Mali Is the Key to Understanding Africa’s Trajectory

During a long career as a foreign correspondent, when human disasters, violence, and turmoil were common, I experienced two long-running stories that were positive in nature and left me feeling blessed to have been in the right job, in the right place, at the right time. One was covering China during the first decade of this century, a time of mind-blowing growth and transformation. The other was reporting in West Africa during the mid-1990s, when a quiet revolution that swept the political landscape seemed just as dramatic. The continent’s first big wave of hopeful political change had come in 1960,…