Akwanga, Nigeria - On the heels of an insurrection propelled seven years
back by the furnished gathering Boko Haram, Nigeria is entangled in another contention that has partitioned individuals crosswise over ethnic and religious lines with thousands slaughtered in the course of recent years.
It's a contention that 16-year-old Haruna Mohammed and his cow crowding family know great.
Not just are they at the focal point of it, however they are likewise being reprimanded for it.
"They call us executioners," he says. "Be that as it may, we don't murder. We are quiet."
In a completely open field in Akwanga, focal Nigeria, Haruna guides his dad's rush of almost 2,000 bovines to a stream in a woods. The dairy cattle hustle past him in a distraught dash for the cool, freshwater. Haruna touches them affectionately. He knows every dairy animals by name. He knows when every dairy animals was conceived. He knows the apathetic dairy animals and he knows the lively ones. He knows which ones create the best drain, and which ones deliver the most fertilizer.
"The dairy animals are uncommon to us Fulani," Haruna says. "They are a piece of our family."
Consistently, Haruna strolls a few kilometers through fields and streets with the dairy animals as they bite on grass.
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He says that he enjoys this chore. It's a break from his secondary school studies and a way for him to preserve his culture. His family hails from a generations-old cow-breeding tradition.
West Africa's cattle herders
The pastoral Fulani people - also called Peul, Fulbe, Fula and believed to be the world's largest semi-nomadic ethnic group - follow their cows today as they have done for centuries across the West African Sahel, from Senegal to central Africa.
In the past, farmers welcomed the seasonal migration of the Fulani and their cattle. The cows fertilised the farmers' fields with dung and the farmers reserved land for the cows to graze. It was somewhat of a mutual relationship, dented every now and then by conflicts, particularly when the cattle would trample the farmers' crops.
But today, the relationship between Fulani cattle-herders and farmers in Nigeria has taken a deadly turn.
Haruna and his family are viewed with suspicion.
As the last of the cows finish drinking water from the stream, a woman runs towards Haruna and his younger brothers. She shoos them away with her hands. Speaking Hausa, she tells the boys to get away from her field.
Haruna beckons his two younger brothers. They direct the cows towards another route.
In the past five years, fights over land and water between Fulani herders and farmers across Nigeria have left thousands of people dead. The farmers accuse the herdsmen of instigating the violence because the roaming herdsmen end up in communities where farmers have already settled for decades, even centuries.
"This is our ancestral land and we have been living here. Then these Fulani people come here once or twice a year with their cows and they are killing us," says Ngozi Ugwu.