What's in an Alias? Family Names, Individual Histories, and Historical Method in the Western Sudan

Abstract

Writing in hisLes Bambara du Ségou et du Kaarta, the French colonial administrator and ethnographer Charles Monteil considered the family name, orjamu, tosum up the history of the community which bears it: it refers to everything which concerns the ancestors, as well as the accomplishments of current members of the community, including their turpitudes and even their alliances, be they fraternal, conjugal, political, or supernatural.Monteil was right, to a certain degree. In the Western Sudan, family names are weighted with history and significance. Yet what Monteil characterized as evidence of stability and tradition, Charles Bird has more recently called a “ticket to mobility.” The fluidity and mobility that had come to characterize thejamueluded Monteil entirely, just as its mutability often eludes contemporary historians.Ajamurepresentsbothan all-important identity marker and an instrument of “mobility.” Yet it is also highly contigent, even aleatory. This mobility has a double sense, signifying both the mutable nature of the name itself and its potential for “making outsiders insiders” by creating an immediate link between people who would otherwise be strangers.Jamuw—the plural takes a ‘w’—also have a deep historicity. Embedded in them are history and myth, along with suggestions of family occupational category—commonly referred to as ‘caste’—and social status. Epics such asSundiataoften provide etymologies and legendary origins of family names, and scholars have sought—misguidedly—to use these to understand the historical processes of ‘caste’ formation and other aspects of the distant Mande past.