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From Sunjata¹ The Search for a Special Wife When Maghan Konfara² was a mansa in Manden, he had power, he had wealth, he was popular, and he had dalilu—but he had no child. Maghan Konfara, Sun- jata's father, craved a child. Though his friends had begun to have children, he still had no child. But then his dalilu³ showed that he would finally have a child. His moriw, his sand diviners, and his pebble diviners all said, “Simbon, you will sire a child who will be famous." Everybody he consulted said the same thing. "But try to marry a light-skinned woman," they told him. “If you marry a light- skinned woman, she will give birth to the child that has been foreseen." Because Maghan Konfara was powerful, he married nine light-skinned women. But aside from Flaba Naabi, none of them gave him a child. He was perplexed. From the 1. Translated from the Maninka by David C. Conrad. All notes were made by the translator unless otherwise indicated. In an excerpted section, the narrator, Tassey Condé, introduces the birth of the seventh king (mansa) Sunjata by recalling the lineage of kings born before Sunjata. He declares that he will not start from the very beginning since the listeners and the Mande people are all Adam's descendants. 2. Maghan Knofara is the father of Sunjata, also referred to as Simbon (Master Hunter) and Mansa (ruler) [editor's note]. 3. Magic, occult, or secret power; in everyday use, any means used to achieve a goal. 4. Nominal Muslims who, in oral tradition, often perform divination. 5. Seers and healers who identify the source of all kinds of problems by spreading a pile of sand and reading symbols in it, or casting mul- tiple objects such as pebbles or cowrie shells and reading the configurations in which they land. Diviners then prescribe appropriate sac- rifices to remedy the problem.