Curtis A. Keim

In search of Sunjata : the Mande oral epic as history, literature and performance

Editors Introduction The Dichotomy of Power and Authority in Mande Society and in the Epic of Sunjata, John W. Johnson The History of the Sunjata Epic: A Review of the Evidence, Ivor Wilks The Epic of Sunjata: Structure, Preservation, Transmission, Seydou Camara The Historical Transformation of Genres: Sunjata as Panegyric, Folktale, Epic, and Novel, Ralph A. Austen Sinimogo-The Man for Tomorrow: Sunjata on the Fringes of the Mande World, Stephen Belcher Searching for the Historical Ancestor: The paradigm of Sunjata in Oral Traditions of the Sahel (13th-19th Centuries), Mamadou Diawara The Gesere of Borgu: A Neglected Type of Manding Diaspora, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias Jeli and Sere: The Dialectic of the Word in the Manden, Karim Traore Mooning Armies and Mothering Heroes: Female Power in Mande Epic Tradition, David C. Conrad Sunjata as Written Literature: The Role of the Literary Mediator in the Dissemination of the Sunjata Epic, Stephen P. D. Bulman Butchering Heroism?: Sunjata and the Negotiation of Postcolonial Mande Identity in Diabates Le Boucher de Kouta, James R. McGuire The Production and Reproduction of Sunjata, Charles S. Bird An Ethnography of the Epic of Sunjata in Kela, Jan Jansen Out of Print: The Epic Cassette as Intervention, Reinvention, and Commodity, Robert C. Newton Glossary Bibliography

Long-Distance Trade and the Mangbetu

Between 1866 and 1886 Arabized traders from the Nile River trafficked in slaves and ivory in the Mangbetu region of what is today north-eastern Zaire. These Nile traders opened the first direct long-distance trading contacts in the area. European travellers present during the period wrote accounts giving the impression to some modern historians that the traders did extensive damage to several small, welldeveloped Mangbetu kingdoms. These accounts do not furnish an accurate picture of the trader impact on the Mangbetu. The Mangbetu system of rule was less developed than the travellers supposed. At that time Mangbetu rule was still based largely on personality and kinship and not on bureaucracy, tribute, commercial monopoly, divine kingship, or any other institution often associated with strong African kingdoms. Moreover, the trader influence was weaker than the travellers supposed because the intruders were newcomers, operating at a great distance from the Khartoum market, who remained only a short time. Only from 1881 to 1885 did the Egyptian government have some success in regularizing the trade and subduing rebellious rulers. In early 1886 all northerners withdrew from the Mangbetu area as a result of the Mahdist crisis in the Sudan. At that point the Mangbetu kingdoms, and kingdoms built on the Mangbetu model, re-emerged relatively unchanged by the trader experience.