Cool, thanks. I can manage academic French and I've printed it out to read.
How do you see the silk-producing culture being organized? Proto-feudalism? City-states? Elected kingship (common in West Africa)? Something else? Would the silk farmers be a separate social group like blacksmiths - you mentioned the Dioula, so would the silk producers be the people who give rise to a distinct mercantile caste? Also, are you using a variation the Dogon religion, and how might silk culture affect this, especially with respect to regional cross-cultural practices such as masquerades?
I see silk production at the beginning to be much like OTL hunter-foragers and herders to accumulate livestock.
First it's foraging for honey to trade for pottery. As time moves on pottery is used to harvest pupae from cocoons. The silk is used in cordage, bows strings and decoration of the hair (look up African hair threading), these developing silk goods are traded for sheep.
From there the two groups merge together but unlike pygmies (and more like the Bangime) the distinct language of the cliff dwellers remain.
Silkers develop full time into Weavers as the herders will begin to harvest kreb (wild grains), butters and cheeses to trade for silk items. This is critical because usually the gatherers submit to the needs of herders.
As pig husbandry increases up high in the cliffs producing meat much faster than sheep the need for herder trade lessens and the development of ex-herders turned foresters, wood workers, farmers and security begins to facilitate not only prestige cloth and adornment but materials for daily life.
I see a highly specialized caste based system of guilds for the first couple thousand years. It'll facilitate the spread of silk production to all the habitable cliffs of the region as they support the spread of tamarind trees, Shea, Baobab, winterthorn, etc.. used to feed silkworms, pigs, sheep, cows and fertilize fields.
Weavers will attain the very unique position somewhat like blacksmiths found throughout Africa which is to say respected but feared for their powers of transmutation. It'll be different because the activities involved won't have the same sort of awe inducing smelting and smithery can have. It will be gendered oppositely with men harvesting raw material and making pottery but afterwords being the work of women.
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Silk OTL like gold, copper and the skin color of young women throughout the continent are refered variously as a sheen, glow or having a redness/whiteness/luminous quality (Some would say aura or heat/hotness) all are manifestations of power, prestige, femininity and divinity.
The cosmology will incorporate the serer belief of the primodial swamp given the people's origin in the Neolithic subpluvial but also incoporates Dogon and Wodaabe beliefs all being people that have retain in my opinion greater continuity in beliefs of the Green Sahara.
By the end of the Neolithic subpluvial you'll have warring factions of artisan guilds fighting for forest lands below the cliffs that provide fodder and wood for silkworms, pigs and silk production.
You'll have miners of shallow gold, salt natron, bat guano, hyraceum, acaciawood and semi-precious stones just south and around the escarpment.
I think by the time of about the Greeks you'll see cliff and adjoing valley city states with kingmakers that will elect a single ruler for them all.
But also various city states and developing kingdoms around far out mines, salt mines and other regions. I still want Mande people to develop and even war with these Bangime people.
Otherwise I'll be butterflying away the Niger-Congo expansion much less the Bantu expansion completely.
The masquarades are gonna be different in many ways but I'll be taking the time to mark them by astronomy as is done OTL.
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