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During a long career as a foreign correspondent, when human disasters, violence, and turmoil were common, I experienced two long-running stories that were positive in nature and left me feeling blessed to have been in the right job, in the right place, at the right time.

One was covering China during the first decade of this century, a time of mind-blowing growth and transformation. The other was reporting in West Africa during the mid-1990s, when a quiet revolution that swept the political landscape seemed just as dramatic.

During a long career as a foreign correspondent, when human disasters, violence, and turmoil were common, I experienced two long-running stories that were positive in nature and left me feeling blessed to have been in the right job, in the right place, at the right time.

One was covering China during the first decade of this century, a time of mind-blowing growth and transformation. The other was reporting in West Africa during the mid-1990s, when a quiet revolution that swept the political landscape seemed just as dramatic.

The continent’s first big wave of hopeful political change had come in 1960, widely called the “Year of Africa,” because 17 countries attained independence in rapid succession. The mid-1990s saw that era’s echo. In 1996 alone, when 18 African countries held competitive elections, democracy seemed to be on the march after decades in which authoritarians and the one-party systems they built were the rule across most of the continent.

Back then, I spent a lot of time going from country to country covering suspenseful campaigns and meaningful, civil, and often surprisingly detailed debates about possible paths forward for nations that faced some of the world’s most daunting development challenges. But one region drew me back time and again: the semi-arid belt to the south of the Sahara known as the Sahel.

One country in particular stood out for me as a kind of sentinel for much of Africa. In 1992, Mali had pulled off a stunning transition to democratic rule that seemed to catalyze political change in countries near and far. At the time of Mali’s breakthrough, it was a country of about 9 million people, with an annual per capita income of $280 and a literacy rate of a mere 40 percent. Seeing that democracy could sprout in such unpromising soil lit a path for other African nations, many of them much better endowed. Elections soon followed in Benin, Zambia, Ghana, and nearby Niger. Even authoritarian countries—such as Ivory Coast, where I was based—felt pressure to loosen controls on political speech and inject more life into their elections, if not free them up entirely.

Mali has been on my mind a great deal recently for far less encouraging news. In late April, its junta-led government was routed by the forces of a northern, ethnic insurgency that mounted a coordinated attack with an al Qaeda-affiliated radical religious group. In a broad-based attack that bore resemblance to the Vietnam........

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