Mali: Where the Twain Meet

At the post office in Timbuctoo, a clerk put aside his French translation of a Soviet novel extolling the Red army, genially affixed a Mali stamp commemorating Telstar onto a postcard. "We get lots of Americans through here," he mused to a visitor from the U.S.

There are many other visitors too. Mali, whose fabled Sahara ghost town of Timbuctoo is the national attraction, has become a magnet for Russians, French, Communist Chinese, East Germans, West Germans, Bulgarians, Hungarians and many other breeds of foreigners. From most of them, Mali accepts assistance.

"One does not tell a man who is drown ing to choose the branch or the plank he will catch hold of," Mali's towering (6 ft. 4 in.) President Modibo Keita explains. Since Mali's 1960 breakaway from France and the rupture of its short-lived federation with Senegal, Keita has been reaching for help in a fashion that few Dark Continent leaders manage to duplicate. Today Mali receives aid from no fewer than 13 nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Trucks & Paddies. To Mali's back water capital of Bamako, the U.S. anted up $2,500,000 a year. West Germany is supplying 325 trucks on $4,900,000 credit. The Common Market nations, as a group, have financed 19 Mali projects worth $17 million. Ex-Mother France pours in the biggest amount, $9,000,000 a year, and also provides 400 technicians, including 180 schoolteachers.

The Communist bloc, for its part, has opened a line of credit worth $100 million, and has 500 technicians on the spot. Russians have put up neon street lights in Bamako, are erecting an expensive sports stadium. Fraternizing French and Czech pilots help run the government's motley Air Mali fleet of six Russian-built Ilyushins and three vintage, U.S. -made DC-3s. Bulgarians, among other things, are developing truck-farming colonies, while such distant types as Red Chinese and North Vietnamese have taught Malians how to operate rice paddies.

A Certain Indecision. For all its cooks, impoverished Mali is brewing precious little progress. The chief reason is that, while talking neutralism abroad, at home Keita and his Union Soudanaise party run a sloppy little Marxist-style land that is deep in financial trouble. In line with his goal of "an economy based on socialist principles," Keita has built up one money-devouring state enterprise after another. There is the airline, now in debt to the tune of $3,000,000; there is the state trading company, currently in the red $3,200,000; and, of course, a chain of subsidized "People's Shops." Six months ago, egged on by the Communists. Keita suddenly brought out a proud new Mali franc to replace the French African franc it had been using. Owing to Mali's near bankruptcy, it was unfortunately nonconvertible. Since few foreigners would accept it, the money (printed in Czechoslovakia) promptly wiped out 85% of normal imports, whose duties had provided the bulk of government revenue. Deprived of their goods, Mali merchants went on a rioting rampage in Bamako and sacked the police station; two demonstrators were killed, and a "People's Tribunal" in Bamako sentenced 77 others to prison at hard labor.