Wendy Wilson-Fall

This chapter focuses on ways that pastoralists respond to ecological and climate variability through strategies of pastoral mobility and exploitation of micro-ecologies throughout the Sahel. The chapter reflects recent scholarly work that argues for recognition of the viability of mobile pastoral systems and their long-term value to national economies and rural community nutrition. West African pasturelands are as biodiverse as woodlands further south, and herders exercise strategic decision-making not accounted for among most government decision-makers before the mid-1990s. In addition to policy challenges, twenty-first-century Sahelian pastoralists are faced with constraints on pasture access, criminal activity, climate instability, and religious radicalism. This chapter argues that intra-regional issues of land use policy and tension between extensive pastoral production systems and projects of nation-building are at the center of current political instability in pastoral communities.

ABSTRACT This article argues that memory, nostalgia, place and sensory experience are inter-related and should not be relegated to the background, as they are indicative and productive of genesis, structure and process of social relations and ideals. The text addresses challenges of writing a narrative that includes diverse representations of mutually experienced events that reverberate in different spaces of the post-colonial world. In the research described, ancestors and their descendants co-exist and work together to fashion family histories in various examples from Madagascar and the United States. Conversations in the field, remembered with the odors, textures, and sounds of intimate exchanges, exposed a tangible reality and pervasive nostalgia that is not knowable through colonial records or national archives.

This chapter focuses on ways that pastoralists respond to ecological and climate variability through strategies of pastoral mobility and exploitation of micro-ecologies throughout the Sahel. The chapter reflects recent scholarly work that argues for recognition of the viability of mobile pastoral systems and their long-term value to national economies and rural community nutrition. West African pasturelands are as biodiverse as woodlands further south, and herders exercise strategic decision-making not accounted for among most government decision-makers before the mid-1990s. In addition to policy challenges, twenty-first-century Sahelian pastoralists are faced with constraints on pasture access, criminal activity, climate instability, and religious radicalism. This chapter argues that intra-regional issues of land use policy and tension between extensive pastoral production systems and projects of nation-building are at the center of current political instability in pastoral communi...

For the last year I have been working with Digital Humanities specialists at Lafayette College to create a website which, though using some content from my book, will also include new research and provide an opportunity for viewers to input data. Please visit. I'll be updating my academia page with notes from our ongoing research, now focused on African and Malagasy sailors present in the Atlantic World in the first half of the 19th century.

This article argues that memory, nostalgia, place and sensory experience are inter-related and should not be relegated to the background, as they are indicative and productive of genesis, structure and process of social relations and ideals. The text addresses challenges of writing a narrative that includes diverse representations of mutually experienced events that reverberate in different spaces of the post-colonial world. In the research described, ancestors and their descendants co-exist and work together to fashion family histories in various examples from Madagascar and the United States. Conversations in the field, remembered with the odors, textures, and sounds of intimate exchanges, exposed a tangible reality and pervasive nostalgia that is not knowable through colonial records or national archives.

This article focuses on Fulbe mobility and sedentarism in different geographic locations as related systems which fabvor the sustainability of mixed farming communities, which represent the majority of Fulbe communities in West Africa. Conversely, these communities make it possible for more nomadic strategies of other Fulbe communities to endure in adjacent zones.

There is no one “pure” Fulani, or Fulbe culture, except as perceived from an essentialist view or from within, where one’s own culture is always privileged. Instead, there are many Fulbe traditions and cultures, and these change over time. In Fulfuulde speaking communities (east of Macina) one finds the creation of privacy and social space through people's behavior instead of physical structures. Privacy does not depend on material constructions such as doors or walls, but is embodied in hierarchical, engendered spaces and zones of privacy that are part of everyday ritual. This paper interrogates how rituals of privacy mediate space, and how space is used to produce privacy. It looks at household rituals that are located in the habitus of everyday life which serve as important markers of cultural literacy. I propose that “creating social space” and “creating privacy” are critical elements that embody the social contract in the small dispersed communities typical of herding famil...

A "nonsense" song which was recorded during the Works Progress Administration "Writer's Project" interviews (1) in the nineteen-thirties was, we argue, a creolized version of Wolof phonetically transcribed as English. Specifically, the song which is the subject of this essay was collected during a field interview carried out during "the Hampton interviews," which were part of the larger Federal Writers' Project. In November, 1936, "an all-Negro unit" of the Virginia Writers' Project under the direction of Roscoe E. Lewis began interviewing ex-slaves in Virginia and during the next year interviewed more than 300 elderly Negroes as part of this project. (2) The Writers' Project interviews in Virginia, carried out during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, were part of a study that was preceded by more modest efforts in the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, and Indiana. (3) The analysis of this song from the 1930s...

ABSTRACT This article argues that memory, nostalgia, place and sensory experience are inter-related and should not be relegated to the background, as they are indicative and productive of genesis, structure and process of social relations and ideals. The text addresses challenges of writing a narrative that includes diverse representations of mutually experienced events that reverberate in different spaces of the post-colonial world. In the research described, ancestors and their descendants co-exist and work together to fashion family histories in various examples from Madagascar and the United States. Conversations in the field, remembered with the odors, textures, and sounds of intimate exchanges, exposed a tangible reality and pervasive nostalgia that is not knowable through colonial records or national archives.

In the face of the spatial histories of modernity and the ‘long revolution of the west’  (Wegner  2002:) it is worthwhile to look at the intersectional meanings of the ‘long duree’ of the post-post colonial movements of people, ideas, and things between the less-industrialized south and the post-industrialized north. In fact, even the binary positioning of the ‘south’ and ‘north’ has become almost non-sensical as the mobility of people and the changing meanings of place outpace our ability to interpret or predict them.  For example, the rise of China, and the emergence of the “MINT” economies disrupt our former concepts of north/south; east/west and even poor/rich countries. It can be argued that increasingly there are rich people and wealthy corporations that project a multi-focal narrative and series of actions upon less rich countries and populations. Within this arena, the long revolution is partly prolonged by ongoing streams of new ideas, people, and needs. Of particular note, and the subject of this paper, is the role of remittances from West African nationals to their families back home. These remittances form a counter (silent) discourse to prevailing strident declarations of assistance to national economies in West Africa. Looking at the cases of Senegal and Ghana, in this paper I reflect on the meanings of private remittances in the context of more formalized and public attempts to aid economic development in those countries.

For the last year I have been working with Digital Humanities specialists at Lafayette College to create a website which, though using some content from my book, will also include new research and provide an opportunity for viewers to input data. Please visit. I'll be updating my academia page with notes from our ongoing research, now focused on African and Malagasy sailors present in the Atlantic World in the first half of the 19th century.

There is no one “pure” Fulani, or Fulbe culture, except as perceived from an essentialist view or from within, where one’s own culture is always privileged. Instead, there are many Fulbe traditions and cultures, and these change over time. In Fulfuulde speaking communities (east of Macina) one finds the creation of privacy and social space through people's behavior instead of physical structures. Privacy does not depend on material constructions such as doors or walls, but is embodied in hierarchical, engendered spaces and zones of privacy that are part of everyday ritual. This paper interrogates how rituals of privacy mediate space, and how space is used to produce privacy. It looks at household rituals that are located in the habitus of everyday life which serve as important markers of cultural literacy. I propose that “creating social space” and “creating privacy” are critical elements that embody the social contract in the small dispersed communities typical of herding famil...

This is the cover of my upcoming book to be released by Ohio University Press later this year.  The book, drawing on historiagraphic and ethnographic methodologies and perspectives, explores African American family narratives about ancestors from Madagascar and discusses the evidence or lack of evidence supporting Malagasy ancestry claims as found in the archives.

This article focuses on Fulbe mobility and sedentarism in different geographic locations as related systems which fabvor the sustainability of mixed farming communities, which represent the majority of Fulbe communities in West Africa. Conversely, these communities make it possible for more nomadic strategies of other Fulbe communities to endure in adjacent zones.

The lives of eighteenth-century women merchants in Saint-Louis, Senegal and in St. Mary's, Madagascar, both coastal ports, are locally remembered as cosmopolitan, elegant, and sophisticated - but perhaps they are also remembered as predataory and cruel. This text explores the issues of gender, ethnicity, and kinship as they may have affected the role of women slave merchants in Madagascar at St. Mary's island, and in St. Louis, Senegal. The chapter postulates what their social networks may have been and what effects the women had on local views of material extravagance and women's agency.

This book chapter from Arujo, Candida and Lovejoy, eds. 'Crossing Memories' examines African American online searches for ancestors from Madagascar, as well as narratives from personal interviews with various individuals. The text interrogates the 'need to know' and the possible historical origins of this desired affiliation with the island of Madagascar. Key words: identity, memory, historical narrative, Madagascar, African diaspora

Nomads, Identity and Memory – ASA Presentation, 2004

This paper presents a discussion of identity among Fulbe nomads in West Africa as it is lived today. In so doing, it refers to the memories of Fulbe people as dynamic process which embodies ideals which are seminal to nomadic lifestyles and critical to nomadic Fulbe identity as lived by people who are currently nomads as well as those currently dreaming of being nomads. I will start with a story of an encounter which I had in Senegal about 10 years ago.

During a field trip to northern Senegal to a village on the border of the Lac de Guers, my mind was wandering away from the meeting which was the official reason of my visit. The look of the place, and the feel of the place, reminded me of places and times in Niger that I had passed with Wodaabe friends. The Wodaabe are a group of Fulbe who still, for the most part, live a more or less nomadic existence. The smell of the dust, the wide open spaces, and the rounded, low hills we had passed on the way to Lac de Guers had sent me into a reverie of pleasurable, exciting moments I had experienced “en brousse” among the Wodaabe.  I looked up at one point and encountered two young men’s faces on the other side of the meeting space. Swathed in white turbans, they, too, reminded me of the Wodaabe. Emboldened by my feelings of nostalgia, I said to them in Pulaar “I have heard that there are Wodaabe here. But, I suppose it isn’t true.” To my surprise, they re-arranged their turbans in a very Wodaabe way and said to me: “oh, yes there are Wodaabe here. We are Wodaabe.”  In shock, I mumbled something that was the equivalent of “how interesting, you must be kidding?” and returned my attention to the meeting.

At the next site, I met young farmers who were preparing a field for a vegetable crop. Here, I thought, I could safely ask about the Wodaabe from some of their neighbors. I had been shocked because the existence of Wodaabe, as I had known them to be in Niger, was more a rumor to me than a reality. When I posed my question, though, the young farmers were transformed. We are Wodaabe, they said, and this is our land.”

What followed next was an excited discussion as I explained that I had known Wodaabe in Niger and was wondering if there were any relationship between the Wodaabe of Senegal and those of Niger. One young man became very empassioned and invited me to visit his mother and family. Once in the car, his comportment progressively moved from that of a young humble farmer to that of a proud independent nomad. He questioned me about the clan names that I may have encountered in Niger. Satisfied that I had in fact spent some time with the Wodaabe of Niger, he presented a story to me.

Long ago, he said, we lived in the western part of this land just after Waalo. We were pushed further east by the farmers. Then, we were living in another place and more farmers came, and we moved again. We did not always dress like this. Before, we, too, wore our hair long, wore leather chaps, and other clothing like our brothers from Niger. We are not sure, he said, but we think that they are our people who began leaving as we were pushed further and further east. We cut our hair now, and dress differently, because we want to appear civilized. We don’t want trouble with people. But, he said, we are also tired. We will not move again. We are farming now, and we will fight to keep this land. From much further west to here was once our land, and we will not give it up. We have (beep) to fight for this land if we must.”

When I thought of the topic of identity and memory, then, my mind immediately went to this encounter and the story  which the Wodaabe of Senegal shared with me.  Here were some nomads, one could say, in disguise. But once in a less public space, the disguise was let down for a moment. The tone of the language, the vocabulary, and the attitude of the speaker changed. In a spontaneous moment, the speaker gave me a Moorish ring in the same way the nomadic friends in Niger had once given me a gift of a Twareg ring. In front of my eyes, a Tucoleur farmer had become a Wodaabe nomad. I saw that his identity was intimately engaged with a long memory of nomadism.

Mary Nooter Roberts and Al Roberts state in “The Audacity of Memory,” the Introduction to the book on Luba art, that “It is truer to lived experience to consider the past as represented and assigned value according to its purposes for group identity and political legitimacy in the present…The politics of history-making in the present and the intentions of poltical legitimacy underlying historical pursuits require that even oral narratives and related expressive media for history-making…be deconstructed to be understood.” The say, later on in the same text, that “…memory is active, always in the present, and a construction, transation, and negotiation as opposed to a reproduction.” I believe that this is true to the story related to me by my friend Ly in Senegal. I have since returned often to this conversation as I am repeatedly struck by the many ways that people who live a nomadic past are struggling to make –do with a semi-sedentary present, hemmed in by development projects, new farming schemes, and unpredictable weather conditions without the ability to employ traditional strategic options that have served as key elements in the pasture and herd management adaptions.

As it happens, there are now geographers, historians, biologists and economists who agree that mobile herd management is a strategic undertaking, requiring considerable skill and knowledge of plant life, water conditions, and the topography of large areas. Ian Scoones produced a wonderful book with contributions by eminent scholars in the field, such as Jeremy Swift, who describe the rational and even “locally scientific” value of nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles and economic systems. Alas, governments are not convinced in many cases, and throughout West Africa the nomadic Fulbe are increasingly being faced with forced sedentarization, not directly through policy, but indirectly through the effects of other policies focused on agriculture and urbanization. Perhaps, then, nomads are being convinced that they are like other people, that they will be happier and more financially secure if they settle down??

Hardly. The songs that are sung, the dances that people do at weddings or simply for fun, in the rainy season, the informal ceremony of entering new towns and markets as the professional strangers that nomads are, reflect the encounter of past selves with contemporary presentations of self that respond to social constraints but do not bow down to them. How do the Wodaabe, and other nomadic Fulbe, recall nomadism?

Nomadism, by definition, requires mobility. This is a physical mobility that is mirrored by a mobility of spirit, by a remove from the routine of the farmer’s life, and by a distance that is maintained from non-Fulbe farmers’ ways. Nomadism requires a mobility and agility of personality, the capacity to be friendly with settled peoples without appearing to threaten hosts with becoming an unwieldy neighbor. Such social agility and slight of hand is a learned thing, it is passed down in families through jokes and songs, and friendly insults between adults, between children, and between adults and children.

Cattle are most often seen as the symbol of Fulbe attachment to roaming. They are even blamed for Fulbe peculiar, stand-offish ways, and their resistance to sedentarization. I would argue that there is much more to the distance kept, even by settled Fulbe, then love of cattle, although love of cattle is central. I argue that it is a love of space, of movement, of having social and material options, that returns, like a tide, to the nomadic spirit. This is a love, like all great loves, that is learned. The memory of self-reliance, of wealth and austerity as a way of life, is a key educational factor in the nomadic household. Rather than dying out when a family or individual settles, it seems rather to rise from the context of memory to that of ideal and ideology.

Many Wodaabe from Niger have talked to me about the stresses that they are experiencing as new variables enter what is already an uncertain way of life. There are Wodaabe, now, who have bought cars and have drivers, Wodaabe youth who have gone to school, and even some  Wodaabe who have succumbed to Christian missionaries. Where does it all lead? Do these circumstances symbolize a march towards an un-Wodaabe new Wodaabe? It doesn’t seem so, and in fact the circular movement of people through categories of sedentary, semi-sedentary, semi-nomadic to nomadic appears to prove its worth in these uncertain times. In Senegal, nomads are remembering their relationship to the land in ways not far from Nyerges proposition of a biography of environment. They are living the environment, and transitioning through lifestyles in ways, to them, that are probably not linear.

Anthropologist Paul Stoller, in writing of the Songhay of Niger, talks about two kinds of histories. He states that there are “histories ‘from above’ constituted by historical texts that are read, re-read, interpreted, and re-interpeted. There are, as well, histories ‘from below’ that are embodied in objects, song, movement and the body. These are the histories of the dispossessed”. Later on, in the same book (Sensous Scholarship) Stoller goes on to describe the monochord violin of the Songhay spirit possession ceremonies. He says that according to his teachers, the violin “resonates existential themes: the powerlessness of the human confrontation with nature; the utter contingency of life in the Sahel; the delicate balance between life and death; the unresolved tensions between men and women, old and young, friends and foes. “ (I might add, between herders and farmers!.)  He goes on to say, “These are historical themes of struggle, of perserveance in a hot, drought-plagued land, of resignation – even the nobles bear powerless witness to the ravages of nature in the Sahel. These themes, the substance of counter-memory, are rarely found in historical texts or epics.”

Stoller’s discussion of the violin is apt as a metaphor for the nomad and his or her existential relationship with memories of mobility, movement and freedom. The land, the pastures, the water holes, and the cattle are the violin.

Abstract:        Voices are Signposts: Archives and Alternative Visions of the Past



Wendy Wilson Fall, PhD.
Kent State University


This paper presents the analysis of material collected over the last several years via interviews on-line, via telephone, and personal interviews, of African Americans claiming descent from Malagasy ancestors settled in Virginia as slaves. By collecting “Madagascar narratives,” and placing them in historical context,  the texts are read from an anthropological perspective, aiming to present a coherent account of what may have historically occurred, but in the context of what descendents believe to have happened. The aim is to contribute to the body of knowledge on the extent to which non-European, non-American identity and culture were transmitted (from Africa and its islands) during the formation of the Atlantic diaspora. If Africa began to be “home,” and to be seen as a continent and a whole entity in the eyes of its diasporic descendents, so did Madagascar, in contrast, become a small other continent in the memories of its descendents who found themselves sharing their destinies with Africans.  One discovers a striking historical background in written documents which tell a parallel, but much less personal story than slave descendents’ points of view. On the one hand this is a story of accumulation and management of wealth, of strategic commercial decisions, and philosophical conundrums regarding slavery and slaves in Colonial America. On the other hand, one finds a story about Virginia and Madagascar, and of creolization of Malagasy and West African peoples, which has yet to be told.  The signposts referred to in the title are the voices of African Americans who have insisted that they have ancestors from Madagascar, and that this is important to them. Evidence indicates that of the approximately 1,200 slaves from Madagascar who arrived from between 1719-1721, there remains a pool of descendents who stubbornly cling to family narratives stretching back to capture in Madagascar. Although such narratives rarely contain detail on life in Madagascar, they do contain important cultural referents which display knowledge of Madagascar phenotypes, culture and values.

Long Memories and Contested Histories: Afro-Malagasy, White Planters and Quaker Friends
in Virginia


Neither their Quaker helpers, their West African in-laws, the Malagasy themselves or their descendents made it into Virginia history books, at least as persons with agency who impacted the social fabric of the African American community. What would history have looked like if the creolized Afro-Malagasy in Virginia had been able to place in public archives their own prioritization and reading of local events?  Recent ethnographic and historical research on the mid-Atlantic region may open possibilities for re-contextualizing the history of some African American communities in the Americas. This paper places conceptualizing such communities in a “world linked” site of extravagant networks between Britain, West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean.  Just as the Mascareignes have been known as “the little New World” (J. Houbert, 2003:129) of the Indian Ocean, so we find the interesting dialectic of the presence of Indian Ocean communities in 18th and 19th century America.  An illustrative case is that of the Afro-Malagasy populations of Virginia, who uphold and elaborate on dynamic histories from their alternative viewpoints of the experiences of slavery, manumission, and the construction of different American identities. This paper presents results from research in Virginia and poses the problematic of the de-isolation of North America as a site of inquiry into African American culture and histories. The author argues from a perspective of reading local histories from an Africa-centered and “world-linked” perspective.

In contemporary times, the individual is paramount in Western analytics of beauty. There is an ideal of slimness associated with self-control and moral virtue. Whiteness was a virtue in Europe that grew with urbanization and the power of noble classes that did not work outdoors. This ideal was carried over to the plantation classes of the Anglo-American colonies where it attained greater importance-the yardstick was the contrast with African-tainted bodies. It was important for all who strove to be white or prove their 'whiteness' that they not be mistaken for mixed blood people-especially African ancestry, however minimal. As we know, this ideal became reinforced with growing ideologies of white superiority and the increasing institutionalization of white power. Whiteness is an ideal that was historically constituted as an expression of privilege among other whites, and then in relation to non-whites. For women in particular, it appears as a literary trope connoting frailty, delicacy, and physical seclusion.