Le héros et son destin: Essai d'interprétation des traditions orales relatant la genèse d'un État du Soudan central, le Kabi, au XVIe siècle

The hero and his destiny: a tentative interpretation of oral traditions concerning the genesis of a Central Soudanic State (Kabi, 16th century).- History -- or rather ethnohistory -- as practised here is not a reconstitution of the past but an attempted restitution of the way in which the various participants in a contemporary polity conceive that past. We deal with a body of remembered facts whose "reality" is established through the multiplicity of evidence. Yet we also have to allow for the emergence of collective fantasies, which express norms and their transgression, as well as the loci of group identification. In this respect the heroes' story is a "recollected" acting out of the social organisation, a corpus of the values anci behaviour viewed as normative. The hero and his story give a nearly concrete shape to the ideological production concerned with the value system, the social practices and the generally accepted norms. The remembered history of the founder of the Kabi kingdom in North-West Nigeria (16th century) is hereby shown, through the choice and identification of its hero, as being one of the logical forms of legitimation of the State structure as well as the ordering stroke of a pseudo-historical necessity.