Talk:Mende people

Comment
I have restored an older version of the article, incorporating some recent edits but leaving out all unsourced statements. Please read Cite your sources, Verifiability and especially Weasel words before re-adding statements along the lines of "Attributed to the Mende-speaking peoples are our earliest indirect indications of seafaring" or the extremely disinformed "The Mende language may be traced to the ancient peoples of Papua New Guinea". &mdash; mark &#9998; 14:43, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Amistad Section
The paragraph about the Mendi people who were sold into slavery, rebelled on the slave ship at Cuba, ended up in the United States, were tried, and freed, seems to have some innacuracies. Namely, as far as to my knowledge, they never worked on plantations, and Montes and Ruiz were not necessarily plantation owners, but slave traders bringing them from Havana to another part of Cuba to sell. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.147.135.10 (talk) 02:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC).

Wasn't there a Joseph Cinque, who was the leader of the rebellion on the slave ship The Amistad? What is known more about him and his fellow rebels? The name Cinque is Italian for 'five'. And 'Joseph' is a Christian name, certainly not his original Mende name. It must have been given him as a slave somewhere in the West Indies, most probably in Cuba, as being the number Five among the group of slaves from the ship or on the slave market. 74.104.144.152 (talk) 23:20, 30 April 2019 (UTC) Hartmut

District percentages
Could someone please cite sources for the district figures. Are they from the 2004 census? Some of the percentages are manifestly false.  D b f i r s   20:08, 15 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Anonymous editors are still making unexplained changes to numbers and percentages. Could they please cite their sources to give us confidence that they are not making up these numbers (as they did for some other articles).    D b f i r s   19:39, 4 July 2008 (UTC)


 * User Sittaconde and an anonymous editor (a sock-puppet?) are still making strange changes to figures, and removing the {fact} tag instead of adding a source. Do we conclude that these numbers are fictitious?  What does anyone else think?  I propose to delete all of these numbers if they keep changing and if no source is given.  Does anyone disagree with this proposal?    D b f i r s   07:30, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

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Disambiguation from Mendi people of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea required.
This page refers to Mendi the town, however there remains no clarification between the Mendi people of Mendi in the Southern Highlands of PNG, and the wholly unrelated Mende people of Sierra Leone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendi_(disambiguation) 2001:44B8:1124:6600:CC52:ABBE:43BA:1031 (talk) 06:51, 11 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I have responded on Talk:Mendi (disambiguation).--A bit iffy (talk) 09:21, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Mende people
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Mende people's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "PV": From David Lansana:  From Soccoh Kabia:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 03:57, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Wiki articles need citations
All material on WP need citations from Reliable Sources (RS). In other words, second and/or third party inline sources are essential to maintain WP standards. It is unfortunate that so much of the content on the 'Mende people' is devoid of verifiable sources. Readers have no sources for additional information.

Overall, the page reads like a school essay rather than an encyclopedia - it is overwhelmed with casual claims based on conjecture rather than actual verifiable sources. Furthermore, there appears to be no effort made, over the years, on the part of the page watchers, to address any of the urgent and fundamental issues of verifiability upon which the authenticity of WP relies. Claims such as "the greatest sin a Mende man can commit is to give away the [special] secrets of his tribe" come across as amateurish, ridiculous and not worthy of a mention in an encyclopedia, since second/third party sources are almost guaranteed to be non-existent.

Some of the more outlandish and clearly unverifiable claims should be deleted immediately in order to restore the credibility/integrity of WP for this 'Mende people' article. The curiously short 'History of Mende' section appears to be based entirely on Sengbeh Pieh and the Hollywood-inspired Amistad movie. Nothing makes this story unique considering all or most west African tribes were also victims of the transatlantic slave trade and several independent slave revolts have been noted in the literature. Since Pieh's Amistad actions are not unique, whatever happened to real Mende indigenous history before the transatlantic slave trade - is it documented somewhere? Anyway, claims of Pieh's Mende heritage are also questionable - the Sherbro believe he was one of theirs.

The vast majority of slaves were from the Yoruba, Akan and Igbo people - not the Mende, yet the respective WP pages of those tribes contain substantial info on pre-slavery history, culture, society, religion etc. Like all other indigenous African tribes, the Mende are certainly NOT a post-slavery ethnicity such as the West African Creoles, African Americans or Afro-Caribbeans, so why attach so much capital on the slavery narrative? Unfortunately WP readers still have no idea who the Mende people really are or where they originated from. A very poor article overall. Inamo11 (talk) 06:27, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

History
I what to learn about the mende social organization in pre colonial of SierraLeone 102.223.170.128 (talk) 18:16, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You're welcome to contribute material that can be footnoted to reliable sources. Wikipedia articles are a community effort. Please note that information on the history of the Mende is patchy and usually contradictory. Apart from the Amistad story, not much has been written about the 'Mende in pre-colonial times'. Their chameleonic ethnonym may have finally settled on homophones such as 'Mane' or Mandi or 'Mandin(ka)' but they are clearly none of those people and, like many other groups in the region, may be linguistically linked to Mande-speaking peoples. In Liberia, they are considered a subset of the Vai people but in Sierra Leone their thick accent, when speaking the national language, is reportedly unintelligible to most. This probably indicates an ethnogenesis characterized by long-term isolation somewhere in the tropical rainforest of Mendiland, West Africa. Good luck with your literature review on the Mende. Inamo11 (talk) 01:44, 5 January 2023 (UTC)