4.4.3. INTERPRETING LEGENDS AND DOCUMENTS

RAIDERS AND POWERFUL MERCHANTS UNITE

Accounts of Nambolosse's death show how stories are used to strengthen points of view.  

• A French report

When demands that a Hausa arms and slave dealer be yielded up to him, some traders leave Bokhala to found Dabakakoro ("old Dabakala"). Then he seizes the inheritance of a Soninke who has died on his lands, "though his heirs were known." Outraged, a Dyula chief* and his men attack Bokhala when Nambolosse's warriors have left to intercept them by another route. They burn him alive in his hut.

-- Dakar archives, 1878

*Suggests a tie between the most dynamic local interests and the traders, as shown by the Senoufo producers who back Samori later.

• The Muslim version, by raiders' descendants

There is no mention of the Dyula chief. Defendants of the disinherited Soninke call in "Mori," the Hausa chief of Marabadiassa, who in the 1870's and 1880's raids in the west. He arrives in Bokhala when Nambolossé's men are gone. They set fire to his hut and when he leaves it, slaughter him and burn his corpse on a prong, "like a roast." 

-- Bakari Coulibali, imam of Darhala

• The animist version, by Senufo descendants

Nambolosse does not die, but chases Mori out of Djimini. He would have caught him except that Mori has an excellent horse, which vanishes and reappears five kilometers farther away. On his flight from Djimini he meets Samory and says, "Watch out for Djimini. There are real men there." Later Samory takes revenge for Mori's defeat: It is he who kills Nambolosse

Muslim and animist Senufo versions reveal lasting antagonism between the two groups, whose villages are separate.

• Burning Nambolosse "like a roast" indicates Muslim contempt for animists, which my teen-aged interpreter expressed by yelling insults at them from the window of a car. (I told him I'd fire him if he did it again, and he didn't.)

• "Watch out for Djimini: There are real men there" expresses animist resistance to the Muslims and pride.

The animist version also shows Mori foreshadowing Samory (please continue). Raiders wrack this part at least of the northeastern Ivory Coast: After about 1870, at least four others terrify populations of the northern Ivory Coast. A record in the archives mentions one of them, Vakuba Ture who "raids in the east with his sons."

-- Abidjan archives for the Bondoukou region (east of Djimini)

# # #

Except for that phrase and the paragraph on Nambolosse, the records in the Paris or Abidjan mention only raiders they confront. 

Records in general 

leave out what  narrators think

does not concern them.

End of this section.

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Next section,

V.5.

Commercial forces win, then crumble