Kaladian Coulibaly was a West African ruler who founded one of the first large Bambara kingdoms, centered on Ségou

Ségou

Ségou is a city in south-central Mali, lying northeast of Bamako on the River Niger, in the region of Ségou. It was founded by the Bozo people, on a site about from the present town...

 in what is now Mali

Mali

Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...

. Around 1650, Coulibaly's kingdom was one of the dominant forces in the region. Though it lacked a systematic framework and thus failed to outlast his death (c. 1680), his great-grandson Bitòn Coulibaly

Bitòn Coulibaly

Bitòn Coulibaly founded the Bambara Empire in what is now Mali's Ségou Region and Mopti Region....

 would found a more stable Bambara Empire

Bambara Empire

The Bamana Empire was a large pre-colonial West African state based at Ségou, now in Mali. It was ruled by the Kulubali or Coulibaly dynasty established circa 1640 by Kaladian Coulibaly also known as Fa Sine or Biton-si-u...

fifty years later on the same spot.