22 September: Mali National Day

Today is the National Day of Mali - here are 10 things you might not know about Mali:

1. Mali is a landlocked country in West Africa. It's about twice the size of the US state of Texas, making it the largest country in West Africa and the eighth largest in Africa as a whole.
2. The capital and largest city is Bamako. The name comes from a Bambara word meaning "crocodile river".
3. Another famous Malian city is Timbuktu, once a very wealthy centre of learning and commerce. The city grew rapidly in the 13th and 14th centuries due to trade in salt, gold, ivory and other things, and one of the first universities in the world was built there. The level of learning at Timbuktu’s Sankoré University was superior to that of all other Islamic centres in the world. By the time Europeans decided to go there and seek their fortunes, the city's wealth had declined, and so its reputation in the west became not a rich centre of learning but a faraway place that is difficult to find.
4. The prime meridian marker is located in Gao, Mali.
5. Mali is one of the hottest and driest countries in the world. About 65% of the country is covered in desert or semi-desert.
6. An estimated 800,000 people in Mali are descended from slaves. The Arabic population kept slaves well into the 20th century, until slavery was suppressed by French authorities around the mid-20th century. Due to certain hereditary servitude relationships, it's thought about 200,000 Malians are still slaves today.
7. Mali was once home to the richest man, ever, Mansa Musa, emperor of the Malian Empire in the early 1300s. In 2012, Celebrity Net Worth took out a list of world’s 25 wealthiest people of all time, and after adjusting for inflation Mansa Musa was placed on top of the list - richer than Bill Gates and the Rothschild family. It was calculated that Musa had a personal net worth of $400 billion at the time of his death. He was so rich that when he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, he took with him 12,000 slaves, 60,000 men, 80 Camels that each carried between 50 and 30 pounds of Gold. Every Friday, when he wanted to worship, he would have a mosque built. He handed out so much gold to his people that it caused the price of gold to fall. By contrast, today, less than 10% of the country’s population earns more than $2 a day.
8. The flag of Mali is a tricolour with three equal vertical stripes in Green, gold, and red, the pan-African colours. The flag is almost identical to the flag of Guinea, except the colours are in reverse order. The green stands for fertility of the land, Gold means purity and mineral wealth and lastly red symbolises the blood shed for independence from the French.
9. Eighty percent of Malian workers are employed in agriculture. Cotton is the country's largest crop export.
10. Mali’s Great Mosque of Djenne is the largest mudbrick building in the world.