Mali: at the festival sur le Niger in Ségou, a week of resistance

Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow | Sabine Cessou Follow

Since 2005, the Festival sur le Niger, organized in the city of Ségou in Mali, offers a sophisticated program and a popular festival. One of the best festivals in Africa took place from February 4 to 10 with a flawless organization.

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Concerts, exhibitions, conferences, plays, craft fair, caravan of peace, wanderings of traditional troops in the streets, the Malian cultural operator Mamou Daffé, with its renowned festival established across Africa, offered a festive parenthesis to his city, Ségou, populated by more than 150,000 people and located 240 km north of Bamako.

He invited the visitor to walk in a waking dream. His own, that of a vibrant Mali that thinks, creates and pays homage to its talents, traditional and contemporary. All this, even in wartime. The theme of the 2020 edition was to take a stand: “Reconciliation and social cohesion”.

A discreet businessman, Mamou Daffé

Mamou Daffé is a discreet businessman supported by the Doen Foundation of the Netherlands. He gradually set up a cultural business. And employs a hundred people in Ségou, between the Koré cultural center, a Foundation for the festival which organizes training courses and hosts artists in residence, and the large "village" of Ségou'Art, set up for the festival.

Its ecosystem includes a hotel, the Savannah, with round huts scattered in a beautiful garden, the festival and the craft fair, which is held in one of the main arteries of the city center.

Housed in a building that takes on the ocher architecture of Timbuktu, the Koré center takes its name from a traditional initiation company to which Mamou Daffé belongs, and who escorts him at the opening of the festival, in a joyful procession surrounded by giant puppets. This immaculately kept place houses an exhibition hall, a conference room, an open-air stage, a projection room and a media library.

The center organized a symposium for two days. The latter made a few waves, around a difficult theme: "Migrations and identities". The curator Simon Njami was there to comment with biting humor on the analyzes of teachers like Ismaïl Maïga, who said that children from Malian immigration in France are " in a permanent in-between, it that is to say nothing, and at all times they need someone credible who can offer them a coherent thought to which to adhere ”.

On the question of the identity that can or cannot be conferred by a French passport, Simon Njami launched: " The most Haitian of Haitians that I know does not have a French passport, but he is a member of the French Academy ".

The political criticism of Cheikh Diallo, pope of design

By the river, an entire "village" has been built, with several exhibition halls and a music scene. The works donated by the great figures of African art to the African Culture Fund launched in 2017 were visible: Soly Cissé, Nu Bareto and other Sanogo. In six other rooms, several exhibitions brought together promising visual artists from the country, including the sculptor Hamidou Koumaré and the painter Daouda Traoré.

The young sculptor Hamidou Koumare and one of his works. RFI / Sabine Cessou

The very famous Abdoulaye Konaté , a day before the opening, was astonished by his own aura with young designers, in front of canvases in strips of cut leather or gradations of colors in fabric that recall his own. The highlight of the show in Ségou: his last monumental work, a gradient of indigo blue bazin highlighted with orange, was presented in a large pan-African room where we found paintings signed by big names present in the room, Barthélémy Toguo, Viyé Diba and Soly Cissé, without forgetting the sculptures of Siriki Sy.

In an adjacent room painted in lemon yellow, Cheikh Diallo, a pioneer of contemporary African design, has set up an installation in a very political sense. Very high kraft paper chairs, quite fragile, symbolizing power, with protuberances of paper flowers. What the artist calls " the virus" . In other words, " the big head " of the summits, the desire to stay there, the capture of wealth, " the oblivion of those below ."

In counterpoint, a bluish canvas showing a field of red flowers, intact at the base but more and more pierced by burns on the way to the top.

A popular and free festival

Cheikh Diallo, an international designer based in Bamako, did not have to be asked to come. " I like the festival, " he says. I come to look for energy there, because it gives it. You have to know Ségou and the weight of tradition, people care! Without tradition the festival would not take place: it is first of all popular ”.

A flawless, roundly organized organization has made the organizers of other cultural events in West Africa envious. Program, booklet, photos and biographies, badges, trips, everything worked with precision. Treated like royalty, the invited professionals reveled in a whirlwind of culture, while young people danced in the street.

Masked men marched during the Festival sur le Niger in Ségou MICHELE CATTANI / AFP

► Read also: African culture: meetings in February

The instructions were strictly observed. Two excavations at the entrance with metal detector, and impossible to enter without bracelet or badge. On the site at the edge of the river which welcomed the crowd, free of charge, the scene was supervised by police officers, moreover numerous to circulate in civilian clothes among the festival-goers.

In the end, a single attack slowed down the festivities, which brought together 250,000 people. That of a swarm of bees from an overturned calabash, in the Ségou'Art village. The firefighters showered the insects. As for the rumors of the attack, which repeat themselves from year to year, they have not prevented the city from rejoicing.

The army was deployed north of the river to protect the city, and for two years, the internal security capacity support mission, Eucap Sahel Mali, has accompanied the event. Ségou seemed protected, throughout this miraculous week, by the simple fervor of its population.

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