Robert Lacville visited the Ségou Music Festival on the Niger River February 2010
Letter from Mali published in The Manchester Guardian Weekly International
One of Ségou’s notable buildings housing a bogolan mudcloth design centre – photo with kind permission from our friend Sam O’Selmou Keita, one of Mali’s top international photographers: africasam@gmail.com
Ségou, Mali’s second city, holds a fabulous music festival ! For three days we sat and listened to world-famous singers like Habib Koité, Salif Keita, and the exotic Tuareg group Tinariwen, or watched local groups twist and dance and drum their way through the African dust. Artists and craftsmen from all over the region flocked to show their wares beside the Niger River: local medicines from Burkina Faso, indigo fabrics from Dogon Country and Dutch wax prints from Europe, wood carvings from all across Mali. Thousands of Malian and foreign tourists watched the Bambara koreh society parade wooden horses, with men imitating women to ridicule social traditions rather as medieval court jesters used to entertain European kings with jokes and antics that criticized social and tax policy.
Ségou is the Bambara city where Mungo Park, a Scottish doctor who was wandering about West Africa in 1795, became the first European to see the mythical Niger River. Until then, it was Ptolomy’s map from 300 BC that provided most of our small knowledge of Africa, showing the long Nile River emerging from a great lake, and the vast mass of the Sahara desert cutting off the Mediterranean world from the dark continent beyond. King Da Monzon Diarra would not allow the strange Scottish creature to cross the river into his city – he was suspicious of the mysterious power of albinos and he certainly wasn’t going to take a chance on this white man with a black beard.
Salif Keita was Mali’s first superstar pop idol, starting as lead singer for the Rail Band
To be born an albino in West Africa remains traumatic, as Salif Keita reminded us with his powerful song Difference : I am black but my skin is white, I am white but my blood is black. His association called SOS Albinos tries to protect white Malians and help them build their dignity. Most stunning was Salif’s dancer. All Mali’s musicians have great dancers, but Salif produced the most extraordinary athlete of the festival, a young albino man with yellow braids and extremely long arms, whose twisting, rhythmic torso appeared to be pure cream from head to waist.
Below the stage, Bozo fishermen presented river puppets representing life on the river, placating the River Spirit Faro and Mali’s Lady of the Lake Mamywata. The farmers of the Bobo village Mouni sent their koro masks to Ségou, huge, barrel-shaped bush spirits who normally appear only in the planting season at the start of the rains to promote fertility. These masks have never before left their village, let alone performed in front of 10,000 people, but their simple rhythms and frantic movements reminded me how ancient the Bobo Bwa culture is – people were dancing the koro masks thousands of years ago in this part of Africa, long before anyone wrote down the Old Testament.
We crossed the Niger River to where Dr Park once stood, and then poled and motored along the river bank to the pottery village of Kalabougou. Blacksmiths create magical iron with earth and fire and air, while their wives create magical forms in clay that are fired to produce clay pots and water jars. We saw elderly women creating ten pots in a morning, grey and wet on their moulds. Their daughters were carrying the fired jars on donkey carts down to the water’s edge, to be ferried by canoe to the Ségou market. Piles of jars shone in the sunlight : rich cinnamon red, orange, ochre, shiny glazed pots brown of-the-earth, earthy.
Madame Fana has been making pots for 40 years. They are fired in an open pit.
We climbed back into our pirogue, and the boatman took his pole to push us out into the stream. A sudden shout caught our attention, as the huge prow beam of another canoe bore down on us from the starboard side. “Duck!” I shouted, and my wife Jeanne threw herself into the bottom of the boat, the point of the blue-painted prow missing her temple by millimetres. The aggressor lunged over our rail and thrust us into the mud of the riverbank. I climbed across two seats, and pushed the prow away: once it was immobile, the wooden pirogue was pushable with one hand. Jeanne remained immobile for three or four minutes while the offending canoe moved back. Much shouting ensued, loudest of which were my Bambara insults to the offending boatman telling him that since his parents were neither Bozo fishermen nor Somono boatmen, obviously they had produced a donkey who was pulling the wrong type of cart.
It turned out that his name was not Kapo or Thiero (names of the Somono fishermen who founded Ségou) but Diarra : “And what,” I asked, “was a Diarra farmer doing on a boat?” I called the Mayor’s office on my mobile telephone – the instrument that has most transformed Malian life - and they sent four gendarmes to arrest Mr Diarra when he landed. He spent the night in jail. Next morning I got the Mayor to release him from prison and transferred my complaint to the Boatmen’s Association, so that he would be judged by his peers on the basis of river lore and not French law. Three days later, a delegation came to inform us that Mr Diarra has been barred from the river for four months, and the Ségou Boatmen have asked the Mayor to appoint a new Master of the River. We met him. Naturally, he is a Somono whose family have been fishing the Niger and placating the Faro spirits for fifteen thousand years.
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This is one of many stories written by Robin Poulton under the name Robert Lacville, some of which appear in the book Sister Cities written by Ana Edwards and Robin Poulton. The book is a good read, describing grassroots and women’s development, life in Ségou and visits where Americans discover Africa and Malians try to understand Virginia …. With their 400 years of shared and sad history.