^Delafosse merely linked different legends (i.e. the Tautain story etc.) and prescribed Diara Kanté (1180) as the father of Soumaoro, in order to link the Sossos to the Diarisso Dynasty of Kaniaga (Jarisso). He also failed to give sources as to how he arrived to that conclusion and the genealogy he created. Monteil describes his work as "unacceptable". The African Studies Association describe it as "...too creative to be useful to historians". See:
African Studies Association, History in Africa, Vol. 11, African Studies Association, 1984, University of Michigan, pp. 42-51.
Monteil, Charles, "Fin de siècle à Médine (1898-1899)", Bulletin de l'lFAN, vol. 28, série B, n° 1-2, 1966, p. 166.
Monteil, Charles, "La légende officielle de Soundiata, fondateur de l'empire manding", Bulletin du Comité d 'Etudes historiques et scientifiques de l 'AOF, VIII, n° 2, 1924.
Robert Cornevin, Histoire de l'Afrique, Tome I: des origines au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1962), 347-48 (ref. to Delafosse in Haut-Sénégal-Niger vol. 1, pp. 256-257).
Crowder, Michael, West Africa: an introduction to its history, Longman, 1977, p. 31 (based on Delafosse's work).
^ abCox, George O. African Empires and Civilizations: ancient and medieval, African Heritage Studies Publishers, 1974, p. 160.
^Noel King (ed.), Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, Princeton, 2005, pp. 45–46. Four generations before Mansa Suleiman who died in 1360 CE, his grandfather's grandfather (Saraq Jata) had embraced Islam.
^Ed. Senghor, Léopold Sédar, Éthiopiques, Issues 21-24, Grande imprimerie africaine, 1980, p. 79.
^Conrad, David C., Sunjata: a West African epic of the Mande peoples (eds David C. Conrad, Djanka Tassey Condé, trans. David C. Conrad), pp. ix, x, xxvi, Hackett Publishing, 2004, ISBN0-87220-697-1.
^Jansen, Jan (1998). “Hot Issues: The 1997 Kamabolon Ceremony in Kangaba (Mali)”. The International Journal of African Historical Studies31 (2): 253–278. JSTOR221083. On page 256, Jan Jansen writes: “Mansa is generally translated as 'king,' 'ruler' or 'ancestor.' The Griaulians, however, often translate mansa as 'God,' 'the divine principle' or 'priest king,' although they never argue the choice for this translation, which has an enormous impact on their analysis of the Kamabolon ceremony.”
^Maurice Delafosse, La langue mandingue et ses dialects (Malinké, Bambara, Dioula), Paris 1929, p. 612. There, the author brings down the French word "roi" (English: king), and brings its Mandingo equivalent, mã-nsa, mã-sa, mā-sa, ma-nsa-kye.
^ abcdConrad, David C., Sunjata: a West African epic of the Mande peoples (eds David C. Conrad, Djanka Tassey Condé, trans. David C. Conrad), p. xxxv, Hackett Publishing, 2004, ISBN0-87220-697-1.
^Stride, G. T., & Caroline Ifeka, Peoples and Empires of West Africa: West Africa in history, 1000-1800, Africana Pub. Corp., 1971, p. 49.
^Fyle, Magbaily, Introduction to the History of African Civilization: Precolonial Africa, p. 61.
^Niane, Djibril Tamsir, Unesco. International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, Africa from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, Unesco. International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, p. 133, University of California Press, 1984, ISBN0-435-94810-5.
^Austen, Ralph A., In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic As History, Literature and Performance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1999), p. 93, ISBN0-253-21248-0.
^Mwakikagile, Godfrey, Ethnic Diversity and Integration in the Gambia (2010), p. 224, ISBN9987-9322-2-3.
^Fage, J. D, The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1050 to c. 1600 (eds J. D. Fage, Roland Anthony Oliver), p. 390, Cambridge University Press, 1977, ISBN0-521-20981-1.
^Badru, Pade, The Spread of Islam in West Africa: colonization, globalization, and the emergence of fundamentalism, pp. 100-102, Edwin Mellen Press, 2006, ISBN0-7734-5535-3.
^ abCollins, Robert O., & James McDonald, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 84, Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN0-521-86746-0.
^Fage, J. D., & Oliver, Roland Anthony, The Cambridge History of Africa, p. 381. Cambridge University Press, 1975.
^Snodgrass (2009), Encyclopedia of the Literature of Empire, p. 77.
^ abBoahen, A. Adu, Topics in West African History, p. 16, Longman, 1966, ISBN0-582-64502-6.
^Delafosse, Maurice, Haut-Sénégal-Niger: Le Pays, les Peuples, les Langues; l'Histoire; les Civilizations, vols. 1-3, Paris: Émile Larose (1912) (eds Marie François Joseph Clozel).
Davidson, Basil (1995), Africa in History: Themes and Outlines, New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN0-684-82667-4.
Gilbert, E.; Reynolds, J.T. (2004), Africa in World History: from prehistory to the present, Pearson Education, ISBN0-13-092907-7.
Janson, Marloes (2004), “The narration of the Sunjata epic as gendered activity”, in Jansen, Jan; Mair, Henk M.J., Epic Adventures: Heroic Narrative in the Oral Performance Traditions of Four Continents, Münster: Lit Verlag, pp. 81–88, ISBN3-8258-6758-7.
Johnson, John William. 1992. The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McKissack, Patricia; McKissack, Fredrick (1995), The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa, Sagebrush, ISBN0-8050-4259-8.
Newton, Robert C. 2006. Of Dangerous Energy and Transformations: Nyamakalaya and the Sunjata Phenomenon. Research in African Literatures Vol. 37, No. 2: 15-33.
Tsaaior, James Tar (2010), “Webbed Words: masked meanings: proverbiality and narrative/discursive strategies in D. T. Niane's Dundiata: An Epic of Mali”, Proverbium27: 339–362.
Published translations of the epic include D. T. Niane's prose version, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Harlow: Longman, 2006, 1994, c.1965: ISBN1-4058-4942-8), Fa-Digi Sisoko's oral version, Son-Jara: The Mande Epic (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003), Issiaka Diakite-Kaba's French-English diglot dramatized version Soundjata, Le Leon/Sunjata, The Lion (Denver: Outskirts Press and Paris: Les Editions l'Harmattan, 2010).