SUNJATA

Introduction

During the years between the Norman conquest of England and the reign of Henry VIII (c. 1066–1547), the world saw many empires rise and fall. Europe’s high Middle Ages saw the rise and decline of the Holy Roman Empire, the establishment of the Spanish Christian kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Aragon and Navarre, the Crusades, and the rise across Europe of a nascent bourgeoisie alongside the feudal nobility and the peasants. Elsewhere in the world, contemporaneously with the Sung dynasty in China and the Kamakura period in Japan, Muslim control was extended to North India as well as into Spain and North Africa, under the Abbasids and their successors.

In West Africa meanwhile, three great empires rose and fell, the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Ghana was famed in the 11th century throughout the Arab world as a producer of gold, gold which was traded across the desert from the heartland of the empire in the upper reaches of the Senegal river to North Africa and beyond. At its height (c. 1050) the empire stretched from the Niger bend to what is now middle Senegal, and from the desert across the savanna. The empire of Mali arose after the disintegration of the Ghana empire into a series of smaller competing states. Under the great Mansa (king) Musa, who made a famous visit to Mecca in 1324, the empire of Mali stretched from Senegal to Timbuktu and Gao in the present-day Republic of Mali. The third great empire, that of Songhai, reached its zenith under Askia Muhammad in the 1520s.

The epic narrative in this book is about the beginnings of the empire of Mali in the early thirteenth century. It concerns the struggle by Mande-speaking people for independence from rule by a Susu king. An Arab historian of the period said,

The authority of the rulers of Ghana dwindled away, and they fell under the domination of the Sosso people – their Sudanese neighbours – who subdued and crushed them completely. Later, the people of Mali, increasing in population more than any of the Sudanese nations, overran the whole region. They vanquished the Sosso, and took all their possessions, both their ancient kingdom and that of Ghana, as far as the ocean to the West.¹

The Susu/Sosso people had been subjects of the Ghana empire until, in alliance with other groups, they were able to assert their independence. During the twelfth century Susu extended its authority to incorporate territories of old Ghana and Mande chieftaincies. Early in the 13th century the greatest king of the Susu, Sumanguru Kante, found himself confronted by a revolt of the Mande-speaking peoples under his control led by Sunjata. The victory of Sunjata over Sumanguru put an end to the Susu kingdom and began the establishment of the great Mali empire over a large part of the West African savanna.

The Sunjata epic in all its varied and various forms relates aspects of this history. N. Levtzion summarizes the Arabic chronicler, Ibn Khaldun, and oral tradition as follows:

Sundjata, an exiled prince from a Malinke [Mande] chiefdom on the Sankarani (a tributary of the Upper Niger, on the border between modern Guinea and Mali), was called back by his people to free the country from the yoke of Sumanguru Kante, the oppressive king of Sosso. A collation of various traditions suggests that Sundjata had first endeavoured to unite under his authority the different Malinke chiefdoms, both by contracting treaties of alliance and by coercion. At the head of the united force of the Malinke, Sundjata defeated the powerful Sumanguru. The combat between the two great warriors is presented by the oral traditions as a struggle between two powerful magicians.²

The ‘oral tradition’ is, of course, never a single source and never the same story. The closest to an integrated narrative is perhaps that created by the Guinean scholar D. T. Niane in 1965. Niane was writing for an international audience, creating a prose synthesis from a number of performances by the same jali (griot). We summarize below the narrative as he renders it in his book, Sundiata: an Epic of Old Mali,³ but with names as they occur in the Mandinka versions given in this volume.

The story

In the early thirteenth century, the Mande people were organized into many small kingdoms, such as Sibi, Kita, Neema, among others. Sunjata’s father, Naareng Makhang Konnate, was king in Niani, within Manding, in what is now eastern Guinea. He already had two wives, but was advised to take a third wife, Sukulung Konte, who was an ugly hunchback and a buffalo-woman, because it was predicted she would give birth to a great ruler who would bring the Mande to great power. She was a princess of the kingdom of Do. Sukulung Konte proved a good wife but was the object of much hatred and jealousy from her co-wives. Sunjata was born to her just before the birth of a half-brother to a co-wife; Sunjata’s mother sent a slave to announce his birth at the court, while a griot was sent to announce the half-brother’s arrival. The griot made his announcement before the slave did, so Sunjata was considered the younger brother and not eligible for the throne.

Sunjata Keita (‘the lion-thief who takes his inheritance’), Sukulung Konte’s eldest son, started life as a cripple and a glutton who at the age of seven was still crawling. After several years of being tormented by his step-mothers, Sunjata finally pulled himself up on to his own two feet by uprooting a baobab tree. Thereafter, Sunjata became renowned and feared for his superhuman strength, brilliant archery and remarkable bravery.

When his father died, life in Manding became difficult for Sunjata. All he asked for as his inheritance was his father’s jali, Bala Faasigi Kuyate. But Sunjata’s half-brother had been proclaimed king and had taken Bala Faasigi Kuyate to be his own personal musician. In desperation, Sunjata went into exile with his mother, taking refuge in the kingdom of Neema. Here Sunjata trained for battle, and gradually the word spread far and wide telling of the extraordinary abilities of this young warrior and hunter.

Meanwhile Sumanguru Kante, king of the Susu people and a famed blacksmith and powerful sorcerer, annexed the kingdom of Manding causing Sunjata’s half-brother to flee. Sumanguru captured Bala Faasigi Kuyate, Sunjata’s musician. Sumanguru kept a xylophone (bala) in his inner chamber, but one day Bala Faasigi – who had previously only played the drums – made his way into the chamber and picked up the bala. The music he played on it was so sweet that Sumanguru Kante nicknamed him Bala Faasigi, ‘praise on the xylophone’, and from then on the xylophone became one of the principal instruments of the Mande jali.

When Sunjata heard the news of Sumanguru’s annexation of Manding, he prepared to return home from exile in Neema, following the death of his mother. Back in Manding he was joined by the army of Faa Koli Dumbuya, Sumanguru’s nephew, who had defected to Sunjata’s side because Sumanguru had stolen his wife from him. Sumanguru’s strength lay in his occult power, but Sunjata’s sister seduced him and forced him to betray the secret of his vulnerability. The remainder of the story concerns the many fierce battles that ensued between Sumanguru and Sunjata using the arts of sorcery. Gradually all the kings of Manding pledged allegiance to Sunjata and fought at his side. One of Sunjata’s generals, Tira Makhang, was sent to conquer the kingdoms of Wolof in the west, and founded the Mandinka kingdom in Kaabu (now Guinea Bissau). At the battle of Kirina, Sunjata finally overwhelmed Sumanguru with a magic arrow; Sumanguru was chased into the east and vanished. Manding was at last restored to its rightful ruler under whom all the smaller kingdoms united, becoming one of Africa’s most powerful empires for the next two centuries.

The telling of the story

… The Sunjata story
Is very strange and wonderful.
You see one griot,
And he gives you an account of it one way,
And you will find that that is the way he heard it;
You see another griot,
And he gives you an account of it in another way,
And you will find that what he has heard has determined his version.
What I have myself heard,
What I have heard from my parents,
That is the account which I will put before you. (6–16)

The story of Sunjata Keita has come to be one of the world’s greatest living epic oral traditions. These opening lines by the Mandinka musician Banna Kanute, in his recitation of Sunjata for Gordon Innes in 1970, are an almost textbook view of the nature of ‘epic’ performance. That it is ‘strange and wonderful’ is evident from the fact that after more than seven and a half centuries, it continues to be a living concern for the millions of West African peoples generally referred to as Mande. Mande (sometimes called Manding) is a term covering a number of closely related languages, spoken by peoples who trace their ancestry to Sunjata’s empire. The heartland language of present-day Guinea and western Mali is Maninka (French: Malinké), and the westernmost variant is Mandinka, spoken in the Gambia, southern Senegal and Guinea Bissau. Another of the major Mande languages is Bamana (French: Bambara).

The figure of Sunjata (French: Soundiata) is an important cultural symbol for Mande peoples (comparable in some ways to Richard the Lionheart for the English). But the Sunjata story is not some quaint relic of a bygone era: it forms part of an extensive and vibrant oral tradition of Mande epic stories and praise songs that are constantly being regenerated through new performance. This tradition has been kept alive by highly skilled professional musicians who are known by the Mandinka term ‘jali’ (Maninka and Bamana: jeli, djeli), often translated as griot, bard or ‘master of the word’. The texts in this volume were recited by Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, two master jalis in the Mandinka cultural tradition of the Gambia.

Not only have jalis been the guardians of Sunjata’s history, they also figure prominently in the story itself, as we can see from the two versions presented here. Their oral traditions provide the main, but not the only source of information on the early Mande courts. By the fourteenth century, there are also written accounts, which confirm that jalis played a crucial role: the Moroccan, Ibn Battuta, who visited Mansa Sulayman’s court in 1352 describes the jali as interpreter, public orator, poet, and genealogist, and provider of music for festivities. He refers to Dugha, the king’s jali, as ‘one of the respected and important Sudan’ (i.e. people of the western savannah). His description of the pomp and grandeur of the king’s musical ensemble, with Dugha playing a xylophone, backed by a hundred-strong female chorus in fine clothes and decked in gold and silver,⁴ could well apply to the 1990s in the areas where Mande traditions have remained strongest, particularly western Mali, except that, if it were Mali today, there would also be microphones, amplifiers, electric guitars, and even drum machines, to add to the spectacle.

The texts presented in this volume

Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute addressed these texts to audiences who were familiar with the story. They assumed knowledge, knowledge not only of the story lines, and of the characters who moved in and out of the narrative, but also of the many different versions of what the central characters were like, their personalities and their histories. People are introduced into the story on the assumption that the audience already knows them. Dialogue takes place which, in performance, evokes all the overtones of emotion and meaning that are the product of past performances. In introducing these two texts to our present audience we set out some of the characteristics which we see as significant in these two versions, not in order to represent the ‘story’ definitively, but to flesh out what we see as being conveyed in sometimes the briefest of elements in the texts.

Sunjata is, in these two versions, a man destined for greatness. Prior to his birth he is marked out as different. But the circumstances of his birth and his youth are hardly glorious. Bamba Suso presents a picture of Sunjata as a crippled child, unable to compete with his peers or accomplish simple tasks for his mother as any other growing boy would be expected to do. As he grows, his frustration and anger at his position lead him to be quick to take offence and to seek vengeance. His mother is publicly ridiculed for her disabled child. Her isolation and humiliation, in Banna Kanute’s version, is reinforced by the fact that Sunjata’s older brothers have all been killed, fighting for the Prophet Muhammad. For Bamba Suso, there is a close and deep relationship between Sunjata and his mother. Faced with a choice, later in the story, between becoming king or staying to care for his aged and infirm mother, Sunjata chooses the latter. Faced with the mocking of his mother by other women, in Banna Kanute’s version, Sunjata comforts her and tells her not to be so upset, he will by himself accomplish the task that will show them how capable he really is. When rods of iron have buckled under his weight as Sunjata endeavours to pull himself upright, it is his mother who is the rock upon which he finally pulls himself to a standing position. It is not only fate which has been cruel to Sunjata as a child; in Bamba Suso’s version, the announcement of the birth of Sunjata, which would have led to his nomination as his father’s heir, is delivered to the court minutes after the announcement of the slightly later birth of the child of a co-wife, who is thus considered the heir. It is a griot, a central figure in Sunjata’s life, who is the agent of this usurpation, and Sunjata’s frustration and anger at this unfairness is given, by Bamba Suso, as one of the causes of his insistence on continuing to crawl when other children have learned to walk. Not only is he crippled, he is marked out by having spent years in his mother’s womb before birth. His closeness to his mother is at one moment endangered; her position as dutiful and virtuous wife is threatened when Sunjata comes to understand that she once ‘had a fright’, that she had once committed a dishonourable act, only to discover that the incident was entirely innocuous. Nevertheless, his quick anger at the potential humiliation leads him to threaten to kill his mother and himself – a most serious threat, indicating what a man of extremes he is.

In Banna Kanute’s version, Sunjata’s mother is well beyond child-bearing age when she gives birth to Sunjata; she is miraculously restored to youth by the intervention of the Prophet for whose cause forty of the sons of Sunjata’s father have given their lives. Presented with a picture of a companionable old age shared by Sunjata’s mother and father, we see the demise of Sunjata’s father leading his mother into a life of hardship; alone with her daughter and her crippled son, she turns for help to the ruling king, Sumanguru, whose smiths fashion the iron rods intended to allow Sunjata to arise. Sunjata laughs at these attempts to help him, knowing that when destiny decrees that he will rise he will do so using his own extraordinary strength. It is one of the ironies of Banna Kanute’s version that Sumanguru arranges to help the person who is destined to defeat him in the end.

The significance of Sunjata’s mother is matched, if not exceeded, by the role played in the progress of the story by his sister, Nene Faamaga. The crucial roles of these two women, combined with the countervailing presence at a later point of Sumanguru’s mother, are a major feature of the whole story. Where Sunjata’s mother was ill-looking, his sister was, according to Bamba Suso, ‘the best-looking woman in both Susu and Manding’ (697), a woman of calming influence, of initiative, courage and sharp wit. Not only does she, Nene Faamaga, instil patience and self-control in Sunjata when he is angry, it is her seductive power and her cool head which leads, at her initiative, to Sunjata’s victory.

The strength of Sunjata’s devotion and loyalty to his mother is measured by the cold fury of his reaction to an erstwhile ally’s demand that Sunjata pay for his mother’s burial plot after her death. Caught in the obligations of guest to host he has to pay but, in language replete with symbolism, he vows one day to have his revenge.

Sunjata’s loyalty to his sister encompasses the skated-over implication that an incestuous relationship has taken place between her and another brother who forced her into a sexual liaison. Sunjata’s reaction is to disqualify the brother from any chance of succeeding to the throne. Nene Faamaga’s loyalty to Sunjata remains absolute, both in Bamba Suso’s version where she is unmarried, and in Banna Kanute’s where she is married to a spirit king.

In Bamba Suso’s version, it is in exile that Sunjata makes the transition from hot-head to mature hero. Sunjata waits patiently to assemble his armies, carefully laying his plans before attacking Sumanguru. Rivalry, potential or actual, between Sunjata’s military commanders is obviated by his ability to unite and maintain a powerful coalition among his generals, including the important figure of Faa Koli who defects from Sumanguru’s camp when Sumanguru seduces his wife. For Bamba Suso there is a balance between the ‘man of words’ (ngara) and the ‘man of action’ (ngana; the jali-defined origin of the name Ghana), summed up in the personality of Sunjata. Sunjata was both, but spoke often through his griot, Bala Faasigi, another key figure in most versions of Sunjata.

There is a depth of devotion and commitment between Sunjata and Bala Faasigi in Bamba Suso’s version which is not so apparent in Banna Kanute’s. Sunjata declares that of all his inheritance it is the griots he wishes to retain. He goes to extraordinary lengths to maintain his griot and to see to his daily needs, a relationship built upon the dependence of the griot upon his patron. The griot for his part both tells Sunjata’s story and sings his praises, protecting the interests of his patron. As with all such patron – client relationships, the client can remain potentially fickle, able to change allegiance according to circumstance. Where Bamba Suso’s version portrays mutual devotion, Banna Kanute’s has Bala Faasigi first attached to Sumanguru, and only much later does he become Sunjata’s griot, forced, according to Banna Kanute, to remain with him and to play for him upon the xylophone.

As with many epic narratives, the series of conflicts representing the historical military clashes between armies is played out through the encounter of individuals. In this case Sunjata against Sumanguru. In this regard, however, the two versions presented here differ markedly. In Bamba Suso’s version, battle is joined between Sunjata’s maternal grandfather and Sumanguru’s jinn father, in circumstances where the secret invulnerability of Sumanguru and his father has been discovered. Sumanguru’s final disappearance in this version is set within a sequence of supernatural changes, emphasizing the magical powers that have underpinned Sumanguru’s dominance and finally also Sunjata’s victory. In Banna Kanute’s version, the story reaches a climax in hand-to-hand combat between the two main protagonists in which the secret invulnerability finally produces Sumanguru’s undoing.

This latter feature, the presence of supernatural beings, powers and actions, constitutes the prime focus of Banna Kanute’s version. The excitement of Banna Kanute’s narrative lies in the violent action and the magic with which the story is imbued. Diviners are set by Sumanguru to discover the presence of the child who will be a threat to his sovereignty, and each act of divination produces a symbolic conflict (between chickens, rams and other metaphorical representations) in which the element representing Sumanguru is always defeated. Sumanguru will not accept the inevitability of this destiny and seeks to thwart it. He employs magical powers in his attempt both to protect himself against and to defeat Sunjata. But it is when he is at his most vulnerable, naked in the washing area, that he is surprised by Sunjata and forced to destroy his protective amulets and his offensive magical substances. Sunjata himself has been assisted by the spirit-king husband of his sister, who transports Sunjata and his sister through the air to take Sumanguru by surprise.