Djenne

Who holds it

Name

Konboro or his predecessor (not pinned)

Title

Seat of the sultan of Jenne

Since

Not pinned

Confidence

low

Lord in 1200

The ruler of Jenne, Konboro or his predecessor.

How things stand that morning

Held by its own ruler; independent.

Charter

None known: towns of the Sudan had no charters; they were governed by the ruler's officers, the clan and quarter heads and, where Muslims lived, by their imam and qadi.

Council

Not known for 1200: the ruler, his court and the Muslim scholars; under the Songhay a Jenne-koi and a Jenne-mondio.

Communities

Nono (Soninke-speaking) and Bozo, Muslim clerics and merchants (Wangara), pagan townsfolk.

Fairs and markets

Markets every day of the week in the town's territory (al-Sa'di); a weekly great market in later times.

Walls and castle

The ruler's palace (soon to become the mosque); the later town had a wall (the chronicle's 'rampart' round the mosque).

Trade and crafts

Rice, fish, grain, cattle; salt arriving by river and lake from the north; gold from the south; pottery, weaving, mud-brick building.

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

1. About 1180-1204 (not pinned)Konboro's conversion and the founding of the first great mosque on his palace site.Depends on: Konboro reigning and choosing Islam. Stopped by: A pagan reaction or his death.

Where the sources disagree

Evidence: Archaeology (McIntosh) and the Ta'rikh al-Sudan.

On the map: The town island and its nearest rice villages.

Primary sources for Jenne

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
• 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.