Teaching the epic of Sunjata Keita, also known as the Sunjata or the Sundiata, opens up all kinds of avenues to teaching against the white supremacist myths that are still prevalent in the American historical imagination.  

The Epic of Sunjata is a living, evolving text, still performed by griots and griottes, with traditional griot instruments such as the kora and the 22-key balafon. Typically, the griot performance of the poem is done in parts or episodes, and is almost never performed in its entirety at once. Because the poem was never concretized into an early textual form after centuries of oral composition, the Sunjata is a prime example of the complexity of interdisciplinary textual performance—one that engages perspectives within literature, history, musicology, and the performing arts.  

I like to teach this text, including video excerpts of performances, alongside the more traditionally taught European epics because it offers my students a wider lens with which to look at the medieval world. Not only does the Sunjata ask students to see a text as merely one point of a story’s history, but it allows students to begin an exploration of the global medieval, one that decenters Europe. The conversation across these texts reveals a world that was far more vast and complex than most students have ever been taught.  

Who is Sunjata Keita?

Sunjata Keita lived between ca. 1217-1255 CE, and was the founder of the Keita dynasty of the Mali Empire. He first came to be known outside of the Mande-speaking world in 1960 through the Guinean historian and playwright Djibril Tamsir Niane. He translated and published the story that was told to him by the Djeli (or griot) Mamoudou Kouyate, who performed the epic tale in music. Known by Manding names such as “djeli/jail,” or in Wolof “gewel,” the griot/griotte was a storyteller, musician, historian, poet, and royal advisor in Mali and throughout West Africa. The story of Sunjata, his ancestry, his childhood, his exile, and his war against Sumanguru, are now all parts of the official national epic in Mali, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea.  

The Empire of Mali that Sunjata Keita founded became one of the wealthiest, most erudite, and intellectually advanced cultures in the hemisphere. The massive collection of Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu, in northern Mali, began to be copied and compiled during and after the reign of Sunjata Keita in the 13^th century. West African literacy, in Arabic, Mande languages, and other West African languages like Wolof, Keren, and Tuareg, was robust in the premodern period and the manuscripts covered a wide variety of disciplines, including the human and physical sciences, philosophy, and Islamic jurisprudence.  

Sunjata’s education

There is no single authoritative source for this story, and many variations exist, numbering close to 40 different episodes. The story of Sunjata has influences from the Quran and other Arabic stories that became part of the fabric of its various iterations over the centuries. It weaves together external influences such as Islam and the indigenous beliefs and customs of the Mande peoples. For example, in the stories of Alexander the Great there is a moment in which we can see Sunjata’s education pulling from a variety of influences:

Sogolon Djata learnt to distinguish between the animals; he knew why the buffalo was his mother’s wraith and also why the lion was the protector of his father’s family. He also listened to the kings which Balla Fasséké [Sundiata’s griot] told him; enraptured by the story of Alexander the Great, the mighty king of gold and silver, whose sun shone over quite half the world.

Here Sogolon Djata (Sunjata) learns about his parents’ spiritual ancestry, with the Mandingo belief in wraiths or doubles, combined with teaching from his griot about kings and especially Alexander the Great.  

In his version, Djibril Tamsir Niane, the Guinean historian and playwright, refers to Alexander by the Mandingo name “Djoulou Kara Naini,” a form of the Arabic “Dhu’l Qarnayn.” Niane believed that many of the songs and stories of Balla Fasséké featured in his version of the Sunjata originated from the reign of Mansa Musa (1307-1332 CE) saying, “at that time, the griots knew general history much better, at least through Arabic writings and especially the Koran.”  

Ancestors, descendants, and the preservation of knowledge

The power of ancestors and descendants is especially important in the story of Sunjata, preserving relations between the various political groups that would come under the Keita rule in Mali. During Sunjata’s rise to prominence, his griot, Balla Fasséké, recounts to him his genealogy and extols the importance of griots in preserving knowledge:

I have told you what future generations will learn about your ancestors, but what will we be able to relate to our sons so that your memory will stay alive, what will we have to teach our sons about you? What unprecedented exploits, what unheard-of feats? By what distinguished actions will our sons be brought to regret not having lived in the time of Sundiata?

Griots are men of the spoken word, and by the spoken word we give life to the gestures of kings (63).

The Mande Charter: hundreds of years ahead of Europe

After the defeat of Soumaoro, the King of Sosso, which is his crowning military achievement and one that begins the dynasty of Keita in Mali, Sunjata gifts to his descendants and the rest of humanity his most important legacy: that of equal rights between all people, declared at Kouroukan Fougan.

Composed of smaller Mandinka kingdoms, Sunjata’s coalition would form the basis of the Mali Empire, codified in the so-called “Mande Charter,” the official constitution created by an assembly of nobles to establish the new empire in Mali.  

Nick Nesbitt characterizes the Mande Charter of 1222 CE as “the invention of an uncompromising, principled, universal concept of social equality, of justice as universal human dignity [. . .] that the logics of entitlement, of class, of property, of authority, of any logic that counts any single human being as less or more than one single being, is not right and is not inevitable.” The Mande Charter predates by hundreds of years all declarations of human rights in European or western modernity.

It is important to bring my students to this moment to show them what it looks like to be confronted with the white supremacist myths we are often taught in western educational settings. The Epic of Sunjata opens a conversation about the tunnel-visioned nature Eurocentrism and allows students to begin seeing a wider world in which Africa’s cultures, histories, and art are not sidelined.