Values Of Honor, Bravery And Leadership
In the story of Sundiata An Epic of Old Mali, we are introduced to the character of Sundiata the title character of the tale. In the story, Sundiata does a lot of heroic actions and certainly undergoes a heroic journey but is he an archetypal hero? According to Carl Jung “The Hero” is a person whose life is made up of adventure after adventure, their birth is surrounded by unusual happenstance, they will have to abandon their home and kingdom until they can return upon reaching manhood. The Hero will be characterized by their strength, endurance, bravery, honor, and their ability to survive hardship and risk their life and wellbeing for the good of all. This fits Sundiata to a fault, his life is filled with adventure from birth to his death and was characterized by the survival of all the hardships throughout his life.
Sundiata was born due to two separate foretold happenstances, the telling of his father, Naré Maghan, that his successor and the leader of a new grand Mali will be borne by an ugly woman brought to him by hunters, and the brother hunters who won Sogolon. He was born crippled and unable to walk until seven, his mother and family faced much ridicule due to this but when his mother confronted him he decided he would walk so that his mother would no longer be ashamed. He and his family were eventually chased out of Mali due to the scheming of his father’s first wife, Sassouma Bérété, where they wandered from kingdom to kingdom before eventually settling for a while at the kingdom of Mema.
There he grows into a man and learns the values of honor, bravery, and leadership, however, he knows he cannot stay in Mema he must return home and claim his place in Mali. He completes his “Hero’s Journey” through the defeat of the sorcerer-king Soumaoro Kanté and the division of the kingdoms and the renewal and rebirth of Mali. It is said that every text should be read in its historical context, that it helps us better understand the texts and what they meant in the time they were written. In taking this statement to heart when reading the accounts of Procopius and Ibn Khaldun in the History of the Wars and The Secret History from Procopius and The Muqaddimah from Ibn Khaldun we are able to grasp a deeper understanding of the accounts shared in the texts and what their viewpoints mean to our understanding of the history they shared.
At the beginning of both texts, as the History of the Wars and The Secret History are joined to a single location, there are short and concise backgrounds given for the author and the text that give context for the works and several questions meant to give the reader a background thought throughout the text, this completely changes how the reader views the text as without the background information or even the questions the reader would view and interpret the text completely different than with the information and questions. In the History of the Wars, we learn about the insurrection in Byzantine, Emporer and his court coerced into fighting the rebels and hear Empress Theodora’s rousing speech which caused them to do so. Due to the context that was given to us in the introduction, we understand how Procopius knew this information, as he was likely there due to his occupation as the private secretary of General Belisarius who was the most significant and important general lead by Emperor Justinian
