Mali’s many shields of its past

Abstract

There is a civilization at risk. In the middle of West Africa, just south of the Sahara, where the Niger River spills into a vast floodplain (the Middle Niger), an indigenous urban civilization emerged around two thousand years ago. The story of that civilization is just beginning to be uncovered from the thousands of tells (ancient settlement mounds) that litter the Middle Niger, but archaeologists have until recently been loosing the race with the looters who plunder these sites for ancient statues and bronze art. The nation of Mali, and the local community of Jenne at the epicenter of this looting recently invented effective shields for the remains of this civilization, protections against local looters in the employ of a syndicate of wealthy European antiquities dealers. In the person of the new, democratically-elected archaeologist-President, the nation has articulated a vision of Mali’s future linked to the preservation of its past. The government has promulgated effective regulations and education programs, and initiated with the United States the world’s first bilateral import ban between a major “source” and a major “market” nation. This 1993 bilateral accord has become a prototype for many nations. In that same year, Mali established a Cultural Mission at Jenne to reinforce local pride in a local past. This local pride, in only a short period, has turned into a total protection of some 200 sites within a ten-kilometer radius of Jenne. These indigenous actions have, in less than a decade, transformed the nonrenewable archaeological resources of the Jenne region from surely one of the world’s most endangered, to a case study in local and national protection