🇲🇱 Mali
Bamako
Bamako (the capital of Mali, population 3.5 million in the metropolitan area — the fastest-growing city in Africa (the UN projects Bamako will reach 10 million by 2035, making it one of the largest cities in Africa) and the cultural heart of West Africa) sits on the Niger River (the third-longest river in Africa (4,180km), after the Nile and the Congo — the river that is the lifeblood of the Sahelian civilizations: the river that connected the great medieval empires of West Africa (the Ghana Empire (300–1200 CE), the Mali Empire (1235–1600 CE: the largest empire in African history at its peak, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Niger bend), and the Songhai Empire (1464–1591 CE: the successor to the Mali Empire and the empire that contained the most important centers of Islamic learning in the Saharan world: Timbuktu, Djenné and Gao)): the city that is best known internationally as the capital of the world's most important live music scene outside of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans: the "Bamako sound" (the music that fuses the traditional Mande griot music (the griots — the "jeli" in Bambara: the hereditary caste of West African poets, storytellers, musicians and oral historians who have preserved and transmitted the history and culture of the Mande peoples for over a thousand years: the most important institution of oral culture in sub-Saharan Africa) with Cuban son, jazz and blues (the trans-Atlantic connection: the blues music of the American South that descended from the music of the enslaved West Africans, and then returned to West Africa via Cuba and the Malian musicians who heard the Cuban orchestras on Radio Dakar in the 1950s — the most extraordinary circular journey in the history of world music)): the musicians Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté (the kora master: the kora — the 21-string bridge harp-lute of West Africa — played at the highest level in the history of the instrument), and Amadou & Mariam are all from the Mali/Bamako tradition.