46 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



lighter colour. They are also distinguished by their industrious 

 habits and generally higher culture, being rivalled by few as 

 skilled tillers of the soil, weavers, and workers in iron and copper. 

 They thus hold much the same social position in the west that 

 the Hausas do in the central region beyond the Niger, and 

 the French authorities think that "they are destined to take 

 a position of ever increasing importance in the pacified Sudan 

 of the future 1 ." 



Thus history brings about its revenges, for the Mandingans 

 proper of the Kong plateau may fairly claim, despite their late 

 servitude to the Fulah conquerors and their present ready accept- 

 ance of French rule, to be a historical people with a not inglorious 

 record of over 1000 years, as founders of the two great empires of 

 Melle and Guine, and of the more recent states of Moasina, 

 Bambara, Kaarta, Kong, and others about the water-parting be- 

 tween the headstreams of the Niger, and the rivers flowing south 

 to the Gulf of Guinea. Here is the district of Handing, which is 

 the original home of the Manding'ke, i.e. " People of Handing," 

 as they are generally called, although Mande appears to be the 

 form used by themselves 2 . Here also was the famous city of 

 Hali or Melle, from which the Upper Niger group take the name 

 of MaWnke, in contradistinction to the SonVnke of the Senegal 



1 Dr E. T. Hamy, Les Races Negres in L? Anthropologie, 1897, p. 257 sq. 



2 " Chaque fois que j'ai demande avec intention a un Mande, ' Es-tu 

 Peul, Mossi, Dafina?' il me repondait invariablement, l je suis Mande.' 1 

 C'est pourquoi, dans le cours de ma relation, j'ai toujours designe ce peuple 

 par le nom de Maude, qui est son vrai nom." (Capt. Binger, Du Niger an 

 Golfe de Giiinee, 1892, Vol. n. p. 373.) At p. 375 this authority gives the 

 following subdivisions of the Mande family, named from their respective tenne 

 (idol, fetish, totem) : 



1 . Bamba, the crocodile : Bauiuiana, not Bambara, which means kafir or 

 infidel, and is applied only to the non-Moslem Mande groups. 



2. Mali, the hippopotamus: Maltuke", including the Kagoros and the 

 Tagwas. 



3. Sama, the elephant : Sama''nke. 



4. Sa, the snake : Sa-mokho. 



Of each there are several sub-groups, while the surrounding peoples call 

 them all collectively Wakore, Wangara, Sakhersi, and especially Diula. 

 Attention to this point will save the reader much confusion in consulting 

 Earth, Caillie, and other early books of travel. 



