The Dankun Network: the Donso Hunters of Burkina Faso between ecological change and new associations

Lorenzo Ferrarini

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

In this text I look at processes of transformation involving an initiatory society of hunters known in parts of West Africa as donsoya. I start from a double embodiment of ecological change: the combination of the reduction of the habitat of big animals that gave master hunters their prestige and role of meat providers, and the restrictive environmental policies that often force the hunters into illegality. Those environmental policies were a fundamental factor in the constitution of donso hunters into hunters’ associations officially recognized by the state in countries like Mali, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, a phenomenon that has massively transformed donsoya in the past twenty-five years. This article takes the contemporary example of Western Burkina Faso to look at the complex interrelation of ecological changes, transformations in the internal structures of donsoya and the diffusion of a cult imported from neighboring countries. One of the main criteria for defining the internal hierarchy among donso hunters, that of hunting exploits, has been subverted by the disappearance of big game. The emergence of modern hunting associations seems to provide a way to negotiate the hierarchy in different ways, with hunters mobilizing their networks of relationships to obtain positions of power. Through a reflexive account of my own initiation to donsoya I show how hunters, in parallel with the emergence of associations, adopted ritual forms that emphasize relationships with other hunters, and I argue how these changes show the interrelatedness of ecology, ritual and politics in today's donsoya.

Keywords: Burkina Faso; ecology; hunting; networks; ritual

In this essay I look at processes of transformation involving an initiatory society of hunters known in parts of West Africa as donsoya. I start from a double embodiment of ecological change: the combination of the reduction of the habitat of big animals that gave master hunters their prestige and role of meat providers, and the restrictive environmental policies that often force the hunters into illegality. Those environmental policies were a fundamental factor in the constitution of donso hunters into hunters’ associations officially recognised by the state in countries like Mali, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, a phenomenon that has massively transformed donsoya in the past twenty-five years.

How is donsoya coping with the decreasing relevance of hunting, and how is it negotiating the internal hierarchies, new structures and ways of initiating its members? I address these questions by looking at the internal workings of networks of initiated hunters in contemporary Burkina Faso, in other words I adopt an insider’s perspective on donsoya. By contrast, most studies of the new associative forms of donso hunters have focussed on their new ways of engaging with the media, policy debates, or broader social and political context (see for example Bassett 2003; Hagberg 2004; Hellweg 2009; Leach 2004). Nonetheless, it is not my intention to limit the scope to the hunters; on the contrary, I connect a number of previous studies with each other, highlighting a series of relationships between environmental, political and religious processes. I suggest that it is fruitful to think of these processes as parts of complex interrelated systems in which each element influences the others.

It is important to note here that I base much of my first-hand observations on doctoral fieldwork carried out in 2011-2012, during which I was able to join donsoya and embark on a path of apprenticeship with a local master hunter. My unexpected initiation gave my fieldwork a direction that, although initially unintended, I later pursued on my own initiative, adopting a participant perspective on a number of levels. Studying donsoya through initiation gave me a privileged and very partial perspective at the same time. As I will detail in a later section, the stages of my apprenticeship revealed many important dynamics in the organisation of hunting associations, the relationship between a teacher and his students and within a group of students. Many of these relationships were revealed by my moves inside these emergent structures - in other words, some processes became

1

visible only through provocation.1 I was given remarkable access to initiatory knowledge, but my position of apprentice also entailed limitations on what I could reveal of the restricted knowledge I was receiving. As an acknowledgement of this positionality I adopt a first-person voice for much of what follows, without nonetheless renouncing to draw more general conclusions.

The bush in transformation

My apprenticeship in donsoya consisted not only of learning initiatory knowledge, but also of many days of hunting - about one out of six in the year I spent in Burkina Faso. During these outings with the shotgun in hand I had much time to realise how the bush around Karankasso Sambla, the village of the Houet province where I was based, was different from my expectations of African wilderness. I often found myself hunting in narrow forested strips between clusters of fields, or in the fields themselves. In fact, many of the small animals that can be found in the areas where I hunted coexist with humans in a multispecies habitat made of contact zones (Haraway 2008; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2007; Ogden 2011). For example, the double-spurred francolin (Pternistis bicalcaratus) can be shot while it unearths recently sown sorghum. Such small animals share the bush with humans up to the point that shooting them could sometimes endanger the safety of the inhabitants of nearby hamlets. Like all other hunters in Karankasso, I sometimes hunted very close to farmers at work.

The lack of extensive forested areas connected to each other means, in practical terms, the absence of larger animals like big antelopes, gazelles or big cats. During the year of my stay the hunters of the village never killed anything larger than a few duikers (Sylvicapra grimmia) or porcupines (Hystrix cristata). The large animals that populate the heroic tales of donso singers are now in many regions either completely absent or protected by law, such that only old master hunters can pride themselves with having killed such prestigious prey.

Further, West African state governments are increasingly applying policies that limit hunting on their territories, as bushmeat commerce is seen more and more as environmentally unsustainable (Pailler et al. 2009; UNEP and UNDP 1998). Those hippos, elephants and crocodiles, and other large animals that can still be found in the area, belong to a protected category and sanctions for their killing include heavy fines and imprisonment. As a consequence, the donsow of the area where I conducted fieldwork usually hunted a few monkeys, birds, hares and even smaller mammals. This means that, in terms of the contribution they can provide to the diet of the local population, the donsow are less and less important. A case study from northern Ivory Coast, based on comparative data from the early 1980s and late 1990s, shows a marked decline in wildlife numbers, associated with a rise in the number of active hunters and firearms (Bassett 2005). Data specifically relative to Burkina Faso is harder to compare, because most of it refers to the central and eastern parts of the country, where many game reserves are in place, and initiated hunters are normally absent (e. g. East 1990; Rouamba 2002; Thiollay 2006). But what I gathered from my fieldwork with hunters seems to point at a similar situation to the Ivorian trends outlined above, especially in the Houet and Kenedougou provinces, in which I carried out most of my research.

The progressive disappearance of big game and the general reduction in habitat for wildlife is a process with a long history, which started to intensify from the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the introduction of firearms to the Mande area. During this period Samori Touré was pivotal in the diffusion of British rifles, which he needed in order to resist the French colonial troops. His troops almost completely exterminated elephants from whole regions in order to procure ivory that he could trade for the firearms he was receiving from Sierra Leone (Legassick 1966; Person 1968).

Another major factor in the ecological transformation of this area was the introduction of cotton on a large scale, as a state-managed commercial crop. Initially made a mandatory crop by the French since the 1880s, cotton production really took off only starting from 1950. In Burkina, production only peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in the south-western region, when it became the country's largest export (World Bank 2004). Thomas Bassett has documented how in northern Ivory Coast this latter period was characterised by a marked extensification, especially in the increase of the surface area cultivated for cotton, as a strategy to cope with the fibre’s falling price (2001, 151-153). Similar processes took place in Burkina, and peasants continue to dedicate an increasing number of fields to cotton, in the hope of realising a monetary gain.2

2

On the other hand, the intensification in the cultivation of cotton, with its elevated use of insecticides, has had the effect of reducing the incidence of trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, thus facilitating cattle breeding. Also thanks to the increasing availability of veterinary treatments, more and more cattle are being herded. Those villagers who can afford to own more cows than they need to plough their fields use cattle as an investment for the surplus of cash they earn through cotton.

Cotton and cows, with the local and global economies connected to them, are important agents in the transformation of the bush space around villages like Karankasso Sambla. Another major influence is represented by global environmentalist discourses as they can be retraced in the policies of some West African countries. Fairhead and Leach, in a number of works (1996; 1998; Leach and Fairhead 2000), have underlined how in West Africa forms of scientific knowledge have backed discourses of degradation of the environment (see also Bassett and Zuéli 2000). This knowledge has been used to regulate landscapes and to control people's interactions with them. Forest reserves and national parks are one such form of control, excluding local populations from all access to natural resources in a delimited area (see an example from Burkina Faso in Hagberg 2001). But the multiple attempts by the state to regulate the access to meat with hunting quotas, game categories and hunting permits, represent more pervasive attempts to control and bureaucratise the bush. In countries like Guinea, in the 1990s, donso hunters were co-opted as partners in these policies, thanks to international donors who were pushing decentralised, community-based and participatory management of the resources. These discourses constructed initiated hunters as traditional mediators between the village and the bush, idealised custodians of the natural environment (Leach 2000). In south-western Burkina Faso, though, attempts to involve donso hunters in the application of environmental laws and policies were not successful.3 Here, like in Mali and Ivory Coast, hunters and forest guards were often in conflict and the state was very strict in regulating hunting activities.

What did such a situation imply for the local donso hunters? One of the ways a hunter can acquire prestige and become influential among his peers is to kill dangerous animals, like a solitary male buffalo, or to bring home large quantities of meat. In this way, he demonstrates not just his skills in tracking, stalking and shooting, but also his occult knowledge. The state of the bush around Karankasso, not dissimilar from other areas of the Houet and Kenedougou provinces of Burkina Faso and increasingly of many other parts of West Africa, meant that a hunter has to find new ways to acquire importance inside the structures of donsoya.4

I move now to describe one way in which donsoya responded to these ecological and political challenges, namely seeking recognition through grouping into formalised associations.

Associations

Joseph Hellweg describes in his book on donsoya in Ivory Coast (2011) how donso hunters first constituted into legally recognised associations in Mali, in the 1980s. Gerald Cashion, in his dissertation on donso hunters in Mali (1984), briefly mentions a national association with an office in Bamako: membership was acquired after the payment of 1500 francs CFA and a card was issued. But, even if they had important roles in representing donsow within the institutions, such urban figures, often civil servants, rarely practised hunting themselves and their authority with village donsow was limited (1984, 101-103). Where they had a powerful function was in their role of mediators, enabling illiterate farmers who would rarely travel to town and were not prepared to deal with the Malian bureaucracy, to have a voice on legal matters.

The reason why such a role was needed at the time seems to lie in the way the state was implementing environmental policies on its territory. Cashion gives an account of the very restrictive regulations on firearms possession and hunting permits implemented by the Malian state at the end of the 1970s. In 1978, in particular, hunting was completely banned within the whole national territory and owners of shotguns were authorised to buy only three shells per year (Cashion 1984, 115Hunters started to be prosecuted by the Waters and Forests police, a corps that exists under the same name - Eaux et Forêts - in Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. The new association, called Association Nationale des Chasseurs du Mali or Benkadi,5 set itself the aim of negotiating state permits for the donsow to carry a shotgun, and reductions on gun taxes and hunting permits, in exchange for collaboration on environmental management policies (Hellweg 2011, 129-130).

3

In post-independence Ivory Coast laws were similarly restrictive, with a general ban on hunting introduced in 1974. From 1994 “traditional” hunting was permitted only in a hunter's area of residence, exclusively with locally made shotguns and for given animal species. Hellweg points out how in specially protected forests - forêts classées - even the exploitation of medicinal plants was forbidden (2011, 130). In this situation where the state was fighting the donsow as outlaws through the Waters and Forests police, a structure such as Benkadi could have put them back in the position of citizens with a role in state policies. Thanks to transnational relationships between hunters, Benkadi crossed the border some time in 1990, to arrive in an Ivory Coast that had serious crime problems, with bandits stopping buses at night and robbing the passengers, plus widespread theft and insecurity (Hellweg 2011, 45-51). In such a context, Benkadi stressed the role of hunters as local security agents much more than was the case in Mali. The association started to spread into the northern part of the country exploiting the existing networks of donsoya. Since the police were applying an arbitrary use of authority to exert bribes and violating human rights, the patrols set up by Benkadi, with their system of fines and refunds, were welcomed by the local population.

Up until this point, Benkadi had lacked national representatives or recognition, in other words it did not have the bureaucratic structures and dialogue with the state that it had in Mali. The first person to set up an organisation that could perform a role of communication between state structures and Benkadi was a civil servant hailing from the north of the country, but living in Abidjan. He had the Ministry of Interior recognise an organization by the name of Afrique Environnementale (AE), with the aim of fighting desertification and protecting flora and fauna, as well as educating the local population about environmental consciousness. Hellweg underlines how AE played with the language of environmentalism, in order to lure state support and attract international funds by promising that it would turn the donsow into environmentalists.

The donsow played along with AE’s rhetoric, because in return the newborn representative body was negotiating less restrictive regulations for them. The choice of an environmentalist idiom was crucial in gaining the state's attention, as opposed to the real reasons behind Benkadi's diffusion, namely a need for security for which the state was responsible, but could not admit to be forced to contract to external agents. Nonetheless, security problems were in AE's unwritten agenda from the beginning (Hellweg 2011, 140-147). Donso associations and militias would play a major role in Ivoirian politics during the 2000s, including participation in two civil wars and in the rise to power of president Ouattara in 2011 (Bassett 2003, 2004).

Burkina Faso has known migratory fluxes and commercial exchanges with Ivory Coast well before both countries gained independence in 1960, and in general the border area between Mali, Ivory Coast and Burkina has historically been very permeable. It is not surprising then that goods, people and ideas circulated quite freely. In 1996 a master hunter by the name of Tiefing Coulibaly organised a provincial-level gathering of donsow to found the first Burkinabe branch of Benkadi. Tiefing, who died in 2002, was from Dakoro, a village in the Leraba province of Burkina Faso that is very close to the border with Ivory Coast, the country from which he took the idea and the name of the association. Sten Hagberg accounts for how the newly constituted association followed the advice of the Waters and Forests police to participate in a World Bank-funded project to conduct an arms census (1998).

Within two years, the association had undergone extensive dissemination, enabled by the fact that membership required just the payment of a 1000 francs CFA fee and initiation into donsoya (Hagberg 2004, 56). The reasons why local farmers felt such an institution was necessary was their on-going conflict with Peul herders and Mossi farmers, who were perceived as foreign invaders and often characterised as thieves. Many cases of excessive and arbitrary use of violence were recorded (Hagberg 1998; 2006). In Burkina, Benkadi became an ethnically marked movement, based on the recruitment of young Senufo farmers with little or no knowledge of hunting as a skilled activity nor initiatory knowledge, which in turn led to critiques by some of the older donsow. Tiefing Coulibaly himself would remark on the difference between Benkadi and donsoya, but used his network of master hunters to spread the association in western Burkina Faso (Hagberg 2004, 59). His delegate Bema Ouattara would travel to initiate new hunters with a simplified procedure, and issue association cards.

Since Benkadi's establishment the politics of hunting associations in Burkina Faso have been far from clear, with multiple rivalries over the leadership and the succession to Tiefing's role of leader of the donsow. His funeral in 2002, for example, was exploited politically by the president of the

4

National Assembly, right before the elections. Furthermore in 2000 another association, named Benkelema and based in Bobo Dioulasso, obtained the official recognition by the state that Benkadi had never obtained, and proposed itself as the main interlocutor for the state (Hagberg 2004, 62).

When I arrived in the field, in August 2011, Benkelema and Benkadi had left their role to another organisation, the Fédération des Chasseurs Traditionnels Dozos de l'Ouest du Burkina, headed by André Sanou. A retired policeman, Sanou was a well-known ally of Burkina's President Compaoré and, although he was at the time the formal leader of the donsow in Burkina, had taken up donsoya only relatively late in his life.6 During the period I spent in Burkina, yet another association was emerging with the explicit aim of becoming a rival of the Fédération, following discontent with Sanou's unclear management of the financial resources allocated by the state. The Union Nationale des Dozos Tradi-praticiens de la Santé du Burkina has its headquarters in the capital Ouagadougou, somewhat closer to political power but even more remote from rural donsow. Its leaders have been very aggressive in promoting events in Bobo Dioulasso and campaigning for membership in the western provinces, in what looks very much like an operation of lobbying in preparation for a political candidature.

Other associations have emerged in Burkina during the period I have briefly reviewed (Hagberg 2006), but I believe I have explained enough to underline how there are, by now, well-established forms of recruitment that are different from those described in the classic works on donsoya by Cissé (1994) or Cashion (1984). While in the past, before being initiated, a hunter had to be an apprentice to his teacher for up to seven years (Hagberg 2006, 782), the new procedures put in place by Dakoro Tiefing Coulibaly required just the payment of a fee and the sacrifice of two chickens, plus the toss of a kola nut. This is in its substance not dissimilar from the ritual described in previous literature, but the dimension of apprenticeship in magic and hunting techniques is absent, as is the moral evaluation of the candidate. This also means that a newly initiated donso no longer has an umbilical relationship with his teacher and even may have no teacher at all - yet he can receive a card and the right to carry a gun.

The actual hunting activity, in all this, recedes more and more into the background, just as the possibility for finding prey also shrinks in an increasingly man-made landscape. Meanwhile, the politics of hunting associations are becoming ever more intertwined with state politics, and more and more decisions take place in towns.

Initiations

When preparing my research, I had never counted on the possibility of being initiated into donsoya, though I knew a number of researchers had been accepted inside donsoya, among which both native (Cissé 1994; Ouattara 2008; Traoré 2000) and foreign scholars (Hellweg 2011; Konkouris 2013; Strawn 2011). I also knew about recent transformations in the paths of apprenticeship and initiation in western Burkina Faso from the works I reference in the previous section, but I could not be sure of the situation in a village like Karankasso. Therefore I was extremely surprised when the head of the village hunters, donsoba Go-Fo Traoré, upon first hearing about my project, told me that the following week he would gather the hunters and we would go to a place in the bush. I should bring a red cock, a hen, and ten kola nuts. The association fee was 1000 francs CFA (£1.30 in 2011). One of the ten kola nuts would be split in half and thrown to determine my acceptance, hence the Jula name for the ceremony - woroci, from woro, kola, and the verb ci, to split.

Without me even asking, he proposed that I have an initiation ritual and be admitted to the association. By becoming a donso, he continued, I would agree to respect my teachers and their families, not to steal or lie and especially to stay away from my fellow donsow's wives. By following these rules, I would be sure to remain “inside” donsoya, become a successful hunter, and never become the victim of a hunting accident.

I knew I was able to enter donsoya thanks to the transformations started in Burkina by Tiefing Coulibaly. In Karankasso there was apparently no trace of the long apprenticeship that used to precede the initiation ritual. Here initiation and membership to an association had been merged into a single event in which, almost simultaneously, the kola nut was split and a membership card was issued. This merger of donsoya as practice and donso tòn or hunters’ association was also visible in the changed mechanisms whereby the leaders were chosen. Normally, according to previous studies

5

(Cashion 1984, 101–102; Cissé 1964, 186) and to the testimonies of elderly hunters with whom I spoke, the leader of a group of hunters (donsokuntigi) is chosen on the basis of the seniority of his initiation. Strikingly enough for the gerontocratic societies among which donsoya is found, the criterion is not a question of age but of the longevity of one’s involvement in donsoya. But in Karankasso, although he was not the most experienced hunter, Go-Fo Traoré had inherited his leadership position, together with the title of president of the hunters’ association, from his mentor Go-Do Ouattara. The latter had established the association in Karankasso in 1998 and had become its first president. The current president/donsokuntigi had been Go-Do’s vice, and after his death he had been nominated to his mentor's double office, whereas normally another hunter should have held the position of leader due to his seniority of initiation. The present situation was determined by the overlapping of the structures of the modern association and the more traditional structures of donsoya, and was a source of tension among the hunters in Karankasso, with the leadership at times contested.

Rather than testing the applicant throughout a long period of apprenticeship, now the donsow preferred to place him under the wing of the association and subject his actions to the moral judgement of his fellow initiates. So on 12 September 2011 we marched to the sound of the donson'goni harp to the dankun of Karankasso Sambla, a few minutes from the village. The dankun, a term that literally means “border”, refers in this case to the fork in a path that creates a triangular shape on the ground. Annual sacrifices, initiations and other rituals are celebrated on these altars, which are widely described in the literature as the sacred places of the donso hunters (Cashion 1984, 207–211; Cissé 1994, 67–74; Hellweg 2009, 42–44; Sidibé 1929, 69) My kola nut and chickens gave positive responses and I became a donso hunter and a member of the local association.7

Besides being crucial for the continuation of my research, my initiation was also a very interesting example of how donso hunters would try to minimise disagreements and conflict. Money was managed very publicly, being shown to everybody and receiving benedictions. I had taken care of the small expenses required to organise the ceremony: sorghum beer for everybody and the musicians’ fee. Neither the donsoba nor anyone else ever suggested how much I should give, putting me in the awkward situation of not knowing who to ask in order to gain an idea of the amount needed. All this showed the explicit aim of avoiding conflict and complaints, including suspicions of misappropriation of funds.

Further research revealed how hunters seek peaceful relationships not only amongst each other, but also in their kinship circles. Before meeting at the dankun, I was told all donsow should ask their wives or mothers for benedictions, and try to resolve any conflict they might have with them. Obtaining the benedictions of one’s father is especially important. Agreement - in Jula bèn - is a very important concept for donso hunters, fundamental for a successful outcome for the ritual, and also a precondition for a successful hunt. A donso who enters the bush whilst conflicts remain between his wives at home, for example, can hope to find very little prey and, in some cases, may even incur accidents.

That conflict and strained relationships can have a negative influence on the outcome of a ceremony became strikingly clear to me during a successive ritual whereby I was to sanction my affiliation to a master hunter by the name of Adama Sogo Traoré. As the membership to an association of hunters does not in itself bring any of the initiatory knowledge that constitutes donsoya, I knew I had to become an apprentice to a teacher. Adama had four students in Karankasso, and about two dozen more in the neighbouring villages. One of the reasons that attracted me to him was not just his fame as a master hunter, but also the prospect of accessing his vast network of acquaintances among the hunters.

Another ritual was required to make me officially Adama's disciple, which would follow the basic script of the woroci in Karankasso with the toss of a kola nut and the sacrifice of chickens. Organising this ritual was extremely instructive in terms of the social dynamics inside a group of students: all news was to be delivered in person, in order of their seniority of initiation, which involved a number of visits to sometimes remote settlements. The aim was to obtain approval for the ceremony to take place from each key component of Adama’s network. The date of this ritual, called borodon,8 was to be decided by Adama's students in Karankasso. But, as I found out, the group was divided, and one disciple in particular was against my affiliation to Adama. He tried to sabotage my ritual, exploiting this need for respecting the hierarchy and hearing everybody's opinion, in practical terms by absenting himself from all the meetings where his contribution was necessary to make a decision. Adama was

6

very well aware of his game, and played along as the refined strategist that he was. Instead of imposing a date with his authority, he delegated the decision to his students, so that whoever disagreed would have had to show his hand in front of his companions. Eventually, rather than explicitly disagreeing with his teacher, this person gave in and a day was chosen. It is interesting here to see how Adama was making use of his position of authority in a subtle way, one that would still respect the importance of group decisions.

Whereas my initiation in Karankasso had been free from difficulties, with the sacrificial chickens expressing acceptance through their dying position, at Adama’s dankun my chickens showed that something was wrong. I was asked whether my parents approved of my research, or whether I had left some conflict at home. But eventually it was determined that the reason for the negative outcome of the sacrifices was a disagreement between Adama and his brother upon the sale of some cows. As soon as the two brothers promised to come to an agreement, another cockerel was killed and died showing that I had been accepted.

Later on, talking to hunters about what had happened, I realised once more how these sacrifices at the dankun are thought to diagnose the quality of the relationships between the hunters affiliated to it. On that day many of the hens the students had brought to learn about their future had shown bad omens because of the divisiveness within Adama’s group. Furthermore, he and his brother were continuously in conflict over all sorts of things, as I was going to discover later, and the very organisation of that day’s ritual had been troubled by intrigue and machination.

My woroci in Karankasso had been a model example of the search for agreement - bèn - whereas the borodon ritual at Adama's, in its troubled preparation, had revealed to me some of the effects of divisiveness. As my apprenticeship to Adama progressed, I came to realise the importance donsow attribute to the relationships they maintain with each other, what I call the dankun network. The donsow’s altar is the centre and the indicator of the health of these relationships, inasmuch as they influence the outcome of the sacrifices performed there. The rest of my apprenticeship to Adama showed me some of the forms these relationships could take, far beyond the manifestations I had known in my initiation rituals.

The networked donso

Perhaps the most fundamental relationship, often equated to a parent-son bond, connects the student and his teacher. This also means that the student is, up to a point, caught in the kinship network of the teacher, and vice-versa. Adama took me on a few occasions to Samogogwan to meet his first wife, sister and elderly mother who lived in the family compound where Adama's grandfather, Bema, had settled around the turn of the century. In turn, Adama was regularly visiting his students' parents, although it was impossible for him to do it with me. Like a son for his father, I would try to perform duties for him, bringing presents from time to time, trying to give him a share of the meat I hunted and occasionally working for him around his compound. Small groups of his students would in turns go to work in his fields when the rainy season started.

The teacher in return would give the students bits of knowledge, mostly in the form of recipes for herbal medicines, but also in a more indirect way, hidden in the many stories he would tell us as we sat around the teapot, constantly boiling with green tea. But Adama was also very careful in respecting the hierarchy among his students, for some had been with him for more than 20 years. Most of the time a medicinal recipe could not be revealed to a student unless his seniors already knew it.

Adama also used medicines to maintain our relation of dependence on him. We often complained that he would not reveal the recipe for the white powder necessary to exorcise the power of the animals we killed. The same powder can be smeared on one's face and forearms before going to the bush at night, or used in one's bathing water to chase away evil forces. It was, in other words, a very necessary preparation that we were often short of, and had to get from him. I realised that this was one way he had tied us to him, and for which he could be sure we had to visit him with a certain frequency. The difference between giving a student a medicine or its recipe is clearly that the former can only be consumed, while the latter can be redistributed within the network and traded for new knowledge, acquiring a completely different relational value.

7

The analogy between donsoya and kinship can be extended even further if I consider how often I had to visit fellow hunters on occasion of funerary ceremonies. Adama was always clear in saying that it was our duty to go, just as it is a duty to be present at relatives’ funerals. A group of students implied solidarity: for example, when a fellow student had to organise an onerous funerary ceremony we all went hunting for a few days, in order to stock him with meat to feed his many guests. Looking at the way meat is shared in the case of an important kill, for example, it is again possible to see the proximity of figures from the domain of kinship and the domain of hunting (see Hellweg 2011, 80-82).

Mobile phones have come to assume a striking importance in this network of relationships: donsow use them often to maintain their contacts, especially considering the relatively high cost of phone calls in Burkina. Adama himself, who being illiterate usually had a son operate his phone for him, had about a hundred contacts in his address book. Having spent so much time with him I know how often he made and received calls. But one of the most striking examples was to see the walls of a house in the compound of a master hunter in Samogohiri, covered in phone numbers. ‘See how many contacts he has’, I was told, ‘it gives you a measure you how important he is’. In this case the extension of the network of this donso, also a renowned diviner and healer, was made visibly public in his compound.

The borodon ritual had allowed me to catch a glimpse of the darker sides of the dankun network. As my acquaintance with the hunters of the Kenedougou and Houet provinces became deeper, I realised that many of these relationships consisted of rivalry, jealousy and hatred. The hunters were very often in conflict, and Adama could count as many allies as he could list enemies. Leadership in a group was very often the reason for conflict. The most representative example that I heard about was a feud between two groups of Senufo hunters in the region of Ouolonkoto, namely the followers of Nafali Koné and those of Kadjana Dembélé. The two master hunters had been trying to kill each other for years, I was told. Also on occasional trips to Samogogwan with Adama I realised that he had many enemies in his village of origin, and he claimed to have received many attacks in the form of sorcery. One of the favourite stories Adama would tell over and over again is an account of how he had killed a hippo for a prestigious ceremony, in spite of the attempts of jealous hunters to frustrate his plans. His pride was not so much in the conquest of the prey itself, but in the way he had been able to overcome a plot against him thanks to his knowledge of magic.

Protective medicines, aimed at deflecting magical attacks constituted a crucial part of my apprenticeship in magic with Adama, and once in a single day he taught me as many as four such recipes. Some were directed at shielding me from attacks on my person, others would deflect curses aimed at spoiling my chances of killing prey. I definitely gained a sense that for the donsow such defences were as developed as were the means for aggression.

What I witnessed on the local scale of these villages in Kenedougou and Houet took place on a broader scale in the politics of national associations. These included fights for the leadership, and periodical gatherings in which leaders would mobilise their connections with politicians, on the one hand, and among the hunters in the villages, on the other. Although it might at first sight seem strange that donsoya, an initiatory society based on hunting, is associated with urban areas, in fact increasing numbers of donsow are now permanently based in towns. In this way they are closer to the centres of political power and can be readily available for supporting an association or participating in a gathering. They no longer hunt very much, but continue to sell medicines and perform divination.

From individualism to relationships?

The more I reflected on these networked aspects of donsoya as I experienced it during fieldwork, the more I was struck by the contrast with donsow as they had been portrayed in part of the literature. Patrick McNaughton, for example, in comparing Mande blacksmiths and hunters, remarks how ‘[Initiated hunters] are not opposed to seriously disrupting social harmony and cohesion to achieve their ends, and they are perceived frequently as threats to social stability’ (1988a, 71). Because of the energy they can command and their sorcery skills, they are feared as much as they are respected (1988b, 156). Furthermore, they embody the archetype of fadenya, the individualistic competition between half-brothers that represents ‘the will to put oneself before the group, to act in defiance of it and to disrupt it if need be, in order to accomplish some personal goal’ (1982, 55). McNaughton relied

8

heavily on the work of Charles Bird, who first wrote about the Mande hero in oral traditions - most of the time a donso - identifying him with the topos of fadenya (Bird and Kendall 1980, 14-16).

I could not recognise my fellow hunters in this portrait, as ‘rugged individualists who seek to bend society to their own wills’ (McNaughton 1982, 56). Rather, they were entangled in networks of relations, from their own compounds to the extended family, to the relationships created through apprenticeship and associations. Perturbations in this network influenced their lives and hunting exploits. Furthermore, there was a lot of micro-politics guiding the decisions of the master hunters or their speeches on the dankun, even for those like Adama, who often deprecated the donsoya practised in town and its connections with institutions and politicians. I needed a moment of realisation that could allow me to put these different views in a diachronic perspective, one that arrived thanks to Adama's network of relationships.

In his compound near the village of Kouakouale, not far from the town of Bobo Dioulasso, I met a master hunter named Bakari Sanou, whom everybody called Taximan. He had been a driver for most of his life, and had the same role in the army where, I was surprised to discover, he had met Adama during the 1974 war with Mali. He told me he had great memories of his time with Adama, and became very open with me upon learning that I had become his student. An old man at 75 years of age, he had a piercing voice and a sharp sense of humour. He could drink astonishing quantities of spirits, and when drunk was even less restrained. During one of our conversations he started a tirade against the dankun. He said this altar was a new trend, but that he never had one and that he never would. I was astonished, and asked him to explain himself better. He continued calling the dankun a fraud, and named Tiefing Coulibaly as the man who “sold” it around. Bakari later revealed to me that he was sticking to the power objects or fetishes of the donsow.

In successive conversations, Adama confirmed that before the dankun “arrived” - most likely before Tiefing there were some but they were not as ubiquitous as nowadays - donsow were relying mostly on fetishes for their rituals. These objects and the dankun are used for similar ritual purposes but the modalities are different. A fetish of the hunters or donsojo is a highly personal object, and only its owner can operate it. If it is used for somebody else, then the owner is anyway the mediator of the request. Any donso, on the other hand, can go to the dankun and ask for good luck or help with some endeavour, or good health for a relative. A donsojo is either destroyed at the death of the owner, or is passed to a disciple, whereas the dankun generally belongs to an area and to its local hunting association. Although a dankun can belong to a single person, most are used by groups of people, be it an association like in Karankasso or a group of students like in Adama's case. In this sense it is different from a donsojo, and Bakari once again expressed his mistrust of the dankun calling it publique (in French). With this word he referred precisely to the fact that, rather than being hidden in a man’s closet. At the dankun rituals like my borodon or the annual sacrifice test and make the network visible. A successful ceremony with many participants reinforces the prestige of the host, especially if important guests come from far away.

Later chats with Adama allowed me to understand that I had made the mistake of considering the dankun as a timeless institution present since the origin of donsoya. I was surprised to learn instead from the accounts of my teachers and other hunters that the dankun only really started to spread in the west of Burkina Faso from the 1990s. But now that I was aware of this, it made perfect sense that the man responsible for its diffusion was the same man credited with the introduction of modern hunting associations in the country. By reading the accounts gathered by Hellweg (2011, 13311, ) in the north of Ivory Coast it is striking how similar a process was involved in the diffusion of Benkadi and of the dankun, with the payment of a fee and the establishment ceremony. The change started by Dakoro Tiefing Coulibaly had involved the cults as much as the institutions of donsoya, creating a different model that saw in the dankun its perfect symbol and tool, the fork of paths that stood for the expanding network of relations the hunters were setting up. Just as the master hunters were establishing their first dankun, the modalities with which young apprentices were recruited also changed, and the fee and card system spread. I had the perception that I had joined donsoya during the final part of a process of transformation into a networked practice.

By way of contrast, in talking to the hunters of the generation of Bakari or my teacher Adama, elders in their seventies, I could picture the apprenticeship in donsoya in the pre-dankun era as very much based on the relationship between teacher and student. A master hunter would never have had thirty students, like Adama had, but only a few and they would absolutely depend on their master as

9

the only figure able to sanction their status, in the absence of an institution able to do the same with a card. Those aspects that today characterise the urban manifestations of donsoya were absent, from large gatherings to parades to politics. Perhaps more importantly, the sheer number of hunters was, according to the accounts of the elders, significantly smaller. This kind of donsoya was probably more similar to that witnessed by Bird and McNaughton in Mali during the 1970s.

Conclusions: back to ecology

Despite my sketch of these two tendencies, one should not fall into the trap of picturing two simplified ideal types succeeding each other, the individualistic donso being replaced by a networked type. In the first place, the extent to which donsow had broader relationships with hunters from different ethnic groups and villages had already been noted by Cashion during his fieldwork in Mali only shortly after Bird’s (Cashion 1984, 109). In particular he draws an analogy with the case of Igala hunters of south-western Nigeria as described by Boston (1964), who already evidenced the existence of a network constituted by esoteric knowledge and skills. Like other initiatory societies, donsoya is ultimately a way to acquire knowledge and, with that knowledge, a power that can only be maintained and recognised through relations with others (Saul 2006).

But most importantly, whereas some aspects of the earlier version of donsoya could be called antisocial if we were to only consider hunters’ relationships with other humans, it would be in my opinion incorrect to call them individualistic. Even before the spread of the dankun in Burkina Faso, in fact, the donsow were entangled in a variety of ecological relationships, among which hunting was one of the foremost.9 Furthermore, the rituals that hunters performed on their donsojow put them in communication with the powers of the bush, namely the genies associated with each type of power object, and even allowed them to approach and tame wild animals.10 In other words, I am arguing that initiated hunters have never been isolated individuals but on the contrary practise their craft in and through relationships. Both hunting fetishes and the dankun could in this sense be considered ecological cults (Schoffeleers 1979) without a specific territory, which deal with two different ecologies - the former mostly a non-human one, the latter chiefly human. This takes us back to the use of ecology as a way to think relationships in complex, interrelated systems, most notably in the work of Bateson (1972). The processes I describe in this article represent a transition of hunters’ relationships from the bush - with animals, genies, and more broadly a non-human environment - towards relations with other hunters, politicians, or state representatives. The skill of a donso is then shifting from mastery of the mostly non-human bush ecology to the mastery of networks of humans. In such a relational perspective, the term individualism appears ill suited.

The other related point I want to make is that environmental change and related state policies are not mere causes of the transformations of donsoya, but are at the same time their effects, as the new associations multiply the number of hunters and their shotguns (see a case study in Bassett 2005). If we look over the long term, the reduction of game or of opportunities to hunt seems to have resulted in an increase in the number of hunters, instead of a reduction. And whilst this results in a decline in the importance and relevance of hunting activities for the donsow, who have become everything from security agents to irregular troops and even park guards (see Ferme and Hoffman 2004; Hagberg 2004; Hellweg 2011), judging from the situation I experienced in Burkina Faso the bush is more beaten than ever. Hunters are active agents in the transformation of the bush, they don't just adapt to a changing context, rather they are even occasional actors in the making of environmental policies (Leach 2000).

Whilst the new occupations and social roles taken up by donso hunters in West Africa have been explored in detail in previous studies, looking at the workings of networks of initiated hunters allows us to grasp the degree of continuity that lies underneath the changes of the past twenty-five years. The story of the parallel diffusion, in Burkina Faso, of modern hunters' associations and of the dankun evidences the remarkable plasticity of donsoya, able to absorb ecological, political and ritual transformations.

Bibliography

10

Bassett, Thomas J. 2001. The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, 1880-1995. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bassett, Thomas J. 2003. Dangerous Pursuits: Hunter Associations (Donzo Ton) and National Politics in Cote d’Ivoire. Africa 73: 1–30.

Bassett, Thomas J. 2004. Containing the Donzow: The Politics of Scale in Cote d’Ivoire. Africa Today 50: 31–49.

Bassett, Thomas J. 2005. Card-Carrying Hunters, Rural Poverty, and Wildlife Decline in Northern Cote d’Ivoire. Geographical Journal 171 (March): 24–35.

Bassett, Thomas J., and Koli Bi Zuéli. 2000. Environmental Discourses and the Ivorian Savanna. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (1): 67–95. doi:10.1111/0004-5608.00184.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. New York: Chandler Publishing.

Bird, Charles S., and Martha B. Kendall. 1980. The Mande Hero. In Explorations in African Systems of Thought, eds. Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 13–26.

Boston, John. S. 1964. The Hunter in Igala Legends of Origin. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 34 (2): 116–26. doi:10.2307/1157902.

Brett-Smith, Sarah. 1983. The Poisonous Child. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 6 (October): 47–64. doi:10.2307/20166698.

Cashion, Gerald A. 1984. Hunters of the Mande: A Behavioural Code and Worldview Derived from the Study of Their Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University.

Cissé, Youssouf. 1964. Notes sur les sociétés de chasseurs malinké. Journal de la Société des Africanistes 2: 175–226.

Cissé, Youssouf. 1994. La confrérie des chasseurs Malinké et Bambara: mythes, rites et récits initiatiques. Ivry, Paris: Editions Nouvelles du Sud ; Association ARSAN.

Colleyn, Jean-Paul. 1985. Objets forts et rapports sociaux: le cas des yapéré minyanka (Mali). Systèmes de pensée en Afrique noire 8: 221–61.

Colleyn, Jean-Paul. 2004. L’alliance, le dieu, l’objet. L’Homme 170 (April): 61–77. doi:10.2307/40590212.Coquet, Michèle. 1985. Une esthétique du fétiche (Bwaba du Burkina Faso). Systèmes de Pensée En Afrique

Noire 8: 111–39.Dacher, Michèle. 1985. “Dans le malheur on ne peut pas être seul avec Dieu”: de l’origine et de la nature des

Tinni Goin (Burkina Faso). Systèmes de Pensée En Afrique Noire 8: 69–109.East, Rod. 1990. Antelopes: West and Central Africa. IUCN.Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-

Savanna Mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1998. Reframing Deforestation: Global Analyses and Local Realities:

Studies in West Africa. London; New York: Routledge.Ferme, Mariane C. and Danny Hoffman. 2004. Hunter Militias and the International Human Rights Discourse in

Sierra Leone and beyond. Africa Today 50: 73–95.Ferrarini, Lorenzo. 2008. Danze di Etnografo e Nativi: interazione e partecipazione per un metodo etnografico

enattivo. Archivio di Etnografia 1: 9–28.Hagberg, Sten. 1998. Between Peace and Justice: Dispute Settlement between Karaboro Agriculturalists and

Fulbe Agro-Pastoralists in Burkina Faso. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Hagberg, Sten. 2001. In Search of NYO: Lyela Farmers’ Perceptions of the Forest in Burkina Faso. Africa 71:

481–501.Hagberg, Sten. 2004. Political Decentralization and Traditional Leadership in the Benkadi Hunters’ Association

in Western Burkina Faso. Africa Today 50: 51–70.Hagberg, Sten. 2006. “It Was Satan That Took the People”: The Making of Public Authority in Burkina Faso.

Development and Change 37 (July): 779–97.Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Hellweg, Joseph. 2009. Hunters, Ritual, and Freedom: Dozo Sacrifice as a Technology of the Self in the

Benkadi Movement of Cote d’Ivoire.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (March): 36–56. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.01529.x.

Hellweg, Joseph. 2011. Hunting the Ethical State: The Benkadi Movement of Cote d’Ivoire. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Kedzierska-Manzon, Agnès. 2013. Humans and Things: Mande ‘Fetishes’ as Subjects. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (4): 1119–51. doi:10.1353/anq.2013.0054.

Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–76. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement. American Ethnologist 34 (1): 3–24. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3.

11

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Konkouris, Theodore L. 2013. Heroes, Gunpowder, Cassettes and Tape Recorders: Production, Distribution and Transmission of Hunters’ Musical Tradition in Mali, West Africa. PhD Thesis, Belfast: Queen’s University.

Leach, Melissa. 2000. New Shapes to Shift: War, Parks and the Hunting Person in Modern West Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (December): 577–95.

Leach, Melissa. 2004. Introduction to Special Issue: Security, Socioecology Polity: Mande Hunters, Civil Society, and Nation-States in Contemporary West Africa. Africa Today 50: Vii – Xvi.

Leach, Melissa, and James Fairhead. 2000. Fashioned Forest Pasts, Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales. Development and Change 31 (1): 35–59. doi:10.1111/1467-7660.00146.

Legassick, M. 1966. Firearms, Horses and Samorian Army Organization 1870-1898. Journal of African History 7: 95–115.

McNaughton, Patrick R. 1982. The Shirts That Mande Hunters Wear. African Arts 15: 54–58 & 91.McNaughton, Patrick R. 1988a. The Mande Blacksmiths : Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.McNaughton, Patrick R . 1988b. The Semantics of Jugu - Blacksmiths, Lore and Who’s Bad in Mande.

Anthropological Linguistics 30: 150–65.Nadasdy, Paul. 2007. The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality. American

Ethnologist 34 (February): 25–43. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.25.Ogden, Laura A. 2011. Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.Ouattara, Syna. 2008. Deux sociétés secrètes dans des espaces publics en Afrique de l’Ouest: bois sacrés,

initiations et rites de passage en milieu Sénoufo en Côte d’Ivoire et au Mali . Gothenburg studies in social anthropology. Göteborg: University of Gothenburg : Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.

Pailler, Sharon, John E. Wagner, John G. McPeak, and Donald W. Floyd. 2009. Identifying Conservation Opportunities among Malinké Bushmeat Hunters of Guinea, West Africa. Human Ecology 37 (December): 761–74. doi:10.1007/s10745-009-9277-7.

Person, Yves. 1968. Samori: une revolution Dyula. Dakar: IFAN.Rouamba, Pascal. 2002. Bilan de La Saison de Chasse - Campagne 2001-2002. Ouagadougou:

MECV/DGEF/DPNRFC/RGN.Roulet, Pierre-Armand. 2004. “Chasseur blanc, cœur noir?” La chasse sportive en Afrique centrale. Une analyse

de son rôle dans la conservation de la faune sauvage et le développement rural au travers des programmes de gestion de la chasse communautaire. PhD Thesis, Orleans: Universite d’Orleans.

Royer, Patrick. 1996. In Pursuit of Tradition: Local Cults and Religious Conversion among the Sambla of Burkina Faso. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois.

Saul, Mahir. 2006. Le fanga comme savoir et destinée: Signification sociale de la réussite personnelle au Soudan occidental. Homme (July): 63–89.

Schoffeleers, J. Matthew, ed. 1979. Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults. Gwelo: Mambo Press.

Scott, Colin. 1989. Knowledge Construction among the Cree Hunters: Metaphors and Literal Understanding. Journal de La Société Des Américanistes 75 (1): 193–208. doi:10.3406/jsa.1989.1349.

Sidibé, Mamby. 1929. Prèmieres notes sur la littérature orale, les croyances et coutumes indigènes. La chasse dans ses rapports avec les croyances religieuses les moeurs et les coutumes indigènes au Birgo. Bulletin de l’enseignement de l’Afrique occidentale française, 47–73.

Strawn, Cullen B. 2011. Kunfe Ko: Experiencing Uncertainty in Malian Wasulu Hunters’ Music Performance and Hunting. PhD Thesis, Bloomington: University of Indiana.

Thiollay, Jean-Marc. 2006. Large Bird Declines with Increasing Human Pressure in Savanna Woodlands (Burkina Faso). Biodiversity and Conservation 15 (7): 2085–2108. doi:10.1007/s10531-004-6684-3.

Traoré, Karim. 2000. Le jeu et le sérieux: essai d’anthropologie littéraire sur la poésie épique des chasseurs du Mande (Afrique de l’Ouest). Studien zur Kulturkunde 113. Bd. Köln: R. Köppe.

UNEP, United Nations Environment Programme, and United Nations Development Programme UNDP. 1998. Compendium of Environmental Laws of African Countries. UNEP/Earthprint.

Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

World Bank, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. 2004. Cotton Cultivation in Burkina Faso: A 30 Years Success Story. 30760. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/11/29/000090341_20041129144712/Rendered/PDF/307600BF0Cotton01see0also0307591.pdf.

Notes:

12

1 I have reflected in more detail on such an approach to fieldwork as applied to my previous research on Egyptian migrants in Italy (Ferrarini 2008).

2 There are many dynamics at play in the history of West African cotton, involving also the role of women, debt, neoliberal policies and colonialism, so I refer to Bassett's work on the region of Korhogo for an analysis that mixes history, geography, economics and ethnography (2001).

3 According to a retired colonel of the Waters and Forests police I interviewed in 2012, and despite the existence of “participatory” programmes to let local populations exploit hunting tourism like the PAGEN - formerly GEPRENAF, now Partenariat pour l'Amélioration de la Gestion des Ecosystèmes Naturels (Roulet 2004).

4 Some donso hunters, especially if they can afford it, can choose to travel abroad or go considerable distances to reach areas that are richer in game.

5 Benkadi is a compound of bèn - agreement - ka - the copula - and di - good - a name that can be given to all sorts of associations in contexts where Bamana-Mandinka-Jula languages are spoken.

6 André Sanou died on 24 January 2015.7 I narrate my apprenticeship in the documentary Kalanda - The Knowledge of the Bush, available online at:

http://kalandafilm.com. Footage from that day is part of the film.8 Literally to “put the hand in”, this term is often used to refer to initiation rituals tout court. 9 On hunting as a relational activity involving human and non-human persons, see (Kohn 2013; Nadasdy 2007; Scott

1989; Willerslev 2007).10 Fetishes among Mande peoples are a complex category, but in an article in preparation I argue that their use is

eminently relational (for an introduction to Mande fetishes or power objects, see Brett-Smith 1983; Colleyn 1985; 2004; Coquet 1985; Dacher 1985; Kedzierska-Manzon 2013; McNaughton 1988a; Royer 1996).