Mali

Mali once produced the richest human in recorded history. In 1324, Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca distributed so much gold along the way that he crashed Egypt's currency for a decade. Today his successor state survives on the same gold—now extracted by foreign firms and traded for Russian mercenaries who struggle to hold territory against jihadists approaching the capital.

The Niger River made Mali possible. Flowing northeast into the Sahara before bending south, it created the only fertile corridor through the desert—a geographic bottleneck that controlled trans-Saharan trade for millennia. The Mali Empire emerged around 1235 when Sundiata Keita united Mandinka kingdoms and seized the gold and salt routes. At its peak under Mansa Musa (1312-1337), the empire stretched from the Atlantic coast to the trading cities of Gao and Timbuktu, where Sankore's scholars maintained libraries that rivaled any in the Islamic world. Gold flowed north to Morocco and Egypt; salt moved south from Saharan mines; enslaved people, ivory, and kola nuts completed the exchange. When Spanish cartographers made the Catalan Atlas in 1375, they drew Mansa Musa crowned and holding gold—Europe already knew this was the source.

The Songhai Empire conquered Mali's core in the 15th century, then fell to Moroccan firearms in 1591. What followed was fragmentation: Tuareg nomads controlled the north, Bambara kingdoms the south, Fulani jihads reshaped religious politics. When France colonized the region as Soudan Français in the 1890s, they inherited borders that enclosed peoples who had never been unified—Tuareg and Bambara, Muslim and animist, pastoralist and farmer. Independence in 1960 didn't resolve these tensions; it institutionalized them. Modibo Keita's socialist experiment ended in a 1968 coup; Moussa Traoré's dictatorship ended in a 1991 coup; democratic experiments under Amadou Toumani Touré collapsed in 2012 when Tuareg rebels and jihadists seized the north.

The current fragmentation began with that 2012 collapse and accelerated after Colonel Goita's 2020 coup. French forces intervened, then departed. UN peacekeepers deployed, then withdrew. Wagner mercenaries arrived in 2021, trading security services for gold mining access; after Prigozhin's death in 2023, Russia's Africa Corps inherited the contract. Elections were postponed in 2023, 2024, and 2025—Goita's mandate now extends to at least 2030. In January 2025, Mali formally exited ECOWAS alongside Niger and Burkina Faso to form the Alliance of Sahel States, the first departures in the bloc's 49-year history.

Yet the economy persists through coalition formation among disparate interests. Gold exports anchor revenues—Mali ranks among Africa's top producers—while new lithium deposits attract investment despite political risk. The 2023 mining code increased state stakes in extraction projects. Agriculture (cotton, livestock) and telecommunications drive the 4.9% GDP growth recorded in 2025. Russia is building a gold refinery in Bamako. The junta has detained Western mining executives to extract payments or seize assets.

The 2026 trajectory confronts an existential security crisis. In July 2024, separatists and jihadists killed dozens of Russian mercenaries in an ambush; by November 2025, JNIM forces had advanced to within striking distance of Bamako. Mali ranks fourth globally on the terrorism index, after Syria and Pakistan. The same geographic chokepoint that made Mansa Musa rich now makes Mali ungovernable—control the Niger bend and you control trade, but you must also defend a 1,200-kilometer frontier against forces that melt into desert and savanna. The empire's ghost haunts the failing state.