The Silence After Sundiata: An Empire Searches for Its Direction

A hero dies, and an empire must learn to live without him. Between 1255 and the rise of Mansa Musa lies half a century that the sources would rather skip.

The Problem of the First Successor

Every civilization knows this moment: the founder dies, and the question of what follows him arrives at once. Rome had it after Augustus, the Rashidun caliphate had it after the Prophet ﷺ and again after each of the four rightly guided caliphs ﵃, and Mali, still young, barely a generation old as a consolidated empire, encountered it around 1255.

Sundiata Keita, the warrior who had defeated Soumaoro Kanté at Kirina, the man who had convened the Gbara and had the Kouroukan Fouga drawn up, was dead, though the sources are vague about how exactly. One says drowning in the Sankarani River, another an arrow during a ceremonial dance, a third a natural death in his palace at Niani. What is certain is that he left an empire that did not yet have an institutional routine for its own continued existence.

What that means deserves spelling out. An empire is not a country but a partnership between clans, kingdoms, trade networks, and religious authorities, all of whom must have a reason to keep cooperating after the man who brought them together is gone. Mali had not yet found that reason, whether in the form of a clear line of succession, of a single shared state religion, or of a bureaucracy that functioned across personal loyalties.

The decades between Sundiata and Mansa Musa are therefore, for the historian, a kind of gray mist, and precisely in that mist something crucial happened: Islam began, piece by piece, to shift the center of gravity of power.

What the Gbara Was, and Why It Mattered

Before the successors come into view, the Gbara itself deserves a pause, because without the Gbara the difficult succession is not to be understood.

The Gbara was the great council of Mali, founded under Sundiata as part of the Kouroukan Fouga. Thirty-two delegates, most of them from clans that had fought together at Kirina, came together to advise, to confirm, and sometimes to decide on who could sit on the throne, and this was a real constitutional organ rather than an ornament; the Mansa did not rule absolutely but in consultation.

In practice the Mande tradition knew two logics simultaneously: on the one hand primogeniture, sonship, the bloodline that automatically ticks on from father to son, and on the other hand the elective principle, the clans that recognize a candidate before he is truly Mansa. Those two logics did not have to contradict each other as long as there was a clear, competent, universally recognized crown prince, but as soon as that was lacking, they collided hard.

This is the drama of 1255 to about 1312, and it was not a drama of war, invasion or economic collapse, but simply one of short reigns, of struggles for recognition within the Gbara, and of a Mansa who sometimes sat for a year, sometimes for ten, before the next replaced him again. Ibn Khaldun ﵀, writing in the fourteenth century from Cairo and Tunis, had trouble making the order add up, and if he had trouble with it, it is no surprise that many details have since been lost.

What Sundiata Had Left Behind

Before the first successor arrives, what Sundiata had built up in concrete administrative terms deserves a more precise look, since it was not nothing, and it was not everything either.

In his twenty-five years of rule after the Battle of Kirina in 1235, Sundiata had left behind three great structures. The first was the Kouroukan Fouga, the constitutional document that was drawn up during a meeting of the Gbara on the open plain at Ka-ba. It was no written constitution in the modern sense, since it was transmitted orally by the griot tradition, but it was an explicit framework of rules: which clans fulfilled which roles, how succession would proceed, how strangers and slaves were to be treated, which landholdings belonged to which family lines. The French ethnologist Youssouf Tata Cissé in the twentieth century had parts of this document reconstructed from oral tradition, and the full text record was recognized in 2009 by UNESCO as intangible world heritage.

The second was the sofa military structure. Sundiata had organized a standing army of cavalry, archers, and spearmen, paid partly from toll revenues, partly from fiefs that warlords managed, which was, for a West African empire of the thirteenth century, unprecedented professionalization. The sofa was not only an instrument for conquest; it was also the mechanism by which rebellious provinces were brought back to obedience without this requiring a war every time. Threat alone was often enough.

The third was the reconfiguration of the trans-Saharan trade routes. Sundiata had after Kirina brought the gold fields of Bambuk under Malian control and reactivated the old Ghana routes toward Walata, and he had integrated the Fulani and Soninke trade networks rather than replacing them. Mali was under him richer than Ghana had ever been, because Mali controlled not only the gold source but also the salt routes that were necessary for it, and this was a more important achievement than the military victories. Money is what keeps empires running.

All these structures stood upright when Sundiata died. The problem was that without him personally they had not yet been tested at stress-test level, since every institution he had set up needed his authority to keep working, and whether it would work without him too was the question with which the generation of 1255 had to deal.

Mansa Wali and the First Hajj

The first successor about whom something meaningful can be said is Mansa Wali, also written Uli, son of Sundiata, who reigned roughly from 1255 to 1270, depending on which chronicle one follows.

Mansa Wali did something that until then no Mansa had done: he performed the Hajj, and that is no small thing, since this is the first documented pilgrimage of a ruler of Mali to Mecca, somewhere around 1260 to 1263. Ibn Khaldun ﵀ records it, and the detail is important because it forms the prelude to what Mansa Musa would do sixty years later on a much larger scale.

The Tarikh al-Sudan and the later West African chronicles are silent about this visit in detail, which is a pity, for one would want to know how Wali was received, how large his caravan was, whether like his later descendant he gave generously. What is known is that he returned, and that he returned with the prestige of a pilgrim, which within the increasing Islamic influence in Mali was an enormous political coin.

Wali ruled further well, and the sources name him as a continuer of Sundiata’s stability, but then he dies, and it begins.

Sakura, the Slave on the Throne

Sakura deserves a paragraph apart, because he was, according to the most common tradition, a freed slave in the service of the palace at Niani, without a general’s pedigree in the birth-elite and without even a distant kinship to the royal house, a man from the jonya class, the servant class, who through military capabilities had worked his way up to a position from which he, in the absence of a clear heir, simply dared to seize the throne.

This happened around 1285, according to Ibn Khaldun ﵀, and it says something important: the Gbara accepted it, not gladly perhaps, but it did. Sakura was a competent administrator who reconquered areas that had been lost in the preceding succession changes, reorganized the northern garrisons, and even performed the Hajj. On the return journey he was killed at Tajura, on the Libyan coast near Tripoli, according to Ibn Khaldun ﵀, and stripped of his gold; his body was, according to tradition, ultimately brought back to Niani in a mummified state, where it was buried with state honors.

That an ex-slave could ascend the throne, rule, perform the Hajj, and be buried as Mansa was something that in, for example, Mamluk Cairo was entirely possible, since the entire Mamluk dynasty there was based on the elevation of slave soldiers to rulers, but in traditional West African societies with their rigid clan hierarchies it was an exception. It shows how much the Kouroukan Fouga and the Islamic influence together had created a Mali in which functional competence weighed more heavily than birth line: not entirely, but more than elsewhere.

The Short Reigns and the Dark Between

After Wali comes Mansa Ouati, then Mansa Khalifa, then, according to some lists, a Mansa known only by his nickname, then Abu Bakr I, a grandson of Sundiata via his daughter, for the Mande tradition also knew matrilineal succession options; then Sakura, a former general and according to some sources a freed palace slave who seized the throne in the absence of a clear heir, himself performed the Hajj, and on the return journey was killed at Tajura near Tripoli; then Qu, then Muhammad ibn Qu, and then, finally, Abu Bakr II.

That list is impressive in quantity and depressing in clarity, since Ibn Khaldun ﵀ himself hesitates, and the order given above is the usual academic reconstruction, in which every name comes with a footnote and every footnote with a question mark.

What is remarkable is that these Mansas become steadily more Islamic: Wali performs the Hajj, Sakura performs the Hajj, and Abu Bakr II will make decisions about which we will say more below, but which only fit in a court where Islam has by now become the dominant religious reference. The Donson Ton, the traditional hunter brotherhoods that under Sundiata played a leading role in social life, begin to lose ground to the ulama, to the Islamic jurists, to the Arabic script-literate at court.

The Tensions Beneath the Surface

Some historians, including Nehemia Levtzion in his studies of West African Islam, suppose that the difficult succession does not coincidentally coincide with the Islamization, and that it was precisely the Islamization that made the succession so difficult.

The Gbara was rooted in a Mande worldview in which hunter magic, ancestor veneration, and clan aristocracy formed the framework, so that a Mansa who increasingly clearly chose for Islamic law, for qadis instead of for traditional counselors, for the Friday mosque instead of for the offering to the ancestral forest spirits, changed not only his own identity but the basis of legitimacy of the entire state; and a part of the Gbara did not simply let that happen.

This is of course speculative, and the sources do not confirm it explicitly, but it explains the fragmented succession, the short reigns, the fact that generals and non-direct blood relatives were sometimes able to ascend the throne. It was a slow, tough negotiation between two ways of being Mali rather than anarchy.

Nor was it necessarily a hostile negotiation; the Islamization of Mali never became a bloody revolution as the Almoravid campaigns in the western Sahara had been a century earlier. It went through trade, through marriages, through court advisors, through the practical realization that an Islamic Mansa had access to a trade network that reached from Cairo to Cordoba and that a non-Islamic Mansa simply did not have. It was pragmatism that slowly became conviction.

The Role of the Griots in This Silence

There is yet another source to which too little attention is paid when the difficult succession comes up: the griot tradition. For while Arabic chronicles were silent or hesitated, while Mande court registers, if they existed at all, have not been transmitted, one archive remained functioning: the memory of the jeli, the griot, the professional storyteller who for generations stored and transmitted genealogies and events in verses.

The current traditions about Sundiata, recorded in the twentieth century by Djibril Tamsir Niane from the mouth of griot Mamadou Kouyaté and later by others, contain references to this in-between period as well, but in a fascinating way, since these memories are flattened, summarized, contracted into a few emblematic stories. It is as if the griots themselves decided that between Sundiata and Musa the detail did not matter, and that what should be transmitted were smaller, more thematic vignettes.

This is a strange attitude toward the past to modern eyes, but not an unreasonable one, because to the griot the past is a source of teaching and legitimacy rather than a chronicle of dates. If a particular Mansa reigned for three years and did little of significance, then he deserves no epic of his own; he is mentioned in an enumeration and the next important ruler gets the attention. This is a form of historiography that is functional rather than chronological.

For the historian this is frustrating, but for the one who understands how West African societies remember themselves, it is telling, since Mali’s succession was for Mali itself not so much difficult as unimportant during those sixty years. The real continuity sat not in the list of Mansas but in the structures, the Gbara, the sofa, the trade routes, that kept working.

Abu Bakr II and the Turn Toward the Atlantic Ocean

The last of these difficult successors is Abu Bakr II, and about him something is known that can be said of none of his predecessors: he turned his back on the Sahara and looked toward the Atlantic Ocean. According to the story that his nephew Musa would later tell to the Mamluk court in Cairo, Abu Bakr II equipped a large-scale fleet to discover where the ocean ended, transferred the government to Musa, and sailed westward, and he never returned. The full account, the number of ships, the story of the one captain who returned, the three readings of what this actually means, belongs at the next event, where Musa tells it himself to the source of al-Umari ﵀ in Cairo; for the story here it suffices that the event is a turning point.

With Abu Bakr II’s departure, however it is interpreted, the period of the difficult succession ends, and Mali gets a Mansa who accepts the throne with full backing, who is Islamically educated, who has managed to bring the Gbara to his side, and who is ready to put Mali on the world map. His name is Musa.

The Griot As Broker of Power

Before that horizon is sought out, one more pause for how these sixty years of transitions were actually endured. The Arabic sources are largely silent and the Mande clan archives are lost, but what functioned, as a hinge between one Mansa and the next, was the jeli, the griot. Every change of throne became legitimate not only after a qadi registered it or a farba executed it; it became legitimate when the griot decided to sing it.

This is a role that Western history books rarely take seriously, but which for the continued existence of Mali in this half century was at least as important as the Gbara itself, since the griot determined which story circulated about a new Mansa: whether he was a worthy successor of Sundiata or an intruder, whether his mother had the right line and his father the right courage. These questions were answered by recited epic rather than by legal text, so that he who had the griots on his side had the people on his side, and he who lost their favor usually lost his throne shortly thereafter as well.

Sakura, the former palace slave, could only become Mansa because the griot tradition took him up into the pantheon of recognized rulers, and that is no small achievement for someone from outside the clan aristocracy. It means that the Mande society in these years developed a second confirmation channel that ran parallel to the Gbara: alongside the council of delegates that recognized the Mansa, there was the collective of jeli that anchored him in memory. Both confirmation channels were necessary, and both could make or break a Mansa.

When the Mist Lifted

If we look back over this half century, we see an empire that quietly, almost unnoticed, redefined its own nature, without collapse and without glory. Islam shifted from court religion to state ideology, the Gbara learned to live with multiple successors and developed protocols to choose and confirm them, and the trade routes remained open, for they did not depend on who exactly sat on the throne but on the fact that there was a throne. And when the mist lifted, an empire stood ready that was greater, richer, more self-confident, and more Islamic than ever before.

This was consolidation under the radar rather than chaos, and the sources call it difficult because they wrote from outside and could not decipher the dramas at court. From within it was probably what every civilization goes through in its second generation, the question who are we actually, now that the founder is gone? Mali answered that question slowly, but did answer it, and the answer was: we are an Islamic empire, with Mande roots, and we do this in our own way.

That answer would receive its embodiment in a man who came to power in 1312 and who would show the world what West Africa could be.

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Sources

• Ibn Khaldun ﵀, Kitab al-ʿIbar, the succession of Mali after Mari Jata: Wali as one of the greatest kings and his hajj under Baybars, Abu Bakr as grandson through a daughter, the mawla Sakura who usurped the kingship, conquered Gao and was killed at Tajura on the return from the hajj, and thereafter Qu and Muhammad ibn Qu, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 94, 96–100.
• Ibn Fadl Allah al-ʿUmari ﵀, Masalik al-Absar, Mansa Musa’s account to Ibn Amir Hajib of his predecessor who sailed out onto the Atlantic Ocean and never returned, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 101–102.
• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh as-Sudan, which is silent on Wali’s pilgrimage; the Sundiata epic in the version of Mamadou Kouyaté, recorded by Djibril Tamsir Niane (1960), as quoted in Gomez, p. 383.
• Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali, Africana Publishing, New York and London 1973, and Youssouf Tata Cissé, La charte du Mandé et autres traditions du Mali, Albin Michel, Paris 2003, as cited in Gomez, p. 408.
• C. F. Beckingham, “The Pilgrimage and Death of Sakura, King of Mali”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 15/2 (1953): Tajura as the place near Tripoli, not in Djibouti.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 82, 84, 86–89, 92–102, 107, 125, 155, 383, 407–408.
  • pp. 82, 84, 86–87: the sofas as infantry and later as servile soldiers; the assembly at Kurukan Fugan; the Grand Council of generals, lineage heads and thirty mansas, with tribute paid to the centre.
  • pp. 88–89: Sundiata’s death around 656/1258, on the banks of the Sankarani or by drowning; the rise of Mali carried by Sahelian trade and the gold source of Bure.
  • pp. 92–93: the jeliw who have little to say about Mali after Sundiata and the shift to external sources; the succession as far from straightforward, with an oral corpus that is divided and contradicts Ibn Khaldun ﵀.
  • pp. 94–95: the thirty-three clan heads as the leadership of Mali; matrilineal succession in Ibn Khaldun ﵀ against the father-to-son line of the secondary literature, with the Grand Council choosing a relative; no designated successor, the jomba ruling without restraint and a war of succession.
  • pp. 96–97, 155: Wali as one of Mali’s greatest kings and a pilgrim between 658/1260 and 676/1277, the beginning of Islam in the affairs of state; his brothers Wati and Khalifa, who shot arrows at his people and was killed; the hajj and the Arabic name as an Islamisation of kingship.
  • pp. 98–99: Abu Bakr as grandson through a daughter and the return to the maternal line; Sakura as usurping mawla, in the oral sources Jonnin Sekure, the little slave; his hajj under al-Malik al-Nasir, his death at Tajura, possibly near Tripoli, and the conquest of Gao; the dating of his reign to 1294–95 or 1299–1309.
  • pp. 100–102: Qu and Muhammad ibn Qu as successors and Musa coming to power in 712/1312; the waning influence of the hunters against merchants and religious elites; the two thousand ships of the predecessor, in Gomez Muhammad ibn Qu, and the Canary Current behind the story of the one captain.
  • pp. 107, 125, 407–408: the gold fields beyond Mali’s direct grasp; the routes by way of Walata to Taghaza; the notion of a constitution in late twentieth-century tradition and Cissé’s La charte du Mandé.