The Motive of the Motif: Tattoos of Fulbe Pastoralists

Though Islam discourages altering the body, and in spite of reformist jihads which spread through northern Nigeria and southern Niger in the mid-nineteenth century, for a long while Fulani herders in these areas wore elaborate facial and body tattoos. When I first visited the area in the 1970s, I was struck by the beauty and diversity of these designs, which seemed to me symbolic of the outsider status the herders cultivated so carefully among sedentary neighbors. This interest, which I was able to explore over a three-year period while a student in northern Nigeria, led to many return visits to the region as I studied Fulani herding communities. Eventually, I began to understand that the tattoos expressed multiple and complex social meanings. This essay is based on research carried out during several periods of residence and visits to Nigeria and the Republic of Niger. These studies, which began during my residence in Zaria, Kaduna State, in Nigeria, focused on aesthetic and other social meanings of facial and body tattoos worn by Fulbe nomadic pastoralists. I was interested in determining whether placement on the body, image or motif, or the time and procedure of tattooing held any particular social, religious, or magical function. A primary concern was to distinguish those tattoos which might have a special social function (i.e., identification) from tattoos which were purely decorative. I saw the tattoos that Fulbe wore as a discursive practice that had its own internal logic, and it was this logic that I sought to understand (Faris 1988:29). Field research was first carried out over a two-year period of residence in Zaria, Nigeria (1975–1977), and complemented by short visits to Nigeria throughout 1981–1984 while I was resident in the Republic of Niger. I was fortunate to be able to continue visiting Niger on a regular basis from 1984 to 1990.1 Fulbe people throughout West Africa have long been known by neighbors and strangers for their distinctive physical features and the blue facial tattoos they wear, particularly the women (Rubin 1988:19). Facial and body tattoos were worn by pastoral Fulbe in northern Nigeria and central Niger for at least a century, roughly from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth. I cannot offer any definite proof that the tattoos were worn in an earlier era, though perhaps new research in local documents, using ajami texts from the region, might shed light on this.2 In this essay I argue that one critical factor in the proliferation of tattoo styles and their former widespread use in the Zaria, Kano, and Katsina emirates, as well as the Sokoto Caliphate, was the increasing density of the Fulbe pastoralist population, which began in the time of Ousman Dan Fodio, the great Fulani Islamic reformist of the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Why would these pastoralists, who self-identified as Muslims, wear irreversible forms of body art (Rubin 1988:13)?3 My findings suggest that a large concentration of Fulbe pastoralists, partially encouraged by the jihad of Fodio and his subsequent rise to power and later motivated by the relative peace of British rule, led to a regional cultural specificity that included the wearing of diverse facial tattoos. Tattoo patterns functioned as embodied indicators of clan and geographic affiliations. Fulbe also wore distinguishing styles of dress and jewelry that functioned to identify particular Fulbe communities. In the following text I describe how the unprecedented number and diversity of Fulbe pastoralists in the area increased the need for outward displays of specific Fulbe identities in south central Niger and north central Nigeria. Brief return visits in 1990, 1992, and 2011 gave me an opportunity to see if tattoos were still popular twenty-five years later. Generally tall and lithe, Fulbe pastoralists express their cultural difference through dress, comportment, and their mobility.