BAMAKO, Mali -- In the heart of this city of 1 million inhabitants, the ancient fetish market occupies a strategic position. It sits directly between the city's largest mosque, shrine for a population that is 90 percent Muslim, and the National Assembly, home of Mali's fragile democracy.
The fetish market is a mysterious place, powerfully symbolic of an Africa more ancient than electoral politics or even Islam.
Nomad boys fill leather bags with water at a Saharan oasis in Mali, a country where tribes coexist in relative peace.
(Brennan Linsley -- AP)
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Here there is nothing modern, other than the mobile phones of the witch doctors. This is a realm of magic. For sale are the skins of leopards, the heads of monkeys and potent spells.
The juxtaposition of modern technology and ancient magic is not the only unlikely congruity found in Mali, a land that is beset by problems but refuses to descend into another chaotic West African hellhole.
Nearly twice the size of Texas, with a population of just 10 million, Mali is home to Bambaras, Fulanis, Senoufos, Songhais, Malinkes, Tuaregs, Dogons and even Bozos, all tribes living relatively peacefully together. One can walk safely through Bamako, Mali's capital city, without fear of being mugged, even though the average wage is less than $275 a year.
Mali's neighbors are much less welcoming. There is civil war in Ivory Coast, fighting in Algeria, grinding poverty in Mauritania.
There are warnings that Islamic fundamentalists are on the loose. Yet you are more likely to see a veiled woman in Paris than in Bamako. Allah is praised, but the law is largely left over from the French rule in the early to mid-1900s, and there is no serious politician campaigning for sharia, a system of laws derived from the Koran.
"Mali has made impressive progress in creating a vibrant open society in which democracy can flourish," says Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador. "The challenge, however, is to the government and leaders of Mali, who must make the hard decisions and undertake the reforms needed to put Mali on a sustainable road to long-term economic growth and prosperity."
The whiff of oil in the Saharan north of the country promises an economic miracle, but also conflict and potential disaster, as the experience in nearby Nigeria shows. But an oil bonanza is probably 10 years away or more. More immediately, it is the stench of whale oil that blows through the streets of Bamako.
No whales have ever been seen in the soupy, polluted water of the Niger River, although there are a few elephants and the occasional crocodile and an unusual species of manatee in the delta.
Yet the fate of the world's whales may be decided by landlocked Mali, which has just joined the World Whaling Council at the behest of the Japanese, and now could cast a deciding vote for the resumption of commercial whaling in exchange for development aid to cope with the country's many problems. Mali's recent woes include even an infestation of locusts that threatened vital crops.
For the moment, the markets in Bamako are heaving with food and Mali seems to have escaped the worst. President Amadou Toumani Toure promises that his country will not suffer famine during the coming year because its grain belt in the Niger Valley has so far been saved.
A more inexorable threat is the sand. The Saharan vastness, home to a million nomads, is moving south: The sand is encroaching on the fertile savannah and piling into the streets of mystical Timbuktu, the fatal magnet for so many European explorers.
A Tuareg tribal insurgency in the north in 1991 is long settled, albeit with some big concessions to the insurgents. It is, however, still not safe to travel there.
With an elaborate and often mystical history and sense of self, Malians recount a glorious past. By the 12th century the king of Mali appeared in Cairo with so much gold the price collapsed. Before that, it was lying around in the sand, like popcorn, waiting for someone to pick it up. Mali is still the third-biggest producer of gold in Africa, after South Africa and Ghana.
Mali's economy is growing, at a rate estimated at 2 percent and possibly faster, given the intense unrecorded economic activity at street level and the mobile phone boom. Yet this is still feeble. Tourism needs infrastructure and a government more welcoming to visitors to thrive. Agriculture is still oriented toward subsistence, and the fine cotton grown commercially -- crucial because Mali has become an African fashion center -- must be spun and printed in the Netherlands before it comes home to be made into the boubou worn by both men and women. The finest examples of these robes can cost the equivalent of several hundred dollars.
Despite everything, there is a buzz to Bamako.
The place brims with cultural self-confidence with a highly sophisticated musical culture spawning some of the best radio stations in the world and some of the best musicians. The top ones, including Ali Farka Toure, Habib Koite, Salif Keita, Oumou Sangare and the famous kora player Toumani Diabate, are internationally recognized, although more likely to be found performing in Paris or New York than in Bamako these days.
There are no discernible limits to freedom of expression. "Why is this city a garbage dump?" demanded a front-page editorial in one local paper. "It's no good denying it -- everyone can see it, everyone can smell it." In some other African countries, such commentary could get a journalist sent to prison. Here, it makes barely a ripple.
Can Mali become a West African success story? The verdict is still out. A former U.S. official based for many years in Bamako believes a fall from democracy to authoritarianism is unlikely, but to set Mali on the road to prosperity would require much more attention and support from donor nations. If only to save the whales.
