Mali?

The day has come. The world is too small.

My news media has been filled with stories about a coup in Mali. The problem with the size of the world is that even among the tens of millions of news reading fanatics only a few thousand have ever been to Mali and even fewer have the slightest notion what the news is about.

I have been to Mali. I spent several days in the capital, Bamako. I wrote about the Bamako zoo in an earlier blog. (The zoo was nearly empty.)

In my recollection, most of the streets in downtown Bamako were dirt and the only two-story building was a movie theater. We are talking about a town no bigger than a small Mexican farming village. The notable element in Bamako was that the military barracks were two blocks from the Capitol building. People pointed that out to me as a reason for the frequent coups.  

Personally I loved Mali and the people I spent time with. Fun, alive and hard working.

The news media has mentioned that the Tuareg have something to do with the coup.  The Tuaregs are a Bedouin like group of desert dwellers who periodically, over the past thousand years, (according to Ibn Battuta in 1350) move toward the Niger River and capture the nearby natives. That is where Bamako is.

I cannot conceive how this piece of ungodly trivia becomes global news. It is the closest thing to irrelevance that I can’t imagine. I can see a picture of man on a bench in southern France cutting his toe nails as being bigger news.

My guess is the Tuaregs recently increased their power because of the abundance of weapons being smuggled out of revolutionary Libya.

But it doesn’t matter.