Green, yellow, and red, arranged in vertical stripes. Mali and Guinea use the exact same three colors, and the only real difference is which end of the flag each color starts from. Mali runs green, yellow, red from the hoist. Guinea runs the same three colors backwards: red, yellow, green.
Unlike some of the other flag look-alikes out there, this one isn’t a coincidence. Both flags draw on what became known as the pan-African colors, first associated with Ethiopia’s flag, one of the only African nations never colonized, and later adopted by Ghana as a deliberate symbol of African independence and unity. Guinea got there first, adopting its flag in 1958 as the first French colony in Africa to vote for full independence rather than staying tied to France. Its president at the time, Sékou Touré, was closely allied with Ghana’s president, and the color choice was in part a direct nod to that relationship. Mali followed a few years later, settling on its current flag in 1961 after a brief run as part of the short-lived Mali Federation with Senegal.
Mali’s flag actually looked a little different at first. The original 1959 version had a black figure called the kanaga printed on the yellow stripe, a symbol tied to the Dogon people of Mali. It was dropped in 1961, largely due to opposition from the country’s Muslim majority, given the broader tradition in Islam against depicting the human form. What was left was the plain tricolor Mali still flies today, which just so happened to be the reverse of the flag its neighbor Guinea already had.
Both countries assign their own meanings to the shared colors. Mali reads green as fertility and agriculture, gold as purity and mineral wealth, and red as the blood spent gaining independence from France. Guinea’s version leans similar but distinct, red for the sacrifice of independence, yellow for mineral wealth and the sun, green for the land and its agricultural life. Same palette, same general themes, arranged in opposite order and given slightly different weight by each nation telling its own story.