Talk:Kingdom of Fouta Tooro

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Africa Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Africa, which collaborates on articles related to Africa in Wikipedia. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Mali. See also The Mali Portal.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Mauritania.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Senegal. See also The Senegal Portal.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

Made some small edits. One bigger question is how to refer to the people of this kingdom - the term today is Haalpulaar'en and groups what are technically Fulɓe and Tukulor. I don't know the history well enough to say whether that difference was at all a factor in the political life of this state, or whether like under Tall later on, the main issue was religion and the Fulaphones were leading. One possible solution is to use the established English term "Fula" to cover peoples who by language and culture are the same but not always technically "Fulɓe." --A12n 13:53, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

I thought these particular Fula or Pulaar were known as Toorobe. I read the word somewhere but I'll have to do some digging to confirm. Scott Free 20:08, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

My understanding is that Toorobe (or as I've seen it Torodbe, sing. Torodo) were a Fula offshoot, becoming a clan / caste group of rural Muslim believers, kind of like the Amish or an orthodox Jewish sect, but on a much smaller scale, and became essentially Zaouia clerical communities. They began to incorporate non Fula people, and were the nucleus of the Jihad states throughout the Middle Niger valley. The name originally comes from "people from Toro", but lost this meaning, and Robinson (on Umar Tall) says it became related to the verb toorade, to beg for alms. People from Futa Toro were rather known as Futanke. All this is taken from Michael Gomez's Pragmatism in the Ago of Jihad (1992), p. 36. Hope this helps! T L Miles (talk) 22:37, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Good work, kinfolk!  :) Scott Free (talk) 00:36, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Check out these links. Jamtan.com, Overview of Fuuta Tooro and Fuuta Tooro Oral History Project: Interview with Ceerno Daahir Aan: The Toorobbe.T L Miles (talk) 19:16, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More to the point on the "Haalpulaar'en" question.

Again from Gomez (and it's ...Age of Jhiad..., ISBN 0521419409 , this quote is pp 22-23. Sorry for the repetition, but it's all that's in the office.)

The Fulbe as a distinct people apparently originated just above the sahel between Mauritania and Mali, and over the centuries migrated throughout the savannah of West Africa as far as the Lake Chad area. One of the areas they settled was the Middle Senegal Valley. The middle valley people refer to themselves as Haalpulaar'en (s.Haalpulaar, "speaker of the Pulaar"), whether they are pastoralists or cultivators. It was the nineteenth century French ethnographers who divided these people into distinct: the largely non-Muslim pastoralists were called "Peuls," while the mostly Muslim agriculturalists were referred to as "Toucouleur." English travelers to the Sokoto Caliphate (in present day Nigeria) adoptedthe Hausa word for the Fulbe there, "Fulani," while the English in the Gambia used the word "Fula," a Malinke loan. The result was that four terms were being emplyed to refer to essentially the same ethnic group, with English scholars adopting the French designstions, and vice-versa.

So in short, Haalpulaar'en as a SELF designation is alive and well (from my experience, mostly Senegalese Fula tracing their lineage from the Futa Toro area). Tukolor (or whatever spelling), I only ever use in an historic sense, for specific states or elites, especilly Umar Tall's, as that's what it was called by the outside world. My 2 cents.T L Miles (talk) 15:52, 5 December 2007 (UTC)