“…So we grew up passing down the label uncivilized. At the bottom rungs of our Jacob's ladder, we-the so-called bona fide sons and daughters of the Western Grassfields, the sedentary groupings, so to speak (Warnier 1984(Warnier , 2012)-confined the Mbororo-Fulani, who number between 80,000 and 120,000, are often called nomadic or seminomadic (despite becoming more sedentary), are known to be "most resistant to change," and have been in the region since the early 1900s (Davis 1995:217-218;Hickey 2002). 3 To those of us who celebrated linear ideas of civilization, to consider as equals people who lived in the hills in huts, herded cattle, hardly farmed, depended on selling milk and butter for subsistence, seldom sent their children to school, and could hardly speak or understand pidgin English, the lingua franca, was tantamount to an unforgivable insult to civilization.…”