Mali

Mali is shaped around the great bend of the Niger. Each autumn the river spreads across the Inner Niger Delta, where channels and flooded pasture surround Mopti, then curves east along the desert edge. The north is Sahara; the south is savannah of shea and baobab. Between them the sandstone cliffs of the Bandiagara Escarpment stretch across the plain, and the Hombori peaks, among them the Hand of Fatima, rise sheer from the Sahel.

Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, and a later ruler, Mansa Musa, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with so much gold that its value fell in Cairo. Timbuktu’s scholars copied manuscripts on law, astronomy and medicine. The Songhai of Gao took over until a Moroccan army crossed the desert and defeated them in 1591. France had conquered the territory by 1900, and Mali took the old empire’s name at independence in September 1960.

Griots, hereditary bards, recite the epic of Sundiata to the kora, and Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita and Oumou Sangaré carried Malian music abroad. Each year the people of Djenné swarm over their Great Mosque, built of sun-dried mud, to replaster it before the rains. The Dogon carve masks and build granaries along their cliffs. Cotton and gold lead exports, rice comes from the irrigated fields of the Office du Niger, and slabs of salt cut at Taoudenni travel south by camel.