The founder of the Mali Empire, who united the Mandinka chiefdoms around 1235 and defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru at Kirina, building the West African state that would later astonish the world under his descendant Mansa Musa. By legend a boy who could not walk before he rose to conquer, he survives above all through the Epic of Sundiata, the oral tradition kept alive by griots for eight centuries, which recounts his childhood disability, exile, and return. The broad achievement is historically secure; the vivid detail belongs to legend.
A boy who could not walk became the founder of one of the richest empires in African history. The griots, the praise-singers of West Africa, have told his story for almost eight hundred years. In their telling, Sundiata Keita was born sickly and crawled on the ground while other children mocked him. Then, the story goes, he rose. He gripped an iron rod, pulled himself upright, and bent it like a bow. He grew into a hunter and a warrior, returned from exile, and broke the army of a feared sorcerer-king on a plain by the Niger River. Out of that victory came Mali, the empire whose gold would later dazzle Cairo and whose name reached medieval Europe. Yet the man behind the legend is hard to see. Almost no document records him. What we have is a poem, sung and resung across the centuries, and the task is to hear the history inside the song.