Mali

2012 Festival au Désert in Words and Photos + Update from Bamako

by phil February 3, 2012 Mali

I recapped the Festival briefly in this post. The event was over two weeks ago. A lot has changed in northern Mali (and in Bamako, you could say) since then. I will address this to an extent later in the post. I will also list some resources for you to follow. I first traveled to [...]

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Brief Recap of 2012 Festival in the Desert

by phil January 19, 2012 Mali

I’ll have a more substantial post up in the next week. For now.. As of two weeks ago, I didn’t know whether or not I would be attending festival in the desert. Security concerns and cost weighed heavily. But a week or so before the festival, I found myself having some reassuring conversations. I was [...]

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Find me a Country with More Pride

by phil September 8, 2011 Mali

I tend to rail on people who generalize about Africa, but I also realize that cultures south of the Sahara have a lot in common. This post from Akila and Patrick, about a cooking class in Zambia, reminded me of that fact. Women append their babies to their backs with vibrant pagnes, vegetables are cut [...]

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Music that is Making my Life Better

by phil August 9, 2011 Cote D'Ivoire

On the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, in Abidjan, you can go to a nightclub and dance to coupé-décalé till morning. It is possibly the most frenetic dance music on earth. Get in sync with it and your definition of human movement will change forever (see Dj Arafat’s “kpangor pour bouger” or this dance video of [...]

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Do you Expect to See this in a West African City?

by phil August 4, 2011 Mali

In what is turning into something of an informal series (see this and this), this is another post challenging perceptions of Africa. In tenth grade, one of my classes began with a round table discussion of current events. Each day, everyone in the class brought in an article to share. On one occasion, a classmate [...]

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Bamako to Dakar: a Tidy 35 Hours on the Okra Sauce Bus

by phil July 27, 2011 Mali

Four hours into a 35 hour bus ride and the sky dropped an ocean on western Mali. Rivulets formed in an instant and brown water submerged a police checkpoint, normally a hub of commerce but temporarily abandoned because of the storm. My seatmate moved to the stairwell, a seat I am familiar with, when the [...]

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