Article for the PCCameroon Agroforestry newsletter

I wrote this article back in December or November, and it just came out in the recent edition. Thought I'd post it here.


Certainly, one of my favorite parts of this whole Peace Corps experience is working with Foulbe Ladde or Mbororo* villages near my post. I love Fulfulde. I love learning it, speaking it, listening to it. I love the musicality of it and the facility of it. And especially among the Foulbe Ladde
populations whose isolation has perhaps kept it more pure, or else led to a deeper language, grammar and vocabulary, difficult even for many Northerners to understand, and against
which I don’t stand a chance! I have to say that that fresh milk is pretty good too, and showing up for a meeting or a fete and getting served warm milk as a guest, having the opportunity to buy it in my village whenever I want is something I have always been grateful for and never
grown tired of. I’m sad that the dry season is already here and soon the milk will dry up, till the cows come back and the rains start again! Then there is something romantic about walking two
hours on a tiny sandy path between towering hills, only fields and mountains in sight, to reach the little Mborroro villages on the other side. Kind of the “typical day in the life of a PCV” image we might have dreamed about before arriving in country. And true I admit I am a sucker for that romanticism. That romanticism extends to the fact that in my region, they are the population the most isolated, the most withdrawn, and the most untouched by the so‐called
modern world, who have successfully held onto so many old traditions, and whose lives are the most different from my own upbringing and life in the West. And wow aren’t they beautiful! The color, the stares, the hair, the stature, the pride, the grace, the smiles.
But perhaps the top reason is linked to Agroforestry. Here is a population of people who have traditionally been nomadic, yet are starting to put down roots. The villages I work with have been settled in that place for about 15 years now. Others have been settled for 30 years. The village stays while the cows and shepherds move seasonally on the trail of fodder. In the past they have had little desire or incentive to plant trees, yet now as they transition into a more sedentary way of life, their desire for trees could be described as a thirst. They want to plant trees, yet many of them don’t know how. It is their pure enthusiasm and complete lack of knowledge that thrills me, and makes me feel like I have something to give. My villagers are incredible farmers. They understand growing things. They for the most part know how to plant trees. They have had group upon group upon group come in and tell them the importance of trees. Many of them do plant them. Others don’t. Yet if they did, they would know how and why to do it. Some of them know how to graft. And often a volunteer wonders “who am I to be instructing them on trees and farming techniques?” If I worked here for years, or studied some of these techniques in more depth through college, yes, but where I am, I am no expert. Yet the Foulbe Ladde that I was working with did not know the necessary size for fruit tree holes, nor the fact that you need to water mangos through the dry season. There is much that I actually am able to share with them. It doesn’t hurt as well that they are people with money. They were one of the few groups I worked with though WWF who had all the money up front when it came time to pay for the trees they had ordered. This season one village planted 600 trees in their village and a few of their fields, all fruit and spiny trees; fruit trees for obvious reasons and spiny trees as a haie vive around their village as a form of protection against aggressors, something they are very conscious of having had many of their children kidnapped last year. Now, we are talking about training two or three of them as pepinieristes, so that they may produce their own trees in the village, to supply all their needs as well as those who live in villages around them. It has one of my “big” dreams at post, and something that seems to be actually occurring, evolving slowly. This is good in itself. But here’s my question. Could this shift in cultural practice, from a nomadic lifestyle to a more place‐based, treeplanting culture have even deeper affects? My area, like many areas in Cameroon, has ethnic difficulties. The Mafa don’t like the Laka who don’t like the Foulbe Ladde who don’t like…..etc. And there is certainly frustration for all the farming community towards the pastoralists, especially this time of year. Tree‐planting will likely not help end agro‐pastoral conflict, as much as I dream it would. Even if the Foulbe Ladde do start a pepiniere and do start producing and planting many trees, there will always be those shepherds who let their cows into an unharvested field, to profit from the easy food and pounds for their cattle. Selfishness and stealing will always exist. But there is also a lot of complaining a b o u t “Mbororo bergers” who slash saplings left and right as they walk with their cows and who destroy people’s plantations of trees with their cattle. What if creating a “tree‐culture” among Foulbe Ladde, giving them more understanding of growing trees, of the importance of them and the length of time that can go into it, might go years down the road towards teaching more respect for trees in general and those they find en brousse? Could years from now we see a tree planting project linking farmers and pastoralists, planting trees along the “chemin de betail” for fodder for animals? Will the young Foulbe shepherd who works in his family’s pepiniere planting trees in his village stop cutting those he finds along the path of his pasturing? One could say that this is the eternal idealist in me speaking and that’s fine, I won’t argue. I agree it’s a f a rfetched concept. However it could be the vision of something, my dream of something that we can hope may arrive someday, that putting more trees in the ground just may lead to more peace.

*as I have gathered, the term “Mbororo” is somewhat derogatory. One Foulbe told me it literally is a word meaning “people without God” or Pagan. Non‐Foulbe Ladde populations often use it derisively as an ethnic slur, and while some Foulbe Ladde themselves use the term, often they don’t appreciate when others do, though their pride might prevent them from making that obvious, and they might make exceptions for the “foreigner working amongst them”. But, to be safe, it would give more respect to use the term “Foulbe Ladde” (“Foulbe of the Brousse”) than Mbororo.