Bakoloba | headline

RFI Mandenkan uses the word bakoloba (bakolo ‘mother-bone’ + -ba ‘big’) to speak of the essential news/headlines when they do their regular news segment:

Bi bakolobaw la kɔni, mɔgɔ kɛmɛ mugan ani kelen, olu de ye Mali donnatɛmɛ-fanga ka wasaden-hakɛ ye…

'In today’s essentials, 121 people, that’s the number of deputies in Mali’s transition government…

This lines up with Bamadaba’s definition, which lists bakolo as meaning something like ‘the essential (in discourse)’

Was doing some research and found some other examples of the phrase bakolo being used to mean ‘headline’ or ‘the essential of what is said’.

Here’s one example from the corpus:

ni an ye kumasen nin bakolo sɛgɛsɛgɛ , an bɛ a ye ko daɲɛ dɔw sirilen don ɲɔgɔn na kosɔbɛ

‘if we analyze the essential of this sentence, we see that some words are seriously tied together’

And another:

an ye nin kunnafoni bakolo sɔrɔ Faransi arajoso de fɛ , n’o ye RFI ye.

‘we got this headline from the French radio station that is RFI.’