Ousmane from Tamikrest

I’ve been busy translating the lyrics for the forthcoming album by Tamikrest, the band from north eastern Mali lead by the talented Ousmane Ag Moussa. If you don’t know them already check out their existing album ‘Adagh’. One thing I always suspected but now know for sure is that Ousmane is a really excellent poet. As usual when I’m trying to get to grips with Tamashek poetry in translation, reading Ousmane’s lyrics in French gives me the feeling that I’m drinking a super fine whiskey that’s been watered down to a faint and washed out compromise, in comparison with the original. It reminds me of something that I learned quickly when I went to the Sahara and started working with Touareg musicians: their lyrics, or poems, are at least as important as their music, and probably a lot more so.

Some people complain about the repetitive nature of Touareg music: the drone, the simple call and response arrangements, the track-bound linear form of every song. It’s only a problem if you don’t understand the lyrics. I’m certain of that. And of course, apart from the very few non-Saharans who have learned how to speak Tamashek fluently, and there are some of those blessed people out there, most of us don’t understand the lyrics. Which is a crying shame. It’s left to record companies to squeeze a French translation out of the artist, and then someone like me, to turn that French into English. I’ve tried my best, and hopefully, the core meaning of each song will be very clear. But all those verbal subtleties, the puns, the nuances, the colour of and the depth of meaning of the original, will hover like an enticing aura around the words, unreachable to most of us. I’d love to do some more in depth translating work, like a real project, where the poet and the translators (English, French etc), sit down over days, weeks even, and discuss meaning and word play and all those issues. A Scottish poet called Don Paterson, who I really admire, recently published a book of poems by Rilke. His essay on the great German poet seemed to imply that trying to achieve literal translations of poetry is a useless exercise. You can only ‘version’ the original into something approximate in a new language, like a DJ doing a remix of a song, or a Jamaican dub master creating a version excursion. I like that idea. It injects real creativity into the job of translating.

Anyway, let’s hope the opportunity presents itself soon. In the meantime, look out for the Tamikrest album, which will be out sometime later in the year on Glitterhouse Records. And don’t blame me for the translations…I did my best, honest!

Andy Morgan (c) 2011

If your power is almighty,

Then help the Touareg man.

Since his beginning,

He has lived in arid zones,

Rigorous, deserted

And without means.

He looks at the ever-changing world,

That overtakes him,

And he is left behind

In his ignorance.”

‘OUTAMACHEK’ from the album ‘Adagh’ by Tamikrest (Written and composed by Ousmane Ag Mossa – Translation by Andy Morgan).

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s Tinariwen who created the path,” declares Ousmane Ag Mossa, frizzy-locked leader of Tamikrest, in a pre-emptive strike against a thousand inevitable questions. “But the way I see it, if younger bands don’t come through, then Touareg music will eventually die.  They created the path and now it’s up to us to walk down it and create the future.”

Ousmane was born twenty-seven years ago in a village called Tin-Zaouaten, a solitary speck squeezed up against Mali’s northeastern border with Algeria.  It’s a remote marginal place.   Or to put it another way: there’s distant, there’s remote and beyond both of those there’s Tin-Zaouaten.

To an outsider, the village would appear to be nothing more than a motley collection of one-storey adobe and breezeblock houses, huddling together for protection against the burning sun, the black rocky hills and the lonely immensity of the surrounding desert.   But to Ousmane, it’s home.

Like its ‘neighbour’ Tessalit, two hundred and fifty kilometres to the west, Tin-Zaouaten is blessed with a water table that lurks benignly just below the surface of the gritty soil.  Dig a few metres and you can usually find water in abundance.   That’s why Tin-Zaouaten, or ‘Tinza’ for short, is famed in the desert for its gardens and garden produce. Ousmane’s father Mossa was born a nomad out in the bush, but by the time Ousmane arrived he had settled in Tinza, making a living from growing onions, beetroot, carrots and dates, and selling them in the local markets.

Ousmane Tamikrest & Abaraybone Tinariwen

In 1985 drought shook desert life to its core. The rains had failed for several seasons and the village was haunted by famine. “I was born in a time of calamity,” says Ousmane. “In the middle of dreadful events for the Touareg people.  My parents knew so much hardship. Then when I was five years old the rebellion broke out. It was 1990, the year of war. I was a child, and I used to hide in amongst the rocks with the other women and children, just a few kilometres north of the village over the Algerian border. When I think of that time, it’s as if it’s all still happening in front of me.”

Thus Ousmane’s childhood was buffeted by the searing winds of recent Touareg history. The droughts of ‘68 to ’74 almost destroyed the animal herds and with them the ancient nomadic way of life of the Touareg. The drought of ’84 to ’85 almost dealt the final blow. Thousands of young men fled into exile in Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and beyond. That’s where the modern Touareg guitar style of music was born and then nourished by anger, homesickness, frustration and dreams of a better life. It was this generation of Touareg men, known as the ishumar, who returned to Mali and Niger in 1990 to rebel against the callousness, corruption and arrogance of the governments in the distant capitals of Bamako and Niamey.

At first Ousmane just listened to traditional Touareg music at home, and the newer guitar music on battered old cassettes. “I well remember hearing my first Tinariwen songs. I was about five. After the death of my mother, my father was obliged to take me to live with my grown-up sister.  One morning I was sitting in front of the house and this guy walked by singing a song by Inteyeden called ‘Imidiwan Kel Hoggar’ (‘My Friends the Hoggar People’).  It went straight into my brain…ha ha ha.”

A few years later Ousmane began to play the guitar himself, and write songs.  He was attending a school in Tinza called Les Enfants de l’Adrar, set up by a French NGO and a local man turned community leader called Hama Ag Sid Ahmed. At the end of every school year the children would create and perform musical plays about pressing themes like ignorance, drought, education and culture.

Hama bought the school an acoustic guitar, and Ousmane adopted the instrument. With his constant friend Cheikh Ag Tiglia, he would write songs and perform them at the school shows. He learned the Tamashek guitar style by listening to a particular cassette which Tinariwen’s leader Ibrahim ‘Abaraybone’ had recorded in Algeria back in 1998.

In 2002, events once again undermined the tenuous calm and stability in Tinza.  The village was home to one of the southern desert’s most infamous freedom fighters and warlords, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. For this reason it became a military no-go zone. Ousmane’s father left to live with his eldest sons in Libya, and both Ousmane and Cheikh went south to Kidal

Kidal is the capital of the far north east of Mali, a region known as the Adagh des Iforas (‘The Mountains of the clan Iforas’). With its wide sandy streets and dispersed one storey earthen houses, Kidal has the feel of a frontier town. For the Adagh Touareg, it’s where it all happens.

Tamikrest: 'Adagh'

Ousmane and Cheikh played the guitar and sang in hidden corners of Kidal, around a fire, drinking bittersweet Touareg tea with their friends. Their reputations grew very slowly, steadily, without wild leaps or fanfares. After a while they heard that a local cultural centre called the DDRK or ‘Maison du Luxembourg’, founded by the Duchess of Luxembourg who had fallen in love with the town when she visited it in 2001, was offering music classes. The teacher turned out to be Juhan Ecaré, a musician from Ivory Coast.

Then this French theatre troupe called La Calma arrived in town and enrolled over fifty young people to perform a massive theatre piece featuring sketches about a host of local issues.  It went down a storm in January 2006 at a local festival called ‘The Saharan Nights of Essouk’.   Although Ousmane didn’t take part in the project, claiming disinterest in theatre (“I’m a musician…theatre’s not my thing”), Cheikh went along and played with a local percussionist called Aghaly Ag Mohammedine and a bass player called Ibrahim Ahmed, aka ‘Pinnochio’ or ‘Pino’ for short.

On their return, Pino proposed that they form a proper band and record a demo at a small studio, which had been set up at the Maison du Luxembourg. They also decided that they needed a name, and agreed on ‘Tamikrest’, which means the knot, the junction, the coalition, in Tamashek, the language of Touareg.   “Each of us came from a different place, a different zone,” explains Ousmane.  “Cheikh and I from Tinza. Aghaly and Mossa Maiga from Kidal. Pino from Gao.  But we found each other and we had the same ideas, the same intentions.  We were like a coalition.”

On the 23^rd May 2006, the army garrison in Kidal was attacked by a new Touareg rebel movement called the Alliance Démocratique pour le Changement (ADC). “It was a hard time for me,” remembers Ousmane. “I woke up early that morning and discovered that the town had turned into a nightmare. Those who wanted to join the rebels had already done so. But, in general, that wasn’t the choice of me and my friends. Because we’d never been in the army. We were musicians, not people who carry arms.”

By the end of the year a fragile peace had been restored, although Tinza’s recalcitrant son Ibrahim Ag Bahanga refused to compromise and remained on the run with his own splinter militia. Tamikrest performed at the peace Forum in March 2007, when the Touareg rebels met with the Malian government and thousands of community representatives in Kidal to map out a way forward.

The group were developing their style and their fan base, which consisted mainly of Kidal’s younger generation. They knew the Tamashek guitar style intimately, but they were also deeply into rap, metal, Maghrebi pop and afro-disco music from Ivory Coast. They had new tastes, new desires, new ambitions and Tamikrest was their band.

Pino was quite the mover and shaker. In late 2007 he contacted Manny Ansar, the director of the now world-famous Festival in the Desert and clinched a gig for Tamikrest. The band found the money to transport themselves the 600 miles eastward to Timbuktu.  In the silky dunes of Essakane they met Dirtmusic, a group of rock’n’roll veterans from the USA and Australia. It was one of those meetings fashioned by fate in destiny’s workshop.

Chris Eckman of Dirtmusic remembers the meeting thus: “On our first morning in Essakane we woke up hearing music, so we went across the sand to the tent opposite ours and that’s where Tamikrest was playing.  Chris Brokaw grabbed his dobro and headed over, then Hugo and I eventually did the same and basically for three days we didn’t leave.”

Once again music overflew all barriers of language, culture, style, shyness and reticence. The friendship formed at Essakane grew in the following months and lead to an invitation by Dirtmusic to come to the Malian capital Bamako to make an album, and contribute to Dirtmusic’s own oeuvre. After another epic journey of 1,200 miles, by car and bus, Ousmane, Aghaly and crew entered their first professional studio and ‘Adagh’ was born.

“It felt very natural to play with Dirtmusic,” asserts Ousmane. “I’ve always appreciated all kinds of different music and it was such a pleasure to play with a different kind of band. Music isn’t something you study; it’s something you learn with your ears. I’d been listening and playing along to Bob Marley, to Marc Knopfler and Dire Straits, to Tinariwen for years.  We’d been listening to so much international music and that’s why the marriage with Dirtmusic worked.”

The end of 2009 finds Tamikrest on the cusp of the world and the next chapter in their great adventure. “This opportunity to go to Europe feels like a big responsibility,” says Ousmane. “I feel like someone who’s done this exam and is now waiting for the result. We’ve already achieved quite a bit, but the hardest is still ahead.”

One thing is certain: Ousmane is clear about the band’s mission. “The situation of the Touareg is very difficult right now,” he declares.  “Even before I played the guitar and started recording, I had this ambition to be a lawyer or you might say, an ‘advocate’. I wanted to be capable of expressing the hurt I felt in my heart, and speak out about the situation, even at the United Nations.  Because we’re a people who don’t have journalists, we don’t have lawyers, we don’t have advocates. But it was only later that I realised that a musician can play that role.”

“What is the weakest part of any nation or people? It’s ignorance. We are stuck in our ignorance. I see the world changing, racing ahead, and leaving us behind.  And the only thing that is holding us back is our ignorance. As artists, it’s our duty to make our problems known to the world, to sing songs about the nomadic life, about our traditions and culture. But above all, revolutionary songs, about what we see, about what the government is doing to our people, which makes no sense to me.”

There it is…Tamikrest, the knot, the coalition, the future.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

Artist Biog for Glitterhouse Records, Dec 2009.

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

Bush jam with Intidao. (c) Thomas Dorn 2007

The air was silvery, still and luminous.   The dark acacia trees, the distant stony hills, the entire floating world were gently hypnotised by the full moon.   I sat on the soft sandy bed of the dried-up river near Tessalit in the far north east of Mali, a 100 miles from the Algerian border.   Beside me Ibrahim ‘Abaraybone’, Tinariwen’s founder was picking delicately at an acoustic guitar, sprinkling notes so soft that they blended seamlessly with the whispering crack and fizz of the camp fire.   Around the glow lazed a company of old ishumar…Kay Kay, Bigga, Hassan ‘Abin Abin’, Iba…men who had lived the errant life of the exiled clandestino in Algeria and Libya in the 1980s, fought the rebellion of the early 1990s against the Malian army and grown older, wiser and quieter together.   Scartilo, the ‘bush man’, was pouring out some Touareg tea.   All conversation was softly spoken, except when a joke cracked the silence and splintered the thin life-etched faces into merriment.   The peace was all-pervasive.  This was La Dolce Vita, desert style.

In that same moment of dream-like calm, not more than two hundred kilometres away on the road from Kidal to Tin Zaouatene, an insignificant distance in desert terms, a Malian army column was fighting for survival against the firepower of the Alliance Touareg Nord-Mali pour le Changement (ATNMC), a splinter rebel movement led by desert ‘bad boy’ and Malian public enemy No. 1, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga.   This ambush left at least 8 soldiers dead, more than twice that number wounded, a large number of hostages taken by the rebels, including several senior army commanders, and numerous trucks and 4×4 vehicles destroyed by mines and RPGs.

As I write, more than a week after the incident, the dogs of war are still roaming the black rocky hills and arid plains north of Kidal, the capital of the Adrar des Iforas region of north eastern Mali. Bahanga’s spokesperson, Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed is reportedly en route to Libya to negotiate yet another cease-fire with the Malian government.   Two thousand kilometres away in the Malian capital Bamako the public are losing patience with president Amadou Toumani Toure and his apparent appeasement of the rebels.   “Everybody knows the right solution,” writes a blogger on the website of the Malian daily, Le Republicain, “a good beating with a big stick on the head of the desert viper with its separatist venom.”

The contrast between the preternatural peace of our campfire near Tessalit and the vicious fighting south of Tin Zaouatene is in step with the great desert paradox.   The vast expanses of the southern Sahara seems alien to the possibility of human life or the hope of human happiness and yet its people, the nomadic Touareg, or Kel Tamashek (‘Those who speak Tamashek’) have a deep attachment to this outwardly forbidding home.

Despite the searing daytime heat and the extreme night time cold of the winter months, despite the dusty rigours of the dry season and the harsh daily grind of the nomadic life, most Touareg wouldn’t swap their desert camp for the most luxurious western penthouse imaginable.  Because, at its best, desert life is the epitome of primeval luxury.  When the rains have come and water is abundant, the animals well grazed, and all the necessities of life either stocked up or within easy reach from nature’s larder, then the desert dweller lacks nothing and the quiet spaciousness of his surroundings, the intimacy of his family camp and the time-rich rhythm of his days elevate his situation, making it seem far superior to the frenetic dependency of life in the west, or even in one of the big conurbations of west Africa.

The founder members of Tinariwen knew this only too well when they answered Colonel Gaddaffi’s all back in 1980 to come to special training camps in Libya and learn how to be soldiers.  The project was clear.  The Kidal region had been crushed after the first Touareg rebellion of 1963, declared off-limits to all outsiders except the Malian military and placed under martial law.   In 1973 it had suffered catastrophic droughts that almost wiped out the animal herds and the traditional nomadic way of life that went with them.   A second drought hit the region in 1984.   In the late 1980s, Mali was being ruled by a brutal military dictator, Moussa Traore, with a simplistic centrist attitude to governance in which more sophisticated notions of federalism and decentralization were not tolerated.  There was everything to fight for, not least the right of a Touareg to live like a Touareg in his or her ancestral land, whilst also enjoying the rights of citizenship afforded to every Malian.

Although Ibrahim, Inteyeden, Kedou, Hassan, Japonais, Diara and the other singer-songwriters that comprised the Tinariwen collective during the 1980s were always poets rather than mere propagandists, the message of their early songs reflected the clear-cut moral simplicity of the aims and objectives at hand.   My friends, wake up to the new reality.  Leave your old tribalism behind, and join the struggle for our homeland.  Remember your families and your sisters back home.  Be strong for them. These messages were sung to whiplash electric guitar melodies and riffs, built on the old tunes that the Touareg griots would play on their teherdent or traditional lute, on Arabic and Berber pop from Algeria and Morocco and on whatever scraps of western music managed to filter through to the Sahara:  Jimi Hendrix, Boney M, Kenny Rogers, Santana, Bad Company and Dire Straits.

Now, in 2008, the struggle is more complex.   The great rebellion of 1990 succeeded not only in helping to topple Moussa Traore’s benighted regime and turning Mali into one of Africa’s more stable and successful democracies, it also brought about a degree of decentralisation.   Most of the top jobs in the civil administration, customs and security forces in the Kidal region are now held by Touareg, often by ex-rebels who benefited from UN-sponsored reintegration programmes at the end of the rebellion.  Furthermore, since the National Pact of 1992, there has been a Touareg prime minister, Touareg ministers, Touareg members of parliament, Touareg governors, deputies, division commanders and mayors.   The Touareg are no longer muffled and completely sidelined as they once were.

So what propels Ibrahim Ag Bahanga and his band of hard men to continue fighting?  Outwardly it is a simple and self-justified impatience with the prevarication and broken promises of the Malian government.   The rebellion of the 1990s ended with the signing of a National Pact in April 1992, which laid out a set of priorities and developmental goals to which the Malian government pledged both finance and manpower.   The main prerogatives in the National Pact were education, water infrastructure development, road building, promotion of the Tamashek language and increased general investment in the region.  By the end of 2005 only a tiny proportion of these goals and promises had been fulfilled.   This lack of concrete progress led to the constitution of a new rebel movement, the Alliance Democratique du 23 mai pour le Changement (ADC).  The 23 of May 2006 is the date on which the Alliance attacked two army barracks in Kidal and another in Menaka, looting huge arsenals of arms and munitions before retreating to the remote Terharhar mountains north of Kidal and setting up a base there.   The action resulted in very few casualties and Algeria eventually sponsored peace talks which led to the singing of the Algiers Accords on July 4^th 2006, which reaffirmed the promises outlined in the national pact, added a few new ones, and set out a road map and timetable for their implementation.

Two years on and hardly anything has been done, despite the existence of a permanent implementation committee (‘comité de suivi’) comprising members of the Alliance, the Malian and the Algerian governments.   Bahanga took some 30 Malian soldiers hostage in September 2007 in order to pressurize the government into speeding up the implementation process.   These hapless Malian soldiers were released in two batches, in exchange for promises to decrease the military presence in the Kidal region.   Bahanga deemed this promise to have been broken and even worse, that the military presence in the region was increasing rather than decreasing.  He issued an ultimatum to the government via the French radio station RFI, and then a few days later, on March 20^th last, ambushed the military convoy on the road to Tin Zaouatene.

There are deeper more complex social and political currents at play however.    In fact, for such a seemingly empty and lifeless region, the Sahara has to be one of the most politically complex zones on the planet, compromising a tangle of interlocking spheres of interest, each encompassing the next like a set of traditional Russian dolls.   In the outermost geo-political sphere, France, the USA and China jostle for influence and a lion’s share of the area’s rich mineral resources, most notably Uranium.  The US conjures up the mirage of Islamic fundamentalism in the region to justify supplying arms and training to the Algerian and Malian military.    China asks no awkward questions but instead builds roads and bridges, like the wonderful new crossing over the majestic Niger at Gao.   France pleads historical and linguistic affinities, with less and less success.

Then there are the regional power struggles between Algeria and Libya who use the Touareg of Mali and Niger like pawns in a larger egocentric chess game.  There’s the whole issue of trans-Saharan trafficking, which has become more cutthroat and dangerous now that one of the main smuggling routes for cocaine into Europe is via West Africa.   There are the national politics of Mali and Niger, in which the ‘Touareg question’ plays the same role as Ulster did in the political landscape of the United Kingdom throughout the last third of the 20^th century.   And finally there are the local politics of Kidal, which deserve several volumes of analysis in their own right.  Suffice to say, they boil down to a struggle for influence between the old clan chiefs and their families, and the new revolutionary leaders, like the charismatic Iyad Ag Ghali and now Ibrahim Ag Bahanga.

And meanwhile the nomad still prays for rain every April, and celebrates every September, if his prayers are answered.   Tinariwen decided long ago that they were neither politicians nor soldiers at heart, but musicians.   And despite the complexity of the political and social storms that rage around them, they prefer to keep their vision simple and focus on the right of the nomad to live by his own ancient laws, on his own terms, without outside pressure or influence.   Their love of the desert remains paramount and visceral.   Hassan once told me that the moment he drives north out of Gao, on his way to Kidal or Tessalit, after a long European or North American tour, he feels like a man plagued by a prolonged thirst who at last can drink again.   The relief is total.  And Ibrahim, answering a question posed by a journalist, once said; “I have no desire to emigrate to Paris or Los Angeles.  That life holds no attraction for me.  In the desert you are forced to live close to nature.   The desert forces you to live simply.  And simplicity is freedom.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2007

First published in a Tinariwen Tour Programme produced by Songlines for the Tinariwen UK Tour 2007

Ibrahim Ag Alhabib. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid

I first met Tinariwen in a tent on the wide stony plains of the Tamesna, sixty kilometres due east of Kidal in the far northeastern corner of Mali.  The date was January 6^th 2001 and the occasion was the first Festival in the Desert.  It was my friendship with the French group Lo’Jo that had brought me there.  I was tired, dirty, and elated, floating in the strangely sharp yet magical ether of the Saharan atmosphere.   I had managed to miss the Festival’s official opening the day before, when Tinariwen had taken to the tiny concrete platform that passed for a stage to welcome a convoy of twenty-four 4×4 vehicles carrying the Prime Minister of Mali, four Ambassadors, and an ostentatiously tooled-up escort.  Everyone I spoke to confirmed that Tinariwen were the pied pipers of the region, a band of legendary renown, a band to know.   My instinct was to just let the flow of each succeeding moment carry me away, but a gnawing and neurotic desire to capture those moments for posterity, to maximise journalistic opportunities, led me to ask if I could interview Tinariwen.  A time was fixed, an act which in itself seemed disturbingly incongruous in that timeless place.

When the time came, I ducked under the red leather animal hide covers of a traditional Touareg tent and sat myself down gingerly on a sandy Technicolor floor mat.  The cool and dark space was filled by about seven men, sitting, lounging, cross-legged, squatting, unperturbed, relaxed and minimalist in their movements.  Some were turbaned, others were not.  There was Hassan aka Abin Abin aka the Lion of the Desert, Mohammed aka Japonais, Abdallah aka Catastrophe, Ibrahim aka Abaraybone, Kheddou and other extended members of the crew like Sweiloum, Diarra and Bigga.   They sat immobile like resting fighters, neither aggressive nor overly friendly.  Their calmness and lack of excess…excess talk, excess movement, excess belongings, excess emotion…flustered me.   A tea was being prepared with unforced ritual.  Tea drinking in the Sahara is emblematic of hospitality, friendship and the slow baked pace of things.  I set up my DAT nervously and then asked the dumbest but most obvious question available to the unprepared journalist, “How did it all begin?”   Long pause.   Mild panic.  Tinariwen remained ice cool.   Eventually Japonais began to answer the question in minuscule chunks of guttural and heavily accented French, each punctuated with the phrase “Est ce que tu vois ça?” or “do you get me?”, which sounded more like ‘Iskitiwassa?”   Those bafflingly oriental facial features, which are the source of his nickname, remained sharp and penetrating, Shogun-like, throughout.   Then after about a minute he motioned me to switch off my DAT machine and proceeded to confer with his brothers-in-arms, in Tamashek, the Touareg language.  A full-blown debate started to brew.  There seemed to be disagreements about dates, times, names and places.   Fifteen minutes later the discussion was still raging, and I was still sitting there, largely ignored, with my inactive DAT machine in front of me.  It was almost comical.

It later became clear to me that there were good reasons for this inauspicious start to our relationship.   This was one of the first interviews that Tinariwen had ever conducted and none of the group members had ever felt any great need to straighten out the facts surrounding the band’s genesis.  I was also later to learn, by the slow but ultimately more fruitful method of endless aimless chats over intense cups of bittersweet Touareg tea, that the tale of those early years comprises a complex drama of exile, wandering and the clandestino life, in which fact, memory and nostalgia are entwined like spaghetti in a bowl.

The key actor in that drama was Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.  His nickname ‘Abaraybone’ means something like ‘raggamuffin kid’ or ‘the scruffy tearaway who’s always playing in the dirt’.   During the first Touareg rebellion against the central government of Mali in the early sixties, Ibrahim’s father, a livestock farmer and mason by trade, was apprehended by a unit of the Malian army for giving succour to the rebels, and shot dead.  Ibrahim witnessed his dad’s murder with his own eyes.  He was only four years old.  Ibrahim then left the Adrar des Iforas region of northeastern Mali with his grandmother, and a single cow, the last of a once substantial herd, which the Malian army destroyed, and went into exile in southern Algeria.  The cow died on the way.   Whilst still young, Ibrahim became a wanderer, a survivor, travelling around Algeria and Libya doing odd jobs.  He spent a number years apprenticed to a carpenter in Oran, for example.  He also did a few stints in jail.  It was the quintessential academy of hard knocks education and survival was by any means necessary, or not at all.

In 1979, Ibrahim found himself in the southern Algerian desert oasis of Tamanrasset, a place favoured by exiled Touareg men at the time.  There he hung out with two other Touareg from the Adrar des Iforas region in Mali; Hassan Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableline.  A Malian friend of mine once described the kind of life they led as l’amitié autour d’une cigarette (friendship around a cigarette).   I can’t think of a better description.   Since boyhood, Ibrahim had been playing music on self-made bush guitars, which consisted mostly of a jerry can, a stick and some bicycle brake wire.  He’d pluck out traditional Touareg melodies, sometimes adding his own phrases and images to an age-old song, or he’d imitate the north Malian blues guitar style that was already beginning to blossom thanks to mentors like Ali Farka Touré, Boubacar Traoré and a mysterious character called Aziz, whom Tinariwen have often cited as an inspiration.  Ibrahim also owed an almost genetic debt to the undisputed granddaddies of all Sahelian guitar styles, the traditional griots with their hide and gut lutes, which the Songhai call ‘ngoni’, and the Touareg call ‘teherdent’.

Ibrahim would also chuck in other rag-tag influences that had accrued in his mind during his vagabond life: rai music which he’d heard in Oran, the radical new chaabi of Morocco, especially Nass El Ghiwane, who’s songs he can still sing verbatim to this day, non-aligned north African pop stars like Rabah Driassa, western pop stars like Boney M or Kenny Rodgers.  There was no musical mission, just a desire for solace, a means to distract the mind and pass the time.   In Tamanrasset Ibrahim saw his first ever acoustic guitar, and persuaded its owner to give it to him.  Together with Hassan, Inteyeden and two other women singers, Ibrahim formed a little band.   Its first name was very longwinded, but it included the words ‘Taghreft’ and ‘Tinariwen’.   Taghreft is a complex word meaning ‘the rebuilding’, ‘the reconstruction’ or ‘edification’, but also the crew or the community who carry out this regeneration.  Tinariwen is simply the plural of ‘Ténéré’, which means ‘desert’, ‘land’ or ‘empty place’.   Taghreft Tinariwen started to play for the exiled Touareg community…weddings, parties, and campfire reveries…and even managed to clinch an invitation to perform at a festival in Algiers.  They didn’t have the proper equipment so they asked a local Tamanrasset combo called Sawt El Hoggar to help them out.  That’s how Ibrahim got to curl his fingers around the neck of an electric guitar for the first time.   And that’s how a completely new style of music was born.

The crucial point is that the personal adventures of Ibrahim, Hassan, Inteyeden and future members of Tinariwen are faithful microcosms of the wider phenomenon of the ishumaren.  This Tamashek word is derived from the French ‘chomeur’, meaning ‘unemployed’, and it describes a whole generation of Touareg men who were driven from their homes by the droughts of ’73 and ’85, as well as by political conflict and lack of opportunity, to go and find work in neighbouring states like Libya and Algeria.  This epic displacement transformed Touareg society and forced it to confront the modern world.  Old hierarchies of tribes, clans and families, in which each person knew their place and their duty, were completely devastated.  Men who were descended from generations of nomadic animal herders and traders were forced to work for money for the first time.  Old tribal enemies were now united by suffering and common political motives.  Many young Touareg men exchanged the utter silence of their desert home for the bustle of modern cities.  And they heard music from Europe, America and other parts of the Arabic world that they never even knew existed.

The camps which were set up by Khadafy in Libya to welcome hordes of these errant young Touareg in the early 1980s were run along brutish military lines.  The Libyan and Chadian trainers could be ruthless.  Khadafy had a vision of a mercenary Islamic army that would further his revolutionary and territorial ambitions in places like Niger, Chad and the Middle East.  The young Touareg however were told that they were being trained up to liberate themselves and eventually create their own autonomous Touareg nation in the middle of the Sahara.  This lie became more and more apparent towards the end of the 1980s, especially when Khadafy started to negotiate the repatriation of Touareg from Niger directly with the Nigerien government.   In any case, the idea of an Arabic Islamic regiment ultimately held little appeal to the Touareg, who were increasingly proud of their distinctly African and Berber origins.

During this time, Taghreft Tinariwen, as they were still known, started to take on the role of the musical voice of the ishumaren.  The revolutionary Touareg movement, the MPA (Mouvement Populaire de l’Azawad), and it’s charismatic leader Iyad Ag Ghali, saw the potential in fostering the group’s talent, and provided money for basic equipment and a rehearsal space.  With no Tamashek language newspapers, magazines, radio or TV stations in existence, Tinariwen’s songs carried the message of hope, struggle, pain, exile and nostalgia to the Tamashek speaking people.  It was a cassette-to-cassette ghetto-blaster grapevine.  The audio quality was as atrocious as the message was powerful.   It was an electrified sound and thus appealed to a youth that were wrestling with modernity.  It was rock’n’roll.

But it would be a mistake to ever reduce Tinariwen to one-dimensional propagandists.  Their message was always more about the rebellion of the soul that the rebellion of the Kalashnikov and bullet.  Their songs freeze frame the young Touareg everyman, exiled from his homeland, forced into meaningless labour, pining for his home, his family, his mother and his sisters.  And in that sense, their music is also intensely personal.  The older members including Ibrahim, Hassan, Japonais, Kheddou, Inteyeden and Abdallah, did take part in the rebellion which broke out in Niger in the summer of 1990.  An ex-rebel once told me that he well remembers Ibrahim and Abdallah entertaining their fellow fighters in a secret bush camp on the night of the now legendary attack a the police post in Menaka, a skirmish which kicked off the rebellion in Mali in June 1990.  Like almost every other European or North American I was initially dazzled by these stories of ‘real’ rebellion and I’d admit to putting excessive emphasis on them when we started promoting Tinariwen in Europe.  Prolonged contact with the band has since wised me up.  It’s clear that the rebellion is a mute subject for them, one that harbours a great deal of pain and bad memories.  There was adventure, and there was heroism too, but in the end, the actual conflict was but a brief episode in a long struggle which is full of unexpected shade and subtlety.  In every real world conflict the distinction between good guys and bad guys is never as blatant as sensationalising journalists would like it to be.  The Touareg rebellion was no exception.

When peace finally came to the southern Sahara with the ritual burning of more that 3,000 small arms at The Flame of Peace in Timbuktu in 1996, Ibrahim, Hassan et al refused offers of reintegration into the Malian army or administration and decided to make a go of being full time musicians.  Some of the extended Tinariwen family (and that’s precisely what Tinariwen has always been, an extended musical family of friends who form little sub-groups to tour and record when opportunity knocks), like Kheddou and Foy Foy did accept jobs offered by the Malian government under the UN sponsored post-conflict reintegration programme. Tinariwen emerged from the rebel underground as a working group and they were welcomed like a heroic mystery finally unveiled.  Thanks to that portentous meeting with the French band Lo’Jo in Bamako in 1998, the Tinariwen phenomenon started to spread beyond their southern Saharan home, slowly at first but now with increasing momentum.   It started with a brief tour of France in 1999 and that first Festival in the Desert, followed by their debut CD, ‘Radio Tisdas’, their latest, ‘Amassakoul’, tours of Europe and USA, accolades and the modern nomadism of the struggling musician.   Where all of this is leading, none of us know.

Managing a legendary group from the southern Sahara is no piece of cake.  You’re constantly having to explain the apparent absurdities of the western music industry, with its voracious and fickle media machine, its painfully slow money flows and its time and paper obsessed ways of operating, to people who feel more comfortable with a smile, a handshake, immediate payment for a job well done and an ‘I’ll make it if I can’ outlook.  But I have to say that working with Tinariwen has been a joy.  Somehow the pervasive toughness of life in the desert, where to complain about discomfort is taboo, has knocked any hint of prissy prima-donna behaviour out of the band.  No doubt those Libyan army sergeants also had something to do with it.  If the gear needs to be loaded into the van at three in the morning on a pissing cold night in Manchester, then Tinariwen is equal to the task.  Compared to the life of a nomad in the bleak hills of the Adrar des Iforas, it’s nothing.

But above all the pleasure has been in getting better acquainted with a remarkable bunch of characters; Ibrahim with his intense reserve and melancholy which more than occasionally get swept away by a magnetic friendliness, which is awkward, guileless and very appealing all at once; Hassan with his rock solid sense of humor reminding you that laughter is the strongest weapon of all; Abdallah with his Errol Flynn smile, his self-deprecating quips, his uncharacteristic chattiness; Eyadou with his simple straight-forward friendliness; Sarid with his cheeky desert dude charms and unassailable grin; Elaga with his slightly spaced out look and quiet mischievousness; Mina, the princess, who doesn’t even have to make any kind of effort to emboy all the beauty and grace of Touareg womanhood.  And there isn’t even the space to praise the qualities of the ‘resting’ members of the band, like Japonnais, Kheddou, Foy Foy or Sweiloum.  When Tinariwen launch into one of their songs on one of their good nights…let’s say ‘Amassakoul’, or ‘Amidinin’ or ‘Chatma’…I’m immediately transported to the place they come from.  My nostrils prick up to the smell of tea, tobacco and gasoline.  The pentatonic drone of the music rolls out the endless line of the desert horizons.  The perpetual polyrhythms put wanderlust back into my heart and my feet.  The slashing guitars remind me of the bewitching harshness of those stony plains, and the gritty truths of recent desert history.  The flowing robes and cheches or turbans of the band remind of the equally bewitching beauty and poise for which the Touareg are justifiably renowned.  And the lyrics, as far as I understand them, remind me that there’s more to this band than I can possibly ever grasp or know.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

First published in Songlines – Feb 2007