Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-vpsfw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T23:32:12.108Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Critical Note on “The Epic of Samori Toure”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jan Jansen
Jan Jansen*
Affiliation:
Leiden University, jansenj@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Samori Toure (d. 1900) is celebrated, both in written history and oral tradition, in Mali and Guinea because of the empire he founded and his fierce resistance against the French, as they sought to occupy their future colony of the French Sudan. Recently published anthologies of African epic (Johnson/Hale/Belcher 1997; Kesteloot/Dieng 1997; Belcher 1999) attest that an orally transmitted Samori epic exists in these countries. In this paper the texts hitherto presented as the Samori epic will be compared to some oral sketches about Samori which I recorded during two years of fieldwork conducted in southwestern Mali and northeastern Guinea. I will hypothesize that a Samori epic may be in the making, but does not yet exist. The texts hitherto presented as the epic of Samori are largely oral narratives produced more or less in concord with expectations about what an epic should look like. The focus is on Samori as a hero on the battefield, and this is not representative for the present-day oral narrative on Samori. Therefore, an epic of Samori, if it ever does come into being and takes the form of a standardized oral narrative, might deal with different issues than one might expect from reading the texts presented in the anthologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 29 , 2002 , pp. 219 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bah, T.M.Architecture militaire traditionnelle et poliorcétique dans le Soudan occidental du XVIIe à la fin du XIXe siècle. Yaounde, 1985.Google Scholar
Belcher, S.P.Epie Traditions of Africa. Bloomington, 1999.Google Scholar
Geysbeek, T. and Kamara, J.K. “Two Hippos Cannot Live in One River: Zo Musa, Foningnama, and the Founding of Musadu in the Oral Traditions of the Konyaka” Liberian Studies Journal 16(1991), 27–78.Google Scholar
Jansen, J. ‘The Younger Brother and the Stranger: In Search of a Status Discourse for Mande’ Cahiers d'Études Africaines 144(1996), 659–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, J.W., Hale, T.A., and Belcher, S.Oral Epics From Africa: Vibrant Voices front a Vast Continent. Bloomington, 1997.Google Scholar
Kesteloot, L. and Dieng, B.Les épopées d'Afrique noire. Paris, 1997.Google Scholar
Newton, R.C. “Out of Print: The Epic Cassette as Intervention, Reinvention, and Commodity” in In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature, and Performance, ed. Austen, R.A.Bloomington, 1999, 313–27.Google Scholar
Person, Y., Samori. Une révolution dyula. 3 vols. Dakar, 1968.Google Scholar
Person, Y. ‘Samori: construction et chute d'un empire’ Les Africains I. Paris, 1977, 249–86.Google Scholar