ABSTRACT

On constructing the kafu's nucleus, Bamako town—as opposed to the kafu—was built around four kindaw, or city quarters, facing north-north-west and east-southeast. Differing architectural styles marked each kin daws' ethnic identity. A rocky landscape, Bamako's Mande-hinterland curved westward toward the Manding Mountains incorporating the Beledugu to the northwest, a mass of undulating protrusions extending across differentiated ecocultural systems toward the drier savanna. Like the Nile, interannual flooding contributed to the earliest material culture-agglomerations of the Inland Niger Delta and Jenne-Timbuktu regions, long before the trans-Saharan trade developed toward the ninth and tenth centuries. Bamana in-migrants also brought new elaborations on a state identity based on war, slaves, market economies, and the jo cult and rituals. Imaging northerners as Islamized elites, the paradigm was really an internal construct to promote a northern identity in relation to the Other: the "pagan" and "animist Bambara".