Peoples of Upper Guinea
The Malinké
The Malinké are one of the three most important groups among the cluster of linguistically and culturally related people called Manding by English speakers and Mandingue by French speakers. They are distributed among several West African countries in an arc of some 800 miles from the mouth of the Gambia River in the northwest to the interior of the Ivory Coast in the southeast. The other two groups are the Bambara, who live mainly in Mali, and the Dyoula, who are known as traders over a large part of West Africa and are scattered in Guinea among the Malinké and the forest peoples.
The ancestors of almost all Manding groups were once united in the traditional heartland known as Mandé or Mandin on the upper Niger River between Bamako and Siguiri. The Malinké are said to have been in Guinea as early as the thirteenth century. Most Malinké live in Upper Guinea. The largest concentrations are in the administrative regions of Kankan, Siguiri, and Kouroussa, where such old clan names as Keita, Camara, Traoré, and Kourouma still predominate. The Malinké are not only cultivators but also traders and as such have profited from cultural contacts. Their adaptability and their strong social structure led to their hegemony over other peoples or to the absorption of smaller ethnic groups who live close to them. They are gradually spreading into the Forest Region to the south, where their language is becoming a lingua franca.
The Malinké are almost all Muslims, but their earlier religious practices, centering on ancestor cults and a supernatural relationship to the land, persist. The Maninka-Mory, a Malinké subgroup centered in the Kankan area, are perhaps the most Islamized of all Malinké groups and are known as tradesmen and religious functionaries. Their name for other Malinké — Sounounké — means pagan, perhaps dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Maninka-Mory led a religious revival in the area. Although their speech is not distinctive, the names of some of their villages (such as Karfarmoria, Tassiliman, Fodecariah, and Foussé) and their principal clan names (Cissé, Diakité, Diane, and Kaba) support their claim of having been originally part of the Soninké (Sarakollé or Sissé), a Mandé-speaking people from the western Sudan.
The Ouassoulounké
The Ouassoulounké (Wasulunka) live west of Kankan in the southeastern part of Upper Guinea on both sides of the Mali border. Although they are culturally akin to the Malinké and speak their language, they consider themselves a separate ethnic group. Research indicated that they are the Peul who were conquered by Samory Touré and that they carved out a small principality for themselves after his defeat in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They still have Peul patronymic names, such as Diallo, Sidi Bey, and Sangaré.
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