Mali: Bamako – Grande Marche de Bamako
Grande Marche de Bamako is the main market in the capital city of Mali and it’s a total Insanity – crowded, hectic, loud, overloaded with smells and flavors, colorful like a kaleidoscope, and overall absolutely nuts. Anything and everything is for sale here – from authentic and unique souvenirs, to textiles, to Chinese knockoffs. But a special area is the voodoo market – any endangered or threatened animal species that still occasionally roams in the Malian wilderness is here – dried and ready to be used for medicinal voodoo practices. We saw leopard skulls and hides, monkey heads, thousands of dried hedgehogs, turtle shells, hundreds of dead green parakeets, snakes, crocodiles, and much much more. It’s dry season now, and so it didn’t spell too bad, but supposedly in the rainy season the stench is overpowering. Interestingly, the voodoo market exploded in popularity and size during Covid – nobody used or tried vaccinations but almost everyone opted for a dried hedgehog infusion or some freshly squeeze hyena juice to fight off those pesky coronavirus infections.
