No One Has Authority to Decide Who Gets to Identify as Anything

 By Farooq Kperogi My intervention on a Trust TV interview in which a retired ABU professor called Alkasum Abba said Shehu Shagari and Muha...

 By Farooq Kperogi

My intervention on a Trust TV interview in which a retired ABU professor called Alkasum Abba said Shehu Shagari and Muhammadu Buhari were not Fulani, presumably because they did not speak the language and inhabit the cultural universe of the Fulani, provoked an interesting conversation.

Since I study and write about collective identity and am working on a book on the rhetoric of collective identity construction, I want to share further insights on the issue.

First, in identity studies, no one has unilateral authority to decide who can identify as what. Collective identity is the product of a multiplicity of different things, including self-identification, descent, cultural practice, language, external recognition and power. 

Applied to the point at issue, the person who speaks Fulfulde and lives in a Fulani community has standing to speak about cultural competence and insider norms, but such a person has no standing to erase the Fulani identity of people whose Fulani descent is known, who self-identify as Fulani and who are recognized by others as Fulani.

There’s an identity scholar by the name of Fredrik Barth who said ethnic groups are not defined simply by a checklist of cultural traits. He said they are defined and sustained by boundaries, especially by what he called “self-ascription and ascription by others.” 

In other words, identity is partly what people say they are and partly what relevant others take them to be. In the case of Shagari and Buhari, the relevant others here were their immediate neighbors in Katsina and Sokoto who ascribed Fulani identities to them.

Joane Nagel also treats ethnicity as perpetually in flux and as shaped both by the agency of people who define themselves and by external political, social and economic actors who define them from outside.

 Barth’s and Nagel’s argument is important because it shows that language, dress, occupation, culture and residence can change while the ethnic boundary remains socially meaningful. 

Richard Jenkins, another identity scholar, makes the same point but with a sociological twist. He argues that identity emerges through a dialectic between internal identification and external categorization.

 But, unlike Barth and Nagel, the decisive issue, he contends, is power. It is not enough for someone to categorize others. The question is whether that person, institution or community has the social and symbolic leverage to make that categorization count. Alkasum Abba, or what he thinks he represents, has no social, symbolic or any kind of authority to decide who can and who can’t be Fulani.

Abba is a Fulfulde-speaking cultural insider. He can make only one legitimate but narrow claim: “Shagari and Buhari are not culturally Fulani in the fullest lived sense.” That is different from saying, “Shagari and Buhari are not Fulani at all.” The first is a defensible cultural judgment. The second is an indefensibly arrogant, even ignorant, overreach.

Roger Blench’s work on Fulani identity in Nigeria notes that only some of the people who call themselves Fulani actually speak Fulfulde. He also describes Fulani communities that have lost Fulfulde, adopted Hausa, Nupe or Yoruba and yet continue to regard themselves as Fulani while also being recognized as such by neighboring peoples. 

For example, a 2018 study of Fulani people in Ilorin by Yeseera Omonike Oloso found that 95 percent of respondents identified Yoruba as their first language, but 75 percent still identified as Fulani. The study’s conclusion was that language shift did not automatically produce identity shift.

And that’s consistent with the predominant conclusion in identity scholarship. Linguistic identity and ethnic identity aren’t always coterminous. 

So, in scholarly terms, Fulani identity can exist in at least three registers: Fulani by descent, Fulani by cultural-linguistic competence and Fulani by social recognition. Some people will satisfy all three. Others will satisfy only one or two. The mistake is to privilege any form of identity as the only legitimate form of identity.

This does not mean every claim is valid, of course. Descent claims can be fabricated. External labeling can be hostile or mistaken. Phenotypes can be unreliable as evidence, although they can become socially consequential when people use visible features to assign identity. 

Kanchan Chandra’s constructivist account helps here. It argues that ethnic identity is usually constrained by descent-based attributes, but that the identity that is “activated” is the one a person professes or is assigned by others. Language and culture may strengthen the claim, but they are not always the sole basis of membership. 

People who can trace patrilineal or both patrilineal and matrilineal descent to Fulani ancestors, who self-identify as Fulani and who are called Fulani by the surrounding community are Fulani. This also applies to other ethnic identities. 

So, yes, Shagari and Buhari were acculturated, linguistically assimilated or maybe even culturally distant Fulani people, but saying they were not Fulani at all amounts to deploying an unsociological and ahistorical cultural-purity test as an ethnic veto. The scholarship on identity does not support that as a basis for determining who belongs to collective identities.