Melé (Aïssa Maïga) is a bar singer, her husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré) is an unemployed railwayman and their marriage is on the rocks. In the courtyard of the house they share with other families in the Malian capital Bamako, a trial takes place. African civil society is taking proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF, charging them with responsibility for the ‘structural adjustment’ policies that have led to Africa's pauperization.

Amidst legal arguments and eye-witness accounts from a villager, a former schoolteacher, a university professor, a migrant worker who has been deported from Morocco on his way to Spain and stunning testimony from a praise singer, Zégué Bamba, the communal life in the courtyard goes on around the court proceedings. Chaka observes Africa's fight for its rights seated against a wall of the courtyard seemingly more and more detached from the seething events around him.

Tiécoura Traoré, the actor who plays Chaka is in real life a Doctor of Civil Engineering and former head of the African School of Railways in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. He is famous in Mali for campaigning against privatisation of Mali’s railways and is founding President of the 'Citizens' Collective for Developing and Taking Back the Railways in Mali' (COCIDIRAIL http://www.cocidirail.info/), a national campaign "to take back the railways for the people of Mali" that he founded after they were sold off in October 2003 to a Franco-Canadian consortium, Transrail.

In 2004 he was sacked. He has produced radio programs, published a petition to MPs (with tens of thousands of signatures), led a mobile demonstration with debates and meetings throughout the country questioning the legality of privatising a public service and now he is starring in a film that has just won the prestigious Lumiere Award (February 2007) in Paris for the Best non-French film shot in the French language.

He has also taken part in building a new railway workers' union, SYTRAIL of which he was elected general secretary. In June and July 2006 The Union of Railway workers in Mali (SYTRAIL) and the Federation of Transrail-SA workers (FETRAIL) in Senegal held 72-hour strikes demanding the reinstatement of sacked workmates and the dismissal of the Managing Director.

A railworker's son with a doctorate in transport engineering, Tiécoura Traoré enjoys enormous confidence both amongst railworkers and ordinary citizens in Mali who oppose privatisation and support a railway that serves the needs of the people of Mali.

Since rail privatisation in Mali passenger traffic has declined, while freight traffic has multiplied 6 fold. More than two thirds of passenger stations have been closed (26 out of 36 in all) in a country where railways represented one of the chief means of travel and many villages are inaccessible by road. Villages, orchards and entire sectors of economic activity, which developed around the railway, are today seriously under threat leading to economic collapse in the countryside, impoverishment and forced emigration.

The first words spoken in the film by a court witness are: “The railways brought Africa its emancipation,.. The World Bank is throwing all that out with the trash.”

Another villager giving testimony says: "Life came to these villages because of the railway ... [Now] you are a seeing the start of an exodus. The situation is distressing."

The junior counsel for the prosecution hits the nail on the head in her final summing up when she says: "A country that does not have its own means of communication,.. its own means of transport, cannot really be called a sovereign nation."

'Bamako' is an angry counterblast to all those who think the laws of economics are natural rather than man made. The film score is also a magnificent treat for those who appreciate African music, which must be just about everyone who has ever heard it. Salif Keita, when he was only twenty-one began singing lead for the Rail Band (founded in 1970 by the Mali railway administration) playing at the Buffet Bar in the Station Hotel in Bamako. Instruments and equipment were government-owned and band members were considered government employees. The Rail Band quickly became a sort of rite-of-passage for Malian musical talent. This film reminds us how essential to African economies and culture railways have become and remain.