This American Looks So Fulani—and He Knows It!

By Farooq Kperogi My family and I went to Masjid Al-Furqan in Marietta, about 20 minutes from our home, for iftar. While at the dinner, I no...

By Farooq Kperogi

My family and I went to Masjid Al-Furqan in Marietta, about 20 minutes from our home, for iftar. While at the dinner, I noticed a man who looked so strikingly and unmistakably Fulani that I immediately said to myself there was no way he could be anything else.

My gaze lingered on him. I was convinced I was looking at another Nigerian. When he noticed my friendly, intent stare, he greeted me warmly.

I wasted no time asking if he was Nigerian. (Fulani people are spread across West Africa, of course, but because he looked so much like many Fulani people I grew up around in my hometown and elsewhere in northern Nigeria, I assumed he must be a Nigerian Fulani.)

“You think I am Fulani, right?” he said in a perfect American accent.

I was stunned. How did he know exactly what I was thinking? Was he a Fulani man born and raised in America?

He laughed and said he was from New York. He told me countless Africans had mistaken him for Fulani before, so he already knew what I was about to ask.

The most dramatic encounter he ever had, he said, happened in New York when someone urged him to “not be ashamed” of his “real identity” and simply admit where he actually came from.

“When I said, ‘My grandparents came from…,’” he told me, “the guy’s face lit up in anticipation that I would say Fulani.” Instead, he disappointed him by saying his grandparents migrated from South Carolina to New York in the early 1900s.

Even so, he said he strongly suspects that his distant African ancestry may indeed be Fulani. According to family lore on his father’s side, his ancestors who were brought from West Africa to South Carolina almost 500 years ago were Muslims who tried to practice their faith secretly during slavery, despite enormous odds. Naturally, such efforts could not endure indefinitely under the brutal conditions of slavery.

We didn’t have enough time for me to ask whether he was born into Islam or whether he embraced it later, perhaps inspired by the family stories about his ancestors arriving in America centuries ago as Muslims.

He seemed fascinated when I told him that many historians of the trans-Atlantic slave trade say South Carolina had the largest concentration of enslaved people from Senegambia. I also mentioned Omar ibn Said, the Fulani-born Muslim scholar from Futa Toro (in present-day Senegal) who was enslaved in South Carolina and later wrote an autobiography in Arabic. It remains the only known autobiography in Arabic written by an enslaved person in the United States and is now preserved in the Library of Congress.

It was a brief but lively encounter. Before we parted, I asked for his permission to take this photo with him and share it with my friends on social media.