The modern nations of sub-Saharan Africa are all artificial creations, by-products of the partition of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1885. While almost all of them are characterized by very considerable cultural diversity, Ivory Coast is even more heterogeneous than most. The country is bisected by an ecological frontier: the northern half of the country is savanna, the southern half tropical forest. Roughly speaking, this also corresponds to a cultural frontier. Modern Ivoirians frequently think of themselves as ‘northerners’ or ‘southerners’, though ‘north’ and ‘south’ are each characterized by further basic cultural divisions. Underlying this diversity, a system of affinities links the peoples of different regions of Ivory Coast with their neighbors living across modern borders. The peoples of southwestern Ivory Coast, speakers of Kru and Mande-fu languages, resemble many of the inhabitants of modern Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Akan-speakers of the southeast have their counterparts in southern Ghana. The inhabitants of the northwest, the Malinke (or Maninka, as they call themselves), are Manding-speakers as are their neighbors in Guinea and Mali. The central and eastern parts of the north are populated mostly by speakers of Voltaic languages, with homologus in parts of Mali, Upper Volta and northern Ghana. It is in this part of Ivory Coast that we also find those Manding-speakers who call themselves the Dyula.

The arrival of the Manding in northern Ivory Coast, even in the northwest where they are now in a majority, is a relatively recent phenomenon.