Epic of Sundiata

The Epic of Sundiata (also spelled Sunjata, Son-Jara or Soundjata) is a long story told aloud by professional bards in the Mande-speaking lands of West Africa. Its hero, Sundiata Keita, is remembered as the man who united the small Manding chiefdoms of the upper Niger in the thirteenth century and became the first mansa, or emperor, of Mali. The empire he is said to have founded later grew rich from gold and trade and became famous across the Islamic world.

It is not a single fixed text like a printed novel. It exists in hundreds of performances by different bards, in different villages and countries, over many generations. Some performances last a few minutes and praise one episode; others last whole nights. Scholars have collected dozens of written versions since the late nineteenth century, but every one of them is a snapshot of a living tradition, not the original.

The epic works on several levels at once. It is a story of courage and destiny; it explains how the Mande clans are related and which families praise which; and for modern states, especially Mali and Guinea, it has become a story of national origins.

The people who perform the epic are called jeli (plural jeliw) in Mande languages; in French and English they are often called griots. They belong to hereditary families of specialists in speech and music. Traditionally only they may perform the epic in public. A jeli is at once a historian, a genealogist, a musician, an adviser and a go-between who can say difficult things on behalf of others.

Accompaniment varies by region and occasion. The best-known instruments are the kora, a harp with about twenty-one strings, the balafon, a wooden xylophone with gourd resonators, and the ngoni, a plucked lute; at Kela, for example, a recitation may be supported by two ngoni players. The bard moves between rhythmic recitation, sung praise and spoken explanation, while listeners answer and encourage.

Certain families have special authority. In the story itself, Sundiata’s father gives the young prince a griot named Balla Fasséké, whom the Kouyaté family regard as their ancestor. The Kouyaté of Niagassola in Guinea still guard a sacred balafon, the Sosso-Bala, that tradition says once belonged to Sundiata’s enemy Soumaoro. In Mali, the Diabaté family of the village of Kela are considered among the most authoritative performers, because they recite the epic at the Kamablon ceremony in nearby Kangaba.

Because the epic explains the history of clans through their family names (jamu) and praise songs, it still shapes public life: a surname tells a Mande speaker which ancestors and which episodes belong to that person.

Many versions begin with ancestors. Some trace Sundiata’s father’s line back to Bilali (Bilal), a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, linking the Mande kings to the Islamic world. Then comes the tale of the buffalo woman: a monstrous buffalo ravages the land of Dô, and two hunters who manage to kill it are rewarded with a young woman, Sogolon, who is described as ugly and hunchbacked. A hunter-soothsayer had already told the king of Manding, Naré Maghan Konaté, that an ugly stranger woman would bear him a mighty son, so when the hunters bring Sogolon to his court, he marries her.

Sogolon’s son Sundiata is born, but for years he cannot stand or walk. His father’s senior wife, Sassouma Bérété, mother of his older half-brother Dankaran Touman, mocks Sogolon and her child. After the old king dies, Dankaran Touman takes the throne, and the humiliation of Sogolon becomes unbearable.

The turning point is one of the most famous scenes in African literature. After his mother is humiliated over a few baobab leaves, Sundiata asks the smiths for an iron rod. The rod gives way under his weight (it bends or breaks, depending on the teller), and in some versions he finally rises leaning on a branch instead. In Niane’s version he then uproots a whole baobab and sets it before his mother’s door, turning the insult around. Once on his feet he becomes a remarkable hunter, and his strength frightens his rivals.

Behind the drama is a Mande idea about family. The conflict between children of the same father but different mothers is called fadenya (“father-child-ness”), and it stands for rivalry and ambition. The loyalty between children of the same mother is badenya (“mother-child-ness”), and it stands for cooperation. The epic shows that a society needs both.

Threatened by Sassouma’s hostility, Sogolon leaves Manding with her children. They wander from court to court and finally find refuge in the kingdom of Mema, to the north, where the king admires the young exile and makes him a war leader. During these years Sundiata grows into a seasoned fighter.

Meanwhile Manding falls under the power of Soumaoro (Sumanguru) Kanté, king of Sosso. The epic presents him as a blacksmith-king and a master of occult power who cannot be harmed by ordinary weapons. When he overruns the Manding chiefdoms, their people send messengers to search for Sundiata. They find him in Mema, and he returns with troops lent by its king and gathers allies among the Manding clans and their leaders.

Victory depends on knowledge as much as on force. Sundiata’s sister Nana Triban, who had been taken into Soumaoro’s household, escapes and reveals the secret of his power: his tana, or forbidden thing, is the spur of a white cockerel. Fakoli, Soumaoro’s own nephew, joins Sundiata after a quarrel with his uncle. In the decisive battle at Kirina (Krina), an arrow tipped with the cockerel’s spur strikes Soumaoro, his magic fails, and he flees and disappears. Tradition places this victory around 1235.

After Kirina, Sundiata’s generals extend his rule. One of the best known, Tiramakhan Traoré, is remembered especially in Senegambia as the conqueror of the western lands toward the Atlantic. Such regional emphases are one reason why versions from The Gambia sound different from versions recorded in Mali or Guinea.

Many versions end with a great gathering at Kurukan Fuga (Kouroukan Fouga), a clearing in the Manding heartland. There Sundiata is acknowledged as mansa, and the leaders of the allied clans receive their titles, lands and duties. Each group’s role is fixed: some clans hold political power, others are smiths, leatherworkers or bards, and alliances between families are confirmed.

In the epic this is less a list of laws than the moment when the social order of Mande is set in place. It explains, for example, the “joking relationships” (sanankunya) that allow members of certain clans to tease one another freely, a custom that still eases tensions in West African daily life. It also explains why the Keita are the royal clan and why particular griot families are attached to them. Not every performer tells this episode, and many treat it only briefly at the end of a long night.

Is Sundiata a real person? There is one important written witness. The North African historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), writing in the late fourteenth century, included a list of Mali’s kings in his great history, the Kitab al-‘Ibar. He names four informants in the text, among them a scholar he calls Shaykh Uthman, and the information they gave him reflects traditions circulating in fourteenth-century Mali.

Ibn Khaldun says that the greatest king of Mali, the one who overcame the Susu (Sosso) and took their country, was called Mari Jata. He glosses the name: mari meant a prince descended from a ruler, and jata meant lion. He gives him a reign of twenty-five years and lists his sons and successors. He also notes that his informants could not give him a genealogy for Mari Jata. Since Mari Jata is still one of Sundiata’s praise names, almost all historians identify the two.

Most modern accounts therefore treat Sundiata as a historical ruler of the thirteenth century who founded the Mali state by defeating Sosso. His reign is often given as about 1235 to 1255, but these round figures do not match Ibn Khaldun’s twenty-five years, and neither his accession nor his death can be dated precisely. The date of Kirina itself, around 1235, is a scholarly reconstruction based on Ibn Khaldun’s reign lengths and on oral tradition, not a date written down at the time.

Almost everything else, including Sogolon, the buffalo woman, the iron rod and the cockerel’s spur, comes only from oral tradition and is best read as a story about legitimacy, kinship and destiny shaped by generations of bards. Whether Sundiata himself was a Muslim is also disputed: Arabic sources and some later griots stress Islam, while the epic portrays a hunter who draws on Mande occult power.

Sundiata’s struggle took place inside a much larger economy. For centuries, camel caravans across the Sahara had linked the West African savanna with North Africa: gold went north, and salt from Saharan mines such as Taghaza, along with copper, cloth and horses, came south. The empire of Ghana (Wagadu) had grown rich as a middleman in this trade, and its decline in the twelfth century opened the contest in which Sundiata lived. Sosso expanded into the Manding chiefdoms, close to the Bure goldfields, and modern historians describe Soumaoro’s pressure on Manding trade as one cause of the revolt. Behind the epic’s duel of sorcerers lies a real competition for control of gold and trade routes.

The Arabic geographers who described this trade also give the earliest written glimpses of Sundiata’s homeland. In the eleventh century al-Bakri named Malal and Daw (Dô) as small kingdoms south of the Niger, and he told of a king of Malal who became a Muslim after a visiting scholar’s prayers ended a drought. Dô is the land of the buffalo woman in the epic, and archaeologists today use these Arabic notes, together with local traditions, to locate the heartland of early Mali.

Islam thus reached Mande courts through traders and scholars well before the empire’s height. The transmitted epic reflects that influence, for instance in genealogies that link Sundiata’s line to Bilali, a companion of the Prophet, although such episodes may have been shaped or added by later Muslim performers and cannot be dated to Sundiata’s time. Later rulers of the dynasty, above all Mansa Musa, whose pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324–25 made Mali famous in Cairo and beyond, built on the state that the epic credits to Sundiata.

The connection runs both ways: Ibn Khaldun’s record of Mari Jata was itself gathered through the North African and Egyptian networks where Malian pilgrims, merchants and scholars were known.

French colonial officers and scholars began writing down accounts of Sundiata in 1889 and published them from the 1890s onward. In 1924 J. Vidal published a version from Kela under the title “The official legend of Soundiata.” In 1937 students at the École William Ponty in Senegal staged a French play based on the story. These early texts are now valued as historical documents in their own right.

The most widely read version is Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue (Présence Africaine, 1960) by the Guinean historian Djibril Tamsir Niane. It is based on the narration of the jeli Mamoudou (Mamadou) Kouyaté of Djelibakoro in Guinea, whom Niane recorded in 1958. Niane did not publish a word-for-word transcript; he turned the performance into elegant French prose. G. D. Pickett’s English translation, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (1965), made it a classic in classrooms around the world.

Gordon Innes of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London took a different approach. His book Sunjata: Three Mandinka Versions (1974) prints Gambian Mandinka texts with line-by-line English translations. It includes a Sunjata by Bamba Suso of Sotuma (recorded in 1969 at Brikama), a Sunjata by Banna Kanute (recorded in 1969 at Serrekunda) and an episode about Faa Koli by Banna’s older brother Dembo Kanute (recorded in 1968 at Serrekunda by Seni Darbo). Readers can see how performers shape the story, repeat formulas and address their audiences.

Other major editions include John William Johnson’s The Epic of Son-Jara (1986), from the Malian bard Fa-Digi Sisòkò; a Kela version recorded in 1979 and published in 1987; and David C. Conrad’s Sunjata (2004), from the Guinean jeli Djanka Tassey Condé. Each reflects one performer, place and moment.

Kangaba lies on the Niger about 95 km south of Bamako and is remembered in Mande tradition as an old royal seat of Manding. Its best-known monument is small: the Kamablon (also written Kamabolon), a round mud-brick sanctuary under a cone of thatch standing in the town square. UNESCO calls it the “House of Speech”: sacred objects are kept inside, and the house also has a role in village deliberation. According to UNESCO, the present building dates from 1653.

Once every seven years the thatch is stripped and replaced in a festival lasting five days. The Keita of Kangaba, who trace their descent to Sundiata, share responsibility for it with the Diabaté griots of Kela. The physical work falls to young men of roughly twenty, and the rebuilding doubles as a lesson: elders explain how the house is made and what it means as the young men work. In 2009 UNESCO added the ceremony to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The heart of the ceremony is a recitation. While the house stands roofless, the Diabaté of Kela recite the history of Sundiata, called the Mansa Jigin, “the gathering of the kings.” The anthropologist Jan Jansen, who attended the 1997 ceremony, explains that the “master of the word” (kumatigi) performs inside the sanctuary for a restricted audience. It has never been recorded, which gives this “authorised” version great prestige precisely because outsiders cannot hear it.

Jansen links the ceremony to the installation of a new male age group, a renewal of society, rather than to ancient secret myths. It also has political weight: Malian ministers have attended, and in 1997 the president sent gifts to the griots and organisers.

Lineage and region. There is no neutral version of Sundiata. Griot families tell the story in ways that honour their patrons and their own ancestors. Kouyaté versions give a central role to Balla Fasséké, the Kela Diabaté hold the prestige of the Kangaba recitation, and the Gambian Mandinka performances recorded by Innes give generous space to Sundiata’s generals, including a whole performance devoted to Faa Koli. Jansen stresses the opposite point too: across the savanna, the core narrative is surprisingly stable, which he explains by the social organisation of griot families rather than by individual memory alone.

Hero and villain. Soumaoro Kanté is the epic’s antagonist, but he is not simply a monster. The epic itself makes him a mighty blacksmith-king, and the Kouyaté of Niagassola still keep his balafon, the Sosso-Bala, as a sacred object. Some modern writers and audiences see him as a defender of local religion, while Muslim griots emphasise Sundiata’s Islamic ancestry. The same story can thus carry different religious emphases.

Places and nations. Where exactly did the events happen? Niane identified Niani, now in Guinea, as Mali’s old capital, while the Malian bard Wâ Kamissoko insisted on Dakajalan near Kirina, in present-day Mali, and the historian David C. Conrad has examined the Dakajalan tradition in detail. These are not only academic questions. When the French Sudan became independent in 1960, it took the name Mali, and Malians widely regard Sundiata’s empire as the forerunner of their republic. Guinea has its own strong claims to the same heritage. The epic is taught in schools in Mali, Guinea, Senegal and The Gambia.

Modern states did not exist in the thirteenth century, so calling Sundiata “Malian” or “Guinean” in today’s sense is anachronistic. The epic belongs to a cultural area that crosses modern borders and explains relationships between clans rather than between states.

The same year, 2009, UNESCO inscribed a second Mande element: the “Manden Charter, proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga.” In UNESCO’s account, Sundiata and his assembly proclaimed it orally in the early thirteenth century, Malinke clans have handed it down ever since, and Kangaba commemorates it each year; UNESCO even calls it one of the world’s oldest constitutions. The values it attributes to the charter read like a modern rights catalogue, from peace among diverse peoples and the sanctity of human life to education, food security, an end to enslavement through raids, and free speech and trade. Heritage recognition of this kind, however, is not the same as historical authentication.

Historians have raised serious doubts about treating any such text as a thirteenth-century document. The best-known written “Kurukan Fuga charter,” with forty-four articles, was first set down at a regional workshop of Maninka traditionists and radio communicators in Kankan, Guinea, from 3 to 12 March 1998. The workshop document itself lists its traditionists, almost all from Guinea, with one from Senegal. The historian Francis Simonis has pointed out that no Malian griots were invited, and Jan Jansen has described the text as a modern bricolage. Gregory Mann notes that this text is absent from the epic itself.

A second text complicates matters further. The “Hunters’ Oath,” published by the Malian ethnographer Youssouf Tata Cissé, declares that every life is a life and condemns slavery and hunger. Mann shows that Cissé first linked the Oath to the epic only in his 1991 publication with the bard Wâ Kamissoko, and he suggests that Cissé inserted it into the closing passages himself. Only in 2003 did Cissé make clear that the Oath came from his own 1965 fieldwork with a master hunter, Fadjimba Kanté, in the Kangaba district. Mann also points out that UNESCO honoured “the Mande charter” without specifying which text it meant. Critics note that UNESCO’s summary, with its abolition of slavery, echoes the Hunters’ Oath, whereas the Kankan text treats slavery as part of the social order.

None of this means the values were invented from nothing. Mann suggests that these texts express real ideals of living together in a hierarchical but diverse society, and supporters see them as evidence of an African tradition of rights. A careful reading separates three things: the Kurukan Fuga episode of oral tradition, old but variable; the written charters of the late twentieth century; and the modern uses of both in civic education and national identity.

Historians of early Mali work with three kinds of evidence, each with limits: a few medieval Arabic texts that depended on informants, oral traditions recorded since 1889 and shaped by centuries of performance, and a thin archaeological record that rarely names individuals.

Ralph Austen and Jan Jansen have shown that even Ibn Khaldun must be read critically. His king list falls into cycles of a strong founder followed by weaker successors, which mirrors the theory of dynastic rise and decline that he had already set out in his Muqaddimah (completed in 1377). They also raise the possibility of “feedback”: once Ibn Khaldun’s work circulated among West African Muslim scholars, it may have influenced later oral traditions. Yet they conclude that he could not have invented a typical Mande name such as Mari Jata or the basic story of Mali’s rise.

Other clues are scattered. Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali in 1352–53, mentions an ancestor of Mansa Musa called Sariq Jata who converted to Islam; some scholars read this as an early echo of the Sundiata tradition, though the genealogy does not fit neatly. The precise location of Sosso is also debated: Stephan Bühnen argued in 1994 that it should be sought farther south and west than the traditional placement in Kaniaga.

Archaeology is beginning to test the epic’s geography. Kevin MacDonald and Malian colleagues have surveyed the region of Dô, home of the buffalo woman, combining al-Bakri’s eleventh-century notes, village traditions and field survey. They argue that the marriage of Sogolon of Dô to the king of Kiri works as a political metaphor for the union of two small polities, and that oral history, though always changing, can still preserve knowledge of the past when it is cross-checked with other evidence.