Sosso Empire

The Sosso Empire, also written Soso or Susu and sometimes called Kaniaga, was a West African kingdom of the early thirteenth century in what is now Mali. It began as a dependency of the Ghana Empire, overpowered its former masters around 1200, and reached its height under Soumaoro Kante, before his defeat by Sundiata Keita at the Battle of Kirina, traditionally dated to about 1235, opened the way for the Mali Empire.

Almost everything known about Sosso comes from oral history, kept and retold by Mande griots, and from written accounts built on it. The Epic of Sundiata, the best-known of these traditions, gives no dates; the chronology rests largely on Arabic and North African writers such as Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun, who wrote about a century or more later. Oral narratives tend to merge people and events from different periods, so there may have been several Kante kings whose deeds are now all credited to Soumaoro. A colonial-era account by Maurice Delafosse, describing a Diarisso dynasty that collapsed after 1180 through civil war and the rise of Soumaoro's supposed father, is now regarded by historians as stitched together from mixed traditions and invented details. Stephen Bühnen has proposed that Sosso lay in the Futa Jallon rather than in Kaniaga south of Wagadu, but this view has not won general acceptance.

According to the traditions, the Sosso began as one of the slave lineages of the king of Ghana, groups that rose to wealth and power by staffing the royal administration and army and governing provinces. Soumaoro himself is remembered as chief of the king's slaves and ruler of a province in the north of Beledougou. The name Sosso may come from a word for horse, reflecting the kingdom's control of the horse trade with its southern neighbours. Its capital, also called Sosso, survives as a town near Boron in Mali's Koulikoro Region.

Traditions from Sokolo and Goumbou describe a ruinous succession war within Ghana's ruling family that left it open to attack, and the nineteenth-century explorer Heinrich Barth dated Soumaoro's takeover to about 1203. A letter sent in 1199 by the Almohad governor at Sijilmasa to the king in Ghana, which mentions a difference of faith, may reflect the rise of the non-Muslim Sosso. Soumaoro went on to conquer neighbouring lands and to subdue the Mandinka chiefdoms to the south, which held the rich gold fields of Bure. Oral history remembers four great towns besides the capital, among them Kukuba, his fortress on a cliff above Bamako, now the site of Mali's presidential palace at Koulouba.

Mande traditions portray Soumaoro as harsh and cruel. Many Soninke are said to have fled his rule, and Muslim traders left the old Ghanaian centre of Koumbi Saleh for Djenne and Walata; he is said to have beheaded Muslim kings who opposed him. Other traditions honour him as a champion of the old African religion, and some credit him with inventing the balafon, a wooden xylophone, and a stringed instrument used by hunters and griots.

According to tradition, the Mandinka prince Sundiata Keita gathered a coalition of smaller states and defeated Sosso at the Battle of Kirina, around 1235, where Soumaoro was killed. Sundiata then destroyed the capital, and the Kaniaga region became part of the Mali Empire. Survivors are thought to have scattered westwards to Senegambia or southwards to the Futa Jallon, where their descendants are counted among the Susu and Yalunka of Guinea and its neighbours, though some of these movements may have been gradual and older than the empire.

Shown on our maps as the Sosso Kingdom, it appears on the 1200 map at the start of its brief ascendancy, in the lands of the fading Ghana Empire, in today's Mali.