Koumen is the dwarf-sized bush genius and initiatory master of the pastoral Fulɓe, central to the initiation text recorded from the Senegalese silatigi Arɗo Dembo and published by Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Germaine Dieterlen in 1961. Bearded like an ancestor and counted among the laareeji, the guardian powers of the wild, he is the auxiliary of the primordial serpent Tyanaba. With his wife Foroforondou he meets the herder Silé Sadio in the bush and conducts him through twelve successive clearings of knowledge that encode the four elements, the structure of space and time, and the secret science of cattle, at the end of which the herder becomes a silatigi, a master of pastoral and bush lore.