Malian

Malians in Libya are young men from Mali who cross the Sahara through Niger or Algeria to work, some on their way to Europe and most to earn money for families at home. They gather at the day-labour points of Tripoli and Zawiya, in the date gardens and building sites of the southern oases from Sabha to Kufra, and in Misrata and Benghazi, and nearly all are Sunni Muslims from Mali's Bambara, Soninke, Fulani, Songhai and other peoples. Many live without papers, so arrest, detention and extortion are a constant risk, and every few months a chartered flight carries a hundred or more of them home to Bamako. Malian Tuareg, who have come to Libya's Tuareg towns since the 1970s, are counted with the Tuareg.

Malians in Mauritania are above all refugees: about 305,000 have fled the wars of northern and central Mali since 2012 into the south-eastern region of Hodh ech Chargui, where Mbera camp, home to some 120,000 people, has grown into one of the largest towns in the country. Most belong to peoples counted in their own groups here, the Tuareg, the Berabich Arabs, the Fulani and the Bambara. This group holds the rest, about 17,000 to 24,000 refugees: Songhai from the Niger River towns around Timbuktu and Niafunké, Arab and Moorish families of other tribes such as the Kunta, whose scholars spread the Qadiriyya Sufi order across the Sahara, and a few Dogon, Bozo and others. In Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, Malian traders, builders and domestic workers, some settled for decades, add an urban community no one counts. At Mbera's weekly market Malian and Mauritanian sellers trade side by side, while new families still cross the long, open border.

Malians in Morocco are a small, mostly young community from Mali: students on Moroccan scholarships, imams in training, traders, and migrants who came across the Sahara through Algeria, some hoping to reach Europe and others settling to work. Rabat holds a cohort found nowhere else, several hundred Malian imams studying at the Mohammed VI Institute for the training of imams, sent by Mali's government to learn Morocco's Maliki, Sufi-leaning Islam and carry it home against Sahel extremism. Most Malians come from the Bambara, Malinke, Soninke, Fulani and Songhai peoples and are Sunni Muslims; many follow the Tijaniyya order, whose founder's shrine in Fès draws West African pilgrims. In Casablanca's working quarters, small West African home restaurants serve maffé, the peanut stew of Mali.

Malians in Saudi Arabia are about 38,000 people, as many women as men, a community of families more than of contract workers. Most are Muslims of the Sahel, Fulani, Soninke, Songhai and Bambara among them, descended from or following the pilgrims who have travelled from Mali to Mecca since the age of Mansa Musa, and many were born in the kingdom without Saudi papers. They live mostly in the West African quarters of Mecca and Jeddah and near Medina, working as traders, tailors, Qur'an teachers, porters and domestic workers. Pilgrimage binds them to home: Mali lost at least 70 of its pilgrims in the 2015 crush at Mina.