Mali’s interim Prime Minister—and NASA’s ex-interplanetary navigator—Cheikh Modibo Diarra was chased out of office Tuesday morning. He’d been arrested the night before by soldiers under the orders of Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, the man who led the coup that set the country into a disastrous spiral of instability in March. Early Tuesday morning, in a […]
Tuareg musicians Tinariwen, on tour in Europe these days, spent some time in Belgium this weekend. Belgian public broadcaster VRT [they’ll do a feature on Mali blues once a year, usually at the end of June, covering the one high-profile ‘world music’ festival Brussels has in summer, squeezing them into a one-minute slot alongside performers […]
Gregory Mann, associate professor of history at Columbia University in New York City,* writes a guest post for Africa is a Country on the coup in Mali:
Here’s video of the coup announcement in Mali. Ridiculous. The screen is dark at first — they were having technical difficulties — but the image appears after 30 seconds or so. See the scene. As for the speech, it’s the usual pompous nonsense, poorly delivered by a junior officer out of his depth.
