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January 07, 2009

How the Fulani celebrate Ashura

Gidaado the grill-man is sitting on a wooden bench by the side of the road. He is surrounded by a dozen boys and about twice as many dead chickens. Everyone is hard at work.
'Jam nyalli, Gidaado,' I call out. 'Are you passing the day in peace?'

Gidaado frowns at me through a cloud of downy chicken feathers thrown up by his team's ecstatic plucking. 'Peace only,' he says. 'The chickens are selling well today.'

I perch on the edge of the grill-man's bench and admire his dexterity dipping each bird in hot water and stripping it bald in under a minute. Dip and strip, dip and strip, then the denuded birds are thrown onto a piece of brown paper emblazoned with the logo FASO-CEMENT. I don't much feel like chicken tonight.

'Today is Ashura,' says Gidaado. 'My cousin Safi woke me up this morning by pouring a bucket of freezing cold water on my face.'

I emit a quiet whoop of sympathy. In this Saharan climate, 'freezing cold' is about 20 degrees, but my friend's discomfort was no less real for that. And all over town, people were woken up this morning in similar fashion, or worse.

Ashura means different things to different people. For Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, it is a day of prayer and fasting. They remember the prophet Moses, the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea and the just deserts of Egypt's Pharaoh. For Shi'a Muslims, the day is a commemoration of the assassination of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the prophet Mumammed. It is a day of remembrance, mourning and (in places) self flagellation. But for the Fulani people of Burkina Faso, Ashura is primarily about throwing water on your cousins.

There is a long history of dendiraaku (cousin-bashing) amongst the Fulani people. Your mother's brother's children are your mock enemies throughout your life, and you must enact this enmity by kicking them in the shins, stealing their belongings, and insulting them as frequently and creatively as possible. On the day of Ashura you crank it up a notch, drenching your cousin with water or dragging him along the ground. To put an end to these torments, your cousin can pay you haramaaji (protection money) in the form of a goat, a chicken, or hard cash. No wonder Gidaado has recruited a team of pluckers today. Everyone wants a chicken. Nothing turns away a cousin's wrath like a finely grilled bird.

By seven o'clock tonight, the water-torture will have drawn to a close, and families will gather together to do some serious feasting. The Fulani say that if you don't eat your fill on the night of Ashura, you won't have enough to eat during the year to come. Even in the poorest and most isolated of Fulani herding settlements, Ashura means Eat All You Can.

Light-skinned and fine-featured, the Fulani are very different from their black African neighbours, so their origin has been much debated by ethnologists. Differing theories abound as to whether the Fulani are descended from Berbers, Bohemians, Persians or Polynesians, but one thing the ethnologists do agree on: at some time in their distant nomadic history, the Fulani passed through Egypt. Fulani griot Bukari al-Farane goes even further: when he recites the tarik (genealogy) of his people's origins, he claims that a group of Fulani came out of Egypt with the children of Israel, following Moses through the Red Sea.

So here's my theory, born out of the ramblings of a griot, a few Fulani ethnologies and one afternoon with Gidaado the grill-man. The reason the Fulani have such a unique way of celebrating Ashura is that they were there at the time. They witnessed the Exodus. They spend the day deluging their mock enemies with water because of a specific event in folk memory - the collapse of a Red Sea tidal wave over the greatest enemy of all, Pharaoh and his mighty army.

'Salam aleykum,' I murmur, taking my leave of Gidaado.
'Aleykum asalam,' he replies, and then adds, 'Bon fête.'

Posted by sahelsteve at January 7, 2009 11:00 PM