“Bamanaya is so difficult to leave behind”

Islamization in Mande West Africa gradually accompanied the expansion of mercantile groups and was surprisingly accommodating via syncretic processes with local spiritual traditions. Elites of the Empire of Mali were amongst the first to embrace Islam and mediate between it and indigenous earth religions. Yet this process was patchy across different cultural sectors and from the seventeenth century onwards there were upswellings of Bamanaya, earth religions, in open conflict with waves of Islamic jihadism (e.g. the Umarian movement). Thus, historic polities could retain both mosques and non-Islamic shrines, and maraboutic practices incorporated forms of local magic. This article considers results from “Project Segou”: historical and archaeological fieldwork undertaken between 2005 and 2013 in the Segou region of Mali, stretching approximately from Sinsanni in the east to Nyamina in the west. As a heartland of the Empire of Mali (c. AD 1235–1500) and the core of Bamana Segou (c. AD 1700–1861), its oral and archaeological sources inform our deep time appreciation of ideological and spiritual change at the margins of the Middle Niger from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries AD.