Perched on the edge of a cart packed with a dozen young goats and pulled by a donkey, Abou Sow drives his family’s convoy at pace. They are heading south, from Senegal’s Sahelian northern landscapes to more fertile land still green after the dry season.
Most of the travelling group are teenagers, or in their early 20s, part of a new generation adopting a pastoralist lifestyle that faces the challenges of the climate crisis and of shifting attitudes towards herders.
“There’s no water, there’s no grass near our homes so we have travelled now for a month,” says Sow, 18, who is heading for Tambacounda, a town that has long been on the route for Fulani herders. “We don’t have a choice. Our goats and cows need to eat and drink so we follow the road to wherever is greener. We don’t know where we will end up.”
The uncertainty goes beyond the journey ahead of him to the future of pastoralism as a livelihood.
His home region of Louga, in Senegal’s semi-arid north west, has experienced increasingly harsh conditions – prolonged droughts followed by heavy rains – forcing moves farther south.
Sow thinks the government could do more to help support the herders when they are struggling to feed their livestock and has questioned government policy that banned pastoralists from moving beyond the region during the Covid-19 pandemic, even during the dry season. Efforts to protect the environment such as the Great Green Wall, a project to plant trees in the Sahel, pose a problem for herders who have to travel long distances around areas reserved for the project.
But Sow is proud of the pastoralist culture he has inherited, which he believes must continue even when it often seems more stable to become a farmer.
The young men who guard Sow’s family herd have already left in search of suitable grazing land. Sow is following behind with the women and children. Everything they need to eat and to set up camp is packed on to wooden carts whose wheels creak as they rattle over the uneven ground.
The path is difficult. The family sleep outside and draw water from wells as they travel on tracks that run parallel to the smooth, freshly tarmacked roads connecting neighbouring Mali to the ports in the capital, Dakar.
At regular intervals they encounter other livestock herds at watering holes or being escorted by young men, tasked by relatives to keep the cattle fed until rains bring vegetation back to their villages. They can be away for months.
“We leave the village and stop somewhere and stay around there for a week or two and then we move again to the next place. It’s tough, you walk until your legs hurt,” says Aliou Ndong, 21, who has helped herd his uncle’s livestock since he was a boy.
Ndong carries only a stick and a jerry can of water as he nonchalantly walks among the two dozen cows of his herd, guiding them with sharp whistles away from nearby agricultural land, where a farmer’s son watches on horseback.
Ndong says a lot has changed since the time of his father’s generation. Herders now have less grazing land close to home and must travel farther south and stray from traditional pastoral corridors.
“It’s harder for our generation, we struggle to get food for our cows. Previous generations didn’t have to come as far us, they would be able to stay closer to the village. The environment has changed and that forces us to go further. The trees have been cut to make fields and there is not much open grass for us.”
Pastoralism in Senegal and the wider Sahel region has changed drastically over recent decades. As well as changing landscapes caused by the climate crisis, herders have been forced to change their routes as more land is used for agriculture.
Migrating herders have longstanding relationships with farmers to whom they sell their products, but competition for land can create tension, with farmers accusing herders of damaging crops. Ndong is occasionally told by farmers that he cannot pass through a village, and is thus forced to take longer routes around farms.
Elsewhere, as in neighbouring Mali, such tensions have intensified into larger conflicts, in which pastoralists are discriminated against and even targeted in massacres because of their perceived associations with armed groups that draw from the same ethnic groups.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) has estimated that poor rains in 2017 forced pastoralists in the Sahel to move their herds three months earlier than usual.. Increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and a spike in armed conflict across the region led to a 300% rise in the number of people who were food insecure in 2018, said the agency.
Alex Orenstein, a data scientist focused on pastoralism in west Africa, says much is changing about pastoralism. Older family members often remain in their villages while the duty of guarding the herds falls mostly on young people.
“The kind of pastoralism of long treks through poorly or uninhabited areas doesn’t really happen any more. Land use is a part of that as well. It’s no longer just the herds moving through large spaces of vegetation, it’s now about navigating between settled areas and farms; there’s a complex system of corridors and routes and avoiding going into farms,” says Orenstein.
Compared with industrial farming of animals, pastoral livestock rearing is seen as more ecologically friendly and the FAO considers it an important sustainable food system.
According to the agency, pastoralism can stimulate soil for planting, helps biodiversity and reduces the need for cereals to feed livestock that could be used to feed humans.
“Mobile pastoralism exists because it’s the only type of production system that works in the Sahel. You have to move your animals around. These places don’t produce enough vegetation to keep animals year round,” says Orenstein. “Pastoralism is going to have to be an important part of the future and given the climate outlook, livestock production in west Africa is going to have to become more, not less, mobile.”
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