Travel Guide Bakel

Administratively, Bakel is part of the Tambacounda region and would take its name from bak leen (beat the tam-tam). Originally, the town would also have been called Tuabo, meaning "on the distant rock". A pebble overlooking the river. The entrance to Bakel is disappointing. Fortunately, turning right at the T-junction, one enters a Bakel that does not make one regret having been to the end of this 562 km road from Saint-Louis, provided one can stand the stifling heat. The thermometer is falling, it is now "only" 42°C. The small streets are worth a look, and everything can be discovered: the river, the fort, the tower on Monkey Mountain. In 1818, the governor Julien Schmaltz, having judged Bakel to be a town with "a sufficiently abundant and docile population", built a fort overlooking the river and the village of traitors. In 1854, Faidherbe (again) sought to make Bakel the main resistance to El-Hadj Omar Tall. He reorganized the fort, giving it its present contours. The gateway to Mali? Bakel was for a long time the headquarters of the high command in charge of colonial penetration towards the east. It was in a way the last fortified city along the river, the main trade route. Bakel was located in the centre of Soninke country, at the crossroads between the French Sudan Gate, the borders of the Eastern Ferlo and the Bambouck. In the 19th century, Wolofs, Soninkés and Bambaras, Toucouleurs and Moors, and French people lived here. To tell the truth, not all the river's merchants were French. Many of the traders were Saint-Louisians operating on their own account or on behalf of French trading houses, such as Devès and Chaumet, Teisseire, Maurel and Prome: buildings that continue to display their effigies from another era. The basis of trade was barter. The goods brought from Saint-Louis - cotton, salt, sugar, soap, powder, silver, perfume - were exchanged above all for gum and also millet, peanuts, ostrich feathers, ivory, gold and skins. Moorish caravans and convoys from the Sudan and trading ships from St. Louis arrived in Bakel. It was at the end of the 19th century that the railway, which opened the way to Bamako via Kayes and not Bakel, called into question the articulation around the river. The easternmost current was diverted to the south, and for Bakel it was the beginning of the end.