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Koli Tengela in Sonko Traditions of Origin: an Example of the Process of Change in Mandinka Oral Tradition*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
Traditions of origin of most of the prominent Gambian Mandinka lineages tend to be bodies of myth containing small, but often recognizable, skeletons of historical truth. Members of these lineages typically think of one of several mythical, sometimes composite, figures as their ancestors. These figures are invariably great leaders, if not of western migrations with large followings, then of successful military expeditions in the west for the Mali empire. Usually, these traditions serve a particular purpose. The ancestral figures symbolize the lineages' ties, real or imagined, to the Mandinka homelands and the center of Mandinka culture on the upper Niger River. The stories of their ancestors' early arrival or successful conquests in the western Mandinka region justify historically the positions of political and social prominence these lineages held throughout the last four centuries or more of the pre-colonial period.
Two of the three traditionally dominant lineages in the region of the Gambia known as Niumi have traditions of origin that are no exceptions to this rule. Niumi was one of more than a dozen Mandinka states that existed along the banks of the navigable Gambia River from perhaps as early as the fourteenth century until colonial times. Occupying forty miles of the river's north bank at its estuary, Niumi was long a focal point for the exchange of slaves and other commodities among Africans and between Africans and Europeans. By what was likely the early sixteenth century, seven extended families of three larger lineages -- themselves segments of still larger, more widely dispersed groups of lineages having the same patronymics -- emerged to rotate political leadership in Niumi and to dominate social and economic aspects of life in the state.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1978
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship that sponsored research for this study. I am grateful, too, to David Gamble and Winifred Galloway for providing me with materials I feared were inaccessible, and to Stephen Bahoum, George Brooks, S.M. Cissoko, and B.K. Sidibe for assistance at various stages of the preparation of this article. Of course, none of these people bears responsibility for what appears in the article; I do.
References
NOTES
1. Boubakar Sonko, oral interview conducted by S.M. Cissoko in Essau, Lower Niumi District, The Gambia, February 1969. Recordings of this interview and others in Cissoko's collection are deposited in the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Dakar, Senegal.
2. Ansumana Sonko, oral interview conducted by the author in Badume, Jarra Central District, Gambia, January 20, 1975. Recordings of this interview and others in my collection from Gambia and Senegal are deposited in the Gambia Cultural Archives, Banjul, and in the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, Bloomington (accession number 75-185-F).
3. For more thorough discussions of Niurni's early history, traditions of the Jammeh and Manneh lineages, the role oral traditions play in Gambian Mandinka society, and the use of these traditions to study the history of the western Mandinka, , see my The Early History of Niumi: Settlement and Foundation of a Mandinka State on the Gambia River, [Papers in International Studies, Africa Series, 32] (Athens, Ohio, 1977).Google Scholar
4. The story of Sonko origins that follows is a composite account from the following oral narratives: Unus Jata, Berending, Lower Niumi District, The Gambia; Alhaji Omar Sonko, Kanuma, Lower Niumi District, The Gambia; Ibrahima Njie, Berending, Lower Niumi District, The Gambia; Landing Nima Sonko, Berending, Lower Niumi District, The Gambia; and Alhaji Maranta Sonko, Essau, Lower Niumi District, The Gambia. These informants were interviewed by the author between September 1974 and April 1975. Also adding to the story was information provided by Boubakar Sonko and Seku Sonko of Essau, and by Bakary Sonko of Berending, each interviewed in February 1969 by S.M. Cissoko, and by the late Bamba Suso, probably the most noted Gambian griot of his day, in an interview taped by Radio Gambia in 1973. A copy of this last recording is available in the Gambia Cultural Archives, Banjul.
5. Bah, or Ba, is the patronymic of one of the most prominent Fulbe lineages living near the Gambia River. Members of this lineage trace their ancestry to Denya and Koli Tengela, whom they often call Koli Tengela Bah. The Bah claim no relationship to the Sonko. See Ousmane, Bâ Tamsir, “Essai historique sur le Rip (Sénégal),” Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire, Series B, 19(1957), pp. 565–66.Google Scholar
6. Soh, Sire Abbas, Chroniques du Fouta Sénégalais, ed. Delafosse, Maurice and Gaden, Henri (Paris, 1913), pp. 120–23.Google Scholar
7. Golberry, S.M.X., Fragmens d'un voyage en Afrique (2 vols.: Paris, 1802), 2:pp. 159–60.Google Scholar
8. Thomas Brown to the Administrator, Bathurst, September 27, 1871, Gambia Public Record Office, Banjul, 1/29.
9. El Hadji Bakari Sonko, oral interview conducted by S.M. Cissoko in Berekolong, Sankola, Guinea-Bissau, March 1969; Ansumana Sonko and Yesa Sonko, oral interview conducted by the author in Badume, Jarra Central District, The Gambia, January 20, 1975; Wula Naso, oral interview conducted by the author, Wuropana, Senegal, January 18, 1975.
10. A legend of Amari Sonko is also recited in the more central Mandinka regions. One such is recorded in Delafosse, Maurice, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, (reprint of 1912 edition, 3 vols.: Paris, 1972), 2:p. 183.Google Scholar
11. Lorimer, George, “Report on the History and Previous Native Administration of Niumiside, and more especially of Lower Niumi, together with recommendations as to the future administration of Lower Niumi and suggestions as to the possible future relations of this district with Upper Niumi and Jokadu Districts [1942],” Gambia Public Record Office, Banjul, 2/2390.Google Scholar
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid. Of course, it is impossible to discover where Sonko traditionalists came upon the Koli Tengela-Denya connection to add to their tradition. As noted above, stories of Koli Tengela circulate fairly widely throughout the entire Senegambia region, and these elements could easily be “picked up” by reciters of the story. However, there is another possibility. In 1931 W.T. Hamlyn, Superintendent of Education for the Gambia, wrote A Short History of the Gambia, which he introduced in the colony's schools soon thereafter. On pages 12 and 13 of the book, describing the early history of the Fulbe in The Gambia, Hamlyn wrote:
From 1559 to 1586 they were ruled over by a Fula named Koli Tenila or Tenguella. He was called on by the Fulas to help them against the Mali Keitas, and, after allying himself with the Susus he set up a kingdom on the Futa Jallon plateau. He attacked the Sereres of the Casamance and the Gambia, and after defeating them he married the daughter of their chief thus allying them with himself.
The Fulas and their flocks and herds became so numerous that at length the country could no longer support them, and they decided to seek some other land in which to live. The following story is told of their journey to find another land. The king and his elders were sitting under the Council tree, discussing the question when a parrot settled in the tree above their heads, dropped a grain of millet before the king and flew away to the north. This was taken by the wise men to be an omen that there was plenty of food in the land from which the parrot came and that Allah had sent the parrot to guide them to a fertile land. They therefore travelled to the north following the parrot who is said to have stopped at each resting place at night and to have flown before them during the daytime.
Koli led his people to the north as far as the banks of the river Senegal and took the Bondu region from the Joloffs. This portion of the country between the rivers Gambia and Senegal remained in the power of the Fulas for many years, and was known to the Portuguese as Grao Foule. But later again the Joloffs went into Bondu again in a peaceful manner and became the allies of the Fulas, and the whole country later became known as the Grand Joloff. Koli and his successors founded the Denianke dynasty which lasted for several centuries.
The effects of this passage and others in Hamlyn's book (which incidentally, has been revised and/or reprinted three times since 1931 and is still in use in Gambia schools) upon oral traditions in the Gambia are not documentable but one would be mistaken not to suspect the influence of a widely-read Schoolbook on African oral literature.
14. It is not surprising, then, that Alhaji Maranta “Mang Foday” Sonko of Essau, a grandson of Niumi's last mansa and first seyfu, holds the seat in Parliament from Lower Niumi and is one of The Gambia's most prominent men; that Landing Sali Sonko, also of Essau and a member of the second “ruling lineage” from that village, is the seyfu of Lower Niumi; or that until 1972 the seyfu of Upper Niumi was Alhaji Landing Omar Sonko, a descendant of the district's first seyfu.
15. See fn 9 above.
16. Cissoko, S.M. and Kaoussa, Sambou, Recueils des traditions orales des Mandingues de Gambie et de Casamance (Niamey, 1969), p. 9.Google Scholar Emphasis in original.
17. Quinn, Charlotte, Mandingo Kingdoms of the Senegambia: Traditionalism, Islam, and European Expansion (Evanston, 1972), pp. 38–39.Google Scholar
18. Ibid.
19. Kanouté, Dembo, Histoire de l'Afrique authentique, trans. Sanogho, Tidiane and Diallo, Ibrahima (Dakar, 1972).Google Scholar