The Mande chiefdoms (Manden)

Who rules

Name

No single holder. The Keita chief of Kiri on 1 January 1200 is Maghan Kon Fatta (Nare Fa Maghan, Farako Maghan Kegni), Sundiata's father, or his predecessor: Niane says Maghan Kon Fatta ruled 'at the beginning of the thirteenth century'.

Title

No king over all: the chiefdoms (kafu, jamana) of the Malinke clans, each under its own chief (faama, mansa in the later sense). The chief of the Keita of Kiri is first among them in the tradition.

Since

Not pinned

Confidence

low

Overlord

None on 1 January 1200. Ghana's hold on the Mande ended in the twelfth century (Lange 1996, as cited on Wikipedia). The Sosso annex Mande only later, under Sundiata's half-brother Dankaran Tuman.

What the realm holds

• Kiri (the Keita and Konate): the Manding mountains round Dakajalan, Narena, Kiri and Kirina, and Kangaba
• Do (Dodugu) of the Conde (Konde, Kone)
• The Camara towns of Sibi and Tabon and their right-bank lands; the Camara country on the Sankarani round Niani
• The Traore of Gangaran and of part of Kiri
• Bako (Banko), four towns
• The gold diggings of Bure (Buri) between the Niger and the Tinkisso, under the Keita's claim in the tradition

How it was acquired

The Mande clans' own country; the tradition makes the Camara the oldest settlers, come from Wagadu.

Allies and rivals

The chiefdoms quarrel among themselves but are linked by marriage (the Keita take wives from Do: Sogolon Conde, Sundiata's mother) and by the hunters' brotherhoods. Outside: Ghana, the old overlord, now distant; the Sosso to the north, not yet hostile in arms; Mema, the friend of the next generation. The Mande are raided for slaves by the Soninke kingdoms in al-Idrisi's account (his Malal and Daw lie in the land of the Lamlam whom the people of Ghana and Takrur raid).

The realm that morning

A loose league of free chiefdoms. The Keita chief of Kiri (Maghan Kon Fatta or his predecessor) is the most important; Do and Kiri are perhaps already merged under him (Niane). Bure's gold is dug in Mande country and sold north to the Soninke and the Wangara merchants.

Threats

• The Sosso
• Soninke and Takrur slave raids (al-Idrisi, 1154)
• Quarrels among the clans over the succession of the Keita chiefship

Ruler and household

See the lords of each chiefdom (Keita of Kiri, Camara, Conde of Do, Traore of Gangaran).

Officers

None common to all. Each chief has his council of elders, his griots (jeli), his smiths and his hunters.

Army

The hunters' brotherhoods and the village levies of each clan; horses are few and precious. No numbers.

Trade

Gold from Bure; iron; cotton; kola coming from the south; salt from the north through Wangara traders. The Niger is the road north to the delta.

Relations

Islam is the faith of some chiefs (al-Bakri's king of Malal; Barmandana's pilgrimage) and of the traders, while the people keep the old religion, the hunters' cults and the masks.

Coinage

None; gold dust and, for small trade, cotton strips and later cowries.

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 1217 (Snodgrass's estimate; the epic gives no year)Birth of Sundiata to Maghan Kon Fatta and Sogolon Conde of Do.Depends on: Maghan Kon Fatta's marriage to Sogolon, which the epic places after his marriage to Sassouma Berete. Stopped by: Anything in play that ends Maghan Kon Fatta's life or line.
2. Later (the reign of Dankaran Tuman; not pinned)The Sosso annex Mande; Dankaran Tuman submits and gives his sister Nana Triban to Soumaoro, then flees.Depends on: Sosso success in the north first. Stopped by: A Mande league formed in time.

Where the sources disagree

• The capital question: Niani on the Sankarani was taken as Mali's capital by Delafosse and Niane; Niane himself says the Keita were long at Dakajalan, Kiri and Kirina and that Niani, in Camara country, became the capital only after Kirina; Fauvelle (2012) rejects Niani as a fourteenth-century capital. For 1200 the Keita seat is the Dakajalan-Narena-Kiri country.
• Wikipedia (Mali Empire) says Mandinka kings ruled from Ka-ba (Kangaba) 'in the name of the Ghanas' from the eleventh century; this goes back to Delafosse and is not supported by a written source.

Evidence: Al-Bakri (Malal, 1068), al-Idrisi (1154) and Ibn Khaldun for the existence of Malal and its Muslim king; everything else is oral tradition written down in the twentieth century (Niane, Kouyate, Cisse and Kamissoko, Diabate, Conrad). No reign is dated.

On the map: The chiefdoms' borders are not known; the drawing joins the places named in the tradition. Do's site is not fixed.

Primary sources for this realm

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.