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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Blick Bassy

Simonobisick is a character from Blick Bassy’s new novel Le Moabi Cinema. He spends his time hanging out with his mates in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon in West Africa. None of them have jobs, or much in the way of prospects. They mostly sit around drinking large amounts of beer, killing time and chatting about nothing and everything. And dreaming, copiously. They dream of wealth, of bagging a beautiful girl-friend, of playing football like Samuel Eto’o, of making a success of their lives, of standing on their own two feet, of being ‘someone’. Most of all they dream of getting a visa and escaping to Europe. But hard as they try, those dreams remain stubbornly elusive. I won’t reveal any more because it might give away too much about this engaging and insightful novel. At some point, I won’t say when, Simonobisick writes the following letter to his mother and reads it out to his friends in the local bar that is their unofficial HQ. It reads like a statement of Africa’s youthful frustration. I thought it was well worth translating into English, pending a translation of the whole novel. Blick Bassy was kind enough to give his OK, and approve the result. So here it is…Simonobisick’s letter to his mother:

SIMONOBISICK’S LETTER

“Dear mum,

I’m leaving this earth. I’m leaving this country. I’m leaving this truncated existence, this sham, this sheep-life, this dog-life. I’m leaving and I won’t be coming back. Not even as a ghost: a real one this time, not one of those false returnees, those Diaspora people, who waltz in here on a regular basis and taunt us because they’ve made it, with their sparkling watches, their fine togs, their bling, and all those other signs of success that smack you in the eyes. I’m giving up on democracy, which is just the law of most heavily armed rather than that of the 50 percent of voters plus one. I’m saying this loud and clear: no longer will I queue up at two in the morning to be seen at ten o’clock in the hope of securing a visa. I should have hit the road to tempt the devil and take my chances heading in the direction of Tangiers and Algeciras, like the clandestinos who grab their visas with their own two feet. I lacked the courage to leave my friends. But I won’t bow my head any more. I’m renouncing the beggar’s life and deciding, as a free man, to rejoin the silence. They’ll never cover me with diadems or marble. But my friends will know that I’ve been loyal, that I’ve respected the pact of true friendship. I’m leaving with a righteous anger, in the hope that they will succeed where I have failed. The West must listen to us, or hang us out to dry once and for all. It takes everything and leaves us with the crumbs. Yesterday, it took our valiant ancestors and today it takes our youth, at least those who aren’t all washed up in beer. My mother, my very dear mum, give the family and your friends a kiss for me. You raised us and believed in us; we became disenchanted and no longer believe in anything. I know you did what you could. Go together and tell my father that I know he had to flee when he could. Go and tell my uncles that it’s not back in the ancestral village that I want to be laid down to rest, but where the earth dances, and trembles.

Yours Simonobisick…who loves you, you poor mums.”

Written by Blick Bassy.  Translation by Andy Morgan.

Reproduced with kind permission from the author.

Le Moabi Cinema is published in French by Continents Noirs, an imprint of Gallimard. 

http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Continents-Noirs/Le-Moabi-Cinema

http://www.blickbassy.com/

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Mbongwana Star (L-R): Doctor L, Randy, Coco (back seated), R9, Theo (seated), Sage.
(c) Florent de la Tullaye

“Here, in the streets, it’s the anti-technology thing that works. Everything’s recorded in the red! Sometimes I over-boost mikes that are recording nothing, just to pick up the kind of environment that’s around me now. Can you hear it? There are three TVs going full blast. Distortion multiplies the energy. I love it!”

Doctor L’s grin pixellates as an atrocious Internet connection dices up our Skype conversation. It doesn’t stop him. He seems to revel in the unpredictable zaniness that kicks in when technology breaks down. His words keep coming, delivered with an accent traceable to some obscure point between Paris and Dublin, his lean face a flag of fearless cheek under the ragged mound of dreadlocks that he credits with the ability to disarm any feelings of hostility a lone white man might otherwise attract in the ghettos of Africa.

It’s not just the sonic dirt that excites him; it’s the free spirit you sometimes find in places that no one is paying any attention to: the garage lands where garage bands turn streetwise anger into DIY productivity, revelling in their own ostracism and self-reliance. Punk rock, in other words. But Doctor L isn’t talking to me from underneath London’s Westway or on New York’s Lower East Side; he’s talking to me from Avenue Kasavubu in downtown Kinshasa, just opposite the Academie des Beaux-Arts. He seems to have found the eternal punk ethic alive and well on the banks of the Congo river, in the raucous swelter-skelter of Africa’s third largest city (equal to London in size), and he’s working hard to bottle it and bring it back to Europe. “It’s not that going to Africa is any big deal,” he says. “The big deal is to try and get something out.”

Horror stories about the Congo have been feeding the gorier side of the European imagination since the British Consul Roger Casement published his report on the abuses of the Congo Free State in 1904. The rape of that immense land, witnessed amongst others by Casement and his friend Joseph Conrad, whose classic Heart of Darkness remains one of the most controversial literary statements about Africa ever written by a white man, has continued to this day under both European and African rulers. It has been perennially justified by the global need, or rather greed, for certain raw materials deemed fundamental to modern existence, rubber initially and then a cornucopia of minerals including copper, gold, diamonds and, latterly, the rare-earth metals that make our digital ‘smart’ lives possible. The Congo wars of the 1990s and 2000s currently sit at No. 15 in the Wikipedia chart of the most costly conflicts in history in terms of human life, and No. 1 in African history. And yet who, outside Central Africa, remembers them now. Rape, followed by injury, insult, ignorance and forgetfulness: is there any other part of our earth that has been so abused and misunderstood?

But the place has its fans. Among them are the Belgian music producer-manager Michel Winter and the French filmmakers Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret. Toiling away down in showbiz’s steerage class to bring some of Kinshasa’s street-level wonders to the attention of the world, they belong to a rare breed. The nightmarish penumbra that envelopes the Congo in the Western imagination tends to repel all but the hardiest souls. It takes a special kind of cultural adventurer to lift the curse and see Kinshasa for what it surely is: a place of immense human creativity, ingenuity and style, with the potential to become one of Africa’s creative powerhouses. It seems that Doctor L has just joined their ranks. “The city becomes a drug,” he says. “Freaks like Michel, like Renaud, like Florent are important. I give the crown to all those guys.”

Yakala ‘Coco’ Ngambali. (c) Renaud Barret

Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye first travelled to Kinshasa in 2004, two virtually penniless wannabe film-makers enticed by an invisible force: ‘invisible’ as in hidden from the rest of the world and ‘force’ as in the tenacious will to survive and create. “At that stage of my life, France was just screwing my head,” Barret remembers. “All those people crying into their cups because they had to have the support of the state just to create something. In Kinshasa, it was the complete opposite; it was people who create out of a sense of urgency, who create because it keeps them alive. I said to myself: “That’s it! That’s the truth, not in the calculation but in the act of creation first and foremost.”

Barret and de la Tullaye’s first documentary film Jupiter’s Dance was a portrait of the Kinshasa music scene through the prism of a musician and street-level philosopher by the name of Jupiter Bokondji. While they were making that film they stumbled across a bunch of musicians in wheelchairs serenading the denizens of the Kinshasa night: prostitutes, renegade soldiers, hustlers and street kids or shégués as they’re known locally, apparently in mysterious homage to Che Guevara. The band was named Staff Benda Bilili (“the people who see beyond”) after a local beer joint. Barret and de la Tullaye spent the next five years and every ounce of energy and courage they possessed making a film about Staff and the extraordinary underworld they inhabited. It was called Benda Bilili and when it came out in 2010, it became the most successful non-Western music documentary since Buena Vista Social Club, helping to propel the reputations of both band and filmmakers to unimagined levels.

But Staff Benda Bilili’s success didn’t bring a deluge of music and film producers to Kinshasa. The ‘freaks’ carried on ploughing their solitary field; the curse remained in place. One reason perhaps is that both Benda Bilili and the other well-publicised Congolese tale of musical triumph against adversity – the undoubtedly remarkable story of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste which was turned into the film Kinshasa Symphony by Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer – drew their power, for Western audiences at least, not from the originality of their art, but from their shared themes of gargantuan self-improvement and self-empowerment through music. They seemed to satisfy Matthew Arnold’s conviction, so entrenched in the Western humanist mindset, that art can elevate the lowest into the realms of ‘sweetness and light’, the only limiting factors being work, will-power and self-belief. Inevitably, there also was a complex element of pity involved.

And though none would dare admit it, both Staff Benda Bilili and Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste had something of Samuel Johnson’s proverbial dog walking on his two hind legs about them: “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” The allusion is unkind of course, and largely inaccurate, as was Johnson’s original statement, which he made in reference to female preachers. Speaking in purely musical terms, Staff Benda Bilili added a credible new chapter to the very old story of Congolese rumba, a style that, along with its louder, brasher offspring soukous and ndombolo, has been the dominant musical force in the Congo and larges swathes of sub-Saharan Africa since the 1960s. Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste might not yet have achieved the technical brilliance of the London Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic – who could possibly expect them to have done so – but their renditions of Carmina Burana and Beethoven’s Ninth exude a courage and cohesive pride that can ignite powerful joy in those with an open heart and sympathetic ear.

But self-improvement and the triumph of human will over poverty and disability can only inspire and sustain the career of an artist or musician for a limited time. The journey from rags to riches can only be taken once. The world must eventually judge an artist not by the journey he or she has taken, but by the intrinsic qualities of their art, not only the skill but, more importantly, the creativity and originality.

When Staff Benda Bilili split under the weight of their own success in late 2013, their main songwriter ‘Coco’ Yakala Ngambali teamed up with fellow singer ‘Theo’ Nsituvuidi Nzonza to form a new band. At first it was called Trio Mbongwana, then Staff Mbongwana International and finally Mbongwana Star. Mbongwana simply means ‘change’ or ’switch’ in Lingala, the lingua franca of the Congo River. “In Mbongwana Star, we’ve changed all the rules,” Theo says in one of the band’s early promotional videos. “We’ve decided to take control. We choose to produce our music ourselves. We are all bosses now.” Theo went further went I interviewed the band in London recently: “We also changed the rhythm,” he said. “We built a tempo that can wake up any dancefloor on the planet.” Talking to the Theo and the rest of the band, it quickly became clear to me that what the band refer to as ‘rhythm’ actually means something broader, something closer to ‘style’.

Nsituvuidi ‘Theo’ Nzonza.
(c) Florent de la Tullaye

Following the global success and painful breakup of Staff Benda Bilili, whatever style Mbongwana Star chose to play had to be new and surprising. It couldn’t just be a re-run of Staff Benda Bilili minus the brilliance of the young Roger Landu and his self-made satongé (one-stringed tin-can harp), both of whom added such a unique dimension to Staff Benda’s sound. Nor did Theo and Coco want to perpetuate the Dickensian sentiments invoked by their rags-to-riches story and the fact that they’re both handicapped. That was old news. They wanted their music to stand by itself, crutchless and proud, and for it to do that, they needed to find a sound that was startling and irresistible, one that mirrored the creative genius of their home city.

But that mission was still vague and unfocussed. Both musicians were carrying a heavy load of influences and habits accumulated during long lives hard-lived (“All the lives of ghetto people are like odysseys,” says Renaud Barret). That made the task of reinventing themselves harder. Coco was turning sixty, and Theo had left his fiftieth birthday way behind. The Congolese rhumba artists who had nurtured them as children and young men still dominated their creative outlook. It wasn’t easy to imagine a new style that paid respect to those greats whilst breaking the mould they had bequeathed.

The Congolese rumba that was born in the 1940s, a love child of the country’s obsession with imported Cuban dance music mixed and its immense wealth of native dances and rhythms, has become a religion in the Congo. Its ‘gods’ – Franco, Tabu Ley le Rochereau, Le Grand Kallé, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba – are cultural icons that inspire pride and loyalty. Their legacy cannot not be toyed with lightly, or irreverently. “Sounds can change, according to what we’re living over there, to what we come across in the streets and elsewhere,” Theo says. “But it’ll never change completely, because we’re still in the rhythm of our forebears: the rumba rhythm. Those are the roots of Congolese music. They’ll never disappear.”

Coco and Theo both contracted polio in childhood, but in contrast to the cruel ostracism suffered by many a Congolese child similarly afflicted, both were treated well by their parents. Coco only left home at the age of 14 when he realised his presence was becoming a burden to his family. He preferred to live with his friends in a special shelter for the handicapped where there was a possibility of learning a trade (tailoring for women in his case). Theo’s father, a fisherman, went to see all the traditional healers in his locality to find a cure for his son, without success. Despite this, Theo was sent to school at the age of six and stayed there until he was fifteen. Then, on the advice of his parents, he travelled up to Kinshasa to live with his older sister and learn a trade, which also happened to be tailoring.

At the time, Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of what was then called Zaire, took a paternal interest in the plight of the disabled and passed laws to ensure that they were, for the most part, properly fed, housed and taught some employable skills. Mobutu also exempted them from charges and duties levied on the river ferries that chugged back and forth over the Congo River between Kinshasa, capital of what had been the Belgian Congo, and Brazzaville, capital of what had been the French Congo. Mobutu’s stroke of largesse attracted many handicapped people to the Kinshasa river port, where, several times a week, their self-made hand-cranked wheel chairs would be loaded up with trade goods and heaved up the gangways onto the ferries for the tax-free journey across the river.

Kinshasa was already a huge city back in the 70s and 80s, and because many of these handicapped traders lived in shelters that were hours away from the river-port, they often decided to move closer and sleep outdoors on large flattened cardboards boxes or tonkara in the local argot (derived from the French slang vocabulary known as verlan, which ‘flips’ the syllables of two-syllable words, turning carton or ‘cardboard box’ into toncar). Despite their street-level existence, the handicapped often managed to achieve a level of security and financial stability that was denied to millions of their fellow Congolese, thanks to the perks afforded them by the law and the strength they found in numbers.

(L-R) Sage, Doctor L, Randy (c) Renaud Barret

Coco’s father went down to the port to try and persuade him to return home, but he refused. His new life down by the river suited him well. His uncle, who was a musician, bought Coco a guitar and he started to entertain his fellow street-dwellers with the popular rhumba hits of the day. He would jam and hangout with another handicapped river-trader by the name of Nzalé, who was an excellent guitarist. Coco was about eighteen years old when the pair began to busk in the swanky bars and restaurants frequented by whites in Gombé, the downtown ‘entertainment’ district of Kinshasa. Years went by in this way: trading, busking, hawking, surviving.

Theo and Coco started playing together after they met down at the river-port in 1999. Theo had learned the traditional music of Bas-Congo from his father and later become the singer in a band in Brazzaville. In 2002, Coco, Theo and their fellow riverside troubadours came to the attention of one of the Congo’s most renowned international stars: Papa Wemba. Enchanted by their rough-cut melodies and fearlessness, Wemba offered them free use of his downtown rehearsal studio, but his patronage ceased after barely more than a year when Wemba was indicted by a court in France for visa-fraud and people smuggling. Not long after this setback, in late 2003, Coco joined up with Nzalé and Papa Ricky, another handicapped musician and doyen of downtown street life, to form Staff Benda Bilili. Theo joined soon afterwards.

“Something you find a lot with people [in Kinshasa], be they musicians or boxers, is that dreams are a way of surviving,” says Florent de la Tullaye. “Dreams allow people to walk tall and create projects. Even if they come to nothing in the end, just the energy of those dreams increases the chances of survival.” Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Coco and Theo lost so little time after Staff Benda Bilili imploded nine years later, before launching themselves on another adventure. When one dream dies, give birth to another one…quick style!

The first Mbongwana Star rehearsals were fairly chaotic. “They bought along this guy and that guy,” remembers manager and exec producer Michel Winter, “mates, members of the family and I don’t know what. And we quickly ended up with a kind of church choir, at least in terms of the voices. It was more like demo stuff than music by a band that was ready to release an album.” According to Renaud Barret, it was Theo who was most aware that what they were doing lacked originality. Barret told him about a friend called Liam Farrell aka Doctor L. Liam and Renaud got to know each other in St Ouen, the scruffy suburb north of Paris city centre where they both lived.

Liam Farrell ‘Doctor L’. (c) Renaud Barret

Liam is the son of the Irish artist Michael Farrell, who exiled himself to Paris when Liam was still a child. He grew into a maverick young drummer and producer on the Parisian hip-hop and electro scenes before becoming one of the most innovative (you might even say ‘disruptive’) producers of music from Africa. Liam had been collaborating with Kabeya Tshimpangila aka Cubain, a percussionist from Kinshasa who seems to have played with everyone who’s anyone in the city’s grass roots music scene, including Jupiter and Staff Benda Bilili. Cubain also happened to be in Kinshasa helping Coco and Theo set up Mbongwana Star. The connections were multiple.

Renaud Barret played Coco and Theo some songs from Black Voices, the album that Liam had made with the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen back in 2004. The name Tony Allen was already enough to put some heat into the idea of a collaboration. Coco and Theo were fans of Afrobeat, the rhythm that Allen had invented with Fela Kuti back in the late 1960s; Black Voices had put new life into that rhythm, just as it was emerging from the confines of African and ‘World’ music fandom and attracting an entirely new audience of white funksters and hip electro-dance priests. “That’s it!” was Theo’s reaction on hearing the album, “that’s the direction we should go in. Because mbongwana means ‘change’. Because that’s the future.”

Liam ‘Doctor L’ Farrell and Michel Winter travelled to Kinshasa in early summer of 2014 for the first real recording sessions. Michel had rented a small house in its own yard near the city centre, a parcelle in local parlance, which offered the most basic accommodation. Doctor L slept in a tiny badly ventilated room that baked in the tropical heat, day and night. The grid provided electricity only for short periods, if at all, so a generator had to be hired to run the amps, mikes and recording equipment. Coco’s wife would arrive everyday with the food – sometimes chicken, sometimes fish accompanied by fufu, rice, manioc, beans. It was the kind of set up that Doctor L thrives in.

The music that Coco and Theo played to Michel and Doctor L was a heedless assault of percussion, guitars and voices that was unsure of what direction it should be heading in. There was work to be done. The sound that everyone was searching for was still latent, like a beautiful stone sculpture embedded in a rough-hewn boulder. Doctor L began to record as much as he could, chipping away, paring down, honing. “When we started, we were still doing the same ideas as before,” Theo says, “but when Liam got involved he proposed a lot of changes.”

R9 & Doctor Farrell. (c) Renaud Barret

“We were looking for something fairly rock’n’roll,” says Winter, whose CV also includes the management of Staff Benda Bilili and the dukes of Congolese distortion – Konono No.1. “We wanted to try and get out of the 100% African, afro-African, straightjacket, into which everybody tries to stick African bands and get back, not in the music necessarily but in spirit, to the 1970s when Africans were really modern, maybe more so than us. I found that Coco already had that in him. People here are a lot more creative than we can imagine; Kinshasa is crawling with creativity. You couldn’t care less if it’s African or not! We just thought ‘Let’s just go for it! Because it’s there anyway. You can feel it in the streets. It exists!’”

“First off, it wasn’t easy,” Theo admits, “but afterward we adapted to the rhythm very well. We changed very quickly…changed rhythm, changed everything. We called it ‘rhumba rock’, because we sing in Lingala, but the rhythm is rock.”

After a few weeks, Doctor L went back to Paris and worked on the material in his studio. He spent the rest of the summer working on it. It was an alchemical process, taking raw sketches of sound, stitching them together and transmuting them into something that shone bright and grabbed the ear. The direction was as evident to him in Paris as it had been back in Kinshasa. There was something out there, a street-level Kinshasa aesthetic that had be captured and distilled into musical form. It wasn’t the old rumba or soukous, whose heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, or anything traditional or folkloric. Traces of all those elements were present, but the spirit itself moved beyond all of them. “Coco and Theo, they’re not talking about their village anymore,” says Doctor L. “That can be generations away from them, and they get bored of this kind of caricature. What they have [in Kinshasa] is a certain ‘Yoruban’ way of life.”

Doctor L’s use of the word ‘Yoruban’ is strange. It’s not meant in the strictly ethnic sense of course; Kinshasa is “a cauldron of all the 400 ethnicities of the Congo” according to Renaud Barret, with the Kongo, Luba and Anamongo in pole position and Yoruba holding only a minority presence if at all. To Farrell, ‘Yoruban’ seems to have more of a spiritual meaning related to the dynamic and polyglot freedom of an immense urban space: “Kinshasa reminds me of the New York of the 1980s. In fact, Kinshasa is more New York than New York itself! It’s Yoruban, and from a Yoruban place you can have a gay band, new wave, punk rock, what the fuck! It’s not griotic, with heritage from your father or your grandfather. It’s more like the European way, like garage music, like when you get ‘Louie Louie’ African style, or James Brown from Ghana, or the like the late 60s and 70s in Lagos, when it was rock’n’roll man!”

Keyboard Percussionist, Kinshasa. (c) Renaud Barret

Technology, the Internet, have changed the game in Kinshasa, like as they have everywhere else. The gamut of influences has exploded. “Cable TV is only four or five years old in West Africa,” Farrell continues, “and already, in four or five years, it’s totally changed the kids. They won’t listen to rumba any more, they’ll be listening to Beyoncé. They already know so much more about London and Paris than we’ll ever know about Kinshasa, and that changes what the expectations of people are from music. But it’s good. I mean, fuck it, the world is like that. Everything needs to be communicating; it’s difference of style, of vibe that makes your originality.”

For Doctor L, this opening up of the arteries of communication and influence isn’t just inevitable, it’s positive. Roots may be important, but they can’t entangle an artist in modes of expression that limit his vision or prevent him being an honest mirror to the life going on around him. “I think Africa deserves, like everybody, to have artists who can take different trips, which may or may not be 100% related to Africa,” he says. “It’s not like we’re busy saying ‘We’re European!’ What does that fucking mean? It’s important that all this magic of art can exist there as well, without it being Iike me saying ‘Ok, I’m going to Ireland to do Celtic music because that’s who I’m supposed to be.’ We’re not talking about Africa here, we’re talking about guys who are doing music.”

When Doctor L’s mixes were heard back in Kinshasa, the effect was one of puzzlement, stupefaction even, followed by escalating excitement and wild dancing. “It was a bit different compared to our rhythm here in Kinshasa,” Theo remembers. “Really, really different. We loved it from the beginning.” Really? From the beginning? “Immediately! It was…WHAAAA?…oh yes, this is good! Those were rhythms that we could get close to.”

What about guitarist R9, one of the ‘youth wing’ of the band? How did he react when he heard the mixes? “Well, it was brand new music,” he said, “but it wasn’t complicated, because it was based on music that we’ve already been hearing for a long time. It was a just a modification for us. For me, it was a joy; I was happy to have created a new style with that. The youth of Kinshasa are more interested by new things. It’s really very important.”

Barret, who was with the band in Kinshasa when Liam’s mixes came through, remembers them dancing all over the place. The songs were on constant replay. Crucially perhaps, the reaction of the band’s entourage was also very encouraging. Fans would gather whenever the band rehearsed in their studio in the Ndjili district. “They would throw flowers at us, support us, shout ‘Mbongwana Star Forward!” remembers Sage, the band’s percussionist and vibe master. “We never expected that. They [the mixes] were great. And they made everyone dance. Without even singing the style, people were already dancing.”

For Theo, danceability is the ultimate litmus test of any new musical venture: “Whether it’s in Kinshasa, or here [in Europe]: that’s the most important things for me. We’ve done quite a few concerts and everybody dances; everyone is into that rhythm.”

Thanks to a fortuitous meeting at a soirée in London dedicated to music from the Sahara Desert, Michel Winter pressed a copy of the mixes into the hands of Nick Gold, famed founder and A&R man of World Circuit. Love at first sight in rare in showbiz, and the offer of a contract on the basis of a simple demo even rarer. But those Congo River gods must have been working overtime because Gold listened to the mixes on his way home that night and a deal was on the table within weeks. Not only was Mbongwana Star the first new band that World Circuit had signed in a long while, it was also the first in over twenty years to be produced by someone other than Gold himself and the first ever to have come from the Congo (Mali and Cuba being World Circuit’s habitual hunting grounds).

By the time Liam and Michel returned to Kinshasa in November, Coco, Theo and their new musicians were busy making the new sound their own. “What’s really interesting with Coco and Theo is that they’re ready to run with it if they feel it, whatever it is,” Liam says. “It’s not me inventing them. They’re artists. This is something really interesting that I love in Africa, and that people don’t talk about a lot: the strength and rapidity they have to integrate whatever comes up.”

Doctor L and Randy. (c) Renaud Barret

The band line-up was beginning to reduce and solidify. First on percussion, then drums, was a handsome young ghetto dude with an intense gaze, a neat splay of short dreads and an easy respectful manner. Forty years younger than Coco, Randy Makana Kalambayi was born in Kinshasa to a family who survived by hawking and doing odd jobs. When he was still a child, his father decided to move the family to Bas Congo but died shortly afterwards. Randy went back to Kinshasa to live with his mother’s family; it was hard to make ends meet. At the age of seven, he met Coco, who was the neighbour of one of his uncles. Coco set him up with a family in Brazzaville; the mother sold peanuts down in the market and Randy contributed by selling plastic bags on the streets. Water had to be fetched from a standpipe hundreds of metres from the house. Life was an accumulation of all these little rites of survival.

Randy played percussion in a local church in Brazzaville before deciding, aged only eight but not quite tender anymore, to go back to Kinshasa and reunite with Coco. He became his mentor’s chief wheel-chair pusher, a position that earned him Coco’s protection, as well as some standing in the informal street syndicate of the homeless and handicapped. In the brutally Darwinian world of Kinshasa’s streets, such an alliance could mean the difference between survival and obliteration for a young shégué or street kid.

Randy even joined Staff Benda Bilili for a while and contributed percussion to their first album Très Très Fort. But before he could board the sweet chariot that carried the band off to Europe and success, Randy was persuaded to come back to Brazzaville by his mother to help support the family. He worked as a fare-collector on the busses and a labourer on a building site, a job that turned out to be lethally hard and very badly paid. Eventually he crossed the river once again and landed back in Kinshasa. There Randy learned that Staff Benda Bilili had become a worldwide success and were currently on tour in Japan. When they returned they asked Randy to rejoin the band, but visa problems prevented him from going on Staff Benda’s next tour. He did play some percussion to the band’s second album however. Then, when Coco and Théo decided to quit and set up Mbongwana Star, they invited him along as drummer.

Although Randy is a father now, he still lives in a shelter for the homeless and handicapped, a place that functions, according to Farrell, like an African village lost in the middle of a megapolis. He’s become a master of the Kitéké rhythms of the Batéké plateau, the old name for the country surrounding the ‘pool’ between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Those rhythms, subtle and strangely familiar, are the pistons of the new Mbongwana sound.

For the pivotal role of guitar-player, an instrument that has supplied the melodic pulse of Congolese music since the 1950s, Coco and Théo chose Jean-Claude Kamina Mulodi, aka ‘R9’ because he was the ninth and last child born to his parents. R9 is a thirty-something guitar hero, who long ago pledged his allegiance to Zaiko Langa Langa, the Congolese band who dominated the pan-African soukous boom of the 1970s and 1980s. He’s also a huge fan of ACDC and Angus Young, but his stock-in-trade remains the intricately flowing, delicately sparkling Zaiko-esque guitar loops, the ones that send your soul skywards while your feet make love to the ground.

R9. (c) Renaud Barret

R9’s father, who was in the army, had a career in the Catholic priesthood mapped out for his son; but R9 had other ideas. He began making his own instruments out of junk when he was barely five years old, and was taught how to play by his elder brothers, who sang ndombolo. Having started off as a drummer, R9 gravitated towards the guitar and eventually became lead guitarist in a band in his hometown of Dibaya in Bandundu, a huge province that lies to the east of Kinshasa. R9’s parents had both died by the time he was seven, and his brothers sisters drifted away leaving him alone to survive on the sums of money sent him by his siblings. After graduating from the local lycée, R9 travelled up to Kinshasa and began performing with small neighbourhood groups, eventually working his way up to becoming a guitarist in the band of Pépé Kallé, a huge star in the Congo. When Coco and Théo formed Mbongwana they asked R9 to become their guitarist. “The guitar loops he plays made Liam and I think of techno and electro music from afar,” says Renaud Barret, “so he adapted well to that electro aspect of the project.”

Completing the line-up was Sage (as in the French word that rhymes with ‘massage’ and means ‘kind’, ‘good’ or ‘well-behaved’). Son of Coco’s wife Marie, Sage is a self-taught percussionist, a tropical cyclone on-stage, a ghetto rude-boy who enjoys his strolls on the wild side. “Very rock’n’roll” was Barret’s succinct description of Sage’s lifestyle.

In January 2015, just as Kinshasa was going through one of its periodic spasms of political violence and mayhem following President Laurent Kabila’s unconstitutional attempts to extend his time in office, Coco, Theo, Farrell and the other musicians were holed up in the Hotel Finesse on Avenue Kasavubu, patiently working out how to reproduce the challenging dynamics of Mbongwana’s revolutionary new style live on stage. Farrell’s position in the project had evolved from that of mere producer to producer, bassist, synth and sound FX player, arranger and conceptualiser. He was no longer the white European strategist who stays in his studio, one step removed, and envelopes his charges in a skin of sound that will, he hopes, make them palatable to the ears of the world. Mbongwana Star was no longer a purely African band. It was a trans-national, trans-ethnic, trans-cultural sound machine, a coalition of black and white, Africa and Europe. Don’t think James Brown; think Sly and the Family Stone.

Given the pressures of history and the build-up of sensitivity around topics such as race, culture and colonialism, it’s easy to guess at the prevalent line of questioning that Mbongwana star will be subjected to in the media and the cybersphere. Can a white man play such a prominent role in a black African band? Does it not risk smelling of appropriation, paternalism, cultural colonialism, exploitation, racial arrogance, dilution or all of the above (delete as applicable)?

Mbongwana Star (L-R): Coco, R9, Randy, Theo, Sage, Doctor L. (c) Florent de la Tullaye

Not only is Liam unapologetic about the level of his involvement in this project, he also considers the sensitivities and malaise that often surge to the fore in reaction to any cultural collaboration between white Europeans and black Africans to be misplaced, even reactionary: “I think, if you like music, and you like art, colour’s got fucking nothing to do with nothing. That’s what’s great about this world. We all need each other. Let’s stop pretending. I’m very happy that white guys make black guys exist and vice versa. It’s like all these old Analogue Africa records. You always need these white mad motherfuckers to dig out all the old dope African music…that’s what’s great about this world. And I’ve got African records where the mix is over the top man! The guitar is 20DBs too strong, but it’s fucking killing! It’s like magic. I never could have done that. So thank you guys!”

Why do I believe him? Several reasons. First the passion and sense of commitment that boosts the voltage of everything he says. Secondly, the time he’s sacrificed to this project, to sleeping in bedroom ovens, plugging into chugging generators, making videos on shoestring budgets, mixing, remixing and remixing the remixed remix, all in search of his grail: a sound that IS Kinshasa, right now in 2015. Thirdly, the feeling that Doctor L has moved beyond the naiveté that paints African musicians as angelic beings, imbued with a mystical spiritual power that a ‘fallen’ white man can only admire and serve. Like musicians everywhere, African musicians are humans who suffer from creative blocks, daft ideas, moments of madness, bad-judgement and breakdowns in reason. Should they be allowed to own their own music and determine their own creative path? Of course they should. The answer is so obvious that it makes the question superfluous. But they should also be able to search any place, consider any approach and collaborate with anyone they want to, white or black, European or African, to create something extraordinary.

Although there’s black blood in almost every note ever played by a white pop musician since the end of the First World War, the traffic has never been one way. Ragtime, jazz, blues, RnB, funk, soul, all have been fed by a minority of white as well as a majority of black cultural influences. In fact, the band with arguably the biggest influence on the evolution of black music in the last three decades, was white. And German! So, as Farrell suggests, let’s not pretend. The true creative impulse is colour-blind. It goes where it wants, talks to who it feels like talking to, collaborates with anybody that takes its fancy. As well as a mutual respect, it’s the brilliance, the originality at the end of the process that counts. “What’s interesting with Coco and Theo is that they’re ready to run if they feel it, whatever it is,” Farrell says. “We’re not like dictators. It’s not me inventing them. They’re artists.”

Coco repays the compliment: “Really, I like Liam. We work well with him. He’s courageous. He’s a real artist is Liam. I recognise that.” And when I ask the band if a white man can play African music, the response is heartfelt, and unanimous: “It’s not colour that plays music,” Theo says, “it’s the spirit. We don’t see the white, the black, the yellow, the red. We all have red in our veins. We’re together. We play music.”

Mbongwana’s aim is to express an attitude, a creative spirit that already exists in Kinshasa. It’s a spirit built on garbage. Renaud Barret has coined a cheeky moniker for it – System K – which he intends to use as the title of a forthcoming feature documentary. It refers not only to Kinshasa, but also to rue Kato, the downtown drag that has become the epicentre of the garbage-to-art revolution. It’s also a skit on the French term Système D, after the verbs se débrouiller (to get by, to find a way) and se démerder (to find a way without landing in the shit). Roughly, Système D means to manage and survive in the face of poverty and rejection with only your wits and your courage to protect you. The term combines English concepts such as the underclass, the black economy and the daily hustle of survival into one neat tag.

“System K runs the entire city,” Barret explains, “that’s to say, it’s imposed by the current climate, by la débrouille (making do), by all those gestures of daily life that are the creativity of survival. As you know Kinshasa was once the musical capital of Africa. Then everything crashed politically and so [there were] no new instruments or anything. De facto, a whole generation of young musicians with nothing in their hands and nothing in their pockets began making their own instruments, not to get into any kind of found-object art, but just out of necessity. Rue Kato is an artery, about two kilometres long from end to end, and on both sides of the streets you’ve these guys making stuff and creating stuff. They’re creating a new musical style. [They’re] recycled grooves but it makes me think of the first Wu Tang album, very minimalist stuff, all based on recycled materials. There are at least 10 creators there, who create loops with tape machines that are themselves reconstructed, and then people come and add stuff, whether it’s a female singer, a rapper, poets. Poverty has created this sound. That’s what’s fascinating. And It’s totally creative. If you listen closely, all the sounds of the city are in there.”

Boy with recycled instrument, Kinshasa (c) Renaud Barret

The rue Kato isn’t just producing musical instruments: Fashion, sculpture, video, photography, art, jewellery, automata, pedal power contraptions, motorised vehicles are all rising like the undead from the inexhaustible scrap heap. “Every instrument could be in a museum, with special lighting trained on it,” Barret says with a chuckle, “but it’s all happening in an atmosphere of general indifference, as always happens out there, a kind of enclosed world with no horizon.” In other words, it’s the old curse. Few people know about what’s happening in rue Kato, or the rest of Kinshasa, and few care. Barret hopes that his new film will shine a positive light on this subterranean world.

But the new spirit has to exist; there’s no choice: “That energy, that desire, that electricity, that vibe, it’s not just an invention,” Barret says. “It’s really coming through and it’s nourished by the fact that people are fed up with politics, with what’s happening at the summit of the state. It’s very new in fact. I’ve never seen that anger before, that punk aspect that’s swelling up.” When I ask Mbongwana Star about that spirit, Coco makes an uncharacteristic demand to be heard: “I can answer that particular question,” he says. “First of all, we’re an a-political band. If we’re asked questions, they should be about music. There are problems in Kinshasa, many problems, but they don’t concern us.” I point out that I’m not talking about politics, but rather a spirit of self-reliance. “If you can get hold of some money,” Coco answers, “then yes, with that spirit, you can build things like schools, where children can study, you can help friends too maybe…”

In our excitement about the potential of Kinshasa as a temple of creativity, it’s easy to forget that, in the end, it’s all about means and graft and courage. The band are well aware that, as they sit in a London hotel, talking to journalists, drinking coffee and playing with their smart phones, thousands back home are still tight-rope walking on the meagre line that separates survival from oblivion. “God pushes us to rediscover what we really see,” says R9, “so it’s a big feeling. What I can say to our friends who are still behind us, they have to work hard and give their energy to go further. No job is unworthy. Only people are unworthy. All that can be done, must be done, must be expressed. One mustn’t go backwards, or stay blocked; you have to give your energy, your inspiration. May we always remain mobile and work hard to prepare the future…”

The Congo Astronauts. (c) Renaud Barret

The video for ‘Mulkayi’, the first single by Mbongwana Star, is a remarkably innovative piece of work by any measure, doubly so if you consider the tiny budget Barret and Doctor L had at their disposal to shoot and edit it. It features a local character, a happening on two legs called The Congo Astronaut, who wanders around the ghetto in a space suit for no obvious reason other than to be seen, be noticed and be stylish. When Renaud ‘premiered’ the video on a huge screen at Kinshasa’s École des Beaux Arts, where the video was shot, the response was exhilarating, heartening. “Everybody was saying ‘that’s it! That’s us!’” Renaud recounts. “And when we played them Liam’s mixes of Mbongwana star, those guys said ’that’s our music! We want that! Our artistic imagery is completely incarnated in that music.’” Coco agreed: “I thought it was great. It made me happy.” Doctor L and Barret’s second video ‘Kala’, is zinging twitching black and white celebration of Kinshasa dance styles, filmed down alleyways, deep in the shanties, out on the drags. They’re working on a whole string of further videos in the same lo-fi System-K spirit.

If the master plan succeeds, Mbongwana Star could become the Trojan Horse that penetrates the bastion of the world’s indifference (and revulsion and paranoia) and lifts the curse to bring that creative power out of rue Kato, the Beaux Arts, and other parts of Kinshasa. “The Beaux Arts is like a town within a town,” says Renaud. “Mbongwana Star has started rehearsing there and there’s a correlation with visual artists, stylists, people working on logos etc. It’s this kind of electric movement, this new vibe in Kinshasa that we’re trying to mix in with the music and the image.”

Theo, Coco and the other members of Mbongwana Star are all aware of the talent that exists back home, and the potential ways in which it might transform their visual appearance and live show. But they remain patient: “All that will come bit by bit,” he says. “We have ideas, but we’re starting with what we’re doing right now and then, little by little we can add other things.”

The journey ahead may be long, but the time for lift-off has surely come. The Congo Astronaut has waiting long enough.

Andy Morgan,

Bristol, June 2015

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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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Bombino at home in Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan.

A small white car, branded with the words ‘Groupe Bambino’ and a crudely drawn electric guitar, is revving its wheels deeper and deeper into the soft sand of a side alley somewhere on the ragged outskirts of Niamey, the capital of Niger. Bombino cuts the engine and smiles. “I should have taken the turn at speed in second gear,” he chuckles at me without a hint of fluster. “But I had to answer my phone so I screwed up. No bother. We’ll just leave the car here and dig it out later.”

While he and his band unload their bush gear – guitars, battery powered amp, djembe, tea pot and stove – a gaggle of local kids gather around us to point and stare. They recognise Bombino instantly and giggle with excitement. He beams them a smile before sauntering off into the scrubland with his bandmates, his purple robe all a shimmer in the evening light.

Such escapes from the city’s noise and stress are a daily ritual for Bombino. “There’s no better place to play music than in the desert,” he tells me. “In complete tranquility.”

In normal times, Niamey is a laid-back place, sprawling along the banks of the great Niger River with plenty of greenery to break the monotony of shantytowns and dusty suburbs. But the Malian civil war is raging away only half a day’s drive north of here and a pall of paranoia has descended on the city. When I receive an invitation to join Bombino and his mates for a jam, a smoke and a round or two of Touareg tea up on the dunes beyond the city limits, it feels like something heaven-sent.

As we wander along a dried riverbed in the twilight hush, past mud and reed villages where women pounding their grain to salute Bombino, his mobile rings again. It’s his manager calling from the USA. Bombino gets plenty of calls from his manager these days. His new album Nomad, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, is set for imminent worldwide release. North American and European tours are in the offing. The grinding carousel of showbiz duty beckons.

Bombino has been charting a steady international ascent since his last album Agadez and a documentary of the same name came out in 2010. Nomad, with its indi-fanboy-friendly rock distortion and jubilant desert wig-outs seems likely to make this 33-year old Touareg guitarist more famous on the international stage than any other Touareg musician in history besides Tinariwen.

What’s more extraordinary however is Bombino’s fame at home. He’s become a bona fide head-turning airtime-hogging star in his own country, not just amongst the Touareg, who mainly live in Niger’s northern deserts, but amongst the youth of the entire nation, including those belonging to other major ethnic groups such as the Hausa, Jerma and Toubou. That’s something that no other Touareg artists has ever managed to do, not even Tinariwen.

Bombino downs le premier, Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan

Anyone who knows anything about the recent history of the Touareg, a nomadic people from the southern Sahara whose ancestral homelands were sliced up when frontiers were drawn across the Sahara in the early 1960s, will appreciate the groundbreaking importance of Bombino’s achievement. Now a marginalised minority in Algeria, Mali, Niger, Libya and Burkina Faso, the Touareg possess a deep and rich culture, but never before have they enjoyed any kind of cultural hegemony in their home nations. “There are plenty of people here in Niger who listen to our music but don’t understand our lyrics because we sing in a different language to theirs,” Bombino tells me with quiet pride. “But they like it. And thanks to Facebook and You Tube, our fans here can see what we’re doing all over the world.”

Now Bombino wants to convince the rest of the world that the Touareg are a tolerant and peace-loving people who are only trying to protect their millennial culture and essential freedoms. Not that the world ever needed convincing until a few years ago. For decades, the Touareg enjoyed a generally benign image as an oppressed Berber people who were impervious to the rabidly puritanical version of Islam that prevails in the Middle East and proud of their age-old nomadic ways, their music and their poetry.

Recently however, the Touareg name has been dragged through the mud thanks to its association with the rise of radical and violent jihadism in the Sahel. The truth is that only a small clique of Malian Touareg leaders, rather than the population as a whole, ever sought any kind of alliance with violent Al Qaida franchised terror groups in northern Mali. Despite this, the Touareg as a whole are now regularly lumped together with the mad spawn of Bin Laden in the mind of ill-informed global-war-on-terror bores the world over. No less of an ‘expert’ in West African affairs than Jeremy Clarkson was recently moved to refer to the Touareg as a bunch of gun-running terrorists during an episode of Top Gear.

“That man has no right to say that,” retorts Bombino when I tell him about Clarkson’s rebranding of his people. “History speaks for itself. The Touareg have never behaved in that way. Many of us never expected this outcome, or this connection. Because of two or three people, our entire community is suffering. It’s very serious because the future of our people hangs in the balance. France should have intervened five or ten years ago, when the terrorists first arrived in our desert. Now it must finish the battle it’s fighting in Mali. Because if it doesn’t, I’m telling you, things will explode.”

Bombino isn’t alone in thinking that only the French army stands in the way of all out ethnic war in northern Mali. Reports of Malian army attacks against innocent Touareg and Arab civilians have been stacking up in recent weeks. The blood of most southern Malians has been boiled into a fury by what they perceive to be Touareg complicity in their country’s calamitous fall from grace. In many ways, the future has never seemed more dark and threatening.

Bombino and the company car, Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan

Which is why it has never been more urgent for Touareg musicians to speak up and educate the world about what’s really going on in the Sahel. But I get the impression that penning lyrical messages of urgent relelvance isn’t Bombino’s natural vocation. Many of the songs on Nomad are Touareg classics by other Touareg groups such as Tinariwen and Terakaft, whose lyrics have been stripped of their deeper poetry and boiled down to whoops and catchphrases that play a supporting role to the rolling desert grooves. “We interpret those songs in our own way, sometimes with our own lyrics” he says. “I like to play an old song which still moves people and at the same time give it a new sound, a new shape, just a bit faster and more energetic than before.”

The message and the poetry, both of which have been essential ingredients in most Touareg music until now, are a work in progress as far as Bombino is concerned. “We’ve begun to work on that aspect these past four or five months,” he offers when I try to probe, “because it’s very important to talk about those issues, to make people understand, to go beyond tribalism.”

Dan Auberbach’s instinctive ability to distil the essence of rock’n’roll and the blues has helped Bombino to perfect a whole new approach to Touareg music – a youthful, almost urban sound that’s resolutely anchored in the here and now. Its main ingredients are raw and rolling dance grooves and long dazzling displays of guitar work rather than lyrical subtlety or the urge to sharpen the minds of audiences back home.

This break with the past is partly intentional of course. “I have a huge respect for the old generation,” Bombino says, “but we’re in 2013 now. We can’t always remain in 1963 [the year of the first Touareg uprising in Mali]. Some of the old musicians are always in a state of revolt. But people must find another way. We must stop thinking in tribal terms, as Touareg or Hausas or whatever. We have to go beyond that.”

Nonetheless, like any Touareg musician of any age, Bombino has no intention of burning all the bridges to his past. That would be culturally impossible. “In some ways my style is a city sound,” he concedes. “But in truth, underneath, the open desert is always there. If you forget your beginnings, you’ll be like a tree without roots. Unstable.”

Bombino and band off to jam outside Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013 (c) Andy Morgan

Hence Bombino’s need for his daily fix of desert tranquillity on the dunes near his home in Niamey, mobile phones and adoring fans notwithstanding. The deep yearning Touareg feels for those infinite Saharan horizons with their blessed freedom from noise, pollution, crowds and time remains at the core of Bombino’s music. It’s also tattooed on his heart. And although he might not possess the lyrical skills of Touareg mentors like Ibrahim Abaraybone or Mohammed Japonais, Bombino cares deeply about what’s going on in his desert home.

“We’ve already suffered enough,” he tells me, those gentle deep-brown eyes tenderising his words. “We don’t want to be like Afghanistan. We only want peace. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 20013

First published in The Guardian – April 2013

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Kinshasa Cellist © Vincent Boisot / Riva Press for Le Figaro Magazine. www.vincentboisot.com

Nathalie is a single-mum who struggles to clothe her little boy and pay the rent. She plays the flute and the sax. Josephine gets up at 4.30am every morning to sell omelettes at the market. She’s in the chorus. Papy is a part-time mechanic who also runs his own pharmacy. He plays the tuba. Josef is a freelance electrician, a kind of African version of the Robert de Niro character in the film ‘Brazil’. He also runs his own hair salon and plays the viola.

Nathalie, Josephine, Papy and Josef are adepts of the Congolese art of debrouillardise, a French word that means ‘getting by’, ‘making ends meet’ and ‘surviving’. Their lives are oddly schizophrenic. For most of the day they do whatever they must to hustle their daily bread in the Congolese capital Kinshasa, one of the biggest, noisiest and most dysfunctional cities on earth. Then in the early evening they set out on a journey that often takes several hours to go and rehearse with The Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste de Kinshasa, the only all-black symphony orchestra in the world. There they find release from their daily cares. “When I sing Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, it takes me far away,” says one of the other singers in the choir. “I’m not here any more,” .

“They come because they’re passionate about music,” says Armand Diangienda, the man who founded the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbaguiste almost twenty years ago. “It gives them something more in terms of confidence, of feeling capable and of being able to contribute to a collective endeavour.”

If the musicians in the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste are masters of individual survival, the orchestra itself is an epic example of debrouillardise, of thinking the impossible and then just doing it. Armand Diangienda lost his job as a pilot when the Fokker F-27 he used to fly across the Congo crashed into the hills above the town of Goma in 1992, killing all 37 people on board. Luckily, he was on holiday at the time. Finding himself unemployed, he rallied some of the followers of his father’s church, the hugely popular Kimbanguiste Church, and created a symphony orchestra, a strange endeavour for a confirmed reggae fan who had only a passing interest in European classical music at the time.

“We told ourselves that creating a symphony orchestra would be great because the church already had a brass band, a flute orchestra, a guitar ensemble and a number of different choirs,” Armand tells me over a distorted phone line from Kinshasa. “I couldn’t read music but driven by my passion and with help from my friends I gradually learned.”

In the early days, instruments had to be borrowed or made from scratch by reverse engineering. Violin strings had to be concocted from bicycle brake wire. Hundreds of scores had to be copied out by hand. Arrangements to symphonic works by Mozart and Beethoven had to be deciphered by listening to the works on CD, over and over again. Music stands had to be cobbled together from old pieces of wood.

Despite attracting huge interest locally, the Orchestra remained a secret until two German film-makers, Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer, made a film about it called Kinshasa Symphony, which was released in 2010. It’s one of the most beautiful and honest portrayals of the power of music and the human spirit that I’ve seen in ages.

Last year, the Orchestra travelled outside Africa for the first time, performing at the TED conference in California and later in Monaco with the Monaco Symphony Orchestra. CBS devoted a hour coverage to them and Peter Gabriel joined them for a gala soirée to raise funds for a music school in Kinshasa.

But that’s not all. Armand Diangienda is on his way to London to become an honorary member of London’s Royal Philharmonic Society, an accolade previously granted to the likes of Mendelssohn, Rossini, Wagner, Brahms and Stravinsky. “The day I was told I had tears in my eyes,” Diangienda says.

The fact that many Congolese regard Armand Diangienda as something of a living God has no doubt helped him to achieve the seemingly impossible. His grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, was a healer and preacher whose sermons instilled pride and self-belief in ordinary Congolese people and deep fear in their Belgian colonial masters. He died in 1951 after spending thirty years in prison. One of his most prophetic statements was “The black man will become white and the white man will become black.”

For Armand Diangienda however, performing western classical music on the banks of the Congo river has nothing to do with turning his back on his own African culture. “Everything we’re learning by playing classical music will allow us to enrich our own music as well and immortalise it by writing it down,” he says. Diangienda himself, and the orchestra’s first violinist Heritier Malumbi and bassoonist Balongi, have already composed several original symphonic works full of rich Congolese flavours.

“My grandfather claimed that to sing was to pray twice,” Diangienda says. “Music is already a form of spiritual wealth to us, the Kimbanguistes. But what inspires me even more is that my grandfather’s message was a universal one; a message of peace, of love, of reaching out for others and bringing people together.”

It was also a message about work, perseverance and self-respect. The stirring finale of Kinshasa Symphony sees the Orchestra performing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on a large piece of waste ground in front of an ecstatic local crowd. The beauty, pride and common purpose that oozes from the performance make mincemeat of the clichés of chaos and hopelessness that burden the Congo. A small but growing group of cognoscenti already know that Kinshasa is one of the most culturally dynamic and creative cities on earth, and OSK only reinforce that conviction.

So here’s another prophecy: sometime in the future, in 30, 50 or a 100 years time, Kinshasa will rival the Paris of the 1920s or the London of the 1960s in terms of its impact on global culture. By then, by the grace of Simon Kimbangu himself, the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste will be old and venerated and Armand Diangienda’s most cherished dreams will have come true.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

First published in The Guardian – May 2013

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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.