"Segu" by Maryse Condé. The story of the Bambara people.

Before discovering this novel I had no idea who the Bambara were, or where Segu was situated (at first I even thought it was an imaginary country, as this literary technique is quite frequent in postcolonial literature). Little did I know I was going to get to know them extremely well! For those of you as ignorant as me, Segu was an old kingdom (divided in 4 different territories) in the current Mali and the Bambara are the ethnolinguistic group inhabiting these territories since the 13th Century.

Maryse Condé's historical-fiction allows the reader to get an idea of what was happening in Segu during the 19th century. On one hand, Islam was spreading its wings and political leaders were sometimes forced to convert in order to prevent the jihad in their territories. On the other hand, slavery was a double-sided knife: The Bambara had been making their war prisoners slaves for centuries, but now they were also being captured and sent to America. At the centre of this turmoil, the novel explores the ins and outs of the Traore family. The Bambara were a caste-based society and in Condé's story, the Traore were an aristocratic family with lots of resources that started to lose their influence almost at the same time that one of their members secretly converted to Islam. People was deeply polytheist and many of their traditions such as burying the family corpses in the compound are well portayed in the novel.

Female Figure (19th - 20th century)

From a feminist point of view the book is also a jewel. In a patriarchal society, in a noble family that kept many slaves, women were forced to satisfy not only the members of the family but also their guests. Perhaps one of the most interesting characters is Dousika's concubine Sira (Dosuika, as fa or head of the bloodline is the central character from which every little personal story evolves). Sira could not avoid falling in love with the handsome Bambara: "A slave ought not to love her master, otherwise she loses her self-respect. She must go. But she found her own people had become curiously alien. [She] couldn't forget Segu -the cheerful freedom of its streets, the singing that rose from the compounds, the women coming and going with water from the river. [...] She would remember the nights with Dousika [and] she would hate herself for the pleasure given and received."

Condé created brave female characters who are sometimes unfathomable for their male counterparts. "It was as if they'd conspired to rebel, each in her own way. Rebel? But against what? Wasn't it enough for them to know that no man is grown-up to the woman who bore him? That, apart from the shared game of appearences, no man is strong against the woman who loves and desires?" .

Detailed raping scenes are also included in the book but they are not there by chance but with a final purpose: making the reader understand the hypocrisy of religion (Condé will also question the purpose of war; how religious can it be? Wouldn't God or Allah protect his children instead of forcing them to kill each other?). An example of this is Tiekoro, the first of the Traore to convert to Islam. Although he left his hometown, went against the wishes and hopes of his own family, and abandoned his own brother in a strange city in order to study in a Koranic school, he could not endure chastity and ended up raping a Bambara woman in the street whose name was Nadie. As Tiekoro's first love rejected him, because he was "black" and she was an aristocratic pale skinned Muslim, he decided to run away with Nadie, knowing she was pregnant and that he could never marry her (for she had been a slave). Back in Segu, Nadie was not well received because the family could see Tiekoro had grown to appreciate her and love her as if she was his wife. Tiekoro was highly respected because he knew how to read and write and he was sent slaves and concubines every day, from his Muslim friends and from the King (who wanted to marry him with one of his nieces). This situation made Nadie take a drastic decision that would make Tiekoro unhappy and guilty for life.

However, not everyone in the family is as selfish as Tiekoro. Naba, another Dousika's son, who was captured and sold as a slave, for instance, sacrificed his own life for his beloved Ayodele and voluntarily got into a ship to America to protect her.

Moreover, the topic of race is also portrayed in the novel, for many cultures and people come together in different places: Muslims from Maghreb, Caribbean slaves, Catholic Portuguese, French, Touareg, freed Africans from Brazil and their descendants known as Agoudas, English priests, Yoruba, Fulani, Ashanti, etc. Some questions arise from the way the so-called Moors acted towards black people. The French colonisers had not yet arrived to the Bambara kingdom, but wasn't Islam a colonisation as well? At the end of the book, we are told the Bambara king renounced his Gods and burnt all the religious objects in a pyre in order to avoid an attack to the city from a Muslim leader. At the beginning of the story, being a Muslim was regarded as a sin, a madness. Then it became somehow trendy, for Islam believers were literate which made them special, valuable allies (this is what made Tiekoro so succesful upon his return to Segu). At the end, practicing old rites and respecting old Gods was seen as something dangerous and outdated. Thus, we learn that change is unavoidable and external, and Condé gives us the chance to experience the many events that shape the lives of an extended family in a very critic moment for their people.

Personal opinion:

On a more personal note, I loved this book because of the incredible stories in it and because I found out hundreds of things I did not know before reading it. I think reading is very much a way of learning and this is undoubtedly a great place to start if you want to know the kind of things history books never tell you about. It was really interesting to see how Islam was imposed on this people as Catholicism was imposed on many other cultures and I felt so sorry that the Bambara lost a part of their identity for political reasons... This is what will stay on my mind when I think about this book: the sense of loss. Also, the topic of slavery really called my intention because I have mostly read Afroamerican stories, but not African. I believe there is a second part to this story called "The Children of Segu" and I am dying to get a copy and start reading what happens next!

PS: I did not meantion the cratfWOMANship of the author because it is impossible to describe. There is not a dull moment in the novel nor a sentence that was not needed.