ABSTRACT
Four principal historical topics engage the interest of the jeliw (professional bards) who have been responsible for Mande oral tradition through the centuries. The most conspicuous concerns are kinship, power and authority, the physical landscape, and spirituality. These are snugly interwoven in the oral discourse to illustrate the fabric of Mande history and culture according to those who tell the story. Within the vast corpus of Mande oral narrative that includes several epic traditions, the collective discourse now usually identified in the non-Mande world by the name of its central character Sun jata, provides a wealth of information on Mande views of the predominant themes, which are, in fact, inseparable. Extremely complex kinship patterns and mores combine with issues of power and authority to include perceptions of the ancestors as larger-than-life builders of state and society, pride of descent from those heroes of the distant past, and shaping of cultural values based on the ancestors' deeds, all of which are bound together with a pervasive spiritual consciousness.
