When Niankoro Yeah Samake lands in Mali on Friday, following a successful California fundraising campaign, to register as a candidate in the country’s upcoming presidential elections, he will be carrying a lot of baggage. There will be the requisite suitcase stuffed with gifts from the U.S. for his family back home. He will have a sizable check from an American hair-products magnate to help fund his campaign. And he will have his well-thumbed copy of the Book of Mormon, scripture that has been a constant source of strength since he converted more than a decade ago. He is likely to need it. Aside from his wife and children, Samake is Mali’s only Mormon. He’s not even sure which will be more difficult: running as a Mormon in a country that is 95% Muslim, or being President of a nation so weakened by corruption that the past 14 months have seen the government felled by a coup and two-thirds of its territory overrun by Islamist militants. “I am not running for President because of my faith, but my faith will help me be President,” he says, via Skype on a layover in Paris. (PHOTOS: France’s War in Mali) It’s hard to understand why a man like Samake, a social entrepreneur well on his way to achieving American citizenship, who has spent most of the past 13 years in Utah running a successful charity, would even want such a job. Were it not for a French-led intervention earlier this year, Islamists would still control some half of the country. The security situation in the northern territory is grim: the undeveloped and ungoverned Saharan expanses have become ground zero for terrorism expansion in Africa, a malevolent node where al-Qaeda-affiliated groups collude with drug-trafficking mafias, gun runners and kidnappers-for-ransom. Mali, once a model for democracy in West Africa, has become a watchword for abysmal, corrupt governance. “The government failed the people, so the people turned to the religious groups that filled the gaps,” Samake says, referring to the success of Islamist militias that, for a time, occupied some … Continue reading As Mali Wars With Islamists, a Mormon Runs for President