Mende (people)
The Mende are a West African people. They speak the Mende language and live mainly in Sierra Leone , Liberia and Guinea . Their cultural and linguistic traditions suggest that they migrated there from Western Sudan between the 2nd and 16th centuries and are related to part of the larger Mande ethnic group. They have their own writing system for their language, the Mende script .
The Mende grow rice and other types of grain and practice soil-conserving crop rotation . The upper class of society is largely descended from the Mané , the soldiers of the Songhai Empire .
Armed conflicts between the local peoples in the 19th century led to many Mende being sold into slavery. The Mende Sengbe Pieh became known as the leader of the slave revolt on the ship La Amistad .
The suffering of this people continued into the 20th century, with thousands of people losing their property, health or life in both the Liberian Civil War and the Civil War in Sierra Leone .
Sierra Leone
In Sierra Leone, the Mende are the largest ethnic group with almost 2.26 million people . There they make up 32.2 percent of the total population (as of 2015). They live mainly in the south and southeast of the country.
literature
- Donald Cosentino: Musa Where: Precognition of Civil Violence in Mende Oral Narrative Tradition . In: Representations of violence: art about the Sierra Leone Civil War . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison (WI) 2003, ISBN 0-615-12818-1 , pp. 11-15 . ( Full text as digitized version)
- John D. Fage: History of Africa. Routledge, 2001.
- James S. Olson: The Peoples of Africa: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary. 1996.
