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It is early morning. Demba is driving Mamadou, Ndilla and me towards the Senegalese town of Velingara, on the eastern side of the Kolda region. All of a sudden, Ndilla cries “the jiyaabe!” and points to a troop of Guinean baboons that has appeared in the fields beside the road. A small joke, as Fulfulde, the majority language for this part of Senegal, uses the expression ‘black monkeys’ (baadi mbaaleji) to talk of that part of the population consisting of jiyaabe (sing. jiyaado): people of alleged slave ancestry. Baboons are black, big and sturdy: these three qualities are stereotypically associated with slaves in Fulbe communities throughout West Africa. In contrast ‘red monkeys’ (baadi mboodeji) attaches to the rimbe (sing. dimo), people like Demba, Mamadou and Ndilla who are of free (or noble) ancestry. In addition to be smaller and leaner than baboons, ‘red monkeys’, which are actually green monkeys, sport a clear and red-flashed fur.
Ndilla called my attention to the baboons beside our car because the oral history we have been collecting in the Kolda region uses the metaphor of the ‘black’ and the ‘red’ monkeys to describe regional political conflicts, as well as collaborations between the jiyaabe and the rimbe that have taken place since the second half of the nineteenth century. In popular wisdom, the physical signs of rimbe ancestry include long limbs, light-coloured skin, and curly, soft hair, which men and women of past generations styled in braids. The marker of the jiyaabe is blackness, although there are dark rimbe and light skinned jiyaabe. Stereotypes address also intellectual and moral qualities. “People look at the intelligence” remarked Ismailou, another of my rimbe friends. “The rimbe tend to consider their own children brighter than the jiyaabe’s ones.”
