Mali: Bamako – Around the City
Bamako is a the capital of Mali and a city of over 4.5 million (though nobody countered recently, especially with the inflow of refugees escaping violence in the northwest. Niger River flows through the heart of the city. It’s very hot, muggy, dusty, busy, extremely chaotic, and a scene of a never-ending African market. There are few architectural attractions – the tallest building is the tower of BCEAO, which is the central bank of the CFA franc west African member countries, a beautiful building in a Sudanese sand-mosque style (funny, but after a military coup, Mali has withdrawn from ECOWAS and is even talking about abandoning franc CFA altogether). There’s also the Tower of Africa dedicated to the unity of west African nations (of which there’s none anymore), and lots of Soviet-style brutalist wall murals of Malians workers and peasants building a happy future.
