Mopti

Unlike Djenné, Timbuktu and Gao, Mopti has no medieval history. It was a collection of Bozo fishing villages on islands in the flood plain where the Bani meets the Niger, whose people grew rice on the floodplains, herded livestock and fished with cotton nets, drying large quantities of their catch for sale in the markets of Djenné. The Massina state of Seku Amadu, founded in 1818 and governed from Hamdallaye nearby, brought the area under a strict Islamic administration in the 19th century, and El Hadj Umar Tall's Tukulor empire followed in the 1860s.

The French conquest made the town. Recognising the value of the confluence, the colonial administration chose Mopti rather than Djenné as the regional capital, built a 12-kilometre dyke to Sévaré between 1905 and 1912 to join the islands to the mainland, and developed the port. Trade in dried fish, rice, grain and rock salt from the Saharan mines grew with it, and by the 20th century Mopti was the most important river port in Mali. The grand mosque at Komoguel was built in the 1930s in the style of Djenné's.

After independence the town added tourism to trade: it became the base for visits to the Dogon country, Djenné and Timbuktu, with hotels, guides and boat operators. The war that began in 2012 ended that. Mopti was not taken by the rebels, but Western visitors stopped coming, and from 2015 the insurgency spread into central Mali and made the surrounding countryside dangerous. The town, still a port and a market, has since absorbed large numbers of people displaced from the villages around it.

Mopti is a river town before anything else, and its communities are defined by what they do on and around the water. The Bozo and Somono are fishermen, with their own ways of handling nets, boats and the flood calendar; the Fula, whose language Fulfulde is widely spoken here, herd cattle through the delta and swim them across the river at the seasonal crossings; Bambara and Songhai farm; Dogon traders come down from the plateau. The relationships between them were long regulated by agreements over water, grazing and fishing rights.

The town is strongly Muslim, and the Komoguel mosque, rebuilt in mud in the style of Djenné, is its centre. Quranic schools, Friday prayers and the two Eid festivals frame the year. Craft traditions serve the river trade: boatbuilding and the painting of pinasses, pottery brought in from delta villages, woollen Fula blankets, and the blacksmiths and leatherworkers of the market.

Mopti's second identity, as the gateway to the Dogon country, shaped it for decades. A generation of guides, drivers, hoteliers and craft sellers grew up around that trade and lost it after 2012, and the loss is part of how the town now sees itself. Manners are Malian: unhurried greetings, respect for elders, and long sessions over three rounds of sweet green tea.

The urban commune, which includes Sévaré, counted 114,296 people at the 2009 census. The town proper is squeezed onto raised ground and dykes, with little room to grow, so much of the expansion has happened at Sévaré, where the roads and the airport are and where offices and newer housing have gone.

Work follows the river. Fishing, drying and smoking fish for export across West Africa remains the signature trade; rice from the floodplains, cattle and milk from the herders, pottery, salt and grain moving through the port make up the rest, and the harbour's loading and unloading employs many. Markets around the harbour sell rock salt brought down from Taoudenni, among a great deal else. Sévaré's junction position gives it transport work and, since the war, a steady presence of aid organisations.

The conflict shapes everything. Armed groups operate across the Mopti region, roads out of town are dangerous, schools in the countryside have closed, and hundreds of thousands of people have left the villages for the safety of the towns, straining housing, water and work in Mopti and Sévaré. Fuel shortages, power cuts and rising prices have been felt here as across the country, and the tourism that once supported a large part of the population has not returned.

Fish is the town's food and its trade. Capitaine, the Nile perch, is grilled whole or fried and served with rice; catfish and tilapia go into sauces; and the smoked and dried fish of the delta, stacked in the market and sent across West Africa, is broken into stews and sauces to give them depth. Rice from the flooded plains is the staple, eaten as riz au gras, cooked in oil and tomato, or plain with a sauce of groundnut, okra or baobab leaf.

The Fula contribution is dairy: fresh and soured milk, butter, and millet porridge taken with them, along with dégué, sweetened millet couscous with milk, eaten as a snack and a dessert. Millet appears as a stiff porridge and as moni, a thin gruel, at breakfast. Onions, grown in great quantity in the Dogon country and the delta, and soumbala, the fermented néré-seed seasoning, go into most sauces.

Around the port and the market the street food is fried fish, brochettes of mutton, bean fritters, fried dough and bread with sauce. Drinks are hibiscus and ginger juices, tamarind, milk, and green tea boiled with sugar and poured in three rounds. Rock salt from the desert mines, sold in grey slabs at the quay, is part of the same trade that once carried gold and is still used in cooking and for livestock.