Portal:Mali/Intro

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mali, officially the Republic of Mali (French: République du Mali), is a landlocked nation in Western Africa. It is the seventh largest country in Africa. It borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its straight borders on the north stretch into the centre of the Sahara, while the country's south, where the majority of inhabitants live, features the Niger and Senegal rivers.

The area of present-day Mali was once part of three West African empires that controlled trans-Saharan trade: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire (from which Mali takes its name), and the Songhai Empire. In the late 1800s, Mali fell under French control, becoming part of French Sudan. Mali gained its independence, with Senegal, as the Mali Federation in 1959, becoming the independent nation of Mali in 1960. After a long period of one-party rule, a 1991 coup led to the writing of a new constitution and the establishment of Mali as a democratic, multi-party state.