Corpus of Early Accounts of the Sunjata Epic 1889 to 1959

The Sunjata epic is a foundational oral narrative for Manding populations of West Africa and claims to describe the origins of the famed medieval empire of Mali. It is both a historical source and an artistic creation of West African oral specialists, the griots (jèliw). Despite its importance, the epic is known to Anglophone non-specialists only through a handful of accounts published after 1960. Corpus of Early Accounts of the Sunjata Epic, 1889-1959 presents twenty understudied versions of the epic, recorded during the colonial period, that are not easily accessible. Previously published in French and German colonial periodicals, here these sources are translated into English, each with a scholarly introduction, allowing the reader to appreciate each version’s context and purpose.

Stephen Bulman, Head of Academic Standards & Quality, Lancaster University, Stephen Belcher, Independent Scholar, Valentin Vydrin, Professor of Manding, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

Stephen Bulman wrote a Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham on written versions of the Sunjata oral tradition and has researched and published on Manding oral traditions, including (with Valentin Vydrine), The Epic of Sumanguru Kante (Brill, 2017) based on fieldwork in Mali. He works in administration at Lancaster University.

Stephen Belcher graduated from Brown University in 1985. He was a member of the Peace Corps in Mauritania, and taught at Penn State. He was the editor of Mande Studies until 2010. He is now retired and mixing family history with African studies.

Valentin Vydrin wrote a Ph.D. at the Leningrad State University on Looma language (Southwestern Mande group) in 1987, and a habilitation thesis at the St. Petersburg State University (Russia) on comparative studies of Mande in 2001. He has worked at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg and taught Manding languages at the St. Petersburg State University. Since 2010, he is professor of Manding at INALCO, Paris.