11 - Conclusions: Heraclitus' paradox

Summary

You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.

Heraclitus (Wheelwright 1964:29)

A Dyula community existed in Koko before the twentieth century. Modern Dyula residents of Koko are convinced that, in a fundamental sense, they belong to that same community. They are, after all, descendants of earlier settlers. Any one of them can provide a genealogical pedigree to attest to the fact. More than anything else, this consciousness differentiates them from the multitudes ‘across the stream’ who resemble them in so many other aspects.

This deeply-felt sense of continuity belies the obvious fact that modern Koko is a very different place than it was a hundred, or even fifty, years ago. What was once a large village has now become one of the largest small towns in the country. Whereas all ‘Dyula’, however defined, used to be members of the Koko community, many, if not most of Korhogo's modern ‘Dyula’ residents would scarcely think of themselves as Koko-ka. Korhogo's trade with the outside world, once a monopoly of the Koko Dyula, has largely passed into the hands of all sorts of individuals ‘across the stream’. Sometimes, Dyula in Koko speak as if these changes had never taken place, dividing their social universe into the neat categories of ‘Dyula’ and ‘Senufo’ (or, even more anachronistically, banmana, ‘pagan’). Yet they are hardly in a position to ignore these changes.