Creation myths, Oral Tradition and the Bamana Ciwara

Photo by Jo-Bama, 2010. Mural inside the Hotel de l'Independance, Segu, Mali.

This mural painted on a wall at a hotel in Segu, Mali depicts what might be considered a few stock characters in the Bamana narrative universe: the hunter, a dog, the drummer (djembe player), farmers working with a daba (a curved iron hoe), and, with the woman carrying water in a calabash, the Fulani neighbors of the Bamana. 

According to a Bamana oral tradition, Mamari Biton Coulibaly, the founding ruler of Segu, was an outsider who learned he would one day become ruler from faaro, a genie who lived at the bottom of the Niger river. Faaro gave Coulibaly some millet seeds to plant, with the instruction that he should not harvest the mature plants, but instead allow birds to eat them: “Every bird whose beak gets into your millet and flies towards the big river, you will be the head of any village where he stops. Any village where it stops, east and west, little river or big river, you will rule there and be responsible for those lands.” (Banbera/Conrad, 1990)

The utility to Africanist scholars of oral tradition, generally, and of orally transmitted creation myths in particular, has long been debated and theorized from a number of disciplinary perspectives. In 1960, Historian Jan Vansina published Oral Tradition: a study in historical methodology (De La Tradition Orale), a programmatic theoretical argument that oral traditions (as carefully defined and distinguished from other kinds of oral evidence) might be successfully mined for details of past events, circumstances and persons from a given region or community. After a generation of critiques, Vansina modified some aspects of the work in 1978, but steadfastly defended the idea that oral traditions constituted important evidence for historians and other scholars of early Africa. The arguments of the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch mark an opposing view that oral traditions in Africa are best understood as a philosophical argument, rather than as historical testimony, and can best be analyzed in structuralist terms as dualistic inventions of the human mind.

In reflecting on an epic series of debates between Vansina and de Huesch in the 1980s, art historian Suzanne Blier has argued that questions of inquiry shape disciplinary discourse about the past; that the conclusions scholars reach are contingent upon the assumptions underlying the questions they pose.

In the case of creation myths, Blier argues that they may in some cases contain elements constituting historical evidence or in others they may be better understood as theoretical renderings of the natural world that in the West might be called science. About the Bamana, Blier has argued that elements of historical experience may be preserved in ritualistic ciwara mask performances among laborers in the field, as well as in the famous mask forms themselves. 

Early 20th century. Photo courtesy of the Photograph Studio, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 Historians have dated the establishment of the Bamana kingdom of Segu, in the middle Niger valley, to the late 17th and 18th centuries. This period, which correlates to a peak demand for African labor in the Americas, saw the emergence across West Africa of new polities and political struggles based on military strength associated with slave raiding: Dahomey (ca. 1626),  Asante (1701), Bamana (ca. 1712), and civil wars within the Oyo empire during the 1750s that led finally to the independence of Dahomey (1823) and Oyo’s collapse (1835).

Slavery in the region controlled by the Bamana of Segu, as across West Africa, including forced labor on plantations, expanded even as slaves were being channeled through trade networks to the coasts for sale to the Americas. Yet in analyzing the ciwara sculptural forms and masquerades of the Bamana, scholars have scarcely sought to understand their creation and use in the context of forced labor. In what ways does our historical understanding of slavery and the slave trades in the Bamana kingdom at Segu transform our understanding of these ciwara forms and vice versa?

Works cited

Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Suzanne Preston Blier, “African Creation Myths as Political Strategy,” African Arts, Vol. 37, No. 1, Explorations of Origins (Spring 2004), p. 38-45

David Conrad, ed., A State of Intrigue: The Epic of Bamana Segu According to Tayiru Banberra, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990