Empire of the Mind: New Work in Mande Studies

Abstract

Readers outside the field of Mande studies may be forgiven for suspecting the descendents of the medieval empire of Mali of continuing imperial ambitions. Although the political and military might of the Mande world has been drastically reduced since the time of Sunjata (of popular memory), or even of the more troublesome Samori Toure in the nineteenth century, its influence remains powerful, and its traditional culture (those elements hearkening back to the precolonial era) seems less endangered by modernization and globalization than is true elsewhere in Africa. Mande culture is in fact exporting itself: the griots 1 of the Mande world are now to be found well-established across the industrialized world, and to some extent they have helped to define the outsider's vision of the African preservation of the past. Within the Mande world, the performance tradition may be undergoing some changes in repertory and theme, but it has adapted itself to the world of the microphone, the loudspeaker, and the cassette recorder. It also continues to inform the world of contemporary authors such as Ahmadou Kourouma or Massa Makan Diabate, and for some readers that connection may define the usefulness of the titles [End Page 129] considered in this essay, which are all devoted to local forms of verbal art, as documentation or as analysis of the social context. Seven of the titles fall neatly into two groups: four are editions of texts, and three are straightforward monographs on the jeliw, the specialist producers of some of the texts. The eighth book, by Sory Kamara, straddles the division to some extent; it contains his (enriched) translations of some recorded material, but contextualizes it in a poetic and personal meditation.