Family Identity And The State In The Bamako Kafu

B. Marie Perinbam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367096335
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980183
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

This groundbreaking book explores the history and the cultural context of family claims to power in the Bamako kafu, or state (located in contemporary Mali in West Africa), primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perinbam argues that the absence of precise information on the Bamako kafu's political status during this period empowered families to manipulate the myths, rituals, and ancestral legends?as well as belief systems?so that their claims to state power appeared incontrovertible. The French, on reaching the region, accepted these representations of power.Although the author's historical data focus mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mythical recountings beyond this historical grid?ranging across approximately one thousand years and including large-scale migrations throughout the West African Sahel?provide insights into the processes by which many of these ethnic identities were subject to reconfiguration and reinvention. Within this historical-mythical matrix, Perinbam offers new insights into the reconstruction of Mande identities, their cultures (material and otherwise), political systems, and various social fields, as well as their past. Instead of rigid ethnic identities?sometimes identified in the historical and anthropological literature as ?Mandingo,? ?Malinke,? or ?Bambara??the author argues that variable ethnographic identities were more often than not mediated in accordance with a number of mythic and historical contingencies, most notably the respective states into which the families were drawn, as well as state formation, maintenance, and renewal, not to mention meaning sensitive to political, generational, and gender challenges. With the arrival of the French in the late nineteenth century and the Mande incorporation into the French colonial state, familial identities once more readjusted.The careful research and original scholarship of Family Identity and the State in the Bamako Kafu make it a significant contribution to the histories of West Africa, the African Diaspora, and the United States.

1
How Identities Are Formed: The Manipulation of Myths and Cultural Signs

The Introduction presented the families in this story, briefly indicating their cultural-linguistic, ritual, and socio-spatial identities, together with their mixed eco-systems. All, to one degree or another, contributed to the formation of the Mande-hinterland's differentiated identities. I likewise observed that although Mande families eventually imposed their manipulated cultures over large areas of the western Sudan—from the Senegambia in the west to the Black Volta regions in the east, and from the Niger bend in the north to towns and villages north of the forest zone throughout Guinea, Sierre Leone, Liberia, and the Cote d'Ivoire—most identities were forged in relatively small communities (see Map 5).¹ In the process, further regional particularizations emerged. To this extent Bamako, the centerpiece of this story, did not stand alone; like thousands of relatively small and larger communities, the kafu was integrated into the wide screen Mande-hinterland and the larger Mande world. A semiautonomous state (state: families holding political power), Bamako was ruled by its founding chiefly family, the Niare (Nyakate: archaic jamu or patronym) from Wagadu. Established during the eighteenth century on the periphery of the Bamana Segu state hegemony, the metropole further redirected identity shifts through wide-ranging public policies (see Map 2).² Through wars, the development of tonjonw armies, marriages and other alliances, Segu's hegemonic endeavors ultimately affected vast sections of the upper Niger region falling within its tributary range. Language repertoires and jo rituals embellished and consolidated these far ranging considerations. Finally, the Umarian and Samorian wars of the latter part of the nineteenth century, mainly jihads with an imperial subtext, introduced a serious ideological discourse into state-society relations, producing conflict as a forge for still further identity negotiations, manipulations, and modifications.

Returning to the cultural data and its mythic past, in this chapter I probe somewhat further the extent to which cultural signs and symbols were manipulated and/or negotiated in search of the Mande identity in general, its Niare counterpart in particular. More specifically, I argue (as Cohen's paradigm suggests) that while the Soninke families reshaped their ethnic identities within the dispersal, and in relation to the state, and that later identities were no doubt "revised" with the colonial authorities in mind, the search for a more general Mande identity was a historical necessity. Dispersed from their Wagadu homeland—possibly since about the end of the first and the second millennium—Soninke families wandered a mythical landscape in search of a homeland. In the process—approximately a thousand years in some instances—they "documented" and "signed" their presence across what was to become the Mande-hinterland and the Mande world, manipulating cultural forms and kinship groups, not least of all their great myths and legends (see Map 5). Today, many Soninke families have espoused different identities, some even no longer Mande.

Nyakate Identities and Mande/Fulbe Articulations in the Jaman'a

Although the Niare (Nyakate) and their Bamako state are the focus of this discourse, it became apparent during my initial research that a larger Mande-Niare/Nyakate identity existed in the Mande-hinter-land, well beyond Bamako, which needed to be addressed. Here, I am referring to the global (jaman'a) Nyakate family which left Wagadu after the dispersal. Most, probably numbering several hundreds originally, if not thousands—along with other Soninko (sing:. Soninke)— eventually settled west of Bamako, in cultural spaces forged in the Kaarta (Lambidu) and beyond, as well as in the Gidiume, Yelimane, Jafunu, and Keniareme regions, even southwest in Khasso, Gajaga (the French Galam), and the Gambia (see Maps 2 and 3). Of those migrating east from Wagadu,³ many eventually settled in the Massina in the Ja region (Jakha, Jaghara or Jagari), creating cultural spaces along the middle Niger zones, especially in the Segu and Nyamina regions, finally founding Minkungu on the Manding Plateau overlooking Bamako. While many migrating west retained their older Soninke identity, including their language and archaic Nyakate patronymic, most of those migrating east toward Segu and the Niger were eventually absorbed into complex processes involving other ethnic identities.⁴ As a matter of interest (although not part of this story) other families migrating still farther east toward the Black Volta experienced additional identity shifts, as they settled among the region's autochthones (see Map 4).

It remains unclear why the western Nyakate branches tended to retain an earlier Wagadu identity when their eastern counterparts, including the Bamako Niare, shifted theirs. It isn't that westerners were removed from the cross-cultural discourse: As mainly maraboutic and trading clans, they were in frequent contact with desert-side Sanhaja and other Berber-Arab identities. They were also the axis of regular exchanges with the Jallonke and Mandinka-speakers of the gold-bearing Bambuhu region, as well as the Fulbe of Fuladugu (Fadugu) and the Birgo (see Maps 3 and 7). Neither did they escape the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kaartan and Senegambian wars, not to mention earlier debacles. They likewise shared an ecosystem with the western Fulbe and were in contact with Tukulor and Mandekan from the Futa Toro and the upper Senegambia, respectively.⁵

On the one hand, most western Nyakate tended to retain an earlier Wagadu identity, because possessing greater numbers and denser cultural-linguistic boundaries, their social groupings were more compact than those found among easterners.⁶ On the other hand, we should leave open the possibility that some western Nyakate identities did in fact shift. As former Nyakate they may now be known by other jamuw, a hypothesis applied to some western branches of the Jakite families, some of whom may have been originally Nyakate (see below). Or some western Nyakate could have otherwise "disappeared," now quite "unrecognizable." We recall Heinrich Barth's surprise in the 1850s at finding ex-Mande farther east in northern Nigeria—the "Wangara" had migrated there sometime during the fourteenth century—with completely new identities, having "entirely forgotten" their mother tongue, some speaking Fulfulde, "even Hausa."⁷

However, if some western Nyakate retained a reasonably clear Wagadu signature, their eastern identities remained more complex, involving the pastoralist Fulbe and Bamana, all ultimately informed by the Segovian and Kaartan (both Bamana) state hegemonies. Today, many eastern Niare families, likewise Bamanized and claiming affiliation with the Bamako Niare, are still found in Nyamina, Kulikoro, Markala, and Segu.⁸ Not just the Niare were found there however: Other Soninke families migrating east—the Sakho and Kone of Nyamina, the Sisse from Kerowane, the Dukure of Kiba, the Sylla from Tuba, and the Simpara from Banamba, to mention but a few—were likewise drawn into the Segovian state hegemony, ultimately espousing a Marka-Sarakolle, eventually a Bamana, identity by the late nineteenth century. Complicating the matter, many Fulbe in the Segu and Bamako regions had also bamanized by the late nineteenth century, and vice versa⁹ (see Map 3).

But if many eastern Nyakate bamanized, what of those jaman'a Nyakate sharing in-between or truly mixed cultural spaces with the Fulbe in the east, in the Massina, in or around Ja, a region still signaled by most Mande-speakers as a major dispersal point after Wagadu? (see Map 7). Or those jaman'a Nyakate establishing in-between lineage-locations among Fulbe on the Kaarta's eastern fringes, in the Massina, the Kingi and Kaniaga regions, ecosystems which they also shared with Fulbe?¹⁰

The data, few and consequently difficult to interpret, are nonetheless sufficient to allow a hypothesis for further investigation. First, the data clarify that in-between Nyakate-Fulbe co-residencies in the west, at Lambidu in the Kaarta and at Kaniaga (near Kingi) were long-standing since about the fourteenth century Malian state hegemony.¹¹ Under these circumstances, many Nyakate could have "tilted" to a Fulbe identity. Second, as part of this process the data especially particularize a close association between the Soninke-Nyakate and the Fulbe-Jakite—especially in the Massina, Gidiume, Kita, and Kaniaga regions—to the extent that an equivalency existed between the Soninke-Nyakate jamu and the Fulbe-Jakite patronym: Both families were entitled, in other words, to the Nyakate and/or Jakite salutation, interchangeably (see Maps 2 and 3). Similar patronymic alternates found elsewhere in the Mande-hinterland are usually explained by close, long-standing ritual alliances between families, very likely including marriage on an intergenerational basis.¹² Applied to the Soninke-Nyakate and Fulbe-Jakite families, interchangeable salutations and patronyms likewise suggest long-standing clan associations bonded by marriage and further alliances. The evidence once again suggests that some Sonirike-Nyakate could have tilted to a Fulbe-Jakite identity. Third, if the eastern Nyakate-Jakite (Mande/Fulbe) axis was an articulating one, compounding the issue was the observation that some Fulbe-Jakite in other Mande cultural spaces (e.g., the Mande Khassonke of the southwest; the Wassulunke and people of Buguni) conjugated a similar axis with other families, notably the Soninke-Kaba, as well as with the Bari, who were Fulbe. Farther south within the Samanyana, Dalakana, and Faraba cultural spaces, other Fulbe-Jakite—associated with the Futa Jallon—may also have "tilted" toward a Mande identity (see Maps 3 and 7).¹³

Accordingly, whether in the east, southwest, or south, clearly these four identities (Soninke-Jakite, Soninke-Kaba, Fulbe-Bari, and Fulbe-Jakite) were variable and "open": Through long-standing marriage and other alliances, these four ethnographic identities articulated on a moving cultural axis, sometimes tilting toward a Mande identity, at other times toward a Fulbe (e.g., Wassulunke).¹⁴ On turning to a chronology, although uncertain, articulating identities probably began sometime during and after the Malian fourteenth century state hegemony, probably between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, the process very likely still continuing. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several of these Mande-Fulbe families had reached the Bamako region mainly from the Massina and Kingi. Others arrived via Gajaga and the Futa Toro, some migrating further southeast to the Wassulu.¹⁵

Thus if, when focusing on the Niare and their Bamako state, I suspected the existence of a jaman'a, or global Nyakate identity, in the Mande-hinterland well beyond Bamako, it is because there was one. And if I speculated that some jaman'a Nyakate families had interacted with Fulbe ethnic identities, it is because they had: The jaman'a family leaving Wagadu after the dispersal settled in Fulbe regions, later in particularized Bamana zones across the Mande world, from the Senegambia in the west to the Niger in the east, and from the Massina in the north, to beyond Bamako in the south (see Maps 4,5 and 7). And if many westerners retained a Soninke-Nyakate identity many easterners— especially those who fell under the Bamana Segovian hegemony, including the Bamako Niare-Nyakate—ultimately became Marka-Sarakolle-Bamana (Niare) and Fulbe (Jakite).

However, "open" lineages were not only found among the Nyakate-Jakite and the Kaba-Jakite families (i.e., a Mande [Soninke] and Fulbe connection). Open lineages could also be found throughout the Mande-hinterland, even the Mande world wherever Mande- and Fulfulde-speakers co-resided. In fact, similar articulations were commonplace from Bakhunu and the Massina in the north, to the Futa Jallon in the south, and from the Senegambia in the west, to Buguni, the Wassulu, the Kong and Black Volta regions in the east, including the Kaarta-Beledugu-Bamako regions and the Bafulabe-Kita-Kayes-Gajaga cultural spaces. Some Fulbe lineages in the Kaarta, for example, are said to have completely "lost their language" and are now Bamanakan. As a matter of further interest, many Mande-Fulbe combined with the Tukulor of the Futa Toro. In some northern regions Mande-Fulbe identities also fused with desert-side signs, including language.¹⁶ Similar open lineage articulations likewise occurred in the Khasso-Fuladugu (Bangasi)-Kita, and Birgo regions, where Fulbe-Soninke and Mandinka c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 How Identities Are Formed: The Manipulation of Myths and Cultural Signs
• 2 Material Elaborations of "The Mande Style"
• 3 "The Family (Is) the Pivot of Sudanese Societies, the Center of All Organization": The Bamako Kafu and Mande States
• 4 Commerce and Markets in the Mande Style"
• 5 "Bamako Was Not as ... We Had Supposed"; Bamako Was Not a "Nothing Country"
• Conclusion: Bamako's "French" Identity or How Identities Are Formed Revisited
• Appendix: Maps of Western Africa
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index