AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	65. The politics of travelling in Africa - Translocal perspectives in African history
Paper ID	102
Author(s)	Breusers, Mark
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	Established through the foundational pact between conquering nakombse and autochthonous tengbiise, the Mossi kingdoms developed an increasingly complex social and political structure by accommodating encounters with various initially outsider groups. Thus, for instance, traders, blacksmiths and various groups of captives were integrated through the disciplining institutions of the Mossi kingdoms. At the end of the 19th century, the kingdoms were themselves subjugated by the disciplining, ‘despotic’ institutions of the French colonial state. Thus the history of these kingdoms appears as consisting of a long series of encounters productive, first, in pre-colonial times, of socio-political relations and institutions regulating intergroup marriages, association of various groups to chieftaincies’ courts and local-level tenure rights, and, second, following the imposition of colonial rule, of a particular brand of French indirect rule and afterwards of a particular articulation of Mossi power with the post-colonial state. This history was rendered from a sedentary perspective in a twofold way. Firstly, this is a history told by Mossi chiefs and court dignitaries, in terms of their genealogies and their and their ancestors’ exploits – i.e. a history subscribing to the unitary and centralising logic of Mossi power or naam. Secondly, it is a history that was first recorded by so called administrator-ethnographers, that is French civil servants whose ethnographic and historical work was supposed to facilitate efficient administration of colonised people. They were turned firstly towards those aspects of Mossi rule on which colonial administration could be grafted. Fulbe were particularly elusive to them. Little wonder, then, that in such accounts of history the encounter of Mossi with Fulbe pastoralists, although occurring relatively early on, stands out as socio-politically barren. In this paper I argue that ‘sedentary’ accounts of history and a concept of society as bounded combined to silence Fulbe’s role in Mossi history and to exteriorise them from Mossi society. First, I briefly outline the main tenets of the sedentary accounts, and argue that in these accounts the translocality of the Mossi-Fulbe encounter simultaneously makes for its ephemerality and for the unthinkablility of sustained and institutionalised Fulbe involvement in Mossi social and political life. I then continue by singling out a number of ambiguities and obscurities regarding Fulbe that were left unexplained by sedentary accounts, and explore the extent to which a ‘nomadologic’ approach, based on ideas and concepts proposed by Deleuze, might be helpful not only to account for such ambiguities and obscurities, but also more generally to disinter and grasp the significance and role of Fulbe in Mossi history and society. I attempt to show that when one adopts a nomadologic approach, the translocal Fulbe-Mossi encounters emerge them as well as productive of history and socio-political institutions – the reckoning of which is essential if one is to grasp Fulbe’s present-day presence on frontiers and in interstices of by Mossi dominated polities and localities. The argument will be underpinned by a re-interpretation of accounts previously rendered in the literature on the Mossi kingdoms and by new material gathered during fieldwork (in 2001-2002) and in archives.

Fulbe in Mossi history: towards a translocal perspective for understanding a West African society