Quote by Sundiata Keita: “It is in the nature of a king to be attacked. But it is in the nature of the lion to endure.”

To lead is to invite opposition and attack — that is simply the cost of standing in the front. The question is not whether you will face hardship, but what you are made of when it arrives. This calls on inner resilience, not invulnerability, as the mark of true strength.

The Sundiata epic, from which this sentiment is drawn by griots over centuries, describes the founding of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century. West Africa was a theatre of competing kingdoms, and the epic tradition preserved the founding ethos of courage and endurance as the foundations of legitimate rule.

Founder and first Mansa of the Mali Empire, who defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru Kante at the Battle of Kirina around 1235 CE to unite the Mandinka people. His life is preserved in the Sundiata epic, one of the great oral histories of West Africa, recounted by generations of griots.