Finding Cotton in Mali, West Africa

Because of a conversation I had with a member of the Virginia Friends of Mali-association, I went off to Mali to find cotton yarn in the Sister City of Richmond (Virginia), Ségou, which happens to be a famous textile center.

Mali turns out to be a country in West Africa where they have a lot of cotton yarn. I mean A LOT: the three biggest cotton-producing countries are Sudan, Burkina and Mali. Who knew? There are 54 States in Africa, and these three produce masses of cotton, which I need for my color-changing yarn. So I went to Mali to seek cotton yarn.

The idea of Sister Cities was dreamed up by President Eisenhower to promote peace between cities through “citizen diplomacy.” So I became a Citizen Diplomat for two weeks while I discovered the amazing people and colors and food of Mali, and visited the Comatex cotton factory. It was a life-changing experience. Surely the most exciting and most spectacular journey I have ever made.

I arrived late January in Bamako, the capital city of Mali, coming out of the Virginia winter snows into the balmy warmth and embracing air of West Africa. The air is as warm as the smiles of the people. Even the guys in uniform at Bamako’s international airport were smiling and charming. The American ICE doesn’t function in Mali. I have the impression from all the Malians I met, that even if the police were arresting me, they would still be smiling and be friendly.

I didn’t get to visit Timbuktu, partly because Mali is huge ….. more than twice the size of Texas ….. and mainly because the time went really fast between the meetings, the art shows, the fabric displays, the cotton factory and listening to fabulous Malian music.

We spent a few days in the capital Bamako where I visited a newly established textile cooperative and some indigo and bogolan dyers before traveling to Ségou, the sister city of Richmond. Bamako and Ségou are only 130 miles apart, but travel in Africa is a very different experience and the journey took over half a day – and was an adventure in itself and worth a separate blog post.

“Mali is one of the world’s biggest cotton producers, which is called ‘white gold.’”

Mali is one of the world’s biggest cotton producers, which is called “white gold.” Their other big export product is golden gold. For the past 2000 years, Mali has been famous for its gold. One of the reasons for Timbuktu becoming famous was the gold trade. Merchants bought gold that had been brought up from the forest gold mines far in the south of Mali, and traded with merchants bringing silks and books from Morocco and salt from the Sahara Desert. The Mediterranean countries wanted gold, which came from the markets of Timbuktu. Thus Timbuktu became a rich medieval city and a center of scholarship with 25,000 students at the university. During the Middle Ages, two thirds of Europe’s gold came from the Empire of Mali.

I visited the Comatex cotton factory in search of white gold that had been dyed in exciting colors. I wanted red gold, orange gold, green gold, blue or purple or any-color-you-like gold except for white! I create color-changing yarns, and I was looking for cotton to combine with my silk, bamboo, and linen yarns.

A nice Malian took us around the factory, showing us how the yarn is spun on vast machines and turned into bales of dyed or printed fabric -- and I realized that we were watching the reality of the European Industrial Revolution and the Spinning Jenny. Imagine scores of machines turning at ninety miles per hour creating yarn …..

Some of the machines looked as old as to be vintage Industrial Revolution – and just as noisy, dirty, and dangerous as factories must have been back then. Standards are surely different in Africa and I wished that workers would wear face masks and ear plugs. But then looks are deceiving, as the Malian food indicates: I was again and again surprised to taste the delicious food cooked in primitive-looking kitchens that were often not much more than open-air fire places.

Before the Industrial Revolution, fabric was scarce, precious and costly. Once the Spinning Jenny was turning out yarn at super-speed, clothing became more available, less costly and far, far more plentiful. The breakthrough in clothing progress therefore came about at the same time and the USA was breaking through colonialism into Independence. And the resulting demand for cotton created the wealth of America starting with Virginia, created of course by the cotton farmers who came from Africa and were enslaved. Africans have been growing cotton for 5000 years. The enslaved cotton-farmers brought their music, their food, their physical labor and their experience of growing cotton. Africans created much of the wealth and culture of America.

ANYHOW, here I was in a huge cotton factory in the capital of the 18th century cotton-producing Bambara Kingdom of Ségou, surrounded by millions of skeins of yarn. I have arrived from Richmond, the capital of the 18th century cotton-producing State of Virginia, and I am looking for colorful yarn.

We walked through what seemed like five miles of warehousing until, in a modest pile in the corner a giant warehouse, our guide pointed to a pile of sacks: “Here is colored yarn.” And there it was! Bags of it! I had come all the way from Richmond, and I had discovered a hoard of yarn: red, yellow, green, blue , beige… a cornucopia of colors waiting for me to try it. I purchased 100 kilos of yarn ! The Comatex factory mostly has customers who purchase by the ton, but they allowed me to buy a test batch of 100 kilos (220 pounds of cotton).

The book is now available as Paperback and on Kindle on Amazon

The Sister Cities book, which chronicles the friendship between Richmond and Ségou, wasn’t published when I went to Mali. Luckily I was given the chance to read it as a draft – and it proved invaluable for my trip. I had never been to Africa and had no idea what to expect. Sister Cities prepared me in terms of appropriate clothing, cultural taboos, and required immunizations. Even if you are not planning on traveling to Mali, it is a wonderful read: recounting how the Ségou major got locked in a bathroom in Richmond and why there are no toilet seats in Mali, among many other funny and enlightening anecdotes. I can highly recommend it!!