Siby
"Siby is the kind of place that makes you wonder why you went anywhere more famous first."
Everyone in Bamako had told me to go to Siby, and I kept not going because I was busy going to larger places with more recognizable names. Then I went, on a Sunday when a French-Malian schoolteacher named Oumar offered to drive there and said I could come if I wanted to see something real. We left Bamako early, the road heading southwest into the Mandé hills, the city dropping away behind us with a speed that surprised me, and within forty minutes we were in a landscape that had nothing in common with the capital except the red laterite road connecting them.
Siby sits at the foot of an escarpment that runs along the border with Guinea, in the heartland of the Mandé people — the cultural and historical center of the empires that preceded Mali’s modern geography. Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century warrior king who founded the Mali Empire and whose story is still recounted by griots across West Africa, consolidated his power in these hills. The founding narrative of the Mandé confederation, the Manden Charter — regarded by some scholars as one of the earliest known declarations of human rights — was proclaimed here, or near here, in 1236. Walking in the hills above Siby with that knowledge is a particular experience: the land is beautiful in a quiet, almost secretive way, and also genuinely ancient.
The Kamandjan Arch is the thing people come to see, and it is genuinely worth seeing: a natural stone arch, perhaps twenty meters across, formed where the escarpment erodes in a particular way, with a waterfall dropping through the opening during the rainy season. In the dry season the waterfall is a trickle and then nothing, but the arch itself needs no enhancement — the opening frames the valley below with the precision of a composition that was never intended to be a composition. Oumar told me the arch was named for Kamandjan, one of the warriors in the Sundiata epic, and that local people regard it as sacred. We sat there for a long time without talking.
Below the arch, the village of Siby is small and unhurried. Market day draws people from the surrounding countryside but does not overwhelm the place. There is a women’s cooperative that produces shea butter, working large round cooking pots over wood fires to extract the oil from the shea nuts in a process that smells improbably good — something between nuts and bread — and produces a cream used for everything from cooking to skin. They sell it in recycled jam jars at prices that are not tourist prices because the tourists who reach Siby tend to know not to push them up.
On the drive back, Oumar took me through Siby’s older quarter, where the founders’ houses had been rebuilt in banco and the pattern of the streets still followed the original settlement plan. An elder was sitting on a stool outside his compound door in the late afternoon light, and Oumar stopped to greet him in Bambara. The conversation went on for perhaps ten minutes and I understood none of it, but the elder looked at me once toward the end and said something that made Oumar laugh, and when I asked what it was he said: “He asked if the visitor was impressed. I said yes. He said good, because it is an impressive place.”
When to go: Year-round, though July through September brings the rains that feed the waterfall and make the hills brilliantly green. The dry season (November through April) is easier for walking and has better visibility across the valley. Siby is a comfortable day trip from Bamako.