Our New Husbands Are Here

1: Origins: The Founding of Baté, 1650–1750

23 1w Origins The Founding of Baté, 1650–1750 When I interviewed people in the Milo River Valley about the origins of the state of Baté, the men and women with whom I spoke told stories about people and about the households that they built. Many of these stories feature dramatic turning points, such as murderous men who try to kill their half-brother, and they are also often laced with references to preternatural powers, such as those possessed by one of Baté’s founders, a woman named Maramagbe Kaba, who could see into the future. The characters who fill these narratives—scholarly Muslims, loyal younger brothers, jealous co-wives, and elderly mothers— do not seem, at first glance, to be the typical protagonists of state formation. Indeed, a more conventional approach to political history would require that these oral histories be dissected to carve out specific information about chiefs and systems of rule. But approaching household-making and state-making as linked processes opens up a broad new interpretive lens with which to read these local historical narratives. That lens shows that, in the Milo River Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, household history is state history. Stories about sibling rivalries, religious differences, and deviant wives—and the idealized gender roles that are woven through them—present, in effect, an account of the workings of power and politics in the nascent state of Baté. This chapter investigates how stories about households tell the history of statecraft in the Milo River Valley. In the earliest years of the state, male elites used their households as the building blocks for the state, which rendered them vulnerable to their gender, marital, and generational dynamics. The close relationship between household-making and state-making meant that the social sphere and the political sphere overlapped and that, as a result, 24 w Origins women could use their domestic position to affect political processes. This shared household-and-state history furthermore offers a prism on processes of change that affected West Africa more broadly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Baté’s history illuminates the rich history of Islam in West Africa, for the Muslims who settled in the Milo River Valley were followers of a particular pacifist religious tradition, Suwarian Islam. Baté’s origins also expose wider migration patterns, as West African peoples responded to environmental pressures and the draw and dangers of an expanding Atlantic economy. Finally, in its internal organization and external relations, the state of Baté provides a counterpoint to other, better-studied African states of this era, many of which sat closer to the coast and engaged in warfare and captivity to feed the demand for slaves along the Atlantic Coast. The oral narratives that pertain to this era focus on individuals who are alleged to have lived over three hundred years ago.1 Some critics may contend that these narratives about people and households are not reliable historical sources. It is clear that the accounts that are told today in the twenty-first century about Baté’s roots are rife with hyperbole and marked by didactic overtones. The individuals who crop up in the oral record are no doubt apocryphal, and they certainly present neat condensations of processes of historical change that were more complex and protracted than the way in which they are represented in the oral record. But close analysis reveals that these origin myths offer a compelling account of the emergence of the state, or jamana, of Baté, as well as a view on how households gave rise to political formations. suwarian islam There are many versions of Baté’s origin stories told today, and there is often considerable variation among them. But they often start at a point far from the Milo River Valley, with a narrative about a Muslim cleric who lived in Jafunu, an area near the Sahara that is dominated by people of the Serakhullé ethnicity. The story of Kaba Laye pinpoints the geographic region from which Baté’s founders came; it also establishes their religious orientation. This story furthermore outlines a model of masculinity that becomes firmly associated with the future state and the households that stood at its core. The synopsis below is based on accounts presented by Dyarba Laye Kaba and Al Hajj Sitam Kaba, two elders resident in the towns of Kankan and Baté-Nafadie, respectively. Kaba Laye lived in Jafunu. He was a devout and educated Muslim , dedicated to his studies and to his teacher...