ABSTRACT
Ubiquitous among French clerical and skilled hires in the Bamako region after 1883 were none other than youths identified in colonial records as "Marka," "Sarakolle," "Soninke," "Somono" and "Fulbe," whose identity aligned them with the Islamized northern paradigm. Within the episteme of the northern paradigm—i.e., the seventeenth-century intellectual categories and imagery designed to separate the "southern animist" from the "northern Islamic" identity—the "animist Bambara" became the Other, at first experientially, subsequently historically realized. Initially transferring French domestications of the northern paradigm and its naming criteria into European imaginations were voyagers such as Pere Labat, informing the world that the interior was full of Bambara whom Islamized Soninke, or Sarakolle traders, brought as slaves to French trading posts. And as teaching in the great Wagadu myth, the powerful jo rituals, and the sacred gold gave way to the secular French curriculum, the French expected that newly internalized values would render youthful minds more tractable.
