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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Understanding Identity Through Networks of Relatedness in the Ader (Niger)
| Panel |
29. Extended families in time. Creating alliances and power networks in Western Africa societies and history
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| Paper ID | 152 |
| Author(s) |
Rossi, Benedetta
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The Ader is situated between Hausaland and Sokoto to the South, and the desert regions once dominated by the Ullimmiden Tuareg to the North. Its society is highly stratified and ethnically plural. Hausa and Tamasheck are the main languages. The categories ‘Hausa’ and ‘Tuareg’ are ascribed to the inhabitants of the Ader only from an external perspective. Within the Ader, they carry different, locally specific meanings. In the Ader, Hausa- and Tamasheck- speakers identify themselves through categories that are meaningful locally, but hardly known outside the region. This paper focuses on the village of Agouloum, which today comprises a relatively uniform Hausa speaking community. At first sight, Agouloum appears to be a Hausa village in a mixed Hausa–Tuareg area. However, oral history testimonies reveal other criteria and processes of identification.
At the beginning of the 1900s, Agouloum contained both Hausa and Tamasheck speakers. The Hausa speaking population comprised two main groups: the Bageyawa and the Djibalawa. In turn, the Bageyawa component included representatives of the Tarimawa and Gazurawa, which are presented, respectively, as an autochthonous group with exclusive religious power over the land, and a technologically superior group of immigrants. The Tamasheck speaking section comprised the Lissawan, the Gawalley, and the Izzanazzafan. Before colonial conquest, Agouloum fell within the area of Ullimmiden Kel Dinnik political supremacy. Members of the Kel Dinnik nomadic warrior elite visited Agouloum few times per year, and sent their representatives to collect tributes in cereals (bodu or haraji). Today, the Lissawan and the Gawalley have adopted Hausa as their mother tongue.
Social identity in the Ader is predicated upon three main factors: (1) residence (how people move; where they reside; different patterns of mobility and settlement); (2) function (economic, ritual, and political specialisation); (3) kinship and alliance. Each of these factors creates commonalities and distinctions between people. ‘Identity-in-practice’ works through junctions and scissions in networks of relatedness: e.g. changes of residence, function, and alliance. Junctions/scissions in social and kinship networks are mentioned in historical narratives to explain how identities are shaped, maintained, or transformed. This paper reconstructs the origins of a set of villages, which evolved from a network of people related through kinship, marriage, or dependence (slavery and servility) at the end of the XIX century. In 1900, the ancestors of groups that today inhabit the villages of Agouloum, Keita, Tamaske, Wassoumamane, Jiggina, and Kourega lived together in Agouloum. Working as local aetiologies, networks of relatedness through time expose conceptualisations of identity, strategies of social mobility, and political manoeuvring in the Ader.
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