Sidi Toure (Courtesy of Thrill Jockey)

When he was a child, Sidi Toure was told to go and hunt for bats in the Tomb of the Askia. On a good day, he and his harum scarum comrades could bring back ten or more, which made a tidy feast for the family. The monument wasn’t far from his home in the Sané district of Gao, an old trans-Saharan entrepôt on the Niger River that is now the capital of northern eastern Mali. A black and white postcard from colonial days depicts the tomb in a state of geometrically chiselled splendour, pyramidal in shape but stepped like an irregular ziggurat. Today, erosion by the annual rains and desert winds has turned it into the bearded sister of the Great Pyramid of Giza, sensuously curved and bristling with acacia branches that protrude from its adobe walls. “I spent my childhood round about the tomb,” Toure tells me. “It was my ‘school’ and I know it like the palm of my hands.”

It’s hard to fathom what this most striking relic of the Songhoy Empire means to Sidi Toure and millions of other Songhoy like him. The empire was founded more than five hundred years ago by Sunni Ali ‘Ber’ (‘The Great’) and brought to a dazzling climax in the middle of the 16^th century by one of his generals, Mohammed Askia Toure, before succumbing to the invading armies of the Sultan of Morocco. It was ruled according to the precepts of Islam, with a meritocratic government administration and educational establishments that attracted scholars from every corner of the Muslim world. The collective myths and memory of the Songhoy people, their deepest pride, find their focus in the Tomb of the Askia. Like the manuscripts of Timbuktu, its very existence trumps those who like to think that pre-colonial African history was devoid of civilisation.

In the summer of 2012, a group of young Songhoy men formed a vigilante guard to protect the tomb from the hard line Islamist mujahedeen of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, most commonly known by its French acronym MUJAO, who had taken control of Gao and imposed an joyless diet of fear and shari’a law on its populace. Les barbus – the bearded ones – were pulverising the tombs of Sufi saints in Timbuktu, 400 kilometres up river, and the citizens of Gao had good reason to fear for their beloved monument.

The Jihadi assault on local culture didn’t limit itself to tombs of course. In August 2012, a heavily bearded spokesman for MUJAO announced on a radio station in Gao that all music except for Quranic chanting was banned throughout northern Mali with immediate effect.

When I ask Sidi Toure for his reaction to the ban, he shakes his head and dishes up a tired little smile. “Even at the time of the Prophet there were griots who sang praises,” he says. “So I don’t see how people can come with other ideas to ban music. And what’s more, Gao is a place of Islam. The manuscripts of Timbuktu attest to that. Our grandfather Askia – it was because he loved Islam that he brought architects from Egypt. When you see the tomb of the Askia it has a pyramidal shape. That means that the architect came from Egypt to build things like that. We adore the same God but it’s moderate Islam that we love.”

The shape of the Tomb of the Askia isn’t the only thing that ancient Egypt gave to the Songhoy people. Almost uniquely amongst the major ethnic groups of the Sahel, the Songhoy still possess a rich pantheon of pre-Islamic deities or spirits which they call the Torou. The founders of this supernatural dynasty are commonly believed to have come from Egypt. One of their offspring was the water goddess and ‘original’ Songhoy mother, Harakoy Dicko, whom Sidi Toure refers to as “the siren”. Her first-born son is Marou Kirey: Marou ‘The Red’, and the youngest of her seven children is Dongo, the god of lightning. To commune with these spirits, humans must be eased into a state of trance by means of rhythm, song and dance. An entire corpus of music exists for that very purpose and the Songhoy call holey.

“To find Kirey, you have to find Dongo,” Sidi Toure explains. “Or to find Dongo, you have to find Kirey. When one comes along, infallibly, the other will also come. In Gao, when the countryside has a problem due to lack of rain, people have recourse to the holey. They take their violins, their calabashes and they go six or seven kilometres from Gao. There they beat their drums and before they get back to Gao, the rain will come.”

In 1984, Sidi Toure, who was then in his mid twenties, won a prize at the prestigious Biennale, Mali’s premier national music, theatre and dance competition, with an original composition called ‘Marou Kirey’. Like most of his music, the song was a blend of modern instruments and orchestration, holey and takamba, the loping rhythm of seduction that is Gao’s other contribution to Mali’s musical treasury.

Toure was already a star on his home turf and lead singer with Gao’s regional orchestra, the Songhoy Stars. Alongside his musical mentors Ali Farka Toure and Ibrahim Hamma Dicko, he was busy hauling Songhoy music and culture out of the northern sands and into the national spotlight. No easy task. In those days the Manding music of the south hogged the airwaves and printing presses. Music from the north – be it Songhoy, Touareg, Arab or Peul – had to struggle to earn playtime and respect.

Although, like most Songhoy, Sidi Toure rails against his Touareg neighbours for fighting rebellion after rebellion against the central government in Bamako and ripping the delicate silk of social relations to shreds in the process, he feels some sympathy with their fight for cultural recognition. In fact, take away the issue of independence for the north, and it’s surprising how much Songhoy and Touareg can agree about, despite their skewed image as traditional enemies.

“One cannot say that all that those Touareg are saying is false,” Toure tells me. “There are realities out there. You can colonise every aspect of me, but culturally you cannot colonise me. I refuse. I have a culture. Air time on TV – that must be open to everybody. Because TV is national. There’s no question of it only being for the Bambara or whatever.”

If his struggle is to put Songhoy culture on the national and international map, then Sidi Toure is winning. Not only is he well known throughout Mali, but his lilting Niger ‘hymns’ have colonised ears from Shanghai to Sacramento, and points in between, both ways.

If it were possible to render the term ‘easy listening’ into one that connoted only positive praise, then it would serve well to describe his music. Toure’s signature simplicity and elegance are in full gentle force on his new album Alafia (Thrill Jockey); the acoustic guitars, flutes, ngoni lute and voices meshing with a lilt and lack of excess to achieve a sensation akin to drifting down some wide and sun-blessed river while your hands trail in the coolness of its waters. Sidi Toure’s music has that ‘roll’ which Andy Kershaw once lamented the lack of in most rock’n’roll; an effortless inner propulsion that, like river currents or the beating heart, seems to be the child of divine physics. Needless to say, it’s the perfect soundtrack for a summer’s day behind the wheel.

Many an awkward label has been cobbled to try and categorise the genre that Sidi Touré’s music belongs to: desert blues, Niger blues, Sahara blues. If a link to American blues does exist then it belongs to the late 17^th rather than the late 20^th century. “When I released my first album,” Toure says, “I met this American journalist who said ‘Hey, what you’re playing there sounds just like wow wow wow by John Lee Hooker!’ I said to him, ‘But that John Lee Hooker of yours, who on earth is he?’ ‘He’s just a bluesman’ he said. ’Nope, don’t know him,’ I answered. ‘I’m just playing folk music from Gao.’”

Despite the easy caress of that folk music from Gao, Sidi Toure isn’t one to sing sweet nothings into your ear. His oft-repeated mantra of “Politics for politicians, art for artists” doesn’t stop him conceding that music has to be more than a sunbathe on the beach. “The artist has always been a fighter,” he agrees. “When someone tells you to listen to my music, it’s not to make you say ‘Ah, Sidi sings well!’. It’s to make you understand what Sidi is singing about. I fight! Look at the pollution in the Niger River, look at global warming. I sing about those things. I like artists who protest and get involved. Because the artist is the one who speaks out from the highest point about what others are saying at the lowest, whatever the consequences.”

And if there was ever a time when circumstances turned musicians into fighters, whether they liked it or not, it was those ten joyless months when Islamist gunmen gripped northern Mali in their puritanical claws. Lucky then that Sidi Toure wasn’t in his native Gao at the time. He’s been living down south in Bamako since 1992, but Gao and the great river have never stopped flowing through his arteries and neural pathways. You can take the northerner out of the north but you can’t…

Songs on Alafia like ‘Boro Ganda’ (‘My Land’) or ‘Gandyey’ (‘The Spirits’) put you in a pirogue and float you off from one of the many Gao river beaches that Sidi Toure use to frequent as a youth, in the direction of Koïma Hondo, a massive pink dune a few clicks down river that is Ayers Rock to the Songhoy, a place where the spirit-folk congregate far from the eyes of the un-initiated and laugh at our little human absurdities.

It seems strange that Sidi Toure was scorned in his younger days by elders who considered playing music to be a wasteful frivolity, entirely beneath the dignity of anyone bearing the noble name of Toure. “As soon as people say ‘Toure’,” Sidi tells me, “they immediately have a vision of a man with his head in Qu’ranic books.” Strange. The vision the name provokes in me is of a man in billowing blue robes dispensing liquid gold from a Gibson, a Taylor or a Takamine. Apparently, for some of us at least, the Toure name has become synonymous with praising the Almighty and raising the spirits of humankind through music rather than scripture. How lucky we are.

Predictably perhaps, peace is the central theme of Alafia. The name itself means ‘peace’. A devout Touareg friend once told me that if anyone angers or frustrates you, you should recite a incantation, just silently to yourself, every time you think of that person. Translated, it goes something like ‘Peace to all, peace above all, peace’.

Maybe the Songhoy are busy muttering alafia and “peace be to all” under their breaths as they contemplate the ravaged social landscape of their beloved homeland. But then, no one must forget that the river goddess Harakoy Dicko had seven sons in all, each fathered by a man from a different tribe. The ferocious Marou Kirey’s father was a Songhoy but his brother Mahama Surgou was fathered by a Touareg. And where there’s brotherhood there’s always hope.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013
First published in Songlines Magazine – Feb 2014

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Tamikrest

When people discover that many of the songs by leading Touareg artists like Tamikrest, Tinariwen or Terakaft are about nostalgia, they’re often puzzled. Nostalgia for what exactly? Surely the black and barren hills of the southern Sahara, the scorpions, the 50C summer temperatures, the droughts, the political turmoil, the brittle harshness of sun-baked nature all amount to something godforsaken, unworthy of longing or nostalgia.  And yet the love of a Touareg (or ‘Kel Tamashek’ as they call themselves), a Songhai, a Moor or any of the other desert peoples for their sandy wilderness is every bit as strong as that of an Irishman for the green green grass of home.

A powerful symbol of that love is the enormous dune the Songhoi call ‘Koïma Hondo’, which lies on the banks of the broad Niger River, not far from the ancient city of Gao. The dune, whose ‘feet’ cool themselves in the blue waters of the Niger, turns pink when the sun sets. Hence its nickname; La Dune Rose. Until recently it was Gao’s premier tourist attraction, but now that there are no more tourists, its older populace, the wise spirits and sorcerers who the Songhoi believe use the dune as a meeting place, have reasserted themselves. They’re holding the dune in trust, while the world around them descends into confusion, conflict and barbarity.

On 22^nd August 2012, a heavily bearded spokesperson for the MUJAO (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa), a motley militia of radical Islamists and big time drug barons, who, at time of writing, currently control Gao, issued a decree banning all western music in northern Mali. “We don’t want Satan’s music,” the spokesman declared. “Sharia demands it.  It is the will of God and we must obey.”

The decree effectively outlawed music and forced musicians like Sidi Toure, who had been the director of Gao’s prestigious regional orchestra, the Songhoi Stars, into exile. Anyone caught listening to the radio, watching TV, or playing songs on his or her mobile phone risks a whipping. Musicians have been stopped at checkpoints, their instruments impounded and burnt. Music, the lubricant of life and community, has been driven underground, or out of the territory completely. Tamikrest have fled north over the border into Algeria.  Bassekou Kouyate lives down south in Bamako, the economically blighted capital city where musicians spend their days wondering where their next meal will come from.

It’s fitting that Sidi Touré has called his latest album ‘Koïma’, which literally means “go and listen” in Songhoi. Even if it might be impossible in a physical sense, this is the time for all Songhoi to go their Ayers Rock, Koïma Hondo, to ask their guardian spirits for courage, honesty, peace and understanding.  It’s time for all Touareg to commune with the Kel Essouf, the spirits of the wilderness, to find answers to the pain and suffering they are experiencing. It’s time for the Manding of Segou, the home of Bassekou Kouyate, to do the same.

That spirit world is ancient, and it lives in all the instruments that you’ll hear on stage today; the ngoni lute of Bassekou Kouyate, the electric guitars of Tamekrist, themselves descended from the teherdent of the Tamashek griots, and the acoustic guitar and sokou monocord violin of Sidi Touré.  Go, listen, and you’ll hear all those spirits talking to each other, like they have done for centuries.  What are they saying?

Their exchange won’t necessarily be one of love and blissful co-habitation. Songhoi and Tamashek have fought periodic wars against each other since the 16^th century, when Gao become the capital of a vast Songhoi empire under the emperor Sonni Ali. In the 1990s Songhoi vigilantes killed Touareg civilians, and vice versa. Since the outbreak of the Touareg rebellion in January 2012, which lead directly to the Islamist take over of the northern two-thirds of the country, southern Malians are deeply suspicious of Touareg secessionist intentions.  Many Touareg however feel that they need independence in order to preserve their unique nomadic and Berber culture.

So the conversation won’t be easy. But listen to the spirits there in the music and they’ll tell you a deeper tale. They’ll tell you that in that vast desert which outsiders are content to call a wasteland, good for nothing except for the oil, phosphates and uranium that lie under its soil, there exists an endless calm, tranquillity and beauty that makes the nomad cry in his heart every day he is forced to spend in exile. They’ll tell you about their home, where space and time are so abundant that they make a visitor from the time and space-starved west feel light-headed and reborn.  They’ll tell you that various ethnic groups – Tamashek, Songhoi, Manding – may have battled each other continuously throughout history, that they may be fighting each other now, but that, in truth, they have also always been neighbours, sharing the same vast space, ribbing each other with gentle humor, tolerant of each other’s presence in times of peace. They’ll tell you about the Sahara’s true soul, a musical soul that no bearded tooled-up Islamist militiaman can destroy.

The spirits are waiting for that soul to reassert itself. You’ll hear them singing their hearts out tonight, out under the stars, around the fire, on the pink dune, by the silvery waters of the great Niger river.

Andy Morgan (c) 2012

Programme notes for the ‘Sahara Soul’ concert at The Barbican, London – January 26th 2013

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