Kouoro

Kouoro
Commune and town
Kouoro

Location in Mali

Coordinates: 11°58′5″N 5°41′19″W / 11.96806°N 5.68861°W / 11.96806; -5.68861Coordinates: 11°58′5″N 5°41′19″W / 11.96806°N 5.68861°W / 11.96806; -5.68861
Country  Mali
Region Sikasso Region
Cercle Sikasso Cercle
Area[1]
  Total 472 km2 (182 sq mi)
Population (2009 census)[2]
  Total 11,315
  Density 24/km2 (62/sq mi)
Time zone GMT (UTC+0)

Kouoro is a small town and rural commune in the Cercle of Sikasso in the Sikasso Region of southern Mali. The commune covers an area of 472 square kilometers and includes the town and five villages.[3] In the 2009 census it had a population of 11,315.[2] The town of Kouoro, the chef-lieu of the commune, is 75 km north of Sikasso, on the RN11, the main road linking Sikasso and Koutiala.

The French explorer René Caillié stopped at Kouoro in February 1828 on his journey to Timbuktu. He was travelling with a caravan transporting kola nuts to Djenné. In his book Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo published in 1830, he refers to what was then a village as Couara.[4] Caillié wrote:

At nine o'clock in the morning we halted at Coura, a pretty village, where we found an abundance of all the necessities of life. The inhabitants grow a great deal of cotton and millet, and are supplied with water from a stream that runs E.N.E., half a mile from the village.[5]

What Caillié referred to as a stream was actually the Banifing River, a tributary of the Bani but in February it would have had very little water.[4]

References

  1. "Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry: Mali", United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs http://cod.humanitarianresponse.info/country-region/mali Missing or empty |title= (help). commune_mali.zip (Originally from the Direction Nationale des Collectivités Territoriales, République du Mali)
  2. 1 2 Resultats Provisoires RGPH 2009 (Région de Sikasso) (PDF) (in French), République de Mali: Institut National de la Statistique.
  3. Communes de la Région de Sikasso (PDF) (in French), Ministère de l’administration territoriale et des collectivités locales, République du Mali.
  4. 1 2 Viguier 2008, p. 52.
  5. Caillié 1830, p. 415.

Sources

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, December 13, 2013. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.