A mujahid in northern Mali.

It ranges from the almost banal: a bunch of mates in the eastern Malian town of Gao are fingered by the Islamic Police. The Bob Marley tape they’ve been enjoying is impounded and instead they’re given one by Saudi Arabia’s star Quranic chanter, Sheik Abderrahmane Soudais. “No more Satanic sounds now lads,” the policeman says. “You have to listen to this.”

To the gut-slicingly terrifying: Seven men in a Toyota pickup draw up outside the house of a guitar player in Kidal, the far flung Malian desert town that is home to members of the Grammy Award winning band Tinariwen. Luckily, the musician, whose name cannot be given for security reasons, is away. “Well, if you speak to him,” one of the AK47 toting militiamen says to his sister, “tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.” Then they drag years of patiently accumulated musical equipment out of the house – guitars, amps, speakers, mics and a drum kit – douse it all with petrol, and set it ablaze.

When a rabble of different Islamist groups took control of northern Mali in April this year everybody knew that the region’s rich and vivid music scene would suffer. But no one imagined that it would almost cease to exist, not in Mali, a country that, like Jamaica or Ireland, only really lives in the global imagination thanks to its culture and music.

“Culture is our petrol,” says Toumani Diabate, the world famous Malian kora player who has collaborated with Damon Albarn and Björk, to name but a few. “Music is our mineral wealth. There isn’t a single major music prize in the world today that hasn’t been won by a Malian artist.”

“Music regulates the life of every Malian,” adds Cheikh Tidiane Seck, a prolific Malian musician and producer. “From the cradle to the grave. From ancient times right up to today. A Mali without music? No…I mean…give me another one!!”

International observers claim that the leaders of the three armed Islamic groups who now control the northern Malian cities of Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao respectively, are motivated by money and power rather the dream of a Caliphate in the Sahel founded on piety and abnegation. Strong ties between these groups and the less than holy interests of major drug-traffickers and arms smugglers exist beyond doubt. But many of the mujahedeen that have zoned in on the conflict from all over the Muslim world are fired by an unquestionable religious zeal. The same goes for Iyad Ag Ghaly, ex-rebel leader, Touareg strong man and born again Salafist, who founded the Touareg-lead Ansar ud-Dine movement at the end of last year.

“He believes in what he’s doing,” says Manny Ansar, director of the world famous Festival in the Desert that has been taking place every January in and around Timbuktu and Kidal since 2001. “And that’s what frightens me. I’m not convinced that he wants to kill everyone who is not a Muslim, like the people in Al Qaida do, but I’ve seen him giving up the fruits of this life for God.”

Back in the 1990s, before he succumbed to the preaching of the Pakistani proselytising movement Tablighi Jama’at, Iyad Ag Ghali liked to smoke cigarettes and hang out with musicians from Tinariwen. He even composed songs and poems to love, rebellion and the beauty of his desert home. Now music, and with it a major source of communal cohesion and well being, has either disappeared or gone underground throughout the territory under his control.

An official decree banning all western music was issued on August 22d by a heavily bearded Islamist spokesperson in the city of Gao. “We don’t want the music of Satan. Quranic verses must take its place. Sharia demands it,” it went. The ban comes in the context of a horrifically literal and gratuitous application of Sharia law in all aspects of daily life. Militiamen are cutting off the hands and feet of thieves or stoning adulterers. Smokers, alcohol drinkers and women who aren’t properly attired are being publicly whipped. As one well-known Touareg musician from Kidal told me, “There’s a lack of joy. No one is dancing. There are no parties. Everybody’s under this kind of spell. It’s strange.”

“People think that the problem is new,” says Manny Ansar, “but the menace of Al Qaida started to have an effect on us in 2007. That’s when the Al Qaida people started to appear in the desert. They came to the nomad camps near Essakane [the beautiful dunes to the west of Timbuktu where the Festival in the Desert used to be held] and at first they were pleasant and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re Muslims like you.’ Then they began to say, ‘We have a common enemy, which is the west.’ That’s when I understood that things were going to get difficult.”

Remarkably, Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) never targeted the festival or any of the thousands of westerners who braved the journey to attend it. According to Manny Ansar, some people put down this to the fact that his tribe, the Kel Ansar, are said to be descended directly from the Prophet Mohammed and are highly revered. “Others even thought that we cast spells to block their route,” he says with a wry laugh. In truth, AQIM knew that if they wanted to keep the locals sweet and compliant, they were well advised not to mess with the Kel Ansar.

Not all music events were so blessed. Returning from the Tamadacht festival near the eastern town of Anderamboukane in January 2009, the British tourist Ediwn Dyer was kidnapped and sold to AQIM, who beheaded him four months later because the British government refused to pay a ransom for his release. This tragedy forced The Festival in the Desert to move into the safe confines of Timbuktu city limits in 2010.

This year in January, no doubt the last edition of the festival to be held in Timbuktu for a while took place in an atmosphere of high alert following recent kidnappings and the murder of a German tourist by Al Qaida. The event was attended by Tinariwen, a host of other Touareg and Malian musicians, and Bono. “I was impressed by Bono’s courage and that of his team,” Manny tells me. “He asked the soldiers who were assigned to protect him to leave him be and let him roam around the town freely or go and drink tea out on the dunes. But I wondered if I wasn’t a bit mad myself to let him do that. I mean, Bono, kidnapped! Imagine that.” La Maison, the hotel in Timbuktu where Bono and entourage stayed is now the headquarters of the city’s Islamic Tribunal.

Manny felt like giving up when the rebellion broke out a few days after the end of the festival. But after talking to many musicians, as well as friends and international backers, he decided to organise a Caravan of Peace and Unity that will tour West Africa and visit refugee camps in February next year. He’ll also be promoting the Festival in the Desert in Exile in Europe, the Middle East, the US and elsewhere. “It’s my way of fighting back,” he says. “Before our music was heard in Essakane. Now it’ll be heard in all the big festivals in the world. So it’s the opposite of what the Islamists want. It’s our victory and their defeat.”

Meanwhile, almost all the musicians in the north have fled the country like more than 500,000 of their fellow countrymen, most of who languish in refugee camps in Algeria, Mauritania, Niger or Burkina Faso. It’s the biggest humanitarian crisis the Sahel has ever known. “There’s no music up there any more,” says Vieux Farka Toure, son of the king of the West African blues, the late Ali Farka Toure. “You can’t switch on a radio or a TV, even at home.”

The town of Niafunké just south west of Timbuktu, where Ali Farka was mayor for many years, is now under Islamist control. “I know that if Ali were to awake from his tomb today,” says Afel Bocoum, Ali Farka’s former sidekick and Damon Albarn’s partner on the 2002 Mali Music project, “he would just go straight back into it. He would die twice.” Both Afel Bocoum and Vieux Farka Toure have fled south to the safety of the Malian capital Bamako with their families.

Down south however, music is also in crisis, for different but related reasons. The military coup that toppled President Toure on March 23^rd and kissed goodbye to one of Africa’s most lauded democracies has left the capital fearful and economically depressed. “People just aren’t used to meeting soldiers in the street,” says Adam Thiam, one of Mali’s leading journalists, “so they tend to stay at home.”

Many live music venues in the capital, like Le Diplomat, the espace culturel where Toumani Diabate and his Symmetric Orchestra used to play every weekend, have closed down. The same goes for hotels and restaurants, starved of their once plentiful foreign tourist clientele. Nightclubs and weddings are still thriving but the trend is to save money by hiring sound systems and DJs rather than live musicians. “People use what they earn to feed themselves, not to have fun,” says Bassekou Kouyate.

But in West Africa nowadays, when the going gets tough, the rappers get going. Like Y’en A Marre, the rap collective that ignited nationwide debate during the election crisis in Senegal last year, rappers in Mali have stepped up to denounce political skulduggery, Islamism and military rule.

“I don’t give a f**k what they say,” was Malian rapper Amkoullel’s terse answer to my question about the Islamist ban on music in the north. “We won’t let them get away with it. We don’t need them to teach us how to be Muslims. We’re a secular tolerant country, where everyone declares their religion according to their feeling. And in any case, they know that a Mali without music is an impossibility.”

Amkoullel set up his own pressure group of rappers, activists and friends called Plus Jamais Ça (Never Again). So far he’s released a couple of videos, including one called ‘SOS’, which has become a You Tube hit. It’s also been censored by the state broadcaster ORTM, which is still under the heavy hand of the military.

“We had this feeling that a heavy blow had been dealt to democracy,” Amkoullel says of the March 23^rd putsch. “And it had been done in a period of popular disillusion. It’s as if in the collective consciousness, democracy was a failure in Mali.” Like Les Sofas de la Republique, the other rap collective raising the standard in rhyme for unity, democracy, peace and good governance, Amkoullel and his team have been organising demonstrations, debates and gigs. He’s also received three death threats.

“I knew that our phones were being bugged,” he tells me. “Then I got this call that was like ‘Yeah…we’re watching you, so you’d better calm down or take the consequences.’ The second message wasn’t from the same person. ‘You’re talking too much’, they said. ‘Shut up or you’ll disappear and won’t understand a thing.’ That was much clearer!”

All the musicians I spoke to agreed; Mali without music would be like Egypt without cotton, a bird without wings, a man without a soul. “I’m a Muslim, but Sharia isn’t my thing,” says Rokia Traore, one of Mali’s most famous international stars. “If I couldn’t go up on stage anymore, I would cease to exist. And without music, Mali will cease to exist.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in The Guardian (edited version) – June 2012

The post MUSIC AND JIHAD IN MALI – “Mali without music is an impossibility” appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Now his writing on the crisis has grown into a book (originally intended as a pamphlet). Morgan details the background and context to the Salafist takeover of an area larger than the combined territories of France and the UK. He untangles the complex web of the different groups involved, and explains how the Tuareg liberationist movement MNLA was hijacked by the Islamist militia Ansar ud-Dine. His political analysis is detailed and comprehensive, tracing how the conflict had its roots in fifty years of Tuareg rebellions, as well as the legacy of events such as  the Algerian civil war of the 1990s and the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya.

But, as you would expect from a publication commissioned by Freemuse, the campaigning organisation dedicated to freedom of musical expression around the world, the main tune of the book is the impact of the crisis on Malian culture. Morgan’s sharp analysis is supported by plenty of first-hand evidence, including accounts of how the music ban was brutally applied under shari’a law. There are also interviews with  Bassekou Kouyate,Vieux Farka Toure, Toumani Diabate, Rokia Traore and members of  the Tuareg bands Terakaft, Tartit and Tinariwen.

His final chapter is required reading, a tour de force of both profound humanity and intellectual clarity, as he describes how even after the jihadists were expelled in early 2013, fear and paranoia still stalk northern Mali. But his ultimate message is one of cautious hope, as he sees Malian cultural life emerging from the puritanical, doctrinaire war waged upon it ”with a greater sense of defiance and honed purpose.”

Nigel Williamson

(c) Nigel Williamson / Songlines 2013

www.songlines.co.uk

The post REVIEW of ‘Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali’ – SONGLINES, September 2013 appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

MUSIC

CULTURE

& CONFLICT

IN MALI

By Andy Morgan

AVAILABLE FROM:

FREEMUSE BOOKSTORE
iTUNES BOOKSTORE
AMAZON

“‘Andy takes you on a clear and considered journey through the complexities of modern Mali. A must read for all those interested in the culture of West Africa.” DAMON ALBARN.

“…one of the few positives to come out of the occupation of the northern two-thirds of Mali by armed jihadist groups in 2012 was the informed analysis of Andy Morgan. Now his writing on the crisis has grown into a book. His final chapter is required reading, a tour de force of both profound humanity and intellectual clarity.” NIGEL WILLIAMSON, Songlines. 5/5 Stars.

“Andy Morgan brings his skills as a journalist combined with deep insight gained as manager of Tinariwen to sieve through the shifting sands of Saharan culture in this fine book.”  IAN BIRRELL, Daily Mail & founder of Africa Express

“Does a wonderful job of not only detailing what happened during that awful period, but explaining why it did, and how it could easily happen again if things don’t change.” RICHARD MARCUS, Blogcritics.

“Essential reading for anyone who has been touched by Saharan music. It gives a clear and gripping picture of what it’s like to live through the chaos of a 21st century conflict…A really valuable piece of work.”  JUSTIN ADAMS, guitarist, UK

“Morgan’s book is an excellent examination of the contradictory forces in the “war on culture” currently led by Islamists in Mali. Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali represents an essential resource for anyone, scholar or layperson, seeking to grasp the Malian crisis, contemporary West African culture, and the impact of extremist movements on cultural production.”  ERIC J SCHMIDT, Ethnomusicology Review, USA.

“Andy Morgan has written a book about the Tuareg people that brings us up close with them in their moments of horror and disgust during the reign of the jihadists in northern Mali.” BARBARA WORLEY, Senior lecturer of Anthropology at University of Massachussetts, Boston, USA

“A wonderful, sad and powerful read! I’m emotionally spent! This goes far further than an examination of the effect on musical life in Mali. It reaches into all aspects of Malian life, history and future. Most powerful though are the personal stories. This is an important record.”  ANN MACKEIGAN, Executive Producer, CBC Music, Canada.

“The book is brilliant. Andy Morgan has solid experience, partly inside the music industry, not least as manager of Tinariwen. On top of that he’s a writer who knows his stuff backwards. It’s a treat to be introduced to the whole conflict in such a competent way and get first hand experience of what happens when the prophecy of The Doors is fulfilled.”  TORBEN HOLLEUFER, Gaffa magazine, Denmark.

“Many thanks for this magnificent work. Even though it’s in English, I’ve almost read it all, it’s so well written and accessible.”  OUSMANE DIARRA, author, Mali.

“An absolutely fantastic read and an invaluable primer on the volatile Malian situation of the last years. ” CHRIS ECKMAN, Musician and Producer (Dirt Music, Tamikrest), Slovenia.

READ THESE EXTRACTS:

“We don’t want Satan’s music!” – Scenes of musical life under Shari’a Law

Music in the red zone – The Festival in the Desert and the advance of Islamism in the north

“We have come here to teach you the true faith,” – Vandalism and destruction along the great fault line of the Sahel

Tisrawt – The epic tale of a theatre company from northern Mali

The post NEW BOOK – Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

AfroCubism: Eliades Ochoa & Bassekou Kouyate eye to eye (c) Christina Jaspars

“The people of Africa have to suffer under the ever prevailing dogma that proclaims the superiority of one race over another and allows a man to be assassinated with impunity in the name of that superiority.”  With these words Che Guevara launched a passionate verbal assault on the “imperialists” who had plotted the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the founding father of independent Congo, and on the complicity of the United Nations in this crime. The date was December 11^th 1964.  The place was the General Assembly of the UN in New York.

There can little doubt that Lumumba’s death churned Che Guevara to the depths of his being. It provoked a complete change in his political and revolutionary career, one that lead, pretty much directly, to his death in the jungles of Bolivia less than three years later. The assassination spurred Che to leave Cuba and devote his considerable energy and charisma to the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of Africa and Latin America, but especially Africa. He even wrote a letter to his friend and fellow rebel Fidel Castro explaining himself: “I leave a nation which has adopted me like a son. I am taking the revolutionary spirit to new battlefields, along with the conviction that I continue to fulfill the most sacred of duties.”

Che was as good as his word. In the few months after his speech at the UN, he toured Africa, meeting and talking with the young and optimistic leaders of many a new African nation: Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Ahmed Sekou Touré of Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.  He also met other men like Samora Machel from Mozambique and Agostinho Neto from Angola whose struggle for independence was far from over. Everywhere Che was welcomed as a hero, a mentor, a fellow freedom fighter, whose role in Cuba’s revolution was admired beyond words.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Africa had fallen head over heels for Cuban music. African independence was celebrated in a Cuban rhythm thanks the Congolese superstar Le Grand Kalle’s trans-continental hit ‘Independence Cha Cha’. In the 1960s the admiration deepened as Cuba’s new socialist regime began to send brigades of doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers to the new continent and invite young Africans who were hungry to learn and build their new nations, back to La Havana. The admiration for Cuba and its revolutionary leadership was intense.

Before disguising himself beyond recognition, adopting the Swahili nickname of ‘Tatu’, and disappearing into the jungle of eastern Congo to fight the Congolese army and its phalanxes of white European mercenaries, Che also met the young President Modibo Keita of Mali. The Cuban adventure in the eastern Congo was a demoralizing failure, but Che’s meeting with Keita was the reaffirmation of an alliance, a friendship and a sort of intercontinental love affair between the two nations.

Che in The Congo

Djelimady Tounkara, one of the greatest guitarists that West Africa has ever produced and a veteran of the Malian music scene, remembers those heady days of green nationhood back in the 1960s. “Our first President Modibo Keita was a communist and a socialist. He was a big friend of Fidel Castro. Their friendship resulted from their shared values. It’s thanks to that friendship that we learned about Cuban music.”

1965, the year of Che’s disastrous Congolese adventure, was a fateful one for third world politics in general. The colonial backlash was beginning to bite. But it was also fateful for more positive musical reasons. In the autumn of that year ten music students from Mali who were studying at the Alejandro Garcia Caturla Conservatory in La Havana de Cuba decided to form a band. They had already been in Cuba for almost two years, living in a svelte post-Bauhaus villa in the chic suburb of Siboney, learning the fundamentals of music theory, composition and arrangement whilst devoting their plentiful spare energy to some of Cuba’s other homegrown attractions, including women and rum.

It had been President Modibo Keita’s idea to send them to Cuba. As Bassekou Kouyate, maestro of the traditional Malian lute or ngoni, explains: “Our first President did everything he could to recruit these musicians and send them to Cuba to study music. Because, at that time, Malians were already great musicians, but they didn’t know how to compose and write down music.  So the President organised this scholarship so that people could learn how to write music down.”

As in so many other fields such as agriculture, industry, health and education, so it was in music. Africa had the raw material, the talent, the desire, the will to learn and build their fledgling nations. Cuba had the expertise. It was a perfect marriage. By the end of 1965, Boncana Maiga, a native of Gao in the far east of Mali and one of the most ambitious and talented of the ten Malians in La Havana, suggested to his friends that they had learned enough. Las Maravillas de Mali, “The Marvels of Mali”, was born.

The group had no intention of just aping the superior skills of the Cuban musicians around them. Their aim was to fuse the Manding, Songhai and other musical cultures of their native land with the rhythms, instruments and arrangements of their adoptive country.  The band performed their first gig on September 22^nd at the Guinean Embassy at La Havana. It was a huge success. A much fêted tour of the whole island, with performances in universities and sugar plantations, followed.  When they returned to Mali for a holiday in 1967, Las Maravillas de Mali played in front of chanting crowds on the Anniversary of Independence and then in front of President Keita at the Koulouba Palace. “The President was proud of us,” violinist Dramane Coulibaly told the French documentary maker Richard Minier. “We were proof of the country’s development potential.”

Maravillas de Mali CD Cover

The young Djelimady Tounkara was in Bamako to welcome the Maravillas de Mali home.  He had been a fan of Cuban music since the late 1950s, thanks to the GV series of 78rpm records. Back in the 1930s, the great depression in Europe and America spurred the executives at EMI’s His Master’s Voice label to seek out new markets. They began to repackage American Jazz and Cuban Son for West Africa. The first GV release, catalogue number G.V.1, was ‘El Manicero’ (‘The Peanut Vendor’) by Don Azpiazu and his Havana Casino Orchestra, recorded in New York City in 1930. The 250 or so G.V records that followed were distributed all over West Africa and became responsible for the birth of modern west African pop music in general, as well as pan-African styles such as Congolese rhumba, Soukous and Highlife in particular.  Thus misery and unemployment in the first world provoked a musical revolution in the third.

But the roots of the story go deeper…much much deeper. After all, the first African slaves arrived in Cuba in 1512. They were the cream of many different peoples: Yoruba, Manding, Kikongo, Carabali and Wolof and their sweat and tears created the wealth that made Cuba the richest place in the Americas by the mid 1800s. The sugar nobility treated their slave class with hatred and contempt, feelings which survived the revolution of 1959 and persist in the racism that still blights the Island today.  And yet, to quote the father of Afro-Cuban ethnology, Fernando Ortiz; “Without the black, Cuba would not be Cuba.”

“African blood is very close to all of us,” says Eliades Ochoa, leader of Grupo Patria. “Very close. We’re a mix of African and Spanish. I’ve always loved African music. More than Mali I would listen to the music of Senegal, the music of Congo, the rhythm of the tumbao drums and the music of Haiti.  All our rhythms are close to Africa.”

So by the time Boncana Maiga and his nine fellow musical ambassadors left Bamako in 1963, Mali had already been well and truly infected with Cuban rhythms.  But it wasn’t a distant relationship. Cuban musicians started to visit West Africa and Mali with great regularity, to the intense delight of young musicians like Djelimady Tounkara.

“I remember when Guillermo Portabales came,” he says. “It was in July 1961.  I was 16 years old and already performing with the National Orchestra – A Team.  I had my picture taken with Portables but then I lost the photo.  That’s what really hurts…ha ha ha.  After Portabales, Cachaito Lopez, the elder, came. I was jamming one day down at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Bamako, myself and the drummer Zani Diabate, and Cachaito stopped by to play with us.  He hired us on the spot!  And that same evening we played with him in front of the President.”

They kept coming; Johnny Pacheco, Ray Barretto, Ricardo Rey.  The world famous Orquesta Aragon came and stayed in Mali for two months, playing not only in the capital but also in regional cities like Mopti and Gao.  The Orchestra’s leader Rafael Lay took a shine to Djelimady Tounkara and to the kora player Sidiki Diabate, the father of kora maestro Toumani Diabate.  “He wanted to take us back to Cuba,” Djelimady remembers. “But President Keita was against it!””

Like most of his contemporaries, Djelimady Tounkara didn’t just revere Cuba for its music. “Fidel Castro was very popular at the time, because he exhorted us to work! Castro and Zhou En Lai of China. Castro came to Bamako and he used to walk all over town, in every neighbourhood, meeting people. I remember I was a member of the Popular Militia and once we were ordered to go to the Presidential Palace, very early one Sunday morning. Fidel Castro was there. We then walked 15 kilometres together to an agricultural centre run by the President, and Fidel Castro dug the fields with us, from the morning to the evening.  He dug with us, himself!  Because, as he used to say time and again, “Nobody will build your country for you. You mustn’t look towards the French or the British. Only you can build your own country.”  “Patriotismo!” that was his slogan.  Patriotismo!  Our rulers now, like our current president Amadou Toumani Touré, they were shaped by that time, by Modibo Keita.  And that’s how we were trained too.  When there’s work to be done, you must work. If you don’t know something, ask someone who knows. That’s what we learned.”

In some countries, like the Congo, the colonial backlash against the fiercely independent and unswervingly socialist governments of independent Africa began as soon as the ink was dry on the documents that brought colonial rule to an end. In Mali, the inevitable moment came at the end of 1968 when a young army lieutenant by the name of Moussa Traore, and a cabal of military plotters, many of whom had been trained at military academies in France, overthrew Modibo Keita in a coup.  Behind a smokescreen of fine words about honour and economic reform, Traore installed a dictatorship that was to rule with varying degrees of brutality for 23 years.

Las Maravillas de Mali were called back home in 1971 and, despite the immense fame they enjoyed throughout Mali and West Africa, were accused of communist sympathies and relegated to the lower rungs of Mali’s cultural bureaucracy. After several years, thanks to the support of the Minister of Culture and the Arts, Alpha Oumar Konaré, who was to take over from the hated Moussa Traore as President in 1991, Las Maravillas de Mali mutated into National Badema band with the incomparable singer Kasse Mady Diabate at the forefront of their new line-up.

Moussa Traoré’s government also accelerated a trend that had kicked off at independence. Despite the popularity of foreign music, not only Cuban son, but American jazz, French musette and Spanish Flamenco, the new leaders of west Africa urged, even ordered their artists and musicians to embrace their own traditions. It was the era of africanité or afro-centricity. Sekou Touré of Guinea was a pioneering force in this trend.

“I remember when our National Orchestra played with an orchestra from Guinea,” Djelimady Tounkara mused with a smile. “They all arrived in military uniforms and sang this very African song for us. There we were still playing French musette ha ha ha.” It had to change and we can thank the unique richness of modern Malian pop for this characteristically political intervention in the artistic process. But it meant that Cuban influences were gradually ousted from centre stage.

The political backlash was replicated throughout Africa, and Cuba’s involvement in the continent became more overtly warlike as a result.  The idealistic small-scale guerrilla activities of Che Guevara in the Congo mutated into wholesale military support for the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, SWAPO in Namibia and the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, as well as more covert logistical and advisory roles in many other countries. The CIA, the cynics, the supporters of US and South African policy, the Cuba haters, the believers in realpolitik put Cuba’s African policy firmly down to a desire to grab natural resources and drive strategic stakes into African soil, rather than any airy fairy notions of spreading international socialism and brotherhood. Maybe there’s some truth that. Geo-politics is never pretty after all.

Nevertheless, despite some glaring mistakes, like giving support to grim dictatorial neuropaths like Mengistu, the Cuban contribution to Africa has been positive in many ways.  Its involvement in Angola and Namibia was in large part responsible for the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Then there were all those doctors, those teachers, those nurses, those dentists, those agricultural specialists and those manufacturing advisors. Most Africans didn’t come face to face with Cuba on a battlefield but in a classroom, a surgery, on a farm, in a factory. And, inversely, countless African doctors, professors, administrators, project leaders, heads of industry, movers, shakers and musicians owe their training and their education to Cuba.  That’s probably one of the reasons why Fidel Castro was the first head of state that Nelson Mandela invited to South Africa after the end of Apartheid.  And that’s why so many Malian’s express nostalgia for their socialist past.

Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela

Toumani Diabate talks about this longing with a characteristic analytical incisiveness: “You know, Africa regrets the distancing of relations with Cuba. After the so-called ‘independence’ of Africa, the relationship between Africa and Cuba, China too, worked really well.  It resulted in the building of many schools, farms and factories in Africa, but especially in Mali.  We Africans realized then that we were very small and we saw what that relationship brought to Africa. It was a very open and honest relationship, based above all in graft and cultural exchange. The Cubans were never like the experts that the colonizers sent us, who earned big salaries and drove the latest cars. No, they lived like us, amongst us. The Cubans gave of themselves. But the colonizers didn’t like that co-operation between us so they stuck their oar in and ruined the relationship, with the connivance of our own Malian brothers. The truth must be told. Africa regrets all of that.”

So when the record producer Nick Gold traveled to Cuba in the early 1990s and fell in love with a cassette by the late great Ñico Saquito, the Afro Cuban story was already old, very old.  Gold, who was already infatuated with Malian music, had the genius to perceive and appreciate the well-spring of love for Cuba music that still flowed through Mali and West Africa and the strength of their intertwining histories. So he proposed the idea to the Cuban musician and producer Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, and to the guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa, to bring some great Malian musicians including Djelimady Tounkara, Kasse Mady Diabate and Bassekou Kouyate, over to La Havana to record with some Cuban legends, thereby rekindling a very old flame. The first song they were planning to record was the Ñico Saquito classic ‘Al Vaiven de mi Carreta’, all about the sweat and tears of a Cuban peasant pushing his cart.

The Malians never arrived in La Havana, thanks to the mislaying of their passports by the Cuban embassy in Burkina Faso, or by the postal service, or some other dreary bureaucratic reason.  So Nick Gold, always ready to play tricks on adversity, called in Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo, Ruben Gonzalez, Ibrahim Ferrer, Cachaito Lopez junior and others, and used the already booked studio time to record the ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ album.  It has sold eight million copies to date.

Eliades Ochoa, however, never gave up on the idea of recording with the Africans.  He continued to pester Gold about it every time they met. “When are we going to record with the Africans?”  Gold was always busy. The Africans musicians had turned into bandleaders or famous instrumentalists in their own right, so they were always busy. The Cubans were surfing the immense wave of Buena Vista Social Club’s success, so they were always busy.  Twelve years went by.

Then in late 2008, this little window opened.  It seemed that Eliades Ochoa was going to be in Madrid with his band Grupo Patria.  And, incredibly, Toumani Diabate, Bassekou Kouyate, Djelimady Tounkara, Kasse Mady Diabate and the balaphon player Lassana Diabate were all going to be available at the same time.

So Madrid’s Sonoland studio was hired. The translator was booked. The Malians arrived in their bouboul robes. The Cubans were in their suits. Quick discussions took place. It was agreed that each musician was to be the ‘boss’ of the song they proposed, but that music would be the only overall boss.  It was also agreed that the Malians would improvise a little less for the communal good, and the Cubans would improvise a little more. Then they started playing, and the music just flowed.

Nick Gold’s World Circuit label released the ‘Afrocubsim’ album earlier this year.  “I think that the Mali-Cuban record came just at the right time,” says Toumani Diabate, “to reaffirm those old relationships, between Africa and Cuba, and China too, which are slowly coming back again.  We’re proud of that.  We’re happy with that.”

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One of the ideas that seems to have suffered in our turntablized and booze-warehoused culture, is that of the band residency.  There was a time when a hungry combo could sharpen its performance skills, widen its fan base and work out its musical mission slowly but surely in the same dark juke joint, on the same night, week after week, month after month, even year after year.  The concept is still alive and well in Africa however.  Take Le Hogon for example, a club in the Ntomikorobougou district of the Malian capital Bamako.  Every Friday night, for the past decade and a half, the uncontested master of the kora, Toumani Diabate, has been cooking up something special in the dimly lit and darkly relaxed confines of this musical laboratory or espace culturel, as its patrons like to call it.  With the release this month of ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’, the World Circuit label is lifting the lid off the crockpot and letting those slow cooked flavours pique the expectant nostrils of the world.

It seems that, in the sphere of West African music at least, all those sessions at Le Hogon may prove to be almost as important and creatively fruitful as those that made Minton’s Playhouse, The Cavern or The Cotton Club legendary in the spheres of jazz and British pop.  What Toumani Diabate has managed to achieve with patience and perseverance is a marriage between two distinct traditions, two musical philosophies, two worlds.  Or, to borrow a well turned metaphor, the traditional ‘high art’ world of the kora and the brash ‘hi-energy’ world of the Malian dance band have had a child, and they call it Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra.   It’s a revolutionary union, legitimised by the dazzling display of virtuosity and groove that characterises the new album, and no one was better placed mastermind it than Toumani Diabate.

Son of the great Sidiki Diabate, the father of the modern kora, Toumani is 71^st in a direct line of griots that stretches back to the reign of the great medieval Emperor Sudjata Keita.  The griots are the hereditary musicians of West Africa, but their role has also involved a close relationship with those in power, to whom they have provided faithful service as oral historians, sages, advisors, ambassadors and ‘truth-sayers’.  Toumani was born in the mid sixties, a decade of speed and change in west Africa as it was in the rest of the world, so it’s hardly surprising that his reaction to the crushing weight of his ancestry was a mix of respect and resistance.  “It’s true that there was a conflict of generations between my father and I,” he admits.  “He was playing purely traditional music and that’s how I began too.  But the fact is that I went to school and got into Bad Company, Smokie, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and I said to myself that I would try to open a universal door for the kora.”

Toumani Diabate doesn’t lack pride in the illustrious lineage to which he belongs, or in its revered position at the cultural heart of the ancient Manding Empire, which ruled over most of West Africa until it lost power in the mid 19^th Century.  In fact, the Symmetric Orchestra is a project underpinned by acute historical awareness.  “This album ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’ is a cultural reconstruction of the Manding Empire,” he explains.  “I’m trying to rebuild it, but in a cultural way.  It’s a meeting of different ethnicities and different generations.  And the music of the kora is at the centre of everything.”

The Boulevard de l’Independence is one of Bamako main thoroughfares, whose status matches that of Mall in London or the Champs Elysee in Paris.  Toumani sees it as the symbolic and geographical nexus of the old Empire.  “From there you can go to all the regions of the Manding Empire: Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mauritania…the whole territory”.  The Symmetric Orchestra grew in the sweltering Petri dish of Le Hogon as musicians from all over West Africa dropped by to jam with Toumani, adding their distinct touch to the burgeoning whole.  “The whole of West Africa, Manding Africa, is represented in the group,” Toumani asserts with pride.  “Once this whole region was the Malian Empire but the colonial powers split it up into different states.  That was a tragedy.  But we can reunite in culture, in music.”

In the past, Toumani’s immense reputation has rested on his ability to fuse and innovate.  In 1987, whilst in London, he recorded a classic album of solo kora music called ‘Kaira’.  The idea of the kora as a solo instrument was then quite new, and one that Toumani, with his absorbing virtuosity, helped to pioneer.  Since then he has soldered the kora sound to alien styles as varied as the new wave flamenco of Ketama, the blues of Taj Mahal, classical Indian Music and Rap.  Even his collaboration with the late great King of the African blues, Ali Farka Toure, on this year’s Grammy award winning ‘In the Heart Of The Moon’ was an exercise blending two previously non-aligned musical traditions.  Did he ever feel there was danger in this unrepentantly frontier-exploding approach?  “No there was no danger,” comes Toumani’s assured reply.  “Because I was never playing Indian music or Spanish music or American music.  I always played Malian music, Manding music.  I feel that it’s my duty to spread the message of the kora, and with more than 70 generations behind me, it’s a heavy responsibility.  And the kora only whispers Manding melodies.”   

The sizzling beats of ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’, whose delicately balanced interplay of voices, horns, bass, drums, guitars, pounding percussion, balaphon, ngoni and kora mirrors the intricacies of the kora itself, are the latest salvo in the career of one who has always struggled to be both proudly traditional and recklessly modern at the same time.  This is the symmetry that Toumani is trying to achieve.  But this time round the idea is entirely his, and its execution has been long and painstaking.  In that sense ‘Boulevard de l’Independence’ is a genuinely personal and homegrown triumph.  Toumani best expresses the crucial impulse behind this whole adventure in a sentence hidden in his eloquent sleeve notes that accompany the album.  He explains that he mixed old and new styles and instruments “so that even if we move towards other cultures, we would always remain guardians of our own.”

‘Boulevard de l’Independence’ is the second of three albums to have come out of the already revered Mandé Hotel recording sessions, masterminded by World Circuit boss Nick Gold.  The first was ‘In the Heart Of The Moon’.  And the last, due for release later this year, will be Ali Farka Toure’s solo guitar swansong.  This groundbreaking triptych of work celebrates the life of the old master instrumentalist of Malian music, Ali Farka Toure, whilst anointing his successor, Toumani Diabate.  It is rumoured that Toumani was with Ali Farka, at his bedside, until just a few hours before his death.  “As soon as I arrived back from LA where I had accepted the Grammy on both our behalves,” he recounts, “I went straight to Ali’s place to pay homage to him.  Because, let’s face it, Ali has done everything for me.  He was the Lion of the Desert.  He will always be the greatest among the greatest!”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006
First published in The Independent, March 2006

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