Easter 1997. I had started my trip out of Berlin early in the morning. In the late afternoon I arrived in Bamako, a totally different world. On my way from the airport to the hotel I got my first impression of Bamako, the capital of Mali.
Bamako looked more like a big market-town than the economic centre of a country. The taxi driver stopped his beaten-up Renault at one of the hundreds of mini-markets to buy one litre of fuel in an old water bottle. Taxi drivers only buy fuel one litre at a time in Mali, I noticed.

The hotel Mandé was located at the bank of the Niger River in a quiet place of the city. In the evening I met John, a 40-year-old Canadian with sun-burned face. He had been flying over Mali for the past two months, he told me as we drank cold bottles of the local beer at the hotel bar. He was working on behalf of a South-African mining company which at the time was looking for gold in the area. John swore at the ‘damned environmentalists’ who made it very difficult for him to find jobs in Canada due to the legal restrictions on clear cutting native forests.
As he heard about the aim of our mission in Mali his temper got even worse. He said to me: “You should think the matter over, think about what helps to improve the economic situation of the country.”.

The mission of the team of consultants I had been working for was to develop the concept of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure in Mali. The gold-rush-like development of the mining sector was one of the reasons why some parts of the Malian government had decided to introduce an EIA procedure within the framework of the national environmental action plan.
We were working together with local experts who opened the doors to the several ministries, associations and companies we visited during our short-term missions. One of those people was Amadou Mody Diall. Everybody in Bamako greeted him by saying ‘Mr. Minister’. Amadou had been the Minister of Justice during the difficult transition period after the removal of the most recent dictatorship in Mali.

The chemist’s shop of Dr Oumar Cissé in Kayes
Bamako’s railway station is similar to a huge market place. Boubakar, one of our Malian colleagues, had organized the tickets for the 12-hour-travel to Kayes. The rainy season made it impossible for our team to access the Kayes region even with an all-terrain vehicle. The ‘mogul slope’ between Bamako and Kayes was silted up. Kayes is the far western province of Mali near the border to Senegal. Kayes is the provincial capital of the region which had been developing fast since the late 90ies: the gold rush has attracted hundreds of people from other parts of Mali and its neighbouring countries – and also, of course, foreign investors. Therefore, the emerging problems of this region formed a good basis for a case study on how to implement an environmental impact assessment in Mali at the regional and local level.
The train connecting Bamako with Kayes and also Senegal is the region’s most important means of transportation. Only a few minutes after our train had left Bamako’s central station it came to a sudden stop: the passengers were looking outside the open, paneless windows and asking those who had already jumped onto the embankement what happened – soon we knew that a cow had been crossing the tracks and had been hit by the train because it didn’t react to the blowing of the locomotive’s horn.
Within half an hour the poor animal had been completely trenched by the passengers and the people living near the tracks. Dozens of local people took pieces of meat with them. This was the most obvious way of making the best of a bad situation. Our train continued its low-speed travel after this incident and wiggled along small rivers and the savannah-landscape until we reached Kayes in the night.

Meeting the Heads of Sadiola
The contrast between the mining estate we arrived at and the local village nearby couldn’t be greater: we sat in canvas chairs near the pool of the AngloGold corporation’s restaurant at Sadiola and had the feeling that this place was like a piece of a South-African residential estate transfered right into the middle of the Malian savannah.
We reached Sadiola after a three-hour-trip by car from Kayes. The surface mining activities were at the time controversial, and still are. During our stay in Sadiola we had meetings with the management of the gold mine, the environmental manager, the liaison man to the local community, and of course with the traditional heads of the village. They were afraid that their community was going to be impacted in an irreversible way by the mining activities and all its appendant consequences, such as intercultural problems with the foreigners, small scale illegal mining activities around the fenced mining site, prostitution and so on.

Flying back from Kayes to Bamako
At that time the local community distrusted the mining company and the liaison man had a lot of talks with both sides. Discussions with the local administration showed us that they had themselves very little influence in decision-making and almost no means with which to monitor the impact of the mining activities. All decisions concerning these activities were made at the level of the central government in Bamako between the concerned ministries and the investors. The reason for this is that gold has accounted for about 20% of Mali’s export revenue and is therefore an important and strategic resource for the country.
Mali may be poor in terms of income per inhabitant according to the official economical statistics. But in terms of friendship and conviviality it’s the country that impressed me the most up to now. More than 14 different cultures are living together, and beside the former conflict between the Tuaregs and the Government there existed no ethnical conflicts between these cultures.

Typical administrative building in Bamako
Due to the lack of a functioning social welfare system, the income generated by those who are employed is distributed throughout their families – and families are huge in Mali. Amadou, the former Minister of Justice and a consultant in our team, accomodates members of his widespread family in the Peul tribe and lives simply in a former colonial house. He told us that he is expected to finance the school expenses of all the children living in his birthplace.
There exists a mutual chain of support throughout the whole country. Moreover, the access to those people in power is uncomplicated. Amadou told us the anecdote of a friend of his who came from his village to Bamako and said to him that he was going to go and see the new Minister of Agriculture. Amadou said to him: ‘How are you going to get a time until tomorrow? It’s impossible. The Minister doesn’t even know you’. His friend answered him: ‘No problem, I am a Sénoufo and the Minister is a Bozo. Every Bozo has the obligation to receive a Sénoufo if he requests it’. And so it happened.
The final proposition of our international project team was the subject of a national meeting. We presented and discussed the key aspects of the environmental impact assessment procedure with representatives of ministries, regional authorities, agricultural and industrial associations, local consultants, NGOs during a two-day-meeting. The atmosphere during the meeting was characterised by good collaboration and openness. We knew of course that the result of the meeting would still have a long way to go until the regulations would be enforced in Mali. Nevertheless, the way the talks were conducted gave us the feeling that something is really going to change in Mali.

Dinner at Fanta’s home
‘Mr le Ministre’, invited us at his home the last evening we stayed in Bamako, too. He was living in an ex-French colonial house with his two wives, his children and some other members of his large family. We were impressed by the frugal arrangement of the house, the walls painted in the typical green and aquamarine colour. We enjoyed his hospitality and the excellent food prepared by the younger of his two wives. Mali will always hold a special and warm place in my memories.