1. Bühnen, Stephan, “Geschichte der Bainunk und Kasanga” (Ph.D., Justus-Liebig-Universitàt Giessen, 1994), 64-68, 75.Google Scholar

2. Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, forthcoming.

3. A plausible explanation for the historical origin of this division of functions in the Segu region is Henry, J.M., “Le culte des esprits chez les Bambara,” Anthropos, 3 (1908), 705n1Google Scholar: village kings lost their political power to governors installed by the ascending king of Segu, but retained their office of ‘landowners.’

4. “Rites de renouvellement de l'année:” Dieterlen, Germaine, Essai sur la religion Bambara (Paris, 1951), 141-42, 206–09.Google Scholar Cf. the classic analysis by Beidelman, T.O., “Swazi Royal Ritual,” Africa, 36 (1966), 373–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Earle, Timothy, “Chiefdoms in Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspective,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 16 (1987), 279–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the chiefdom in social evolution see, for example, Friedman, J. and Rowlands, M.J., eds., The Evolution of Social Systems (Gloucester, 1977)Google Scholar, and Breuer, Stefan, Der archaische Staat (Berlin, 1990).Google Scholar

6. I deviate from the general assumption that power creates sacrality as a means of legitimization. The inverse is correct in cases where landownership and kingship are vested in one office: sacral landownership is first and is—or is not—only later filled with temporal power. The chiefdom notion is also relevant in the search for ‘capitals,’ because in patrilineal societies the ancestor cult dictates that the sacral ruler dwells near the shrine, which must of course be located in the territory of the royal lineage. Thus a capital of the Keita empire of Mali should have been located in a Manding Keita territory. For a different view of territoriality and capitals see Conrad, David, “A Town Called Dakajalan: The Sunjata Tradition and the Question of Ancient Mali's Capital,” JAH, 35 (1994), 361, 377.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, E.E., African Political Systems (London, 1970), 6, 13.Google Scholar For a review of the notion see Terray, Emmanuel, “Sociétés segmentaires, chefferies, états: acquis et problèmes,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 19 (1985), 106–15.Google Scholar

8. For a three-tier pyramid of polities in the hinterland of modern Guinea, recorded in 1612/13, see Bühnen, Stephan, “In Quest of Susu,” HA, 21 (1994), 30.Google Scholar Here and in subsequent notes evidence for some of my more general assertions comes from Senegambia, which is richer in historical documentation than Mande: Portuguese authors of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century noted four tiers in southern Senegambia, with Mali over Kabu, Kabu over smaller polities such as Kasa, and Kasa again over some Bainunk chiefdoms: de Almada, Alvares, Tratado breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde, ed. Bràsio, A. (Lisbon, 1964), 70Google Scholar; Alvares, Manuel, An interim translation of Manuel Alvares S.J. «Ethiópia Menor e Descripção Geographica da Província da Serra Leoa», ed., trans. Hair, P.E.H. (Liverpool, 1990), f. 22v.Google Scholar More on pyramids of chiefdoms in southern Senegambia in Bühnen, , “Geschichte,” 412–16.Google Scholar The incorporation of non-chiefdoms (such as cities and Muslim rural polities) must have been legitimized through non-ancestral ideological constructions.

9. Al-ʿUmari (1337/38) noted that the ruler of Mali did not collect tribute from gold-producing “nations” in his kingdom, thus suggesting that he did collect tribute from other “nations” (Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, ed. and trans. Levtzion, N. and Hopkins, J.F.P. [Cambridge, 1981], 272).Google Scholar Tribute payments noted for southern Senegambia in 1606 by Barreira, Baltasar in Bràsio, António, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana. Africa Ocidental (20 vols.: Lisbon, 1952–1988), 2/4:166.Google Scholar

10. E.g., the “emperor” of Kasa, “who installs and deposes nine kings with his own hand:” de Sandoval, Alonso, Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana (Seville, 1627), 38.Google Scholar

11. Monteil, Charles, “Les empires du Mali,” Bulletin du Comité d'Etudes Historiques et Scientiflques de l'Afrique Occidentale Française, 12 (1929), 313–14.Google Scholar In order to emphasize his dependence a subordinate mansa might himself be termed faran: Bühnen, Stephan, “Place Names as an Historical Source: An Introduction with Examples from Southern Senegambia and Germany,” HA, 19 (1992), 72–73, 96n42.Google Scholar

12. Cf. Amselle, Jean-Loup, Logiques métisses. Anthropologie de l'identité en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris, 1990), 194.Google Scholar And note the specification of provenance, in the chiefdom of Jitumu, of “the two magic objects (boli) of power originating from Segu,” the former empire (ibid., 160, my emphasis). In the absence of pertinent research in Mande compare the southern Diola of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, living in lineage territories with kings (wielding little temporal power) and entertaining, according to Thomas, hierarchies of shrines, the lower ones being conceived of as derived from the higher ones. The priests, kings in the case of royal shrines, form a corresponding hierarchy. The “priest of the original shrine benefits, in a way, from multiplying his boekin [shrine-spirit] because the owners of subordinate shrines return periodically to strengthen their spirit at the source, which renders profit in rice, wine, pigs or cattle.” Thomas, Louis-Vincent, Les Diola: essai d'analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance (2 vols.: Dakar, 1959), 2: 605–07.Google Scholar

13. For example in Amselle, , Logiques, 109, 160Google Scholar, whose chiefdoms are but “contracted forms of empires and kingdoms” or “in a way a product of the kingdom of Segu.” Similarly Bazin, Jean, “Princes désarmés, corps dangereux. Les “rois-femmes” de la région de Segu,” Cahiers d'études africaines, 28 (1988), 394, 398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Friedman, J. and Rowlands, M.J., “Notes Towards an Epigenetic Model of the Evolution of ‘Civilisation’” in eadem, Evolution, 206–15.Google Scholar

15. Al-Bakri (AD 1068) already noted that a king of Malal had converted to Islam and had “ordered the idols to be broken:” Corpus, 82-83.

16. In 1337/38 al-ʿUmari reported that an informant had lived in the capital of Mali “for 35 years and went to and fro in this kingdom.” Corpus, 262.

17. It should be bome in mind that the populations of Hamana and Juma-Nugu had been Jalonke before they switched to the Malinke identity. Bühnen, , “Quest,” 23.Google Scholar

18. Es-Saʿdi, , Tarikh es-Soudan, trans. Houdas, O. (Paris, 1900), 19–20.Google Scholar

19. Bühnen, , “Quest,” 16–17.Google Scholar

20. Jansen is more explicit on Mande as a warrior state in his “Younger Brother,” note 43.

21. Roberts, Richard, Warriors, Merchants and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700-1914 (Stanford, 1987), 34Google Scholar; Bazin, Jean, “Guerre et servitude à Segou” in L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale, ed. Meillassoux, Claude (Paris, 1975), 169–70.Google Scholar

22. Bühnen, “Quest.”

23. References in ibid., 17.

24. Alvares, , Ethiópia Menor, f. 76Google Scholar; a fuller quotation in Bühnen, , “Quest,” 30–31.Google Scholar

25. Es-Saʿdi, , Tarikh es-Soudan, 20.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., 278.

27. E.g., Delafosse, Maurice, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (3 vols.: Paris, 1972), 2: 168–69.Google Scholar

28. Bühnen, , “Quest,” 12–14.Google Scholar For references in the Sunjata epic see Bulman, Stephen, “Interpreting Sunjata: A Comparative Analysis and Exegesis of the Malinke Epic” ( Ph.D., University of Birmingham, 1990), chapter 7.Google Scholar

29. The ‘Fakanda’ variant in Leynaud, E., Les cadres sociaux de la vie rurale dans la Haute-Vallée du Niger (typescript, Paris, 1960), 21Google Scholar, as reported in Meillassoux, Claude, “Les cérémonies septennales du Karaablõ de Kaaba (Mande),” Journal de la Société des Africanistes, 38 (1968), 173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Delafosse, Maurice, La langue mandingue et ses dialectes (Malinké, Bambara, Dioula) (2 vols.: Paris, 1929–1955), 1:389Google Scholar (keletigi; gana, kana “chef d'armée,” “chef de guerre”), 2: 241 (gana, kana, kanda “chef de guerre”). Sunjata's father is named Famaghan in some versions of the epic. Maghan being a northern equivalent of mansa, (fa)maghan and (fa)kanda appear to be synonymous with mansa and keletigi respectively.

31. Evidence for the Konte-Keita matrimonial alliance in Bühnen, , “Quest,” 12.Google Scholar Evidence from the fourteenth century for a matimonail alliance of the Marian royal lineage: Ibn Battuta mentioned the Malian king's “chief wife, the daughter of his maternal uncle,” being of royal blood by implication from a co-wife “not of royal blood” (Corpus, 294). In the reported case the chief wife was a classificatory daughter of a mansa (“royal blood”), whose classificatory sister was the mother of the present Malian king and thus the wife of the Malian king's predecessor (classificatory father). Therefore the Malian (Keita) kings married women of a particular lineage ruling its own territory (which may well have been under Malian suzerainty).

32. van Wouden, F.A.W., Types of Social Structure in Eastern Indonesia (The Hague, 1968), 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Bazin, “Princess” (with rich ethnographic illustration); Henry, , “Culte,” 705n1.Google Scholar