Roads? Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads!

Mali is one of the best examples of what Oxford economist Paul Collier would categorize as a “non-developing country”; after half a century of the government pushing for industrialization, a thorough IMF structural adjustment overhaul and a steady flow of World Bank development loans and NGO grants, Mali’s GDP now stands at $8.8 billion and has been growing at an average rate of 4.7 percent over the past ten years. This might sound like a fairly decent growth rate, but if you consider that the GDP of this nation of 13 million people is less than half of Michael Bloomberg’s net worth of $18 billion, as far as nations go Mali’s $8.8 billion amounts to peanuts. And when you consider that Mali’s population of 13 million has also been growing 3 percent annually, GDP per capita has only been growing around 1.7 percent per year. And since such a disproportionate amount of these final goods are being bought and sold in the cities, and even in the cities at least 30 percent of the masses are absolutely unemployed and can hardly even buy cheap staple foods, and the vast majority of the rural population is barely eking out a living in the subsistence agricultural economy, that 1.7 percent annual GDP growth per capita really only represents growth in the wealth of the small urban elite. So yes, Mali’s economy is in fact growing – but it is only growing for the handful of bankers and bus drivers and cell phone dealers and government employees who have any money to begin with; meanwhile the rural peasants are reaping smaller harvests, the urban poor are able to purchase less food, and malnutrition and even starvation are becoming increasingly common. Such a trend of nominal financial expansion fueled by growing public indebtedness and deepening inequality surely represents growth in the amount of money changing hands, but it can hardly be described as economic development.

Collier would explain that there is a rational geographical explanation for why Mali’s economy is going nowhere fast, because it is a “land-locked country with bad neighbors”; that the Malian people conduct such little trade because man-made barriers preclude exports to foreign markets. If you look at a map of the region, you should be able to understand how the Niger River has served as the primary trade route between Bamako, Ségou, Mopti, Timbuktu and Gao for more than a millennium – the waterway has been such a vital artery that in Bambara it is known as Joliba, or “the Big Blood”. And likewise, the river should serve as the natural trade route for contemporary Malians to transport cotton, peanuts and shea butter from Bamako up through the northern provinces of Mali, down through Niger, Benin and Nigeria to Port Harcourt and cargo freighters bound for the markets of the world.


But downstream from Timbuktu, the Niger River flows through politically unstable territory prone to unchecked banditry, and even if Malian goods make it all the way to the coast the Nigerian customs agents demand egregiously high bribes in exchange for export licenses. The next best alternative would be to truck Malian goods across Côte d’Ivoire to the seaport at Abidjan – but overland transportation is significantly more expensive, the rebel militias in Northern Côte d’Ivoire demand hefty extortion fees from all vehicles traveling through their territory, and the port in Abidjan is manned by equally corrupt kleptomaniacs. The port in Accra is arguably the most efficient and professionally-manned in all of Africa - but there is no Malian-Ghanaian border so that would require paying customs duties twice. Senegal is relatively stable and bribery at the Dakar seaport is somewhat less rampant – but anything grown in Mali is also grown locally in Senegal and can be trucked to the port of Dakar much cheaper, so Malians have to slash the prices of their own goods in order to compete. Altogether, completely unnecessary transportation costs and institutionalized bribery jack up the cost of running an export-oriented business to such an extent that it is quite challenging for anyone in Mali to sell their goods abroad and make a profit. Even though there are foreign consumers who do want to buy Malian cotton, peanuts and shea butter, with such constrained access to foreign outlets these wares stay to glut brackish domestic markets where the prices of locally-produced goods remain depressingly low.

Another cause of Mali’s economic stagnation which Collier failed to acknowledge is that the same factors which hinder a “land-locked country with bad neighbors” from participating in the global economy – political instability, insufficient trade routes, institutionalized bribery, graft, embezzlement and outright theft – also play a major role in stifling domestic commerce. Despite being fellow citizens of the same country, the Bamakois urban elite, the Malinke gold miners in Kayes, the Senaful cotton farmers of Sikasso, the cliff-dwelling Dogon of the central plateau, and the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara Desert represent distinct markets effectively more segmented than the nation-states of Europe. And the separateness of the various markets of Mali is not predestined by geography or ethnicity; it is directly related to more human factors like the fact that the 23rd largest country in the world has only 18,709 kilometers of roads – less than Jamaica, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.

Part of the transportation problem in Mali exists, of course, in the complete and utter lack of physical infrastructure. There is a modest network of one-lane paved roads known as le guidron connecting the major cities, and there are some decent one-lane dirt roads connecting some of the larger market towns… and that’s about it. In the region of Ségou in which I live, there is a guidron that goes from Bamako to the city of Ségou, down to Bla and San, then up to Mopti and the Northern provinces; there are also two guidrons from Bla and San which converge in the city of Koutiala in the next province South. An equivalent would be if Ohio had a one-lane paved road from Cleveland to Toledo, a second paved road from Toledo to Cincinnati, a third from Cincinnati through Columbus to Cleveland, and the only routes to Akron or Canton or Youngstown were made out of dirt.


Unless it happens to be situated along one of the roads between cities or market towns, a rural village in Mali is effectively isolated from the national economy because there is probably no route to the nearest car-worthy road that can be honestly classified as a “road” in its own right. When I bike to visit my friend in the village of Zamblala 40 kilometers away, I’m going down a mountain biking trail over gullies, through sand traps and around ditches which is only distinguishable from the rest of the scrubland in that other people have traveled this way in the past. Some sections of the “road” from Sanadougou to Zamblala are so completely identical to the rest of the expanse of sun-baked mud that I have to know to go South at the big termite mound and Southwest from the old baobab tree towards the pile of rocks. Parts of the “road” to Zamblala are so narrow and it makes such sharp turns that I couldn’t even drive down it with my late Jeep Wrangler – it is only accessible by bicycle, motorcycle, donkey or foot.

That doesn’t mean that people from Zamblala don’t come to Sanadougou to do business. They do. On Sanadougou’s market every sixth day, Zamblalakaw tie a few chickens to their handlebars or pack a satchel of however many onions they have to spare and bike the nonexistent “road”. Since there is no car that services this little village, what they can sell at Sanadougou’s market is limited to that which won’t be damaged en route – usual market mainstays like tomatoes, mangoes or bananas can only be sold at home. So though the soils and the climate are identical, due to the lack of transportation infrastructure Zamblala’s economy is considerably more oriented towards autarkic subsistence and less towards commerce than the economy of Sanadougou only 40 k away.

And when I speak of commerce among rural agricultural communities, I refer to an exchange so miniscule that American readers might wonder why people even bother. When a Fatimata from the neighboring village of N’jesu ties a satchel of peanuts, balances it on her head and spends the morning walking the 16 kilometers down the “road” to the Sanadougou market, she really only has a window of two to three hours to sell her peanuts before she has to spend all afternoon walking home. And I emphasize that in an agricultural community where everybody has been growing more or less the same crops for generations, the market is flooded with surpluses of the same products that everyone is trying to sell to people who already make these same things themselves. If she’s lucky, after a busy day hawking at market Fatimata will have sold 150 francs (~38 cents) worth of peanuts – enough to buy a box of tea and a small bag of sugar, and then she has to walk the 16 kilometers back the cow path to N’jesu before nightfall. In a rural Minianka village, most people like Fatimata partake in such incipient trade only once every six days.


Sanadougou is a rural market town serviced by a significant dirt road that is relatively well-maintained and large enough that the trucks from the textile company CMDT can come to buy the cotton farmers’ harvest and bring it back to their mill in Koutiala. Sanadougou’s farmers benefit from these roads as they provide the infrastructure necessary for them to sell a cash crop. Farmers come to Sanadougou from smaller villages by donkey cart over the little dirt paths...


... and at the Sanadougou market CMDT agents weigh and buy all of the cotton so the can fill the storage containers carried back to Koutiala by truck. Hence the improved dirt road from the guidron to Koutiala to Sanadougou develops the commercial economy of the market town, and this economic expansion allows global capitalism to at least penetrate the economies of villages like Zamblala and N'jesu.


As consumers, Sanadougoukaw benefit from the improved dirt roads in that they can buy things that no one makes locally; tea, sugar, instant coffee, plastic cups and bowls, black marketed Goodwill clothing, bootleg “medicine” from China and Nigeria, ginger, green peppers, plantains and bread. But local producers who came to market on foot or bicycle now have to compete with vendors from Koutiala selling the same tomatoes, mangoes, onions, cucumbers, yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, etc. that they sell – only they were grown in the more fertile Sikasso region which means that the imported goods are generally larger, richer, and overall superior products to what is grown locally. The net result is a form of domestic mercantilism in that rural farmers earn their modest monetary income by selling their cash crops to urban industrialists, and these cash crop farmers spend all of their money on urban merchants’ cheap manufactured goods – only the most miniscule commerce is conducted between rural villages.

Would economic activity expand and diversify if USAID were to swoop in and pave the road from Sanadougo to Koutiala? Or even the cow paths from Zamblala and N’jesu to Sanadougou? There would be some more money in circulation in the area if USAID were to hire local men to do all of the menial labor – but more than likely they would hire a contractor from Bamako with one of the few steamrollers in this country, and contractors almost always come with their own team of workers. And maybe motorcyclists would be able to drive a bit more efficiently and save ever so slightly on their gas bills. But other than that it is difficult to see how paving the way to rural backwaters is going to carry much economic benefit; road construction per se does not guarantee the arrival of more customers unless it allows for bigger and better vehicles to ship new products that they are willing to buy, fresh blacktop does not necessarily mean that more vendors are going to travel to a particular market with more variety and quality of goods unless there actually exists demand for those goods at the end of that road.

The relationship between economic growth and road construction is not at all like that between the chicken and the egg – economic growth must come first, for there is no way for the benefits of road construction to outweigh the costs otherwise. And those new roads must continue to generate additional economic activity and tax revenues indefinitely, because roads must be regularly maintained in order to remain functional. In this harsh climate which alternates between extreme heat and extreme dryness to torrential rains, a paved road that is never re-tarred will develop pockmarks which develop into potholes and the entire mass of blacktop will crumble into black pebbles and dust in less than 10 years.


So a road cannot just be a one-time cadeau from a foreign NGO, it needs to be necessary infrastructure whose regular upkeep can be justified in the annual budget of the cash-strapped Ministère de l’Équipement et des Transports in order to be sustainable. And the le Ministère de l’Équipement et des Transports is never going to be able to finance road construction and regular maintenance until le Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances receives a greater regular flow of cash into its coffers, and that is not going to happen until the commercial portion of the Malian economy finally experiences sustained growth. Only then will the state be able to recognize the trade routes which facilitate that new economic activity and allocate its scarce resources towards infrastructural development.

The government’s construction of new car and truck-worthy roads would facilitate the more efficient transport of goods to and from rural markets like Sanadougou; nevertheless, Ségou province is a relatively flat and traversable part of Mali where the construction of a road is at least a feasible endeavor – this cannot be said in other regions. The Dogons purposefully established their oldest villages on top of cliffs only accessible by exhausting, hours-long hikes through steep, narrow boulder passes so that they would not have to defend themselves from Fulani warriors on horseback or camelback. Improving transportation is particularly daunting in Dogon Country because this tribe deliberately chose to settle in locations as isolated as possible from the rest of the human population, where road construction is downright impossible. Some Tuareg communities roving in the middle of the Northern desert are so far from the nearest gas station that they can only be reached by camel caravans. And it would be a futile effort to pave roads in the Tuaregs’ desert where the sand dunes can migrate up to 100 meters every year – these people have spent millennia wandering in the desert precisely because they have cornered the Sahara trade routes without any formal transportation infrastructure.


If deficiencies in transportation are standing in the way of economic development and yet roads do not by themselves facilitate more commerce, what else can the government of Mali do to aid the free flow of goods in this country? For starters, the State could strengthen public integrity laws, conduct self-policing sting operations and fire all of those who are caught breaking the laws in order to root out corruption in the gendarmerie.

You see, the government could pave every road, street, bike trail and cow path from Kayes to Taoudenni, but moving goods from the country to the town and from the town to urban markets is still going to remain prohibitively expensive for farmers to participate in the market economy so long as the transport companies are free to gouge their customers as they please. There are laws on the books which regulate trucking and bussing operations, but they carry as much force as the Soviet Constitution so long as the owner of an offending vehicle can flash a wad of bills in front of an unscrupulous gendarme and drive away scot free.

A market town like Sanadougou is the final destination for some country produce, but it serves its most important function in the national Malian economy as a regional hub for rural goods to make their way to the cities. Farmers don’t stand to earn much selling food to other farmers who have food of their own but very little money, but they have the potential to make considerable profits if they can move their goods to the cities where all of those bankers and government employees and cell phone dealers and mill workers live who have to buy their food with their salaries and wages. Urbanites don’t just buy tea and sugar – they even have to buy peanuts and their staple cereals of millet and rice. And a Sanadougou farmer cannot transport 100 kilograms of peanuts 60 kilometers down the road to Koutiala by bicycle – he has to go by car.


There are two cars in Sanadougou; one car belongs to the Commandant who never drives it but keeps it propped up on blocks to flaunt his wealth before his houseguests, the other is driven every day by the “mobilitigi” Issa Sogoba as the most profitable business in the entire Commune. It is a 38-year-old German delivery van that was originally intended to carry two people and a small load of cargo; if this van could have been used in Germany for human transport (and it most certainly would not have) maybe it could have had seats for a maximum of 9 passengers. Issa Sogoba installed four rows of five 12-inch seats so that if one person sits shotgun and another sits with their legs around the stick shift they can sell seats for 22 passengers. I must emphasize that these 12-inch seats are only as wide as seats for small children and they run only 12 inches up the passengers’ backs; it is literally impossible for five grown adults to sit in this row with their backs alongside the seat, so when the car is at maximum capacity – and it almost always is – everyone has to sit at an angle with their arms interlocking and their shoulders in each others’ faces.

The only product that a Malian mobilitigi is selling is movement from point A to point B; timeliness, efficiency, safety and comfort are dismissed as unaffordable luxuries. The engine on the Sanadougou car can only ignite if the car is already moving, so Issa begins each journey with his apprentices and all of the male passengers pushing the overloaded van to a start. There are no functional breaks, so Issa can only stop the car by letting his foot off the gas and coasting to a halt. There are no seatbelts. The tires are so bald that there are no longer any visible treads – but that doesn’t prevent Issa from careening down potholed dirt roads at 60 miles an hour. The windshield is shattered into a hundred pieces but by some stroke of luck it hasn’t fallen yet. The driver’s side-view mirror no longer exists. There is no muffler and the tailpipe belches out plumes of black smoke. By all standards of common sense and Malian law, it is a danger to society for anyone to drive this car and no one should ever be allowed to charge people to ride in it.


But that doesn’t stop Issa from transporting the farmers and goods of Sanadougou and its tributary villages to markets in the nearby cities. Almost everyone riding in Issa’s car is going to the city to sell their wares, so the roof is so overloaded with sacks of millet and rice and peanuts that it tips noticeably to one side or the other. And Issa’s two apprentices are sitting with the sacks of peanuts on the roof so they can load and unload cargo over the course of the ride. Sometimes they carry a 25th and 26th passenger who sits with the apprentices on the roof, and a 27th and 28th stand on the rear bumper holding onto a ladder for support. And the passengers in Issa’s car are also traveling to market breastfeeding their babies, with their chickens pecking at people’s feet, and their goats tied to the roof where they urinate on whoever is sitting by the window. And on trips home from the city Issa often brings a drum of gasoline which he crams in the back – all but guaranteeing that if the car were rear-ended with any amount of force that at least the 22 human passengers with seats would be trapped in a fiery inferno.

Usually Issa’s car simply does not work because the fan belt dates from the early 1970s so every time it tears Issa stops for 40 minutes to melt it back together with a cigarette lighter. Given the fact that fan belts are available for purchase in every city to which he drives, it is somewhat amazing that Issa has never bothered to purchase a new one. But there is no pressing need to spend money on replacing broken parts when the old ones can be stitched into temporary semi-functionality indefinitely. After all, every other Malian transport company also sells tickets to vans and buses with 30-year-old engines that unambiguously do not work, so spending revenues on anything but bare-bone maintenance is considered an uncompetitive business practice. There is not even any incentive for chauffeurs like Issa to improve their services, because Malian customers are perfectly accustomed to waiting on the side of the blacktopped road for 2 hours in the 116 degree sun – they’re not going to complain, because they’ve never known any reality other than one in which buses routinely break down. Besides, a rural transport provider like Issa Sogoba faces no pressure to make his car more efficient or to otherwise reduce his fares, because he enjoys a perfect monopoly over the Sanadougou market.

I recently sat down with Issa to crunch the numbers of his business, and the results demonstrate just how profitable it is to run a transport company with zero competition and zero regulation. Issa bought his fifth-hand car in 1994 for 3 million CFA (~$6,000) – which was by any measure an act of highway robbery, though since no one in Mali could possibly save that much money he financed the purchase by taking out a loan from Kafo Jiginew on the terms that it be paid back in one year at 15 percent interest – which any objective analyst would classify as clear-cut usury. So I actually have some sympathy for the man in that he is a victim of an exploitative banking industry, and the rates that he charges were perfectly justifiable in light of the terms of his original loan.

In order to make 3,450,000 CFA so that he could pay off his loan within a year, Issa set his standard of filling his car with at least 22 passengers and their cargo on any leg of the journey. If one man is traveling to Koutiala with 4 sheep to sell at market, he pays 1,500 francs for his own fare and 250 for each of his sheep. Or if that passenger is bringing 2 sacks of peanuts, he has to pay 1,000 francs for each sack. Issa transports a disproportionate amount of goods in relation to passengers, however, because a lot of people in Sanadougou have prearranged sales with customers in Koutiala and only have to pay to send their goods. In all, Issa makes an average of 45,000 CFA in revenues on a typical trip to Koutiala. He pays for 10,000 francs worth of gasoline, and his two apprentices make 1,000 each day for loading and unloading cargo; this day’s operating costs total 12,000 francs. Thus on an average Wednesday – Koutiala’s market day – Issa makes 33,000 francs (~$66) in profits.

Fares, gas prices and apprentice earnings differ according to the distance traveled each day. On Monday Issa drives to the San market and makes a profit of 40,000 francs (~$80). On Tuesday he drives to Yangasso and makes 35,000 francs (~$70). Thursday he goes to Bla and makes 28,000 francs (~$58). Friday he drives all the way to Bamako and drives back on Saturday to make a whopping 46,000 francs (~$94). The commercial economy of Sanadougou largely depends on Issa’s transport services, so this schedule is carried out more or less indefinitely every week over the course of the year; when Issa himself cannot work because he is sick or has to attend a wedding or a funeral, one of his apprentices assumes driving responsibilities.

Over the course of a year, Issa Sogoba’s transport business takes in 14,820,000 CFA (~$29,640) in revenues, he pays the apprentices 624,000 CFA (~$1,248) for their labor, he pays 4,914,000 CFA (~$9,828) for gas. Issa does not pay for the cost of maintenance because his brother Yahya is the town mechanic and services the family business for free. And he does not pay for replacement parts unless the engine literally cannot turn on; Issa told me that the most he pays for parts in a given year is 2 million CFA (~$4,000). During the first year this business was running he had an additional expense in pay off his loan to Kafo Jiginew plus the usurious interest rate to the tune of 3,450,000 CFA (~$6,900), but he has not had to pay for debt services since 1995.

So in an average year, Issa makes a profit of approximately 7,282,000 CFA (~$14,564) – this is by far the most lucrative enterprise in the entire Commune of Sanadougou. These profits of approximately 7,282,000 francs represent Issa Sogoba’s pre-tax income; after the Commandant, the Mayor and the two doctors, the mobilitigi is the richest man in a population of 16,000. In comparison, Issa makes more than 10 times per capita GDP in this country - which now hovers around 550,000 CFA (~$1,100); since the monetary income is disproportionately weighted in the cities, Issa's immense income is even more immense compared to the subsistence and tangentially-commercial farmers in a rural town like Sanadougou.

Issa Sogoba’s profits, however, can only be honestly evaluated in relation to the costs borne by his customers; i.e. the farmers of Sanadougou. If Amadou the millet farmer were to travel to the Koutiala market to sell his 4 sheep, he pays 1,500 francs for his own fare and 250 for each sheep. If these sheep look meaty and demand for sheep is high – say, as Muslim families prepare for the Eid al-Adha feast – Amadou could sell each of his 4 sheep for 40,000 francs (~$80) and his transport costs of 4,000 francs (~$8) only cut out 2.5 percent of his revenues. But if Amadou only sells 2 of his sheep and he has to pay for their fare back to Sanadougou, or he sells all of his sheep in the months after Eid al-Adha when demand is low, then transport costs up to 6 percent of his total revenues. If Amadou sells none of his sheep, then he just lost 5,000 francs. This might not sound like a lot, but in an economy where that sale of his best sheep might account for the entirety of his monetary income that year, 4,000 to 5,000 francs for a trip to market and back is no insignificant deal of money - with that sum he could buy a pair of mosquito nets, among other things.

And the 4,000 to 5,000 francs that Amadou has to pay for a trip to the Koutiala market only count as the nominal costs of transportation. If Issa’s car breaks down and Amadou has to spend an August afternoon waiting on the side of the road for someone to bike down with new engine parts, Amadou just lost a good chunk of hours when he could have been working out in the millet fields. If Issa is speeding like a madman as usual, slips on a patch of sand and can’t slow down because he has no breaks, the car might crash into a baobab tree, all of Amadou’s sheep might get killed and Amadou himself might sustain debilitating neck injuries which put him out of the labor force for the rest of the year. This is not a society where people sue for pain and suffering. When it comes to safety, Amadou the customer assumes all of the risk and all of the cost of potential injury to himself and loss of goods and Issa the mobilitigi only stands to lose a little bit of profits – even if he were to crash his car into a baobab tree, it would be a safe bet that Issa would be selling seats in his van again within a week.

Furthermore, if Issa gets caught by the gendarme checkpoints driving a car that violates every single regulation on the books, the cost of fines or bribery do not serve as an incentive for him improve the quality of his services because he doesn’t pay for them – that expense falls upon his passengers. When unscrupulous mobilitigis get nabbed for driving a car filled to 250 percent the maximum occupancy with a cracked windshield, without side view mirrors without a license, it is a standard practice in Mali for the apprentice to go down and tell every passenger to cough up “their share” of the bribe so the gendarme will let them pass. Depending on the severity of the offense and their ability to pay, passengers are told to give as much as 2,000 francs each. And without hesitation or complaint, Malian passengers simply do what they’re told and comply like cows marching toward the slaughterhouse – paying bribes is accepted as a routine expense of traveling down le guidron to the big city market. If Amadou the millet farmer would usually pay 4,000 francs in transport costs to sell his sheep at market, then institutionalized bribery raises those transport costs by as much as 50 percent. But in real terms Malian passengers have to pay three times for transport; they pay the mobilitigi once for the nominal fare, they assume all of the risk and cost of injury inherent in traveling in such hazardous deathtraps, and even though it is the mobilitigi who is breaking the law by not paying for new tires or breaks it is their passengers who pay for the fines and bribes. The people willingly pay for the unscrupulous mobilitigis to fuck them twice - and if they get nabbed by a corrupt gendarme, they pay to get fucked three times.

I avoid motor vehicular transport in this country when I can, but whenever I have no choice but to suffer with my adopted countrymen sitting in sub-human conditions and the car gets stopped and the inevitable shakedown falls, I ask my fellow travelers why they put up with such bullshit. The responses I get are quite Stoic; “C’est comme ça” or “Nous n’avons pas un choix”. Perhaps this is a cultural thing and patriarchal Malians are more accustomed to obeying their social superiors, perhaps 80 years of colonialism and 30 years of homegrown dictatorship have robbed people of any semblance of dignity and self-esteem. Two millennia ago such attitudes might have been considered virtuous, but in this day of free will, free markets and democratic self-government it breaks my heart to watch as grown adults just grin and bear it while they’re being cheated and exploited.

And when it happens to me, the storm clouds in my head erupt into pitch black fury. Maybe it’s because my hippie parents taught me to think of myself as a unique snowflake. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a society where people are encouraged to criticize the way things are so that we can remedy existing problems and pave the way for a better future. Maybe it’s because I come from a nation whose values were forged in the fires of dissent, protest and a Revolutionary War, a nation whose modern regulatory regime was conceived by a Populist movement that demanded protection from the price-gouging railroad trusts, a nation that honored the body of Rosa Parks with the same pomp as only the greatest of presidents in the Capitol Rotunda because she refused to give up her seat and move to the back of a bus.

But my style of rebellion has less in common with the moral majesty of Rosa Parks than the brazen vernacular of New York. When I'm on a bus, we get stopped for safety infractions and the apprentice tells me to cough up 2,000 francs to bribe the gendarmes, I raise my middle finger and tell him to perform the unspeakable on various farm animals. If he asks again, I dig my feet in further and tell him to perform even more creative and more obscene actions on those livestock. Eventually the apprentice realizes that the more he asks me to pay for bribes the more I am going to instill an image of him sodomizing a donkey into the minds of my fellow passengers, so he backs down and moves on.

Every time I put on such a show the rest of the passengers watch in bewildered astonishment. They’re used to paying these bribes week after week. They’ve never heard someone stand up to the mobilitigi before. It’s never occurred to them that they have the power to say “No” - and that refusing to acquiesce with the status quo is the first step to changing it.

Transport costs might lessen and more commerce might flow if the Malian government were to build more paved roads. But bringing goods to market would become even more affordable if the Malian government were to regulate their own law enforcement agents who are tasked with regulating the transportation industry in order to facilitate more commerce and economic growth. The underdevelopment of this economy is a scandal, and the blame lays no small part in the hands of those gendarmes who allow these modern day robber barons to flout the law with impunity in exchange for illicit enrichment.

In the meantime, Malian farmers have to learn to stand up for themselves. They have to organize so that every single passenger refuses to pay for bribes and chauffeurs themselves have to pay the penalty when they break the law. And the farmers have to learn to speak up to their transport providers and demand that they improve the quality of their services. If rural mobilitigis do not change their ways and begin to adequately maintain their cars, enteprising farmers should pool their money, take out loans and start their own competing businesses that break the local monopolies so that there is an incentive to improve services and reduce the price of transportation. And villagers of all stripes need to get into the habit of bringing their valid grievances to the traditional gerontocracy, the offices of la Mairie et le Commandant. Only when the compelling force of the State is exercised to protect the interests of the farmer over the exploitation of the middleman will the rural masses be able to break out of mere subsistence and participate in the modern commercial economy.

The Number Five

There are so many deficiencies in human capital which make it difficult for the Malian economy to function that one might be tempted to cast the blame on economic illiteracy. Very few people here understand that profits = revenues – costs because the Bambara language has not evolved different words for money to express those three distinct concepts. Quite often rural shops fail because the butigitigis purchase their wares in the cities and then resell those wares to their customers in village for the same exact prices – with every sale, they actually lose money. Most vendors don’t even bother to keep ledger books; they just eyeball how much money is flowing through their business in relative terms; “a little”, “a lot”, “enough”.

But economic illiteracy is only the tip of the iceberg; it has not been uncommon for merchants to hand me incorrect change – not because they are necessarily trying to cheat me, but because they simply cannot handle the math. Most owners of big shops in this country are able to invest 500 francs in a small calculator, and most are so uncomfortable doing subtraction in their heads that they whip out their machini every time they make a transaction – but that doesn’t mean that they know which buttons to push. The deficiencies in Malian human capital run even prior to arithmetic.

I myself never really understood how devastating ignorance can be on the local economy until I sat down one day in market to talking with a Malian vegetable-seller named Ma about the prices of the goods she sells at market. As we were discussing all of these numbers Ma stopped her own thought in mid-sentence, smiled radiantly and hunched over to trace her index finger into the dirt:



“One, two, three, four, five, six!”

And that is how I was introduced to the concept of “innumeracy”: the inability to read or write numbers. Innumeracy is a phenomenon causally related and integrally tied to illiteracy, of course, but it comes across to the numerate observer as incredibly more astonishing. In a society completely bereft of novels and plays or anything application of the written word more complicated than the labels on tea boxes, being unable to read does not seem to be all that much of a handicap. But numbers are an intrinsic part of material existence prior to their utterance by humans, and for an adult member of society to be unable to recognize or portray the visual representations of these numbers in any system at all means that they cannot possibly comprehend a base-ten system, that they can at best comprehend mathematical concepts as complex as the amount of digits they have on their two hands.

The sorry fact of the matter is that the Malian monetary economy is predicated on society’s inability to recognize and identify the numbers printed on their own currency. Back in the days of colonialism and the first two and half decades after independence, Malians conducted business with the sou – the smallest denomination of which was a 1 sou piece. But in 1984 the Republic of Mali joined the Economic Community of West African States and adopted the CFA as their new currency, and since this new currency had already depreciated in value from rampant inflation the smallest denomination in circulation at the time was a 5 CFA piece. Those who could actually read those numbers and speak a little French referred to the money with the proper French terms for each denomination: “cinq francs”, “dix francs”, “vingt-cinq francs”, “cinqant francs”, etc.

But very few Malians could make sense of the squiggles representing those concepts on their coins and bills, and even fewer could speak French. Though the different denominations of this new currency were easily distinguishable by size and color, the vast majority of the Malian population could make no sense of the “5”, “10”, “25”, “50”, “100”, “250” and “500” engraved on their coins, and they especially couldn’t decipher the “1,000”, “2,000”, “5,000” and “10,000” printed on their bills – that is, if an innumerate person could ever get their hands on a paper bill to begin with. So they referred to their new ECOWAS currency with the same names as the sou; since the 5 CFA coin was the smallest denomination like the 1 sou piece, innumerate Malians referred to it as the Bambara word for “one”, the 10 CFA coin as “two”, the 25 CFA as “five”, the 50 CFA as “ten”, etc. There were a lot of people who could in fact read those numbers, but if they read them correctly they couldn’t do business with the innumerate.

Moreover, this is a culture that regularly bows to the lowest common denominator - no matter how absurd. The older generations who came of age during colonialism were disproportionately more likely to be unschooled and innumerate, and Malian society is largely structured upon youth’s deference to elders; in this country, if Grandpa has no teeth, then no one can eat solid foods for dinner so as to not hurt his feelings. So just as the House of Habsburg purposefully mispronounced every “s” as a “th” to humor the grotesquely underbitten, dreadfully lisping King Carlos II, the entire population of Mali established the practice of misidentifying their currency to accommodate those who do not recognize that the numeral 5 stands for the number five.

As though Malian shop-owners don’t already have enough problems staying in the black without any accounting or arithmetic, there is a unique problem which besets those who are in fact numerate; the spoken terms used to identify prices are five times smaller than when those prices are written down – thereby making every transaction at least five times more confusing than necessary. If a shop-owner does know math and he knows that a customer’s order is 9,750 francs, he has to ask his customer for “one thousand, six five hundreds and sixty” no matter how nonsensical that is.

Even I have a really hard time converting between numeric prices and Malian illiterate prices, accepting the cognitive dissonance between seeing one value of numbers on budgets and currency but referring to it as something else. Let’s say I’m haggling over cement prices and the market price for 83 sacks at 7,100 francs a sack and the vendor’s starting price should be 589,300 francs, but I don’t have any scratch paper on me so I have to figure out in my head, what’s 589,300 divided by 5?... well, 100,000… then… what’s 89,000 divided by 5?... um… 16,000… plus 1,800… then 60… so 100,000 plus 16,000 plus 1,800 plus 606 equals… 117,860…

“The price for this should be '117,860', but since I’m buying so much cement here how ‘bout you cut me a break and cut it down to '100,000'?”

“ '100,000' is too low. '107,225'.”

'107,225' ... what’s that in real numbers?... multiply by 5… 500,00… plus 35,000…”

And even I have to give up and take out the calculator application on my phone and translate every numeric price into an illiterate price, and even though I and the cement seller can actually do relatively advanced math the negotiations take so long that we get confused as to what the other is trying to say and we completely lose track of each other’s offers because the only common language we share requires that we manhandle our numbers out of deference to all of those who don’t know what to make of the numeral 5. This is why – as much as I hate speaking to people in French in this country – Bambara and all of Mali’s other tribal tongues are wholly inadequate and the language of the former colonial power is in fact necessary for dealing in transactions more complicated than a few thousands francs.

If you can imagine how difficult handling money in this country is for people like me who can in fact do math, now try to imagine how much harder it is for the masses who need to use their fingers to count to ten…

It is pretty hard to find statistics quantifying the population of the innumerate – maybe that makes a lot of sense, actually – but if slightly more than 70 percent of all Malians are absolutely illiterate, and identifying individual numbers is significantly easier than sounding out combinations of letters into words, then the innumerate population must number at least a few million persons out of a total population of 13 million. But seriously, when is the average millet farmer eking out a hand-to-mouth existence going to interact with any amount of currency so complex that it cannot be adequately expressed with the illiterate numeral system? The fact of the matter is that most people living in countries like Mali are still living in a pre-modern subsistence level agricultural economy in which they farm the coarse grains that they eat, they eat the coarse grains that they farm, and there usually isn’t enough to feed the whole family to begin with. Unlike cash crop farmers, it is fairly rare that subsistence farmers can produce any sort of surplus that can be traded for currency, the whole question of money is a relatively minor aspect of their overall business plan.

And so long as they are illiterate and innumerate, Malians are extremely vulnerable to exploitation by the better-educated urban elite. There probably isn’t very much exploitation present when two rural peasants trade between themselves, like when Amadou the farmer goes to his village market and sells handfuls of tomatoes or onions to his neighbors. Though exploitation is certainly present if Amadou farms cotton on a third of his fields and sells it all to the representative from the nearest big city textile mill. Mills like CMDT and Comatex enjoy perfect monopsony over their respective local cotton markets, so they can still collect supplies of raw cotton year after year by paying the farmers only 200 CFA for a kilogram of cotton. A typical small-scale farmer will sell about 100 kilos after an extremely successful harvest – so for that year, they will take home a monetary revenue of 20,000 CFA (roughly $40). To an innumerate farmer who does all of his counting on his fingers, all of those zeros equate to a completely incomprehensible sum of currency – he will consider himself such a wealthy waritigi that he will spend without abandon.

But in reality, the innumerate farmer is getting royally screwed. The only reason why the textile mills can pay below market value for their raw materials is that no one else in town is buying – the peasants can either take the below-market value offer from CMDT or get nothing. Maybe the executive leadership of the textile companies knows about this disparity, but Amadou the farmer has no means of tracking global commodity prices, he doesn’t even know that he is being exploited. He understands so little about the value of money that he thinks that he is coming out on top, so the next year he is going to whittle down his acreage designated for cereal crops so he can grow even more cotton.

What exactly is Amadou the farmer going to do with the 40,000 francs he earned from selling cotton this year? Perhaps he will invest it in a new plough, another donkey, some better hoes and shovels. Perhaps he will hide it under the loose brick behind his bed in case of emergencies. But most likely, he is going to blow it all on tea, sugar, cigarettes, warm Coca Cola, millet beer and prostitutes. If he hasn’t already, there’s a good chance that he will spend 20,000 francs on a cell phone which he will use can play Tetris and the snake game – he will have to pay more for credit if he wants to actually make any calls. Amadou will spend hardly anything on better food, clothing or medicine for his family; taking care of the children’s day-to-day needs is generally considered the complete responsibility of the women of the family. There’s a good argument that such profligate spending could be reformed if women had more say over family decision-making or if men knew enough about science that they appropriately valued modern medicine– but there’s an even better argument that money would be spent more wisely in this country if people actually understood its value.

And while Amadou the farmer has blown all of his cotton money on toys and candy, the cotton he planted last year has mined all of the nutrients from the soil and put nothing back in, so the third of his fields used for cotton production have become too barren for food production in the long run. Amadou might have money, and he might have even more of it if he expands his cotton acreage the next planting season, but if this trend continues he will eventually be forced to purchase his food – and the 200 francs earned for each kilo of cotton will by no means suffice to compensate for the lost food production. So even though Amadou made what looked like a lot of money this year, the nutrition and health of his family will suffer from the paltry stores in his granary. If Amadou was duped into planting too much cash crops in proportion to food crops he will have to sell off some of his cows or donkeys, maybe even take out a loan at an usurious rate of interest in order to feed his family until the next harvest.

Maybe the typical Malian farmer could avoid such hardships if they could buy better fertilizers, high yield seeds and machine tools. Maybe they could be better off if they actually knew how to manage their finances. But neither can become a reality so long as the typical Malian farmer does not comprehend that the numeral 5 stands for the number five.

Underdevelopment is a Universal Shame

As long as I’ve been alive to remember, not a whole lot has ever happened in my hometown of Vista, New York. Back when I was ten years old there was a big to-do when an Associated supermarket sprang up in our sole strip mall, but they shut their doors just a few years after it opened because our town’s demand for groceries was too small to keep a full-size supermarket in business. There was an Italian restaurant along a little pond behind the strip mall which couldn’t lure enough customers as it couldn’t be seen from the road, so it closed and a new manager set up a new Italian restaurant – which quickly went out of business, and that was replaced by a third Italian restaurant – which also went out of business. For a couple of years Vista boasted a carpet store – which just as soon as it opened up went out of business, and of all things a used sporting goods store – which lasted maybe six months before it too went bankrupt. The only real economic development that I can think of over my 22 years of knowing Vista is when the shopping center sprouted a shop for beers by the caseload and keg and a merchant of wines and hard liquors – to my understanding these businesses are thriving.



Vista is such a peripheral enclave of Westchester County in that we are too small to justify our own infrastructure – we have no train station, no library, not even a post office of our own, and still we are too far from the larger suburbs of Mt. Kisco, Bedford Hills or Katonah to make use of theirs. Until the Katonah-Lewisboro School District was carved out in the 1950s, Vista residents went to school in Connecticut. You see, Vista is so far from the larger suburbs of New York that for many practical purposes Vista residents had to leech off of the state next door. By the time cell phones became widely used in the late 1990s and 2000s, Verizon and Nextel built cell towers in all of the New York suburbs and all of the Connecticut suburbs, but Vista was so far between both that it couldn’t get reception from either. Vista is so distant and relatively isolated that if its residents wanted to be able to use cell phones anywhere within the 533 neighborhood code, the hamlet would have to built a cell tower of its own.

The lack of cell phone coverage in my bucolic hometown is quite a serious matter. All of the landline phones in my parents’ house are wireless, so when the power went out we had no functioning phone at all – though we would if our cell phones could find a signal. When an ice storm this past month turned our vital artery Rt. 123 into miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, none of the commuters trapped in their cars could communicate with the outside world to tell them to avoid the road. Once when I was 16 years old I was pulling out of a parking lot and another driver raced around a blind corner and crashed into my side and my car spun out in a 720 degree turn until it plowed into a snow bank – though we both had cell phones, neither I nor the other driver could call out for help and we had to wait for someone to physically drive to the Fire Department to call in a police officer from their two-way radio. Especially for emergency situations, public safety in Vista is endangered by the lack of reliable communication infrastructure which exists just about everywhere else in the populated territory of the United States.

For more than a decade there has been considerable demand, and multiple plans have been orchestrated to put up a cell tower on the property of a church along the only considerable road in town. For years each plan has floundered, because town meetings on the subject were dominated by a coalition of overprotective soccer moms who were terrified by the fear that the radio waves emitted from a cell tower might stimulate cancerous growths in the healthy tissues of their children. Of course, medical researchers have yet to conduct any study linking cell towers and cancer; if anything¸ contemporary understanding of oncology suggests no reason for such a link to exist. Even the American Cancer Association espouses that since cell phone radio waves are of such low energy levels, the wavelengths of radio waves are so long, and the magnitude of exposure to radio waves emitted by cell towers is so insignificant compared to microwaves, televisions, radio sets and cell phones themselves that “cell phone antennas and towers are unlikely to cause cancer.”

Though the mantle of science and reason hasn’t stopped the Sheila Broflovsky’s of Vista from holding up progress. Even though the medical fallacy is gaining less traction, the voices of reaction now put up claims that a cell tower conflicts with “the wooded landscape and the rural character of the town”; in so many words, we can’t have modern technology which is all but necessary to do business and simply function in the world nowadays because some people are under the delusion that their suburb of the New York metropolitan area is in fact a clearing of log cabins in the Adirondacks.

The Town Hall debate was often re-enacted at our dinner table between my father (a psychiatrist) and mother (a real estate agent):

“I am licensed medical professional, and I can tell you that a cell tower is not going to give anyone cancer unless they were to lay down with their head directly next to the transmitter for 20 years! If people in this town are seriously worried about the level of radio waves emitted from a cell phone tower, then they shouldn’t put a cell phone next to their head, they shouldn’t stand next to their microwave oven, they shouldn’t ever listen to the radio in their car!”

“That doesn’t matter! The people of this town don’t want it!”

“Yes they do! Everyone in Vista has a cell phone, but they have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over to be able to make a call!”

“Well maybe we want a cell tower, but Not in My Back Yard! It’s going to be ugly and drive down home values!”

“Isn’t your business booming in all of the other towns? Maybe people value being able to actually talk to one another?”

“Some people just don’t want it, and everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“You know, one of my patients suffers from panic attacks every time she sees an Asian man in a pickup truck - maybe society should accomodate her phobia with a town ordinance prohibiting Asian men from driving pickups?"

When I’m sitting in my little Minianka village in the Malian bush and my parents call my Nokia cell phone via Skype, I find it hard to believe that the villagers of Vista are still debating about this. I find it even harder to believe that educated Americans in the year 2010 can be so terrified of technology that they don’t quite understand, and that their unfound fears are strong enough of a political force to prevent such unarguably necessary development. And I find it absolutely humiliating that I live in a village of mud huts and millet stalks with no electricity, no running water, no trash collection and no dirt trail worthy of the word “road” – but I have 5 bars of cell coverage 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and my parents in Vista, New York can’t even receive my text messages because my hometown has been for so many years too pigheaded to put up a cell tower.



My Minianka tribesmen neighbors are afraid of lots of things - they believe in witches and wizards and black magic, they are scared of frogs, goblins and demons I which supposedly wander the fields at night. But unlike the villagers of Vista, they aren't scared of cell phone towers. The people here are proud of their cell phone tower which dominates the skyline of one-story huts - to them it symbolizes progress and modernity, it demonstrates that their otherwise backwater village matters enough to have a place on the map.

The chief of my village is an old illiterate, toothless man named Abdoulaye Sogoba. He doesn't have a phone himself, but he still understands the value the service has for the rest of his neighbors and their market. In conversation, Abdoulaye let me understand how important is the cell tower of Sanadougou.

"Nowadays, phones are necessary to do business! No one can do any serious business without one!"

"But what about back in the days before Sanadougou had a tower built? Aren't you sad about the traditional way of life that is now lost?"

"Nothing has been lost! This change is only good for us! The time of not being able to speak with other villages is a thing of the past, it is time to move on."

"What about all of those other little villages that don't have cell towers? What do you think about them?"

"I feel pity for any village without a cell tower. Without a cell tower, the people cannot experience any development."

Poverty in the Country versus Poverty in the City

In America, there exists a class of the relatively well-to-do who make a point of quitting their stressful jobs in the city and retiring to quaint villages in the Berkshires or Vermont, locales rural enough that they can afford acres of forests and fields accessible only by dirt road, where they can renovate an old farmhouse into an interior-decorated mansion and live the life of a gentleman farmer – but close enough to civilization that they can still get the Times delivered to their doorstep. Out in the country where the cost of living is cheap, a successful professional with a decent-sized nest egg can escape from the consumerist alienation and impersonality of metropolitan life, and instead bask in the freedom to chop wood in the morning, fish in the afternoon, read poetry and criticize after dinner. Such country gentlemen have no real need to till the land– for the rest of their lives they can eat off of the interest from their savings accounts and the dividends from their mutual funds – though it is nevertheless obligatory that they wear flannel and work boots, bide their time farming and hunting so as to justify their bucolic residence, to demonstrate to the locals that despite their former careers as urban professionals they are in fact country boys at heart.

When I think of the “rural splendor” that I know so well – the land of bed & breakfasts, ski chalets and gourmet country stores, the kind which my parents aspire to retire to – sometimes I can’t help but laugh a little. Without the influx of money from Wall Street and all of the sub-industries patronized by the titans of finance (e.g. psychiatry, real estate), those ski lifts could not operate and those cute little bed & breakfasts would go out of business. The “country” which I knew was really no such thing; it was really an extension of the New York suburbs.

I think of this façade of the American country lifestyle when I bike far down the road out of Sanadougou. The roads out of this village will forever remain unpaved, glorified cow paths - not because any retired doctors or lawyers want to preserve the aura of a Norman Rockwell painting, but because at no point in the foreseeable future will the subsistence farmers of the local Minianka tribe ever generate enough tax revenue to justify the construction of a real road. But in truth this Minianka village doesn’t really need a paved road; they don’t have to commute to work, they travel to distant markets more for pleasure than for necessity, they can produce all of the commodities they truly need to live from the fields immediately adjacent to the village.



A term which repeatedly comes to mind is autarky: a term usually applied to the economics of states policies, autarky means the quality of being perfectly self-sufficient. Autarky entails one must grow all of one’s food in order to live, it means zero participation in external trade. It is the absolute individualist extreme of the local food movement. Even the most radical of American brown bread-eaters find this ideal easier to profess than to actually live by; when he spent his year “in solitude” sowing the bean fields along Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau relied heavily on purchased dry goods, he regularly supped at the Emersons’ dinner table and his mother even did most of his laundry. If Thoreau had indeed spent all of his days practicing perfect autarky, he would been so occupied with the constant drudgery of manual agriculture that he would have never had the time to study his tomes of Greek philosophy and Latin poetry, to travel to Concord every other day to catch up with current events, to meander through the woods and contemplate Nature and the Higher Law. Even the first proponent of the “back to the land” movement farmed not because he really had to, but as a pastime to round his hours from a life of contemplation.

The concept of the “back to the land” movement is absolutely untranslatable in an anomalous nation where 68 percent of the population lives in the country and – even more – 80 percent of the work force is employed in agriculture due to seasonal migration from the cities. This is a society which has been living off of this land for untold generations, and it most likely will be until the end of time. These fields which the villagers of Sanadougou hold in common and manure and plow and plant and weed and harvest are truly all they have. The vast majority of their land is dedicated to the production of millet – the basic cereal crop which constitutes about 90 percent of their total caloric intake. A significantly smaller portion of the fields are planted with corn and rice, which require so much water that they can only be successfully grown in the rare floodplains. Land too barren for cereal cultivation is planted with peanuts and beans to add a smattering of protein to the Minianka diet and rejuvenate the poor soils with nitrogen. Less than 1 percent of the cultivated fields are fenced in to act as vegetable gardens, and all of the remaining land is left for grass and weeds to grow wild for the grazing of cattle, sheep and goats. The Miniankas’ land – worked by their own calloused hands with only the simplest of hand tools – is the source of all of their food and the better part of their very modest wealth.

This is not so much the case in Sanadougou – which is really a rural town of roughly 4,400 persons, but if I bike only a few kilometers outside of the town limits I pass by a few solitary huts. These are occupied by men who found their family concessions to be so crowded that they decided to leave the village altogether, build a hut kilometers away from any human improvement. Like Jacob in Canaan, the Minianka tribesman who digs a new well to slake a new family outside of his father’s village is founding society anew. From the perspective of a subsistence farmer, this decision makes economic sense; land is allotted by the dugutigi according to use and geographical proximity, and to escape the orbit of the village and stake out virgin fields means that they can cultivate many more hectares and increase their yields with little to no competition. Though to live so far outside the village means that the enterprising settler can only go to market on rare occasions, he cannot possibly live off the profits of commerce, his family must be essentially self-sufficient and farming enough millet, maybe a little corn and peanuts to feed themselves unaided.



Unlike the Vermont country gentleman who might grow a few tomato and basil plants on his windowsill, what the Sanadougou subsistence farmer produces in his fields in November and December is literally his food for the year. Depending on the size of his family and the success of his yields, that millet should be able to allow his wife(s) and average 7 children each a bowl of porridge in the morning, a batch of goopy toh with leaf sauce at lunch, and whatever toh is left over to be reheated for dinner. In a good year, the Malian farmer should be able to harvest enough millet for his family to eat on 365 days. But even in a good year, the granary’s stores will be mostly depleted during the months leading up to the next year’s harvest; during this time which is known as “hungry season”, your typical Malian farmer’s family will reduce their consumption to one meal a day, they will even cut down on how much they themselves eat at that solitary meal as the granary depletes to almost nothing. And this is in a good year – in the year after a drought, “hungry season” begins months earlier and its privations become ever more severe.

The traditional Minianka economy contains some modest diversification which stabilizes the ravages of drought. Everybody raises cows, sheep, goats, chickens, guinea hens or some other animals which of course they can slaughter and eat themselves; though a side of mutton can only go around for a few days, hence it is far more economical to sell that sheep in market and use the proceeds to buy a few more weeks worth of millet. They farm market gardens and a few cash crops too, but in a year when the population is suffering from scarcity of millet – which is relatively drought-resistant, that year’s harvest of cash crops will be even more underwhelming. In a year of drought, a rural community like Sanadougou becomes desperate for outside sources of money in order to fill the family food bowl; trades become significantly more important, the young men of the village will be sent far and wide in search for work in order to send remittances back home. The problem is that in a year when a single province, the entire country or even all of Africa is hit by drought, the young men of every other village have the same idea – and after the harvest season there really aren’t any jobs to begin with.

The Commune of Sanadougou is inhabited by about 16,000 persons; 4,400 in the town of Sanadougou proper, the rest in a few dozen smaller villages like Wintigili and Kashienso which comprise of only 400 to 1,000 persons, and about a hundred isolated families as described above who decided to live alone in absolute autarky. The degree of each family’s respective self-sufficiency tends to be inversely related to the size of their village; in smaller villages of only a few hundred people, no family can provide their daily food needs through any occupation other than subsistence agriculture. Over time, enterprising individuals tend to find some sort of niche to fill in the local economy; one man who is particularly competent in the art of bicycle repair will develop such a reputation for his skills that he becomes the village’s go-to man for broken chains and punctured tires. Another man who buys a lot of cigarettes in the city might do the math and – instead of buying individual cigarettes for his own consumption – decides to buy whole packs of cigarettes and resell the individual cigarettes to his neighbors. In even the most basic societies it is only natural for individuals to differentiate their labor in some fashion which maximizes their own income and the efficiency of society as a whole. However, since so very few trades are lucrative enough to obviate farming for personal food consumption, any job specialization and commerce in goods or services is decidedly secondary to subsistence agriculture.

In this Commune of 16,000 persons about 12,000 are children, and even though children begin to provide vital labors in the house and in the fields at a young age, according to Western definitions of market economics they will be discounted from the labor force. So from a labor force of about 4,000 adults in this entire Commune, most have some sort of skill in addition to mere agriculture. Some men are handy enough with a sewing machine that they are known as tailors, a few men have practiced their woodworking skills to the extent that they are known as carpenters, and there is even one man in Sanadougou who has figured out how to build a small electric circuit attached to a light bulb and carve a small wooden casing that he is known as the torosidlala: “the flashlight builder”. But none of these men could live off of their trades alone. Even the Mayor, the directors of the schools and all of the teachers – all who enjoy generous government salaries – still farm millet, corn, rice and peanuts during the rainy season in order to feed their families.



As overwhelming as the poverty of Mali’s villages might be, it cannot compare to the concentrated desperation of Mali’s cities. In rural villages and towns like Sanadougou, people are poor because the bulk of their economic activity consists of farming their own food and they only barely participate in the market economy. Though there are no fields to farm in a densely populated city, so urban dwellers have to pay for all of their food – they have to participate in the market economy in order to live. Participating in the market economy is remarkably difficult in a country whose overall economy is all but defined by subsistence agriculture.

The rapid population growth of Mali’s cities is truly a bizarre phenomenon. In the demographic history of the world, urbanification of entire societies usually coincides with either the expansion of commerce or the rise of concentrated production, factories and industrialization. Yet in Mali there are only a handful of factories; there is the Comatex textile mill in Ségou, the CMDT mill in Koutiala, there is a fruit juice bottling plant in Bamako, etc. Even using a liberal definition of the term “factory”, there are less than two dozen factories in this entire country of 13 million people. What little industrialization that does exist here is very, very basic - the kind of extremely low-tech factories which are little more than a concentration of the cottage industries, the primordial species of industrialization which could have existed in England in the 1800s.

The establishment of these factories has been a great achievement in Mali’s dialectic of economic development, introducing this market to the world stage in a way beyond the extraction of raw materials. There are now multiple thousands of Malians who can truly be described as “industrial workers” – who get paid wages not just in the agricultural off-season, but as a full-time vocation – a revolution in personal finance. Though in macroeconomic terms, the population of industrial workers hardly registers – they are even dwarfed by the 5 to 10 percent of Malians who make their living as nomadic herders and traders.

The existence of a few thousand industrial jobs cannot justify the size of Mali’s obscenely overpopulated cities. The one-mill city of Koutiala has a population of 75,000, the economy of Ségou which is powered by another mill and a budding tourism industry has 90,000, the cotton capitol Sikasso is home to 114,000, the capitol of Bamako can boast over 1 million inhabitants.

Despite the recent nascence of a few full-fledged factories, Mali is not an industrial economy. In a country where 80 percent of the work force is involved in agriculture, it makes sense that the vast majority of all commerce consists of trade in raw agricultural goods. Just as the majority of rural monetary income comes from farmers coming into the cities to sell their cereals, fruits, vegetables and livestock, about half of the urban economy consists of women who buy that produce and resell it to urban consumers. There is very little value-added in the urban economy; most foodstuffs are sold in urban markets exactly as they were picked, the level of urban value-added consists on the level of a woman who buys rural firewood for 200 francs, shea oil for 500 francs and sweet potatoes for 1,000 francs, she lights a fire, chops the sweet potatoes and over the course of a day sells a batch of sweet potato fries for 2,000 francs of revenue and 300 francs profit. As simple as it is, such a modest means of production is advanced in comparison to the bulk of urban trade.



With only modest industrialization and hardly any value-added, Malian cities are essentially communities of middlemen who buy rural produce and sell it to the government officials and industrial workers, who buy imported cell phones, cassette players, knock-off watches, counterfeit medicine and Goodwill clothing to sell to the country farmers, and of course they make most of their money selling their bootleg merchandise to each other. Even the merchant class suffers from a devastating lack of diversification; every butigi sells exactly the same brands of tea, cigarettes, chicken boullion and canned sardines; every street vendor walking around with trays of the same knock-off watches buys their merchandise from the same central wholesaler. The only way for merchants to profit in this bazaar economy is to drive a hard bargain, the only way for the mercantile class to get rich is to exploit the monopsonistic market and pay the illiterate, innumerate country farmers pennies for their cotton, and then dupe those same ignorant customers to pay the wholesale price for imported luxuries many times over.

What industrial jobs the urban economy could rationally justify have already been taken with waiting lists hundreds of names long, those few successful commercial niches have been emulated and replicated dozens of times more than their merchandise could ever demand, and yet the urban population continues to swell. Part of urban population growth is organic – industrial workers and merchants reproduce too, but the population growth owed to the fertility rate is overshadowed by young men from country villages who are enticed by the allure of the good life promised in hip hop music videos, disillusioned by the prospects of a future in millet cultivation, and flee to the cities to “find money” and make it big in the modern commercial economy. There are no job openings awaiting them, so the young rural exodus tends to make their own employment; the most common schtick is to buy a sheet of 12 phone cards for 11,800 francs and sit on the street waving their cards in passerbys’ faces to hawk them for 1,000 each; others buy 100 francs of tea, 75 francs of sugar and 50 francs of charcoal, and they cook up a pot by the bus station to sell 12 individual shot-glasses of tea for 50 francs each. If they can make friends with the right people, a strong young man can rent a handcart so that he can ferry heavy merchandise from the trucks to the shops and vice versa – the pooshpooshtigi is a perfect personification of the bazaar economy, for he contributes no value to any products, he profits by simply moving goods from one place to another.

The unemployment rate in this country stands at 30 percent, but since every self-employed country farmer is unclassifiable for the purpose of market economy labor statistics that means that the unemployment rate only defines the urban economy, that means that 1 in 3 Malian urbanites has no job to justify their residence in the city. When you look at what counts as “employment” – any sort of income generating activity at all – the official unemployment figures are truly astounding. A lady who sets up a little street stand selling fried dough balls counts as “employed”; the youth who go around with their portable shoe-shine stations are “employed”; the men who buy sheets of 12 phone cards for 11,800 francs and resell them for 1,000 francs each count are also “employed”. An official 30 percent unemployment rate translates into an urban population of roughly 600,000 adults who cannot even buy a six-pack of Kleenex to resell, a lumpenproletariat class of 600,000 men and women who serve no purpose in a capitalist economy but to leech off of economically-productive family members, take advantage of religious charities, and ultimately drive down wages for those who are productive members of the work force.

When in a Malian city, it’s not very difficult to spot these economically extraneous members of the lumpenproletariat; they are the hoards of men congregate around the television to watch soccer matches all Monday morning and afternoon, they are the dozens of men who sit around at the hardware store which only employs one or two, who spend all day sitting around sipping tea, making small talk and adjusting their iPhone ring tones. And of course, the reserve armies of the unemployed also consist of the blind, disabled, schizophrenic and just plain lazy who sit on the street all day imploring pedestrians "to be pious Muslims".

The expansion of the urban population and its bazaar economy does count toward economic growth, for the more people who break away from subsistence agriculture means more people who have to purchase food, who have to sell something in order to live. Economic activity goes up. More people earning and spending pecuniary wealth means a greater total value of final goods and services purchased in a market economy: a higher GDP – the statistic which all but defines economic development to most businessmen and government officials. According to the methodology used by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and USAID, the exodus of the Malian country’s youth to its overcrowded cities is considered progress towards a modern market economy.

However, the increase in the monetary incomes of young Malian men does not necessarily translate into a higher standard of living. A wise urban-dweller could save his money to buy shoes, mosquito nets and medicine for all of his children, he could invest in a new well, fencing, seeds and farm tools so that his family in the village could plant a market garden – or he could blow it all on an iPhone. Judging by the facts that every young man who sojourns to the city to find work returns to Sanadougou with a brand new cell phone, and that their families are suffering from illiteracy, malnutrition, giardia and malaria at the same rates as those families whose men stay in village, it would be difficult to say that this economy receives any real benefit from the demographic exodus to the cities. But no one needs to worry about grinding poverty so long as they can distract themselves with the opiate of Akon music videos…

What is worse, the growth of Mali’s urban population to the detriment of rural development renders the entire economy more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of capitalism. A man who works in the fields and grows what he eats might not earn a lot of money, but at least he will have millet in his granary; even the poorest of farmers with not a franc to their name can at least work enough to eat. There is no such guarantee in the city – an urban-dweller has to have money to buy food, and in an economy with 30 percent employment there is a great paucity of opportunity for monetary income. The lumpenproletariat is faced with the choice of resorting to theft to eat or starving to death – or moving back to the country.

On Second Wave Feminism and Toilets

With the enormous chasm between the cultures of Mali and America, it is quite difficult to describe the status of Malian women with the terminology of Western feminism. If 15-year-old Kimberly were to be married off to a Fundamentalist Mormon who already has three wives to his name, a conservative Catholic soccer mom in Baton Rouge would shudder in disgust at such degradation of women. If Peggy Sue from the mountains of Kentucky were to spend her life toiling in the kitchen, illiterate and barefoot, feminists chatting over soymilk lattés in a Northampton coffeeshop would probably say that she is repressed by the traditional gender roles of a misogynist culture.

In Mali, however, such conditions are the norm. Here most women spend a good part of their lives barefoot in the kitchen, pounding millet while with a baby strapped to their back and another on the way. Upon matrimony most Malian women explicitly consent to their husband’s taking of additional wives. Only a small minority of women will ever complete a high school education and very few have a skilled trade of their own.

The conventional status of women here would make the average American woman shudder – and I have yet to mention genital mutilation. Though as much as normal gender roles are quite different in Mali from what I know in the Northeastern blue states, I would caution anyone from making a sweeping moral judgment; one cannot evaluate the condition of Malian women without taking into account the economic realities of the world’s third-poorest nation.

Let me introduce you to Bintu – an archetypical Malian woman. Bintu was born to a large family of millet farmers in Sanadougou where she has lived her entire life. For a couple of years Bintu went to the elementary school down the street, but by the time she was 10 she stopped going because as the eldest daughter she had to take care of her younger siblings while her mother went to the fields. At age 18, Bintu was married off to a peanut farmer on the other side of town. Now 30, Bintu has since has given birth to eight children – six of which have managed to survive the onslaught of diarrhea, malaria and general malnutrition. She will probably have only a few more now that her husband has taken a second wife.

Bintu hardly has a moment’s respite from the daily labors of raising a family of ten in a subsistence agricultural economy. Every morning she wakes up before dawn to draw water from the well, and then she will retreat into the smoky air of her wood-fired kitchen to cook millet porridge for her family’s breakfast. Then she goes out to the fields to collect firewood and leaves from the baobab tree to cook a more gelatinous porridge called to (pronounced like the appendage) for lunch. At lunchtime her husband will come back with a cart full of peanuts, which Bintu will spend the rest of the day shelling. Then she will go back into the smoky kitchen to cook another batch of to for dinner. After drawing more water from the well to clean the dishes, she will go to sleep and wake up to another day of more or less the same work around the house and adjacent fields.

At age 50 Bintu will die of respiratory infection from having spent half the hours of her waking life inhaling the harmful tars and particulate matter of wood smoke. Except for the occasional trip to sell her peanuts at market in the next village over, she will have never left Sanadougou.

Despite these common tales of woe, there is much to praise about the status of women in Mali – even according to the narrow lens of Western social theory. First Wave Feminism is an established fait accompli; compared to other majority Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia or Iran, Mali is eons ahead in terms of political equality. Upon independence from French colonial rule in 1960, the Republic of Mali borrowed from her mother country a republican ethos of equal political rights for both men and women. As long as there has been a Malian state, women like men have been constitutionally guaranteed the right to vote, to serve on juries and to hold public office, and discrimination based on sex has been prohibited by the Constitution. Seeing that the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution is limited to voting rights, Malian women have arguably greater de jure equality than their counterparts in America.

At this point in time, I would be inclined to classify Mali somewhere on the cusp of the Second Wave of Feminism. There are many women here who generate income of their own outside the home – a typical business operation consists of a lady sitting on a stool in the street directly in front of her home selling fried doughballs with fish sauce. Out of all seriousness, this is the height of commerce in an ordinary rural village – in the countryside there are very few factories and offices to speak of. In those urban centers like Bamako, Sikasso, Ségou or Koutiala there is a small but growing population of university-educated women who hold jobs as secretaries, teachers, accountants and even the occasional doctor, lawyer or engineer. Though in a country where the vast majority of men work on the family farm, the issue of women in the workplace is barely a blip on anyone’s radar.

As to Third Wave Feminism, well… (gulp) let’s just say that Mali is an overwhelmingly Islamic country. Though West African Muslim societies are generally more open and tolerant than their Arab counterparts, the Qur’an is very clear about what will happen to sodomites when the Mahdi returns. Though I would not describe Malian society as being particularly hostile to homosexuality – it’s more like most people do not know what homosexuality is. I am told that there is no word in Bambara – or Senaful, Fulani or Minianka for that matter – for a man who loves a man or a woman who loves a woman.

It would be fair to say that the prevailing attitudes on gender and sex in Mali are an ocean and a continent apart from those in the United States. Yes, many men here view women as inferior subordinates. But then again, so do a number of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and Southern Baptists in Montgomery – and their wives enjoy much greater opportunities to find employment. Male chauvinism is without a doubt an obstacle to the realization of the needs of Mali’s women, yet their most immediate problems are not so much products of misogyny as much as they are symptoms of a completely underdeveloped subsistence agricultural economy where daily life has not changed all that much since the Iron Age.

Whereas traditional gender roles seem like bizarre anachronisms in America’s postindustrial metropolises, here in Sanadougou they actually make a lot of sense. Since so much labor goes into the production of each meal, it is completely unfathomable that an individual could live off the land without the help of a family. Here on Bintu’s farm, someone has to be hoeing, sowing and reaping the millet fields and someone has to spend all day sorting the grain from the chaff and pebbles, pounding the grain into an edible powder, and fanning the fire in the smoky kitchen – there are not enough hours in the day for one person to do all of these tasks themselves. The law of comparative advantage says that the pregnant woman with a baby on her back should be excused from more strenuous work and assigned to the lighter work of the hearth.

And as to those very, very many babies, the fecundity of Mali’s women is the upshot of many causes. First of all, contraceptives and birth control are expensive. Secondly, even if such methods were more readily available, devout Muslims heed Allah’s exhortations to be fruitful and multiply and the woman with the most offspring commands great respect in her community. And most of all, for traditional village women to have many children is the pre-capitalist equivalent of having life insurance and a pension plan with diversified holdings – if Bintu’s husband were to suddenly die, or if she were both to live long enough that she becomes too old and frail to work, at least one of those children will be able to put food on the table.

In Mali the current debates in American feminism seem a world away. Can a woman support a family of five and simultaneously serve as Vice President? If Bintu has to attend meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then no one would be able to cook to and leaf sauce for her husband and children. Should civil marriage rights be extended to same-sex couples? Here, the definition of a feminist is a woman who does not allow her husband to marry multiple wives. Abortion? A surefire way to have nightmares for a month is to imagine how that operation might be conducted in a country with neither bathtubs nor clothes hangers…

That is not to say that a feminist movement does not exist in Mali. It does, but like all other democratic movements in this young Republic it is taking baby steps towards progress. The typical American hockey mom in the year 2008 has not been cognizant long enough to remember a time when homemakers were expected to prepare tea and cookies without the luxury of supermarkets, refrigerators, dishwashers or Tupperware. But their grandmother’s generation would remember that these wonders of modern consumerism were the essential ingredients without which Betty Friedan would have never found the time to read the newspaper and be active in civic causes beyond the P.T.A.

Right now the Malian feminist movement is largely occupied with achieving a comparable level of material comfort. Just as Lenin wished to bypass industrial capitalism to transform Russia’s feudal agrarian economy directly into a post-capitalist industrial state, Malian women are toiling to improve the household economy so that the Second Wave of Feminism can come about prior to running water or electricity. Like most things in Mali, change is coming about little by little.

For example, gas stoves. In America they are rustic antiques, but in Mali they are on the cutting edge of consumer technology. For a woman to own such an item means that they save hours a day which would have otherwise been spent collecting and chopping firewood. A gas stove also frees them from the confines of a smoky kitchen thereby vastly improving their pulmonary health, perhaps tacking on a few years to their life. Gas stoves, however, will forever remain beyond the means of women who have enough trouble paying for food. So some advocates of women’s health in Mali are beginning to espouse culinary practices which are easy on the lungs and also free of charge, such as recipes which can be cooked in the noonday sun or – a truly ground-breaking innovation – cooking outside.

Nevertheless, the most revolutionary tool in the dialect of Malian Second Wave Feminism is without a doubt the toilet. You might be wondering what a toilet could possibly have to do with equal rights for women, but this simple apparatus has more to do with equality of opportunity than you might imagine.

It’s not so hard for me to imagine, because every morning the kids in village have to pass my house along the road to the primary school. Every so often when I am brushing my teeth and watching the procession go by, a kid will stop and drop his pants or lift her dress and defecate on the other side of my fence.

Villages in countries like Mali are lucky if they have a building reserved solely for the education of their children. They are even luckier if they have a public latrine near that building. You see, even if there is a school in town does not mean that every child is going to attend class, because as they grow older children in Mali have other duties to attend to such as watering the garden, letting the cattle out to graze, and menstruating.

Yes, menstruating – it is embarrassing enough to go through puberty as is, and it is even more embarrassing when the butigi doesn’t sell tampons and the only place where they can find privacy is in their family’s latrine on the other side of town. Especially in schools where there is no bathroom on the premises, or even if there is a bathroom there is only one for a class of fifty and no lock on the door, the arrival of a girl’s first period often means the end of their academic career.

A toilet changes that whole equation. Not necessarily a flush toilet like the one you might be accustomed to, but an improved cement outhouse appropriate for a rural village without central plumbing. One of these thrones happens to be built next to the brand-new schoolhouse down the street from me – and it is reserved just for girls. That means the schoolgirls of Sanadougou might just be able to fight against the odds and achieve full literacy, go on to high school, maybe even acquire a skilled trade. A toilet for girls does not mean that everyone who uses it will necessarily be able to read and write and it certainly does not guarantee future employment – but it provides the infrastructure necessary so that girls can at least stay in school through adolescence.

Karitie Sanago, the principal of the Sanadougou school district, is quite grateful for the new latrines constructed next to the elementary school. He tells me that last year girls made up only 35 percent of the elementary school class rosters. But since this school year is the first that there has ever been a toilet for girls, a number of female students who never even finished elementary school have decided to give it another shot. This year, girls make up approximately 45 percent of the student body; the gender breakdown is still nowhere near absolute parity, but now that there is a toilet for girls it has been significantly narrowed.

His wife Durcas spends most of her day sorting rice and tending the fire to cook three meals a day – but she is also one of the few women in town with a lycée education, fully literate and fluent in French. This puts Durcas in a position as one of Sanadougou’s civil society elite; she runs the local women’s group and serves as an advisor to the Mayor’s Office. “What we need in Mali is a reason for women to want to learn”, she tells me, “because so many women think that they will never be able to do anything but cook to.”

In our free time I am teaching Durcas how to type with my word processor and how to make spreadsheets with Microsoft Excel. At the moment the Mayor’s Office is trying to put Sanadougou on the electrical grid, but my hope is that one day when they have computers, Durcas will be the only person in a hundred villages who can digitally manage the public finances.