When farmers and herders lived in harmony!

Boudji Momine, a Fulani herdsman in his sixties, talks about his life more than two decades ago in the village of Tagal I. He takes us back to the instructive experience of social cohesion with the Moussey in this small village in the Kabbia department (Gounou-Gaya) in the eastern Mayo-Kebbi region of south-western Chad.

Due to its climatic distribution, Chad is an agropastoral country. Agriculture and livestock farming alone employ 80% of the working population. The desert north and the steppes in the centre are home to the nomadic Arab and Goran herders. Herders in the south, on the other hand, are Fulani and Hausa, who sometimes come from Cameroon and Nigeria and have settled down over time. The drought of recent decades has caused these northern herders to move with their livestock to the verdant south, with its meadows and crop residues.

This move usually results in clashes between farmers and herders. The trend in the Centre and South shows that these conflicts are alarming, with hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. In Mayo-Kebbi East, a province in south-west Chad (capital Bongor), bloody conflicts in the Kabbia region, particularly in Canton Berem (November 2020) and Canton Léo (August 2022), have resulted in the loss of many lives.

How has cohesion between farmers and herders deteriorated in recent decades?

The sources of herder-farmer conflicts.

Agropastoral violence in Chad has various origins. They are caused by climate change, the effects of which are being felt throughout Chad in the form of an increase in extreme weather phenomena, particularly drought and flooding. This disruption is reducing grazing and watering areas in the north of the country, forcing livestock farmers to move to the greener south, which is ideal for grazing. It is also important to note the prejudices and mental constructs of the 1970s, which resulted from the tensions that built up between the sedentary populations of the south and the nomadic herders from the north.

For the sedentary farmers, the herders were invaders, seeking to occupy their land. They call them rude, violent and intolerant. They also accuse them of deliberately devastating their fields.

The herders, for their part, look down on the farmers who come from the days of the Baguirmi, Kanem-Bornou and Ouaddaï empires. For them, the farmers of the south are cattle rustlers, ‘Abits’ (slaves)…

Tagal, an example of cattle-breeders and farmers living together.

Tuesday 20th August. The sky is darkened by squadrons of shifting clouds. My translator companion and I are driving along the red laterite track between Gounou-Gaya (capital of the Kabbia Department, Mayo Kebbi East Province) and Pala (capital of Mayo-Kebbi East Province) in south-west Chad. We head east from Tagal I towards the Peul encampment in the village. Rainwater has filled the holes in the road, forming puddles that stretch the entire width of the road and a few metres in length. To say that the road has deteriorated is an understatement. We were actually driving through water. Along the way, we are overtaken by the roar of motorbike engines. We reached the small bridge over the river at Bereo Gamba (a village 3 km to the east of Tagal I). A horde of children were shouting and jumping into the water for the swimming competition on a raging river that had burst its banks. The water rushed back and forth through the small tunnels under the bridge. On the bank, women and a few young girls are washing clothes and dishes. Not far away, on a tree trunk that has been uprooted by the current of water, silent young boys are angling. A few metres after crossing the bridge, we turn left. We skirt the river on the wide, sandy (but rain-packed) road that leads to the Fulani camp. Braving the bad weather, women, men and children are weeding the groundnut and sesame fields, transplanting the missing plants. As the workers shout, the children lead the goats and sheep to pasture.

After fifteen (15) minutes on the road, we enter tall maize plantations bearing large ears of corn. A few metres further on, we enter a vast, clean courtyard. Six round huts made of unfired mud bricks with thatched roofs are perfectly aligned, facing away from the rain. Five wild trees grace the courtyard, providing thick shade. We are greeted by the ‘djabamma’ of the women pounding maize under the trees. We park our modest vehicles and head straight for another doorless hut in the centre of the compound.

An old man in his sixties was lying on a woven mat made from roast tree leaves on the ground, rather than on a bed made from well-covered woven shrubs. When he saw us, he came out and welcomed us in the shade of the tree under which there were two beds made of braided shrubs. Once we had settled in, he went over to a woman who immediately offered us a piece of couscous made from rice and millet flour in a cup with a sauce of powdered baobab leaves. We ate the dish, which according to the old man was intended to replace milk as the cows were on the move. This old man, dressed in a sky-blue ‘boubou’, wearing a white cap identical to his hair, his face wrinkled, his back a little bent under the weight of age and his teeth yellowed probably by the cola (he never stopped chewing in our presence) immersed us in his life. ‘My name is BOUDJI MOUMINE. We come from Nigeria. I came here (Tagal I) when I was 08 or 10 years old before independence. Since then, he and his family have settled down and assimilated the life of the locals: ‘our patriarch at the time had asked GUIRFOGO (Tagal I village chief in the 1950s) for the land. We are essentially cattle farmers with many head of oxen. In the past, there weren’t as many natives as there are today. The Moussey also moved around like us Fulani. We keep the cattle away in the bush, far from the natives’ fields. The oxen only come back after the harvest to graze on the crop residues. At night, the oxen are penned in thorn bushes to prevent them from getting out and destroying the field. This immobility of the cattle also fertilises the farmers‘ fields and increases their yield’.

Even if the Fulani did not practise agriculture as they do today, there was no need to worry about feeding themselves. ‘Breeders and farmers bartered their produce. The farmers milk the milk, which they make available to their wives. They make butter and curdled milk to sell in the village of Moussey. There, she can exchange the milk directly for agricultural products such as millet, groundnuts, okra and many others…’ recalls BOUDJI MOUMINE.

At 67, BATNA GASTON, a Moussey native, is one of the witnesses to this peaceful cohabitation. His father was one of the natives who owned oxen. He kept the oxen for 14 years before becoming a breeder and farmer like his father. Now retired, he no longer has any oxen because they were all decimated by lightning in record time. To survive, he sells petrol for motorbikes at the Tagal I market. ‘We grew up with the Fulani children behind the oxen. We were friends. We played the same children’s games during grazing time and knew each other by name,’ he recalls. This cohabitation continues to this day. Fulani and Moussey can be seen together at the place of mourning, at the market, in front of the wells, and Fulani women harvest peanuts together with Moussey women, which leads BATNA GASTON to say that ‘the name Fulani remains meaningless, in reality we are all Moussey’. this same observation is shared by BOUDJI MOUMINE ‘today I farm and the Moussey have become breeders. We are brothers because all those who have a special status in Tagal I or the surrounding villages are the children I saw being born.

Conflict resolution at the heart of social cohesion between farmers and breeders.

Living together is the result of good conflict resolution. The Peuls and the Moussey have lived and continue to live together not because there were no problems, but because they knew how to solve their problems.

Some 50 metres from the Tagal I market to the north, the head of the village chief’s house stands out imposingly, a modern villa with a black tile roof spotted with white. The courtyard is vast and enclosed in breeze-block bricks, although the main entrance has no gate. In the centre of the courtyard is a shed covered in secko (high woven straw) and furnished with several beds made from the trunks of medium-sized dead trees that have become smooth with use. In the courtyard, farmyard birds abound, and kids and lambs are kept in an enclosure while they wait for their mothers to be set free to graze. In the shadow of his villa, stretched out on the pickup bed, I am greeted by a burly man with a dark complexion, his eyes rounded in their sockets, dressed in a sleeveless white boubou, DANLHARA Gabriel. Also in his sixties, he is the Tagal I village chief and representative of His Majesty the Tagal Canton chief to the villages of Tagal (I to VIII), Djamane (Mbarissou and Landou), Bongoro Djodomo, Teh, Balian and Goli Ham-Ham. What’s more, he is the non-Peul or Haoussa breeder who outnumbers all other breeders in terms of head of oxen. ‘In society, whoever damages something has to compensate,’ he tells us. ‘When a field is devastated, the owner follows the trail of the herd to the enclosure. He identifies the shepherd who tells him who owns the oxen. This can be during the day or late in the morning. The owner of the field goes to see the chief, who summons the owner of the oxen. The next step is to go down to the field to inspect it. Depending on the seriousness of the damage, a proportional fine will be imposed on the farmer, who accepts wholeheartedly because there is no injustice,’ says the chief on his pickup bed, his right hand supporting the weight of his chest.

 

 

GAKA MOMINE, aged 51, cantonal representative for the Fulani camp, adds: ‘Sometimes the two get along without the intervention of a chief. If there is devastation and the shepherd is also the landowner, he will apologise for the damage and agree on a fine. GAKA MOMINE, who expresses himself very well in Moussey, complains at least about the failure to respect the transhumance corridor, which for him is narrowed by the field. He does not accuse the Moussey directly, but points out that the population has increased and also needs food, and that the Moussey have become large-scale stockbreeders like themselves, even exceeding them, because many Fulani no longer have oxen and only keep those of the Moussey.

Believing this to be an interview with a humanitarian NGO, the local Fulani representative smirked: ‘Tell your NGO that we don’t have any problems with each other, we want water, and that the corridors should be respected by the farmers and by us too’. May this example of living together be copied everywhere for the sake of sincerity!