Portraits of Niger Musicians including Bombino, Etran Finatawa, Mamane Barka and Alhousseyni Anviolla taken in around Niamey in 2013
NIGER MUSIC – Photo Essay
Month: January 2014
FINDING THE ONE (extract) – If your name is Keita, you’re still royalty
It was only after he’d started living in Europe and having kids of his own, that Seckou Keita started to wonder about his father. “I was in that mood,” he says, “I just wanted to find out.”
FINDING THE ONE (extract) – Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales
The news of Aberfan shocked him into a new awareness. What was the fire that had destroyed his workshop compared to the river of slurry and filfth that snuffed out the lives of 116 children? Not forgetting the 28 adults. Nothing. “People can loose more than I’ve lost,” he thought. Granted, his livelihood had been…
Does the Touareg question have an answer?
A few years ago, on a beautifully calm Saharan evening, I was drinking tea with an old Touareg musician in a garden near Tessalit in the far north east of Mali, a place that has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The musician’s work was gaining popularity throughout Europe and North…
FINDING THE ONE (extract) – How the kora came to mankind
No one is one hundred precent sure of how or when the kora came into being. Strangely, the first person to ever mention it was a Scotsman by the name of Mungo Park, who wrote about it in his Travels In the Interior Districts of Africa, published in 1799. Park was commissioned by Sir Joseph…
