Sikasso

Sikasso was a village in Senufo country until the 19th century, when the Kénédougou kingdom, ruled by the Traoré dynasty and independent of the Kong empire from about 1825, made it a capital. Tieba Traoré moved the capital here from Bougoula in 1877, set his palace on the hill known as the Mamelon, and ringed the town with the tata, a massive earthen city wall.

That wall made the town's reputation. Samori Touré, the Malinké conqueror building an empire to the west, besieged Sikasso for fifteen months from 1887 to 1888 and failed to take it; the French, then allied with Kénédougou against Samori, helped relieve the siege. The alliance did not last. In 1898 Babemba Traoré, Tieba's brother and successor, refused a French garrison and stopped the annual tribute; French artillery opened on the tata on 15 April and the town fell on 1 May. Wounded in the defence, Babemba ordered his bodyguards to kill him rather than surrender, and the kingdom ended with him.

Under French rule Sikasso became an administrative centre for a fertile, well-watered district, and after independence it grew with cotton. The state cotton company made the surrounding plains Mali's main cash-crop zone in the second half of the 20th century, and orchards of mango and other fruit followed. The city counted 225,753 people at the 2009 census, making it the second largest in the country, and it has kept growing as a market, transport and border trade centre since.

This is Senufo and Minianka country, with Bambara, Dioula and Fula communities alongside them, and the cultural mix is audible in the market, where Bambara and Dioula do the work of trade. The Senufo are known across West Africa for their carving and their masks, for the initiation societies that shape a young person's education over many years, and for the balafon, the wooden xylophone; the Senufo balafon group Neba Solo comes from Sikasso.

Islam is the majority religion and the town's mosques fill on Fridays, but older practices persist openly in the countryside: sacred groves, hunters' brotherhoods with their own songs and amulets, and sites such as the Missirikoro caves, where Muslim prayer and older rites share the same rock. Christian communities in the south are a legacy of mission work.

Daily manners follow the Malian pattern. Greetings are unhurried and cover the whole family, elders are addressed first, and the joking-cousin relationships between family names allow insults that would otherwise be unthinkable. Weddings and baptisms fill weekends with amplified music, and the three rounds of green tea are the frame for most conversation.

Some 225,753 people were counted in the city of Sikasso at the 2009 census, and the town has grown well beyond that since, spreading along the roads towards Bamako, Koutiala and the two nearby borders. It is Mali's agricultural capital in all but name: cotton is ginned and traded here, potatoes and vegetables are grown on a scale unusual in the Sahel, and the orchards around the town produce mangoes for processing plants and for export, a trade that has grown steadily in recent decades.

Trade with Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso is the other pillar. Lorries queue at the customs posts, and the town's transport yards, garages and warehouses live off the traffic between Bamako and the Ivorian ports. Gold mines in the wider region add further work. Away from these, most households farm, keep small livestock and sell in the market.

The rhythm of the day is early: market and fieldwork before the heat, a long afternoon pause, then visiting and tea in the evening. The town's difficulties are those of the whole country — fuel shortages and rising prices, power cuts, and the pressure of a farming economy exposed to poor rains — with the added worry that insecurity, long a problem of the north and centre, has moved closer to the southern regions.

Sikasso eats better than most of Mali, simply because more grows here. The stiff millet or maize porridge eaten across the country comes with sauces of baobab leaf, okra, groundnut or the local greens, and rice is common as riz au gras, cooked in tomato and oil, or with tiga dege na, the peanut stew known elsewhere as maafé. Soumbala, the strong fermented seasoning made from néré seeds, and shea butter give the sauces their character.

Fruit and vegetables define the town. Mangoes are sold by the basket along every road, sent to Bamako, and dried or cold-stored in local plants; oranges, mandarins, bananas and guavas follow through the year. Potatoes, a Sikasso speciality rare in the Sahel, appear fried beside grilled meat, and the market's vegetable stalls supply much of southern Mali.

Street eating means brochettes of mutton, grilled chicken, fried plantain and yam, bean fritters and bread rolls filled with meat or spaghetti. Drinks are ginger and hibiscus juices, tamarind, and green tea boiled with sugar and poured in three rounds. In the non-Muslim villages of the countryside, millet beer is still brewed for work parties and ceremonies.