This is a call — not to anger, not to defensiveness, but to action. To every Fulani person reading this: the herder in the savanna and the banker in Lagos, the schoolgirl in Adamawa and the software engineer in Finland, the imam and the trader, the grandmother who has never left her village and the young graduate posting from a phone in Abuja — this is addressed to all of you, because the threat we face does not check your profession, your income, your education, or your passport before it labels you.
Forty million people. That is roughly how many Fulani are scattered across Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and the Central African Republic. Forty million distinct lives, professions, dialects, dreams, and daily routines — being compressed, again and again, into a single word in a headline: “herdsmen.” Not “armed group.” Not “suspects.” Not even “Fulani militants,” which would at least be specific. Just “herdsmen” — a word that quietly drags an entire ethnicity into the frame of every crime it touches.q
Here is the truth that should alarm every one of us into motion: when a stereotype goes unanswered long enough, it stops being treated as a media failure and starts being treated as a fact. It gets repeated by officials. It gets cited in policy discussions. It gets absorbed by children who have never met a Fulani person, who will grow into adults carrying that single, flattened image as their entire understanding of who we are. This is not paranoia. This is how prejudice calcifies into permanent disadvantage — and history has shown us, in Nigeria and far beyond it, exactly how dire that can become when a whole people are reduced to a label and nobody with the power to correct it speaks loudly enough, soon enough – a case in hand is the Rwandan genocide.
There is a comfortable illusion that staying quiet is the safe choice — that controversy is something to be avoided, that the media circus will move on to its next target eventually. It will not move on if no one interrupts it. Silence does not protect us. Silence is simply consent, recorded and filed away as agreement.
There is a quiet danger more corrosive than any single headline, more dangerous than any one biased article or recycled photo: the danger of letting someone else finish your sentence for you. For too long, that is exactly what has happened to the Fulani people. Others have been writing the ending to our story, and increasingly, that ending is being written in the language of suspicion, criminality, and fear.
Consider what it costs when only the loudest, most extreme voices are left to define an entire people. A small number of armed bandits, a handful of violent actors who happen to share an ethnic label with tens of millions of peaceful people, are currently the only “Fulani voice” that much of the public ever hears, because they are the only ones generating footage and headlines. Meanwhile, the banker, the doctor, the civil servant, the herder who has lost his own cattle to those same bandits, the mother raising children in a community torn by exactly the violence being wrongly attributed to her — none of them are being asked for a quote. None of them are being interviewed. Their silence, however understandable, however born of exhaustion or fear or simply not knowing where to begin, leaves the floor entirely to people who do not represent them and never asked to.
This must change, and it can only change through deliberate, collective, fearless engagement — not someday, not when conditions feel safer, but now.
This is not a call to anger, and it is not a call to deny that real violence exists in some of the conflicts associated with our name. Pretending there is no crisis at all would only hand critics an easy excuse to dismiss everything else we say. Taking the media seriously means something more disciplined and more powerful than that.
It means showing up. When a journalist is reporting on farmer-herder conflict, on banditry, on any story touching Fulani communities, there should be a Fulani voice in that story who is not a suspect and not a victim being spoken about in the third person, but a person being directly quoted, with context, with nuance, with a name and a face attached to a real perspective.
It means writing. Op-eds, letters to editors, statements from community associations, posts that carry real names rather than anonymous frustration. A single well-placed, well-reasoned piece from a credible Fulani voice can do more to correct a narrative than a thousand angry comments ever will.
It means organizing. Professional associations, youth groups, women’s groups, religious leaders, traditional rulers — every layer of Fulani society has a platform of some kind, however small, and every one of those platforms is a chance to put a human face and a clear, calm voice in front of a public that has mostly only been shown a stereotype.
It means correcting the record, every single time it is wrong. A recycled photo from another country presented as evidence of Fulani violence inside Nigeria. A headline calling an entire profession “killers” over the actions of an armed minority. Each of these deserves a direct, sourced, public correction — not because every editor will listen, but because the pattern itself, documented and called out repeatedly, becomes its own form of accountability over time.
And it means condemning real wrongdoing just as loudly as we contest false accusations. A community that visibly, vocally rejects the criminal minority operating under its name earns something that silence never can: credibility. The Fulani family farmer who publicly denounces cattle rustlers does more for the reputation of forty million people than any defensive statement ever could.
To the young Fulani professional building a career in a city far from where your family grazed cattle for generations — your voice carries weight precisely because it disrupts the stereotype simply by existing publicly. Use it.
To the elder, the traditional title-holder, the imam whose words carry the authority of decades — your community is listening to you before they listen to anyone else. Speak plainly, speak often, and speak where journalists and policymakers can hear you, not only where your own community already agrees with you.
To the herder still living the pastoral life that gave our people our name — your testimony is the one the media claims to be reporting on, yet is the one voice most consistently left out of the reporting itself. Insist on being heard. Tell journalists what your actual days look like, what threats you actually face, what you have actually lost to the same bandits being falsely conflated with you.
To the mother, the teacher, the student, the trader, the nurse, the engineer, the artist — every one of you carries a piece of the real, full, complicated, ordinary humanity that no headline has room for. Each of you, simply by speaking publicly and visibly as who you are, chips away at a flattened caricature that has had far too long to harden into “common knowledge.”
This is not an academic exercise in public relations. Real lives are at stake in how this story gets told. When suspicion calcifies into policy, into vigilante violence, into the kind of profiling that gets innocent people pulled off buses and harmed for nothing more than how they speak or dress or where they were born, the consequence of an uncorrected narrative is not embarrassment. It is grief. It is families broken by mob violence aimed at the wrong people. It is young men pushed toward the very armed groups that the stereotype falsely claims they already belong to, because they conclude, not unreasonably, that they are being punished regardless of their choices.
The alternative to speaking up is not safety. It is simply a slower, quieter version of the same harm — the kind that shows up later as a law that singles you out, a community denied land rights, a child who absorbs shame about an identity they had every right to be proud of.
So this is the call: across every border that splits us, every dialect that distinguishes us, every difference in how we live — as pastoralist or professional, devout or secular, rural or urban, young or old — there has never been a more urgent moment to insist on being heard accurately, completely, and on our own terms.
Pick up the phone when a journalist calls, and call them when they don’t. Write the op-ed you’ve been hesitating to write. Correct the headline. Tell the true story to the neighbor who only knows the stereotype. Stand publicly against the real wrongdoing committed in our name, precisely because doing so is what makes the rest of our case unimpeachable.
Our story does not belong to whoever shouts the loudest about us. It belongs to us — and it is past time we insisted on telling it ourselves.
Saturday, May 20th, 2017. I attended a church programme ‘THRIVE’ at the Harvest House Church in Akobo, Ibadan. All my life, I’d never seen the inside of a church except in movies, newspapers and other media. Harvest House was state of the art. Like a modern day music theatre, there was a spotlight on the pastor and three adjacent large wall-size projected screens at the background displaying other parts of the church one may be blind to one as He focuses on the speaker. The sound systems were modern, the notes sounding clear and confident. The congregation sat in an orderly manner, basking in the wisdom the speaker shared. I thought to myself: “Little wonder Christians barely miss church services, this is fun.” The service started with a heart-warming Yoruba praise song I used to enjoy during morning assemblies as a secondary school student –Ta lo da bire. Born a Muslim, I have kept to my religion and never felt the need to probe other faiths. Having read the Holy Qur’an and adhered to its tenets to the best of my understanding, I’d been convinced it is enough to navigate my way to Heaven.
Farooq Gajo 