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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Les Jeunes Nomades at the Taragalte Festival 2016 © Andy Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a boundless dream for a boundless place.

Andy Morgan,

Bristol, March 2017.

© Andy Morgan. All rights reserved.

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

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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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In many ways, it’s the perfect size of venue: not too big, or too small. A convenient balcony. Good lines of sight. A sturdy dance floor fit for moshing. Solid, utilitarian fixtures and fittings. All the systems for dealing with over-excited rock’n’roll fans in place and down pat. It reminds me of the old Town and Country Club in London. It’s an exciting place to be.

Tinariwen with Robert Plant at the Bataclan, Paris – 7th April 2007

And so it proved back in 2007 when Tinariwen played their first gig there.  Their third album Aman Iman had just come out to a loud international fanfare. The momentum around the band seemed unstoppable. There were journalists, photographers, TV people to deal with. Life was frantic. And exciting. The band’s bus was parked just outside the front doors of the venue. From mid afternoon onwards, there were fans hanging about. When Ibrahim came out to go into the venue, they mobbed him. Most of them were North African. They just wanted to do what fans generally want to do – say hi, have a hug, ask a question, snap a selfie. But it was strange for Ibrahim, and for the rest of us. We hadn’t really had to deal with these kinds of demonstrations of fan-love before. But this was the Bataclan and Tinariwen had arrived.

Because I hadn’t been with the band when they’d played at a festival in southern Morocco just a few months before, I was yet to realise the impact they were having in North Africa. It hit me for the first time there and then, outside the Bataclan. Later, during the gig, there were Berber flags waving in the audience. That was also new.  This was an altogether different, more positive, assertion of North Africa cultural pride and defiance to the one we saw last Friday night.  Robert Plant had agreed to come on and do a guest appearance.  I seem to remember that he sang ‘Win My Train Fare Home’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to the broiling roll of Tamashek guitars, with Yadou kicking out that famous riff on his bass.  Justin Adams was also there.  It was a night I won’t forget.

Last Friday night, once again by all accounts, the excitement was palpable.  “Eagles Of Death Metal Tonight – yet another sold out concert!” the venue proclaimed on its Facebook page.  People had come from far and wide.  It was going to be a cracker. Then the first gun shots – a different kind of death metal, unmusical, joyless, rhythm-less – cut across the broiling riffs. Men in black with goatees, of a similar age to most in the audience, had come to put and end to that feeling that anyone who’s been to an eagerly anticipated sold-out gig will know and cherish. It’s a feeling of immense good fortune, of being one of the privileged few, in the right place at the right time. Those young men stood that feeling on its head, and murdered it.

The ISIS statement called what was happening that night, before their bloody intervention at the Bataclan Conference Center (sic), “a profligate prostitution party”. How familiar the ring of those words, echoing a thousand puritan, Calvinist, kill joy rants from our own history. Christianity fought these same battles many centuries ago.  They were still being fought in the 1950s. We thought they’d been won. But no, that battle is still being fought. And anyone who walks out onto any stage – in Paris, or London, or Madrid, Melbourne, Mumbai and Osaka – is now in the front line of that battle.  Music itself is on the front line.  The whole global community of musicians, promoters, managers, roadies, sound engineers, bouncers, merchandising sellers, bar workers, music PRs, music journalists – we’re all on the front line. Take courage. We’ve got to win.  The alternative is too bleak to contemplate: a life without joy, relief, togetherness.  In short, a life without music.

Andy Morgan

Bristol, 17th November 2015.

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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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Souad Massi. Photo by Jean Baptiste Millot

A few weeks ago, an article called ‘What can Ibn Arabi do against Daesh?’ appeared in the pages of the Algerian daily El Watan (one of Souad Massi’s favourite newspapers). The question in the title neatly summarizes the ideological struggle that rages in almost every corner of the Muslim world; it also lies at the heart of Souad Massi’s new album El Mutakalllimûn, although she might balk at avowing as much in public.

Daesh hardly need any introduction; many readers might know the organisation by the acronyms more commonly used by non-Arabic speakers: ISIS or IS. This latter-day ‘caliphate’ is busy preparing the ground for the annihilation of all infidels and apostates, and putting anyone who doesn’t agree with their brutally literalist interpretation of Islam to the sword. It already occupies large swathes of eastern Syria and northern Iraq – the prophesied battleground for that final apocalyptic showdown with the non-believers. And though it professes a desire to rewind the human clock back to the 7^th century AD, the organisation has turned a local conflict into a global battle of hearts and minds with its gruesomely brilliant manipulation of modern digital media. In fact, ISIS is a paradigm of modernity, as much a part of the age we live in – like it or not – as Grand Theft Auto or Taylor Swift.

The name Ibn Arabi requires little more clarification perhaps. It belongs to a Muslim mystic and philosopher, many would say ‘saint’, who was born in Murcia, southern Spain, in 1165AD and died in Damascus 75 years later. Posterity bestowed him with the honorifics ‘al-Shaykh al-Akbar’ (‘the great Cheikh’) and ‘Doctor Maximus’. Amongst his many works is the seminal al-Futuhat al-Makkiya (The Meccan Illuminations) which comprises over 7000 pages of densely packed manuscript that elucidate, in language both complex and beautiful, his metaphysical philosophy of Oneness and the divine role of love and mercy in human existence.

Ibn Arabi was both venerated and reviled in the centuries following his death; venerated by those who admired the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his mystical insight; reviled by those, such as the 13^th century scholar and jurist Ibn Taymiyyah, who were wary of unfettered philosophising of any kind and preferred to adhere to a strict, literal and unquestioning (though selective) interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. Ibn Taymiyyah’s teachings are still revered by Sunni literalists and followers of ISIS to this day.

The article in El Watan was a report of a conference held last June at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Algiers to mark the 850^th anniversary of Ibn Arabi’s birth. The event gathered together eminent professors of philosophy, history, poetry and linguistics from all over the Arab world to venerate the great man, and contemplate the hotly topical question of how his fiqh or ‘philosophy’ of love can be deployed against the bigotry and hatred of ISIS and their ilk. The path to enlightenment propounded by Ibn Arabi is poorly suited to modern lifestyles and expectations; it demands silence, solitude, contemplation and self-abnegation – a retreat from this world rather than a more exhilarating involvement in it. What, in comparison to Daesh’s thrilling brew of guns, adventure, brotherhood and, above all, certainty, can his philosophy possibly offer today’s ardent young Muslim minds, apart from boredom perhaps?

Well, let’s start with peace, tolerance and love. Ibn Arabi and the ‘golden age’ of Islam in al-Andalus (southern Spain) that gave him birth are like beacons that shine a light across the centuries into Islam’s current heart of darkness. They offer examples of how not only Muslims, but all human beings, can live in state of peaceful coexistence and tolerance. Medieval Spain had its share of despots, bigots and jihadists, but it was also, in its heyday, the greatest centre of learning, science and religious tolerance in the western world. Muslim caliphs employed Jewish viziers, philosophers and architects. Christian kings were buried with Arabic inscriptions around their tombs. Poetry, especially Arabic poetry, was prized by all men of education – Muslim, Christian or Jew. Muslim and Jewish philosophers had no fear of assimilating the ‘pagan’ thought of Aristotle and the ancients into their discourse. Reason nourished faith. Tolerance towards the other was matched by a tolerance of inner contradictions and doubts.

Ibn Arabi is often held up as the guide and poet of what is often referred to as jihād al-akhbar, ‘the greater jihad’ – in other words, the endeavour to master the self. In comparison to that immense struggle, in which we’re all engaged, beheading innocents in northern Iraq is, at best, a lesser jihad. It’s this message that those professors and intellectuals who gathered in Algiers to venerate the memory of Ibn Arabi wished to convey. ‘One left the hall astoundingly relieved and calmed,’ wrote the El Watan journalist who covered the conference, ‘with the gentle conviction that another discourse is possible.’

Ibn Arabi’s writings stress the importance of the night as the time best suited for the inner journey. Souad Massi admits that she’s attracted to the silence of nocturnal contemplation. This was especially true when she was a young teenager living in Algiers during the late 1980s and 1990s, a time when her homeland was being ripped apart by political turmoil and religious fanaticism. “I was always very solitary,” she told me. “For me the night was an important time. If you wanted to cry, no one could see you. Because I lived in a large family and you can’t do anything during the day, everybody can see you, but in the night I spent hours looking at the stars, sometimes until three in the morning. Especially in summer, I found it amazingly beautiful.”

Many years later, after she had moved to France and become a singer of global renown, Massi chanced across a documentary on TV about the Spanish city of Cordoba and its golden past during another nocturnal vigil, at around 4am in the morning. She was immediately “bewitched by the city”, to use her own words, and fascinated by its former intellectual grandeur, sophistication and spirit of tolerance. She started reading books about the place, wondering why she hadn’t ever paid much attention to its history and legacy, despite her early love of flamenco and Spanish culture. “I was ashamed,” she says. “I’ve been all around the world but I’ve never been there.”

She read about a sort of cultural assembly that existed in Andalusia during the early medieval period, frequented by wise men – ‘masters of the word’ – who were called El Mutakalllimûn. The word is the plural of mutakallim, which means a scholar of Ilm al-Kala – the Islamic science of discourse. The object of the mutakallim is to defend the word of God by means of reasoned argument and reconcile faith with non-Islamic traditions of deductive philosophical reasoning. As such it was and still remains highly controversial. Strict Sunni scholars, of Salafist or Wahabist tendency, consider the kalam to be a dangerous innovation and generally forbid their students to indulge in it. The word of God is uncreated by man and therefore human reason cannot and should not be applied to it, or so they say.

To Souad Massi however, her personal discovery of Cordoba and the tradition of kalam served as a gateway into Islam’s glorious intellectual past and the accumulated cultural wealth of the Arab world. She was infused with a missionary zeal to share what she discovered, and, by celebrating the beauty of Islamic philosophy, poetry and calligraphy, to find “another discourse”. “I think we’re lacking a lot of tolerance,” Souad says, “and I think that we must give the power and the opportunity to the learned people in Islam, the university professors. They’re the ones who will show us the way and who won’t lead us astray. Because when you’re ignorant, anyone can tell you anything they want, and you’ll follow him.”

She prepared to fight her own gentle ‘cultural’ battle with two types of ignorance. The first was the ignorance of non-Arabs who see the Arab world and Arabic culture as a monolithic threat to their well-being; a source either of angry youth who refuse to integrate into the culture of their adopted homes in Europe and prefer to spend their time rinsing violent rap lyrics and stealing cars, or angry bearded zealots whose only purpose in life is sow terror and murder innocents. The second is the ignorance of Arabs, especially the youth in her own adopted country of France, of their own history and cultural heritage.

“How come nobody ever talks about those wise men? Avicenna, Ibn Arabi, great men of learning, writers?” asks Massi, “Why do people always talk about little hoodlums who’ve stolen some nonsense?…We don’t have the right to marginalise and hide away this treasure, and emphasize all the stuff that’s happening right now. We can’t reduce Arabic culture to that.”

Massi tells me that she set to work creating El Mutakallimûn the album “like a police investigator.” She read widely, surfed the net, visited archives and libraries and posted requests for information on Facebook. She corresponded with professors of Arabic literature and translators. She came across the work of the calligraphers Mohamed Bourafai, and his son Ayman Bourafai. Despite her longstanding love of poetry by Leonard Cohen, Mahmoud Darwish and Victor Hugo, she had never considered herself a very ‘literary’ person. Grappling with early medieval Arabic wasn’t easy.

But, as she delved deeper, wonders kept emerging. She discovered the 9th century Iraqi poet Al Mutanabi – ‘The Would-be Prophet’. “There are miracles in his poems,” she says. “No one has scaled the same heights as him. It’s just not possible to come out with beauty like that.” She discovered the ‘hanging odes’ of the pre-Islamic poet Zouhaïr Ibn Abi Salma and the astonishing depth that the Arabic language is capable of in some of the words he used, words like sa’imtou: “It means more than ‘I’m tired’. When you say it, you include all the years you have lived. I remember that when I was a child, it was the only word that really left its mark on me. When I couldn’t go on, I always thought discreetly about sa’imtou.”

She discovered Majnūn Layla – ‘[The Man] Possessed by Layla’ – the Arab world’s answer to Romeo and Juliet, about a young man called Qays who falls in love with a girl called Layla but goes mad and dies of hunger because her father disapproves of him and he cannot have her: “I said to myself that it just wasn’t possible to die of love, just like that. It doesn’t exist. But, well, yes…it does.” She discovered The Song of the Whistling Nightingale (‘Sawtou Safiri el Boulbouli’) by the 9th century poet Asmaï, with its intricate verbal refinements and frankly untranslatable word play. “You think you’ve written, you’ve composed,” says Massi, “but you’ve done nothing at all. They were geniuses who left traces, marvels. We’re nothing in comparison to them.”

Perhaps most encouraging of all, she discovered that the poetic prowess of the ancients had survived into the modern era, reincarnated in poets like the Tunisian Abou el Kacem Chebbi who wrote the irresistibly stirring hymn ‘To the Tyrants of the World’ (‘Elā Toghat al-Alāam’) with its prophetic lines “You dare to defile the magic of existence / And scatter needles of misfortune at will / Beware! That the springtime doesn’t trick you / Nor the clarity of the sky, nor the light of day.” Although el Chebbi died in 1934 at the age of 25, his verses stoked the passion of the crowds that marched down Avenue Bourguiba and occupied Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011, alongside the rap of El General du Bled, the protest songs of Cheikh Imam and the poems of Ahmed Fouad Negm.

‘Houria’ [‘Freedom’] by Mohammed and Aymen Bourafai

Souad Massi avows an admiration for poets and artists who take risks. “I have a lot of respect for people who can put themselves in danger of death to tell the truth,” she says. She cites the modern Iraqi poet Ahmad Matar as a luminous example. He was forced to flee his adopted city of Kuwait and settle in London in the 1980s. In 2011, he wrote about the power of poetry and words, a power even greater than the forces shaking the Arab world at the time: “Poetry is not an Arab regime that falls with the death of the ruler. And it’s not an alternative to action. It’s an art form whose job is agitating, exposing, and witnessing reality, aspiring beyond the present. Poetry lights the road, and guides our deeds.”

Massi set Ahmed Matar’s poem ‘El Houriya’ (‘Freedom’) to music and included it on El Mutakallimûn. It’s the tale of a teacher who writes the word ‘freedom’ up on the black board only to be met with the blank stares of his pupils. “It’s heartbreaking to see the youth / Who understand nothing about Freedom” says the teacher. The calligraphy by Mohamed Bourafai’s that accompanies the poem looks like the manuscript of a poem that has been saved from the flames, with the word ‘Freedom’ glowing bright at its heart.

There are young Muslim men and women all over the world who are caught in a vortex of identity-politics, weakened, disorientated and prone to apocalyptic rhetoric. In France, where Souad Massi now lives, the problem is acute. “The youth here have nothing. They’re made to feel like foreigners. All they have is football pitches, because the state has cut the funding for all kinds of activities in the housing estates. So either you become a football champion, or you’re nothing. If there was a place to meet and someone who could say ‘Look at your ancestors…like Ibn Firnas, the first guy to try and fly. He was from Muslim Andalusia. Or all those hospitals named after Avicenna. That is ‘Ibn Sinna’, a Muslim.’ That would already give them a little confidence, allow them to gravitate towards something.”

Talking To Souad Massi, it’s clear that she prefers to play the role of educator, sharing the beauty of Arabic culture, rather than risk career, family, life by taking the fight to the bigots and the haters. Her adopted home of France is one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the war of words and ideas that rages through Islam and the Arab world. As a public figure, she already stands exposed. She doesn’t want to become another Charb. Even though the passion with which she talks about the injustices perpetrated against Arabic culture and Islam, both from without and within, is palpable, her strategy is seduction rather than confrontation.

“All I’m trying to do is to make people aware [of all this beauty], by means of pop, of a beautiful poem,” she says. “Then perhaps that person will be attracted by that culture and will make his own way. That’s my aim. I have nothing to prove. I did for love, really, and I was very well supported by musicians. Then again…I’m sure there’ll be those who say that poems are sacred; but poems aren’t sacred. For Muslims, what’s sacred is the Qur’an, and I won’t tamper with that, that’s for sure.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2015

This article is an amalgamation of the sleeve notes for the album El Mutakallimûn and an article that was published in Songlines in July 2015

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We live in a noisy world. Our cities and towns fizz with an almost permanent tinnitus of machine-generated sound. And even if, by some fluke, all that noise is absent for a while, most of us are left with the din of our own mental machinery churning inside. To disengage from that noise requires a drastic amputation from our usual environment; a trip to some distant wilderness perhaps, or an afternoon in a floatation tank. Sometimes we try to approximate the absence of noise by sitting in a garden or a park with the hum of traffic or roaring jet planes swept into the distance for a brief hour or two. Or we listen to ‘relaxation’ tapes of rhythmic sea-surf, dawn choruses and Celtic harp music laced with saccharine.

Clychau Dibon by Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita isn’t one of those tapes. Believe me.

You don’t pair the greatest young harpist in Wales with one of the most innovative kora players from West Africa for the purposes of relaxation. Their music is too deep, full-blooded and fragile for that. It engages with rather than disengages you from life and plays out against a backdrop of history, places, lives and legends that mirror each other in curious, even startling ways. Music with that kind of depth can never be relaxing. Too much old blood runs through it.

The harp and the kora appear to us like old instruments, designed for quieter sparser times. They can seem out of place in this cacophonous world. They’re old, that’s true. If you have a mind to go back to their beginnings, you’ll need to try and imagine that first hunter-gatherer who plucked the string of his bow and made music. Killing, skinning and eating animals were essential to him, but he also had a need to talk to the spirits and only music could do that. The many different harp-like instruments you can find around the world, including the kora, the classical concert harp and the Welsh harp, are the descendants of that hunter’s bow, just as every human descends from Lucy, our common grandmother.

About three hundred years ago, in an old West African kingdom known as Kaabu, simpler harps made from the tough gourd of the calabash, an African cousin of the melon too bitter to eat but good for just about everything else, were fused to create a new instrument with 21 strings, an instrument of majestic complexity and sophistication. Every griot or ‘bard’ in West Africa has his own version of how the kora was born, but they all agree that it was handed to man by the djinns. In other words, it was born in the spirit world before and then passed on to the human one. Which makes sense. All great music comes from the other side.

Like the Welsh harp, the kora’s original purpose was to help the griot sing the praises of great men, especially noble warriors and fighters. Hence its original name; koring bato – the box of the koring, who werethe warriors of the West African Manding. Like the Celts, the Manding are an ancient people bound together by ties of language and culture who populate the modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Mali. The kora is the king of all Manding instruments.

Seckou Keita was born in southern Senegal, in a town called Ziguinchor that sits on an arm of the great Casamance River. His mother was the daughter of a great griot whose bardic lineage stretched back into a distant and foggy past. Seckou’s father was a Keita, in other words, a descendent of the great Manding king Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire in the 14^th century. The bluest of blood runs in Keita veins.

Seckou learnt the kora under his grandfather’s stern eye. He later rebelled and took up the drums as well. His entire clan, the Cissokhos, are griots and kora players of international renown. Many younger Cissokhos are scattered around Europe, surviving on their wits, their charm, their affability and their music. Seckou has made England his base since 1997.

Catrin Finch was born in Aberystwyth, west Wales, of English and German parents. She grew up in a tiny village near Aberaeron, on the shores of Cardigan Bay, with the sound of the sea in her ears. She fell in love with the harp when she was six years old, after seeing the Spanish harpist Marisa Robles play at the Lampeter Music Club.

By the age of nine, Catrin had dusted all her grades and was soon filling the cupboards of her family home with trophies and stringing gigs with the National Youth Orchestras together with solo concerts and the occasional appearance on Blue Peter. The child prodigy turned into an A-list student at the Royal College of Music in London and, at the age of 19, was invited to become the first harpist by appointment to the Prince of Wales.

Now in her thirties and living in south Wales, Catrin Finch enjoys star status in the classical music world, although her instrument is still the Cinderella of the classical orchestra, considered good enough for the musical expression of sparkling brooks, fluffy clouds and angelic dreams but not much else. That’s something Catrin would like to change. Her collaborations with the Colombian cowboy virtuosos Cimarron and now Seckou Keita provide proof of her desire to leap over cultural barriers and roam in mapless musical territory.

Harp and a kora, woman and a man, Celt and Manding, European and African, written scores and word of mouth; you might expect Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch to be separated by unbridgeable cultural chasms, but you’d be wrong. Go deep and you’ll find strange symmetries and fabulous coincidences that bind West Africa and Wales; bards and griots, djinns and faeries, the Casamance River and the Teifi, Sundiata Keita and the 10^th century Welsh King Hywel Dda, the list goes on.

What’s more, both the harp and the kora make music that flows like water and expresses its essential melancholy. The poet Dylan Thomas once wrote a line about the sea singing in its chains. ‘Ceffylau’ (‘Horses’) is a groove that Seckou dreamed up in a moment of nostalgia and longing. It’s doused in the sadness of leaving, of being thrown out onto the mercy of the waves, never to return.

Both the enticement and the loneliness of an empty horizon is expressed in ‘Llongau Terou-bi’, in which the old Welsh air ‘Llongau Caernafon’ (‘The Ships of Caernarvon’) is played out on a quay or terou near Dakar in Senegal, gulls screeching overhead, fishermen unloading their catches, the eyes of a young boy transfixed by that endless coming and going of shore life. Poverty drove many Welsh men and women to take to the sea. Near Terou-bi beach in Dakar lies the Island of Gorée, from which so many Africans were forcibly embarked on ships bound for the new World. Both were enslaved in their own ways.

But the sea, together with the inlets, creeks, swamps and tributaries that are its limbs, is also an enchanter. The island of Carabane at the mouth of the Casamance River and the wide Bae Aberteifi, or Cardigan Bay, are magical places for Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch. Those Bras de Mer (‘Arms of the Sea’) inspire the currents that flow through their fingers.

When they were working on the song Bras de Mer, Seckou remembered this old Welsh tune that he’d once played with another Welsh harpist by the name of Llio Rhydderch, but he couldn’t remember its name. Producer John Hollis found it on the Internet. It was called ‘Conset Ifan Glen Teifi’, ‘The Concert of Ifan Glen Teifi’. Teifi is the name of the river that runs through Cardigan. It’s a lush and beautiful Welsh waterway and the tune fitted Seckou’s Manding melody ‘Niali Bagna’, named after an old Wolof king, like a hand fits an old glove. Seckou then added an old Manding melody called ‘Bolong’, meaning ‘The Arms of the Sea’. Finally Catrin overlaid ‘Clychau Aberdyfi’ or ‘The Bells of Aberdovey’. Everything found its place in the whole without coercion, like the pieces in a puzzle or the water of many rivers flowing into each other for their final journey to the sea. That’s how most of Clychau Dibon came together. Strange symmetries. Strange coincidences.

Like the imaginary encounter between the Manding king Nialing Sonko, famous for collecting too much tax from his people, and Robert Ap Huw, the 16^th century musician who invented his own baffling form of notation and wrote down many of those old Welsh harp tunes before history could consign them to oblivion. Seckou chose to name his contribution after Nialing Sonko because the tune echoed the pure Casamance kora style of his youth and Sonko was a Casamance king. Catrin rummaged in the Ap Huw canon and pulled out a melody called ‘Caniad Gosteg’. Once again, the fit was seamless, uncanny, the old courtliness of medieval Wales echoing the old-world dignity of the Casamance style. Then, returning to his childhood again, Seckou added an exercise that all aspiring kora players have to master, Kelefa Koungben, the rhythm of Kelefa. Kelefa Sane was another old Manding warrior whose name is intimately tied to the birth of the kora itself.

Seckou dedicated another of his tunes, which he called Bamba, to the great Senegalese holy man and anti-colonial resistance leader, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké. He was a man who devoted his life to the welfare of those around him. His deeds and miracles have been praised in endless tales and poems. The tune leaves a sense of wisdom, kindness and gentleness – the qualities of true sainthood – in its wake.

Downstream and further out across wide oceans, we come to ‘Genedigaeth Koring-bato’, ‘The Genesis of the Koring-bato’, in other words, the birth of the Kora. The piece is dedicated to Toumani Diabate, probably the greatest kora player in the world, who, in March 2012, pulled off an unforgettable tour of Wales with Catrin Finch, despite illness and the military coup that had just shattered the peace and well being of his native Mali. That tour, the brainchild of producers John Hollis and Dilwyn Davies of Theatr Mwldan in Cardigan, is the genesis of the album Clychau Dibon.

But there’s more. Seckou often had to delve back into the old Manding melodies of his youth, to the genesis of his own style and his own life as a musician, in order to find the necessary symmetry with old Welsh songs such as ‘Beth Yw’r Haf I Mi’, (‘What is the summer to me?’), melodies that cry tears of loss and longing and tell us that Wales is not all about emerald hills and sun-kissed bays, but also boarded-up mines and factories, enforced migration, callousness and poverty, chapel and bible, hopelessness and damnation.

That’s the tone with which Clychau Dibon opens, a Welsh love story gone awry. Out of it, the kora emerges holding down a simple riff taken from a tune called ‘Macki’, named after an old king who was kind to orphans. It’s then overlaid with more longing, this time for a love left behind in Pontypridd, to which the kora answers with a tune called ‘Kelefa Ba’, the ‘Great Kelefa’, the warrior who will not succumb. Not just musical notes, but whole stories and worlds are blended here.

Why? To create something new out of the old. We’re dealing with young hearts whose desire to break new ground is strong. Future Strings is a fine example of the uncharted territory into which Seckou is pushing his kora, a territory in which the theme from ‘Prelude from the Asturias’ by the Spanish composer Albéniz can trip lightly from Catrin Finch’s fingers. The highly structured and complex world of European classical music is fused with the oral traditions of West Africa. Each make compromises, the kora moving into a more structured world that it is perhaps used to, the classical harp jettisoning the strictures of notation and over-bearing reverence for the ancestors to breathe more freely…

Where? To a world where the Bells of the dibon bird – Clychau Dibon – chime their bittersweet chime. The second bass string on the left hand side of the kora is named after the dibon, otherwise known as the West African Ground-Hornbill. During the day, the male and female dibon do everything and go everywhere together. But at night they part to sleep alone, each in their own nest. The next morning they call to each other, a mix of low male tones and higher female ones, so that they can reunite and face the new day.

What are all these old tunes from West Africa and Wales except old pop songs that remain doggedly tenaciously alive. Listen to them carefully. They’ve found each other and created a new sound, another kind of noise to add to the tinnitus of modern life. But listen again and see if you can’t find a different kind of peace in there, not the emptiness relaxation or switching off, but the fullness and peace that only come once you have travelled through life, love and loss, to emerge sadder and wiser on the other side.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

Printed in the cd booklet of Clychau Dibon by Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita (Astar / Mwldan 2013)

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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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