The Battle of Kirina

Sundiata Keita had returned from his exile. The years in which he had moved from court to court, from Mema to the land of the Tabon Wana, had given him a coalition older and broader than any Mande army before him.

Facing him stood Sumanguru Kanté, king of Sosso. The Tarikh al-Fattash and the traditions of the griots portray him as a ruler who governed by iron and by fear. He had driven out the kings of Mande, carried off their cattle, and forced their blacksmiths into his service.

According to the tradition that Niane recorded from the mouth of Mamadou Kouyaté, Sundiata gathered his coalition from several directions. From the west came his own Mande troops. From the north came the Tabon Wana under Fakoli Koroma. From the east came the blacksmiths and hunters who had fled Sumanguru’s rule.

Sumanguru advanced from the Sosso heartland, along the old road toward the Niger. His force was larger, better trained, and more heavily armed by weight. He believed he would break Sundiata’s coalition on the open plain of Kirina, on a day of his own choosing.

The griot Balla Fasséké would later relate that the two armies first saw each other on the evening before the battle. The fires of Sosso burned opposite those of Mande, separated by a few hundred paces and by a history older than the men who stood there.

Al-Umari ﵀ notes in his description of Mali, written generations later, that Sundiata’s victory over Sumanguru counted as the founding act of the empire. What was decided at Kirina endured for eight centuries in the memory of the Mande.

The plain of Kirina lies flat and open. To the west rise the Mandinka hills. To the east the land slopes down toward the Niger. It is no place for surprises. Here the fight would be settled in full daylight.

Sundiata pitched his camp on the western side of the plain, close to a line of low hills that covered his flank. Sumanguru remained on the eastern side, on the broad sandy ground. Between the two camps lay several hundred paces of open terrain.

According to the tradition that Conrad gathered in his work Sunjata, Sundiata held council that night with Fakoli Koroma, with his sister Sogolon Kolonkan, and with the griot Balla Fasséké. These were not merely councils of war. The Mande tradition speaks of prayer, of sacrifices, of the names of the ancestors that were called upon.

On the Sosso side, Sumanguru remained in his tent. The griots relate that he rested with the certainty of a man who believed no weapon could touch him. His power, so the tradition says, lay in a secret: a talisman, a covenant, an invulnerability he had inherited from his mother’s side.

Sundiata’s people knew of this secret. Sogolon Kolonkan, so the griots relate, had discovered it and passed it on to her brother. The arrow that could strike Sumanguru would be no ordinary arrow. It would carry its point from a rooster’s spur, and its strength from a word older than iron.

Mahmud Kati ﵀ records in the Tarikh al-Fattash that the struggle between Sumanguru and Sundiata was waged with the weapons of the visible and the invisible world at once. What the griots hold in song, the chronicler held in prose.

When morning broke, both armies took up their positions. The griots beat their drums. The hour had come.

The armies took their positions opposite one another. According to the tradition that Niane recorded from the mouth of Mamadou Kouyaté, Sumanguru rode forward between his foremost ranks. Sundiata did the same. The two men saw each other for the first time face to face.

The griots still carry the words of that meeting with them. Sumanguru called out to Sundiata that he would break him as he had broken the kings of Mande before him. Sundiata answered with the names of his ancestors, long chains of descent that every Mande boy learns by heart before he can carry a weapon.

Then came the arrow. The tradition speaks of a white arrow, charged with a rooster’s spur, shot by Sundiata himself. The arrow struck Sumanguru in the shoulder. The Sosso king remained standing, but his strength gave way.

According to Conrad’s reconstruction of the epic, this was the breaking point. Not because Sumanguru fell, he did not fall, but because the Sosso warriors saw that their king could be struck. The certainty that carried them began to tear.

At the same moment Fakoli Koroma gave the signal from the north to the Tabon Wana cavalry. Their position, hidden behind a slight rise, became visible in that instant.

It was no longer a duel. It was a battle.

At the moment Sumanguru wavered, the Tabon Wana cavalry threw itself from the north onto the Sosso flank. Fakoli Koroma rode at the front. The griots, and later Conrad in his recording of the tradition, describe the maneuver as a pincer: the Mande main force pressed frontally, the Tabon Wana closed in from the side.

The Sosso formation was built on weight and on fear. Now both got in each other’s way. The foremost ranks could not give ground without trampling their own rear. The flank, unprepared for cavalry, broke first.

Sumanguru himself kept fighting. The tradition has him in the saddle until the last moment. But his commanders fell, one by one. His nephew and second-in-command was killed in the press. A second Sosso commander fell beneath the hooves of the Tabon Wana horses.

In the Tarikh al-Fattash, Mahmud Kati ﵀ writes briefly and without ornament: the army of Sosso was scattered, and its king fled. The griots give the same outcome, with more words and more fire.

The afternoon was not yet over when the Sosso front collapsed. What had begun as a pitched battle became a pursuit.

When the Sosso front fell apart entirely, Sumanguru turned away to the north. The griots relate that he fled without escort, on a horse he had taken from his own captain of the guard, in the direction of the hills above Koulikoro.

The pursuit was brief. The Mande cavalry rode after him but lost him in the broken landscape where the paths between the rocks disappear. The tradition that Niane preserves says that Sumanguru in the end vanished into the cave of Koulikoro. What became of him after he entered the cave the tradition can no longer say.

For the Sosso remnant left on the field, there was no king to return to. His commanders were dead or in flight. His capital had not yet been taken, but his power had been broken on the plain of Kirina.

Al-Umari ﵀ writes a century later in his description of Mali that Sundiata’s empire arose from this single victory. The Mande kings whom Sumanguru had driven out returned. The blacksmiths he had forced into service were freed. The covenant that the victors made, the Kouroukan Fouga, gave to the twelve kingdoms of the Mande a common law.

From that day the griots have called Sundiata Mansa: king of kings. The Tarikh al-Fattash adds that the empire he founded would endure three centuries after him, until the arrival of another army, from another direction, on another plain.

But that lay in the distant future. On the evening of Kirina there was only the silence of the battle just ended, and the voice of Balla Fasséké, who added the name of Sundiata to the song of his forefathers.

After Kirina, Sundiata summoned the twelve kings of the Mande to an open place near Kangaba, on a site that in the tradition is called Kouroukan Fouga. What was spoken there has lived on in the mouth of the griots and has been recorded by Niane and Conrad down to our own day.

It was no peace treaty in the modern sense of the word. It was a constitution in verse. The clans received their rights and their duties. The blacksmiths their standing. The griots their protection. The women, in the version Niane preserves, their voice in the council. A limit was set upon the victors, and a future was left to the vanquished.

Mahmud Kati ﵀ writes in the Tarikh al-Fattash that under Sundiata, Mali ceased to be a collection of tribes and became an empire. The roads that Sumanguru had blocked were opened again. The trade with the Soninke and the Berber merchants from the north, which had flourished under Ghana and been choked under Sosso, revived.

Eight centuries later the griots of the Niger basin still bear the same names. Sundiata Keita. Fakoli Koroma. Balla Fasséké. Sumanguru Kanté. They are not names from a dead past. They are names that are learned anew in every new generation.

What was decided at Kirina lies at the root of what West Africa itself would later call an empire. What was spoken at Kouroukan Fouga held that root together.