MAMOUDOU GASSAMA: TRAVELLING IS A RITE OF PASSAGE FOR MANY MALIANS
M AMOUDOU Gassama's fourstorey dash to save a small boy in France is a reminder of another Malian hero who gained international prominence for a brave rescue.
In January 2015, Lassana Bathily was credited with saving the lives of six hostages including a baby during an extremist attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris. He led them to a safe hiding place, escaped, then directed gendarmes to them.
Two weeks later - after six years of struggling to secure legal residency in France - Mr Bathily was given a medal and a French passport by then President François Hollande.
In 2016, he wrote a book ''Je ne suis pas un heros'' (I am no hero) and created a charity whose first project was to provide irrigation for his home village in western Mali. Like Mr Bathily’s selfless leadership to save the hostages, Mr Gassama’s heroic climb to save the boy cements the image of Mali as a country with a culture of old-fashioned public spiritedness.
Following Mr Gassama’s meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Mali’s ambassador in France, Toumani Djimé Diallo, said: ‘’The courage of our young compatriot aged 22, an undocumented migrant, shows that his values are of humanity and love for his neighbour.
“These are fundamental values in Malian society and are Republican values shared by France.’’
Mr Gassama, who is understood to have been in France for only six months, is among thousands of Malians still making the journey to Europe, despite muchpublicised measures to limit immigration to the continent.
This is not only because of the failure, so far, of European Union attempts to stop people from crossing the Sahara and Mediterranean.
It is also because many of those of who leave Mali - including Mr Gassama, as his surname indicates - are from the Soninke ethnic group. For Soninko (the plural of Soninke), travelling has for centuries been an obligatory rite of passage to manhood.
So well established is the Malian travelling tradition - and so strong are the emigrants’ links with home - that when Mali’s population is stated to be 12 million, the figure includes a diaspora estimated at about three million people.
The Ministry for Overseas Malians says that remittances from the diaspora - estimated at more than $3bn (£2.25bn) per year - easily provide a third of the country’s GDP.
But it is important to keep perspective on African emigration. Most sub-Saharan Africans who travel to seek work do so within the African continent - and because of Mali’s strong emigration tradition, its statistics are a useful indicator of the broader picture. Data collected by the ministry shows that of 89,134 Malians repatriated by force or voluntarily between 2002 and 2013, more than 90% (81,755) were sent back by other African countries - in particular, Ivory Coast, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
As a matter of comparison, in the same period, European countries expelled 5,947 Malians.
More recently, there have been large-scale expulsions of Malians from the Central African Republic, Angola and Gabon. Many African countries have well-established Malian - chiefly Soninke - communities which are engaged in trade.
As a consequence, a Malian who travels - be it to Nouakchott or New York - has friends and solidarity wherever he or she goes.
For the Malians who do travel to Europe there are two options. Those who have a relative in the EU - most often in France or Spain - might seek an invitation and a tourist visa, secured legally but on which they might decide to overstay.
For them, the preferred means of travel is by air.
For the past 30 years, migrants from sub-Saharan Africa without passports or visas have used four main routes to cross by boat to Europe.
The busiest, until 2012, was to the Canary Islands which belong to Spain. But this exit point was blocked after Spain’s Gardia Civil, or law enforcement agency, was stationed in Mauritania. They are still there.