At a time when African founding narratives struggle to be heard amid the tumult of global history, the Mande Charter (proclaimed in the 13th century according to oral tradition) returns like an ancient breath with modern resonance. A mythical text or a political manifesto? From Kouroukan Fouga to the streets of Kayes, and through the halls of UNESCO, Nofi explores the impact of a pledge that upheld human dignity long before the Enlightenment. Between symbolic exaltation and academic controversy, this is a critical dive into what some are already calling “the first declaration of human rights.”
In the shadow of Kouroukan Fouga: a buried word
They say it all began with a vow, spoken with hands full of dust and future.
At the foot of an old baobab, somewhere between Kangaba and the edges of the savannah, a griot weaves his words like spells. His voice, punctuated by the sway of his body and the beat of a soft drum, travels through the twilight air. Around him, the wind lifts the red earth, mixing scents of millet, woodfire, and memory.
The man speaks—or rather sings. He invokes the name of Sundiata Keita, the lame child who became king of kings. The one believed doomed to crawl, yet who made thrones kneel. He tells how, in the wake of victory over Soumaoro Kanté, the peoples of Mande gathered on the plain of Kouroukan Fouga. There, between the joined hands of the elders and the crossed arrows of hunters, words were spoken—not a decree, not a law carved in stone, but a breath borne by oral tradition: a charter.
It is said that this charter abolished slavery. That it affirmed human dignity. That it banned hunger, slave raids, and contempt for the weak. That it recognized each person’s right to self-mastery, to freedom of action, and to the fruits of their labor. A manifesto of equality, ahead of its time—long before the Enlightenment, before 1789, before the Universal Declaration.
But what is the value of ancient words in a modern world? Can an unwritten charter still speak to us, trouble us, guide us? Can we believe that an African empire in the 13th century envisioned human rights—not as an invention, but as a given?
In the shadow of the baobab, the griot keeps speaking. And in each syllable, something unheard pulses through the centuries: a whisper of justice murmured in the dust.
Political genesis of an oral memory
There is no parchment. No royal seal. No yellowed manuscript found in a monastery basement. What we call the “Mande Charter” is neither a notarized deed nor a constitution in the Western sense. It is a memory carried by breath. A text of fire, passed from throat to throat, from griot to griot, like an ember rekindled with each generation.
The founding scene, too, is sung more than written. Kouroukan Fouga, the year 1236. Sundiata Keita, crowned by his victory over the sorcerer-king Soumaoro, summons the peoples of Mande. On that vast plain turned agora, gather clan chiefs, hunters, blacksmiths, and elders—all pillars of a society still wounded by years of war. That day, among the applause of the winds and the vigilance of the ancestors, is spoken what would later be remembered as a charter: forty-four articles, they say, outlining the framework of a society built not on conquest but on covenant.
The words strike hard—simple and radical:
“Hunger is not a good thing, nor is slavery.”
This is the line repeated most often. It snaps like a sentence and rises like a prophecy. One hears in it the cry of those once shackled, and the promise of those who refuse to let the cycle of contempt begin again.
This text is anything but neutral. It draws lines: against slave raids, against the deprivation of freedom, against the dehumanization of one’s fellow. It also asserts subtle rights—almost inaudible if one isn’t paying attention: the right to speak, the right to move, the right to own the fruit of one’s labor. Nothing codified in legal terms, but everything that forms the backbone of a just society.
To some, this charter is a late fiction, rewritten through the lens of modern ideals. To others, it is proof that Africa never waited for the Enlightenment to think about law, dignity, and peace.
Caught between these two views remains one certainty: in a world shaped by colonial domination and the erasure of African knowledge, this resurrected word disturbs. It disturbs because it suggests that African peoples were not only part of history but also part of political thought. And that this thought, passed down without pen or paper, already carried within it the seeds of universal justice.
What if the first declaration of human rights was african?
What if everything we thought we knew about the origin of human rights needed to be rethought? What if the griot’s chant preceded the printing presses of Paris? What if the Mandinka word had whispered “equality” before the revolutionaries of 1789 inked it onto parchment?
The idea is unsettling—it stirs up certainties. Yet it is gradually gaining ground, not as an absolute historical truth, but as a credible, even poetic, possibility.
The Mande Charter, proclaimed in 1236, affirms principles that would reappear more than five centuries later in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The right to life, the condemnation of slavery, the freedom to dispose of one’s labor, respect for others—these ideas were perhaps not born in French parliament halls, but on the lands of Mande, amid the sound of calabashes and the rumble of the djembe.
It would be naïve to claim that the Mandinka Charter is legally equivalent to European declarations. But it would be equally false to dismiss it as mere myth. In the article on hunger and slavery, in the hunters’ oath calling for fraternity and justice, in the idea that every life is a life, one senses a radically human ethic. A sovereignty founded not on divine right or class domination, but on interdependence and mutual recognition.
In this tradition, ownership of one’s labor is not a bourgeois abstraction; it is a social fact. The individual is not alone—they are responsible for their family, their land, their word. And civil peace is not imposed from above; it is the fruit of a balance between duties and rights, memory and future.
In today’s Africa—marked by inequality, ethnic conflict, and the lingering shadow of hereditary slavery—these ancient words ring strangely like rallying cries. They remind us that universal values do not have a single center, that they can emerge from a griot’s assembly just as well as from a gas-lit parliamentary chamber.
This text is a prayer spoken aloud against erasure. And that is what disturbs: the defeated’s ability to pass on an ideal.
For in this charter, the point is not merely to brandish a glorious past—but to reclaim a future. A way to say that Afrofuturism begins not in fictional galaxies but in the folds of our memories.
The controversy of origins
At first glance, the Mande Charter seems like a glorious relic—a testament to precolonial Africa’s political genius. But behind this radiant image smolder the embers of controversy, stoked by the fiercest academic debates. For the question haunting historians is not so much what the charter says, but what it truly is.
For Jean-Loup Amselle, a renowned anthropologist, and Francis Simonis, a historian at Aix-Marseille University, the matter is clear: the Mande Charter is a modern reconstruction. According to them, it’s the product of a desire to provide Africa with an ancestral version of human rights—a gesture more driven by Afrocentric ideology than historical rigor. Simonis goes further, describing the charter’s “invention” in the archaeological sense: a creation dating from 1998, during a workshop in Kankan, Guinea, where various oral versions were merged to produce a unified text.
The main criticism? The lack of medieval written sources, the variability of oral accounts, and the confusion between the 1222 Hunters’ Oath and the 1236 Kouroukan Fouga Charter. In their eyes, UNESCO made a mistake by classifying the charter as intangible cultural heritage without verifying its scientific credibility.
But to this positivist approach, others offer a different vision, more grounded in African realities. For Éric Jolly and Noël Sanou, specialists in orality and Mandinka culture, the charter is not an invention but a transformation. Like any oral text, it evolves, adapts, updates—without ceasing to be authentic. In African societies, living speech holds archival value. The griot is both memory and mediator, and the narrative doesn’t lie: it expresses social truth, not frozen chronology.
The debate is not merely historical—it is profoundly ethical. In 2009, when UNESCO listed the Mande Charter as world heritage, it chose to recognize the legitimacy of an African narrative. But this choice raises a profound question: must Africa prove its past with manuscripts to be credible? Must the written always trump the oral for a text to enter collective global memory?
Ultimately, the controversy reveals a deeper rift: between two conceptions of truth. One, cold and factual, demands tangible evidence. The other, more intuitive, sees in the Charter a powerful symbol—a declaration of principles rooted in African thought. And between these two fires, one question remains: is historical truth more valuable than symbolic truth?
Perhaps, at times, it is collective fictions that carry the greatest dreams of freedom.
Contemporary Mali and its contradictions
It is invoked with fervor during national commemorations. It adorns educational posters, quoted in presidential speeches as a source of pride. And yet, in today’s Mali, the Mande Charter sometimes resembles a cracked mirror. It reflects as much as it distorts. It illuminates ideals it has failed to bring to life.
Because behind the official celebrations lies another reality—stubborn, brutal, unbearable. That of descent-based slavery, still present in several regions of the country, particularly among the Soninke. Women barred from marriage, children denied education, families stigmatized for being “of servile birth.” In 2021, at least twenty people were imprisoned for… demanding the end of this ancestral social hierarchy. This is not legend. It is an open wound in a republic that claims to uphold an anti-slavery charter eight centuries old.
To these contradictions are added ethnic tensions, community militias, land conflicts, and a crisis of legitimacy for the central state. How can we speak of peace, justice, and solidarity—the very words of Kouroukan Fouga—when the social fabric itself is torn?
A young activist from Kayes, interviewed in a BBC report, put it with biting irony:
“They talk to us about Sundiata… but in my village, the jôn don’t vote.”
His words snap like a reality check. They highlight the gap between founding myth and daily life, between promise and lived experience.
So can an ancient text be reactivated as a modern emancipation project? Can we read the Mande Charter not as a relic, but as a manifesto? That is the challenge. Not to sanctify a glorious past—but to seize it to transform the present. To make it not a museum piece, but a political matrix. A compass in contemporary storms.
What remains is this imperative: that the principles proclaimed at Kouroukan Fouga serve not to conceal injustice, but to combat it. That the griot’s words be not empty incantation, but a call to action. In short: to make the charter not a myth that lulls us to sleep, but a truth that disturbs—and drives us to act.
What the Mande still tells us
Twilight has returned. The old griot is still there, beneath the same baobab, his calloused hands resting on his ngoni. His voice, rough and slow, fades into the falling night. He hasn’t moved, but the world around him wavers. Phones record, children listen half-heartedly, elders nod—and yet something in the air remains solemn.
He whispers one last verse, as one might close a book without really ending it:
“The word I spoke, I received. Let whoever hears it know that it does not belong to me. It comes from far away, and goes farther still.”
The Mande Charter may not prove anything. It has no codex, no seal, no date carved in stone. It floats between centuries, like an invisible papyrus. But what it affirms—human dignity, solidarity as law, freedom as foundation—touches the essential. It dreams everything. And perhaps that is its strength: it does not impose—it inspires.
In a world where dominant narratives smother marginalized voices, in an Africa too often seen by others before hearing itself, the Mande Charter whispers a counter-narrative. It invites us to think of history not as a European monopoly but as a polyphony where Africa is not only an actor—but also an author.
For ultimately, this text is not meant to be read in the silence of a library. It is meant to be spoken, echoed, reinvented—and above all, lived.
In every word of this charter breathes an urgency: the urgency to believe that another African history is possible—and perhaps, already written.
Sources and references
- La Charte du Mandé et autres traditions du Mali, ed. Albin Michel, 2003
- Djibril Tamsir Niane, Sunjata ou l’épopée mandingue, Présence Africaine, 1960
- CELTHO, La Charte de Kurukan Fuga. Aux sources d’une pensée politique en Afrique, L’Harmattan, 2008
- Éric Jolly, “L’épopée en contexte,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2010/4
- Noël Sanou, “La Charte du Mandé : reconfigurations textuelles et mémorielles,” Afroglobe, 2021
- Francis Simonis, “Le griot, l’historien, le chasseur et l’Unesco,” Ultramarines, No. 28, 2015
- UNESCO, “La Charte du Mandén, proclamée à Kouroukan Fouga,” 2009
- UNHCR, “Slavery by descent in Mali must be criminalised,” press release, May 23, 2023
- Al Jazeera, “Slavery is alive in Mali and continues to wreak havoc on lives,” October 29, 2021
Table of contents
- In the Shadow of Kouroukan Fouga: A Buried Word
- Political Genesis of an Oral Memory
- What If the First Declaration of Human Rights Was African?
- The Controversy of Origins
- Contemporary Mali and Its Contradictions
- What the Mande Still Tells Us
- Sources and References
