Sheila in Fulani country, early 1950s.
Fulani Women:
a journey into sisterhood
Sheila M Stenning-Bennett
This is the autobiographical story of an English nurse who, six months after her marriage to anthropologist, Derrick Stenning, was taken off to live in remote northern Nigeria for two years. Her new husband was studying the nomadic Fulani. She not only coped with her clinical and domestic duties, but her husband also expected her to act as his field assistant. She had access to the women in a way that he could never achieve in this Muslim community. A lot was expected of her as she set up a clinic in a village, and took her medicines deep into the bush.
We'd only been married six months, and for most of that time, Derrick had been away setting up his fieldwork. Whilst waiting to join him, I took a course in tropical diseases in London, where I learned about what I was to encounter: flesh eating maggots, death by black water fever, internal parasites and other debilitating and revolting diseases.
In the first year our base was in a village. Home, and my intended clinic, were mud huts; the cooking would be done on the ground by suspending pots over an open fire. Water was drawn from a very muddy well. The bats urinated from the thatched roofs and geckos and cockroaches were my room-mates. We had no car and hitched lifts on groundnut lorries for local journeys. When with the nomads, Derrick insisted we should travel the same way as them; by foot and on horseback. What a welcome: a horse instead of a car, not even a kitchen sink and no friends. He was also talking of taking a second wife he had already been offered by a Fulani chief. And he forgot our first wedding anniversary.
This was near the end of the colonial era. I had arranged for supplies of medicines for my clinic to be funded by the British government, and in Kaduna for two slim wooden boxes to be made to go on either side of a bull to carry medicines to nomadic camps. My first emergency was attending to two young men deep in the bush, who had fought a bloody duel with swords over the wife of one of them. Their wounds were horrific, but if I didn't treat them no-one else would. I saved the life of the loser.
Daily life was all alien at first. When Derrick was away on his fieldwork, I was left alone and isolated. I was committed to my clinic and needed to stay at 'home'. The village Fulani women befriended me and helped me learn the language. I kept meticulous accounts of my patients but eight months on a horrendous storm destroyed my records, my books and some of my medical supplies. I cried that day.
I joined Derrick on some of his arduous journeys to camp with the nomads. One safari, in the advanced dry season, allowed me some insight into life on the very edge. Even as they clung to survival, they still managed to celebrate the Muslim naming of a new baby. This group of nomads also honoured me by giving me a namesake. My chosen tokara was nine year-old Magara, whose name was close to my middle name, Margaret. She presented me with a kola nut as a sign of our new state of sisterhood. The senior camp wife, Jee, also became a close friend and cared for me tenderly when I became ill. Such friendships were especially important to my sanity since Derrick abandoned me each evening. Muslim custom dictated that he sit with the men and I with the women, on a woven bark mat by their camp fire. As they talked about their lives, I learnt how they changed partners frequently, and that women would leave one man for another who was richer in cattle. I discovered also that there was marital love and love at first sight.
On another expedition, a long journey south to find another group of nomads, we met the keeper of Palaku, who held the early philosophy of The Way. This was a code setting out how these people should conduct their lives. Here the women arranged a special ceremony in my honour. They brought branches from what was called the blessing tree.
We also stayed with nomads who had become settled or semi-settled, to do a comparative study. Initially the women seemed more sophisticated than those who roamed forever in the bush. Their material wealth had been improved by the building of a cheese making unit that bought their milk and took away the need for long treks to markets to sell it. However their other customs did not change noticeably by being settled. Derrick had been asked by the Colonial Office to submit a report as to how the cattle-rearing nomads might be settled in order to supply meat for the nation. But he didn't betray his informants.
Later with another group of nomads, I was befriended by Haliima, who taught me about childbirth. I was delighted when she invited me to spend my last night in camp sleeping in her shelter. I felt I had been accepted.
We were privileged to live among these handsome and resourceful people, but more importantly I made some very special friendships, including the sister-bond with my charming little namesake. She is a grown woman by now and, no doubt, will have married several times, for there is no such thing as a single Fulani woman; the word spinster does not exist for them.
Many have heard of the Masai of East Africa, but this is an historical account of the equally interesting cattle keeping Fulani of northern Nigeria, a memoir of fieldwork and being a nurse among them. It is a timeless account of an enduring people leading simple lives of survival which are little changed today.
There is a map, scraperboard illustrations and photos.
9.9.07