ABSTRACT
The Fulani (singular, Pullo), or Fulbe, are present everywhere in the Sahelian zone of the African continent, from Senegal in the west to southern Sudan in the east and to the Central African Republic in the south. Varying according to the place and time, communities have been more or less numerous and have occupied different situations among other peoples, from small groups of herdsmen who even now lead a nomadic life (e.g., the Wodaabe in Niger) to the vast nation-states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were wiped out by the colonial conquest (Futa Jalon in Guinea, Sokoto in Nigeria, Adamawa in Cameroon, Massina in Mali, and the Tukulor empire in Senegal). The variety of circumstances that the Fulani communities have experienced has undoubtedly left its mark on their ways of thinking and of living, but it has not impaired their awareness of sharing a common culture and—in spite of dialectal differences—a common language (called Pulaar or Fulfulde) classified as an Atlantic branch of Nigero-Congolese languages. Their literary production is extremely rich in oral forms, dominated by poetry and epic, as well as in written forms; from Islamic influences they have acquired a tradition of scholarly literature written in Adjami script. On the ideological plane, the Fulani envision their culture as resting on three pillars (even though, often enough, this is a matter of mental representation rather than of hard facts): herdsmanship, pulaaku (the emblematic Fulani code of ethical, social, and psychological behavior), and Islam.
