My understanding (or misunderstanding) is that, among other things, the blues is the result of a collision between the European do-re-mi scale and (1) African pentatonic and sextatonic scales (if that's the right word for a six-note scale) and (2) rural English, rural Scottish, and rural Irish scales, also pentatonic because the do-re-mi scale hadn't totally penetrated to the countryside. So esp. in the American southeast where you get the interplay of a lot of people of African descent and rural English and Scots-Irish and Irish descent, the do-re-mi scale is used but with a lot of fucking around on the mi and the ti note - basically bending between the notes so you get neither the major key nor the minor key but rather are refusing to stay steady on a half-step (if that explanation makes sense), and also bending a lot between fa and sol (I'm not sure why, but such a bend is basic to Chuck Berry and hence to a lot of others). So I'd think that someone raised on pentatonic scales might be more comfortable with blues playing than with straight-up European-derived western playing (with major and minor chords), since blues is neither major nor minor. But then, you're talking of discomfort with the 12-bar blues progression, and that might be because the progression is too European, not because it's too blues.

The only Malian musician I know anything about is Ali Farka Touré, and interestingly he did go blues a bit, playing some John Lee Hooker boogie (though without the 12-bar progression); also recorded with Irish traditionalists the Chieftans, iirc.