I remember the first time that I held bhoylé earrings – shiny, golden emblems that appeared in films I had seen growing up. Though they are light, thin and smooth, they carry the history of the people whose blood runs through me, the Fulani people.

With a population of between 25 million and 40 million, the Fulani, Fula, Peul, or Fulbe are the largest nomadic ethnic group in Africa, found in countries such as Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Chad and Sudan.

I had long known and been proud to know that they’ve often been credited as being instrumental in the spread of Islam in the region, and are also known for their pastoralist lifestyles. But I knew less about how their movements contributed to how they understood wealth. This is why Fulani women would wear their family’s wealth, such as gold, for security while on the move.

Bhoylé earrings, or kwottenai as they are known in Mali, are twisted hoops normally made from gold (but can be made from other metals) that symbolise nobility and social standing, and are normally gifted and worn during weddings or the passing of a matriarch. The metal is cast into rods, chiselled, hammered into flared blades and hand-twisted into crescent shapes, for which the earrings are known.

“Traditionally, bhoylé earrings were made of solid gold and their weight needed support, so Fulani women used dense cotton red threads as the earrings’ posts. There were versions of the earrings with the dense cotton red thread, also behind the ears, to support even more weight. Often, Fulani women would wear a scarf (hijab), so the thread behind their ears would not be visible. Fulani women wore bhoylé earrings in solid gold as a sign of wealth and nobility, so the larger the earring, the more it weighed in gold, thus the higher the status of the woman in society,” Haby Barry explains to AMALIAH. 

Barry is a Guinean-American of Fulani descent who founded Fulaba to showcase and preserve beautiful West African jewellery traditions, such as Fulani jewellery, as she wanted to raise the standard of the craft. 

“The bhoylé earrings I came across were made of brass or some mixed metals, never containing any precious metals, and were usually poorly made. I had a decent pair of Fulani (bhoylé) earrings from Harlem that were well made, but the brass would often irritate my ears. After receiving many compliments on the earrings, I was inspired to create a version that was of higher quality, made with precious metals and more closely resembling the original bhoylé earrings,” Haby says.

Fulani gold traditions sit within the broader narrative of a vast history of West African trade. Starting in the 8th century, trans-Saharan gold routes linked West African gold mines to Arab and Mediterranean markets. It became the backbone of one of the most prosperous and influential of the West African empires, the Mali Empire (1235-1645). At the height of its power, it produced almost half of the total gold supply for Africa, Europe and Asia.

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But it’s not just Fulani earrings that signify this beautiful West African beauty tradition. Fulani braids are one of the most celebrated and globally recognised symbols of African identity in the African diaspora. 

This style consists of a single braid down the middle of the head, with smaller braids on the sides, embellished with decorative beads. Over the years, there have been modifications and other styles practised by other Black communities. But they have come to symbolise, in particular, a link between the Fulani and the wider African diaspora.

This can be traced back to the forced trafficking of Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade or Maafa (a Kiswahili term meaning “great disaster” or “terrible occurrence”), during which many individuals preserved and carried their braiding practices.

In the United States for instance, braiding styles were used as maps to escape enslavement on plantations and came to symbolise resilience and cultural preservation for later generations.

During the Black Power movement, the late actress Cicely Tyson was reportedly among the first Black women to wear Fulani braids on the cover of Jet Magazine in the 60s and 70s and on the red carpet. R&B singer Alicia Keys was featured with the style on her debut album, ‘Songs in a Minor’ in the early 2000s. Various posts on Instagram show the style is increasingly popular.

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But Black hairstyles have often been the crux of controversy, particularly in relation to allegations of cultural appropriation. In January 2018, Kim Kardashian posted a video on Snapchat donning Fulani braids, crediting Bo Derek, a white actress who wore cornrows in the 1979 film 10. In doing so, Kardashian whitewashed the style and dismissed its origin, as did her predecessor. 

In her acclaimed 2019 book, ‘Don’t Touch My Hair,’ writer and broadcaster Emma Dabiri explains that instances like this can be understood in light of the theft of Africa’s ‘cultural, physical and natural resources for five hundred years.’ She says,

“It also reveals an awful lot about how race is constructed and how white supremacy is informed by complicated emotions relating to inferiority. How do we theorise the white desire to not only possess but to embody the same features that Black people are penalised for?”

Haby believes modernisation and globalisation risk erasing the importance of this quintessentially Fulani and Black culture. “I also feel that it is important that women of the African diaspora are the ones to monetise on our diverse cultures and not other groups. There is a global market interested in the beauty and wonder of West African and Fulani culture, and it should be none other than West African and Fulani women tapping into this, because no one will honour our culture more than we do. The other important piece is capturing the value beyond the raw materials, so that finished products are made in Africa, which helps the local economies,” she says.

Then there are those cultures which are not ordinarily commodified. For centuries, some Fulani communities practised a distinctive form of applying tattoos called tunpungalle, which involves puncturing the skin around the lips with ink or charcoal to create deep ornamentation, marking significant milestones like entering puberty and marriage.

In ‘Love in the Sahel,’ an episode in the 2001 8-part PBS and National Geographic television series titled Africa, viewers are introduced to a Fulani community in Diafarabé, Mali, where a group of ladies are braiding their hair in preparation for suitors, upon their return from herding cattle through the Niger Delta to the Sahel. A young married lady called Dada explains how prospective brides prepare by “putting henna on their bottom lips.”

While it historically symbolised beauty, identity and cultural belonging for Fulani women, today, it is not as popular. There may be some Fulani women who choose to avoid this kind of permanent body modification due to the general impermissibility of tattooing in Islam. In doing so, they are finding other alternatives to honour this aesthetic or have come to prefer temporary forms of beautification like henna tattoos, which are inspired by Arab and Amazigh cultures.

A post by Running Africa (TikTok) shows a Fulani woman with Gambian and Senegalese roots explaining how her grandmother proudly wore the permanent black lip tattoo. Because the permanent process is painful, she chose to emulate the tradition using dark makeup on her wedding day. This allowed her to feel a deep connection to her community’s beauty standards without altering her body permanently.

In a world where Fulani aesthetics have become more popularised, preserving their history and origin is crucial. Fulani beauty traditions are not just styles and modes of creativity; they hold the story of a people and a history. For those of us in the African diaspora, each braid, twist of gold or touch of henna is a beautiful reminder of the vastness and endurance of Black and Muslim identities.