All the Way to Timbuktu: Exploring the Cultural Riches of Mali

February 10, 2021

Look beyond what the Western media says to appreciate Mali’s rich cultural heritage.

WARNING: As of February 2021, the U.S. Department of State advises against all travel to Mali due to risk of crime, terrorism and kidnapping. For the time being, enjoy the country from your computer screen. Do not visit Mali.

A man reading historical manuscripts from West Africa. Jermaine Johnson. CC2.0

Mali is a landlocked country located in the heart of West Africa. Mali’s rich history dates back to the 11th century, when the empire of Mali controlled vast swaths of the Niger River valley. Known as a beacon for Islamic scholarship and trade from the 13th to the 16th century, things took a turn when the French colonized the country in 1898. Since achieving independence in 1960, Mali has suffered from coups, droughts, corruption and insurgencies by Islamic extremists in the country’s north.

Despite Mali’s negative reputation in Western media coverage, the country has a fascinating history and vibrant culture that deserves to be celebrated—from afar, until safety returns. Here are some of the stunning historical and cultural sites in Mali:

Djenne

Located in central Mali on a seasonal island in between the Niger and Bani rivers, Djenne is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest towns and has been inhabited since 250 B.C. The town was a stopping point for traders in the trans-Saharan gold trade and was known as a hub of Islamic learning during the 15th and 16th centuries. The stunning Great Mosque in Djenne is the world’s largest adobe structure, containing three turrets. Interestingly, adobe structures are very common in Mali due to the lack of wood in the desert. The area in front of the mosque makes a great spot for people-watching and is the site of a colorful market every Monday.

Cliffs of Bandiagara

A village in Mali’s Dogon region. Emilio Labrador. CC2.0

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the cliffs of Bandiagara are home to the Dogon people, who continue to carry on age-old traditions. Carved into tall sandstone cliffs, the Dogon region stretches for over 125 miles and provides a fascinating place for travelers. Due to the region’s remote nature, the culture of the Dogon people has been mostly left unchanged for centuries. Dogon cultural festivals take place from April to May and contain beautiful Dogon masks, dance and art. Travelers in the Dogon region often stay overnight in Mopti, a town located along the Niger River.

Timbuktu

A city fabled for its rich heritage as a trading center, Timbuktu is still a crucial point for salt caravans traveling across the Sahara desert. From the 13th to 16th centuries, Timbuktu was a center of Islamic scholarship, with its teachings and sacred texts disseminated across the Muslim world as far as Cairo, Persia and Baghdad. The city was home to a 25,000-student university and several magnificent mosques, including Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia. Many manuscripts are now in danger of falling apart or being sold on the black market. Due to recent conflicts in northern Mali, Timbuktu was proclaimed an endangered World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2012. Thus, preserving Timbuktu’s historical legacy is of utmost concern.

Bamako

Mali’s capital is a vibrant city located on the Niger River in the southern part of the country. Translated as “crocodile river” in the Bambara language, it is an exciting place to acclimate to Malian life and culture, whether by trying the local cuisine, visiting bustling markets or exploring Mali’s music scene, which is well known throughout Africa.

Mali’s rich historical legacy is often overshadowed in the Western media by stories of violence caused by religious extremists, but there is much more to the story. One must be willing to look beyond the country’s negative portrayal to appreciate Mali’s true cultural heritage.

Ableism in the Age of the Coronavirus Pandemic

July 16, 2020

What is Ableism?

“Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior.” Ableism rears its ugly head in our society every day through large discriminatory practices such as the eugenics movement as well as minor ableism that is utilized when assuming someone’s disability must be visible for it to be a disability. On a day-to-day basis people with disabilities (or disabled people as some in the community prefer to use identity-first language) endure ableism and now during the COVID-19 pandemic they are facing ableist rationing practices.

Triage and It’s Ableist Undercurrents

Disability activists have been speaking up about how many of the guidelines and criteria for triage during the COVID-19 pandemic are proving to be ableist. As Elliot Kukla puts it, “This is not an unusual triage decision to make in wartime or pandemics; our lives are considered, quite literally, more disposable.” Various states are under fire for their ableist triaging policies, with many of them receiving federal complaints from a coalition of national disability advocates including the Center for Public Representation, The Arc of the United States, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos. In Alabama, the state’s policy (which has since been retracted following retaliation from disability advocates) conceded that “individuals may be excluded under Tier 1 with … functional domains include cognitive, neurological, and psychosocial. For example, persons with severe mental retardation, advanced dementia or severe traumatic brain injury may be poor candidates for ventilator support.” In New York, where the virus hit the hardest in the U.S., a doctor made the decision to take a non-COVID and terminally ill patient off a ventilator to save another patient with COVID. This disregards the fact that many disabled people are already living with the use of a ventilator.

Statements and Solutions from the Disability Community

In an op-ed from The New York Times, disability rights activist and author Ari Ne’eman says that, “While many disabled people need ongoing medical care, many doctors view life with certain disabilities as unworthy of living. Disabled people who require ongoing ventilator care and other forms of expensive lifelong assistance are used to being asked by medical professionals if they would rather abandon life-sustaining treatment — often with the clear implication that ‘yes’ is the right answer.” These experiences are not an anomaly among the disabled community, as disability activist Alice Wong argues that, “Eugenics isn’t a relic from World War II; it’s alive today, embedded in our culture, policies, and practices. It is imperative that experts and decision-makers include and collaborate with communities disproportionately impacted by systemic medical racism, ageism and ableism, among other biases.”

Others such as Joseph Stramondo, a philosophy professor at San Diego State University, are focusing on creating a paradigm shift in the way professional bioethicists respond to the coronavirus pandemic. He advises against using deeply biased quality of life judgment due to there being “a significant body of empirical evidence showing that there is a substantial gap between a disabled person’s self-assessment and how their quality of life is judged by folks that have never experienced their disability.” He furthers the discourse by highlighting Shelley Tremain, a feminist philosopher who studies disabilities and hopes to push the conversation away from just fixing triaging protocols. “The primary object of our analysis seems to sanction the idea that these hard choices are inevitabilities,” Tremain writes of triage practices. Instead, bioethicists “should be putting our energy behind efforts to reduce the need to make such choices at all.”

Hanna Ditinsky

is a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is majoring in English and minoring in Economics. She was born and raised in New York City and is passionate about human rights and the future of progressivism.

#HatchKids Discuss Microaggressions

April 19, 2017

SheKnows Media's Hatch program creates KidsSpeak content for grown-ups, made by kids on a mission. This workshop's mission was to educate parents on the concept of "microaggressions," defined as a form of unintentional discrimination, and their impact on teens' self-esteem. SheKnows Media's Hatch program creates KidsSpeak content for grown-ups, made by kids on a mission. For more information, visit – http://corporate.sheknows.com/hatch

Flip Your Map and Up Your Impact

February 9, 2017

Part 1 of a 2-part series on Maps

When we look at the most commonly-seen map of the world, we assume that it depicts the earth as it truly is. But this particular projection of the world, like all others in existence, isn’t completely accurate, as it is impossible to avoid distortions when translating three dimensions into two. Known as the Mercator projection, this map was designed for navigation but distorts relative size, artificially enlarging land masses further from the equator. The result is more severe than you might imagine: Africa appears smaller than Greenland, when it is actually fourteen times larger. See this for yourself here.

There are many other, less common projections which you can explore here. Some are equal area projections, such as Gall-Peters, which manage to avoid the relative size distortion of Mercator but are then much less useful for navigation and less accurate with regard to shape. While the Mercator projection has been abandoned by atlases in favor of projections with more balanced distortion profiles, it is still used by popular online navigation tools such as Google Maps given its navigational prowess (unless you happen to be exploring one of the poles, where it is practically useless).

The most commonly-seen map of the world also has a particular orientation and center: north-up and the Atlantic. Yet this framing is neither inevitable nor inherently more correct. Medieval maps were often East-up, Pacific-centered maps pop up in Asia, and a National Geographic feature on the world’s oceans opted to carve up continents instead of bodies of water.

As a result of the complex politics of map-making over time and the inertia of convention, the north-up, Atlantic-centered Mercator projection is the most prevalent, making it not only a navigation tool, but also the image of the world in our mind’s eye. But why does this matter? If all projections are distorted in some way, and orientation, although heavily influenced by historical political jockeying, is ultimately arbitrary, can’t we just continue using it?

There is a big reason why this is not such a great idea: where things are on the map and how big they are in relation to other things affects what we think of them.

Research has shown that we (English-language users) tend to associate up with goodness and down with badness; think about upper and lower class, movement along the socio-economic ladder, “started from the bottom now we’re here”, the assumed location of heaven and hell, and the connotations of uptown and downtown. It has also shown that we tend to associate up with north and down with south (“up north”, “down south”) despite the fact that up/down is an orientation to gravity while cardinal direction is an orientation to the poles. When we are repeatedly exposed to the north-up world map, it reinforces the association of up with north and down with south, and therefore strengthens the association of north with the positive qualities associated with up, and south with the negative qualities associated with down. The popularity of the north-up map makes us more readily associate positive things with northern places.

We also tend to associate things in the center of an image with importance, and large objects with importance and strength. Overall, this means that we tend to equate things that occupy large, upper (northern), central places on the map with goodness, importance and strength; and things that occupy smaller, lower (southern) and peripheral places with badness, insignificance and weakness. It is therefore not surprising that some Australians, Asian states, geographers, educators, and even people on The West Wing have pushed for south-up, Pacific-centric and non-Mercator maps.

Now you might be thinking, but I know that those things don’t always match up! Rwanda has a higher percentage of female Members of Parliament than any other country on earth even though it’s in the Global South! China is hugely important in the global economy even though it’s on the periphery of the map! Israel is powerful even though its relatively small size is exaggerated by its proximity to the equator!

But these mental links, also called implicit associations, are mostly unconscious, and they show up in many areas of our lives even when we consciously know and believe that they aren’t correct. In other words, stereotypes and generalizations affect our decisions and behaviors even though we know they aren't always true. This insight comes from implicit association tests, which show that we are quicker and more accurate at sorting things into bins when the bins match up with unconscious associations in our brains, even when we report not having these associations. For example, when sorting words or images that are often perceived as fitting into just one of four categories - fat, skinny, good, bad - we tend to be faster and more accurate when we are putting items that we perceive as fat or bad into one box, and items that we perceive as skinny or good into the other box. We are on average slower and more likely to mess up when we instead have to sort into a box for skinny or bad items, and a box for fat or good items. And this happens even when we report that we don’t believe fatness is inherently associated with badness, or skinniness with goodness. See this for yourself by taking multiple versions of this test.

The most probable explanation for this phenomenon is that it's an evolutionary remnant, which in the earlier days of humanity helped to keep us alive by allowing us to quickly distinguish between safe and unsafe through stereotyping. But the modern-day implication is clear: even if we don't explicitly think that northern, central, or large countries are better, stronger and more important, associations between these categories probably lurk in our psyches. Where things are on the map and how big they are in relation to other things affects what we think of them regardless of whether or not we realize it’s happening. We don’t just shape maps, maps shape us.

These mental links may seem harmless, but researchers have suggested that implicit associations in general contribute to everything from childcare expectations for different genders to police brutality against people of color. They affect decisions like whether or not to cross the street when we see someone walking towards us, where to travel, and which deaths from terrorist attacks to change our profile pictures for.

The particular mental links created and reinforced by this map aren’t harmless either, as they correlate with current and historical global patterns. And when these mental links line up with what’s happening in the world, they perpetuate each other. Although it is sometimes quite handy that associations from our dominant map match reality, it is also limiting, as we tend to see characteristics of certain places as natural and normal, and the resulting global power dynamic as inevitable. For instance, this map and the associations it fortifies make it harder for us to imagine a world where the West (a confusing term generally used to refer to Northwestern Europe, the US and Canada) isn’t the most powerful and important group of countries. When we see things as inevitable and can’t fathom a different reality, we are less likely to intervene to change the course of history. We cannot go somewhere that we have not first traveled in our minds, and with maps reinforcing the status quo instead of igniting our imagination of how the world could be, we are more likely to perpetuate global systems of oppression.

The mental links reinforced by repeated exposure to this map don't just prevent us from taking action, they can also lead us to take part in less-than-ideal action. For example, this particular map reinforces the belief that the West is inherently good and that all countries should strive for our way of life. This belief then informs actions in many sectors, from foreign policy to international development, often resulting in detrimental outcomes for people and planet. Individually, we are encouraged to engage in well-intentioned efforts such as teaching English, which, instead of indisputably beneficial, can be seen as an effort to make “them” more like “us”. Beliefs arising from the associations this particular map reinforces don’t just prevent us from changing things, they support harmful things happening right now.

Instead of being held back by exclusive familiarity with only one of an infinite number of possible projections of earth, we can improve our chances of having a genuinely positive impact by changing our maps. We can continue to use Mercator projections for navigational purposes, but we should switch it up for non-navigational purposes. When hunting down the exact location of a current event you’re reading about, scroll over a pole in Google Earth to flip the world upside down. If you’re buying a world map poster to plan your next trip or track where you’ve been, consider a Gall-Peters projection, south-up or Pacific-centered map; all are relatively easily to find online.

Over time, as you expose yourself to different maps, your mental maps will shift, decreasing the power of certain associations and helping you combat your unconscious internal bias. While daily exposure to our culture and language makes it very hard to de-link up from good, and large and center from important and powerful, changing your maps can delink north from goodness, Africa from weakness, and Small Island States from insignificance (they are, after all, a key climate change frontline). Switching between maps will also remind you that the map is not the territory, and that all maps simultaneously obscure and illuminate. We can also expose ourselves to stories and other media that contradict these associations, a tactic which has been shown to reduce bias when measured with implicit association tests. Purposefully and regularly exposing yourself to other perspectives is also a good life practice, especially for people of privilege, and one of the things travel is perfect for.

SARAH LANG

Instigated by studies in Sustainable Development at the University of Edinburgh, Sarah has spent the majority of her adult life between 20+ countries. She is intrigued by the global infrastructure that produces inequality and many interlocking revolutionary solutions to the ills of the world as we know it. As a purposeful nomad on a journey to eradicate oppression in all its forms, she has worked alongside locals from Sweden to Zimbabwe. She is a lover of compassionate critique, aligning impacts with intentions, and flipping (your view of) the world upside down.