When the harvest of blood and innocence pried parts of Plateau State apart, this essayist looked back to history, and at a time when the locals ached for the Fulani. When they did not arrive early enough, they pined for them. They just did not want them, they needed them.
No one would have thought, only two generations ago, we would see this today. They lob curse words at each other, guns reply guns, machetes glisten into crying flesh, sneers over screams and tears, corpse pile on corpse. At nightfall, many fall, including the grandma next door in her wizened glory.
The halcyon times now belong to the ages. When this essayist learned of the slaughter at Bokkos and others, we also saw the message of the governor, Caleb Mutfwang, when he announced that over 60 communities have been colonised by foreigners in the state.
In the good times, these foreigners were invited. Was their goodwill the reason for today’s ill-will? They are not even Nigerian Fulani. They are interlopers. But when they came in those days, it was because they gave them value. Everyone was a farmer, and everyone wanted a herder in their clan, in their villages. This was not restricted to the plateau area alone; it was all over the north.
They were the brides of the farms. The locals craved fertilizer. The Fulani came with wife and sometimes kids. But their jewel of the bride was the cow. The herdsmen lived for their cattle then. No one knew they would die and kill for them. Their love for their jewel was hidden in their genes, and only revealed generations later in spasms of slaughter. The cows toiled then as they do today, going through what J. P Clark described: “From desert through grass and forest/To the hungry towns by sea/Does call at least for rest.”
Indeed, the locals loved the cattle first, and later their human bearers. They wanted them less for food than their stools. Food for the farms. The cattle were jewels of wastes, and the wastes were worth the wait. When they arrived, they gave without measure and it made Clark wonder in poesy, “Your face of stool for mystery:/What secret hope or knowledge,/Locked in your hump away from man.”
Indeed, the locals scrambled for the arrival of the nomads. And when they came, they settled on the farms. Not as hostile takeovers but as welcome guests. The cows crouched and mooed and mated, and filled the soil with manure. Their filth was gold. The Fulani built temporary shelters.
Only good locals were allowed to host them. In my biography of the former governor, Senator Simon Lalong, titled: Forty Days and Forty Nights, he relates to me his experience as a child growing up in that part. In a chapter titled: Everyone Wants a Fulani Herdsman, Lalong said: “In those days, you dared not say Fulani would not settle on your farm. If they came and they didn’t settle on your farm, it meant you are a wicked man because people were looking for them in advance. If it was a dry season, some went to ask a chief to allow them stay on their farms when they came around.”
When they arrived, they would meet the village chief, and the chief would instruct him on whose farm to settle. It was not the Fulani that lobbied for a place.
“The prize was breathtaking. Once the Fulani settle on the farm, the cows deposited dung. Dung was boon.” There was no fear that the Fulani would steal their crops. They were wayfarers of integrity. They lived in mutual trust of their locals. When their tour ended, they did not leave without gratitude. Sometimes they would present valuables as gifts to their hosts.
They slaughtered cows for the host, and even butcher them. Sometimes, they would hand them live goats. Lalong relates a story when he and his friends thought the visitors had left, and shared their precious possesions like wrappers among themselves. Suddenly, the owners materialized, and the woman turned out a friend of Lalong’s mother who sold her favorite fura. All the boys were chided and compelled to return all they acquired.
How did that paradise of harmony transform into slaughter? When did the person whose cow farted for plenty become a nightmare? The first sign was Gamalin, a chemical that poisoned the fertilizer.
The fetish of modernity turned the love of the poop. They were done with dung. Welcome the fertilizer. Alas, the Fulani was no longer wanted on the farm. When the rains came, they flooded the farms, and the Fulani were gone. But the Gamalin did not only poison the farms, the flood carried the poison to the rivers where they fished.
The apotheosis of peace was behind them. They had no fish, and no rice. Poverty beckoned. The first villain was not the Fulani. It was modernity. Then the Fulani wanted to graze, and gradually cooperation became suspicion, and suspicion turned to tension of hostility.
If they did not welcome the Fulani who came from outside the country, why did they remain? That is the question. The land belonged to the locals. Gradually the Fulani lost cattle, and they blamed those who did not give them room to graze. They lost cattle because the locals resented them as colonisers. They also said the locals stole their cattle. The tension worsened.
They told each other the words of Arab poet, Mahmud Darwish, “don’t ask of me, my love, the love I once had for thee.”
Their numbers swelled, and now they have over 60 communities. They now own them with impunity. It is what Germans called Lebensraum in the days of Hitler’s Nazis. It is called living room. The Germans said they wanted areas of Czechoslovakia where the Sudeten Germans lived, and they did not care for the locals. It was an expansionist ideology with racism in its core. But some have said Babangida’s creation of a local government now known as Jos North empowered this impunity. But it is Hausa who live there, not Fulani. Yet, we cannot deny that official somnolence allowed community after community to fall to people who are not even Nigerians. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands.
A lot of this happened under Buhari. To reverse this will mean extreme slaughter. The colonisers are ready for the kill. They recall Sophocles’ play Ajax about a man who slaughtered cows after cows under the delusion that he was slaughtering his human enemies. In this case, they slaughter humans after humans as though they are slaughtering animals. It is a play American soldiers are instructed to watch because of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When the locals kill one or filch a cow, they can eliminate a thousand in revenge. Medics need to investigate that pathology.
A group visited one of the communities, and the colonisers said even the mechanized army division in the state would be slaughtered if it tried to evacuate them. Who owns the land? An echo from Sunny Okosun’s grave.
