Guest Post by Samira Sawlani* We won’t be surprised if Malians don’t care much for football right now as conflict ravages through the country’s north and east (separatists and Islamists are occupying much of the north of Mali, engaged in a standoff with French and Malian government troops). So I asked a friend who lives […]
Whew, Mali. French air raids against Islamist positions in Mali began Thursday night, and the dust hasn’t settled yet. The news is changing fast, but, three things emerge from the haze. First, fierce fighting in the North and the East, with French forces in the lead, will open up a whole new set of dangers. […]
Remember that little video campaign called #Kony2012? Yeah, we wish we could forget too. Few videos have reached the magnitude of pestilence that the non-profit Invisible Children’s video achieved this year. By transforming a complex regional crisis involving the Lord’s Resistance Army into a simple, manufactured (and in some ways factually false) narrative about the […]
Ah, the warm bath of public affection in the post-colony. French President François Hollande’s visit to Algeria this week was a little odd, on more than one count. Algeria is about the last place you’d think a French head of state would engage in what in American politics is called working the crowd and in […]
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 […]
Two things I’ve learned about the popular press in the last few months: you don’t get to pick your own headline, and you don’t want anyone thinking that the inevitable picture of the guy with a machine gun is the author photo (not the one above, although strictly speaking, if his face is hidden, it […]
I’m not in the music business. I am, however, in the bullshit business. So my ears prick up when I hear some guy’s launched a Kickstarter project to go to Mali and make music and instead wound up helping to end slavery. Damn. That Kickstarter must be strong stuff!
Mali in the rainy season has its own rhythm, especially in the South: long days under heavy skies anticipating rain; moments when it comes so powerfully the world seems ready to end. Afterwards, a peculiar freshness and coolness, and new brown streams gurgling everywhere. With Ramadan coming soon, that rhythm will be syncopated, the regular […]
Strange bedfellows in the Malian Sahara of late. The Tuareg rebel movements that took control of northern Mali last month looked to have struck a deal over the weekend, only to have it come into question since. The supposedly secular, progressive, and multi-ethnic MNLA shook hands with the Ansar Dine, the Salafist movement that has […]
Ah, Mali. From bad to worse. Monday, “protestors” found a seventy-year old man sitting in his office and beat him unconscious. Preliminary reports had him lying in hospital with head wounds. Apparently he’s been released, but after such a beating, he might never be the same again. Will the country?
