The blade on this Manding sabre is German, indeed pipeback, and produced from around 1820s well through the 19th century. It is well established that many blades used on these sabres are from French presence in these Saharan regions, and many French blades were actually German produced.
I am unsure of the mark on the blade but it does not seem European applied, looks like an arc but what the rest would be not sure.
Actually the connections between Zanzibar and these Mali regions in the Sahara seem fairly well established, though they were most certainly the result of networking these trans Saharan trade routes. The Manding were the merchants in Mali controlling these routes as I understand. There was prevalent slave trade activity from Zanzibar into the interior, which routes probably traversed Kenya then into Ethiopia, then to Darfur. In Darfur one of the centers of such activity was Sennar, where westward through Chad and Nigeria to Mali these traders went.
There is a type of 'baselard' form hilt sword/dagger found in Morocco known as the s'boula. However Demmin (1877) classified one of these as a Zanzibar sword. This misclassification was carried forward by Burton (1884) and the error noted by Buttin(1933). It seems clear these were notably present in Zanzibar from thier indiginous provenance from Morocco, most plausibly from being among merchants returning on trade caravans. These are known to occur in Ethiopia in degree, even being inscribed in Amharic, suggesting of course examples being left there by traders coming through.
With this instance of cross diffusion between Moroccan regions and the Zanzibar entrepot, I would suppose the possibility of the cylindrical hilt of the Manding sabre could be the source of the Omani kattara form, but I still feel the influence went the other direction. With the appearance of this hilt in Oman c.1744 as well described by Ibrahiim, more needs to be discovered on the possible origin period for these in Mali.
I would note that the Kenyan seme' also has this type of cylindrical hilt without guard, and as noted these regions seem to have been along some of these trade and slaving routes. As far as I can recall, these seme' appear to be fairly recent in most cases, mostly 19th century.
All best regards,
Jim
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