History
The region of Kayes is the cradle of the Kingdom of Khasso founded at the beginning of the 19th century.
In 1855, Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal, built a fort at Medina which would be besieged by El Hadj Omar Tall, in an 1857 war against the sovereign of Khasso. In 1892, the town of Kayes became the capital of French Sudan.
The construction of the railway line of Dakar-Niger, inaugurated in 1904, made of Kayes a city-crossroads. Essential at the time, the railroad had an important place in the lives of the inhabitants, as described in Ousmane Sembène's novel God's Bits of Wood.
Read more about this topic: Kayes Region
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“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)