Chinese candidate’s ambition is to improve lives in Mali
Print Edition
Unassuming and affable, election candidate Astan Coulibaly would be unremarkable on the campaign trail in Mali, except that as a Chinese national she has been hailed as an embodiment of racial harmony in the fractured west African nation.
The 54-year-old, born Yu Hong Wei in Shanghai, is competing for a constituency in the city of Segou, 230 kilometers northeast of Malian capital Bamako, in the parliamentary election to be held on Sunday.
She is among more than 1,000 candidates vying for 147 seats in Mali’s national assembly.
“I’ve been in Segou with my husband since 1982,” Coulibaly said in fluent Bambara, Mali’s lingua franca. “I have only ever lived here. This is why I want to help our town and our children to get out of poverty.”
Just 23 when she arrived in the early 1980s, Coulibaly was welcomed in a country largely at peace after a period of political turmoil and several coup attempts.
But today the nation is a melting pot of rival ethnic groups with tensions between them intensifying during a 10-month Islamist occupation ended by a French-led military intervention in January.
Coulibaly runs a medical surgery in Segou, where she practices both modern and traditional Chinese medicine.
Her manifesto as a candidate for the recently formed Movement for a Common Destiny party proposes initiatives to improve the lives of women, children and young people without jobs.
Coulibaly met her husband Amadou, a native Malian textiles student, in Shanghai in the late 1970s.
“He asked me to marry him and my parents finally agreed after some hesitation,” she recalls. The couple married in Shanghai in 1982 and settled in Segou.
Amadou has retired but his wife, ever the entrepreneur, has moved into real estate and haulage, renting trucks to Chinese construction companies and travelling to China at least once a year to shore up business relationships.
The couple have four children — the youngest is 13 — and their eldest boy Ibrahim says he supports his mother’s political ambitions “without reservation.”
Over three decades in her adoptive home, Coulibaly has become something of a celebrity in Segou, where locals often stop her in the street for a chat.
“The whole of Segou knows this woman. She was here long before I was born,” said Mamadou Diarra, 23.
On the campaign trail in Dioro, 60 kilometers from Segou, Coulibaly has received an enthusiastic welcome, and it is perhaps unsurprising that many supporters see her as means of access to much-needed Chinese aid and investment.
“We’ll vote for you so that the Chinese make the journey here,” one woman said.
Coulibaly doesn’t rule out tapping her contacts to seek aid from the small but burgeoning Chinese business community in Mali.
“There are more than 100 Chinese in the Segou region now,” she says.
Adama Diarra, a trader and a running mate in Coulibaly’s party, puts her popularity down to her community work, which includes free medical consultations for the elderly, and says many locals are placing their hopes on her.
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