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.

Triumph

It took nine excruciating months – more than twice as long as estimated. There were so many, many, many setbacks, and at times I was tempted by the prospect of accepting a half-built, grotesque failure for what it was and quitting. But when the Continental Army was facing hypothermia and starvation at Valley Forge, did Washington say to his troops “being a British subject isn’t all that bad… let’s just go home…”? When the Nazis ran a surprise winter counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest and decimated Allied battalions, did Eisenhower tell his soldiers “Whatever… it’s just the fate of the free world… Let’s pack our bags and fuck it…”? When Han Solo was frozen in a solid block of carbonite, did Luke tell Chewbacca “Well, we can’t fly without a pilot… maybe we should just succumb to the Empire”?

No.

And likewise, even after the village of Tonto surrounded by an endless expanse of sand proved incapable of finding enough sand to make bricks, Zac Mason did not give up. And even when handed a budget for two latrines and a wall and he came back from vacation to see that his construction crew had built three latrines behind his back – and the wall only went up to his ankles, Zac Mason did not give up. And then when the project was 90 percent done but the village of Tonto could not get the subcontractor to finish the job for a whole three months because some pinhead thought that it would be a good idea to pay the subcontractor in full in advance, Zac Mason did not give up. He wanted to kneel down so that he could smash his head against that ankle-high brick wall, but he did not give up.

But Zac Mason could not just build the nyegens himself. No, after throwing his back out carrying a ton and a half of cement from his porch to inside his house, there is no way that Zac Mason could ever have possibly done so much physical labor with his enfeebled spinal cord. Rather, Zac Mason set out twisting arms and working The System so that – despite the fact that Tonto increased the size of this project by 50 percent and threw out the budget that they had originally agreed to – they would still be held to the terms of their contract. Zac Mason had to twist those arms very hard.

And in the end, after a period of time comparable to the gestation of a human being, my own baby is finally finished. And now the students of the Tonto Secondaire Cycle are able to poop and pee within the confines of a modern, sanitary latrine complex. Exceeding all expectations, we have three latrines – one for boys, one for girls, and one for teachers. And we have a barrel with a spigot that the students are going to fill with water so that they can wash their hands – the traditional government of Tonto tells me that they are going to have the women provide home-made soap, and I can only hope that they will in fact do so. And the students are even more responsible for cleaning and maintaining their latrines from now until kingdom come. And so long as the students and adults of Tonto take responsibility for the proper use and upkeep of these nyegens, this construction project will have laid the groundwork for public sanitation and co-education.

One Man's Trash

The foundation of the Malian economy is composed of subsistence agriculture in which peasant farmers feed their families with the fruits of their own labor. Indeed, the manual work involved in millet cultivation could be made faster and easier with better shovels and ploughs – but it is difficult to expand the annual harvest yield very much with a limited allotment of land and water. Here in the epoch of pre-capitalist means of production, there are only so many ways of stimulating the economy. The cost of farming with a tractor, combine or commercial pesticides could not be justified by a crop that is consumed by the people who grow it and hardly sold at market for currency. Hence microcredit or cash grants are of little use to expand millet production, and any new international trade agreements or adjustment of currency exchange rates would be all but irrelevant to the subsistence agricultural economy. What rural millet farmers need to increase their yields is something more organic than capital, something tangible and solid…


To find an apt method to stimulate economic growth, Peace Corps Volunteers are not asked to further the Obama administration’s international trade policy or the interests of American business. Instead, we must return to the first principles of the American Republic and the sustainable agricultural practices of the Founding Fathers.


Though most remember George Washington as the commanding General of the Continental Army and as the first President of the United States, Washington has been overlooked by history for his innovations as an organic farmer and poop management engineer. Paul L. Haworth’s biography George Washington, Farmer states that at his Mount Vernon Vernon estate he “saved manure as if it were already so much gold, and hoped with its use and with judicious rotation of crops” to reap plentiful harvests of tobacco, corn and wheat. Washington also experimented with fertilizers, finding that the fertilizer with the most stimulating effect was a mixture of sheep poop and black mould.

Thomas Jefferson – the author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State, second Vice President and third President of the United States – was also deeply interested in organic fertilization. In Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, Edwin Morris Betts explains:

Jefferson used dung in three different stages of decomposition – fresh or long dung, half purified or short dung, and well-rotted dung. He does not state which condition of the dung he found most beneficial for his crops. Jefferson probably used very little manure of any kind on his lands in the early days of farming at Monticello and at his other plantations. The newly cleared land was plentiful and rich and brought fourth abundant crops. He expressed this idea in a letter to George Washington on June 28, 1793. He wrote, “…Manure does not enter into this, a good farm because we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old acre…” But later, after the soil had been robbed of his fertility by successive crops of corn and tobacco, fertilizing his soil became a necessity.

James Madison – co-author of The Federalist Papers, father of the Bill of Rights, Secretary of State and our fourth President – also stood out among the Founding Fathers as the most eloquent student of waste management. On May 12, 1818 he gave an address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia:

Nothing is more certain than that continual cropping without manure deprives the soil of its fertility. It is equally certain that fertility may be preserved or restored by giving to the earth animal or vegetable manure equivalent to the matter taken from it. That restoration to the earth of all that naturally grows on it prevents its impoverishment is sufficiently seen in our forests, where the annual exuviae of the trees and plants replace the fertility of which they deprived the earth... That individual farms do lose their fertility in proportion as crops are taken from them and return of manure neglected is a fact not likely to be questioned. The most logical mode of preserving the richness and of enriching a farm is certainly that of applying a sufficiency of manure and vegetable matter in a decomposed state; in order to procure which too much care cannot be observed in saving every material furnished by the farm. This resource was among the earliest discoveries of man living by agriculture; and a proper use of it has been made a test of good husband in all countries, ancient and modern, where its principle and profits have been studied.

Though Washington, Jefferson and Madison probably only owned slaves descended from the inhabitants of what is now Mali, the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe independently developed similar practices of organic agriculture. One might even contend that the Minianka are more absolutist in their waste management methods – so much, in fact, that they make efficient use of the contents of their own solid waste. Even in fairly densely-populated cities, a common sight in Malian streets is the evacuated contents of emptied pit latrines. When the poop has left the latrine, the Minianka no longer refer to it as bo - "poop" - but as nogo – which has a double meaning; nogo can mean “filth”, for they will refer to something extremely dirty as “nogolen don”, but it can also be translated as a more benign “compost”.


Part of the reason why most Malians just throw their shit into the street is that they simply do not understand the health hazards that this poses to their neighbors. But they also use their collection of months of their phosphorus-rich fecal matter as the foundation of a prime compost pile. As they harvest their various crops, Malians cover their crap with nitrogenous and carbon-rich millet stalks, peanut shells, corn husks, mango pits, and all of the other waste that is produced while farming, cooking and eating their food. And livestock also enjoy rummaging through these compost piles to find all sorts of goodies, so poop eventually gets more distributed among the layers of vegetable matter. Over the course of the eight months or so between the addition of one season's agricultural waste to the compost pile and its recycling into the next season's fertilizer, all of that poop and organic waste should decompose into a rich humus.

Down the street from me, Soongalo Sogoba maintains one of the most impressive compost piles in all of Sanadougou.


Malians harvest millet from October to November, and if they farm cotton they pick it in December. The start planting again when the rainy season begins in June – so depending upon the crop designated to it those fields have been lying fallow for seven to nine months. Cotton robs the nutrients from the soil so thoroughly that the cotton fields are pointedly more austere. Crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peanuts is seldom practiced, so if these fields are to be useful the next planting season the soils must be rejuvenated with fertilizer. So during April and May they send boys to load their compost onto donkey carts and bring it out to the fields.


Over the next few weeks the farmers will rake their compost through the rows, and once the rains come they will aid the fertilizer’s decomposition and carry its nutrients into the soil.


However, the composting practices prevalent in Mali are not as organic as those at Monticello. Only a few generations ago, very close to 100 percent of all solid waste produced by Minianka farmers was composed of agricultural waste and it all made great fertilizer. But in recent decades as foreign-made industrial goods have begun to penetrate this remote market and household garbage now includes decidedly inorganic plastics and metals, the quality of Malian compost has significantly degraded. To be more precise, Malian compost can now be toxic – roughly correlating to the degree that a particular family participates in the market economy. Here is a close-up of Soongalo’s massive fertilizer collection.


A lot of Malians are concerned about all the plastic bags lying around – only because goats and sheep often think that they are food, try to swallow them and choke to death. So it is common for people to burn their trash in the streets – something that wouldn’t be so bad if trash still consisted entirely of millet stalks and corn husks. But burning plastic releases noxious fumes into the air, exposing the population to toxic heavy metals, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and carcinogenic dioxins. Even with the complete and utter lack of industrialization, air quality is surprisingly bad in market towns like Sanadougou because everyone sells their wares in cheap Chinese-manufactured plastic bags which are inevitably incinerated; the concentrated burning of plastics makes breathing in Malian cities absolutely intolerable. Air quality is at its worst when night falls, because many people think that breathing plastic fumes is only bad when you can see them.


What is even more hazardous is that people can buy cheap Chinese-made batteries for use in flashlights and radios, and these batteries also make their way into their compost piles. Every battery carries a warning “MAY EXPLODE OR LEAK IF CHARGED OR DISPOSED OF IN FIRE” – but of course, no one can read here and even if they could read they can’t read English. Batteries also carry a pictogram of a garbage can with a cross through it and “Pb” – the abbreviation for plumbum; anyone in the developed world should be able to recognize this to mean that they should not throw their batteries in the garbage because they contain lead. But in a society without trash collection where hardly anyone could identify the image of a garbage can, these safety warnings are meaningless hieroglyphics. So Malians burn their batteries with the rest of their trash, they explode, and battery acid containing extremely toxic concentrations of lead, nickel and cadmium seeps into the compost and the soil.

Taken from another angle, one can see how Soongalo’s otherwise awesome compost pile is actually really dangerous because he collects it only a few meters from the well where his family draws all of their drinking water.


Even if this were a purely organic compost pile, a significant amount of that cow, sheep and donkey shit would inevitably make it into Soongalo’s uncovered drinking water supply. And it does. But since he also tries to compost plastic and batteries, Soongalo is also polluting his family's drinking water with toxic concentrations of lead, nickel and cadmium. Thus it should come as a surprise to no one that most of Soongalo’s children have severe neurological disabilities. I’ve tried to politely tried to explain to him why he should move his compost pile somewhere further from his well, but the modern consensus on lead poisoning can be much-too-easily rejected by a man who is convinced that his children are mentally retarded because they have been cursed by an evil sorcerer.

The health hazards of improperly disposing extremely-toxic substances are particularly acute when they are thrown away directly adjacent to the wells from which people draw their drinking water. But even if plastic bags are thrown away in trash heaps far from the water supply, if that refuse is eventually used to fertilize the fields then the toxic materials are going to seep into the soils, they will be absorbed by the millet plants and people are still going to consume that lead, nickel and cadmium with their food – albeit maybe in smaller concentrations. You are what you eat – and if you fertilize your food crop with batteries, then your body is going to contain lead, nickel and cadmium and you are probably going to develop anemia, cancer, renal failure and irreversible brain damage.

If there is anything that can be done to improve the quality of the water, air and soil in this country, it is to teach people about the health hazards of pollution and safe waste management practices. When you consider how controversial environmentalism is in the United States, you can only imagine how much more difficult it is to get these concepts across is in a conservative culture like the Miniankas who are generally ignorant of modern science and believe that illness comes from frogs, the wind, whistling at night and voodoo spells. In a society where people are more scared of soap than they are of consuming the fecal matter of those who don’t wash their hands before eating from the communal food bowl, it will long remain an uphill battle to get people concerned about the carcinogens they put into the air and the battery acid they put into their food and water.

Of course, the absolutely most environmentally-sound course of action would be to encourage Malians to reduce or eliminate the inorganic trash they produce by going to market with canvas tote bags and replacing their disposable batteries with rechargeable Energizers –insh’allah this strategy might be feasible over the course of the next few centuries. Though in the meantime, Sanadougou needs to adopt different ways of disposing their organic and inorganic waste.

In some cities and larger towns, Peace Corps Volunteers or NGOs have helped communities to establish trash collection agencies. Such a project often entails creating demand for services where none might exist. But once there exists a critical mass of families who are interested in separating their organic from their inorganic waste, one would have to get them separate containers to contain the latter; in the past PCVs have bought empty steel gasoline barrels and hired blacksmiths to split them in half to serve as trash cans. And then they have to get the village to designate a fallow field isolated from the water supply and dig a massive hole to serve as a landfill. And they would have to dig a separate hole and line it with concrete so that it can contain the toxic chemicals in batteries. And then they have to organize any number of donkey cart owners to serve as trash collectors, come to these people’s homes once a week, take their inorganic waste and dump it in the appropriate pits in the landfill. And this is the kicker: the trash can-owners would have to pay for these services and the donkey cart owners or le Bureau de la Mairie would have to collect payments and manage their funds without any fraud or embezzlement so that this trash collection agency can stay afloat as a profitable business. Even in those few municipalities in Mali where there is a trash collection agency, services are often so irregular that subscribers stop paying their bills and collection stops altogether. But nevertheless, even if the agency functions relatively well, without laws mandating participation there will always be cheap, lazy, ignorant people who won’t spend money on trash collection when they can burn their trash for free.

Most importantly, any effort to improve the sanitation of Malian waste management practices cannot lose sight of the fact that the application of garbage as fertilizer constitutes a crucial part of this country’s agricultural economy – no grassroots campaign to improve the safety of local composting practices can succeed unless it can also promise farmers that these new practices will improve the total yield and quality of their harvest. Even if the health hazards of consuming plastic and battery acid is beyond the comprehension of the intended audience, extension agents like myself have to emphasize that the toxins at hands are harmful to their millet, corn and cotton crops.

So I have been collecting my own compost pile to demonstrate how to make even better quality humus.



The quality and potency of compost increases accordingly with the ratio and concentration of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. I collect nitrogen-rich millet stalks and corn husks like everyone else in town, though the only livestock I have to my name are a dog and a cat so for phosphorus I pay children with milk candies to collect buckets of cow, donkey, sheep and goat manure. I add my rotten vegetables, mango pits, banana peels and orange skins, but I prevent my compost pile from emanating the sour reek of organic fermentation because the ample vegetable matter contains enough carbon for the micro-organisms to finish their job and break down dead matter into usable molecules. And my compost is even richer than that of my neighbors because I add my own urine – which contains 90 percent of excess human potassium. So not only is my compost essentially free of the toxic chemicals which ruin Malian compost, but it contains much more potassium so that my garden crops can utilize the nitrogen and phosphorus to build complex chemicals needed for plant growth and reproduction - and I get to consume the fruits of my labor.

Banking on Defeat

Let’s say that an enterprising Malian farmer named Amadou invested his best field, his strongest work ox, that ox’s richest fertilizer, 1,000 francs worth of seeds, 5,000 worth of pesticides and two months of his family’s labor towards the cultivation of cotton. Let’s say that this year Amadou’s cotton crop was quite successful and he was able to sell 100 kilograms of raw cotton to the local textile mill representative, netting him the sum total of 20,000 CFA. Amadou was smart and collected all of the cotton seeds, his tools are all in good shape, and his work ox looks healthy enough to work the cotton fields next year – he has no need to put any revenues back into the operation costs of his cotton business. His 20,000 CFA of revenues this year translates into pure profits. And let’s say that Amadou is really, really responsible and he wants to save all of his money so that he can have something to fall back in case of an emergency, and he hopes to one day buy a millet-grinding machine to give his family another source of income.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Amadou the farmer doesn’t have any good places to put his money. What looks like the safest option might be to stuff his cash in a tin can and to hide it behind the loose brick in his one-room mud hut. So Amadou hides his 20,000 francs behind the loose brick in his hut and resolves to not touch it unless he needs to pay for medical bills. But maybe a few weeks later, Amadou’s shady younger brother Mamadou sneaks inside Amadou’s hut, and since he knows the hiding space he pulls out the brick, opens the can and steals 5,000 to buy cigarettes and whiskey. And over the next few months a termite colony invades the mud bricks in Amadou’s hut, the termites find the cavity comprising his hiding spot, and happily munch away at the remainder of the paper bills. When Amadou has to send his wife to the clinic months later, he opens up his secret stash and all he has to show for his cotton harvest is a rusty can of termite poop.

What’s really tragic is that in countries like Mali, there really aren’t any better options for Amadou to manage his savings. At least if he puts his money in a tin can behind a brick in his hut, there’s only a chance that his savings will be stolen or destroyed. If he were to employ any of the other options available, that would be all but guaranteed.

If Amadou were interested in a more aggressive, growth-oriented investment strategy, he could do what most Malian men do and put his money on the horses. Yes, even though there are no race tracks in Mali, the inevitable has occurred and a group of exploitative parasites that calls itself PMU found a way to enable this largely illiterate, innumerate culture to bet on horse-racing in France. All they had to do was set up booths in every major city and hire local agents to distribute pamphlets and collect wagers in the villages, and most importantly to spread the word that people could win big money. I've been told by numerous investors in the horse market that "There is a man around here who won so much money from the horses that now he'll never have to work again!" - none of these investors know who this man is or where he lives, but they insist that he exists. So now every week when PMU distributes the next lineup of horses, the barely-numerate men of the village sit together and closely examine the odds as though they were stock quotes in The Wall Street Journal.

Since he bets on the horses every week, I asked an inveterate gambler named Alexandre – a poor subsistence farmer with 3 wives and 19 children – how much he’s actually won this year.

“This one time, my horse came in first place and I won 1,000 francs!”

“… Yes, but how much have you bet on all the other horses that didn’t win?”

“This year, I have put 8,400 francs on the horses.”

“…So you lost 7,400 francs.”

“But I won 1,000 francs!”

Given the performance of more reputable investment houses like Goldman Sachs as of late, one could argue that college-educated American investors are managing their money no more prudently than PMU’s illiterate, innumerate clients. The greatest difference between Goldman Sachs and PMU is that wagering with the more respectable American investment house carries much less risk, for if the value of Chrysler stock plummets then its shareholders only lose wealth if they sell their stock at that lower value and they can always wait it out until Chrysler stock rises again – but if Amadou puts his money on “Silver Bullet” and his horse comes in 7th place, then his money is unambiguously lost. Furthermore, there is hardly anyone in America who wagers on the stock market who doesn’t also have money sitting in the bank, accumulating interest at a slow and steady rate.

So why don’t Malians put their savings in a bank account? There are even banks in rural towns like Sanadougou – which has a two-room Kafo Jiginew office open on market every sixth day. Kafo Jiginew is a real bank in which men and women can open accounts, make deposits, take out withdrawals and even apply for small loans. But the money put in an account at Kafo Jiginew does not accumulate interest. In fact, this bank charges each holder of an account 5,000 francs (~ $10) every quarter. So if Amadou were to open up an account at Kafo Jiginew and deposit the 20,000 worth of profits from his cotton harvest, he better withdraw it all within a few months because by this time next year the bank will have deducted it all. That is why rural Malian villagers do not ever put their savings in a bank, and if they do have an account in a formal bank, it is simply for the purpose of taking out loans and repaying their debts.

Banking is only slightly better in the cities, where people can choose from opening an account at either Kafo Jiginew or la Banque de Developpement du Mali, la Banque Nationale de Developpement Agricole, EcoBank or Bank of Africa. Though urban banking is quite different, for people’s livelihoods tend to be based less on good production than on selling goods and services; with less people who need to buy new seeds and tools every planting season, urban banks rely less on lending to make a profitable business. Generally, the only people who have accounts at the urban banks are functionnaires who get paid via monthly, directly-deposited salaries; police officers, teachers, doctors, NGO personnel, those in management positions at textile mills, etc. And since there is more communications infrastructure in the cities, urban banks offer a wider range of services, most importantly in that they have access to computers and the Internet which allow clients to wire transfers to family-members in other cities and receive remittances from family-members abroad.

Urban banks are also more expensive; they charge 10,000 francs just to open an account, and another 1,500 francs just to keep the account open every month. Like Amadou’s money at Kafo Jiginew, the funds that I leave untouched in my BNDA account accrue no interest. Even in the supposedly more sophisticated cities, banking is a losing endeavor. In truth, these banks truly function less like banks in the Western sense of the term and more like those establishments where illegal immigrants go to cash checks and wire remittances via Western Union – they charge predatory fees for minimal services which a real bank would offer for free, and the only reason why people keep throwing money at these institutions is that they have nowhere else to go. Since they exercise a monopoly over the money market¸ these so-called banks do not even have to conduct the development-oriented lending which they were originally commissioned to do in order to remain profitable enterprises – they are making a killing by providing services that can be done just as efficiently by an ATM.

A fundamental departure from Kafo Jiginew is that some urban banks allow holders of a checking account to open up une caisse d’épargne; a savings account. At BDM, so long as an account-holder can put away 50,000 francs (~$100) into a separate savings account which they cannot touch for a year, they can earn 15 percent interest. So if Pascal the teacher can put away the exact minimum for a savings account, after a year he can accrue an extra 7,500 francs (~$15) and feel like a big winner. Compared to prevailing interest rates in American banks, this might sound too good to be true – because it is.

You see, no one can hold une caisse d’épargne for a year without also having a checking account, and though the savings account might have accrued 7,500 francs, over that same amount of time BDM will have charged Pascal 18,000 francs simply for keeping a checking account open. The effective benefit to Pascal of opening up a savings account is that instead of losing 18,000 CFA in convenience charges, he only loses 10,500 CFA. In fact, Pascal would have to be able to put 120,000 CFA (~$240) away in une caisse d’épargne for a whole year just in order to accrue enough interest so that his participation in the banking sector can break even. Therefore, in this country where per capita income hovers around 200,000 CFA (~$400), the mere act of holding a bank account can only serve as a profitable endeavor for the wealthy elite. And still, the despots of General Traoré’s kleptomaniac regime decided that it would be in their interest to tuck their pillaging away in Swiss banks…

As much as individual adults are responsible for their own fiscal solvency, it is hard to blame individuals for being bankrupt in this country where the banks are not facilitating sound money management. The banks in Mali as they now stand provide only disincentives for the rural peasantry, the urban poor and the middle class to save their money, and even if they can’t do math they understand that keep cashing around the house will make it liable to getting lost, destroyed or stolen – so they feel compelled to spend it as quickly as possible on fancy clothing and electronics they can’t afford, and before you know it they’re broke.

And as perverse as it is, the worse the people are at managing their money, the better it is for the bank’s short-term profits. In failing to offer better financial products, the banks are keeping the standard of this living in this country stuck in abject misery, because without savings people cannot pay for their children’s school fees and without savings they cannot pay their medical bills – unless of course they pay with borrowed money. And since the banks do not allow private individuals to collect interest in savings accounts, the only way for enterprising individuals to start or expand a business is by taking out loans and going into debt to – of course – those very same banks.

The fact that we in the developed West can so easily save our money, accumulate capital and invest it as we choose is what drives our relatively-thriving market economies. Conversely, the Malian banks’ collective failure to offer bona fide savings accounts to the middle class, the urban poor and the vast rural peasantry is more than just a burden on those individual consumers – it is one of the reasons why the economy of Mali is suffering from one of the weakest growth rates of any country in the world. Especially when you consider that Kafo Jiginew, la Banque Nationale de Developpement Agricole, la Banque de Developpement du Mali were established for the explicit purpose of offering financial services to stimulate the agricultural sector, the fact that these banks are actually discouraging small-scale farmers from saving is decidedly backwards.

Until Malian banks offer savings accounts that appreciate interest greater than the cost of merely keeping a bank account open, or until they eliminate outright their service fees which now make banking such a losing operation, individual Malians are never going to have any reason to save their money, capital will remain painfully scarce, and entrepreneurs will continue to be shut out from the investment they need to make this economy grow. Until they start offering modern financial products and reform the way they do business in a way that encourages private savings, the Malian banking system will continue to retard this country’s economic development.

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.

Frambara

I believe that it is impossible for any reality to exist so miraculous that it can authoritatively prove the existence of God. However, the fact that the United States government assigned me to live and work in Mali because of my background in French is so absurd, in fact, that it ipse facto proves that if there is a God, He must have a sadistic sense of humor.

You see, the general rule among Peace Corps Assignment Officers is that if an applicant has any knowledge of the French language, they get sent to Africa, anyone who can speak Spanish goes to Latin America, and that one linguistics major who wrote her thesis on Kyrgyz poetry gets sent to Kyrgyzstan. This rule generally makes a lot of sense, for it efficiently utilizes Volunteers pre-existing skills and places them in communities where they can most readily integrate. And when PC Washington was going through my application way back when, they were apparently very impressed by the fact that I took 6 years of French back in junior high and high school – so much, in fact, that they decided that I should be assigned to a country in Francophone Africa.

The fact that I do know French has been more of a liability than an asset here in Mali. When people like me arrive with a solid background in French in this officially Francophone country, we wrongly assume that we can communicate with the locals and that they will understand what we are saying. I am one of those pretentious assholes who spends his free time reading Camus and Baudrillard in the original, so when I first came here and bank tellers told me that they too spoke French and I reflexively told them what to do with my money in the conditional pluperfect subjunctive tense, time and time again I would become enervated when they mangled my instructions. Presuming that people here actually speak French only leads to situations in which the Francophones get frustrated, the locals feel lorded over, and everyone loses.

Even in Africa where each and every tribe has developed their own language which they have been speaking for thousands of years, there are some African countries which have wholeheartedly embraced the language of their former colonial masters. In Ghana where there are 47 traditional tongues, the government is promoting English as the single national language in order to mitigate tribal identification and shore up national identity. Some former French colonies like Senegal and Benin have also forged such a post-tribal national culture that parents raise their children to converse exclusively in the official, formerly colonial language. And such profound cultural shifts don’t just happen with a presidential proclamation; the reason why English is the common vernacular in Ghana and French is so prevalent in Senegal and Benin is that the governments of these countries have spent the past half century investing in the education of their citizens, particularly in literacy and language instruction.

Senegal and Benin are exceptions in that they truly are Francophone countries. In the bulk of the former French colonies like Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, there is an elite class of government officials, soldiers, gendarmes and teachers who use French for the workplace. And there is an even smaller minority of persons who do not work in government but can command the French language because they were born to such immense wealth to have attended private lycées. Though after decades of gross government neglect of the public welfare, the vast majority of adults have never received even a cursory elementary education, more than 70 percent of the population is absolutely illiterate, and they definitely do not speak more than a few token words outside of their local tribal tongue.

… But if asked, they will tell you that they do in fact speak Tubabukan ¬– the “language of the white people”. Of course, there is no such thing – the Tubabukan spoken here is a patois hybrid of French and Bambara we call “Frambara”; the nonsense that Malians who have never interacted with foreigners mislead each other into thinking is truly the “language of the white people”; usually, it is only Bambara laced with a few French nouns, maybe "est-ce que", "le voila", or - my favorite - "peut-etty". And likewise, most Malians are taught that if you see a Tubab, the proper thing to do is to address them in “their own language”:

“Bozu le Blanc!”

Here, the colloquial “Ça va?” – “how goes it?” – has transformed into functional equivalent of “Bozu”. People will shout “Sava! Sava!” and they think that they are greeting me. It is also common for Malians to greet Tubabs “Sava! Sava sava byen!” – which must have originated in the dialogue of an introductory French textbook “Ça va?”/ “Ça va bien!” and has now regressed into a greeting uttered by one single person. Thus it is thought that "Bozu sava sava biyen" is how we white people say hello.

The most entertaining phenomenon is how Frambara has taken certain phrases and so warped their meaning that they induce cringes in anyone with a rudimentary understanding of their etymological origins. For example, in Mali it is perfectly customary for people to come up to me at 8:00 in the morning and greet “Bo swa, Monsieur!”

“Soir means ‘evening’. You cannot greet anyone ‘Bon soir!’ until the sun is setting.”

“No, when you see a white person you are supposed to greet them ‘Bo swa’.”

“That… doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what we do in our country.”

“… As I said…”

Other times I am greeted “Bo swa, Madame!” When this happens I like to think that these kids must have learned this phrase in the context of a female teacher, which must mean that at one point in their short lives they have in fact sat in a classroom. But there are other Tubabukan bastardizations that suggest more nefarious settings.

Children in the cities greet me with a bastardization of French with a mission: “Bozu cadeau? Sava sava cadeau?” When I am confronted with such obscenity, it is apparent that some asshole taught this kid that if they see a white person, all they have to do is say these magic words and the white person will smile and give them a lollipop. But when you’ve been living here for an extended amount of time and have been petitioned for a cadeau every single day by kids and adults alike who think of white people as arcade machines which will give you a toy if only you toggle the joystick and push their buttons the right way, these childlike Frambara-isms quickly become downright dehumanizing.

The absolute worst bastardization of French is when I’m in the city and I’m approached by one of the barefoot, tomato can-toting beggar children and they blurt out, “Tubabu! Do mwa cinq mille francs!” Initially, such an utterance impresses me in that it is in fact a complete sentence – a lot more than can be said of 95 percent of the "French" spoken here. However, in every such situation it is fairly obvious that if I were to reply “Préferez-vous un billet de cinq mille francs ou cinq billets d’une mille francs?” or even “Tu t’appelles comment?” the kid would have no idea what I’m saying. These kids are never going to be taught proper French greetings, introductions, how to ask for directions or the weather. “Do mwa cinq mille francs!” constitutes the entirety of that garabout’s French, because their “Quranic teacher” only instructs their cash cows in that one saying to finance their sedentary lifestyles. Accordingly, the marabouts instill the despicable misunderstanding that the language of Senghor, Césaire and Fanon is the language of humble supplication to white people.

The logic of a Malian greeting white people in Tubabukan is inherently racist – not necessarily a vicious ideology of racial supremacy, but at least the belief that all persons of a similar skin tone are indifferentiable. Of course, if a given Malian is walking down the street and they see person with pale skin, to the Malian it makes sense to greet this stranger in Tubabukan when 70 percent of all of the melanin-deficient they will ever interact with are in fact French, Belgian, Quebeçois or Luxembourgian. But there are also a lot of Americans, Germans, Spaniards and Italians who come here speaking no French at all, and according to Malian logic they too are greeted “Bozu! Sava sava byen!” because Tubabukan is “the language of the white people” – all of them. The term Tubabu refers to Aryans, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, Latinos, and all non-African persons alike. Even when Japanese or Korean tourists trek through Dogon Country with their brand new video cameras, they too are greeted by the locals “Bozu! Sava bonbon!” When Malians address each and every white person with what they think is “our own language”, it only demonstrates how profoundly unaware they are of the outside world and the crudeness of their racialism.

Even when the adult population addresses made in grammatically correct, polite French along the lines of “Excusez-moi, monsieur, est-ce que tu es perdu?” or “Je vends du pain du qualité superieur!” it strikes me as patronizing and just as innocently racist. When people speak to me in French, it means they assume that I am a lazy NGO worker or gold miner who is only here to interact with government ministers and rarely leaves the hermetically-sealed, self-contained expatriate biodome – or even worse: a tourist.

So when anyone in this country ever speaks to me in French, I instinctively reply in Bambara – and after a few lines of dialogue in which the Bambara is speaking broken Tubabukan and the Tubabu is speaking fluent Bamanankan the former eventually realizes the folly of their efforts and switches gears into their own language. Now that I’m starting to pick up Miniankakan – the really, really local language which only has any use in the tiny homeland of the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe, around my home base I can show off how dedicated I am to integration with an even greater effect. The response is universally effusive, for these people have spent their entire lives thinking that they have to learn the language of their former colonial masters if they ever want to do business with the West – with much detriment to their collective self-esteem. Thus when an Occidental comes to live amongst an isolated culture and takes the time to learn to speak to them in their own obscure tongues, the symbolism is lost on no one.

When people ask me why I do not speak to them in French like all the other Tubabs do, I point out the ideological chasm between my country and the Old World powers:

Americainw Mali la kono be Mali kanw kalan tiyenna barisa folofolo Angleterre tun be an mara i na fo jonw ye, ni an ye keleke fo an ye an yere ka jamana mine. I be se ka fo ka an te fe ka jamanw were mara.

“Americans in Mali take the time to learn Malian tongues largely because of our own history of exploitation by the British and our War for Independence… You could say that our own experience has left a particular distaste for colonialism.”