Segu by Maryse Conde

Segu by Maryse Conde

Using specific illustrations from Maryse Conde's novel Segu, this is an essay that discusses how the coming of Islam to Bambar society affected that people's traditional, political, social and economic practices as well as challenging the Bambaras' religious beliefs.

Before the arrival of Islam, Segu and its people, the Bambaras, were extremely different world from what they became under Islamic rule. The Bambaras were proud people with a long history in farming, and the wealthy ones worked with hundreds of slaves and planted millet, cotton and fonio (p. 4). Their currency was cowrie shells and gold dust, and they hadn't even heard of money, which came with the white man. With the coming of Islam, manufactured goods from Europe and North Africa were making their way into Bambara households (p. 324). Conde described it: "It was not unusual to see well-born young men in boots bought from some trader. Many families had silver dishes in their huts, and the Mansa proudly displayed to his friends a service of fine Chinese porcelain that he never actually used." Fetishists, they turned to all manner of objects and all manner of gods to assure their good fortune. For example, Dousika used a tooth twig to increase his physical strength and sexual potency (p. 3). As Sira gave birth, Nya ordered plants be burned to drive away the evil spirts and help the milk come (p. 11).

Much of life was extremely magical, as evidenced in the way Tiekoro reacted when he first saw a man write with a pencil. The animist world of Segu was rocked when the Muslim religion took over. Segu was steeped in the traditions of story telling and the griot's song was the way the society passed on its news and traditions. The Mus...

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...nsulted the ancestors "What blindness, what folly! After such crimes the name of Segu would disappear off the face of the earth. Or else become the name of some miserable little hole dozing on the banks of its river, unheard of (p. 477)," Conde wrote.

The god they worshipped also changed. Fetishists believed that two gods were to be credited for the creation. The god Pemba whirled around and created earth while the god Faro took care of the sky and the waters (p. 14). Islam, of course, teaches that there is just one God, Allah.

Bibliography:

Marys,Condee. Segu. Barbara Bray, trans. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987).

Kemedijo, Cilas. The Curse of Writing: Genealogical Strata of a Disillusion: Orality, Islam-writing, and Identities in the State of Becoming in Maryse Conde's Segou. Research in African Literatures 27. (1996, December 1): 124.