Modibo Keïta

Modibo Keïta was born on the fourth of June 1915 in Bamako, French Sudan, into a family that claimed descent from Sundiata Keita — the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire. The genealogy was substantive. Modibo Keïta, on assuming power as the first President of independent Mali in 1960, restored the empire's name to the modern state.

He had trained as a teacher at the École Normale William Ponty in Dakar and led the Union Soudanaise. After the failure of the Mali Federation — a short-lived 1959 to 1960 union of French Sudan and Senegal — he led an independent Mali from the twenty-second of September 1960. He pursued a doctrine of African socialism modeled on Nkrumah's Ghana and aligned diplomatically with the Eastern Bloc.

His rule was austere and economically heterodox. He withdrew Mali from the franc zone, established a separate Malian currency, and pushed cooperative collectivization in the cotton sector. The economic outcomes were poor; the political ones were lasting. He was a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity, hosted the conference that established the Niger River Basin Authority, and remained, to the end of his career, the most outspoken voice for Pan-African political union.

He was deposed by Lieutenant Moussa Traoré on the nineteenth of November 1968 in a military coup. He was held under house arrest, then transferred to detention at Kidal, in the Saharan north. He died there on the sixteenth of May 1977, age sixty-one, under circumstances that have never been adequately explained.

He is honored here as the first President of Mali, and the heir of Sundiata who restored the empire's name to the modern map.