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A Critical Note on “The Epic of Samori Toure”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jan Jansen
Jan Jansen*
Affiliation:
Leiden University, [email protected]
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Extract

Samori Toure (d. 1900) is celebrated, both in written history and oral tradition, in Mali and Guinea because of the empire he founded and his fierce resistance against the French, as they sought to occupy their future colony of the French Sudan. Recently published anthologies of African epic (Johnson/Hale/Belcher 1997; Kesteloot/Dieng 1997; Belcher 1999) attest that an orally transmitted Samori epic exists in these countries. In this paper the texts hitherto presented as the Samori epic will be compared to some oral sketches about Samori which I recorded during two years of fieldwork conducted in southwestern Mali and northeastern Guinea. I will hypothesize that a Samori epic may be in the making, but does not yet exist. The texts hitherto presented as the epic of Samori are largely oral narratives produced more or less in concord with expectations about what an epic should look like. The focus is on Samori as a hero on the battefield, and this is not representative for the present-day oral narrative on Samori. Therefore, an epic of Samori, if it ever does come into being and takes the form of a standardized oral narrative, might deal with different issues than one might expect from reading the texts presented in the anthologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 29 , 2002 , pp. 219 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002

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References

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