Mali

The Ghana empire (Wagadu), a Soninke state north of the Niger, grew rich from about the 4th century by taxing gold from the south and salt from the Sahara. After its decline, Sundiata Keita founded the Mali empire in the 13th century. Its most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with so much gold that he disturbed prices in Cairo; he brought back scholars and architects who helped build Timbuktu's mosques.

Songhai, ruled from Gao on the Niger bend, replaced Mali in the 15th century and under Askia Muhammad reached from the Atlantic to today's Nigeria. A Moroccan army with firearms crossed the Sahara and destroyed it in 1591. Later states included the Bambara kingdoms of Ségou and Kaarta, the Fula Massina caliphate of the 19th century, and the Tukulor empire of El Hadj Umar Tall.

France conquered the region between the 1880s and 1890s as French Sudan. Independence in 1960 came after the brief Mali Federation with Senegal collapsed. Modibo Keïta's socialist government fell to Moussa Traoré's coup in 1968; a popular uprising in 1991 opened two decades of elected rule.

In 2012 Tuareg separatists and jihadist groups seized the north and a coup toppled the government in Bamako; French troops intervened in 2013. Violence moved into the centre and to Burkina Faso and Niger. After coups in 2020 and 2021 the junta of Assimi Goïta expelled French forces, ended the UN mission in 2023, left ECOWAS with its neighbours in 2025 and, the same year, faced a JNIM blockade of fuel convoys into Bamako.

Bambara is the language most Malians share; Fula herders, Soninke traders (many with relatives in France), Songhai along the river bend, Bozo fishermen, Dogon farmers on the Bandiagara escarpment and Tuareg and Arab nomads in the north make up the rest. Mande 'joking cousin' relationships between family names help keep peace between groups.

Islam arrived with traders over a thousand years ago; most Malians are Sunni Muslims attached to Sufi orders, and local practices — griots, masks, spirit cults — mix with it. Jihadist groups reject that mix, and have destroyed shrines in Timbuktu and banned music in areas they control. The Dogon keep a cosmology of ancestors and masks; the dama funeral dances are among West Africa's best-known ceremonies.

The north is Sahara, the centre is Sahel, the south is Sudanian savanna. The Niger enters from Guinea, spreads into the huge Inner Niger Delta — a seasonal floodplain the size of Belgium — and bends east at Timbuktu before turning south at Gao.

The rains fall from June to September in the south; the flood crest reaches the delta in autumn, when fishermen, herders and rice farmers share the water. Droughts in the 1970s and 1980s pushed nomads south and fed later conflict, and the Sahara's edge is shifting with climate change.

Mali is one of the world's great music countries: the kora of Toumani Diabaté, the desert blues of Ali Farka Touré and Tinariwen, the Wassoulou songs of Oumou Sangaré, the voice of Salif Keita. Griots still sing genealogies at weddings and naming ceremonies.

Timbuktu's private libraries hold hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on law, astronomy and medicine; when jihadists held the city in 2012–13, librarians smuggled most of them to Bamako. Djenné's Great Mosque, the largest mud-brick building in the world, is replastered by the whole town each year in the crépissage festival.

Mud cloth (bògòlanfini), indigo, and the photography of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé are among Mali's best-known arts. Food centres on rice and millet with sauces — tô, riz gras, peanut sauce, capitaine fish from the Niger.