Good and Bad Fortune at Ibadan
p. 37-59
Texte intégral
1In September 1991, I return to Ibadan to begin my second and final year in Nigeria. I go up to Misau, in the North, to work for two weeks on Bure with the Reverend AllaBurah. On my way back I branch to pick up Sunday at Gyara in Bauchi State.
2On arriving at Gyara, I am told that he left in the morning, as on all Tuesdays, for the market at ‘Boi, where he does a second job as a bicycle repairer. And it is there that I find him, in the midst of dismantled motor‑cycles and spare parts, grey with dust, his clothes stiff with dirt. In two hours he is back home, takes a shower and slips into clean clothes. He says good‑bye to his family and jumps into the car, his face lit by a wide smile. He is happy to leave his village to discover the big cities in the south of the country.
CREDU
3The second year at Ibadan started on a rather promising note. I returned to the Centre for University Research and Documentation (CREDU), opened at the University of Ibadan the previous year by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. CREDU had been sited by the French Embassy at the University of Ibadan in the Institute of African Studies. As Director, I had two hats: to formulate and administer research in the humanities and to conduct my own research in linguistics, for which I was given the job. It is on this basis that I divided my time between the administration of the Centre and my research on Chadic languages. Matters concerning my accommodation and the setting up of the Centre being more or less finalized, I picked up my cruising rhythm.
4CREDU1 was one of the French research institutes abroad funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, like those in Great Britain, Japan, South America, Syria, etc. They are sited in non‑francophone countries to promote research in the humanities on the countries they cover. CREDU’s headquarters was sited in Nairobi, where it covers East Africa. In 1985, the first branch office was opened at Harare in Zimbabwe. This branch office constituted a forward observation post for South Africa before a research centre was officially sited there. In 1990, CREDU’s Director, who knew Nigeria very well, succeeded in persuading the Ministry and the Embassy in Lagos to open another branch office in Nigeria to integrate West Africa into a network that was beginning to form. Of course, the funding fell short of these ambitious plans, and they ended up with a slender budget and an elaborate administrative set‑up. Fortunately, the support of the Cultural Counsellor, in the form of post‑doctoral scholarships and budgetary extensions, made it possible to organize a colloquium, a collection of works and a newsletter, and to bring some Nigerian researchers into CREDU’s activities.
5Many reasons combined to favour the choice of Ibadan as its foundation site. In Nairobi, CREDU is sited in a building directly opposite the Embassy of France. The embassies had still not packed out of the former Nigerian capital, Lagos, a swarming, disorganized, stinking and dangerous city, full of traffic jams. Moreover, the sheer cost of a building in the embassy reservation area of Lagos made it impossible to site CREDU in the same environment as in Nairobi.
6Aside from these physical considerations, there were also diplomatic reasons: the conditions in favour of the siting of CREDU in Nairobi made CREDU look like an extension of the services of the Embassy, its scientific objectives not always being clearly distinguished from the needs of the Embassy for information, especially in the mind of the Ambassador himself, who sometimes tried to make CREDU undertake research work needed to write his telegrams to Quai d’Orsay2. Paradoxically, therefore, geographical proximity was the cause of tensions between CREDU and the Embassy.
7In Nigeria, the federal structure of the state, the decentralization of cultural life, and the relative independence of research and universities with regard to central power, made it possible to avoid the problems and ambiguities of Nairobi by distancing CREDU from the capital. At the same time, the non‑existence of modern means of communication (telephones and fax machines were perpetually out of order) required that the centre be not sited too far away, so that administrative problems could be resolved quickly. Letters could be picked up at least once a week, from the Embassy: In Nigeria the diplomatic bag and the telex were the surest and fastest means of communication.
8On the other hand, decentralization, which goes hand in hand with the federal structure of Nigeria, offered an additional flexibility. In fact, research is conducted at the level of each establishment: universities, research centres of the ministries, association of museums, foreign institutes. The existence of the oldest university at Ibadan, and of the Institute of African Studies within that university, provided the solution. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (I.I.T.A.) is also at Ibadan. A huge research establishment3 sited in the north of the city in a gigantic American‑style campus with impeccable lawns, a hotel, a restaurant, a swimming pool, a food shop, a satellite antenna for telephone and electronic correspondence, it is completely autonomous. Although completely cut off from the town, the institute, by recruiting Nigerians locally and fostering relations with local experts, maintains at Ibadan a certain intellectual activity. This explains why the brain drain is felt less at Ibadan (and Lagos) than elsewhere in the country.
9The choice of Ibadan for CREDU was, however, regarded by the University of Ife as a betrayal. The University of Ife is another important university in the south‑west. It had maintained a close relationship with the University of Bordeaux and its Institute of Political Science for ten years.
The Linguist becomes AN Administrator
10Without informants to work with at Ibadan during my first year, I had devoted my time to financial matters. Coming fresh from the University of Orleans where I had just been promoted from Assistant Lecturer in English to the position of a Lecturer, I had no administrative experience whatsoever, and at the beginning I was a little apprehensive about working in a country where I had not worked before. On my arrival, I expected to find the question of the integration of CREDU into the University of Ibadan already settled in the form of a co‑operation agreement between the Embassy, the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the University. In order to have a co-operation agreement fully negotiated, a former French assistance personnel attached to the University of Ife had been given a six-month appointment to come and set up CREDU at Ibadan. This specialist in political science saw in his stay at Ibadan the opportunity to catch up with the time he had lost in writing his thesis. He arranged to rent an official bungalow that the Director of Alliance Française did not occupy and effected, on CREDU’s budget, the only purchase of some property during his stay: a photocopier which he installed in his house. The negotiations he initiated for the co-operation agreement were not concluded and no agreement had been signed by the time I arrived at Ibadan.
11In taking up my post, therefore, I discovered that the settling‑in budget, which had been allocated to CREDU, had hardly been touched by the purchase of the photocopier and that I had only two weeks to spend the money or definitely lose this budgetary allocation.
12In the office space that had been allocated to us, I found Wumi, a secretary that my predecessor had at least succeeded in recruiting, sitting at a small table behind an old typewriter in the middle of a room without any other furniture. This room was in fact one half of a former archaeology laboratory which had been partitioned into two. It was complete with draining boards and taps. The other half had been requisitioned by the Institute of African Studies during the vacation to accommodate a young researcher, a lone member of an Institute of Islamic Studies. Wumi had to suffer many times the proselytizing advances of this Yoruba Moslem who was seeking to convince her that it was indecent to expose her arms and hair to the lust of every Tom, Dick and Harry.
13I succeeded in arranging for a meeting with the lady Director of the Institute of African Studies, not without some difficulty since my predecessor had not left a very positive image of CREDU behind. I negotiated the return of the other half of the room, the transfer of Islamic Studies to another part of the building, and the release of an adjacent second large room to CREDU on the condition that it got it ready for its own use. This meant that I had to arrange to remove the draining boards in the laboratory, clean out and repaint everything. I put in a library/reading room, which I equipped with furniture. The half recovered from Islamic Studies served as a reception cum archival room for the adjacent secretariat. My office was set up in a small, self‑contained room.
14I recruited a second secretary, Elizabeth, a francophone Togolese, a smiling, placid matron full of goodwill but whose commercial zeal I had to check before she turned her office into an adire4 shop. Wumi was able to leave the secretariat to Elizabeth and to devote herself completely to the library. Following the initiative of the CREDU in Nairobi, she went through the major articles of the Nigerian press (magazines and many dailies). She cut and classified, by theme, articles dealing with current affairs in Nigeria (political, cultural, social events, etc.). A part-time position was created for a student to assist in the classification and shelving of the press files.
15Wumi manifested exceptional qualities in her position as a librarian. She had spent two years in Paris where she had completed her schooling when her mother was working there at UNESCO. A writer, T.V. producer, and researcher at the University of Ibadan, this lady was among the first set of people to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree in Nigeria. She was now in retirement. After studying French and documentation, Wumi had taken up her first job at I.I.T.A. She had very quickly decided to leave that segregationist universe and come to work in a francophone environment which was more familiar to her. This was in spite of a considerable loss in salary, my predecessor having been particularly hard in his negotiations with her. Apart from her work as a librarian, Wumi was a member of Amnesty International and she was a writer. A few months after my arrival, her first novel which was still in manuscript form, obtained the Nigerian equivalent of the French Goncourt. This was a phenomenon without precedent. It quickly found a publisher.
16Wumi and her mother Mabel were soon among the closest friends I had in Nigeria. Their assistance was particularly invaluable to me when it became necessary to re‑negotiate the status of CREDU, my predecessor having neglected to sign an agreement precisely defining the conditions of our association with the Institute.
Life at Ibadan
17Finding lodgings was also difficult. I had about one month to furnish a place where I could receive my family for Christmas. The recession, which was biting the city of Ibadan hard, brought matters to a point where the rented property market was practically non‑existent for lack of demand: rents were so low that the landlords could no longer maintain their property properly. The empty houses, abandoned over a long period of time, were in a lamentable state and would have needed major repairs. I ended up renting a villa in a luxury residence, the property of a group of insurance companies. There, too, the maintenance had been minimal, but the quality of the construction had made it possible for the buildings to hold out better. It was a debauchery of concrete in Hollywood dimensions, situated in one of those quarters at the outskirts of the town known as Government Reservation Areas which are found in all the big Nigerian cities. These are urban housing zones, residential quarters where the state government constructs houses for its senior functionaries. These quarters attract rich Nigerians, and so one finds there beautiful colonial style villas built in large parks and, since the civil war, reclaimed camps where modern constructions hide themselves from public view behind high walls guarded by armed security men.
18It was in one of these residences that I finally ended up, at the other end of Ibadan. Everyday I spent close to an hour in the car to get to the university, and another hour to get back home. One shared the road with crowds of pedestrians walking briskly by, hawkers and beggars walking alongside markets, heaps of refuse threatening to tip over onto the pavement; herds of cattle arriving from the north of the country, dilapidated taxis moving in a lopsided manner and trailed by stinking plumes of smoke, and Mercedes Benz cars, the owners, propped up at the back of their air‑conditioned balloons, casting a contemptuous glance at the swarms of life around them.
19Seen from the top of one of the hills that make up the city, Ibadan offers an unending spectacle of a dark‑brown sea of rusty iron roofs punctuated by islands of greenery which still appear here and there. One wonders how so many people can live together, with so little provision of infrastructures. The infrastructures that existed before have ceased to function because of lack of maintenance. In the two years I lived in my beautiful luxury residence, I never saw a drop of water coming out of the taps. This did not stop the state water board from charging their water rate. I arranged to have a tanker of water delivered every two weeks so that I could enjoy the comfort of my house. With much vigilance and frequent personal contacts, one could manage to keep a telephone line working. Electricity supply was often cut off because the most deprived Nigerians were sometimes reduced to stealing the bolts of the electric pylons and the cables and transformers. These were resold as raw materials. The outages caused by such thefts sometimes lasted up to two weeks. All my neighbours had their own electric generators. Consequently, when there was an outage, not only was I in darkness and a victim of the heat of the tropical night, in addition I benefitted from the concert of the diesel engines which surrounded me.
The University of Ibadan
20The University of Ibadan is sited on an open‑plane campus with extensive lawns, brightly coloured trees, locust‑bean trees, palm trees and gigantic bougainvillaea. The English who had planned this campus had done it according to their taste and their deservedly world-famous sense of landscapes. There is an immense library that is freely accessible and centrally air‑conditioned; there is a conference centre, a hotel, churches, a mosque, a theatre and a bookshop, in addition to all the usual university buildings. But all this is no more than the testimony of a past splendour. The federal government stopped funding the university system in 1984. Starting from that date all acquisitions for libraries, as well as subscriptions to scientific journals, stopped. The reduction of subventions to a minimum for recurrent expenditure could no longer maintain such expensive services. The air‑conditioners in the library are out of order; the windows are open; the books are now covered with dust, and humidity takes its toll on collections that any French university library would be proud to possess.
21Lack of water in the university residences has given birth to a business for water carriers. Reservoirs built on the ground floor of residences are filled by water tankers. The richest students have recourse to children who carry up buckets of water into their rooms on the higher floors. For the less fortunate ones to have a shower or to do their washing, they are obliged to queue up beside the reservoirs on the arrival of a water tanker, generally early in the morning or late in the evening. The basic food is prepared and served by private businesses in the university restaurants and is scarcely edible. The same single meal is on offer everyday. The hostels have two, three or four students per room and it is difficult to study in such crowded rooms or to have any privacy.
22If the university system in Nigeria is lucky to have remarkable teachers and researchers, thanks to efforts made before, the future is hardly encouraging. The badly paid teachers run away from public service or multiply their private activities to make money on the side. When the government does not close down the universities for fear of student demonstrations, the strikes are endemic. The teachers do not have access to the tools for acquiring knowledge, and the students even less: no books or journals in the libraries and no money to buy them themselves. The price of a scholarly work represents half the salary of a lecturer! It is a whole system which is crumbling, and the last generation of great Nigerian intellectuals is today 40‑50 years old. Those to take over from them are nowhere to be found.
The hazards of a Linguist
23It is therefore in the second year that my research with Sunday could really begin. The Nigerian office hours (7.30h–15.30h) allowed me to divide my day’s work into two parts: the morning was spent at the university; the afternoon and the evening were spent at home on the Zaar language. The whole routine was only interrupted by trips to Lagos.
24After returning to the exploration of the basic vocabulary, I went on to the transcription of the recordings. I started with that of the story of the attack on Emmanuel by highway robbers, then I went on to the tales recorded in the millet beer parlour in Bauchi State.
25We installed ourselves, Sunday and I, on a large table in the sitting‑room. So I was able to comfortably spread around me cards and exercise‑books on which I noted ongoing work, pieces of paper on which I scribbled hypotheses, references and intuitions of the moment.
26To put in place a reliable system of transcription for my use, I classified the vocabulary elucidated, verbs on one side, nouns on the other. I put the nouns in lists according to their tonal pattern to facilitate the subsequent confirmation of the correctness of their classification. I made Sunday repeat them. The melody of the words regrouped in this way made a sort of refrain. The one whose tonal pattern I had wrongly noted broke the monotony and so made itself noticed: it was then taken out of the list of words bound together by a similar tonal pattern.
27One day, a mere week after the arrival of Sunday in Ibadan, work was proceeding apace when we were interrupted by the front door bell. It was during the afternoon break and only Sunday and I were in the empty house. I went down to open the door. Fred, a friend, wanted to spend some time with me. As we were considering the possibility of meeting later, we heard some noise of broken glass upstairs. I said to myself that a nail must have given way and a frame fallen to the floor. I therefore calmly went upstairs to see how to fix it back. Arriving upstairs, I found Sunday standing beside the working table, his thigh with a deep gash, an ever widening pool of blood at his feet.
28The table was on the high plane of the living room, which opened through a bay window onto a lawn, the lower part opening through a balcony onto a small valley covered with bamboo and palm‑trees which palm‑wine tappers regularly climbed.
29Sunday had seen something move on the lawn and had thought that it was a monitor lizard, a delicacy highly appreciated by the Zaar. He therefore jumped up with precipitation to pursue it, forgetting the bay window, which was closed to keep in the cool air from the air‑conditioner. He just simply went through it. I suspect that it is his shoulder that broke the window and that a very thick fragment of the glass had gashed his thigh. He had then entered the room, completely taken aback by what had happened to him.
30Overcoming my panic, I stretched him out on the floor, telling him to press very hard on his leg. I ran to fetch compresses and sticking plaster in my bathroom and came back to bandage the wound as tightly as I could to stop the bleeding. What should I do now? Ask for assistance. I had a telephone line which worked fairly well. I telephoned Wumi. No question of taking Sunday to the hospital. Wumi, who had friends in medical circles, absolutely forbade it. She knew a surgeon in a private clinic. Fred and I put Sunday in the car and I drove straight to Wumi’s house. She took us to the clinic very near her place. There was no‑one there. A secretary asked us to wait. All the medical personnel had gone out. We waited half an hour for them to return; then we gave up. Fred then recommended a doctor whose clinic was opposite his shop. The doctor studied in Germany and had many white patients. We set off for the doctor’s clinic. Since distances are long in Ibadan and the roads are sometimes crowded by incomprehensible traffic jams, it was fortunate that the clinic was not far away.
31On our arrival at the clinic, we met a secretary who asked us to wait while she went to call the doctor. The young doctor calmly examined the wound and prescribed antibiotics to prevent an infection of the 15 cm wound after stitching it. He took Sunday into a room, closed the door, stitched up the deep wound and gave Sunday a penicillin injection. The whole procedure lasted more than an hour. Sunday did not say a word during the whole episode. He came out of the room looking very pale and sweating profusely, having probably suffered quite a lot without flinching. He told us later that because the operation took a long time, the initial anaesthesia lost its efficacy bit by bit. He returned to the clinic regularly for the next two weeks to take his penicillin injections and to have the bandage changed. His wound healed very well, and the whole incident is now no more than an unpleasant memory of his first few weeks at Ibadan.
32Our work continued until Christmas. I went back to Paris, Sunday to Gyara, each of us to see his family. On my return, I waited for Sunday in vain. After some days I received a letter in which he informed me that he had broken his collarbone while driving a motorbike in the narrow roads of the hills in his village. He had gone to the next village, to a bone‑setter who took care of fractures. The sick go to stay with him in his residence until their limbs have returned to their normal form. He practised a treatment consisting of vigorous and repeated manipulations aimed at reducing the fractures in the first instance. This was then followed by massages with chicken grease and tight bandages. The chickens that produced the grease were bought by the patient and, once the grease was extracted, the rest of the chicken was eaten by the family of the bone‑setter and by the patient.
33Sunday came back at the end of two months, his arm held in place by a sling made of bands of cloth of uncertain colour, impregnated with stale grease, and from which he absolutely did not want to be separated. I ended up persuading him to believe that his bones had fused back and that he could remove the bands and take a bath. This he did, and he discovered that he had recovered the complete use of his arm.
34During Sunday’s absence, Eski, who had heard of the accident, took advantage of a two‑week holiday to come from Azare to work with me. I therefore benefited from his knowledge of English grammar to clarify the meanings of certain conjugation paradigms, something that took a lot of time with Sunday.
The ZAAR conjugation system
35Zaar has a well developed system of conjugation. Assisted by Schneeberg’s article, I was able to begin my investigation of it at Azare with Eski.
36According to Schneeberg, besides an imperative and a Subjunctive, the language possesses five tenses (a Narrative, three Pasts and Future) and four aspects (Continuative, Perfective, Habitual and Punctilliar). The Narrative functions in fact as an Aorist, and the Habitual as a general Imperfective. The three Pasts are the Immediate Past (what took place the same day), the Remote Past (what took place two days or more ago), and the Recent Past which occupies the intermediary position. To indicate that a certain event took place yesterday, it is not necessary to use an adverb: the Recent Past suffices to situate it in chronological time.
37Tense and aspect can combine relatively freely, and Schneeberg brings out combinations of one tense with as many as two aspects: Remote Past + Perfective + Punctilliar; Immediate Past + Habitual + Punctilliar.
38Schneeberg’s description turned out to be correct in terms of notations and distributional analyses. It was observed, however, from the study of the recorded texts that her work must have been done from questionnaires, because other conjugation paradigms eluded her: a conjugation was set aside for hypothetical systems (unfulfilled condition); finally, in the tales, there occurs an invariable form which replaces the conjugation form and the person marker in concord with the subject ‑‑ in the following examples, instead of ka (you + Future), mya (I + Conditional), ma (I + Future):
(1) | ka | ¨íí | yáà? | ||
thou + Future | leave | question | |||
Are you going to leave? |
(2) | myáá | súú, | ma | ¨íí | |||
I + Unf. Con. | want | I + Fut. | leave | ||||
myáá | súú | hÑ, | ma | ¨âÑ. | |||
I + Unf. Con. | want | Neg. | I + Fut | leave + Neg. | |||
| If I want, I’ll leave; if I don’t want, I won’t leave. |
39One can find the morpheme ƒèè invariable whatever may be the tense, aspect or mood, or the person and number of the subject:
(3) | á | wû | tu | kyáàn | ƒèè | fim | zàmba | |
he + Narrative | say | that | you | SHE | do + me | trick | ||
He said, it is you who have deceived me. |
where ƒèè replaces kŒ, that is to say <you + Narrative>;
(4) | ƒèè | yelí | Ñáà? | |
SHE | see + Perfect | Question | ||
You have understood, haven’t you? |
where ƒèè replaces káá, that is to say <you + Perfect>;
(5) | ƒèè | lÉÉr | volaÑ | •i, | ||||||
SHE | carry | groundnuts | here | |||||||
ƒèè | ndŒŒr | dÈn | wò | kÉn | ||||||
SHE | shell | house | your | only | ||||||
If I bring you groundnuts, you will have to shell them at your house. |
where the first ƒèè replaces myáá, that is to say <I + Conditional>, and the second replaces ka, that is <thou + Future>.
40The absence of grammatical gender, added to this obliteration of aspect and tense markers, gives these Zaar tales and fables a very special tonality.5
The Events of April ’91
41For me work was making good progress. As for Sunday, he was philosophically enduring the monotony of life at Ibadan. Certainly, he was enjoying such comfort as few Nigerians knew. The work that I required of him was, if repetitive, at least not physically demanding. But I was not working full‑time on the language, and the few assignments that I could ask him to do alone were very limited. He remained idle for many hours, away from his friends in the village, alone in the big empty house. He had brought along with him from the north some cassettes recorded by Zaar singers. These singers, whose singing was accompanied by a little guitar with metal strings, spoke about their daily lives in the village, their marriage and money problems. But above all, Sunday continually listened to the song on the events that occurred in April 1991 at Tafawa Balewa in Bauchi State. This flare‑up of violence, which was very localized and did not last up to one week, is a very sensitive subject in the region and the fire is still smouldering today.6 The spark that lit the powder was an incident that should have been harmless.
42In Northern Nigeria, the sellers of roast beef who sit along the streets kill their animals by themselves. This is generally the work of the Moslem Hausa. At Tafawa Balewa, a few Zaar also engage in this trade. A Fulani (therefore a Moslem) had come to buy some skewers from a Zaar. After he had finished eating his beef, the Hausa sellers near the Zaar made fun of the Fulani, telling him that he had just finished eating a dead cow since that beef had not been killed by a Moslem. The Fulani accused the Zaar of cheating, but paid anyway before going away. The Zaar began to attack the Hausa, asking them why they were trying to destroy their trade. The quarrel degenerated into a brawl. Zaar schoolboys who were just then coming out of school joined in. One person was knocked down. The brawlers brought out their knives. The schoolboys knocked down the stalls and set fire to the shops and houses of Hausa people in the area. Following this, the traditional and government authorities tried to calm down the situation. The mobile police patrolled the town day and night. The Igbo traders, an ethnic group from the south‑east of the country and normally the first victims of this type of riots, fled from the town. At the instigation of the authorities their shops, with their stocks of beer, were pillaged and their goods distributed to the Zaar. This kept them busy and put them out of action for a day or two.
43That was all as far as Tafawa Balewa was concerned; but the confrontations moved to Bauchi, the state capital, and into the neighbouring villages. The reprisals of the Hausa were horrific: destruction of Christians’ houses; killing of the occupants. Eminent members of the Christian community were specially targeted: doctors, army officers, engineers. Following the killing of a senior army officer, the regiment that he commanded decided to avenge his death and organized the eradication of several Moslem villages. Headless bodies were piled up on trucks and displayed in the streets of Bauchi. A crowd of Moslems therefore went in a procession to the palace of the Emir of Bauchi to ask him to launch a jihad against all the Christians in the state, something he apparently agreed to do. The governor of the state, assisted by the army, just managed to stop the massacre from getting out of hand.
44Between the villages, Moslem Fulani shepherds lived in camps which tended to become perennial: the structures were no longer of straw but of clay. Fulani villages were beginning to form around these camps. Sunday told me how the Zaar had driven off these Fulani and had forced them to vacate the region. Those who were slow in moving were massacred. In 1992 I saw the ruins of these houses. Now all the villages in the area where Sunday lives (the southern part of Tafawa Balewa division) are inhabited by Christians only.
45In the press, in the rest of Nigeria, it was talk only of religious conflicts. The political and economic dimensions linked to population pressure were hidden. In the rural areas, it is a question of control of the land; in the cities, it is a matter of control of trade. And so, at Tafawa Balewa the local authority banned the slaughtering of cattle outside the places officially designated for the purpose, for reasons of hygiene. The Moslems took advantage of this ban to monopolize the new abattoirs constructed by the local government. The administration of these slaughter‑houses, like all administrations in the North, are in the hands of Moslems. The Christian butchers had taken possession of a cemented place which they had transformed into a parallel abattoir. The reaction of the Hausa at the beginning of the conflict can be explained by their anger to see their control of the meat market frustrated.
46In the songs, the theme of war for the land is a recurrent one. The departure of the Fulani, looked at from the outside, is catastrophic for the farmers. The traditional osmosis is broken: during the dry season, once the harvests were over the shepherds penned in the herds in the fields and these herds ate the millet stalks and then fertilised the fields with their dung. When the rainy season came, they migrated to the pasture lands of the North, which usually disappeared during the dry season. Moreover, certain zones were transformed into irrigated lands, which make the cultivation of dry‑season crops (onions, tomatoes, vegetables) possible. These zones also were considered as lands from which the herds of the nomadic shepherds were barred.
47These shepherds have therefore a tendency to settle down in the south, where they come into competition with the traditional farmers. This increases the population pressure which is already very intense in Nigeria and has led to the abandonment of the fallow land system. The abandonment of this system and the lack of natural fertiliser means exhaustion of soils and lower returns. Since chemical fertilisers are too expensive for the Nigerian farmers, their harvests are just enough to feed their families during the year and quite inadequate to cover financial expenses.
48The manner in which the Fulani were driven away has brought about another catastrophe for the Zaar. Traditionally, the savings of settled populations are invested in livestock entrusted to Fulani shepherds who keep for themselves a part of the cattle in compensation for their work. Obviously, the Fulani who fled the area went away with the livestock which had been entrusted to them. The owners have never recovered them, and have therefore seen, in some cases, the fruit of years of savings disappear.
49The village of Gyara, where I stayed several times, and Sunday himself suffered at second hand as a result of this civil war. One of the children of the village had gone to study agronomy in Bulgaria and had come back to work in rural planning in Bauchi. His qualifications and influence put him in a position of advantage and also made it possible for his village to benefit. The village therefore had a very deep well, with a modern pump installed, which ensured that the village had pure water all the year round. He had built a cement house in the village, which, except for the church, was the only one that had corrugated iron roofing. He had promised to make Sunday the driver of the pick-up van he planned to buy in order to engage in the transportation of goods. He had a tractor and was cultivating a huge expanse of land in the European way. This man, whom everybody called “Engineer”, was among the prominent people assassinated. His memory has been perpetuated in the cassettes of the singers.
50In the song that Sunday was listening to, a chorus was repeated again and again: “We will defend our land, we will kill them, we will bleed them like cattle.” Personally, I was horrified by the intensity of the hatred and the calls to murder in which Sunday bathed the whole day. But, after all, is this so different from the line “May impure blood wash our furrows”, which is in the French national anthem?
The end of the stay
51At the end of the 1992 academic year, in order to make the research centre a little better known, I decided to organize an international colloquium on political science, the proceedings of which I edited with two Nigerian specialists. The novelty of this work was a distraction for me for some time; but it made me abandon my research on Zaar, and the time for my final departure to France came quite quickly.
52At the end of the few months of work with Sunday, I had more or less established the basic vocabulary and the stability of my transcription system. The transcriptions of the recorded tapes had helped me to ascertain the conjugation paradigms and to describe more clearly the system of verbal classes. The nominal system remained confusing.
53I was thereafter able to exploit these first pieces of work for a paper on the verbal classes of Zaar at a Congress of NACAL. I presented another one on nominal and verbal plurals at a meeting of the Group of Chadic Studies.
54But these studies made me quickly take note of some fuzzy areas in my work. I had settled on a notation which represented a first intuitive phonological analysis, but I was still not sure of the transcription of modulated tones on short vowels in an open syllable. I had realised their importance while studying the conjugation of about ten very common monosyllabic verbs. In addition, the Zaar speakers with whom I had worked all came from the same area and spoke the same dialect, the most modern form of Zaar and the most unstable. This meant that some of the information on possible earlier forms of the language (both from the morphological and phonological points of view) certainly escaped me. I did not have the means to evaluate the dialectical variations within the whole of Zaar. This would have given my work a little diachronic perspective and would have enabled me to collect maximum information for my colleagues who are comparative specialists. This information is indeed essential for the reconstruction of the history of the family of Chadic languages, on the one hand, and of that of the migrations of populations in the north of Nigeria on the other. I was therefore determined to go back to work with Sunday and Eski to clear up, one way or the other, the mystery surrounding the modulations on short vowels in open syllables and to carry out research in the different villages of the Zaar nation, in order to identify the dialectical variations that there may be in Zaar. This is what I was able to do during two research trips in 1993 and 1995.
Notes de bas de page
1 CREDU has since been renamed IFRA (French Institute for Research in Africa).
2 Quay d’Orsay is the address in Paris of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
3 I will meet its director at a dinner in a Lebanese businessman’s house. This director, an American, as 90% of the researchers, will negligently reveal to me that he has a budget of six million dollars. The budget I had been given for CREDU in Ibadan did not reach 25 thousand dollars.
4 Adire is the name of traditional Yoruba cloth.
5 What I assumed to be a new tense used in tales appeared, on closer look, to be the imitation of a speech impediment characterizing the hyena, and is not to be found anywhere else in the corpus. [note added in 2002]
6 At the beginning of July 1995, more riots took place at Tafawa Balewa and its environs. The federal government succeeded in suppressing the incident until the publication of an article in Tell, an opposition newsmagazine, on 8 January 1996. According to this article, which quoted figures that were certainly exaggerated, there were 146 deaths among the Zaar; 30 Zaar villages, 8 Jara and Hausa‑Fulani villages, and 77 churches were destroyed. Only about 15 men from the Zaar community were arrested and thrown into detention in Bauchi. I found Tafawa Balewa, at the time of the 1995 end‑of‑year festivities, patrolled by military police, and vehicles entering or leaving the region were stopped and searched at two checkpoints. I must add that I saw no burnt‑down village or church and that no‑one talked to me about such a massacre. On the other hand, I was told about arrests in connection with the incidents of 1991.

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International - CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: English, French, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba
Foreword by Wole Soyinka
1993
Creative writing, writers and publishing in Northern Nigeria
Abba Aliyu Sani, Jibrin Ibrahim et Emmanuel Babatunde Omobowale
1997
Archaeological investigation of Itagunmodi potsherd pavement site, Ijesaland, Osun State, Nigeria
1991-1992 season
Babatunde Agbaje-Williams
1995
Guerre et société au royaume de Fetu
Des débuts du commerce atlantique à la constitution de la fédération fanti (Ghana, Côte de l’or, 1471-1720)
Yann Deffontaine
1993