Sumanguru Kanté

Also Known As: also Soumaoro Kanté, Sumaworo Kanté, Soumangourou Kanté, Sumamuru; Kanté is the name of a Mande blacksmith clan
Region/Culture: West Africa
Mythos: Mande Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A smith-king taught by jinn, able to survive any weapon except the one substance his secret forbids him, the spur of a white cock.
Role in Mythos: He is the tyrant of the Sunjata epic, the power the Manden has to break before the Mali empire can exist.
Relation to Humans: He ruled people rather than protected them, taking their smiths, their wives and their tribute, and the epic dwells on the heads and skins he kept as furniture. In Koulikoro, where the tradition says he vanished into a hill, offerings are still carried to the rock in his name.

In a round mud-walled hut in the Guinean village of Nyagassola there is a wooden xylophone roughly the length of a grown man, twenty hardwood slats with calabash gourds lashed beneath them to carry the sound. One family keeps it. Only the patriarch of that family may strike it, and only on certain days, the Muslim new year and a burial that matters, and he is the one who teaches the children from about the age of seven. The instrument is called the Sosso-Bala, the balafon of Sosso. The man who owned it first has been dead, or gone, for something close to eight hundred years, and UNESCO now lists the cultural space around it as heritage of humanity.

His name was Sumanguru Kanté, and he was king of Sosso in the early thirteenth century, in the unsettled country that ancient Ghana left behind when it came apart. Kanté is a blacksmith name. In the Mande world the forge is not an ordinary trade; the people who work iron handle a power that most families would rather not have in the house, and the smith is expected to be something of a sorcerer as a condition of the job. Sumanguru took that reputation and made a kingdom out of it. He absorbed the small states around him, put the Manden under tribute, and for a while was the strongest man between the desert and the forest.

Nearly everything told about him was recorded by the people who beat him.

There is one great exception, and it is worth knowing about. In 1997, at Koulikoro, the jeli Abdulaye Sako narrated a version in which Sumanguru, not his conqueror, is the hero of the story; the Bamana text and an English translation were published in 2017. In Sako’s telling the king has two mothers, co-wives so close that they shared the pregnancy, the child passing the night in one and the day in the other. Their labour comes on in open bush with no midwife anywhere. They panic. Then the unborn child speaks, tells them to get on with it, delivers himself, and when they ask what to call him says he arrived carrying his own name, and adds that he will be nobody’s slave and nobody’s servant. It is a birth story built to answer the other tradition, in which he is only ever the obstacle.

The obstacle version is the famous one, and it is magnificent about his sorcery. The jinn had shown themselves to him, and his power had no measurable edge. Under his palace at Sosso lay a chamber almost too well furnished: the walls hung with human skin, a throne covered in the same, the heads of nine kings he had killed set out in the room, a snake kept in a jar, and standing among them the balafon that nobody but the king was permitted to touch.

Somebody touched it. Balla Fasséké, sent from the Manden as an envoy and left alone in the palace, found the door, went in past the skins and the heads, and could not leave the instrument alone. The first notes went out through the walls and reached Sumanguru wherever he was, and he came back at speed to kill whoever was in his room. What he found instead was a griot already singing his praises, and the king did the thing that undid him: he liked it, and kept the man.

He was that sort of king. One griot’s account has his magic so fine-grained that if a single fly settled on the balafon of Sosso, he could pick that one fly out of a swarm and kill it. The same account says the first sign that his time was ending was the day his balafon player would not play for him.

The cracks came from his own household. His nephew Fakoli was his best commander, and Fakoli’s wife was a woman of power in her own right, a cook who could feed the entire army without help. Sumanguru took her. Fakoli walked out of the alliance and took his men with him, and other subject chiefs followed, and the war that came next was fought with the king’s own generals lined up on the far side.

The war opened with the two sorcerer-kings sending each other declarations, each naming himself as something the other could not survive: a poisonous mushroom, a wild yam rooted in rock, an ember in a fire that will not be picked up. After the boasting there was nothing left but the field. Sundiata Keita had learned by then what ordinary weapons were worth against Sosso, and he had been given the one thing that would work. His half-sister Nana Triban, married off to Sumanguru as part of the tribute, had flattered her husband into showing her the chamber and telling her his tana, the prohibition that held his life, and then she had escaped with Balla Fasséké through a gate she had the key to.

At Kirina, around 1235, Sundiata rode with an arrow of plain wood tipped with the spur of a white cock. It did not have to kill. It only had to touch him, and it grazed his shoulder, and the power went out of him like water out of a cracked pot. A big black bird went over the fighting and he understood what it meant. The rest of the battle was a rout, and the king who had held the western Sudan rode east along the Niger with the field behind him.

He stopped at Koulikoro, where a hill of dark rock stands above the river, and went into the cave in it, and the accounts stop there. He is not recorded as dying. He is recorded as ending. The place, Nianan Koulou, is sacred ground still; people bring offerings to the fetish kept there by the family who have custody of it, and Mali entered the site in its national heritage inventory in 2001. Sosso itself was pulled down, and the griots say a town of some consequence became a place where guinea fowl take dust baths.

His powers were all of a piece with what he was. Iron, and the knowledge that goes with iron; the jinn, who had come to him and not to anyone else; the ability to see everything that touched what belonged to him. The balafon in the chamber was an instrument of state, a thing whose sound meant that the king was in the room. His limits came out of the same material. A tana is a secret, and a secret is a thing that can be told to the wrong person, and the wrong person will usually be someone you have wronged. His cruelty cost him a nephew, an army and a marriage. And the griot he took as a prize went home to the Manden and spent the rest of his life making another man immortal, which is the most expensive mistake in the story.

Whether any of it happened is a live question among historians. Some of the deeds may belong to a whole lineage of Kanté rulers collapsed into one memorable name, which is what oral tradition does to families, and a few scholars have gone further and asked whether the man existed at all. The evidence is a thin scatter of medieval references and a great deal of song. What is not in doubt is the balafon in Nyagassola, which is real, and still gets played, on the days when it is allowed, by the descendants of the griot he made the mistake of keeping.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Sumanguru Kanté?

Sumanguru Kanté, also written Soumaoro Kanté, was a thirteenth-century king of Sosso in West Africa and the chief antagonist of the Mande epic of Sundiata. He came from the Kanté blacksmith clan and is remembered as a sorcerer-king who dominated the Manden until Sundiata Keita defeated him at the battle of Kirina.

How was Sumanguru Kanté defeated?

He was defeated at Kirina, around 1235, by an arrow tipped with the spur of a white cock. That spur was his tana, the prohibition his power depended on, and the secret was obtained by Nana Triban, Sundiata’s half-sister, who had been married to Sumanguru and escaped back to her brother with it. The arrow only grazed him, but his sorcery left him and his army broke.

What happened to Sumanguru Kanté after the battle of Kirina?

The tradition says he fled east along the Niger to the hill of Nianan Koulou at Koulikoro in present-day Mali and disappeared into a cave there. No account gives him a death. The site is still treated as sacred, receives offerings, and was entered in Mali’s national heritage inventory in 2001.

What is the Sosso-Bala?

The Sosso-Bala is the sacred balafon, a wooden xylophone of about twenty slats with gourd resonators, said to have belonged to Sumanguru Kanté and to be the ancestor of all others. It is kept at Nyagassola in Guinea by the Kouyaté griot family, played only by their patriarch on important occasions, and UNESCO inscribed its cultural space on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

Was Sumanguru Kanté a real person?

Historians are divided. The written record for thirteenth-century Sosso is very thin, and almost everything detailed about Sumanguru comes from oral epic performed by the descendants of his enemies, which tends to gather the deeds of a whole lineage onto one famous name. Some scholars accept a historical king behind the figure; others question whether he existed in the form the epic gives him.