The mystique of Eternal Mande, which is expressed so vibrantly in the heroic songs of the Malinke people hinges above all on the leadership provided by the medieval ruler, Soundiata Keita, the man whose actions, both legendary and real, are like an unwritten constitution that guides the daily life of this vast precolonial nation. It is thanks to the military and political genius of this historic figure that Mali became a true empire during the twenty years of his reign, the nostalgic and proud memory of which still gives the Mande, according to the French sociologist Jean Gallais, a sense of cohesion that resists dispersion and decline (Gallais 1962:111). Legend depicts him as a man who surmounted incredible odds and physical handicaps in his childhood to become the unifier of the Mande against the oppressive rule of Soumangourou or Soumaoro Kanté, the King of Sosso.

Beyond the often exaggerated feats that the oral artist attributes to Soundiata and his companions such as Fakoli-with-the-large-head and Tamadjan Kamara, Prince of Siby and Tabon, modern historians have established with enough certainty that it was during his reign that many areas of central West Africa came under Mande influence (Niane 1989). After his death, this movement was to continue for several centuries, during which Mali not only became well-unified but also established definite cultural and economic ties with the Middle East. Many Arab chroniclers noted the famous pilgrimage made to Mecca by the Emperor Kangou Moussa, whose boundless generosity caused the price of gold to fall on the market in Cairo (Egypt). His brilliant achievements and those of other leaders as promoters of Mande nationhood seem however to have paled in the mind of the Mande people and their oral artists, for whom Soundiata remains to this day the perfect incarnation of their fundamental values, a permanent symbol of good moral and political leadership. In effect, no hero or ngana arouses as much emotion in the hearts of the Mande as Soundiata. He remains the point of reference for all Mande people, regardless of their social class or caste and throughout the whole Mande diaspora.1

If no formal cult is devoted to Soundiata, it is true that his name strikes a most sensitive cord in the Mande soul. The songs and aphorisms that celebrate him are charged with a strong nyama (vital force), for his example as a leader and as a captivating actor of Mande heroic ideology remains to this day a powerful model and guide for the resolution of the conflicts and challenges of Mande national existence.2 Thus when the oral artists say that Mande is eternal, what they are saying is that those values that constitute Mande identity or maninkaya have one inherent quality: they bear primarily the seal of adaptability and flexibility. They are expressing the philosophy of a society which has learned throughout its long history how to jealously maintain a sense of itself and of its origin while subscribing wholeheartedly and generously to the imperative of change and social evolution. In fact, if we limit ourselves only to the period from the Middle Ages to the present, it becomes clear that the name Mande has seen its definition change from several points of view. From a purely ethnic basis, it expanded beyond the narrow limits of its cradle to become a civilization and a cultural and linguistic entity, one that is no longer tied to racial affiliation but that is widely open to assimilation of the most diverse components.3 So much so that Jean Gallais wrote: “the African of these regions does not understand ethnic affiliation as a legacy of nature, one that he is obliged to assume just as he assumes his height and the more or less dark pigmentation of his skin. Since he can always question his ethnicity, ethnic ‘mutation’ appears in these regions as a major sociological phenomenon” (Gallais 1962:129, translation by the author). Here again, it appears that Soundiata symbolizes this valuable trait of Mande personality. The oral artist, who is never short of metaphors and arresting formulas, has called him “Manden jenjen fen ani manden kagna fen,” which translates as “he who has dispersed Mande and adjusted it on its foundations” (Diabaté 1972).

This attribute of Soundiata gives us a unique insight into the Mande people’s sense of their identity. While being a direct allusion to the empire-building process carried out by Soundiata and other ambitious Mande social actors and which required many conversions in the social and mental space of the Mande people, this formula is also a condensed expression of the Mande ideal of personhood and nationhood. Indeed, nothing is more exalting to the soul of a Malinke than to be praised as an individual, who has succeeded in stretching the frontiers of his or her family tradition or fasiya. This paradoxical image of a person who adheres to a tradition or collective heritage while doing violence to it by imposing an individual mark upon it is at the heart of the dialectic of heroism or nganaya in Mande society. Indeed, the Mande ngana or the hero, who is honored in so many songs, is the mediator between the past, which he or she inherits, and the present, which he or she is expected to shape almost single-handedly. This is the idea expressed in the following oral formula: “Your life is composed of three days; the first one is done before you; the second is done with you; and the third is done by you alone.” This ideology, which is fostered by a strong sense of fadenya or competition between individuals, families and clans makes the manden ngana both a social and an anti-social being, one who is motivated by an incredible sense of personal achievement or reputation. The Malian writer Massa Makan Diabaté put it so well at the 1972 Mande Conference when he said that the ngana “sees himself torn between the desire to fit within his society and that of going beyond its limits” (Diabaté 1972). He or she is both a reassurance to society and a terrible threat to its internal peace or status quo. Mande ambivalence toward heroic behavior is expressed in the following statement: “Ngana ma mandi fo kojugu lon” which is translated as “the hero is not loved but on troubled days.” On the one hand, Mande society makes sure that the hero is forced into exile because of the threat he poses to the status quo but on the other hand, it never fails to send for him when the collective welfare is challenged or threatened by an outside force.

This is the case of Soundiata Keita, who was forced into exile by his own jealous half-brother Dankaran Touman and his mother’s co-wife, Queen Sassouma Bérété. But when it became clear that the heir to the Mande throne could not protect his land against Soumangourou, the invader, the Mande people sent a delegation to ask for the return of Soundiata, the one they call nankama ani duga diabi, the man of prodigious destiny. Upon his return, Soundiata manages to defeat Soumangourou, the sorcerer-king, by forming an irresistible coalition of the bravest sons and daughters of Mande. This victory over an unjust and oppressive rule gives him the necessary assurance to conquer other lands and to expand his ancestral patrimony, as any Mande person is expected to do. His appetite for personal fame or tògò (what you leave to posterity after you die) forces the Mande people to renounce the false security of “home” and “isolationism” and to throw themselves into the risky but gratifying adventure of assimilation and expansion. It can be said that in the course of this empire-building process, Mande society acquired a new sense of itself and of its geographical boundaries. Thus, the hero, or the ngana, gave his or her fatherland the gift of immortality by teaching it how to constantly renew itself.

“Mande is eternal,” says the song, because every generation of Malinke people is taught the same lesson of heroism by the oral artists, those who are known as the jali and who are part of the nyamakala caste.4 In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the Mande oral artist by scholars from different fields: history, literature, anthropology, music, etc. Although beneficial in general, for the long overdue recognition it brings to Mande oral systems of thought, this attention has often been accompanied by a certain confusion about the exact role and function of the oral artist. One often hears the jali being referred to as historians. We find this label very misleading because the jali is not a professional committed to keeping exact records of past events, if ever such an operation was possible. The jali is primarily an artist, and an artist whose role is to take a lot of liberty with the past in order to unlock the energies of social dynamism and progress contained within individuals and communities.5 As a caste, they perform this function by weaving into songs and narratives the metaphors of Mande personality and heroic models. Thus, the land of Mande is presented as an inexhaustible reservoir of heroism or nganaya.

The jali is taught through a rigorous family training to tie each Malinke person to the heroic matrix that we have described, and particularly to link him or her to the energy or nyama that makes social progress possible. None of their tools reflect the dynamics of Mande personality better than the tradition of praise-singing, called fasa da or madjamuli. In fact, the Mande believe that to be a hero or ngana, which is essentially to transcend one’s initial conditions and limitations to rise above the level of the ordinary mortal, one needs to be made aware of one’s ties to heroic behavior. The word fasa (praise-song) contained in the noun fasa da (praise-singing) is the contraction of the word for patrilineage, fasiya. The semantic filiation between the verbal artifact that the people of the word create and the social antecedents from which a person originates is not a coincidence. It is a recognition of the fact that the energies required by heroic acts are concentrated in the patrilineage and particularly in the competition with the heroic models bequeathed by one’s ancestors. Therefore, the role of the oral artist is to display in words and before every Mande person the heroic attributes encoded in his or her patronym (family or clan name) or jamu. Since the patronym is inherited and since one has the duty to augment one’s family patrimony, however prestigious or lowly it may be, knowledge of the past heroic paradigms or nganaya is a necessary condition to self-improvement and self-fulfillment in Mande society.6

Thus, the oral artist is the one whose role is to incite the others to compete with each other for distinction and reputation or tògò, the keys to immortality in a milieu where the predominance of the oral medium of communication and conservation makes it hard for everyone to be remembered by posterity. Such is the environment, both metaphysical and social, in which Mande verbal art has flourished and continues to flourish today thanks to the new techniques of audio-visual recording. Just as Mande society expands through the constant travels and competition of Mande people in search for success and fame, the very building blocks of their individual and collective existence, the praise-singing mission of the verbal artist continues to evolve always at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Judging by the world-wide popularity enjoyed by Mande artists such as Mory Kanté, Kandia Kouyaté, Salif Keita and many others, one can say that the Mande oral artist has succeeded remarkably well in reconciling the need of his or her fellow Mande people for immortality and the necessity for any art (and their art in particular) to incorporate new media and technical resources in order to survive the test of time.7 Thus, between the Mande and their wordsmiths, there is a deep complicity and interdependence. They are always ready to lavish fortune on their jaliw/djeliw (plural) because the latter always makes sure that they stay connected to the roots of their personhood or yèrè don through the Sunjata Fasa and the many other songs of heroism inherited from the past.8

In conclusion, it would be extremely useful to look at the Sunjata Fasa as more than an epic, because that term, when taken in the Euro-American sense, has too limited a scope for the critic who wishes to understand Mande esthetic genres from the inside, that is, through the prism of Indigenous languages, social institutions, and above all, through the context of daily musical performance. It is only by examining closely the multifaceted dynamics inherent in the fasa and its performance that one finds the key to the immortality and the timelessness the Mande attribute to maninkaya, their individual and collective identity, a way of being that is achieved by constantly fusing the past and its glorious narratives with the present in a determined search for a brighter future.

References

Bird, Charles, and Martha Kendall
1980 “The Mande Hero” In Explorations in African Systems of Thought, Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 13–26.

Cissé, Youssouf Tata, and Emile Leynaud
1972 “Notes sur l’histoire de la Haute Vallée du Niger (Mandé).” Paper read at Conference on Manding Studies. London: SOAS.

Diabaté, Massa Makan
1972 “Le héros Mandingue.” Paper read at Conference on Manding Studies. London: SOAS.

Diabaté, Yamourou, Nankoman Kouyaté, and Balla Diabaté
1971 “Sunjata,” liner notes for various artists. Première anthologie de la musique malienne. Bareinter Musicaphon, BM 30 L 2501/06, 6 LP box set.

Gallais, Jean
1962 “Signification du groupe ethnique au Mali.” L’Homme 2(2):106–29.

Keita, Cheick M. Chérif
2011 Outcast to Ambassador: The Musical Odyssey of Salif Keita. English translation/adaptation by Cheick M. Chérif Keita of Salif Keita: l’ambassadeur de la musique du Mali by Cheick M. Chérif Keita. Paris: Editions Grandvaux, 2009.

Keita, Salif
1991 Amen. Island Records, 261 694, CD.

Kourouma, Ahmadou
1968 Les soleils des indépendances. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

Niane, Djbril Tamsir
1989 Histoire des Mandingues de l’ouest: Le royaume du Gabou. Paris: Karthala-ARSAN.

Tarawele, Daramani
1991 Fasoko. Bamako: Balikukalan Baarada.