Topics in Creativity and Flags: West Africa

There's something about the red, green and yellow that makes all the rastafarians of the world smile. I thought you'd all like a little lesson in telling the difference between the flags of West Africa especially those that look pretty much the same.

Let's begin with Mali, please note the order of the colors as well as the YELLOW color in the middle, you would not want to get this confused with Guinea-Conakry. And, if you use the wrong color you'll probably get into more than one argument with Malian patriots (YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE A WORD FOR YELLOW IN BAMBARA, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?!)
Guinea-Conakry: notice the golden tint to the middle color and the order of the red and green have been changed. I'm sure there's some sort of reason why that is, but it's not obvious from the flag.
Senegal: I was recently on a bus and saw this flag hanging from the rearview mirror (yes, the bus had a rearview mirror, not sure if it had a rearview window), and I thought "it's a Ghanain flag...the star is just faded." No, no no, it's just a green star.

Togo really went all out with this one:

Guinea-bissau...mixin' it up, wouldn't want to get you confused with the other Guinea who actively confused its flag with with that of Mali...Senegal...and Ghana.

Okay, so when you flip it around it looks like the mali and senegal flag, and Africans aren't as particular with rectangles as Americans are, so it's hard to tell which way it goes sometimes...nevertheless...here is Ghana:

Cameroon is copying everyone because it's so far away, it's trying to hang on to the better part of Africa and leaning away from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, Angola...and other places where there is no Peace Corps and no peace.

Burkina Faso: In Mali we like to call Burkina a smaller, duller, cooler, calmer, cleaner version of Mali and I think their flag justly represents this assumption.

And now Benin, a wonderful country with a very dull flag.

God Bless Africa and their wonderful colors and flags. I hope we all learned a lot today. If you want to find out real information about the meaning of the arrangement of each flag I suggest you ignore everything on this page and visit wikipedia or some other source with slightly true facts.