Bamako, Capital of Mali

The Grand Hotel in Bamako was a five star international hotel run by a French Company.  It was wonderful to arrive from Kayes all covered with dust and grime and have a hot soapy bath with soft fluffy towels and a good meal.  Staying in the Grand Hotel was like plunging back into Europe after months in Africa.  We wandered around the hotel smiling stupidly with delight at familiar European style restaurants; familiar looking bars, lounges and hotel shops. We started to explore Bamako next day taking a short walk through this modern, busy city of a million inhabitants.  There are about twelve million people in the country who speak Bambara, with French as the main foreign language. Clearly with twelve million people in an area five times bigger than the UK there is a lot of empty space, and that is mostly in the north where Mali extends up into the Sahara desert. Bamako was impressive with paved roads, pavements, streetlights, parks, museums, multi storey office blocks and big modern hotels.  Since Mali has gold, iron ore, manganese, and uranium it is perhaps not surprising that the capital is so well developed.  On the other hand we knew that Mali was poor with a Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per head of $900 and some sections of the population were suffering from malnutrition.  So we were not sure what to expect.  The images of poverty, starvation and suffering promoted and promulgated in the Western media tend to dominate the imagination and don’t really give a balanced picture of West Africa.  Here was a relatively well to do city with happy industrious people working hard to make a living.  Certainly there was poverty, malnutrition and lack of opportunity in many agricultural areas, but that was clearly not the whole story.  To write off Africa as an economic basket case on the brink of starvation was just plain wrong.  Africa has more natural resources than almost any other continent; and with only 800 million inhabitants, half the population of China, it must be in with a fighting chance of eventual economic success. 

Our exploration of Bamako continued with a walk from the Grand Hotel down the main street, Avenue Modibo Keita, to the fabled great River Niger.  Here was another of the major African rivers and the object of European speculation and endeavour during the exploration of the African interior 200 years ago. It was wonderful to stand looking at this great African river, blue reflecting the perfect African sky, about 500m wide, and flowing slowly eastward toward Timbuktu, pointing the direction of our travel. At one time, a little over two hundred years ago, so little was known of the geography of the interior that it was believed that the Niger and the Nile were connected, somewhere in the centre of Africa.   We stopped for a drink of coke at a modern and expensive hotel on the banks of the Niger.  From there we took a taxi to explore the large bus garage on the south bank of the river.  The six or seven different bus companies that operated from here were in active competition and employed touts to bring in the customers.  So two white faces turning up sparked a riot of interest, which we expected and understood.  That is why we arrived in the taxi and not on foot. There were reasonably good buses to all parts of the country and our taxi driver very helpfully, dodged the touts and recommended the Bittar bus company.  So we bought bus tickets for the first bus out to Ségou the next day.

The main national museum was recommended and it was well worth a visit.  The exhibition of Malian history and culture was very well laid out with the exhibits tastefully displayed in air conditioned halls.  Explanations in English as well as French would have improved it for us, bit it was never the less fascinating. At the time there was also an excellent photography exhibition by a South African photographer who specialised in character studies and street scenes from all over modern Africa.  We took a slow walk back from the museum to the hotel to complete an interesting day in Bamako.  The hotel restaurant that night served excellent dinner and we took coffee in the bar.  Later in the evening there was a concert of leading Mali musicians, around the pool, which we enjoyed from our room.

This article is part of a series describing our tour of West Africa
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