Mourdiah

Mourdiah lies in the dry savanna north of the Niger, on the edge of the Sahel. Tradition places the early capital of the Bamana kingdom of Kaarta near here: Sounsan was said to have been founded by Sunsana, a son of Niangolo, in the seventeenth century. Kaarta later developed into a rival of the Bamana kingdom centred at Ségou. The history of Mourdiah belongs to a region where farming settlements and pastoral communities shared the land between the Niger valley and the desert.