We Count the Same

The highlight of my visit to Northern Benin was meeting the people who live there. I loved the Tata Somba houses, many of which were over 100 years old. 

I also loved visiting a Fula compound and meeting the distant relatives of my friends in Mauritania. Fula people live in 18 countries throughout West and Central Africa. In many countries, like Benin, they are primarily still living as pastoralists, but even the family we visited had a small area for agriculture. 

When I told one of the women of the household that I lived in Mauritania and asked her if she knew where it was, she thought for a second and then responded, "the place with the big river." She was exactly correct! When I tried practicing my morning greetings in Pulaar, she smiled a little and repeated the words I said quietly under her breath, "jam wali." She understood but didn't use the same phrase. When I told her "ajarama," meaning thank you she didn't understand at all. I asked the guide how to say thank you and he asked her. She said, "gole." I explained that gole means "work" in Mauritania. She smiled again and said that it means work in their dialect as well. So they use the same word to mean both "work" and "thank you." I guess that perhaps good work and thank you can be used interchangeably, although I don't usually think of the word in that way. 

The breakthrough came when I counted the number of houses in the courtyard and another woman counted along with me. The numbers in both dialects are exactly the same. It was so amazing to travel so far from the villages in Mauritania and find someone who speaks the same language. It showed me how strong the roots are that bind people together and how resilient language can be. Despite many generations of separation, language proves that Fula people in Benin and Mauritania are the same.