According to the Malinke oral epic tradition, Sundiata Keita led a coalition of small kingdoms to victory over Soumaoro Kanté of the Sosso kingdom near the town of Kirina. The triumph established the Mali Empire, which would grow to control the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade and produce, a century later, the fabulously wealthy ruler Mansa Musa.
The story of Sundiata Keita comes down through the griots, West Africa's hereditary oral historians, in an epic recited and embellished over generations, which makes pinning an exact date a genuinely difficult exercise for historians who nonetheless place the decisive Battle of Kirina in this general period of the 1230s.
According to the epic, Sundiata was a sickly child, unable to walk until well past the normal age, mocked by rivals as the "crawling king." Exiled from his homeland, he eventually returned to unite a coalition of small Mandinka kingdoms against the Sosso ruler Soumaoro Kanté, a figure the oral tradition paints as a tyrannical sorcerer-king wielding supernatural powers. Their showdown at Kirina, near the modern border of Mali and Guinea, became the founding myth of one of Africa's great medieval empires.
The Mali Empire Sundiata founded would eventually stretch from the Atlantic coast deep into the Sahel, controlling gold mines and trans-Saharan caravan routes that made it fantastically rich. A century later, his descendant Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca, reportedly distributing so much gold along the way that he temporarily crashed regional currencies, would make Mali legendary as far away as medieval Europe.
Key people: Sundiata Keita, Soumaoro Kanté