The Maahes who made friends with a future. Kemoko-Dia took the mantle in an age of small kingdoms, in a country of rivers and hills ruled by clans who did not yet have an empire. He noticed something that no earlier Maahes had: that the hunters of the Mande country, a brotherhood who tracked game through the bush and sang the deeds of their dead, were doing something very like what the Pride did.
He spent twenty years among them. He did not recruit them. He sat at their fires and learned their songs, and by the end the hunters' brotherhood and the Pride had made a quiet pact: when a clan lord's hunters found a brood in his domain, they would send word to the Pride, and the Pride would answer.
Those same hunters, two generations later, helped found the empire of Mali. The Pride was already at their side.
What he left behind: the pact with the hunters' brotherhood, which became the Pride's foundation in Mali.
