By Merritt Frey, Executive Director

I was a terrible history student. As a kid, all those dates and names of generals felt so irrelevant. If I am honest, I memorized key facts for history tests, and then basically wiped the slate clean before the next round of history class. As I’ve grown older, I regret this huge hole in my education! Even worse, I don’t think we learned essentially ANYTHING about the history of places like Mali.

If your relationship to history class was anything like mine, never fear! Thanks to the internet there are now fairly entertaining ways to learn about history and to learn the history of places generally ignored by western curriculums. I thought today I’d share just a few links that might fill in your historical gaps on Mali.( The region has such a rich history I can’t do it complete justice here, but I hope these links can serve as a jumping off point if you want to dig deeper!)

• A timeline of Mali’s history from the BBC — great context.

• A Super Short History of Mali — a whirlwind video summarizing a lot in just over 3 minutes.

• A Brief History of Mali — a short history that reaches from 700 AD to 2007 AD.

  National Geographic’s educator summary — short and sweet.

• Britannica’s entry on the Malian Empire — includes some helpful maps and lots of links.

• African Empires on Youtube — this link contains several short documentaries but the first several (one is narrated by Morgan Freeman!) look at the history of Mali’s most famous city, Timbuktu.

One thing I notice about many — although not all — of these types of resources is they tend to focus on the Malian Empire quite a bit and skim over the years of colonial rule by France. Mali gained independence from that colonial rule in 1960 — really not very long ago in the scope of history! The first three resources listed above will give you at least a little information about that period and how its impact is still deeply felt in Mali today.