The Sosso Period

Not every page in the history of Islam is a flowering. Sometimes a setback comes. And in the twelfth century, on the ruins of Ghana, a king appeared who refused to kneel.

A Void That Had to Be Filled

By the twelfth century the Ghana Empire, once the great power of West Africa, is a shadow of itself. Awdaghust was lost to the Almoravids and the trade routes were diverted. The royal family, according to some sources converted to Islam around 1076, has undermined its old legitimacy without fully acquiring a new one, and the priests of Bida, the sacred serpent, have been driven away or isolated. The empire is not yet dead, but its heart beats irregularly.

In such periods, and here the classical authors do not abandon us, power vacuums arise, and power vacuums are always filled; the only question is by what, by whom, and with what agenda.

Around the middle of the twelfth century an answer begins to be written, in a region called Kaniaga, south of Kumbi, not far from the present border between Mali and Guinea. There lives a people called the Sosso, a branch of the broader Soninke culture, but with its own character, its own worship of gods, its own military tradition.

And from that people a king will rise who will play a special role in the history of Islam in West Africa, as counterweight rather than as a bringer of faith or a forefather of an Islamic empire, as resistance, as the last great pre-Islamic power that defends the old order against what is coming.

His name is Sumaoro Kanté, sometimes written as Soumaoro, Sumanguru, Sumaoro Kantè. According to the later Mande epic tradition he was a dark, magical warrior-king, while according to the historical sources he was a real political figure in whose shadow an entire generation of West African history played out.

Who the Sosso Were

The Sosso are historically Soninke rather than a race apart, which is to say that they share the language, the culture, the genealogy of the people who had also built up the Ghana Empire. But they inhabited a particular region, Kaniaga, on the edge of the Sahel, and there they had developed a specific military and religious tradition.

The Sosso were known above all as smiths, since ironworking was their craft, and in the African conceptual world smithing is not just a profession but a spiritually charged activity. A smith masters fire, he changes the form of matter, he makes weapons and tools that can preserve or destroy life. Smiths in many West African societies were a separate social category, partly feared, partly respected, often connected with mystical powers.

The Sosso royal family, the Kanté, were such smiths, and in the later Mande tradition their power is expressed in magical terms. Sumaoro Kanté is said to have worn iron armor that no arrow could pierce. He is said to have been able to manifest himself in several places at once. He is said to have kept sacred serpents and spirits in his palace. His whole figure is, in the epic of Sundiata as sung by the jeli, the griots, built up into a figure of superhuman demonic power.

None of this need be taken literally, and none of it should be dismissed too quickly either. The epic tradition translates political realities into spiritual images, so that a Sumaoro described as spiritually formidable was in reality politically formidable, and a power captured in magical terms tells us that his power in political reality was great and oppressive.

The Pagan Reaction

Here lies the heart of this period. The rise of the Sosso is often framed in later Islamic chronicles as the “pagan reaction” to the Islamization of West Africa, and there is truth in that frame, but also a simplification that must be corrected.

The truth: Sumaoro Kanté was indeed not a Muslim. He was an adherent of the traditional Mande religion with its ancestor veneration, its spirits (jinn in Islamic terminology, nyama in Mande), its sacred objects and places. He claimed legitimacy from an old, pre-Islamic African worldview, and in that sense his regime was a counterweight to the Islamic influence that had penetrated through traders, Almoravids, and courts.

The simplification: it is not the case that Sumaoro was a programmatic anti-Islamic warrior who systematically persecuted Muslims. The historical reality is more nuanced. The Sosso state included Muslim merchants in its cities and there was no thorough persecution; what there was: a refusal to make Islam the state religion, a maintenance of the old rituals, and an expansionist policy that militarily challenged Muslim rivals.

The Tarikh al-Fattash preserves an interesting detail about this period. It tells that Sumaoro Kanté had a special relationship with the smith caste and that he actively rejected certain Islamic symbols. When a Muslim envoy asked him to adopt Islam, he refused, the chronicle relates, with the words that his gods had made him rich and that he did not want to leave them.

An Empire on the Anvil

From around 1150 Sumaoro, or his predecessors, since the exact dating is uncertain, begins to expand his sphere of influence. He annexes former Ghana territories and subjugates the twelve small Mandinka kinglets of Manden, the region from which Mali would later rise. He establishes a tributary system in which conquered kings pay annual tribute, and his capital, probably Soso or Sosso (the name of the people and the place mingle), becomes a center of power.

In the stories this empire is painted in dark terms. Kings are said to have been locked in cellars. Daughters of subjugated rulers are said to have been forced into his harem. Villages are said to have been plundered empty. That is epic exaggeration, but it contains a kernel of political reality: Sumaoro ruled harshly, settled accounts with resistance, and generated a hateful reputation among his neighbors.

One of the Mandinka kingdoms he subjugated was Niani, the city that was home to the Keita clan. The ruling prince of the Keita at that moment was weak and sickly, so Sumaoro placed a vassal on the throne and left the Keita family alone, on condition that they would no longer show political ambitions. Within the Keita family a boy grew up with paralyzed legs, a child of a less popular secondary wife, who was regarded within the family as a doubtful heir. His name was Sundiata.

But that is the sequel.

What Islam Did Do in This Time

Islamic development during the Sosso period did continue, though it does not happen in the state; it happens around it.

The Wangara merchants, the Muslim merchant class encountered earlier, remain active in this period. They trade through Sosso territories, pay tolls, maintain their mosques in the great trading cities, Djenné, Kabara, Walata, without being sanctioned by royal power. They stay outside the Sosso court, and they are not systematically driven out either. They wait.

Muslim scholars continue to teach in private circles. The Tarikh al-Sudan mentions several families of twelfth-century scholars who maintained their transmission of knowledge during this period, sometimes in discreet circles, sometimes in full openness, depending on the local attitude of a Sosso governor.

Islam in West Africa did not therefore go into hibernation during the Sosso period, but into a more underground register. It was sustained by communities, traders, and teachers, but without royal patronage. That is a condition that Islam has known worldwide for centuries in different contexts, and it survives in it well. What it cannot do in such a condition is continue growth at a scale that brings structural change.

For that structural change an Islamic king is needed. And he is on his way.

A Reassurance and a Warning

For a West African Muslim in 1155 this period would have been a disappointment. The promises of the Almoravid era, the possibility that the entire Sahel would come under an Islamic banner, had not been fulfilled. Instead there was a pagan king who dominated large parts of the former Ghana region, who actively favored the old religion, who gave Muslim states no room to fully develop.

But in that disappointment lies a lesson. The progress of Islam in a region does not go in a straight line, since it knows plateaus, setbacks, underground periods. That the eleventh century brought progress did not mean that the twelfth would continue it, and that Takrur was the foundation of an early Islamic state did not mean that all of West Africa would follow.

The Prophet ﷺ predicted that every century will bring a mujaddid, a renewer who will revive Islam anew, and this prediction works in West Africa too. The Sosso period was a silence, but a silence that preceded an uprising that would come under the banner of Islam, under a prince who as a crippled boy would grow up at Sumaoro’s court and then overturn his entire order.

The Clash on the Horizon

The tension that built up between Sumaoro and the underground Islamic line would concentrate itself in one person: Sundiata Keita. He would return from exile and forge a coalition of Mandinka kingdoms that lay under Sumaoro’s yoke, and he would defeat the Sosso king on the battlefield at Kirina in 1235, almost a century after the beginning of this Sosso period. And out of that victory would grow the Mali Empire, the greatest Islamic state that West Africa had known until then.

But that is the future. In 1155, Sumaoro Kanté is the master of a great part of West Africa. His smithy smokes, his iron is hard, his gods are old, and he has no idea that somewhere, in a corner of his empire, a child is growing up who will undo his entire edifice.

The Epic Translation

It is important to note that knowledge of the Sosso period is largely dependent on the oral tradition that has been transmitted by the jeli, the griots of the Mande. The epic of Sundiata is our principal source, and it is not objective: it was written by the winners. Sumaoro is painted in this epic in the blackest possible colors so that the founder of Mali, Sundiata Keita, may shine all the more brightly.

We must read this in the right way. Not as the precise description of Sumaoro’s character, but as the Mande communal memory of what he politically represented. He was the replacement of the old Ghana system, the last great pagan ruler, the man who denied Islam access to political power. In the memory of a community that later became Islamic, he could not appear otherwise than as a shadow.

For historical honesty, however, it must be acknowledged that Sumaoro was also an administrator with established institutional patterns. He maintained road-building, taxation, military organization. He was a king of his time and place rather than a pure tyrant, a man who wanted to maintain his own religious tradition in a world that was changing.

The End of an Era

What ends with the Sosso period is more than Sumaoro as a person, since a whole way of political legitimation ends with him. After him no great West African king will any longer be explicitly non-Muslim. Sundiata, although himself not yet fully Islamic, will not turn publicly against Islam, and his successors will be ever more Islamic, culminating in Mansa Musa who in 1324 makes the hajj and passes through Cairo with so much gold that the gold market there remains depressed for a decade.

Sumaoro Kanté is, in a sense, the last. He is the last image of a West Africa that could remain itself on its own, pre-Islamic terms, and everything afterward will, in the political sphere, stand under the sign of Islam. He is therefore tragic, less because he was a bad man, which cannot be said with certainty, than because he was the last representative of a world whose time had passed.

For a Muslim looking at this history, respect is also in order. Sumaoro fought for what he believed and he lost, but he lost honestly, on a battlefield, against an enemy who proved greater than himself. That is the fate of many rulers, in every religion and culture.

The Economic Shadow

In addition to the religious and political dimensions, the Sosso period also has an economic dimension that is often overlooked. Under Sumaoro Kanté the dynamic of the trans-Saharan trade does not stall, but it changes in character. The old Ghana routes, along which gold from Bambuk traveled via Kumbi to Awdaghust and beyond, lie under Sosso control, so that Sumaoro can levy tolls, can favor or disadvantage merchants, can close routes.

The effects are mixed. On the one hand goods continue to flow, since Sumaoro is not so foolish as to destroy his own source of income. On the other hand Muslim merchants feel less welcome, and some begin to seek alternative routes. A route through the east, via Gao and along the Niger, gains in importance, while another, more southerly route, along the border between the Sahel and the forest, opens up new gold fields, those of Bure, which will later play an important role in Mali’s economy.

These shifts are quiet, since they are not decreed in a single year but occur over decades, caravan by caravan, merchant by merchant. But their cumulative effect is that by the end of the Sosso period the old Ghana–Awdaghust–Sijilmasa axis system is no longer dominant. A new, Niger-oriented network becomes the future, and that network will have its center in Djenné, in Timbuktu, in Gao. Not by chance these will be the cities that under Mali and Songhai will know their glory.

The Sosso period has, without intending it, redrawn the economic geography of Islamic West Africa.

The Voice of the Epic

Before this period closes, the voice in which it lives on is worth a moment’s listening. The epic of Sundiata, as it has been transmitted by centuries of jeli singers and recorded in the twentieth century by researchers such as Djibril Tamsir Niane and Bamba Suso, preserves whole passages in which Sumaoro speaks. He is proud, religious in his own way, convinced of the rightness of his rule rather than a flat villain, and in one famous passage he declares to his griot Balla Fasseke:

So speaks a man who does not understand that his time is passing, since he thinks his power comes from his gods, while his opponents will discover that his power comes from his iron, and that iron can be neutralized by anyone who knows how. In the epic it is Sundiata’s griot, defected from Sumaoro’s court, who reveals the tyrant’s weak point: a particular kind of arrowhead, made of a particular stone, that can pierce his magical protection.

This is folklore, but folklore that packages a truth: empires do not fall because their gods abandon them, they fall because their internal legitimacy has cracked. Sumaoro’s fall, when it comes, is not the fall of a man but of a whole system. The old order, which could do without Islam, can no longer do without it. The world has changed while he stoked his smithy.

The Mali Empire Steps Into History

We stand on the threshold of something great, and on the Mande horizon a new era is taking shape. A young prince, humiliated by Sumaoro’s representatives, initially written off by his family, will return from exile. He will forge a coalition of oppressed kingdoms, he will meet the Sosso on a battlefield and defeat them, and from his victory an empire will arise that will surpass not only Sumaoro but also Ghana’s old glory.

The Mali Empire is about to step into history. And with that, everything we have discussed up to now, from first acquaintance in 750 to Sosso resistance in 1155, changes into the preparations, the backgrounds, the inevitable links in a chain that will end at the shoulders of a Mansa who stands in Cairo handing out gold to every passerby.

Everything told so far has its meaning, but that meaning only becomes fully visible in what is now to come.

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Sources

• The Sundiata epic, the oral tradition of the jeli of the Mande: the version of Mamadou Kouyaté recorded by Djibril Tamsir Niane (1960, English rendering by G.D. Pickett), and the Mandinka versions, among them that of Bamba Suso, recorded by Gordon Innes (1974), as quoted in Gomez, pp. 383, 391.
• Ibn Khaldun ﵀, Kitab al-ʿIbar, the report of Shaykh Uthman ﵀ of Ghana (796/1394): the subjugation and absorption of Ghana by the Susu, Mari Jata as the greatest king of Mali who overcame the Susu, and his twenty-five years of rule, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 41, 69, 88.
• Tarikh al-Fattash, attributed to Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀: the dying out of the rule of Kayamagha and the most vile taking authority over the greatest, read as the Susu, as quoted in Gomez, p. 41.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 32, 37–38, 40–41, 63, 67–69, 75–77, 80–84, 87–90, 104, 107, 383, 391, 395, 402, 409.
  • pp. 37–38, 41: the loss of Awdaghust to the Almoravids in 446/1054–5 and al-Zuhri ﵀ on the Islamisation of Ghana in 469/1076–7; the head of the slain snake Bida landing in Bure, the new source of gold, and the Soninke diaspora; Ibn Khaldun ﵀ on Ghana subjugated and absorbed by the Susu, a neighbouring people.
  • pp. 63, 67–68: Susu domination followed by war as historically highly probable; the Susu heartland in the present region of Koulikoro, associated by some with Kaniaga, as the eastern neighbours of Ghana; Sumaoro or Sumanguru Kante as king of Susu to whom Mali was subject and to whom even Ghana paid tribute; his name as Sumaoro the Cruel who robbed merchants and abducted girls; the rise of the Susu as a watershed.
  • pp. 81, 89–90: his powerful army of smiths and Susu rising from an insignificant village to master of Ghana; the triple wall, the seven-storey tower and the chamber of human heads of the Dark Forest; his sixty-nine bodies; his descent from the smiths of the Jarisu, numu who had served the rulers of Ghana, and his name as slave of Da from the servile estate of Wagadu; the Kante smiths who escape the massacre; the conflict as an allegory of the tension between smiths and a rising merchant class, and the gold fields of Bure as the foundation of Mali.
  • pp. 75–77, 80, 82: Sundiata as a child who could not walk and Sogolon as the rejected co-wife; the court of Niani where he grows up with Fran Kamara and Kamanjan; Sumaoro who kills Sundiata’s brothers and conquers Niani from Mansa Kara Kamara, the king of iron.
  • pp. 83–84, 87–88: the spur of the white rooster as Sumaoro’s secret; the battles of Kankigne and Krina/Kirina on the Niger; his disappearance into the mountains of Kulikoro or his petrification; the destruction of Sosso; the twelve kings with their twelve spears who proclaim Sundiata mansa; the dating of Kirina around 630/1233 from the regnal years in Ibn Khaldun ﵀.
  • pp. 32, 40: Bida, the sacred snake of Wagadu, to whom a virgin was offered each year for rain and gold; the emergence of Walata as the new terminus of the caravans by the beginning of the 13th century.
  • pp. 69, 104, 107: Mari Jata in Ibn Khaldun ﵀ as the same person as Sundiata; Mansa Musa in Cairo on 18 July 1324 and the price of gold that never rose above 22 dirhams after his visit.
  • pp. 383, 391, 395, 402, 409: the recorded versions of the epic in Niane and Innes; Johnson on Sumaoro who is not despised in Mali, in a struggle that was no question of good against evil; Balla Faseke Kuyate, Sundiata’s griot whom Sumaoro kept for his playing of the balafon; the warning that reading the conflict as ancestral religion against Islam is unproductive, with Niane’s bulwark of fetishism as the example.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. 14, 18 (TS ch. 4 and 5): the Malians who followed the dynasty of Ghana; Jenne becoming Muslim at the end of the 6th century AH, around 1200, when Sultan Kunburu converted and gathered the Muslim scholars of the town.
• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, p. 14: the west-east route from ancient Ghana along the Niger Bend to Gao and Tadmakka until the rise of Walata in the 12th century; Timbuktu beginning, according to as-Saʿdi ﵀, at the end of the 5th century AH as a camp of nomads.
• The Prophetic ﷺ word on the renewer whom Allah ﷻ sends for this community at the beginning of every century (Sunan Abi Dawud, Kitab al-Malahim), as quoted by the Shehu ﵀ in Sulaiman, The African Caliphate, p. 21.