# Sega, seggae, chutney Bhojpuri: spicy Mauritian blends of Creole music  
If there is one place where creolization takes on its full meaning, it is music. Music is used to identify common aesthetic components and/or specific features of Mauritianness. It is also through music that knowledge is shared, in addition to community-based endeavours, political instruction and segmented perceptions, and where Mauritianness is built.  
As can be seen in European accounts, the importance of Mauritian sega music has been highlighted since 1832. Original sega was a chant, a tale given rhythm by the ravanne, a local percussion instrument which is a sort of flat tambourine, and sometimes by the maravanne, an instrument similar to the maraca. Sega narrates the legends of the African tribes deported into slavery and tells the stories of daily life on the plantations. Sega is not only Mozambican and Malagasy in origin; it also derives from musical sources in Senegal, the Gambia, the kingdom of Galam, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, the kingdoms of Loango and Angola and the kingdoms of Ardres, Juda and Benin (Didier, 1987; Massamba, 2003, p. 12). It is both a dance and a rhythm. 'Jazz, Mississippi blues, calypso, reggae and séga share a founding rhythm from ancestral Africa' (Police, 2001). Its most famous performer is the singer Ti-Frère. 'Listen to the voice of Ti-Frère, the voice of Africa, the magical voice' goes the poem Lavrwa Tifrer (Sedley Richard Assonne). Through its freedom of expression, sega has come to influence the other forms of musical expression in Mauritius. It gave rise to seggae, the fusion of sega and reggae; seggae groups such as Otentikk Street Brothers, Les Natty Rebels and Racinetatane cultivate close