Thus, the ministers who assist the emperor, rather than being members of the high nobility of the Nakomsé, are systematically chosen from outside of it, from among the common people and the slaves. They represent at court, as we shall more clearly see, the different social categories, professions, and castes. “Those without birth,” slaves and laborers, organized into professions (castes), far from being kept separated from power in this period which extends far beyond the Occidental Middle Ages (since, very likely, it may go back to the first century and the foundation of Ghana), are associated with it, not in any symbolic but in an organic way. Each profession has its representatives within the government; they will, as needed, present its complaints.

That is the spirit of this constitution. In order to comprehend its originality, we would have to imagine, at midpoint of the Middle Ages (1352–53, the time of Ibn Battuta’s voyage to the Sudan and of the Hundred Years War), not just some provincial lord, but the King of France or of England, giving a share of his power, with a voice in decisions, to the rural serfs, bound to the soil, the free peasants, the town guildsmen, and the merchants. And beyond all that, imagine the existence of a tradition according to which the king, within the framework of an already constitutional monarchy, cannot reign, cannot have moral and political authority in the eyes of the people, unless he is invested by a bourgeois who is also chosen from among one or a few traditionally determined families. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the peasantry of the West would then have had the revolutionary virulence that once imbued them, and the course of Western European history would probably have been different.

The non-absolute nature of the monarchy is revealed by the fact, once invested, the ministers cannot be removed by the king.