Content provided in partnership with

Traditional drought and uncommon famine in the Sahel

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1986 by David Tenenbaum

TRADITIONAL DROUGHT AND UNCOMMON FAMINE IN THE

SAHEL

I DON'T KNOW THE NAME of the Fulani cattleherder, so I will call him Musa. Bending over his well, Musa knots together the two pieces of well rope and straightens. The new rope joins a dozen other pieces that hold a bucket 100 feet below. His well is now twice as deep as usual.

It is June, 1984. The annual rains, lifeblood of the Sahel region in West Africa, should be coming north with green rebirth for the dusty, flat rangeland. Musa spends his days watering his herd, raising buckets of the muddy water that seeps so slowly into his well. Again the rains are late, and he fears this year will repeat the year before, when the rains failed, the crops and pasture shriveled, and people went hungry.

Most Popular Articles in News: The Ten Best Laptop bags; Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market; GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD; Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...; THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY; More »

The Fulani herd their cattle in northern Burkina Faso, one of six sub-Saharan countries of the Sahel, the arid savannah that extends 2,000 miles from Senegal on the Atlantic Coast to Chad in the interior of the continent. The term "sahel' is Arabic in origin and means "border of the desert.' Musa might not know about Ethiopia's famine, 2,000 miles east, but he does know drought. He knows the signs the Ethiopians see as their land parches and fails to feed them. He understands the foreboding they feel as they watch their crops wither, as they search the sky for rain clouds, as they push their herds further to vanishing pasture.

The Fulani, an ethnic group of about nine million in West Africa, conquered their present land by "jihad,' or Muslim holy war, during the 19th century. They herd the great majority of the cattle, sheep and goats in the Sahel and are typical of Sahelian peoples. One third of the Fulani are semi-sedentary; they raise millet and corn to supplement their meat and dairy food. One hundred thousand Fulani are true nomads, following the rain and pasture, subsisting entirely from their herds.

Of necessity, the Fulani are experts in extracting a living from the harsh Sahel. Their cattle herding customs take advantage of the lush northerly pastures fed by summer rains and use the wetter areas for grazing during the dry season, when the Sahel might be mistaken for the desert itself. During the dry season, the sun scorches the earth and daily temperatures regularly push past 100| F. Relative humidity is predictably low. The vast plains do nothing to deflect a desiccating wind, the cold harmattan, that blows off the Sahara. In a good year, eight to ten consecutive months are rainless. The rains come between May and September, but they are often torrential downpours, sluicing off rather than soothing the arid soil. "Average' years bring eight to twenty-four inches of rain to the Sahel, but as with many drylands, average rainfall is exceptional, and many years the peoples of the Sahel endure destructive floods or drought.

Two years later, in 1986, the drought shows signs of abating, though it is inevitable that it will return. It is less certain whether the return of the drought will mean famine to the Sahel. According to Dr. Paul Stoller, an anthropologist studying in Niger, people in their 50s and 60s said they had never seen it so bad. In 1984 people had been reduced to eating millet stumps, pounding the stumps to make a gruel. Even the cows would not eat it.

Stoller's report brings a disquieting sense of deja vu. The Sahel first made headlines during a drought and famine that lasted from 1968 to 1972, when a 40 percent reduction in "normal' rainfall brought six million livestock herders and farmers to the brink of starvation. At least one hundred thousand Africans died.

The equation is not simply: The Sahelian drought equals famine. A raft of other factors determine how well the Sahelian peoples and their cultures stand the withering strees of drought, not the least of which is the failure of well-intentioned Western experts and the solutions they have proposed.

The world's leading authorities on surviving the drought in the Sahel don't come from Indiana or Texas. They come from places like Mancoulicounda in Senegal, a village in the dusty, hungry rangeland of the Sahel.

The true experts are the Sahelian peoples. Their cultures are storehouses of wisdom for surviving in the drylands, where they have lived for centuries.

Despite its harshness, the Sahel has been home to humans for millenia. It hosted great trading empires such as Mali in the 13th century and Songhai in the 15th and 16th centuries. Major trade cities grew on the borders between the ecological zones. Legendary Tombouctoo (Timbuktu), on the Niger River in Mali, arose in the 11th century as a center of Islamic learning and became a headquarters for the trans-Sahara caravan trade. As recently as 1950, camel caravans hauled goods north from Tombouctoo across 1,500 miles of desert to the Mediterranean coast and south on the shorter trip to the Gulf of Guinea.

DOZENS OF DISTINCT CULTURES inhabit the Sahel. Senegal, for instance, a nation the size of South Dakota on the Atlantic Coast, contains eight ethnic groups. Depending on their location, tradition, and political and military might, those ethnic groups have exploited different niches in the delicate ecosystem of the Sahel. Farmers grow drought-resistant millet and sorghum on the wetter southern plains or near good wells further north. Pastoral peoples (some purely nomadic, others semi-sedentary) herd animals on the desert fringe.

Traditional drought and uncommon famine in the Sahel

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1986 by David Tenenbaum

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in News

Most Popular Publications in News