National museum · Mali
National Museum of Mali, Bamako
The National Museum of Mali, at the foot of the Point G hill in Bamako, was founded in 1953 as the Musée soudanais and became the national museum at independence. Its permanent galleries show archaeology, ritual art and textiles from across Mali, and it is a regular venue of the Bamako photography biennale.
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From colonial museum to national museum
The museum was created on 14 February 1953, in the colonial era, as the Musée soudanais — French Soudan was the colony's name — by Georges Szumowski, a French archaeologist of Polish origin who ran the local section of IFAN, the French research institute for West Africa based in Dakar (its art museum is now the Théodore Monod Museum). After Mali's independence in 1960 it became the National Museum of Mali.
Its first decades were hard. A Malian account of the museum's history describes the years from 1957 to 1982 as a difficult period of moves and of too little staff and money. In the early 2000s it was extended with a building whose curved forms draw on traditional Malian architecture.
What to see
Since the extension the museum has had three permanent exhibitions: archaeology, ritual arts and textiles.
- Archaeology: the museum holds many important objects from Timbuktu and Gao, as Al Jazeera reported in 2013, when conflict in the north of the country made it hard for the museum to keep going.
- Ritual arts shows masks, figures and other objects made for ceremonies; an academic study of the museum's Dogon holdings notes that they are mostly masks and mask accessories.
- Textiles has a permanent gallery of its own; for the mud-dyed cloth of the Bamana, see mudcloth.
The museum's collections are estimated at about 7,000 objects. In 2006 it signed an agreement with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which helped build a new conservation store for the archaeology and textile collections.
Photography and contemporary art
Bamako is one of the capitals of African photography: it is the city of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, and since the 1990s it has hosted the Rencontres de Bamako, the biennale of African photography. The National Museum is one of the biennale's venues and also shows contemporary art in temporary exhibitions — see African photography and African art fairs and biennales.
The park
Next to the museum, the 103-hectare National Park of Mali was laid out by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture with the Malian government and opened in September 2010, for the fiftieth anniversary of independence; the architect Francis Kéré designed its gates, entrance building and other pavilions. Museum and park can be visited together.
Looking ahead
In April 2026 the Malian authorities launched a project to "rethink" the National Museum with Spain's help, to improve the care of the collections, train its staff and bring it closer to the public. Check the situation and opening hours locally before you go: travel advice for Mali has changed often in recent years.
