what is the literature of Niger?

Niger is not among the richest, neither in its precolonial past, nor in the colonial era and its consequences. In the old times of Songhay empire, it was one of those vaguely Islamicate regions far from the great centres of Islamic learning and literary tradition. The first French outposts appeared in 1867, although those territories only became part of the colony known as French West Africa in 1922. Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, a meagre body of colonial literature in French arouse, with such books as Ma femme au Niger, by Edouard de Meringo (1919). In this category, there was even a poetic contribution, given by Michel Péron (L'ère nigérienne, 1926), with poems on the Fulani (Peul) and the Tuaregs. 
The literature produced by the colonised, rather than the colonisers appeared shortly before the independence of the country, in 1959. Among the first Francophone authors of Niger was Ibrahima Issa, the author of Les grandes eaux noires. 

I have read

... nothing ...

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I have written

... nothing ...

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Les Peuls WoDaaBe du Niger

I read a text of Sandrine Loncke, and I contemplate the photographs, in an old and cherished French book I have, Territoires nomades, organized by Jean-Marc Durou. I realise that it may be in fact a quite rare book. I bought it second-hand in Tours when I was working on my research project about the Adamic language, just to have some respite. Old and cherished, I say, because it dates back from those remote times when Sahel and the Saharan world was a distant, picturesque reality of proud and happy people, not a source of yet another migratory crisis. 
So how do they live, those Peul (or Fula, as I often call them after the Portuguese)? And how different they are from the other nomads, such as the Tuareg, to whom a greater part of attention is dedicated, and other Peul sub-divisions? For the Peul peoples occupy a vast territory right along all the Sahel belt; they can be seen in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, where the Portuguese met them, throughout southern Mali and the northern part of Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, and an isolated corridor stretching through Chad (Mongo) till El-Geneina in Sudan; which is a little more than the width of the entire European Union. Those WoDaaBe occupy apparently uncharacteristic patch of the desert more or less in the middle, near a location called Tahoua, on a sort of road leading to the salt deposits of Fachi and Bilma farther north-eastwards. What seems to identify them at the first glance are extravagant khulkhal, or how should I call the bracelets that are not put on arms, but on legs; covering the female calf nearly till the knee; abundant fringes, contrasting with partially shaven heads appear to be equally fashionable. They appreciate cowries, that the women use to decorate their prominent fringes, as well as plastic flip-flops and colourful umbrellas. We might think such groups date from time immemorial; but apparently this precise identity was formed in the 19th century, gathering by the beginning of the new millennium some 80 000 or 100 000 souls. They pasture a type of dark brown, long-horned cattle. I wonder what is the place in their economy reserved for the royalties dues for all those photos in Traveller and National Geographic where they appear. 


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Jean-Marc Durou, Territoires nomades. Hommage a Edmond Bernus, Paris, Editions de La Martiniere, 2006.