Moving Through and Passing On: Fulani Mobility, Survival, and Identity in Ghana

Yaa P. A. Oppong. Moving Through and Passing On: Fulani Mobility, Survival, and Identity in Ghana. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002. xiv + 259 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. Price not reported. Cloth.

Yaa Oppong conies to this study with an uncommon set of talents and a background that permits her to ferret out information and insights that often remain hidden in ethnographic investigations. She has command of Twi and Ga, two principal languages in southern Ghana, and she studied Fulfulde in France in preparation for her eighteen months of fieldwork among Fulani immigrants. The bibliography of the monograph reveals Oppong's intimate familiarity with both published literature and with unpublished materials in the library of the University of Ghana at Legon.

Oppong seems to have been predestined to her study. Her father served thirty years earlier as a veterinarian on the Accra Plains, and he subsequently wrote a Ph.D. thesis on skin diseases of cattle in the region. Her mother, an academic, eagerly supported her daughter's work: On one occasion while Oppong was in the field she gave her cows as a birthday gift, an act that could only endear the ethnographer to her subjects, who prize cattle so highly! The cows remain in Ghana, but Oppong moved on to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and then to Harvard.

Moving Through and Passing On focuses on the nature and perpetuation of Fulani ethnicity in the Greater Accra Region, an administrative area stretching about 120 km chiefly eastward from Accra and reaching inland approximately 40 km from the coast. The Fulani, resident in this area less than one hundred years, have retained their traditional interest in cattle, but increasingly they are being swept into the vortex of urban Accra and crowded by the expansion of that city. The initial two chapters of the book recount movements of Fulani in West Africa through space and time. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 constitute the core of the study. The final three chapters analyze elements instrumental in perpetuating-and dismembering-Fulani identity in this setting: secular education versus traditional Koranic instruction, deliberate displays in public parades, development of associations to foster "Fulaniness," and the like.

The study is based on ethnographic data developed through the life stories of 99 females and 105 males, with the informants divided roughly equally between urban, peri-urban, and rural settings. Clearly, Accra and its expansion dominate the lives of the Fulani: 65 percent of males and 72 percent of females reside in urban and peri-urban locations, and, by my count, at least 33 percent of males and 25 percent of females engage in nontraditional work. On the other hand, the Fulani penchant for mobility persists. Movement and travel beyond Ghana, for example, were mentioned by 73 percent of the females and 91 percent of males, which no doubt helps to explain how it is that all the informants are able to speak more than one language. Of course tensions arise from interactions with surrounding ethnic groups and with modernity itself. While patrilineal parallel cousin marriage is the most desired, only 46 percent of first marriages were of this type.

Moving Through and Passing On is not without its problems and irritations. The bulk of the problems I attribute to insufficient (poor?) editorial effort on the part of the author, editors, and proofreader. The subtitle of the volume proclaims a study of the Fulani in Ghana. Not so: It is a study of the Fulani of the Greater Accra region, an area perhaps 5 percent of Ghana's total. The author fails to explain how it is possible for Fulani, and their Zebu cattle, to be in this southern, coastal region, namely, the fact that the savanna climate of interior West Africa, and its associated grassland biome, intrudes into the otherwise continuous rainforest climate along the coast. This relatively dry, subhumid environment reduces the threat of the tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis in Fulani cattle. Arithmetic miscalculations occur (127, 128); words, phrases, and perhaps even whole sentences are missing, incorrect, or misspelled (2, 64, 76, 84 24n, 104, 191). And how I wish the editors would have correctly applied the words among and between throughout the text!

If one is able to surmount the numerous lapses, Moving Through and Passing On rewards the reader with intimate, sensitive observations on Fulani in transition in the Greater Accra region. Its insights into coping, adapting, and change have validity and applicability elsewhere.

Donald E. Vermeer

California Polytechnic State University

San Luis Obispo, California

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