The French explorer René Caillié stopped at Baramba on 18 February 1828 on his journey to Timbuktu. He was travelling with a caravan transporting kola nuts to Djenné. In his book Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo published in 1830, he refers to the village as Bamba.[2] Caillié wrote:
After proceeding four miles we halted at the village of Bamba, which is shaded by boababs. At the market I observed that women wore glass rings in the nose; and some had these ornaments made of gold or copper. This village contains three to four hundred inhabitants.[3]
The route of Caillié's caravan passed a few kilometers to the west of what is now the town of Koutiala. The town did not exist at the time: it was founded at the end of the 19th century by the French army after the conquest.[2]
Notes
^Written as Barhamba on the 1:200,000 Koutiala map issued by the French Institut Geographique National (IGN) in 1970.
References
^Communes de la Région de Sikasso(PDF) (in French), Ministère de l’administration territoriale et des collectivités locales, République du Mali, archived from the original(PDF) on 3 December 2013.
