Bambara people

The Bambara (Bamana) are the great Mande people of southern Mali, with kin across Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Senegal, and makers of the historic Bambara Empire of Segu. Eight in ten Malians speak Bambara whatever their blood, so the language is the country's true constitution. Farmers of millet and sorghum who read the rains like scripture, the Bambara built Segu into an 18th-century power of war canoes, cavalry and palace intrigue on the middle Niger. Komo and Nama initiation societies carve the great hornbill, antelope and hyena masks that guard moral order, and the bozokin stringed ngoni carries epics across the savanna. French conquest took Segu in 1890, but Bamako's markets, Segou pottery works and the bogolan mud-cloth workshops keep Bamana hands shaping the modern Sahel. Bambara is spoken by 80 percent of Malians of every ethnicity, and the historic empire ruled from Segu on the middle Niger. Bamako markets overflow with bogolan cloth.