A troupe of singers at the Taragalte Festival 2016 in M’hamid el Ghizlane. © Andy Morgan

For the intrepid tourist at least, M’hamid el Ghizlane is the dream Saharan town. A dense green backdrop of palm groves offsets the earthy hues of its ramshackle buildings, their emerald shade shielding the eyes from the surrounding barrenness. The air is clear, limpid, the horizons low and limitless, and apart from the odd rumbling 4×4 engine, puttering moped or braying camel, the silence is profound. There’s the same naked yet comforting feeling that takes possession of you when you’re in any coastal town, the feeling of being close to the edge of an immensity. The Sahara stretches away from M’hamid’s southern boundary for a thousand miles, unalloyed and pristine apart from the odd salt mine, all the way to Timbuktu.

The place isn’t particularly remote in Saharan terms. A relatively smooth modern road – currently being upgraded at huge expense – connects it to the more northerly parts of Morocco, where wealth and power reside. The last stretch from Zagora was first tarmac’d as recently as 1980, in preparation for the one and only visit to the town by the then king of Morocco, Hassan II. “The nomads thought it was a form of red carpet,” says local grandee Halim Sbai, unable to suppress a cynical chuckle, “and that it would be rolled back up again once the king had gone.”

The biggest attraction however, for the intrepid tourist at least, is security. M’hamid is one of the few places left in the entire Sahara that a foreigner can visit in relative safety. Most of the desert is a no-gone zone for anyone who isn’t wearing a bulletproof vest or working for a multinational mining concern. The demons that have come to torment the Sahara in recent years are many and varied, but all mysteriously and symbiotically linked somehow: armed separatists, bearded jihadists, criminal traffickers peddling drugs, arms and human beings, pervasive poverty, corruption, marginalisation and social disharmony. The existential disquiet of most of its older residents could be summed in one neat phrase: Paradise lost. The existential question that torments its youth is how to get that paradise back.

A camel rider at dusk – Taragalte Festival 2016                © Andy Morgan

“Before the Europeans came, people crossed the deserts as they wished,” says Issa Dicko, an intellectual from northern Mali who is an authority on the ancient tifinagh alphabet of the nomadic Touareg people. “It was a system that worked, but today the nomads feel imprisoned by events they neither control nor understand. The problems are geo-political but also cultural, because more and more people are abandoning nomadism and adopting a settled life. They can no longer live off caravan trading, as they once did. They can’t even go twenty kilometres into the desert from here before they hit a frontier.”

That frontier, the one dividing Morocco from Algeria, lies just south of M’hamid’s communal boundary and is currently closed to all except wandering camels and criminal traffickers. For most people, getting to the other side, a crow-fly distance of about 30 kilometres, would entail a round trip by car and plane via Casablanca and Algiers of about 3,400 kilometres. An entire criminal mafia has sprung up devoted to stealing the camels who stray over the border. The irony is that this same frontier, with its tight security, is one of the reasons that M’hamid is so safe to visit.

Halim Sbai comes from a long line of desert grandees belonging to the A’arib, a nomadic tribe who speak Hassaniya the west Saharan dialect of Arabic. His uncle Sidi Mohammed Ould Sidi Khalil was a don of the trans-Saharan caravan trade who fought the French coloniser in the 1920s, only to be murdered by a commando from a rival tribe in 1932. His father Mohammed Sheikh Sbai was an opponent of Hassan II who did several stints in jail for his vocal denunciation of corrupt local officialdom.

Back in 2009, Halim and his brother Ibrahim launched a new music festival called Taragalte, the ancient Berber name for M’hamid. They had immediate practical motives: boosting tourism, creating employment, preserving traditional music. But there were also deeper reasons. “The caravans ended because of the frontiers,” Halim says. “The last ones left here in the 1970s, just when the war in the Western Sahara started. The end of caravanning destroyed the social fabric of the Sahara. So we thought, why not create an event that reunites all these people. That was the aim.”

The dunes at Abaraz ‘The place of the Caravans’, M’hamid el Ghizlane. © Andy Morgan

The festival takes place about 4 kilometres out of M’hamid, on a site bordering a gentle sea of undulating dunes dotted with trees, most of which were planted in the past five years by Sahara Roots, a Dutch NGO dedicated to reversing the Sahara’s environmental degradation. The name of this spot is Abaraz, which means ‘place of the Caravan’ in the old Amazigh or Berber tongue. It was here that the returning caravans would earn their first proper taste of life’s sweetnesses – fresh water, milk, dates and women – after months of arid nothingness. Considering how welcome the sweat on an ice-cold bottle of Coca Cola can be after only a few days drive in a comfortable 4×4 from Marrakech, the delight and relief of those bygone desert-travellers can only be imagined. Nearby there was a customs house and a mint to turn all the gold that the caravans transported from Bilad as Sudan – the land of the blacks – into coin, as well as a large community of Jewish traders who lived here “in symbiosis with the local Muslims” according to Issa Dicko, right up until the 1950s, and provided the finance and connections that underpinned the trans-Saharan trade. The twice-yearly arrival of the caravans mutated into a moussem or traditional feast dedicated to Sidi Khalil, a medieval saint and revered forebear of the A’arib. The Taragalte Festival is a modern reincarnation of that ancient celebration.

This year’s edition took place during the relative cool of October, drawing around 1000 locals (who can attend the evening concerts for free) and 300 foreign visitors, including a sizeable contingent of journalists and TV crews, foreign NGOs and volunteers. The US Ambassador to Morocco, the improbably named Dwight L. Bush, was also in attendance and spent a night in a tent at the festival with his entourage. “It was a very strong signal to all Europeans and westerners to say ‘Come, there are no worries in Morocco,” says Halim Sbai.

The bill featured artists from Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Algeria and Niger, representing many strands of the old warp and weft of Saharan society. One of the headliners was Khaira Arby, a diva northern from Mali with a voice powerful enough rearrange your internal anatomy, comes from a neighbourhood of Timbuktu called Abarajo, a southern Saharan distortion of the world Abaraz. The other end of line, in other words.

Ibrahim ag Alhabib with his oud at Taragalte Festival 2016 © Andy Morgan

The uncontested stars of the festival were Tinariwen, the globally renowned band of Touareg guitarists and poets from northern Mali. The men who founded the band were mere teenagers when drought, poverty and oppression drove them out from their ancestral homeland back in the 1970s. It was a brutal dislocation, a head-on collision between an ancient nomadic existence and the modern vicissitudes of city life, unemployment and paperless vagrancy. That odyssey, which Tinariwen shared with an entire generation of Touareg men, resulted in a twin birth: a new political militancy and a new style of desert music that fused traditional melodies and poetry with the whiplash of the electric guitar.

Tinariwen’s leader Ibrahim ag Alhabib is the closest thing to a universal cultural icon that today’s Sahara has to offer – a mix of Marley, Lennon, Dylan and Che, all rolled up into one. Along with thousands of other angry Touareg youth like him, he fought with the Touareg nationalist militia, the MPLA, against the armies of Mali and Niger in 1990-1. They called them the ‘ishumar’ generation, a cheeky Tamashek bastardisation of the French world chomeur, meaning ‘unemployed’. They were the Sahara’s generation X – landless, jobless, vagrant, rebellious, angry, hopeful and in love with modernity. Now Ibrahim is the most famous Touareg on the planet, a status that only music with its power to speak across oceans and frontiers could possibly have bestowed. Touareg politicians are nowhere in comparison.

I find him one morning sitting in a small patch of shade beside a large white tent, not far from the main festival ‘village’, slowly brewing up a scalding bittersweet cup of Touareg tea. He’s a shy, gentle man, who, despite global success and years of international touring, only feels truly at ease in the Sahara. Tinariwen recorded their new album Elwan here at the festival site last year because their own corner of the desert around the town of Kidal in northern Mali is too dangerous to visit. 2012’s Touareg-led uprising against the central government and the subsequent jihadist takeover of the northern two thirds of Mali, which lead to a ban on music, have drained local people of their cultural vigour and turned the region into a sinkhole of crime and desperation, hostile to outsiders.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Ibrahim tells me when I ask him about the situation back home. “It’s even hard for nomads now, because they’re scared. All they want is to be left alone with their animals. Even the animals are scared. Yes! It’s true!” I wonder aloud what the solution might be. “For the children there has to be school,” he answers, “and for the youth, some kind of work. If you do something constructive, you’ll be integrated. But if you stay without anything, you’ll always be a rebel. Far from everything.” Would he ever take up arms again? “No. That’s finished. Even if you get angry, it’s no solution. You have to learn to express what you feel without guns.”

A traditional troupe of Ahidous singers at the Taragalte Festival 2016 © Andy Morgan

Idle hands. Everyone here seems to agree that they’re at the root of the Sahara’s most urgent evils. An illicit opportunity is better than no opportunity at all and the dazzling sums of money offered by criminal traffickers and jihadi emirs are simply too great for the Sahara’s jobless youth to resist. But that youth has also been handed the torch of Tinariwen’s hopes and dreams. The guitar, a rare and exotic object in the desert when Ibrahim first picked it up in the late 1970s, is ubiquitous now. Young men, and women, from M’hamid to Timbuktu and beyond are singing songs of cultural pride and self-awareness. Tinariwen have spawned at least two new generations of poet guitarists wearing turbans, robes and rude-boy stares. Their songs taught the Touareg who they really were: no longer a collection of widely scattered tribes whose self-interest went no further than their patch of sand and rock or their ties of blood, but a people, a nation even, with a common destiny and a homeland, the Sahara, that needed to be protected and cherished at all costs.

The gist of those songs encompasses revolving themes and messages, delivered with a yearning insistence: Listen! Awake from your millennial isolation. There’s a world out there. You must find your place in it. Unify and stop your tribal in-fighting. The desert is dying of thirst. The young and the old are weeping. Protect them. But there was also a strain of profound elegy in their poetry, elegy for homeland, elegy for the campfire and the loved ones left behind, elegy for lost freedom. That elegy finds expression in one crucial word: assouf. Its two syllables require an entire prose poem in English to do them justice but, to be brief, assouf means homesickness, loss, longing, the pain that isn’t physical. You could call it the blues.

Sadam from Imarhan (L) & Ibrahim from Tinariwen (R) © Andy Morgan.

The Saharan youth of today still have their assouf, but it’s been filtered through different life experiences to the ones that Tinariwen’s founders lived forty years ago. In many cases, members of the younger generation have grown up one step removed from the old nomadic existence, in towns or cities, with radios, TVs, the Internet, and guitars readily available. From the moment of birth, they’ve been immersed in the poetry and melodies of Tinariwen. Their parents’ lives were ripped apart by war and exile and many of their elder bothers, uncles, and fathers were wounded or killed in the rebellions of the 1990s. But most younger Touareg musicians haven’t taken up arms themselves (unlike others of their generation who have joined the armed struggle in Northern Mali, or become embroiled in violent jihad). Nor have they crossed the desert on foot in search of work and opportunity. They see the struggle in different terms, and their songs reflect that. Education is now the banner word. But certain themes and moods persist: the need for unity, the need to preserve culture and develop self-awareness. And assouf – always assouf.

Sadam ag Ibrahim is the lead singer of Imarhan, who are here at Taragalte representing the new generation of Touareg guitar bands. He looks like a younger version of Ibrahim, same mane of frizzy hair, same diffident smile, same lanky frame. But his youth growing up in the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset was far removed for the raw desert wandering that characterised Ibrahim’s formative years. The mutual respect is palpable however.

Group of Ahidous sword dancers and singers, Taragalte Festival 2016. © Andy Morgan

“I always find that if you look behind any powerful music, you’ll find a big story,” Sadam says. “All great artists are like that. The Touareg suffered a lot. There were a lot of refugees because of the rebellions. That’s why the music of Tinariwen is so strong. But for us, the second generation, life is OK. There aren’t so many problems. Our music is good, but it doesn’t touch you so deeply. Not yet.”

Ibrahim is baffled by the way that Sadam’s generation have embraced the Internet. “The youth spend all their time looking [at those gadgets] but they do nothing with it afterwards,” he says with a chuckle. “When they speak, they understand everything. But they do nothing.” Yet despite the unimagined power and reach gifted by the web, the new generation is still grinding away at the same battles that Tinariwen fought thirty years ago, with perhaps a few modifications. The dream of an independent Touareg homeland in northern Mali, the country they call Azawad, is still strong. It’s just the means of acquiring it that are undergoing heartfelt revision. That combination of guitar and Kalashnikov, so appealing to the romantic sensibilities of some of Tinariwen’s western fans, is no longer deemed to be the solution. “The independence of Azawad is coming,” Sadam tells me. “That’s for sure – not today, not tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow, but one day. But it’s neither guns nor music that will bring make it happen. For that you need politics; you need the right leaders with the experience and education to find the right strategy. Today, guns get you nowhere.”

Les Jeunes Nomades at the Taragalte Festival 2016 © Andy Morgan

Perhaps every new Saharan generation is destined to take up arms in an attempt to make life with dignity possible and heal the wounds wrought by impassable frontiers and negligent governments. Perhaps guns, guitars AND education will all remain necessary, and aspirational, for many years to come. In M’hamid a group of boys with ages barely in double figures were inspired to form a band when they saw Tinariwen perform at the very first Taragalte Festival in 2009. Now they can play Tinariwen’s songs note for note and word for word, even though they don’t speak Tamashek, the language of the Touareg. They call themselves Les Jeunes Nomades.

“We can’t really explain why we love Tinariwen so much,” they tell me through an interpreter, excited and unruly during what must be one of their first ever interviews. “It’s as if their soul has impregnated us. Their music bewitches us.” And what about Ibrahim? He’s so much older than you. What do you see in him? “We appreciate him because he’s a mujahid…a fighter, a revolutionary. And his music soothes us because he talks about the youth, the desert and about revolution. We empathise with the suffering that exists where he comes from.”

A member of Les Jeunes Nomades with nomadic caravan in the background

This youthful respect for the ‘mujahid’ is guaranteed to alarm the older generation, which generally sees armed conflict as useless and aberrant. “I think the desert doesn’t allow for much violence and hostility,” Halim Sbai says, “because the desert is itself hostile in its nature. It doesn’t tolerate people who abuse it. We’re obliged to get on with each other. When all’s said and done, confronted by the desert, one feels small. The field of view is so vast, there’s always a void that one tries to fill.”

Tinariwen’s percussionist Sarid ag Ayad, who has never left his home town of Kidal in Northern Mali, apart from when he’s on tour, not even during the worst violence of the recent civil war, sees peace as a fundamental pre-requisite for life in the Sahara. It’s like water for the soul. “For me, the desert already has all the wealth it needs,” he says. “There’s nothing lacking except peace. The Touareg are so scattered but asked them anywhere what they desire and it’s peace and stability. With that they can achieve anything.”

There’s a consensus among most people I talk to at Taragalte: If the wider world, with its geo-political anxieties, its obsession with nation-states and frontiers, its lust for the natural resources that lie under the desert sands, would just let the Sahara be what is was designed to be – an open space of trade, cultural exchange and free movement, then Paradise might one day return.

It’s a boundless dream for a boundless place.

Andy Morgan,

Bristol, March 2017.

© Andy Morgan. All rights reserved.

Said ag Ayad from Tinariwen at Taragalte Festival 2016 © Andy Morgan

The post TARAGALTE FESTIVAL – Dreaming of a better Sahara appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

So stark and brash was the nature of this visit that many see in it a major attempt to realign power relations in North Africa and the Sahel. Morocco’s ostensible aim is to finesse the role of privileged’ partner to Mali in the region from its old rival, Algeria. With Algeria in considerable disarray at the moment, due to the ill-health of President Bouteflika and the immense uncertainty about who should succeed him, this is an opportune moment for Morocco to step up to the plate. Its ancient ties with northern Mali, especially with the various Arab communities of Timbuktu, Djenné and Arawan, no doubt confers historic legitimacy to this move in the eyes of many at home in Morocco.

The first concrete result of the visit is an agreement from Morocco to help train 500 new Malian imams. “We share the Maliki madhab (school of religious law) with Mali, so there’s a perfect cohesion between us in the matter of training imams and in that of religious practice too, which is of a moderate Sunni Islam,” Morocco’s ambassador to Mali, Hassan Naciri, told Mali’s state TV station ORTM. “For us, it’s also important to train these imams according to the principles of moderation and tolerance in Islam.”

The Maliki madhab is still the most popular rite in North and West Africa. Generally, it is considered a lot more tolerant and respectful of people’s differences than the Hanbali school that has taken hold of many parts of the Middle East and which the Salafiyya, who are making inroads into countries such as Mali and Morocco, hold dear.

Mohammed VI fears radical Salafism and Wahabism as much as any hereditary ‘traditional’ ruler in the Maghreb, maybe more. In fact, extremist groups in Morocco recently issued death threats against the king.  The creeping influence of radical Sunni beliefs throughout the Sahel, aided and abetted by the petro-dollars of the Middle East, has also been a great cause for concern to Mali’s secular political elite.  So this move could be seen as a concerted counter-attack against religious radicalism and influence of firebrand Salafi preachers in North and West Africa.

The wider scope of Morocco’s intentions in Mali remains to be seen however. They see, if not common cause, at least a strong empathetic parallel between their struggle against the Polisario in the Western Sahara and Mali’s struggle against Touareg separatists in the north of the country. There were also many reports during the Malian civil war of 2012 of links between jihadi armed groups in northern Mali and disaffected youth in southern Morocco and the Western Sahara. The two countries no doubt see advantages in sharing know-how, intelligence and resources to fight separatism.

The issue of drug smuggling also binds the two countries together, whether they like it or not. Much of the big-time hashish trade that transits through northern Mali is connected to the Moroccan underworld, and there is some evidence of Moroccan involvement in the more lucrative cocaine trade as well.

Morocco might also see the election of a new President in Mali as an opportunity to reassert their influence in the north of the country. Many in the old nationalist Istiqlal party still harbour dreams of a ‘Greater Morocco’, whose influence, if not borders, would encompass all those lands conquered by the great 15th century Sultan Ahmed al-Mansour, which include large tracts of what is now northern Mali.  Those dreams may be fanciful, but closer and more vigorous ties with Mali will be at the very least expected to bring new business and resource-extraction opportunities.

Mohammed VI’s Bamako trip is an attempt to reassert Moroccan hegemony in the region at Algeria’s expense, to establish common cause with the new Malian President in terms of fighting separatism, drug smuggling and religious extremism, to ease pressure on the Western Sahara and generally flex the economic muscle of an increasingly confident Morocco.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

The post What does Morocco want from Mali? appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Some of the clichés of the European imagination can stand up to scrutiny. The Sahara is definitely hot, with a mean annual temperature of over 30°C. In the hottest months of April and May, just before the rainy season arrives, temperatures can leave the 50°C mark way behind. But the Sahara can also be cold, viciously cold. Hapless night travellers sometimes die of cold in the desert. The Sahara is certainly arid, with annual rainfall rarely more than 25mm and often less than 5mm in certain parts. An area like the Tanezrouft, the featureless plain that surrounds the ancient salt mines of Terhazza and Taodenni, is so dry that it is known as the ‘land of thirst’ or the ‘desert of the deserts’. In 1809 the bodies of 2000 caravaniers and their camels were found by chance in the Tanezrouft. Loosing your way and loosing your life can be fearfully synonymous in certain parts of the Sahara. But elsewhere, in the ‘wet’ months of July and August, floods occur, dry sandy beds become torrential rivers, lakes and ponds fill up, vistas become surprisingly green and wells overflow with water. At that time, local nomads feel a deep sense of relief and happiness as life is guaranteed for another year, and the impulse to celebrate and make music becomes especially potent.

The Sahara is vast. It spans the African continent from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and from the Atlas ranges and the Mediterranean in the north to the Sahel in the south. The whole continent of Europe would fit into it easily, with plenty of space to spare. But in this huge expanse there is also a great variety of landscapes; seas of sand-dunes or ergs like The Grand Erg Occidental that faithfully provide a palpable answer to every child’s ultimate desert fantasy; billiard table-flat plains of gravel or regs that stretch for hundreds of miles like the Tanezrouft and Tamesna, so feared by generations of travellers; mountains ranges like the Hoggar, the Tibetsi, and the Aïr, with their mesas and lunar contours; desiccated scrublands in the Sahelian ‘coast’ of the southern desert; vast oases in the shadows of the Atlas ranges in the north. Each of these landscapes are capable of both extremely fierce, and extremely tender expressions, depending on the light, the heat and the time of day.

Although the Sahara is sparsely inhabited, with a population roughly one third that of greater London living in a territory far larger than Europe, it is by no means empty. The pre-historic stone carvings and paintings that literally litter some parts of the desert bear silent witness to a time when the Sahara was much wetter than it is today, carpeted by tall Savannah grasses and populated by rhinos, elephants, hippos, giraffes and chariot-riding humans. Since the land dried up, around 3000 BC, the Sahara has become a bolthole for peoples and tribes escaping invasion, war and oppression in North Africa, Egypt, The Middle East and black Africa. All the peoples who now live there…Touareg, Fulani, Moor, Tubu…have origination myths that tell of ancestors who came from some other place, conquered the ‘primitive’ people they found living there, and set up home. The Sahara has been decisively Islamicised since at least the 10th century AD, but faint hints of earlier Pagan, Jewish and Christian migrations can be found in the language and customs of its modern inhabitants.

Most Saharan people are still nomads, although the sedentary way of life is gaining ground. Outsiders often confuse the concept of nomadism with a kind of primeval soul-searching. In fact it is a life born of necessity. A nomad will roam a fixed territory, moving his herd of camels, cattle or goats with the seasons and the rains from well to well, pasture to pasture. It is an extremely harsh existence but it brings with it a priceless independence and a deep bond between man and nature. A nomad needs little or nothing except what the land and sky around him freely provides. Most recent conflicts, like those between the French colonisers and various Touareg factions like the Kel Ahaggar, Kel Aïr and Ouellemeden, arose when the Touareg felt that their freedom and independence were threatened. The Touareg rebellion that broke out in the Adrar des Iforas region against the newly minted Malian state in 1963, and more recent rebellions in the early 1990s, also share the same root causes. Why must we pay taxes when God provides all we need? Why must we educate our children to read and write when neither of these skills will help them survive in the bush? Why do we need papers or passports to cross lands that our forefathers have roamed freely for centuries?

This sense of freedom is also the secret of the Sahara’s seductiveness. The desert and the nomads who inhabit it, embody so much of what was irrevocably lost in Europe and other ‘developed’ societies long long ago; space, simplicity, freedom, timelessness and the bond with nature. The epic immensity and undisturbed silence of its landscapes are the perfect antidote to bricked-up lives and the tyranny of the clock. Most newcomers sense the awesome pull of this freedom almost immediately. For the local, it is perhaps more subliminal, co-existing with hard and unremitting physical labour, corrupt officialdom, droughts, flash floods, atrocious roads and the occasional rebellion. Life in the desert is not easy, but it is both seductive and essential.

In terms of music and culture, the Sahara is like an inland sea, where the sounds, tastes and colours of peripheral ‘port’ cities like Marrakesh, Sijilmassa, Timbuktu, Agadez, Ghardaia, In Salah, Ghat, Ghadames, Tunis, Tripoli, Siwa, Cairo, Walata, Chinguetti, Djenné and Kano have mingled for centuries. This fact makes it a fascinating catalytic space whose role mirrors that of the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Over its immense rock-strewn wastes, the Arab and Berber cultures of the Maghreb have cross-faded with those of the Fulani, Songhai, Manding, Bambara, Wolof, Dinka and many more further south.

Our odyssey through the immense musical treasury of the Sahara starts in the far north west of the territory, in the huge oases of the Tafilalet, which nestles under the towering bony vertebrae of the Saharan Atlas range. It’s an area that gave birth to numerous quasi-religious dynasties that went on to conquer swathes of the Maghreb and southern Spain. The present Moroccan King, Mohammed VI, is a descendant of one such clan. It’s clear that the region is a source of immense musical riches too. The Compagnie Jellouli & Gdih come from Erfoud, the capital of the Tafilalet, and they play a style of music known as al baldi, in which the elegance of Andalusian melodies are coupled with the searing intensity of Berber music from the Atlas, and the harrowing lyricism of popular malhoun poetry. Centuries ago, the caravaniers that left the region to travel south to the salt mines of the Tanezrouft before crossing the Sahara to trade in their salt for an equal weight of gold in the bilad as soudani, ‘The Land of the Blacks’, must have had melodies such as this one swirling in their heads.

Moving over one thousand miles west by south-west we come to the Republic of Mauretania and one of its most remarkable up and coming young stars, Malouma Mint Meidah. Malouma has forged a name for herself as an innovative band leader and outspoken female voice in a country which has long been straight jacketed by fundamental Islamic mores and the dominance of old traditional musical castes. ‘Jraad’ is taken from her second album ‘Dunya’, which was recorded in the capital Nouakchott and released to global acclaim in 2003. It faithfully portrays her rebellious musical spirit, and her desire to incorporate jazz, blues, rock, soul together with the widest possible range of native Mauritanian sounds into a stunningly original new mix, thereby giving her fellow Mauritanians a bright new musical horizon.

The northeastern corner of Mali, a region known as the Adrar des Iforas, has been a cradle of dissent since independence in the early 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s drought and oppression drove thousands of young Touareg, or ‘Kel Tamashek’ (The Tamashek speaking people) as they refer to themselves, into exile in Algeria and Libya. In military training camps set up by the opportunistic Colonel Khadafy, these young clandestinos learned how to fight, and in the early 1990s they returned home to launch a rebellion. Tinariwen were the pied pipers of this youthful movement of so-called ishumaren, or ‘unemployed’. Since the first Festival in the Desert, which took place near their hometown of Kidal in the Adrar in 2001, Tinariwen have toured the globe and the outside world has woken up to their searing skeletal brand of desert blues. However, ‘Alkhar Dessouf’, a mesmerically moody song about loss, nostalgia and love, illustrates the essential point about Tinariwen. They are first and foremost rebels of the soul, not the Kalashnikov, and their real battleground is the human heart.

The songs, rhythms and melodies of black African slaves and migrants and their descendants are a core element of modern North African music. In Morocco this heritage is sometimes called gnawa music, in Algeria it’s called diwan, or more specifically diwan de Bechar. Bechar is a dust blown town on the northern edge of the Sahara, made famous in colonial times by the antics of the Foreign Legionary garrison stationed there. It is now home to Hasna El Becharia, doyenne of the diwan style, and queen of the vibrant local wedding music scene. Hasna is virtuoso of the various Afro-Maghrebi instruments like the gut-string bass known as the guembri, or the metal castanets known as krakesh, and her jaunty tune ‘Hakmet Lakdar’ sums up her Afro-Berber-Arabic heritage very well.

Taking one of those huge geographical leaps that are obligatory in any brief overview of Saharan music, we end up in the southern Libyan oasis of Fezzan, whose links with the Mediterranean world date back to pre-Roman times. The territory has long been a battleground with Touareg and Arab nomads who have fought with the local black African Tubus for control. Chet Fewet are a powerful and youthful musical combo from the area, whose Arab-flavoured melodies are lent a rough, rootsy fire by the group’s own Touareg berber heritage.

It’s not only misinformed Europeans that have deemed the Sahara an empty place. Rapacious North African leaders have also used this widespread misconception to further their territorial ambitions. In 1975 King Hassan II of Morocco lead an army of soldiers and civilians into the vast deserts that line the Atlantic coast south of Morocco, which had previously been called ‘Rio d’Oro’ or ‘Spanish Sahara’. As far as he and his counsellors were concerned, this ‘empty’ territory was Morocco’s by historical and geographical right. The local Sahraoui people disagreed and their military arm, the Polisario, have been fighting for independence ever since. This bitter struggle has few silver linings, but one has been superlative canon of Sahraoui songs and recordings inspired by the conflict. Aziza Brahim, Nayim Alal and Mariem Hassan are all leading lights in this movement, and the raw uncompromising power of their music is self-evident.

Another group born out of struggle is Tartit Ensemble, let by the charismatic Fadimata ‘Disco’ Walet Oumar. Tartit, which means ‘union’, are all Touareg from the Kel Antessar tribe who have held sway in the deserts around the historic city of Timbuktu for centuries. During the Touareg rebellion of the early 1990s, Disco and many of her fellow Kel Antessar escaped to refugee camps in Mauretania. It was there that they founded a women’s music group in order to foster good spirits and strengthen cultural pride. With the help of friends and aid agencies they managed to tour Europe and have since become the world’s most famous ambassadors of traditional Touareg music. The group mostly comprises women, but it also includes a few men, including the singer Mohamed ag Abada, who performs with such haunting effect on the song ‘Ikruhuwaten’, which was recorded in the refugee camp in 1996. Tinariwen, Tartit and the Sahraoui musicians are all proof of the painful irony that while conflict and rebellion have had a cruel and devastating effect on desert peoples and their lives, they have also been the source of some of the greatest modern music to come out of the region.

The Songhai people have shared the southern fringes of the Sahara, along the banks of the Niger River, with the Touareg for centuries, and despite recent events, the two ethnicities have managed to live in harmony for most of that time. The city of Timbuktu and its environs have thrown up Songhai musicians of international repute like Ali Farka Touré and Afel Bocoum, but these names are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A local musical hero is the young Songhai singer Seckou Maiga, who has established himself as a serious contender after only three cassette releases. The cover of his 2002 release ‘Malfa Sibori’ depicts the Flame of Peace of 1996, a milestone event in which 3000 small arms, collected from combatants on both sides of the Touareg rebellion, were burned on a ritual pyre on the outskirts of Timbuktu. The Flame of Peace marked a definite end to hostilities and the beginning of a fragile peace which has so far managed to hold fast.

Another group who have helped to make the Timbuktu region a trove of musical, as well as historical treasures, are Kel Tin Lokiene. Lead by Hemi Ag Akreirou, this fifteen strong troupe delve deep into the funky yet diamond hard heart of traditional Touareg music. Their subject matter is often dominated by tales of old heroes and warriors, and the virtues of courage and chivalry that were apparently so much stronger in days of yore than now. Nostalgia for the past is an affliction felt as strongly in the Sahara as in Europe or anywhere else.

Agadez in northern Niger is a town that rivals Timbuktu in terms of historical and political importance. The presence of local uranium mines, made world famous by the hollow claims of President Bush and his entourage in the lead up to the second Gulf war, have also afforded the area increased wealth and notoriety. The nearby deserts of the Aïr and the immense Grand Erg du Ténéré possess some of the most beautiful and breath-taking scenery in the entire Sahara. Group Oyiwane are a local group lead by Balla ‘Barmo’ Kader, that have existed for two decades. Their music is based on the traditional rhythm of the tindé drum, which is itself based on the loping gait of the camel.

The Berber music of the northern desert fringes in Algeria is sometimes called Sahraoui, not to be confused with the people and music of the Western Sahara. Its core instrument is the rosewood desert flute or gasba, whose searing plaintive tones best describe the sound and mood of a forlorn desert wind blowing in from those interminable stony prairies. Sahraoui Bachir is one of the leading cheikhs, or improvising male poets and singers, of the genre. His vocal style is stark and powerful. It’s a sound that sums up the Sahara, in all its fearful, harsh yet seductive beauty.

The post The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.