Maryse Conde's novel Segu tells the vivid story of a family thrown into the chaos of a rapidly changing world. Condé does a phenomenal job of putting readers in the mindset of his many colorful characters, allowing readers to access the thoughts and motivations behind these characters' actions. The story is exceptionally intricate and yet the individual stories all seem interconnected to the Traore family which is the focal point of the novel. Various themes all play a role in Segu's tale. From religion to the transatlantic slave trade, from family to trade, all of these themes come together to form a story that ultimately spans cultures, continents, and centuries. This article will focus on the topics of family and religion. The first thing people usually do when they encounter or learn about a culture or civilization different from their own is to immediately start comparing and contrasting the two, especially the family unit. The differences between the Bambara, Fulani and Muslim cultures in various parts of Africa alone are great. When compared to the European lifestyle, it might even be a completely different world. A striking characteristic of the Bambara people shown in the novel is the size of their family units. A main character who surrounds much of the novel, Dousika Traore, is the father of around twenty children born to legitimate wives and at least two illegitimate children born to a concubine and another to a slave. In addition to her large family, Dousika lives in a compound with her siblings along with their respective families. The family's interconnectedness and bonds between them are undeniably loyal, yet the actual feelings they have for each other are a whole...... middle of paper......ekoro a "dirty nigger" and stating that she would never marry a smelly black man. A surprising point after this meeting is when Tiekoro explains the events to Siga and reflects on how the terms black and negro have no meaning to him. In his mind he is a Bambara noble. In Gorée, following the plot of Naba, renamed Jean Baptiste as a slave, we see a glimpse of the racism of Christianity. The slaves were divided into two distinct groups, a smaller group consisted of house slaves who worked for the officers of the local Gorée fort, from Signares or various officials working on the island, the second and incredibly larger group consisted of from “human cattle huddled in slave houses.” This seemingly indistinct separation of Africans into house slaves and slaves who would ultimately perform harsh physical labor seems reminiscent of slave practices in America.