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David C. Conrad. 2016. Sunjata: A New Prose Version. Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company. 140 pp.
Certainly, the "seventh folklore miracle" of the world is the heroic epic poetry of Africa, the incredible wealth of which has been recognized over the last decades after a long period of ignorance. The heroic epic genre in Africa came out of the fog of ignorance (non-recognition, non-discovery) to the light illuminating its incredible richness from the previously unknown depth. Before 1960 (which is the year of the publication of D. T. Niane's Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali) western scholars still do not know that there was an African heroic epic. Frobenius himself undoubtedly discovered Sunjata's text and other types of West African heroic epic (1907-1909, published in English, in The Voice of Africa, vols.1-2), but he considered them knightly stories. Due to the wide range of researches on the new types and new variants across the continent, the emblematic story of West African Mande peoples, the Sunjata epic, stands out in the African material, which to this day has become one of the most important sources of historical and cultural identity for the peoples of the continent.
The Sunjata epic left behind, for example, the Nyanga Mwindo epic of Congo rich in variants and Fulbe epic material discovered in many places in West Africa as well as the Mongo-Nkundo Lianja, likewise of Congo, as Africa's richest known heroic epic type. According to Stephen Bulman's bibliography ("A Checklist of Published Versions of the Sunjata Epic,"History in Africa, 1997) we know about forty to fifty pieces of total or fragmented versions, and since then they have only increased their number, among other reasons due to recent publications by Conrad. He...