Kati's story did not start with soldiers. In the early 17th century it belonged to a kingdom ruled by the Diara family, based in Nyamina. After the kafo of Bamako rose to prominence, the powerful Niare clan attacked Kati and forced it to pay yearly tribute in cattle and cowrie shells — an arrangement the town resented. Kati launched a rebellion against Bamako's dominance shortly before the French arrived in 1880, but the revolt failed, and by then the town was nearly uninhabited. It was a small place with a long memory, accustomed to living in the shadow of a larger neighbor down the road. That relationship with Bamako, so close and so fraught, would define Kati for centuries to come.

The French turned Kati into a soldier's town. They established Camp Gallieni here, garrisoning the 2nd Regiment of Senegalese Tirailleurs — the African infantry who fought and died in France's colonial wars. On May 13, 1934, the town dedicated a war memorial to its dead from the First World War and the conquest of the Sudan. When Mali won independence, the French Armed Forces marched out on June 8, 1961, but the barracks did not fall silent. The new Malian Army moved in and founded a military school at the base. The uniforms changed; the purpose did not. Kati remained what the colonizers had made it: a place where Mali kept and trained its soldiers, close enough to the capital to march there in an afternoon.

That proximity has had consequences. Kati hosts the headquarters of the 3rd Military Region, and its camp has become the staging ground for Mali's coups. It was here, at the Soundiata military base, that soldiers began firing into the air on August 18, 2020, distributing weapons and arresting officers before driving on Bamako to depose President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. The town's fifteen-kilometer road to the capital, so convenient for a weekly cattle drive, has proven equally convenient for armored columns. When Mali's politics turn, they have a habit of turning first in Kati — a reminder that the country's center of gravity is not only in the presidential palace, but in the barracks on the hill above it.

For all its martial reputation, Kati is the largest town in the Koulikoro Region and a thriving community in its own right. Its population topped 114,000 in the 2009 census. The town sits on the historic Dakar-Niger Railway and the roads linking Bamako to Kolokani and Kita, making it a natural crossroads of trade. It supports military and civilian hospitals, numerous schools and a college, and a youth and arts center built with French cooperation. The population is mostly Muslim, with an established Roman Catholic community, and speaks Bambara. Kati has even given Mali some of its more glamorous names — the fashion couturier Chris Seydou was born here, as was the writer Doumbi Fakoly. It is, in the end, a real town with real lives, not merely a launch pad for history's larger dramas.