Mali

A country named after one of the wealthiest empires the world has known, and now among the poorest states in it. The Mali Empire dominated the western Sudan from the thirteenth century on the gold trade across the Sahara, and Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 distributed so much gold in Cairo that the metal's price there was depressed for years. Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of Islamic scholarship, with private libraries holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, many of which survive. Songhai succeeded Mali and was destroyed by a Moroccan army crossing the desert with firearms in 1591. France conquered the region as French Sudan in the late nineteenth century, and independence came in 1960 after the two-month federation with Senegal broke up. Modibo Keita's socialist government was overthrown in 1968, beginning a pattern. Tuareg rebellions in the north have recurred since the 1960s, and the 2012 rising, reinforced by fighters and weapons returning from Libya, took the northern half of the country and brought French intervention. Manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu to save them. Bamako is the capital. The Niger river arcs through the country. The country covers over 1.2 million square kilometres, most of it desert. Djenne's great mosque is the largest mud-brick building in the world and is replastered communally each year. Four of its sites are World Heritage listed. Salt from Taoudenni was once traded weight for weight against gold. Malian musicians are among the continent's best known internationally, and the Festival au Desert near Timbuktu ran until the 2012 conflict stopped it.

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