The Gbara (; now spelled and pronounced as Bara or Gara in those Manding languages lacking ) or Great Assembly was the deliberative body of the Mali Empire, which ruled much of West Africa during the Middle Ages. It was first formed in 1235 on the orders of Sundiata in the Mandinka constitution known as the Kouroukan Fouga.
The Gbara (; now spelled and pronounced as Bara or Gara in those Manding languages lacking ) or Great Assembly was the deliberative body of the Mali Empire, which ruled much of West Africa during the Middle Ages. It was first formed in 1235 on the orders of Sundiata in the Mandinka constitution known as the Kouroukan Fouga.
==Function== The Gbara was made up of 32 members from around 29 mostly Mandinka clans. Members of these clans had aided Sundiata in his overthrow of Soumaoro Kante and were given a voice in the government of a new Manden federation, the Manden Kurufa. The descendants of these clans occupied posts in the Gbara, and checked the power of the federal emperor, the Mansa. It was presided over by a belen-tigui (or master of ceremonies) who recognized anyone who wanted to speak, including the Mansa.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).