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Naturally, the road back to Mopti was still plagued by sand-traps, like the one ahead of us, forcing us to leave the beaten track to find our own way now and then.
As you can see, my room at the Campement was not luxurious but it had mosquito netting and was not bad for 13 dollars a night.
I am on the road again, this time badly cramped in the overcrowded back of this "bâché" for the drive from Mopti to Djenné. Everyone is getting off to board the ferry across the Bani River a few kms before Djenné.
The water was low in the Bani River as this was taken near the end of February. The level will continue to drop until the rains come in July. Later in the season, vehicles can cross the Bani on a causeway that is presently still submerged.
This is the fabled Djenné Mosque seen on Mali posters all over the world. Djenné was founded in the ninth century which makes it one of the oldest cities in West Africa, but its famous Mosque was built only at the turn of this century to replace a similar one dating from the 11th century. This dried mud architecture is an attractive characteristic of the Sahel but it is vulnerable to rain and requires constant maintenance.
Djenné's Monday market draws people from far and wide but the city is now only a pale shadow of its glorious past in the 15th century when it shared with Timbuktu the control of all the north-south trade in this region.
This large building, which looks out of place in Sahelian Djenné, was built for Moroccan merchants who maintained a strong presence here for a long time after the destruction of the Songhai Empire by Morocco at the turn of the 17th century. It had been converted to a hotel where I had a comfortable room for 14 dollars.
This labyrinth of narrow streets invites the mind to roam a few centuries past to imagine the great Songhai Empire whose distant capital Gao, is bigger but does not look as ancient as Djenné.
Djenné has been protected from change by its decline as a trade center and also by its location 30 kms away from the important highway linking Mopti to San and hence to Ségou and Bamako.
This is the outer gate of the hotel "Le Campement". I am not complaining about the place where I stayed but I would have preferred this one for it has more style.
The outer gate leads to a large courtyard and to this one which is the real entrance to the hotel. Next time I'll try this place.
Here is another view of the typical semi-arid Sahelian landscape that I took somewhere between Djenné and San on my way to Bamako. Notice the two baobab trees that store water in their porous trunks and the thorny acacia tree which doesn't seem to need water at all.
Bamako is a big African city with a busy market and an excellent ethnographic museum. This Catholic Cathedral, a legacy from colonial times, is generally empty for this is a very Islamic city. Everything closes down for a half hour long public prayer at noon even in the busy city center where loudspeakers ensures that nobody misses prayer by inattention. If you need to buy something, you just wait till prayer is over.
The sign in front of the Grande Mosquée next to the market states that "Mosques are consecrated to Allah" and orders: "Therefore, do not invoke anyone else but Him. The message is obviously aimed at at the country's Animist minority who invoke their ancestors as well as good and bad spirits associated with the forces of nature.
This is the artisans pavilion in Bamako's market.
And here is the sculptors alley with their supplies of seasoned wood.
This new market was built to replace the old one which was getting crowded and unhygienic. Its opening was still being delayed because of infighting over the attribution of the stalls between the various influential merchant families involved!
In a square dedicated to his memory, that great African idealist Patrice Lumumba raises his fist to call for the liberation of Africans from colonialism. Four decades later, it is ironic and somewhat sad to observe that in most African countries, the people have exchanged their foreign masters for local ones who are just as greedy and often more cruel than their predecessors.
Tribal politics, the inevitable result of the artificial delineation of the "countries" left behind by the colonialists, have led to nepotism and to the systematic corruption of officials and politicians at all levels of government. I would have liked to leave West Africa for North Africa on a more positive note, especially for sake of the sincere, hard working and competent Africans I have met, but it would do them disservice to pretend not to have seen their sad situation.
By the way, I think the rubbish some specialized magazines print about Africa constitutes a mockery of the freedom of the press. I think it is scandalous how some glossy paper prestige magazines not only fail to see the reality but unashamedly eulogize the worst dictators and the most corrupt regimes. Thankfully, some of that thrash so obviously reads like paid advertisements that only the most naive can take them seriously. We still have a long way to go... It seems to be politically correct and courageous to hassle the Chinese about human rights but strangely enough, many western politicians are proud to be photographed shaking hands, if not kissing, African dictators whose victims did not get the attention of the international media.
It is difficult to fight corruption from within when there's no free press. In these circumstances it becomes imperative to fight corruption from without by attacking the corrupters. Consequently I applaud the generosity of those countries (of which Canada), which have passed legislation making it a crime to pay bribes to foreign officials.
I also applaud the efforts of Transparency International (TI) whose exponential growth in the five years clearly demonstrates the need to fight corruption. I have added TI's Corruption Perception Index to the essential data box for the countries I could to give you an idea of the scope of the problem. In a global market, anyone is concerned because corruption, even in a remote and unknown country, warps the rules of the game and affects each one of us indirectly. I therefore enjoin all my readers to contact one of the 75 chapters of Transparency International to see how they can support that movement, however modestly it be.
