Mali: Rubles for Timbuctoo

Though it is twice the size of Texas West Africa’s arid, landlocked Mali Republic (pop. 3,700,000) has little claim to fame beyond being the place where Timbuctoo is. Last week the news from Timbuctoo, now a crumbling mud village on the edge of the Sahara, was that the Russians would soon be there.

Back in the days when it was still the French Sudan, Mali eked out a tenuous living on French colonial subsidies. When the Sudanese were granted autonomy from France in 1958, they sought to solve their economic problems by joining neighboring and more prosperous Senegal in the Mali Federation. But eight months ago, the Senegalese, fearful of Sudanese domination, seceded from the federation; they also refused the Sudanese (who stubbornly clung to the name Mali) further access to Senegal’s great, modern port of Dakar. With no outlet to the sea and nothing to sell on world markets save peanuts, kapok and a little rice and dried fish, Mali’s Premier Mobido Keita turned to the increasingly popular game of playing West against East.

Right from the start, the pickings were pretty fair. The French went on buying Mali’s peanut crop at above-market prices, Britain furnished four DC-3s to get Air Mali into business, West Germany’s Krupp advanced $6,000,000 in credits to permit the Mali government to buy 300 trucks, and the U.S. anted up $2,500,000, mostly in cement and gasoline. Entering enthusiastically into the competition, the Common Market nations jointly granted $2,700,000 for irrigation and medical supplies, and Red China signed a barter deal: Chinese machinery and building supplies for Mali’s agricultural products and handicrafts.

Fortnight ago, Moscow got into the act. After treating half a dozen Mali officials to a princely tour of Russia, the Soviets came up with the handsomest offer yet: $44 million in long-term credits.

Most of the Soviet aid will go for more or less worthy development projects, including preliminary work on a railway line and help in exploiting Mali’s largely unexplored deposits of iron, gold and phosphates. But, as usual, the Soviet aid package includes one project that is purely for show: a football stadium for Mali’s isolated capital of Bamako.