Ségou

Wednesday we set off early for Ségou, past red earth and green, green, green lushness, towards the north east, passing karité or shea fruit trees. We stopped at a village where the women picked the karité fruit, boiled it, then removed the outer part to pound the inner part to pulp… to shea butter. Each village we visit, we give little gifts, money for photos, etc. We went through villages called names like Binguebougou. Mostly trucks and buses were on the road. There are hardly any Toubabs, (Toubab! Toubabou! Babou! Cadeau!) white people, in Mali in this season. They mostly come when all the great festivals take place and it’s dry and cooler: December, January, February, for the Festival of the Desert that I am determined to participate in for three days some year that made Tinawaren and other Tuareg groups famous, the Dogon festival, and so on. I have to say though, that having experienced the Mistral, the dry, dusty, windiness of the high tourist season does not appeal to me as much as this season when we seem to be alone, everywhere in this verdant idyll.
Our second stop was Old Ségou, or Sékuro village, where we were introduced to the chief of this ancient dynasty on the Niger. After chatting with him about his responsibilities we were given a tour by an initié who showed us the adobe or mud, straw and sand structures. The mosques and tombs of former chiefs are beautifully maintained every year and are deep red. The women are busy everywhere and especially on the life-giving Niger, under the baobab trees. Children followed us everywhere and we gave them the karité fruit we had bought in the shea butter village, which they gobbled up on the spot, wanting more. Here on the Niger were pirogues or pinasses, the colourful local boats, shipping animal feed, twigs, acacia gum, and fishermen making nets, women washing, children swimming, ostensibly the pastoral, village idyll. This is a clean, caring village community, hard-working, especially the women; a lovely, dignified people who have completely missed the Industrial Revolution, its benefits, yes, but also the greed, the pollution, the break up of the extended family, the urbanisation – they have worked on the land and the water all this time and have been very resourceful and creative… I sense a big future for Malians, especially if they can get some of the profit from the oil excavations in the north for themselves.
New Ségou is a delight: quiet, red earth, un-named streets, scrupulously clean, and around our hotel, L’Auberge, best in town, are many merchants selling really beautiful arts and crafts, and in the hotel is a pool surrounded by Frangipani trees I haven’t seen since Hong Kong. In the evening, we walked to a pottery and saw all the colonial buildings and their Sudanese style architecture. We observed that every inch of arable land was planted with millet, sorghum, corn, beans, and so on.
We then drove to a fascinating but less salubrious destination in a poor, Christian part of town where women make millet beer. First the millet seeds are piled in big containers that have a central water hole from where water is moved and poured over the millet for two days non stop, but the millet never sits in water. Once germinated, the seedlings are boiled then dried, then ground …then mixed with water and yeast and heated, fermented an bottled. The women did all the work; the men sat around, the children were dirty, the dogs had suppurating wounds that flies crowded and the generally fly-ridden space killed our curiosity quite quickly. A sorry, sad picture that is heart breaking, but of all the behind-the-scene scenes that we have been introduced to by our wonderful guide, it is the only one of this kind.

Back to a delightful dinner under the frangipanis with the best travelling companion one could wish for. Laura is the most lovable, intelligent, wonderful companion. We can be silent together or have the most satisfying conversations about anything and everything. She offers amazing insights into the Palestine-Israeli conflict and has taught me so much about life in the region. She has been learning to recite the Quoran with Lamine for the intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic pleasure of it and engaged the Lebanese owner of L’Auberge in a long conversation in Arabic.