Mali
March 11, 2009
This morning I started my day with a traditional Mali breakfast- Millet
porridge. Women hammering millet grains with large pestles are a
ubiquitous site in the villages of Mali. Unfortunately most of my last
two days in Mali will be spent driving back to the capital Bamako. Today
I traveled from Dogon Country to Sogou. The trip was relatively
uneventful. I did stop at several small villages along the way that looked
interesting. For part of the journey much of the landscape was
dominated by large termite mounds. You don’t want to run out of
petrol outside the big cities, otherwise you will have to purchase it out
of wine bottles at the side of the road. These “gas stations” are illegal
and not surprisingly sell low quality fuel.
Sogou is a
city of about
2: Girl Grinding Millet
100,000 on
the bank of the Niger River. In the 17th
century Sogou was the center of the Bamana
Empire founded by the Kulubali Dynasty. The
Bamana people were anamist and the
empire was destroyed by an Islamic Jihad in
1818 arising out of Mopti. While touring the
old city of Sogou (Sogou Koro) I meet the
chief who is a descendant of the last Bamana
King. The dominant feature of the main city
of Sogou is the remnants of the collapsed
French colonial administration. The buildings
don’t
really
look French or 1: "Gas Station"
Malian for that
matter. They are sort of a French/Arabic hybrid. Like many African
countries Mali became independent in 1960. It first experienced one
party socialism, then a military dictatorship, but now Mali is considered a
“model-African democracy” (which I guess is better than being a “modelAfrican dictatorship). Actually people here seem to like the current
government and although corruption is still a problem, it is much better
than in the past.
In the evening I enjoyed another Mali delicacy, Poulet Yassa. It is chicken
in an onion and lemon sauce. The sauce was very good, but as I
mentioned before, the chicken here is always fairly scrawny.
3: Segou Koro
4: Royal Segou Chief striking a bad ass poses and Segou Imam
Best,
Sean
www.n-images.net