Who Are The Mandé People?
Mandé People is a family of ethnic groups in Western Africa who speak any of the many related Mande languages of the region. Various Mandé groups are found in:
- Benin
- Burkina Faso
- Côte d’Ivoire
- Gambia
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Liberia
- Mali
- Mauritania
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Senegal
- Sierra Leone.
The Mande are comprised of a number of different ethnic groups:
- The Bamana (or Bambara), Maninka (or Malinke), and Dyula, who constitute the linguistic and cultural nucleus
- The Somono, Bozo, and Wasuluka, who are close to the nucleus
- The Kagoro, Khasonke, Mandinko, Marka, and Soninke, who are savanna groups
- The Kuranko, Kono, Vai, Susu, and Yalunka, who are forest groups.
The Bamana are the most numerous ethnic group, with a population of around 1.6 million. The Bozo and the Yalunka are two of the smallest groups, with populations of fewer than 50,000 people apiece.
The Mandé people may be found anywhere, from dense coastal rainforests to the dry, dusty Sahel. They are divided mostly by language but share a broad variety of cuisines, cultural practices, and religious tenets. In the modern era, Islam and the caste system have become the main religions.
The religion of Islam has been pivotal in classifying the Mandé as a transnational ethnic group with ties that go beyond the boundaries of specific tribes. Historically, the Mandé had an impact far beyond their own region, reaching the Sahel and Savanna and the Muslim populations that lived there. The Mandé expanded their trading routes down the Niger River and inland, and their military might caused the rise of new nations, including Ghana, Mali, Kaabu, and Wassoulou.
To differing degrees, the Fula, Songhai, Wolof, Hausa, and Voltaic people all share the same written script, architecture, food, and social customs as the Mandé.
The Mande are very fragmented culturally and linguistically. Mande is spoken in several different dialects, some of which are incomprehensible to one another. Some cultural features, such as Islamic observance, also show substantial regional and local variation.
All Mande are farmers at heart, with the vast majority working as subsistence farmers all year. Women’s garden plots and bigger family fields surround many urban centers. Rice is a major food source in many countries.
Many hours are spent in the fields throughout the growing and harvesting seasons. Some farmers augment their income from harvests by engaging in side ventures during the offseason.
Similar social structures may be seen in all Mande communities. The Mande were traditionally stratified among farmers and aristocrats, specialized professions, and slaves prior to the arrival of colonization in the nineteenth century.
The establishment of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century is often credited with the establishment of this particular social order. Ethnic groups’ definitions of membership and interactions among themselves shifted swiftly throughout time and differed greatly from one another. At the turn of the 20th century, European colonialists outlawed slavery, but the position of slave is still prevalent in Mande society due to the recently established caste system.
The oldest man in a Mande family assumes the role of patriarch. Traditionally, a man’s immediate family’s residences have been considered his “minor lineage” in terms of land ownership. The homes of ancestry-linked brothers and their families form a large lineage. The next bigger unit is a hamlet, which is made up of the homes of males who have a common clan name.
The males of a hamlet gather regularly for ceremonial gatherings, when they are often ranked in an approximate order of seniority based on age. The hamlet also characterizes a form of exogamy in which the males of one hamlet marry males from another.
Men do most of the physical labor on farms, while women do both that and housework. Women are primarily responsible for time-consuming tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. Women in a village frequently have their own organization with a leader who corresponds to the male religious leader, whereas males often have village-based leadership roles like headman and imam. The girls go to this “circumcision queen,” as she is frequently called, since she is regarded as an authority on health, medicine, and childrearing.
Culture Of The Mandé People
The majority Muslim Mandé people use a patrilineal kinship structure and live in a patriarchal culture. Few of them dress like Arabs, but they generally wash their hands before meals and pray five times a day. In public, their female citizens are covered by veils. The sanankuya, or “joking relationship,” between clans is one of the most well-known customs in Mandé culture.
Secret societies Of The Mandé People
Poro, Sande, or Bundu, their secret fraternal societies and sororities, are founded on ancient traditions said to have arisen about the year 1000 CE. As boys and girls reach puberty, they participate in significant rites of passage and enter gender societies, and these rituals determine the social order within their community.
Caste system Of The Mandé People
Mandé society has always been organized along “caste” lines, with nobles and their vassals. Serfs (Jonw/Jong(o)) were also common and consisted of prisoners or captives seized from rivals during conflict. The nomads and the settlers alike looked up to the descendants of kings and generals.
This discrepancy in social standing has shrunk over time, mirroring the improving economic situations of both groups. The Mandé first settled in many of their current areas as raiders or traders, but they quickly became at home there. Most people in modern times are farmers or nomad fishermen. Some of them are accomplished musicians, griots, or cow herders.
Oral tradition Of The Mandé People
The epic of Sundiata, in particular, plays a significant role in transmitting the Mandé tradition. Oral histories and practices are passed down from nyamankala, the traditional knowledge keepers, to students at Kumayoro. These nyamankala play a significant role in Mandé culture by recording and passing along the oral history of the people.
The most prominent of these schools is Kela, and it plays a crucial role in keeping oral history alive. The versions of the Sundiata epic are very similar because of the high quality of the authors’ work. The epic is performed once every seven years, and the Kela version is the one that counts. The Kela adaptation features a written text known as a tariku. The Mandé are the only people in the world who combine written and oral histories in this way.
There are two main types of epic performances: one for educational or rehearsal purposes, and the other for public dissemination of the story’s key points. Gifts from the many clans featured in the epic are presented as part of the instructional performance. The canonical rendition permits the use of musical instruments and prohibits applause breaks. When performing the epic, the Mandé clans each use their own set of instruments.
The Kandasi also established a school dedicated to teaching their culture’s oral history.
Literature Of The Mandé People
Mandé literature includes the Epic of Sundiata, an epic poem recounting the rise of Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire. Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry notes that these tales “for a vast body of oral and written literature” ranging from Ibn Khaldun’s 14th-century Arabic-language account to French colonial anthologies collecting local oral histories to modern recordings, transcriptions, translations, and performance.
Tarikh al-Fattash and Tarikh al-Sudan are two important Timbuktu chronicles. By the late 1990s, there were reportedly 64 published versions of the Epic of Sunjata. Although traditionally attributed to Mahmud Kati, Tarikh al-Fattash was written by at least three different authors. Among the Mandé, griots are a group, traditionally a specialized caste who are bards, storytellers, and oral historians.
Religion Of The Mandé People
Since at least the 13th century, most Mandé communities in western West Africa have been mostly Muslim. The Bambara are one such group that converted to Islam in the nineteenth century. Traditional beliefs among Muslim Manden include the efficacy of Juju and participation in initiation organizations like the Chiwara and Dwo. The Bobo are only one of several tiny Manden communities that adhere wholly to pre-Islamic religious systems.
Oral histories suggest that the Mandé and the Soninke in particular played a role in the Islamization of non-Mandé Gur tribes living on the Sahel’s periphery through commerce and colonization.
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