Global Voices, curated by Rozella Kennedy. This essay is also available in Spanish.
September, 2026: Across cultures and across time, words and stories have taught us how to survive, thrive, and make meaning of life. Before the printed page, communities and cultures used speech, song, theater, ritual, and other living forms to share knowledge, resist oppression, celebrate joy, and carry memory forward. I’m on a journey to learn more about and celebrate diverse writers and traditions from around the world, and you’re invited along! This month… we visit Mali.
About Mali Independence Day
September 22 marks Mali Independence Day, commemorating the country’s 1960 decolonization from France. (Entirely unrelated, Bulgaria marks 1908 independence from the Ottoman Empire on the same day.) France, which had first colonized Mali, along with Senegal and Niger in French West Africa, didn’t let go of its African holdings easily; for the descendants of the mighty ancient Mali Empire, freedom came at the end of a long struggle. Their fight for freedom included decades of filling the European coffers through unpaid human and natural resource extraction, heavy wartime losses on behalf of French armed forces during both World Wars, decades of political organizing, along with labor actions such as the 1947–48 Dakar–Niger railway strike, later fictionalized in Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembène’s critically acclaimed novel God’s Bits of Wood (Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu, 1960).
Many of us are taught African history as if nothing existed before European colonization. That mindset is especially unjust when it comes to the region French forces would designate as “French Sudan.” This is a land and people with one of the most illustrious cultures and histories in humanity. Consider early written accounts of the Ghana Empire of the eighth century, CE, known as Wagadu by its own rulers. This period was shaped by powerful kingdoms and thriving trade networks linking gold and salt, and during this time, longstanding cultural and ethnic formations emerged that still define lifeways today. Among the most celebrated rulers of the region was Sundiata Keita, whose thirteenth-century Mali Empire became one of the most powerful and prosperous states in West Africa during this epoch.
Sundiata’s grand-nephew was the great Mansa Musa (dates of rule: 1312–1337), he of the legendary 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca. Musa’s caravan reportedly included sixty thousand people and stretched so long, it took a day for the full group to pass. It is also said that Mansa Musa brought so much gold to Egypt during his pilgrimage that it depressed the precious metal’s price in Cairo for years afterward. He is credited with turning Timbuktu into a magnet for Islamic scholars. I am excited to know that Michael B. Jordan is poised to collaborate with filmmaker Ryan Coogler again, this time in a forthcoming biopic of Mansa Musa, where the Oscar winner will play the legendary king.
A Legacy of Epic Storytelling and Kings
Given its prominence in the Malian legacy, it should surprise no one that the best-known regional storytelling topic is the Epic of Sundiata, the founding story of Sundiata Keita and the thirteenth-century Mali Empire, which for centuries circulated solely in performance format. The epic recounts how Sundiata, an exiled and physically disabled prince, returned from banishment to defeat the sorcerer-king Soumaoro Kanté and found the Mali Empire around 1235. Jeliw, or as they are more widely known, griots, performed the episodic oral-musical cycle at royal courts, weddings, and naming ceremonies across the Mande-speaking lands that today span Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia. Let’s note that it was, like many oral sung/spoken epics of antiquity, not a work for entertainment but a foundational societal charter, one that legitimized the Keita lineage’s claim to rule and modeled the courage and patience expected of a Mande sovereign, and which all subjects should aspire to, however they were able.
A quick word about the jeliw. This honorific role of culture keeper was generally handed down through family lineage, and a select group of historians, poets, and musicians were entrusted with the task of chronicling their people’s history and leading them onto the pathway of an honorable life. The adapted live “performance” of genealogies, praise songs, and epics was often shaped and crafted in response to the occasion at hand and who was gathered among them.
In the griot tradition, skill is passed parent to child, voice to voice, and a jeliw’s authority comes from that unbroken lineage as much as from what’s actually said in performance. Indeed, many griots could trace their roots back to the founding of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century. And because their craft was never fixed to a single script, nor to the exploits of the individual, the tradition is generally approached as a collective expression of history and life.
Beyond the oral-musical cycle, Mali has a parallel tradition of grand scholarship tracing back to the Arabic-language manuscripts of great Timbuktu. Many of us think of “Timbuktu” as shorthand for “some faraway and potentially concerning place bad children are exiled to,” but the truth couldn’t be further from this unfortunate stereotype. This ancient desert trading city was, from the fourteenth century onward, a leading educational hub. Scholars attached to the Sankoré mosque copied, annotated, and sold books on topics such as law, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and poetry by the thousands. Between 300,000 and 700,000 of these manuscripts survive today, most still held in private family libraries and handed down through generations. This is a legacy that is fiercely and proudly protected: when jihadist fighters occupied the city in 2012, librarians and families smuggled the bulk of the collection out to Bamako in trunks and rice sacks. The manuscripts have only recently begun to return home.
Scholars like Ahmad Baba al Massufi (1556–1627) chronicled centuries of Islamic scholarship in law, astronomy, and theology, showing us that in the magnificent empire, oral and written record-keeping developed in tandem. The commingling of music, poetry, and text carries right into the founding of the modern state, which we will consider in a moment. But first, since we are celebrating Mali’s Independence Day, let’s briefly touch upon the colonial period.
From the Colonial Period to the Independence Movement
France took “control” over Mali in the late 1800s, as part of the land grab known as “the Scramble for Africa,” where European powers, chiefly France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal, raced to claim African territory for themselves (with no regard for the ancient and traditional cultures, territories, and norms of the indigenous peoples). The Europeans formalized the process at the infamous 1884–85 Berlin Conference, where Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, France’s Jules Ferry and others “carved up” the continent, with nary an African representative at the table. The borders they drew had little regard for the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences of the region, and followers of geopolitics and history recognize that these arbitrary boundaries, which later became national borders, are an underlying cause of much of the regional and intra-national conflicts that continue on the Continent to this day.
Under the French, the people of “Mali” endured the hallmark penuries of colonization, such as forced labor, physical punishment, and the installation of a small colonial-trained elite that imposed the machinery of empire on their own people. One of the more tragic outcomes of this period was the suppression of forms of Islamic and oral education, as the French sought to impose Catholic and western norms as superior, if not mandatory.
Colonization and the imposition of the French language and culture would infuse the narrative voice of Mali with western educational standards, a transitional and cultural mixité that culminated in a post-War literary generation. One notable individual of this era was Modibo Keïta (1915–1977), from Bamako, the capital city. The future first president of Mali, he also had a life in letters, authoring L’Enfant Sarakolle (1936), a cultural study of Soninke childhood as his final academic thesis. This work offers insight into both African intellectual life and the opportunities and constraints of education under French colonial rule. Later, he served as editor of L’Œil de Kénédougou (1943), a magazine critical of colonial rule, before turning his energy fully to organizing. Tracing his own family lineage to the medieval Keita dynasty, Modibo helped build the Sudanese Union–African Democratic Rally (US-RDA) into the territory’s dominant political party after World War II, and as I mentioned, would go on to be the newly independent nation’s first president.
Greatly weakened by the devastation of World War II, the European colonial powers faced growing demands for self-determination and the dissolution of empire. In 1958, France reorganized its colonial system by creating the French Community, granting its West African territories greater autonomy while maintaining close political ties to France. This was not an overnight victory for the colonized, but rather the culmination of decades of political organizing, labor movements, intellectual activism, and armed resistance.
Independence Arrives
In January 1959, French Sudan and Senegal joined together to form the Mali Federation, a name deliberately chosen to invoke the legacy of the medieval Mali Empire and affirm a shared African history and identity. The federation negotiated independence from France on June 20, 1960. Unfortunately, political disagreements between Keïta and Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor split the union apart within months. Senegal withdrew from the federation in August 1960. On September 22, 1960, the remaining territory declared itself the sovereign Republic of Mali, with Keïta as its first president.
Men of letters had prominence in the new nation. It was novelist and physician Seydou Badian Kouyaté (1928–2018) who provided the words to Mali’s national anthem, and the melody was arranged by Banzoumana Sissoko, a blind griot known across West Africa as the “old lion of Ségou.” Sissoko set the anthem to a tune said to date back to the medieval Mali Empire. “Le Mali,” adopted in 1962, is still the national anthem, literally built on a griot’s ngoni. (A ngoni is the griot’s plucked lute: a small wooden or calabash body covered in goatskin with a fretless neck, and four to eight strings. 14th-century Moroccan Muslim scholar, jurist, and traveler Ibn Battuta heard one played at the Malian court in 1352. This instrument, which would have made its way over the Atlantic during the dreadful Middle Passage, is widely considered the African ancestor of the American banjo.)
Keïta chose to maintain the new country’s name as “Mali” on purpose, staking his new republic’s identity to the legacy of Sundiata and Mansa Musa rather than to its colonial days as French Sudan. His government quickly replaced French civil servants with Malians, nationalized industry, and pursued a socialist, non-aligned path through the early years of the Cold War, before a 1968 military coup led by Moussa Traoré ended his presidency.
Mali Today
A landlocked country of some 25 million people and one of the youngest populations on earth, Mali has not had it easy in recent times. Coups in 2020 and 2021 brought Colonel Assimi Goïta to power; in 2025 Mali left the regional trade, development, and peace and security coalition ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) alongside Burkina Faso and Niger to form the Alliance of Sahel States. At this time, it dissolved its political parties, and in 2026 the transitional parliament granted Goïta a renewable five-year term without elections, even as jihadist and separatist offensives have taken ground across the north and center.
Despite these political woes, Mali remains one of the most culturally generous countries on earth. The griot line runs straight through musicians known to music lovers today such as Salif Keïta, Oumou Sangaré, Amadou & Mariam, Rokia Traoré, Fatoumata Diawara, and the late, great Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, whose twenty-one-string kora carried the music of the jeliw onto stages worldwide. Bamako has given the world the studio portraitists Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, and Souleymane Cissé, the first sub-Saharan African director to win a prize at Cannes, for Yeelen (1987); he passed away in 2025. I mention these musicians to underscore how closely linked storytelling, music, and culture remain to this day.
Twentieth-Century Literary Voices
With such a tremendous legacy, it is not surprising that the literary output of the independence era migrated the glory days of the Malian Empire into a modern tradition of spoken and sung word on the printed page. The earliest “literary” works of the 1960s demonstrate this, such as 1960’s transcription of the epic tale, transcribed and published in French by historian Djibril Tamsir Niane (1932–2021). A Guinean man, Niane was gifted the story through the tellings of a griot of the village of Djeliba Koro named Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté. Five years later, an English translation of the epic was published for the Longman African Writers Series by a British Africanist named G.D. Pickett. Though he has personally sunk into obscurity, Niane deserves credit for helping introduce the epic Sundiata tale to English-language readers worldwide.
Ethnographer, diplomat and writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ (c. 1900/1901–1991) spent his career translating that oral inheritance into written form, and he also gave the world an enduring dictum: the death of an African elder is “the loss of an entire library.” Bâ’s two-volume memoir, including Amkoullel, the Fula Boy (1991; translated into English by Jeanne Garane in 2021 for Duke University Press), blends autobiography with ethnography, tracing his Fula upbringing in the aftermath of war between the Fula and Toucouleur peoples, and Mali’s transition from precolonial life through French rule.
As the century progressed, other writers expanded the lens of their activity, such as Yambo Ouologuem (1940–2017) whose 1968 novel Bound to Violence is a sweeping satire spanning the thirteenth century to the twentieth. For his oeuvre, he became the first African writer to win France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot. Sadly, accusations of plagiarism and a legal case brought by British author Graham Greene exiled Ouologuem from public literary life for the rest of his years. Today, however, his work has attracted renewed critical attention. Some believe Ouologuem was harshly punished because he was a Black African writer, given there is a long tradition of “inspired by” and “borrowed from” in literature. Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning book, The Most Secret Memory of Men, recounts the story of an African writer in Paris who is damaged by plagiarism accusations; many say this is a depiction of Ouologuem’s story.
She-Roes of Malian Culture
Women appear in Malian letters as historians, novelists, and political memoirists, often as chroniclers of the independence movement. One of Mali’s earliest women political organizers was a midwife and leader named Aoua Keïta (1912–1980). Her 1975 memoir, Femme d’Afrique: la vie d’Aoua Keïta racontée par elle-même (A Woman of Africa: The Life of Aoua Keïta, Told by Herself), depicts her life of activism during the independence period, and won the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique Noire the following year. Trained as a midwife in Dakar in 1931, she became the first woman elected to Mali’s National Assembly in 1959 and helped draft the country’s 1962 Marriage and Guardianship Code, which expanded women’s legal rights. Adame Ba Konaré (b. 1947), a historian and Mali’s former first lady, has written extensively on Malian history and women’s roles within it. Novelist Aïcha Fofana (1957–2003) and contemporary writer Fatoumata Keïta (b. 1977), winner of the Massa Makan Diabaté Prize in 2015, both write fiction grounded in the textures of everyday Malian life, urban and rural. I’d like to consider that these women are extending the oral tradition on paper as jelimusow, or female griots. These are books I’d like to pick up whenever I next get back to Paris!
Poetics
Naturally, a culture rooted in the melding of spoken and sung history has also produced some poets worth knowing. Fily Dabo Sissoko (1900–1964) was associated with the Négritude movement, the literary and political current launched in 1930s Paris by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Paulette Nardal, which asserted the dignity and distinctiveness of Black African culture against French assimilationist doctrine. Conservative Sissoko (no relation to the blind griot) was a prominent political rival to Modibo Keïta during the pre-independence days. In a sad historical footnote, he died in 1964 while imprisoned at Kidal, one of several political opponents jailed under Keïta’s one-party state.
Massa Makan Diabaté (1938–1988), born into a griot lineage in Kita, transcribed his own versions of the Sundiata epic (Kala Jata, 1970; L’Aigle et l’épervier, 1975) before turning to fiction with his “Kouta trilogy” of novels set in his hometown. Le Lieutenant de Kouta (1979), Le Coiffeur de Kouta (1980), and Le Boucher de Kouta (1982) are wry, gossipy, affectionate portraits of a small town negotiating independence, and they earned him the Grand Prix International Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1987; Michigan State University Press published Shane Auerbach and David Yost’s English translation of the first volume, The Lieutenant of Kouta, in 2017. Diabaté once said that writing novels was itself a kind of betrayal of the oral tradition his uncle, a master griot, had initiated him into—but also, simultaneously and paradoxically, its continuation.
A living poet to know about is Ousmane Diarra (b. 1960), who is also a novelist. He lost both his parents at age two and has written extensively about growing up in the Sahel desert region, an area which stretches in a dry belt across the continent between the Sahara and the savanna, and which has been pressed hard in his lifetime by drought, desertification, and armed conflict. His works, such as Vieux Lézard (2006) and La Route des clameurs (2014), both published in Gallimard’s Continents Noirs series, are said to glide fluidly between French and Malian oral storytelling forms. La Route des clameurs, written in fury just after the 2012 jihadist occupation of northern Mali, is narrated by a boy watching extremists seize his town and persecute his father, in a voice that sounds far more spoken than written.
I’ll end with mentioning a female essayist, Aminata Traoré (b. 1947). She is the former Mali Minister of Culture and Tourism, known internationally for her writing on globalization, West African economic sovereignty, and cultural policy. Works include L’Étau: l’Afrique dans un monde sans frontières (Actes Sud, 1999) and Le Viol de l’imaginaire (Fayard/Actes Sud, 2002).
Other Sources
- History of Mali — Wikipedia
- History of Mali — Britannica
- List of Malian writers — Wikipedia
- Mali country overview — The World Bank
- Mali economic outlook — African Development Bank
- Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G.D. Pickett — Longman African Writers / Pearson
As a member of the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival’s Bridge Builders Committee, I curate a short monthly series for the Festival’s newsletter highlighting Global Voices. That brief overview is published in English and Spanish in the newsletter; the longer essays publish here, in English and in Spanish. Reality Check: While I have not and cannot read all the books I refer to, I am savoring the discoveries as I read, listen, watch, and explore what I can on this global cultural voyage. That’s the spirit of this venture, so I hope it brings you some discovery, delight, and appreciation for our wonderful world of creative people and traditions. I’m also the founder of Brave Sis Project, and reside in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.