As we approach the end of the rainy season, we will have the opportunity to see the beautiful and famous ceremony of the Peul the Gerewol Festival
The Fulani M’Bororo are obsessed with beauty and use it as a hierarchy of value.
The Gerewol establishes a lesson in love, a beauty contest for the men and a choice of partners for the woman it is a scene of great sweetness, with young men who smile with all their teeth and with bright eyes, hoping to be judged by the most beautiful (the Yake).The Gerewol is also a combat dance using large swords, sometimes practiced in the Yake.
The young participants start dancing with the swirling swords. Winking, smiling, dull-eyed, to test their seduction skills.
It is the women with their furtive gesture of the hand that indicate the chosen one, thus couples form and the dance resumes incessantly until dawn.
Some notes on the Gerewol Festival
The date on which the Gerewol festival takes place in Chad is often asked, those interested are uneasy because they fear they will not be able to attend the Gerewol ceremony and perhaps you are on this page for this very reason
so we want to help you understand what Gerewol Festival is all about
False Myths and legends of the Savannah on the internet about the Gerewol
– Le Gerewol is a Ceremony not a Festival, the festival was born in Niger following the gatherings for the Cure Salee’ of the Touareg and the Peul in the plain of l’Ighazer wan Agadez
https://www.ingall-niger. org/aujourd-hui/la-cure-salee/84-la-cure-salee
– The origin of the Gerewol
Among many peoples of Sudanese Africa, the custom is that the boy, having reached manhood, shows his strength, his courage or his endurance, in exercises which vary according to the races.
The Eastern Puls, in this respect as in many others, fall into two groups; the Fulbe proper, who have the “Soro”, and the Wodaabee, who have the “Gerewol”. .
1— The Soro among the Fulɓe.
What it consists of. — The soro consists of receiving blows from an adversary that has been provoked for this purpose, blows that the patient must “collect”
2— The Gerewol, or Gere’ol, of the Woḍȧ̇̇̇be.
At home, the competition of endurance to blows is replaced by “a beauty contest”
Notes on two institutions specific to the Fulani populations between Niger and Chad, the Soro and the GerewolGilbert Vieillard
Journal des Africanistes Année 1932
– Traditionally the Gerewol does not take place at the end of the rainy season,
the end of the rainy season is the period chosen by most travel agencies to arrange meetings with the Wodaabe without adverse weather events
-beauty as such is constant in Boror society,
but it explodes in all its vital fullness in times of tornadoes during the festivities which bring together groups usually scattered by the sun in the parched grass for a few magnificent days of the beauty contest Gerewol. he opposes the most beautiful men of the race
The art peul
Jacqueline Delange
Cahiers d’Études africaines Année 1963