In the market areas of Bamako, the red dust of Mali rises with a vengeance, spinning behind the wheels of bikes and taxis, diesel trucks, and Soviet-made mopeds. Shops sell the detritus of generations—old pipes salvaged for eventual use, ruined boxes of dusty bolts, and novelty foods and soaps that never found a first-world market. Strangely, the

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newest tools seem to be gas generators, which still gleam unused on the shelves of the electrical stores. We're not looking for a generator, though. Alberto has already rented one, and it merely awaits our departure tomorrow or maybe the next day. Our needs are much simpler: we seek adapters that will let us plug our flat prongs into the round holes of the country's grid.

Power is the issue here—power and connections. Or perhaps connectivity is the more appropriate word: it seems to suit our contact with a young Frenchman named Eric Stevance, manager of MaliNet, Mali's first and only Internet service provider. MaliNet is on the Internet but not on the Web as yet. Stevance is negotiating for the "pipe" that supports the bandwidth necessary for PPP connections, which afford direct access to the Web via computer. He hopes to have Mali plugged in by the first of the year, so you'll have to wait to check out http://www.malinet.ml; even then, it will be a big help to know French.

Meanwhile, Stevance has set us up with an e-mail account and is serving as a crucial backup

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to our digital shenanigans. The front of Bintta, his shop, has a couple of photocopiers and a number of appealing easy chairs; in back, Apples and PCs are webbed together in a complex UNIX network, configured for surfing the communications tsunami crashing the shores of all nations.

Mali is landlocked, but the swells of change are pellucid. Take its president, Head of State Alpha Oumar Konaré. He's widely popular, well-educated, freely elected, and he's an archaeologist. As former head of the national teacher's union and a minister of youth and culture under the previous administration (a military dictatorship), Konaré was well-positioned to slide into the top seat when the time came for the electorate to vote. His voter support came from the teachers he had already organized, who, aside from the police, were the only officials present in every town in this country twice the size of Texas.

Being an archaeologist has helped Konaré make a strong case for preserving Mali's heritage, and the National Museum is one of the best-financed institutions in Mali. The comfortable one-story building showcases the ethnic treasures of Mali's many peoples, and a visit here is made doubly enjoyable by the efficient air conditioning—not always a feature of Malian construction. A special exhibit fills a chamber with musical instruments—tabura in every shape and size, flutes of bone and antelope horn, single-stringed lutes used by the country's griots to score their songs of the genealogies of kings and the deeds of heroes.

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In the main room, Mali's most prized treasures are on display—the masks of the country's many secret societies. Fearsome and evocative, these anthropomorphic visages of the spirits are worn in rites that demand circumcision, initiation, and propitiation. The most famous mask portrays the chi wara, the antelope-horned god who gave agriculture to the Bambara at the cusp of history. Nearby we find the long-faced Masque du n'Tomo, a Bambara precircumcision mask. The number of feathered Tomo horns usually represents the sex of the initiate; in Mali, as elsewhere in Africa, female circumcision has a long and profound history, a legacy beyond the perimeter of political correctness.

The collection also contains a long-billed Senufo bird, decorated with snakes and crocodiles, symbolizing at once virility, fecundity, longevity, and death. Over there, in a glass box, squats a gnomelike figure with the thick limbs of a wrestler and the long-ridged neck of some chthonic beast seen only in bad dreams. And on the way to the postcard rack, there's the Dogon's androgynous god Nommo, the twin at the origin of psychology as well as creation. These, too, are images of power and the connection between the spiritual world and the cultural, between the animal and the human, between the radiance of the mind and the red dust beneath our feet.

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