The Formation of the Mali Empire
Mali did not import Islam but wove it into what already stood, and grew into a civilisation that spanned three rivers, twelve provinces and a continent of trade; yet before that empire could exist it first had to be formed, clan by clan and oath by oath.
An Empire You Cannot Capture on a Single Map
If you try to draw the borders of the Mali Empire today, you become stuck, for it concerned not only the land that is now called Mali but stretched across what today is Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, parts of Burkina Faso, Mauritania, the Ivory Coast and even pieces of Niger, a surface larger than Western Europe, reaching from the Atlantic coast to the great bend of the Niger and from the edge of the Sahara to the savannah where the forest begins.
And yet the map is not the most important thing, for the Mali Empire was not a territory of sharp lines but a web of cities, provinces, vassal states, trading posts and pilgrimage routes, held together by a single figure at the top, the Mansa, the king of kings, and by a charter, a constitution, that was pronounced centuries before the Magna Carta beneath a tree in a place called Kangaba.
This was not merely a state but a civilisation that found its own form, not imported from Baghdad, not copied from Cairo, but built upon a Mandé foundation over which Islam was later woven, the way colour is woven into a cloth without the pattern beneath it disappearing.
From Ghana, by Way of Sosso, to Mali
You should not see the Mali Empire as a starting point but as a link, a heavy and long link in a chain of West African states that began centuries before the birth of the Prophet ﷺ.
First there was Wagadu, the empire the Arabs called Ghana, where the Soninke speakers had built up a form of state around gold, salt and the trans-Saharan trade. Al-Bakri ﵀ describes in his Kitab al-Masalik wa’l-Mamalik (1068 C.E.) a court where a king sat adorned with golden jewellery, with dogs wearing golden collars and an army reported to be two hundred thousand strong; perhaps exaggerated, yet the figures matter less than the fact that Ghana held a place on the mental map of the Muslim world.
When Ghana wavered, exhausted by internal conflict, by climatic pressure and by the Almoravid disruption in the north, there came an interim period in which the Sosso, under their blacksmith-king Sumaoro Kanté, tried to rule. The Sosso were not Muslims, and Sumaoro was remembered in the oral tradition as a sorcier-roi, a sorcerer-king who clung to the old religious order of the Mandé and was cruel toward the trading posts that by then contained Islamic communities.
And then came Mali, under Sundiata Keita, a prince of the Keita clan who according to the oral tradition lived in exile and was recalled by the twelve Mandinka clans. In 1235 C.E., at Kirina, Sosso fell, and in the years and decades thereafter Sundiata and his successors built the third great West African civilisation.
This was no break with the past but continuity, for the cities that had fed Ghana, Awdaghust and Walata, remained, and the trade networks the Soninke had charted stayed intact, often carried by the same merchant families, now known as the Wangara. The Imazighen in the north continued to send salt down from Taghaza, but the political centre of gravity shifted, and Mali became the new heart.
The Mansa and the Twelve Provinces
How did you hold together an empire this large, in an age without telegraph, without roads in the Roman sense, without writing in most regions?
The answer has a name, Mansa, the Mandé word for king, though literally it lies closer to “ruler of rulers”, for the Mansa stood not merely at the head of a single people but above twelve provinces, each led by a farin or farba, a sub-king who administered local affairs but paid tribute, supplied troops and swore loyalty to the central throne in Niani.
Those twelve provinces were no arbitrary administrative division but reflected the twelve Mandinka clans that had come together at the founding: the Keita as the royal clan, and alongside them the Traoré, the Condé, the Camara, the Kamissoko, the Diawara and others, each with their own role, their own specialism and their own territory. What stands out here is the political delicacy, for the empire was not imposed from above upon an existing social order but woven out of that order.
Beneath the farin sat the village heads, the dugutigi, and beneath them the families, while above the Mansa stood no one save Allah ﷻ, in the official discourse of the Islamic elite.
And then there was the parallel hierarchy of the djeli, the griots, the hereditary storytellers, genealogists, musicians and diplomats, who stood beside power and not beneath it. A Mansa without a griot was a body without memory, for it was the griot who recited your lineage, who recorded your deeds and who decided after your death how you would be remembered, and in a culture where written sources were scarce that was no ceremonial detail but a power of state.
The Kouroukan Fouga: A Constitution Beneath a Tree
Around 1235 C.E., somewhere in the plain near Kangaba, the survivors of the war against Sosso gathered beneath a great tree, and according to the oral tradition, as handed down by the griots of the Mandé world and in the twentieth century recorded by Djibril Tamsir Niane among others, the Kouroukan Fouga was there pronounced, the Manden Charter.
This document, oral and not written but passed down for centuries, contains provisions that, when you read them today, are breathtaking for a state of the thirteenth century. The charter ordains that war may be waged only for just causes, that women must be able to take part in governance, that slaves must be treated with dignity and not mistreated, that refugees deserve hospitality, that the nature of forests, rivers and wild animals must be protected for the generations yet to come, and that the word of the griot is inviolable and that he may never be touched out of resentment for what he says.
At this last point it is worth pausing for a moment, for a king could have a general executed and a Mansa could have a province reordered, but the griot held a legally protected freedom of speech, set down in the constitution of the empire, seven centuries before the first American amendment.
This is no European projection back in time but West African political philosophy, grown out of the Mandé tradition itself and codified at the moment Mali passed from tribe to state. In 2009 the Kouroukan Fouga was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible world heritage, not because it is picturesque, but because it is one of the earliest constitutions in the world.
And here Islam comes into view, for the Kouroukan Fouga is no Islamic constitution in the sense that it is a copy of the Shari’a, but a Mandé charter in which Islamic principles such as justice, protection of the weak and accountability before a higher order resound together with the indigenous political ethic. This is no apparent contradiction that you must resolve, but precisely the point, for the genius of Mali was that its rulers did not choose between Mandé and Islam but wove the two into each other.
Islam in Mali: Layer upon Layer, Not Replacement
Here we must be honest, for this is where much of the historiography stumbles, both the romanticising and the dismissive.
Sundiata Keita himself was, according to the best sources, nominally Muslim but in his practice deeply bound to the old Mandé religion. He bore the title of Mansa and not that of Amir al-Mu’minin, he ruled with griots at his side and not with qadis as first advisers, and the oral tradition describes him in terms that stand closer to a Mandé hero than to an Islamic sovereign.
Only under his later successors, above all Mansa Musa, who in 1324-1325 C.E. undertook his world-famous Hajj, did Islam become the openly adopted state religion at the highest level, yet even then the greater part of the population remained faithful to a layered practice in which Islamic prayers, Mandé rituals and ancestor veneration existed side by side.
Ibn Battuta ﵀, who visited Mali in 1352 C.E. and set down his experiences in his Rihla, praised the Mali Muslims for their piety, their punctual prayer, their dress and their love of the Qur’an, but he complained of practices he saw as un-Islamic, such as the fact that women at court moved freely without covering themselves fully, that pre-Islamic rituals were celebrated, and that during official audiences people threw dust over their heads as a sign of submission to the Mansa, which he regarded as a form of idolatry.
What Ibn Battuta ﵀ describes is no failure of Islam in Mali but another form of Islam in Mali, a form that took account of social reality, that was not imposed but seeped in, and that mingled with what already existed. We see the same dynamic later in Indonesia, in the Balkans and in parts of Central Asia, where Islam became regional without ceasing to be Islam.
Ibn Khaldun ﵀, writing in the fourteenth century in his Kitab al-'Ibar, documents the succession of the Mansas and names Mali expressly as a Muslim empire. For the scholars in Cairo Mali was a brother-state, for the Mansas corresponded with the Mamluks, sent delegations and received scholars from Fez and from Medina, and the integration was deep enough to let Mali count as part of the Dar al-Islam, and at the same time open enough to let Mali remain itself.
The Cities That Let the Empire Breathe
An empire without cities is a flag without wind, and Mali had cities, each with its own function.
Niani, the capital, lay on the banks of the Sankarani, a tributary of the Niger, in what today is Guinea. Here the Mansa sat upon his audience platform, surrounded by his counsellors, his lance-bearers and his griots, and archaeological research in the late twentieth century has confirmed the exact location, a city larger than many a European centre of the same period, with quarters for craftsmen, for merchants, for scholars and for foreign guests.
Timbuktu, at the bend of the Niger, was the heart of learning, and though the city already existed as an Imazighen trading post before Mali arrived, it grew under Mali’s protection into a centre where the Sankoré mosque would later become a place of study in which thousands of students studied Islamic law, theology, astronomy and medicine. The city remains central to all three of the great empires that would succeed one another: Mali, Songhai and, in the early modern period, the Moroccan occupation.
Djenné-Djenno, one of the oldest known urban settlements in sub-Saharan Africa, became under Mali an important centre of trade and learning, and here, according to the Tarikh al-Sudan of Abd al-Rahman al-Sa’di (seventeenth century), the great Djenné mosque was built that to this very day stands as an architectural symbol; the present structure does indeed date from the early twentieth century, but the pattern is medieval.
Gao, on the Niger, was the eastern gate, while Walata was the northern trading gate to the Sahara, and Kangaba remained the ceremonial place, the heart of Mandé identity, where the Kamabolon, the sacred hut-shrine, is re-consecrated every seven years in a ritual that continues to this day.
Between these cities moved caravans, and the Tarikh al-Fattash, another seventeenth-century chronicle from Timbuktu usually ascribed to Mahmud Ka’ti and his descendants, describes journeys of thousands of camels at a time that carried gold to the north and salt, books, copper and coffee to the south. This was no economy of survival but of abundance.
Gold, Salt, and the Secret of the Wealth
You cannot understand the Mali Empire without gold, yet gold alone does not explain everything either, for you must understand how the Mansa managed the gold.
The gold mines lay in the south, in Bambuk and Bure, in regions that formally fell outside the direct control of the Mansa, and the miners, chiefly Malinké and related groups, worked under their own traditional systems. According to a well-known account, recorded by al-Umari ﵀ among others in his Masalik al-Absar (fourteenth century), the Mansa had decided not to convert the miners and not to govern them directly, for when he had tried this earlier the gold ceased to flow and the people no longer worked, and so he left them in their own system and took only tribute.
This is a lesson in pragmatic governance that still reads as modern today, for not every resource need you centralise and not every soul need you convert in order to enjoy an economic benefit, and Mali understood that.
The salt came from Taghaza, deep in the Sahara, where Imazighen labourers hewed blocks of salt from old salt flats that were carried south by camel, and in some places salt was exchanged for gold in equal weights. This sounds incredible until you consider that in the heat of West Africa salt literally kept the body alive, so that it was no luxury but medicine, preservative and a necessity of life.
Between these two commodities, gold from the south and salt from the north, stood Mali, and the Mansa took his share of every transaction, not by seizure but by order, for the routes were secured, disputes were settled and caravans were protected against robbers, and that is what a state does, and because Mali did it the wealth flowed.
When Mansa Musa travelled to Mecca in 1324 C.E., with a retinue that Arab chroniclers estimated in the tens of thousands, with reportedly twelve hundred slaves each carrying a bar of gold, and with so much gold that in Cairo he drove down the price of gold for a decade, that was no eccentric outlier but the visible top of a system that had already been functioning for nearly a century.
The Griot and the Memory of an Empire
Back to the djeli, because for the Mandé diaspora, for us and for our ancestors who were dragged through the slave trade to the Caribbean, they are of particular importance.
The griot is no entertainer but an institution, a hereditary class that preserves genealogies, memorises history, recites laws, conveys diplomatic messages and both praises and criticises kings, and the Kouroukan Fouga gave them a special status, namely inviolability for what they said.
The Sundiata Epic, the great oral poem that tells the founding of Mali, is recited to this very day by djeli families in Mali, Guinea and Senegal. The version best known in the West is that of Mamadou Kouyaté as recorded by Djibril Tamsir Niane in Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue (1960), but this is only one version of many, for every great griot family has its own variant, with its own accents and its own genealogical digressions.
Why is this important for the diaspora? Because much of what reached us through the slave trade, the music, the stories and the narrative structures, runs by way of the griot tradition, and the blues, spoken word, story-as-identity and song-as-history are no coincidental resemblances but remnants of an oral civilisation that crossed the Atlantic Ocean from the western coast of Africa in human chains. When a Surinamese or Trinidadian Afro-Caribbean Muslim today rediscovers the griot tradition, that is no new knowledge but a homecoming.
Mali and the Islamic World: Two Directions
It is easy to imagine the relationship between Mali and the Islamic world as one-way traffic, as though Arab scholars came and Mali merely learned, but that is not how it went.
Mali itself sent scholars, pilgrims, books and knowledge back. The libraries of Timbuktu, of which an estimated 700,000 manuscripts still survive, partly rescued during the unrest of 2012, contain works written in West Africa, in Arabic and in the Ajami variants of West African languages, that is to say Arabic script for Fulfulde, Songhai and the Mandé languages. There are original West African treatises on astronomy, on law, on linguistics and on medicine, and that is production, not consumption.
When Mansa Musa returned from his Hajj, he brought with him the architect Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, who designed mosques in Timbuktu and Gao that would inspire the characteristic Sudanese style, but the local master-builders took those impulses and translated them into the mud architecture that to this very day defines the image of Djenné and Timbuktu, and that was no copy but synthesis.
Scholars from Mali travelled to Fez, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus and Medina, where they were received as equals and at times as honoured men, and Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century traveller of Moroccan descent, wrote that in Timbuktu more money was made from the book trade than from any other product. That is the image we must reckon with, for Mali was no edge of the Muslim world but a pole.
What Remained and What Was Washed Away
The Mali Empire held firm until roughly the seventeenth century, though for its last two centuries it was a shadow of its heyday. Songhai, led by the Askia dynasty out of Gao, took over much of Mali’s territory in the fifteenth century, and in 1591 C.E. a Moroccan expedition with firearms broke through at Tondibi and ended Songhai dominance, after which the whole political system of West Africa fragmented.
But what remained, remained deep.
The Kouroukan Fouga is still recited, the Sundiata Epic is still passed down, and the Keita family still exists, with presidents, singers and footballers who bear this surname and who know from whom they descend, with names that run back to 1235 C.E. and beyond. The libraries of Timbuktu still stand, weakened but not destroyed, and the mosques of Djenné and Timbuktu are re-plastered each year by the communities that own them.
For the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and for Dutch Afro-Caribbean Muslims in particular, Mali is no curiosity but an ancestral land. Many of the Wangara merchants, the Malinké farmers and the Soninke scholars were, in the centuries after Mali’s peak, carried off into the slave routes that ended at last in Paramaribo, Port of Spain and Willemstad, and although the Islam that arrived in Suriname through Javanese and Indian migration is well known, the older Islam that crossed over by way of African ancestors, sometimes lost, sometimes suppressed, sometimes preserved underground, traces back in large part to Mali and its successors.
This is no romanticising, but simply knowledge of who we are.
A Foundation, Not a Statue
It is tempting to see Mali as a golden age, a lost paradise, but that would be a mistake.
Mali was a state like other states, for there was slavery in Mali, internal and not only trans-Saharan, there was war, there was taxation, there was class difference and there were famines, the Mansas were not all just, some were greedy, some weak and some were deposed, and a civil war in the late fourteenth century weakened the empire irreversibly.
But precisely the fact that Mali was an ordinary state, human and therefore fallible, makes it the more serious to take, for we need not romanticise Mali in order to respect it, and we need not pretend the Mansas were saints in order to acknowledge the strength of what they built.
What Mali built was the last great synthesis of the Mandé world and Islamic civilisation, carried by a generation that knew Sundiata Keita as its founder and succeeded by a line of rulers who understood that power is only lasting when it is woven into what is already there, and that is, I think, the deepest lesson.
What Mali began at Kirina, what it codified in the Kouroukan Fouga and what it brought to worldwide fame under Mansa Musa, was a foundation and not an endpoint, for history went on: Songhai followed, then the smaller states, then the colonial rupture, and then the slave trade that tore away so many of our ancestors. But the foundation remained, and upon it, even today, one can build.
The Formation: How Twelve Clans Became One Empire
An empire is not proclaimed, it is negotiated, clan by clan, oath by oath, tree by tree, until suddenly it exists.
Before There Was an Empire, There Was a Quarrel
There is a tendency in historiography to describe the founding of an empire as though it were inevitable, as though Mali had to come and as though Sundiata Keita was born to be Mansa, but the truth is rougher, for before Mali was an empire the Mandé world was a collection of quarrels: disputes over farmland, over salt routes, over who might rule which village and over who might take which bride, a patchwork of small chiefdoms, rival clans and shifting loyalties.
And through these fragments one figure pushed his way, Sumaoro Kanté, the blacksmith-king of Sosso, and it is his story that fills the first half of the founding history, for Mali was formed not in a vacuum but against something, against Sosso.
This article is not primarily about Sundiata, though he plays his part, but about the politico-anthropological question of how a collection of Mandé clans, each with its own lineage and its own throne, became one political unit, and how exactly that came about in the years before and around 1235 C.E.
The Mandé World: What Was It, Really?
Let us first establish what we are talking about, for the term “Mandé” refers to a linguistic and cultural family and not to one people. Within the Mandé group fall the Malinké (also Mandinka), the Bambara, the Soninke, the Dyula, the Khassonké, the Susu and others, who share related languages, all on the Mandé branch of the Niger-Congo language stock, alongside a shared social system.
This social system is important to understand, for without it the logic of what happened in 1235 disappears.
Mandé society was divided into three great layers. The horon were the free, the farmers, the warriors and the nobles; the nyamakala were the artisan castes of blacksmiths, leatherworkers, griots and woodworkers, hereditary and endogamous, with specific ritual and social functions; and the jon were the slaves, who in their turn were subdivided into household slaves, agricultural slaves and caste slaves with differing rights.
Within these three layers moved the clans. The Keita were horon and royal, the Traoré were horon and warriors, the Kouyaté were nyamakala and griots, and the Camara were horon and farmers, while the Kanté, and this matters, were nyamakala and blacksmiths. That is crucial for the story of Sumaoro, for he was a blacksmith who became king, and in Mandé logic that was a break with the order.
Sumaoro Kanté: The King Who Was Not Meant to Be King
Sumaoro Kanté was no cruelty for the sake of cruelty, though the griot tradition paints him so, but a political figure with a real project. After the fall of the Ghana empire, somewhere in the early thirteenth century, Sumaoro filled the power vacuum that Wagadu left behind, conquered Koumbi Saleh, the old capital, subdued the Soninke and extended his influence over the heartland of the Mandé.
But Sumaoro struck two walls. The first was religious, for he was no Muslim and clung to the old Mandé religion, the cult of the jinn and the ancestors, with specific sacrificial practices that the growing Islamic merchant class, the Dyula and the Soninke traders in the cities, found uncanny. The second wall was social, for he was a Kanté and therefore nyamakala, and within the Mandé order he was not meant to be king, so that his power always remained coloured by that irregularity, which made him vulnerable to the propagandistic attack of those who were of royal descent.
The oral tradition, in particular as preserved in the Sundiata Epic and recorded by Djibril Tamsir Niane and others, describes Sumaoro as a sorcerer with a chamber full of human skulls and a fly-totem that made him immortal. This is epic language and not historical reportage, but beneath that epic language lies a political message, namely that Sumaoro was other, standing outside, someone who stood beyond the order while that order had to be restored.
The Diaspora of the Keita: Exile as a Political School
While Sumaoro extended his empire, the Keita line nearly ran out, for according to tradition Sumaoro killed the male heirs of the Mali chiefdom, which then was still a small chiefdom around Niani and no empire, save one. Sundiata, the son of King Naré Maghan Konaté and of an ugly, hunchbacked woman from the Do land named Sogolon Condé, escaped the slaughter, and he was, according to most variants of the epic, a boy with physical limitations who could not stand on his feet to an age at which other children already run, an unlikely candidate for any throne whatsoever.
Sundiata and his mother Sogolon were forced into exile and travelled for years through the Mandé world, by way of Tabon, Ghana and Mema, and found refuge at last at the court of the farba of Mema, where Sundiata grew up as a guest-prince and learned to fight, learned to govern and came to know the local political geography of the neighbouring lands.
This is important, for the exile was no lost time but a political education, in which Sundiata learned how other courts worked, which coalitions were possible and how to make contacts, and in which he came to see the Mandé world not from the perspective of one clan but from the outside.
And then came the invitation, for the Mandé clans, under the pressure of Sumaoro, sent griot messengers who sought him everywhere, and according to the epic it was the griot Balla Fasséké Kouyaté, who served for a time as a captive at Sumaoro’s court, who interpreted the signs: the heir of Mali must return, or Sosso would devour everything.
Sundiata returned, not as a lone hero but as the head of a coalition in the making.
The Twelve Clans: How an Alliance Is Forged
Here lies the heart of this story, not in Sundiata’s personal courage but in the alliance.
The oral tradition names twelve clans that gathered around Sundiata, and though the exact composition varies between griot families, the core is stable. There were the Keita themselves as the royal clan; the Traoré, led by Tiramaghan Traoré, who bound himself to Sundiata as a general and would later push through to the Atlantic coast; the Condé, the clan of Sundiata’s mother, from the Do land; the Camara, strong in the farming communities west of Niani; the Kouyaté, the griot family that supplied Balla Fasséké; and further the Kamissoko, the Diawara, the Koroma, the Cissé (ironically of originally Soninke name), the Sissoko, the Diabaté and others.
Each of these clans had its own territorial centre of gravity, its own military tradition, its own grievances against Sumaoro or its own interests in his fall, and each had its terms, what in the language of negotiation one would today call conditions.
The negotiations took place in several rounds and at various gatherings, and a decisive moment was the assembly at Sibi, where the clans according to tradition concluded a blood-pact, literally the mingling of a drop of blood from each leader, understood symbolically as brotherhood across clan lines.
This is an anthropologically rich moment, for in a society where lineage is everything, the crossing of lineage through a blood-pact is a radical act that creates a fictive kinship which is at the same time politically binding, and thus you turn twelve rivals into one coalition.
The Kouroukan Fouga, codified later, would set down these relationships, but it began here, in the field, beneath a tree, with a small drop of blood and an oath that every griot would repeat for the ages.
The Army: Who Came With Whom
A coalition becomes real only when it has troops in the field, and here Mandé society becomes concrete.
The horon warriors formed the infantry, Malinké and related groups, armed with spears, bows and shields of leather, who came with their clan-units under their own subordinate commanders and remained loyal to their own farin, a structure one still sees today in the West African military tradition.
The cavalry was another matter, for the horses came from the north by way of Soninke and Imazighen trade routes and were costly, so that only the wealthier clans, often those with direct access to the trans-Saharan trade, could bring riders to the field, and Sundiata bound them to himself with promises of trade privileges and territorial rights after the victory.
The archers, and this becomes crucial at Kirina, came from specific regions, and the Sundiata Epic names in particular the archers from Wagadu and from the north, who fought under Fakoli Koroma. Fakoli, a nephew of Sumaoro himself, had according to the epic gone over to Sundiata when Sumaoro had taken away his wife, an offence that laid bare the dynastic pattern of Sumaoro’s weakness.
Moreover there were the blacksmiths themselves, not the Kanté who stood with Sumaoro, but other smith-lines who on Sundiata’s side placed their knowledge of metal, of spearheads, arrowheads and horseshoes, at his disposal, for in a war where weapons were handmade, every blacksmith was a munitions factory.
The Role of Islam in the Formation
Here we must be precise, for this is often presented confusingly.
Sundiata himself was nominally Muslim, and his father Naré Maghan had according to some traditions already converted to Islam to a certain degree, not unusual in the Mandé elite of that time, which had stood for generations in contact with Dyula merchants and Soninke scholars, but Sundiata’s Islam was light and his practice layered, and he was, to use a term from modern anthropology, a syncretist.
What did happen in the formative phase is that Islam counted as a political factor, for the Islamic merchant communities in the Mandé cities, small but influential, saw in Sundiata an ally against Sumaoro, who threatened their caravans and restricted their practices, and they placed knowledge, money and diplomatic contacts at his disposal, while the Wangara merchants, who already governed a trans-Saharan network, bound themselves to the Sundiata coalition.
This is why Mali had a specific character from its founding, no Muslim empire that imposed Islamic law and no pagan empire that rejected Islam, but an empire in which Islamic merchant communities could flourish, in which Islamic scholars were welcome, and in which the Mansa himself at certain moments pronounced the shahada without losing his Mandé identity.
Ibn Khaldun ﵀, writing in his Kitab al-'Ibar, names Sundiata expressly as a Muslim ruler in the enumeration of the Mali rulers, and so the fourteenth-century scholar of history saw him, while the oral tradition of the griots is more nuanced. Probably both are true, for he was Muslim in the sense that he made the claim and pronounced the profession of faith, and he was Mandé in the sense that the rituals of his youth never fully disappeared.
From Sibi to Kirina: The Last Negotiations
Between the forming of the coalition at Sibi and the decisive battle at Kirina lay still months, perhaps years of skirmishing, and Sundiata’s army grew through small victories, at Tabon, where a young prince Fran Kamara joined him with his own troops, and in various other provinces where local chiefs decided which horse they wished to back.
Sumaoro understood what was happening and tried to break the coalition by buying off or threatening individual clans, he sent reinforcements from his heartland, and he appealed to his ritual power, to the skulls, the totems and the oaths, in order to exert psychological pressure.
The griot tradition tells that the turning point was a magical duel between Sumaoro and Sundiata, in which Sundiata at last discovered Sumaoro’s secret through the stratagem of his half-sister Nana Triban, who had been taken by Sumaoro as a concubine and from there returned with the knowledge that only an arrow tipped with a white cock’s spur could strike Sumaoro. This is epic language, but the historical kernel, that espionage, internal leaks of information and psychological warfare played a role, is plausible and finds a parallel in much medieval warfare.
On a day in 1235 C.E., at the plain of Kirina, the two armies stood facing each other, and that story is treated in detail in another article; here it suffices that the coalition that stood here on its feet had not existed a few months earlier but had been negotiated and formed.
The Ethnogenesis: From Mandé Clans to “Malians”
What happened here is what anthropologists call an ethnogenesis, whereby a new political identity arises out of the bringing together of existing ethnic components which retain their partial identity but acquire an overarching name and loyalty alongside it.
Before the founding of Mali there were Malinké, Bambara, Soninke, Susu, Khassonké and Dyula, and after the founding each of these groups remained, as they still do today, but they acquired a shared identity as subjects of the Mali empire, so that a Malinké farmer in Niani and a Soninke merchant in Walata were both “Mandé” in the ethnic sense and both “of Mali” in the political sense, and this double level of identity became the norm.
The Kouroukan Fouga confirmed this, for it gave the twelve clans each their recognised role, royal, religious, artisanal and military, and obliged them to mutual respect, and even a jest between the Keita and the Traoré, the so-called senankuya or “joking kinship”, was codified, so that a Keita and a Traoré greet each other to this very day with ritual insults that go back to this charter, which is political anthropology in living form.
What Began in 1233
The event date, 1233 C.E., probably refers not to the battle itself (1235) but to the preceding period of coalition-forming, precisely the phase this article highlights. In 1233 Sundiata was probably back on Mandé soil, the negotiations were in full swing, and no one yet spoke of an empire, and yet an empire was forming before the eyes of the participants, who at that moment were only trying to survive.
This is an important nuance, for people make history but do not always know that they are making it, and the twelve clans that concluded their blood-pact at Sibi thought they were waging a war, while in hindsight they had founded a civilisation.
This is also a lesson for today about how great changes come about, not through one grand declaration of ideas, but through a series of negotiations between actors who all have their own interests, who distrust one another in some respects, but who find a common enemy or a common goal important enough to suspend their differences for a time, until that, sometimes, sets into something new.
Women in the Formative Phase: Sogolon, Nana Triban, Keleya Konkon
It is customary to tell the founding of Mali as a male story, with clan heads who negotiate with one another, generals who plan campaigns and a prince who returns from exile, but the oral tradition shows, if you read it carefully, a deeper pattern, for the political formation of Mali ran in large part by way of women.
Sogolon Condé, Sundiata’s mother, was the axis of his legitimacy, for without her descent from the Do land, without the prophecy that was bound to her person and without her protection in the years of exile there would have been no Sundiata. Tradition describes her as physically unattractive by Mandé standards but spiritually exceptionally powerful, a nyamakala in her own right with access to the old knowledge of the Do land, who carried her son for years quite literally and preserved him when others had let him die.
Nana Triban, Sundiata’s half-sister, was the pivot of the intelligence that led to the victory, for in captivity at the court of Sumaoro, where she had been taken as a wife, she learned details of his ritual practices that would later prove decisive at Kirina, and her flight, or return, with this information is political intelligence work in a society where written documents were rare, in modern terms an agent in the field.
Keleya Konkon, the wife of Fakoli Koroma, was the occasion of one of the decisive defections, for when Sumaoro took her from Fakoli, in an act that grievously violated Mandé social norms, he lost his nephew and one of his best commanders, and that is no aside but the moment at which a single political offence tips the military balance.
And then there are the nameless women, the griottes who carried the stories along, the female hunter-allies from the Do land, and the mothers and sisters who travelled along in exile and made decisions for which the tradition often gives no room, for their presence is everywhere, even where their names are not recorded.
The Kouroukan Fouga would later expressly ordain that women must be able to take part in governance, and that is no incidental clause but a recognition of what had actually happened in the formative phase.
The Moment Before Kirina
And so they stood, in the last days before the battle, in a plain north-west of what would later become Niani: a prince who as a hunchbacked child had not been able to walk, twelve clan heads who for centuries had been one another’s rivals, a griot family that would carry the stories, an Islamic merchant class that supplied financing and knowledge, and an army of farmers, riders and archers who spoke one another’s tongue in different accents.
On paper they were no empire but a loose alliance with a meagre chance of victory, and yet what did not exist on paper existed indeed in the oath they had sworn, and that oath would become the stone upon which the rest was built.
What happened thereafter at Kirina is another story, but the formation, the weaving of the fabric, took place before the arrows flew, and the rest was fulfilment.