A land most firm and prosperous, Bamako rests upon the valley of Niger as a stronghold of commerce and cosmopolitanism. While never a glimmering emerald such as Tangier or Tunis, remaining tolerable in the African malady is a feat underestimated.

From a fiefdom under Bambara rule, a prototypical confederation of small settlements upon the river, Bamako was not a remarkable place until the French expedition towards the Niger, where the administrator of Upper Senegal laid fortifications and sieged upon this minute chiefdom for two months. In a flaccid proportion, this led to its swift surrender and the establishment of French Soudan, a colonial expansion carved through sweeping hegemony upon commercial domination of the region.

Bamako's flat terrain and rolling currents delivered an administrative paradise for the bureaucrats who ruled the oppressive Malian territory for the subsequent half-century. Francophone officials and a few assimilated elites ruled in the vein of bringing modernity and civilization, a confounding contradiction to the thousands who slaved away in plantations and mines. This absolute paradox that a monopoly of violence kept afloat was a rather stubborn apparatus, both by the industrial progress brought and the populations shepherded, one only broken apart after the sordid collapse of Free France.

Although the disgraceful holdout residing in the Ivory Coast presently has no say in the affairs of the Sahel, the current Mali state remains under the governance of the same despotism as before — heartless oppression perpetrated not by men but by the barren and volatile material conditions themselves, singing a self-righteous lullaby in the name of the future.