Conde of Do

Who he is

Name

Not known for 1200. In the epic the king of Do in the next generation is Do Mansa-Gnemo Diarra, brother of Sogolon; Faony Conde leads Do's men at Kirina.

Title

King (mansa) of Do

Since

Not pinned

Born

Not known

Family

The Conde clan (Konde; Kone in Bamana usage). Sogolon Conde, Sundiata's mother, is of this house.

Confidence

low

Niane, GHA IV, pp. 126-129; Wikipedia, Sundiata Keita.

Overlord

The Keita chief of Kiri, if Do and Kiri had already merged under him, as Niane thinks likely.

What it holds

• The twelve towns of Do (names not recorded)

How it was acquired

Old clan country.

Allies and rivals

Bound to the Keita by Mamadi Kani's conquest and by marriage.

How things stand that morning

A Conde chiefdom under Keita primacy (probable, not pinned).

Wealth

Farms and hunting; slaves were taken from it by Soninke raiders in al-Idrisi's day.

Military

Hunters and levies.

Threats

• Slave raids from the north
• The Sosso, whose Kaniaga lies just beyond

Seat note

Kati is a marker only: the site of Do is not fixed.

Where the sources disagree

• Do's site is not fixed. Niane puts Do north of Kiri and calls the right bank of the Niger Bako; other writers place Do towards Segou. The drawing round Kati and the left bank at Bamako is a guess.

Evidence: Oral tradition, with al-Idrisi's mention of Do (1154) as the one written witness.

On the map: Placed only by Niane's 'north of Kiri'; treat the outline as a marker, not a border.

Primary sources for Manden

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• History of the Sudan, Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi (about 1655, at Timbuktu). The Timbuktu tradition on the middle Niger four and a half centuries later, and the only narrative there is: the Za (Zuwa) kings of Gao and Kukiya, whose fifteenth king Za Kusoy is said to have accepted Islam in 1010 and whose successors ruled at Gao through the twelfth century; the foundation of Jenne and the conversion of its king Kunburu with his people towards the end of the sixth century of the Hijra, that is about 1200, with Jenne's early trade; and the position of Mali and Ghana as al-Sadi understood it. Read online
• The Chronicle of the Researcher, Ibn al-Mukhtar (attributed to Mahmud Kati); rewritten by Nuh ibn al-Tahir (about 1665, rewritten about 1830 to 1845). Later than the Tarikh al-Sudan and far less reliable: a seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicle rewritten in the nineteenth century to serve the Masina caliphate, with insertions. Read online
• The Book of Examples: the History of the Berbers and of the Muslim Dynasties of North Africa, Ibn Khaldun (1375 to 1379 at Qal'at Ibn Salama and Tunis, revised until 1406). Ibn Khaldun's tribal histories are the standard account of the powers that Almohad chronicles treat as background: the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in Ifriqiya and Tripolitania and their alliances with the Banu Ghaniya and Qaraqush; the Zenata of the central Maghreb (Banu Marin, Banu Abd al-Wad, Tujin, Maghrawa) before their rise; the Sanhaja and the veiled peoples of the Sahara; the Masmuda and the Almohad tribes. Read online
• The Book of Geography, Ibn Said al-Maghribi (Ali ibn Musa ibn Said) (about 1250 to 1275). Written two generations after 1200 but drawing on the travels of Ibn Fatima, a merchant who had been in the Sudan, Ibn Said gives the first clear picture of Kanem as an empire: the mai Dunama Dibalemi (reigned about 1210 to 1248), his capital Njimi, his Muslim subjects and his reach to the Fezzan, Tajuwa and the Zaghawa, with the Sao and other peoples on his borders. Read online
• The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Egypt, the Horn, the Swahili coast and Mali, Ibn Battuta (dictated to Ibn Juzayy) (1355, at Fez). A century and a half late, but the first eyewitness of places that in 1200 are known only from hearsay: Zeila and its stench, Mogadishu with its sultan, qadi and merchant hosts, Mombasa, and Kilwa under the Mahdali sultan Abu'l-Muzaffar al-Hasan, raiding the Zanj of the mainland; and the Sahara road from Sijilmasa through Taghaza and Walata to the court of Mali under Mansa Sulayman, then Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda among the veiled Berbers. Read online
• The Epic of Sunjata, Various (Mande jeliw, the hereditary bards) (oral; the main recordings date from the twentieth century; Niane's version published 1960). Oral tradition, not a text of the period, but the only account from the Mande side of the world of 1200: the Sosso kingdom of Sumanguru (Sumaoro) Kante, which the epic shows ruling over the old Ghana lands and pressing on the Manden chiefdoms, with its smith-kings; the Manden of Sunjata's father Nare Maghan as a cluster of small chiefdoms; and the Mema, Diara and other states that sheltered the exile.
• Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, Various (edited by N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins) (ninth to sixteenth centuries; the collection published 1981). The standard English collection of every Arabic passage on the western and central Sudan.