« We never belong to an ethnic group, a race, or a community in life by birth or by blood. We become members through its culture and the respect of certain traditions. »
Ahmadou Kourouma,
Yacouba chasseur africain
(Gallimard 1998)
Born into a family of noble Malinke hunter-warriors, Kourouma learnt to hunt alongside his father and grandfather. Was it by listening to the hunters’ great exploits that he developed his writing and subject matter’s intractability? Was it through his contact with the teaching of these « hunters, African heros » – the title of another of his books – that he whet both his insolence and his lucidity?
Nothing would come as less of a surprise. The hunters were the first to revolt against slavery. They have always been, and still are, protectors and healers. They watch over the community’s safety. Upholders of traditional values, they defend equity and revile corruption and the loss of moral standards. It logically follows that this sometimes causes ambiguities or misunderstandings, as is clear from the conflicts with the authorities widely reported in the African press.
Whereas French hunters – or at least the hard-liners the media refer to – are a reactionary caste defending an obsolete corporatism irrespective of contemporary ecological imperatives, West Africa’s hunters represent an astonnishing force that is profoundly anchored in the rural social fabric and plays a significant role in maintaining balances, in caring for and protecting the population.
They put their knowledge acquired during initiation at the service of their fellows. Unlike in Judaeo-Christian culture which favours identification with paternal models (« do as Christ or the Saints did »), African initiation leaves individuals free to define their modernity within the framework of universal collective values. It is a receptacle whose contents can be defined by all. This is how, like the traditional myths, the hunters’ acts convey this ancestral knowledge about what constitutes man, and enable the community to define its future.
No one becomes a hunter by birth, but by initiation. At a time when political discourses tragically encouraging xenophobia are filtering through from Côte d’Ivoire, the word of West Africa’s hunters, whose solidarity knows no frontiers, comes to set the records straight and is acutely topical. They are about to meet for an exceptional six-country event. Always anxious to have our finger on the pulse of what is going on in Africa and to document its lesser-known expressions, Africultures is delighted to back this event by devoting this dossier to them.
///Article N° : 5473
