The security surrounding the camp was reportedly sparse at the time of the attack. Access was relatively easy. The bomb exploded when the camp’s parade ground was packed with soldiers preparing to go on patrol. In fact, the timing was so gruesomely perfect, and the livery of the fatal pickup truck apparently so similar to the one regularly used by the units in the camp, that many have jumped to the conclusion that the suicide bomber(s) had accomplices on the inside. The claim of responsibility issued by al-Mourabitoun, the armed jihadist group affiliated to al-Qaida and lead by the slippery terrorist mastermind Mokhtar Belmokhtar, only confirms what everyone immediately suspected: this is yet another, albeit the worst, atrocity in the long war of attrition between jihadist groups and central government in northern Mali.

But by far the most significant and potentially damaging aspect of the attack, in terms of Mali’s future peace and prosperity, is the nature of the military units that were targeted. The soldiers who died weren’t Malian army regulars, or UN troops, or Special Forces belonging to French army’s Barkhane mission, all of whom have been the subject of numerous attacks in recent years. They were part of the recently formed mixed-patrol units or MOCs – Operational Mechanism of Coordination to give them their technical name – promised in the Algiers peace accords signed by most of northern Mali’s non-jihadist warring parties in June 2015.

To anyone familiar with Mali’s recent troubles, the ‘mix’ embodied by these patrols is astonishing. One third of the six hundred men stationed in the camp in Gao were from the Coordination des Mouvements de l’Azawad (CMA), the umbrella group of anti-government rebel groups in northern Mali; another third were from La Platforme, the umbrella group of pro-government militias, and the last third from FAMA, the regular Malian army. In other words, three entities that have been in an almost constant state of antagonism towards each other for the past five years, are now sharing a military camp and conducting patrols together, in theory at least.

Despite the many delays and factional bickering that have marred their implementation, the very existence of these mixed patrol is, or at least was until a week ago, rare proof that Mali’s fragile peace process is shuffling in the right direction. In fact, their existence is of even deeper importance, for without the effective implementation of mixed patrols in the north, Mali’s feasibility as a nation state within its present borders will for ever remain in question.

It’s often been said that what legitimises any government is the monopoly it holds on violence. The Malian government’s weakness is that it hasn’t monopolised violence in the north, not for decades, and especially not since the end of the civil war of 2012, far from it. Among the reasons why the government has found it so hard to monopolise violence in the north is the fact its authority, and the presence of it army, has long been considered illegitimate by some groups of northerners, especially by the Touareg of the far north eastern Adagh region, where the first rebellion against the central government broke out in 1963.

Furthermore, the Malian army has never been properly constituted or equipped to monopolise violence in the north. Most of its soldiers are southerners who have little or no experience of fighting in the harsh steppes of the desert. The climate, the landscape, the territory, the people, everything is as strange to them as the mountains of Tibet to an inhabitant of Hong Kong. Back in the days before 2012, when there were Malian army barracks in most northern towns, its recruits appeared alien to many local people by dint of their language, their appearance, their attitudes. This isolation was occasionally mollified by an influx of locally recruited soldiers, most notably as part of the UN sponsored reinsertion programmes that followed the rebellions of 1990-1 and 2006. But the levels of interaction and cooperation between northerners and southerners in the army have never high enough to guarantee its efficacy as a fighting force.

This is why the mixed patrols are so important. They have a chance of succeeding where the regular army, as currently constituted, is bound to fail. They are the seeds of a effective home-grown security policy in northern Mali. The idea itself is hardly new. It was first officially proposed in the National Pact that was signed by rebel Touareg leaders and the central government in 1992, following the great Touareg rebellion of 1990-1. It’s rationale seemed solid: if the hardened desert fighters that populate the ranks of northern Mali’s armed-groups, both pro and anti government, to whom the deserts are entirely familiar because they are home, could team up with the Malian army to bring back security and a monopoly on violence, then everyone would be a winner.

Everyone that is apart from the jihadists and the criminal traffickers. Despite the many accusations of collusion (proven in some cases) between members of the CMA and La Platforme on the one hand, and jihadists and criminals on the other, there can be no doubt that security is the number one priority for most people in northern Mali, over and above either jihad or democracy, illicit wealth or clan advancement. Lack of security has been a major blight on the lives of ordinary people for far too long and the mixed patrols are, or were, their one hope of salvation.

The problem has always been that many politicians in Bamako and many southern Malians in general have balked at the idea of equipping rebel soldiers to police the north of the country. To them, hiring enemies of the state to carry out essential state duties seems highly illogical. As a result, the mixed patrols have always been grudgingly funded and supplied. I well remember one senior Touareg official lamenting the fact that the mixed patrols that were put in place after the rebellion of 2006 were given five 4×4 all-terrain vehicles to police the whole of northern Mali, an area at least a big as mainland Britain. Some people are now claiming that the poor and underfunded defences of the Gao camp made some kind of attack inevitable. Maybe it was even deliberate. The mixed patrol project is one idea that many would like to see ending in failure.

None more so than the jihadists and mafia godfathers. It’s not surprising that al-Mourabitoun decided to deliver such a devastating blow to the mixed patrols so soon after their creation. The prospect of their enemies uniting into an effective combat force, with popular backing, is one that they fear most

But their violence mustn’t be allowed to derail this initiative. However pitiful the images from Gao of the 77 coffins draped with Malian flags that have been published on the web in recent days, the mixed patrols must be given a chance to succeed. They’re too important for the peace and prosperity of the north and for Mali’s survival as a nation. And if President Trump really believes in his own inaugural promise to eradicate Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth, he could start by persuading the international community to provide the funds and the training necessary to ensure that mixed patrols in northern Mali continue to operate and eventually succeed.

Andy Morgan.

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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

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Songhoy Blues, Bamako, Feb 2012. (L-R) Garba, Ali, Nathaniel, Omar. (c) Andy Morgan.

Garba Touré and his guitar were a familiar sight on the streets of Diré, a dusty town on the banks on the Niger River, upstream from Timbuktu. But when armed jihadists took control of northern Mali in the spring of 2012, he knew it was time to leave.

“The first rebel group to arrive were the MNLA, but they weren’t against music, so there was no bad feeling between them and the population,” he tells me over the phone from the Malian capital Bamako. “But then Ansar Dine [‘Followers of the Faith’ – a local armed Islamist group] came and chased them out. They ordered people to stop smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and playing music. Even though I don’t smoke or drink, I love the guitar, so I thought, ‘this isn’t the moment to hang around. I have to go south.’”

Like many other thousands of refugees, Garba grabbed a bag, his guitar and boarded a bus to Bamako. His father, Oumar Toure, a famous musician who had played congas for Mali’s guitar legend, Ali Farka Toure, stayed behind with the family. The hard line Islamist gunmen drove music underground. The penalties for playing or even just listening to it on your mobile were a public whipping, a stint in an overcrowded jail or worse.

“When I arrived in Bamako the mood wasn’t great,” Garba remembers, “Different army factions were fighting each other. There were guns everywhere. All we heard was the scream of weapons. We weren’t used to that.”

Garba and some other musician friends from the north decided they couldn’t succumb to the feeling that their lives had been shipwrecked by the crisis. They had to form a band, if for no other reason than to boost the morale of other refugees like them. “We wanted to recreate that lost ambiance of the north and make all the refugees relive those northern songs.”

That’s how Songhoy Blues was born. ‘Songhoy’ because Garba Toure, lead vocalist Aliou Toure and second guitarist Oumar Toure, although unrelated to each other – ‘Toure’ is the equivalent of ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ northern Mali – all belong to the Songhoy people, one of the main ethnicities in the north. And ‘Blues’, not only because northern Mali is the cradle of the blues and its music is often referred to as ‘the desert blues’, but also because Garba and his mates are obsessed by that distant American cousin of their own blues. “My father used to make me listen to Jimi Hendrix. He’s one of my idols. But I also listen BB King and John Lee Hooker a lot.”

After signing up drummer Nathanael Dembélé from the local conservatoire, Songhoy Blues hit the Bamako club and maquis (a kind of local spit ‘n’ grit bar restaurant) circuit with their raucous guitar anthems dedicated to peace and reconciliation. People flocked to see them, not only fellow Songhoy, but also Touareg and other northern ethnicities. Even southerners came.

Anybody familiar with the enmity between the Songhoy and Touareg peoples left behind by Mali’s recent civil war will appreciate the how inspiring it must have been to see Touareg and Songhoy youth wigging out together in a Bamako bar.

Last September, an uncle told Garba that a group of European and American musicians and producers were coming to town under the banner of Africa Express. Garba called Marc-Antoine Moreau, one of the Africa Express organisers and, after passing an informal audition, Songhoy Blues were introduced to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, whose surname Garba pronounces Zeiner.

“Marco told us that Nick was a big American guitarist and asked us to collaborate with him. So the next day we went into the studio and did some takes with Nick. Everything went well, no problem. He’s a very simple person; a great guitarist but really modest.” The word simple is just about the greatest compliment a Malian can pay to another person. In the Malian French patois it means honest, down-to-earth and solid as a rock.

“We just walked into the studio not knowing what to expect,” Zinner recalls. “There was just one amp between all of us, so it was like ‘What are we gonna do here?’ But then they showed up, sat down, said ‘hi’, and thirty seconds later they were playing music, amazing music.”

One result of these sessions a track called ‘Soubour’ which means ‘patience’. “We’re asking the refugees to have patience,” Garba explains. “Without patience, nothing is possible.” A video of ‘Sobour’ featuring Zinner and friends has now gone viral. Is the rawest, spikiest and most electrifying dollop of desert r’n’b you’re likely to hear this year or next, but it remains proudly Malian and African.

Working with musicians who had just seen music outlawed in their homeland was humbling experience for Zinner. “It’s impossible for a westerner like myself to imagine it,” he says. “Like, truly unfathomable. And knowing the reasons why a lot of the musicians that we were working and hanging out with had come to Bamako really added another dimension to the whole experience. Like…a real intensity.”

Like the great majority of Malian Muslims, Garba has no truck with hard line Salafist attitudes to music. “The world without music? It would be like a prison, right?,” he says. “Music causes no harm and what’s more you can educate an entire population using music. Maybe in previous generations, music could have been condemned by religion, but not now.”

Africa Express has invited Songhoy Blues to London to appear at the launch of Maison des Jeunes (Transgressive), the album of recordings made last October during the Bamako trip. Songhoy Blues and other emerging Malian talents, like the seraphim-voiced Kankou Kouyate, who is also appearing at the launch, feature alongside Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Ghostpoet, Nick Zinner and an eclectic mix of other artists and producers. To Garba and his fellow band-members, the whole experience has been like a dream that dropped out of a deep blue African sky.

“There we were living in the north,” he says. “We were told that if we played music we could get our hands chopped off. Then we arrived in Bamako, in a state of emergency. We had to go to the Ministry of the Interior to ask for permission to play. But then, by the grace of God, the atmosphere returned. Africa Express came and we were invited to play in London. Really and truly, it’s an explosive joy for us, an explosive joy! We can’t even begin to explain that joy.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

First published in The Guardian – December 2013

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A camel procession at the Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk Festival, Essouk, Adagh 2007. (c) Andy Morgan

I wrote this article when the uprising that later plunged Mali into its worst crisis since independence was only weeks old. Most people outside Mali, the Sahara, or the tiny community of international Sahara ‘experts’, were racing to update their understanding of a region that had hitherto been largely ignored. Having been blessed with the opportunity to visit Kidal and the north east of Mali on various occasions as manager of Tinariwen, I felt obliged to weigh in with whatever I knew about the Adagh region of northeastern Mali, its people and its struggles, just to try and provide a little ballast to the breathless ‘semi-blind’ international debate that had suddenly blown up around Mali for the first time in its history.  I hoped that this would be useful especially to anglophone observers, who tended to know even less about the issue that their Francophone counterparts.

Reading through the article now I realise that, like many other interested parties, I was guilty of some naivety at the time. I wasn’t ‘in situ’ (no journalists were), and I underestimated the power and ‘infiltration’ of both AQIM and Iyad ag Ghali’s Ansar Dine.  To be fair, most people did, especially those who had had dealings with the Touareg of northern Mali for years and who couldn’t quite believe that Iyad, a hero of Touareg nationalism, could suddenly be flying the black flag of jihad and claiming that he had no interest in an independent Azawad.  I still hold to my bald statement that “In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle.”  For most people involved, Islamism and Jihad are proxies for deeper desires for security, cultural independence, opportunity, economic gain etc etc.  I say ‘most’, because there are of course plenty of idealists fighting under the jihadi banner in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But I also believe there are also more ‘realists’ involved than we dare to imagine: young men who have seen every path to peace, security and happiness closed to them and feel they only have Islam, the Quran and the kalash left.  

I also detect naivety in my analysis of the MNLA and their preparations for the uprising. Their desire to avoid previous failures was genuine, but they also made some blunt mistakes, not least their short-lived association with Ansar Dine and by extension, with AQIM, during the latter part of March and early 2012.  So if you still have the courage to read on, all I can say is thanks for attention and your forbearance, Andy (July 2014).

“Long live Azawad!” “May Allah Bless Mali!”

Through December and early January, the tone of the exchanges on various Touareg chat forums was expectant, frustrated, even desultory at times. Everybody knew something big was about to happen. They had known for some time already. But when exactly?. The wait was excruciating. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, January 17^th 2012, a new Touareg rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) attacked the town of Menaka in the north east of Mali.

Messages of support and relief poured in from Mali, Niger, Libya, France, Saudi Arabia and the entire Touareg diaspora. “The hour has come. We urge all Azawadians to lend their hand in the fight to liberate our Azawad,” wrote a blogger called Targui Rebel Boy. “Aguel’hoc is free and now we’re going to liberate Tessalit. Vive Azawad!” wrote another surfer. “The flag of Azawad is floating everywhere, even over some towns that have not yet been conquered,” and “Long live Azawad, long live Freedom!” went the patriotic outpouring. One online sympathiser, with an almost Churchillian grasp of the magnitude of the moment, urged everyone to make a note of the date, “for 17^th January 2012 will live for ever in history.”

There was also internet traffic bearing different perspectives and different emotions of course. As the MNLA quickly moved on from Menaka to attack the towns of Tessalit and Aguel’hoc further north, and casualties began to be reported on both sides, some Touareg bloggers questioned the wisdom of taking up arms once more against the central powers in Bamako, the capital of Mali. “War is always ugly,” they claimed. “Dialogue is always better.”

The Malian press meanwhile sharpened its fangs and unleashed a torrent of invective against the Touareg rebels, calling them “armed bandits”, “drug traffickers”, “AQIM collaborators” and “Ghadafi mercenaries.” The news agency, Agence France Press, picked up and relayed these same catchphrases throughout the world, in reports that seemed to rely almost entirely on Malian army sources for their version of what was actually happening 1,200 km away in the far north east of the country. Southern Malian bloggers were even cruder and more violent in their attacks. “A warning to those little wankers from the North…Fun time is over!” read the text accompanying a video of elite Malian army units parading in front of President Amadou Toumani Touré. “Those rebels don’t know about dialogue. They must be killed, killed, killed!” and “May God save Mali from this useless war!” or “Long live the Malian army…may Allah bless Mali!”

The international press lead with the angles of the story that are of greatest concern to the international community; The fallout from Ghadafi’s overthrow and Islamic terrorism in the shape of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The general assumption was that this new uprising was a direct result of the Libyan civil war and of the weaponry and demobbed Ghadafi mercenaries that flooded back down into the Sahel to the lands of their origin in the wake of the dictator’s demise. Another generally accepted viewpoint was that the north east of Mali had become a cauldron of crime, islamic terrorism and insecurity, and that the MNLA were but a symptom of the the furies that plague this deeply dysfunctional corner of the southern Sahara.

Neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM are the prime movers.

In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle. The first rebellion of the nomadic Touareg, (or Kel Tamashek – ‘the Tamashek speaking people’ – as they prefer to be known) against the central government of Mali broke out in 1963 when a young renegade called Alladi Ag Alla attacked two camel-mounted policemen or goumiers in a remote region north of the town of Kidal. Mali had only just won its independence from France, and the Kel Tamashek, detached from world events in their far flung desert home, simply could not understand why their cherished independence and age old nomadic culture had been subsumed into a new state ruled by black Africans living hundreds of miles away who had never proved their right nor their fitness to become the Touareg’s new masters. It was to be six years before Ghadafi grabbed power in Libya in a military coup and 44 years before the Algerian terrorist group, the GSPC, rebranded itself as AQIM and became the north African franchise of a successful global Islamic terror movement.

That first Touareg uprising in 1963 lasted barely a year before it was crushed with unforgettable brutality by the Malian army under the command of the infamous Captain Diby Sillas Diarra, the ‘butcher’ of Kidal. The northeast of Mali then became a no-go area ruled by martial law. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of extreme drought and suffering in the region that saw many thousands of Kel Tamashek flee their homelands and take refuge in the neighbouring countries of Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. They say that the word ‘Touareg’ means something like ‘abandoned by God’ in Arabic, and in those years of drought and exile, this foreign name seemed cruelly apt.

In June 1990, the second great Touareg rebellion broke out when Iyad Ag Ghali, the leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MPLA), attacked a police post in Menaka with a small group of soldiers recently returned from army camps in Libya. The parallels with the outbreak of these latest hostilities are stark. The 1990 uprising ended in an Algerian brokered peace treaty and the National Pact of 1992. The Touareg movement then dissolved into a bitter soup of acrimony and acronyms as the MPLA split along ethnic and tribal fault lines into four different factions. The northeast was given a certain measure of self-determination by the government in Bamako. Rebel leaders and soldiers were ‘re-inserted’ into the Malian army and administration. But the main clauses of the National Pact were never honoured, and Kel Tamashek resentment simmered away for the next fourteen years. On 23^rd May 2006 a new rebel group, the Democratic Alliance of May 23^rd for Change (ADC) attacked Malian army installations in Kidal and Menaka before retreating to a well stocked base in the Tegharghar hills north of Kidal. Algeria once again stepped in to broker a new peace deal and a new treaty, known as the Algiers Accords, which basically restated many of the demands made in the National Pact. These included greater autonomy for the Kidal region, greater recognition of the Tamashek language and culture in the national media and in education, the formation of special security units staffed by local Touareg, economic development in the region, a proper airport for Kidal and a special tax regime for the north to encourage investment. For the next six years the north eastern of Mali grumbled and groaned under an uneasy peace, while the refusenik Touareg war lord Ibrahim Ag Bahanga kept the flame of revolt alive by attacking the army and taking hostages and the implementation of the Algiers Accords stalled, then ground to a halt amid bitter accusations and recriminations on both sides.   On January 17^th of this year, it all kicked off again. For the Kel Tamashek, this is the fourth roll of the dice in a very long struggle for autonomy.

This uprising is different

The mild cynicism of some veteran observers of Saharan politics as they contemplate yet another uprising in the north of Mali can be forgiven. Previous revolts have adhered to a certain pattern of failure that has repeated itself in varying degrees: a group of well connected and disgruntled Kel Tamashek community leaders, usually all veterans of the great 1990 uprising, form a new rebel group with a freshly minted acronym. They attack a Malian army base in Menaka, Kidal or Tinzawaten, kill a few soldiers, then retreat to the hills as soon as reinforcements loom on the horizon and wait there while politicians in Bamako, Tripoli or Algiers work out a way of getting everyone around the negotiating table. Then a deal is thrashed out which comprises the enticing lure of financial incentives for the rebel foot soldiers and ‘jobs for the boys’ in the administration or the army for the rebel leaders. A pact or accord is signed, the rebels go back home and the Malian government proceeds to ignore most of its promises. The frustration mounts again over a number years, and, when the requisite level of tension and dissatisfaction is reached, the whole process repeats itself. Meanwhile, the average Touareg man, woman and child slips deeper into despondency, unemployment, poverty and general despair.

However, there are a number of key reasons why this latest uprising is different from all the others. First and foremost the level of preparation and forethought on the rebel side is unique in Touareg rebel history. In 1990, Iyad ag Ghali and his small troupe reportedly went into battle armed with two old hunting carbines and a length of rope. In 1963 the Touareg arsenal comprised a few old Mauser rifles alongside traditional takouba swords. In 2006 the rebels were better armed, allegedly by Algeria, but the rebel movement wasn’t primed for a long battle. In 2012, the MNLA have assembled one of the most impressive arsenals ever seen in the north of Mali.

Some of the MNLA’s weaponry has come from Libya. Some it was already in Mali. Some of it has been stolen from weapons stores by Touareg and Arab officers and soldiers who have deserted the Malian army. What is now becoming clear however is that the process of assembling this impressive stockpile of weaponry, and bringing together the soldiers and officers that would eventually use it, was part of a carefully preconceived plan that had been several years in the execution. The main man behind that plan was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, Mali’s public enemy number one and the recalcitrant hero of hawkish Touareg everywhere.

Ibrahim Ag Bahanga – The man who had a plan

A veteran of the 1990 rebellion, Ag Bahanga was one of the leaders of the 2006 uprising, alongside Iyad Ag Ghali, Hassan Ag Fagaga and Ahmed Ag Bibi. However, he soon grew disgruntled with the compromises that his fellow rebels in the ADC seemed prepared to make in their negotiations with Mali, and their willingness to hand in their arms before any of the promises made by the Malian government had been delivered. In September 2007, Ag Bahanga formed a new splinter group called the Northern Malian Touareg Alliance for Change (ATNMC). For the next year and half, until he was finally driven off Malian soil by Malian army-backed militias, Ag Bahanga lead a campaign of harassment and terror against the Malian army and security apparatus. It included kidnapping upwards of 80 Malian soldiers and holding them hostage for months, and a number of ambushes and daring raids against army posts, especially the one in Tinzawaten, a village right up against Mali’s border with Algeria, which was Ag Bahanga’s ancestral home and fiefdom.

After his defeat in February 2009 and the disbanding of the ATNMC rebel camps, Ag Bahanga was given refuge in Libya. He then dipped off the media radar screen for almost two years, until his return to Mali in January 2011.   It now appears that far from idly luxuriating in some grace and favour Libyan villa on Ghadafi’s pay roll, Ag Bahanga used his time in Libya to conceive and execute a master plan designed to give the Touareg movement a military capacity that would offer it at least some hope of fighting a successful war against Mali. He began to talk to a group of 1990 rebel veterans who had left Mali in disgust after the signing of the 1992 National Pact and become senior officers in the Libyan army, commanding special elite units set up by Ghadafi to fight his desert wars. Most prominent among them was Colonel Mohammed Ag Najm.

When the first cracks began to appear in the foundations of the Ghadafi dictatorship, shortly after protests began in Benghazi in February 2011, Ag Bahanga and a few close allies set about putting their plan into action. They got to work persuading Ag Najm and his fellow Touareg officers in the Libyan army to abandon their posts and return to Mali with as much weaponry as possible. By early summer, as the Ghadafi regime started to disintegrate, Ag Bahanga’s plan was already well on the road. Touareg army defectors travelled south west in convoys with large stocks of arms and ammunition, including BM21 and BTR60 ground to ground and ground to air missiles. The Libyan returnees set up camps in Zakak, Tin Assalak and Takalote, all locations in the remote Tegharghar hills not far from Kidal. More arms and more defectors kept arriving and both Mali and the international community started to become increasingly worried.

On the afternoon of August 26^th, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga was killed in a car crash not far from his base at Tin Assalak. He had many enemies: the Malian army, the Malian people, other Touareg leaders who resented his uncompromising belligerence, Arab drug traffickers whom he had confronted and robbed on numerous occasions and the secret services of both Algeria and Libya for whom Ag Bahanga was often an intolerable liability. Nonetheless, many who knew Ag Bahanga well and were close to him deny any dark dimension to his death, claiming that he perished when his vehicle somersaulted at speed on one of the desert’s dirt tracks. Others say that his vehicle was shot to pieces by arms smugglers, or drug traffickers or a branch of Al Qaida, possibly all three of these in one.   Whatever happened, his death left a large hole in the bourgeoning revolutionary project, but it wasn’t large enough to stop it.

Ghadafi and the Touareg were never good friends nor faithful allies.

Colonel Ag Najm and his fellow Touareg officers’ abandonment of the Ghadafi cause and the general pilfering of Libyan arms by Touareg from northeastern Mali goes some way to contradicting those who insist that the Touareg have always been ardent Ghadafi loyalists and blind allies in his games of power and terror.   Since the mid 1970s, the relationship between Ghadafi and the Touareg has been one of mutual opportunism rather than shared ideals or common destiny. When the Touareg needed a refuge from poverty, drought and joblessness in the 1970s, oil-rich and underpopulated Libya was one of the countries they turned to. When the nascent Touareg rebel movement needed someone to fund their struggle for self-determination in the 1980s, Ghadafi provided army training, a base, some equipment and financial backing. The fact that he then went on to use ‘his’ Touareg fighters in his wars against Chad and Israel whilst never demonstrating any real desire to make the Touareg revolt actually happen, reveals the Libyan dictator’s true intentions.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Ghadafi uttered many fine words about being a nomad and a spiritual brother of the Touareg, and about how the Sahara should be a borderless region, free to all his native sons and daughters. In truth he played double games with aplomb, funding Touareg dissent with small occasional gifts whilst investing enormous sums of money in the energy, water, industry and tourism infrastructure of Mali as a whole. “Ghadafi never helped us,” a veteran of the 1990 rebellion once said to me. “He never did anything for the north. All the money he spent went to the south. We helped him, not the other way around.” When Ghadafi finally starting loosing the Libyan civil war, the greatest demonstrations of support for his regime didn’t occur in the northern parts of Mali, among the Touareg, as some might have expected. They occurred in the heart of the capital Bamako, where tens of thousands of southern Malians took to the streets to voice their approval of the Libyan dictator and their hatred of the USA, Britain, France and the United Nations.

Ghadafi and the Touareg were never really good friends or faithful allies. They were never more than partners in a game of coincidental self-interest. True, there were many Touareg fighting on the Ghadafi side in last year’s Libyan civil war. But they were often obliged or paid to do so. It was matter of expediency rather than belief. Through times of drought and marginalisation in the 1980s and 1990s, and even right up until last year, anything has often seemed preferable to a life of poverty and starvation back in the Malian desert, including a stint the Libyan army. And it must also be remembered that a sizeable number of Touareg also fought for the National Transitional Council (NTC) against Ghadafi. So did many Imazighen or Berbers, a fact that is often forgotten by both western powers and die-hard Arab supremacists in Libya.

In an extraordinarily frank and revealing interview given to the Algerian newspaper El Watan just a few days before his death, Ag Bahanga didn’t mince his words about Ghadafi: “[his fall] is good news for all the Touareg of the region,” he said. “The aims of the colonel [Ghadafi] have always been opposed to our aspirations. All he ever did was try to use the Touareg for his own ends and to the detriment of the community. His departure from Libya opens a new path to a better future and allows us to progress in our political demands… Ghadafi was a barrier to every solution of the Touareg question.”

Brain storming at the Zakak base – The eternal problem of disunity.

With Bahanga gone, the build up of arms and soldiers in the north east of Mali continued. In early October, all the various leaders of a burgeoning new Touareg rebel movement gathered together in the Zakak base for what can only be described as ten days of soul-searching and brain storming. “We discussed the past errors of certain leaders of the movement,” says Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed, who was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga’s father-in-law and spokesperson of his ATNMC rebel group. “We talked about where things had gone wrong and tried to agree on a plan and on some common objectives. We created a ruling council, a military état majeur, commanded and coordinated by Mohammed Ag Najm and other senior officers. There are about 40 of them. And we also created a political bureau, which set about analysing and considering all the political aspects including how to raise awareness among the international community, especially the regional powers.”

Past errors boiled down essentially to three areas: weakness of military strategy and material, lack of a strong intellectual and political branch and disunity. Of those three, disunity has always been the biggest problem in previous uprisings. The French conquered the Sahara by fomenting internal divisions within the old Touareg confederations, turning tribal leaders against each other and vassal clans against the nobility. The government of Mali adopted precisely the same strategy after independence in 1960. The first rebellion of 1963 was weakened by the disagreement between Intallah Ag Attaher, the current aged hereditary leader of the Kel Adagh Touareg and his brother Zeid Ag Attaher. Intallah favoured cooperation and cohabitation with Mali. Zeid favoured revolt and was eventually captured and imprisoned by Mali in their infamous jail near the remote salt mines of Taodenni.

In 1990, the MPLA splintered after the signing of the Tamanrasset accords. Iyad Ag Ghali, who belongs to the ruling Ifoghas clan of the Kel Adagh, remained as the head of the MPA, having dropped the word ‘Liberation’ from the name of his movement in order to make it more appealing to moderate Touareg and to the Malians. Many other Ifoghas leaders remained loyal to Iyad and the MPA. The ‘lower class’ Tamashek clans in the region, especially the Imghad, a subordinate ‘vassal’ clan to the Ifoghas, split from Iyad’s group and formed the Revolutionary Army for the Liberation of Azawad (ARLA), which was lead by nobles from the Taghat Mellet and Idnan clans. ARLA also represented some Iklan, or former slaves.   The Popular Liberation Front of Azawad (FPLA) were hardliners, opposed to the idea of making peace with Mali before the rebellion’s primary aims were realised. They were made up mainly of Kel Antessar Touareg from the Timbuktu region and Chamanamas from Menaka. Then there was the Armed Islamic Front of Azawad (FIAA) which was composed mainly of northern Arabs and Moors. It had a more religious character than the other rebel movements and was closely allied to Mauritania and Algeria. All these four movements were represented at one time or another by a kind of umbrella rebel organisation called the Movement of United Fronts of Azawad (MFUA).

Needless to say, all this division and splintering did nothing for the strength of the rebel movement as a whole and it quickly allowed Mali to regain control of events. Things weren’t that much better in 2006, when the ADC eventually split between a faction dominated by Ifoghas Touareg on the one hand and different factions lead by Taghat Mellet, Idnan, Imghad and Chamanamas on the other, all of whom accused the Ifoghas of hogging the limelight in the negotiations and seeking their benefit above all. Ag Bahanga’s schism and his creation of the ATNMC was an outward sign of these internal splits.

These bewildering divisions within the Touareg community pale in terms of the strife and damage caused when compared to the ethnic wars that have been unleashed by Malian policies of divide and rule. The darkest ethnic conflict in the modern history of northern Mali began in 1992 with the formation of the Patriotic Malian Movement Ganday Koy (MPMGK) or just Ganda Koy for short, a Songhoi militia that was backed and funded by the Malian army, and whose main aim seems to have been to foist terror on innocent Touareg and Arab civilians. The Ganda Koy perpetrated several massacres in the Gao and Timbuktu areas in the mid 1990s, the most famous of which was a massacre of around 60 Touareg marabout or holy men from the Kel Essouk clan in a camp near Gao in October 1994.

Is the rebel movement more united this time? The answer is yes. At least, so far. The talks in the Zakak camp allowed various concerns and age old gripes to be aired and a basic consensus to be established around a shared set of goals and an agreed division of roles and responsibilities. The political leader of the MNLA is Bilal Ag Cherif. But while the Ifoghas still hold on to their historical role as the political leaders of the Touareg in north eastern Mali, a great deal of effort has been made to spread the message and raise awareness of the MNLA and its aims among the entire population of the north, in all its various ethnic groups and across all the strata of its society, and bring people from all the different clans and factions under one umbrella. Talking to various Touareg friends in the past few months, the general sense of hope united behind the MNLA was palpable.

Having said that, there are many Touareg, especially Imghad and Kel Antessar, who are staying loyal to Mali. They include numerous Malian army officers and soldiers, as well local mayors, deputies and senior administrators. A whole group of about 300 Touareg fighters who returned from the war in Libya late last summer, lead by Colonel Waki Ag Ossad, an Imghad Touareg, made great play of their fealty to the Malian state. They were received with great fanfare by President Adama Toumani Touré at the Koulouba Palace in Bamako. “We didn’t come back to create a division between communities, and even less to divide the state,” declared Ag Ossad. “The military material that we have brought with us is there to be used by our country, which is Mali. We’ve come to contribute to and maintain peace and security in the north.”

Every rebellion eventually turns into an ethnic war

The MNLA have also made strenuous efforts to present themselves as a revolutionary movement for the liberation of ALL the peoples of Azawad – Touareg, Songhoi, Arab, Peul – and not just a Touareg rebel movement.   Azawad is the name they give to the independent state they are seeking to create, which they say will comprise the three main provinces of Northern Mali: Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu. If an independent Azawad were to exist, it would relieve Mali of more than 50% of its actual surface area. The MNLA also say they have no designs on parts of the Sahara inhabited by the Touareg that exist over the border in Niger, Algeria and Libya. They claim that there are large numbers of Arabs and Songhoi already fighting on their side. It’s true that certain important Arab leaders, such as Baba Ould Sidi Elmoctar, the hereditary chief of the influential Arab Kounta tribe, have already thrown in their lot with MNLA. As I write, there are also reports arriving from the desert that northern Arabs in the towns of Leré, Timbuktu and Goundam who are leaving to join MNLA in the field.

Whether or not MNLA can bind together all the different tribal and ethnic groups in Northern Mali until its aims are achieved is still a moot point. Even before open revolt broke out last Tuesday, there were dark mutterings about a resurgence of Ganda Koy vigilante activity. The founder of the movement, Imam Mohammed n’Tissa Maiga, made his intention to rearm and get his militia ready for the growing threat from Touareg rebels quite plain back in early December. In the past few days, reports from Gao and Timbuktu claim that the Malian army is handing out cash and arms to Songhoi men and urging them to go and attack anyone suspected of sympathy with the MNLA. The spectre of tribal war haunts the north once again. And not only reports, the houses of several prominent Touaregs in the garrison town of Kati near Timbuktu have been burned by angry mobs wielding machetes and as I right, Touareg and Arabs in Bamako, easily distinguishable by their lighter skin, as suffering attacks on their person and their property.

The private militias within the Malian army

Even more dangerous to the MNLA than the Ganda Koy are the ethnically based militias that have been fighting the Touareg alongside the Malian army since 2008.   It was during that year that the Malian high command finally realised the futility of sending raw recruits from the southern savannah regions of the country to fight Ibrahim Ag Bahanga and the ATNMC in the arid deserts of the north.   The Sahara is completely alien to most southern Malians, and soldiers from the south have never had much luck at defeating hardened Touareg fighters in their own environment.   So the Malian generals changed their strategy and invited two senior army officers from north to form and train their own militias. The first is a Touareg called El Hadj Gamou, an imghad, who seems to harbour a visceral disdain for the Ifoghas Touareg who are the historical ‘nobility’ in the Adagh des Ifoghas, the name given to the Kidal region by the French in the late 19^th century. The imghad were a subservient or ‘vassal’ clan in the old days, and many imghad Touareg favoured the more egalitarian society that Mali imposed in the north east after independence. The Touareg rebellion has its own element of internal class warfare.

Gamou is the most senior Malian army officer in the region, a feared and ruthless soldier whom the MNLA have accused of numerous human rights abuses in recent days, including torture. His militia is run like a private army which exacts retribution and submission from both professional and private enemies, by force if necessary. The other main militia fighting with the Malian army is lead by Major Colonel Abderahmane Ould Meydou, the trim and square-jawed northern Arab who has also, like Gamou managed to carve out an fearsome reputation as an able and daring desert soldier. The MNLA announced his death in action with great glee a few days after the outbreak of recent hostilities, only to emit a collective groan when Ould Meydou subsequently appeared on national TV to denounce rumours of his demise, looking fit, relaxed and debonaire.

The ranks of Ould Meydou’s Arab or ‘Berabiche’ militias were swelled just before the outbreak of hostilities on January 12^th thanks to a deal brokered by the Malian government. In return for the recruitment and training of Arab militiamen, a super-rich northern Arab businessman by the name of Mohamed Ould Aiwanatt was released from prison where he was serving a sentence for the role he played in a major drugs-trafficking operation known as Air Cocaine. This extraordinary episode involved a entire Boeing 727 stuffed full of cocaine that flew into the Sahara from Venezuela and landed in the remote desert north of a village called Tarkint. The cocaine was then unloaded into a convoy of 4×4 vehicles and disappeared eastwards into the desert, probably en route for Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans and finally Europe. The mayor of Tarkint, Baba ould Cheickh, a close advisor to the Malian President, was implicated alongside Ould Aiwanatt in this and several other major drugs scandals. Aiwanatt’s release from gaol and the hypocritical behaviour of the Malian government in their so-called war on drugs and insecurity infuriated Touareg opinion, and added more than a strand of straw to the load that eventually broke their back and drove them to war.

Gamou’s and Ould Meydou’s militias were the weapon that eventually allowed Mali to subdue Ag Bahanga’s ATNMC in January 2009. Bamako is no doubt hoping that they can do the same again to the MNLA, even though it presents a challenge of an entirely different order to Ag Bahanga’s underfunded and poorly equipped crew.

All in all, unity and disunity will be among the biggest challenges to the success of the MNLA uprising. It has always been the Touareg movement’s greatest challenge. No wonder so many desert songs by Touareg bands like Tinariwen and Tamikrest lament the lack of unity in Touareg society, and berate Touareg leaders and politicians for succumbing to tribalism and Malian games of divide and rule. Bamako plays its hand subtly and expertly when the need arises. One of the current MNLA representatives in Nouakchott, Mauritania, and senior political figure from Mali’s north east, Nina Walet Intallou explained how it works: “Mali sends someone, some senior figure in the administration, who is a relative of one of the rebels, to have a discrete word with him and bring him back to the road of peace with promises of money, favours and preferment. Then they send a minister to speak to the leaders of his clan and persuade them to follow the path of peace. That’s not negotiation.”

The Sahara’s Facebook generation

Another novelty in this uprising is the presence of a strong and very active ‘intellectual’ wing in the Touareg independence movement. By intellectual, I mean one whose main concern is policy, communication, influence, diplomacy and engagement in geo-political affairs, rather than fighting out in the bush. The lack of such a dimension has been a weakness of Touareg uprisings since the earliest days. Most rebel leaders have felt more comfortable out in the desert leading their troops than pressing the flesh in the corridors of power. When there have been political men of any worth, their work has often been hampered by a mutual mistrust between them and the military leadership. There’s an apocryphal story about Ibrahim Ag Bahanga that illustrates this lack of intellectual capacity in a damning way. During his time as a renegade in the remote Adagh des Ifoghas a few years ago, Ag Bahanga once received an envoy with an important message from the government in Bamako. The envoy handed over the sealed letter and Ag Bahanga proceeded to open it and, holding the missive upside down, pretended to read it thoughtfully. He then told the messenger that he would “think the proposal over” and sent him away.

Ag Bahanga was a man of many talents, but written correspondence and the fine arts of communication weren’t among them. He was in his element at the head of a rebel group out in remoteness of the desert bush, not in the fine gilded halls of ministries in Bamako, Tripoli, Algiers or Paris. It was often left to his father in law and spokesperson, Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed to be Ag Bahanga’s ‘voice’ on the international stage. Ag Sid’Ahmed is now the chief spokesperson of MNLA, and one of the more worldly and politically experienced men at the head of the movement. But even he recognises the need for an active and engaged ‘intellectual’ dimension to the MNLA project, and his co-revolutionaries agreed that this was a great failing in the past.

Cue the National Movement for Azawad or MNA, an organisation that was created by a group of young Touareg students and graduates in late 2010.   These well educated, internet savvy and youthful revolutionaries gathered together in Timbuktu at the end of October of that year and declared their intention to find a political, legal and peaceful route to Azawadi independence. Their discourse was non-tribal, non-ethnic, inclusive, literate and fluent. In their first declaration, issued as a press release, on November 1^st they wrote:   “Today, Azawad has become a zone of conflict fought over by countries and extremist groups who care only for their own interests. As for the Azawadis themselves, they are simply caught between the anvil and the hammer of so called terrorist groups. Azawad is now prone to all manner of regional and international interventions…in which the people of Azawad are given no role at all, except that of a useless spectator, forced to look on while the image of their homeland is ruined and its national riches plundered by governments and multi-national companies….Aware of the pain that our people have suffered for decades, as sons of the nation and defenders of a cultural identity threatened with extinction, who are merely perpetuating the struggle of the ancestors, whilst adhering to universal human values…we announce today the birth of a National Movement of Azawad (MNA).”

At the end of this inaugural meeting, two of the MNA’s leaders, Moussa Ag Acharatoumane and Boubacar Ag Fadil, were imprisoned for treasonous activities damaging to the territorial integrity of the state. They soon became Facebook heroes, a cause célèbre among the youth of the Touareg diaspora. After numerous demonstrations and petitions they were freed. Acharatoumane and his fellow revolutionaries had already set about disseminating the message of revolution among the younger demographic of the northern deserts. Their work resulted in several small demonstrations in Kidal, Menaka and Timbuktu, that occurred around the same time as the launch of the MNA.   These events marked the emergence of the Sahara’s own Facebook generation, one acutely conscious of its role models in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere, and energised by the idea of flexing its own people power.   The MNA soon set up a functioning and well maintained website as well as a very active Facebook forum and an online newspaper called Toumast Press, which features well written and well argued, although admittedly partial, articles about the current situation in the desert.   Apart from anything else, this new generation is less encumbered by the divisions, the compromises and the defeats of the past. They are free of the cynicism that is born out of defeat. Their horizon is straight, clear and blue and nothing less than victory will satisfy them.

As soon as hostilities commenced on January 17^th, a continuous flow of communiqués and updates by Ag Acharatoumane, Ag Sid’Ahmed and other MNLA spokespersons started to be posted up on the web and circulated via online social networks. This energetic PR was in stark contrast to the almost complete lack of communication by the ADC in the first few days of the uprisings in May 2006, a void which allowed all kind of crazy assumptions and claims to be made by the Malian army and circulated without hindrance by the international press. The propaganda war is a great deal more involved this time round, and the two sides are more evenly matched.

The MNLA – a better balanced and muli-faceted movement

With the inclusion of the ‘internet generation’ rebels in the MNA, the MNLA has achieved a better balance than previous rebel movements. “It’s important to define who is who in this movement so that there’s no blurring of boundaries with other agendas and issues,” says MNLA spokesperson Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed. “Mohammed Ag Najm has come back from Libya with officers and men. There are also those who have deserted from the Malian army, more than six senior army officers. There were fighters who were with Ibrahim Ag Bahanga in the ATNMC. And then there was this new elite from the younger Touareg generation, who were very present on the ground and who had done some very good work raising awareness among the population of the Azawad.”

Alongside this new composition of the rank and file, there have been changes in the rebel movement’s leadership, and with that, a change in its all important relationships and ties to Algeria and Libya.   Iyad Ag Ghali is no longer the boss, and the crust of compromise that has adhered to his name ever since the national pact of 1992, his less than crystal ties with the Malian government and Algerian governments and military intelligence services, with Libya and others, has been chipped away and discarded by the new movement.   This is a crucial development. All previous uprisings were successfully manipulated, or ‘defused’ depending on your point of view, by Algeria and Libya. The fact that both countries have also been accused of being the instigators and supporters of these same uprisings demonstrates the mind boggling complexity of southern Saharan politics.

A different relationship with Libya and Algeria

The prospect of Touareg autonomy in northern Mali has never been attractive to either Libya or Algeria. In fact, all the nations in the region have always viewed the idea of independent Azawad with absolute horror. Both Algiers and Tripoli have always known that at the first sign of a truly successful Touareg uprising in Mali, their own Touareg populations in the south would inevitably begin to harbour up some very uncomfortable notions of their own potential autonomy. But the threat doesn’t end there. Ever since the outbreak of hostilities, the various disgruntled Berber populations of Algeria and Libya have been voicing their unbridled support for the MNLA and their delight at the prospect of fellow Berbers (the Kel Tamashek are a branch of the wider Imazighen family) giving a culturally oppressive regime a bloody nose. The most in depth interview accorded to any MNLA representative yet has been the one that spokesperson Mossa Ag Attaher gave to the Berber website www.tamazgha.fr   The messages of support from Berber secessionist organisations such as the Movement for an Autonomous Kabylia (MAK) or World Amazigh Congress (CMA) have been effusive.

Ghadafi is no longer around to muddy the waters on behalf of Libya, and the NTC have too many problems of their own to take a very active part in what’s happening in northern Mali. That leaves Algeria. When the MNLA tried to capture the northern town of Tessalit on January 20^th, they learned that there were a number of Algerian army trainers and special ops personnel in the nearby Malian army camp at Amachache. The MNLA commander gave them 24 hours to leave, but rather than obeying, the Algerians proceeded to send more soldiers to Amachache and resupply the base. Far from instigating this rebellion, or supporting it, or even manoeuvring into their usual position as peace brokers, it seems that Algeria has thrown it’s lot in with the Malian government against the rebels. The truth is that Algeria has been excluded from the action this time round and so it has decided to play hard and show its true colours by supporting Mali in an attempt to make sure that an independent Azawad never sees the light of day.

“Since 1963, the attitude of Algeria has always been that if Mali gives autonomy to the Touareg of Azawad, they’ll also have problems with their Touareg,” agrees Nina Walet Intallou. “In reality, they’ve always wanted to take over this region. They see it as part of Algeria. When you think that there was the Algerian consulate in Gao that would give Algerian nationality to anyone who asked for it, from Kidal or anywhere, that’s proof. But it isn’t Algeria or Libya that will intervene this time round. From now on, we will only address our problems to the United Nations and the European Community.”

The fact that Algeria has been excluded from the party is possibly linked to the recent fall from grace of Iyad Ag Ghali. “When we created the MNLA there were many of us who said that Ibrahim Ag Bahanga had been too manipulated by Iyad,” a senior MNLA political figure explained to me. “The condition that people gave before putting their confidence in Ag Bahanga and his people was that he detach himself from Iyad, because of all the mistakes that Iyad made in the past. Iyad was totally in favour of the Tamanrasset accords [of 1991] but once they were signed, he never spoke about them again. He never opened his mouth to denounce what happened afterwards, even though he was supposed to be the leader of the entire Touareg movement. In creating the MNLA, we wanted new people in charge, who had serious objectives, and not people who would drag us between Mali and Algeria.”

The sidelining of Iyad Ag Ghali and his islamist vision

The story goes that Iyad Ag Ghali came to the meetings at the Zakak base in October, and put himself forward as a candidate for the post of Secretary General of the MNLA. However, his candidacy was rejected, due to his past silences and obscure dealings with the governments of Mali and Algeria. Instead, the post was filled by Bilal Ag Acherif, a cousin of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. There was an overwhelming sense that this time round the movement needed fresh thinking at the top, independent of Algerian, Malian or Libyan meddling and that all the half measures of the past, the broken treaties brokered by one or other of the regional powers, the compromises and the stalling had to stop. This time, it was full independence or nothing.

After being turned down the MNLA leadership at Zakak, Iyad Ag Ghali also presented himself to an important meeting of the leaders of the Ifoghas clan, to which he belongs, in Abeibara north of Kidal. There he proposed that he become the political head of the clan and be allowed to pursue an Islamist vision of an independent Azawad. Once again his candidature was rejected, and instead Alghabass Ag Intallah as chosen as the new political leader of the Ifoghas, in place of his ageing and infirm father, the amenokal or leader of the Ifoghas, Intallah Ag Attaher, who almost fifty years ago threw his lot in with Mali and opposed the rebellion lead by his brother Zeid.

At the end of the great rebellion of the 1990s, Ag Ghali became increasingly religious and ‘spiritual’ in his outlook, growing a huge and venerable beard in the process. He was attracted to the teachings of Pakistani preachers belonging to the huge worldwide Muslim proselytising organisation, the Tablighi Jama’at, who were present in Kidal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tablighi Jama’at is over years eighty old, has over 20 million members world wide, and does not preach violent jihadism.   In fact, if anything, its approach is largely pacifist and spiritual. Ag Ghali and other Touareg seemed moved by the urgent call of these foreign preachers for a return to the core values of Islam, and Ag Ghali even travelled to Tablighi Jama’at’s headquarters in Raiwind, Pakistan, to learn more. He later spent time studying at the mosque in St Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris.   Many, if not most of Iyad Ag Ghali’s fellow Malian Touaregs however either steered clear of Tablighi Jama’at or took a vague or merely temporary interest in them before finally deciding that they preferred to stick with the more tolerant and ‘Berber’ form of Islam which Touareg have long been known to espouse. The Pakistani preachers ended up getting into trouble with the authorities in Kidal and Gao, becoming mixed up with local politics and electioneering, and finally being politely but firmly asked to leave the region.

Ag Ghali however continued on his religiously inspired path, whilst still holding down the jobs of rebel in chief and general high level fixer. He played a central role in the negotiations for the release of 32 Swiss, German and Dutch hostages from the grip of a GSPC katiba lead by the shady Algerian emir Aderrazak ‘Le Para’ in 2003. This first close contact with the terrorist group that would eventually become Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has left a penumbra of doubt and suspicion around Iyad’s name that has spawned all kinds of theories, of varying degrees of implausibility, about enduring connections and even collaboration between Iyad and Islamic terrorists or Iyad and the Algerian secret services, the DRS. None of these theories has ever been proven beyond doubt. However, when Iyad was sent to be a consular advisor at the Malian consul in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2007, following the 2006 uprising which he essentially lead, he reportedly got himself into deep water by associating with proscribed extremist figures or groups. He was eventually expelled from the country and flown to Paris, before returning to Kidal.

Iyad’s talk of the benefits of sharia law for the Touareg nation went down badly at the Abeibara meeting. One female delegate told him that he had a long road to travel before his fundamentalist dreams of a sharia state became true, as he would first have to climb over the bodies of all the dead women of Azawad, not to mention those of the dead men. His ideas were simply unacceptable. Iyad then declared that if that was the decision of the assembled Ifoghas leaders, then he would go off and form his own movement. This he promptly did, calling his new organisation Ansar Eddine. He declaired its main aim would be to install sharia law in the Adagh and rehabilitate the primacy of the ulema, the council of religious elders.

Iyad Ag Ghali, Ansar Eddine and Mali-AQIM collusion theory.

Iyad’s creation of Ansar Eddine and his reported ties with a certain Abou Abdelkarim aka ‘Le Targui’, one of the minor AQIM leaders operating in the southern desert, have opened the flood gates to national and international speculation about the possible links between the Touareg rebel movement and Islamic terrorists, a link that the Malian government is all to keen to stoke and publicise in order to discredit the movement. As his name indicates, Abdelkarim le Targui is supposedly a Touareg, a native of the Tinzawaten region and the erstwhile preacher at the mosque in In Khalil, a remote and fairly lawless border town in the far north east of Mali. He is reportedly a subordinate of the thuggish emir Abou Zeid, and leader of his own small katiba called ‘Al Ansar’ which was responsible for kidnapping the septuagenarian French humanitarian worker Michel Germaneau in 2010.   According to an announcement by Abdelmalik Droukdel, until recently the supreme leader of AQIM, which was posted up on the AQIM website, Abdelkarim Le Targui was also responsible for murdering Germaneau in cold blood as well as negotiation major drug deals on behalf of AQIM with the representatives of a Colombian drugs cartel in Guinée Bissau. Not the kind of person you should be associating with if you want to present yourself as a legitimate political organisation.

Iyad’s association with Abdelkarim Le Targui is vague and conjectural. Some Touareg even argue that far from being a true targui, Abdelkarim is an Algerian Arab, like all the other AQIM leaders in the southern desert.   Nonetheless this link, together with the perceived religious extremism of Iyad and his Ansar Eddine movement, has spawned a smear campaign in Bamako which aims to convince the world that the MNLA are in cahoots with AQIM.   The AFP reporter in Bamako even claimed that Abou Zeid took part in a recent MNLA attack on the army in the village of Aguel’hoc north of Kidal. Nothing is more poisonous to the international image of the Touareg cause than this taint of fundamentalism and AQIM, not even the Ghadafi links.

There are several reasons why that taint is wholly unjustified. The first is that since the inception of the MNA and MNLA movements, one of their loudest, most cherished and oft repeated aims is to rid their homeland of AQIM, an organisation which they consider to be one of Mali’s most effective weapons in its fight against their cause. “AQIM was parachuted in and installed in our territory by the Malian government,” declares Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed, with total conviction. “It was the initiative of certain drugs barons, who are advisors to the President, in the shadows of the Koulouba Palace [The Presidential palace in Bamako]. They brought them into the Timbuktu region and then to Kidal. In return for the release of the 32 hostages in 2003, a pact of non-aggression was signed between Bamako and Al Qaeda, who then progressively occupied this territory. Those contacts became permanent and it’s clear that since then all the operations lead by the terrorist groups have originated in Mali, and the terrorist have always fallen back to Mali. It’s their safe haven. Everyone knows that the terrorists are in communication with military leaders, and that politicians from Bamako meet the terrorist emirs quite regularly.”

Far fetched? Maybe. Like Professor Jeremy Keenan’s controversial theory that AQIM are a creation of the Algerian DRS, the Mali-AQIM collusion theory remains conjectural. But the circumstantial evidence that links a cabal of Malian army and secret service operatives, usually Arabs from the north of the country close to the upper echelons of Mali’s political and military hierarchy, to the huge drug smuggling operations that have blighted the stability of the northern deserts in recent years and to AQIM is very strong. It’s hardly a secret anymore that a consensus exists among US, French and Algerian diplomats in the region that Mali has been long on words but short on action in its dealings with AQIM since 2006. The frustration with Mali’s lack of firm resolve and decisive action in this regard, despite the millions of dollars in aid that it has received from the US and France specifically for the purpose of fighting terrorists on its soil, has been growing exponentially in the embassies and foreign ministries of the world powers. Apart from one clash with AQIM in the desert north of Timbuktu back in 2006, there have hardly been any confirmed reports of the Malian army doing any damage to AQIM at all. In fact, the most determined opposition that AQIM has encountered during its five year campaign of terror in Mali has been at the hands of the ADC, the Touareg rebel movement launched in 2006, who skirmished with the terrorists several times between 2006 and 2009, with lives lost on both sides. And now that the entire might of the Malian army has been thrown against the Touareg uprising with such devastating force, including fighter jets, tanks, armoured vehicles, missiles of every stamp and thousands of troops, its little wonder that Touaregs, diplomats, analysits and commentators are feeling a tad cynical about Mali’s repeated assertions in recent years that they’ve never had the military wherewithal to deal with the AQIM threat.

A senior Malian politician once had the temerity to declare in a private meeting at the US Embassy in Bamako that the presence of AQIM in the north east of the country was a good thing, as long as it meant that the Touareg rebel movement wasted its resources and time trying to combat it. At another meeting, the new Algerian ambassador informed his US counterpart that he suspected collusion between Mali and the terrorists. He cited the then recent case of a joint Algerian-Malian operation to attack an AQIM base that had failed because the AQIM katiba in question had been tipped off in advance. All these frankly startling revelations are contained in the US Embassy cables leaked by Wikileaks. In fact, there is no better way to understand what really went on in the northern deserts of Mali between 2006 and early 2010 than to read those US Embassy cables. The level of intel, of analysis and research contained in them is often of the highest order.   And yes, they do reveal that the US Embassy has also suspected Mali of at best tolerating and at worst colluding with AQIM at one time or another.

If the implantation of AQIM on Touareg soil was part of a deliberate Malian strategy, then it has been extraordinarily effective. The main campaign of AQIM kidnapping and extortion began in March 2008 (interestingly there had been a five year hiatus since the 2003 hostage incident), just when relations between Mali, the ADC and Ag Bahanga were reaching their nadir. Since that time AQIM has knocked the Touareg rebellion squarely off the front page, both national and internationally. Until January 17^th last that is. The presence of AQIM in Mali put the country in the front line of the USA’s global war on terror, giving it kudos and a receptive ear in Washington whilst justifying the huge amounts of money, training and equipment that America lavished on Mali in the context of its Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Programme (TSCTP) and Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI). It has also emptied the north of foreign journalists, foreign observers, foreign NGO workers, foreign tourists and foreigners in general, whose presence could have been inconvenient for certain shady army or secret service (DGSE) operations, especially those linked with the drug trade.   Most of all, AQIM have simply throttled the region and deprived its Touareg population of any hope of building a viable future and developing a strong economy. In short, AQIM has crippled Touareg society in Mali’s north east. No wonder MNLA have vowed to rid their land of Al Qaeda.

And yet Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ansar Eddine movement continues to sow the seeds of doubt and Mali’s propaganda machine continues to milk any possible connection between the MNLA, Iyad and AQIM for all its worth. Apparently Iyad tried to sell his plan for an Islamic inspired movement to the Ifoghas meeting in Abeibara by promising that his political approach would be no different to that of the moderate Islamic parties that have come to power following the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. There also happens to be another Islamic organisation in Mali with the name Ansar Dine. It has a vast following amongst southern Malians, who flock to football stadiums in their thousands to hear the preachings of the movement’s leader, Cherif Ousmane Madani Haidara. Ansar Dine preaches tolerance, democracy and social morality inspired by faith in the teachings of The Prophet. It is also an ardent critic of government corruption and incompetence. Perhaps Iyad sees his movement as a Tamashek off shoot of the bigger Ansar Dine. Who knows. “What’s very important is that all the religious leaders of the Adagh des Iforas have categorically rejected this foreign Salafist culture that has been planted in their midst,” Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed declares with emphasis. “I know that Iyad is an important person in the region and I know that he’s involved in religious matters. But I can not believe that he would completely abandon the tolerance that is part of our Touareg culture. Not for one second. Maybe Iyad and others realise that AQIM has a hold on some of our young people, and they’re trying to present a different message about Islam that might possibly win back all those that the Salafists have co-opted into their ranks.”

Why rebel?

Two questions remain to be answered. Why rebel now? And why rebel at all? The latter question often perplexes curious outsiders. What, they wonder, do the Touareg people have against Mali, a country which, on the face of it, seems relatively friendly, peaceful and tolerant. It is after all one of the better functioning and more stable democracies in Africa. It is renowned for its culture, its ancient sites of religious devotion and learning, and for its musicians, who are better known outside Africa than any of its political leaders.   Mali has many fans throughout the world, justifiably so. What makes the Touareg so determined to wreak tear this country apart and wreak havoc on its population?

“Our inclusion in the country was a mistake,” is Nina Walet Intallou’s blunt answer to that question. “In the beginning, just before the end of colonisation, a letter was written by some desert leaders to General De Gaulle pleading with him to let the Touareg and other ethnicities create their own state in the middle of the Sahara. Only four tribal chiefs signed it, but there was never really any proper explanation given by the French to the Touareg, telling them “Listen, we’re going to leave you and your homeland will just be sliced up into four or five parts and given to different countries [Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso]. You will be given to Mali.” We had never been colonised by Mali before. It was something quite brutal and at the time there weren’t any intellectuals who could measure the consequences of it all. The leaders didn’t realise that the south of Mali would come and occupy their territory. They thought that they would remain masters of their own country in an independent Africa. When they saw the people of the south who came and said,”Now, you’re under our authority,” they were completely perplexed.”

That’s the original sin, that duplicitous betrayal of the Touareg and their ‘colonisation’ by Mali at independence. It has been entrenched and deepened by war, oppression, drought, corruption, exile, marginalisation and a painful chain of cause and effect, tit for tat, hurt and vengeance, ever since. But in the end, it all boils down to that original ‘mistake’. All attempts to convince the Touareg as a whole that they are and should remain proud citizens of Mali have, by and large, failed. Not for all, but for most. Apart from religion, the cultural and social bonds that tie the Touareg to Malians from the south are just too weak to make the idea of belonging this nation called Mali acceptable in the northern deserts. And it’s the same vice versa. To most southern Malians, the Sahara is another place and a generally fearful one at that. For a southern soldier from Sikasso or Kati, being sent up north to patrol the open desert is akin to a Muscovite being sent to Siberia in the 19^th century.   It’s another world.

Nonetheless there are Touaregs, a large number in fact, and even more Arabs and Songhoi, who do see their future within the current borders of the Malian state. Those people have in a sense made their peace with the idea that Mali is one nation that can include all its diverse peoples. They argue that development is more important than nationalism or ethnic separatism. Mali has always emphasized the idea of inclusivity, of a state that would treat all its citizens, black, white, Muslim, animist, northern, southern, with equanimity. It sees the Touareg propensity to rebel as an act of downright ingratitude, emphasising the special treatment the north east has received in terms of investment and political freedom, compared to other parts of the country, ever since 1992. The north may be poor, but Mali as a whole is poor, so what are the Touareg complaining about.

Most Malians in the south resent the idea of their country being split in two. They point out that the ‘white’ Touareg and Arabs aren’t the only ethnicities in the north. There are also Songhoi, Peul, Bozo, who are black like them.   Why should they be forced to secede and become part of this Azawad? It’s a pertinent question, that the intellectual wing of the MNLA are trying hard to answer with their claims that Azawad will be for ALL the people of the north, not only the Touareg.   And of course, most Malians realise that under those northern deserts there are immense deposits of oil, uranium, gold and phosphates that could one day make their nation rich. They are loathed to give up on that enticing prospect.

Nonetheless, the Touareg who are fighting the Malian army have no doubt in their minds that theirs is a just cause, that their land and freedom and dignity were taken from them by subterfuge in 1960 and that they have been duped ever since into accepting their unhappy state. No longer. The father of the military leader of MNLA, Mohammed Ag Najm, was killed by the Malian army during the first ever uprising in 1963. Make no mistake, this is not a storm in a tea cup involving a few disgruntled returnees from the Libyan war, or a few irate drug dealers and traffickers settling scores, it’s battle driven by dreams of a better future, although tainted in a small way, no doubt, as is the way of the world, by other motivations like vengeance and gain. Whether those dreams are justified or not is debatable, but they are real.

Why rebel now?

In December, before the outbreak of hostilities, a revealing essay entitled ‘Azawad, it’s now or never’ appeared on the Toumast Press website. Written by Ahmeyede Ag Ilkamassene, it outlined the apparently favourable geo-political climate for the Azawad cause that existed at the end of 2011, citing the independence of South Sudan and Eritrea as examples of mistakes made at the time of decolonisation that had been rectified and which therefore proved that the idea of an independent Azawad wasn’t just pie in the sky. It pointed out that the structures that had dominated global politics since the second world war were changing, that new powers like China, Russia, Brazil and India were coming to the fore and that these powers were more open to the idea of the post-colonial settlement in African being dismantled and rebuilt.

Ag Ilkamassene also proudly stated that, this time, the Touareg revolutionaries were prepared for battle. They would not be hampered by the syndrome of the rusty canon that refused to fire on French forces during the capture of Agadez in 1916, thereby ensuring the defeat of an uprising lead by the first great Touareg independence fighter, Kaocene Ag Gedda. This time the dreams of Kaocene, Zeid Ag Attaher and Mohammed Ali Ag Attaher could come true.   Another inspiration was the Arab spring, which had been closely followed throughout the southern Sahara. “For the first time in the history of humanity,” writes Ag Ilkamessene, “revolutions are occurring simultaneously at all four points of the compass.”

The essay defined a zeitgeist that, claimed Ag Ilkamessene, was propitious for the decisive move. Then there were the local realities on the ground in Northern Mali, the opportunities not to be missed, such as the arrival of the Libyan contingent with their arms. The MNLA also cite the fact that the Malian government had been progressively rebuilding and reequipping its military infrastructure in the north east since early autumn 2011, using money that was supposed to be spent on economic and social development in the region, or fighting Al Qaida. Add to that the recruiting of Arabs for Ould Meydou’s militias, and the rumours that the Ganda Koy were getting ready to re-arm, and that feeling of ‘It’s now or never’ became overwhelming.

Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed puts the outbreak of war down to the repeated refusal of the Malian government to negotiate seriously with the MNLA, or even to give it any official recognition. ”We called on the the government of Bamako to take the difficult situation in the region seriously on several occasions,” he says. “Bamako’s response was simply that the situation didn’t exist. They thought any problems were under control or if not, they could be solved by trickery. We told them to be careful, because the problem exists and it’s serious. There’s permanent insecurity in the region, and terrorism too. We can’t live with that.”

In late November, Bamako sent a delegation of National Assembly deputies to the desert north of Kidal to go and meet with the Touareg soldiers who had returned from Libya. The Malian newspaper L’Essor recently published a fascinating eye-witness account of these meetings out in the open bush, which ultimately ended in failure. The delegation of eminent senior northerners found it hard to listen to the demands and discourse of the relatively young secretary general of the MNLA, Bilal Ag Cherif. Age is very highly respected and deferred to in Touareg society. But apparently not this time. “You speak in the name of Azawad when you don’t even know what it is,” retorted an angry deputy after Ag Cherif had spoken. “We deputies have been elected and we are natives of this region. You’re demanding something in the name of the inhabitants of the north without having any mandate from them. Where is your legitimacy?”

Then, on January 7^th, Bamako sent Mohammed Ag Erlaf, a former Touareg rebel and a senior bureaucrat in the Malian administration, who for the past few years has been managing a huge project called The Special Programme for Peace, Security and the Development of Northern Mali (PSPSDN), to talk to the MNLA leadership. He outlined a set of promises that sounded uncannily like those Mali had already made in 1992 and 2006. They included a special offer aimed directly at Iyad Ag Ghali to create a new post of cadi, or Muslim judge, for each administrative region of the north, and of an imam for every major mosque. The Touareg rebel leadership were tired of such approaches and they resented way in which Ag Erlaf tried to separate one leader from another by promising each special favours. It smacked, once again, of that old divide and rule policy.

So that was that. The time for talking had come to an end. The dice were cast. Ag Najm and his troops set off for Menaka.

Postscript – The dirty war

Today, as I write, the rebellion has entered its second week. The MNLA have attacked the towns of Lere and Niafunké in the west of Mali, reaching further beyond MNLA’s northeastern heartlands than any other rebel movement since 1990. Instead of attacking a town and then immediately disappearing off to the hills, the MNLA are trying to hold on to their gains, and extend their reach, thereby over-stretching the under-paid and often demoralised Malian troops to their limit. News from the desert is scanty, and objective verifiable news is almost non-existant. However, as predicted, it does seem that the MNLA are giving the Malian army the kind of challenge that the north of Mali hasn’t seen in twenty years, if ever. Nevertheless, it’s hard to conceive how this mitigated military success will ever translate into the birth of an independent Azawad. The pressures against that ever happening, both from within Mali and, more importantly, from all the nation states of West Africa and Maghreb, and the global powers, is just too strong. But MNLA believe it can be done. Only time will tell.

What’s certain, and what was also predictable, is that this conflict is also fast degenerating into a dirty ethnic war, pitting Bamana, Manding, Songhai and Peul against Touareg and Arab. There are reports of burning and looting and machete attacks on northerners living in the south. Unconfirmed, as always, but the direction of events seems clear. Whatever happens, the loser will inevitably be that unity, that fraternal bond between peoples and cultures, that Malians have cherished for so long.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in Think Africa Press – Feb 2012

The post THE CAUSES OF THE TOUAREG UPRISING OF JAN 2012 – The 4th roll of the Tamashek Dice appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Ibrahim ag Alhabib on stage at the Highline Ballroom, New York, July 2011. (c) Andy Morgan

PHOTO ESSAY – Tinariwen in New York, July 2011

All was quiet in room 509 when I turned up with my bottle of Jura whiskey. Tinariwen’s sound engineer Jaja was watching a vampire movie on TV. Elaga, their rhythm guitarist, was sitting at a small darkly varnished table eating pasta from a Styrofoam carton. Said the percussionist was lying on his bed, delving through the archive of photos and recordings on his LG mobile, keeping his own counsel as he usually does.

As I entered I saw Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Tinariwen’s iconic founder and frontman, standing by the window. He looked better than he had done that morning, when the back pain that had been plaguing him on the overnight flight from Seattle, depriving him of sleep or comfort, gave him the aura of a hungry ghost. His hair was still standing crazy in a 240-degree arc around his head; grey-black, wild, electrocuted. His features were still creased and haggard, with those small round eyes staring out in a half-daze. But at least he was walking around now and engaging a little in what was going on. I told him I’d bought him a present and he thanked me with a mumble, a wan smile and averted eyes. I stepped into the bathroom to have a smoke out of the window, looking down into one of New York’s countless dark back alleys with its morbid machine-like hum.

Emerging from the bathroom I sat down at the table and poured myself a shot of whiskey. Ibrahim remarked that this whiskey didn’t taste like the others. I agreed, explaining that it came from an island called Jura, just like the name on the bottle. I launched into an enthusiastic eulogy of Scotland’s west coast; the rain, the raw beauty, the glassy sea, the islands floating off into the horizon. Ibrahim told me that he liked rain. It didn’t bother him at all.

“And there are whales,” I continued, “Do you know about whales?” I had a distinct feeling that I was bothering him with my insistent questioning but the whiskey made me talkative so I just blustered on. Ibrahim sat looking at me with his tired grave eyes and said, “the ones that jump out of the water?” He made a snaky jumping motion with his hands. I didn’t feel like explaining the difference between dolphins and whales and so I just answered, “Yes.”

We sat in silence for a while. Ibrahim’s head was propped on his hand and his eyes stared into the middle distance; infinitely sad detached eyes with their look of disconnected longing. Was his mind in that Saharan desert home of his, so far away? Or with his boy Haroun, who died recently from some unexplained illness? I couldn’t tell. I tried to imagine such a tragedy happening in my own life, and the thought alone was unbearable. The reality lurked in some incomprehensible place just beyond the frontiers of my imagination.

Ibrahim had been there. And now here he was in New York with his melancholy untamable presence. Malian soldiers, Algerian policemen and Libyan army sergeants have all tried to tame him by force. But even though they have all failed, theirs was perhaps the easier challenge. There are those of us who have tried to tame him with our friendship, our banter, our small talk or our love. We’re on a fool’s errand. I’ve learned, slowly and patiently, that one the kindest, gentlest men alive lives behind that gaunt and grave exterior. Being with Ibrahim is a lesson in simplicity and friendship stripped bare of possession or advantage. But don’t expect him to be your pal and to indulge you like an old mate. If you do, he’ll evade you like a jackal in the night.

I upbraided myself for attempting to analyze and comprehend this man. “He’s just a bloke,” I repeated to myself silently and unconvincingly, “who’s in pain and tired and a little melancholy.”

He asked after my son Alfie. “He must be big now,” he mused in his quiet croak. I answered kindly, yet awkwardly. Then I managed to get to my feet and announce that I was off back to my hotel and bed. I said goodnight and Ibrahim answered, “goodnight Andy.” As I reached the door of the hotel room and opened it, Ibrahim called out again, “Andy?” I turned round and looked at him. “Goodnight. See you tomorrow,” he said, looking straight at me. That final parting was touching and unexpected. It was as if Ibrahim was saying, “Sorry I couldn’t really talk to you, but I’m glad you’re here. Forgive me. That’s how I am.”

As I passed from the cool air-conditioned hotel lobby into the sweltering soup of the New York night, the city hit me with its monstrous clammy roar. It was like a machine with a trillion cylinders that had passed breaking point long ago, but somehow managed to roar on regardless. Anyone from a quiet peripheral part of the world might possibly bear this Nuyorican assault in the cool of autumn or winter. But now, in this summer month of record-breaking heat, the atmosphere was pulverizing, suffocating. Walking down Park Avenue in a jet-lagged sweat, I was seized by sudden panic. The dense swelter, the inhuman throb tightened around my chest like some instrument of torture. I felt like I was about to faint but a kind-hearted troop sergeant in my head took control, calmed me down, and urged me on. I reached my hotel and read Maugham with intense captivation. The noises of the New York night outside my window were savage – sirens, horns, engines, air-con, generators, beeping, honking, whistling, cooing, groaning, blasting, roaring. I sank into sleep while an intense argument brewed up on the sidewalk outside my window. “You fucking punk you fuck punk racist arsehole…!!!” And so on. Happy New York slumbers.

This was supposed to be a promo trip occasioned by the release of Tinariwen’s new album ‘Tassili’. But it didn’t feel like a routine junket. I managed Tinariwen for six years until I gave up showbiz to concentrate on writing full time eighteen months ago. I hadn’t seen them for a year. Driving from JFK through the bad dream of the Bronx, the alphabet soup shop-signs of Harlem, a place which reminds me so much of Tottenham in north east London, and the canyons of mid-town Manhattan, I contemplated the philosophical dilemma that this sky-lacerating city, full of what the poet Lorca called “geometry and anguish” presented to people like Ibrahim, for whom peace and solitude are as essential as food and air.

Not that New York can phaze Tinariwen any more. After all, it’s their sixth or maybe their seventh visit to the city. I’ve lost count and so have they. They’ve been touring the world for ten years now, taking their dusty skeletal guitar licks to the four points of the compass, spreading the gospel of a people who still cling against all odds to a desert which others are content to call a good for nothing wasteland. For them, the Sahara their home, their soul, the source of their pride and their inspiration.

Five CD albums, starting with ‘The Radio Tisdas Sessions’ back in 2001, and ending with ‘Tassili’, which was released last August, have earned Tinariwen an enviable global reputation, built on a bedrock of raw guitar, pentatonic melodies and rolling rhythms. Tinariwen’s unique sound feels part of the mythology and archaeology of the blues and rock’n’roll, but in fact it was born it its own space, and developed according to its own rules, out in the isolation of the southern Sahara during the 1970s and 1980s. The music itself has been given an almost fantastical allure by the myths and stories surrounding the band, the real McCoy rebels, born in tents out in the desert, trained in Libyan camps in the 1980s, who once strode into battle against the Malian army with a Kalashnikov on one shoulder and a guitar on another. The truth of course is subtler, deeper and infinitely more fascinating. But music and myth have seduced fans the world over, including an ever-growing list of star rockers that includes Robert Plant, Tom Yorke, Mick Jones, the Animal Collective, Metallica, Flea, Santana and the Henry Rollins.

Most of these names mean little to Ibrahim or the rest of the band. It’s not that they feel superior or indifferent to their fellow musicians’ praise, it’s just they haven’t heard of most of them. For Tinariwen, as for the Touareg in general throughout most of their troubled modern history, isolation has been both a blessing and a curse. They can’t reel of the names of tracks on ‘Exile On Main Steet’ or ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ but I’m certain that if Ibrahim had been living in Paris, London, or New York, during the past meteoric decade, he would have succumbed to the pressure long ago.

In fact, Ibrahim recently left the tiny village of Tessalit in northeastern Mali to go and live in the surrounding countryside, in the valley of the oued Affara, very close to where he was born fifty-one years ago. There he helps to tend his animals, mostly goats, and grow vegetables. His good friend Kay Kay lives nearby. Both Ibrahim and Kay Kay are old ishumar, the name given to the young Touareg who left their homes in the southern Sahara in the sixties, seventies and eighties and went into exile in Algeria and Libya to seek their fortune and join the rebel movement. In the early 1990s they fought an armed rebellion against the central governments of Mali and Niger, to reclaim ownership and governance of their ancestral lands, to defend their language and their culture and to fight for the right to live by their own ancient laws in the way their fathers and forefathers had done for centuries. That’s a pretty way of putting it I admit but it covers the essentials. The reality of the Touareg struggle is complex and testing and the fight is still very much alive today.

Nowadays, Ibrahim, Kay Kay and many other members of their generation seek the peace of their own gardens and herds in the vast Saharan landscape. I’ve been to oued Affara and the undisturbed quiet and solitude of the place is so deep and pervasive you can almost touch it.

In the last couple of years, the Sahara has been cursed by new demons: mafia kidnapping and extortion masquerading as Islamic fundamentalism, drug and people smuggling, profligate corruption and exploitation of mineral resources. It’s been put about that Tinariwen were forced to decamp from their home in Mali and travel about six hundred miles north eastwards to the region of Tassili in southern Algeria, near the town of Djanet, to record their new album because the presence of an Islamic fundamentalist militia affiliated to AQMI (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) between Tessalit and Kidal, the capital of the far northeast of Mali, made it too dangerous for foreigners to visit that area.

Ibrahim attributes the decision to other reasons entirely. “I know the Djanet region very well and it’s a very peaceful place,” he says. “It’s not like at home in Tessalit where even if you go off somewhere, your friends will follow your tracks and find you. I spent lots of time in Djanet, going there as an ishumar. We always had to hide because we had no papers and we were looking for work. I remember lots of things, things that were hard. It was an adventure you know…”

Hard up against the Libyan border, Djanet was a crossroads for migrating Touareg men during the 1980s. It was the first place where they had any hope of getting news of home, after months, maybe even years, working clandestino in Libya. Ibrahim had originally intended to record the new album with Mohammed Ag Itlale aka ‘Japonais’, an erstwhile ishumar brother-in-arms, member of Tinariwen and poet of great renown, who now lives in Kidal. But Japonais has his own demons to fight and wasn’t available for the recording, so Ibrahim went off to Djanet with five members of Tinariwen, determined to nail down the simple sound and poetry of ishumar adventurerssitting around a campfire, sharing cigarettes, stories, songs and a guitar. This had always been the context in which Tinariwen’s music was heard before they added bass and percussion and went global. It’s bottled to perfection on ‘Tassili’.

A few days later Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe from the New York band TV On The Radio arrived at Djanet airport. They were picked up in a Toyota 4×4 Landcruiser by Eyadou Ag Leche, Tinariwen’s bassist and driven through the Saharan night to the campsite / bush recording studio. Eyadou played havoc with his guests’ nerves by travelling down the un-surfaced desert tracks without any headlights on, an experience akin to riding a bucking bronco in pitch darkness at 70 miles per hour. Then, the next morning, Kyp and Tunde awoke in the epic splendor of the Saharan and it fairly robbed them of their breath. Nothing surprising there. The desert has the same effect on almost everyone who wakes up in its bitter cold dawn, or goes to sleep under its million glittering stars.

One of Ibrahim’s greatest pleasures is showing off his beloved desert home to strangers so having TV On The Radio around for the recording was a pleasure. “Everything came naturally,” he told me enthusiastically. “When I found a tune or a pattern on the guitar, Kyp would find something that went with it. Or if he found something, Eyadou just followed him. It was great. They became friends very quickly. We didn’t even have to talk that much.”

Words carry a long way in the deep hush of Ibrahim’s desert valley. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t use them that much. On this visit to New York, his tortuous back pain prevented him from venturing out much, except to fulfill band obligations, but he still could feel the city’s crush and frenzy. I reminded him that he once spoke to me about arriving at Paris Orly airport for the first time ten years ago and the general impression of fatigue and exhaustion that his first glimpses of western ‘civilization’ left with him. I asked him how the atmosphere of New York compared. “Well, I’ve understood many things,” he answers. “It’s as if, for me, it’s dirty here. That’s what works here. My village is a completely different world.”

Ibrahim doesn’t denigrate or criticize easily, so I found his stark use of the word ‘dirty’ fascinating. I decided that he was using it in the same way that Johnny Cash uses it in the song ‘Hurt’, when he refers to ‘my empire of dirt’. The exhausted frenzy of modernity, ambition, career and monotonous hedonism, that’s Ibrahim’s ‘dirt’.

Tinariwen’s performance at the Highline Ballroom in the old meatpacking district of the lower west side is one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty. They’re sharper, nimbler, less reserved and more self-confident, even as a five piece, without the visual stimulation of Hassan, their dancer and vibe master, or female backing vocalists. Said and Eyadou lock down and play like a soul-revue rhythm section, nailing their complex dialogue breezily and effortlessly. Abdallah spreads desert honey, like the Saharan pin-up that he is. Elaga stands stock still as always, his ker-chink slicing the air like the best James Brown or Lee Perry rhythm guitar.

Ibrahim battles through the show, smiling only once. His grave immobile presence is like a challenge to the hip bubbling New York crowd. To do what? To imagine a simplicity and a silence that their city will never know, but which, to Ibrahim, is the be-all and end-all. When he takes his acoustic guitar and sings a solo song, his voice parched, desiccated, otherworldly, the hubbub abates and splutters, and the imagination takes over. It almost feels as if, for just a few minutes, Ibrahim’s challenge has been accepted, the dirt has been wiped away and endless silence of the desert has descended on us all.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006

Revised version of an article first published in The Observer – August 2011

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MC and kids in front of the ‘Discovery’ stage, Festival on the Niger 2014. (c) Andy Morgan.

PHOTO ESSAY – Festival on the Niger 2014

Ghostboy spoke in penetrating riddles. From his pale skin, I guessed he was a Fulani, with maybe a bit of Touareg or Arab thrown in there too. Not that it mattered. Bitterness and pride mixed in with the gentleness of his smooth face. He never smiled.

He followed us, my German friend Herman and I, down to the Niger river beach. He’d been following us since morning, glum, tight-lipped. He stuck to us despite my pep-talk. “I’m a musician too, you know,” he’d said after a while. “I write songs, and poetry.” “Ok, mon ami, I just gotta say something,” I answered, turning on him, rag already lost. “It’s no use just stalking us with claims that you’re a musician and a poet. You have to start the battle somehow. Don’t hawk the ghost of your talent, show it!!”

Those words felt brutal. Our whole relationship, with its crazy imbalances, felt brutal. Ghostboy was young, maybe 19 or 20 years old. He brought us Touareg jewellery, then Dogon carvings, then other stuff. It kept coming. He never gave up or let go. He didn’t say much but he seemed angry. I felt brutal.

The beach was a different space to the Festival, which was right next door. People were just doing whatever they normally do: stacking wood, carting goods, carrying dishes of oranges or dates on their head, lounging under lean-tos that leant like crazy, laughing, brewing tea. Upended, the empty porter carts looked like tomb-stones sculpted from metal tubing, with the handle forming a cross against the pale Sahelian sky. The wood piles made alleyways on the beach. The ferry trundled back and forth, disgorging its passengers at either shore. People didn’t take much notice of us. Life went on.

Approaching the Festival site you could feel the fever. It was hard to diagnose: music, release, expectation, opportunity, commerce, laughter, pride, they were all in there somewhere. Ninety-eight percent of the revellers were Malian. Most of the Europeans, not more than a hundred of them, had some kind of mission going on: journos, photographers, film-makers, funders, advisors, humanitarians, UN folk, diplomats, music managers, musicians. Not many straight-up just-curious tourists. This was still the red zone.

Last year, the Festival on the Niger had been cancelled at the last minute. French transport planes full of soldiers and hardware had landed in Bamako only two weeks before the festival was due to start. The troops were part of Operation Serval, on their way up north to fight the jihadists and put Mali back together again. Segou was on their route. You can’t have a much of a party with tanks rolling past your door.

“The whole economy of this region, the major part in any case, is geared around the festival,” Mamou Daffé told me. “Imagine a year without the festival. It meant that the economic and cultural stakeholders lost up to 80% of their revenue. It was terrible, enormous.”

Mamou Daffé founded the festival back in 2004. He was head of the local Office du Tourisme at the time. He wanted to haul Segou up out of its status as mere truck stop on the road to bigger tourist attractions – the African ‘Hobbiton’ of the Dogon country, Djenné with its mighty mud mosque, Timbuktu the legendary. Segou was once the capital of the Bambara kingdom, an animist polity bought low by the Islamic jihad of El Hadj Oumar Tall. Jihad is nothing new in these parts. Bamako was just a little fishing village back then. Now it’s Mali’s capital city and Segou’s just a relatively minor tourist attraction; Winchester to Bamako’s London. The big wheel keeps on turning.

This year the Festival on the Niger was celebrating its tenth birthday. It’s not as famous as the Festival in the Desert, but it should be. The site was impressive, the main stage a kind of pontoon floating in the Niger, a few metres off shore opposite a steeply sloping stone quay where the audience sit. There was another stage about four hundred metres away that focussed on up and coming talent. It was free to all comers during the day. In between them there was a marché with a few bars and a ‘street’ of stalls selling clothes, crafts, food, books or the work of organisations like the Segou University Students’ Association, the Segou Chamber of Commerce or MINUSMA – the UN mission to Mali. It all looked…well…like a festival; like WOMAD or Glastonbury, but much smaller and in Africa, on the banks of one of the greatest rivers in the world.

I went and loitered in the book stall. The complete works of Amadou Hampâté Ba were on sale. He’s the Malian writer and intellectual who said, about the griots: “Every time one of those old men die, it’s like a library that burns.” Or words like that. He also said, “between your truth and my truth lies the truth.” I like that. This is no time for absolutes. It’s a time to lick wounds, your own and those of others. It’s a time to value peace.

“Above all, we understood that peace is a resource, an extraordinary asset,” Mamou Daffé told me in answer to a question about the lessons of the crisis in the north of Mali. “We understood that without peace, nothing is possible. That’s why this particular edition of the festival is very welcome, with its powerful themes, which are national reconciliation, cultural diversity and national unity.”

So peace was back. So was music. The jihadists tried to ban all music except Quranic chanting in the north of Mali. But it just came back like Whack-a-mole. How could it not? Music in Mali is no different from the water that flows in the Niger, always there, glinting, life-giving: an old man smiling at his errant children.

The first night of the festival, the moon shone like a scimitar in the sky. I went to the Festival Village early, a nondescript space for about six hundred people a few kms away from the main site. It was empty. The mosquitoes were disco dancing around the strip lighting. Tonight was the Nuit de la Paix – A Night of Peace – organised by the Festival in the Desert, which was still banished from its home in Essakane near Timbuktu by threats of insecurity, real or imagined.

To contribute something meaningful to the cultural calendar, the Festival in the Desert had organised a Caravan of Peace in collaboration with the Festival on the Niger and the Taragalte Festival in southern Morroco. The caravan had travelled to Segou from its starting point at the Taragalte Festival, via various towns and refugee camps in Mauritania and Burkina Faso. It was a bold adventure. Khaira Arby and Amanar, the Touareg band from Kidal lead by Ahmed Ag Kaedi, had both taken part. Now, tonight, it was the Caravan’s grand finale, here, as guests of the Festival on the Niger.

But the Festival in the Desert weren’t happy. They wanted this statement of reconciliation and peace to be made on the main stage by the river, not in a ‘fringe’ space a few kms away. They needn’t have worried. By the time the MC came out wearing his tracksuit to start warming up, the Festival Village was packed. Mamou Daffé and Manny Ansar, director of the Festival in the Desert, were sitting all self-conscious and stiff amongst the big cheeses that always populate the front row of any important gig in Africa. The audience became looser, wilder, more joyful as you moved towards the back; the mamas all blithe and chatty in their riotously coloured robes and head dresses, young men in dickie bow ties, sharp enough to slice a heart in two, the youth giggling in their gaggles. The ambiance was good.

Speeches. Lots of speeches. Malians love their speeches. “’Daffé’ means ‘horse’ in the local language,” the MC tells us, “and the horse is most faithful of animals. Daffé is faithful to Segou. Thank you Daffé, Thank you Minusma, Serval, Morocco, Senegal. Peace, peace above all else.”  “The people already have peace in their hearts,” said Manny Ansar, “it’s up to the politicians now.”  “People talk about the north, but Manny is my brother,” answered Daffé.

A griotte in a lavish yellow dress comes on. Her voice splits the night like an axe slicing through kindling. It’s riveting, insistent. The guitar behind her sounds like the workings of some divine intestinal tract. A man is filming it all on his an iPad. Mali is documenting itself now.

The scimitar moon is slicing through the trees. Khaira Arby bustles onto the stage, all tough mama and female hardcore. That northern rhythm starts to roll out, recalibrating the movement of crowd. Excitement thickens. “Erkus! Erkus!!” she hollers – ‘Clap! Clap!’ (in Tamashek, the Touareg language). No enemies here, not now. No Bambara, Touareg, Songhoi, Dogon or Fulani. Just a crowd and their mad music-induced joy.

After only two songs, Khaira is followed by Amanar: tall shy Ahmed ag Kaedi and his Touareg posse from Kidal. Friends of the republic from deep behind ‘enemy’ lines. But this crowd loves them without moderation. When they play the song ‘Amidinin’ – a lilting version by Tinariwen’s Intidao has been made famous by national Malian TV – it sets the night on fire. I can hardly believe it. “My Friend.” That’s what the song title means. Mali, un et indivisible! – Mali, one and indivisible! At that moment it hits me. In the mouths of politicians, it’s just a slogan, a weapon of both war and peace. But here, in the ‘Gods’ at the back of La Nuit de la Paix, it’s a love thing, an irrational desire, a longing, a hope.

The next night I queued up at the main gates to the site with the good citizens of Segou who could afford the 10,000 CFA (c. £16) weekend ticket for the Festival. Many couldn’t and they stood there like Tiny Tims, noses pressed up against the glass ceiling.  We were all frisked, at least three times, before being let in.

“When Salif Keita does a gig in Bamako,” Daffé told me, “It’s 25,000 CFA just for him. Our ticket sales barely pay for the PA system. But we’re fighting an African fight. We said to ourselves, if we can’t provide 40-50% of the budget ourselves, then there wasn’t going to be a festival. It’s a matter of dignity and tradition for us to pay our own way. Here, in Segou, you’ll find an Africa that’s standing on its own two feet, and trying to take responsibility for itself.”

Everything was orderly. We sat on stone steps of the quay. Mobile phones glowed in the dark. The river glowed in the background. Super Biton de Segou’s opening riffs sucked out hollers of recognition. These guys are local heroes, named after Mamary Coulibaly aka ‘Bitòn’, former king of 18th century Segou and founder of the Bambara Empire. A fierce warrior, by all accounts. Mali needs the memory of its great warriors.

Super Biton de Ségou were one of Mali’s greatest orchestras in the days when every region of the country had its own band, financed by the state. They still stir local hearts with their cascading guitar riffs, the indefinable pulsation of their song, the tender currents of their melody. When they finish, the head of Segou’s chamber of commerce says a few words: “We thank the almighty for allowing this event to happen.” Then he praises the great river, calling it by its local name Joliba; “the symbol of the blood that runs through our veins.”

Mawula, a musical spectacular about a mythical vulture that seems to symbolise Mali’s fighting spirit is up next. I respect the festival for commissioning new and challenging work. I respect director Adama Traore, a legend in Malian theatre circles. But just when the audience is simmering, hungry for musical abandon, it gets treated to an hour and half long dirge of traditional hunters prancing round the stage, jihadists screaming ‘Allah u Akbar’ and women being raped. This might have worked at a more pensive time, earlier in the afternoon, but now, despite the calabash women, wild leaping men and raw searing chants that reminded me of Moroccan Aissawa, it falls flat on its face. People start to leave. “We don’t want to be reminded about the war,” a local man tells me later, “we want to relax and enjoy music.” The moon is a silver teardrop falling through the clouds.

Next day, down on the river beach, Ghostboy told me about a dream he once had. “It was about Jesus. I saw him walking on the river. Right there. I’m a Muslim but I still dreamed about Jesus.” I made some flippant remark to the effect that he must be feeling confused. And then I felt ashamed. I sat there, watching the world unwind to dusk, listening dutifully and intently to Ghostboy’s strange ramblings.

On the smaller ‘discovery’ stage Ben Zabo never unzipped his smile. There he was, a local boy made good come home to his people. There’s no greater joy than that. His band, all wearing the ‘mohawk’ crest of the animist Bwa people, cured the oppression of heat and dust with raw cruising funk. We all had smiles zipped on to our faces.

That same afternoon I’d seen the rapper Mylmo being mobbed by a crowd of local fans. He left me with the feeling that I had to revisit all my preconceptions about Malian music. It’s the rappers who fill the stadiums here, not the griots or the old dance bands. And although some of them have taken a fancy to chunky Eric B and Rakim style chains, super fly threads and Beemers, the best rappers have become the voice of the voiceless, those who “say on high what is being thought below.”

Mylmo is considered to be among the best. He’s a prince, tall, talented and full of shy charm. He strides on to the main stage to a mighty cheer and asks us all to observe a minute’s silence for the fallen soldiers. The moon is a bright lemon, alive and tart. The river blushes silver. Mylmo takes hold of the flow, dedicates a song to Nelson Mandela and shouts “We’re rappers, not gangsters!” The moussou – the women – scream!  Mylmo substitutes bombs and AK47s with the mic and the tama drum. He sings an homage to Oumou Sangare. The moussou go wild. He spits a tune about teenagers who go into prostitution. The moussou get even wilder. Specific lines bust the scream-o-meter. I revel in the spectacle whilst cursing my incomprehension. Fellow rappers Tal B and Master Soumy come on for guest spots – a Malian rap summit. The wildness redoubles.

The moon is an eye full of love. This is a night for the moussou. Stelbee from Burkina Faso is a femme consciente: a blender of reggae, African sensuality and Gallic style. She’s a warm mug of peace, love and togetherness. The moussou love her. They’re dancing in the river. I’m not so sure.

Sekouba Bambino appears all in white, a vision of romantic perfection. He comes from Guinea, just like the river. “Women will welcome him, men will tolerate him,” the MC tells us. A djembe drum clatters. A balaphon rattles.  Everybody stands up. Sharp-tongued moussou berate their sisters for blocking their view. “This one’s for peace!” Deci-belles! Sekouba Bambino’s voice has more power and suppleness that even Salif Keita’s. But Salif’s has the crackle of experience. Sekouba is sensuality personified, in a land whose sensual fires are regularly doused by Muslim reserve. Although tonight, barely.

Mornings were for talking. The conferences at the Centre Culturel Koré, another of the Festival’s ambitious initiatives, told me that Mali has long lost its sense of deference. The debates were lively. The panelists often under fire. Next door the exhibition space was showing work by Malian artists and photographers on themes such as ‘Love’ or ‘the Masks and Puppets of Mali’. In the dusty back alleys, Orange organized a free stage for hip hop. There was an international fair at the Foire Kènè and traditional troupes at the Festival Village. This was a city-wide feast of culture.

I stumbled on a river pageant just by chance, of men and women chanting the rawest roots music I’ve heard in moons. It sounded like the dusty grandmother of Moroccan gnawa, which made complete sense. They arrived in huge pirogues, like itinerant party-makers, banging, chanting, wailing. The quays were packed and expectant. Then the dances started. A fish crawled onto the beach, snapping wildly at anyone who approached. Then a crocodile. Then a hippo. It was a wild screeching rush, gleeful and breathless, like riding a helter-skelter without ever leaving the ground. Mali’s animist heart beat loud, the one that some feared lost.

That night, the last, the MC was superbly comic. People were in stitches. “Voulez vous voir le cheval blaaannnc!!!” (“Do you wanna see the white horrrrsssse!”). It took me a while to work out he was talking about Salif. But first I had to tussle with Mao Otayeck: Lebanese Ivory Coaster via LA, Paris, Dakar and some place in the middle of the Atlantic that I have no wish to ever see or hear. The man’s got credentials – Stevie Wonder, Alpha Blondy and many others, so it’s hard to explain my aversion to this kind of music: too many instruments, too many notes, too much clever fiddling and faddling around. Just fucking entertainment, that’s all it is.

The moon peeps shy through the clouds. Vieux Farka Toure cleans the palate. Black suit, white rock’n’roll energy, total confidence. This is Songhoi guitar music for the 21st century, respectful of Ali Farka but free of him too. Vieux doesn’t have the poetic touch of his father, but he has plenty of 1.6 Litre V8 turbo-charged guitar licks. All you have to do is get on board, strap yourself in and enjoy the level horizons of the Sahel as they blur past you. It rocks.

Then its Salif. The King himself. A Keita to his very marrow. Floppy white hat, brown black tabard. How many victories and defeats are there in that voice? It’s not the most beautiful any more, not in the conventional conservatoire sense at least. But it holds whole histories of yearning. The backing band are loose and relaxed. Or should that be shambolic? Don’t know, don’t care. The guitar has the fluency of speech. The kamelgoni scratches you in all the right places. The music picks you up and cradles you. There’s a change of tempo. The energy rises several notches. Salif leaps in the air.  Then…

Wow. I’m watching Salif Keita on the banks of the Niger, in his heartlands: the old river in the background, calm, ghost-silver, indulgent life-giver.

It’s all endless. Then it ends.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2014

First published in fRoots – May 2014

PHOTO ESSAY – Festival on the Niger 2014

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Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako

Some bands score a few hits, some change the face of music and some end up defining a whole era. Les Ambassadeurs did all three. During their decade and half of existence, from 1970 to 1985, this West African supergroup wrote and rewrote the rule book for the Manding pop that was to achieve global success during the ‘world music’ boom of the 1980s and 1990s. They forged a new sound out of the dreams and tensions of post-Independence West Africa: socialism, pan-Africanism, black pride, authenticité, salsa, jazz, soul, rock’n’roll and the ancient art of the griots. They gave the Malian everyman and everywomen a chance to reconcile their instinctive pride in West Africa’s illustrious past with their equally instinctive desire to be fully engaged in the modern world. “Above all”, says Salif Keita, Les Ambassadeurs’ most famous ‘son’, “they taught Malians to love their own music.”

The reunion of Les Ambassadeurs is a banner headline long dreamt of by Malians, West Africans and lovers of African music the world over. What the band’s surviving singers and instrumentalists are preparing to deliver when they stroll on stage this summer is more than just nostalgia for a time when Mali was young and drunk on the hooch of hope and possibility, more than an excuse to rekindle past friendships and relive old glories and more than an hour or two of unforgettable Malian orchestral pop. What Les Ambassadeurs will deliver is proof that Malian musicians, given the right conditions and support, can create truly revolutionary music. That’s exactly what happened back in those salad days in the 1970s when Les Ambassadeurs were the pride of Mali and West Africa, and that’s what will happen again if the country can face its demons, heal its fractured soul and get back to the business of creating conditions in which music and culture can flourish.

Every successful Malian musician is an ambassador for their nation, because as the great griot Toumani Diabate famously said, “music is our cotton, our gold and our diamonds.” But les Ambassadeurs weren’t only true ambassadors, they were a pioneering institution, a school through which the greatest Malian musical talent of the late 20^th century passed before going on to conquer the world, a symbol of Mali’s enduring potential as a musical powerhouse.

Les Ambassadeurs is also a story of friendship, danger and music. It’s a story that needs to be told!

Dateline: Bamako, Mali. 1970. The honeymoon of independence is most definitely over. Mali’s first president Modibo Keita festers in a military prison up in Kidal, a desert outpost in the far north east of the country. The socialist dream that bought him to power in 1960 has turned into a nightmare, with enforced collectivisation and currency devaluation leading to financial meltdown and widespread dissent. President Keita’s response is to suppress political opposition and personal freedoms, often with extreme brutality. Then, on the 19^th November 1968, the President is arrested by a group of soldiers as he’s driving back to Bamako with his cortège. They bundle him into a tank and take him back to the Presidential palace in the capital. That night, a cabal of army officers lead by Lieutenant Moussa Traore and his Military Committee for National Liberation (CMLN) seizes power. The next morning there’s jubilation in the streets and the nation breathes a collective sigh of relief.

The man who arrests President Keita is a steely-eyed lieutenant by the name of Tiékoro Bagayoko. He fought for the French in the Algerian war of Independence and received military training in the Soviet Union and the US. His swashbuckling hardman attitude and all round ruthlessness earns him the rank of no. 2 in Mali’s new military government. He’s also named head of Mali’s security services. Not a man you’re likely to argue with if you value your life, let alone your peace and prosperity.

Bagayoko happens to be a big fan of music and football. He runs Djoliba AC, one of Mali’s leading soccer clubs, treating it like an executive toy. But to be a real big shot in Mali’s 2^nd Republic, you also need your own orchestra. In 1970, Bagayoko persuades the owner of the Motel de Bamako, one of his favourite nightspots in the capital, with its mango trees and wide views of the Niger River, to form a new resident band. A group of musicians are duly poached from two highly reputed orchestras based in Bouaké in the Ivory Coast – L’Orchestre de la Fraternité Ivoirienne (OFI) and Les Elephants Noirs. Their leader is a saxophonist by the name of Moussa ‘Vieux’ Cissokho. A lead vocalist called Ousmane Dia is lured from the legendary Star Band of Dakar in Senegal and more musicians are hired locally. Given the multi-national nature of its membership and Bagayoko’s penchant for exclusivity and style, the band is baptised Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako.

Initially, Les Ambassadeurs have only one mission: to be the best human jukebox that money and patronage can buy. Their clientele is a mix of military goodfellas allied to the junta, their wives and mistresses, other well-heeled government employees, expat businessmen, diplomats, visiting dignitaries and high class ladies of pleasure, all of whom converge on dance floor of the Motel nightly from Wednesday through to Saturday. The entry fee is sky high and the bar bills prohibitive. It’s a place to see and be seen, its atmosphere perfumed with an intoxicating scent of power thanks to the presence of Tiékoro Bagayoko himself, who often holds exclusive private parties at the Motel and clears the dance floor with a couple of shots from his pistol when the fancy takes him. The band play…well…almost everything: salsa, son, calypso, French variété, musette, funk, soul, rock’n’roll, twist, country and western, Russian songs, Arabic songs, Chinese songs. The list goes on. Clients often slip the band a tune in the morning requesting it to be played that same night. Rehearsals are from 2pm to 3pm every afternoon. Showtime is at 9pm sharp and the party goes on until the last man standing.

With the arrival of the renowned guitarist and composer Manfila Kanté and the keyboardist Idrissa Soumaoro in 1972, Les Ambassadeurs begin their slow mutation from a covers act to a real creative force. Manfila Kanté was born a nyamakala, a member of a hereditary clan of blacksmiths and griots in Guinea. He cut his teeth in various jazz bands in Ivory Coast before joining up with Les Ambassadeurs. His talents as a composer and arranger are widely recognised. Not only is the Motel the place to be, but Les Ambassadeurs are becoming a magnet for musical ambition and talent.

For a while now, a young singer called Salif Keita has been making waves in Bamako with the goose-bump intensity of his voice. He’s the frontman of The Rail Band du Buffet Hotel de la Gare, the great rivals of Les Ambassadeurs on the Bamako music scene. Like a covetous football club manager, Manfila Kanté sets his sights on persuading Salif Keita to switch sides. Salif is already at odds with Ally Diallo, the manager of Bamako’s main railway station hotel, in whose buffet restaurant the Rail Band is the resident attraction. When Salif questions Diallo about royalties and copyrights due on various Rail Band album releases, he’s told that he’s an employee of the Malian railways, in other words, of the state, and as such royalties and copyrights are of no concern to him. He should content himself with his generous monthly salary and free moped.

But Salif is beginning to think otherwise. After finishing his set with the Rail Band he gets into the habit of scooting over to the Motel to join his best friend Ousmane Dia and Les Ambassadeurs for a late night jam. He digs the creative genius of Manfila Kanté. He loves the intense camaraderie at the Motel. “It was those people who really taught me how to compose,” he tells me, “They were people who had been in the biggest bands in the Ivory Coast. They really weren’t just any old musicians. They were really strong intellects, people from whom I could learn loads. So it’s there I really wanted to go.”

The Rail Band are a force to be reckoned with. Under the inspired leadership of saxophonist Tidjani Koné, the group has been blending traditional epic poetry, for centuries the exclusive preserve of the griots or hereditary ‘bards’ of the Manding People, with a 20^th century brew of salsa and jazz. But despite the presence of musicians who would later become globally famous, like the guitarist Djelimady Tounkara or the singer Mory Kanté, Salif still sees the Rail Band as a glorified cabaret act, albeit a glorified MALIAN cabaret act. Les Ambassadeurs are something else: modern, international, outgoing, creative and the home of Salif’s best friend, Ousmane Dia. In 1973, he decides to jump ship, a move equivalent in Malian terms to Mick Jagger joining The Beatles in ’64, or Damon Albarn defecting to Oasis in ’96.

And not without political consequences either. Salif has to face the displeasure of Tiékoro Bagayoko’s friend and fellow-putchista Lt Col Karim Dembélé, who is the Minister of Public Works and the man responsible for Mali’s one-track rail network and ultimately, the Rail Band itself. The presence of Salif Keita in ‘his’ band is an adornment that Lt Col Dembélé is loath to loose. But eventually, Bagayoko gets his way, as he usually does, and Salif moves from the Buffet de la Gare to the Motel de Bamako. The reception he receives is warm but conditional: “The musicians came up to me and said, ‘you won’t find the Manding griots here. You haven’t come to transform Les Ambassadeurs into a folkloric instrumental ensemble. Either you’re willing to learn or you can get lost!” The memory brings out a chuckle in his voice.

Those welcoming words hint at the ideological winds that have been shaping Malian music since independence. Mali’s first President Modibo Keita was a doctrinaire socialist, who viewed his country’s moral and cultural health as his paternalistic responsibility. His goal was to decouple the Malian mind from colonial feelings of inferiority and disdain, and forge a new sense of pride and national cohesion using local West African traditions of music, poetry and dance as both hammer and anvil. In doing this, he was following the lead of President Sekou Touré of Guinea, to whom authenticité and Africanité were inviolable creeds. Guinean bands like Bembeya Jazz, Les Amazones de Guinée, Balla et ses Balladins and Keletigi et ses Tambourinis were already way ahead of their Malian counterparts by the late 1960s.

As soon as he came to power, President Keita set up the annual Semaines de Jeunesse (Youth Weeks) during which musicians, actors, dancers and sports men and women from all over the nation would come together to celebrate Malian culture and tradition in all its pied beauty and ethnic variety. He also created two National Orchestras, Orchestre Nationale A and Orchestra Nationale B, and a National Instrumental Ensemble, and stuffed them with Malians most talented musicians who became, in effect, state employees. Every region was also urged to create its own orchestra; Mopti, Kayes, Ségou, Sikasso and eventually Gao rose to the challenge. The musicians in these state-run orchestras started by playing what they knew and loved, which was salsa and jazz. But they were constantly urged to “be more African!” and so lyrics glorifying the new nation in local languages started to be superimposed over the Latin rhythms and eventually, epic poetry and praise songs were ‘borrowed’ from the griots and adapted to the new purpose of nation-building.

The most important of those epics recounted the exploits of Sunjata Keita, the warrior-king who founded the Empire of Mali in the 13^th century. It was no idle fancy that drove the founding fathers of the nation to choose the name Mali for their new country. Under the French, it had simply been known as Le Soudan Français or French Sudan. The story of Sunjata Keita and magnificence of the Empire that he created was a unifying legend every bit as powerful to Mali’s sense of its own being and worth as King Arthur is to the British, or Moses is to the state of Israel. President Modibo Keita was determined that every citizen should learn and draw strength from those epics, and there was no better way of transmitting them than through music. He also sent out his hated milices populaires to keep a watchful eye on the youth of Mali and ensure that their behaviour, their dress and their musical tastes conformed to his vision of anti-colonial socialist morality and Islamic propriety.

But the youth had other ideas. They revered Sunjata Keita but in their own way. Salif Keita, who was nineteen years old when Modibo Keita was overthrown, was especially familiar with the legacy of the great king because he was one of his direct descendants. As such he was a horon, a man of ‘noble’ birth, even though his father was a simple crofter who tilled his fields of manioc in Djoliba, a small town on the Niger not far from Bamako. A Keita wasn’t supposed to sing or play music. A Keita was supposed to be sung to by a griot, who knew a thousand beautiful words and phrases with which to praise him and his illustrious ancestor. Such are the strange workings of birth, caste and tradition in Malian society.

What’s more, Salif Keita was born an albino, his skin as pale as that of the coloniser who had just been sent packing from the country. He was a freakish aberration that inspired an uneasy mix of curiosity and fear in the strangers he met. In West Africa, albinos are derided, spat upon or sometimes fetishised as mascots with mysterious powers. In rare and extreme cases, they can even be murdered young by the paranoid and superstitious, their head and genitals removed and their hair harvested as a lucky charm.

Salif’s father chased him from the family home whenever he sang or played the guitar. He grew up lonely and isolated, often shunned by classmates, singing griot songs in the fields as he watched over the crops. By his own admission, music saved him from insanity, and at the earliest opportunity he left for Bamako where he busked in bars or out on the street, living off the few coins and notes that were stuffed into his guitar soundbox by appreciative folk in the audience. That’s how he was ‘discovered’ in 1969 by Tidjani Koné, the leader of the Rail Band. His very being was a revolution in itself: A noble Keita turned ‘troubadour’ in flowery shirt and bell-bottoms, who sang the old epics just like a griot. An albino who didn’t hide his pale skin away in shame like the others, but actually did everything he could to display it in public, along with his heavenly voice.

In the latter years of the 1960s, the patronising speeches about socialism and authenticity that kept being blasted out by the government propaganda machine had limited appeal to a Malian youth fascinated by the culture of the West and other emerging nations. Their heroes were James Brown, Mohammed Ali, Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Their soundtrack was James Brown, Otis Redding, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Santana, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Bad Company, Ten Years After, Woodstock and Latin stars like Orchestra Aragon, Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco. Their fashion sense was moulded more by Haight Ashbury and Carnaby St than it was by African traditions. Black and proud but brash and loud and sexy and funky to boot – that’s what Malian teen spirit smelt like. The forces of socialism and Islam bore down on that spirit with their weighty moralising pedantry. Culture was an ideological battleground and nobody could tell which direction it was heading in.^[1]

When Modibo Keita was deposed, music stopped being a tool of the socialist state and became the flower in the buttonhole of powerful individuals in government. The military dictator Lieutenant Moussa Troare abolished the Semaines de la Jeunesse and most of the national orchestras. However, after the remnants of the National Instrumental Ensemble won gold prize at the Pan African festival in Algiers in 1969, Traore was persuaded to revive the concept of regular nationwide cultural gatherings. In 1970s he set up the Artistic, Cultural and Sportive Biennales, which became a sort of bi-annual cultural summit for musicians and dancers form every corner of the land.

People often ask why Mali is such a prolific musical nation. Part of the answer has to be the Biennales. They were a wonderful mix of melting pot, talent contest and music school. From the Biennales and the multitude of local, district and regional contests that were associated with them emerged a new generation of musicians who began to create a myriad of private bands sponsored by organisations, companies or individuals. This wasn’t the musical socialism of Modibo Keita. It was a new form of cultural free enterprise or, as Salif Keita puts it, “Every man for himself and God for all.”

At the top of the pile are The Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs. Taking a lead from Guinea’s Bembeya Jazz and a band called Las Maravillas de Mali, which comprised musicians from Mali who had been hand picked by the government to go on a course in music in Havana, Cuba, Salif Keita and Tidjani Koné have already started experimenting in the Rail Band by mixing old griot epics together with improvised Latin jazz backing tracks. This isn’t the only style that the Rail Band were capable of, far from it, but it’s the one most popular with their audience at the Buffet de la Gare. But when Salif Keita leaves to joint Les Ambassadeurs, he’s told by his new musical family that he has to change. That’s what lies behind their welcome: “Learn or get lost!”

So Salif Keita goes to school. The steady rigour of absorbing almost every style in modern pop, and playing them night after night creates a fluidity and group cohesion in Les Ambassadeurs that is second to none. Salif’s intense vocals blend elegantly with the tight Afro-latin grooves of bassist Ichiaka Dama and drummer Djossé, the eloquent freeform guitars of Manfila Kanté, Ousmane Kouyaté and Issa Gnaré and the floating horns of Moussa ‘Vieux’ Cissoko and Kabine ‘Tagus’ Traore. Salif sings the Manding songs, whilst Ousmane Dia sings Wolof numbers from Senegal and Moussa ‘James Brown’ Doumbia sings all the funky soulful tunes from across the Atlantic. By 1974 the band have reached cruising altitude.

Manfila Kanté, Salif Keita and Idrissa Soumaoro work on new material, some of it based on old Manding melodies and griot praise songs. They also want to show their love of Mali’s past, but in their own way, and better than the Rail Band. When they’re invited to record radio sessions by the Malian state broadcaster ORTM, it’s that Malian material that comes to the fore. Sound Engineer Boubacar Traore does wonders with the new German microphones and recording equipment that the junta have bought to help create a Malian recording industry. Classics like ‘Mana Mana’, ‘Super Pitié’, ’Saranfing’ and ’Tiécolom-Ba’ are cut during those sessions, and released on the Sonafric and Mali Music labels. The assistant on many of those sessions is a young guitarist from Niafunké in the north of the country called Ali Farka Toure.

The reputation of Les Ambassadeurs begins to cross frontiers and go places. In 1974 the group fly to Paris to play for ex-pat Malian migrant labourers living in their all-male worker’s hostels, who toil in French factories and pine for the warm touch of home . “It was the first time I saw France,” Salif says. “We discovered the true face of immigration there, but we weren’t that far out of our comfort zone, because we were among Malians.” The group stay in the mainly immigrant Barbès district of the French capital, watched over by a government minder. Several members are sacked for various misdemeanours when they return home.

Balaphon player Keletigui Diabate and guitarist Amadou Bagayoko, later to become world famous as one half of the duet Amadou & Miriam, join the ever spinning merry-go-round that is the Les Ambassadeurs line-up in 1975. Keletigui Diabate, who also plays a masterful violin and sax, soon becomes a crucial part of the composing and arranging team. “I think Keletigui was the foundation,” says Cheick Tidiane Seck, the producer and keyboard player often dubbed the ‘Quincey Jones’ of Malian music.

Cheick Tidiane, who’s studying at the National Institute for the Arts, joins the Rail Band around this time but also becomes a regular presence at late night jam sessions with Les Ambassadeurs at the Motel de Bamako. “I was in my Guevarist period, always in revolt,” he says. “The government offered me a teaching job in Gao but I declined to go. I persuaded the Rail Band to let me join them on their return from Nigeria. I already knew how to play Jimmy Smith, James Brown and all that stuff. That was my secret weapon.”

The rivalry between Les Ambassadeurs and the Rail Band remains intense, but devoid of malice or bitterness. “I think it was a bit political,” Salif says, “because Tiékoro Bagayoko supported us and his best friend [Lt Col Dembélé] supported the Rail Band. But there wasn’t any nasty competitiveness. It really just pushed the musicians to work harder.” There’s a famous ‘clash’ in 1974 when both groups share the largest stage of Bamako’s Modibo Keita stadium. Each has been asked to arrange a version of ‘Kibaru’, an old tune with lyrics that rail against the evils of illiteracy. “There was no competition really,” Salif declares with categorical certainty, “because we were composers and they weren’t.”

Tiékoro Bagayoko uses his influence to muscle Les Ambassadeurs onto the bill of the Quinzaine Artistique in the Guinean capital Conakry. It’s one of President Sekou Touré’s regular statements of African authenticity and personal grandeur. Normally, only state-sponsored orchestras are allowed to appear at such events, but no one says no to Lieutenant Tiékoro. Come showtime, Les Ambassadeurs torch the rest of the bill. In the middle of their set at the Palace of the People, Salif Keita starts to improvise lyrics of griotic praise song to President Touré who is seated in front of him, over a popular tune called ‘Wajan’. He addresses President Touré as “Mandjou” which is a kind of panegyric nickname reserved for members of the illustrious Touré family, renowned throughout West Africa for their marabouts and learned men. To the astonishment of the audience, Salif Keita goes right up the Guinean ruler and kneels before him as he sings these words:

“Mandjou, don’t cry

Son of Alifa Touré, don’t cry

Son of Aminata, Fadiga, don’t cry

Mandjou, don’t cry

Father of André Madu, don’t cry

My hope lies in you

The time for crying has not yet come, Mandjou

May Allah reward you with gold

Mandjou, don’t cry

The whole world believes in you…”

(Lyrics taken from the website http://lhistgeobox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/199-les-ambassadeurs-internationaux.html. Translated from the French by Andy Morgan).

Overcome with gratitude, President Toure stands up and places his hand on Salif Keita’s head. Salif the albino is touched and ‘blessed’ by one of the most famous rulers in post-Independence Africa. It’s a moment of immense significance. “I think we’re really feeling the absence of Seckou Toure right now,” Salif Keita says, almost forty years later, “because he was one of the pioneers who had some good ideas for this continent. Unfortunately, we need him now but he’s not there.”

These sentiments aren’t universally shared, to say the least. By 1975, the early adulation that Sekou Touré received for his defiance of the colonial order has turned into bitterness and disappointment. Thousands of political opponents, even entirely innocent citizens, have been imprisoned without trial, tortured and executed during his paranoid reign, especially after the failed coup of 1970, one of seventeen that take place during his reign. And thousands more will go on to suffer a similar fate before he dies in 1984. But that’s the griot pact: You sing the praises of the great and the powerful – tyrants or saints – and in return you receive gifts and protection.

As the seventies progress, Les Ambassadeurs become less and less of a juke box in flares and hippie shirts, and more and more of a creative force. The composers and arrangers lead by Manfila Kanté propel them forward. “Kanté knew how to be the boss,” Salif says, “And he was a good teacher, very open, with lots of talent.” The group’s reputation grows and the Motel buzzes with comings and goings. Even the great masters of Cuban son, Orquesta Aragón, pay several visits just to see them play. “It was top!,” Salif Keita recalls, “after we played they asked us what school of music we’d been to, and we said that we’d never been to any school. They were floored! They couldn’t understand how we had come to learn their songs so faithfully.”

In 1977 Les Ambassadeurs travel to Lagos for the Black and African World Festival of Art and Culture (FESTPAC). “Quite honestly, the violence scared me,” Salif recalls. “Guns were being fired off continually next to the camp where we were staying. It wasn’t at all pleasant.” A few years later, the band return to the Nigerian capital and spend time with Fela Kuti at the Kalakuta Republic, hanging out and smoking stupendously large spliffs. “He was treated like a king out there,” Salif says, “he was a king, really! Holding court at Kalakuta. It’s something that had to be seen. Then, years later, I saw him for the last time at the Zenith in Paris. Before going on stage, he made me sit down next to him and he said ‘Salif, we did what we could. We resisted. Now it’s time for you to take up the baton and continue the struggle. But above all, do it with your heart, and never be frightened.’ It bought tears to my eyes.”

Back in Mali, the struggle intensifies. The military junta are cracking down on dissent, arresting student leaders, trade unionists and opposition politicians and often packing them off to the barracks of the Paratroop Regiment at Djicoroni for a little softening up. Some don’t return. Modibo Keita dies from poisoning in 1977 and his funeral becomes a mass demonstration of discontent. There are whispers that Tiékoro Bagayoko himself gave the order to liquidate the former president. He’s kept busy rounding up the ‘trouble-makers’, and pays many unannounced visits to Bamako’s educational establishments with a bunch of scary looking paras in tow. But then, as often happens in the annals of despotism, Tiékoro suddenly finds his own head on the block. He’s called to a meeting with President Traore at the Koulouba Palace in February 1978, along with his good friend and fellow music fan Karim Dembélé, and both are arrested on charges of corruption and disloyalty. They’re sent up north to the salt mines in Taodenni, a truly terrifying place, where Tiékoro Bagayoko dies soon afterwards.

Without their protector, Les Ambassadeurs feel vulnerable. Several of the surviving cronies in Moussa Traore’s regime demand to take his place and become the group’s new patron. But the group spurns their advances. Finally, in August 1978, Manfila Kanté decides that Les Ambassadeurs should relocate to Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast. They leave in the nick of time. “Some politicians wanted to arrest us,” Salif explains. “So we had to flee at 6am. We met up and got the hell out of there.” At the frontier, the group are received by a gendarme in the frontier police who’s a close friend. A goat is slaughtered and a delicious méchoui roast is prepared. As the musicians eat their fill, a call comes from Bamako with an order to arrest them all. But the group’s host informs the caller that Les Ambassadeurs have already crossed the frontier and are in the Ivory Coast. They’ve escaped by the hairs on their ears.

Mali’s loss is the Ivory Coast’s gain. For some years, Abidjan has been the city of choice for many West African musicians fleeing oppression and moral constraint in their own countries. Its buoyant coffee and cocoa economy has created a wealthy middle class eager to consume good music and support musicians. The country has a formative but dynamic recording industry and there’s also large Manding community in the capital Abidjan, comprising mostly of merchants and traders, who are happy to welcome Mali’s leading group into their midst. The move to Abidjan is made necessary by the disintegrating political situation in Mali, but also in part by a desire to work in a place where musicians were respected and can earn a decent wage without having to kowtow to a powerful patron or the state. This is all quite new for Les Ambassadeurs.

Nonetheless, life is hard initially. Having been used to being given quality instruments by their employers or patrons, Les Ambassadeurs are now forced to hire their own before every show. They find work playing at various clubs, especially one called Les Trois Cocotiers near the sea in Grand Bassam. There are also weddings, baptisms and circumcision feasts to serenade, but it all seems far from the cocooned life of salaried stardom that the group have known in Bamako. They rebaptize themselves Les Ambassadeurs International. A few members including Idrissa Soumaoro have stayed behind in Bamako. He’s replaced by Cheick Tidiane Seck, who receives a telegram from Salif Keita and Manfila Kanté which reads “What the hell are you still doing in Bamako. Get yourself over here quick!” This is a new Les Ambassadeurs, an international band in exile.

A way forward comes in the shape of Moussa Kamara, a friend who works as a sound engineer at the studios of Radio Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI) in downtown Abidjan. One night, Kamara smuggles Les Ambassadeurs past the studio guards and records a two-hour session that features five songs. One of them is a version of ‘Mandjou’, Salif Keita’s paean to President Ahmed Sekou Touré. Along with four others, the song is released in 1978 on a small local label called Amons Productions, and then re-released a year later by Badmos. It becomes a massive hit throughout West Africa.

A smudgy black and white video of Les Ambassadeurs performing ‘Mandjou’ on Malian TV in the early 1980s can be seen on You Tube. Salif Keita and two other singers cut some moves out front, surprisingly shy and restrained. A dour looking Keletigui Diabate glows incandescent on the violin. Manfila Kanté’s guitar stabs and glides over the melancholy lilt of the Latin beat. The dress code is matching short sleeve shirts with geometric patterns on shoulder and chest, and stay-press bell-bottoms. The effect is disciplined, confident, and masterful. The Manding words of praise are wrenched from deep by Salif Keita who looks down, sideways, inwards, but never to camera. It’s so much more than mere entertainment. It’s a way marker in a road that started long before independence, a glorious peak for Malian and West African music.

The success of ‘Mandjou’ endears Les Ambassadeurs and Salif Keita to President Sekou Touré even further. The song becomes his personal anthem. Salif is rewarded with a medal of Officer of the National Order of Guinea, a diplomatic passport and an extended stay in Guinea after a tour, as a personal guest of the President. Les Ambassadeurs are on a roll. One classic recording follows another: the love song ’N’Toman’, a wrenching Manding praise song called ‘Seydou Bathily’, and song called ‘Kandja’ by ‘Vieux’ Cissokho that’s dedicated to the Guinean griot Sory Kandia Kouyate who died in 1977. If Salif Keita ever followed a role model, it was Sory Kandia Kouyaté. Two albums of acoustic “back to the roots” duets entitled Dans L’Authenticité Vols 1 & 2, featuring Manfila Kanté on guitar and Salif on vocals is released. They propound “a return to the positive values of the past for the building of a modern society.” Salif is nicknamed the ‘Domingo’ of Malian music, in reference to his football-playing homonym, who is blazing bright with Olympique de Marseilles at that time.

At the end of 1979, Les Ambassadeurs receive a Rockefeller scholarship to go and record a new album in the United States with producer Ray Lema. Their semi-official patron and friend, Ivorian businessman Sidi Mohammed Sacko, also helps with the cost of travel and accommodation. Salif Keita, Manfila Kanté, Ousmane Kouyate, Moussa Cissokho and a few others arrive in the alien decay and musical effervescence that is late 70s New York, in the depths of winter with hardly more than a few words of English between them. “It was very cold,” Salif Keita remembers, “I didn’t really try to understand American culture but it was clear that it was too much a case of every man for himself and God for all out there. We were used to more solidarity in our society. It wasn’t the same.”

The group need to prepare musical score sheets of their arrangements, but none of them can read or write music, so they entrust the job to a Puerto Rican musician and pay him $400. He promptly disappears with the money. Feeling demoralised and abandoned, Salif Keita calls his old friend President Sekou Touré who offers the group the hospitality of the Guinean embassy in Washington. They stay in America for a total of three months, recording several songs with Ray Lema. The most noticeable thing about those cuts is the overriding attempt to ‘modernise’ of the Ambassadeurs sound, with liberal use of synths, drum machines and other emerging technologies. This trend heralds the start of major artistic differences within the group. Even though Salif later claims that nobody wanted to “spoil” their music with technology, it’s clear that his ears are more receptive to what’s happening at the frontiers of modern pop than those of Manfila Kanté. “I listened to a lot of pop music,” he says, “that’s all I listened to. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Bob Marley. There were always with me. Whereas Manfila, he just listened to salsa in fact. And jazz and Guinean music a lot. But I listened to pop.”

Salif Keita is almost arrested when he spots a fire at the top of a building next to the Embassy in Washington and attempting to raise the alarm with his two-word English becomes an arson suspect. “I understood that over there, when you see things like that, you stay out of it,” he says laughing. The band return safe to Abidjan and to a steady flow of new releases. First comes the album Seydou Bathily on the Badmos label, its title song a classic Manding jazz salsa blend in the mould of ‘Mandjou’. Then, in 1981, it’s followed by the albums Tounkan and Mani Mani on Sako Productions. Tounkan features songs recorded in the USA, including ‘Primprin’ which becomes a big hit. The sound is driven by a different energy, a big pop thrust varnished by the professionalism of the American studio that marks a change of register in the group’s career.

With the wide distribution of these releases in Africa and the African diaspora in France and other European countries, Les Ambassadeurs are becoming truly internationaux. Salif Keita is turning a star with global reach, a beacon of adulation for a West African youth hungry to see one of their own go beyond the stultifying strictures of home life with its moral straight jackets, its political corruption and cronyism, its poverty and hopelessness. There’s Salif, a Malian kid from the wrong side of the tracks, striding off down the Main St of modernity, in love with the world beyond African shores, in tune with its pleasures and benefits, aware of its pitfalls, but still African down to his very marrow. It’s a vision to make any young Malian dream.

But cracks are appearing. Despite the success, royalties are almost nonexistent and money is scarce. Success without the accompanying financial rewards creates strain in any group. Eventually, Les Ambassadeurs split in two, with Manfila Kanté taking a few loyal followers including Moussa ‘Vieux’ Cissokho and the singer Sandaly Kanté along with him and Salif Keita gathering some of the younger members to his side, including singer and old friend Ousmane Dia, guitarist Ousmane Kouyate, keyboardist Cheick Tidiane Seck, Djossé the drummer, Sekou Diabaté the bassist, Tagus the trumpeter and singer Solo Doumbia. Manfila Kanté and his followers continue to play a regular residency at Les Trois Cocotiers, and Salif’s crew find a new home at the Agnebi bar. It’s a painful divorce that offers the music fans of Abidjan the unique delight of seeing two versions of Les Ambassadeurs in two different places on the same night.

The world is changing too. The old gentility of Manding orchestral grooves built mainly on salsa and jazz is beginning to sound dated, as is the safe metaphorical approach of the lyrics that go with it. The Ivorian reggae singer Alpha Blondy is achieving mass success with music that rides booming bass and drum grooves and speaks plain words about uncomfortable truths such as corruption, lack of democracy, abuse of power and the death of opportunity for young Africans. In addition, audiocassettes and the ease with which they can be pirated is destroying the African recorded music industry. Its economic engine is beginning to shift elsewhere, mainly Paris where the big bang of sono mondiale is in full motion. Radio Nova, SOS Racisme, Actuel Magazine, labels like Celluloid and Sonodisc, producers like Martin Meissonnier and festivals like Musique Métisses in Angouleme or WOMAD in the UK – these are the new gateways to international recognition and success for African musicians.

The last Ambassadeurs album is recorded at the famous JBZ Studios in Abidjan in 1982. The title song is a classic piece of Afro-Manding pop called ‘Djougouya’. All the primary ingredients of the Ambassadeurs sound are there: Cuba, Afro-Beat, jazz, Manding. Concerts in Gabon, Sierra Leone, Liberia follow and in 1983, an invitation arrives perform at the Chapiteau de Pantin in the suburbs of Paris. Les Supers Ambassadeurs, as the Salif Keita-lead branch of the group is now called, return to France in 1984 to play at the prestigious Printemps de Bourges and Jazz en France festivals. At the latter, they share a bill with Super Biton de Ségou, one of Mali’s most prolific and successful regional orchestras, as well as Super Djata Band and the griotte Kandia Kouyaté. It’s a night to remember. 1984 also brings a mass relocation to Paris. Salif Keita finds himself a little apartment in the suburb of Montreuil, with its huge community of expat Malians. Manfila Kanté and the renowned leader of Mali’s Orchestre National, Kasse Mady Diabate, also find permanent homes in the French capital. The great displacement of musical energy away from Africa and towards Europe has begun.

Youssou N’dour lends Les Ambassadeurs a small PA and a sound engineer to do a tour of Senegambia at the end of 1984, beginning of 1985. A major argument takes place in the small town of Kaolack . This is merely the full stop at the end of a long decline in group morale. Les Ambassadeurs are no more. Salif Keita, Ousmane Kouyate and others return to France. Cheick Tidiane Seck goes back to Bamako before eventually also moving to France. What’s left to keep all these musicians in Mali? The military dictatorship of Moussa Traore is entering its most paranoid and repressive phase. The music industry is being shot to pieces by piracy. The whole system of artistic and cultural patronage, by the state or by rich and powerful individuals, is on its last legs. If you have the talent, the energy, the ambition, then exile seemed to be your only option.

Of course, as one star fades, another begins its ascent. With finance provided by the great Senegalese record producer Ibrahima Sylla, Salif Keita goes into a Paris studio in 1986 with Manfila Kanté and many of the musicians he’d known in Les Ambassadeurs and The Rail Band, including Cheick Tidiane Seck, and records the album Soro. The production work of Frenchmen Jean-Philippe Rykiel and François Bréant helps to ensure that the balance between the African and the rock and pop elements feels natural, even inevitable, whilst also sounding utterly revolutionary. The album is released in 1987 and almost from day one, it feels like the beginning of a brand new chapter in the long story of West African music. The spawn of Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako are set to conquer the world.

Now, forty years after that golden age of home-produced Malian pop, memories are warm, but a little spiked too. The reappearance of Les Ambassadeurs begs painful questions about Mali, the country that gave them birth. Where’s all the hope that existed back then? Where are all the social opportunities that were later squandered, the political initiatives that came to nothing? In the grand tradition of most modern Malian music, many of the songs recorded by Les Ambassadeurs were vehicles for social advice on a wide range of topics: literacy, education, honesty in public life, cleanliness, health, development and so on. Forty years later, the situation in some of these domains has barely moved forward and, in the worse cases, has even been reversed.

“I think that those people whose job it was to make those messages come true haven’t been doing their job properly,” Salif Keita offers in explanation. “That’s nothing to do with the musicians. But…well…that’s how it is. But what Les Ambassadeurs did was to allow Malian culture to become known beyond the frontiers of Mali. Those musicians became the real ambassadors of Malian and West African culture, thanks to what they did. And after all, that’s very important for Mali itself.”

The compounded mistakes and weaknesses of successive Malian leaders and their administrations, from Modibo Keita through Moussa Traore to Alpha Oumar Konaré and Amadou Toumani Toure together with a complex web of external pressures lead to the bitter crisis that enveloped the country in 2012. Mali’s 20-year-old democracy was ripped to shreds by a military coup and the nation was split in two by a secessionist Touareg uprising and a jihadist takeover in the north. Once again the founding legend of Sunjata Keita came to the fore in public discourse to help buttress Mali’s sense of self worth as a peaceful, open and potentially courageous nation. Above all, the fact that Sunjata had united the Mandé people under his rule, from the Atlantic to the place where the great Niger River turns south, thousands of miles to the east, offered a vision of hope and unity for the Sahel beyond the divisions of tribe and nation. That vision finds its echo in Les Ambassadeurs, a band that was always transnational in its membership and outlook, reflecting the polyglot nature of the region.

“The great orchestras of Mali must be a symbol of a sacred union around a nation which was peaceful with a moderate form of Islam,” says Cheick Tidiane Seck, the man who, along with others, has spearheaded efforts to reunite Les Ambassadeurs and put them on the road once again. “Mali has never been an incoherent nation,” says Salif Keita. “Mali has been a family which from the beginning to the end, from the north to the south, to the very last village, is one family. What we want is reconciliation. Society must come together as it has always done. It must unite.”

What is the true legacy of Les Ambassadeurs? “It’s us,” answers Cheick Tidiane Seck, “and the careers we’ve been able to have since then: Salif, Amadou, Idrissa Soumaoro, Manfila Kanté. That’s the legacy. It’s also the younger bands who emerged after us, and who acknowledge the debt to their elders. It’s also what we’re going to build tomorrow, to prove that we’re still here and can still touch people’s emotions.”

Us: A group of friends, partners, musicians, and adventurers. Les Ambassadeurs changed the face of West African music, but theirs was also a story of friendship, one that this summer’s reunion will warm back to a fine simmer.

“It’s Manfila Kanté who I’ll miss most,” says Salif Keita with affection. His musical co-conspirator died in 2011 after a varied but ultimately impressive solo career. “He was a like a big brother to me, and friends with everyone. He was the jack of all trades in Les Ambassadeurs: composer, arranger, guitarist…the boss of everything that went on at the Motel, along with his teacher, Moussa Cissokho, whom we called ‘Vieux’. But in fact, I’ll miss them all, because it really was a great band. There was a great solidarity between us. And there’ll be a few tears shed when we get together this summer, even if those tears may not be seen. The reunion will remind us of many things, and touch us deep down, because many of our friends have left us now.”

Andy Morgan. (c) 2014

Bristol UK, June 2014.

Commissioned by 3D Family to accompany the reunion tour of Les Ambassadeurs, July 2014.

^[1] Anyone wanting to delve deeper into the fascinating stew of influences cooking up on the streets of Bamako in the late 1960s should take a look at the work of the Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, or read an essay by the Malian writer Manthia Diawara called The Sixties in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown.

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