Emily Osborn has written a highly accessible and well composed social and political history of Kankan covering the period up to the First World War. She explores an impressive variety of sources: oral history, local manuscripts, and archival texts. This work is an important contribution to debates in the social history of West Africa and to gender studies. This review will use her book as an occasion to revisit important questions about the use of oral traditions as sources.
The strength of the book lies in Osborne's decision to set a time frame of several centuries. This longer timeframe invites questions we might otherwise fail to ask. The focus on women entails reading traditional sources ‘against the grain’. Her study dramatically demonstrates the absence of women in the documentation of social and political processes, thus revealing the masculine character of politics in Kankan. I have, however, some problems with Osborn's ‘grand narrative’ of an increasingly masculinized state.
Kankan's Muslim elite was Suwarian, which means that it did not preach jihad, as some other groups did in the nineteenth century. Osborn argues that this elite was forced, due to increasing warfare in West Africa, to abandon a ‘pacifist’ and ‘tolerant’ (p. 44) lifestyle in the early nineteenth century: ‘a variety of forces masculinized statecraft from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century’ (p. 183). Osborn illustrates this pacifism by emphasizing the scholasticism of the male Muslim elite. She thus neglects (although she does mention it once on p. 43) the importance of marital patterns in this part of West Africa: incoming Muslims as a group often occupied the social status of bride takers rather than bride givers. This reiterated the individual pattern through which a Muslim man might take a non-Muslim bride but could not give his own Muslim daughter to a pagan in marriage.
As Osborn explains, Baté, which was the political predecessor of the town of Kankan, only started to develop around 1800. Osborn uses oral traditions as historical evidence of the pacifism of Baté's elite in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The pacifist form of statecraft of Kankan's elite was based on an endogenous marriage system, which in her analysis allowed for ‘an inward looking state that avoided making enemies’:
Baté's elites gave traction to the principle of nabaya [‘welcoming’] by granting migrants plots of land on which to settle and by arranging marriages for them with local women. This practice, in which the newly arrived ‘stranger’ married into Baté's leading families put into reverse marital practices that are characteristic of Mande and many other groups in West Africa. … [I]t was through their new wives that male settlers gained access to the extended households that constituted the state. (p. 58)
According to oral tradition, the founder of Baté society was Abduharamane Kaba, who settled at the banks of the river Milo (p. 28). Seven years later his post-menopausal sister joined him. Abduharamane's son was able to claim a certain baobab tree, thus blessing his family with the leadership position. The chief of the area had failed to claim this baobab for his own people because his wife had not served him breakfast in time. The location of the baobab marks the first Kaba settlement (pp. 34–5). Osborn notes that some accounts characterize the chief's wife as ‘being from a different ethnicity or slave status’. She concludes from this that ‘This episode also underscores how the choices and comportment of a woman could create long-lasting political consequences, … the subtext of male anxiety that runs through these stories suggests that those gender and status differentials could also easily soften and collapse. It was possible, in other words, for an unruly woman or a recalcitrant slave to create a fundamental threat to the household and thus to the state’ (p. 48).
This reading is problematic. Such stories describe a political system; they are not evidence of a once peaceful and pacifist life in which women had some influence. Firstly, there is the issue of internal validity: these stories are composed around standard narrative themes, as Osborn mentions, and therefore there is no reason to treat the baobab story and the women's actions as data of different kinds. Secondly, there is the issue of external validity: as the state was under pressure in the first half of the nineteenth century, oral traditions should be studied in relation to the concerns of Kankan's Suwarian elite and to the question whether Kankan's elite could cope with this pressure by means of its particular marriage system. In my opinion, Osborn's interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not simply ‘optimistic’, (pp. 14–15), it is invalid. It not only lacks supporting data, which is a prerequisite for using oral traditions as sources to reconstruct the past. It also denies the golden rule of oral tradition research that in order to study the past, the point of departure should be the present.
Kankan's oral traditions have always depicted women as instruments in the elite's alliance politics – these are political myths by men, about men, and for men. There is no basis for Osborn's idea that marriage in precolonial Kankan was an institution that provided women with some prestige and agency, as they became part of a household, which, according to Osborn, was the basic unit of the state. I wonder whether a comparison with neighbouring polities would have prevented Osborn from describing this unique – but questionable – process of masculinization of society. I mention here Richard Roberts work on Kankan's neighbouring warrior states and Mahir Şaul's study of the Watara war houses. In my view, Osborn has written a book that dramatically demonstrates the marginal position of women in the entire period of its analysis and which documents how Kankan's elite voiced the political tension it found itself facing in the nineteenth century.
