Sundiata tells the story of Sundiata Keita, remembered as the founder of the Mali Empire in West Africa in the thirteenth century, tracing his path from a childhood marked by a physical disability and mockery at court, through exile with his mother, to his eventual return and victory over the rival sorcerer king Sumaoro Kante at the battle of Kirina. The narrative treats Sundiata's early weakness as preparation rather than simple misfortune, a hero whose eventual strength is framed as earned through hardship and supported by prophecy given before his birth.
The epic is not only a heroic biography but a founding charter for the Mali Empire and the Malinke people, explaining the origins of ruling lineages, alliances between founding clans, and the customs a listening audience would have recognized as still shaping their own social world. Later episodes describe Sundiata's consolidation of power and the organization of his empire, giving the epic a dual character as both adventure narrative and a kind of oral constitutional history.
The epic also gives an origin account for the Keita dynasty's claim to rule, tracing Sundiata's ancestry back through named forebears, and later Malian rulers and their courts continued to invoke this genealogy for centuries after the events the epic narrates, which is part of why griots historically served ruling families directly rather than performing only for general audiences.