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ORAL TRADITION, MASCULINITY, AND STATECRAFT IN KANKAN (GUINEA)

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. ) lifestyle in the early nineteenth century: ‘a variety of forces masculinized statecraft from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century’ (p. ). Osborn illustrates this pacifism by emphasizing the scholasticism of the male Muslim elite. She thus neglects (although she does mention it once on p. ) 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 ownMuslim 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 . 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’: