PERIMETERS, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States Agency for International Development, Quote:"Soninke society is not egalitarian, but rather is stratified into castes. At the top there is the noble or hore caste. The hore consist of debeaumme, nyinvaaumme, and the marabouts or religious leaders. The power of the marabouts is less than that of other nobles. Next are the artisan castes or nyakhamala. ..."; According to the anthropologist Tal Tamari, the Soninke society became highly stratified after the thirteenth century. The Soninke strata have included a free category called Horro or Horon, a caste system category called Namaxala or Nyaxamalo, and slaves called Komo. In the Jaara subgroup of the Soninke people, the nobility called Tunkanlenmu was another strata.Mamadou Lamine Diawara (1990), La Graine de la Parole: dimension sociale et politique des traditions orales du royaume de Jaara (Mali) du XVème au milieu du XIXème siècle, volume 92, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, pages 35-37, 41-45 The slaves were the largest strata, one at the bottom among the Soninke like other West African ethnic groups, and constituted up to half of the population. The slaves among the Soninke people were hierarchically arranged into three strata. The village slaves were a privileged servile group who lived apart from the village and took orders from the village chief. The domestic slaves lived in with a family and could not be sold. The lowest level among slaves were the trade slaves who could be bought and sold. With time, each of these strata became endogamous, states Daniel Littlefield – a professor of History. Above the slaves were the castes of Soninke, which too were hereditary, endogamous and had an embedded hierarchical status. They included, for example, the garanke (leather workers) below the fune (bard), the fune below the gesere or jeli (griots, singers), the jeli below the tage or numu (smiths, pottery workers). Susu people The Susu people are a West African ethnic group, one of the Mandé peoples living primarily in Guinea. Influential in Guinea, smaller communities of Susu people are also found in the neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. The Susu are a patrilineal society, predominantly Muslim, who favor endogamous cross-cousin marriages with polygynous households common. They have a caste system like all Manding-speaking peoples of West Africa, where the artisans such as smiths, carpenters, musicians, jewelers and leatherworkers are separate castes, and believed to have descended from the medieval era slavery.