Segou Kingdom

  General Description   Almost nothing is known about the Segu (or Segou) Kingdom, the name we have chosen to use for the polity occupying the Niger Inland Delta from the mid-17th century CE to the foundation of the more well-known Bamana Kingdom in 1712. Neither oral traditions nor regional histories compiled in Timbuktu suggest the existence of a Bamana ’king’ prior to the 17th century. However, in around 1650, a hunter and warrior called Kaladian Kulibali (or Coulibaly) drew on the indigenous male age-grade associations known as tòn to become the ruler of the first Bamana state, ^[1] which briefly included Timbuktu. ^[2]
Population and Political Organization
The Bamana before the mid-17th century were probably a ’stateless society’ — specifically, they may have been divided into independent villages who only banded together in response to a threat. ^[3] After a brief period of integration under Kaladian Kulibali, centralized power weakened after his death and an oligarchy of regional rulership by his sons and their successors held sway for some time. ^[3] By the time Biton Kulibali rose against the status quo and founded his own Bamana Kingdom in 1712, it seems that the Bamana region was divided into small communities, each ruled by a gerontocracy. ^[4] However, details are hazy, and mostly derived from oral traditions, so the relationship between Kaladian’s successors’ loose oligarchy and the gerontocracies of the early eighteenth century is not very clear. We are not certain, for example, whether the former gave way to the latter, or whether the latter existed within the context of the former. No population estimates for the Segu Kingdom could be found in the literature.

[1]: (Bortolot 2003) Alexander Ives Bortolot. 2003. ’The Bamana Ségou State’. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bama_1/hd_bama_1.htm. Accessed 23 February 2017.

[2]: (MacDonald 2014, 129) Kevin C. MacDonald. 2014. ’"A chacun son Bambara", encore une fois: History, Archaeology and Bambara Origins’. In Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past: Materiality, History, and the Shaping of Cultural Identities, edited by Francois G. Richard and Kevin C. MacDonald, 119-44. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

[3]: (MacDonald 2014, 129) Kevin C. MacDonald. 2014. ’"A Chacoun son Bambara, encore une fois": History, Archaeology and Bambara Origins’ in "Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past: Materiality, History, and the Shaping of Cultural Identities", edited by Francois G. Richard and Kevin C. MacDonald. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press.

[4]: (Izard and Ki-Zerbo 1992, 332-33) Michel Izard and Joseph Ki-Zerbo. 1992. ’From the Niger to the Volta’, in General History of Africa, vol. 5: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries edited by Bethwell Allan Ogot, 327-67. London: Heinemann.