The Fulbe and the samurai code - mixing the Japanese and African cultures

Ryo Ogawa explains why a Japanese can feel at ease among Africans

When I was doing research among the Fulbe of Dyolof, in Senegal, I had a faithful assistant called Awdi, an evocative name meaning "seed kept for the next sowing". He was ten years my junior. The day of my departure, instead of seeing me off from the village like the other Fulbe, he hid himself away and did not bid me farewell. It was his way of not showing how sad he was.

As a Japanese taught at a very early age not to show any emotions, I was always touched by the way my Fulbe friends concealed their joys and sorrows. It was the result of a code of behaviour they call pulaagu.

Dignity, courage, patience and discernment all form part of pulaagu. For me, its essential feature is the notion of self-control. In Japan, too, it is thought shameful to make an exhibition of oneself or give in to physical needs, in accordance with the bushido tradition venerated by the samurai of old.

It is true of hunger, for example.

I very rarely heard a Pullo(*) say, "I'm hungry." To say so would be to betray pulaagu, to demean oneself. I never saw children of four or five complain when a meal was slow in coming. If they went to market with their mothers, they would not eat anything until they got back home. At the beginning of my stay, I myself was sharply criticized for wanting to watch a sheep that had been killed in my honour being cut up. My curiosity went beyond the bounds of pulaagu.

Yet pulaagu, devised by an African people of herdsmen, and bushido, devised by Japanese rice-growers, have the same function, which is to train fighters who are capable of resisting adversity and want to surpass themselves while retaining their self-control.

We differ in so many ways that I am delighted by such affinities. The brisk, almost violent dances of Africans contrast with our slow, undulating movements. Their eloquence contrasts with our terseness--there are few great Japanese orators.

How can I explain why I always feel at ease with Africans? Perhaps it has something to do with our shared attitude to nature. The Japanese, like the Africans, are careful to maintain harmonious links with nature, which is seen as the manifestation of a many-faced deity. African animism and Japanese Shintoism are closely related.

Black Africans' dignity in their daily lives and their mystical links with nature are such that whenever I return to Africa I come into contact again with the real Japan.

RYO OGAWA is a Japanese ethnologist who worked until 1993 at the Osaka Museum of Ethnology and now teaches at Kyoto Seika University. Since 1975 he has carried out research on the Fulbe of Senegal, about whom he has written several studies including (in Japanese) Life in the Sahel Ethnographical Study of a Fulbe Society in Senegal (Japan Broadcasting Office Publishers, 1987) and (in English) "Bodilessness" and Incongruity: Body Image and its Social Dynamics among the Fulbe of Senegal (1990).

COPYRIGHT 1994 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group