The national flag of

Mali Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Ma ...

(french: drapeau du Mali) is a

tricolour A tricolour () or tricolor () is a type of flag or banner design with a triband design which originated in the 16th century as a symbol of republicanism, liberty, or revolution. The flags of France, Italy, Romania, Mexico, and Ireland were ...

with three equal vertical stripes. From the hoist (the place where the flagpole meets the flag) the colours are

green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combin ...

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile ...

, and red, the

pan-African colours Pan-African colours is a term that may refer to two different sets of colours: * Green, yellow and red, the colours of the flag of Ethiopia, have come to represent the pan-Africanist ideology due to the country's history of having avoided being ...

. The flag of Mali is almost identical to the

flag of Guinea The national flag of Guinea (french: drapeau de la Guinée) was adopted on 10 November 1958, with the publication of the country's first Constitution. Design The colors of the flag were adapted from those of the Rassemblement Démocratique A ...

, with the exception that the colours are in reverse order.

Symbolism

The green stands for fertility of the land, gold stands for purity and mineral wealth, and the red symbolizes the blood shed for independence from the French.

Colour scheme

History

The current flag was adopted on March 1, 1961. The original flag was adopted on April 4, 1959, when Mali joined the

Mali Federation The Mali Federation ( ar, اتحاد مالي) was a federation in West Africa linking the French colonies of Senegal and the Sudanese Republic (or French Sudan) for two months in 1960. It was founded on 4 April 1959 as a territory with self-ru ...

. This flag was the same, except the golden stripe had a black '' kanaga'', a shape of a squatter man with arms raised to the sky. The figure was removed due to the opposition, in a country whose population is 90% Muslim, of Islamic fundamentalists (see

Aniconism in Islam Aniconism in Islam is the avoidance of images (aniconism) of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. Islamic aniconism stems in part from the prohibition of idolatry and in part from the belief that the creation of living forms is God's pr ...

, the belief against making pictures of the human figure).''Guide to the Flags of the World'' by Mauro Talocci, revised and updated by Whitney Smith (), p. 124.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mali, Flag of

Flag A flag is a piece of fabric (most often rectangular or quadrilateral) with a distinctive design and colours. It is used as a symbol, a signalling device, or for decoration. The term ''flag'' is also used to refer to the graphic design empl ...

Flags of Africa Flags introduced in 1961

Flags of Mali