Global Voices Online

Dino's visa experience at Mali embassy: “My Mali experience made me think about the visa experiences both with South -South travels, and South-North travels. I also thought of what it meant to be a North-South traveller. South-South Travels were clearly much easier than South-North travels. Just recently, there has been a raging debate about the difficulties encountered when looking for a visa to France (14 Nov Travel, Saturday Star).”

GVO in French translator and Mali-based Bambara blogger Boukary Konate, who blogs at Fasokan, is featured [Fr] in Africascopie, a blog of the French daily Le Monde.  They call him “the unrepentant blogger”, and you can listen to a podcast of a “smashing” interview.  In an earlier entry of the “collaborative report”, he talks about new media as a great way out of the crisis and to raise awareness, “if we go to the trouble of translating them into our national languages” and can bring cheaper and more efficient internet access in African countries.

American blogger in Bamako writes about her experiences while conducting a survey in rural Mali: We left around 8:30 in the morning (I knew even then that this was way too late of a start). We walked 1km to the moto taxi junction and waited for a moto taxi. Eventually we found one that was heading towards Allahhena - the village where we would need to get out and walk to the river.

Le Pangolin writes about Teriya Bugu, a model village on the Niger river, in Mali, “proof that Africa has every opportunity to advance so long as it invests in people, especially farmers.  Hope is a value Africa should invest in” [Fr]

Mali Travel Diaries writes about Mali's multilinguism, a country where French is the official language and 50 others are spoken.

Sociolingo's Africa reports on a new museum to be created in Sikasso, Mali. It will be the first museum designed to preserve the heritage of the balafon, an African xylophene played in Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote-d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin and Ghana. The post includes a video of two balafon musicians.

Sociolingo's Africa quotes two recent articles that “show that slavery still goes on today” in northern Mali and that it is a very complex issue in the country as many people deny its existence.

“Between Conakry and Bamako there are 1000 km of motorways. First forests, then mountain, savannas after. It is a gift to the eyes and a way to ease the 15 hours' drive. The trip ends in a bath of dust, by the entrance to Mali's capital”. On publishing an incredible picture he took last week, Jorge Rosmaninho [pt] says sorry to those people who live by the motorways he drove past carelessly and left in a cloud of dust.

Ghasbouba, from Morocco, writes about the Touareg struggle for liberation in Niger and Mali.