Maninka

Maninka belongs to the Manding group of Mande languages, spoken across Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone in a chain of closely related varieties that speakers usually treat as one language with regional accents rather than as several languages. Its religious importance rests less on a written scripture than on a profession. The jeliw, the hereditary specialists English usually calls griots, are the custodians of genealogy, praise, historical narrative and the etiquette of formal speech, and their material is transmitted in Maninka within named lineages, of which the Kouyate and the Diabate are the best known.

The Sundiata epic, the account of the founder of the Mali empire, is their central work, and the version most read outside West Africa was set down from the recitation of Mamadou Kouyate. A jeli is not simply a performer. The office carries obligations of mediation and of restraint, the right to say to a patron what nobody else may say, and a corresponding bar on certain kinds of work, and the epic itself narrates the origin of the bond between the jeli lineages and the noble ones. Islam has been present in the Manding world for many centuries and the epic carries a layer of Muslim reference over an older stratum, so a recitation can invoke the pilgrimage of a Mali emperor in one line and a hunter's power in the next without treating the two as a contradiction.

Maninka has been written in three systems and each carries a different claim. Arabic script adapted for the language, the practice generally called Ajami in West Africa, has been used for centuries for correspondence, amulets, legal instruments and devotional verse, and it is bound up with the authority of Muslim clerical families.

The Latin alphabet arrived with colonial administration and mission printing and is the standard of state literacy work in Guinea and Mali today. The third is N'Ko, a script devised in 1949 by Souleymane Kante of Kankan, written from right to left, with letters shaped to fit Manding phonology and a full set of tone marks; Kante created it as a direct answer to the claim that African languages had no writing of their own, and it has since acquired newspapers, a body of translated and original literature, and in some circles a cultural and religious movement around it.

None of the three has displaced the others. The point of interest for this atlas is that the material which matters most in Maninka, the epic and the praise repertoire, is exactly the material that resists being written at all, because a recitation is shaped to the occasion, the patron and the audience in front of the speaker, and a printed text fixes one performance as though it were the work itself.