Interim President Ndaw and Mr. Ouane were driven by soldiers to the Kati military camp near the capital, Bamako.
This raised fears of a second coup within a year in the country. Defence Minister Souleymane Doucouré has also reportedly been detained.
Since the 1950s, there’ve been a total of 206 coups attempts in Africa, according to a dataset compiled by two US political scientists, Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne.
Their definition of a coup is that they are illegal and overt attempts by the military or other civilian officials inside the state to unseat sitting leaders.
However, the definition of coup is often contested and in the past, military leaders have denied they were conducting them.
Take, for example, Zimbabwe in 2017. The military mounted a takeover to put an end to Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule. At the time, a top military official, Maj Gen Sibusiso Moyo, went on television to deny flatly that it was a military takeover.
Late on Monday, Mr. Ouane told AFP in a phone call that soldiers “came to get him”. The news agency said the line was then cut.
The African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the EU and the US also condemned the arrests, saying Mali’s top politicians must be released without any preconditions.
A previous coup in 2012 led to militant Islamists exploiting the instability to seize territory in northern Mali.
French troops helped regain territory, but attacks continue.
