At peace in my skin

One of the most important things my fiancé has helped me to understand is why people call me anasara or tubob. Greetings are incredibly important here. So important, if you don’t greet someone, they think you are mad at them, not just that you forgot to greet them or didn’t notice them passing by. Even before buying something you have to go through the greetings—from their spouse and children to the state of their cows. Additionally, ethnic identity is still very strong here—and relatedly, family names carry much more significance than they do elsewhere. Often when greeting, people address each other by their family name. If they don’t know the person’s name, they’ll address them by the name the most common to the ethnic group (Bambara = Coulibaly, Peuhl = Diallo, Songhoy = Maïga). If a person greets someone not from their ethnic group, they will call out the name of the ethnicity. Therefore, Diallo is often greeted as fula ce ! (among Bambaras) and fulan aru ! (among Songhoy). And I am greeted equivalently as tubob or anasara. It’s not meant to be a slur because I’m white, but merely a way to classify and greet me. 

During the lunch break of the training I was in Monday and Tuesday, one of the trainers asked me if I get bother by people refering to me as anasara (just before my colleague had told the server the anasara doesn’t eat that much, so don’t fill her plate). I said it used to bother me but no longer does because I’ve come to realize that everybody uses certain terms to identify and refer to people here. I think it only becomes a problem when people use the terms to generalize about certain ethnicities and do so out of the context of joking cousins (for example, the artisan who made our wedding rings is a Peuhl of the blacksmith class of forgerons who joke with Peuhls, so he joked about the significance of my fiancé’s small fingers and the fact that all Diallo’s are traitors). Sadly, two groups excluded from the joking cousins/ethnicities (Diarra’s joke with Traoré’s, all Dogon joke will Songhoy, etc) are the Touaregs and the Bella. These are the only two groups I’ve heard being seriously slurred against here in the North. And they are the ones you hear about most on RFI.