Mansa-Idris

Ordered the Roll written down for the first time

The Maahes who wrote the Roll. Mansa-Idris took the mantle in the golden age of Mali, when the empire was the richest in the world and Timbuktu was becoming a city of scholars. The Pride gave him the name Mansa-Idris, after the title of the kings of his age, as an act of homage. No king was ever a Maahes. The Pride simply chose to honour the greatest figures of its world.

For a thousand years, the Roll had lived in memory. Every Maahes learned it from the one before, and the Pride recited it entire once in a generation at a great gathering called the Reckoning. Around 1310, Idris sat through a Reckoning and heard three arms of the Pride tell the same story of the same Maahes three different ways. The Roll was drifting. It was not being lost in a fire or a massacre. It was being lost the way a river loses its banks, an inch at a time.

He remembered the oldest echo in the Roll, Irike-Maa's refusal to let a scholar copy it: "A library is a place where memory goes to be locked up." He spent five years deciding whether Irike-Maa had been right. He decided that he had been right, and also that he was wrong.

His answer was a compromise. The Roll would be written, but only the names, the dates and the deeds. The echoes, the voices of the Maahes that the mantle carries, would stay in the mantle. He wrote it in three copies, in the script of the Mande scholars, with a second cipher that only the Pride could read, and he put each copy in a different house. The book would hold the names. Only the mantle would hold the voices.

He held the mantle for 48 years. The Roll he left was the first written record of every Maahes from the border settlement to his own day.

What he left behind: the written Roll, in three copies, and the rule that the book never replaces the mantle.