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History, Oral Transmission and Structure in Ibn Khaldun's Chronology of Mali Rulers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Ralph A. Austen  and
Jan Jansen
Ralph A. Austen
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Jan Jansen
Affiliation:
University of Leiden
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Extract

The early history of the Mali empire is known to us from two sources: Mande oral literature (epic and praise poetry) recorded over the last 100 years and Ibn Khaldun's Kitab al-ʿIbar (Book of Exemplars) written in the late four-teenth century. The list of Mali kings presented by Ibn Khaldun is precise, detailed, entirely plausible, and recorded not too long after the events it purports to describe. For scholars attempting to reconstruct an account of this West African empire, no other medieval Arab chronicler or, indeed, any Mande oral traditions provide comparable information for its formative period.

There is, however, reason to question the historical reliability of Ibn Khaldun's account precisely on the grounds of its narrative richness. When read in relation to the general model of political development and decay which Ibn Khaldun worked out in the more theoretical Muqaddimah (“Prolegomena”) of Kitab al-ʿIbar, as well as the larger context of the work in which it is imbedded, the Mali kinglist takes on some characteristics of an instructive illustration rather than a fully empirical account of the past. Indeed Ibn Khaldun himself, in his contemplation of the basis for asabiyah (group solidarity) among bedouin peoples, cautions us against literal interpretation of genealogical accounts:

For a pedigree is something imaginary and devoid of reality. Its usefulness consists only in the resulting connection and close contact.

Ibn Khaldun is certainly not as ideologically engaged in constructing the royal genealogy of Mali as a bedouin spokesman might be in reciting the list of his own ancestors. Nevertheless, this great Arab thinker has something at stake in this story which needs to be given serious attention by all scholars concerned with either the events of the medieval western Sudan or the process by which they have been incorporated into more recent narratives.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 23 , January 1996 , pp. 17 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1996

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References

Notes

1. The relevant sections of this text are carefully translated and annotated in Hopkins, J.F.P. and Levtzion, N., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge), 333–36.Google Scholar

2. Khaldun, Ibn, The Muqaddimah: an Introduction to History, trans. Rosenthal, Franz 3 vols.: New York, 1958), 1:265.Google Scholar

3. Delafosse, Maurice, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (3 vols.: Paris, 1972)Google Scholar; Levtzion, Nehemia, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Ly-Tall, Madina, Contribution à l'histoire de l'empire du Mali (XIIIe-XVIe siècle) (Dakar/Abidjan, 1977)Google Scholar, Niane, Djibril Tamsir, Recherches sur l'Empire du Mali au Moyen Age (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar

4. Transcript of the Sunjata Epic Conference, 13-15 November 1992, Institute for the Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University, pp. 3-4, 15ff. (transcript available at Northwestern University Africana library; papers (including one by Jansen who did not attend the conference) to be published as Austen, Ralph A., ed., In Search of Sunjata: the Mande Epic as History, Literature and Performance (Bloomington, 1996).Google Scholar

5. The Northwestern discussion focused on the passages in Ibn Khaldun referring to Sunjata rather than the lengthier series of reigns under consideration here.

6. Including one of the present authors (Austen), who organized the conference.

7. Ibn Khaldun names four informants, giving the dates when he spoke to them (but not always precisely which data each provided), and adds that “we have heard” of events in the very late fourteenth century, when his own account was being written.

8. The text calls him a son; Levtzion (Ancient Ghana and Mali, 65) interpolated a certain Faga Laye (taken from Niane's research on oral tradition) in order to make him a grandson. It is unimportant for our purposes whether Musa was the son or the grandson, because both classifications present him as a direct descendant of Mari-Jata.

9. Levtzion, , Ancient Ghana and Mali, 68-72, 78ff.Google Scholar

10. For the meaning of the younger brother in Mande claims for legitimate rule see Jansen, Jan, “The younger brother and the stranger; in search of a status discourse for Mande” (paper for the Mande Studies Association Conference, Leiden, March 1995).Google Scholar

11. Ibn Khaldun notes that his informants could give him no genealogy for Mari Jata I (Hopkins, /Levtzion, , Corpus, 333Google Scholar). Current Mande oral traditions do provide Sunjata with a long line of illustrious ancestors, extending back to Mecca. However, even here there is some suggestion of a disruption through the statement in many versions of the epic that Sunjata's jamu (clan name), Keita, is not the same as that of his father, Konate. This datum (buttressed by the accompanying accounts of Sunjata's triumphant return from exile in the north), has led some local informants and one expatriate historian to speculate that the founder of the Mali empire was a Sahelian invader (the griot Seydou Camara cited in Charles S. Bird, “The Production and Reproduction of Sunjata”, in Austen, In Search of Sunjata; Lange, Dierk, “Das alte Mali und Ghana: Der Beitrag der Oraltradition zur Kritik einer historiographischen Fiktion,” Historische Zeitschrift, 255 (1992), 587–623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. We have substituted this term for “group feeling,” which is Rosenthal's translation of asabiyah.

13. Khaldun, Ibn, Muqaddimah, 1:278–80.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 1:281.

15. Hopkins, /Levtzion, , Corpus, 289-90, 295.Google Scholar Ibn Battuta was a contemporary of Ibn Khaldun who visited Mali in the mid-fourteenth century. His accounts of travel to India (but not to sub-Saharan Africa) are discussed at some length in the Muqaddimah, where Ibn Khaldun reproaches himself for having assumed them to be untrue (Muqaddimah, I:369–71Google Scholar).

16. Abu Bakr is possibly a basis for Mande Bori/Mande Bakari, Sunjata's brother and hunting companion in twentieth-century traditions. However, the name “Bakari” is very common in West Africa today, and therefore its origin cannot be traced. On the contrary, no one bears the name “Sekura/Sekure',” which makes plausible that Ibn Khaldun's Sakura is one and the same as the Sekure of Mande traditions.

17. Ly-Tall, Madina, Camara, Seydou, and Dioura, Bouna, L'histoire du Mandé d'après Jeli Kanku Modi Jabaté de Kéla (Paris, 1987), 74–75Google Scholar; Jansen, Jan, Duintjer, Edgar, and Tamboura, Boubacar, L'épopée de Sunjara d'après Lansine Diabate de Kela (Leiden, 1995), 191–96Google Scholar; Ly Tall, 1977, Contribution, 201-03, provides a very similar account in which the servile ruler is named Djonsombe (“Slave Sombe”).

18. Ibn Khaldun served for some time under a regime in Egypt, the Mamluks, whose very name indicates their origin and continued recruitment from the ranks of imported slave soldiers; Mande traditionalists would know of the Ngolossi dynasty of the eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century Segu empire, which traced its origin to a coup by a leader of the ton-jon, a servile (jon) military formation which constituted the power base of this state (unlike the Mamluks, the Ngolossi did reproduce themselves via patrilineal descent rather than newly imported slaves).

19. Conrad, David C., “Searching for History in the Sunjata Epic: The Case of Fakoli,” HA, 19 (1992), 167.Google Scholar

20. This is particularly plausible for Sekure, since the few oral references to him come from a small region: either the village of Kela or the nearby Upper Guinea town of Siguiri (see references in note 17 above). Since the reign of Sekure occurs after Sunjata's death, it does not form part of the standard epic performance and the two earliest recordings of it in Siguiri (Ly-Tall, Contribution) and Kela (Ly-Tall et al., Histoire du Mandé) had to be induced by direct questioning. It is possible that further inquiries would reveal a wider provenance of this figure in Mande tradition and also provide more understanding of the relationship between oral and written sources.

21. John Hun wick reports (private communication) that the sixteenth-century Timbuktu scholar, Ahmad Baba, was quite familiar with Kitab al ʿIbar which he cites in his own essay on slave-trading in Africa. Ahmad Baba's essay was known and quoted extensively by the nineteenth-century Sokoto scholar and Jihadist Ahmadu Bello (s/o Usman dan Fodio); see Austen, Ralph A., “Orality, Literacy and Literature: a Comparison of Three West African Heroic Narratives” in Hunwick, John and Lawler, Nancy, eds., A Cloth of Many Silks: a Festschrift for Ivor Wilks (Evanston, 1996).Google Scholar

22. Ralph A. Austen, “The Historical Transformation of Genres: Sunjata as Panegyric, Folktale, Epic and Novel” in idem., In Search of Sunjata. An alternative explanation for the silence of written sources is that up until 1879 we have no first-hand accounts of any kind concerning travel in the Kita-Kangaba-Kouroussa triangle of southern Mali and Upper Guinea—the core area of post-imperial Keita dynastic authority and thus of the Sunjata tradition: Jansen, Jan, “De draaiende put: een studie naar de relatie tussen het Sunjata-epos en de samenleving in de Haut Niger (Mali)” (Ph.D., University of Leiden, 1995), chapter 3.Google Scholar

23. See especially Rosenthal, Erwin I.J., Political Thought in Medieval Islam (Cambridge, 1968), 67–109passimGoogle Scholar, where the highly literary “mirrors” tradition is compared unfavorably with the “empiricist Ibn Khaldun” (69), characterized as “not a dispenser of advice to rulers and administrators but a political scientist who probes into the causes underlying the historical and political process” (80); for some suggestive linking of Ibn Khaldun to authors of the “mirrors” school see al-Azmeh, Aziz, Ibn Khaldun: an Essay in Interpretation (London, 1982), 145ff.Google Scholar

24. Hopkins, and Levtzion's, (Corpus, 317)Google Scholar translation of the complete title is “The Book of Examples and the Register of Subject and Predicate [or the Origin and History], on the Days of the Arabs, the Persians and the Berbers;” the root and associated meanings (“admonition, warning”) of ʿibar suggest that “exemplar” is a better translation for this key term.

25. He wrote a very detailed autobiography and there are many other sources for his public career; see Rosenthal, Franz, “Ibn Khaldun's Life” in Muqaddimah, xxix–lxvii.Google Scholar

26. Marlow, Louis, “Some Uses of Historical Anecdote in Medieval Islamic Advice Literature” (unpublished paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association meeting, November 1993).Google Scholar

27. Khaldun, Ibn, Muqaddimah, 15.Google Scholar

28. The technical term for such chains, isnad, is very prominent in the collections of extra-Quranic traditions upon which much of Islamic law (shari ʿa) is based.

29. Khaldun, Ibn, Muqaddimah, 16.Google Scholar

30. Julien, Charles-André (ed. Le Tourneau, Roger), Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord de la conquête arabe à 1830 (Paris, 1956), 22–26Google Scholar; Laroui, Abdallah, The History of the Maghrib: an Interpretive Essay (Princeton, 1977), 219–23Google Scholar; al-Azmeh, Aziz, Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship: a Study in Orientalism (London, 1981), 199–222.Google Scholar

31. Jansen, “Younger Brother.”