Going to Mali: the backstory |
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GDP: US$ 5,400 million (1994) |
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Going to Mali winter term of my senior year was the culmination, in a way, of my academic experiences in college. I knew nothing about Africa when I arrived Freshman year. I was interested in film, so I took a course in African Cinema taught by Professor Keita and Media Studies Professor John Schott. The movies were filled with cultural symbolism that Cherif unpacked for us through telling stories of his childhood, and that was the beginning of a long relationship with colonialisme that popped up in every French course I took afterward. Still, I didn’t feel particularly drawn to the continent. While friends of mine were going on off-campus studies program s in Tanzania, China, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, I played it safe, and went to Paris as a sophomore. But as if by chance, or fate, the courses I needed for my concentration always seemed to revolve around Africa. I studied ethnography, history, literature, oral tradition, and music before my senior year. I had not expected to be able to participate in the program because senior comprehensive exams take place in the winter, the term that Professor Keita would lead the first group to his native country. When I found out that it was possible to do much of the preparation for the exam during the fall, and thus be able to go Mali in the winter, I stayed up the whole night thinking about the ways my life would or could change as a result. I applied the next day. It was a natural progression, but one that was only clear to me once the trip was part of my near future. The work I had done in the classroom and out, photographing Malian musicians who came to visit Cherif, suddenly had a new context. Finally getting to see the country that had been such a part of my education was the capstone of my college career. While I had learned a lot about the culture and its epic heroes and colonial history, I
knew almost nothing about the present day realities, except that it was the third-poorest
country in the world. Our pre-departure reading and the U.S. State Department website gave
me the necessary statistics: its GDP per capita is less than US $600, and infant mortality
and fertility rates are regularly number one among developing countries. There is little
industry and only a skeletal infrastructure.
Agriculture comprises 40% of the GDP, with cotton and
livestock as the major exports, along with millet, sorghum, corn, rice, livestock, sugar,
peanuts, and tobacco. I had seen some of the geography in the films we saw for class: it
looked dry and barren, but there were trees and fields. That was only a small part of the
country; the climate is subtropical in the south and arid in the north; 65% of its land
area is desert or semidesert, and only 2% is considered arable. Frequent droughts, like
the one that devastated Mali in the mid-80’s, deforestation, soil erosion, and
desertification make farming difficult even in irrigated areas, which are confined to the
area near the Niger. Roughly 80% of the population works in agriculture, either farming,
herding, or fishing; industry is limited to food processing, textiles, cigarettes,
plastics, and beverage bottling. Mali has promisingly vast mineral reserves, including
gold, salt, uranium, bauxite, iron ore, tin, and copper, but the near-total lack of
infrastructure severely limits their exploitation. Of the 15,000 kilometers of roads, only
1,827 are paved, mostly linking the capital, Bamako, with major cities such as Segou,
Sikasso, Mopti, Timbuktu, and Gao. The only way to reach the western portion of the
country is by the railway that links Bamako with Kayes and Senegal. While there are numerous ethnic groups in Mali, whose borders were drawn by the colonial French government without regard to native populations, there is very little ethnic conflict. The majority share similar historic, cultural, and religious traditions, and each was traditionally tied to a specific occupation, so that a sort of ethno-professional symbiotic relationship existed throughout history. The Bambara, Malinke, Sarakole and Voltaic (who comprise a larger group, the Mande) were farmers; the Peul,and Tuareg, herders; and the Bozo and Somono, fishers. Each ethnic group has its own language, but Bambara is the language of trade, used by an estimated 80% of the population, and in regions with a multiplicity of ethnicities, most people grow up polylingual. As empires have risen and fallen over the centuries, the people of the Sahel have incorporated into their culture a healthy sense of fatalism: fortunes may improve or be destroyed at any moment, so make the most of the present situation, help your neighbors, and hope for the best. Inter-ethnic relationships are relaxed and cooperative: embedded in the culture is the knowledge that at various times throughout history one’s ancestors went from slaves to kings and back again, and thus while many jokes are made about the relative merits of Malinke vs. Peuls, for example, everyone understands that they are all fundamentally equal.
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Country Facts (from the CIA World
FactBook, 1999):
From December 28, 1999 to March 6, 2000 I
lived in Bamako, the capital of the West African nation of Mali as a participant in the
first Carleton College Mali program, led by Professor Cherif Keita. I and the other
eighteen students lived with host families, and took classes in Malian literature, Malian
film, and Bambara (the language spoken by 80% of the population). We traveled most
weekends to visit other parts of the vast country; interacted with artists, musicians,
writers and filmmakers in French (the official language) and began to absorb the rich
culture that is Mali’s heritage. I majored in English at Carleton, with a
concentration in French and Francophone Studies.