In February 2013 I traveled to Niamey in search of Niger music. I spent time and drank plenty of tea with some inspiring musicians and they gracefully allowed me to take photos of them. The honour was all mine

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“We hadn’t thought of creating a group when we travelled together to the famous Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu in 2004,” explains Etran Finatawa’s bandleader Ghalitan Khamidoune, a diminutive Touareg with a gentle purposeful manner.  “The two musical cultures are very different, different instruments, different vocal styles.  We’d only written a couple of songs together back in Niamey, which we wanted to perform as a kind of finale at the Festival to show the Malians what musicians from Niger can do.  It was only when we saw the joy of the audience response, and found that people were congratulating us all the way back home, that we felt there was maybe something there.”

This hunch received an overwhelming endorsement with the recent release of Etran Finatawa’s debut CD ‘Introducing’ on the World Music Network label.  Reviews have been liberally sprinkled with words like ‘unearthly’, ‘hypnotic’, ‘haunting’ and ‘compelling’, accolades which justify themselves within seconds of pressing the play button.

Powered by the perpetual motion of the Touareg tindé drum, the Etran Finatawa groove possesses a kind of inexhaustible inner dynamo, a sublime transport that carries a cargo of joyous call and response vocals, booming bass and effortlessly intricate electric guitar licks, all of which reinforce the wide linear horizons of the music and echo the endlessly horizontal skyline of the group’s desert home.   This raucously poised sound was captured with sensitivity and expertise by producer Chris Birkett at his Chateau Richard studios in the heart of the dreamy wine-growing country of St Emilion near Bordeaux in the summer of 2005.

Onstage Etran Finatawa come across like an enthralling Saharan fashion display.  The three Touareg members look stately in their top-to-toe indigo robes, whilst the tall slender-armed Woodabé disport the intricate and strangely effeminate make-up which has made Woodabé men-folk a byword for African masculine beauty.  Back home in the desert, at certain key traditional gatherings, young Woodabé men gather in their hundreds to go through this laborious beautification process, delicately daubing their faces with a combination of natural dyes and the highly toxic black powder of used batteries, before lining up to roll the whites of their eyes and flash their teeth in the hope of being chosen for a night of passion by one of their female ‘judges’.   It’s the most famous dating ritual in the world, a magnet for generations of anthropologists, travel photographers and film-makers, like Werner Herzog, who captured the process on film in his opus ‘The Herdsmen Of The Sun’.

Although Etran Finatawa are proud to give the world a ravishing glimpse of this ancient beauty, what they really embody is the painful clash between nomadism and the modern world. Like so many of his Woodabé kin, percussionist and vocalist Bagui Bouga was forced by drought and desertification to move from his ancestral pastures to the polluted streets of Niger’s capital Niamey in search of work.  “Times have changed,” he says ruefully. “Nomads suffer now.  There isn’t enough water or good pasture for the animals.   Grain is expensive.  A majority of people prefer to live in the towns, because at least you can find food there, and water from a tap, and soap to wash yourself.  But in the towns we suffer too.  We can only find menial jobs as watchmen and caretakers, for 10,000 CFA (about £10) a month.  We have to sell our cattle and camels to pay debts.”

In the early 1990s, the Touareg, who have always been more politically engaged than their Woodabé neighbours, launched a rebellion against the central governments of Niger and Mali in an attempt to wrest back a modicum of self-determination and find their own solutions to the seemingly insurmountable problems that were facing the people of the Southern Sahara.  It was an upheaval of cataclysmic proportions that produced few positive benefits, one of which was a flourishing modern desert music scene in which time-honoured traditional instruments were ditched in favour of the electric guitar, and old tales of heroism and natural beauty replaced by rebel songs.

“The first cassettes I heard featured Inteyeden and Kheddou, who were members of Tinariwen back then,” remembers Bagui.  “We really liked them and it gave us the idea of doing the same thing with our Woodabé songs and poetry.”  Meanwhile Ghalitan had also taken up the guitar, inspired by the music of a rebellion that was actually ignited by an army massacre in his hometown of Tchin Tabaraden.  When peace came in 1995, he moved to Niamey and started his first group Etran N’Guefan, “The Stars of the Dunes’.  Bagui was a member of Kaouritel, the first self-consciously performance-orientated Woodabé troupe ever to exist, before leaving to form his own ensemble ‘Finatawa’.  “It’s the collective word for all our traditions and customs,” explains Bagui.  “And all those aspects of our culture that belong to every child who is born Woodabé.”  After that fateful rendezvous at the Festival in the Desert in 2004, the two struggling musical entities fused to become Etran Finatawa, ‘The Stars of Tradition’.

For the jobless desert migrants of Niamey, music is an antidote to the terminal hopelessness of sitting around all day, shooting the breeze and knocking back cups of bittersweet gunpowder tea.  Encouraged by their budding international success, Etran Finatawa harbour ambitious plans to shake up the Nigerien music scene for the benefit of all.  “We hope in the future to create a recording studio, a record label and distribution system, not just for the Touareg, but for all musicians,” says Ghalitan.  “The music scene in Niger isn’t in very good shape.  There’s no infrastructure and the whole question of composer’s rights hasn’t been sorted out.  The government do very little to help because unlike the Malians, they haven’t understood the importance of music for developing the image of the country.  We want to show the world that Niger is not Nigeria, and that it has nomads who make great music!”

These plans have an aura of dire necessity about them.   It’s clear that all the members of Etran Finatawa miss their spacious homeland when they’re holed up on tour in European hotel rooms.  “Back home we love to take our time to eat, to chat and to drink tea.  Here there’s always a programme,” admits Bagui.  “When I’m in Europe it feels like I’m permanently shut up in side.  I can’t see the horizons and there’s so much noise.  Back home we’re free.”

But that freedom is under serious threat.  The droughts and subsequent famine of 2005 in Niger rang alarm bells throughout the world.  Those same alarm bells chime incessantly in the minds of Ghalitan and Bagui.  “”In my opinion, I can’t talk about the others, we’re in danger of loosing our nomadic culture,” Ghalitan declares.  “Education poses a huge dilemma for us.  We need to educate our children, but once we’re gone, what will they become…bureaucrats and administrators.  They won’t go back to the bush.  And the desert is growing every day.  Animals can’t eat sand.  Once sand gets into the stomach of a cow, that’s it.  She dies.   There’s nothing you can do.”

It seems that Etran Finatawa are on a mission of far greater urgency that just making us dance to their gorgeous unstoppable grooves.

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Festival Security in 2003. (c) Kate Morgan.

The article in Harpers and Queen came as a shock.  “Exotic.”   “Move over Glastonbury.”  “The most remote music festival in the world.”   “The romance.”  To see an event that was born in a spirit of deranged adventure mixed with post-conflict shoestring survival previewed in magazine that epitomizes affluence and the charmed life…I had to double take and double take again.  Six years ago, under the haunting light of a lunar eclipse, the first Festival in the Desert took place on a wide stony plain near the village of Tin Essako, in the deepest desert of the southern Sahara.  We were a motley assortment of musicians, technicians, journalists, ambassadors, duchesses, tourists and friends who travelled to that unfeasibly remote and yet utterly seductive spot to witness this renaissance of cultural pride and hope.  Our hosts, the nomadic Touareg of the Sahara, had latched onto the idea of using their culture to try and extricate themselves from years of rebellion, drought, isolation and underdevelopment.  The Festival was only a means to this end.  We were only a footnote in this wider project.  Harpers and Queen was very far from anyone’s mind.

The humble seed that was planted back in January 2001 has grown into a media bougainvillea of global proportions.  The take-off point came in January 2003 at the third edition of the Festival near the tiny village called Esskane, in the dunes west of Timbuktu.  LoJo, a group from Angers in France who were so instrumental in setting up the first edition of the Festival, came with a team of technicians.  The Sfinks Festival in Belgium added another crew.  They erected a stage of dreams which welcomed a procession of the Sahara’s finest: Tinariwen, Tartit, Tarbiat, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum, Haira Arby, Seydoum Ould Eide and many more.  A smattering of European ‘names’, including Robert Plant and Ludovico Einaudi, added a frisson of celebrity status.

The 250 strong contingent of whiteys stumbled around in the cream-coloured talcum-powder sand, drenched with sweat and wide-eyed with wonder.  The 1000 or so locals strutted their finest robes, their fanciest turbans, their most magnificent camels and the unearthly sounds of their traditional music.   A CD was recorded on a portastudio set up in a rusting old shipping container.   It sold like hot cakes, and a DVD followed.  Suddenly the Festival became a byword for extreme musical adventurism.  Attendance became a test of sang-froid and derring-do.  Big tour companies started offering all-in packages including first class tent accommodation.   The various ministries in the Malian capital Bamako began to realise that the northern deserts, rather than being a god-forsaken sink hole full of bandits and terrorists, could actually become a very bankable asset  in terms of tourism and cultural kudos.   All this success descended on the bewildered organisers like a sandstorm, at once epic, exhilarating and radically disorientating.

The painful truth is that speedy success dragged along a heap of uninvited problems in its caravan train.  The Malian authorities exerted uncomfortable pressure on Manny Ansar, the President of the EFES Association which was responsible for organising the event. It became official policy to keep the festival alive at all costs, despite spiralling debt, despite the pressure of alien crowds on the fragile desert environment, despite the growing discontent of certain Touareg who felt that the event was being hi-jacked and turned into a kind of Arabian Nights meets Woodstock Of The Sands fantasia.   No one locally could imagine that the Festival was anything other than immensely rich.  But the opposite was true.  The expense of freighting every single piece of equipment and infrastructure in huge burly Mann trucks over the atrocious track that links Essakane to Timbuktu had well nigh bankrupted the event.  Budgets were dismissed as fiction.  Grumbling suspicion became widespread.  Tinariwen, the musical heroes of the rebellion that had shaken desert society to the core in the early 1990s, went back home to Kidal in the far northeast of Mali to set up their own festival, Les Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk.  They were pining for a return to the original mission; a celebration of desert culture, an event that brings the various different Touareg confederations, from Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya together for three days of parlaying, problem solving and partying.

The Touareg are unified by a common language, Tamashek, and a common culture rooted in the Berber subsoil of North and West Africa.   But historically the various tribes and factions have often been rivals or even sworn enemies.   It was the rebellion of 1990 to 1991 that broke down these old enmities and forged something approaching a common Touareg destiny.  But old traditions die hard.  As the Festival at Essakane became the talk of the desert, the Touareg of Menaka, Tessalit,  Aguelhoc, In Gall or Agadez wanted a piece of the action.  Why should all the glory go the Kel Antessar, the tribe that rule the Timbuktu region, who have always been the most adept at playing politics and furthering their cause in the corridors of power in Bamako?   After all the original Festival in the Desert was nothing more than one of the Touareg’s annual traditional gatherings, a bit like our country fairs of yore, opened up to participants and audiences from all over the world with the help of some funding, a website, and friends in Europe.  In January of this year there were no less that six desert Festivals in northern Mali: at Essakane, in Essouk, Ashawadj, Gourma, Aguelhoc and Tessalit.   It’s no longer a question of THE Festival in the Desert, but of The FESTIVALS in the Desert.

At this year’s Essouk festival, about 150 nomad tents covered in terracotta stained hides were arranged in a wide crescent along a ridge near the ancient ruins of a medieval metropolis.  The setting was arrestingly grand.  On the sandy plain below was a tiny concrete stage, backed by a huge open sided truck.  The crowds were thinner than they might have been.  Local people were constrained by the fact that the annual feast of Tabeski was only a few days away, and they needed the time to get home and prepare for it.  Tourists had been turned off by a completely misguided message on the Foreign Office website advising against travel in the northern deserts of Mali.   Statistically, the area is about ten times safer than London, Bristol, or the centre of Trowbridge on a Saturday night.  The old myth about the desert being a parched hell-hole inhabited only by Touareg freebooters and renegade Al-Qaida elements still holds swa y in Bamako, and apparently also in the Foreign ministries of the UK, France and the USA.

That’s why the Festivals in the Desert are so important.  They give a region previously ravaged by conflict and insecurity the chance to show a peaceful face to the world.   They give the chance for the Touareg to prove that far from being bandits, they are a simply another African people in the pressure cooker of enforced modernisation, desperately trying to adapt their millennial nomadic culture to the merciless realities of a modern globalised world.  They give adventurous westerners the opportunity to travel to one of the most beautiful places on earth, and hear music whose alien splendour is as difficult to conceive as it is stunning.  And they give the world a chance to ponder how a friendly cultural get together can being some much needed pride, hope and confidence, where bullets and politically inspired machinations have previously failed.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006
First published in The Independent – Mar 2006

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