Listen to the story of a man who had a mission to accomplish
|
D'autres peuples se servent de l'écriture pour fixer le passé; mais cette invention a tué la mémoire chez eux; ils ne sentent plus le passé car l'écriture n'a pas la chaleur de la voix humaine (...). Quelle piètre connaissance que la connaissance qui est figée dans les livres muets. (p. 78-79) |
The Mandinga epic on the life of Soundjata is indeed a touching story, with many ingredients, not just the hero who wins a war to reconquer the kingdom of his father. There is more than just a glorious male with a great destiny predicted before he was born. There is also a touching story of cripples, first of all an ugly, humpback girl that nonetheless marries a king. Yet she is a double-souled buffalo woman, as ugly as she is powerful. Then Soundjata himself that crawls at the age when other children learn how to walk, till the day when he laboriously stands on his feet leaning against a very big metal bar, the biggest that had ever been forged. Feeble in his legs, his arms are strong enough to unroot a baobab tree and bring it to his mother.
The humpback Sogolon is almost a paradigmatic figure of African refugee mother, as she has to leave her village, together with her four children, and lead them all the way across the Mandinga world. They find a living among kind strangers, till her son reaches the age of eighteen to confront Soumaoro Kanté, the tyrant wearing human skins, the sorcerer leader of an army of blacksmiths.
Soundjata is never a solitary hero, he works with others; he is a great coalition maker. Not the least important of his companions is Balla Fasséké, the griot, as the French taught us to call these personages, i.e. the djeli (poet - musician - intellectual preserving the memory of the past and granting the fame of the leader to whom he is attached).
Overall, it is a convincing story of people who make themselves a way in the world. Most probably, its final literary shape has been somehow improved by Djibril Tamsir Niane, a Senegalese historian, a man of writing who edited the story in French. Yet as he recons, the true author is Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté (a Guinean griot who died in 1991 in Burkina Faso), who claimed to be a descendant of that Balla Fasséké who actually accompanied Soundjata Keïta and preserved his memory. The only difficulty in this story is that it all is supposed to have happened in the first half of the 13th century. This Sundjata in question, the son of a humpback mother, is supposed to be the first emperor of Mali, crowned under the name of Mari Diata I (1190-1255).
The history and the legend are certainly forged together for a transmission that has several streams. After the relatively modest booklet of Niane, published in 1960, that I have found in France, the story was passed to print again in 1988, in an ampler version elaborated by the ethnologist from Mali, Youssouf Tata Cissé, under the title La Grande Geste du Mali. That one was based on the oral tradition according to another griot, Wa Kamissoko (1925-1976).
Be that as it may, it is clearly, and confessedly, a history presented from the point of view of the victorious. The cities of the vanquished had been obliterated together with the memory of them: malheureux, n'essaye point de percer le mystère que le Manding te cache; ne va point déranger les esprits dans leur repos éternel; ne va point dans les villes mortes interroger le passé, car les esprits ne pardonnent jamais: ne cherche point à connaître ce qui n'est pas à connaître (p. 152). Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté didn't assume any vow of searching for truth. On the contrary, he is a sworn guardian of that narration of the victorious he received from his own teachers: j'ai pu voir et comprendre ce que mes maîtres m'enseignaient, entre leurs mains j'ai prêté serment d'enseigner ce qui es à enseigner et de taire ce qui est à taire (p. 153). A part of silence is embedded in the very middle of this oral history. Not only it introduces magic in the melee of the decisive battles; what is more, it remains faithful to this essential compromise with a unique truth, beyond any aspiration of representing a multiple vision. There is one emperor, one Mansa, and it is him who makes the partition of the world that is to last for all the eternity, remembered and reproduced by the generations of griots, men of a single alliance: not that with truth, but that with a ruler.
D. T. Niane, Soundjata, ou l'épopée mandingue, Paris - Dakar, Éditions Présence Africaine, 1960.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 30.03.2021.
The humpback Sogolon is almost a paradigmatic figure of African refugee mother, as she has to leave her village, together with her four children, and lead them all the way across the Mandinga world. They find a living among kind strangers, till her son reaches the age of eighteen to confront Soumaoro Kanté, the tyrant wearing human skins, the sorcerer leader of an army of blacksmiths.
Soundjata is never a solitary hero, he works with others; he is a great coalition maker. Not the least important of his companions is Balla Fasséké, the griot, as the French taught us to call these personages, i.e. the djeli (poet - musician - intellectual preserving the memory of the past and granting the fame of the leader to whom he is attached).
Overall, it is a convincing story of people who make themselves a way in the world. Most probably, its final literary shape has been somehow improved by Djibril Tamsir Niane, a Senegalese historian, a man of writing who edited the story in French. Yet as he recons, the true author is Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté (a Guinean griot who died in 1991 in Burkina Faso), who claimed to be a descendant of that Balla Fasséké who actually accompanied Soundjata Keïta and preserved his memory. The only difficulty in this story is that it all is supposed to have happened in the first half of the 13th century. This Sundjata in question, the son of a humpback mother, is supposed to be the first emperor of Mali, crowned under the name of Mari Diata I (1190-1255).
The history and the legend are certainly forged together for a transmission that has several streams. After the relatively modest booklet of Niane, published in 1960, that I have found in France, the story was passed to print again in 1988, in an ampler version elaborated by the ethnologist from Mali, Youssouf Tata Cissé, under the title La Grande Geste du Mali. That one was based on the oral tradition according to another griot, Wa Kamissoko (1925-1976).
Be that as it may, it is clearly, and confessedly, a history presented from the point of view of the victorious. The cities of the vanquished had been obliterated together with the memory of them: malheureux, n'essaye point de percer le mystère que le Manding te cache; ne va point déranger les esprits dans leur repos éternel; ne va point dans les villes mortes interroger le passé, car les esprits ne pardonnent jamais: ne cherche point à connaître ce qui n'est pas à connaître (p. 152). Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté didn't assume any vow of searching for truth. On the contrary, he is a sworn guardian of that narration of the victorious he received from his own teachers: j'ai pu voir et comprendre ce que mes maîtres m'enseignaient, entre leurs mains j'ai prêté serment d'enseigner ce qui es à enseigner et de taire ce qui est à taire (p. 153). A part of silence is embedded in the very middle of this oral history. Not only it introduces magic in the melee of the decisive battles; what is more, it remains faithful to this essential compromise with a unique truth, beyond any aspiration of representing a multiple vision. There is one emperor, one Mansa, and it is him who makes the partition of the world that is to last for all the eternity, remembered and reproduced by the generations of griots, men of a single alliance: not that with truth, but that with a ruler.
D. T. Niane, Soundjata, ou l'épopée mandingue, Paris - Dakar, Éditions Présence Africaine, 1960.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 30.03.2021.
