Super 11 de Gao. Photo by Horst Timmers

“At the first Festival of the Desert in 2000/2001 there were many musical revelations – Tinariwen’s trajectory has been well documented – but another very different group had a huge impact on me: Super Onze de Gao just played one rhythm, but what a rhythm! Devastating and unlike anything I’ve heard, the relentless beat from the two calabashes had the impact of the first time I heard the Burundi Beat, or the Musicians of Jajouka. Two distorted desert lutes circled around each other calling to mind Hendrix’s most trancey moments or Howlin’ Wolf’s band when their sound turns into a web of abstract groove. I love the way the Super 11 Album sounds, I love the rawness and distortion and the heavy calabash sound. This CD brings to the West for the first time the undiluted sound of the Takamba – Not for the faint hearted – it deserves to be heard by everyone who loves wild groove music with no limits.” – JUSTIN ADAMS.

Gao and takamba: the background

The Niger sparkles like a giant sapphire luxuriating on a bed of green velvet as it flows past the city of Gao. All around the far horizons are dry, earthy-brown and immense. Travelers coming down from the arid Sahara drink their first sight of the great river from higher ground just to the north of the city. Vivid, intense colour floods back into their monochrome world. The promise of all that endless rolling blue water revives their parched senses. Thanks and praises are intoned by cracked lips. The desert crossing is over and the ‘shore’ of black Africa, or the Sahel as the Arabs called it, has been reached.

Until a few years ago, you had to navigate the Niger on a rickety old car ferry if you wanted to reach Gao on the main road from the west. Nowadays, a gleaming new Chinese-built bridge spans the sedate waters.  The local people – mainly Songhai (pronounced ‘son-rai’ or ‘son-goy’), but also Tamashek, Bozo and Fulani – hope that this incongruously flashy piece of infrastructure is a sign of things to come. For far too long, their once proud homeland has been reduced to a quiet backwater, starved of attention, deprived of investment and stuck out on the eastern perimeter of Mali, far from the seat of power and influence in the capital Bamako.

Gao’s illustrious past owes everything to its prime location at the junction of the Niger and the Tilemsi valley, a huge superhighway of sand and rock that runs from north to south across the southern desert. Before Timbuktu stole its crown in the 16^th century, the city was the biggest caravan ‘port’ in this part of the Sahara, a proud and preeminent trading hub where gold, salt, slaves, ostrich feathers, ivory, millet and all the produce of Africa set out on its journey north to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Coming in the opposite direction, traders and students brought Islam and the cultural wealth of the Maghreb, Egypt and beyond, turning Gao into a Mecca of culture as well as trade.

In the fifteenth century, the great Songhai ruler Sunni Ali founded an Empire that stretched from the Aïr desert in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Ali’s successor Askia Mohammed built and endowed universities and koranic schools, unifying his vast Imperium under Islam and establishing a sophisticated bureaucracy and legal system. Before the Moroccans invaded in 1591 and brought Gao’s dominance to an end, the Songhai Empire was one the largest and most sophisticated political entities that Africa had ever known.  Two and a half centuries later, the German explorer Heinrich Barth found all that glory reduced to nothing more than a sleepy town of 300 adobe dwellings, sweltering by the cool evergreen shores of the great river.

Despite its waxing waning economic fortunes, Gao has always been certain, and proud, of its musical wealth. Songhai culture has given us Ali Farka Touré, Afel Bocoum, Baba Salah, Khaira Arby and Ibrahim Hamma Dicko, as well as a rich catalogue of different rhythms, instruments and musical styles.  Among the most popular is takamba.

Takamba is music made for celebration; weddings mainly, but also birth and circumcision parties, harvest thanksgivings, festivities to mark the end of Ramadan, The Prophet’s birthday or the feast of Tabeski – as Eid is known in Mali – and many other occasions of communal joy. They say that takamba has its origins in a neighbourhood of the same name situated on the edge of the small town of Témera, up-river north of Gao, on the road to Bourem. Its driving force is the unmistakable takamba rhythm which pulses on the boom and bip before lurching at the end of every phrase, catching the uninitiated in mid-step. Try and imagine the lope of a camel combined with the flow of a vast sedate river and you’ll be getting close. This beat is locked down by one or more players of the calabash, a species of over-sized died out pumpkin gourd that sounds like an entire drum kit in the hands of skilled player, with its deep booming bass thump and rattling ‘hi-hat’ click.

Atop this sedate beat come the ngoni players. The ngoni is a three or four stringed lute.  The Songhai call it the kurbu, and the Touareg the teherdent. With generous historical license you could call it the great granddaddy of the blues guitar and you wouldn’t be too far wrong. The takamba musicians play the ngoni sitting down, with the instrument lying on the floor and one knee pressing down on its body, as if they’re taming a wayward animal. With their flowing bouboul robes and heads enveloped in a cheche or turban, the ngoni players cut a cool debonair figure as the notes flutter and fizzle out of their fingers in a bewildering bluesy stream. In the last three or four decades, the ngoni has usually been stuck through an amp and a pair of deliciously distorted speakers. Super Onze employ the vintage bullhorn variety. This gives the music a modern punch and grimy edge that could easily rival The Velvet Underground or The Jesus and Mary Chain. Sometimes the ngoni is substituted with an electric guitar thus sealing its contemporary transformation.

The final layer in the takamba sound is the praise singer, the lead vocalist who directs proceedings. Takamba is a generous music. Its role is to make people feel important and happy. The lead vocalist will praise the bride’s beauty, the bridegroom’s strength, the illustrious lineage of the bride’s mother, and the great deeds of the bridegroom’s father. He’ll tell stories about the guests or recite ancient tales of love and bravery, compliment dignitaries for their honour, their astuteness and their generosity, making sure that the power structures that underpin society are recognised and reaffirmed in joyful music. In that sense, takamba, like all praise-music, has a very political and social purpose, which it fulfills in an understated non-confrontational manner.

And then there are the dancers. Not for takamba the wild gyrations and flailing limbs of many other Malian dance styles. Takamba moves are all about dignity, restraint, undulating limbs, covert smiles and trysting eyes. The dancers generally form two orderly lines which face each other, one for the women and one for the men. Sometimes they stand, sometimes they’re seated.  The more traditional mode is the seated one, which places further restrictions on unseemly bodily movement but intensifies the subtle beauty of the dance.  Takamba dancing is a metaphor for flowing water. It’s the body’s hymn to the river, the source of all life. All passion, all excitement is subsumed in its gentle undulations. But those passions still lurk beneath, just like the currents of the great river.  That’s why some swear that takamba is the most erotic dance form in the whole of west Africa, albeit eroticism of the subtlest kind.

Both the city of Gao and the takamba style itself sit neatly and squarely on the frontier between two cultural spheres: the ‘white’ Arab / Berber culture of North Africa, and the black African culture of the Sahel and beyond. Although the Berber Kel Tamashek, or Touareg, and the black Songhai peoples have long been adversaries and have even known periods of open conflict in the past three decades, it’s common for takamba groups to feature both Songhai and Touareg musicians.  For that reason, takamba is a potent and valuable bridging style, which stretches hands out across a fundamental cultural divide, and invites them to shake and make peace.  Some even say that “take the hand” is one of the meanings of the word ’takamba’.

Super Onze de Gao

Super Onze de Gao was founded in the early 1980s by Haziz Toure, Asaalya Samake and Agita Moussa Maiga, who became the group’s first president.  All three were Songhai men from Gao.  In the venerable tradition of so many west African music ensembles, Super Onze was created in order to entertain at community celebrations, preserve traditions, propagate culture and create a kind of ‘club’ or community organization which could support the needs and nurture the talents of its members. In other words, it was more than just a ‘band’ in the European sense of the word. The founding members are still alive, but now it’s the next generation that fills the active roles in the group. That’s another advantage of their typically African orchestral structure. It doesn’t depend on any one individual or person for its survival, and can thus better cope with the passing of time.

Initially Super Onze de Gao played in their own homes, three or more times a month and especially on Fridays, the day of prayer and rest in the Muslim week. From the beginning they concentrated strictly on the takamba style, and were soon a popular feature of local weddings and festivities. In 1985 they gave their first ‘official’ non-festive concert, at an election gathering in Gao. The ex-military dictator of Mali, Moussa Traore, was returned to the presidency with an absurd 99.94% of the vote that year.

In 1986, Super Onze de Gao were invited to perform for the Songhai community at the French Cultural Centre in Niamey, the capital of neighbouring Niger, which is about a day’s journey from Gao by road. Throughout the ensuing years, the group gradually consolidated their position as the number one takamba outfit in eastern Mali. They participated three times in Mali’s famous Biennales – a government sponsored national competition to find the best music ensemble, best theatre group and best dance troupe in the nation – representing Gao in regional and national finals.

The Biennales were instigated by Moussa Traore in 1970 to instil cultural pride and community cohesion in the various regions of Mali, especially among the youth.  Traore also hoped to strengthen the patriotic glue that bound Mali’s huge variety of cultures and ethnic groups together.  Like many African leaders at the time, he was trying to build a nation from elements that hadn’t historically had very much in common. Moussa Traore has been branded a brutal dictator by history, justifiably so, but his Biennale system is one of the reasons that Mali is one of Africa’s musical powerhouses today.

Sometime during the 1990s, Issa Toure took over from his father Haziz as the main singer of Super Onze de Gao.  He is now their president.  He comes from a family of Songhai farmers, rooted in the rich alluvial mud of the Niger valley.  His son is also preparing to become a singer, and will hopefully take over the leading role in the group in due course.

Super Onze’s leading ngoni player is Yehia Mbala Samake, son of Asaalya Samake. Yehia comes from a caste of Songhai blacksmiths. The role of blacksmiths in Songhai and Touareg society is very complex and very important. They belong to an endogamous group, which means you can only be born a blacksmith, you cannot become one. Until recently they were responsible for making almost everything necessary for nomadic or sedentary existence: tents, swords, spears, camel saddles, leather bags and cushions, padlocks, cooking utensils and, most importantly, jewellery. They still make jewellery and many other artefacts. But the role of the blacksmith has never been confined to artisanal manual labour. They’re also storytellers and guardians of family histories and lineages. They’re often called upon to negotiate between two rival clans, and to arrange marriages. And it’s their duty to play music at feasts and festivities. As such, their role has many affinities with that of the Manding or Bamana griot.

Ahmed Ag Assalat, the second ngoni player, also comes from a family of blacksmiths, but in his case it’s a Touareg family. The other Touareg in the group are Aliou Saloum and Ousmane Yattara, who come from a family of wood sellers. The remaining two members of the group are dancer Fatoumata Sarre, daughter of a blacksmith and ‘Cola’ Toure, second calabash player and the son of a farmer.

In 2003, Super Onze de Gao were invited to the third edition of the now world famous Festival in the Desert, which takes place annually near the village of Essakane, by Lake Faguibine, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu. They were the unheralded hit of the Festival. Robert Plant became a fan overnight, as did his guitarist Justin Adams. Both harbour a life-long mission to seek out the distant African and North African ancestry of the American blues. When they heard Super Onze de Gao in the silky white dunes of Essakane, it was nothing short of a ‘Eureka’ moment. Ali Farka Toure asked Super Onze to warm up the crowd before his performance; a very wise choice.

Although Super Onze de Gao – who are also known by the alternative name Takamba Super Onze – became fêted regulars at the Festival in the Desert and were famous all over Mali, they failed to find a partner to help them launch an international career.  They did make one off trips to Washington DC for the Smithsonian institute’s lavish festival of Malian culture in 2004 and the Sfinks Festival in Belgium in 2008.  But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Dutch DJ and producer Horst Timmers, aka MPS Pilot that their dream of international recognition began to be realised.

Timmers saw Super Onze at the Festival in the Desert in 2003 and, along with so many others, was blown away. He returned to the Festival the following year, and found that the band’s impact even more powerful. In 2008 he travelled to meet Super Onze and put together a plan to launch their career outside Europe. He enrolled them into an ambitious project that melded takamba with electronica, or ‘la machine’, as the group members themselves refer to new computer-based music technology. The project is called Future Takamba and it toured around Holland and Belgium in October of that year.

Timmers also did a recording session with Super Onze de Gao ‘sans la machine’, in other words, pure and simple, live and direct, in August 2010 and the resulting CD, released by Two Speakers Records, is the best record of raw and rootsy takamba ever released. If Justin Adams is to be believed, you might just find it “devastating” and unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2011

Artist biography for Future Takamba Project

Super Onze de Gao / Future Takamba Links:

Two Speakers – Super Onze de Gao CD

Super Onze on Facebook

Super Onze on Bandcamp

Super Onze on Soundcloud

“We hadn’t thought of creating a group when we travelled together to the famous Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu in 2004,” explains Etran Finatawa’s bandleader Ghalitan Khamidoune, a diminutive Touareg with a gentle purposeful manner.  “The two musical cultures are very different, different instruments, different vocal styles.  We’d only written a couple of songs together back in Niamey, which we wanted to perform as a kind of finale at the Festival to show the Malians what musicians from Niger can do.  It was only when we saw the joy of the audience response, and found that people were congratulating us all the way back home, that we felt there was maybe something there.”

This hunch received an overwhelming endorsement with the recent release of Etran Finatawa’s debut CD ‘Introducing’ on the World Music Network label.  Reviews have been liberally sprinkled with words like ‘unearthly’, ‘hypnotic’, ‘haunting’ and ‘compelling’, accolades which justify themselves within seconds of pressing the play button.

Powered by the perpetual motion of the Touareg tindé drum, the Etran Finatawa groove possesses a kind of inexhaustible inner dynamo, a sublime transport that carries a cargo of joyous call and response vocals, booming bass and effortlessly intricate electric guitar licks, all of which reinforce the wide linear horizons of the music and echo the endlessly horizontal skyline of the group’s desert home.   This raucously poised sound was captured with sensitivity and expertise by producer Chris Birkett at his Chateau Richard studios in the heart of the dreamy wine-growing country of St Emilion near Bordeaux in the summer of 2005.

Onstage Etran Finatawa come across like an enthralling Saharan fashion display.  The three Touareg members look stately in their top-to-toe indigo robes, whilst the tall slender-armed Woodabé disport the intricate and strangely effeminate make-up which has made Woodabé men-folk a byword for African masculine beauty.  Back home in the desert, at certain key traditional gatherings, young Woodabé men gather in their hundreds to go through this laborious beautification process, delicately daubing their faces with a combination of natural dyes and the highly toxic black powder of used batteries, before lining up to roll the whites of their eyes and flash their teeth in the hope of being chosen for a night of passion by one of their female ‘judges’.   It’s the most famous dating ritual in the world, a magnet for generations of anthropologists, travel photographers and film-makers, like Werner Herzog, who captured the process on film in his opus ‘The Herdsmen Of The Sun’.

Although Etran Finatawa are proud to give the world a ravishing glimpse of this ancient beauty, what they really embody is the painful clash between nomadism and the modern world. Like so many of his Woodabé kin, percussionist and vocalist Bagui Bouga was forced by drought and desertification to move from his ancestral pastures to the polluted streets of Niger’s capital Niamey in search of work.  “Times have changed,” he says ruefully. “Nomads suffer now.  There isn’t enough water or good pasture for the animals.   Grain is expensive.  A majority of people prefer to live in the towns, because at least you can find food there, and water from a tap, and soap to wash yourself.  But in the towns we suffer too.  We can only find menial jobs as watchmen and caretakers, for 10,000 CFA (about £10) a month.  We have to sell our cattle and camels to pay debts.”

In the early 1990s, the Touareg, who have always been more politically engaged than their Woodabé neighbours, launched a rebellion against the central governments of Niger and Mali in an attempt to wrest back a modicum of self-determination and find their own solutions to the seemingly insurmountable problems that were facing the people of the Southern Sahara.  It was an upheaval of cataclysmic proportions that produced few positive benefits, one of which was a flourishing modern desert music scene in which time-honoured traditional instruments were ditched in favour of the electric guitar, and old tales of heroism and natural beauty replaced by rebel songs.

“The first cassettes I heard featured Inteyeden and Kheddou, who were members of Tinariwen back then,” remembers Bagui.  “We really liked them and it gave us the idea of doing the same thing with our Woodabé songs and poetry.”  Meanwhile Ghalitan had also taken up the guitar, inspired by the music of a rebellion that was actually ignited by an army massacre in his hometown of Tchin Tabaraden.  When peace came in 1995, he moved to Niamey and started his first group Etran N’Guefan, “The Stars of the Dunes’.  Bagui was a member of Kaouritel, the first self-consciously performance-orientated Woodabé troupe ever to exist, before leaving to form his own ensemble ‘Finatawa’.  “It’s the collective word for all our traditions and customs,” explains Bagui.  “And all those aspects of our culture that belong to every child who is born Woodabé.”  After that fateful rendezvous at the Festival in the Desert in 2004, the two struggling musical entities fused to become Etran Finatawa, ‘The Stars of Tradition’.

For the jobless desert migrants of Niamey, music is an antidote to the terminal hopelessness of sitting around all day, shooting the breeze and knocking back cups of bittersweet gunpowder tea.  Encouraged by their budding international success, Etran Finatawa harbour ambitious plans to shake up the Nigerien music scene for the benefit of all.  “We hope in the future to create a recording studio, a record label and distribution system, not just for the Touareg, but for all musicians,” says Ghalitan.  “The music scene in Niger isn’t in very good shape.  There’s no infrastructure and the whole question of composer’s rights hasn’t been sorted out.  The government do very little to help because unlike the Malians, they haven’t understood the importance of music for developing the image of the country.  We want to show the world that Niger is not Nigeria, and that it has nomads who make great music!”

These plans have an aura of dire necessity about them.   It’s clear that all the members of Etran Finatawa miss their spacious homeland when they’re holed up on tour in European hotel rooms.  “Back home we love to take our time to eat, to chat and to drink tea.  Here there’s always a programme,” admits Bagui.  “When I’m in Europe it feels like I’m permanently shut up in side.  I can’t see the horizons and there’s so much noise.  Back home we’re free.”

But that freedom is under serious threat.  The droughts and subsequent famine of 2005 in Niger rang alarm bells throughout the world.  Those same alarm bells chime incessantly in the minds of Ghalitan and Bagui.  “”In my opinion, I can’t talk about the others, we’re in danger of loosing our nomadic culture,” Ghalitan declares.  “Education poses a huge dilemma for us.  We need to educate our children, but once we’re gone, what will they become…bureaucrats and administrators.  They won’t go back to the bush.  And the desert is growing every day.  Animals can’t eat sand.  Once sand gets into the stomach of a cow, that’s it.  She dies.   There’s nothing you can do.”

It seems that Etran Finatawa are on a mission of far greater urgency that just making us dance to their gorgeous unstoppable grooves.

The truck just after the hi-jack attempt. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid 2001

(At the beginning of January 2001, on the first full moon of the new millennium, a remarkable music festival took place in the depths of the Sahara desert in Mali.   The following is a subjective eye-witness report of the event.)

I first heard about the Festival in the Desert from Philippe Brix, the lean and indefatigable manager of the French global troubadours, Lo’Jo.   Two years ago, on his return from one of Lo’Jo’s regular trips to Bamako, the capital of Mali, Philippe told me that the group had minted a solid and friendly relationship with a band of Touareg musicians from northern Mali called Tinariwen, which means ‘deserts’ or ‘empty places’ in Tamashek, the ancient language of the Touareg people.   Philippe had also met a quietly spoken and well-informed Touareg intellectual called Issa Dicko.   Dicko was a member of Efes, an official association based in Mali whose goal is to further the political, social and cultural development of Mali’s remote northern desert regions.   After many conversations and cups of bitter syrupy tea they decided to stage a festival of Touareg music and culture in the desert around the first full moon of the new millennium.

Almost a year of ifs, buts, don’t knows and maybes followed.    Then in May 2000 a beautiful slim white book called ‘Tamashek’ published in France by Editions Deleatur came through the letter box.    It was an account written by Philippe Brix of a trip to Mali to prepare the ground for the festival.    He had completed a 3000 mile round-trip by Toyota land cruiser from Bamako, to Kidal in western Mali via Timbuktu and then back again via Gao.   He had met the top brass of Efes, and various other potential partners in the venture to discuss how the huge logistical problems of staging this event would be handled, and by whom, and at what cost.   Mohammed Ag Intala, honorary president of Efes and deputy for Tin Essako in Mali’s chamber of representatives, had announced that the festival would take place on an empty plain of sand near the ancient ruins of Tamaradant in the Adrar des Ifoghas.   Mohammed’s father is Intala, a sage old man who is leader of the Ifoghas clan of Touaregs and one of the lynchpins of the Touareg rebellion.   The location, which Mohammed had chosen for Takubelt, the name given by the Touaregs to the festival, gave the word ‘remote’ an entirely new meaning.   Philippe had joined forces with the organisers of a famous annual street theatre festival in Chalon-sur-Soane, central France and with the Association YO!, a bunch of veteran rave promoters in western France who knew all about the technicalities of staging musical events in unusual circumstances.    The finance would come both from Lo’Jo themselves and the Chalon-Dans-La-Rue Festival who had already declared that the 2001 edition of their event would have a Malian theme.  Further assistance came from French Cultural Centre in Bamako, The French Embassy, Credit Agricole and various French cultural quangos like ADAMI and AFAA.    There were also plans to spend a whole month in the Kidal region in the run up to the festival and record Tinariwen and other Touareg musicians.   Justin Adams, the English guitarist and producer of Lo’Jo’s two highly acclaimed albums ‘Mojo Radio’ (1998) and ‘Bohème de Cristal’ (2000), would be drafted in to help with the recordings.

Lo’Jo like thinking big.   Maybe that’s why they scare the mainstream French music industry, although it must be said that their distributor Universal did agree to contribute towards some of the costs of filming the event.  The green light finally came in October 2000.    Point Afrique, a French travel agency specialising in desert tourism, run a regular weekly charter from Paris to Gao in eastern Mali and they were responsible for transporting musicians, technicians, equipment and plain old festival ravers like myself to Mali.   On January 7^th at the ungodly hour of 2am, I boarded their chartered ‘troop carrier’ with 100 or so other virgin travellers and Nigel Williamson, an English journalist who pens music articles for The Times, Billboard and Uncut amongst others.

The only thing that spiked my excitement was a gnawing apprehension about the general anarchy in the region north of Gao.    Touareg politics is like a labyrinth made of mud.   We had all been told that the Touareg rebels had signed a peace accord with the Malian government in 1997 and everything was now bathed in sweetness and light.   Peace in our time.   Young Touareg men who had lived for years in the bush on dates, camel’s milk, rebel philosophy and the dream of self-determination were happily rebuilding their lives as soldiers in the Malian army or teachers, administrators, politicians, even musicians.    Tired of war, they had accepted peaceful cooperation and development as the only feasible option.   Reports from the field weren’t so rosy.   Many of the rebels, either for noble ideological or purely practical reasons, had not accepted the terms of the peace accord and were refusing to hand in their weapons as requested by the Touareg leadership.    As far as they were concerned the black Bambara politicians in Bamako were still treating them like a sub-species, ignoring their language and culture, starving the Saharan regions of aid and development, embezzling funds promised by international NGOs and generally acting like they just didn’t care.    The cultural fault line that separates the ‘white’ Berber Touaregs of the Sahara from their ‘black’ sub-Saharan neighbours, the Songhai, the Bambara, Peul, Manding, Dogon etc, has groaned with underlying tension for centuries and that tension was still there, however sugar coated.   The murderous chaos of modern Algeria together with the internal politics of Niger and Ghadaffi’s wayward policies in Libya didn’t help either.    The whole region was playing Russian roulette.   Only a few months before Philippe Brix made his reconnaissance trip in March, three Dutch tourists were kidnapped and murdered, their throats slit and bodies burned on the road to Kidal.   Only a week before the festival an army checkpoint on the main Gao-Kidal road was attacked by bandits and several servicemen were taken as hostages.   Whether the perpetrators of these crimes were just opportunist muggers or uncompromising rebels fighting for their dream ‘by any means necessary’ I just don’t know.   It was said that the killers of the Dutchmen were lead by a renegade Algerian, possibly an ex soldier or GIA terrorist or both, and his gang possessed the latest vehicles and guns.    That’s the deadly fascination of the desert.   Outlaws, soldiers, freedom fighters and politicians play a game of cat and mouse in the vast and arid emptiness.   European political rules don’t apply.   It’s closer to the wild west.  A week is by no means time enough to equip you with the insight and knowledge of local power-struggles to be able to tell the difference between Dillinger and Che Guevara in these parts.

The 2001 Festival in the Desert site. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid 2001

Gao airport consisted of a huge plain of sun-cracked tarmac and an adobe aircraft hanger.   Inside it was all screams and chaos but the human flow somehow carried us safely past customs and immigrations.   Nigel and I ended up in a group of 16 festival goers, all French apart from ourselves, under the wing of a local travel agency called Azawad Voyages who had hired four 4×4 Land Cruisers to get us to the festival site.   Our vehicle was driven by an imperturbable Songhai from Gao called Youba.   I found out that I had been mispronouncing ‘Songhai’ for years and it actually should sound something like “shongoi”.    Mahmoud Ben Ali, the young, ambitious and eager ‘patron’ of Azawad Voyages also rode in our vehicle along with Nigel, two French blokes called Thomas and Olivier, and myself.   Thomas was a loud brash jester with a talent for making people laugh and Olivier, by contrast, a quiet and respectful Parisian.    Due to the enforced underdevelopment, which the powers that be far away in Bamako have allowed to grip this part of Mali for decades, according to Mahmoud’s cursing observations, the road out of Gao was nothing more than a track, deeply rutted and treacherously sandy.   The drive to Kidal consisted of eight hours worth of bumps, jolts and searing sandblasted heat.   Youba held the road like a veteran, clocking up impressive speeds on the open stretches of hard desert plain.   He was proud of the fact that he had never once capsized a vehicle.    Along the way we passed two villages, each with their obligatory police / army checkpoints at which our convoy halted respectfully while Mahmoud kept the grim-faced fatigued officials sweet.   These hamlets were nothing more than a sparse collection of one-story adobe yards baking in the aridity of the midday desert.   They looked like Gods own gulags.   My overriding thought was simply, “how do people sustain life in places like this?!!”

Kidal is the local administrative centre of the northeastern corner of Mali.    In amongst its decomposing French colonial fort, its airstrip, market, brace of hotels and restaurants you can find most of life’s necessities, as long as you can distinguish what is strictly necessary from what is grossly western and superfluous.    After a day out on the desert trail a cold beer is the mother of all necessities and Nigel and I made for Bar Matthieu as soon as humanly possible.   Nigel’s appetite for cold beer, almost to the exclusion of any other kind of sustenance provoked great gallic laughs and good humor amongst our fellow-travellers and cemented his reputation as l’eccentrique anglais, an impression reinforced by Nigel’s sparse and yet original grasp of the French language.    English tourists are rare in these parts.   Mahmoud delighted in telling us that even the Touaregs mourned Lady Di.   We spent our first night in Africa on the roof of a house on the edge of Kidal just by the airstrip.    The moon was but a slither away from fullness and it flooded the night with brightness, making the stars hardly visible.

The famous cold of the desert night in winter only really bites in the wee hours of the morning, at which time anyone not in possession of a reinforced five-season sleeping bag will find his testicles shrunken to the size of nutmegs.    It’s friggin’ freezing, to put it mildly.   Nevertheless, the rising sun warms you as quick as an electric heater.   Breakfast was baguette, surprisingly crunchy and tasty in these part, and Vache Qui Rit.   Processed cheese and tinned sardines, along with the occasional treat like goats meat with macaroni, figured a great deal in our menus over the next few days.   After a trip to town to buy cheches, the famous Touareg headgear without which life in the desert is tricky if not unbearable, we left the town in convoy by the eastern track to Tin Essako.   Just before leaving we were treated to a titillating display of brute Ramboesque power as a convoy of about 25 Toyota Land Cruisers carrying the Prime Minister of Mali, four foreign ambassadors (France, USA, Canada and Germany), with entourage and bodyguards drove out of Kidal on their way to the Festival.   I suddenly felt like Mel Gibson in the film ‘Year Of Living Dangerously’.   At least two of the vehicles were upholstered with the biggest, deadliest mounted machine guns I had ever seen in my life.   Another three of the Land Cruisers were brimful of gun-toting young blades, heads wrapped in their cheches, and eyes masked by fake Armani shades.   They looked like Kurdish rebels I once saw in a newspaper article.    The convoy snaked its way through dust clouds and out of town, exuding a potent mixture of guerrilla chic and badly disguised paranoia.    This ‘official’ junket could be compared in its brazen sense of provocative diplomacy to a visit by Tony Blair to the republican sanctuary of the Falls Road in Belfast.   Our collective sense of awe and excitement was ratcheted up a few notches.

A tent builder at Tin Essako. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid 2001

More dust, more juddering tracks, more dessicated landscapes.    As the convoy edged its way towards the plain known as In-Amadjel, where the festival was happening, the scenery became imperceptibly emptier, drier and eerier.    I realised that what I had been driving through the day before was not real desert, only the ‘amateur hour’ equivalent.    There were still trees, however mangled and skeletal and even shrubs, however brittle and parched.    Now we were entering the dead zone where even the merest hint of vegetation or habitation was absent.   This was the Teneré, the land of nothing, where wind and sun socialise with sand and rocks, glaring suspiciously at outsiders.   If the Americans really had faked the moon landings, this is where they must have done it.

Our vehicle lurched drunkenly over the brow of a low black hill and there it was…..the Festival in The Desert.    At first it was hard to see in the midday haze.    The site consisted of a line of about 20 brown nomadic tents and a small stage.   It seemed laughably insignificant in midst of the huge flat plain of earth bordered by dunes and hills, like a brown twig in the middle of an immense empty parking lot.    To the south, about fifteen minutes walk from the site itself, there was an arid grove of gnarled and thorny trees where we set up camp.   Some had brought tents but most of us just slept on mats under the stars.   Nigel and I went over to the festival site as soon as we could to meet our friends.    In one of the large nomad tents nearest the stage, about 30 Europeans had made their home and there we found Justin and all of the Lo’Jos as well as technicians, organisers, hangers-on and friends.   It was good to see Philippe, Denis, Richard, Kham, Yamina and Nadja from Lo’Jo and especially good to see Justin.   I gave him three bear hugs; one from his wife Mandy, one from his son Joseph and one from me.   Greetings were quickly followed by news.    Apparently we had just missed the arrival of the Prime Minister’s convoy.    About 20 camel riders had come out to greet the grand stranger and Tinariwen, the desert rebels, had insisted on playing a welcoming set on the stage with full PA as the convoy drew up to the site.    To pursue the Tony Blair in Falls Road analogy, it was as if Blair’s arrival had been greeted by a procession of unarmed IRA volunteers and an impromptu concert by Christy Moore.

There was more.    The truck carrying three tons of PA and lighting equipment from Gao to the festival site had been ambushed in the dead of night by 11 bandits, two of whom were armed with Kalashnikovs.    By heavenly chance the PA convoy was also carrying Kheddou, one of the guitarists with Tinariwen and a hero of the Touareg rebellion.   His body has been pierced by bullets a total of seventeen times, as a consequence of which he now walks with a limp.    It was he who had led the attack by small group of Touaregs armed only with swords and sticks on an army post near Kidal at the beginning of the rebellion and captured the arms and ammunition which allowed the uprising to take hold and develop.   Kheddou is known and respected throughout the Sahara.    He negotiated with the bandits for more than two hours, asking them where they intended to dispose of 3 tons of PA equipment in the middle of the desert and what their families, who Kheddou knew, would have to say about the matter.    In the end he managed to persuade them to let the convoy pass.   Disaster had been avoided and not a single shot had been fired.

Justin told me about the sessions in Kidal.    Together with Lo’Jo’s sound engineer, Jean-Paul Romain, he had spent fifteen days recording Tinariwen and Azawad.   Electricity is switched on between 7pm and midnight each evening and so the pair had this small daily window in which to record.   It certainly concentrated the mind.   Lo’Jo had performed a concert which was broadcast by the Tamashek radio station in Kidal.   Philippe told me more about the hardships involved in making the festival a reality.    The petty politics of Efes, and the other Touareg association, Assakok, had proved to be both a smoke screen and a stumbling block.    Quite understandably, local knowledge of event organisation was nil and a lot of time was spent patiently teaching the ABC of staging a concert to the local promoters.   When the band had arrived at the site it was soon realised that a stage had to be built out of concrete in the absence of scaffolding and wood.    Philippe managed to borrow the money from the mayor of Tin Essako, the nearest village, to buy the concrete.  A mason was brought in from Bamako and everyone worked solidly for several days to build a metre high platform.    The same mason also built a bread oven on the site, which kept everyone blissfully supplied with fresh crusty breakfast baguettes.   Even finding branches with which to erect the large nomadic tents was a huge problem because branches of the required length and straightness were like gold dust in these parts.    The arrival of the prime minister, who had been invited without consultation by Mohammed Ba, the local MP and President of Efes, had complicated matters, imposing a heavy military presence and the unforeseen straightjacket of protocol on the event.   I was introduced to the famous Ba, a huge man in royal blue jellaba and mountainous white cheche.    Size and authority are closely related in Touareg society.   He apologized for all the organisational problems and assured me that things would be better once the Prime Minister had gone the next day.   Nevertheless, despite all these trials and tribulations, I could see that Philippe felt like a hundred miles as he looked around him and said with a huge smile, “We’re here.   We did it!”

After dinner at our encampment, we headed back to the festival site for the official opening.   The light of the deepening dusk was magical across the plain.   The first full moon of the new millennium was already up in the eastern sky looking like a rising white sun.   The Touaregs say that a full moon in the desert has the power to crack boulders in half and drive people mad.   Near and far, the camel riders were out on their towering white thoroughbreds, piercing the horizon as if attempting to defy the awesome immensity of the sky.   Out on the plain a group of women, heads covered with black shawls, were huddled around a Tindé drum.    This simple long wooden framed drum loosely covered with goatskin is the emblematic instrument of traditional Touareg culture and Touareg musicians call their traditional music ‘tindé’ to distinguish it from the more modern electric and rock influenced styles.    Two women sit on either side of the drum padding out soft, mesmerising beats while their companions chant songs in a call and response style.    The sound rises up into the sheltering sky like a pulse of enchantment and is audible for miles.     We approached the group and stood by them while they played.    There were about six mounted camel-riders near the group, all dressed to kill behind their impenetrable cheches.    We didn’t seem to be upsetting anyone at first because there were other men standing with us and noone paid us much heed.    Then it was as if we weren’t welcomed anymore.    The camel riders who had been strolling at some distance from the group would come towards us, cantering in time with the women’s rhythm, and brush past us close enough to make those huge gliding hooves seemed terrifying.    In fact, a rider in full ceremonial dress atop a thoroughbred racing camel is a beautiful but not altogether comfortable mixture of grace and menace.   In general the Touaregs are friendly but reserved, impenetrable and a little haughty.   They only give you their eyes which leaves you guessing a lot and prone to pangs of paranoia.    There was nothing really aggressive in their behaviour.   It was a kind of menacing curiosity.    Walking across that plain left me wondering if I had stumbled into one of those huge epic Victorian orientalist canvasses.   Yet there was nothing really exotic about what I was seeing.    It was all too hard and tangible for that.

The festival started with speeches.    The prime minister and his court were seated on sofas.   Everybody else, stood, knelt or sat on plastic chairs.   There were about 50 to 60 Europeans and as many as ten times that number of local Touaregs.   The occasion was starched and formal.   It was as if some arcane Machiavellian game was being played out, with all the rules hidden from view.    News that army units were hidden in the hills all around us, there to protect the dignitaries, gave the evening a particularly potent charge.    We learned later that one of the famous bandit warlords, Ibrahim Banga, had slipped into the site incognito, face masked by his cheche, and listened to the speeches whilst posing as a good and peace loving citizen of the Malian republic.    The speeches were all “your honour”, “cooperation”, “friendship after war” and “our welcome foreign guests” delivered in French and then Tamashek.    Justin and the Lo’Jos were having serious first night nerves.    Deciding on a running order had proven to be a task requiring very fine diplomatic skills as each Touareg group vied for poll billing, keen for their group, their region and their tribe to be seen in the best possible light.    Justin had landed the job of stage manager by default and he rose to the challenge with defiant enthusiasm, attending tirelessly to the musicians’ technical and ‘political’ difficulties.   Stagecraft, as it is known in the west, was something new to the Touareg groups.   The whole idea of taking the stage, connecting with an audience, running through a predefined set of songs, encores and then goodnight is unknown.   To them a performance is just an ‘at home’ session transplanted onto a stage.    The musicians chat amongst themselves and with the audience, tuning up for hours, strolling across the stage and generally taking things very easy.    Nevertheless when a performance was in flow, then there was no mistaking the passion or the skill.    Who needs stagecraft anyway?

The opening act of the festival, a traditional ‘tindé’ group from Tessalit on the Algerian border, took the stage in just such a fashion.   The music spluttered hesitantly into life but when once the engine was definitely turning over, the effect was mesmerising.    I remembered just how captivating the polyrythms of Malian music can be….pure rhythm without definite beat.   The air was cooling and darkening all around us.   Despite the best efforts of Lo’Jo’s dedicated lighting engineer, Jerôme Lubin who had moved heaven and earth to bring a small but respectable rig across oceans and deserts, the light show was surpassed by one far greater.    The day before I had been joking with some of my fellow travellers about how preposterous it would be if there were to be an eclipse to celebrate the opening of the festival.    The laugh was on us.    No sooner had the moon reached its fullness above the horizon, it’s perfect rotundity was invaded by a dark shadow.    We were in for a total eclipse of the moon.    For me, the whole event was already skirting the limits of belief before the great Lighting Engineer in the Sky pulled out this marvel for us.    The eclipse seemed like the stuff of fantasy and fairy-tales.    We were in for a truly magical spectacle.

When Lo’Jo took the stage they seemed nervous.    A potent cocktail of fatigue, prolonged excitement and first night nerves produced a jumpy set, which nonetheless seemed to go down a storm with the Touaregs.   They didn’t exactly clap.   That’s not their style.   With Tamashek audiences it seems to be all or nothing.   Until the moment of abandon comes, they will just look on in silent impenetrability, which is very unnerving if you’re not used to it.   Then, if the music is having the required effect, they will flip on a coin and start hollering, shouting and stamping out their appreciation.   This approach definitely unnerved Lo’Jo even further but they kept things steady and proceeded through a set comprising several totally new numbers, which showed a great deal of courage.   The singing of Nadja and Yamina Nid el Mourid, the two sisters, was especially highly appreciated.   At the end of their set, their relief was palpable.

The evening culminated in a performance by the undoubted stars of the whole show, Tinariwen.   This outfit is the pride of the desert.   Every man, woman, boy and girl from Timbuktu to Tamanrasset and beyond can sing at least some of their songs word for word.   Each member of Tinariwen has his aura, his legend and his mystique.   Ibrahima, one of the founders of the group is a thin, world-weary looking man with a very mid-70s looking Afro.   The story goes that, as a boy, he witnessed his father being murdered by Malian soldiers.   In the late 70s, when the Sahel and southern Saharan regions were being throttled by drought and poverty, he left for Tamanrasset in Algeria and then joined one of Ghadaffi’s training camps in southern Lybia.   There he met Hassan and Intayedan, the other founding members of the group.   In between courses in Islam, Arab nationalism, socialism and freedom-fighting the young dispossessed Touaregs would drink tea, play cards, tell stories, kill time and above all….sing songs on the guitar.   A whole new style took root in those camps, based loosely on traditional Touareg music and the harsh melodies of the one-stringed Touareg violin, but also incorporating influences such as Bob Marley, the rebels of the Moroccan new wave like Nass El Ghiwane, Bob Dylan together with other disparate influences, both western and middle eastern, which managed to penetrate that far into the desert.    The new style was and is still known simply as ‘guitar’, because the instrument is so central to both the music and image.    Ibrahima is an intense and quiet man.   You get the impression that life has dealt him enough blows to last one hundred lifetimes and your natural instinct is to respect that and rejoice in the fact that at least music is there to communicate his stories.

Japonais in 2001. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid 2001

Then there is Mohamed ‘Le Japonais’, so called because he has the features of a Mongol warrior.   His deep sunk eyes and high cheek bones seem to belong to another world.   The only explanation I heard for his extraordinary physiognomy is that Japanese and Chinese engineers used to work on oil installations in the desert in the 50s and 60s and that maybe one of them is a relation.   This story seemed too far fetched.    ‘Le Japonais’ is also intense but in contrast to Ibrahima, talkative as well.   He was fresh from a spell in the Gao penitentiary where he had been put after running amok with a stick of dynamite in a drunken stupor.    Like the rest of the group, he gave the impression of placid steel with a hint of uncontrollable fire hidden below the surface.    His reputation as a fine and profound poet is widespread.  In fact, the poetic quality of Tinariwen’s lyrics was often alluded to by all who knew them well.    After ‘Le Japonais’ came Hassan, aka ‘Le Lion du Desert’, who was the oldest member of the group and a veteran of Ghadaffi’s training camps.    I never got to know much about this man except that the fierce spark in his eye was more likely to ignite wry good humor and uncontrollable laughs than anger.   He seemed to be more economic with his words than his smiles and was universally liked and respected by the others.    After Hassan came Abdallah, aka ‘le Catastrophe’.   Why and how he became saddled with such an unfortunate nickname I never found out.   Abdallah was the youngest member of the group and a favourite with the women.   He was reputedly adept in lyrical love-making and his voice was one of the finest in the group.   He was born into a family of devout ‘marabouts’, or muslim holy men and his decision to pursue a career in music has caused a rift with his nearest and dearest which continues to fester.   When I interviewed Abdallah a few days later, he made a deep impression on me with his rare combination of kindness, good humor, humility and ferocity.   Placid steel.   All the members of Tinariwen have that same irresistible aura of fierce politeness and inviolable honour, derived no doubt from having faced down moments of extreme danger during their lives.

None more so than the already legendary Kheddou, hero of the rebellion and saviour of the PA system.   It is said that Kheddou used to go into battle with his guitar strapped to his back and his Kalashnikov in his hands….. an image to make The Clash green with envy.    This tall lean man, with brilliant eyes sunk deep into a rugged face, had seen action in southern Lebanon as a mercenary in the pay of the Hizbollah movement.    Once, his wounded body had been doused in petrol and he owed his life to a faulty lighter.    Legends about Kheddou were thick and numerous, but only in the mouths of others.    The man himself was too modest to talk about his own exploits.   On stage Kheddou drew the most applause and adulation.   He played the guitar fluidly and effortlessly, like a cheched up acolyte of Ali Farka Toure, but somehow meaner and leaner.   He was also a fantastic minimal bass player.   Tinariwen produced a magical effect on the crowd causing the young Touaregs to stamp and dance with abandon in front of the stage.   It was clear that these men were their heroes and mentors.   The atmosphere of the evening was similar to that of a blues dance in Bristol or south London….grave appreciation and wild abandon.   There were few extrovert displays of cosy friendliness.   I felt that I owed it to the occasion to keep my wits about me.

Standing in front of the stage felt like being on a minute pleasure boat in the middle of a vast and empty ocean.   The festival site was just a speck of laughter, dancing and colour in the surrounding darkness.   At one moment I decided to walk off onto the plain to take a leak.   Privacy is impossible on these flat and endless plains.   Everyone can see your business.   Touareg men have this agile knack of squatting down like women when they urinate so as to minimise their exposure.    I just stood up like a scare-crow and let flow.    The silence engulfed the distant music and the air drowned the sounds in its silvery ether.    This was undoubtedly the strangest and most bewitching night of music I had ever experienced.

Thus ended the first of three days of superb music and unforgettable experiences.    In the following 48 hours there were camel races, dune treks, a lot of talking, listening, sleeping in the midday heat and some excellent performances by Azawad, Super Onze de Gao, Tinariwen, Lo’Jo and Justin Adams amongst many others.   Relatively few people experienced the Festival in the Desert but all of them took home memories that will prove as durable and precious as a 24-carat diamonds.    The event proved that you don’t have to be ‘big’ in the classic sense to dream and achieve big things.    After a lifetime of surviving on the breadline in order to have the freedom to play what they want, where they want, Lo’Jo have faced down their biggest challenge.   Unless they get booked to play a festival on the moon, it’s unlikely that any live concert proposition, wherever it may be, will faze them.    Sang froid….or what.    For the local musicians and cultural activists, the Festival was a lifeline in the latest phase of their long struggle.    Many of the old combatants now realise that the fight must be pursued with the weapons of media and mass communications, rather than swords and Kalashnikovs.   Up until now theirs has been a largely hidden war, known to only a few mainly French desert enthusiasts and experts.   On the back of the festival there have been prominent features in the French daily Liberation, The Times of England, Uncut Magazine and Billboard.    A film is being prepared for broadcast on the Franco / German TV channel Arte.    The recordings of Tinariwen are likely to surface either this year or early next year as a CD with European or even worldwide distribution.    These are major victories in a propaganda war which has only really just begun.    Despite their geographical isolation the Touaregs are astute and aware political observers.    Listening to the BBC world service is a favourite pastime and they are acutely aware that they need to use these new weapons of mass communication if they are to have any hope to achieving their aims.   As one of Tinariwen songs go:  “If I could sing so that those in London could hear, then the whole world would hear my song.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2001
First published in the EFWMF Newsletter – May 2001

Festival Security in 2003. (c) Kate Morgan.

The article in Harpers and Queen came as a shock.  “Exotic.”   “Move over Glastonbury.”  “The most remote music festival in the world.”   “The romance.”  To see an event that was born in a spirit of deranged adventure mixed with post-conflict shoestring survival previewed in magazine that epitomizes affluence and the charmed life…I had to double take and double take again.  Six years ago, under the haunting light of a lunar eclipse, the first Festival in the Desert took place on a wide stony plain near the village of Tin Essako, in the deepest desert of the southern Sahara.  We were a motley assortment of musicians, technicians, journalists, ambassadors, duchesses, tourists and friends who travelled to that unfeasibly remote and yet utterly seductive spot to witness this renaissance of cultural pride and hope.  Our hosts, the nomadic Touareg of the Sahara, had latched onto the idea of using their culture to try and extricate themselves from years of rebellion, drought, isolation and underdevelopment.  The Festival was only a means to this end.  We were only a footnote in this wider project.  Harpers and Queen was very far from anyone’s mind.

The humble seed that was planted back in January 2001 has grown into a media bougainvillea of global proportions.  The take-off point came in January 2003 at the third edition of the Festival near the tiny village called Esskane, in the dunes west of Timbuktu.  LoJo, a group from Angers in France who were so instrumental in setting up the first edition of the Festival, came with a team of technicians.  The Sfinks Festival in Belgium added another crew.  They erected a stage of dreams which welcomed a procession of the Sahara’s finest: Tinariwen, Tartit, Tarbiat, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum, Haira Arby, Seydoum Ould Eide and many more.  A smattering of European ‘names’, including Robert Plant and Ludovico Einaudi, added a frisson of celebrity status.

The 250 strong contingent of whiteys stumbled around in the cream-coloured talcum-powder sand, drenched with sweat and wide-eyed with wonder.  The 1000 or so locals strutted their finest robes, their fanciest turbans, their most magnificent camels and the unearthly sounds of their traditional music.   A CD was recorded on a portastudio set up in a rusting old shipping container.   It sold like hot cakes, and a DVD followed.  Suddenly the Festival became a byword for extreme musical adventurism.  Attendance became a test of sang-froid and derring-do.  Big tour companies started offering all-in packages including first class tent accommodation.   The various ministries in the Malian capital Bamako began to realise that the northern deserts, rather than being a god-forsaken sink hole full of bandits and terrorists, could actually become a very bankable asset  in terms of tourism and cultural kudos.   All this success descended on the bewildered organisers like a sandstorm, at once epic, exhilarating and radically disorientating.

The painful truth is that speedy success dragged along a heap of uninvited problems in its caravan train.  The Malian authorities exerted uncomfortable pressure on Manny Ansar, the President of the EFES Association which was responsible for organising the event. It became official policy to keep the festival alive at all costs, despite spiralling debt, despite the pressure of alien crowds on the fragile desert environment, despite the growing discontent of certain Touareg who felt that the event was being hi-jacked and turned into a kind of Arabian Nights meets Woodstock Of The Sands fantasia.   No one locally could imagine that the Festival was anything other than immensely rich.  But the opposite was true.  The expense of freighting every single piece of equipment and infrastructure in huge burly Mann trucks over the atrocious track that links Essakane to Timbuktu had well nigh bankrupted the event.  Budgets were dismissed as fiction.  Grumbling suspicion became widespread.  Tinariwen, the musical heroes of the rebellion that had shaken desert society to the core in the early 1990s, went back home to Kidal in the far northeast of Mali to set up their own festival, Les Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk.  They were pining for a return to the original mission; a celebration of desert culture, an event that brings the various different Touareg confederations, from Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya together for three days of parlaying, problem solving and partying.

The Touareg are unified by a common language, Tamashek, and a common culture rooted in the Berber subsoil of North and West Africa.   But historically the various tribes and factions have often been rivals or even sworn enemies.   It was the rebellion of 1990 to 1991 that broke down these old enmities and forged something approaching a common Touareg destiny.  But old traditions die hard.  As the Festival at Essakane became the talk of the desert, the Touareg of Menaka, Tessalit,  Aguelhoc, In Gall or Agadez wanted a piece of the action.  Why should all the glory go the Kel Antessar, the tribe that rule the Timbuktu region, who have always been the most adept at playing politics and furthering their cause in the corridors of power in Bamako?   After all the original Festival in the Desert was nothing more than one of the Touareg’s annual traditional gatherings, a bit like our country fairs of yore, opened up to participants and audiences from all over the world with the help of some funding, a website, and friends in Europe.  In January of this year there were no less that six desert Festivals in northern Mali: at Essakane, in Essouk, Ashawadj, Gourma, Aguelhoc and Tessalit.   It’s no longer a question of THE Festival in the Desert, but of The FESTIVALS in the Desert.

At this year’s Essouk festival, about 150 nomad tents covered in terracotta stained hides were arranged in a wide crescent along a ridge near the ancient ruins of a medieval metropolis.  The setting was arrestingly grand.  On the sandy plain below was a tiny concrete stage, backed by a huge open sided truck.  The crowds were thinner than they might have been.  Local people were constrained by the fact that the annual feast of Tabeski was only a few days away, and they needed the time to get home and prepare for it.  Tourists had been turned off by a completely misguided message on the Foreign Office website advising against travel in the northern deserts of Mali.   Statistically, the area is about ten times safer than London, Bristol, or the centre of Trowbridge on a Saturday night.  The old myth about the desert being a parched hell-hole inhabited only by Touareg freebooters and renegade Al-Qaida elements still holds swa y in Bamako, and apparently also in the Foreign ministries of the UK, France and the USA.

That’s why the Festivals in the Desert are so important.  They give a region previously ravaged by conflict and insecurity the chance to show a peaceful face to the world.   They give the chance for the Touareg to prove that far from being bandits, they are a simply another African people in the pressure cooker of enforced modernisation, desperately trying to adapt their millennial nomadic culture to the merciless realities of a modern globalised world.  They give adventurous westerners the opportunity to travel to one of the most beautiful places on earth, and hear music whose alien splendour is as difficult to conceive as it is stunning.  And they give the world a chance to ponder how a friendly cultural get together can being some much needed pride, hope and confidence, where bullets and politically inspired machinations have previously failed.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006
First published in The Independent – Mar 2006