“We too want to learn Internet” under a mango tree

Thursday, 12 July, 2012

In mid-May, Boukary Konaté from Mali, who writes the excellent Fasokan blog in Bambara and French, visited the village of Sékoro, where he conducted an “introduction to the Internet” course for local schoolchildren under a mango tree. Google Translate: “This two-hour session was an opportunity for young students to a computer running, plug the USB 3G internet, and go turn a page on Google and do searches.”

The internet on a bike

Language note: The Bambara language is spoken in Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal by some six million people. Given the colonial history of the region, Bambara uses many French loan words. For example, the Bambara term for snow is niegei, based on the French word for snow neige. As there has never been snow in Mali, the Bambara language has no unique word in to describe it.

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