Susu

The Susu are a Mandé people of the upper Niger, speaking Sosoxui of the Soso-Yalunka branch. Their traditions say they began as a Soninke blacksmith clan who left the Ghana Empire rather than accept Islam. In the twelfth century they moved south to Koulikoro and built Soso.

Under Sumanguru Kanté the Sosso state overshadowed its neighbors until Sundiata Keita defeated it around 1235, bringing the Susu within the Mali Empire. In 1337 they farmed rice and millet, fished and worked iron around Bamako and Narena, organized in patrilineal lineages with artisan castes.

As Mali weakened in the fifteenth century they moved west into Futa Jallon, joining the Yalunka. The Fulani jihad of the 1720s drove them toward the Atlantic coast; during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they adopted Islam and built the trading chiefdoms of Dubréka and Kindia on the Guinea plain, absorbing smaller coastal peoples.