Bridges from Bamako | life in a budding West African metropolis

Mali is a land of rich cultural diversity, this much is certain. The country’s population comprises dozens of ethnic and language groups, from Khassonke in the west to Bwa in the east, and from Tuareg in the north to Senoufo in the south. Malians practice...

This is a story about some encounters I had nearly 20 years ago in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, while researching my dissertation on transnational migrants from the western Sahel. It was in Brazzaville that I got to know a Malian named Malik, who...

“The French military, suffused with colonial ideology and stuck in obsolete schemas of the ‘War on Terror,’ is incapable of correctly analyzing the situation. Caught between French decision-makers unwilling to lose face and African leaders shirking their...

For the past few years, Mali’s industrial gold production (as reported by the Malian government in various press outlets) has been trending upward:
This is surely good news: add rising production levels to the climbing value of gold on world markets and you have a growing benefit to the Malian economy and the Malian treasury. Mali has become Africa’s third-largest gold producer and is ranked sixteenth...