Reading Genealogies of Sovereignty through a Mande Epic: A Methodological Intervention

• In Event: Black Sovereignty: Narrative Continuities Across the South Atlantic

Description for Program

The Epic of Sunjata is part of the history of the Manding peoples. and helps represent how traditions and cultures are embodied through “songs, genealogies, and origin tales which are represented as truth.” The Epic of Sundiata also appears as a performance by praise singers, and in turn is part of an embodied archive available to historians of medieval Africa, which, I argue, has been unfairly critiqued and discredited. Additionally, chronicles that reference events from the medieval period, such as the Tarikh-al-Sudan and Tarikh-al-Fattash, find themselves part of the historical narrative, which hints at the changing socio-political dynamics of the greater Senegambian region during the fifteenth century. Read together, both the Sundiata and the Tarik chronicles are compelling sources for understanding the function of kingship, the relationship between African and Arab sovereigns, and the basis on which authority was legitimized in the medieval and early modern period. This paper utilizes a frame that considers how the materialities of ritual and embodied religious practices alongside the expressions of kingly power contributed to a re-emerging imperial impetus across the fifteenth-century Sahel. The Epic of Sunjata and the Tarikh-al-Sudan and Tarikh-al-Fattash can be used to interpret how medieval Senegambian ideals, morals, and religious beliefs influenced and defined sovereign leaders, the degree to which they can govern their people, and the acceptable qualities of a leader. Finally, this paper proposes a critical historiographical and methodological intervention, which provides tools to reassess the use of widely disputed sources, rather than examining them as evidence of evolutions in political organization in the Middle Niger and Senegal Valley through the mid to late fifteenth centuries. With this foundation, historians can now engage closely with the role of Africans in constructing new ideas around governance, sovereignty, and territorial demarcation, which factored into the making of the Atlantic world.

Author

• Mariah Bender, Rice University