Author Archives: brucewhitehouse

For English speakers, the French verb “récupérer” is one of those false friends: it doesn’t exactly mean “to recuperate,” though many of their meanings overlap. A better translation would be “to recover,” as in to get something back that was … Continue reading →

Stupid of me. I should’ve known better than to arrive on time. I’d been told the event would begin at 3 p.m., and it was just a few minutes past the hour when I got to the venue, the size … Continue reading →

I associate auto shows (based, at least, on their television advertisements) with huge convention centers, American-style marketing excess, and blonde models — all of which are rather hard to find in Bamako. So I never would have predicted that I’d … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, a population of hirsute strangers began gradually infiltrating Bamako. Where only a few thousand of them used to live here, their ranks soon swelled to hundreds of thousands. Newcomers to the city, they could be seen … Continue reading →

Until recently, if you were looking for a place to go in Bamako approximating the Western notion of a “park,” you were basically out of luck. The city has its share of plazas, squares and monuments, but none intended for … Continue reading →