Senufo

The Senufo are an ethnolinguistic cluster of some thirty related Gur dialects, spread across northern Ivory Coast, southeastern Mali and western Burkina Faso. Korhogo was linked to them as early as the thirteenth century; around the fourteenth century the rise of Kong as a Bambara trade station set off migrations, and the Senufo group coalesced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

They are farming peoples, many matrilineal, whose villages kept the Poro initiation society and the Sandogo order of women diviners, and whose masks and figures honor the Ancient Mother Maleeo.

Around 1650 the Muslim Dioula Traoré clan founded the Kénédougou Kingdom, whose Senufo kings used the Mandé title of faama; in the eighteenth century it became an extension of the Kong Empire and won back independence by 1825. Their lands were raided for slaves and supplied captives to merchants.