until you assert your dignity!

Empowered in your solidarity!

Come and say what you have to say!

Follow the path your culture shows you!

Liberate your people!

You better know, my sister, that progress depends on us, as our men have risen and

declared that if we do not go along we won’t succeed!

Just like a single bracelet on a wrist cannot jingle by itself

So, my little girl, take my hand

Let’s hold on to one another, and stir together our respective experiences.

Jinndaa Dem, May 25, 1989 (Dem 2009, p. 34)

Born in 1968, Jinndaa is from the small town of Aañam Coɗay, just a couple of miles to

the west of Yeroyaaɓe. That is where I found her when I last saw her, managing her family’s

household in the absence of her husband, who was living in France. Jinndaa herself had traveled

to France multiple times, where early on in her career as a Pulaar-language author she received

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celebrity treatment from members of Kawtal Janngooɓe Pulaar Fulfulde. Based in Mantes-la-

Jolie, France, KJPF has both Senegalese and Mauritanian members and the organization has

conducted Pulaar literacy teaching for several decades. I learned about Jinndaa’s travels the

second time I met her, in 2013. We first crossed paths that year at a “Soixante douze heures”

festival in Asnde Bala, a village located 8 or 9km west of Coɗay and Yeroyaaɓe. I was seated in

stands that had been set up behind the stage where those invited to talk made their speeches. At

one point, I heard a woman’s voice warning people- particularly her fellow women- of efforts

made by “tuubakooɓe” (White People!) to introduce artificial baby formula in their country. The

essence of her speech was that imported formula was not as good for their babies as their own

breast milk. Jinndaa and I crossed paths later that evening and she half-apologized to me for

criticizing “tuubakooɓe,” though I admitted that we deserved it.

Not long after that, we met at her compound, a welcoming place at the southern end of

her village, with two multi-story buildings flanking a sizeable common area. The two of us spent

all day chatting, some of it small talk. During the course of the day, several friends stopped by to

say hello, and by late afternoon, several children and young adolescents living in the compound

had returned from school and other social activities. The living room we sat in was large, with

shiny white tiles, a TV set and cushions for sitting or lying down ran along the walls. Jinndaa

revealed an impressive archive of materials, from VHS tapes, to audio cassettes, many of which

consisted of radio broadcasts she had recorded for RTS Matam and Pete FM. She has also

recorded broadcasts for Salndu Fuuta FM in Thilogne. Her work in broadcasting has included-

but is not limited to- interviews with local officials about aspects of the Senegalese government’s

effort towards decentralization and conversations with well-known Pulaar language activists.

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She spent hours showing me her collection of VHS and audio material. She played one of

the videos on her VCR, showing a series of special events KJPF held in France in her honor.

Included in the footage is a scene where Katante, who himself lives in France, sings a poem

about her. In 2015, Jinndaa and her book Darnde Deɓɓo Pullo e Ɓamtaare were the subject of a

“dédicace” or, as it is known in Pulaar, “a day of celebrating” (ñalawma mawningol). Film of the

event was edited into a documentary that can be found on YouTube, and was produced by none

other than our friend Abou Gaye.

What appears to be Abou’s footage begins outside of the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye

(formerly known as the Centre Bopp), and begins with the reknown Senegalese author Cheikh

Hamidou Kane praising Jinndaa for her work. Kane remarked that his own writings, such as

l‘Aventure Ambigüe (known in Pulaar as Innta Aaniinde), also addressed the role of women. The

film then takes the viewer to an upper floor of one of the office buildings within the Centre,

where the NGO USE has its headquarters. The organizers held the event in a room with the kinds

of brown-painted cement walls that are characteristic of the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye. They

had arranged numerous rows of plastic chairs to seat attendees and these faced a table for

dignitaries due to speak at the event, all of whom had something to say about Jinndaa’s book and

her role as a writer. I did not recognize all of the guests but I did know several of them. One of

the guests was Deffa Wane. Other guests I immediate recognized included the poet and actor

Amadou Moctar Thiam and Saidou Bah, a native of Ndulumaaji Dembe and head of KJPF in

Mantes-la-Jolie.

Men gave most of the speeches made during the main event, with the few exceptions

devoted mainly to singing performances. The remarks portrayed Jinndaa as a role model for

other women to follow. This sentiment is first expressed by Ceerno Cherif Sy, an ally and

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confidant of Ceerno Madani Tall. Though Ceerno Madani had been invited to offer his blessings

at the start of the meeting, a variety of travel obligations had made that difficult. Ceerno Cherif

had the following to say about Jinndaa:

All of us have been to many events like this where men from our community (those

who speak our language) have been honored. But, I have to say, is the first time I

have seen something like this having to do with Pulaar in honor of a woman. That

said, Madam Jinndaa, we are very happy and may Allah take care of people like

you. . . . Let’s offer Jinndaa our prayers, and let’s also offer our prayers to our

women- may Allah see to it that they emulate Jinndaa Dem’s example (Lewlewal

Communication 2015).

Mamdou Diop, the Secretary of the Union pour le Solidarité et l’Entraide (USE)- the

NGO originally founded by Amadou Malick Gaye- also made a statement regarding the

importance of Jinndaa’s example for other women and for the cause of promoting National

Languages in education.

Her success should be an example for a number of women out there, showing them

that anything can be achieved with Pulaar. Any kind of respect or distinction can be

had with it, and any kind of knowledge can be stored in it (Lewlewal

Communication 2015).

Another speaker at the event listed Jinndaa’s accomplishments and roles, which included

serving as ARP’s representative in her hometown, as well as working as Vice President of the

Fédération des Associations du Fouta pour le Développement (FAFD). She also served two

terms as a councilor to the Communauté Rurale of the “Agnams,” or “Aañameeje.” Like

Dieynaba Boubou Sow, she has also been involved in local microfinance projects. In addition to

Pulaar, Jinndaa Dem is also literate in French and Wolof.

Jinndaa Dem’s stature notwithstanding, there is no woman in the Pulaar movement

whose fame has reached the celebrity status of an Elhadj Tidiane Anne, Murtuɗo Diop or Ndiaye

Saidou Amadou. Women Pulaar language activists, even those who establish themselves more or

less successfully, tend not to enjoy the same profits of distinction as do ngenndiyaŋke men. Why

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is this? I don’t have a complete answer, but I do believe that one aspect of it has to do with

different degrees of mobility available to men and women. A gendered division of labor in which

mothers assume vital household responsibilities, such as child care, cleaning and cooking, not to

mention helping to tend to animals and livestock makes it very hard for many of them to come

and go as they please. The prolonged, multi-village tours, attendance at nighttime rallies, speech

giving, media appearances, all of which are a part of how certain male Pulaar language activists

maintain their public profiles, are simply not as accessible to women.

One particularly awkward conversation highlighted the issue of unequal mobility

between men and women. The conversation occurred during a visit to the Nouakchott apartment

of a woman who has been involved in Pulaar literacy teaching for many years and even has

published books in the language. During our conversation, she discussed how she basically ran

her household on behalf of her husband, who lives in Belgium. A friend of hers stopped by to

meet me and chat late in the afternoon. At one point, something I said prompted the other guest

to ask me, “did she tell you about the new wife her husband has in Belgium?”

No, she had not. The guest was incredulous. “Why wouldn’t you clarify that?” she asked

our host.

My host seemed deeply annoyed and responded defensively. “That’s not what brought

him here! That’s not why we are spending the day together. He is not here because he is

interested in whether I have a co-wife, we are here to talk about Pulaar!”

I felt bad for her, even though the fact that I write this story makes its occurrence my own

ethnographic gain. I got the sense that given the relative independence with which this woman

activist conducts her life and the respect she has earned among many male Pulaar militants, her

co-wife status is a shameful reminder that she is not immune to certain indignities that often

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befall women where she comes from. I also could be wildly wrong in this. Maybe she just

thought the matter was none of my business. In fact, with her husband’s second wife in Belgium

getting all his attention, this activist may have even more freedom to go about her life, despite

her role as sole caretaker of the children who live in her apartment.

During one of my fieldwork trips, I spoke at length with a woman who has been involved

with Pulaar-related organizing for much of her life and I wanted to know her view about why

Pulaar language activist networks often look like boy’s clubs. I introduced the question by

commenting that I had recently attended a meeting of a prominent Pulaar activist organization

and not a single woman was present, to which she responded with the following statement:

Women have bigger problems than their lack of presence at a meeting. Because,

here in this country, women have many challenges . . . (and) when any woman

stands up in a public setting, 80% of those observing her- even her friends she

interacts the most with and shares the same views and ideas with- with whom she

works night and day- they will go home and say of her to their wives, “she is not a

woman that is worthy of marriage.” Those who you think are your friends, that’s

what they will say about you if you are a woman! They will say, “she is insolent,

she cannot be controlled,” as if you are a goat or a ram. That is how they will

regard you! It is that standard by which they judge you. If you regard a person as

someone to be dominated psychologically and have achieved that domination, then

the person won’t be capable of anything. We women have many problems when it

comes to our role in society, with where we are born, where we come from-

problems between us and our parents- “don’t stand,” “don’t move,” “don’t exist!”

You have problems in the public arena that you occupy- with the men you meet

there, what you are exposed to, what you experience there, how you are perceived

there- even if you offer an opinion, it’s a WOMAN who expressed that opinion.

Even if you bring an opinion, they will question whether you understand what you

are saying. Those who most loudly proclaim today that they are ngenndiyaŋkooɓe,

it is they more than anyone who step on women and keep them down. With any of

them, whatever the strength of his ngenndiyaŋkaagal- that is how strongly his foot

will be planted on his woman . . . (and) I say that however much he may be a

ngenndiyaŋke, that is the extent to which he will NOT be a ngenndiyaŋke when it

comes to his wife (Interview with anonymous participant, July 30, 2012).

The sense of frustration she expresses seems understandable if one considers what comes

across as a major paradox of the Pulaar movement: On the one hand, women make up a large

portion of the movement’s foot soldiers through their involvement in literacy activities and

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NGO-sponsored literacy projects. On the other, women- as I have stated- make up few of those

most celebrated by the movement’s militants. It is no surprise to me when, as I cited above, the

Imam Cherif Sy declared at the “dédicace” of Jinndaa Dem’s book that he had never seen such

an event where a woman was the main guest of honor.

The Right to the Spoils of Linguistic Militancy

The politics of language loyalty bound up in the Pulaar movement do not merely have to

do with who gets to speak for or represent the Pulaar-speaking “renndo.” Nor do they have

solely to do with the sense of “moral panic” (Cameron 1995) that is drummed up about

supposedly existential threats to Pulaar. I believe the politics of language loyalty I am examining

here are also about who has earned the right to enjoy the specific kinds of social recognition,

personal contacts and friendships that come with membership in the community of activists. For

many Pulaar militants, whether involved in theater, broadcasting or literacy, the promotion of

Pulaar is not merely instrumental, or something they do just because it might give them the

contacts they need to get ahead; their credibility and stature among fellow Pulaar language

activists and their sympathizers is often hard earned. Their air of commitment to Pulaar-related

causes, as well as knowledge about those causes, are not things one can simply impersonate.

These practices must be learned and internalized through long periods of immersion in the Pulaar

movement’s social milieu.

For certain Pulaar language activists, it is particularly galling when someone who has

apparently not paid his or her dues attempts to cash in on the benefits that are thought to

rightfully belong to those who have demonstrated- or performed- true commitment. The anxiety

that some express about so-called “lonngereyaŋkooɓe,” or people who make a show of Pulaar

militancy for their own personal gain, may have to do with the importance to long-time Pulaar

language activists of the social capital that comes with their own roles in the movement. In a

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sense, this concern acts as a gatekeeping mechanism preventing participation in the movement as

just another livelihood-securing tactic potentially available to everybody.

As I discussed with respect to language loyalty in the previous chapter, the question of

“how much has Kaari7 done for Pulaar?” or “which one of these people has done more for

Pulaar” have arisen in leadership struggles in organizations such as ARP-Tabbital Pulaaku. What

is at stake seems to be the question of who has earned the right not only to represent the

organization, but to enjoy the benefits and prestige that come with a leadership role. The case of

former RTS TV personality Aicha Guisse underscores this issue. Many Pulaar language activists

I know personally are loyal viewers of the relatively few Pulaar programs that appear on

Senegalese TV stations. A number of them resented Guisse’s coveted role of hosting one of

those programs due to her perceived questionable loyalty to the language and the movement.

Matters become worse when the perception grows, as it did for Guisse, that the TV or radio

personality in question does not speak Pulaar confidently or uses a lot of Wolof or French words

when they speak it.

Veteran Pulaar literacy activists, broadcasters or theater performers lament the passing of

a bygone era in which significant numbers of people were willing to teach Pulaar on a volunteer

basis. This bit of nostalgia often pairs with the allegation that the introduction of lots of

temporary paying jobs teaching Pulaar, often through NGOs, diminished people’s willingness to

volunteer for Pulaar-related causes.

In 1996, Minister for Literacy and Basic Education Mamadou Ndoye, an opposition

member of then-President Abdou Diouf’s government, helped secured a loan from the World

Bank of $12.6 million. The loan was devoted to a five-year program aimed at teaching basic

7 “Kaari” is a generic name, like “so and so” or “John or Jane Doe.”

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literacy in Senegal’s National Languages, particularly among women. From 1996-2001, the

Programme d’Alphabétisation Priorité Femme (PAPF), as it was known, was to facilitate the

teaching of literacy in National Languages to 135,000 Senegalese, 75% of them women

(Nordtveit 2009). Within the political context of Senegal, the World Bank loan reflected the

government’s concern that illiteracy was posing a major hindrance to the country’s development.

However, according to a former Pulaar militant who was among Senegalese NGO

representatives responsible for overseeing the project, there was little attention paid to

longstanding efforts by people in the country to read and write in their own languages.

Depoliticizing literacy by rendering it a development issue made for a project that was

divorced from the questions of cultural pride and power that had inspired Pulaar language

activists. In the event, the implementation of the project wound up empowering- if temporarily-

many people who had little involvement in or knowledge of the Pulaar movement, while

experienced militants who had for years taught Pulaar, often on a volunteer basis, lacked the

connections and familiarity with how to obtain financing from an initiative like PAPF. Those

most well positioned to reap the short-term benefits of the PAPF-financed sub-projects were not

Pulaar language activists, but outsiders to the movement. The project’s eliding of the political

and social context into which it waded, as well as its insistence on treating literacy as a

development issue distinct from politics is part of what Ferguson (1990) identified as an “anti-

politics machine.” The anti-politics machine, according to Ferguson, depoliticizes development

by representing its concerns- literacy, farming, etc.- as problems to be solved by technocrats

rather than as fields of power that are embedded in political and economic relationships of

inequality.

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Where Ferguson’s analysis of the anti-politics machine as it played out in Lesotho

showed the World Bank as viewing the that country’s government as technocratic instrument of

development, with PAPF it was “civil society” that was so fetishized (See Nordveit 2009) .

Making NGOs and so-called “civil society” groups in general the key to spreading literacy was

characteristic of the 1990s, a period of apparent democratization around Africa. Jaded by the

corruption of post-independence regimes promoting state-led growth and even various forms of

socialism, the development community stumbled upon civil society as the democratizing and

liberalizing antidote to Africa’s problems. This dovetailed with a global context in which

neoliberal economics prescribed the privatization of public services and the marketization of

social and cultural life.

What was the rationale for the allegation that PAPF reduced the extent to which people

were willing to teach Pulaar on a volunteer basis? The ethic of volunteerism had previously

persisted partly because of the possibility that it could result in paid employment down the line,

but those returns were not immediate. “People did not merely get into teaching Pulaar for the

money,” I was told, “they did it because they loved it.” However, he added that, “there are many

people who have various kinds of work with projects today who got their through a spirit of

volunteerism (yarlitaare), teaching Pulaar for no pay” (Interview with anonymous participant,

December 16, 2014). This prospect helped people maintain their enthusiasm. The argument

seems to be that before the World Bank loan that brought PAPF to Senegal in the 1990s those

opportunities to work jobs using Pulaar literacy tended to be available only to long-term

activists. The activist who worked with PAPF specified what he saw as the connection between

the introduction of the project and the perceived decline in militancy in the Pulaar literacy

movement.

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All over Senegal, there had been people who had long been killing themselves as

volunteers, killing themselves for the sake of teaching the language. But when the

(World Bank) funding came and people were being paid and told “come and

teach,” those who had been fighting the fight for a long time got nothing. There

was absolutely no attention paid to strengthening already existing efforts at

teaching national languages and incorporating them in the project. They just

wanted to get the money out there. Let me give you an example: Let’s say the two

of us are from the same village. You, Ousmane, you have never been interested in

Pulaar literacy. You have never volunteered, never sacrificed for it. Meanwhile, me

and others, we are standing up for it, killing ourselves for it and have given

ourselves to such a point that the entire leñol recognizes our efforts. Suddenly, we

wake up one morning and hear you have received funding and you come to me

saying you want us to teach Pulaar for classes you need to organize. However, I see

that with the money you received you purchased a car, or I see that you have

purchased bicycles or a motorcycle. But I know that you used to not have money

and that it is the funding for Pulaar classes that you used to buy those things, and

now you tell me you want me to come help you because I am the one with actual

experience teaching Pulaar!? And you won’t even pay me!? Of course, I will say

no! This kind of thing frustrated many people. People who taught for a long time

on a volunteer basis began saying “with those other people getting money for

Pulaar literacy, if we are not paid, we will not teach” (Interview with anonymous

participant, December 16, 2014).

I encountered this perspective on the effects that the arrival of international development

funding had on popular enthusiasm for the Pulaar movement on several occasions. One of the

people echoing the view expressed above is someone who has been involved in Pulaar literacy

since the 1980s in both Kaolack and Dakar. Speaking about the experience of Penngal Mamadou

Alassane Bah, he reflected somewhat bitterly about the role of the Projet d’Appui au Plan

d’Action en matière d’éducation non formelle (PAPA), which was also launched under the

ministry of Mamadou Ndoye.

In 1993, a project arrived, it was called “PAPA” and it was aimed at teaching

National Languages. When it came to Senegal, people were given, shall we say,

encouragement, in the form of monetary compensation. When this happened,

Pulaar literacy education died. Nothing killed Pulaar literacy but this. When the

literacy projects came, they gave people equipment and paid them but the agenda of

organizations like PAPA dictate what is taught. Back in the 1980s, it was all about

volunteerism (yarlitaare), you love Pulaar and you go teach it. But when these

projects came, there was a decrease in literacy teaching. I don’t see how these

projects like PAPA came to help Pulaar. They came here to fill nothing but their

own pockets! They and the government only cared about the paperwork showing

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that ten thousand people studied here, but paid no attention to who among them

actually understood what they learned (Interview with Sam Faatoy Kah, June 19,

2015).

As the critical comments about PAPF and PAPA indicate, the Pulaar movement is bound

up in international development politics and forms of governmentality in which functions

thought to belong to the state become the province of NGOs (See Mann 2015). When defined as

a development issue placed in the hands of “civil society,” projects having to do with literacy

and other issues depoliticize local questions of power and cultural identity that motivate people’s

commitments.

The opportunities to make a living through the use of written or spoken Pulaar are quite

limited. Nevertheless, this chapter has highlighted some very significant ways in which, despite

the well-known limitations, participation in the Pulaar movement has powerfully affected many

lives. As I have stated throughout this dissertation, the experience of involvement with Pulaar

language activism opened for many people access to social networks, friendships and on-the-

ground experience teaching, performing and speaking in public. For many Pulaar language

activists, these networks and experiences have become resources that enriched their lives at a

time when land grabs, austerity and climatological changes threaten the viability of livelihood

practices that have long maintained the social fabric of the region.

The practices of worldliness that characterize Pulaar language activists like Abou Gaye,

Jinndaa Dem, Dieynaba Boubou Sow or even Sam Faatoy Kah are not unique to the movement

to which they are connected. What is important is understanding their sociolinguistic solidarity

as embedded within the range of options and resources people in a rapidly changing West

African context can call upon in times of uncertainty. From the perspective of language activism,

this theme provides an interesting ethnographic angle through which to analyze emergent

movements because it shows what happens when regimes of language and ethnonational loyalty

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interact with multiethnic, “worlded” regimes of practice that characterize the urban life.

Linguistic identity does not simply die or phase out in favor of an ethnically transcendent, post-

ethnic order. Rather, language loyalty is redeployed and can be the basis for a profit of

distinction through which certain people occupying the expanding and increasingly concentrated

urban landscape can access a self-validating sense of public recognition and valuable material

resources.

There is a clearly gendered dynamic when it comes to the right to publicly represent the

movement. Jindaa Dem and the small number of women who have gained a degree of fame

among Pulaar language activists are not only an exception; they appear to be an exception that

proves the rule. Watching the video of her book dedication, I cannot escape the feeling that the

men speaking are somehow vouching for her, letting everyone know it is safe to approve of

Jinndaa’s work. Dieynaba Boubou Sow persisted in her efforts with the help of her husband’s

protection for resentful in-laws. Another woman cited above vents angrily about the hypocrisy of

male “ngenndiyaŋkooɓe” when it comes to their views on women. Many more women (and men)

have worked hard to learn how to read and write and even teach Pulaar, with little recognition

beyond their immediate neighborhoods and often little compensation. A number of women have

gained considerable local (even quasi-national) celebrity through media engagements in Pulaar.

They include TV journalists, as well as broadcasters working at community radio stations in the

part of Fuuta that lies in Northern Senegal. I turn to this discussion in the next chapter, which

also looks at how the men and women at those community radio stations are involved in the

promotion of a renewed sense of shared community among Senegalese and Mauritanian

Fuutaŋkooɓe. The role of the community radio stations offers a glimpse into yet another domain

in which modes of governance spawned by the rolling back of the state and the emergence of the

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international development industry have influence Pulaar language activism in Senegal and

Mauritania.

Figure 7-1. Abou Gaye at the Lewlewal office at the Centre Amadou Malick Gaye in Dakar,

Senegal. Photo courtesy of author.

Figure 7-2. Front from L to R, image of author Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Jinndaa Dem and Deffa

Wane from the documentary footage of Jinnda’s “dédicace.” Source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVPycPpFvr0

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CHAPTER 8

LANGUAGE ACTIVISM ON THE AIRWAVES: PULAAR COMMUNITY RADIO

BROADCASTING IN THE SENEGAL RIVER VALLEY

Since the early 2000s, several community radio stations have been established in

Northern Senegal along the middle Senegal River Valley, or Fuuta Tooro. The reasons and

motivations for creating these radio stations varied somewhat but they had in common a

connection with the international development industry. In the town of Thilogne, where one of

the radios is now located, local politicians and community members thought that a community

radio station would address what they saw as a lack of communication between the mayor and

his constituents. In 2004, Ardèche Drome Ouro Sogui Sénégal (ADOS), a partnership between,

on the one hand, the departments of Ardèche and Drome and the city of Valence in France and,

on the other, elected officials in Senegal’s Région de Matam, offered to support the initiative.

The people in Thilogne established a Comité de Gestion to oversee the radio (so that it would not

be entirely under the mayor’s control) and the Senegalese Ministry of Communication along

with the Autorité de Régulation des Telecommunications et des Postes approved their frequency,

88.3 FM. Another community radio station, known as Timtimol (Rainbow) FM, is based in Ouro

Sogui, Senegal and was established by the Projet de Développement Agricole de Matam

(PRODAM), an agricultural development project that had originated as an emergency

intervention to help 7,000 refugees who had been expelled from Mauritania in 1989 (IFAD

2004). The creation of Radio Timtimol, which began broadcasting in 2002, was inspired by a

lack of Pulaar-language media content available to the local population, particularly herders,

farmers and fishermen- the groups PRODAM is most concerned with assisting.

The two radio stations I have mentioned here, as well as several others I will discuss in

this chapter, regularly air broadcasts about the pressing socioeconomic needs of the Senegal

River Valley. At various points, they have been funded by NGOs, international governmental

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organizations and agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, USAID, Tostan and Institut PANOS, a

French NGO which promotes press freedom in the Sahel Region. Sometimes, these organizations

will offer the community radios contracts to run broadcasts targeting those most affected by

issues such as maternal and child health, education, as well as economic and environmental

conditions that threaten the viability of livelihoods made through farming, fishing and herding.

This chapter examines another aspect of these radios’ broadcasting practices, one that

may be overlooked by a narrow focus on the development agendas and shifting dynamics of

governance of which the radios are emblematic. These latter include an international discourse

and agenda that privileges “civil society” as a driver of development (Comaroff and Comaroff

1999; Nordtveit 2009), as well as the NGO-ization of social services and administrative

functions that were once solely under the purview of African governments (Mann 2015). The

radio stations I look at here broadcast mostly and, in some cases, exclusively in Pulaar, the most

widely spoken language in Fuuta Tooro. Moreover, the on-air personalities and programs at

these radio stations are profoundly influenced by the Pulaar movement in Senegal and

Mauritania. In addition to the socioeconomic issues the radios are concerned with, broadcasting

content at all of the radio stations at where I conducted fieldwork evokes concerns, interests and

themes that have long been the concern of Pulaar language activists.

Some of the programs at the community radios stations make frank attempts to change

attitudes and linguistic behavior among their fellow Pulaar speakers, exhorting them to be proud

of their language and to insist on using it whenever possible. Many of the broadcasters have

backgrounds of deep, long-term commitment to Pulaar linguistic and cultural activism. Some of

them read and write Pulaar using the Latin-based orthography, having learned it through militant

cultural associations like the Association pour la Renaissance du Pulaar (ARP-Tabbital Pulaaku,

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or Fedde Ɓamtoore Pulaar) or NGOs such as Tostan. Some were respected poets or performers

before they came to their radio stations, having been groomed in the various village cultural

associations (goomuuji pinal) that can be found in villages throughout Fuuta.

In addition to discussing the range of contextual factors that shape the roles of Fuuta’s

community radio stations, there are two main themes I address in this article. Both of them

highlight the way so-called “development” projects can provide new opportunities for the

expression of ethno-linguistic claims in ways unanticipated by the goals set out by a project’s

architects. First, the community radio stations are another reminder of the significance electronic

mediation has had for language activists (Eisenlohr 2004). In this case, the significance can be

found both in the way broadcasters make arguments that speak to the relationship between

language and power and how radio can serve as an arena subjecting language to interventions

that have the potential to recast its use. I draw on my fieldwork, as well as examples from

recorded broadcasts, to show how these community radios are a sounding board for ideological

arguments about how Pulaar should be spoken and how the language should be promoted.

Second, Fuuta Tooro’s community radio stations have a trans-border appeal that is built

on the linguistic, cultural, political and economic ties that have crisscrossed the Senegal River for

centuries. The trans-border linguistic, cultural and kinship ties shared by Senegalese and

Mauritanian Haalpulaar’en have been understood as a form of “local citizenship” (Fresia 2009)

that certain Fuutaŋkooɓe enjoy in addition to the rights that come with their status as either

Senegalese or Mauritanians. Building on my argument in Chapter 5, I argue that the community

radio stations sustain a transborder linguistic citizenship (Stroud 2001) that has been a resource

with which Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar language activists have formulated some of the

ethno-political claims that they have pursued in their respective countries.

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This chapter is based on interviews and participant-observation conducted among radio

hosts affiliated with the following community radio stations: Radio Timtimol in Ouro Sogui

(91.9 FM), Radio Salndu Fuuta in Thilogne (88.3 FM), Pete FM in Pete, Senegal (102.0 FM),

Fuuta FM in Pete, Senegal (90.7 FM) and Cas-Cas FM in Cas-Cas, Senegal (95.7 FM). In

addition to radio show hosts, I conducted extensive informal conversations, participant-

observation and some recorded interviews with other people who participate in the life of these

radio stations. They include people who call into or appear as guests on shows, regular listeners

and those who submit announcements or socialize at the offices or around the compounds where

the radio stations are located.

The bulk of the fieldwork on which this chapter is based was conducted between

December 2012 and March 2013. Brief follow-up visits were made during the summers of 2015

and 2016. Since 2013, a new radio station has been founded in riverine community of Demet,

Senegal, right across the river from the important Mauritanian market town of Boghe, while the

stations Ngatamaare (the first planting rain) FM and Doumga FM have been established in the

respective Senegalese villages of Ndioum and Doumga Wuro Alpha. Yet another radio station

has been created in Galoya, Senegal, just 12km from Pete. That is not all. In the small

Senegalese town Agnam Siwol, Mayor and Deputy Farba Ngom, a griot (gawlo) and power

player in President Macky Sall’s ruling party, has sponsored the creation of his own radio

station. Those who described his initiative to me characterized it as a “rajo politik,” or “political

radio.” However, during my most recent brief visit to Fuuta in 2016, Farba’s station was off the

air. The Mauritanian side of the Middle Senegal Valley also has a radio station reaching listeners

on both banks of the river. In 2010, the Mauritanian government created Gorgol FM in Kaedi as

a part of its chain of national radio affiliates. Though a plurality of the broadcasts air- not

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uncontroversially- in Hassaniya, as of 2013 Pulaar was allocated 2-3 hours of programming a

day.

The River Valley’s Community Radios in Context

For decades after independence, most inhabitants of the Senegal River Valley

experienced a glaring lack of radio content in their own languages. Even on the south bank, the

Senegalese side of Fuuta Tooro, Mauritania’s national radio often provided the only content that

was available in Pulaar. For many around the River Valley, even the regional radio in Saint-

Louis, originally established by the colonial regime in in the 1930s (Barry 2013), was difficult to

tune in to, especially as one ventured further away into Fuuta. More than one Senegalese

Fuutaŋke has told me that the programs they most remember people listening to aired on

Mauritania’s national radio. One of them had the distinct memory of regularly hearing the

strumming of the one-stringed molo instrument by Kamarel, who used to perform from a studio

in Nouakchott. Other popular Pulaar programs airing on Mauritania’s national radio over the

years included those of the late Amadou Sarr, some of whose broadcasts circulate today on

cassettes and on the hard drives and USB keys of Pulaar enthusiasts.

Things changed considerably starting in the 2000s. Soon after the creation of Senegal’s

Matam region (previously part of the Région of Saint-Louis) in 2003, RTS opened up its affiliate

Matam FM (89.1) (Barry 2013), which still airs today. During the same decade, Fuuta Tooro’s

community radio stations began their emergence, as well. At the beginning of the chapter, I

mentioned how Timtimol FM began broadcasting in 2002, even before Matam FM. Timtimol

FM was itself based in Matam for many years but in 2010 relocated 10km southwest to Ouro

Sogui, which has eclipsed Matam as an urban center and is conveniently located at the

intersection of the N2 and the freshly-paved N3 highways. PRODAM, which launched Timtimol

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FM, was originally funded by loans from the West African Development Bank and the

International Fund for Agricultural Development, the latter a UN agency.

In addition to the initial investments by ADOS, Radio Salndu Fuuta received many

contributions from sons and daughters of Thilogne living in Dakar and abroad. Like other radio

stations in the area, Radio Salndu Fuuta receives contracts from agencies and NGOs to run

broadcasts about themes related to those organizations’ particular fields of expertise. Pete FM,

which began its broadcasts in 2004, was launched with the help of money from USAID, as well

as significant assistance from Pete originaires living in Gabon. Cascas FM, which sits almost

literally a stone’s throw from the Senegal River, benefitted from the help of people from

surrounding villages, as well as people from Cascas living abroad, including in France. The

outlier here is Fuuta FM, which was created and funded, at least initially, by the mayor of Pete,

who pays at least some (though I cannot definitively say all) of his staff. The Director of Fuuta

FM, Idi Gaye, had had extensive radio experience, including at Cascas FM and at Pete FM, from

where he and others were fired under circumstances that are disputed by all sides involved. The

nature of Fuuta FM’s creation, coming as it did after the transfer of the Communauté Rurale

from Pete to nearby Ɓoke Jalluɓe, heightened the sense of rivalry between the two Pete-based

radio stations. More recently, the longtime head of Pete FM was removed and is now working at

the new radio station in Galoya. Meanwhile, he has been replaced by a Fuuta FM broadcaster

who had himself previously been employed at Pete FM.

The broadcasters working at these radio stations have many connections to the broader

Pulaar movement. As I discuss below, many of the community radio staff I met were literate in

Pulaar, and some even had prior broadcasting experience. Idi Gaye, the director of Fuuta FM,

launched his broadcasting career at Diamono FM in Dakar, which had attracted a number of

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Pulaar militants, most of whom worked there on a volunteer basis. Many of those I met would

reference Tijjaani Aan, Murtuɗo Diop and other well-known Pulaar language activists as

pioneers who helped make possible the work they do today.

Community radio has a vibrant presence in the Sahel region, bringing local news and

cultural content in multiple languages to both rural and urban areas. Tower’s (2005) discussion

of community radio engagements in and around Kouthiala, Mali highlights a range of exciting

possibilities and challenges that are similar to those that characterize community radio in Fuuta.

The radios have ushered in a new mediation of social relationships through which longstanding

cultural practices are expressed through the airwaves. For a small fee, family members of

deceased submit funeral announcements to their local radio stations, where before they would

have sent messengers on foot, bicycle or horseback to inform relatives in surrounding villages.

The radios also collect proceeds from announcements of local cultural festivals, weddings

or advertisements submitted by local marabouts and spiritual healers. When a herder loses a cow,

goat or sheep he can submit (either in person or by sending an emissary with a note and the

necessary fee) an announcement to his nearest radio station describing the missing animal. In

addition, I more than once witnessed people submitting announcements about missing persons.

In two cases, the missing were children, one a Koranic student the other a public school student,

who had run away from the communities where they had been boarding.

Recently, Radio Salndu Fuuta has been partnering with the Senegalese Ministry of

Education, airing broadcasts that explain important changes in national education policy on the

Ministry’s behalf. In return, the radio station receives some much-needed financial support.

According to one of the radio station’s announcers, attempting to reach parents of students via

community radios is a new strategy for the Ministry of Education. Before, he told me, they

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primarily sponsored broadcasts through larger, public and private radio stations based in urban

areas such as Dakar. Apparently, the Ministry of Education was not getting its money’s worth

because those larger radio stations demanded greater fees. Moreover, those radio stations often

broadcast mainly in Wolof and French, bypassing audiences who did not learn French or who are

from language groups other than the Wolof.

It is commonly claimed that over 80% of Senegalese speak Wolof, which is the lingua

franca in much of the country. Strictly speaking, this is likely true, but can also be misleading.

The Wolof proficiency among people of various ethnic groups can vary widely and even among

them who speak Wolof well, Wolof might not always be the language they primarily use

(whether in public or at home) during the course of their day. Some may even prefer to speak

Wolof only when absolutely necessary. The Salndu Fuuta announcer cited this distinction as he

explained the advantages for the Education Ministry of advertising through community radio

stations, which air their broadcasts in a variety of languages.

Community radios in the Sahel operate on a formal ethos- promoted by partnerships with

NGOs, governments and umbrella associations such as the Association Mondiale des

Radiodiffuseurs Communautaires (AMARC)- that emphasizes radios’ non-profit status as well as

their role in promoting community harmony and solidarity (Tower 2005). There are ways in

which Fuuta’s community radios may deviate in practice from this normative ideal. For example,

popular radio broadcasters sometimes receive gifts (financial or otherwise) from patrons; certain

paid-for spots may blur the line between public service announcement and flat-out commercial

advertising; some cultural programs create the impression that Fuuta’s radios are strictly “Pulaar

radios”; and talk shows and news broadcasts sometimes wade into politics to an extent that they

are not supposed to. Community radio stations affiliated with the Union des Radios Associatives

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et Communautaires du Senegal (URACS) must sign pledges to avoid such things as political

advocacy, defamation and incitement. Ideally, the radio stations can step in and help resolve

conflicts in their communities. Radio Timtimol once helped mediate a political dispute involving

the President of the Communauté Rurale of Nabbaji, who is from Ndulumaaji Demɓe. A major

conflict had erupted in the area between farmers and herders and farmers had taken to seizing

herders’ cattle. In some cases, they held the animals for ransom, sold the cattle or let them starve.

In an effort to help resolve the dispute, several broadcasters from the radio station went to the

President’s home in Ndulumaaji and recorded a debate aimed at discussing and resolving the

issue. The broadcasters took the recorded discussion back to Ouro Sogui, where they played it on

air for their audience.

Fuuta’s community radio stations address a range of issues affecting their surrounding

villages and towns and amidst a rapidly changing environment socially, politically and

economically. Even Fuuta’s mediascape (Appadurai 1996) is rapidly changing. Within the River

Valley, the community radios exist alongside state-run radio affiliates (both Senegalese and

Mauritanian), an Internet that is increasingly accessible through smartphones and computers and,

of course, Senegal’s growing number of TV channels. Among young people in particular, the

radios sometimes struggle to attract audience members who have the option of watching TV

channels such as Senegal’s TFM, SEN TV, or 2sTV. Their predominantly French and Wolof

content includes news, talk shows, concerts and theater programs, some of the latter of which are

produced in Senegal, while others are Indian, Latin American or the Middle Eastern soap operas

dubbed in French.

Despite the stiff competition, the radios enjoy significant support in their communities,

particularly where TV or Internet may not be as readily available. This might also explain the

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enthusiasm for the radios on the Mauritanian side of the border, where most villages do not have

electricity. Both the Senegalese and Mauritanian radio audiences can relate to the themes of

Pulaar linguistic pride that so often appear in the stations’ programming. The rest of the chapter

explores in detail how the decades-long Pulaar movement has profoundly influenced the context

in which the radios operate. The Pulaar movement was, in fact, the medium through which many

radio staffers I met were originally socialized into public life as orators, poets, theater performers

or Pulaar teachers.

Language Activism on the Airwaves

At all of the radio stations I visited there was a sense among many broadcasters that

promoting Pulaar was one of their important roles. In some cases, broadcasters specifically

viewed their community radio stations as following the trails blazed by the likes of Tidiane

Anne, whose Eeraango called for the promotion of Pulaar-language broadcasting around West

Africa. The director of one of the radios quite openly made this connection in addressing the

importance of community radios for their bringing more local news in Pulaar on to the airwaves.

When there were not many radios stations around anyone wanting to listen to a

program had to go to RTS Dakar or Radio Mauritania, which only talked about

what was going on in those places. Not many people had their own personal radios,

so when a popular program was on people would gather around one set. . . . (So),

those who have gone before us have cleared the road for we who are here today.

They swept the road, reducing the obstacles we would face. Today the local radios

are here providing us with a space to be heard. Elders like Tijjaani Aan did good

work. On nights when he would air his program, “Anndu so a Anndi, Anndin” you

would find people in every compound who had gathered to listen. His

conversations were enjoyable and he knew what he was talking about. Even though

many like him are no longer with us, we broadcasters who are here today have seen

their example and we speak to the kinds of people they spoke to. Their legacy

really benefits us with what we do now. (Interview with Alassane Dia, January 12,

2013)

The perceived significance of Fuuta’s community radios as carrying the torch of Tidiane

Anne is not limited to a sense of legacy. One broadcaster observed that he and his colleagues at

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his own and at other radio stations like to borrow certain phrases and slogans from various

esteemed Pulaar broadcasters and orators. Such orators, he said, include the late Mauritanian

historian Moustapha Bolly Kane, also known as Saidou Kane, Mauritanian poet and radio

personality Gelongal Bah and Abou Diop, a longtime radio broadcaster and language activist

based in Dakar. “Right now, if you look at the language some broadcasters use, each one seems

to be stealing terminology from one or another ngenndiyaŋke,” he said, “listen and you will hear

people talking like (2sTV talk show host) Hamet Ly, other people speaking like Boubacar Ba or

Gelongal Ba. Everyone has this ambition to borrow their terms” (Interview with BS, February

14, 2013).

An example he gave is the resemblance in the phrases used to introduce radio programs,

such as “banndiraaɓe heɗtiyaŋkooɓe, fuɗnaange, hirnaange, rewo e worgo . . .” (“Brother and

sister listeners, east, west, north and south . . .”). Another well-known example to any Pulaar

speaker would be “no haanirta nii” or “no haanirta nda nii.” It is difficult to translate this term,

but it is used to characterize events or situations and, depending on the context, could mean

“properly,” “correctly,” “well” or “as it is supposed to be.” Pulaar radio broadcasters use the

term to punctuate their descriptions of events, saying things like “heɓlooji jeeyngu ɗi, e ɗi nafa

rewɓe yeeyooɓe ɓe no haanirta nii,” “the training sessions dealing with commerce are

benefitting the tradeswomen very well.”

The formation of Broadcast Pulaar on the air also involves the re-appropriation of Pulaar

words, using them to denote things for which Pulaar never previously had a name. Here’s an

example: Announcers at Radio Salndu Fuuta, identifying their station, 88.3 FM, sometimes

identify it in Pulaar as capanɗe jeetati (eighty) e jeetati (eight) wempeƴere (point) tati (three),

except the Pulaar word wempeƴere is the singular word for “ocean wave,” and is colloquially

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used abstractly to refer to a disruption or upheaval. Another example of linguistic reappropriation

on the radio can be heard in broadcasters’ use of the word “ɓoggol,” or rope, to refer to a phone

line or phone reception. When program hosts welcome callers they announce, “won musiɗɗo na

na e ɓoggol ngol” or “we have a kinsman (or kinswoman) on the line.” Sometimes, when a call’s

reception is poor, the announcer will state, literally, that the “rope is rough” (ɓoggol ngol na

ñaaɗi). Such practices of re-appropriation that broadcasters and activists employ can meet with

mixed reviews. While speaking an apparently “high” or “modern” Pulaar can earn a broadcaster

prestige, some radio staff and listeners I met believe that always reaching for Pulaar words to

replace loan words can make it difficult for listeners to understand them.

The question of whether to modernize Pulaar by replacing loan words, some of which

have been in use for many years, by creating new Pulaar words or reappropriating old ones

divides listeners. Broadcast Pulaar, if one can call it that, has emerged partly through the mastery

by certain orators of a speech style that is apparently (if not always actually) free of loan words,

particularly from Wolof or French. As Deborah Cameron (2005) points out, politics and ideology

are bound up in all linguistic practice. I therefore resist the temptation to dismiss as

“prescriptive” or “ideological” efforts- even shabbily-imposed ones- to expand or alter the

lexicon of the Pulaar language by creating terms for new technologies or objects for which a

Pulaar word may not have previously existed. Sometimes, replacing a loan word with a newly-

manufactured or reappropriated Pulaar word can make sense for an audience that may not be

well-versed in, say, French. There is nothing necessarily wrong with fashioning (in Pulaar they

use the term tafde kelme kese, which literally translates as “to forge [like a blacksmith] new

words”) terms like “boowal laaɗe diwooje” (the flying boat lot) for airport or “faawru defte” (the

storage place for books) for library. As some language activists, including a few associated with

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Fuuta’s community radios argue, however, at certain times there is something to be said for not

reinventing the wheel. Some broadcasters and language activists, they believe, go too far in

trying to avoid the use of loan words at all costs and take it upon themselves to create terms that

might not make sense to their audiences.

Many of the radio personalities I met had, prior to coming to the radio stations, either

learned how to read and write in Pulaar or had taught literacy classes in the language. One of

those I met had grown up in Mauritania in a small village that was wiped off the map during the

racial pogroms of 1989. After coming to Senegal as a refugee, he spent many years teaching

Pulaar for an NGO in the western part of the country before eventually joining the radio station

that now employs him. A woman I met who hosted a “loowdi”- or, Dear Abby- program had

previously learned how to read and write in Pulaar through her involvement with the NGO

Tostan. Another woman, a well-known Pulaar militant who has worked for RTS Matam, Salndu

Fuuta FM and Pete FM is the author of several published books in Pulaar. Many others had

previous experience teaching Pulaar through other organizations or initiatives, including ARP-

Tabbital Pulaaku, PRODAM, Tostan or the Programme Intégré de Podor (PIP).

In addition to Pulaar literacy, many of Fuuta’s community radio personalities have

backgrounds as poets or theater performers. Some are also known orators who at public

gatherings discuss matters of language, culture or current social or political issues affecting

audience members. Events conducted by the goomuuji pinal are often known as hirjinooji, or

public appeals aimed at promoting awareness or inspiring action in the name of a particular

cause. Some radio hosts reported prior broadcast experience. Idi Gaye, the director of Pete FM,

recalled getting his start as a radio show host thanks to a chance meeting with Hamet Amadou

Ly, a Pulaar-language poet and well-known TV host on the privately-owned 2sTV. This person,

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while living in Dakar, had frequently held public discussions about the history of Fulɓe life in

Fuuta Tooro. At one of those talks, Hamet Amadou Ly was in attendance and was impressed

enough to invite him to join Diamano FM, where Ly (along with other known Pulaar militants)

was then employed. That was where Gaye’s broadcast career began. In discussing his personal

background, he recalled how as a student at CEM Momar Maréme Diop in Yeumbel, near Dakar,

he successfully organized in the face of opposition from the school principal an event hosting

Murtuɗo. Perhaps two of the most well-known Pulaar militants to have worked for Fuuta’s

community radios are the poets Abdoulaye Ali Diallo, known as “Jalliis,” and Djiby Bah, more

widely known as Gelongal Bah. In addition to a brief period working at Timtimol FM, Gelongal

spent years as a radio host for Mauritania’s national radio, where on more than one occasion he

incurred the wrath of his bosses for his outspokenness on political issues.

Even with these strong connections to the Pulaar movement, staff at Fuuta’s community

radio stations assert their commitment to serving all the language groups in the districts or

regions in which they operate. One of the radio personalities I interviewed framed his radio’s

desire to cater to multiple language groups in light of the perception that Pulaar has been unfairly

marginalized from predominantly Wolof media outlets in Dakar. Even though he believes

promoting Pulaar and celebrating certain cultural practices of the Fulɓe and Haalpulaar’en is an

important part of what his radio does, he emphasized they are not out to settle some kind of

ethnolinguistic score by excluding other languages. In one of our interviews, he discussed his

response to criticism he received when his radio station aired a program in Wolof.

Here, there is a Wolof program. The Moors also have a program that is run by

Hassaniya speakers. The Soninke also have a program at this radio station.

However, when we started doing these programs on our radio station some people

came to me and were like “No! We are fools to be just giving away air time to these

other languages because all the other ethnic groups with influence over a radio

station are going to do whatever they want and just favor their own languages. In

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Dakar, many radio stations there refuse to give the Haalpulaar’en their fair share of

programming.” I said to them, “that’s not the way it goes. We are in a country that

has laws saying that if a Senegalese person opens a radio station they must go about

it a certain way. Just because those people over there are not doing what they are

supposed to doesn’t mean that I must get payback by also breaking the rules.” My

philosophy is that someone promoting his or her language should not go about it in

a way that expresses hatred for other groups. (Interview with Idi Gaye, January 12,

2013)

Many of those I interviewed and spoke with informally expressed a similar commitment

to the idea that their stations must serve all language groups in the area. The sense of radio’s

sociopolitical power is widely shared among radio broadcasters, and they celebrate the clear

benefits while expressing caution about what they see as the ever-present risks of abusing the

medium. Some of them even mentioned the role of radio in contributing to ethnic conflict in

another, widely-known context:

There are certain things you are afraid to say, because we all know with radio any

statement you make is like water: If it spills there’s no picking it back up. Do you

remember Radio Milles Collines of the Rwanda Genocide? The Rwanda Genocide

was the work of bad people who got a hold of radio. That’s why all of us

community radios around Senegal are very careful. Those of us at radios near

Senegal’s borders are specifically told to guard against the use of incendiary

language. We are against behaving like some radio stations in southern Senegal

where broadcasters have said some bad things. (Interview with Ousmane Anne,

January 23, 2013)

In Fuuta, there have been incidents illustrating the power of radio to antagonize or rile the

passions of certain listeners. Sometimes, perceived incitement is merely the unintended

consequence of a bad joke. One memorable story I was told by a radio staff member involved a

theater program in which one of the performers invoked a negative stereotype about Fulɓe Jeeri,

the social group of seminomadic cattle herders who live in the area. The performer was playing

the role of a herder from that group (it was not clear to me whether the performer himself is

actually a Pullo Jeeri but I got the sense that he was not), impersonating the distinct accent for

which Fulɓe Jeeri are known. During the theater program, this particular performer, in character,

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commented that he very rarely bathes. According to the person who told me this story, a group of

Fulɓe Jeeri later appeared at the radio station armed with machetes and demanding an

explanation. The situation was deescalated, but it was cited by the person recalling it as a

significant cautionary tale about the power of radio.

This incident is reflective of the negative stereotypes other Fulɓe (or Haalpulaar’en) in

Fuuta Tooro sometimes express about the Fulɓe Jeeri. These stereotypes portray them as

unclean, violent, unpredictable, dishonest and as living a generally backwards lifestyle. Once,

during my 2012-2013 round of fieldwork, I communicated to one of my hosts an interest in

visiting a community of Fulɓe Jeeri in a remote area south of the N2, the main road that runs

through northern Senegal, roughly parallel to the river. She strongly advised against it, telling me

that I would not enjoy the harsh, dirty conditions they live in. Even worse, I would probably be

drinking water straight out of a weendu, one of the countless small bodies of water resembling

anything from a large puddle to a small pond that form seasonally around the River Valley. As if

that were not enough, I was advised that goats, sheep and cows would be sharing the water with

me. Despite the existence of such stereotypes about them, the Fulɓe Jeeri play an important role

in sustaining the radio communities that emerged in Fuuta with the creation of the stations I

researched. Programs devoted to herding, or ngaynaaka, feature in several of the radios I visited.

Practicing Linguistic Struggle on the Air

Fuuta’s community radio stations have a number of programs that deal directly with

issues pertaining to the Pulaar language, cultural knowledge and preservation, as well as the

history of Fuuta Tooro. Some of these programs involve direct attempts to render the Pulaar

language subject to interventions prescribing ways to speak Pulaar more “clearly.” Other

programs test the knowledge of callers by challenging them to phone in and attempt to answer

riddles (cifti), while yet others do not directly prescribe or conduct linguistic interventions but do

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involve arguments and debates about the need to learn Pulaar and to maintain the language.

Well-known Pulaar language activists from Senegal and Mauritania have been invited as guests

on to such community radio programs as Salndu Fuuta’s Yimiyaŋke Leñol, on which they

perform their poetry or discuss their backgrounds as language activists. On the program Jaŋde e

Ɗemɗe Ngenndiije, or, “Studying our National Languages,” which airs on Timtimol FM in Ouro

Sogui, the host will sometimes read excerpts from Pulaar-language novels. Other programs

feature matters of cultural interest such as Fuuta FM’s Cubalaagu, which offers interviews and

discussions involving people with knowledge about Fuuta’s occupational caste of fishermen.

Meanwhile, Pete FM’s Dendiraagal, versions of which also appear on other radio stations, is

devoted to the performance of mutual ribbing and banter between people who have joking

relationships with one another, whether because they are cousins or on the basis of their

respective last names.

The radio program that most directly challenges audiences to aspire to linguistic purity is

a call-in game show in which participants attempt to go as long as they can without using neither

a single loan word nor the words “yes” or “no.” Several radio stations in Fuuta have versions of

this program, which sometimes go by different names. On Radio Salndu Fuuta it is known as

Helmere Pulaar (Literal translation, “Pulaar word”), while on Timtimol FM it is known as

“Kaalen Pulaar Ɓolo” (“Let’s speak nothing but Pulaar”). In addition to the rules just mentioned,

the call-in game also disallows other forms of verbal communication, like the use of “mm-hmm”

to affirm another person’s point. There is also a Wolof version of this game, which appears on

Radio Timtimol as Baatu Wolof. When a contestant calls in to Helmere Pulaar, the host will

attempt to stump them by asking them questions phrased with loan words, to which the caller

must respond with enough discipline to continue using Pulaar words to refer to the objects that

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the show’s host refers to by using the French, Wolof or even Arabic words. Sometimes, non-

Pulaar words will go unrecognized by the show hosts perhaps either because they do not regard

the word in question as a loan word or they fail to notice its use. Once, when listening to a caller

I knew navigate the host’s attempt to trip them up, I figured the game was up when that caller

used the word “waktu,” an Arabic word often used by Pulaar speakers (and those of other

Senegambian languages) as a general term for hour or to refer to a specific time. However, the

host kept needling the caller with questions, continuing the game.

Radio programs like Helmere Pulaar engage the public in an effort to render language an

object of intervention to suit a political and ideological agenda of modernization (Urla 2012). For

many involved in such programs- whether as hosts or callers- they just constitute a fun game.

However, involved is an implicit (sometimes overt) assumption about what constitutes “correct”

Pulaar (Pulaar laaɓɗo). The exclamation “a yanii” (“you fell!”) by some hosts to callers who

have slipped up and used loan words during on-air Helmere Pulaar competitions is a jocular

censure for perceived linguistic incorrectness, even if it is all supposed to be just for fun.

Helmere Pulaar is one of the programs through which, as I alluded to above, regular on-air

callers acquire a degree of celebrity status. One acquaintance of mine, a woman who calls into a

Helmere Pulaar program quite frequently, was chatting with me in a public transit vehicle when

another woman recognized her voice as “the one who calls into Helmere Pulaar.” My

acquaintance told me that such interactions happen to her frequently.

Joorngo Miijooji (“A Gathering of Ideas”), a program that has regularly aired on Radio

Salndu Fuuta, is the kind of program that caters to listeners interested in themes related to Pulaar

language activism. As one staff member at Salndu Fuuta told me, the program is more or less

dedicated to “aafeer ngenndiyaŋkaagal,” or “ngenndiyaŋke affairs.” The program is hosted by a

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man named Idi Kane, who is originally from the village of Ngidjilogne, Senegal, located at the

south bank of the Senegal on the border with Mauritania. During an interview, which I cite

below, Idi states that he got the idea to name his program Joorngo Mijooji from hearing Murtuɗo

Diop mention the concept. I myself have been a guest on this program, giving an interview in

December 2012 during which I explained my interest in the Pulaar movement. Within the range

of programming offered at Radio Salndu Fuuta, Joorngo Miijooji is one of the programs that

provide a space for guests to make arguments about how Pulaar should be spoken and the

interventions speakers must make in order to maintain it.

An illustrative example of linguistic advocacy on the air is a conversation that took place

during a Joorngo Miijooji program between Idi Kane and a woman named Jinndaa Dem. During

one exchange, which took place over several minutes, the two of them discussed the richness of

the Pulaar language, as well as the need to study the language in written form. Jinndaa expressed

her concern that there are many rich, literary aspects of the Pulaar language that people no longer

use. She argued that a program like Helmere Pulaar would encourage people to learn the kind of

deep, rich style of Pulaar that many from the younger generations no longer speak.

During the course of their discussion, they mentioned the legacy of Murtuɗo Diop, who

both of them knew during the legendary activist’s lifetime. Idi quoted Murtuɗo’s perspective on

the price Pulaarophones are currently paying due to the fact that earlier generations never learned

how to read and write in the language.

He (Murtuɗo) basically gave this program its name, because I got the name from

among the statements I would hear him make. I then requested that Salndu Fuuta

allow me to launch a program called Joorngo Miijooji. Murtuɗo said that Pulaar is

beaten down to such a point that we should make ourselves some clubs and go over

to the cemetery and find the graves of those who never studied Pulaar and beat

them, demanding why the hell they never learned Pulaar . . . the consequences of

their failure to learn Pulaar are an example that what strikes the dead will not spare

the living. (Kane, Date Unknown)

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This message about the failure of past generations to learn Pulaar is one of many that are

tied to broader debates about the role of the Pulaar language in culture, politics and education.

Yet another program, called Cifti e Tinndi, which also airs on Radio Salndu Fuuta, includes

segments where callers pose riddles or questions to fellow listeners. Such riddles are often

regarded as a part of Fuuta Tooro’s cultural repertoire requiring special preservation, a cause to

which the program aims to contribute. Throughout an hour-long program, several riddles may be

asked of listeners and people are allowed to call in offering their guesses throughout the show.

When someone calls to give an answer, the host is not to say immediately whether the answer is

correct or incorrect but is to allow as many callers as possible to give an answer until finally

stating the correct answer at the conclusion of the program1.

In one episode of Cifti e Tinndi, Moussa Sy asked his listeners whether the word

kinkiliba, which refers to a tree whose leaves are used to brew tea, originates in Pulaar. In

addition, he asked that if the word kinkiliba does not originate in Pulaar, what is the actual Pulaar

word that refers to the tree? The participants called from a variety of communities, including

Daabiyaa, Aañam Coɗay, Aañam Godo, Taabe, Gaawol, Perlel, Koɓɓilo, Gafeeji, and Hoore

Foonde, which are in Senegal. There were several callers from Mauritania, as well, with a couple

of people phoning in from the nearby city of Kaedi and two others phoning in from the

Mauritanian villages of Jowol Saare and Neere Waalo, respectively.

Among many of the callers, the consensus was that the Pulaar word for the kinkiliba tree

is talli or talwi (sing), or talle (pl), though some offered different answers. Here is one of the

1 I did not realize this when, in December 2012, I was a guest on Joorngo Miijooji. After I posed a riddle to the

audience, a young girl was the first person to call and she gave her answer. I immediately congratulated her and told

her that her answer was correct.

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exchanges between Moussa Sy and some of his callers, in which the host appears to question the

logic of the caller’s answer:

Demba Diallo (the caller): The tree in Pulaar is known as talli. Talli.

Moussa Sy: Talli is what it’s called?

DD: But kinkiliba is Pulaar. It’s just that it’s the coffee

of the Bah people (The caller is making a joking

reference to those surnamed Bah, who have a joking

cousin relationship with the Diallos).

MS: Kinkiliba is Pulaar?

DD: It’s Pulaar! Remember, on the Helmere Pulaar

show with Mamadou Baas, many callers will say

“kinkiliba” but won’t be disqualified.

MS: They won’t, huh?

DD: Nope.

MS: But don’t you think the other one might be the real

Pulaar word?

DD: Talli?

MS: Isn’t that what you said it’s called?

DD: Yes, when you are talking about just the tree, it’s

called a talli, but when the leaves and stuff are

taken from it that’s called kinkiliba. That’s what

Pulaar says.

MS: So, when we have leaves taken from a gawdi tree

we give them a name besides gawdi?

DD: We just call that the offspring of a gawdi.

MS: Seydi Jallo, do us a favor, make sure our phrases are

not lost to history! (Sy Date Unknown)

Here is another exchange, this time between Moussa Sy and a man I will call Yero Kah

from Kobbilo, Senegal, in which the latter alleges that kinkiliba is a French word:

Yero Kah: I would like to speak to the question on kinkiliba.

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MS: Go ahead.

YK: Kinkiliba is clearly French.

MS: Kinkiliba is French?

YK: As clearly as can be!

MS: All right.

YK: It’s not Pulaar.

MS: Mm-hmm.

YK: Pulaar calls it talwi, and saying it’s called this or it’s

called that doesn’t fly. In Pulaar, the term is talwi.

It’s French that says kinkiliba. Everyone needs to

know that kinkiliba is not Pulaar. But, you know

how it is. Kinkiliba is sold at markets all over. It’s

sold at markets each and everywhere and the name

spreads. However, go to the bush and spend time

with the Fulɓe aynaaɓe (Fulɓe Jeeri) who have

knowledge about our trees. They call it talwi. (Sy

Date Unknown)

The allegation that kinkiliba is a French word came as a surprise. The word is used by

multiple language groups in the Senegambia region and my own perception is that the word is

Mandinka. A book of West African linguistic terms also makes this claim (Mauny and Calvet

2011). Perhaps the most humorous (whether intentionally or not) answer to Moussa Sy’s

question came from a young woman calling from Neere Waalo, Mauritania, who I will call

Aysata Amadou.

Aysata Amadou: You ask what kinkiliba is called in Pulaar?

MS: Yes, is kinkiliba Pulaar? If it is not, then what is the

Pulaar word for kinkiliba?

AA: Kii weli.

MS: Kii weli???

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AA: Yeah.

MS: (Sarcastically) Now is this while it has sugar on it or

before the sugar is put on it?

AA: Without any sugar on it.

MS: While it has yet to have sugar put on it? What is

your name?

AA: My name is Aysata Amadou.

MS: Aysata Amadou, where are you calling from?

AA: I’m calling from Neere Waalo.

MS: Is everything good in Neere?

AA: Everything is good. (Sy Date Unknown)

Aysata Amadou’s answer amused me because the name she gave could be construed as a

play on words. “Kii weli” basically translates as “this tree is sweet,” or “this tree is enjoyable,” at

least in a gastronomical sense. Ki (or “kii”) is the noun class used to refer to trees (among some

other things), while weli is a conjugation of the infinitive welde, which means to be enjoyable,

pleasurable, or, in some contexts, sweet tasting.

At the end of the broadcast, the show’s host Moussa Sy discussed with a guest he had in

the studio (this man had posed another riddle earlier in the show) the answer to the question of

whether kinkiliba is a Pulaar word. Kinkiliba, he said, is French! The Pulaar word, on the other

hand, is talli (or talwi; pl. talle), as many of the callers suggested.

Workaday Engagements with Pulaar

For Pulaar-language radio staff, the deployment of their linguistic knowledge does not

always occur within an explicitly ideological frame. Such linguistic engagements are sometimes

just a day-to-day part of getting the job done. Forms of written Pulaar, to name one example, can

be found in many different aspects of how staff members at the community radios conduct their

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business. Occasionally, notices in Pulaar are posted on the walls at the radio stations and

broadcasters who are literate in Pulaar sometimes prepare written statements in the language in

preparation for news or other kinds of programs. In addition, many of the announcements that

people submit to the radio stations, particularly funeral announcements, are written in Pulaar.

Sometimes those who wrote the messages demonstrate a clear familiarity with the Pulaar

orthography as it is commonly taught in Senegal and Mauritania. In other cases, the Pulaar is

written phonetically as it would appear in French. For those radio staff who can read and write in

French, having handy documents that are written in Pulaar can nevertheless save them the mental

translation process that announcements or interview questions written and French would have

demanded.

I observed this during a trip I took to the town of Agnam Siwol with a broadcaster from

Radio Salndu Fuuta. His objective that day was to record interviews with women who had

brought their babies to a free health clinic for children 0-5, which had been organized as part of

an effort to combat “ŋakkere haaranduru” or malnutrition among children. Before he got started,

the staff organizing the clinic handed him a sheet of paper with questions he would use to quiz

the women on their knowledge of children’s nutrition issues. The questions were written in

French. The interviewer is fluent in French and could have translated the questions in his head as

he interviewed the women. However, before he got started he found a piece of paper and a pen

and began translating each one into Pulaar, writing them using the Pulaar orthography that is

well known to those who have been exposed to literacy in the language. The idea was that in the

process of interviewing he could easily read off the questions in a way that would make sense to

those he was speaking with.

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Another way in which Fuuta’s community radio stations create new opportunities for

linguistic engagements is through their bringing together people of different social and

occupational backgrounds. For instance, members of the caste of fisherman, known as subalɓe,

may be more likely to know the names of various fish, as well as terms related to the tools and

practices involved in fishing, not to mention the various natural features associated with the

area’s rivers. This is also the case with respect to aynaaɓe, or herders, as one broadcaster, early

in his tenure at Pete FM, was reminded first hand. Himself a native Pulaar speaker and originally

from a fishing village along the Senegal River, his encounters with herders who came to the

radio station to report lost cattle caused him to question his own proficiency in Pulaar.

When I began at that radio station, I finally learned that, despite what I had thought,

I didn’t know Pulaar very well after all. Let me give you an example: One older

man was missing some of his cows, so he had come and was describing them to

me. He saw that I had a computer and asked me if I could write the description

down, saying “I have come to ask you if you could write an announcement about

the disappearance of some cattle.” I said, “sure.” So, I am writing and he goes, “one

of the cows I am missing is a ‘weerawe,’ another one of the cows I am missing is

an ‘ajje.’ There is another cow I am missing also, and that is a ‘luguwe.’” While

putting all this down, I turn to him and ask what color or fur patterns to which these

terms refer for the respective cows. But in fact those terms refer to the appearance

of a cow or bull’s horns. He told me this, showing me the different ways in which

the horns curve. “the horns of a weerawe go like this”, “the horns of a luguwe are

like this- facing each other”- and “the horns of an ajje are like this.” Right then, I

realized here is this man speaking Pulaar, yet it is a Pulaar I do not understand. It

was simply that I did not know the terminology aynaaɓe use. They the herders have

their own terms with which I am unfamiliar. (Interview with Idi Gaye, January 12,

2013)

The radio personality who recalled the experience believed it showed how much

knowledge he had gained by working at the radio station. “Being on the radio,” he said, “has

taught me things about my community and my language that I was not aware of before.”

Community radio broadcasting in the Senegal River Valley has also boasted some

popular programs whose hosts have inspired the spreading of catchy slogans or phrases. At

various points during my research, I would frequently be addressed with the greeting, “aɗa selli,

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aɗa ɗeeƴi?” “Aɗa selli?” or “how is your health” is a very common Pulaar greeting (depending,

of course, on the dialect), often immediately coming after “no mbaɗ-ɗaa,” or, “how are you?” I

first heard “aɗa selli, aɗa ɗeeƴi?” (ɗeeƴde, the infinitive form of the latter verb, means to be

content) when I began staying in Pete. Though I understood it, I found it an uncommon

formulation. I heard a number of people, including members of my host family using it, along

with staff members at both Pete FM and Fuuta FM. However, I did not think too much of it

beyond the fact that I liked it enough to occasionally borrow the greeting for my own use.

As it turned out, the greeting was popularized by Pete FM radio personality “Demba

Jalel,” the host of the station’s “Dendiraagal” program. When I met him in the nearby village of

Ngoye, he had only been with the station for seven or eight months, but given his show’s

popularity and its reputation one would have thought he had been there for years. He told me that

he spends a fair amount of time preparing for his shows. Though “Dendiraagal” is intended to

make people laugh, the humor cannot be idle slapstick; it is incumbent upon the host, Demba

Jalel told me, to come up with creative ways to make people laugh by highlighting the joking

relationships involving himself and those who participate in the show. He had settled upon “aɗa

selli, aɗa ɗeeƴi?,” which had become his program’s trademark, as a pragmatic, catch-all greeting

that would obviate the need for the more extensive greetings that so often begin interactions

between Pulaar speakers and Senegambians in general.

I came up with “aɗa selli, aɗa ɗeeƴi?” in the context of hosting the radio show. I

was thinking about how when you talk with people you have to go through this

process of greeting them, saying “mawɗum,” “jam tan,” “to baari kalla,” “mawɗum

nii,” “Alhamdullilaay”- it just eats up my air time. My minutes are all taken up

because my callers will tend to go on and on with it. I finally thought of a plan to

think of a term or greeting that has like two syllables or just a couple of words or

phrases that would sum everything up. So, that is how I thought of “aɗa selli aɗa

ɗeeƴi?” because if a person is healthy (omo selli) and content (omo ɗeeƴi)

everything else will go along with it. (Interview with Demba Jalel, February 2,

2013)

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I argued above that, in contrast to “Broadcast Navajo” (Peterson 1997), Pulaar-language

broadcasters at Fuuta’s community radio stations, as well as in other contexts, will very often

attempt to avoid the use of loan words. In both contexts, however, the time constraints and

format of a radio broadcast necessitate deviating from longstanding linguistic practices and

norms that are a central part of people’s daily interactions. For Demba Jalel, “aɗa selli, aɗa

ɗeeƴi?” wound up being a useful way for circumventing what might have been a time-

consuming greeting process. It also wound up being popular, with listeners, who made it viral

(even if, in some cases, a few of us did not even know where it originated). In this sense,

participants in the Pete FM radio community were engaging in the process of appropriating

broadcast speech, internalizing “aɗa selli, aɗa ɗeeƴi?” in a way similar to that which Spitulnik

(1996) observed in her study of people’s daily engagements with national radio in Zambia.

“A River is not a Boundary”

Pulaar community radio broadcasters operate as “border journalists” (Jusionyte 2013),

whose work relies on border-crossing practices made possible by linguistic, kinship and

commercial ties that have long spanned what Robinson (2000) calls the “Senegalo-Mauritanian

zone.” Call-in radio programs often include participants phoning in from Mauritania, though it

can be more difficult for them to remain on the line than it is for Senegalese participants. This is

because many of their phones are equipped with Mauritanian SIM cards from companies like

Mauritel, so when they call Radio Timtimol or Radio Salndu Fuuta, they are charged with

international calls. However, many Mauritanian Fuutaŋkooɓe live close to the border so that

when they insert Senegalese SIM cards into their phones they are able to get reception from

Senegalese phone towers. This makes calling the radios on the Senegalese side of the border is

much cheaper.

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Spend enough time listening to Salndu Fuuta FM, Pete FM, Cascas FM, Fuuta FM or

Timtimol FM and you will find evidence of the ties between the radio stations and Mauritanians.

Mauritanians make up an important source of support for the community radios and comprise a

significant portion of the listenership. One person I spoke with believes that the radios may be

more popular in Mauritania than they are on the Senegalese side of the border. One of the

reasons he gave for his claim is worth consideration: The significantly greater access to

electricity and, by extension, television, on the Senegalese side of the border has resulted there in

reduced interest in community radio programming. Along the N2 that runs through Fuuta Tooro

in Senegal, many villages, particularly the larger towns, are electrified. Access to electricity

means more houses with TV sets. Evening programs like Denɗiraagu, Helmere Pulaar, Loowdi

or Cifti e Tinndi compete for attention with popular news and entertainment programs, mostly in

Wolof or French, that air on major Senegalese channels. On the Mauritanian side of the border,

there is a much different picture to paint. The only municipalities in Mauritania that have

electricity and that are close enough to get reception with the Senegalese community radio

stations are Boghe, Kaedi, Bababe and Mbagne. In every other community, whether Niabina,

Bagodine, Haymedaat, Mbahe, Haayre Mbaara, Wocci or Haayre Gollere- just to name a few-

the radio stations are not competing with TV, except in those compounds that run TVs with

generators. There are more than a few such compounds, but they are in the minority.

Among the quotidian operations of the radio station, one observes practices that give

living proof to the claim that “maayo wonaa keerol,” or a river is not a boundary. On numerous

occasions, I observed people appearing at the radio station compounds bearing written funeral

announcements and Ouguiya, the Mauritanian currency, to pay for their broadcasting. Funeral

announcements, as well as announcements for weddings and other public events taking place just

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across the border are made on the air regularly. As suggested with the call-in talk shows

discussed earlier in this paper, some of the radios’ most loyal callers are in Mauritania, and Fuuta

FM even has correspondents it collaborates with who are based in Mauritanian towns such as

Mbagne and Bababe.

Kaedi, Mauritania provides a critical vantage point for observing the cross-border

networks constituted by the community radio stations that are based on the Senegalese side of

the border. Many callers to the community radio programs live in Kaedi, and there are people

based in the city of 100,000 who interact with the radio stations in a variety of ways. Jommolo

Bah, a bammbaaɗo, who performs using the hoɗdu and is from Kaedi has established a good

relationship over the years with the staff at Radio Timtimol in Ouro Sogui. When his wife passed

away a few years ago, people from Radio Timtimol crossed the river to pay their respects.

Radio Salndu Fuuta has designated various people in Kaedi as its representatives in the

town. Two of them own cassette shops in the Kaedi market. One of them, named Bah Hamadou

Adama, also makes a living by selling milk from his market stall, from which he also sells copies

of Fooyre Ɓamtaare, the monthly newspaper of Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar. On one of the walls in

his stall, there is a picture of him with several staff members from Salndu Fuuta, including Idi

Kane, the host of Joorngo Miijooji. Sy Oumar is another person who has served as a Salndu

Fuuta representative in Kaedi and he is known as one of the station’s most loyal callers. He is

good friends with Salndu Fuuta’s Amadou Tidiane Kane and wife Aissata Sow. Whenever she

visits Kaedi, Sy Oumar’s shop and compound are her resting spot. I was present when Sy Oumar

came to visit them during the 2012 “72 heures” cultural festival that was then taking place there.

Since 2010, Kaedi has had a radio of its own, called Radio Gorgol. It is a regional

affiliate of Mauritania’s national radio and listeners on both sides of the border can tune in.

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Though Pulaar speakers make up a majority of the population in and around Kaedi, Hassaniya

gets the majority of programming hours, a fact that has provoked some to call for a boycott of

the station (Gaye 2011). Radio Gorgol staffers are familiar with their counterparts across the

border. At the conclusion of our interview at his home in Kaedi, one Radio Gorgol broadcaster

even called into a Radio Timtimol program. The host, who I knew personally, let me and his

other listeners know he was not pleased that he had not heard from me for a while. Even after we

hung up, he playfully told the audience that he was angry with me.

A broadcaster I know who works at Radio Salndu Fuuta once received a special

invitation from a Mauritanian fan and patron. This radio staffer is married (with one wife) and

has several children to help feed. He once told me that when you are a radio personality in this

area people place you “high” (“ɓe paw maa ɗow!”). The invitation came from a fan of the radio

station in Maafoondu, Mauritania who usually listened to it via a Skype feed from France, but

was home visiting his family. Would I come along, the friend asked me? I would have loved to,

but I did not at that moment have a valid Mauritanian visa. However, two years later, while

sifting through their radio stations archive, I had the luck of stumbling upon the broadcast that

they recorded when they went on that cross-border trip. They let me copy it into my own archive.

During their visit to Maafoondu, my friends from Salndu Fuuta were treated to a gracious

reception that included a theatrical and poetry performance in their honor.

Things do not always go smoothly for people working at these radio stations when they

try to cross the border. The director of Pete FM 102.0 recalled how when he and some of his

colleagues once arrived on the north bank of the Senegal River, Mauritanian border guards

confiscated their recording equipment. According to this same director, their radio station once

had a weekly program in Hassaniya Arabic, which most Senegalese cannot speak. As a result,

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the other staff at this radio station could not exercise any editorial oversight with that program.

The director explained the consequences of this during our interview:

When you have someone speaking a language on the air at your radio, especially

considering that our broadcasts can be heard in another country, it is best that you

can hear what the person is saying. We had someone who had been expelled from

Mauritania during the Events of 1989 come and host the program in Hassaniya, the

language of the Moors. He came and from the start was insulting Moors on the air.

Well, soon enough an officer from Mauritania’s National Police who heard what

was being said warned us to be careful because the guy on the radio was saying

things about their government. We understood the police officer had a point. Since

we cannot hear what the guy at our radio is saying we have no way of censoring

him. And the programs are live, not a safe thing. (Interview with anonymous

participant, January 25, 2013)

Despite these sensitivities, stations such as Fuuta FM regularly reach out to audiences

across the border, and Institut PANOS has given Fuuta FM contracts to produce broadcasts

pertaining to issues that are of interest to the NGO. A number of these agreements involved

paying Fuuta FM, which- mind you- is owned by a Senegalese politician, to run a series of

broadcasts about migration and development in several communities across the border in

Mauritania. These broadcasts have included interviews with the mayors of Mauritanian villages

such as Bagodine, Bababe and Dawalel. These communities, of course, are within range of Fuuta

FM’s antenna. When I was staying in Bagodine in June 2015, I was listening to a Fuuta FM

newscast with Saidou Nourou Diallo’s family when one of them said, “why don’t they report

about their own country, already! They are always talking about Mauritania” (Author’s field

notes, June 10, 2015).

No radio station is better situated to bring together on the airwaves Senegalese and

Mauritanian Fuutankooɓe than Cascas FM in Cascas, Senegal. By far the least well-funded of the

community radio stations when I visited in 2013 (at the time, it was only on the air from 6pm to

11pm), it is located just a few hundred feet from the Senegal River. Its neighboring village across

the border, Haayre Mbaara, is a sister village to Cascas, colloquially known as “Kaskas Rewo,”

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or “Cascas North.” Most of the families I interacted with from each village reported having

relatives in the other.

I spent several days in Cascas and Haayre Mbaara in 2013, where I interviewed the head

of the radio station, as well as two people in Haayre Mbaara who regularly call in to broadcasts

and have personal relationships with members of the Cascas FM staff. Though in Senegal,

Cascas FM’s Mauritanian audience is an important source of support for the radio station. While

sitting across a desk from Cascas FM’s director at the station’s office, he held in his hand

money- in the form of a 5,000 Ouguiya note- sent from a supporter of the radio station from

across the river. The money was intended for staff to share for the purposes of buying tea and

other refreshments for the office. Sometimes, Mauritanians appear as guests on Cascas FM

broadcasts and radio staff travel across the border seeking reports from nearby towns. One of the

station’s recorded broadcasts that I have in my possession is an interview with a women’s

cooperative farming group based in Bababe.

A Mauritanian who is familiar with Cascas FM and is known to its director and staff

members is Sall Djibril, a poet and retired police commander who lives in his family compound

in Haayre Mbaara. When he showed up for our interview in Haayre Mbaara he walked slowly

and wore what in the US would have been considered a winter hat with a large pom pom at the

top. I also remember being surprised by the jocularity of his interactions. Sall had served in

several posts around Mauritania with the country’s national police. Thanks to his recognition as a

poet and novelist, the Mauritanian government allowed him to take a post for several years

working with the OAU in Nigeria. Fortunately for him, he was out of the country when the

Events happened. During our interview, Sall remarked on how his calls to and appearances on

the Senegalese radio station had made him famous among Mauritanian audience members. He

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had just recently traveled to Ciide, which is located about 20km to the west next to the town of

Boghe.

At Ciide, I was given a great welcome. You hear me? Why was I greeted there so

well but for the radio- Radio Kaskas. I spoke on the radio just three or four days

before I went to see them (the people of Ciide) and I was received as though I was

the head of state. “Look, this man is Sall Djibril! It’s him! This is the man here who

spoke on the radio!” (Interview with Sall Djibril, March 14, 2013).

The retired commander appeared to have derived great pleasure from this encounter.

Another loyal listener and supporter of Radio Kaskas lives in a Haratine community a

few miles north of Haayre Mbaara beyond the main road. When I met him, I was curious as to

why a Haratine man would so strongly support a radio that broadcasts mostly in Pulaar and

whose program themes often address themes that are culturally specific to Fulɓe and

Haalpulaar’en. Many relationships between Haalpulaar and Haratines in the River Valley have

been strained since the pogroms of 1989. However, the man- SB., I call him-states that he likes

Pulaar and likes the people working at the radio. He has been in contact with Senegalese Pulaar

broadcasters for years since Pete FM, the first predominantly Pulaar-language radio station in the

area, took the airwaves. Over the years, he has formed a friendship with current Fuuta FM

President Idi Gaye, who was previously with Cascas FM. When Idi Gaye- who is from the

village of Dounghuel, Senegal- was preparing to marry his wife -who is a Mauritanian from

Haayre Mbaara- SB delivered to Dounghuel Rewo (Mauritania) tent equipment to be used for the

wedding. SB was about to return to his own village when Idi Gaye’s father urged him to cross

the river to Dounghuel, Senegal and say hello to Idi, which is what SB did.

When I asked him what the radio did for cross-border relations he strongly argued that

the river, indeed, is not a boundary.

Both sides of the border are a single unit, if you go to the river and say “a river is

not a boundary” and such there is more to it than just that. If we sit and examine it

right now, me, I am living here, my older sibling lives over there in Cascas- or my

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younger sibling lives there. You understand? I will obtain my Mauritanian papers,

and they will get their Senegalese papers- that’s the way it is today. There are

people who come from the same mother and father, but one is Senegalese the other

Mauritanian. You understand? Essentially, I am just trying to say to you that we are

one person. You hear? On this, don’t let anyone fool you. Outside of that it is only

recently that we distinguish- he is Senegalese, he is Mauritanian. You understand?

The way in which the river is not a boundary, it is in that way in which I do not

make boundaries with anyone- any ethnic group. (Interview with SB, March 13,

2013)

This friend of the radio strongly asserts the kinship ties that bind people on the north and

south banks of the Senegal River. The fact that the Pulaar language is spoken widely on both

banks is, as I have discussed above, one of the major factors cited by people who assert that

“river is not a boundary.” However, the Haratine supporter of the radio, while he is someone

who enjoys speaking Pulaar, took offense at the occasional tendency of some broadcasters at the

River Valley’s community radio stations to acts as though they work solely on behalf of

“Haalpulaar” or “Fulɓe.”

This radio (Cascas) belongs to all of Fuuta, without regard as to who is a Moor or

who is a white person or anything. But, sometimes there is this woman who, as she

did recently, will when speaking announce herself as speaking for the

Haalpulaar’en. You see? When I hear something like that my body dies. It’s like all

the other ethnic groups are excluded. That’s not what a community is. When you

are addressing a community, you include everyone from its wise people to its fools.

(Interview with SB, March 13, 2013)

The sense of a historical bond between Northern Senegalese and Southern Mauritanians

can be seen not only in the strong personal ties certain Mauritanians form with Senegalese

community radio staff, but at public events the community radios cover. At a series of events to

which I accompanied some of the community radio correspondents I met, I observed how public

gatherings bring together people from both sides of the Senegal-Mauritania border. At a

Mawluud in the riverine village of Juude Jaabe, Senegal, to which I accompanied a Fuuta FM

reporter, a number of the attendees I met had crossed over from the Mauritanian side. Many of

them had come from Bababe, which is less than a couple of miles away. When one of the

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attendees from Bababe heard me speaking Pulaar he complemented me on my proficiency in the

language, comparing mine to the Pulaar spoken by a Peace Corps Volunteer who once lived in

the town.

At a cultural festival I attended in the village of Asnde Balla, Senegal, the featured

performers at the nighttime concert were members of a band led by the well-known Pulaar

musician Ousmane Hamady Diop, who is from Kaedi, Mauritania, not 25 miles away.

Correspondents from multiple community radios attended the event, including Radio Salndu

Fuuta and Fuuta FM. During one of the days of the cultural festival, I shadowed the

correspondent from Salndu Fuuta, Fat Sileye Sall. Early in the evening she and a group of us

went to the compound where Ousmane Hamady and his entourage were staying and resting up

before their nighttime performance. Fat Sileye is from Thilogne but is familiar with Kaedi,

Mauritania, the musician’s hometown. She owns a shop in Thilogne and like some other

merchants in that part of Senegal travels to Kaedi to purchase goods for her business. When we

arrived at the compound Ousmane Hamady was sitting on a ledge holding his guitar and he

serenaded Fat Sileye, along with Jinndaa Dem. In his serenade, Ousmane Hamady refers to each

of them as a “ngenndiyaŋke.” Here is the bit he sang for Jinndaa:

Ahhh, Jinndaa!

Ahh, Jinndaa, all of you listen to her! She is an orator, listen to Jinndaa!

Ahha, Jinndaa Dem, listen to Jinndaa Dem, the great speaker!

Jinndaa is a ngenndiyanke! Is a ngenndiyanke!

Jinndaa is a ngenndiyanke! Jinndaa is blessed with a gift (Ousmane Hamady Diop,

Author’s Personal Recording, January 13, 2013)!

During the brief clip I recorded, the musician from Mauritania sang similarly of Fat Siley

and the Salndu Fuuta broadcast personality said she would think about using the clip as an intro

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to her program, “Darnde Deɓɓo e Renndo.” Despite their different nationalities what does

someone like Fat Siley or Jinndaa represent to a Mauritanian like Ousmane Hamady that inspires

him to bestow them with this ngenndiyaŋke title? One must suspend for a moment consideration

of the fact that as a musician he might have been hoping they would return the favor in some

way. Could it be that his ties to Senegalese Fuutaŋkooɓe and the community radio stations have

provided Ousmane Hamady with a sense of cultural and linguistic recognition that his

Mauritanian citizenship could not? Is that, as we attempt to understand the linguistic politics of

these community radios, the essence of cross-border, minority linguistic citizenship? That is,

Ousmane Hamady’s practicing of his Pulaar linguistic citizenship does not necessarily

undermine his identification with his Mauritanian citizenship, but it does offer a resource for

cultural expression and validation that his Mauritanian citizenship has never delivered.

Community Radio in a Changing Mediascape

The community radio stations discussed here, as well as others that have appeared more

recently, give new expression to the common histories, family and commercial relationships and

cultural concerns shared by Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar speakers. Yet this is only one

manifestation of how forms of media production continue to draw together audiences across the

Senegalo-Mauritanian zone (Robinson 2000). In addition to Senegal’s state-run television

channels, the country’s growing number of private media enterprises reach enthusiastic

audiences in Nouakchott and throughout Mauritania, who tune into a variety of news and

entertainment programming in French, Wolof and, to a lesser extent, Pulaar.

These developments are made possible by a broader set of migration networks, kinship

ties, business relationships, Sufi religious organizations and shared linguistic and cultural idioms

that span many parts of Senegal and Mauritania. Fuuta’s community radio stations provide an

instructive window into the possibilities that exist for (re)emergent identity formations that cross

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borders between nation-states. However, the radio stations also alert us to a variety of

connections and fractures that accompany boundary making and state-building. Radios such as

Salndu Fuuta or Fuuta FM gather together on the airwaves callers, hosts and listeners in a single,

transborder public sphere. However, their work is fraught with the ever-present if often unstated

reality of two different national contexts, demarcated by the border and memories of the 1989

pogroms. These realities render certain topics off limits, sometimes cause journalists to get

stopped by police at the north bank’s edge and are the very reason that there are some

Mauritanian refugees working at the radios today.

Combined with the border realities, the widespread embrace of “civil society” as “one of

the much-vaunted panaceas for the world’s problems” (Soares 2006) played a role in shaping the

radios’ particular transborder character. Civil society has, as Robinson (2000) points out, long

existed in the Senegalo-Mauritanian zone in the form of Sufi religious groups, despite the

tendency to regard the concept as absent or underdeveloped in the African context (See

Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999). More recently, the increasing role of local and international

NGOs and agencies in governance and development that made the radios possible has occurred

more intensely on the Senegalese bank than on the Mauritanian side. In addition, Southern

Mauritanians have few local media options other than the Senegalese radios, and this is partly

because of the relative slowness with which their government has pursued electrification

compared to the government south of the river.

The way community radio broadcasting provides broadcasters with a platform to deploy

governmental rationalities of linguistic correctness raises broader questions about the

relationship between civil society and the state. To what extent does considering civil society as

an entity apart from the state mislead us, particularly in a period where neoliberal forms of

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governance shift state-like powers to corporations, NGOs and other entities in obvious ways? It

is more important than ever for scholars concerned with understanding the media’s role as a

watchdog of institutions of power to look at how apparently non-state entities participate in

governance. They may find paradoxes resembling the one wherein Fuuta’s community radios

publicly promote and facilitate arrangements between international agencies, NGOs and the

Senegalese government, all in the name of “decentralization.”

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CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSION

In Senegal, Mauritania, the Diaspora and online, the observer who is trained to notice

will spot some of the Pulaar movement’s many achievements. Some of them sit, literally in some

respects, unused and collecting dust. At many book stalls in Dakar’s touristy Sandaga market,

where French-language books vy for attention with religious texts, a request for Pulaar books

will often yield at least a small stack of dusty learning manuals and books of poetry and novels,

the spines worn and pages frayed. Sometimes the fate is worse. In the River Valley town of Pete

in 2013, I spotted a vendor on the street whose baguettes for sale were stacked next to pages torn

from a Pulaar textbook to be used as wrapping paper for the bread.

Sam Faatoy Kah’s Pulaar bookselling operation at the Thiaroye Gare market once

received phone calls from members of the Diaspora in Central Africa or Europe, the customers

promising to pay via emissaries sent to pick up the books. Today his stall in Thiaroye resembles

a museum devoted to the many decades of Pulaar literacy efforts. A wealth of historically

relevant information is contained in his stacks of newspapers, some of them over a decade old

and out of print. Stacks of books containing religious instruction, proverbs, riddles, children’s

games, novels and historical research pay homage to decades of labor devoted to literacy

instruction, writing, editing, typography and the panstaking search for publishing houses that

stymies even some of the most prolific Pulaar-language authors. The book stall goes days and

weeks at a time without customers, and Sam Faatoy is considering converting it to another kind

of business, though when I last saw him in 2016 he was not sure what that would be.

All over West Africa, NGOs and governmental agencies run or sponsor projects that

require literacy teaching in National Languages. In countries like Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia

and Mali, Pulaarophone participants in such projects learn the same orthography whose

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composition was debated by young student activists in Cairo and Mbagne during the 1960s.

Tostan, a respected NGO in Senegal founded by an American and controversial for its reputation

of encouraging opposition to female circumcision, teaches Haalpulaar members with that same

orthography. Wide-eyed Peace Corps trainees arrive and begin learning the basics of an alphabet

created with the help of young, idealistic student radicals who faced suspicion and, at times,

hostility from their own governments. Many of their Pulaar teachers were inspired to learn to

write in the language not simply by the desire for a job with a US government agency. Some of

them got their start listening to the poems of Ibrahima Moctar Sarr or learning anti-imperial

songs in organizations like Rénovation de Ndioum, the leftist student group and cultural revival

association.

There are many with an interest in Pulaar literacy and print who soldier on. Literacy

classes continue in strongholds of activism like Madina Gounasse and Nouakchott. At the offices

of ARED, the veteran language activists who work for the NGO continue to organize and edit

unpublished manuscripts left behind by Yero Dooro Diallo. Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar’s Bocar

Amadou Bah almost single-handedly continues to manage and publish the organization’s

newspaper Fooyre Ɓamtaare. From Nouakchott to Kaedi, loyal supporters of the organization

sell copies of the publication, which still prints every month. Bah also runs pulaar.org, the online

version of Fooyre Ɓamtaare, to which new stories and commentary are regularly posted. As of

the summer of 2015, Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar had also commenced with a Pulaar literacy and

math program targeting women in Nouakchott. The project is largely funded by the Spanish

NGO Manos Unidas.

One domain of Pulaar language activism that went largely unmentioned in this

dissertation despite my devoting some considerable time researching the topic is cinema. Since

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as early as the late 1980s, theater troupes produced movies for consumption in the Diaspora,

where nostalgic migrants could treat themselves to the sights and sounds of life in Senegal and

Mauritania in their living rooms. Over the years, hundreds, perhaps thousands of feature-length

films were made by enterprising producers who directed and edited production and sold VHS or

DVD copies on behalf of the performers. One France-based Pulaar movie director once told me

that the major difference between actors in the Wolof movie industry and that of the

Haalpulaar’en is that while the former see themselves as professionals who perform a job, the

latter see themselves as part of a language-promotion cause. The fact that Wolof moviemakers

pay their actors more has driven some Pulaar movie actors to perform in Wolof films.

The returns that Pulaar movie actors might have seen were dimished because DVD and

cassette piracy in the Diaspora made it unnecessary to purchase the films. Nevertheless, the work

of theater troupes such as Fedde Pinal e Ɓamtaare or Lewru alaa Faayoore reached

Pulaarophone audiences on multiple continents and the enormous volume of work such troupes

produced is visible today on YouTube, where in some cases the erstwhile profit-seeking movie

producers have posted many of the films. Also to be found on YouTube are speeches and poems

by Ndiaye Saidou Amadou, Tidiane Anne, Ibrahima Moctar Sarr and others- material that just a

decade ago would only have been available through purchase at market stalls in Thiaroye, Kaedi,

Nouakchott or Pete. In addition, Web Sites such as Pulaagu.com, Lewlewal.com and Radio

Haayre Laaw are but a few that produce written and broadcast material in Pulaar with the

collaboration of activists in Senegal, Mauritania and the Diaspora.

The movement’s creation of a fledgling mediascape (Appadurai 1996) of TV shows,

Internet-based and terrestrial radio programming and cinematic filmmaking without the

privileges of steady support from the state or wealthy patrons is a remarkable achievement.

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Despite the many speakers of Pulaar/Fulfulde dialects around West Africa, their language’s

minoritization throughout the region meant that the growth of Pulaar-language media had tp

come through often chance engagements with diverse sets of institutional, social and political

developments at the national, regional and global level. These include transnational labor

migration, neoliberal decentralization projects and the NGOization of many social services

(Mann 2015).

Pulaar language activists with official and contingent roles as media personalities are

working to build the talent of a new generation of Pulaar-language journalists. In March 2017,

Hamet Ly and Abou Gaye were involved in organizing a training for Pulaar-language broadcast

and TV journalists, which took place under the auspices of an organization called Goodal, an

alliance of professionals and veteran activists who work in the Pulaar language. A major

development has been the creation of Radio et Télévision Fulɓe. I visited its headquarters in

Dakar in 2016, and the accessibility of its radio and TV programming in Senegal and to

subscribers in the Diaspora may portend a significant boost to Pulaar-language media.

Though I would hesitate to argue that there is an inverse relationship between the two, the

waning of the power of the Pulaar literacy movement since the late 1990s has coincided with the

increasing influence of the Pan-Fulɓe activism. In more precise terms, the language-based

activism involving predominantly those with ties to the Senegal River Valley and around

Senegal and Mauritania has given way to a concern with promoting a pan-Fulɓe, Sahel-wide

ethnocultural consciousness. For the latter, language remains important but appears to be less

central than it is for the original ngenndiyaŋkooɓe of Fuuta Tooro.

The rise of Pan-Fulɓe activism has been directly tied to some of the factors that have

sapped Senegalese and Mauritanian Pulaar language activism of its energy and organization.

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Upon the organization’s formal creation in 2002, leading national representatives of Tabbital

Pulaaku International’s (TPI) various branches sought to redirect the energies of Pulaar linguistic

and cultural revival associations towards strengthening TPI as something of an international Pan-

Fulɓe umbrella association. In certain contexts, members of existing associations in Senegal,

Mauritania, France and the United States resented what they saw as an arrogant attempt by TPI

to absorb their organizations in the name of Fulɓe unity. Some TPI supporters in these countries

argued that the leadership of organizations such as Fedde Ɓamtaare Pulaar were merely jealously

guarding their power and influence and during my trips to Nouakchott, TPI and Fedde Ɓamtaare

people were introduced almost as two separare factions.

In Senegal, the fault lines created by the feud between Yero Dooro Diallo and renowned

French-language author Cheikh Hamidou Kane over whether to make ARP a branch of TPI came

up often. In the event, ARP became ARP-Tabbital Pulaaku and the organization has been

plagued by leadership struggles almost entirely since TPI’s creation. In 2015, Maham Diallo,

former Governor of Dakar, was selected as a mediator to oversee the selection of a new ARP-

Tabbital Pulaaku Executive Bureau. This came after the previous head of the organization, a

partisan of Yero Dooro Diallo, had overstayed his mandate by several years. In France, the

Mantes-la-Jolie-based KJPF, which for years had successfully organized Pulaar literacy and

cultural programs, suffered major defections to Tabbital Pulaaku once the latter arrived in the

country. In the United States, I recall joining a TPI delegation in the late 2000s as they travelled

to Brooklyn to smooth over relations with the Pulaar Speaking Association, with whom they had

previously failed to get along. I was warned to ignore such tensions and rivalries, but I could not

avoid asking about them as I learned about the movement. The best I could do was prove to

those I spoke with that I would attempt to treat all sides of these rivalries fairly.

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Within the movement, there are some signs of what Duchene and Heller (2012) call a

shift “from Pride to Profit.” This refers to a commodification of language and cultural identity in

which language serves as a signifier of authenticity in the context of tourism or product branding.

In 2012, I attended a meeting in France at which Tabbital Pulaaku members discussed an

entrepreneurial scheme aimed at raising money to create a Pulaar language TV channel. The plan

involved getting merchants in Africa and Europe to sell learning cards that teach non-native

speakers basic Pulaar. In 2013, I joined a meeting in the Senegalese village of Aañam Godo,

where Tabbital members present discussed plans to take to the media and the Senegalese

government their proposals to build a Fulɓe cultural center targeting tourists. Whether the TPI-

centered Pan-Fulɓe tendency will mark a broader trend towards culture and language

commodification remains to be seen.

Finally, one of the major developments in the promotion of the Pulaar language is the

emergence of hip-hop, particularly in Mauritania. Not only has hip-hop become a form of

political expression for Haalpulaar youth, but it has become an important medium through which

ideas related to ngenndiyaŋkaagal have reached them. As a result, many older and established

Pulaar activists have cautiously embraced the rappers. The rappers’ singing of a style of Pulaar

laced with words from French, Wolof and Hassaniya and urban slang may not fully satisfy some

of the Pulaar movement’s linguistic purists. The purists would be pleased, however, at the

homages paid in Mauritanian rappers’ songs to the likes of Ndiaye Saidou Amadou, Tidiane

Anne and Murtuɗo. To paraphrase a statement Urla made about Basque Free Radio, Pulaar hip-

hop may not teach good Pulaar, but it does provide venues in which youth can experiment in

developing their own voice in Pulaar (2012:201).

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Hip-hop may just be part of a reimagining of the community of Pulaar speakers, spelling an

emergent “Post-Nationalism” taking shape within the movement. Pulaar hip-hop artists in

Mauritania seem to resemble some of the figures Heller (2011) encountered in her ethnography

on post-nationalism in Canada. Pular hip-hop artists are in the business of making consciousness-

raising music. Yet this music is often linguistically hybrid, they eschew the linguistic purity of

Pulaar activist poets and journalists, and their expressions of Pulaar language loyalty are

situational.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

John Hames received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Florida, where he

also received his MA in anthropology in 2012. In 2005, he received his BA in International

Affairs from Suffolk University in Boston, MA. His background includes service as a Peace

Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 2005 to 2007. The fieldwork he conducted for this

manuscript took place mainly in 2012-2013, with follow-up visits in 2015 and 2016. Funding for

that research included support from the West African Research Association and the University of

Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.