FESTIVAL OF THE NIGER RIVER (January 2007)

Allan Levenberg (dit Kouyateh) and Robin Edward Poulton (dit Macky Tall) led a delegation of a dozen VIRGINIA FRIENDS OF MALI to the third Segou music Festival of the Niger River February 1-4, 2007.

The Ségou Festival was spectacular, and the welcome given to the Virginian delegation by Mamou Daffé and his team was as generous as this banner indicates. This photo was taken in the yard of the Motel Savane which is owned by Mamou and is where Mamou Daffé’s Festival Team has their HQ.

The story of our visit is told in Ana Edwards’s and Robin Poulton’s book SISTER CITIES published in 2019 to celebrate 15 years of Segou-Mali collaboration and the tenth anniversary of the signature of their Sister City Agreement. The book describes how each member of the Richmond delegation was ‘baptised’ by the people of Ségou, and the touching story of how Carol Warner became Saratan Dembélé, taking the name of a Ségou Mother because Carol was herself the Mother of our group.

The delegation enjoyed a life-changing experience and the Oregon Hill Folk Orchestra played the festival fringes, in bars and restaurants and in the public spaces. One problem: whenever a Malian drummer began to hammer on his djembe within 200 yards of where we were playing, we could no longer hear our own music. Allan Kouyateh (Levenberg) on banjo, Michael Farka Touré (Gahan) on guitar, James Jobarteh (Hickman) on fiddle and Macky Tall (Poulton) on the bottle enjoyed themselves immensely, and private spaces proved to be more successful for our fairly quiet Old Tyme music. As the following photo shows, people in Mali dance whatever the music may be and it seems that Old Tyme and Bluegrass music is in fact a fusion of Celtic (Irish and Scottish) music with West African rhythms.

Here we are playing for the family of Madame Koné, Safiatou Kamateh whose family fed us and looked after us during the Ségou festival.