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Fine Art For Fine People
NOMADS OF THE DESERT
BETWEEN TRADITION AND CHANGE
During my years in northern Nigeria, I spent time observing and drawing Fulani families whose lives were being shaped by both long-standing traditions and rapid change. What interested me was not the idea of a romantic nomadic life. I was looking at people dealing with work, family, education, movement, limited resources, and the practical demands of everyday life. Some families continued to move with their cattle. Others were becoming more settled. Education was beginning to create different possibilities for some of the children, and those changes affected the expectations parents had for them and the futures they might choose for themselves. The children especially held my attention. They could be serious, stubborn, curious, playful, watchful, and sometimes difficult to read. I rarely remember them as unhappy, but neither did I want to pretend that their lives were easy. That difference is important. These drawings came from watching people live within circumstances that were changing around them. Some traditions remained. Others were being adjusted, questioned, or left behind. I was not trying to preserve an image of the Fulani as people outsi de of modern life. They were already living inside it.
THE FULANI: BETWEEN TRADITION AND CHANGE
BETWEEN TRADITION AND CHANGE
When I first encountered Fulani families in northern Nigeria, I was looking at a culture with a long history of movement, cattle herding, family relationships, and traditions that had survived for generations. But I was not looking at a culture frozen in time. Education, permanent settlement, work, changing economies, and contact with the larger modern world were already affecting how some Fulani families lived. Children who might once have followed the same path as their parents were being introduced to other possibilities. Some families continued a nomadic life while others settled for longer periods or moved between both worlds. That interested me. Tradition is often discussed as though people must either preserve everything exactly as it was or abandon it altogether. What I saw was much more complicated. People carried parts of the old life with them while making room for the new. The changes were not always dramatic. Sometimes they appeared in clothing, education, work, or simply in the ambitions parents began to have for their children. The culture was moving, just as all living cultures move. That is part of what these drawings record. They are not meant to present the Fulani as people from some distant or disappearing past. The men, women, and children I knew were living in their own present, making decisions, adjusting to circumstances, holding on to some things and letting others change. For me, that is where the humanity of the work lives. THE CHILDREN The Fulani children became some of my most memorable subjects.I never saw them simply as examples of hardship. That would have been a very incomplete picture of the children I knew. They could be serious one moment and running after one another the next. Some were shy. Some seemed ready to challenge anything in front of them. Others carried themselves with a calmness that seemed far beyond their years. Those differences matter in the drawings. Binta does not have to express the same thing as Gimbiya. A child who looks serious does not necessarily look unhappy. Another who appears guarded may simply be watching, thinking, or deciding whether she trusts the person standing in front of her. I wanted the drawings to leave room for those individual personalities. DRAWING FROM LIFE Much of this work grew from direct observation during the seven years I lived and taught in Nigeria. Drawing became a way of paying attention. The clothing, gestures, faces, work, family relationships, ceremonies, and rhythms of everyday life gave me subjects, but the drawings gradually became about more than recording what was in front of me.Nigeria changed the way I saw things. It taught me to look longer, to pay closer attention to ordinary people, and eventually to reconsider how line, value, shape, and space could work together in a drawing. Many of the ideas that later became central to my work began there.
