The history of Mali

Mali takes its name from one of the great empires of medieval Africa, and the lands along its stretch of the Niger river were the heart of three of them in turn: Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Their wealth came from gold mined to the south and from the caravans that carried it across the Sahara, and their cities, above all Timbuktu, Djenné and Gao, became centres of Islamic learning and trade known as far away as Europe. After the Moroccan conquest of 1591 the region broke into smaller states, until French armies conquered it in the late nineteenth century and ruled it as French Sudan. Independent since 1960, Mali has known one-party socialism, military dictatorship, two decades of democracy and, since 2012, a deepening war in the north and centre that has brought repeated military coups.

During the wetter phases of the past the Sahara was crossed by rivers and lakes, and what is now northern Mali was savannah. At Ounjougou, on the Dogon Plateau near Bandiagara, archaeologists have found traces of human activity stretching back more than 150,000 years, and pottery dated to around 9400 BCE, among the earliest in Africa. Cattle herders followed, and as the Sahara dried after about 3500 BCE they moved south towards the Niger, bringing herds, millet and, later, copper. Rock art in the Adrar des Ifoghas and around the Niger records this pastoral world.

The inland delta of the Niger, a vast seasonal floodplain, was among the first places in West Africa where towns grew up. Dia was settled around 900 BCE, and Djenné-Djenno, occupied from around 250 BCE for more than a thousand years, became a walled town of thousands of people whose craftsmen worked iron, copper and fine pottery, and whose merchants traded salt, fish and grain along the river long before Islam or the camel caravans arrived. Its ruins, beside the modern town of Djenné, show that West African urban life grew from local roots.

The first great state of the western Sahel was Wagadu, which Arab writers called Ghana, after the title of its king. It was founded by the Soninke, Mande-speaking farmers, perhaps as early as the third or fourth century CE, in the borderlands of what are now south-eastern Mauritania and western Mali. Introduced to the Sahara in the early centuries CE, the camel made regular crossings of the desert possible, and Ghana grew rich by controlling the trade between Berber and Arab merchants from the north, who brought salt, copper, cloth and horses, and the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure to the south-west.

The Ghana Empire is described most fully by the Andalusian geographer al-Bakri, writing in 1068. He described a capital of two towns, one for the king with his palace and sacred groves, and one for Muslim merchants with a dozen mosques, and a king who held all gold nuggets as his own while leaving gold dust to traders, to keep up its price. Its likely capital, Koumbi Saleh in southern Mauritania, has been excavated. In the eleventh century Ghana came under pressure from the Almoravid dynasty, a Berber movement of religious reform from the western Sahara. Older accounts spoke of an Almoravid conquest in 1076, though many historians now doubt that one took place. Either way, the kingdom's rulers adopted Islam, and Ghana declined as trade routes shifted east and its subject kingdoms broke away.

In the early thirteenth century the Sosso kingdom under Sumanguru Kanté dominated the remains of Ghana and the Mande lands along the upper Niger. According to the epic preserved and recited by griots, the hereditary bards of the Mande, the young prince Sundiata Keita, born lame and sent into exile, returned to lead a coalition of Mande clans and defeated Sumanguru at the battle of Kirina around 1235. Sundiata is remembered as the founder of the Mali Empire and, by tradition, of a charter that set out the duties of the clans, the Kouroukan Fouga. The location of its capital is still debated, with Niani on the border of modern Guinea long favoured, though many historians now doubt it.

Sundiata's successors, who took the title mansa, expanded the empire west to the Atlantic, in what are now Senegal and the Gambia, and east down the Niger beyond Timbuktu and Gao. At its height Mali was one of the largest states in the world, with control over the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure and over the trading towns of the Sahel. The empire was a federation of provinces and tributary kingdoms, held together by the mansa's armies, including cavalry, by marriage alliances and by the prestige of the Keita line.

The most famous of Mali's rulers was Mansa Musa, who came to the throne around 1312. In 1324 he set out on pilgrimage to Mecca with a huge retinue, reported to number thousands of people and to carry tons of gold. In Cairo he spent and gave away so much that, according to the Arab historian al-Umari, the value of gold there was still depressed years later. News of the African king's wealth reached Europe, and in 1375 the Catalan Atlas showed him seated on a throne, holding a golden orb.

Musa returned with scholars and an Andalusian poet and architect, Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, who is credited with designing the Djinguereber mosque in Timbuktu. Under Mali's rule Timbuktu, founded around 1100 as a seasonal camp of Tuareg herders, grew into a great market for salt and gold and a seat of learning, with scholars gathered around the mosques of Djinguereber, Sankore and Sidi Yahya. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta spent most of 1352 and 1353 in Mali at the court of Musa's brother Mansa Sulayman, and praised the safety of its roads and the piety of its people, while disapproving of some court customs. In the later fourteenth century disputes over the succession weakened the empire. Tuareg raiders took Timbuktu in 1433, and Mali shrank back to its Mande heartland, though a reduced kingdom survived until the seventeenth century.

Downstream, the Songhai people had built a kingdom around Gao, a trading town on the great bend of the Niger that Arab writers knew as Kawkaw. Gao had paid tribute to Mali, but in the fifteenth century it threw off Mali's control. Sonni Ali, who reigned from 1464 to 1492, turned it into an empire. A brilliant and ruthless commander with a fleet of war canoes on the Niger and a strong cavalry, he took Timbuktu in 1468, where Muslim chroniclers remembered his harsh treatment of the scholars, and captured Djenné after a long siege around 1473.

After Sonni Ali's death his son was overthrown by a general, Muhammad Ture, who took the title askia and founded a new dynasty in 1493. Askia Muhammad I, a devout Muslim, went on pilgrimage to Mecca in the late 1490s, returned with the title of caliph's deputy for the western Sudan, and built up an administration of provincial governors, a professional army and royal estates worked by servile labour. The Songhai Empire became the largest state in West African history, stretching from the Atlantic coast to Agadez in what is now Niger, and from the salt mines of Taghaza in the Sahara to the edge of the forest zone.

The sixteenth century was the high point of Timbuktu as a centre of scholarship. Its scholars taught law, theology, grammar, astronomy and medicine, and families copied and collected manuscripts, hundreds of thousands of which survive in private libraries and archives. The scholar Ahmad Baba, born in 1556, became one of the most respected jurists of the Islamic west. Djenné, with its great mud-brick mosque, was the commercial twin of Timbuktu on the inland delta.

Songhai was weakened by succession struggles after Askia Muhammad was deposed by his son Musa in 1528, and by quarrels over the Taghaza salt mines with Morocco. In 1590 the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur sent an army of a few thousand men, many of them Spanish-born renegades and Andalusian exiles armed with muskets and cannon, across the Sahara under Judar Pasha. In March 1591 they routed the much larger army of Askia Ishaq II at Tondibi, near Gao. The Moroccans occupied Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, and deported scholars including Ahmad Baba to Marrakesh. The empire broke apart. The Moroccan garrisons, known as the Arma, soon became a local ruling caste, independent of Morocco in all but name, while trade shifted increasingly towards the Atlantic coast and the European forts that bought slaves and gold.

Power in the region passed to new states. The Bambara kingdom of Ségou, founded by Biton Coulibaly in the early eighteenth century, dominated the middle Niger, and a rival Bambara kingdom, Kaarta, arose to the west. Both raided widely for captives, many of whom were sold to the coast and into the Atlantic slave trade. On the inland delta the Fulani scholar Seku Amadu led a jihad in 1818 and founded the Massina caliphate, centred on Hamdallahi. In the 1850s and 1860s the Toucouleur leader Umar Tall, returning from Mecca and inspired by the jihads that had created the Sokoto Caliphate in Nigeria, conquered Kaarta, took Ségou in 1861 and Massina in 1862. His son Ahmadu ruled the Toucouleur Empire from Ségou. In the south the Senufo kingdom of Kénédougou had its capital at Sikasso, and to the south-west the Malinke leader Samori Touré built the Wassoulou Empire.

French armies advanced inland from Senegal during the Scramble for Africa, building forts along the upper Senegal and Niger rivers in the 1880s. Colonel Louis Archinard captured Ségou in 1890 and drove Ahmadu east. Timbuktu was occupied in 1894, Sikasso fell in 1898 after a siege in which its king Babemba took his own life rather than surrender, and Samori was captured the same year. Resistance by the Tuareg of the north continued into the twentieth century.

The colony, named French Sudan, became part of French West Africa, governed from Dakar, with Bamako as its capital from 1908. France imposed head taxes, forced labour and compulsory crops, above all cotton. The Dakar–Niger railway reached Bamako, and from 1932 the Office du Niger irrigation scheme in the inland delta was built and farmed largely by forced labour. Tens of thousands of men from the colony served as tirailleurs in the French army during the First World War and the Second World War.

After 1945 political parties were allowed, and in 1946 the African Democratic Rally, a movement spanning French Africa, was founded in Bamako. Its local branch, the Sudanese Union led by Modibo Keïta, came to dominate the colony's politics. In 1958 French Sudan voted to become a self-governing republic within the French Community proposed by Charles de Gaulle, and in 1959 it joined Senegal in the Mali Federation, named after the medieval empire.

The Mali Federation became independent on 20 June 1960 as part of the decolonisation of Africa, but broke apart two months later, and on 22 September 1960 the former French Sudan declared itself the Republic of Mali, with Modibo Keïta as president. Keïta built a one-party socialist state, left the franc zone, nationalised trade and turned towards the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War. A Tuareg rising in the north in 1962 to 1964 was crushed with great harshness.

Economic decline and repression by party militias led to a coup in November 1968 by young officers under Lieutenant Moussa Traoré, who ruled for 23 years. Mali was devastated by the Sahel droughts of the early 1970s and 1980s, which killed vast numbers of livestock and drove herders south. Traoré's regime was corrupt and repressive, and political opponents were sent to desert prison camps. Modibo Keïta died in detention in 1977. In 1985 Mali fought a short border war with Burkina Faso over the Agacher strip. A new Tuareg rebellion broke out in 1990.

In March 1991 security forces killed scores of pro-democracy protesters in Bamako, and Lieutenant Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré arrested Traoré. Touré led a short transition, a new constitution was approved, and in 1992 the historian and archaeologist Alpha Oumar Konaré was elected president. A peace pact with Tuareg rebels was signed the same year. Konaré served two terms and handed over in 2002 to Touré, elected as a civilian, in Mali's first transfer of power between elected presidents. For two decades Mali was widely seen as one of Africa's democratic successes, though poverty, corruption and the neglect of the north persisted, while kidnapping gangs and jihadists of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, many originating in the Algerian civil war, established themselves in the Sahara.

In January 2012 the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), a Tuareg separatist group strengthened by fighters and weapons returning from the war in Libya, launched a rebellion in the north. Angered by the army's defeats, soldiers in Bamako overthrew Touré in March 2012. In the confusion the rebels took Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, and in April the MNLA proclaimed an independent state of Azawad, which no country recognised. Within months the jihadist groups Ansar Dine, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and MUJAO had pushed the MNLA aside and imposed a harsh version of Islamic law. In Timbuktu they destroyed Sufi saints' mausoleums, which are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and as they fled in January 2013 manuscripts were burned at the Ahmed Baba Institute, though most of the city's manuscripts had been smuggled to safety.

When the jihadists advanced south in January 2013, France intervened with Operation Serval and, with Chadian and Malian troops, drove them from the northern towns. A UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, was deployed, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was elected president in 2013, and in 2015 a peace agreement was signed in Algiers with the northern armed groups. But the war spread. Jihadist groups, reorganised in 2017 under the al-Qaeda-linked coalition JNIM, and a local branch of the Islamic State took hold in central Mali and across the borders into Burkina Faso and Niger. Intercommunal violence between Fulani herders and Dogon and Bambara farmers, and abuses by the army and militias, killed thousands of civilians.

Mass protests against Keïta's government were followed in August 2020 by a military coup. In May 2021 Colonel Assimi Goïta removed the transitional civilian leaders and took power himself. The junta broke with France and its neighbours and turned to Russia, hiring fighters of the Wagner Group, who were replaced in 2025 by Russia's state-run Africa Corps. French troops left in 2022 and the UN mission in 2023. In March 2022 Malian soldiers and foreign fighters were accused by the UN of killing hundreds of people at Moura in central Mali. A new constitution approved by referendum in 2023 demoted French from official language to working language. With the military rulers of Burkina Faso and Niger, Mali formed the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023 and left the West African regional bloc, ECOWAS, in 2025. That year the junta dissolved all political parties and gave Goïta a five-year presidential term, renewable without elections.

Government forces backed by Russian fighters retook Kidal from Tuareg rebels in November 2023, and the 2015 peace agreement collapsed. In 2025 JNIM began blockading fuel supplies to Bamako and other southern cities, causing severe shortages. On 25 April 2026 JNIM and the Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front launched coordinated attacks across the country, including on Kati, the garrison town outside Bamako, where Defence Minister Sadio Camara was killed, and the rebels seized Kidal. In October 2026, after an air and ground campaign supported by Russian forces, the army re-entered Kidal when the rebels withdrew, while the war against the jihadists continued across much of the country.