The Makings of a Classic: Literary Precursors, Textual Strategies, and Political Purposes in Niane’s Soundjata

More than sixty years after its publication, Niane’s Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue remains a standard and popular account of the Manding oral epic. This article seeks to determine the causes of its longevity through a comparison with other Sunjata narratives that Africans published in the period 1930–1960. Factors identified include the narrative’s length, format as a single volume, and claim to the high-status literary genre of epic, alongside the characterization of the hero and a relatively weak focus on women, sexual politics, and the supernatural. New information on the range of sources Niane employed is used to counter widely held assumptions on the nature of the book as a translation or transcription, and to support the hypothesis that Niane sought to model complex aspects of traditional African oral sapience through his book.