Land, labor and opportunity: Social change and development in a stratified Fulbe community

This study examined the factors influencing the emergence of an unequal social order in precolonial Fulbe communities in the Fuuta Jalon region of the Republic of Guinea, West Africa, and its perpetuation despite various political, economic, and social reforms ushered in during the successive colonial (1896-1958), socialist (1958-1984), and democratic transition (1984-1993) periods. The analytical focus was on the changing relations between the Fulbe and their former slaves residing in a village cluster that included free Fulbe as well as former slave settlements. The research employed participant observation techniques, the use of historical documents, and oral histories collected during the fieldwork process. For each historic period, I analyzed the manner by which the Fulbe attempted to maintain their privileged position and explored the changing nature of Fulbe domination. The unequal social order characterizing the Fulbe community in the Fuuta Jalon emerged as a consequence of an historical process that was set in motion when the precolonial indigenous social system, stimulated by external forces, resulted in the formation of an Islamic theocratic state economically based on slavery and the slave trade. During the precolonial period, there was a simultaneous expansion of domestic slavery and Fulbe involvement in the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade. Domestic slavery increasingly served as a way to recruit and mobilize labor for agricultural pursuits. This allowed the Fulbe pastoralists to follow a more sedentary existence and engage in statecraft and warfare, especially following the sixteenth century rise of seaborne commerce and the subsequent realignment of the axis of regional trade from north-south to east-west. The Fulbe were able to establish and then maintain their privileged position by their continued control of the prevailing cultural ideology, based on Islam, which justified the practice of slavery and the control of slave labor, and then, after the effective end of slavery in the 1950s, the continued control of labor by the control of access to land.