Epic of Sundiata

The story

The Epic of Sundiata is an epic poem of the Malinke people about Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire in West Africa, who ruled from 1235 until his death in 1255. It has been told for generations by griots, or jelis, the traditional oral historians of the Mande world, and it is foundational to Mande culture. There is no single authoritative version: the known variants hold more than 40 episodes between them, but the main parts stay largely the same. Stephen Bulman divides them into Sundiata's ancestry on his father's side, the tale of the buffalo-woman, his birth and childhood, his exile, and his return and war with Sumanguru.

In the epic, a hunter foretells to King Naré Maghann Konaté that an ugly woman will bear him a son who will be a mighty king. The king marries the hunchbacked Sogolon, and their son Sundiata cannot walk throughout his childhood, mocked by the king's first wife, Sassouma Bereté. After his father's death her son Dankaran Toumani takes the throne, Sundiata at last stands with the help of a branch of the baobab, and their hatred drives him, his mother and his sisters into exile in the kingdom of Mema, where he grows into a great warrior. When Soumaoro Kanté, a historical leader of the Sosso who is shown in the epic as a cruel sorcerer king, overruns the Mandinka kingdom, the people send for Sundiata. He forms a coalition of small kingdoms, defeats the Sosso and is crowned Mansa, "king of kings", the first ruler of Mali, giving the assembly of nobles at his coronation an oral constitution, the Kouroukan Fouga. The epic also carries the Mande ideas of fadenya, the rivalry between half-siblings, and badenya, the affection of children of one mother: Sundiata needs both to fulfil his destiny, and the narrator says that "the child is worth no more than the mother is worth".

Few written sources tell the early history of Mali: there are only limited Arabic histories of the 14th century, notably those of Ibn Khaldun, so the oral tradition may be critical for reconstructing the events of the period, though it has necessarily changed over the centuries. Written summaries of the epic existed in Arabic before 1890. In the 1890s French officials in the colony of French Sudan collected versions, which were published in French and German translation from 1898; F. Quiquandon's account of 1892 was among the first. From the 1930s Western-educated West Africans made literary versions, notably at the École William Ponty, which staged a drama based on the story in 1937, and that form of the tale became the most influential in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1960 Djibril Tamsir Niane published a novel-like French version based on the telling of the jeli Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, translated into English by G. D. Pickett in 1965, and the first line-by-line transcription of a jeli's performance was made in 1967. Many other tellings have since been edited, among them those of Bamba Suso, Banna Kanute and Dembo Kanute (1974), Fa-Digi Sisòkò (1986) and Djanka Tassey Condé (2004).

The epic remains an integral part of Mande traditional culture, retold by jelis and in masked ritual performances. It has also become part of the official national mythology of Mali, the Gambia, Senegal and Guinea, and is studied in history lessons in their primary schools. Some jelis have compared Sundiata's deeds with those of Alexander the Great.

What it says

A hero's journey: a child born weak and scorned overcomes his body, his family's jealousy and exile to return as the saviour of his people and the founder of an empire. It is a story of destiny foretold, of a mother's strength and of kinship that can both destroy and sustain, and it presents the right ordering of a realm through alliances and law as the end of the hero's path. The mood is grand and proud, as befits the founding story of a people.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.