Mali
Mali (officially Republic of Mali) is a country in Western Africa, with its capital at Bamako, and is home to roughly 24.5M people.
French is the official language; the currency in circulation is West African CFA franc (Fr); people from here are called Malian.
- »Timbuktu was a major centre of Islamic scholarship, and tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts survive from its libraries.
Mali straddles the Tropic of Cancer.
Mali touches seven neighbours: Algeria to the northeast, Burkina Faso to the south, Guinea to the southwest, Ivory Coast to the south, Mauritania to the northwest, Niger to the east and Senegal to the west. Directions run from one centre to the other. Neighbours in six different compass directions make this one of the better-connected outlines in the set.
Bamako sits on the Niger river and has grown from a town of a few thousand a century ago into one of the fastest-growing cities in Africa.
1,256,796 km² (485,251 sq mi), 21st largest of 198 countries and territories on file, almost exactly the size of Angola.
Population 24,478,595, 58th of 198 on file. That averages 19 per km² (50 per sq mi).
Pan-African green, gold and red. A human figure once stood at the centre but was removed in 1961 to satisfy objections to depicting the human form.
Close enough to Senegal's flag to cost you a guess.
Senegal ▸