Day 5: The “Venice of Mali” : Mopti
We are getting good at this now: pack up our stuff, hop into the van and hit the road. The car is swerving to avoid hitting cows and goats and donkeys. We fly past villages and people tilling fields with plow and oxen. Mopti is a Niger River port town crammed on a peninsula. The market is even more crammed against the water and offers a lot of dried fish (to Robbie’s delight). Craftsmen are banging some pinasse together from wood that comes up from Guinea. We rented a pinasse to take us up along the river.

(The Niger River port in Mopti)


("Campement Peul" on the Peninsula where the Bani River meets the Niger)

We visited a Bozo village (fishermen), a peul camp ground (cattle herders), a Touareg campement (mostly traders). Our guide started to explain how it all works: the migrations of the cattle herders and fishermen with the seasonal flood of the Delta; the trade and reciprocal relationships between the ethnicities; how things are changing lately with urbanization and the climate change, etc. I think this stuff is fascinating. Peuls walk in and out of their huts that look like piles of hay. Fishermen throw their round nets in an arc over the water from their slim boats. A peul woman comes back with a load of cow dung on her head (used as cooking fuel). All of humanity has lived “living-standards” much closer to this than what we’ve seen in Europe, the US, and all the capitals of the world since the “industrial revolution.” We call it “poverty.” It is easy to idealize a way of life when you’ve just had spaghetti bolognaise at the Hotel “Il y a pas de problème,” but I wonder about the sustainability of the changes (of “development”). With the environmental degradation of industrialism we risk wreaking the planet within a century... The people in the Inner Delta of the Niger River live in ways practically unchanged for centuries.

(Bozo children fishing)