Mane people

The Manneh were in origin Mandé [nyancho jong kende falla] soldiers who invaded the western coast of Africa from the east during the first half of the sixteenth century. There is really no room for doubt as to their origin, from the evidence of their dress and weapons (which were observed at the time by Europeans), their language, as well as from the evidence of Mane tradition, recorded in writing about 1625.

Origin

The widest deployment of political and economic power in the Sudan before the seventeenth century was undoubtedly that stemming from Mandé initiative in the successive empires of Ghana and Mali (and to some extent of Songhai also). This had direct political consequences in the lands immediately to the west and south of the Mandé heartland around the upper reaches of the Niger and Senegal rivers. One result was the Fulani dispersion eastward past the farthest reaches of Mandé influence, and the other was the settlement of Mandé-speakers along the West Atlantic coast.

Expansion

Mandé-speakers moved west and south of their homeland as traders and conquerors. In the case of traders, an important incentive was probably access to the supplies of salt obtainable from the coast. This move towards the coastlands led to a number of Mandé pioneers carving out kingdoms for themselves in emulation of the major model of Mali. There seem to have been two major axes for the Mandé expansion. One was along the line of the river Gambia, a most useful artery for trade, which rises within a few miles of the sources of the Faleme, one of the major tributaries of the Senegal, whose head-waters were firmly in Mande occupation. The other, separated from the Gambia by the Fouta Djallon massif which the Fulani were occupying, ran south into modern Sierra Leone close by the Susu settlement. In both areas, political organizations were established under rulers called farimas. Initially these seem often to have paid tribute to Mali, and even after the decline of the great Mali power in the later fifteenth century, they maintained some idea of its ultimate supremacy.

Conquest

A final Mandé contribution to the ethnic and political geography of the West Atlantic lands came when these were invaded from the east during the first half of the sixteenth century by marauding bands of conquerors called the Manneh. There is really no room for doubt, from the evidence of their dress and weapons (which were observed at the time by Europeans), as well as from the evidence of their language, that the Mane were in origin Mandé soldiers. But how they came to be advancing parallel to the coast from the east, is another matter. External sources cannot take them back further than about the middle of the Liberian coastline. But there is a Mane tradition, recorded in writing about 1625, to the effect that they first reached the coast close by a Portuguese fortress. This, it seems, can only have been on the Gold Coast (i.e. the coast of modern Ghana) some 600 miles further east. There is no corroboration for this either in Portuguese records (but these are notoriously defective for the period), or in the surviving traditions of modern Ghanaian peoples. But in view of what will be said shortly about Mandé connections with the Gold Coast, it would be by no means impossible for a Mandé military contingent to have got there over the trade roads leading south-east from Jenne. Its decision to return home westwards along the coast could conceivably have been in some way connected with the rise of Songhai military power along the middle Niger. Since there is certainly some evidence that Mandé as far west as the Gambia knew about other Mandé trading activities in the Gold Coast hinterland, such a decision need not have been such a step into the unknown as might have been supposed.

By about the 1540s the Manneh [nyancho jong kende falla] were advancing westwards parallel to the coastline of modern Liberia, fighting in turn with each tribal group that they came across. They were almost invariably successful. Following each victory, some of them settled down as overlords of a new petty state, while others were enabled to sweep up in their train some of the local people as auxiliaries (called Sumbas) and, thus reinforced, to continue to further victories further west still. The Mane advance was really only halted when, in the north-west of what is now Sierra Leone, they came up against the Susu, like themselves a Mandé people, and possessing similar weapons, military organization and tactics.

Legacy

The end result of the Manneh conquests was considerably to complicate the ethnic situation in the southern and south-eastern borderland of West Atlantic territory. It seems to have been these conquests which established the Mandé-speaking Mende as the dominant stock of southern Sierra Leone. Further north, the Loko are also Mandé-speaking, but there is reason to believe that their ethnic base was originally of ‘West Atlantic’ origin. Their neighbors, the Temne, though speaking a West Atlantic language, seem to have an aristocracy of Mane origin, and it seems that some chieftaincies among the Kru, the dominant stock of much of modern Liberia, may have arisen the same way.

Mandé influence in lands to the east of Liberia, in the modern republics of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, seems to have been primarily commercial in intent, though, as the speculation about the early history of the Manneh may have already suggested, this could and did occasion considerable consequences in the political sphere. It was connected with the expansion of the specialized class of Muslim Mandé traders called the Dyula, who seem in origin to have been connected with, if not identical with, the Soninke Wangara gold traders.